The Besties - The Besties Podcast XXV (archive)

Episode Date: August 25, 2012

Special thanks to Salivation Army for recovering this episode from the archive! 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!

Four yogurts for one dollar? Yeah, four yogurts for one dollar. It was on sale. I was like, oh. That's about like a dollar for like, I guess it's a quarter of a yogurt? It's a quarter of a yogurt, yeah. Pretty much. So I get home, and I'm like, I'm all excited and proud of myself, like unloading all my yogurts and stacks. And this was August 20th when I bought these, and I started looking at the labels. It's August 21st, August 21st, August 21st.

I had bought 12 yogurts that were going to expire the day after, or like the sell-by date was the day after. So I... This is what I'm saying. The second a deal like that comes along and it involves a yogurt, alarm bells should be going off in your head. I think you personally... Oh, God.

Oh, God. Are you eating the bad yogurt? Wait, wait. the yogurt alarm bell should be going off in your head i think you personally oh god oh god wait wait no i think we know the real question did you did you eat all the uh do you eat all i did step up my yogurt consumption but i'm on the last i'm on the last one today shut your mouth you did not eat 12 yogurts in one day. No. No, I ate like. That is four yogurts a day. Four a day for three days. Three a day for four days. I ate three a day for four days. And I shipped my wife off with two.

Where is Sydney telling you not to do this? I'm trying to eat through this value yogurt that I bought. It's none of her concern. This is man's work. This is man's business. I just. I just. some of my meals that I would normally eat as a not yogurt meal. I replaced them as a yogurt meal. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Dave Tack, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. I'm a lumberjack, and that's okay. My name is Russ Rustick, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome friends to the besties where we pit the four hottest games of the week against each other to find out which one reigns supreme. We then pit that game against our current reigning champion to find out if it will unseat it as our favorite game of the year. Chris Plant, what is our current favorite game of the year? It's Sound Shapes.

Sound Shapes on the PS Vita. We got a hot week. This week is popping off, and I have a good feeling about this week that it might just get unseated. That's what I think. Really? Yeah. Who knows?

I don't know. So, you're the Commissioner, Russ. Who's going to start us off start us off well actually before we started off i just wanted to go off on a rant briefly oh no strap in everybody now this is i want to talk a little bit about counter-strike source which is not one of the games we're bringing this way counter-strike go yeah i'm sorry counter-strike go the new counter-strike counter-strike source only came out like eight years ago. Counter-Strike Go, so I was kind of excited for it.

I'm not a huge Counter-Strike fan, but I like shooters, and I was going to play it on the 360. And then I heard they block party chat in the multiplayer on the 360. You can't use party chat. You have to use game chat. In the multiplayer on the 360, you can't use party chat. You have to use game chat. What that basically means is you're stuck listening to morons and idiots instead of just like people you know while you're playing multiplayer. And I just can't fathom a world in which this makes any logical sense. Now, this is not a new practice, right?

The last time that I've heard of anyone doing this was with Modern Warfare 2. They blocked it as a means of like stopping people from cheating and stuff like that and there are certain very specific modes in modern warfare 3 that do it but for the most part party chat is free and wild and it's fantastic because you can talk with people before you're in the game and coordinate to like get everyone in the same game but here everyone's in game chat you can't talk to any of your friends that are already in the middle of a game oh i know another um dark souls oh dark souls does that dark souls would just dark so boot you out of the game i'll beat you out of the game for activating it's just like the most infuriating thing anyway i complained about

this on twitter and all i got was oh you should be playing on pc because it's a pc game guys they made it on 362 there's no reason i need to play it in front of my computer hunched over i can play on my couch and chill out this stuff drives me up a wall val please let party chat back into the fold it'll make me so happy they won't they will i know they won't competitive game like the whole idea of it is like feed the competitive culture. I know, but, like, what percentage of it is people just wanting to have fun versus people wanting to, like, KD ratio the hell out of it? Well, it's probably the opposite of what you think. I think if you're playing a game for fun, it is not Counter-Strike Go.

Yeah, I think that's the whole thing is they are purposely skewing to that audience. Anyway, it makes me angry. are purposely skewing to that audience anyway it makes me angry um and with that out of the way uh i thought we'd um start with um christopher plant christopher plant what kind of game you bring this week i i brought a game that i think you will be pining after uh i just want to say one quick thing so i I'm recording out. I'm recording from Chris Plant's house. Don't. Don't. And Chris Plant.

Don't. Literally. Don't. Just pulled up a page of tree puns. Just brace yourselves, guys. Anyway. Yeah, you've really sapped the fun out of this. Oh, God.

I'm going to use some of these while he's doing it. Oak A. I'm ready to start. Did you say Oak A? Yeah. Okay, guys, just leave me alone. Okay? So, the root of the fun in my game is chopping up trees.

It's a game called jack lumber uh it is by owl camille labs uh is that a pun that's actually their name that's not a pun uh and it's it's kind of like a slow fruit ninja some things pop onto the screen and then the second you touch the screen you can chop uh through everything you have to do it in a very quick amount of time before time runs up and you have to cut specific lines like kind of shapes or you have to double cut or you have to cut through things in a specific order or there's even like dynamite to blow up trees uh but the ultimate goal is still the same cut everything on screen accumulate the most points through combos finish a round yeah i'm really fond of those games yeah yeah any anything else something about a maple tree well we'll not make a joke about it you know all right you're uh i'm dead yeah listen all i'm saying is those who cut down trees

don't necessarily believe in the future okay okay so the point of the game is that uh yeah we cover the point again the great thing about this game is it's basically a Ren and Stimpy-inspired video game. The art style looks exactly like John Kay's. There's all this kind of kitschy art design. There's lumberjacks. There's a beaver that talks to you. You accumulate animals. The fact that you're cutting logs is one giant nod to the log board game or the log song, if you've listened to or watched watched runes tempe uh and i

loved that show as a kid so it was kind of a nostalgic uh i don't know it tapped into that for me it tapped was that intentional i think that wasn't intentional it was just good man that was astonishing ash tonishing ash ash like a an ash tree. Okay, please. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it. It's a very, it's a simple, simple game. I don't know, does anybody have any questions about it? There's not a lot to talk about other than it being simple. Is there any sort of gameplay to it that separates it from, you know, your Fruit Ninja? Yeah, I mean, like I said, it's not the same game. Fruit Ninja is one of those

games that you can play endlessly because it's the same thing every round there's no levels or anything you're just you know seeing how much you can cut time after time this is specific levels with like very specific types of logs that you're cutting and the goal is to cut increasingly difficult types of logs and use these sorts of like exploding logs or like windy logs or time freezing mechanics uh to complete harder and harder levels it sounds more like a more strategic fruit ninja yeah yeah okay okay and with an actual like a cool art style and it has like some interesting in-app purchase twists like a lot of times these games can be spoiled by uh people buying bonuses in the game like you know like oh you get additional time freezes or things like

that and you have that option uh wow that was god wow sorry um so one of the options in the game though is you can earn or acquire beards which make the game much more difficult but they reward you with free in-game cash so if you actually have skill in the game you can acquire everything that you would otherwise pay for with real money pretty easily and quickly so it it's a good in-app uh i don't know sometimes i feel like skilled people get pushed out of uh iphone games because they can just be kind of bought out of the leaderboards by people who are willing to spend all that cash and there's not an option for people who are good at the game other than spending money too uh and this kind of solves that problem okay yeah what's the cost of the game

uh i believe it's on sale i think think, for like $0.99. Maybe it's $1.99. It launched at $1, but that was sort of a temporary sale. I'm not sure what it's at when the show goes up. It's $1.99 right now. It's now $2. Would you say it's worth $2? Easily.

Duh. I would also recommend you read Chris Plant's more full-featured review of the game, which went up on Polygon last week. Yeah. I i mean i'd be happy to bark about it okay i face palm i hate your guts hey it's not my fault i'm so popular with uh ios reviews okay i can't yeah uh so uh justin mcelroy uh did you play again yeah i did did you not have time because life's a birch okay uh i do yeah that's a good one uh i i do want to uh i want to make a couple of super quick recommendations um that are not the games i played this week um the first is an app called Pocket Casts that I got. Two words.

And it is a wonderful replacement for the official podcast app on iOS if you've been looking for something like that. I use something else, though. I don't use that one. What do you use? I use Downcast. I heard some good recommendations for that, too. I'm a Downcast guy, too. Well, I will have to give that a shot.

That was simply my recommendation that I wanted to give you. And also, I wanted to say if you have a PC, you should get 30 Flights of Loving and Gravity Bone. There are two games from Blendo, and they will take you each about 15 minutes to complete. And they are

pretty much revolutionary in terms of storytelling, and I think they're amazing. But I didn't want to bring them this week because you could spoil them fairly easily by talking about them for any amount of time. I do one quick question about Gravity Bone. Any relation to Monkey Bone?

None, none, none. Because I'm a big fan of Monkey Bone the movie. Well, who isn't? But yeah, I don't think there's any relation. No, my game this week is a hybrid uh made by the people who brought you scribble knots uh hybrid is a third person shooter uh it is cover based and it takes that to the extreme um by which i mean that your your character doesn't move freely through the environment he only can i'm assuming it's a he it may be a she i don't know it's a it looks like a robot so your character uh moves from cover point to cover point you select a cover point on in your

some you know one that you is within visual range you put your reticle on it, you press A, and he uses his jetpack to hover towards it. You can still shoot while you are hovering between two points. You can retreat to go back to the point you left, and you can press the left stick in to give yourself a quick boost. You can also switch the point you're heading to mid-flight. And I say that only to highlight, like, those are the only locomotion options you have.

So it creates basically paths and choke points and I think helps to keep the action moving quite a bit. It, for me, takes the emphasis off of the things that I don't like in a shooter, things that I feel like I struggle with, knowing the right places to be at the right times, and, you know, looking around to try to figure out where the other entrances and exits and all that stuff is. This makes it a lot easier to deal with. And I was actually doing pretty well. I had an even kill death spread, which for me is like really good for a shooter that I actually just started

playing. I mean, just started the, there's some interesting uh experience you know you'll unlock uh lots of you perform little missions you get experience uh you use that experience to increase your rank and as you increase your rank you get weapon unlocks where you can unlock one weapon in in a certain category so maybe when you make sergeant you know you'll get a helmet unlock or a shotgun unlock and you can choose any of the shotguns and unlock them and then you'll have them um there are also many there are missions you can complete uh sort of secondary to your primary objective um and to get more experience the uh sort of more interesting thing and i say interesting but i don't necessarily want to connotate that as good or bad uh is that you can use real money to speed up those unlocks

you can um you can pay for gold you can use to either uh just straight up unlock a weapon or you can use the gold to get a three-day or five-day boost of your experience the rate at which you get experience um i you so the equivalent of like what call of duty did where you like bought doritos and got double xp yeah yeah yeah i that's that's except you don't get to eat delicious delicious doritos um yeah which is too bad i mean you could buy doritos but it's not gonna help you uh anyway i i, uh, it has a lot of really cool weapons, which was very appealing to me. And the, the, the sort of outlandish nature of some of them help to really do help you to go with whatever play style fits you. Like for instance, I'm not great at, uh, aiming and shooting a guy.

at aiming and shooting a guy. So I got a gun called the Gambler, where if you get the person, then you will kill them. It is a one-hit kill. But it only has one bullet in the chamber. It takes a while to reload. And there's a slight chance that it will explode and kill you.

So for me, that's like, oh, that's great. Because that like you know i'm not i don't have to worry about firefights if i lose you know if i don't have the person dead to rights right from the jump then you know that's on me but at least i i there's another um you have a one weapon that you take into the battle and one ability. And of course you can change those with your loadout, but again that's another thing I like because it helps keep you focused and driven on a... towards a certain role, help you fulfill a certain role. The... there's a one ability, for instance, that lets you detonate yourself and you explode killing every enemy in the surrounding area even if they're behind cover so you know depending on what you're like driving nuts though yeah i feel like you'd

just be a sad sap what do you mean oh god oh i don't know what doing that uh no what do you what would drive you nuts you mean if you're on no like if you're on the other side of that is there any way to combat that? It sounds like, not to bring up Call of Duty again, but everyone hated Martyrdom for a reason. Which is the one where you drop a grenade when you die. Well, this is not, I mean, you have to trigger it, and you do lose your life. I mean, you die when it happens. I know, but there's so many people out there that don't care about anything but making other people miserable.

That to have a feature in the game that's like... Well, okay, the other thing about it is that if... So, when you're behind cover, you're safe. You're super vulnerable when you're in the air. You just said you could die when they exploded. No, let me finish. You're super vulnerable when you're flying through the air so if i see a guy over there and i want to go do uh you know i'm going to go self-destruct and try to kill him um i have to fly towards that guy where in which

he has ample opportunity to kill me i mean he could just not let me get close if he lets me get close and then i use the ability that's that's on him um yeah but but yeah so there's counters to that sort of thing so what i like about this game and one of the things so i really liked gears when it first came out gears of war multiplayer because it was cover base and it like felt really tactical and sort of sounds similar but what ended up happening with gears was that people adopted this like new way to move around the environment where they're just like constantly like rolling and diving and locking onto cover to like speed up their movements and it sort of ruined the game for me because it like got rid of the tactics and turned it into a twitch shooter and i guess theoretically that could happen here too but it sounds like getting rid of like the more complicated movement elements you can't cheat the system

might level the playing field it's like uh what is it called snaking in mario kart when people figure out a way to operate the game and the way it was not intended to be yeah i'm really good at snaking yeah yeah i think that uh it's interesting because there's a great tradeoff, I think, between the cover and the movement. Because you're so safe in cover, except for the fact that pretty much all the environments are very open. So it's not hard for someone to get the jump on you if you're waiting. When you're in the air, you're super vulnerable. you if you're waiting when you're in the air you're super vulnerable so it it is sort of this part of i mean it's built into the game that you're going to have periods at which you are just a sitting duck basically um which is interesting to me and i and i think it is a

nice balance the other thing i like about it is that it's 3v3 uh which really is very helps me to like sort of understand what's going on and keep track of of the action and have give it sort of an ebb and flow uh you know without ever feeling like i'm completely getting swarmed or uh up against a a completely you know undefeatable force but is there party chat you know i don't know i don't really play video games with people certainly hope so uh it's worth noting this was the game that was like completely busted at launch right yes yeah apparently this is just like not working at launch that's a crime and it's a real shame it is a shame but i i have to say i have had quite a bit of luck finding matches with people who are a comparable skill level to me,

which I think is good news for people who are thinking about getting into it. Because, you know, the game's in trouble if you start getting paired with, like, level 50s. And so far, that hasn't happened. Cool. That sounds pretty good. Yeah. Thank you. I might try it. Yeah, it yeah it might try it yeah well i mean it it's i think it's worth i think it's worth checking out i i i do not as a rule enjoy multiplayer shooters um and i and i really dug it so uh uh i would encourage you if you if it sounds like something you might like to enjoy or absorb in your body.

The only thing that kind of turned me off was the acorn-y art style. Good one, Chris Plant. Okay. Well, I want to die, so let's talk about literally anything else. Well, so has anything been going on in anyone's lives? What the hell is that? I watched Apocalypse Now. Oh, yeah.

I'll talk about that some more. Only 40 years too late. Yeah, it was good. I'm pretty sure no one needs insight on a movie that came out 40 years ago. Hey, has anybody seen this movie? What? Tell me about it. Tell me more.

It turns out Vietnam was crazy. It all worked out, right? Yeah, I mean, not really. No? It wasn't all great? Well, I mean, the movie didn't fill me in on what happened with Vietnam. So, well, the verdict's still out over there. I think it went okay. I don't think it worked out well for Colonel Kurtz.

No, he's fine. He survives. Spoilers. Do you know the weird thing about that movie? Is that you do see an animal get killed on screen that's weird that maybe that was like that was upset maybe it's special effects no it was definitely an animal being slaughtered on screen well maybe you know it's hard to say maybe it might be special effects d Tack, have you been on any adventures lately?

Gone to Sheetz. I have gone to Sheetz. You had breakfast there, I saw. I was taking pictures of donuts. You know what I want you to do? I want you to get a Foursquare account. I want you to only check in when you go to Sheetz. There's Dave Tack, the king of Sheetz.

You act like there's somewhere else I go other than Sheetz. Dave Tack. I just like the image. Like, you work from home, Dave. So you basically, like, in the morning, it's like, okay somewhere else I go other than sheets. I just like the image, like you work from home, Dave, so you basically, like in the morning, it's like, okay, here I go, off to the gas station to get my breakfast. That's better than me.

I'm eating expired yogurt. For expired yogurt. For expired yogurt. I hope you just dumped them into one bowl. See, I know how funny that all sounds, except that it happens to be true And now I just feel terrible the best friend about it is that you Instagram it Dave Tackett The moodiest Instagrammer in the world he can make literally anything look sad

you know that scene in Parks and Recreation where that we're a We're a Ron Swanson and Andy have to fulfill April's assignment to shoot something sad, and Ron starts shooting random objects. Like, there's a sad floor. There's a sad desk. That's how Dave Tack does with everything on his Instagram. He can make anything look so sad.

He uses X-Pro. It's his favorite filter. No, I don't. That's how he sees the world, maybe. What's your filter? No, no, no, no. My new thing. I'm in my black and white. Uh-oh.

I'm using an app on iOS called Huelus. H-U-E-L-U. H-U-E-L-U. Huelus. I think it's pronounced Huelus. Huelus. Huelus. age, age. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut.

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Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut. Umlaut capture them in color. Yeah. No, because it would be gross. Before Sheets came to my area, someone convinced me that the sandwiches, you order the sandwich on a TV screen, and then someone hands it to them. Before they came to my area, I had been convinced that it was robots, that robots made your sandwich. You put an order in, and then a series of robots constructed it. Is that far from the truth? Yeah, they humans well teenager robots i mean they're dead behind

the eyes enough that you could pretend they're robots but it's not the same thing we just lost all our sheet sponsorships um there we go i want to hear about something happier from dave tech though yeah it's something happier like a game starring death. DaveTac, what are you bringing this week? I played Darksiders 2. I am in the middle of playing Darksiders 2, and it is awesome. I love it.

Did you guys all play the first Darksiders? I really liked the first one. People, I think, are a little more lukewarm about it, but I really dug it. I only had one problem with it, was that thing at the end where you had to put together the weapon. That's where I bailed on it. I don't even remember that part. Oh, it was like a Zelda style.

It was the backtracking. Yeah, you had to backtrack through the whole goddamn game. Yeah, I still love Darksiders, the first one. I don't think it was perfect, but I think what it did, it did very well. And it chose to focus on only a few things and that made it a lot of fun. It was also, I think it's worth mentioning,

very much a Zelda game. But it didn't feel to me, or I guess anybody who actually likes it, like it was a rip-off. I think it walked the line pretty it was definitely inspired i would say but not so i wouldn't say it was a clone the same way batman was inspired by that in metroid what batman arkham city or asylum is just just because

there's gear gating it's gear get You go from one dungeon to the next, collecting the weapon that will get you into the following dungeon. Yeah, I don't think that's cloning, though. I didn't say clone. I said inspired. Yeah, but you said it with an air of sophistication. Just because I'm a sophisticated gentleman. Anyway, Dave Tackle, what were you saying?

He can't help it. Anyway, yeah, I just... What were you saying? He can't help it. Anyway, yeah, I just, and I actually did a start-stop on the first Darksiders a while back and only finished it a couple of months ago. And it was, you know, so it's all fresh in my mind. And now, obviously, Darksiders 2 is out, and I think the easiest way for me to say it is that it does everything you want in a sequel, where it retains all the stuff that they got right the first time around, and then it mixes in some combination of the stuff they didn't have time to do and some cool things that they thought to do afterwards.

Practically speaking, I said I like the simplicity in the first Darksiders. There was a limit of really three weapons that you could do some minor upgrades to. They had an opportunity to sort of blow that out of the water and make it super complicated here and they don't but what they do is they give you for example tons of similar weapons but with different buffs and different perks on all the weapons that you're sort of finding after you kill everybody so there's a moment in the game where you're you're always using the same type of weapon like your scythe or your you know a hammer or things like that but you have choices between all of these different things and you know some of them will get you health when you uh you know

after kills or somebody will buff your some of them will buff your uh your strength or your defense um so it's effectively like diablo mixed in with the original darksiders right right so it's got it's got the the combat which i think was probably the best part of the original Darksiders. Right, right. So it's got the combat, which I think was probably the best part of the first Darksiders, which is very simple, very focused, very, you know, combination of X, X, X, X, X, Y, X, X, Y, Y. You know, very... Whoa, take that from the top.

It doesn't... X? Okay. Okay, first of all, there's an X button. Okay. Then there's a Y button. Whoa, spoilers. But the problem is, like Ninja Gaiden, Gaiden? How do we pronounce that?

No one cares. Good. Ninja Gaiden would increase the difficulty or increase the power of the weapons attacks by making them, as the weapon leveled up 30 button presses long and a dark siders it made the button presses four buttons long or you know the the combination to pull that stuff off so you didn't have to uh you know sit down and study the moves it just became very fluid very fun very um just as i got more powerful i actually got to use the uh the combinations in the new moves that i got it's exactly like that in darksiders 2 so they they focus on that combat while giving

making the range of of options bigger that is actually an interesting yeah there's there's always an interesting divide with action games uh where not always but but a lot of times with these these melee focus games where the point at which becomes advantageous for you to learn combos is is negated by the difficulty of the enemies like you just don't need to you find you know six or seven short combos that you can cheese your way through and there's really no point or value in in learning some of the more impressive combos yet sleeping dogs like that the combos never get much longer than four or five buttons and most of them are the same button in sequence right and and that's what that's what i think makes the the Darksiders formula work so well, is that the powerful combos aren't complex. They're still easy and still fun to pull off.

They took out, for example, and I think this is deliberate on Volition's part, because, did I say Vigil Games? Because I said Volition. It's Vigil, right? Vigil, yeah. Vigil, yeah. Vigil, yes. Okay.

Well, sorry about that. Okay, I just edited it. I forgot to edit it. But, like, they took out, there's no block, as far as I can tell, in the game. Is there, like, a parry? Yes. And it's super responsive and super effective i love sequels but i had a problem with the ending when he gets put in carbonite yeah

what are you doing to this honestly tripping balls why are you destroying the show why are you trying to dave tax serious question that doesn't involve chris plant at all go for i really the only thing i love more than party chat is costumes. How are we doing on costumes in this game? Well, they don't call them costumes per se. They should. But there's a bunch of armor that you're picking up. It's not just weapons they're dropping.

It's armor, and basically you're customizing the look of death. So it's not just like a stat difference. No, it's... There's like a visual difference. Yeah, there's a cosmetic difference, too. So, you know, like I said, to my mind, it's exactly what you want out of a sequel, where they retain the good things and they add in stuff without... Just like the combos, without making it too complicated.

And the horse is good? Oh, the horse is always good. Yeah. Did you know when Queen Elizabeth was nine years old, she was interviewed by a magazine, and they asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said,

I should like to be a horse. That's a real thing. That wasn't one of my jokes. That was Ross. See, I guess dreams don't come true even for queens. Yeah, that's true. That's why she was so sad at the Olympics. Anything else you wanted to say about the game, Dave Tack?

Game of the week. Game of the week. That's it. Anyone else have any last minute pleas for love and respect? No, I'm excited. I feel like these are three top-flight titles that anybody could enjoy. I would have to say, though, as much as I've been enjoying Hybrid and I have not myself played Darksiders,

I think that the appeal of Darksiders is probably wider-ranging. Honestly, for—and I think Hybrid the appeal of Darksiders is probably wider ranging. Honestly, for, and I think hybrid is 15 bucks. That's kind of a crapshoot, I think, for, it's kind of a high investment for a multiplayer shooter that may or may not even be, like, sustainable in a month. Yeah, I'd agree. That sort of does happen. I mean, I'm enjoying it now but i got a

free code for it so i like what do i know but who's to say yeah in a month there could be no one playing and that's a terrible line of reasoning because it uh you know it um self-fulfilling prophecy exactly precisely right but it also underlines the need for a some sort of free to play model on the 360 i mean if this game was free to play it would be great it would be the easiest recommendation in the world would be tribe there's a demo yeah no i yeah but i mean structurally structurally um whether or not you have fun in a demo now does not represent whether or not the game will still exist in a month um and and if you had a

free-to-play game then everybody could could get on board it would be completely sustainable and i just don't see that that model of a 15 dollar multiplayer only shooter makes a lot of sense on on xbla i don't know for for 15 dollars it's a bit of a crapshoot. Chris Plant's game sounds also good. Yeah, I think if you're loking for a good game, you could leaf these other ones aside. No. Loking? Oak.

Like a loking. Oh, no. How about we leaf these other ones on the side? He did close the window, so this is him shooting off the hip. You could... I think we should turn... No, I think you're right. We're branching down a lot of paths here.

Chris into Deadwood and Leaf, his body, by the side of the road in a ditch. How does that sound? That sounds lovely. Yeah, I'm going to have to go with Dave Tack's game. I think... I'll admit I'm a little biased because i do really like the first darksiders and i do really like diablo like loot stuff and um everything that i've heard about the game is rather uh cool so hooray dave tack thank you that's i feel good

this is my first win um i would like to i guess first of all thing okay uh moving on is this game going to best sound shapes first off have any of us played sound shapes i have and also i'm gonna say no no for okay here's a big reason because i hopped on sound shapes and my concern was that it's a user for to catch everybody up really quick it's a platformer game that you can create levels for, and in creating those levels, you also create music, in part. That's a rough idea, but the problem that I feared was no one would create anything good. Obviously, I vastly underestimated the internet, because while it was a little dry the first few days there are now some incredible uh levels up there i mean some really really good stuff so i looked on there the other day and all i could find from like the top downloaded were like one screen levels were just like the mario theme yeah

that is the problem is that they haven't updated the web page yet so you actually need to know who to be looking for. Who should we be looking for, Chris Plant? I will put a link to his stuff on – or a few of them's stuff in the blog post. Okay. So people can look for it there. Fine. But there is some really great stuff.

So they still have some work ahead of them. I think they need to fix up the website in terms of getting eyes on the best stuff. I also think they're already running into the problem of these levels will all look the same because the only assets available to the people are what is within the four grand art themes of the main game. There's ways to kind of cheat that system uh but it's a lot tougher it requires a lot of uh elbow grease to get it done but for now it is exceptional you know it's a great game i'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you chris plant i really like sound shapes i find it charming and enjoyable as a platformer which at its core it is a platformer it's not amazing it's good but not

like alien mutant blobs attack good but i'd argue that it's not a platform at its core i'd argue that it's a music game that uses but that's like saying little big planet's not a part oh no no because little big planet actually the whole point of little big planet iset actually, the whole point of LittleBigPlanet is the platforming. The whole point of this game is the music. And the platforming. That's the secondary part. Anyway, does anyone else feel strongly one way or the other about Sound Shapes versus Darksiders 2? I haven't played either one of them,

except that I know that I would probably like Darksiders 2 more. I feel like Sound Shapes has had its day. I think it's, I'm sure it's great. I don't think, but Sound Shapes hasn't gone long enough. Okay, here's the question for me. I think Darksiders is probably just as good a video game as Sound Shapes, which is a crazy comparison. It makes no sense.

The question is, is Sound Shapes good enough that we want to hold on to it long enough to put it into the hall of fame i say yes because i don't see darksiders competing at the end of the year but i see sound shapes depending on what is created by the users possibly having a good comeback towards the end it will be the game that i actually remember from this year okay okay i suppose i think that's i think that's legit and i think it's legit that darksiders 2 is i'm certainly enjoyable but is probably not um it's probably more of a known quantity maybe maybe that groundwork because it was already sort of in place from the jump

that's fair well then Sound Shapes will retain its title as our favorite game of the year I imagine at this point we would almost have to put it in the Hall of Fame when it eventually is unseated but you'll have to find out for yourself, before we go

does anybody have any idea what they might be bringing next week I'm bringing a pc game something something something pc you're not gonna have chris plant wants to build a pc between now and then that is absolutely not gonna happen i think i think rock band blitz is out next week so yeah i don't i don't know we're out almost in september yeah really start picking up. Right now, it's hope you like iOS games. Anyway. I think I'm going to bring Griffin.

Yeah, that would be great. Dave Tack, thank you so much for joining us yet again. Thank you, Dave Tack. Congratulations on being a big wiener. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to see some of our writing, you can go to theverge.com forward slash gaming. Soon that'll be at polygon.com, but it's not quite there yet.

Follow us on Twitter at Polygon. YouTube slash Polygon. Facebook slash Polygon. And so much more. Thank you so much for listening. And be sure to join us again next Friday for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? besties