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

Episode Date: February 12, 2014

The Besties are back! At the end of 2013, the fate of the show was unclear. We were unsure what the podcast would look like in 2014. But after hearing positive feedback from many of our listeners, we buckled down and came up with a new format. We really like it; we hope you do, too. This year, we will record one extended episode at the end of each month, discussing the best games of the previous 30 or so days. With the new format, we can ensure all four hosts have had time to play the selected games. We think that change alone will produce better conversations. If all goes well, the show will feel more like our end-of-the-year specials. Also, we'll be reading listener mail. So send your thoughts, feelings, questions and deepest, darkest secrets to besties at polygon dot com! We also want to know your favorite games of February and why they're so special. Thanks again to everyone who asked for more Besties. You are why we do the show. 9:20 - Rust 29:00 - Hearthstone 49:00 - Halftime! 55:00 - Loadout 1:05:00 - News of the month 1:23:00 - The Banner Saga 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!

Hey. Hey. Saw you on the news. Still pulling people out of burning wreckage, huh? Old habits. You look terrible. Thanks. Why'd you call me, Justin?

I was hoping that you'd heard... that maybe you'd go to the funeral. Why would I go to the funeral? I've been flying a lot. What? Yeah, that golden pass they gave us. I've been using it. Every Friday night I fly from L.A. to Tokyo or Singapore, Sydney.

Then I get off, and I have a drink, and then I fly home. Why? Because I want it to crash, Chris. I don't care about anybody else on board. Every little bump we hit or turbulence, I mean, I... I actually close my eyes and pray that I can get back. This is not going to change.

No, I'm sick of lying. We made a mistake. I have to go. He's going to be wondering where I am. We were not supposed to leave. Yes, we were. Goodbye, Justin. We have to go back, Chris. We have to go back! Hey, yo, it's me, the smoke monster.

Oh no, no, it's not. We can't go back. We have to stay here. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the month. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game this month. My name is Russ Froschek, and I know the best game of the month. Do you? Welcome back to The Besties, where four of Earth's best friends talk about the latest

and greatest in tech, news, sports. Tech news. Tech news, sports news, news sports. Wolf Blitzer. Which is basically just who can type fastest. Wolf Blitzer and so much more in games. And this week, we're going to talk about video games. You know, we thought that besties formula,

we've been doing it the same way for so long. That was like at least three weeks. At least three weeks. We had to mix it up. Should we really talk about like, here's the thing. I think we should just lay all of our fucking cards take them out of the decorative box we keep our cards in put them on the table like the rule card no throw that card out the rest of the cards everyone can see we were

gonna cancel best we were ready wanted to take besties out behind the barn this is not a goof we did not think the roi on this particular radio program was beneficial in any way for anyone but no kidding like it i don't know it's been kind of wonderful the outpouring the demand for more besties how uh what's his name felt when they made that movie about the sci-fi show that got canceled and they made a movie about it that guy probably felt pretty good too john travolta that guy mash um the so thank you everyone for demanding the besties return to you uh please keep in mind that you're this show is only here because you love it so much so if you want it to keep coming you have to keep telling other people to listen to it or just tell us how much you like it because

we need that constant... No, I don't care about that. I want them to spread the word high and low. What can they do? Like reviews on iTunes? Maybe rate us? Yeah, reviews on iTunes would be great. Rate us there. Tweet about the show with the besties hashtag that I just invented. Let's

talk about some of the fundamental changes because I think the biggest thing for us to bring it back is like i i think we've all pretty much agreed at this point between the four of us that our favorite part of the show is the year-end specials that we do in new york we've done a couple of them where we we at that point have all played all the games we can do these deep dives. It's not like, I don't like just getting into shitty arguments about like games that we haven't played games that one of us played. And like that also sort of lends itself to just one of us talking for 15

minutes and like, it sucks and it's not like that, that stuff sort of weighed the show down. Um, but at the same time, I think sort of the general structure of the show is decent. So we wanted to make it more like that and less like the weekly episodes, a lot of which I think were pretty weak.

Well, weak, that's good. Yeah, thank you, Russ. I think there's a lot of people that would want a podcast that's more like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, so imagine that, but toss two more guys in there because just Lincoln and Douglas were not cutting it. Everybody was bordering that, strictly speaking. Here's the tradeoff.

We're going to do it monthly from now on. And I know that's going to be a bummer for a lot of people because I consume my podcast weekly and I like having this constant thing. This show just really isn't built for that because to get us all together and make and edit the show, it takes a little bit of time. But in order for all of us to have played all four games enough to know what we're talking about and then do that every week, it's just not. We can't do it, guys. It is not sustainable at all. And we'd rather be talking about super, super memorable games and not just games that literally just came out two days ago and we're like, yeah, this is pretty good. We would also rather, and really, if you're honest with yourself, we were still only doing one good episode a month, maybe.

So this is hopefully going to be a better product. Also, we're going to make it longer than the episodes usually were to try and make up for some of that um and incorporate sort of i didn't know about that let me yeah there are also so many ways to see us now on the site or hear us if that's what you want i mean i don't know if you've watched or listened to griffin's new show overview but it's it's pretty great thanks chris chris does some stuff too but we are we can say plugs to the end i just i just think this is gonna be a much better formula i seriously guys like i love doing podcasts i love listening to podcasts i i really do um wish that this could be a weekly thing but i really don't think it makes sense

right like that's true comic books are monthly too just deal with it this is the world you're living in and there's no saying like we can't do another podcast later on that is weekly a little bit easier to produce but like to do the kinds of discussions that we like doing and like the kinds of discussions that we do in those year-end videos i i think this is the way to do it so hopefully you understand if not it's it's free i guess it's free like you didn't waste any money on it you can probably still complain if you want to though yeah go ahead still america that's exciting though so we're monthly uh this we should mention this is going to be the quote-unquote january 2014 episode we're coming in a little late um because we were still in the process of maybe not killing the show uh so we figured out that the show is existing and now

we're doing january we're gonna do uh the february episode at the end of february um which seems like a good time to do it um so. We should also tell you at the top that we're going to start doing reader or listener questions and suggestions for games to talk about. You can hit us up at bestiesatpolygon.com, and we'll get all those. And also let us know if you have any feedback on the show, because that's important.

You can email us now, bestiesatpolygon.com. Yeah, just said that out loud okay well i'm just saying it too just to mix it up uh that sounds great i'm very pleased i'm excited about the new format and i feel like we should just get it going right let's dive into it with a game that definitely didn't come out in january start not strong um this is going to be a good one to talk about because it's a game that you can talk about for a very long time because there's a lot of fascinating stuff going on in that game. They very recently, I think last night, pushed an update for this game that sort of turns it a bit on its ear.

And that game is Rust. I did not know about this update. Well, okay, let's give the overview first and then we'll talk about Rust itself. Well, let's not get our brands mixed. Let's not cross the cables on our brandings okay it's not an overview so we can call it something else we can call it a you know uh a glance at a glance at a glance give me the glance of rust griffin do you want me to do it i feel like i've been talking a lot i'm just so nervous okay our rust. Rust is sort of like Minecraft in that you're thrust into a world and forced to carve out your own existence. Imagine if Minecraft had, like, good graphics because it was made by people who actually care.

Whoa, wait, wait. Let me finish. I realize you hate. Good graphics by people people actually care. And also there was a point because there are other people trying to kill you with guns. And also zombies. Now imagine. Oh, wait.

Hold up. Wait a minute. Yeah. You spoke too soon there, buddy boy. They took zombies out. No zombies. What? They're gone.

Patched them out. It was something they always wanted to do was to remove the zombies. Because you made the Minecraft comparison a lot. And that's's fair but i think most people compared it to daisy yeah because it does have that survival element that is very very i mean it is it is the game the game is all about survival so it was a survival zombie game so very daisy it didn't help that they both sort of entered this early access stage of Alpha around the same time, which was last November. But I thought we could talk about it now just because they're updating it so frequently. Yeah, it's like a playable game now.

Yeah. Here's what I don't get. Wait, they always intended to remove the zombies? They always did, yeah. So why the hell put zombies in there in the first place? That's a good question. No one legally made them do it, right? No, they, I, shit, I forget the guy, the guy's name.

Gary. Gary. Gary Newman. Yeah, he is the creator of Gary's Mod. And he wrote that Cars song in the 80s. God, that was a really good joke. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, he talked about how it sort of started off based on that DayZ idea, but he wanted to make it,

and honestly, if you play both games, they're not really similar at all. They're really not. Rust has a level of accessibility that just doesn't make it even nearly resemble DayZ. Wait, which is more accessible? Rust. Really?

Oh my God, yeah, god yeah dude yeah for sure well that just shows like how inaccessible day z is this i watched your video and it's like wow that game looks amazing but i don't know if i have the time to really get into figuring all that out and then i would like look at day z and it just seems impossible. It's not impossible. It's just not the, so the crafting element of Rust is what completely sets it apart. Because in Rust, you have to survive a lot of different lethal forces.

You can starve to death. You can be irradiated, which will kill you if you are in radiation zones. There are a lot of different status effects that will hurt you. Wolves. You can be cold if you're naked. Well, a wolf isn't really a status effect. I mean, it is if you get bit by a wolf.

You're still being bit. You've got to take care of that. There are a lot of ways to die. I think, obviously, the most prevalent one is other players who will just kill you for no reason um but you have some agency to prevent that um it's not i mean the different resources that you need to craft things are um somewhat randomized there are areas in the map where you can like find really good troves of wood and stone that you need. Yeah, but I thought the maps were uniform, weren't they?

The maps are uniform, yeah, but I'm talking about actually the resource spread across those maps. In DayZ, you just start off on a beach and hope that you run into a house that has some good stuff in it. And there's definitely a random loot element in Rust as well. There's little um you know care packages hidden all over the map in in radiated zones yeah but for the most part like you don't really need that stuff you can chop a tree and then hit a rock and get enough stuff to make a hatchet and then like you sort of know which way to go daisy you kind of just it's a it's a game of chance it's funny though because when i first started playing Rust, I was so lost, like had no idea what I was supposed to do.

Because who the hell thinks, oh, I need to craft stuff, so I'm going to take this rock that they spawned me with and hit a tree with it, and then I'll get wood. Like, it really, when you first start out, because it's so bare bones and like so raw in terms of game design right now, you really are not given very much direction at all once you like realize oh i hit c or whatever brings up the crafting menu the game starts making a lot more sense yeah but it is this is not very user-friendly right now and i think the biggest testament to that is that i don't actually think the game is all that bare bones right now it just doesn't do a great job of explaining what it is. Like the end game for Rust is something you can get to within a couple hours. And all it involves is going out, gathering resources, and then using the game's fairly robust fort building mechanics to create something that other players will be unable to to take down so you can it has

a uh an entire like sub menu of things that you can build that basically snap together lego block style to make these huge and elaborate forts uh and then you can you know build storage boxes in those forts and then go out into the map collect stuff and then put it in your fort and then you can make sleeping bags or beds so you can spawn inside your fort and then like you basically don't have to start over every time you die because when you die you lose everything um so like the the end game idea is that you can go out try and design a fort that is really difficult to siege and or you know going out and sieging other people's forts like there actually is quite a bit of of complexity and back and forth to it

but like if you don't look at a video or you don't have a friend helping you start out there is no way that you're going to reach that point on your own which to a certain extent like that was minecraft when it first started like you did not get a lot of direction when you're first starting out and you're just like oh i'm hitting some sand with some blocks you were going to forums and you know it was actually and i think that it's interesting to watch games it's a very for some reason when you start a game out like that and you force people to learn the basics like that it's not as silly of a strategy as it seems like because I think you get two effects.

One is there's a lot more that you actually learn on your own. And I think knowledge that you gain that way is a lot stickier and a lot more rewarding. You get that hit of dopamine when you can figure out a lot of stuff and there's a lot of stuff to figure out. But I think it also helps you to develop a sense of community pretty early. Because if you look at like EverQuest is sort of my classic example of this, where a lot, a lot, a lot of the game was not presented to you. And you had to head online to forums and websites to try to figure out how things were done and how items were created and

i and i think that that forces interaction between players and starts to develop a sense of of community for the game that maybe you lose with something that held your hand a little bit more i don't really enjoy not having everything spoon-fed to me, but I am a little afraid that people are going to catch on to this idea that the best marketing strategy is to just not explain your game very well. And Dark Souls is another example of this, where there's a lot that's great about that game, and it's very well designed, but there are a number of things I don't know how it would be possible to have ever guessed that I should do something without having turned to somebody who'd already finished the game or a fact and like i i think that is part of why that game has you know developed this kind of cult community is because

everyone has to turn towards each other to get help to kind of get through it and figure it out yeah but you need a good game first you can't just like throw a game up with like, absolutely, you're gonna have a tough time getting attention. But I think part of why rust, like Justin said, has become so popular so quickly is because you needed other people playing it, you kind of had to push it on to other people just to kind of get off the ground. Yeah. Which which makes me think of something else. So Griffin was talking about sieging houses. And one of the things about Rust is that it's never off. So if you sign out, your body still, correct me if I'm wrong, still exists in the world.

So there is a pretty wide set of server mods that people have developed to sort of spin the game in different ways uh and to the developers credit they have started incorporating some of the more helpful aspects that those mods added for instance uh one of the more popular mods has a feature in it called door sharing um so if justin and i build a base together uh whoever puts the door on that base is basically the only person that can get into it uh but this mod would add a way to manually add people to that door so that they can open it and the developer has now incorporated it so it's part of the base game there's like codes for doors too right yeah uh and and one of the mods is a no sleepers mod which basically when you log out you disappear otherwise the default

is your body just lays down and then someone can kill you and still take all your stuff with the logic being you would lay down in your house but even with that mod on you still have to worry about i'd spent tons of time making this awesome house someone could come by with c4 and blow it to smithereens right absolutely um to me like i've actually had more fun my favorite part of rust is the beginning it's not the end game stuff it is this idea it is this panicked completely vulnerable state of just trying to get a foothold in the world um because that process basically involves you yes you start out with a rock and then there is a sort of hierarchy there's like a natural progression of tools that you know you want to make um and to me trying to run up that hierarchy and stay alive through it

and then like getting just enough stuff to you know bank it to make a wood shelter with a furnace inside so you can smelt metal to make a metal door and then once you do that you are good to go basically for life um that is such an exciting and rewarding part of the game it's also like makes you feel like a pioneer because you can basically lay down your roots wherever you want and there are good aspects about each part of the And there are good aspects about each part of the environment. There are bad aspects about each part of the environment. It really does make you feel, you can take a tremendous amount of ownership over a shared multiplayer world.

Yeah, but isn't it a bummer that, again, let's say you spent six hours and you have this dope house and you log out, someone with perseverance and like interest in saying, I'm going to blow through all my resources just to ruin this guy's house can do that. There's like nothing you can do to stop. They can. But I mean,

if you think about the economy of the game, you brought up C4 a couple of times to make C4, you need a flare, which you need to find in the environment, or you can learn to craft it and make it. You need leather, which drops off bears, or you can cook cloth. You need explosives,

which are incredibly expensive to make per unit. You have to get a bunch of gunpowder and sulfur together. So C4 is essentially the most expensive thing you can make in the game. So if you were on across a little wooden shelter with a metal door on it, and then spin C4 to get like the 10 rocks that the person has accumulated inside,

it's a really bad investment. And that's another thing that sort of plays into the complexity of fort building is that if you can make like a giant fort with a bunch of different chambers, it's really difficult for somebody to siege that without blowing through like 20 pieces of C4. Sure.

Because then they just like, that is a mountain of resources they just spent, and there's no guarantee that they're going to get something out of it. Yeah. So it's not like, it's not a griefer's paradise in that sense. There are ways of protecting yourself, and developing those protections is really satisfying. It's funny that you mentioned grieferers paradise because you you mentioned uh killing someone in cold blood on your videos i did do that yeah why why did you do that i mean you kind of become the beast you kind of become the primal like hey you become that which you hate here's the thing like that person i killed

was for all intents and purposes naked they had nothing wait what how does that justify murder well it's not like i killed the opposite does it's not like i killed them and then they drop their like super rare rifle that they managed they might have wait wait they're they're people like they're not they're not video game characters what are you doing you know you i did i did watch griffin murder this poor guy but i would also say it's interesting because you get these scenarios one of the coolest aspects i think this is in daisy too but one of the coolest parts is like the voice chat via proximity um and you could hear other people talking if you're close to them and my favorite

moment of griffin playing was when he walked into this dude's house and the dude had a fancy what was it a shirt if it's not fancy it was a shirt it was a shirt and griffin was like hey can i have your shirt and the guy was like uh sure like very dejected about it? Well, I was holding an axe. I love that shirt. Yeah. I was holding an axe and I had a hat on. Sure. That's the other thing. Like whenever you're out in the open and you've been collecting, you know,

resources or drops from towns and you run into somebody, you kind of have to eyeball them. It's sort of that. To bring up EverQuest again, EverQuest had that system where you could right-click on an enemy and it would give you like a sentence description of how they match up against you. Like, it'd be like, oh, he's pretty weak. You could walk all over him, or he looks pretty threatening.

I'd watch out. You sort of have to eyeball it. So, like, if a person is dressed up all in blue clothing, then you know that they're wearing all Kevlar gear, which is, like, the best gear that you can get. And you know that you should probably run away from that person. If they're totally naked, you could probably like wreck shop, which has its own implications. If like you do want to kill somebody, you can take all your clothes off, run up to them and be like,

hey man, can I have some wood? And they'll be like, yeah, sure. Here, I just chopped this down. And you say, hey, thanks. And then you pull out the secret shotgun you were hiding and they didn't see they did not see that coming yeah i and i think that's the real reason why they got rid of zombies is because they realized it was way more interesting just to have these player interactions than it was fucking zombies right like um i think it's a good move i think zombies were essentially big

treasure chests that could kill you like the zombies had really good loot on them that you really couldn't get anywhere else and so people would sort of build these farms where they could camp out really close to these zombie infested areas run out kill a bunch bank stuff go back and kill like it just really wasn't a very rewarding loop also they were super super super buggy also fucking zombies are the worst enough already guys i'm done i don't want to see anymore i'm done you're like we get it bears are fine wolves are fine yeah bears are going to be the next big thing i think you think i think bears have you think left for dead three is just going to be all bears

i would play that game i would definitely definitely play that game bear down um so that's rust i i definitely definitely recommend it it's still super early there's some weird stuff about like when you kill an animal uh the only meat in the game is chicken meat so this is one of my favorite things about i mean everything tastes like chicken so it makes sense i guess that's true like you kill a wolf and then harvest it and then you get chicken meat out of it yeah i would i would say though what are they charging for it was it twenty dollars um i don't remember what the price is i want to say 30 let me maybe 30 i put it on mac and it supports mac as well it's pretty buggy not support mac i mean it quote

unquote supports mac i don't know i checked it out when i got my new macbook pro which i think was like a month ago and it was not um oh it's 20 bucks okay 20 bucks um it is it just didn't work very well it's really hard to get servers to load uh pc version works pretty well but uh i would hold off just until they can get yeah unless you're like one of those intrepid pc gamers that like is willing to try a really rough product like if you're expecting something some semi-polished wait six months like it is definitely not there right now it's kind of fun though to watch a game like that evolve like yeah right have a strong core like they have an idea for this what they want it to be it is fun like i put a ton of game in into this i put a ton of time into this game now which is frustrating because servers keep

disappearing because they're updating it so quickly uh which is another thing that you should keep in mind uh but i put a ton of time into this game now and now like this huge element it's just fucking gone like it's crazy, it's just fucking gone. Like it's crazy that it's like, if you've been playing Mario all your life and then they patch in like in the original super Mario brothers, like, Hey,

we took Coop is out late. Like that's, that's like crazy that they can, they, they are able to do some of that. Um, and it is, it's kind of exciting because it kind of makes me want to jump back into the

game and see what's up. Yeah. I think this is the perfect example of how early access should be used. We've been seeing larger game publishers using early access to be like, well, we haven't gone through beta yet, so we're just going to use you guys as bug testers. That's crappy. Whereas here, you're literally seeing the game forming from the uh ooze of humanity into something that's actually playable um so it's very cool it's just super buggy

um but please if you start a server will you please let me know and please just don't delete it as soon as i finish researching every item in the game, please, Christ. For once. For once. Do your research, they don't carry over from server to server, right? No, there's no progressive character that you have. It's just server to server. So like, no kidding, probably 20 hours Jake and I spent collecting resources, building this insane fort

that nobody even, somebody tried to siege it once, building this insane fort that nobody even somebody tried to siege it once and it was basically a three by three uh house that was three stories tall and then we made every sort of chunk of the house into its own discreet room so it was like 30 rooms each with their own like metal door that nobody could open unless they blew it open like somebody tried once they made it through two doors and was like fuck this i'm out like we had this incredible thing going and then the person that was hosting the server just deleted it all gone that's life though isn't it i mean in a nutshell yeah i mean you could die at any time thanks justin for that reminder i want to talk about uh another game that i'm equally sort of uh obsessed with both conceptually and in practice and that's hearthstone the uh new collectible card game from blizzard new is

new is pushing it just got put out on beta and launched an open beta in january so this one i think there's a lot of stuff we haven't had an opportunity to talk about. Yeah, sure. Yeah, that sounds good. But Hearthstone is... I have never been one for collectible card games. I've never really... I think it's largely because I never had people to play with. You and I got into a bit deep with... Into Magic the Gathering, I feel like, in college sure no wow maybe you did but i i did

he was just humoring you we went to college like seven years apart do you know we did play griffin we played that um a tactics uh what we played a tactics we played but remember that was that marvel hero click collectible no the it was like a card game where you would have like a team oh yeah yeah that was shitty i liked it okay anyway how tactics are dope can we take a quick like aside to talk about dope attack have you guys heard of this no we'll get back into the discussion but it was like the coolest idea ever it was uh little figures that were sort of like Heroclix. Do you know what those are?

Yes. Like little miniature figures with stats on them. Except each of them had a sort of way of physically attacking. So it was Star Wars themed. Oh. This version. So there was a Jedi and you would put your finger on its base to hold it and then you twist sort of its arm back and let go and it was spring-loaded and it had a lightsaber.

And each figure had a little wheel in its base. So it had like a certain number of clicks that it could move. And so you would move it, physically move it, and you could do it on any surface. We would do it on like a table. You could move it and then if you can knock over one of your opponent's figures that figure is out and so like some of them had like little nerf-esque projectiles and so you just sort of

had to actually manually aim it and shoot it at other figures but it's all about like getting them in the right position and then using them to physically knock down other people's figures it was really really cool idea but interesting i played paper football so that's basically the same thing yeah you put the uprights up no i like those little you guys remember those little finger skateboards let's talk about those first those are great and then you could like z-bots half pipe i had some z-bots sure justin tell us about hearthstone hearthstone is based in the if you'll forgive me world of warcraft uh and the world of world of warcraft the world of war of warcraft it pits two players against each other they each have a 30 card deck

of their own construction uh but as sort of like a guiding principle for how to put your deck together you play as one of um nine different characters is that right nine different classes all all classic classes from world of warcraft warlocks and mages and druids and warriors and etc etc um but the it's a very basic system and i quantify that only in the regard that i've been able to understand it uh there are 30 cards in your deck you draw a hand of cards and you have a mana bar that fills up by one crystal uh with every round and each card in your hand costs a certain amount of mana to use that's one of the best parts of the game for me is that there's no unlike most trading card games you don't have resource cards that you play and then based on those resource cards you can spend that energy to play your other cards so magic the

gathering has one of the god what terrain cards yeah it's a swamp you have swamp energy you play it and then you can tap that energy to play one of your other cards based on its cost in in hearthstone you just get that energy and it refills every turn so it behooves you to burn through your mana as much as you possibly can and use it as efficiently as you can every single turn you don't have to think about like i gotta save some some mana for next round. It's just there. It's sort of frustrating when you play those games and it's like, oh, I have to waste this entire turn putting mana out.

Whereas here, it's literally removed from the equation. You know exactly how much mana you have, and you're gonna just have to spend it based on the cards you have. It's very, I think that aspect alone is very inviting. And the other aspect i really like is that a lot of i mean it's not complex math but all the math is taking care of it for you

in the game so essentially like depending on like how many hit points a card has yeah or how much attack it's going to do you see that physically represented on the card because it's a game it's not a physical card and you don't have to like figure out, oh this guy's gonna have one left you don't have to put bottle caps on your yeah it really is I mean there's a lot more

complexity and depth in the surface level but the surface level is like 90% of the game it's all about attack and health and like putting down enough minions that have enough attack to like take out the other minions without their health dropping to zero like it really is just those two numbers so it's it's not like you have to keep in mind like oh is this unit flying is my attack even going to hit that like it there are definitely variables but for the most part it's

that and it's just that yeah i don't think there's a way to like really explain how to play the game in oral form at least but the um tutorial in the game which is sort of par for the course with blizzard games is excellent so good it's so like good that's probably the chief reason that I continued playing this game, is because it is laid out the first, you have five or so games that are laid out for you against

pre-made competitors, and it introduces one facet of the game in each round that you play. So it's very slowly adding, layering things on, so you're completely able to can i ask you guys a question yes i'm worried that this happened to me and just me so there's there's actually like 10 of these right and on the last one uh before you even play it they're like

hey this is you're gonna lose this one sorry you know blame the game designers it's just too hard and then i played it going in thinking like you know i'm gonna have fun i'm gonna go out guns blazing but i'm gonna lose and then i won so then when it ended i was ready to i i assumed i am a natural born hearthstone it would be a shame for me to waste these skills and not play this game every day for the rest of my life. And then about 10 minutes later when I was going to brag to you guys about it, I caught myself and I realized that that's what I wanted. You've been goofed. I've been goofed.

I was hoping that you would go directly to play someone online and just get absolutely decimated. No, what I did is I turned it off and I assumed I was great. And then I played Griffin and I accidentally beat him somehow. We were using basic decks, to be fair. And then I tried to practice round and I got destroyed.

Yeah. It's actually, it's interesting because as simple as the game actually literally is, there are so many levels where a more experienced player could demolish you on the one hand just their strategy might be better they might have a better plan they might have uh have constructed a more solid deck with cards that work better together or they may just have cards that you don't. They do. They definitely, definitely have cards.

They definitely have cards you don't. And that can feel a little unfair, but I know that personally I have beat decks with a solidly constructed basic deck that doesn't have a lot of frills. I have beat decks with a lot of crazy cards. If you get good draws and you play them smart, like you'll win.

It really isn't about how many cards you have, but if you go straight down the line statistically, if you look at every card that costs two mana, the best cards that cost two mana are almost always the ones that you have to find in packs or craft yourself. Have we talked about that, the two ways that you can get cards? No, we have not.

There are two ways that you can get cards. You can craft them using a resource called Arcane Dust, which basically, depending on how rare the card is, it costs a certain amount. And then you can disenchant the cards that you currently have, i.e. destroy them, and get Arcane dust in return that you can spend on making other cards it's really not one-to-one you get like a fourth of the value

of the card whenever you destroy it so to make like one common card you have to destroy four to get enough resources i think my math might actually be off on that but it's not like a great value in that sense but if you have a bunch of cards you don't like toss them or if you buy an expert deck and you get a super rare card for a class that you don't play like burn it and get a bunch of dust

I would not suggest doing that by the way because there are daily quests that you can do to gain gold for yourself and gold that you can do uh to gain gold for yourself right and gold you can use to buy buy you know new decks or not sorry not by decks by packs of packs of cards right which and these daily quests uh a lot of times are you know tell you to play a certain class so right um you may get into a new class that you like better. Sure. There's also the Arena, which is a specific play mode

that is really a nice equalizer because you don't use the decks you've constructed when you play the Arena. It puts you through this deck-making gauntlet where it provides you with three random classes. You have to pick one. And then basically 30 times in a row, it presents you with three cards usually

of the same mana value and then you pick one and then move on to the next set of three cards pick one of those and you keep doing that until you have a deck that you have made and it doesn't pull from the cards that you've collected it's everything um and then after that you you keep fighting and then but for the arena you need to like pay you have to play it's 150 gold to play the arena right uh it's 100 gold to buy a pack of cards but the arena is almost always a better option because even if you so once you lose three games in the arena you're out the more games you can win before you lose three the better rewards you'll get after you finish the arena so no matter what you get an expert pack of cards okay no matter what so it's it's almost always the right thing to do you can also get like more than one pack of cards you can get a bunch of gold you can get a bunch of arcane dust um if you win i think my

highest streak is like five or six wins before i got three losses uh you can go up to like 12 and if you can get 12 you're just gonna get like so much shit um but it's almost always a better idea to do that and it's really exciting and it doesn't make you feel like oh that person just won because they've spent more money on cards yeah i i like that too and i like the fact that like even when you lose you like understand why you lost it's not like someone pulled out this insane like strategy that doesn't make any sense to you it's like right it's very clean and clean is that like the way they present what a card does even if you don't have it you just hover over it and you see all the stats on that card but it's just like very

clean cut it feels like a bare bones like very uh focused collectible card game that just does not have a lot of fat on it at all and and on top of that the other thing that really draws me to it is the like blizzard which is standard blizzard presentation aspects to it where they like make every car that you play they'll be like a funny audio clip or like some special effects that fly out you can like there's a there's a catapult on one of the maps uh-huh like on the board and you could actually put rocks into the catapult pull it back and fire the catapult it doesn't do anything it doesn't do anything it's just cool like not know that blizzard you're crazy uh yeah so much money the arena is also great because

it can you might draft a card that you don't have and then you finish your arena run and you end up with like a bunch of dust and you say like well i'm gonna just go get that card because it was so awesome and i want to start including it in my in my other decks like with every game you play you learn something about a card or like a synergy that two cards have because a lot of cards have like special effects that will happen as soon as you play them on the field and some effects work like really really well in tandem um and so like you start figuring that stuff out and then you sort of naturally gain resources through playing and then you spend those resources on fine-tuning your decks

until you have something that you really, really are proud of. Yeah. I like the fact that it's so short, too. Every match is like five, ten minutes. Like, that's it. Like, it will never go over that. Well, I mean, I've had games that go on forever. It can turn into a slog.

You can get to a point a lot of times where if two players are playing sort of a middle game type deck and there are decks like that that are oh, there are certain... the two different sorts of kinds of cards there are are minions and powers.

Minions are... they stay on the board and fight for you and protect you and fight for you and powers augment them or direct attack directly or charge you up there are minions that have an ability called taunt which means that they have to be attacked first before your opponent can attack you or other minions that you may have out and you can have a strategy where you know you're playing a lot of taunt cards which can

you know sort of let you turtle and avoid damage and a lot of times it'll get down to just draw each player just taking turns drawing one card hopefully that they get the thing they need. I had a game that ended

with basically I was playing a game that ended uh with basically i was playing a deck that i was i thought was so genius and it was all about just like putting a bunch of minions on the board just flooding the board with minions and including enough spells that can clear out my opponent's side of the board and i played a game against somebody who had that exact same deck to a t and so we made it to the final round and we both burned through all of our cards just like flooding the flooding the board and then erasing the other person's side of the board and we did that back and forth and back and forth until we're both out of cards and still almost at full health and then it was just like 20 minutes of drawing like hoping that we were going to get the one card that was going to clean the other person's clock what happens if you run

out of cards i haven't actually gotten to that point's clock. What happens if you run out of cards? I haven't actually gotten to that point. I mean, you can run out of cards and then you just don't have anything. I was talking about running out of cards in our hand, not in our telepon. It's a really rewarding, it's a deeply, deeply strategic game.

Mostly around those kinds of synergies that i talked about and every class has their own class specific cards that all play off each other so like um hunters for instance have a lot of cards that augment uh other minions that have the beast type so like wolves and bears and stuff so they mainly want to build a deck based around those things. Yeah, they'll spawn a lot of other side minions. Right, and so beasts can have their own synergies within themselves. It really is like there's so much complexity. But on top of that, don't let that scare you away,

because that's what put me off to it. When I heard crazy deep strategy, I thought that's a time commitment, and also I'm just not into card games like that. They're too confusing. It's so simple because of how the health and, I guess, attack powers are weighted that you feel like you're constantly learning easily. Like, it never feels overwhelming. And it's kind of as difficult as you, you know, want it to be. feels overwhelming and it's kind of as difficult as you you know want it to be i'm sure you could obviously take competitive play like we have phil on staff who is a freak at this game but

at the same time the match that griffin and i had this morning felt you know just as fun i'm sure yeah oh my god when this hits ipad i'm gonna lose my mind it's gonna be insane man i mean you're gonna have to be online for the matches, I think. Yeah, that's fine. I'm sure you could maybe do practice offline. I would play the hell out of it on iPad. It's going to be, I mean, oh, my gosh. I just like the feel.

Even the feel of, like, picking a card from your deck and, like, dropping it on the field is a satisfying. Yeah. It's so well done. There's also a lot of augmentation of... If you're doing a big play, you're doing a big amount of damage to a boss. The graphics and sound that accompany that

feel very impactful. I feel like you're just fucking shad racking that. People cheer for you if you deal like 10 damage in a single turn like people just lose their minds like yeah they they they know what they're doing man they know how to make a game like feel like something yeah i was like shocked how well they've got the tabletop feel down because i thought you know they haven't made tabletop games before but i guess when you really pull back from it you think about diablo in starcraft i mean these are games that are clearly inspired by tabletop games that existed

before them uh in in some capacity kind of have that feel to them already sure like when i play diablo it doesn't feel like i'm actually you know wandering around these places it feels like i'm looking at the most beautiful versions of game boards with characters playing about them. Yeah, you're moving a figure around. Yeah. And I had never thought about Diablo like that. In a weird way, this game is making me appreciate a lot of their other games even more in terms

of how well they know exactly what they're creating. Yeah. Good job, Blizzard. Man, it's like they know what they're doing i do have one more question can you were you able to chat when you were playing with a friend yeah uh but you can't chat i don't think you can chat with strangers correct me if i'm wrong oh god why would you want to i wouldn't want to i'm just no firefying like every time like somebody like i spend a really long time there are a lot of decks that uh build on synergies that

uh develop a single minion into like a killing machine yeah as fast as you possibly can like there are minions that become stronger when your other minions die so you might like put him on the board and then put five like super cheap minions on the board and then kill them all off so this one guy becomes like mega strong. And then the other player plays a card that like turns them into a sheep. And you're like, you mother fuck. It's so easy to take someone's shit apart.

Yeah. And it's so frustrating every time. I don't think I could restrain myself. You should play my polymorph and a murloc deck. That's all it is. God. I'm disowning you as a friend. I that i played this for like 30 minutes i'm already like thinking building decks that's awesome that says a lot yeah it's it's really good everyone should check it out tell us about something

exciting that's going on griffin you're getting a house right i'm buying a house dude it fucking sucks this process sucks oh i have questions about this so okay go ahead you're buying a house right i'm buying a house dude it fucking sucks this process sucks oh i have questions about this so okay go ahead you're buying a house you're pretty close it seems like you're getting close to like locking this thing down what the house yeah or just like or just my life like you're getting pretty close to just like doing nothing about the house there's a follow-up question okay so the question is like as you're looking at this house like do you spend a night in the house to see if there's like to see if it's haunted right to see if it's well haunted or just has like raccoons in the basement like i feel like a lot of stuff happens at night that you wouldn't

know they did disclose that there was a serial drowner that lived in this house like what kind of drowning like in a tub or like ocean just ocean? Just, like, water, man. Any water. Any water, dude. Any liquid? Honey? Get a big enough bucket. This guy can just, like, do his thing. Yeah, no, it's going to be very haunted.

And that is, like, sort of the one thing that an inspector won't pick up on. We've had probably four inspectors in this place already, which sucks. Different, like, electricians. Yeah, like, general inspector, an engineer, a plumber. What about a ghostbuster? No ghostbusters. Do you know why, Plant? Why?

Because nobody's actually doing that yet. Somebody's got to get in on that. I'm sure there are people who are ghostbusting if you pay them. Guaranteed. There's probably somebody who will inspect some esoteric idea of your house and charge you $400. I Ching, or what is it, with the furniture? Yes, how is the I Ching of your house? How is the Tao of your house? Close enough.

Is your house's chakras aligned? Because your beams and pillars in your garage certainly fucking aren't. Yeah, it seems a little overwhelming, to be honest. And you sort of had to take their word for it, because it's not like you know if the J-pipe is out of whack. No, I actually do know all about that J-pipe. Oh, really? Yeah.

I mean, I was in college, wasn't I? Which one? Pass the touchy on the left-hand side, am I right? Smoking weed. Is it scary? Are you scared, Griffin? Yeah, it's fucking scary. Because you think you're going to fuck up.

Because you think, like, if you fuck this up, your life is fucking ruined. Yeah, it's ruined. We had a plumber, and we didn't know if we wanted to, like, pay $400 to have a specific plumbing inspection. We were like, ah, sure, let's just do it. And he did it, and he was like, oh, yeah, here's an issue. It cost you $18,000 to fix. Like, fuck me, dog. Like, if we hadn't paid you to do that, like, that's $18,000.

It's like getting an accountant. You save money by spending money. I guess that's what they mean when they say you've got to spend it to make it, except you have to spend it to not put yourself in the fucking poorhouse for the rest of your life like it's it is a horrifying process it is very scary yeah is there like a lemon law with houses where it's like after 30 days you can sort of be like nope not for me what and then what and then you burn it to the ground what do you what's the odd what you give

it back to the seller like i would like yeah you'd be like no money back now not feeling it not really digging this one a lot of ghosts does that not work out you did not disclose about the serial drowner because you could just keep jumping from house to house and basically getting like free rent that way also i don't think that's a real law with cars i think the lemon law google it i mean you also don't actually google it how the home buying process works if you think it's like no money down. Free rent. Keep on house hopping, buddy. Just try it.

Let us know. I've watched a lot of House Hunters and a lot of that flipping show where they flip things. Strongest man. World's strongest flipper. And so I'm pretty well versed in the situation do you think you'll ever buy a house the two of you uh yeah not in new york though right because it's like i can't fucking imagine going through all this in a place where like you buy a condo well yeah i mean yeah you'd either buy an apartment you wouldn't buy a house certainly unless you moved out to like way up

state where brian is or in queens or something um you could buy an apartment apartments are a little i think there's less variables in apartments first for space and second like it's it's not practical for like me like i can't buy an apartment in new york right but i'm saying the process is like you don't have to worry about like the heating necessarily because the building but then yeah sure sure which are like right bonkers it's not a standalone thing man it's just like it's a good it makes sense like i can understand how financially this process makes sense it's just like getting into it it's like i just wish it was more like hearthstone you know yeah they need like a tutorial you need a tutorial i'll tell you that much there's no fucking tutorial if somebody makes a video game that's like an interactive

process of buying a house i would i would play it has to exist they should make a video game where it's like not only buying a house but like you have a job and you take a shower and you go to the bathroom and you have like a meter that judges like your hunger level sounds like a nintendo game genius maybe is that Wait, has that been done? What? You click the Sims. In Sims, you click a fucking house on a map and it's like, it's 24,000 Samoans.

It's like, okay, bye, done. Yeah, that's not what it's like. You don't have to worry about option fees. You don't have to worry about earnest money. Oh, God. Earnest? You're like a baby. Does he go to jail?

No, he gets scared stupid. Totally done done with that i'm done with you professionally uh let's talk about uh the next game i uh on our list which actually came out at the tail very very tail end of um january it apparently was also on early access but it launched for full in earnest please don't make another earnest joke at the end of january yes um but so so the game is loadout um it's free on pc it's a free-to-play shooter and uh i think at first glance people will think oh Team Fortress, but not made by Valve. It's similar in the sense that it's an action game, and it has cartoony Pixar-y graphics. But it plays a bit more like Quake. It has a camera.

It's a third-person game like Gears of War. And I was pretty pleasantly surprised by it. I went in with basically zero expectations and came away uh having a lot of fun it's uh a pretty well polished um action game i played a lot more of it last night i i had no expectations that it would hook me it's it's pretty fun it's it's we should talk about the free-to-play stuff up front it's really weird so it has two different forms of currency, as all free-to-play games ever have to. And I did, Russ, you and I did an overview of this game.

We did. We screwed this up so bad. I can't believe how much free shit it gives you. And then one of our readers commented, did you guys spend money? I don't understand why you have all this free shit. Like, nah, man, you just start with all this free shit. Apparently, because I have, like,

the Polygon Steam account on my computer, I wasn't even using it. It started me off with, like, a shit ton of free money. Now, in this case, obviously, it's a free-to-play game, so we figured, like, oh, it doesn't matter, obviously, if we have a free account. But I wasn't even using that account.

I was using my personal account, so they, like, snuck me some funds yeah so apparently any i guess i guess steam press accounts are like granted is it just did we figure out is it just a crap load of gold yeah it's a crap it's a i think it was just just just the gold i think i don't know see now i don't fucking know anything yeah i'm a little bit i'm a bit worried about it, too. Let's, for argument's sake, say it's just the gold. Because I have read a lot of people have been having a lot of fun with the game, even without paying any money.

Okay. But essentially, you've got these two currencies. You've got the gold, which is just for visual customizations or character, costume, etc. It's also for gun slots and loadout slots which are you know i think that's sort of the one area that is a little shady because that is kind of a mechanically important part of the game is having like a lot of different options sure but you do but you do have like a free um loadout slot like yeah and i think you have three gun slots that you can, like, craft your guns and put them in. So there's that, and then there's Blutes. Is that right? Blutes?

Yeah, that's the Blue currency. So the Blue currency is used to unlock weapon customizations, and this is really where I got the most fun out of the game, is the weapon customization system is super in-depth. You can basically change every aspect of a gun changing it's like the the ammo that it shoots what sort of accuracy it does scopes um what type of gun it is from like a beam weapon to like a launcher to like a machine gun you can change it to a sniper there's like a ton of customization options

and there's a really cool testing system where even if you don't have the currency to buy a gun you can just test it out and see if it's something you want to work towards um yeah i mean i said in the overview episode it's something that i wish a game like borderlands had um it's just super in-depth and uh allows for a lot of fun on that front that i really wasn't expecting i mean most of these games have very strict gun rules um griffin you sort of i made a terrible guy yeah you can make a shitty gun like it's it's sort of like they threw balance to the to the wind and said like go ahead and get out there and find the best way to do it which is which is kind of a clever idea because not every gun is right for their every person Like, I'm shit with sniper rifles. I can't, like, if I unlock a sniper rifle in a Call of Duty game,

I'm like, oh, fucking great. Skip. Like, never going to use that. Yeah. I'm more of, like, a submachine gun guy because that's sort of the range that I like to be with other players, and I'm terrible at aiming, so I have to be close anyways. Yeah. Fast firing.

Yeah, so, like, it sort of gives you freedom to make that and do that and go however you want, but it is also possible to make a gun that shoots a scattered blast of healing barbs like three inches from you. That is just fucking useless. Yeah, it does absolutely nothing. But that's kind of fun.

That's kind of great that you can experiment and fuck up up that bad there's an option to test each of the weapons too before you actually purchase all of them yeah and often i i found that i literally just talked about this and yeah i well i'm just saying i didn't do it like i i would go into a game and spend the money and find that i had made a terrible weapon and realize... Yeah. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying, because I literally just talked about that. Try to stay tapped in, Chris Plant.

There are a ton of carrots in this game, because there's a tech tree that as you use different weapon attachments and weapon types, they level up, and then you can upgrade them or unlock new attachments that you can purchase and or unlock new attachments that you can purchase and put on your guns yeah um so there is like a lot of variation you can also pick up other people's guns when you kill them and sort of see what it is that they're what it is that

they're they're they're slinging yeah that's kind of if you keep getting crushed by a guy and hopefully he dies eventually you can just pick up his gun and mess around with it or like if you're bad at killing people you can make a healing beam gun and then use that on your teammates and you still get like experience and points and stuff for that and it genuinely is helpful because nobody's doing it right now and almost all of the game types are objective based yeah to the point where no one really knows what you're doing when you start firing at them so they'll run away from you right because it also heals you and it heals you yeah there's a lot of benefits too there's some really terrific locomotion in the game too because you

have dodge rolls that you can do and you can like chain those with a dash to like cover like huge gaps in the map like it's really really really fast paced there's so much jump dodging going on which is such a like crazy old school concept that like basically everybody is using right now yeah it feels very quakey are you enjoying that part of it because once I got into like matches with better players I found it kind of

frustrating shooting anyone it felt like I had to learn the trick to how to play it right kind of like do you remember snaking and mario kart oh yeah snaking and snake yeah oh god thank you but where people figure out uh a different way of moving than the game intended for you to use uh and it's only fun for the people who like master it yeah so that was the case in gears where like people would just go from cover to cover. It's still the case. I can't play Gears of War multiplayer because all the game is is like, oh, you move a lot faster when you're moving into cover.

So people just like zoom from cover to cover. And I didn't notice that as much in Loadout because you obviously aren't using cover mechanics. It felt a lot easier to stay on target with people. But I do know what you're saying. It can be really frustrating but yeah it's a good game it's a i think it it dishes out the blutes which is really the the i think the more important that's all you care about because i mean everything else is just visual it's what you spend on upgrading your tech tree and on unlocking attachments for your weapons i think i think i

really do think it's the more important of the two. I've heard a lot of reports that gold is really hard to come by, so you have to actually spend real money if you want to buy outfits for your characters, and the price of those outfits is pretty exorbitant. Gold is more valuable for buying bonuses. So you can buy XP bonuses or loot bonuses, or I guess multipliers, and that's why you would actually want it. Otherwise, it has very little impact on the game. But to me, yeah, the core of the game is this idea of experimenting with making your own guns.

And I really do think that it dishes out enough currency for you to do that without having to drop any cash on it. And you can make a decent weapon early on. The reality is some of the fanciest weapons that you can make, the craziest ones, they lose a lot of their oomph. Like there is a give and take to almost every attachment that you put on the gun. So you can get like a weapon for, you can get a rocket launcher that fires, I think, five or six rounds, but it makes each round almost meaningless. Yeah. And then you want to find out, well, why would I want something like that? And then you can make that weapon have lobbed rockets, which are more like grenades,

and you can give each of those grenades flak, which, you know, explodes in a radius, and you want six because it doesn't matter if it's little damage so long as it's covering, like, half the map. It's like figuring that stuff out is what I enjoyed. I enjoyed the violence and horrible gore of this game. I don't like that. I really like it. I don't like that. I really like it. I don't know why I like it, but I find it really... So there's like the level of violence is insane

where you can literally, like you'll shoot a guy in the arm and a chunk of his arm will get removed and you'll see the bone underneath the arm. But because it's... Sorry, I almost dropped my mic there. But because it's... So hot and bothered. I was really getting worked up. It's really Sorry, I almost dropped my mic there. But because it's... So hot and bothered. I was really getting worked up.

It's really exciting, you sick fuck. But because it's cartoony, it's very silly. It doesn't look realistic. I mean, you can literally shoot a guy's head, and his skull will be gone, and it's just a brain with eyes. It has almost a claymation look. Yeah, it looks like claymation.

It makes it feel kind of safe. The thing that bothers me is flipping the bird after you look. Yeah, it looks like claymation. The thing that bothers me is like flipping the bird after you die. Yeah, that's a little crass. Just kind of like, yeah, shallowly MTV humor. It does have this like very juvenile sense of humor and some

of which is like really lame like oh, you can do the dance from Gangnam Style. Yay. Like that's not cool. what happened to the joy in your heart i'm sorry um yeah you used to love gong i did those were the days i feel bad making fun of this game too much though because at the very first thing it asks you to do in the game is name your weapon because when people uh kill you they can steal your weapon and then they'll see whatever you named it and i think i named named him the Fart Cooker and the Fart Kisser.

And that's immediately, I was like, I have the perfect name for this weapon. And then I was like, stupid game, showing the bird, like, I'm better than this. No, I'm not. You're not much better than him. I named my first gun Tim Gun, which I was really proud of. That's nice.

Yeah, I actually like it. And given the fact that it's free i don't think there's a reason you shouldn't give it a shot guys a lot of games came out in huanuary but should we talk about some of the big news the best news of the month uh yeah absolutely i mean i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily say anything on this list the best news it is actually a lot of pretty crummy news um but yeah i thought i take a look back see what happened in the month and you can think back to how you felt at home about when those moments happened for example remember when nintendo almost went out of business because they're doing so poorly? That's an exaggeration.

It is. I'm blowing out of proportion, but they're really having a tough time. There's no question about that. They still got fungibles. They have good games coming out. They ain't got no debt, and that's good.

Really, the issue is that no one seems to want to play their gaming console, the Wii U. We're talking about this like we're on fox and friends have you heard of this wii u it's almost like i do that on a regular basis um what do you think is the issue what like is it just a matter of like they just missed with this new console and there's no coming back from it do they have a chance you know i would have ruled them out after the gamecube i would have ruled

them out you know many times before um i don't think that they're going to i hope they're not building their business on the hope of having another sort of insane we you make some success like yeah like the um or that i mean That was not just quality product. That was a specific time period and a specific lightning striking type. Well, the DS too. Yeah, right. If we're talking about insane cultural wide adoption

and unreproducible success, you talk about the DS, which is the best-selling piece of gaming hardware of all time right yeah like dedicated gaming hardware not including like you know yeah yeah and it wasn't like it wasn't driven i mean obviously it had the dual screens but the success of it had nothing to do with the fact that i had dual screens it was just like everybody made fucking games for that thing everyone made everyone was doing it that it had i think of any nintendo system the best makes it

first and third party releases that came at like a fucking relentless clip like yeah it was it was a constant there was constantly something you needed to play yeah that was that on ds that would like just come out of nowhere like oh scribble knots what's up like scribble knots is out now you probably didn't know about it let's let's pick games that were fun to play like castlevania every castlevania game on on there was oh my god amazing and then scribble knots came out and just fucking changed the game um and that's really the issue i i agree like they shouldn't be in the mindset that they're ever gonna hit that like one two punch of wii ds but the question is like i was talking about this the other day, do they just like say, okay

consoles, we're just never going to catch up on the console side and focus on handheld. And we know that they are in the mindset that they can replicate that. Like that's their long-term goal. Their long-term goal is to make the health platform, and that was

Wii Fit, which was the biggest I think their proudest success for the sure um i used the word unreproducible earlier i don't think that's true obviously their strategy is going to continue to be going forward making sort of hardware designed for their own dedicated software like their their big hitter franchises which you can say what you will about nintendo but those games are almost always fucking phenomenal they're almost always like really really great and so they know they have this opportunity still if they if they have the right hardware to support the right software i think we use failures and i'm not saying anything new or fucking revolutionary here it was a huge

messaging problem when it came out it is when you look at like the big buzzwords that ps4 and and xbox one bandied about about being like entertainment hubs for the living room and interconnected experiences for for players across the globe like we you you can draw pictures for people and they can see them it's not really great for either of those. I think the problem is Nintendo is the world's greatest parlor trick maker and toy maker. And that's what the Wii was. The Wii didn't really quite do what they advertised it to. When we first saw it, it's like, wow,

this is going to change the world. Motion controls, Wii Fit. We're in game. It did. I can't say that. Sorry, you need to stop. Sorry, it did change the world like inarguably changed the world but it didn't it absolutely changed but it wasn't the landscape

of of but i would agree and part of that is a magic trick what they thought it would it wasn't actual motion controls it was a trick uh boom blocks oh my gosh my my My point is they make these really great toys. That's what they do really, really well. They don't make, like Wii Fit isn't actually a platform that's going to change the way that we do health. And even the Wii didn't really change the way we play video games as much as I think anyone thought it would initially. Are you kidding me? You're crazy. Do you not remember how fucking everybody was playing catch up after the way everybody did it but we don't play motion

games like that that's true it's no longer i mean it has normalized back to like where it was before saying that it it wasn't the revolution that everybody thought it was and yeah we have connect and the biggest thing that we use connect for is to turn on our tv yeah it was it was about for five years or so that was i mean it basically dominated everything and now it's again it's normalized back to where things were and i'm not understating like what they did what they did with the we was absolutely incredible i think what i find concerning is if health is really what they like are banking on if that's a big thing i don't think it is is it that's what they've

explicitly said is their long-term goal is to build this giant health platform whatever that is i think that's a mistake because they don't make that sort of accurate technology they don't make things that i think change that literally change the way we do things i think they make really impressive kind of demos or things that get very close or create the illusion of it. Yeah, but that's fine. It doesn't need to be super accurate, especially for the health set. Well, I think for health it probably does. And that's why people have gotten cold with the latest Wii U exercise things.

I mean, you saw a review. No, I think it's more the fact that, like, everyone bought a Wii Fit and now they realize, oh, it's sitting in the closet and I haven't touched it in three years uh listen we got a lot okay there's a lot of there's a lot of news there's a lot iOS controllers released is another uh thing that is written here that I don't know what it refers to but like let's get into that hey so uh you know how before there were iOS controllers but they were like made for games, and that sort of sucked. Yeah, I remember that. Now, there are iOS controllers that theoretically could work with all games that support iOS controllers. That's still kind of suck. Okay, real quick, I just want to go around.

Is that how anybody on this call, yes or no, just don't want to hear yes or no, wants to play video games? With a controller? With a controller. I'll say this. Video games? It was a yes or no. This is, it's not. video games with a controller with a controller i'll say i'll say this and video games this it was a yes or no this is it's not on their fucking phone you don't say that it's not one-to-one for me because i have an i have an htc one uh i did buy a a little controller for it a bluetooth controller for it so that i it, so that I could play games on it.

And I just connect my Bluetooth controller into my HTC One, and I snap that into the controller, and it's fucking great. It's fucking super good. I don't know if it's the same for iPhone, because it's, you know... It's a little different. Here's the deal.

Justin, I think you have a very short-sighted view of this. I'm not, I agree with you. It's silly to like be on the subway, have your iPhone, whip out a controller and carefully prop your iPhone up on your lap and play a game with the controller. What's not silly is- Apple TV.

Right. The moment that Apple wakes up is like, hey, we should put every fucking game we've ever made on Apple TV. Suddenly you have a controller and thousands of games for one dollar tens of thousands millions i don't know how many there are or even ostensibly a second screen experience using your phone and apple tv it's just hard for me to think that way when apple has shown time and time and again that they have neither the inclination nor the ability to even acknowledge that humans play video games i don't think that's the case look at how much of

their app store is dedicated to gaming they know how much money it's driving like against their will you know every time i agree that a game goes on an app store fucking steve jobs ghost comes down to earth and walks it angrily like how did you let this goofy thing on here that sounds can't there be something else for listening to podcasts that's good character justin we should bring that back apple is like the dad of a child like celebrity like he loves collecting all that cash but he really doesn't give a shit about the kid honestly i think the second like they're gonna wake up one day and be like well guys here's our official controller all our games are on apple tv and microsoft and sony are have to think like

oh maybe our 10 indies or our 60 triple a games have a little bit of competition on on tv the thing but like i mean if that's the way the world worked like yeah but if that was the way the world worked then like that's the same line that people have been giving about nintendo games like you know one of these days nintendo is going to wise up and they're going to put all their games on you know fill in the blank here stop stop stop that's a totally different we're comparing two different things entirely. Nintendo has built a business around selling $60 games. They can't start selling dollar games and make as much money. I'm just saying the logic of, hey, somebody can make a lot of money if they did this,

is not always the end of the conversation. I agree that they could make a lot of money but sometimes corporations don't want money i think the bigger argument is people who play ios games love the convenience of it and just a simple task of connecting it to their tv is too much yeah it might be but maybe not i think it's exciting i can't wait to see what people do with it let's move on we're taking i want to talk about this next thing because it's interesting yeah uh tight remember when everyone freaked out about this, this Titanfall news? Well, here's the thing. We're going to talk about this.

It's sensitive. Let's not diminish people's frustration with it. Because at first blush, the news is Titanfall only has six versus six multiplayer. And when I first saw that and I saw like, by the way, we're reading off, right? This is the most traffic news stories from, no, I just, uh,

you just picked a cross section. People were like, there was a lot of discussion in our post about this. And there were a lot of people who were fucking furious about it. And my first inclination was who gives a fuck? Like I, that has never really mattered to me very much because I, if anything, I would be more excited to have fewer players because it means less of, like, running six feet and then getting shot to death.

And it means you can make more of an impact. I mean, that was my... But at the same time, like, there are definitely, definitely huge, enormous numbers of people who want those kinds of like large large-scale warfare experiences not only that if you have seven friends that are playing titanfall yeah you can no longer like party up with all of them it's way more difficult to like have a game night where you and all your friends get online start a party and then just like hop from room to room which is like a really like important and and i don't what is that scenario the seven friends who are these fucking people that have seven i love to play games on a friday night and i also have seven friends that are all playing titanfall

i i would so i get what griffin is saying i think you guys are like trying to no no i like write that off he's trying to to pull some velocity girl nonsense. Imagine you and seven of your friends are out and around at the same time. You're all playing video games together. I'm just saying, just because it's not the way that we consume games doesn't mean there aren't tons of people who do it that way, because there are.

That is a really important experience that only became possible in terms of consoles in the last generation. But this is what kills me, like so what? So what? It means they can't do that anymore. But I like it. No, it's not.

No, no, no. It doesn't mean they can't do that anymore. It means they can't do that with this game, Titanfall, that isn't built for it. That's like saying Spy Party doesn't support 16 on 16 deathmatches. Like, well, no, of course it doesn't because it's a game about two people playing against each other. I think that's like saying spy party doesn't support 16 on 16 death matches like well no of course it doesn't because it's a game about two people playing i think that's not really great it's exactly this it is it's like the chess metaphor it's not a great metaphor and here's here's why

first of all spy party isn't really part of this shooter genre right so like it doesn't the fact that it's one versus one doesn't really go against any kind of norm that the other entries in the genre has sort of set also when they were originally showing off this game i think i'm right about this i hope i'm not talking out of my ass i think it had it was seven versus seven so like it might have been seven does that change anything yeah russ it changes it by two goddamn players like yeah it changes something i i don't think it changed that and also like this is it is it's something that the that people were very very very excited about it's a shooter so like when compared to its contemporaries six versus six is pretty fucking low okay you can't really say that okay i want to exact this is this is the same this is that like line of logic is the same. That line of logic is the reason that every AAA game that comes out is so fucking homogenous. Bloated.

Because you have to have the bullet points on the back of the box. 52 players. 52 players. X number of weapons. Right. Every sword imaginable. Why can't the game just be what it is? Why can't you game just be wouldn't you rather it's like the game make something different right wouldn't you rather the game be as focused and as fun as the dudes who

made it want it to be like clearly they've done a lot of testing they've said it's not a like a net code right it is because clearly they know how to make a fucking game that's 12 on 12 because they did it for 10 years or whatever long call dude is going let's use battlefield as the example i tried to play that with uh fresh chicken a few other people from we hopped on and it's little groups of four people i didn't get to play with them right that's battlefield which has you know a gargantuan number of players i still didn't get to play i would also say i'm turned off from Battlefield, like the large games of Battlefield that are like 32 on 32, because my impact is so marginalized because there's 31 other people on my team. There's 31 other people and there's 32 on the other team.

Flip side of that, though, on a team of six, if you fuck up, your team's fucked because you are, hold on, let me do math. 12.5, hold on, no, I'll get this. Okay, settle down. 16%. Wouldn't you rather feel like you're making an impact than not making an impact? Not if I do a shitty job, Russ. Don't do a shitty job.

I can play Mag. I can play Mag. Oh, God, don't bring up Mag. And I can just sit in the middle of the barracks pooping in my hand and making cave art. And our team can still win. I'd be like, yeah, I did it. I'm the best soldier. i caught a little shit recently because i said i was happy that the order announced

that they're not gonna have a multiplayer mode and the reason i said i was happy about it not because there was no multiplayer mode but because it was focused development they knew what was gonna work for them under the resources they were given and they're pushing for that rather than tacking shit on and that's what i feel like this is i mean you mean, you never know what a game's development environment is like, though. Like, Tomb Raider I don't think suffered because it had a multiplayer component. Like, they could bring in a separate team to do the multiplayer component. Yeah, but that costs money. And Tomb Raider came in under expectations

because they spent part of the money on multiplayer that they might not have. It came in under expectations, but it made up all of its development funds. It took a year and a half. I'm just saying I would I trust that developers especially developers like Respawn who have been through a lot of bullshit know what kind of game they want to make and I

trust them more than I trust a back of the box bullet point saying 32 players and I have to imagine that either EA or Microsoft was like come on guys oh I'm sure I'm sure. Let's just try 32. I'm sure most of them wanted more.

Give me 32 players. So, frankly, I'm thrilled. I realize a lot of people are pissed off. Guess what? You can play Battlefield. It's still broken. Or like any other game. Right.

There's tons of options. It's baffling to me. It's just such a weird, like, this game isn't what I wanted it to be. That argument does not work for Titanfall because it's such a fucking like this game isn't what i wanted it okay but that argument does not work for titan fall because it's such a fucking crazy outlier it's not like call of duty ghost came out and if it was only like two versus two i mean like well fuck that i'm gonna go play some other military shooter titanfall is the fucking heir apparent to the next gen xbox one kingdom and like it is a game that has had so much hype behind it. And then that hype that that is the double-edged sword of hype is that as soon as you run a foul of somebody who's fucking totally jized,

then it hits you back style like twice as hard. I think the, I think it'll do okay anyway, but that's a, and you know, sequels, you gotta go have somewhere to go. Yeah.

Right. That was a good conversation though it's very engaging i like oh man there's there's nothing that caps off a better conversation than acknowledging a blue cantrell reference oh gosh i'm gonna talk about the banner saga but i'm kind of a funny choice to talk about it because i don't know a lot about fantasy uh which is kind of what this is but i'm gonna go for it uh banner saga is a new tactical role-playing game made by some uh former bioware developers i think it's only three or four of them uh i think the main the main development team unless they've i don't know i i interviewed them

god when we were doing press reset what was that like a year and a half ago oh my god was that the same game yeah it's the same game and it was it was just three three guys all from the austin bioware brand i think it was the austin bioware branch anyway they're called stoic they're cool dudes they work out of a goat shack a literal goat shack yeah it was in a farmer's market uh behind this really great bar in north austin and they just found this space that was literally a shack where goats lived and so they bought it and put computers in it and insulated it and that's where they developed it that's amazing yeah um so i mean the basics of it are you uh there's you're in this kind of land that looks like a don bluth cartoon kind of thats, I guess maybe even late 70s cartoon style.

It's gorgeous. But 2D animated style, kind of looks like a Viking era thing. And there are humans, there are giants, and there are these stone monsters. And we're led to believe that there have been all these wars that have taken place between them. Anywho, the sun has stopped moving in the sky. And trouble is afoot. Man has turned on man. And you are going on a quest to not really get to the bottom of it.

I don't want to go too much into the story because I don't want to spoil any of that stuff. Well, it's the first part of a three-part arc. So if we got into the story, we wouldn't be able to cover many of the bases. Yeah. But you're also trying to forge an alliance and trying to, like, re-ignite the world, and you've got to figure out this sun situation, sort of like what happened with the Teletubbies.

This sun situation is a real pain in my keister. It is. The whole thing with it not being one? Stone monsters? Well, there is a song It's just not moving Ugh No thanks

Yeah Mondays There's kind of a side of hand here Because it is a strategy game And you lose people There's permadeath For a number of the people in your group Which I found really intimidating

But you kind of just accept it The fighting is not the most important part of the people in your group uh which i found really intimidating uh but you kind of just accept it the fighting is not the most important part of the game the the most important part is actually conversations that you have uh which play a big impact on the way the game plays out and also this weird oregon trail like game that happens between fights and cities that you visit and it's really slick how well these things all work together. So you mentioned the permadeath. Your character sort of in, I guess in layman's terms, has

a number of lives that they can lose. But they can lose those in battle, or like you're in a town, the town's about to get ransacked, so you try to get as many people out and as many resources out as you possibly can. And one of your team members in conversation will just just be like what do you want me to do and you can be like go get some people and load up the truck or you can be like go hold off those

monsters so we have more time to get more resources and if you do that that person's fucking dead like the permadeath can happen in conversation it can happen on the trail it can happen in battle like there are consequences to literally everything that you do. And they're really, really well implemented just because of the sheer number of decisions you have to make. It's not like, not that the Walking Dead games do this necessarily poorly, but in Walking Dead games, zombies break into a room. You have to save one or two people. And then whoever you don't save dies. It's more abstract than that

it's i can sacrifice this person and then maybe we'll have enough resources to make it to the other town without everybody fucking starving to death um it really is it it feels more real in a way yeah they hide like a lot of like they don't make it clear where they'll be like as you said a moment we're in a room and it's like pick between these two people it's very subtle and you really have to pay attention because yeah it is literally you pick the wrong thing and a kid is dead because he got hit in the face by an axe it reminds me of dungeons and dragons at its best and i'm talking about like playing with friends where you have a really competent dungeon master who is using the gameplay elements to kind of draw you in. It's not really about the fights. It's not really about any one thing. It's about this kind of story that you are telling almost without realizing that you're part of it. And that's what I really

liked about it, is that I felt like I was in the hands of somebody who really knew what they were doing. And that even if I lost players, players like i was still going to get through this adventure uh and enjoy it on the other end um and that art style man you can't fucking man it's under it's unlike anything else out there all of the uh the the guys who made it showed me how they worked on the animations uh it's real people that they got uh and then they you know they would do like a death animation where they would just film somebody sort of collapsing to the ground and then would do that blue style

animation over it. Rotoscope. Rotoscope animation. It's fucking, it's so cool. Like every single thing that happens is really really really cool. Did anybody else have a hard time following it a little bit because they introduced so many characters? It's overwhelming.

There's different plot lines and factions sort of all going on at the same time. And they really just, there's very little introduction to the world. They just sort of drop you into it. And then you have to sort of figure out the different allegiances and the politics of this world through conversation which is very fantasy-esque it's like the wire with vikings i that's not like a terrible i don't thank you i know you're probably goofing no i'm serious a terrible comparison it reminded me of like trying to read it's why i gave up on the game of thrones books just because like i don't know there's a lot of they're introducing a lot it's high fantasy like it is it fantasy. You have to be high to like it.

It's not especially approachable. It's definitely punishing. You will lose people that you really like. Sort of like Fire Emblem in that way. Be careful. The combat is also really... It's funny that we're talking about this in the same episode we talked about Hearthstone, because it basically boils down, again, to two statistics. You have an armor statistic that can

sort of mitigate damage whenever you take it, and then you have a, I forget what the other. Strength. It's called strength, right, which is also your health and the amount of damage that you do. So as your health goes down, you become weaker, which functionally makes sense so you have to always you can target with almost all attacks and abilities either armor or health um so you know if you fight against a really heavily armored guy and you just try and like storm them and go for the health you're not going to do very much damage so you have to choose which of those two different things to attack and if you make the wrong choice and they can you know pay it back to you in kind

it's it's really simple but but uh with a lot of under the surface complexity yeah that makes it a lot easier for me to get into than most tactical role-playing games because you play a disgaea game and man it is just like i get it like i get the appeal but there's just so many fucking moving pieces and statistics going on there that it is the opposite of approachable. Yeah, it is a weird strategy though, because the idea of your health is really low, so you'll

do very little damage is sort of a different mindset than most games, but I like it. I think it's a good system. Yeah, it's a good game, Banner Saga. Well done. GG. GG. Justin, you got any emails you want to read for us yeah we had a few of you chime in on what your favorite games of the year have been you can write to us at besties at polygon.com can we call these rest resties he's the resties he's these are the resties trace uh says banner sagaies. Trace says Banner Saga is his favorite.

I already did that one. Pay attention, Trace. God damn it. I'm just chiming in. He said he's old enough to still favor turn-based strategy in RPG games from my youth, as well as have a fondness for the Oregon Trail, plus the art, music, and ambiance are perfect for the setting. Agreed.

He also likes Hearthstone. Yes, also into that. Phil's favorite is Olly Olly. Is this Phil Kohler? Oh, fucking Olly Olly. Phil, no, it's not Phil Kohler. I loved Olly Olly. How did we forget about Olly Olly?

I thought about it, but I don't think a lot of, I've played it and I know Griffin's played it. I don't know if the other two have played it. It's fucking sick. I have not played All I Want. It is a 2D downhill skateboarding game that requires you to basically build

the longest and sickest combos that you possibly can. It's on Vita, which is like the perfect place for it. It was originally, I think, going to be a mobile game or maybe it was also going to be a mobile game and the developer killed that. Roll seven is the developer. Killed that just like it feels so good on the vita it's such a good good place really good controls really slick controls really like slick presentation it's got a spelunky ass daily challenge mode it's got hella leaderboards it is it is a it is a nice

little game yeah it's groovy ollie ollie uh we also heard from Mark Bayer who says Threes. Threes. Oh, no. That came out in February. You can't say Threes. We'll talk about that. Maybe we'll talk about Threes later because I'm obsessed. Threes is amazing.

It's really good. Grant says his favorite is Hoplite. Oh, what up? I loved Hoplite. Justin, you didn't like that game. It didn't really click. You're wrong. I don't like the tile. Did you give it a lot of time? No, he played

one level and it was like, 2D graphics, don't care. Yeah, it was the pixels. It's good, man. It sort of, it is a roguelike with progression elements that carries over even if you die, it is a roguelike with progression elements that carries over even if you die, which is like,

that's what you gots to get. You gots to have those. But it also has like a sort of chess-like system of movement. I mean, it's on a hex, so obviously it's not chess-like in that sense, but you have to constantly evaluate what the best move is um which gives it a lot more a lot more um depth and approachability than than most roguelikes which i think are more boiled down to like well i'm gonna take this hit right but is it gonna be enough to kill me and can i find a way to heal it is almost entirely based around what can i possibly do in this turn that is not going to get me hit yeah it was actually created as part of a game jam and the effort of the game jam was to

um make a roguelike that didn't rely on the concept of roguelikes where two enemies you sort of like run into an enemy a bunch of times and like that's how combat works yeah so this was his solution which involves a lot of of sliding around enemies as attacks. And it's just really, really well designed. And it's great because it's turn-based, so it's really good for the iPhone. I play it on the subway and stuff like that. It's highly recommended. It's $1.99.

Check it out. I've been having a lot of fun with it. Yeah. Anything else? Yeah, Steven Swift says Euro Truck Sim truck simulator 2 i have not played that uh matthew uh says that his favorite is broken age act one which i loved that was great i still haven't played through all of it unfortunately i have a question for you guys i haven't started this game yet right i have not either Would it be wrong for me to just wait

till the whole game is available? Because I'm kind of, I don't want to start this and then be really bummed that I can't finish it. I wish I could have. Okay, I'm going to do that then. I said in my review, I mean, on the one hand, it's fun to look forward to something. On the other hand, the more and more i feel like we're doing a disservice to

stories by telling them this far apart you know we do we know it's a two-parter right yeah it's a two-parter we use the the tv comparison for games a lot and i i i think that if you're keeping a super regular schedule it's maybe applicable but like for instance i just played the second act of uh wolf with wolf among us and i was that three months there's been it's no it's four months four months i mean i went back and played the first uh episode for reasons that are too boring to dictate here but if you hadn't like that is really hard to keep up story momentum. I mean, that's tough. Do we know when the second part of Broken Age is coming out? I don't think they've dated it, no.

Could be any time. But it's really cool. I mean, it's worth really noticing. It really is hard to complain about, like, the development decisions that they made. I mean, it's not difficult because fucking, like, a lot of people who kickstarted that game, I think, were grousing about the decisions that they made but i mean obviously it turned out a good product so like they it was the right decision i think yeah talking about that tv thing that justin just

mentioned i i'm just playing alan wake for the first time because nobody recommended it everybody was like shut your mouth to chris grant uh yeah i recommended it non-stop jerk uh that game is great and the episodic structure is great and i'm really jazzed about quantum break now but what i realized is i don't so much care about getting the game you know every couple months i just appreciate that the game is broken up into chunks of like complete story right like because they know that they have to hit these moments within a certain amount of time i feel like they're writing better story uh so i'm i'm jazzed about that and like i'll probably play wolf among us when it's all out but i just have

no intention of waiting that long i don't know i'm actually i i actually fall into the camp as justin referenced it in passing i i like being excited about what's coming next like i i rachel and i played uh the first episode of the second season of walking dead and like i i'm i am now like really really really looking forward to the second episode which is i i i like having that in front of me and i think that telltale probably likes that i like having that in front of me and yeah definitely going to buy it you are the guy who bought a wii u because there weren't any games out for it but you were ready to be on the hype that's true and like some of my favorite games for last year were on the wii u so you know what that's true good work Worked for this guy.

As games come out in February, make sure you email us bestiesatpolygon.com and let us know which ones and why so we can make sure to say hello to you. Kyle Allen, by the way, also suggested the Banner Saga was the best game so far this year.

So I think that's pretty much going to do it for us. Thank you so much for hanging in there with us. And seriously, no kidding, thanks for demanding that we continue to make this program. You can review this show on iTunes. You can tweet about it with a link to our iTunes page with the besties hashtag. Just hashtag the besties would be great.

And help us to spread the word about it so we can make the show grow. Yay. Next episode will be in late February so you're not actually going to have to wait that long. Right. A few weeks. Bonus. Bonus. Bonus. And shoot an email. I think you just said it.

Besties at Polygon.com. And now who's fucking repeating the i'm not i'm just saying like if you have questions i think those might be fun to field on the show yeah discussion discussion favorite games but also uh yeah since we've decided to just meander for two hours we're gonna have to kill we had a very structured rundown that's what they said they said we want you to tiptoe through the tulips and waste a couple hours of our life. Mission accomplished. Hopefully the dishes are all washed now and you can finally stop listening. If it took you two

hours to wash those dishes, god damn. What are you doing? Licking them clean? One last thing. Wednesdays at 12 p.m. Eastern, we have a new show called Polygon Live. Justin McElroy is going to be on it this week. Oh shit, I forgot I was going to do that.

That is appending him not being able to come up with a good excuse to get out of it. Seems likely. Yeah, it'll be fun. Polygon Live, if you aren't watching it, every Wednesday at noon. Eastern. And also available on iTunes. It's a video podcast

on iTunes. They have those, too. We're just getting it covered, guys. We're making a lot of stuff. That's going to do it for us this week on the Besties. Make sure you join us again next month for the Besties. Shouldn't the world's best friends

pick the world's best games. Besties!