The Besties - The Besties: The Best Games of February 2014

Episode Date: March 7, 2014

February came and went. The shortest month of the year was practically a wasteland in terms of major game releases. The standout AAA game, Thief, left many of us feeling robbed. And Fable's anniversary wasn't quite worth celebrating. Then again, maybe we were just looking for fun in all the wrong places. Bravely Default, The Last of Us' DLC and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze all got lavished with praise by our reviews team. And hey, I'm always happy to shout my love for Earth Defense Force 2025. You know, maybe it wasn't a bad slate of games, so much as it was a strange one. Just look at the four we chose to discuss: a remake in the mode of Metroidvania, an anthropomorphic number puzzler, an asburdist espionage comedy and a third-person shooter spin-off of a family-friendly real-time strategy game. 5:30 - Thief 14:30 - Jazzpunk 26:00 - Threes! 36:15 - Halftime! 56:00 - Strider 1:08:00 - News of the month 1:25:45 - Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 1:41:30 - Reader emails 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!

Guys, do you think the besties will ever be the Oscars of video games? Because I know that there's a lot of outcry for a simulation of Oscars in this particular sphere. And I think if anyone's going to do it, I think we probably have the best shot. What do you mean by simulation? Like we need something that auspicious and prodigious and litigious. A simulacrum, maybe. A simulacrum. Yeah.

I think we probably would fit that bill. What do we need to do? We need to get John Travolta to make an ass out of himself. Poor John Travolta just has dyslexia. I don't know why everyone's giving him a hard time. Yeah, that's the only reason he messed up. No, come on now. It is. He has dyslexia. I don't know why everyone's giving him a hard time. Yeah, that's the only reason he messed up. No, come on now. It is. He has dyslexia. Okay, but like,

are you telling me there wasn't a single moment when John Travolta was like, who am I introducing again? And the person was like, uh, Crunch Lushum Lushum Lushum? Crunch Chocula. Crunch Chocula? And he was like, well,

I didn't quite hear you, but... There's a lot to remember. I didn't quite hear you, but I'm just going to go with it. This is the wickedly... What did you say, Griffin, on Twitter? What he said was Adele Dazeem. Which is like, you didn't even get a syllable, my friend. Adele Dazeem! And it had to be, like, I think the teleprompter person was goofing on him.

No, no, it's a, it's, if you listen to, if you think about the words Adele Dazeem, it's like the perfect dyslexic reorganization of Idina Menzel you can think of. Yeah, but like, dyslexia shouldn't, it doesn't get to your, like, know who it is. She was in

fucking Wicked and Rent. Just know who it is. Right. She was in fucking Wicked and Rent. Just know who it is. Right. She was in Wicked. Guys, guys, guys. He obviously knows who she is. He was in Grease. He is a huge fan of Olivia Newton-John.

He just recorded a new hot Christmas song with her only like a year and a half ago. The man knows musical theater. What a hot jam that was. Something else happened here. There's something more sinister going on. You're saying this is a plot because nobody has embarrassed John Travolta ever before. I mean, he has an otherwise

spotless career. Sure. Look who's talking now. Look who's talking now too. I think it has something to do with airplanes and his love of them. Man, that dude loves airplanes. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and no, I am the one who knows the game that's good this month. My name is Christopher Plant, and I've played some games this month.

Bye! My name is Rush, and I know the best game of the week. I could have sworn You were going into Lion King You are at the perfect pitch Thank you This is the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest In news, tech Technical news

Citrus fruits I've been thinking of getting aquatic animals How do you guys feel? Sea beasts Ocean romance citrus fruit i've been thinking of getting is it aquatic animals how do you guys feel yeah that's a great area for us to see beasts uh ocean romance and we've got uh uh this week we're going to talk about video games or vid games now i thought that those were just for kids and it's i thought it was only pac-man now they, they're not just Pac-Man anymore. They've come a long way since the bleeps and bloops that you remember from your cigarette-stained childhood.

No, these are true cinematic experience. Now, look at this scene here. You're not watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster. No, this is a scene from a video game. It uses CD-ROM technology. Super VGA. This is super VGA. Where are the ghosts?

This isn't the latest Pixar cartoon. This is a video game, interactive. We were talking about February today, and there were, I wouldn't say a lot of great games released in february but there were games released in february some of which uh i would say ascended to the level of greatness can we it's a much shorter month like it is like i mean at least like 25 shorter than other months can we explore what would have happened if we were still doing the weekly schedule and we had this month? There had to be a week there.

There had to be a week there where I think the four games that we have ended up with, we're still pretty contentious about. I know there's some that, like, not everybody loved. So, like, to think, like, if there was a week where none of these four games came out, what the fuck were we going to talk about? No question about it, there would have been at least one week where one of us was like, I think the new Taco Bell web game, Crunch Defender, is the best thing that there is. Or worse, we would have said Thief.

No. I can't even think about it you just acted you just said the kill phrase for the thief defense force it's i does not exist it definitely exists i literally uh bought thief because i thought we were gonna play it and talk about it on the show and i got like three hours in i thought man i hope we don't talk about this on the show because i don't want to play any more of this and then i didn't so we yeah we had it on the yeah go ahead i i played about 15 minutes uh of thief um and then and then i couldn't proceed um because i hit a game ending bug where i couldn't unlock a door and then i thought that's

that's too crazy let's restart and try this again. And then I hit the same bug with a different door. This is on Polygon Live. We literally have video footage of us getting to a point you can't get across. And we thought, yeah, maybe it was just like

a bug on our end. A one-time thing. So we reloaded the game and we hit a different door with that same bug should we can i propose that we actually do take a few minutes here to talk about thief because i think people listen to this show to like why is it here even though it's not like the best game like it's it's fuck it's fucking crazy like the way that game turned out it's it's it's bonkers that they made a game like that. Is it really crazy? I mean, given all the stuff that we heard, yeah. I guess, for me at least, I tend to assume that because of the way the industry is set up now,

is that if a AAA game gets worked on for many years and eventually is released, I tend to think that it's just gonna be decent. You know, like, maybe not exciting or innovative or whatever, but, like, it'll be pretty good just because there are enough you know, replicatable things

that have been proven over time that people can include in a game that make it decent. You know know i think the problem with thief is that so much of it is uncharted territory right it's not like they're they're releasing a first-person shooter where structurally you know the beats that make that a satisfying experience like stealth first person is like not i don't know wait a minute stop it there's an entire fucking franchise this is the fourth game in the franchise. Also known as Dishonored, another game that did first-person stealth.

Yeah, but Dishonored did it really good. I'm not saying that it's not been done before. I'm just saying it's not as easy. I agree that it's not as easy. I will rush to Justin's defense here, too, and say it's been a long time since A Good Thief came out,

and a lot has changed in terms of how we play games and dishonored is a perfect example of that right like they figured out a way to make stealth games kind of fast and more action heavy and the the very first second you hop in thief it feels heavy and old-fashioned and like i i just think the game is married to both this like idea of what thief was a long time ago and, like, whatever else they wanted it to be at some point, I guess, in its development, which I imagine is crap. My biggest complaint is, like, all the defenses of this game is,

it's just pure stealth, baby. You don't get it because you want, you know, sword fighting and guns. And that's such bullshit because you can play a game like Dishonored without killing anybody, without getting caught the entire time you can play a game like splinter cell in that like super stealthy yeah i mean or a better from the same publisher deus ex which just got rebooted and well two years ago or three years ago and did it they did an amazing job yeah and there's good stealth and there's good action you play a game like far cry 3 where like yeah you are you're murdering a lot of dudes but there's a really heavy and really rewarding stealth element to that game like you can't just

say it you don't get it because this game's pure stealth you wanted something else from it like i knew it was going to be a pure stealth game there are games that did a better job of the one thing that thief was supposed to do like in addition to the other shit that it did like and if that's going to be your one thing it has to be on fucking point beyond that it needs if you if i'm not saying there has to be a component for uh you know and oh shit button combat like but if you don't have one then it starts to feel extremely constraining like there would be times where like i the the reason the loop worked in dishonored is that both of the possible outcomes were satisfying like i knew that even if i got caught it didn't make me

feel like i was a failure because i had another option for how to attack it. And Thief doesn't have that. If Thief, the moment you're spotted, you just feel like an idiot, like a stupid baby with a bow that everybody hates you. And also, oh, sorry. I was just gonna make one other note about the bow. And I know that this is more specific to me,

but because there is such a shortage of arrows that you can pick up and find, I was extremely discouraged from using the bow at all because I never knew when I was going to get my next package of arrows. Sure. I mean, you can buy those. There are vendors scattered throughout. But I'm not going to spend money on a disposable resource when I need that money for upgrades.

It's kind of hard to know, like, who's a vendor. Like, you have the main one in that sort of quest hub where you get a few missions. But sometimes, like, you'll see a dude on the street and, like, you would have no way of knowing. Yeah, I completely missed. He has a giant barrel of arrows there for you. I completely missed the vendor before the second mission just because I didn't see them. And in the hub world you can get caught, so that like completely

discourages exploration and everything. I don't know. And then the focus, the thing that's supposed to make you feel like a cool thief is a limited resource that you have to refill with items. Like, I don't know, it's just ugh. Nothing about it felt fun to me. I want

to talk about the dishonored thingored thing you mentioned, though. It's the idea of it feeling good to fail, which I think is something that started with, really, like, Grand Theft Auto series, where things go wrong, but, like, that's the best part of the game. And in Dishonored, they nail that. Like, I love when suddenly, like, halfway through a mission, I had to drop the stealth charade and sometimes get decimated by guards, but going down swinging with that sword fighting mechanic,

which was fun. And I don't know. It just feels really weird to play a game now like that where when you fail, it just punishes you. There's no joy in it. Also, I think the constricted movement in Thief also is... I mean, it's a huge problem. And for me, it's the biggest problem by far.

It made exploring the world just an absolute nightmare. Yeah. But it also plays into this idea of if you get caught, I'm curious to hear, what do you guys do when you get caught in Thief? I let myself die. I mean, or reload a save, because you can run away.

It's, you can't, like, there's not, like, some perch that you can, like, easily locate and scale up to, because you can only run up certain walls. You can, like, try and put enough distance between you and the person, so you can maybe find a closet to dip inside. But that's very context-sensitive. Like, it's just, like, I don't know, man.

It just didn't, I mean, the big thing, I mean, we've talked about the combat and Dishonored that we all liked, but the big thing that I love about those games and the Thief games, the original Thief games, was not even the like punishing stealth aspects. It was how open the world was. Like, here's this giant environment

that you can explore, figure out the best way to like rob this bank. And in this game, they just clearly did not have the time or the resources. I mean, they had the time certainly, but they did not, you know, given the fact that it kept rebooting the project, ended up not having enough resources

to make this giant, like each of the maps as giant as like a Dishonored map, for example. The actual stealing is just brutal. Like walking into it, knowing that every room you walk into you need to like go shelf to shelf to find the one coin or brooch or necklace that someone has left in that drawer is like the height of tedium.

I would have gotten rid of the open hub world entirely. Like, your game is divided into chapters already. Like, just fucking lean into it. Just make it, like, just drop me out at the start of the thing. Like, show me a cut scene of you saying, now you're going to go rob a bank. Like, everything in the open world part. I didn't actually i kind of like some of the missions it was just the overworld that just fucking killed me like it it was the uh

i hated like finishing a mission because i knew i was about to get dropped in the middle of stink town again well that was uplifting anyway that's why we're not going to talk about um uh so let's move on to the games we actually do want to discuss does that seem like yeah that's reasonable procedure i um first up is jazz punk a game for your pc and macintoshazzpunk? It's about the birth control thing that gets put inside of you, and then it controls your births, I think. Jazzpunk. Chris, play it. What is Jazzpunk? Jazzpunk is an espionage game, and that's pretty much it.

You do a little bit of spy work, you break into the Kremlin, you recover some documents, and then you beat the game. So it's like Thief. Yeah, it's just like Thief. Except nothing like it because if you decide to break the game and disobey, there's

all sorts of crazy, weird hijinks to be found and it's a funny game. It's kind of like Airplane in that it's riffing on a lot of the things that we're already familiar with in video games um and and yeah i and that it's hard it's a hard game to describe uh it is impossible we learned this when we tried to do the the overview which i don't think turned out super great just because like i don't know man it's like

it's like talking about a funny friend of yours. You're just going to sound like an idiot trying to describe it. He's so wacky. He always does these things you don't expect him to. Let me list off all the jokes that are in the game. Here we go. Bullet points. I would say it's abstract. It is as abstract as video games have gotten yet.

It's an abstract first-person spy game, I guess. It is the Bubsy 3D. The new Bubsy 3D. The new Bubsy 3D of spy games. Actually, I think that's something we can talk about because I do think it will be difficult to talk about Jazz Pump, but I think we can talk about this broader idea of these games are like weird meta-commentaries on video games,

but doing so in a really droll way, like Bubsy 3D, where people are taking these like... I mean, Stanley doing so in a really droll way, like Bubsy 3D, where people are taking these... I mean, Stanley Parable is... Sure, Stanley Parable is that, but there's this new aesthetic that's more riffing on 90s art. For a long time, pixel art was kind of like the go-to for indie

project. And now we're seeing this wacky, I don't know, distorted 3D graphics that are kind of like almost Nintendo 64-esque, maybe early PlayStation. And it's all about kind of glitching through things. It's like it's an awareness of how broken games were back then. Am I going really way into that space? Well, what I don't want to do is for I think there's a lot of people that are listening that literally have never ever seen jazz punk because i think it was sort of a minor release so maybe just like painting a scenario

and like like for example like getting into breaking into the kremlin yeah at the beginning of the game you are uh in first person trying to break into the kremlin and there are all these people around to look like uh 3d versions of the iconography on bathroom signs, right? Or like Playmobil characters. Sure. Yeah. And you go up and talk to them, and all of them react in very strange ways, often in puns.

And some of them give you tasks. So you might meet a guy who's dressed as an informant, and he'll give you a ray gun, which you'll use to zap pigeons. And the pigeons, when they're killed, will turn into perfume, which, when you spray on people, gets them covered in 100 more pigeons. Like that scene in Home Alone 2. Sure.

And none of this serves any purpose. Like, you could skip all of this. There's no real reward, I guess, other than, like, achievements, which I don't really get into. Well, and also because it's the funniest stuff. Right, that's the reward. The reward is actually doing it. And there's tons

and tons of it. To the point where I didn't even understand what the game was the first time. That's the first level, and I kind of just went through it. I probably went like 15 minutes into it. And you should point out that side quest you just and I kind of just went through it. I probably put like 15 minutes into it. We should point out that side quest you just described is one of the more

normal side quests. There's a mission where you're at this Hawaiian resort and then apropos of nothing, there's like a wedding cake sitting on a table and when you interact with it, it folds back on itself and reveals that there's actually a computer and then you dial into the computer and you play a multiplayer first-person shooter called Wedding Quake,

where you shoot people with champagne bottles and wedding cakes. And when you do, it says, like, matrimony achieved or things like everlasting happiness. things like everlasting happiness like yeah it's like the same density i guess the same density of humor of like a duke nukem game but like way more creative and funny and i'll and not like fucking base like yeah look at the ass on that like not like dumb bullshit actual like airplane is a really good example it's a mix of like sight gags and puns and just like really humorous unexpected stuff to the point where like seriously i can't think of another game that has as many jokes as this game has that are like still keep making me laugh on like a minute to minute basis yeah i just didn't think I didn't think it was that funny.

I appreciated the silliness of it. Like I appreciate that it's anything that's sort of off the wall like that and feels that sort of fresh. But like I didn't think it was particularly funny. I just thought it was kind of random and silly. It was. It just didn't,

you talk about a lot of jokes. I don't think jokes is like... It's not jokes in the tradition. So, for example, there's a scene where you're running away from a bunch of FBI guys, and they're blocking the alleyways, and when you knock into them, it makes like a bowling pin noise.

And you keep doing this, and then eventually you get to a line of them, and one of the guys is an actual bowling pin in a hat. You like that. Is that, you know what? If you think that's hysterical, it explains everything. I also think it, like Airplane and like those movies of the 70s, it has so much in it that I read a number of reviews that were pretty negative about it. And the same joke was in every negative review where you see a turtle on the beach and you try to interact with it.

You throw a piece of pizza and two size at it. And it's like, oh, get it. It's the Ninja Turtles. It's like, yeah, there are a lot of easy, you know, kind of obvious pop culture jokes in the game. But they happen with such like relentless frequency that like that in and of itself, kind of obvious pop culture jokes in the game. But they happen with such, like, relentless frequency. Like, that in and of itself is kind of amusing. Like, when you're still, like, sort of processing one joke, another one is already, like, happening to you. I'll tell you my favorite joke, and this is not going to be funny at all,

but it just kept tickling me. And I think, like, the second level of the game, you find a blockbuster VHS box, and you pick it up, and then, like, when you're walking around, you find a depository spot for it. So you, like, put it away. But then, throughout

the game, you keep coming across these for no reason. Like, you're at a beach, and you find another one, and then, of course, there's, like, a depository in the middle of the beach. And they serve no purpose, and I, for some reason, that kept kept tickling me because i kept doing these stupid things thinking like oh if i do this i'm gonna get some great reward and the game's like there's not it doesn't care and it's just another dumb thing for you to do um yeah it's a very it's very strange and doesn't really feel like any other game that i've played in the sense that, like, what is driving you through it is not the story.

It's not seeing new levels. It's, like, these one-off ridiculous jokes that half the time make no fucking sense. I would argue with that, though. I was pretty pulled through by the story. I liked seeing where it went with uh my the the head of my organization sure and i really really enjoyed the ending yeah we won't get into uh because it's short i mean if you it's it's cheaper and it's short uh and it's worth playing through i think i liked um there are a lot of classic game references which i i i i don't know i feel like a lot of classic game references, which I don't know.

I feel like a lot of games are handled very cheaply. I'm amazed, actually, at some of the shit that they got away with. There's one part where you run into fire, and then it makes the golden eye damage noise, like that noise, and then it shows the little ring of health and armor, just for a split second. And it doesn't belabor that joke. It's just like hey we're gonna use golden eye assets really quick i also i also sort of like the fact that you could go a little bit out out of the lines to solve like puzzles so uh around the same time that the scene that griffin's talking about you're trying to get through a door and it has like an id scanner and you could find the id of like a scientist that works in the

building but there's also a copy machine and if you use the copy machine you just sit on the copy machine and make copies of your butt and you could pick up one of those copies of your butt and carry it over the scanner and the scanner will go welcome dr butley and then the door just opens okay why would a scanner be programmed to even do that because there's probably a scientist that looks like a butt yeah just is that not okay there's also a close mind you also throw spiders in the face of a sushi chef it's also pretty funny uh i don't know i mean it really comes down to, like, a sense of humor thing. I also love how we've actually spent the last, like, ten minutes doing what I said was terrible when you're describing funny games

with just listing off our favorite jokes. Yeah, but, like, that goes to, it really is such a sense of humor thing, and, like, if you don't find those jokes remotely funny, which is just incredibly... If you haven't laughed at the last ten minutes of our show. It's because we're fucking describing jokes second right and like you've got to go straight to the tap yeah also that we can remember any of these jokes how many

jokes you remember from most video games the others true remember when some corridor said that you were fat Matt hazard got some good ones in oh yeah uh-uh rat race I mean that's right and it's good that never got released good ones in. Oh, dear God. Rat Race. I mean, that's the old standard, isn't it? That never got released, Griffin. It's funny that we were the only four people who ever played Rat Race. And we referenced it constantly. Was it in an overview?

What was the... I talked with somebody about Rat Race, and we tried to get this narrative going. There was a press-only version of Rat Race that got released, and only the press got to play it and it was the funniest fucking thing ever made by anyone. The great thing about Rat Race, which is if you don't recall,

then you don't work in video games journalism, it was mostly like a comedy game. And I don't know why, but the idea of Rat Race, I think because we got so excited about the possibility of tearing it apart that like it seared into the mind of pretty much all game journalists who were working at the time so like we were all so excited about rat race being released because the jokes that were in the trailer for it were unfathomable that's got to be around the trailer has got to be around yeah well yeah we'll uh uh we'll go look for it on youtube

or something i want to talk about another game uh and it's the one that i've probably if i were to like uh completely calculate it out is probably the one that i've spent the most time playing this month uh or at least in february rather and that is threes a new puzzle game by, I think it's a guy, is the guy made Spell Tower or Puzzle Juice? No, no, no, Puzzle Juice. Asher Vollmer made it, and the art is from Greg Goulwind, who did the art for a bunch of different games, including Ridiculous Fishing. It is... Man, if talking about Jazz Punk was difficult, this is going to be...

It's numbers numbers and you squish them together it's it's a puzzle game which means the mechanics are pretty inscrutable to describe but the the short version is you have a uh grid with numbers uh spread out across it is five by five right i think it's four by you're an expert what do you think i believe it's four by four no it's not four by four when is it no it is it's four by four really yeah oh. Plant, you're an expert. What do you think? I believe it's 4x4. No, it's not 4x4. Wait, what is it? No, it is. It's 4x4. Really?

Oh, yeah, it is. You're right. 4x4. Good work, Plant. 4x4 grid in which you slide the numbers around and if two numbers are the same,

then they will combine to make a larger number when you slide them into each other. That goes for every number except ones and twos which can only combine with each other. That goes for every number except ones and twos, which can only combine with each other. And

you get more points for higher numbers. And it goes exponentially. So if you have several 48s, for example, their value will be dwarfed by a single

128 or 256 or whatever also you have to slide you don't just slide individual numbers you have to slide the entire board so the entire game is sort of about just positioning the numbers to put them where they need to be to combine with the same numbers yeah and with every swipe you make a new card gets added to the board and when you get to a point where you can't make any more moves, then the game ends. The experience is over. It is.

It's a really interesting puzzle game. First off, it's very addictive. Every time you lose, for some reason I have it in my head that if I just had one more shot, I could do a better job. Um, the interesting thing about threes though, is that unlike many, uh, well, like almost every video game I would say, but especially puzzle games, like I don't feel like I get necessarily get better at it every time that I play or even after several several times i mean i've played hundreds of games with threes and i still frequently have games where i score less than a thousand points which is very just very bad yeah that's terrible for me it's less about

like if i keep playing this game i'll get better at it even though that is happening i i do like fuck up a lot. For me, I actually approach it, and I think it's because it does have that really, really strong score chase hook. I play it more like Super Hexagon in that, like, man, if I have a good run by chance, like, that'll be really great for me. So I'm going to keep going until I win the threes lottery, even though it is, I mean, it's not luck-based.

I mean, I guess maybe a little bit in terms of where the shit spawns. No, I think it is actually more luck-based than most puzzle games. No, it's not. Sorry to interrupt. But I just, like, there's systems that are trackable. Okay, first off, when you swipe down and a new card enters the arena. It'll come from the top. It'll come, no.

Yeah. Yeah, if you swipe down, it comes from the top. It comes from the direction that you're swiping. Yeah, I'm not talking about direction. I'm talking about placement. Oh, yeah, sure. Which of the four columns it'll end up in, right that's random sure that's random okay i think the thing also the number only kind of random it it's not always clear which spot it'll come down from but if you keep going in

that direction it'll keep coming from that spot oh really yeah i believe so crazy i don't think that's true yeah i don't think that's true either pretty sure that's true. Yeah, I don't think that's true either. I'm pretty sure that's true. Unless it's fall, in which case it'll move to winter. I get what you're saying, Justin. I think what has come to light, especially for people that have, like, really gotten hardcore into it, is that there's the, like, first tier of playing threes, which is, okay, I understand the rules. I get, like, oh, this is the upcoming number, so I want to plan around that. And then there's like the third and fourth tier of playing threes where you know how to stat count where you're like

counting cards and uh building into a corner like plant recommends in his tips video and that's really where the the luck starts evaporating to the point where people that play using these certain tactics are never essentially never having games that are under like 30k is that fair to say even even higher than that people yeah people have figured out once you like i don't know how to do this but it sounds like once you can do that stat counting tricks if you spend enough time like basically jotting these things down and managing your cards then you can go go to, I mean, just absurd numbers. Right. So it's not random.

I know what you're thinking at home. Jotting down numbers, that sounds like a lot of fun. That's my only problem with the game at this point is to get much better, it would be too much of a time commitment. I don't think that's bad. Like, I think there are definitely people who love puzzle games like that. But for me, I got to a point where i was investing so much in a single round just to try to figure out new strategies and at that i'm just

not much of a puzzle person yeah that's when i lost uh most of my interest was when i started seeing the insane high scores and like learning that there were these levels of tactics just because it was it sort of made me feel like oh unless i do these tactics and like follow these guides i'll never be able to compete on a casual basis uh also my girlfriend got like four times as many points as i've ever gotten and that was pretty depressing same yeah my my wife has blown my score out of the water and like i'll pick up my ipad from time to time like well let's take a run at it and i i won't even get close to it but but i like that's not to take away from the brilliance of like the the reason this game was not only successful with like game nerds like us but

also with just random like people that play candy crush is because i like dirty casuals filthy casuals filthy casuals it because, A, a really approachable art style, which is also surprisingly very likable, given a lot of character to it, and also just clean, simple gameplay. Gameplay

that does not require, unless you get to that higher tier stuff, tons of thought and process. And it's just like very rewarding it's like a very pure game and i was reading i forget who wrote the piece it might have been ben kutcher or someone else on our site i was reading a piece about how you know at one point the game was a lot more complex and they just stripped and stripped and stripped away these gameplay mechanics until you got to like the core thing that worked for this game.

And that is why it's so successful. And that's honestly why you see it at the top of the App Store charts and stuff like that. And that's really encouraging because the last 12 months have been a gut punch for mobile games because it's been so much crap. It's been cold out there. It has.

I think it shows a real maturity by the designer, too, because Puzzle Juice, which I really dug, and came out I guess this time last year, was fun, but, I mean, that was the definition of layering and layering ideas. Yeah, it was three sort of puzzle game archetypes

that they had sort of squished together into one. It was inventive and terrific, but my favorite thing about Threes is that they had sort of squish squished together into one it was inventive and terrific but my favorite thing about threes is that they've essentially and i'm always impressed when a game designer can do this um i mean it definitely fits into the puzzle genre it's not like they've invented a new genre but like it is definitely like a fresh new thing like it is a fresh new gameplay idea um and i think that's why it's so successful is because there hasn't really been anything like it.

I mean, I think Triple Town is kind of similar. Would you say? No. It's somewhat, it is similar, but I think Triple Town again has... I agree, it's very much its own thing. It also has a lot, it is definitely similar, but I would say, again, Triple Town has a lot of, like, additional layers.

Like, if you boiled Triple Town to just like two types of trees or whatever uh it'd be a different story but there's like they are different experiences yeah and it's interesting because if you look at puzzle juice puzzle juice the like boiled down to puzzle juice is essentially spell tower which zach gage admits he made spell tower after seeing puzzle juice and thinking like hey there's a simpler idea here yeah and this i know i think zach gage uh you know is good friends with asher and they talked about this and for this uh release it feels like um this was the good takeaway was that yeah we're just gonna boil down what works about a puzzle game and and leave everything else on the side of the road.

I just love that community. It's great. I love whenever we hear stories like that between these like this kind of band of indie developers, especially with Gage, where it's like, hey, I noticed that you're really good at doing these things. What if you did this, this and this? And people actually taking those notes and finding obvious success here with threes yeah and i'm i mean my hope is that we'll see more of these types of games on ios but again i just like it's such a flash of like a crapshoot right now and getting past the tier of um free to play games is so brutally difficult that, I mean,

it's just like, I know so many people that put out games and they just get buried and that's why they're moving to Steam and Mac and Humblebucket and stuff like that. Should we talk about that? I'm so thankful this game does not have does not have downloadable

microtransactions. Oh my god, there are certain scenarios where it's like, you know, for just $40, I could slide you a 128 right in there. That wouldn't even be an issue. Yeah, they could have done it easily. Should we talk about that during halftime? Because it is something that I've noticed.

It's like, I feel like last year, and especially the year before that, my iPad was my most played gaming device. And no kidding, I go entire, like, weeks and weeks and weeks now without picking that thing up. Yeah. It's, um, and, yeah.

Is it just drying up? Like you said, like, are those developers just moving on to? drying up like you said like are those developers just moving on to i'm not saying that there aren't like good games that are being made for but not like the the i don't know not like the games that were coming out like uh i don't know like field runners 2 or kingdom rush or shit like that but that i would just like play incessantly every single night until i couldn't stay awake anymore i think three years ago people were like oh i mean yeah i would say closer to like maybe four years ago it was like the wild west and everyone you know any decent game that got put up on the app store did pretty damn well like that's how angry birds ended up

being such an enormous success is because there really weren't a crap load of amazing like well put together games on the app store because crash the castle didn't look very good i mean that's 100 right it didn't like they realized hey maybe if we make crack the crash the castle look pretty it'll sell better and it kind of did it yeah it kind of did a little bit a little bit they found a they they experienced a financial windfall kind of a little bit so you had these people that were like making i would say quote unquote legit games um with a lot of like thought and um wanting to provide a lot of value for not a ton of money and then free to play came along and it was discovered that oh we can force people

to throw down instead of spending one dollar forever, throw down $20 every month because they want extra turns in Candy Crush or whatever. Here's the thing. I feel like that element has always, maybe not always, but for a while now it was that way, and people were still making good games in spite of the fact that there was this gnarly free-to-play shit going on. People were still making games like Punch Quest.

Well, Punch Quest is a good example because they had a real difficulty setting themselves apart and making that profitable. They didn't make much money on that. That game was kind of a financial disaster. Exactly. And this all has to do with the app store, the structure of the app store, which is to say games that are making

a ton of money, you have two lists. You have the free-to-play list, which is just, like, all free-to-play games. And then you have the paid games list, which is dominated by stuff like Angry Birds and Minecraft and stuff that are known. So it really does not give a lot of room for new games to set themselves apart. Yeah, I think it's two parts. I think one is just the entire structure of the App Store makes it almost impossible to find things. two parts i think one is just the entire structure of the app store makes it almost impossible to

find things um i mean it is abysmal in terms of you know curating things you would i don't do it i i go to i go to our site i go to like i'll go to like touch arcade i'll go to like websites that list sales of of games and like go through that but yeah i i don't think i have found a game on the app store that i hadn't heard of already and was like, oh, I'm going to give this a shot. Exactly. I actually think there's a broader, I think there's another issue here that's hampering

mobile gaming, and I think it's how it's tied to coverage from the media. To walk you guys through sort of what the timeline has looked like for people who work in game journalism. There was a period I would say about two years

ago when it seemed like the industry was sort of shifting towards mobile gaming and all of us knew that what we needed to do was find a way to cover that space better and cover it more. What we found is, and

Russ, you could probably speak to this better, but what we found is that most people don't want to read extensively about a game when they could just buy it themselves or maybe it's free and they could just get it. So the idea of reviewing you know putting the time and energy you put into a normal game or like a mainstream downloadable game or whatever the idea of doing that for a mobile game doesn't make sense because you know what's it cost a dollar two dollars three dollars so the for us it didn't people didn't want to read about mobile

games like they just want to buy them and play them. And so what it meant is that we stopped making as much coverage of that because it's really not how people want to take in games media. And so it becomes harder for the really great stuff to get much heat. great stuff to get much uh much heat i think just by nature of how that platform behaves and how like the the quantity of games that are being released on it every nanosecond that that sort of role that may have existed two years ago of like we need to review these games so we can tell you whether a game is bad or good i feel like it has now changed into and there are definitely still websites that are doing that,

that are reviewing most of the big new releases that are coming out. But I feel like that role for most, for lack of a better term, general sites like ours, has become almost one of a curation. If there's a standout knockout game, then you try and give it the coverage that you can.

Right. But you can't do that on a regular basis. Trust me, I know for a fact you can't do that on a regular basis, like a weekly basis, because there aren't enough standout exceptional games on a weekly basis. I know that because I did a weekly recap show of mobile games and it's brutal. So the only way you can do is like every once in a while highlight a game like threes it's also hard because unless a game is a known quantity there are so many things released that even if you release the best game in the world unless it has a groundswell of support behind it of people um you know playing it enjoying it it

doesn't really get elevated to the point where you you know you find out about it so people um you know playing it enjoying it it doesn't really get elevated to the point where you you know you find out about it so how do you apply like a fair standard across the board you can't review everything that comes out so you have to wait until something gets popular and then once it's popular it's like why write about it everybody already knows about it and if we were to review mobile games and like i i i don't want to sound like I'm being snobby because, like, I still really do love when a really great mobile game comes out and we play it. My least favorite trend in that space, actually, more even, I think, than free-to-play because, like, I can just not give you money for free-to-play games. My least favorite trend is this idea of we are going to adapt perfectly triple a experiences we are going to adapt this first person shooter and make it a first person shooter on mobile

right so you you do that and even if by like some miracle you are able to make something like competent if we review that game it's not going to be as good as like that experience is on the platform that it's supposed to be do you know what i mean like yeah if you were to take a game like deus ex the fall for instance like that is one of i think one of the better adaptations of a i don't know what word to use here. A traditional console game. A three-dimensional action-adventure game. I think movement in 3D space in most tablet-based games

is kind of a tough putt anyway. I think that's one of the better ones, but if Deus Ex of like if that if deus exo fall came out on on you know pc or on on ps4 or xbox one or 360 or ps3 or whatever like it's not a very good game like comparatively so like how do you go about talking about those experiences do you have to like put in the caveat of like this is a good game that you can play on your ipad i think part of the problem for that too is there's no first party development for the system right if you if you and i'm sure i'm gonna get bullshit for this but if you look at even nintendo and the ds right the games that really felt like they belonged on that system were made by nintendo and they were made to

push that system they were made to take advantage of how that system behaves essentially uh and they were made to push that system. They were made to take advantage of how that system behaves, essentially. And they wouldn't really belong anywhere else. And I think there are, especially indie developers, who are developing for the iPhone as just an iPhone, right? Well, I'd also say that's what Infinity Blade is. Sure. And that's probably the closest they actually have to a first-party developer. Yeah, well, I mean, EA, a shitload of games on there.

Some of them are, like, that same idea of, it's going to be a hardcore console experience on your phone. Like, I always get super hesitant when I hear that. But they are, I mean, God, like, I mean, I guess PopCap developed it, but, like, Plants vs. Zombies is sort of the, that is, like, a game that works exactly on mobile. There are a lot of, I don't have an easy solution here, but I think you have to lay a lot of the blame for this at Apple's feet. They had at one point the most vibrant, exciting space in gaming.

And they did like nothing to sort of support and prop that up and curate it and make it something really special. I mean, it happened almost in spite of Apple. And there just wasn't the interest in making that. I mean, there were some half-hearted attempts, but nothing to sort of make that space and sort of keep it as special as it was for a while. What I'll say they're doing right now, they're doing two things. One, they're curating their, like, homepage at the App Store, which isn't terrible because I do actually find games that I'd never heard of. It's gotten way, way better. And they are actually doing a decent job of, like, if a game comes out, giving it, like, the hero treatment at the top. So I'll definitely find games there the other thing i wanted to say apple's doing which you may

or might not realize is that they're paying a shitload of money to companies like ea to ensure that plants versus zombies 2 comes exclusively to ios first which isn't good for us it's not like i've got it i know i know it's not good for us but it's not like, thanks, guys. I would just say they know, like, Apple as a company realizes the importance of gaming. They've also done a good job of developing out and supporting Game Center, which, like, I find a lot of games through. Yeah. I do think before we wrap this up, it's really worth recognizing that we're also not the audience. No, I know that. The audience, well, I didn't believe that for a long time.

I thought I was really gung-ho about the whole, you know, mobile iOS movement, and I thought, like, oh, they get it. Like, they realize this is a vibrant scene for games and yada, yada, yada. I think they feel like they're doing a good job for the type of games that they are providing right like there's a whole separate world out there of people who want these sort of clash of clones uh whatever games and they have created an environment that is rich uh and fertile for that it's just if you look at a site like touch arcade and you look at that community uh, and this is kind of lumping them all together, I apologize, but it's a community that one pretty much wants to play their games on mobile,

maybe hasn't played a lot of these games like Grand Theft Auto that are coming out on mobile for the first time. They didn't play them on PlayStation. They appreciate how cheap these games are. A lot of them are kids who, you know, they only have, they have a limited budget, so this is like a way for them to get 20 games a month. It's just a very different community than, I think, most of the people who probably read our site.

I just think, I think the biggest reason why I don't play it, my iPad as much as I did anymore, is because I feel like there's this golden age, and it apparently wasn't super long, where people were developing games for that platform. They weren't trying to move these other experiences that you might have on what you would consider a more hardcore platform

and then sort of squish it down onto it. And there are definitely still people making games for for touch-based platforms i think threes is a good example i think one of my favorite games that came out was a 868 hack which is like yeah like yeah that experience is works really well for a touch-based mobile platform um i just feel like there used to be a lot more games like that that were coming out. And maybe those developers got pushed out by the free-to-play stuff. Maybe they just realized that there are more lucrative platforms for those kinds of games. I don't know how well 868Hack has done, but it's a $6 game on the app store that doesn't have like that brand

recognition like i i imagine i don't know i don't want to speak out of turn maybe it is actually doing okay just because it's came out and during sort of a wasteland period but i just want there to be more games like that yeah i completely agree you know a game that's not at all like that what's that strider i but uh sorry before we move to strider can we just take like five or ten minutes to talk about something light and half-timey that's not that intense yeah sure ios conversation um i went on vacation over the month of february that was maybe my best game of the month was not playing games i I was on an island somewhere. Where'd you go? I saw your island on an episode of The Bachelor.

That's where we went for the fantasy suites. I know. St. Lucia? I went to St. Lucia. I'm really thrilled that The Bachelor did not announce where they were going until after I got back. Because it made it look like you did like a Bachelor tour. Pretty. Oh, this is where Marco.

Oh, shit. I don't actually know his name. What's his name? It's not Marco. Is it Marco? Juan Pablo. Juan Pablo. No.

So I went to St. Lucia. And I'll admit, when I went, I was sort of hoping for the weather to be really bad back at home because otherwise you don't really get your money's worth. Right. Little did I know. Unless others suffer. Well, right. Exactly.

Exactly. money's worth right little did i know unless others suffer well right exactly but yeah apparently i wished upon like a terrible week straight of snow storms on everyone at home thanks for that so well i mean i live in austin so like i i had i had a nacho storm but it is a little weird like it's not only weird like looking back weather, but also weird looking back at, like, the, like, chaos of, like, video games and all that stuff when I'm, like, totally disconnected from it. What week of video games did you miss? I don't know. Whatever was going on that week. There's always fucking, that's the thing.

There's always, like, bullshit that we're all, like, obsessing about and think it's a big deal, and then you get a little bit removed from it, and you're like, oh, yeah, that's fine. I've been wasting my life. It was a little bit eye-opening. I've been calorie by calorie, button push by button push. I've been using my precious life seconds on an electronic pacifier that does not let me die. When I could just be sipping from a coconut.

I could be doing jello shots out of it. Living the island dream. You find a sinewy native boy and do cocaine out of his belly button. I could be doing that instead of like flipping cartwheels and getting bonus bananas. Like fuck me, Fuck my career. Fuck this hobby.

How about you buy, how about you spend $500 on an Xbox One? That's cool. I'm gonna spend $10 on a hammock. And just, like, fucking chill. Out. I'm so glad that Jason Mraz could join us on this episode of The Besties. Yeah, that was pretty much my takeaway.

Moral of the story, go on vacation if you can. You don't need to go somewhere far. You didn't bring your 3DS or anything with you? I actually did bring my 3DS, and I played five minutes of Bravely Default, and within the first five minutes, they're like, oh, no, the power crystal has been corrupted by a dark force, and I'm like, delete.

That game. Man, I'm like delete that game man i completely forgot about that game i completely felt like i played probably 25 or 30 hours of that game i completely forgot about it i like the combat system they're trying i like the combat system jrpg storylines give me a anyway it was so i'm glad that i didn't get hooked into it because it really let me just totally disconnect it makes you it is insane how much that game makes you do the same shit over and over again. And I didn't even get, that game is divided into chapters. And there's one chapter where you have to go to these four places that you went to already during the course of the game. And you have to beat a boss in those four places.

And then you have to do it four times over. All four places, four times over. Like, I didn't even get to that part, and I thought it was one of the most repetitive. I was very, very disappointed by Bravely Default. Every month we ask you listeners to send in what your favorite games of the month were. We actually had a couple.

We call those the Resties, by the way. We had a couple of people who said that Bravely Default was their favorite. Matthew said Bravely Default was a weird one. The first 40 odd hours were incredibly streamlined jrpg it was highly enjoyable and then as soon as the story picked some of its groundhog day-esque intrigue the gameplay became stale and padded uh however i still managed to enjoy the entire game all the way through john said it's a wonderful game that

reminds me why i love the first final fantasy games it. It definitely has a lot of that. I liked a lot of it. I really did. I love RPG systems that let you sort of evolve your class and combine these different archetypes to create your own strategies and stuff. And I really did think that the combat system of using the brave and the default options to get ahead and buy no those are really

things that's what they're called um i really did like a lot of that it's just like i i also i to balance that out i despise it when rpgs just like don't treat my time as valuable and think they can get away with it just because like hey man it's an rpg it's supposed to be 50 hours long like yeah not if you make me do the same shit over and over again like once i reached a point where i realized that i'd been doing like chapter to chapter like the same stuff of like go here and beat this guy oh you beat this guy now you have a new class now go here and beat this guy oh you beat this guy now you have a new class now go here and beat this guy oh now you have a new like a just man yeah and while that was going on i was

floating on my back in 70 degree ocean water drinking a pina colada you didn't miss anything uh i what you might have missed is a game uh called strider strider uh. Yeah, I'll talk about Strider because I played through it twice for some reason. Oh, wow. Really? I did. I'll admit why in a little bit. I'm a little embarrassed to say. Can I...

Let me consult the magic crystal. Achievements. Yeah. Anyway, Strider is a side i love that you just spent this time talking about how you just like i know shed your game well i came back to new york and my empty crust of a life was here so i was like oh i better get a platinum trophy dig your bubbly climbed into the chrysalis digging your bubbly toes into god's sand you are the lord of the skeksis i've heard that more than once um yeah striders a side-scrolling uh metroidvania game inspired

by the original strider which is like an actiony uh game from the nes era uh also an arcade game also i think a genesis game but know, only jerks had Genesis. And Striders made by Double Helix, makers of things like Earthworm Jim. And all the Matrix games that you love. Don't confuse people. There were a lot of goofy 1990s, early 2000s, like, people who made tie-in games and then they merged and they

became this super beast uh that has done killer instinct and strider and recently got bought by amazon so like i would say i think uh there were a bunch you know no one really knew what to expect from this studio called double helix and the last two games have been pretty good. Strider does a good job. It's a Metroidvania, which doesn't happen very often. Maybe we get, like, two a year. And I really enjoyed it. What I will say, and I'm sure Plant will echo from the heavens,

is that it's far from an exceptional game. I would say any other month it probably would not have made this show because, you know, the story is like a fucking joke. Non-existent. And there's like, like the art style is like very forgettable for the most part, except for certain elements.

It's, but it's a fun, you know, throwback game. It just doesn't really try too hard, which is probably the reason why it's a fun, you know, throwback game. It just doesn't really try too hard, which is probably the reason why it's, like, relatively enjoyable and fine. I think they sort of knew their limitations as a studio and worked with that rather than really trying to expand what a Metroidvania game was. Yeah, so the funny story about why i played it twice i played it

through once on hard because i tend to play metroidvania games on hard because i like to collect everything and then i'm super powered up and that's the only way for it to be a challenge so i beat it on hard and they gave me i played on ps4 and they gave me all the trophies and everything like that but they did not give me the normal trophy for beating it on normal. What the fuck? That makes me angrier than, oh my god. And I was like, oh god. So I sprinted through it. It took about two hours to beat it on normal to get the platinum trophy. And I'm a little embarrassed to admit it.

But I think the game does a few good things right. I think the upgrade system is smart. They have this system where you're upgrading your sword with different like types that you can switch with the d-pad and one of them like reflects bullets back and one of them does like fire damage and one like freezes guys and one does like magnetic long range damage and that was kind of interesting because you are like switching between those types a lot in combat scenarios um yeah it has some neat ideas later in the game yeah it takes a little while to warm up i would say uh there's a a boss that has his own gravitational pull that you have to to fight that's pretty neat um and there's there's some other stuff that's kind

of cool it's mainly a throwback you knowback. It's mainly a nostalgic trip for people who love this kind of game. But like Russ said, if you don't get a lot of them, it's a lot of fun. It's also really good for if you're somebody who doesn't want to sit down and play a gigantic four-hour-long block of a game if you just have a little time to play. It's really good for, like, my wife was on call last week, which meant she was getting calls from the hospital a lot. And whenever she would get a call, I would just, you know, unsuspend my Xbox One session and play, you know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes,

and then put it back away. It's pretty easy to, you know, remember where you're at and what you're trying to get to because it's pretty clearly located. One thing I would say to counter myself on that, and this is something I didn't learn until someone told me, the game will frequently say, like, checkpoint. Yeah. And it is not that. Yeah. It's's not that yeah it's not a save point it's not a save point that's just if you die off the game and come back to it the only things that

are safe points are the uh the little rooms with the sphere that refills your health those are the only things that save it otherwise the game doesn't save and i lost two or three times i lost like a good amount of progress because i did not realize could have been that much progress those save points are pretty frequent yeah but if you didn't go through one you know if you were doing like i think i had uh you know like a lot of games of this style you get a power and then want to go back through some of the previous levels to find collectibles you couldn't get before so you know i i had been avoiding i hadn't gone through the progression the normal progression i see one of those i was looking for power-ups i feel like you can feel the game's past uh within it that that this is a game like made by people who know how

to deliver uh a property and do like hit all the things, the action items that people expect, it just felt really, really safe. And not necessarily in a bad way, it just felt like they took 20 proven ideas and really did not worry about getting hung up on the details that I think might impede people who have, I guess, a little bit of a higher ambition of what they want to do. Like the design of this world. There's just things randomly strewn everywhere that you're climbing on.

Nothing about the layout of this thing makes sense other than it being a grid that you use to find items in yeah to make a good as exactly what you just said to make a good example with a game like shadow complex which i think is probably one of the best um if not the best modern uh metroidvania game that's been released shadow complex has a lot of elements where you're the game is sort of encouraging you to break the world using the tools at your disposal. And you absolutely can. You can jump hours ahead in that game. Right, phone guns and stuff like that. And you could get upgrades that you couldn't get before by doing that stuff.

And Strider never, ever does that. There are one or two times where you have to creatively use ice kunai to freeze some robots and air to jump on them but for the most part it's like very clear how you get to like all the unlockables and all the like upgrades and it yeah as plant said totally 100 it feels safe um which isn't a bad thing um i think it's the reason why you know it's relatively like easy to play the only the other thing that kind of put me off a little bit was what justin just said which was how guided it is like they literally not only tell you where to go but give you the direction and the distance to your way

point okay but i i i love that in a metroid gaming like, you, you, it makes sense to get lost and explore the environment because maybe you'll find a healthier energy upgrade. And then you do that and then you go, ah, well shit, like,

I got this thing, but now I forget where I was supposed to go. Especially in a game like Strider, which has you like, returning to areas you've already been to get through the one door that now you can get through because you had the right attack.

Like, if you didn't have that waypoint, and I can say this, like, pretty conclusively, because this is how, like, every Metroidvania game ever has behaved, like, you just have to either wander around until you find it or, you know, keep in mind constantly, like, your orientation of where you're supposed to be heading right now. I also don't think they had any option because, again, the levels are just a ton of platforms. So you could get lost really easily. There's no real direction or guidance in the layout or the architecture of the game.

It's just, okay, I need to go diagonal up into the east. Yeah. What a few games have done in the past is instead of giving you an exact waypoint, they sort of give you a region. I think Metroid Prime did this, where they'll be like, go in this area. There's something here relevant.

And I think I would have preferred that, if only because at least then I feel like I'm exploring and finding something rather than literally being dragged by the nose to find like the exact door i need to go through um gavin a listener uh said that he really liked the game but he has had some difficulties with the challenge he said uh i'm dodging and cartwheeling directly into enemy bullets and blades maybe i'm just stupid maybe it's time to quit playing games forever i think that's a mature way to handle it um i i i have run into some sections where uh that that are challenging i don't die a lot though because it there there aren't a lot

of situations where you know you would have to run your head into a wall pretty fiercely to actually die without backing up and refilling your health. There aren't a lot of enemies that do massive amounts of damage. Yeah, I put it on hard, and I think if you're obsessive about getting a lot of upgrades, it doesn't get too difficult. There were a few bosses that killed me a handful of times but i didn't find it over uh super punishing yeah um i really like how fast it is we talk about how derivative of the ideas in the game are um but there really aren't a lot of games and especially metroidvania games that are

this like fast like you don't have to wait between attacks like you can just like fucking jam on that button and the faster you jam the more damage you're going to do like it makes it's it's a you know it's a relatively simple mechanical idea but it really does change how the game feels yeah I would have liked to have seen a more thoughtful combat system like I thought um Guacamelee did that like really well oh yeah um and this game i mean it's a little bit better than i would say metroid which doesn't really have any system apart from just like shoot guys um but it's still pretty basic uh it's like charge attack to get through shield it's all very solid i would say for me like I don't, because of a couple things we talked about. One, the narrative

is absolute throwaway, like non-existent basically. And a lot of the powers weren't that interesting to me. Like they didn't, I didn't think that they were that exciting. I don't feel like a huge push to actually finish it. I think it's solid, but

not particularly thrilling. I think that there's, it is a little short on greatness it's just very it's all very like confident and not crappy yeah i i agree with that again as i said earlier like i think any other month it probably would not have made the cut um but i think it's a totally serviceable game that, you know. Okay, so what is, what's broken inside you that you would want to play a serviceable game twice? I don't know. Where did the little puppet Russ get broken down along the way?

I have no idea. What's so weird, Russ, is that I do have a moral compass for these things, which is to say I will not play games like avatar on 360 where it was like really easy to get all the achievement points or guard you know whatever open season like i won't play the game the real reason that he did this because i can tell you he's he's ducking around around it right now what it's because you had already started it and you have to have it 100 no that's not true come on no it's not true i only started it, and you have to have it 100%. No, that's not true. Come on.

No, it's not true. Come on. I only do the achievement hunting stuff for games that I enjoy playing. And I enjoyed myself playing Strider. To give you another idea, over the weekend, I platinumed a game called Velocity Ultra on Vita, which is like a super hard game but also super satisfying like those are the games usually those are the games that i obsess over but you know

it's not an achievement you know you beat it on hard so like you know you could beat it on normal like yeah and the game ripped you off and you returned to with open arms saying please just let me play you again you know the real thing is like i kind of ignored uh trophies for the whole like ps3 era but now that i have a ps4 and a vita i kind of feel weird not having any platinum trophies so i was like i'll add one to the mix i've only got a few i'll only take a two hours i've got a bunch now i've got nine now i'll give you a hint the resistance game on vita that's an easy player yeah so that's the example though is like i'm not going to play through a game that like i know is easy just to get the trophies if that it makes no sense it's an amazing game no it's a trend it's a transcendent experience yeah i i'll pass um yeah i there's no excuse i'm sorry it's a broken part of my

brain that i would like to get fixed maybe there's like a you know spike jones style solution to that problem guys it this this month hasn't been all fun and games it's been some dark times this. It's been some rough patches. There was a whole craze that came and went in the course of the month, and that's Flappy Bird mania. I'll tell you, it's so funny how this kind of ties into, I think, what we were talking about is the first time I heard about Flappy Bird, The first time I heard about Flappy Bird, it was my 13-year-old sister-in-law telling me, like, hey, did you get Flappy Bird yet? You got to get on that Flappy Bird.

Everybody is playing Flappy Bird. And sorry, old man, you're the last one to find out about it. And that was like how it sort of came into my consciousness. What about you guys? Where did you first hear about Flavie Bird? I think it was just memes that I kept seeing. It really, like, it's so weird because, like, normally we hear about games because we get a press email or there's an event or whatever, but this was like, it really felt like I was the last person to hear about this game.

It was grassroots. You know what it was? My explanation for this phenomenon, about this game grassroots you know what it was um my explanation for this phenomenon um it reminds me of when i was 15 and everybody was starting to get those nokia phones um and they had snake on them yeah and literally everybody at my high school was playing snake like every lunch break everyone was playing snake not because it was an especially good game but because like in almost like we a self-acknowledging form of silliness like we treasured our high scores like it almost became like a joking way of ranking your peers was based on their snake score, and I really, really, really do think it was this sort of weird derivative

of score chasing that people would talk to their friends and be like, oh yeah, I've made it through 53 pipes. What's up? I really do think that that played into it. I think you're absolutely right. I know people at The Verge

are obsessed about it and fight over high scores. My experience playing it was literally i downloaded it i played it for 30 seconds i'm like this is bullshit and not fun and i haven't so i'm gonna play it for two days straight until i get all the achievements no i haven't played it since so like what's fascinating is it really is not a well-made game it's frankly you know i don't think that's true i i think i don't think that's true at all yeah really yeah it's not it's not an especially like i don't think it's a complex game but yeah it's yeah

it's i mean uh i don't think it anything that gets that many people playing it can be like, I don't know. It just seems weird to call it bad. Because so many people obviously connected to it in some way. I think just the fact that it's a game that threw you into it immediately and took like four seconds to have a session of it, and there's not many other games like that. I don't know. I think there's obviously something to it.

And we actually saw a lot. It's really interesting. We saw a lot of Flappy Bird's clones after the game was released. Or the game was pulled, actually, because its creator kind of took it down. He had a bit of a freak out, I think. A bit of a nutty. Sort of a multi-day nutty. Well, I mean,

I don't think... The whole situation is like we're talking in some sort of moon language. Like, he was making $50,000 a day off ads. And he was getting, like, a lot of death threats and bullshit from people online. And, like, that sucks ass and

that was like a logical result of him making this challenging punishing game and then it becoming a you know beyond his wildest dreams a huge success that that thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people were playing like i don't know i feel like everybody in this industry puts up with some bullshit online. If you've never had the entire internet angry, let me say that it is a supremely unpleasant experience. But for 50 stacks a day, dog? Just delete Twitter, my dog? That's what I'm saying. Like, why do you just, like, take a drive and, like, go into the country and, like and sleep out under the stars for a week.

Or how about for the rest of your life, $50,000 a day. People will forget. Fiby Bird will not be a phenomenon for longer than, say, a month or so. Just fucking ride the wave and then spend that fat cash, yo. Sorry, guys. Not everybody's an American. Some of us value on things besides money. Like, Dong.

What? That was his name. Dong. It's Dong. I really like him. We're friends. We're buddies. There was some really great things that came out of the Flappy Jam, the game jam.

Terry Kavanaugh made a really great flappy bird game what was the hook there uh you could there was a dive button also ah that sounds amazing yeah yeah it's really and it had great like it had a similar music and aesthetic style the super hexagon uh no that's what i was actually going to say is that when we saw a lot of clones emerge what you realize is that not not the simplicity of it is betrays sort of the sophistication that it takes to make that feel the way that connects with you like can make make it feel exactly right um and that doesn't happen by chance you know it it may be simple but it's not uh it's not easy i guess is yeah i didn't want to imply that it was easy um because obviously like some thought was put into it i just i don't know where that switch was where like i play a lot of games i

feel like i have pretty good taste in games and know when games are good i don't know where that switch would have flipped where it was like oh oh yeah, no, this is fun. Like, I don't get it. The only reason I didn't get terribly obsessed with it is that it lacked a lot, and this is also kind of interesting, is it lacked a lot of the hooks that a lot of those mobile games will,

you know, there wasn't a button to pay more there wasn't a lot of like your buddy just got this score can't you beat it it's literally like just a personal it's a self-flagellation of video game design where it's like i'm i deserve this i'm a terrible flapper yeah it's also uh what i think is rare a free-to-play game that doesn't have microtransactions, as you said, but also isn't, like, designed. It's just, like, that's the whole game. Like, you're sort of seeing everything for the free download, which I think is a pretty rare commodity. Generally, if it's a free game, it'll either be a demo or, like, full of microtransactions. So I think that's probably part of the reason it

did so well i want to talk about something impressive you know we were just yeah i guess we're talking about sort of negative community and the internet you know kind of shutting the flappy bird guy down i want to talk about something that the internet did that was nice and and together and that was they beat pokemon the internet beat pokemon this week i did this month big deal yeah but they did it together so i did it by myself did you guys watch this twitch plays pokemon thing i watched it incessantly surprising no one it is it really was like an amazing feat that i didn't 100 understand like griff can you explain yeah what are the mechanics twitch plays pokemon uh was a a twitch stream of

pokemon red that uh the the anonymous creator which i think is fascinating uh this guy made like it was a legit fucking phenomenon like millions and millions and millions of people watched it they broke twitch chat like all over um there's some pretty crazy stats that twitch has been putting out but still the creator is anonymous he created this uh interface for uh that would adapt uh twitch chat inputs as uh in-game commands for pokemon red so you would say a and then it would do it would uh you know the game would recognize a uh a lot of caveats though uh there's a there's a native delay in between what you put in the twitch chat and how it would feed back into the game because there's about 20 seconds of of delay between what you're seeing on Twitch

and what the person who's playing is actually doing. So because of that, there was a pretty substantial amount of delay. So like really it would be, you would type in up and then the game would get your up command, you know, 10 or 20 seconds later, which made things difficult enough as is, but also when there were 80 to 100,000 people in there

at that peak, all screaming into the void to try and control this game, the game would, you know, it would accept all of them. So it was... So it wasn't a vote. No, but there was... So there were two modes that the game oscillated between. And this was something that was input, I think, like three or four days into the stream

because the creator wanted to add a little bit of complexity and choice into it. So there was democracy mode where it would only input a move every, I think, like 10 or 15 seconds. And so it would calculate – it would tabulate how many inputs a certain thing had gotten and would then do that command. So if there were 10 people that said up and 10 votes was like the most, then it would move up. You could also chain commands together in that. So you could type like up nine, right three, A. And then if enough people did that,

then the game would go up nine times, right three times and hit A. Oh. Yeah. And then there was anarchy mode, which is sort of classic. It would just like like, accept commands. Those commands are coming in a lot faster than the game can recognize them, right?

So really it was after a frame of animation is over, whatever the first command is that it reads. Oh, I see. Yeah. Right. Because if, you know, Ash is moving up, then he can't move down at the same time. So that was still sort of democratic in a way

because if more people were saying up, then it's a better chance that up is going to be the command that it reads whenever it's done with that animation frame. The game was beaten in anarchy mode, and it stayed in anarchy mode for almost the entire time. Oh, the way that you switch between it is, in addition to inputting chat commands, if you said democracy or anarchy in the chat, it would move like this meter.

And the meter had democracy on one side and anarchy on the other. And once it reached a certain point, it would switch command modes. document that was collaborated on by some of the people who were sort of leading the charge of the game that i recommend that everybody go reads because uh there were about 17 days of game time and some really fucking fascinating stuff happened uh for instance somebody there was uh i think a streamer that was like really really popular on twitch uh organized a movement to get the game into democracy mode and then once it was in democracy mode, they flooded the channel to basically input a chain of commands that would walk Ash to the computer, open up the computer,

go to the Pokemon storage system in-game, and then release all the Pokemon. So there was a day called Bloody Sunday where like 12 or 13 Pokemon were released. And that happened pretty frequently throughout. There were movements of people who like, they needed, so they realized they needed a Pokemon that had surf so they could progress through the game.

So they got an Eevee, and then Eevee evolves through, you know, the different stones in the game. If they use a Water Stone, then they could get a Vaporeon who could surf. Was there a conversation going on? Yeah, yeah, sure. No, there were all kinds of movements trying to organize in Twitch chat or mostly through, like, external sites because it's really hard to talk when there's, like, 100 people.

Like, up, down, up, up, up, B-A, B-A. So there was this movement trying to get a Vaporeon only when it came time to, like, buy the stone that they needed. They accidentally bought a Fire Stone and turned it into the wrong Pokemon. And so people started calling this Flareon. They'd accidentally evolved the False Prophet. And there was a religion that formed around him. And there was a war to try and keep him in the party

and also release him. And so throughout the game, they would spend a lot of time grinding and get this Pokemon. Like their Charmander, who they started started out with it was at a pretty high level for the point that they were at in the game and then somebody managed to get to a pc and release um so like stuff like that kept happening what was the helix thing people i mean the two fossils that you can find in that game are the dome and helix and there was a lot of internal debate as to which fossil they were going to pick and helix fossil became the one they picked and because that was an item that you couldn't release you couldn't like throw away or use

because every time like you they would find an item like they would find a full revive like great they're not going to use it ever in the right way like somebody's just going to drop it because they couldn't drop it people would continuously like navigate to the menu accidentally and just keep clicking on that in battle. And then it was like, you can't use that. You're in a fight. It's just a fossil.

But like literally thousands of times, like people in battle would try and use the helix fossil. And so people started saying he were consulting the helix to learn what to do, what to do next. So basically it proved that democracy doesn't work. Like democracy when used was used for evil. Was almost always used for evil. And anarchy, it turns out, was what made you a Pokemon master.

And it made you look at that like it was silly and fucking hilarious. Like the organizations that sprung up around it, the religions that sprung up around it. Like that stuff was really, really funny. What is it? It's not funny. It's super fucking fascinating. This guy invented a new way to play video games. It's like, yeah, multi single player.

And like, as Twitch, probably pretty fucking happy. Yeah, because like it makes you think about playing video games in a different way i'll be in a pretty silly way but like the biggest boss battle in the game wasn't the elite four uh who they actually managed to take down in like a single day it was uh a ledge that you have to walk to to get to the end point of the game that affords you a single unit of space you have to walk left basically get to the end point of the game that affords you a single unit of space you have to walk left basically like 15 or 16 times and then you can get past the ledge but at any time if you press down you jump off the ledge and you have to start over again and it took them

hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and then they made it to the uh victory road which has like a lot of really high level trainers and pokemon And if they died at any time, they'd have to start back at the Pokemon Center and then do ledge again. God. Before they could, like, even take another run. It turned things that were not challenging, if you're playing it by yourself, into, like, really hilarious events. The other thing I think that's notable about Twitch Post Pokemon is that there is now a new hardest thing on Earth to explain to my nonny. Yeah. It was really, really, really fun, though. I kind of want to write, like, a book about it.

Just because, like, it was like watching a new constitution be written for a new nation. Like, of people, like, within three days, there were just warring tribes working. I read that book, Griffin. Why don't you rush that out? Okay. Get that written. Get an e-book published. I'll publish that out real soon.

Get it out there. But first, before you start working the book, why don't you tell me a little bit about Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare? Yeah, sure. I'll talk about my game is Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare. I've played it quite a bit. It's a, I guess, budget price is fair to say. Class-based, team-based shooter. It's $40.

$40. I don't know that it counts as budget price well i mean compared to most triple a titles um it's out on xbox one and 360 uh i still haven't played the 360 version or know anybody that's played the 360 version so i don't know how it holds up but i've been playing it on xbox one it is a uh yeah it's a class-based shooter titanfall basically titanfall yeah um it's the teams are plants and zombies as you might imagine and both teams have four different classes you can play as and the classes kind of mirror each other although not like perfectly uh like both class both both factions have a healer uh class

although just sort of the way that those behave are different like the plants have the sunflower who just needs to get near somebody and then can like activate a constant beam of healing that heals them while the zombies have the scientist who sets down like a healing pot that you have to stay close to but you can like set that up on the end of like a hallway you're trying to get through and then you know you can heal multiple people yeah you can heal multiple people right um and and it's just it's a really really well balanced game um i i thought for sure that just because the archetypes were so different between the factions, that there would be one that was just sort of natively better than the other.

Like, for instance, the plants have a plant called a Chomper that doesn't have a ranged attack, really. It has, like, a ball of goo it can spit out to slow people down. But it doesn't do, like, a heck of a lot of damage. It doesn't have, like, a gun or or anything like that like basically every other class has uh but if it can get behind an enemy and attack them it will eat them in one bite it can also burrow into the ground and if you can get underneath an enemy like that you jump up and kill them in one bite um and the zombies have like a melee class it has a football player that can sort of dash into people but it doesn't have that one hit kill like so plants definitely have this one thing that the other faction just doesn't have and and there's like a lot of that idea going around but at the same time like

the game is still really well balanced i feel like and there's not like a faction that i think i'm better at playing um so like the the core gameplay is really it feels it feels really nice it's sort of a different take on a lot of the team-based shooters that that come out it's it feels different from a call of duty or battlefield feels a lot closer to the battlefield heroes game i don't know if any of you guys ever messed around with that i remember it's still going that's a good question i think maybe i think so i'm not sure um but it still going? That's a good question. I think maybe. I think so.

I'm not sure. But yeah, it's a bit more of a casual take on it. Yeah, there's some cool MOBA-y stuff where you can spawn zombies or drop down turret plants that do their own thing. Yeah. Which I like that element. I do too, even though it's weird that that's a consumable item that you can run out of. down like turret plants that do their own thing yeah um which i i like that element i did too even though it's weird that that's a consumable item that you can run out of um it is a little

weird but like i yeah there's no uh microtransactions in the game right which is weird because there's in-game yeah well there's an in-game story that you can use to that's what you use to buy those consumable items that let you plant those plants or summon you know zombies to help you out it's also how you get all of the character upgrades both mechanical and cosmetic it's also how you unlock new characters um and use all of you you buy all that stuff with money that you earn just from playing the game um and the consumable stuff though i didn't find like you could buy yeah it's like, 15 consumable things for 1,000 coins, which takes a long time. And you get money for planting them,

and you also get money for each kill that you get using those things. So, like, it almost always makes sense to burn through them. It gives you rewards at a pretty frequent pace, and it, I don't know, like, I've really enjoyed unlocking new characters. So, like, the new characters fit into those different archetypes, although they add, like, one special thing that's specific for that character. Like, I got an electric cactus, which handles, like, the regular cactus class on the plant side,

which is, like, a long-ranged artillery class. Only because he's electric, his, like, damage, if he lands a hit, will arc from enemy to enemy. So it has certain instances where that's handy. If you're playing the game's co-op horde mode, you can take out a lot of zombies if you can arc your damage between them. So there are different considerations you have to keep in mind. And there are also, for each character,

there are upgrades specific to that character that you can find in those packs. There are thousands of carrots to chase after. There are some weird omissions in the game that I don't know if it's a negative necessarily, but things that I was wishing for. Rather than any sort of radar per se, you get a small icon on the horizon. I think it's triggered when an enemy

shoots to let you know sort of a general location of where they are. There's also a Overwatch thing that you can use in the basically the game's version of Commander Mode where you get a top-down view of the battlefield and then

you get a resource that appears over time but you also collect it whenever somebody on your team gets a kill and then once you save up enough of that resource you can like drop an airstrike or you can drop a little radar beacon that will what is that in it's in boss mode boss mode yeah and what's boss mode because i was always afraid to trigger that yeah it's like a top down uh as griffin mentioned commander mode was in battlefield the battlefield games and it's like a top down view of the action and you could drop things like airstrikes and you can drop like mass revives to like heal to like bring your entire team back to life um you can also shoot it down if you're on the ground and then they can't use it for the other thing i wasn't crazy

about and i i don't know a good solution for this but because of there's not a real clear visual language that lets you immediately identify enemy as plant or zombie. You know, you, you, I'm not, this isn't a, this isn't a joke.

Except that they have, if they have leaves on them, Justin, they're probably a plant. I'm not. Okay. But I, you have to remember whether or not you're a plant or a zombie

so like you have to think like okay am i a plant or a zombie okay i get what that thing in front of me is i'm saying in a instant like twitch based shooter scenario i you would often i would often see someone and not like it's not like they're red yeah like their icon is a different color it's not like my reticle changed when I pointed. It is. Justin, yeah, I get what you're saying, which is to say because the matches maybe take 10 minutes, you're constantly flipping from one to the other,

and you really, there are a lot of moments where it's like, I need to remember who I'm playing to remember who the bad guys are. I will give you that it doesn't do that thing where red names appear over, I don't think, right? Red names don't appear over your opponents. I might have been wrong about the radical. Your radical might change when you turn on an enemy, but it's nothing, like, super noticeable. Compared to, like, a military shooter where, like, oh, their clothes are slightly darker.

Like, you're a bipedal human zombie guy. Like, I don't think the visual— But their name also appears in red, and you have a HUD that— more of a hud that lets you know like that's an enemy like it lets you immediately identify enemies and and that was something i struggled with but i'm like it does seem silly but i i get what you're saying i am i don't know that hasn't been a problem this game you're younger than i am your brain works better that's true who do you think is going to be playing this game? Because, I mean, it looks like a kids and family game, but

I would think most kids who like shooters will see this and be put off by that fact. Like, they'll be like, oh, it's a kids game, I'm not gonna play it. I think you're talking about 10-year-olds, or rather, you're talking about, like, 13-year-olds that would rather a mature shooter. I think there's, like, 8, 9, eight nine and ten year olds that would want to play this game well okay and also because i'm also

26 year olds because like i can't fucking stop playing i think it's that i think it's that progression hook that's going to be the thing that keeps bringing people back because like it is the perfect game for me to pick up during my lunch break and play and play and play and play and then i get enough coins to like buy a pack and then i'll buy that pack and then check out what i got and then stop playing like that that hook to me is it is infallible like i will i will keep dipping back in just to do that because it is it is like the very definition of the pickup and play shooter whereas like a game like call of duty i if i go like a month or so without playing it

and then get back in, I have to remember, what were my different loadouts? How was I playing those? What was my strategy for playing these specific loadouts? What weapons am I good with? In this one, it's like, oh, this cactus shoots needles.

I do wonder if there are adults who will play this game too because they can actually play it in front of their kids. Right. I can throw that on. That's not going to do any permanent damage. I will give a pro tip to everybody at home. If you are

like me, there's an area called the welcome mat for when you first start playing that is just sort of like a lot of the customization is taken out and it's basically just like learn the ropes, learn how to play, play against other people who are, in theory, also beginners. No, it doesn't work like that.

It doesn't work like that, I would say, first off. And secondly, I'm the sort of person that until I am forced out of an area like that, I'm like a baby bird in a nest i never think that i'm like quite good enough to really fly so i'll stay in that sort of newbie area for as long as humanly possible but what i discovered actually after leaving that was that i think the game gets about five times better yeah because first off you don't have any customization options in the customization is huge and secondly the the later maps i think and and it's probably a combination of the map and also player skill but the welcome mat area

is very much sort of a random people running around and shooting at each other in the late in the later stages it feels more like there are some much more clearly defined choke points, clearly defined like battle areas that are designed for like, uh, uh, large scale battles to take place where naturally the flow of players takes you into. In gardens and graveyards mode, which is like that exactly.

Like there is an area where people congregate around and then you have to like strategically take it down and you know that you're going to find like a fight if you go to that place. I also really, really, really like the co-op mode i really like it a lot um i play that probably as much as i play the competitive stuff just because it's like a it's a really nice take on the horde mode with like good randomization elements and um really nice rewards and like genuinely exciting moments that happen pretty frequently. Yeah. Listen, we're the besties, but we're not the only people who get a say here.

Actually, Justin, before reader emails, I wanted to mention something. I actually have the opportunity to represent someone and I wanted to let them know that they have an opportunity here to sort of let the world know about their abilities. Do you mind if I? Yeah, fine. Hey, yo, it's me, Planty the Palm Tree. You sound a lot like New York Giraffe, though. No, it's me.

Don't you see the leaves? There's leaves on my head. I'm Planty the Palm Tree. You looking to do some dlc with this game oh boy not really we we actually don't make the games um you know you were just talking about plants versus zombies i'm a plant i'm a palm tree i shoot like cannons and stuff like we said earlier we have a really hard time differentiating between plants and other things so like you i have

no way of proving that you're actually a palm tree people can't see this right now but what just happened is russ left the room and then something that it might look kind of like russ but dressed as a giraffe and then that giraffe dressed as a giant palm tree there's no way to dress as a palm tree you are who you are and i'm a you know i grow i sit on the beach i drop coconuts on people sometimes and and if those are zombies great if aea is looking to use some dlc some micro transactions of course i mean who else would you hire let's try to find a silver lining here uh at least he's not a zombie because the idea of a rust fresh stick that you can't kill is personally very terrifying to me i just want to say if you could put in a good word

for planty the palm tree that's definitely not a giraffe dressed up as a palm tree sure there's really no reason you shouldn't i guess my main question is how can you promise to sell virtual goods in a game that a you didn't create and b you have no sort of um ability to affect it now that it is out because you don't work at pop cap or electronic cards no i don't i'm just saying they could use me maybe as an inspiration for some dlc or some microtransactions to add some plants into the game like a palm tree that doesn't currently exist okay what would the palm tree like what's its what's its it's got some coconuts dog because i got coconuts as you can see and it's also got like cannons and stuff okay what are you

and spots i've got spot i mean no there's no spots what do you hope to gain from this because i i can't imagine that you you're doing this out of the kindness of your own heart well first of all i'm a talented palm tree and i want to get my name out there how is it sorry how would one sort of quantify or qualify the talent of a tree a palm tree yeah specifically mostly what what would cause one to look at a palm tree and go like, God damn, that's a talented palm tree. How shady is it? How good is it, you know, sitting on the beach looking pretty? You could take pictures of me if you wanted to. You could put me on box art if you wanted to, like, make a sequel.

Game's already out. Just, well, I'm saying another one and just do it all on palm trees. And you don't even need to hire other palm trees. You just hire me and copy-paste across the whole box art yeah sure clown so i'm just saying if if they're looking if you guys know anyone who john riccatello is he still there yeah so uh yeah put in a good word for planty he's a palm tree he's very very talented. Just you can email him. Are you seeking residuals, royalties? I mean, whatever they can throw me would be appreciated.

I don't think I'm asking for much. I don't need a vig or anything. Can I do, I need to ask just real quick what a tree needs money for? You know, soil. This is also really confusing. I'm looking at your business card right now and it just says new york giraffe at lycos.com that that's my manager wow the mythos gets deeper and richer yeah uh that's not that's my that's my representation um he's very uh expensive uh listen plenty uh gosh we're so

sorry you have to take off so early me yeah i'm sorry just put in a good word that's all i'm asking don't bust my balls here it's okay you have balls now coconuts all right All right. Oh, crap. Listen, we're the besties, as I was saying, but we get to decide the best games. We want to give you guys a chance to weigh in on what you thought. We already talked about Bravely Default. Another entry that a couple of you suggested was the Last of Us DLC left behind. Mertz said, not only is it a continuation of what should have been last year's game of the year sorry mert incorrect but it defines what dlc can do for a game and how prequels can add to their predecessors rather than override uh have any of us have any of us stepped into this no i can't play PS3 games anymore. Wow. Sorry. I actually don't know if I can't find my copy right now.

Oh, no. Yeah, so I don't know. I did want to play it. Maybe a re-release on PS4 would be good. I want to dip back in. I can't touch the DualShock 3 anymore. I've made a rule with myself. I can never use that controller again.

You're such a snob. I know. I can play through Strider twice, but I can't touch the DualShock 3. Jesus. Lightning Returns is snob. I know. I can play through Strider twice, but I can't touch DualShock 3. Jesus. Lightning Returns is another one that was suggested. Andrew said, even though reviews would suggest otherwise, I found the game to have a deeply rewarding

combat system as well as a vast open world for me to explore. So I'm so glad you enjoyed it, Andrew. So those are just a few of the suggestions. If you have a game that you would like to suggest as the best game of March, when we get around to that episode,

you should email us. It's thebestiesatpolygon.com. And that's how you can get in touch. And if you have an urgent... Wait, is it thebesties or bestiesatpolygon.com? It's just bestiesatpolygon.com. Not thebesties, sorry. thebesties or besties at polygon.com? It's just besties at polygon.com. Not thebesties, sorry. Got it.

Just besties. Seth Seavers also suggested Banished. Oh, yeah. Oh, Griffin loved Banished. That was a good game. Sort of a medieval take on SimCity where your citizens weren't just sort of like this score-based commodity. They were like also all of the workers in your town. sort of like this score-based commodity.

They were like also all of the workers in your town. So you had to sort of a lot, you had to build, you know, structures in your town to support them and keep them alive. But, you know, not only that, you had to assign them the right tasks to build future structures for keeping more people alive. Like it was a really, really clever game.

I like it a lot. Cool. Any others, Justin? No, those are the big ones. There were others that were wrong, objectively. But those are the ones that at least made sense. Now, come on. Give it a fair shake.

Let's see. My favorite game is Renegade X. I love the obscure multiplayer mode from the original Command & Conquer Renegade. It turns out I wasn't alone. A group of fans lovingly and meticulously recreated it and released it for free. And it's been a trip getting to play

a better looking version of a game I devoted hundreds of hours to back in middle school. It's from Clayton. What's wrong with that? What? No, nothing's wrong with that. That one literally just came in.

Oh, okay. We also had The Flo one literally just came in. Oh, okay. We also had The Floor is Jelly. Oh, yeah, fun. From Matthew. You can find that he said it's a fantastic, beautiful platformer that manages to be sublime because of its simplicity and focus rather than in spite of it. Plus, it has music by Disasterpiece, the composer of Fez.

So fucking good. I have not gotten into that one. Is that on Macintosh computers? Can you play that on a Macintosh computer? I don't remember. I think it's just Windows PC. Is it? I'm not 100% sure, though. Email us, besties at polygon.com

to tell us your favorite games, or if you just want to say hi, that's fine, too. We don't respond to all those emails, but we do read them, or at least I do. So it is being seen. And make sure to tell somebody about the show this week. You can tweet about it using the besties hashtag

and include a link there, include a link to our iTunes page. And while you're there, why not leave us a rating or review and subscribe to the show? That really helps us out when you do that. And gosh, we sure appreciate it. We sure would like to get above that four-star rating we're at right now.

A lot of people used to not like us very much. We just really like to climb out of that hole that we find ourselves in. That would mean the world. So if you could help us sort of climb out of there, we'll give you regular updates as to what the score is like right now. Doing a quick checkeroo. And hey, we've battled up to four and a half stars. Yeah.

Thank you, guys. Climbing back up. Do you want to also mention when we will be doing the next episode, like the schedule? Yeah. I think we're going to be sticking to like the first week of the following month. So in the first week of April, we'll have the best games of march that kind of thing so you got plenty of time to play the the latest and greatest jesus what an ep that's gonna be march is gonna be insane i'm guessing

right now probably titanfall towerfall dark souls 2 infamous i cannot talk about Towerfall with you people again. I don't think we can limit ourselves to four next week, to be honest. I think it has gotten its due. This is a new game. It's Towerfall Ascension. No, no. That and so much more coming

up next week, or sorry, next month for you on the besties. So be join us. So be, please be joining us the podcast watching listening watching and listening do listen to joining us my wife uh be there for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!