The Besties - The Final Besties Ever: 2014's best games battle it out

Episode Date: December 22, 2014

This is it. The Besties have been on hiatus — which intimates a brief pause in an otherwise regular schedule, so let's call it a "temporary cancellation" — for a few months now, but we've gathered the crew back together for one last hurrah. We're going to talk about video games for a very, very long time, y'all. In this four-hour series finale, we're pitting 2014's best games against one another in unyielding combat to the death. (This isn't Polygon's official Game of the Year lineup, though — those will be announced soon!) For those that have stuck with us from the beginning, through the exploratory episodes, the Chris Grant-a-Tron period, the video specials and countless horrible, imaginary special guests — thank you. Sorry it got so weird there, in the middle. Now: Let's close this out right. The Games Dragon Age: Inquisition Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Mario Kart 8 Super Smash Bros. for Wii U Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Transistor P.T. Far Cry 4 Dark Souls 2 Bayonetta 2 Wolfenstein: The New Order Destiny Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Titanfall Sunset Overdrive Shovel Knight Theme song by Ian Dorsch Get the show: Download MP3" 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!

What are you guys gonna do when we get out of Bestie's Jail? Oh my god, we're creating like a meta-universe now? Yeah. Okay. What do you got- I can't wait to see my folks on the outside. You know, uh, what I've been waiting for is, you know that Fun Dip? You looking forward to getting out of Bestie's Jail so that you can have Lick-a-Made Fun dip? You were looking forward to getting out of Bestie's jail so that you can have Lick-A-Made fun dip? I kept trading cigarettes for it,

but it cost like 16 cartons. It was in such demand out in the real world. Russ, we haven't spoken since you broke my heart and betrayed the trust that we built together in polygon.com our video game website um you've you've developed quite the draw there buddy no i was just putting it on oh is it like a jokey goof okay man oh man i also noticed you've been taking some improv classes um because you've gotten really good at keeping a bit going

keeping the goof beach ball up in the air yes and no that's not right what do you say after that though yes and umbrellas and now I've got one I'm the mother from How I Met Your Mother hey

hey I have missed this mother from How I Met Your Mother. Hey. Hey. I have missed this. Do you even remember how to start the Vesties podcast? My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the year. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I cannot believe we're doing this again, but I'm glad to be back, and I also know the best goddamn game of the year My name is Chris Plant and I know the best game of the year My

Name is Ross Brushing and I know the best game of the week Fuck yeah blow the moon up Every week Here on the best Yeah I said every week We talk about the latest Listen here on the best yeah I said every week we talk about the latest listen we may have missed a couple

in 2014 but we got really busy we were recording them we just didn't put them out they just weren't up to snuff they didn't live up to our high standard high standard so now here we are and we're recording one last episode of the besties.

Because, well, I guess two last episodes, is that what we're doing? No, no, it's one big episode. We're doing one big episode. One super length, super powerful episode. This is all, uh, everything you're hearing right now, from the beginning of the MP3 file to now, and continuing on, is our epitaph. Yep. R.I.P. Rip.

This is our rip jam. So yeah, this is the besties and everything. I forget what we do exactly, but there's games in it. There's games in it. It's game adjacent, for sure. Game related. Polygon wouldn't publish it if it wasn't at least game adjacent. I mean, this is like the one episode that ever makes sense each year.

We made a show that is about the best games of the year, and then we decided to talk about crappy games every week. Can we do a quick, just like Bessie's retrospective, because to be frank, there are a surprising number of people who really like this podcast and thank all of you for supporting

us over the years did it make it multiple years? yeah, it had to be because we did at least two video end of year specials. So the first version of the show, which I liked, was... The angriest, meanest version. Friendship Bloodbath, where each person brought a game each week and then was fed to the other three while they just tried to eviscerate them uh and hurt their feelings

and if i recall votes were traded it was basically turned into survivor alliances imagine american idol um but there's only four contestants and then they all sing and then they all decide who dies it's it was horrible it was a really bad game structure, a bad friendship structure. As an edifice of friendship, it failed spectacularly on almost every level. So then after that, we... I don't even remember after that. After that, there were multiple versions. There were multiple iterations.

There was a robot at one time. Do you remember the robot? Holy shit, the Chris Granatron. What was a robot at one time. Do you remember the robot? Holy shit, the Chris Granatron. It was a robot that we introduced. Like that crappy Fantastic Four cartoon. We tried to spice it up by introducing our own version of Herbie. Oh, boy. God, what a disaster.

Think about all the... You know what? I'm swept up thinking about all the bits that we missed By not recording For as long as we did We could have gone through several weeks of Fresh Dick just repeating I am Groot Over and over again

The new character guy that loves Guardians of the Galaxy Oh boy We also had so many guests We had a giraffe. Don't invoke them. We had Milton Bradley. Milton Bradley's racist, horrible ghost.

Who had entire bits removed. Had entire bits excised from the show. That was not a joke. We cut entire Milton Bradley bits out of the show because they were horrific. You know, he just rolls how he rolls. Yeah. What else did we have in there? There was one other really weird version of it.

It had, like, lots of mobile games or something. I don't remember. What I do remember is our year-end specials, which I do like doing. I liked doing them in video because I get to hang out with y'all, and that's always good. Because somehow, despite everything that we've gone through, I still like you guys. Oh.

Which is weird. It's weird, yeah. Impossible. I wouldn't expect that. Although I am going to go out right now, about nine minutes into this episode, and I'm going to say that that beyond a shadow of a doubt, this episode is, or this, yeah, I guess this full-length finale episode is going to end with us in a deadlock between two games. Two and two votes for each game.

And then somebody's going to buckle after 15 minutes of impotent arguing. And then we are all going to end up with a game of the year that we're all incredibly unsatisfied with. Oh, man. Full circle. It's like lost. It's not really a full circle as much as it is a sine wave. Because that's what happens every goddamn year in specials. Valid.

Valid. So look forward to that. Sorry I just spoiled this, what, like nine-hour episode. There it is. Should we get into it? Yeah, let's explain this bracket you put together for us, right? Okay, so I put together this bracket. We had, among ourselves, we picked 12 games that we thought

deserved the Mighty Besties Game of the Year title. We left four remaining games to the audience to select uh which they did via a lovely forum post thank you for voting if you did that what were those four by the way because i'm looking at the list i'm having a hard time remembering yeah so those four i'm gonna see if i can pull them out destiny was one of them oh okay uh sunsetanfall was another one yes and um and it was no bandit was in our list sorry i was not prepared for your transistor transistor was the last one yes correct all good choices good good work audience good lineup uh definitely games that we considered uh when we're coming up with our 12 but didn't make the exact final cut but we're glad that they're in there i think you got like number our number 11

and our number 13 and 14 i should say like the ones that we just barely knocked off the list so i'm glad to see them glad to see them back yeah so we i basically uh matched up those games generally in terms of not so much chance of winning as it was uh similar game categories so you'll see you know fantasy versus fantasy or local multiplayer versus local multiplayer uh in the first round and then in the second round we'll start matching up uh the ones that get a little bit deeper yeah um we're gonna have a grand old time is there a google doc or something i can see this listed? Yeah, it's just like a Google Doc that we all are looking at right now.

Yeah. Why can't I see it? Maybe it's because you didn't click on the Google Doc. Or the email. Oh, it's the one called Bracket. The one called Besties Game of the Year. The email's called Bracket, and then, okay. Oh, yeah.

Yes. Correct. You found it. You cracked it. I see him in the document now. Yeah, I'm in the document. It's me, J-Man. I'm in the document.

We're gonna just do the damn thing. Yeah. Round one. Dragon Age versus... I forgot what the game is called. It's not Lord of the Rings Mordor. That's for fuck's sure. It's definitely, definitely not Lord of the Rings colon Mordor.

Middle Earth... I'm not going to say that. That's bad poopy language that Justin's writing. Shadow of Mordor. Are we sure it's Middle... Okay. Yep. Great's writing. Shadow of Mordor. Are we sure it's Middle? Okay. Yep. Great.

Middle-earth Shadow of Mordor. They want to make it a franchise where you visit all of Middle-earth. You can go to Bree and check out that, like, thing. Anyway. Shadow of Tom Bombadil's Beard. And that game takes place entirely in Tom Bombadil's beard. These are, like, rough pairings you've got here. This is gonna...

See, for me, these are all no-brainers. Wow. Yeah, you were saying this before, how you were like, already decided. I know where this is going. The first half of this episode is our first eight match-ups, two games in each one. I just don't think this is fair.

I don't think this one is fair. I guess since we're trying to get to the best game of the year, like... Doesn't matter. These two games are much better than many of the pairings of games we have below well okay well you know what let's just figure it out well then one of them will always get through yeah okay so okay so let's talk about how much of these games did

you guys play i played all of the games on the list are you talking about these two specific in terms of like how much yeah so dragon age is like a 400 hour game yeah nobody's actually finished dragon age i hope there's not super racist stuff at the end of it no one's actually ever finished it uh i am 50 like 55 hours into dragon age and i i think i'm like maybe two missions away from finishing it i i've hit the point in dragon age where i have uh either finished or just decided i'm not going to do any more of those, like, supplementary mission zones. Because I've just spent, I mean, the majority of the time I've spent playing that game has been hopping into those, like, non-essential secondary areas and just, like, running them shits down, going to all them camps well that's what i liked about this game and uh

shadow mordor is you kind of have to do the non-essentials like stuff the way it was designed to get through and to you know be upgraded and have enough power to complete whatever the main quest is but it makes it feel like it's your choice um do you i mean like in in inquisition you have to unlock power right right and that's if that is a very like numerical like calculated way of gating progress in the campaign until you do some goddamn role-playing gaming like you're you're allowed to see the next chapter in the story but you need to get out there and do a little bit of role-playing gaming before we let you do that. I don't know. It doesn't feel especially optional to me.

Because the later missions... Mordor had that a little bit, where you were unlocking power levels to get to later skills, but it wasn't gating the story itself. Yeah. It just made the game easier if you did that. And I mean, that's true of Dragon Age 2. I mean, grinding and getting levels is as important in Dragon Age as it is in any RPG.

What do you think it is that Dragon Age does uniquely better than, I guess, most RPGs? Because obviously, I think with Mordor, it's very clearly the Nemesis the nemesis system is, like, the big standout feature. So what do you think is the big standout feature for Dragon Age? Or is it just a good game? I think it's just so, like, solidly executed. Like, it definitely has its flaws. Like, the war table system is pretty unbearable. Oh, my.

Can we take one quick side version to talk about that terrible, terrible piece of design? It's bad on all fronts. It's like, the interface of it is laughably bad. Like, you clustered nine little, like, molecular-sized dots together on a board, and it's like, there's no list telling you what you can do. There's no, like, way of immediately gut-checking, like, which missions on the board and it's like there's no list telling you what you can do there's no like way of

immediately gut checking like which missions on the board are essential missions that will like unlock dope shit and which ones are fucking clown shoes that will get you like 40 gold like thanks 40 gold wow and that only took an hour great great great good investment of my time um and not only that but like you have to like fast travel back to your hq and like there's a loading screen and then you have to run all the way to the war table room and there's another loading screen and it the whole thing is just like really really unpalatable it's yeah it's it's it's horrendous i cannot understand why anyone thought that this was a good idea i like the visual representation of the missions,

but to not have better ways of sorting them is insane. That I'm just hovering my mouse over, or my cursor over item by item. The whole design sort of felt like a take on the Assassin's Creed Black Flag ship system, right? Where you got ships and you could upgrade them and send them out on these passive missions where you get these bonuses after waiting a certain amount of time, and

certain ships were better at certain things. The only problem is in that you could unlock and upgrade dope ships, and in this one you just have three fucking people. You just have the same three goddamn people. And so it doesn't even... You pop back constantly because you only have three people,

and so they're constantly completing these missions meaning you have to go through the cycle and deal with that horrible interface yeah also the best part about when assassin's creed did this was the first time they did it with brotherhood where those people then were like superheroes who came and fought alongside you yeah yeah like you had a tangible benefit um so but i think that that is like one of the few uh defects in a game that is mechanically narratively like pretty goddamn impeccable like pretty pretty on point basically across the board in in most ways that rpgs can be on point um so i think that's that to me that's like it's defining trait of of in in a in a game where or in a year where like a lot of games that tried to be this

ambitious completely fell on their own just sat on their own balls i don't know that a lot of games necessarily tried to be ambitious they might have said that they were trying to be ambitious but i think this year is more typified by games not trying to be ambitious trying to be very safe uh i think that was last year i yeah this year was like watchdogs is not an ambitious game yeah no sure it was trying to be yeah it tried to be ambitious and it sat on its balls assassin's creed unity for as you know assassin's creed as it Tried to make it so you played Assassin's Creed With three other people at the same time and in doing so Sat on its own balls the crew tried to be

The biggest fucking online racing Game of all time and sat Directly it parked a truck On its balls Something's connecting these three I don't know what yeah There's like a bridge for some reason But Dragon Age Like I I thought I was going,

when I heard, I've been looking forward to the game, but then I heard Phil say in reviewing the game, he spent like 80 hours with it. And I was like, fuck, like, I don't play video games like that anymore. I just don't. But I'm 55 hours into the thing, and like like i still like adore it like it's really good for like chunking out a little bit and just like i don't know i'll play for 20 minutes see what i get into and then hop back out it's really cool i mean there are all kinds of things about it

that are really cleverly designed it has a lot of the like um uh streamline upgrade stuff of mass effect three. Um, uh, in, in that, like there are very broad ways of making your characters better. Like the potion upgrade system. Uh,

I like all that stuff is, is really, really smart. And I mean, it's also just designed to be, be able to be played like that, which is kind of incredible. It's weird though,

for every like really smart system they have, they have another system that's utterly inscrutable like in this specific example i'm thinking of the uh armor and weapon upgrade system which is absolutely mind-numbingly terrible and i don't understand again i just don't use it yeah i just don't use it okay but like no no i'm not saying that as a defense. I'm saying that as, yeah, I agree with you. Griffin was saying it as a defense. Like, it's terrible. Like, you get an item, and rather than, like, being able to, so, like, I get an item that has some sort of upgrade on it.

Rather than, you know, just being able to sell that item off, I have to wait until I'm back at my home base. I have to remember, oh, that one had an upgrade on it. I have to physically take that one off as I shuffle through endlessly, like complicated menus and finally pop that off and then find the item that maybe can use that. And then some just can't for whatever reason, just don't fit it. And then if I'm lucky, I can can i can find a new home for this thing and hopefully i won't get another one another item to replace this item in like 20

minutes yeah right the whole thing over again and that's the problem right like i feel like i i'm willing to put up with some pretty obtuse methods of uh like inventory management if it's something that i'm going to have to do once every two hours and i feel like maybe they were trying to go for like a dark soulsian approach where all of those all those upgrades to your weapons and armor are very like material very important uh upgrades so you can like feel the difference in but yeah like you said there's no guarantee that you're not going to kill a boss and then get a purple item that just like beats the ever-living shit out of it so like that's one thing that dark souls does well is you can find a sword at the beginning of the game and

then upgrade it and upgrade it upgrade it and use the entire goddamn time um and that's just not that's not a really viable solution yeah i will say the one thing that i absolutely love about the game and i have not played through an rpg in forever uh is how digestible it is but also how big it feels how it can how i can both hop in for 15 minutes and feel okay with the work i got done but then also feel like the scope of this game is the end of the world like it's yeah one of the few games about the end of the world where i'm like wow this i feel like i am traveling across the world to try to get this shit done and because the game is so big and they do a good job pacing it so it doesn't have that issue uh where you're like well i shouldn't be doing this right now because i should be saving the world right uh it paces it so well that i don't feel bad just

hopping in and getting a small thing done here and there. And that's a super Bioware thing. Like that is Bioware's sort of game architecture bread and butter. And it has never been this good or this well executed. It's funny. I think the only Bioware game before this that I got super into was actually not that because most of their games i agree do follow that model of let's get the gang together let's let's empower your clubhouse to take on the big bad at the end sure well actually i think so i was gonna say mass effect

2 but that's exactly what that is well but it does get the gang together but the focus of mass effect 2 isn't even the big bad at the end. It's really just the individual stories of these characters. Like when I remember Mass Effect 2, it's like, oh, I'm going to do this story mission for whatever, the bald girl. Jack. And learn her backstory. Yes, exactly. So that is what I found really engaging about that game. But I feel like a lot of the time,

it's the end-of-the-world stuff that ends up making me roll my eyes and not care because it's so generic. But here, I think they did it a little bit better. Also, all the Wraith stuff. I have never been into fantasy lore, and I am buried in the Dragon Age wiki. It's so obvious but works so well of having every group have its own internal conflict. So everyone

not only hates what's going on outside their group but also hates half the people in their group. What's awesome is that it also plays into each character that becomes a member of the Inquisition, like a playable character. It really helps to shape your character because typically in role-playing games,

your character is the least interesting character in the thing. I think that's probably especially true of Bioware games because they are very good at coming up with a very vivid cast of characters and then sort of just making your character like a decision box. Yeah. But in this game, I feel like, like and they've tried in other games too but i feel like they've done it really really well here

like i began to imbue my character with these certain characteristics based on the types of people that i liked to hang around with so like i would my party was usually vivian uh cassandra and iron bull and so the decisions I started to make, I moved from being this very general, very plain character who just sort of made decisions as I went and started to actually develop a personality that was, you know, a bit anti-like a rogue mage just because that was sort of the personality

of the characters that i rolled with and that was a really interesting thing that i don't think i've ever had a bioware game like uh due to me before um yeah also a little bit of that in um what was the uh that top down rpg that was like that came out earlier this year it was like wasteland 2 but not that oh uh oh divinity original sin divinity original sin you saw a little bit of that there where you were and they were like encouraging you to sort of like diverge how you responded and fit more of a character which i liked but yeah i think they do it a little bit better here um yeah this is a really good game this is a very very good game i

wish they had maybe a little bit geared it for remote play more than they did, which is to say not at fucking all. Zero. They did any gearing for remote play. In order to do your basic attack, you have to hit the R2 button still, which is the touchpad on the back of the Vita. I mean, for what it's worth, it's a tough ask. Pretty much the only game I played this year that did remote play well

as a full console game was destiny destiny yeah which but yeah i mean a shooter is still not the best way yeah to remote play anything i know it's a big ask and like they use every button on the yeah exactly on the controller it was just mortar is the same way i have no idea how you could do that in remote play it's just so many buttons that they use let's talk about mortar let's how did that um i've played much much less mortar than i played dragon age inquisition um yeah uh yeah i i don't want to really lead the conversation on it because i don't know enough about it here's here's what i think mortar does better than any game this year or uh in a lot for many years has really uh set us a new standard is making you care about nameless faceless npcs that you have no interest in

and suddenly become your arch nemesis it that is i mean they use the term nemesis to describe the system and i remember when they were promoting the game they were like hammering this point home this is what's cool about the game that was the system blah blah and it sounded like generic like marketing crap like we're just trying to set it apart from the rest it is so goddamn cool to get killed in the first five minutes of the game and then have this dude that you hate keep coming back and fighting him and he has his name and you build a rapport of hatred with this guy. A rapport of hatred. That would also accurately describe certain episodes

of The Besties. And her favorite Jack Metal bands. There's nothing better than being in a, and by better I mean more infuriating, than being in a fight with maybe one of the orc leaders that you're probably too weak to take on but

you get lucky and you like hit the barrel at just the right place to take out all the soldiers and you're about to give him the final blow and your nemesis comes out of nowhere like did this did this happen to you guys were like all of a sudden yeah there like oh you dick where did you come from and it slaughters you because of, you're not ready for him. But he was just hanging around, just passing through, seeing if he could antagonize you. I mean, I think it seems like that's what the system is built for. It's a cool system for, like you said,

building character for just about every main enemy in the game. But I think it is also a system built for moments like that like those are the moments that sell the game yeah and it also makes you realize like how much of a missed opportunity it was for assassin's creed because the best moments of assassin's creed are like here's this dude you really hate him go kill him in an interesting way and that's pretty much all of mordor is constantly having this list of dudes that you need to kill in interesting ways based on their strengths and weaknesses like you are it's it is a much better assassin's creed game than there have been i think it's a better certainly a better game even than four and i liked assassin's creed

four a lot well and it has the benefit of being in a fantastic world. So it's not tied to like, oh, let's both be realistic and not realistic. If we're making the Assassin's Creed comparison, I think the only one I've ever liked more was Assassin's Creed 2 and the one that came after Assassin's Creed. Brotherhood.

Because, like you said, those were the games that did that shit really well. that did the go find this person that you hate and take them down in a really clever way um and that's just not really the focus of that particular franchise but can what i guess when i say fantastic world with this can assassin's creed even like hold up to this sort of thing anymore when you can do what even like hold up to this sort of thing anymore when you can do what the arrow dash thing in this game there's so many moves like literally can't happen in the yeah real world universe of assassin's creed versus here they i mean they have the benefit of going into fantasy uh yeah yeah i still think

you can get away with i mean whatever assassin's creed technically is like a VR mission. So you should be able to do that. Yeah. My one problem with the Nemesis system is for a person who likes compulsively checking shit off a list. And feeling like a good, good accomplished boy for finally achieving something with his life for once. It is not a system built for me. and i know that sounds like a silly thing but like to spend a really long time hunting down somebody who keeps killing you over and over again um and then you kill them and then their spot gets filled like very quickly like way quicker than I thought was possible is really frustrating. And you can make the game tougher for yourself, too.

If you keep going after all these people, you keep advancing their levels. And you can end up getting a set of high-level guards. Well, but there's always low-level guys. Right. There's a lot of different ways of tracking progress in Shadows of mordor um whether it's like the the power system or um uh you know finding finding the different upgrades

completing the different missions and like all that stuff is great but the mission system that i or the progress system i cared the most about was the nemesis system and i just never really felt like i was and i i didn't again like i didn't even play half of the game, I think. But I never felt like I was, like, making any headway in the game at all. And that was really frustrating cool on paper but um i also found it a little bit repetitive um when i when i was tasked with uh killing the same guy that i already killed who came back to life through orc magic uh that that element was also kind of a huge bummer for me yeah that's that's fair i i just think it was just an original idea. And for the most of it,

I think it's really, really well executed. I agree that there are some issues with it. But that really stood out. And I think it's just a very strong game. They clearly took a lot from Batman, which is already a very strong game.

The combat system is very Batman. I heard this was pitched initially as a Batman game. I thought they had developed it for a this was pitched initially as a Batman game. Oh, really? They had developed it for a while as the Dark Knight Rises game. Yeah. And so would it just have been a bunch of bangs? Batman goes to the desert.

It's pretty easy, though. I know you guys aren't as savvy about development as I am. It's pretty easy, though. What you do is you just take the, like, if a a file set is called like stone or like building side you just delete that and then you replace with a file called like trees and mountains and so you take your mouse and you highlight falconi right and then you click replace all and then you type in where's the merciless then what if i want to find Falcone? How would I say, Control-F wears Falcone?

Well, you're going to need a game shirt. You're going to need... Right. Got it. Gut check? We ready to take a vote on this one? We've been going for like a half hour. Yeah.

I love Mordor. I am still going to go Inquisition, I think. Yeah. Dragon Age. That's fine. Are you not on board? No i that's fine with me i i didn't play enough of dragon age to feel as strongly as you guys did like clearly um but there was a there's a moment i get it i have a feeling that's going to become problematic it's been for too long there's a moment in that game that just, like, I was playing it on remote play while I was watching, I think,

probably, like, MasterChef Junior, one of my shows that I can just kind of watch a little bit. And there was a moment in that game, it was one of the judgments. I don't know if you guys have gotten to that part yet, where people who have committed crimes in the world come to your stronghold and you actually pass judgment on them and decide their punishment um and there was a moment in that game where you pass judgment on somebody that was so fucking funny that i i like lost my mind laughing at it it was it might be the hardest i've ever laughed at a video game before was it the crate yes yes it's so it i don't know it perfectly like shows that

every cylinder like this game is firing on all cylinders well it's big enough that there's room for variants like that you know what i mean like there's no room for anything like that in a game light mode or even though it's very long it hasn't built a big enough world that there's room for warmth and humor and romance and all that other stuff other than killing orcs. Right. Sweet Christ. And sneaking up on your wife with a kill move. And to have a romance system where it's not set to pop off at pre-scripted times, right?

It feels a little bit more real to not be like, oh, we're about to go in for the final mission where we're all going to die. Let's bone. It's not how it happens in dragon age because it's not how it happens like ever i had a great moment in dragon age with the romance system before i move on that i had picked the character that i was going to to woo this is going to be my character that i would woo because there was a little heart option right so? So if there's a heart in the dialogue, that means it's a character that you can win over. I did everything, everything for this character. I bent over backwards. I went on missions.

I disgraced people that I kind of liked just because I thought it would win me a few brownie points. And I got to the conversation where I'm like, I'm into you. This is happening. And they were gay. They were gay. And they did not like my style at all.

And it was like, legitimately, it felt like a reasonable smoker of what that experience would have been like in real life. Except maybe worse because I had just been like, pretend trying to woo a pretend digital person. But it was excellent. And you went and killed pretend digital people

to win over their heart. Alright, congratulations Dragon Age. I'm gonna delete Middle Earth. Round two. Oh, you blew it. There we go. Alright, round two. This is one that I feel like you guys aren't gonna give a shit about at all. Oh, you blew it. There we go. Okay. All right, round two. This is one that I feel like you guys aren't going to give a shit about at all. I'll lead him here.

I do have an opinion. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U versus Mario Kart 8. Oh, I have opinions. Which one do you want to take? I'll take one of these. You take the other. Kind of busted that the two sort of Wii U showstoppers. Oh, I guess we have another Wii U game on here, don't we?

Yep. Wii U showstopper. I guess we have another Wii U game on here, don't we? Yep. I mean, should we do gut checks before we launch into our conversation? Are you guys talking before we vote? Let's talk a little bit. Smash Brothers Wii U is tremendous. It's the best Smash Brothers game.

It is the most pound-for pound like content rich uh game i i'm going to play i'm probably throughout like the next few years and i don't that's not again not how i play video games ever anymore um but over the next few years pound for pound i'm going to spend more time playing smash brothers with you than i'm spent playing dragon age is that just because you're going to have people over and then play i because and i wrote about this um for our their first like 2014 in review we're doing like a series of like what the year in gaming meant to us and for me it was the year where like all of my friends got into like capital g games like we we would play dance central here and there but like none of them were people who would get excited when i would bring a new game around like tower fall ascension uh which like my group of friends i got addicted to and we

play it almost every time they come over and then like this this onslaught of games like that just poured in like uh like nidhogg and sports friends and mount your friends which is fucking amazing and then smash brothers wii u comes out and and just like takes that ideal to the extreme it adds eight player multiplayer which is if you can get it together which i managed to do by cobbling together it was i had the wii u gamepad i had two gamecube controllers i had three um wii motes with various uh attachments and then i had a uh oh i'm sorry four four wiimotes with various attachments and a nintendo 3ds that i had networked to the eu um but if you can get that together it is a fucking blast it's so it's so much better than you think it's gonna

be even yeah i i played uh game i'd never liked the i think along with everyone never really liked the wii version of smash brothers i liked i liked brawl okay it was a fun party game but it didn't have the the legs that i think that that smash brothers for you is going to have sure and game but i played the gamecube version oh crap load and i was so into it and it got so competitive it was in my college years we played a ton of that um i never anticipated that if you introduced four additional characters it would still be fun and interesting and not just like total absolute insanity but it really is because the meta game of eight player is the best thing about the entire game and you know russ fruschick

strategy in eight player just wait wait for other people to die hides in the bottom corner and that's that's great get somewhere green it's so cool that that's like a thing that you can that you can do that's that's what i'm talking about the metagame is better than the game at large which is rare for a game and almost never happens for a nintendo title um because yeah it's it is this political power struggle where usually when we play there's like two people or three people who are like better than everybody else just because they've been playing smash their whole lives that will either start beating the shit out of each other or maybe you'll wander into a match with people that you think you can take on or maybe you wait like rust doesn't wait for everybody else's stock to fall off or you

wait for that big item to pop up and then you go get it and clear the whole board the first time we were playing in like one of the levels that is just like a straight line um and i was playing as ganondorf and i got the smash ball and i got seven people knocked out by using his, like, super special. I cleaned the fucking board, and it was, like, one of the most exhilarating moments I've ever had playing a video game before. Because, maybe just because of how many people I obliterated. But it's just so, like, there's so much stuff like that, and it has the really good character customization stuff that the

3ds version had it's just like man so many little details like when you play as the the little koopa troopers and instead of just generic costume swaps for them having all the uh all right baby who's your favorite i'm always morton that's like my dude i'm like i'm really back and forth between what's his name iggy iggy Iggy. Iggy and Ludwig. And the character roster is so great. I'm trying to teach myself the villager, because there's nothing funnier than playing the game with somebody who hasn't played before,

and then the villager's strongest special attack is he plants a tree and then chops it, and then if it falls over on somebody, it murders them. So seeing somebody walk up to the tree and be like oh what's this tree doing here in the middle of the battlefield and then just like crushing them with it is is really satisfying man what a good game good job nintendo justin i feel like you've been very quiet it's because you don't know people justin

hates smash brothers uh do i i am all i do? I am a... I have nothing against Smash Brothers. It just doesn't... I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. Is it because you were never in a scenario where there were a bunch of people? No, it's because when I try to play it, I feel like my nonny.

I push buttons, the little man on screen doesn't do anything. I push all the buttons, the little man doesn't do anything. He puts his little stubby fist out there. What does he't do anything. He puts his little stubby fist out there. There's two buttons you need to do. He puts his little stubby fist out there like he's going to hit somebody. No, Mario, he's too far away. You can't hit him.

There's just no way to Hadouken. I don't like Smash Brothers. I hate it. Let's talk about Mario Kart because I'm going to just get rid of it really quick for us. Mario Kart 8 is excellent. Do not get me wrong. It is an excellent Mario Kart game. It borrows plenty from Sega Sonic All-Star Racing Transformed.

Oh, that's why you're getting rid of it. Unfortunately, it is not as good. That's crazy. No, no, no. I loved Mario Kart 8 when it came out. Are you saying it's not as good as Sonic all-star racing transformed uh you are you are no no here's here's the beef and don't get me wrong it's a beautiful game you can't play a shinmu so you can't play shinmu but also it got rid of uh the uh what is it competitive mode the versus the balloons and stuff i mean it didn't get rid of it as much as it completely mutated into this horrible swamp monster yes um on top of that though there's no

campaigny stuff it's right i agree that it's been forever same structure well there's never been a campaign yeah but but what has happened while it was busy not changing at all is other games like Sega's Sonic All-Star Racing Transformed have figured out great ways to create campaigns. Or Chocobo Racing. Sure, sure. It just feels like there are so many cool things happening in racing games and arcade racing games right now that to not add anything is dopey as shit like there there are too many cool things that they could do with this game and instead they made just yet yet another polished version of a great game which is fine but like at this point the ds version is still way preferred for me over even this one um wow that's wrong um i i i agree i think for me smash brothers

is the is the better game it's my favorite wii u game of of the year and like really high in my top top 10 um mario kart 8 is i i don't know i spent a really long time playing it just because i have a group of friends who i've told you guys about Cario Mart, right? No. Our Mario Kart 64 drinking game where you open a beer when you start the race and you can't drink and play at the same time and you have to finish the beer before you finish the race. I don't

encourage that. It's the best. I don't either. It's bad. I mean, it's great. Don't you just drink the beer all at once and then race? That's a really viable strategy because then when you're in last place you get the best items that's typically how i go i'm not good at chugging i'm super tight at drifting there's a lot of technique to it because if you get like spun out by a red shell put your controller down have a few sips get back in yep um uh so like i have a group of friends that really likes mario kart so we spent a lot of

time playing it and the dlc have you guys guys played any of the DLC for Mario Kart 8? No. I will say I feel a little bad picking on it because I've heard the DLC is so good. It's fucking spectacular. Really? What did they add? I know, what is it? Link drives a motorcycle.

They add, I think it's four new racers. Lots of Yoshis. There's Link. There's, I can't remember the others but link is like the standout and then they added eight new tracks so like okay that's a fuckload that's that's a lot of tracks i think it's eight new tracks my numbers might be off um uh but yeah it's really good the the hyrule um map is really great instead of picking up coins you pick up rupees that's pretty that's pretty good stuff but functionally functionally i mean yeah it's it is basically the same but um i don't know i just really i i think it is mechanically my

favorite of the mario kart games because you're constantly you're constantly doing shit there's no like long boring straightaways like you are having to always get them red sparks you're having to constantly like look for tiny tiny tiny ramps that you can jump off and get those extra boosts of speed. You're constantly trying to optimize your line when you're hang gliding. It's just constantly throwing new shit at you. Do we think it's better than Beetle Adventure Racing? No. What is?

No. That's a... Okay. Let's get back to that. Just wanted to establish that we're all on the same page, that Beetle Adventure Racing is better. Also, that is kind of the beef with Mario Kart 8, too, is it feels very straightforward. Like, weird shortcut stuff i i don't get that in mario kart 8

no i disagree what shortcuts are you talking about besides the obvious like oh you go in the fish big open area to the right there's a couple shortcuts but like fuck that because i i hate it when there's just like an obvious shortcut that everybody takes what i really like about what mario kart 8 does is with the uh the anti-gravity stuff then it opens up different paths for you to race on that are built for like different car tunings or different like uh driving strengths like there's a really really narrow path over a pit uh you can take that and it might be faster if you have a car that can handle it and a driver that can handle it otherwise you need to stick to the main road and it might be faster if you have a car that can handle it and a driver that can handle it. Otherwise, you'd need to stick to the main road, and it's constantly throwing that shit at you. I disagree wholeheartedly.

I think that it actually handles that stuff really well. Also, it's fucking sweet being on the road and then looking to your left and seeing somebody driving on a wall. That's a really cool effect. Yeah. But for me, it's Smash Brothers. Quick question. Justin, do you know the buttons for this game? This one, you just hold in the pedal.

The go button. Yeah, there you go. You got it. I use the wheel. I only use the wheel, so. Okay. Are you standing on the Wii pad while you do that? Gut check.

Gut check. Check that gut. Smash. Smash. Smash. My gut is that I defer to you all. Okay, acceptable. I'll vote if we need a tiebreaker. No. Beetle Adventure Racing. Alright, next

round. Hearthstone versus Transistor. This is gonna be a nail-biter. This one doesn't really uh fit the i get the last two right i tried i really tried it's just you got you can't make appropriate matches for every single game this one's like a cranberry uh cranberry sauce on the mashed potatoes it's like the thanksgiving leftovers that like you want to try and make a meal out of, but you just can't. Were you serious about this being an ale-biter? Yeah. Can I

describe Hearthstone for everybody? Yeah. Imagine a version of Magic the Gathering that everyone in the world can play, is made by some of the smartest and best designers, is absolutely beautiful, and it's free. And it is presented so well that it feels

like you could chew on it it feels like you could put it in your mouth and eat it and and uh has cards that it what i love about hearthstone and there's infinity things i love about hearthstone um is that it couldn't exist in real life. It could not... There are game mechanics in it that could not work in, like, an actual physical... Maybe with, like, a lot of pencil and paper. Yeah, it would not be fun.

Like, math and stuff. It'd be a pain in the ass. Yeah. It... What a fucking great game. It is fantastic. Let's talk more about Transistor first because I think it's better than Hearthstone. Yeah, and we can even save some of Hearthstone because I have a feeling if Hearthstone's gonna win, let's talk more about transistor first because i think yeah and

we can even save some of hearthstone because i have a feeling of hearthstone's gonna win we can talk more about it as it gets deeper into the well we don't know sure anything could happen okay um transistor i didn't finish yeah i'd be transistor i'll i'll i'll drop it all right so transistor is a gorgeous um really uh presentationally amazing game. It's made by the folks that made Bastion, Supergiant Games. And they do a really good job, I think, introducing this, like, totally foreign world that you don't really understand how it works. And all these crazy, like, computers and whether it's vr and whether whatever it is and it's all presented in like a very painterly like uh colorful uh art style and

behind that is a turn-based uh strategy mechanic um well the soundtrack is also and the soundtrack is for me it was better than even the the artistic presentation again yeah uh the issues that i had would translate to the reason why in this situation it wouldn't be my pick is because i think the uh combat system did not really feel as great it's very ambitious um but it did it didn't quit quite hit on every single point it was going for. I felt a little more cumbersome and a little more hit or miss, like I wasn't sure exactly what was going on at all given times. And that made it a little bit frustrating. I don't know. I felt like there are a lot of thematic and presentational lines you can draw between this and Bastion.

lines you can draw between this and Bastion. And I feel like what worked really well in Bastion that is not working so well here is that for as sort of narratively solemn and ponderous and sometimes just sort of desolate as Bastion

could be, the action was a really nice counterpoint to it because it was always so frenetic and, you know, tons of stuff going on at once and very in the moment, very, you know, you felt very connected. And the issue I had with Transition, which I finished and enjoyed a great deal and thought did some really interesting things, maybe even more interesting than the bastion in terms of like putting out a story in a in a very sort of

like non-linear catch-as-catch-can way that sort of let you almost assemble it in your head sort of in the background um but but that as a pairing with the the the sort of turn-based action made for something that i if i found it harder to get connected to it just it didn't have the moments of like sort of heart-pounding excitement that that that helped to balance out the sort of somber uh presentation of the story i will say though it had the best use of the playstation speaker in that game uh hearing the voice of the sword coming through the controller oh that's cool super see i played it on pc i didn't get that yeah i also really nice i like that it also had a flourish button which basically just you threw the sword into the air

and did a little and a humming button and a hum button that was really really terrific yeah i'm sitting here trying to think why i didn't finish Transistor. I really think it was just one of those games that I just, like, moved on from to. It doesn't do a great job encouraging, like, keeping that breadcrumb trail going. Right, because I really like the turn-based combat system. Like, I think that was really, really clever. It was getting a little bit repetitive for me, but that might just be because most of the, what are they, the EXE, likeE tools that I had were sort of similar, and so I didn't feel like there was a lot of variety in the combat. But again, that also seems like the thing that could change.

I really like the customization system of letting your other main powers absorb certain traits of other ones by like nesting them inside i i thought that stuff was really cool i really liked i really liked this game a lot i just i guess i just like it fell off my my radar and i moved on to some did this come around around the same time that like dark souls 2 came out maybe was that possibly the thing it felt like a game where all the different pieces on their own were really, really interesting. I just never got it to click together for me. Like, I didn't...

Part of it was I just, I could never really get into the story. I could never quite tell what was happening. And they based everything on the story. Like, when you're doing the connecting the two different weapon pieces, there's all this information about like, each weapon is like a person. Right. Yeah. And like,

I, I, because of that, I was like, ah, I don't really want to read this at this point. I'm confused. And now I'm like disconnected from the weapon stuff entirely. So like talking about this game,

I makes me want to go back and play it because I did like all these things on their own. I just couldn't quite get into the game. Is it on any port? Is it on to go back and play it because I did like all these things on their own I just couldn't quite get into the game Is it on any port? Is it on Vita or anything? I think it's coming to you But I think, I haven't tried this myself but I think it would be perfect for a remote play just because I mean the hum and the flourish button

are optional Can you fucking believe that every time we talk about a game we always ask if it's on Vita because we want to play it on fucking Vita, and the Vita is going in the fucking dumpster. I love the Vita. I do too. How the fuck is it?

I don't know. Didn't they announce that they're bringing all the video games or something to the Vita? Yeah, they're bringing all the video games is what they announced. I thought it was something like all the video games. I would honestly pay $200 to have a Vita

with all of the buttons of a PS4 controller. I would pay $200 right now, today. That would be weird. Just for remote play, it'd be fantastic. Ah, Hearthstone. Yeah, Hearthstone's really good. I like that game. And I'm playing it again. We should talk a little bit about Hearthstone, right? Hearthstone's really good. I like that game. And I'm playing it again.

We should talk a little bit about Hearthstone, right? We can come back to it, because we're going to need things to talk about. Have you guys played either of the expansions? I'm playing currently Three Shadows of Narax... Naxxramas. Naxxramas, yeah. That is an interesting sort of like...

an interesting companion to how I like to play Hearthstone because I don't get into deck building at all. I have no alacrity for putting together like a killer deck that's going to work really well. like finding online a deck that's supposed to be good for beating a certain boss and then like trying to reverse engineer something kind of like yeah with my shitty cards that don't have you know whatever legendary is like the keystone of that like so that's kind of been actually fun for me is figuring out like well okay i don't have you know i don't have blizzard so maybe just like some more i don't know, I got Ice Lance. Is that kind of the same thing? Yeah.

And seeing if I can get through by the skin of my teeth has actually been pretty fun. Has anybody else played the Goblins vs. Gnomes at all? No, that's the one thing I'm a little bit scared about, is I played Naxxramas, and that was fun. I'm just worried at this point, I haven't played in a while. Didn't they introduce 90 new cards or something? Like, 120 or something like that. That was post-Nax.

Like, Nax introduced a bunch of cards on its own. That makes me worried, though, to get into it. Like, I'm worried to get back into competitive play. Understand, right now, everybody's at square one. Nobody knows the best way to play Hearthstone anymore. And that shit, them shits was codified. is the best way to play hearthstone anymore and that shit that shit them shits was codified them shit it was like yeah there were warlock zoo decks and there were uh uh there were miracle rogues and like these these different strategies that were the best strategies in the game like

every like you know hearthstone based website that ranks the the meta game like which class is just better uh and all that shit is upended right now like nobody knows i'm playing a priest for the first time ever because i got a bunch of good priest cards in my free gnomes versus goblins expansion packs that i got um and then just started playing a mech priest deck that i just like fucking invented knowing nothing about what i was doing and i'm like in love with the game again man what a good game. Cool. Okay. Round three. Carson wins round four, actually.

Four. I feel like this one's going to be... Really hard. It shouldn't be, but... It shouldn't be. Yeah, I don't know. Okay, so the next matchup is PT, short for Playable Teaser,

versus Far Cry 4. I don't know. When you say it should be easy, I don't know when you say it should be easy i don't know what you want to vote for griffin because i'm okay okay well i'm glad that we made that clear i feel really strongly about pt it is one of if not the most memorable video game experiences of this year for me i think it's brilliant we just we're not gonna get on the same page about this one okay so let me just lay it out and then you could say whatever you want um pt um why i like it so much i'm not a horror game guy and part of the reason is that i think horror games traditionally when i think about games like silent hill uh i think about like here's the you

know octagon of truth that has a dragon thing on it and you have to put it in a door and then it unlocks the next area so it's resident evil the only horror game you've played and silent hill like all the jj horror games are like that okay they're like they have lame obtuse puzzles and it doesn't interest me at all with pt they made it so grounded a because it's in first person and because it's set in like a hallway um that i was like legit pulled in because it was so goddamn believable like the graphics in that game are unreal because they just had to render the coolest looking hallway they could right and and just like the oh my god

when you try to go in the bathroom and what happens there and every single moment it granted the only the experience was what 30 minutes 40 minutes uh we'll come back to that but no but go on i mean granted you could do the multiple levels of intricacy later on i think griffin has four hours of experience with this game here's here's. I think Griffin has unique experience with this game, too. Do you want to know my experience with fucking PT? Sure, go for it. They released it as a surprise following the

PlayStation press conference? Gamescom or something like that? They released it as a surprise and immediately I said I need to capture video of this thing that is almost certainly going to be a trailer for something this is there's definitely this is a fucking arg or something i gotta crack this code so then i spent the next like 12 hours wandering around the

hallway waiting for phones to ring listening for babies to cry trying to find the fucking secret riddle that that hideo kojima had hidden inside of this fucking game and then the way that somebody cracked it well somebody cracked it accidentally on twitch uh right after i like gave up and went to dinner and then i got a text like hey just to let you know if you'd gone on for like 10 more minutes you would have found out it was silent hill did you have fun today no oh i'm sorry uh okay and then the way that you actually fucking crack it is the most arcane fucking dumbest like you have fun today? No? Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. And then the way that you actually fucking crack it is the most arcane fucking dumbest. Like, you have to find all the...

Okay, finding all the picture pieces is pretty cool. I found the one in the menu, and I was like, that's pretty tight. But then you have to, like, stand in one place for a minute, and then you walk to the phone, and you look at the picture, and then you sing yourself a song. And then you have to say the word, like... What is the word you have to say into a fucking headset in order to get the trailer to pop off no you have to say a word and it's like it's the it's all that shit like yes as an experience as a scary free surprise experience it was cool it was. But the hours that I spent wandering around trying to make sense of a riddle that is, like, the fucking dumbest thing ever was, like, so hugely frustrating for me.

And I know that I'm alone probably in that experience as a person whose job it is to get, like, good video content and also early news out of any like game content we get but fuck your problem with that is it made it too hard to do your job was that it made it too hard to yeah i guess and to like i just drink my ties maybe it would have been maybe it would have been better if that what if that one person hadn't like accidentally figured it out i don't know if you guys watch like the twitch stream but it was a a woman who, I don't even think she meant to do it. Like, I don't know how she, maybe she said a word that sounded like the,

the key word that you're supposed to say to pop it off. Bazinga. Bazinga. And then like got it that first day. And I think Hideo Kojima himself was like, well, that's disappointing. I wanted that to last like a few weeks.

Like I didn't want people to know that quickly that it was a Silent Hills trailer. But like, yeah, the, the the arg like nature of it was a huge bummer for me okay well i don't know that that was the uh you know having to mainline it was the experience for a lot of people i mean honestly like i did you keep going back and playing it trying to like ferret out the mystery no didn't care I didn't even make it to a certain point I got what I liked out of it

I was thoroughly freaked out after 15 minutes I never needed to do that again but it was amazing it was like one of the best like really an amazing horror experience whether I played through the end and cracked the crazy code who cares? I really loved it.

It's called Playable Teaser. So? And if you don't get the teaser out of it... I got the teaser. Well, it's called P.T. They were teasing this really awesome horror game that I was totally in for. Okay. But it's a game.

Because it's Game of the Year. It's not. It's super not. Justin, what did you think? I got sort of... I mean, I enjoyed the experience of what I've played with PT, but I'm not interested in something I have to have, like, a wiki page open in my phone.

You don't, though. You could have just... Get all the cool content. I mean, you got the spooks anyway. She ate you. She didn't. I didn't get that far. I need to step it up.

Okay. Yeah. this is just uh yeah i thought i thought it was neat but not a game and certainly not a game of the year i i think it was a neat experience but not not i mean it can't hang it was a pleasant surprise certainly ps they should have called it yeah i'm talking about the saddest thing about all of it though is that thing got so much hype and then then they interview Kojima, and they're like, hey, is the game going to be anything like this? He's like, oh, no, no, no.

We're going to have a lot more puzzles and action. You know, give the fans what they want. It's like... Is that game next year? Is that... Yeah, maybe. Who knows? I'm fucking gasping for a good horror game.

I mean, okay. There have been a lot of... PC is the fucking king of this. I'm gasping for a game in the style of games that apparently Russ Frushtick hates. Yep. Octagons.

Obviously, Eternal Darkness sequel is never going to happen. No, I got that Five Nights at Freddy's. That's a pretty good horror game. Yeah. I got Five Nights at Freddy's 2. Yeah. That both came out this year, which is kind of crazy.

I just happened to have that lying around. Like, stuff like that is awesome. And I'm glad that that stuff is around. I'm just, like, that that beefy like exploration based thing with maybe a few rpg mechanics fuck it why not um like i i really really want something like that god i can't remember that the last game i played like that was like jesus like the the wii silent hill game shattered that was pretty good it was yeah i didn. I didn't, I didn't hate it. I actually liked it quite a bit. Um,

that was excellent. My dream is for silent Hills to be PT meets what that XCOM first person game was supposed to be. Like if it was like 12, like little PTs, little investigations that all connected. As long as the solution wasn't like plug in a headset and wait for the phone to ring twice and then walk to the bathroom and the baby might cry but there's no guarantee the baby's gonna cry

oops it didn't cry start over four hours later here's norman reedus hide in a cardboard box wink wink pt is up against far cry 4 far cry 4 can we talk about it it's really far cry 4 is really really really really good excellent yeah it's really good. I don't want to take anything away from Far Cry 4. It is definitely one of my favorite games of the year. Justin do you want to spearhead Far Cry 4? Far Cry 4 is an

evolution of the Far Cry 3 experience. What is this voice? More than it is. This is my like. Professional reviewer. Huh? More than it is. This is my, like, I, uh, Huh? Professional reviewer voice? Professional reviewer. This is how I would pronounce it to,

like, if I were for Ubisoft and I was, like, presenting it to buyers for Walmart, this is how I would present the game. It's a, it is building on Far Cry 3, inarguably. I mean, if the knock you want to put against this game is that it shares too much DNA with its predecessor, I don't think it's going to be able to get out from underneath that. refinement of that experience in almost every conceivable way from uh gameplay to narrative

i think that like far cry 4 delivers on that it also adds a co-op mode that is as fun as anything you're going to do in a video game this year guaranteed hands down it is an absolute full bore blast um i love far cry 4 very very much and uh i think it is a it is an excellent game that i wish more games would i mean even for like a trip i know it's like a triple a release and as such like it can't have the maybe the level of like personality that you would see in a in a in an indie game that is made from a very specific viewpoint but it does make like creative stylistic choices uh far cry 4 and it's like and it and it is so refreshing to see a game actually like going for it in in in in a way that far cry 4 does that other games uh don't just the first 10 minutes

are like the the punch before the credits is like it feels really vibrant and like full of life and vitality in a way that a lot of triple a games just don't they just kind of lie there and it had the luxury of having a protagonist that you didn't i mean i don't think the protagonist has a lot of character in this game but at least you don't hate actively despise when he gets eaten by a tiger you're not like awesome and they're also a lot smarter because in the first game they sort of fell into the idea that oh having an awesome antagonist is a good idea here they were like oh let's actually do that instead of making that antagonist die in the first half of the game well that's actually a really interesting thing making that antagonist die in the first half of the game.

Well, that's actually a really interesting thing about video games that I hadn't really thought about until this year with Pagan Men is that because of the way video games are made, most of the time your protagonist isn't going to have much character because it's you, it's an avatar that you're living through.

Same thing with Dragon Age. Same thing that i just pointed out with dragon age where like you are not the most important character or interesting character in any game yeah it makes sense to just have more compelling antagonists sure well that's tv as well because you have so much more room to move with an antagonist the protagonist has to be relatively flat in terms of a character seth seth cohen is way more interesting than Ryan Atwood. Exactly. Those are characters. The co-op stuff, though, I can't stress enough. I tried to play the co-op, but then Justin didn't accept my invite.

Oh, man. He's accepted my invite several times. Oh, my God. There's just so many fucking fun games. It is so streamlined it's so designed for like if something if there is something you can think of that would be fun to do it like lets you do it like there are these personal helicopters that you can hop in uh what are they buzzers that you can hop in and just have this like open beautiful view of curate um and you hop in that and you think like,

man, it sure would be fun if you could ride on the back of it like a bicycle and just like fire your grenade launcher off the back of this thing. And yeah, you can do that. Like physically, aerodynamically, doesn't make a lick of goddamn sense, but sure, yes, go for it.

Do that thing. Yeah, I also really like the fact that the console versions, PS4 and Xbox One, looked much better than the PC version Oh is that true? I'm just hearing to see if Plant is listening He's trolling me No it does look extremely good On next gen consoles

Obviously it looks much much better on PC But it's a gorgeous game no matter where you play it Whereas to be honest Dragon Age I didn't think looked very good on console I don't know how it looks on pc but it's kind of looks nuts a little bit ugly on console it was a little too demanding for my pc which is disheartening because i built it in fucking january yeah uh but yeah the the problem with pc right now is like if you don't have a card that came out this fall you're not screwed that is the game that's uh far cry 4 also has honey badgers which i really appreciate who are like invulnerable yeah they're fantastic they take a lot of damage to to knock

out true to real honey badgers um i feel like far cry 4 scratches a lot of the itches that like just cause maybe scratch yeah i mean it definitely feels like Just Cause in first person. There are many things in the game that I cannot imagine they did not see in Just Cause. Is Just Cause 3 going to have co-op? Because now I kind of, I feel like Far Cry 4 has raised the bar a little bit. Because the stuff that you can do in Far Cry 3 that was really, really fun alone, and the stuff that you can do in far cry 4 that's really really fun to do alone is incalculably more fun when you're doing it with another person just fucking watching have you played just cause 2 online with the co-op hack yeah um just just

like watching justin like fucking wacky shit ride an elephant off of a uh airport runway off a cliff and then like jump off the elephant's back and wingsuit away is like that's like the fucking funniest shit i've ever seen a video game character do um and it's like the only thing that's going to happen with co-op and so like if that shit isn't in games of this ilk from this point on i feel like it's actually going to be a pretty huge disappointment i i can't imagine it not being in those sorts of games yeah like it seems like the direction everything's going uh yeah for me it's far cry 4 with a with a bullet yeah i one one quick question do you i feel like they can't do this model again oh no no they're gonna assassins created if they do if they do another one that're gonna assassins creed it if they do if they do another one that doesn't that's not a joke if they do another one that is just like

that's another big exotic open world and and you can do it with co-op how do you evolve this yeah it's it's i don't know it i mean that that's obviously it's up to them uh yeah but but yeah it's gonna be i mean the good thing is they're gonna release beyond good and evil 2 next year that'll give us some time i'm fucking glad that far cry 4 existed because like god damn you guys this was like this year was like ubisoft's fall from grace almost and like i'm glad that they had like a game that i adored um among a bunch of other games that were just not super great. Because, man, if they didn't have that, then the...

What is the agency? No, what is the game? Oh, God. The Tom Clancy game? Yeah. Division. And the Rainbow Six game. They still have a lot of games that I'm looking forward to, but this was not the best... I don't know. The best year for their for their brand i really hope this doesn't get a lot looped in with the narrative of those because this is actually a very good you know it doesn't

really fit in with the with the narrative i think people were trying to it also runs on pc like yeah for a change yeah it's it's a markedly better game than everything else they put out this year um I don't know I'm still hoping they can pull off pull off those games I mentioned next year pretty well I just want anything with those rabbits I got rabbit fever

gut check Far Cry 4 fine so be it okay next up we got Dark dark souls 2 versus bayonetta 2 i'm about to get fucking fierce i picked these two uh up against each other just so you guys are clear because they both have two in them terrific job i think i'll check before we even do this because i think we can just finish this one right now it's gonna be don't don't you fucking dare i'm about to get i'm about to go beast i uh okay i okay i think that i think it's pretty obvious that dark souls 2 is going to come out on top here before we like get

to that can we just talk about bandit 2 first because this one really caught me by surprise i i played you play the original a couple hours of it and didn't get into it. I don't know why. It just didn't grab me. And Bayonetta 2, I loved. First off, just on a mechanical level, it is really great when I figured out that I could have my Wii U tablet in my office, which is a floor above my Wii, and play a Wii U game that way.

Yeah. You really don't appreciate that system until, like, you're in a situation like that. Like, wow, that's really nice. I really wish... I'm amazed that it has that level of range. I can't play it. I have my Wii U in my office, and I can't play it from my living room, which is on the same floor. Well, this is like a direct...

It's like a straight shot. Yeah. Like, above my... Directly is on the same floor. Well, this is like a direct, it's like a straight shot. Yeah. Above my, directly above where the console is. I don't think you can give Bayonetta any points for that, though. Yeah, because Mario Kart 8, Smash Bros. Fair. No, I mean, absolutely true. Bayonetta 2, for me,

what I, the thing that really sold me on it, first off, it is a character action game that has a lot of combos, but doesn't require you to know any of them. The skill involved is not about memorizing the best way to do the highest damage and memorizing a combo and doing quarter rotations of the stick to finish moves. It's just about dodging and pattern recognition and i think that's really what i really dug is like it was a it was an action game where your skill with it wasn't necessarily about like how how well you had absorbed the the actual combat mechanics.

And what it really tested was your ability to assess the enemy in the moment. How well you can improvise in any kind of battle. Right. And look at the enemy and say, okay, what is his attack? How do I know that he's about to attack? Because really, what this whole combat system comes down to is dodging. So if you dodge at the exact right moment, then when an enemy is attacking,

they enter witch time, which the enemy basically slows to a crawl and you're able to put a bunch of damage on them and then move out of the way of whatever attack they have. And there's variations on this to where, like, there's one where if you trigger witch time exactly when you get hit hit you don't take damage and you turn into a swarm of bats of course um yeah of course why wouldn't you um that system

was that system was in the original bayonetta it just wasn't as it was never as mechanic i don't know what they did but it wasn't as mechanically satisfying as it is here it was harder to they did but it wasn't as mechanically satisfying as it is here it was harder to pull off i guess maybe it does feel like punch out right because you're watching the enemy you're looking for their tail they like wiggle their eyebrows and then you know to dodge and then you get a ton of damage on them essentially yeah it's exactly like punch out great job thank you it's a uh that's expert commentary i can't believe yeah i can't believe the industry lost you i know what will they do our poet laureate my other thing with bandit two is just the incredible sense of of scale um every every boss you see and you think well they can't expect me to fight him now

i'm sure i'll come back around and that's a final boss yeah that's a final boss level no he's just like a guy that's there and just happens to be a huge three-faced crown that shoots stars and angels at you and he's just like there he's like the doorman to the actual uh uh area i was worried after that first level with this problem because you fight on uh fighter jets that are like crashing through new york city and i was like oh this is awesome but this is gonna be some sonic the hedgehog stuff where the first two stages are like kayaking crazy and then it's gonna like go to slow boring crap and uh it's the exact opposite it only it tries to out crazy itself every single stage do you guys watch the cut scenes by the way in between these things with the talking and the dialogue with the talking and the dialogue or do you just skip them

i watch them i can't i watch i could i watch them but they're miserable they're so long and boring oh god it makes me want to die but you can skip them so i can't really knock that it's more than I watched them, but they're miserable. They're so long and boring. Oh, God, it makes me want to die. But you can skip them, so I can't really knock that. It's more than I can say about Destiny. Oh, God. Yeah, it reminded me of that I love that a lot of people didn't get into. Did you guys ever play Ninja Blade?

No. Ninja Blade was a From Software game. I remember it was a bit of a dark horse. Came out in 2009. It was that amazing sense of scale, like running up a missile to flip it into a plane, that kind of crap. And I thought Bayonetta really nailed that.

I really liked sprinting. You turn into a panther. And the double jump you become a wonderful butterfly. I like that. Lovely. That's my two cents. Thank you, Griffin.

Chris Plant, did you play this game? Bayonetta 2? Yeah, that's what I was talking about with the jet thing. You love it? Yeah, I mean, I wish I had more time to play more of it. I had Frush over yesterday so he could play that hour, and I was worried even then, knowing how it keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier,

that he would somehow get the boring middle part when I handed him the controller, and that was not the case. There was actually a moment where you freeze a giant wave, and you have to run across the wave. And it's visually, I mean, it's beautiful, but it's kind of like, it's beautiful, but then you just have to walk through it,

which has always been kind of my beef with these games, where it's like, it looks amazing, but really what you're doing is just walking and being pressing forward platforms uh and i was like man if this was like an like a real nintendo game you wouldn't just walk on this wave you would surf on it and then like i shit you not 20 minutes later you're surfing on a wave fighting a monster and I was like okay got it they were saving that for later yeah I don't know I liked what I played I didn't like it markedly more

I mean I liked it a little bit more than the first one but I guess if everything is so bonker jerks crazy you can't really I guess if everyone is super then no one is you know that quote from that movie no uh it's just like there's i don't know the pacing of it i just was like wow this is super cool but i felt

like i was doing the same thing over and over again i i i think again this is like another one of those games where i'm trying to figure out why i didn't finish it and i just think it had i i have to play everything doing the the videos that I do now for Polygon. And so like, it's really hard for me to sit down and finish a game. I feel like I really wish this had come out like in those summer months. It is really weird. My wife doesn't play most video games. Yeah.

And like, I don't have the stomach to explain like some context for this game when it's doing it's like weird like start on her lips and then go down through her boobs and then like scan like inches away from her crotch and then up her butt crack and it's like that's where her that's the source of her magic source of her the source of her power. But yeah, it's such an enjoyable game. And I get that it's doing the whole cheeseball thing, but there's this weird line where sometimes it feels like the cheeseball works, and sometimes it feels just gross. Y'all want me to talk about Dark Souls 2?

Sure. Because I've beaten it like fucking three times this year. So I had a question for you griffin yes the impression that i get is the general consensus of the internet snobs they are people seem disappointed with dark souls 2 do i think it's off base i mean i mean okay dark souls 2 for me is an improvement on the original Dark Souls in just about every way, just about every conceivable way. And in making those changes, and making those improvements, I should say, they changed a lot of core systems of the game. And while that may not sound like such a huge deal,

because that's sort of like the nature of iteration, I feel like people played Dark Souls in a way that a lot of action RPGs aren't played. I feel like a lot of people played it, if they were hardcore into the PvP element of the game, then the changes would be more dramatic, right? It would be like if they changed changed entire systems in like street fighter 5 um so i think that that stuff was uh a bit disappointing for people i think that its approach to difficulty is is different than the original dark souls was so for purists in that sense uh maybe it would be a disappointment but for like everyone else i feel like outside of those uh you know hardcore fringe dark souls enthusiasts it was just a better game and and the original dark souls is one of my favorite games of all time so to have a a improved version

of that uh is something pretty spectacular um dark souls 2 i think is my game of the year like i i really did beat it i beat it twice i'm i uh got about halfway through my third playthrough um i was playing as sonic hedgehog a character i created to look like sonic the hedgehog uh it just was did you guys play it i should ask yeah yeah i liked it a lot i it just some games i got so into it i i got the strategy guide despite what you encouraged me feverishly not to yeah uh and i and i i loved it because of that okay uh yeah we had this conversation it made me very angry but go on yeah but but what i like about the game was I didn't use that to get through the entire game, but when I found that the choice was between just not playing the game anymore

or turning to something that could help me move a little bit further, I appreciated that. I also liked that their guide had so much in the way of the lore, again, which is weird. But explaining kind of what's actually happening in the game and a little bit of history about the series. Because there's a shit ton. There's a shit ton. And having not played the other stuff, it helps. They divulge it mostly through item descriptions, which is fucking butterfly sugar baby crazy town um but i mean for me that's one of the many many charms of this uh this series i couldn't tell

a i couldn't give you a single fact i played through all of dark souls one and some of dark souls two and i couldn't say one word about the story. You don't know about the first fire? There's a big bird that carries you places. Okay, so the very beginning of the first game. And you're a zombie. Well, close. And there's some witches. Pretty good.

And there's a rock that kills you. I did not finish the first Dark Souls. I got to, well, I got to Anor and i and i and i bailed um wrote a song wrote a beautiful song and then i i quit um this i i i don't know why dark souls 2 works so much better for me a lot of it is some concessions towards playability. And I know people will, there are some people who will denounce some of those changes as, as like getting too far from the spirit of the game. But the balance that Dark Souls 2 struck for me so much better than Dark Souls 1 is that there were things that were hard,

but they didn't, it wasn't trying to break you. Like it wasn't trying to break your spirit and i think there was a lot of things in dark souls one famous like for me it the best example is getting cursed the fact that there was just this mechanic that like when it happened to you it it was already a very hard game and the game just got harder and and it and and there was almost nothing you could reach a point where you didn't have enough souls to buy the cure you may not have gotten far enough

to get to the person who sells the cure for it right um yeah it was man what a what a huge fuck you that was and i and and once i feel that spirit in a game once i feel that like oh you're just trying to like antagonize me like it's it's hateful you know what i mean it's like the difference between being in a haunted house and being in a haunted house where somebody kicks you in the nad sometimes like i'm i'm just trying to be scared you don't need to kick me in the nads um that's unnecessary yeah i i i feel what you're saying i far uh dark souls 2 has a lot more it has i should say it has a lot fewer moments that are just like yeah this is fucking super super super difficult and there's nothing you can do about it like there's

i feel like dark souls 2 doesn't have the um ornstein and smog fight where it's just like yep you're just not gonna i imagine that was the fight that made you stop playing the original dark souls correct that fight that's just like yeah yeah, it's going to be fucking incredibly difficult. It's just super, super, super hard. Fuck you. If you can't beat it, then go play, you know, a SpongeBob SquarePants game. I feel like Dark Souls 2 has less of that stuff. It definitely still has that stuff.

Like the entire goddamn water level where people are just blasting you with magic while you run at like one and a half feet per minute um like that's that stuff is still very very frustrating there's still definitely like blockades like progress blockades but they are not as soul crushing as dark souls was and if that's the stuff that you liked about dark souls that's fine i understand why you are not as into dark souls 2 because it definitely loses some of that spirit but like i think as a result it is a better game and it's also like a way bigger game um i just like especially with the the three expansions i don't know how deep you guys have dug into that but like it is now like i don't know that that those equal about half of the

core game so now it's like uh you know 50 bigger than it was and it already was like fucking enormous like there's just so there's so much to do there's so many different ways to customize your character so many different ways to build your character out um so many like amazing ways to fuck with other players um i i got so much joy out of the chameleon spell where i would just like invade a person's world and then go chameleon and like take on the shape of an urn next to a bottomless pit oh my god you can do that yeah and then somebody walks by and a kick and then you spartan them and like that shit is so you just kick them off yeah it's so amazing every time it works out or you use wrath of the gods which is like this huge force spell that just like launches them off off of a bridge how many different things

can you turn into uh you can turn on like a vase or a torch or wherever you are the the chameleon spell i think does different stuff based on the uh the environment uh yeah but then you can get zany with like you can buy a set of armor after you've like uh played through new game plus that uh gives you like butterfly wings so that you can jump off ledges and float down which you can use to like execute these insane aerial maneuvers and then do like a drop attack on somebody and like insta kill them like that shit is so amazing that on top of like this core game that is one of the finest role-playing games one of the finest action games one of the finest action role-playing games i've ever played there is also this deeper layer of just like silly shit that of of of silly shit that just isn't in other games and makes it like

one of the most special i played through the game again just well because they released it on pc and it was just like so much better um but just to like dig deeper into that uh that layer of you've beaten the game now look at all this crazy stuff you can do. I, I've spent more time watching YouTube videos of people coming up with like insane PVP builds that shouldn't work, but do, uh, than I have watching, watching any other content for any other game this year. Then watching sunsets. Then watching sunsets with my family. Yeah. Um, watching sunsets with my family yeah um it's just like it's just an incredible game um that i i loved every single second of i couldn't put it down i think we'll be talking about it more are we ready for a vote here can we just vote up down for me it's dark souls 2 dark souls that's fine

dark souls 2 i agree excellent sorry bandetta sorry bandetta next up we have wolfenstein Dark Souls 2. Yep, Dark Souls 2. I agree. Excellent. Sorry, Bayonetta. Sorry, Bayonetta. Next up, we have Wolfenstein. Okay. Let me jump in real quick for this Wolfenstein vs. Destiny battle. I know full well 110% where this is gonna go and I agree with it. It's gonna go the right way. But let me just say

a couple things. I don't think you... And now Russ Frost presents The Case for Destiny. I don't think... Can I... Can I... Russ? Yeah, go for it, Griffin. For me, it's Destiny.

Really? Yeah. But I'm a fundamentally broken... I'm a broken person inside. So am I. I've dropped God knows how many hours into Destiny, so that tells you how broken I am?

But I will also say this. I will never play that fucking game ever again. But go on. Okay. So here's what I'm going to say about Destiny. And I strongly believe this. And I fucking hate when people say this.

But it is 100% true about Destiny. It gets better after hour 30. It gets better after hour 30. It's 100% right. And it's bullshit. And I hate it. What's your jam? What is this content?

It's 100% raid content. The raid content is so fucking good. And I'm going to and I hate it. What's your jam? What is this concept? It's 100% raid content. The raid content is so fucking good. And I'm going to give you an example. Last night, I was playing with some Vox product guys, Jake Lear and the rest. And DZ was there. It was the whole crew. And we got together. We had six people.

And the new raid that just came out, Crota's End or whatever it's called, starts with this insane dash from a bunch you're you're in this dark cavern it looks like the minds of moria you know with the giant pillars but it's very dark and there's like basically effectively zombies attacking you from all sides and you're running as a group from lighted pillar to lighted pillar frantically and as you activate the pillars they explode and it's just this frantic like left for dead style race through this pitch black environment okay and this is super this is the raid that came in the $20 dlc pack this is the raid that came in the $20 now there are similar moments in the raid that came with the core game so i'm not saying that you need the dlc to enjoy this stuff but

unfortunately you need to be like level 26 at least to experience any raid content. And you need the DLC to enjoy any future raids. And that fucking grind. Is that right? Yeah. Well, you can play the original raid and then DLC. But then at the end of the raid, does it not culminate in a boss fight where you shoot a guy for an hour? No, that's not true.

Okay. In both cases, the final boss fights are actually complex. That's what I love about the raid content. And it's, again, a shame because the rest of the game really – So both cases, is there just one in the main game? There's one raid in the main – right. There's one raid in the main game, then there's one raid in the DLC. So this game deserves to be on this list because there was one raid in it? Well, let's

be very clear that the fans wanted this game on the list. I did not fight for this game to be on the list because of the reason that the rest of the game really doesn't stand out. Can I be completely honest with you guys? I worry that, just for myself as a critic and appreciator of games,

that the my own as a critic and appreciator of games, that, like, the... my own sort of, like, personal situation is going to start really hindering a lot of the best gaming experiences. Are you talking about... Did you just call your baby your situation?

No, no, I mean my age and the stuff I'm doing, and, like, that sounds like... What you just described russ sounds like an absolute blast and like i i don't think that i am gonna be in a position like unless i like do a lot of engineering to like set it up i don't see myself being in a position and i'm not like like i'm not complaining about it like it's not like god i wish i didn't have a kid so i could play that fucking destiny raid like that doesn't make any sense but i feel like i there is going to be some stuff that's just like gated you know that i'm just not gonna be able to to experience

i also just wish it was easier i i this is so old dude complaining but i miss menus like with the the call of duty or not call of duty, oh my gosh, the Far Cry stuff. I've played it on PC, but I want to play co-op with people who have it on PS4. But I know that just to get to that part of the game, I'm going to have to play through the first two or three hours. It's an hour. It's not two or three hours. It's an hour. To get to where I can unlock the co-op.

The co-op. Yeah. It's an hour. Still, just give me a button. Just give me a button. Yeah, I agree. The stuff that I want. After seeing the Halo,

the Halo, what is it? Master Chief Collection? Super Collection, yeah, sure. But like seeing a game presented in that way where you can just choose what you want. And then have it absolutely not work. Well, sure. That's a whole different thing.

But I just wish that there were better ways what you want and then have it absolutely not work well sure that's a whole different thing but i i just wish that there were better ways to present games for people who don't want to have to do the bullshit so this is the other reason why i like destiny um and this is not a great reason but it is uh you know i know you guys used to play wow a bunch oh my sort of a regular group yes yeah wow and so Yeah. Me, not so much. I think Justin. Justin, certainly. So I think there's this element in Destiny that they're very smart about

that games like Far Cry don't do nearly as well is how damn easy it is to jump into a game with another person. Yeah. Like, it is literally a click of the button and you are in their game. They don't need to invite you. For the most part.

I would say 95 percent success i mean there's certain there's certain strikes there's certain well no there are certain strikes that you just can't match make and you have to have buddies to no but that's what that's what i'm talking about i'm talking like if you have a full list of psn friends and i have probably i would say eight to ten people that play pretty regularly yeah i can just bounce around and suddenly like i don't mind that the missions are a little bit dull because it's like an excuse to like shoot the shit and just like casually talk yes i'll give you that and it's it is a very uh you mentioned world of warcraft i think it's a very similar thing where that was a social event for me like playing playing through a dungeon with

my playing through an instance with my guild and like grinding through heroic instances for you know stuff with better item level like sure i dig on that loop um and i a lot of that is reflected in destiny i like a lot of destiny systems i really genuinely do um but the experience of playing through a strike mission and then getting to a boss that you just have to fucking keep shooting over and over and over and over again. While an unconscionable amount of mobs like spawn on you. And then if you die, you're going to start over. Although almost guaranteed if you die after like a half hour of shooting at

the same life bar, uh, and, and you fail, like somebody is going gonna quit from your team and then that's a fucking ball game like that loop for me was unbearable and i do think that got a lot better as the game has been released and they i don't know i haven't played it in a couple months i haven't it's gotten a lot better and i would also say in the cases the raid content for what

it's worth none of the raid bosses play out that way okay well maybe maybe i'll give it a second chance it's just like i loved so much of destiny i loved i know a lot of people gave like the the world shit because it you know had wizards and all kinds of silly shit i dug that shit man i dug the presentation i dug like the the spaceships i remember saving up my money because i wanted to buy a spaceship that looked like the spaceship that Spike Spiegel drove in Cowboy Bebop. I was like, I fucking want that. That's crazy to me that I would do that for a ship that has no like mechanical purpose in the game. It just looks like a thing from Cowboy Bebop. But like so much stuff in the game was so memorable and so cool looking. And then just, just don't know man like the the progress i think it

is telling the most telling thing about destiny is how popular the idea of loot caves became where it was more palatable to fucking stand in one place and fire bullets into a busted piece of environment because you would rather do that mind-numbing activity which i admittedly did for a long time because that was better than the in than the like majority of in-game content that they had in the game at the time like that's that's that's that is the case in point summary of it was a mess yeah so i don't know i want them to fix that stuff i i think doing stuff like fixing how the engrams work is is a step in the right direction although i i uh i don't think I've played enough

to really notice the big change there. But, like... It's a better game than it was. Okay, and that stuff seems easy to fix. Like, reduce the amount of spawns. Reduce the amount of, like, life that bosses have. Like, make the game feel more rewarding and less like a fucking slog.

Like, don't make me run around looking for fucking like spin metal like following the same farming routes that they've fixed right by making a mission stuff like that but it's i agree it's still got a lot of ways to go it's also really destiny's really interesting to me uh because we don't have any examples that I can think of sort of off the top of my head of a game that here in like a year or so could very well be unrecognizable from the product that was launched. And I think you have a lot of instances of things like that you can point to on PC while being a great example.

World of Warcraft is the best example, yeah. Where, you know, that game has very little to do with the game that launched however many years ago. And, like, it's weird to think of a console game actually doing that, because I think a lot of that has to do with annualization and this rush to, like, get it out, get the money, and move on. Post World of Warcraft, just to speak to that, because they just launched Warlords of Draenor, which is a fucking incredible expansion pack. That's going to be the thing that actually maybe gets me back into the game in the slow months next year. The garrison system, all that shit, the garrison healer system is so fucking tight.

World of Warcraft is a game that has pupated and evolved. I remember even, I think the Cataclysm expansion was such a fucking sea change. That is a completely different game in almost every way, visually, mechanically, than the game that launched. That's what's kind of disappointing to me about Destiny is when the original World of Warcraft came out, it was the best MMO ever made. It beat the shit out of Dark Age of Camelot and EverQuest,

all the other stuff that was on the market at that time couldn't hold a candle to this vanilla world of warcraft product i don't think that's true for destiny and not only that um the the first expansion they launched for a while the burning crusade added so much shit a crazy amount of shit added new uh playable races um a ton of new environments. And then the first expansion for Destiny was not nearly as ambitious, was not nearly worth the value, came out way too quickly. It's just, I was hoping— Well, I don't know if it came out way too quickly for them to maintain people's interest. No, it came out way too— give me way the fucking year on that stuff and then release and they have so many more games to release i mean everybody saw those documents

at least they have like literally a full sequel every other year and they need to do whatever these like pseudo sequels are the years in between i mean at least that was what seemed to be the plan initially i know that's what i'm curious about, because it's not WoW. They want you to pay for the game every year. Right, that's the console game environment. And you're not paying a monthly fee. There's a lot of different considerations to be made. But I want that WoW sort of prophecy to be true,

because I think World of Warcraft um like a lot of blizzard games like fucking hearthstone like uh especially like diablo 3 those games changed dramatically for free the loot 2.0 patch made diablo 3 a fucking different game and that shit was free all of hearthstone is free and the metagame is completely different for that game i was really hoping that that was going to be the case for destiny but while there have been there have been some minor improvements i just i i haven't seen that that level of of change that i yeah i agree it definitely feels like they're they're experimenting and getting to a place where they're happy with it i will i was i was too harsh before i will come back and play destiny because the hope that i had for destiny was at least partially realized and i loved the stuff that was that was realized so so maybe they can

fix that stuff because unlike a lot of games this year that came out that i was like so disappointed in like ac unity and the crew um i think that this one can be fixed i would pour it to the sequel yeah like assassin's creed 2 that if i get an assassin's creed 2 of destiny that would be great be fixed. I would forward to the sequel. Yeah. Like Assassin's Creed 2. If I get an Assassin's Creed 2 of Destiny, that would be great. Now, on to Wolfenstein, a game that I am shocked, like, if you had told me in January that Wolfenstein

was going to be not only on, like, our list, but pretty high up on my own personal list, I would have called you a liar. but it is bizarre to me that wolfenstein is one of if not the like smartest and weirdly most like sort of emotionally satisfying first person shooters that come out in the entire year i feel like it is such a weird like paradox almost that the this year the thinking man shooter is einstein right what what are you talking about bj blaskowitz of course um i really like kind of i mean i i feel like i rail on video game storytelling

maybe a last year's bestie thing but But this year, there has been such a noticeable improvement in terms of the way games writing is being accomplished. And a lot of credit goes to, I think, the voice direction on these games, too. It actually feels like they're getting great actors, great voice talent who is being directed properly. Like Peter Dinklage in Destiny? Well, so yeah, unlike that that they're actually hiring voice actors uh what was amazing about

wolfenstein was that i was expecting it to be the most offensive game yeah yeah uh and it really It really isn't. No, it's not. It's shocking how well it handles romance and sex in a sex-positive way, how it deals with the idea of revenge, how it deals with World War II and the idea of the alternate history, and also still is a shockingly violent person and shooter it's insane like how fully developed and well realized the world is how seriously they have taken a lot of stuff and then how like crazy campy violent exploitative like how much of that shit they got in there that they it doesn't feel shoehorned it doesn't feel out of place it's it's this bizarre hybrid between like i i don't know like really really really thorough sophisticated world building and then also like this fucking like chainsaw torture scene right outside of reservoir dogs oh go ahead i just want to say it's bizarre the biggest for me, the biggest accomplishment

of Wolfenstein is like there are so many games, I mean an incalculable number of games where the overarching structure is you're a one man army against the an overwhelming force

and the odds are stacked against you and you know it's a million to one shot and whatever you know it is shot the really like big accomplishment for me in Wolfenstein is that this is the first game I've played in ages where like I actually bought

it like I actually was you know in one of the scenes where you're like basically waking up in a nursing home and the world is gone like everything you knew is gone and i have not felt that level of like i really bought into well this is hopeless like i really don't know what what we do at this point like where do we go from here how do we even start to like rebuild back from that and the fact that like i could get emotionally invested in a one-man army like uh story and actually like buy into it emotionally is is a shocking achievement for me i never would have 30 minutes in that's not even like six hours

in yeah for sure there are two things i really want to hit and one has to do with that story part and it's how they literally ground all of that believability and your comeback, not on, oh, well, if you get the bazooka, you know, they're all screwed. They ground it in concrete. Like, it's sort of like, oh, there is one thing we could exploit, and it is a very, like, mundane, civic thing that is what's going to turn this story around, which is so much more believable than you just going and killing everybody. But the other thing that I really liked about the game is they figured out how to make the game a stealth game or a deranged old school shooter, depending on how you want to play it. And it's such an obvious mechanic of there are these doors that will release unlimited enemies if you choose to go in loud

or if you go in stealth you can more or less kind of shut these imaginary doors that are going to be spawning uh countless bad guys so if you want to play that stealth game you can get through the stage and i loved the stealth and i i usually hate that shit right like i've talked i've talked about that uh a lot uh particularly i think maybe maybe even last year or whenever Far Cry 3 came out, how I really liked the stealth systems in those games, but it was so punishing when I fucked up and lost my element of surprise. And I felt like I had failed, and I wasn't interested in the sort of improvisation um that that the game sort of forced you to do after that but for some reason and i don't understand how it does this every time that you get to that dubstep drop in wolfenstein where it's like oh time to go loud i was always like all right fuck yeah let's do it stealth was fun but now we're doing a different thing now now

it's time for double-fisted submachine guns. Shotguns with bouncing bullets. Maybe it's just because, like, doing dual-fisted submachine guns slide under a robot to shoot it in the back, like, is incalculably tighter than, like, the combat in Far Cry 3 is. So maybe, like, that stuff actually felt more rewarding in a way. And also, like, the game's progression system

of, like, whatever you are doing, you are moving towards completing accomplishments that give you like material upgrades to your character um but that that system has never worked for me in a game before and it totally works for me here they also managed to make me hate nazis more than any other game i've ever played and that's saying a lot because i've played a shitload of games with nazis in them and this is a alternate future game like you would think oh of course a game and set during world war ii you'd hate nazis they just like it makes it partial again right right like it makes that scene in the uh there's a scene in the train that is like so fuck yeah amazingly good and so thoughtful and clearly like the entire game was it felt like it was built off of that scene like a really personal in your face get to know

how evil and fucking sick these people are and that made me like legit want to crush them into oblivion and i you know generally it's just like oh here's a bunch of generic guys with machine guns like i want to fucking destroy these guys yeah is this game going to go up against far cry because there is like such a clear uh talent for ripping off tarantino in this game yeah and there isn't far cry which also tries to do the same thing and wow there's great writing in far cry it's well don't don't i don't want to sell it short i feel like i actually wrote a pretty unfair like preview of this game like the first time i played it at quake con where i was like oh man it's great takes all this stuff from tarantino and then also there's some stuff that feels kind of like robert rodriguez that's not selling it short i

mean that train scene is a tarantino scene like i mean that i'm not even talking about the inglorious bastards stuff i'm saying literally that scene i just don't i don't that's the funny thing about how games are maybe getting better like i feel like games have tried to ape tarantino for years but what they don't get is like they don't get this they don't get the scene in the diner where they're talking about tipping before there's the gun okay you know the huge gun the point i'm trying to make is as a whole in context it's a very it's a totally original thing like there are definitely glimmers of of that stuff but there are so many fucking glimmers from different places that i i feel like it all comes together. And that's the reason I love the game as much as I do,

is because, and not just narratively, not just aesthetically, not just mechanically, all of it, in context, is this fully original, like, brilliant game that I think beats the... Griffin, have you talked your way back to being pro-Wolfenstein versus Destiny? Here's the thing. I think maybe next Griffin, have you talked your way back to being pro-Wolfenstein versus Destiny? Here's the thing.

I think maybe next year, Destiny... Because that is the nature of the game that they have made. Maybe next year, Destiny could hold a candle to it. Meet Towerfall and Kentucky Road Zero? No, we're not bringing those back again. I think maybe next year, Destiny, because I was more inspired by the stuff that worked in Destiny, and I spent more next year Destiny because I was more inspired by the stuff that worked in Destiny.

And I spent more time playing Destiny. I was more in love with the stuff in Destiny that worked. But the stuff that didn't work was – well, there was a lot of it. And it was so punishingly off-putting that I can't go for it now. So no, for me it's for me it's wolfenstein wolfenstein wins and next year there will be another episode of the besties right god there it's it's decided um oh god don't even joke call of duty advanced warfare versus titanfall let's not spend the first one that i really don't i don't know let's not spend a lot of time on this

one because while i think it's going to be an interesting discussion i don't think either of these games are going to be goatee contenders goatee contenders here's what i'm going to say about titanfall i think titanfall does its loop extremely well it's like this that concept of like you're on the foot on foot you call on a titan you're trying to like out maneuver titans by jumping on the back of them that loop is really really amazing unfortunately that's pretty much all it really has going for it there's not a lot additional to just like keep you coming back for more like i put in i'd say probably about eight hours into titanfall maybe 10 and i just didn't have a huge desire to come back so i agree with you um i i i agree with you i miss having a campaign in titanfall i do i mean it

had that fucking whatever um and the campaign in call of duty advanced warfare was was was very good um for me uh i kind of want to go with titanfall just because like that loop was so original so fucking rad um i i still like for me it might be my favorite competitive shooter experience of the year because while the stuff in advanced warfare was you know pretty neat i like the pick 13 system i like a lot of that stuff i still had the same i still ran into the same goddamn brick wall that i've run into over the past like three call of duty games which is just like it's not fun for me anymore it's not because you get outskilled i get outskilled like really quickly yeah even though i got outskilled with this game because of the verticality i just like couldn't keep up with and the the the the the i don't know what it is i don't know if i'm just like i hope it's not that i'm just terrible at the game because of the verticality i just like couldn't keep up with and the the the the i don't know what it is i don't know if i'm just like i hope it's not that i'm just terrible at the game

because i swear to god there was once a time where i was pretty fucking good at call of duty and like the modern warfare 2 is that it or am i just my bones getting creakier no you're an old man um but but titanfall was so you know it had all these really great balance structures that made it more possible for me to hang and even when i couldn't hang it wasn't as like horrifically punishing as call of duty's multiplayer was where you just like run for 45 seconds and then get shot by somebody who you could never see yeah yeah you're almost always gonna do even if you're bad, once they give you a robot that throws rockets at people, you're always going to have some kind of impact. Right. You will affect the game in some way.

And that's a really frustrating thing for, like in a Call of Duty multiplayer, you know, that feeling of like, I'm just getting mowed down over and over and over and over again. down over and over and over and over again um and even that that and that is so punishing that even if you finish a match with like a two to one kill death ratio those deaths of just like getting popped by by someone you couldn't see just i don't know it's not it's not they they added so much really cool stuff this year they really did and i don't want to undersell that. I think it's one of the best like customization systems they've ever done, but it's just not the, the, the, the rewards of call of duty multiplayer.

Just like for me, it's just doesn't seem worth the frustrations of it, but the single player, the call of duty single player this year is so good. It's better than it's ever been. In my opinion. It is fully capitalizing on what it should be, which is a big, explosive, fun, kind of silly, but in a way that is celebratory more than it is sort of rub it in your nose, like what a dumb thing you're doing there's that moment at the end of god i want to say it's black ops where the last image of the game is literally you like putting on sunglasses while an eagle throws fireworks over an aircraft carrier it's like oh i don't feel good

about this like i get it it's dumb um but this had some of the like the best like action like really and not even like military bro shooter type action but like some of the escapes yeah on the cycles and stuff like that are absolutely that was cool the escape where you had to grappling hook up the constructed the like building that's in the process of being built uh escaping from from soldiers like that whole escape sequence is really tight. I feel like this conversation is going to boil down to what is better? The really original, really fucking rad

multiplayer loop of Titanfall or the surprisingly well-made single-player campaign of Call of Duty? And for me, it's Titanfall. I just want to say I prefer the multiplayer and in call of duty oh really i don't i don't yeah i i'm shocked that you guys had the experience of being outclassed because as frustic knows i'm not great at these games well i i get crushed regularly but i would say one out of three games, I come out in the top three or four. I feel like it regularly pits me against people that I can compete with.

I had the exact opposite experience with Titanfall. I always felt like I didn't start playing it until I think three or four weeks after it started, and it was just not a fun experience. I was destroyed every time I tried to play it. And and i liked titanfall a lot especially in the beta uh but i i could not find a entry point into it and the fact that it didn't have like a campaign or something else to kind of help me in i didn't do it any favors really i mean it it had that campaign-ish thing. Campaign adjacent. Let's do a vote because we can talk more about the victor in the next round, and we need to get moving.

So for me, it's Titanfall. Cod. Cod. But it is, yeah. Man. Think about that Kevin Spacey. cod it just it's caught the the the fact that a first-time team did like actually finally made good on a really fucking solid single player campaign it's not really to be fair they made the best part of modern warfare 3 right yeah it's their first thing that's just solely their baby, right?

Right. But, I mean, Titanfall, though, you can eject out of the top of a robot and land on top of another robot. Listen, for best ejection out of a robot, I think it's safe to say we're going to give it to Titanfall this year. Okay. Yeah. I vote Call of Duty. All right. Okay.

Fine. Final round? Last matchup of the. Alright. Final round. Final round of the first game. Sunset Overdrive versus Shovel Knight. You just had fucking given up at this point, huh, Frags? They both have S's?

I do like, yeah. What do you want? I can't match them all with a pretty little bow. I would have said Sunset Overdrive versus Bayonetta would have been my my pairing but whatever whatever shovel night no because then you would have then you would have made me pit shovel night against dark souls 2 and that's a that's a fucking tough man uh sunset overdrive what i really really like about it is how much fun it has with itself and video games in general and how bright and silly it is and it's just like a very light-hearted game even more so than a game like

crackdown which you know is light and fun and silly but the story doesn't really back that up it's like weirdly dark and contradictory here they like go all the way with it and the mobility is really good and the customization is like on point it way with it and the mobility is really good and the customization is like on point amazing yeah sunset overdrive i'm always gonna have a personal connection to because sunset overdrive came out at an exact moment that i needed to feel good about video games i needed a a video game that i could like love and feel great about and that like was very game positive it was not making fun of video games but it was having fun with them yeah um and and i needed sunset overdrive at the exact moment it was released and the fact that they managed to do

a thing that like i've always talked about like i use matt hazard as my example you guys remember matt hazard yes dear god yes fucking not the not eat lead the the shitty side scroller but the shitty person actually um no it was uh oh you know patrick harris was in it also but it was um uh fucking um um um um um doesn't matter go job from uh rest of them yeah will arnett was was matt hazard but anyway it was that it was that thing that matt hazard did where it was making fun of game mechanics that that are like trite and shitty but still like having them like you're still doing the bad thing you're making fun of and since that overdrive managed to make fun of video game quirks there's an amazing mission where you are it is so insane that this actually made it into the game there's a mission where you

are helping out the woman that lends uh quest indication icons to people who have not returned them yet where you have to go and fight like because they have the question marks that start the mission but they haven't returned the icons and they're very valuable and tough to replace so you have to go get quest indication icons that people just have lying around. It's batshit. Yeah. Here's what I did not like about Sunset Overdrive. I don't think the combat is very good. I don't think it's a matter of it not being very good.

I think it's just... It's a certain type, a certain feel of combat. I know. I mean, they could have... It's just, it's not as good as Ratchet & Clank. And that's the standard that I'm setting it to. And the guns aren't as interesting. It doesn't feel as satisfying.

It's just that element. I never felt very – I'll grant you that. It never felt very satisfying to me. It always felt very, very loose. A lot of times when I was very effective, I didn't feel like I was having a lot to do with that. Exactly, yes. It was very much like, I don't know, I fired the right thing and it exploded

this other thing. It's very chaotic in a way that made it feel a little random. Wasn't that kind of their point with the design, though, where it's like, every weapon, essentially, will do the trick. We just want you mixing and matching and having a different design. They have different strategic applications, and each one has

different strengths against different types of sure of monsters um i just didn't find the very like satisfying to use in the way that like the guns in ratchet and clank or the guns in uh what's that other resistance i have like a very interesting well that's because resistance had like eight guns that were all fucking radical that were all like super super great and that's just not the approach they were going for with this one um i i yeah i i agree with you like a lot of the weapons i unlocked uh i just didn't i just didn't like the handgun right i had like the handgun for humans i had another gun for mutants i had like i i don't know i wasn't mixing and matching them in the way that i feel like they wanted me to do um and i i don't know that's i mean that's room to grow if they ever make another one like everything else i think they really nailed yeah um shovel knight though

shovel knight's really effing good i think you said griffin it might have been you or maybe justin when you talk about shovel knight you say that it feels like an NES game but with all of the rough edges that your memory forgot. Not even rough edges. I think the point I made in my review was that a lot of people have made retro-inspired

games, but so many of them were just so referential of retro games that it didn't feel like a retro game. That was the paradox of a game like – I mean, Retro City Rampage is maybe a little bit on the nose, which I like that game. But it didn't – I don't know. It didn't capture the feel of those games because it was just so full of references to that era. full of of references to that era in not having that stuff shovel knight freed itself up to like come up with an original world that was so quirky and so bizarre that it actually felt like a like

a an nes game and like it actually felt like an nes game that could have come out on the nes and would have been like one of the best n games ever. But still utilizing, I think, some mechanics that no one had ever thought to include in the past. Right, that's what I'm saying. Like if it had come out and had this like Dark Souls-esque structure of death and risk and reward, that shit would have been obviously so far ahead of its time. It's like a time traveler went back in time

and only had NES technology, but had the know-how of modern-day game design. Right. Essentially. Man, that game is just so good. All of the characters are so memorable. The mechanics are so fucking flawless. Like, the DuckTales-esque shovel bounce mechanic that you can use as a weapon in certain points that you have to use as a traversal mechanic in certain points is so like challenging but not in the way that nes games were challenging where they just

felt challenging so you would spend more time playing them uh it's just like man what a what a what a fucking fantastic game that was and the music and the presentation and i wish the graphics were good stop it stop it i wish they didn't put they'd put good graphics in instead of bad ones that look like an old game um like i wish they put like good guys oh like duct like the ducktales like the ducktales remastered yeah that's a great example of where like it was shitty like it was shitty and bad from where all old games used to look bad they couldn't do anything but we have like good computers now and stuff i just wish that they would put good graphics in like maybe like some better graphics just like put better graphics in it rather than make it look like old

and shitty and bad like it should use the cpus and the gpus more yeah that's the problem they weren't using the gpu they were just using the CPU. I've got games on my phone that have better graphics. You are the worst person. Have you guys played Crossy Road? It's sort of like that. For me, it's Shovel Knight. That game I just adored. Yeah, Shovel Knight.

Shovel Knight. I'm outvoted here, but I love Shovel Knight, too, so I feel pretty good about it. Okay, that's our game. That's round one in the bag. Awesome. Eight. I think things only get harder from here, crazy enough.

Do you want to bounce through the eight, and then we'll come back and re-bracket them and have some fun? So we got Dragon Age Inquisition, Smash Bros. Wii U, Hearthstone, Far Cry 4, 4 dark souls 2 wolfenstein call of duty advanced warfare and shovel knight man that's a fucking good list i i it's a good list i feel like a lot of people myself included like thought this was kind of a bad year for games but i think that might just be because the games that we wanted to be good like there were a lot of games we wanted to be good that were very very bad but that doesn't keep the games that we wanted to be good, like there were a lot of games we wanted to be good that were very, very bad.

But that doesn't keep the games that are good from being good. You know what I mean? Amen. Great points all around. Salient, great points. Should we pretend like we're going to continue recording, but it's actually going to be the end of the show? Yeah.

Hey, guys, let's go make, let's talk some more about the rest of the thing. Let's take a break from ranking games and maybe talk about some other stuff. Halftime. Here comes Beyonce. She's taking the football field, and she's singing and singing and singing, and she's done. Now we can talk. Now that Beyonce's finally done singing.

Is this the panel part of the halftime show? Yeah. Guys, can I tell you what happened to me this morning? Is it related to Survivor or Bachelorette? No, because you never let me talk about those things. Yeah, well, that's for... This week, Survivor popped off. Don't tell me.

That last episode of Survivor was so good. We're not going to do it. I've enjoyed this season, but I can see that it is not the best. Christopher. Yeah, because they're all dummies. They are so bad at the game. Christopher Thomas Plant. Tell me what happened this morning. Okay.

So I got in the elevator this morning, right? And there's one other dude in the elevator. And I do not recognize him. And he hit a floor that I also work on. And I'm, like, a little confused. And I don't hit a floor. And at this point he realizes like, oh, this guy's going to the same place I'm going.

And he looks at me like, oh, hey, we're just two cool dudes going to the same floor. Like smiles and kind of like half winks. And I'm like, how do you, how does one half wink? Well, you know, it's like you want to wink. You squint with one eye. Yeah, but you don't go all the way.

Like, you kind of catch yourself. Gross. That's a gross. That's the grossest way to wink. It was wicked gross. And he had, like, this gnarly, like, pseudo beard, you know, where it doesn't connect to your ears. Where it's like, it's the devil thing and then, like, the mustache but nothing else. You're really painting a word picture.

You are. Got it? So he's doing all this stuff and I'm like, I don't know this guy, and I know everybody who works on my floor. So then I come in, and I, like, go and throw my stuff down, and I go into the kitchen, and he is, like, stocking up. He has a ceramic bowl full of shit, like, full of snacks, full of breakfast foods. He has a little carton of half and half. The dude has it all. Was it John Boyce?

No. I wish. That's the writer of Breaking Madden. And I don't know what to do. I'm like, oh, whatever. He must be new and hungry. And he's going to go back to his desk. Very hungry.

He's hungry. Great job, Edward. Wait, you thought he was stockpiling stuff from the kitchen to take back to his desk to have a satellite kitchen location? I was immediately proven incorrect because he beelines back from the elevator. Yeah. So now I'm wondering, this dude knew our floor. He knew where the treats were. How long has this dude been coming in and grabbing our grub that's

rough um do you guys want to talk about like the year in general because i know like we came up with some other it was a real shitter well i think we've we've managed to call out the actually good games but there were oh my god so many really either shitty shitty games or disappointing and we're recording this on uh like two days after we recorded the first half of the podcast just to clue you guys in because the thought of us being together for four hours is just not horrifying we just can't do it um so we did like literally just talk about how it was a pretty good year actually i'm there were some really good games that came out this year despite how like um awful and just awful across the board the year was um and i love that we've put together a few lists here uh one of them is just local

multiplayer games which i just wrote a thing about so we don't have to talk about that that's not awful that's great it's like the best thing ever. But boy, howdy, there's some rough games on here, including in our disappointing games column, we have Destiny, which was very recently up for debate. Game of the year. Well, we did talk at length about why it was disappointing. Which I think is actually appropriate for Destiny, right?

It is a really neat, ambitious game, but that just dropped the ball, I guess. Can we just talk about the bomb assault that was the Metal Gear Solid 5, 6 demo for $20? Like, that is the epitome of... I don't know if it was disappointing as much as it was just like a giant fu to anyone how much i i my level of excitement versus that actual product was like there were there were oceans in between i despise that i didn't see see i didn't i guess i wasn't like so excited about it because I kind of felt like, in my gut,

it wasn't going to be a super great deal, I guess. I hate talking about games in that context. Forget the deal. I didn't even think it was that good of a game. It's just not fun. It's not fun. I don't care about the money. And it basically just alludes to how unfun the full game is.

Oh, see, I thought the mechanics were cool. Oh, FBS. No, no, no, I did. I thought, see, I thought the mechanics were cool. Oh, FBS. No, no, no, I did. I thought, like, I really liked a lot of that stuff. I like the... I just... The combination of Metal Gear with, like, giant arenas where people are all over and, like, very open, that is not fun to me whatsoever. See, I like that.

And I liked the slow-mo reaction shot when you get spotted. I liked... I really did like a lot of this stuff it was just did you like kazuya and the other characters that we've all come to love from offshoot psp games yeah those are my favorites um i really liked it it was just like i i i forgot that fucking thing came out that year it was was just nothing to me. It was so... It was way too insubstantial. Guys, there is a game that is far more nothing than anything on this list, and it's really sad because...

It's interesting. It's interesting to see which one you're going to say because there are a lot of games that could fall into that category for me. I think it is 100% Thief. Yeah, I would agree. Thief was like, oh my... Do you remember when you guys tried to play that live for video

for Polygon? And it broke. And it broke multiple times. We couldn't get past the lockpick sequence. That was a real treat. Do you remember when Drive Club came out and nobody anywhere on the planet could play? So that's my biggest disappointment. Yeah. Like, no joke, because, I mean,

I have barely any interest in playing it and barely ever did. So it's rude to say it was disappointing when I didn't think the game looked like my thing to begin with. But Motorstorm was, like, one of my favorite franchises of the previous generation. Yeah. And I think that studio has such incredible talent. And then to see it be put on the most generic-looking driving game... But you knew that's what it was going to be.

...imaginable. I know, I know, but I still... It's more like the disappointment is applying to Motor Store, like the studio itself, than it is to this game. And it hurts me to see this game that was meant to be, like, the studio itself, than it is to this game. And it hurts me to see this game that was meant to be, like, a commercial cash-in, essentially, for it to flop on top of that

is, like, a double whammy waste. It's basically like if the team that made B2 Adventure Racing went on to make Drive Club. You are just, like, crazy. I mean, that's pretty much it. Why have we resuscitated that game? Why have we brought it... It got shortcuts for days. It's so effing good when there's's pretty much it. Why have we resuscitated that game? Why have we brought it... It got shortcuts for days.

It's so effing good when there's a dinosaur in it. For me, I think it's either... It's probably a toss-up between the crew, which I was really looking forward to, really loved the beta, really loved the open world of it, and then just the rest of the game was very bad. Or the Sims 4, which I was, like, really excited about,

and then just, like, came out with not a lot of shit to do. How do you goof up Sims? They've been making the same game for 10 years. Well, it's because, like... Well, they have to live in SimCity is the problem. Right, no. That was already so broken. No, it wasn't broken.

I don't think... That was not my problem with it. It was actually a fairly well-executed game. It was very well polished and it had, the problem was they focused way too much on systems and not on content that, or they, you know, wanted to sell the content,

which like, I don't know. I, I was less skeptical about that because they actually have released a lot of that stuff for free. Since the game came out, I haven't played it since they put fucking pools back into the game, but for free

but um yeah i was really looking forward to that one and then i played it like once through like one family life and then i was like well i never want to play this again which is weird they all died you just ended the life of the entire uh oh yeah i i wiped him out there was a blight um wouldn't it be great if the game connected to the new SimCity so every night it was a different family in your house? It was just new families came in? Well, that was the closest house. Are you going to play for like 70 hours

and then Godzilla stomps on your homestead? Justin, do you have a most disappointing game? God, you know, for me, and I know this is like kind of obvious because of course but for me um i i have played through every assassin's creed game every year like every one i always play it and the annualization thing does not bother me and i'm not going to be able to make it through unity i can yeah not do it it makes me because of technical stuff or because of the no it's just there is not a single sin of gaming in 2014 that is not perfectly represented by that thing yeah that it has systems upon systems upon systems that add nothing it has uh an app thing an app it has an app that is like actually actually makes the game worse

it's not like it's not it it literally does i mean it makes the game worse for being involved with the game it's a miserable that whole thing's a miserable experience that doesn't even work half the time the thing's a technical nightmare i had 15 minutes where my frame rate was like a slideshow and i eventually just had to reboot the whole console and that's like recent that's like after The thing's a technical nightmare. I had 15 minutes where my frame rate was like a slideshow, and I eventually just had to reboot the whole console. And that's, like, recent. That's, like, after it's quote-unquote fixed. The puzzles are miserable. You look at the map.

Like, do yourself a favor next time you're in Unity. Once you've got, like, a lot of areas opened up, like, zoom out and just look at that nonsense. Look at that vomit of video game. It, like, reeks of desperation of not knowing what's actually fun to do. Like, do you like this? We have no idea. Here's a thousand icons.

Man, that thing has so lost its way, and I really, I mean, I have no reason specifically to think that victory will be better. I am hopeful. I'm hopeful that it is. Taking a tube. I've wanted that setting for so long. I really hope it's fixed. But, man, I just... Woof.

Have you heard the Beatles? Okay. Is it going to be in Liverpool in the 60s? Yes, it's all in Liverpool. Well, thanks a lot, 2014. Smell you later. Oh, Elder Scrolls Online. Can that be my other one? Yeah, sure. Oof. Oof.

I played Elder Scrolls Online before to do my review. It was like I helped Phil do our MMO, our review. Oh, yes. Like him doing the MMO elements and me doing the Elder Scrolls-y things. And I know exactly how far I got in Elder Scrolls. Because there was a boss in my main story quest line that wouldn't... Not even a boss. Just a character I needed to kill that wouldn't spawn.

So I left my character logged in where he was supposed to appear. And every day I would log in and just see if he was there and ask around and see, hey, did he pop yet? Nope, he's still broken. Okay, catch you guys tomorrow. That's how far I got Elder Scrolls. That thing was miserable too.

It's my favorite franchise and I can't believe I disliked it as much as I did. Maybe it's better now. Our MMOs... This will be interesting. Are MMOs just done? Like, if they don't start with World of Warcraft, colon,

something. I mean, no. There was... There was Wildstar, which I liked Wildstar. I really did. I liked it a lot. I played it for two weeks. and then i just can't like it's it's a fine game it's just like i don't i just don't have any my problem with mmos is has always been since world of warcraft came out is that i've invested two weeks of play time into this thing and that's probably very very conservative um that just like i don't wanna i don't wanna divide my interest anymore and like i don't think that

mmos can come out obviously like uh i i could see myself getting into like an mmo slash other genre thing like i still think when planet side 2 comes to ps4 i'm gonna get pretty deep into that um because i really liked it on pc uh but but i i just don't see myself playing an mmo mmo rpg uh because like there's just so many of the systems world of warcraft got dead to rights and if there's just another game with those same systems again i just no thanks i i'm just not super interested destiny is an mmo despite what they might want you to believe it is pretty much it's a fantasy star it's a fantasy star online take on mmos it's very compartmentalized that's definitely true um uh i think that's the only chance you have though if you're just following

the wow model and trying to do it if you're just following the WoW model and trying to do it better you're not going to you can't I think every game is making its way towards that pseudo MMO territory that's the hook everybody wants you to be playing their game

indefinitely so you don't trade it in and so you don't buy anything else and you can keep buying and a lot of games like The crew are fucking it right up just like just like really screwing their pooch on it i just i i it used to be my favorite genre like i used to play every single one that came out and and now it's just like the more the work that world of warcraft keeps releasing these expansions where it just shows that like yep we're the fucking kings of this we are still super super good at this and nobody's even there is no close second um the more i the that i think that like i can't think of off the top of my head any mmos any straight mmos that are in development right now um i don't know i i think that that most people

abandon that format i i think that you're going to see... I don't know. I just feel like online gaming is going into more... Like, it's going into MOBAs and going into stuff that's more explicitly sort of gamey. I think even Blizzard recognizes that when you see them bailing on whatever that other project was and going for the more, like, shooter-y sort of thing

and then having Hearthstone and then going after MOBAs. Is that shit? Is that next year? Their new shooter thing? I mean, my guess is it would be. Yeah, I mean,

it's Blizzard, so who knows? I don't think they would show it if they didn't. Well, stop it. They showed World of Warcraft seven years before they released it.

So it's Blizzard. I wouldn't take anything for granted, but I do agree. I think, yeah, I'm more interested in the stuff that you guys said, like, like, MMO elements and other things.

Yeah. If they brought Phantasy Star Online 2 to America ever, I would be all over that shit. Sega, what the fuck, you guys? What the fuck? It's like the one game y'all have that I would be, like, crazy about. Also, didn't Phantasy star online one have that english to japanese translator in it in the dream yeah i think so i mean i mean it's not like that is let's remember it was also that is not the reason yeah god i love that game i remember me and justin and our dad and

travis used to all play at local co-op on the gamecube i remember justin had a hunter named oprah oh did you have a cool mag i got some mags god i love my japanese friends um all right let's hop back in all right semi final round time time for the guys guys i've got a semi for these games that sucked ew um do we want to start with number one on the list or or should we go backwards? Okay, so let's take a look and see which ones. Yeah, I think we work our way from the bottom. Okay. From the bottom of bottoms. Number four.

Wait, no. How do we? Wow, good job. Semi-final seed A. Wait, are these the semi-finals? This is a quarter final. Quarter finals? Guys, guys, guys.

I've got a quarter. So this is Wolfenstein versus Far Cry 4. Oh, fuck. Okay, so I thought that, like, we got to move through these rounds, obviously, much, much faster than we did last time because we have three rounds to go through now. But these matchups are brutal, though. Yeah, some of them are gonna be pretty bad so um this is sort of a tricky situation i think wolfenstein uh pushes a lot more boundaries in terms of storytelling oh the story is yeah like way better yeah way better way but i had way more

fun playing far cry 4 like but i would also agree with that although far cry 4 does not have you cutting holes in metal boxes that is so true that there is very little um lace box cutting you russet just reminded me of that uh the e3 demo way back in the day with wolfenstein and i know this isn't technically what the game actually is, but it really is amazing how good that game ended up being versus how awful it looked every time I saw it before the game came out. You know what was that other Activision game with the time travel? Oh, yeah, Wolfenstein. No, no, no, no. What?

Singularity? Singularity, exactly. Singularity, same thing. No one had any expectations. They basically buried it alive and it comes out it's like whoa this is actually good um far cry 4 though justin and i were playing it yesterday he was flying around in a personal helicopter which i grappled up onto just flying around like that and i zipped up onto the back of it and then i shot a grenade launcher into a river

and blew a fish out of the water and it was and it was the happiest I've been in a super long time. Guys, can I tell you why Far Cry 4 has to win this? Because Far Cry 4 I don't think will win the overall best game. But if Wolfenstein goes through, somehow

it will win the best game. I know this scenario. Yeah, it's that game where it's like, yeah, we liked it. Okay. I mean, for me, my reason for wanting to put Far Cry 4 through is less contrived than that. I've just had a lot of fun playing co-op. For me, co-op is the reason Far Cry 4 is this super special thing. Although we were talking about, before we started recording, that Justin and I are maybe tapering off a little bit,

because we both have unlocked a weapon called the Buzzsaw, which is basically like a fucking hate laser that can cut the world in half, and has made taking down the strongholds just a little bit boring. We took down Pagan Men's Fortress. Like, the big guy's main base. And, like, after you finish the final boss. Three minutes. Yeah. Yeah, like...

But, I mean, it's still, like, I've still gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it, and I've also been, like, really enjoying meticulously going through and completing everything. Like, I never obsess about... i'm not a completionist at all yeah weirdly the side missions are all like they're all super fun i just started doing the kirat uh fashion week quest where you have to hunt down certain uh boss there's like a

super honey badger there's a super honey badger that you have to take down which by the way i love that they're harping on that joke now um but yeah, there's a final boss honey badger you have to take down. And when you try to accept the mission, it makes you keep accepting the mission. Like, are you sure? Have you thought about this? Okay, I don't think you're coming back from this one. Yeah, like, all that stuff is really fun. Taking down all the strongholds is fun.

I've sort of, like, decided that I think I'm going to go for the platinum. Yeah, me too. Which I never um i've sort of like decided that i think i'm gonna go for the platinum um which i i never i never do which sort of speaks to me neither i never go oh shut up um i got them all baby all of them you have every platinum every plan you're amazing sing star 2 i rock yeah sure i always go for the garbage ones like um uh avatar the last airbender well no but like the resistance ps vita game oh um shit anyway for me it's for me it's far cry 4 i vote far cry 4 yeah me too who'd have thunk it right like i mean i i mean i from a ubisoft considering all the mess that ubisoft went through this year yes i was that and more that just like i i didn't i wasn't that inspired by what i played a far cry

4 at e3 and i thought that all the trailers you know look cool very stylish but i just thought it's more far cry 3 and then i played it and was like oh fuck that's right far cry 3 ruled that was except for the crappy story. Yeah, yeah. That game was super rad. And they sort of fixed the writing. I actually like the writing in this game. And the co-op, though.

If you haven't played the co-op, Russell, I haven't. Let's play it today. Yeah. Give me a time. I got nothing better to do. Yeah, sure. All right.

Round three. Round two. No, it's quarter... Round two. No, it's quarterfinals ranked the next level the next matchup to be to be hearthstone versus shovel knight oh my god guys i'm sorry this is like this one's easy i mean i honestly think it's easy too but for me it's not easy at all shut up no it is just a game uh griffin i'm sorry stone is a game that we will be playing in years from now. Yeah, you know full well that Shovel Knight is going to get booted.

I don't want to... Let's talk about how good Shovel Knight was. People can't see this right now, but we have a Google Doc that has these things on it, and Griffin is literally stroking the words Shovel Knight with his cursor. It's like lightly being highlighted

in memory of... I am doing that shovel night was just like this it was the first game that came out this year that i like loved it was the um i i don't even remember when it came out but um i sort of felt like early 2014 that it was gonna be a bad year for video games like there there were huge stretches for this year where and i hope this doesn't like reflect poorly on me as like a video game professional or whatever but there were huge stretches of the year where i didn't have a game i was looking forward to and that's like a horrifying thing yeah that's like three months at least where it was just like a desert of crap and it wasn't that there weren't games coming out. It was that when I looked through the known future of the industry,

I just didn't have anything I was really looking... I was really psyched to drop. And I can't describe to people who aren't in the industry what a scary feeling that is. It's either one of two things like either the industry is just not producing great stuff and i think that may have been part of it or just that you're out of touch or like you're losing i know people who fall out of love with this industry who work in this industry and then it's like well i have to leave now and and i don't know it's really scary when

that happens especially when you're a member of something called specifically the Enthusiasm Press. If you can't work up enthusiasm anymore, it's a pretty scary thing. But then I remember Shovel Knight came out. And it's like, this is a total cornball thing that people say about stuff. But I mean it more about Sho shovel knight than probably any other game that came out this year it's a game that reminds me why i love video games and i think it's maybe because it's so reminiscent of the games that came out like when i was born um it it reminded me of the games that made me love video games in the first place so like that game will always have

a very very special place in my heart for very sentimental reasons but fine hearthstone i played it last night for like three hours so sure i already deleted shovel night shovel night is i was obsessively stroking i i hope a lot of people also try shovel night too and they don't have the uh what's called the the justin mcelroy problem where they look at a game and they decide that it's not for them because it looks like it was made in Poohland. And then there's a broken wing on a little seagull that crashed into the ground

and Justin's like, this is the prettiest seagull. This 3D mess. It's very much like Charlie Brown Christmas Tree Syndrome. Have you guys, since we last recorded, played any more of the new Hearthstone expansions? I really want to have a conversation about how fucking cool these new cards are i didn't realize that the uh my ipad hadn't been touched in about two weeks so it was completely dead but i did charge it up just to get those three

yeah well good so we'll see if i get you're probably already i don't know if they're still on offer though do you think it's weird right because it's like like if i hop into this game and i literally haven't played for like two months i i realize that everyone's a little bit in the same category but like could i just win with like my basic cards just because no one would be ready for that um i mean that's the interesting thing about because i think that people will be ready for that that's that's the thing thing about Hearthstone. No, because I think that people will be ready for that. That's the thing about the new Hearthstone cards. I feel like people were still even getting used to the cards that were introduced in the next Ramis that everybody had. Yeah.

Because there's no luck of the draw there. Right, right, right. There's no chance. You just get them when you complete the challenges. So I feel like people were still getting used to... There are a lot of cards that do some interesting things with death rattles which is a just a basic card mechanic and people were still getting used to how to integrate those into their decks and how to counter those um and then all of this new shit came in uh gnomes versus goblins adds a whole new mechanics like um there are a lot of cards that have a 50 chance to attack

the wrong enemy which you see that in a card and you think oh that sucks because you know the game is all about carefully considering your attacks and your trades and if your cards can uh attack the wrong enemy why would you use it that was my reaction to it until i realized that like that means you can get past an enemy that has taunt and you can attack an enemy that isn't taunting or you can attack an enemy that has stealth um that you couldn't normally target there are so many strategic applications so you'll be a little bit lost but like the broad strokes concepts of how you win which is either you know rushing the enemy or maintaining control of the board or maintaining card advantage like those broad concepts won't ever change they will just have different ways to get to them with the new stuff. Every time I look at Hearthstone, I just think I want Blizzard to make more of these types of games.

Which is to say, granted, it's not quote-unquote a small game, but it's a much smaller game than the games they've been making. And look at how well their game design know-how converts into a smaller atmosphere. Agreed, y'all. Let's save it. We're going to be talking about Hearthstone some more. Shut up. Agreed. Next round.

Talk what I want. Smash Brothers Wii U. This is quarterfinals 3A. Oh my god. Shut up. Delta timeline. Bye week. Okay, Smash Brothers Wii U

versus Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. A natural matchup. Kevin, this is, for what it's worth, the only one that does not match up well in the quarterfinals. I don't know about you guys, but Kevin Spacey is my favorite fighter in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. He plays Jigglypuff, right?

He does the voice. Jigglypuff. He does it in his... I do want to... Yeah, I want to take a moment. So I went over to Plant's house a few weeks ago to play Smash Bros., and we had seven people playing... Strangers. Strangers. Well, not really. Yeah, I want to take a moment. So I went over to Plant's house a few weeks ago to play Smash Brothers,

and we had seven people playing. Strangers. Strangers. Well, not really. I knew half of them. And at one point, we all agreed, okay, we'll start doing random. Everyone has to play a random character. So it got, like, a lot of, like, Game & Watch and stuff like that that no one ever plays.

And then at one point, people that plant plants we uh avatar was on the system and suddenly we had seven plants battling it out and you know who won plant one real plan oh it's because you you know the contours no i i had only used that character once but i think there's a natural connection that happens between you and your week i think well yes i think that's probably true. It was an amazing experience. I really thought it was superb. Call of Duty, I've actually not played a ton of the campaign,

but the multiplayer is quite fun, even though I very quickly got outmatched by everyone, and I've been playing Call of Duty games forever. I don't know. It's exciting and really interesting for that franchise to make so many changes to their core gameplay mechanic that i have no idea how you go forward from here like i don't even for like another military shooter i don't know how you make just a base

military shooter where everyone just runs on the ground anymore okay here's what's interesting about this this matchup that actually kind of makes sense. Both of these games are sequels and franchises that I feel do not change a whole lot from iteration to iteration, but these two are the best versions in a long time, if not ever. Well, certainly for Smash Bros. Yeah, for Smash.

I think Call of Duty changed pretty damn dramatically. It's excellent. I think Call of Duty changed pretty damn dramatically. It's excellent. Granted, it doesn't really seem like it from the outside, but Call of Duty, I think, changed. I mean, when you're changing core mechanics like Jump... Oh, no, I'm saying this time it changed dramatically. Yeah, but I don't know that Smash did, to be honest.

It didn't what? Change that dramatically. Oh, yeah, fucking... Yeah, it did. It's super good. Yeah, I think it it's quite what would you say is the biggest difference apart from eight player multiplayer i think eight player alone is i mean that's a pretty fucking big difference you can't just write that off it's like the best part of the game okay but the gameplay remains essentially the same it's way more fun with eight players instead of four but they didn't change anything about the- You can't play as Lucas now, so that does suck. Yeah.

Yeah, but Ness. But- I was bummed about- Justin, do you want to weigh in on this conversation, or are you just- Are you cool? Okay. I think it's Dark Souls 2.

Well, it's not- That's not up for contention. You weren't paying attention, were you? What have you been doing? What have you been doing for the past ten minutes? Smash Bros. and Wii U is not a very good game. I figured that was pretty clear from my point of view.

I didn't think I needed to make it clear that I think Call of Duty Advanced Warfare... Well, I can't say that. Yeah, you can't even say that. I mean, Smash Bros. Wii U is probably a better game. It's just not my cup of tea. Yeah, I really like Call of Duty. I think Smash Bros. Wii U is... Yeah, for me too. And it's just Justin's... Not Justin's cup of tea because his baby is i really like call of duty i think smash yeah for me too and it's just justin's not just a cup of tea because his baby is too young to play right i'm gonna come to town and

i'm gonna give you a smash clinic i'm gonna teach you all about the secrets you should go to the local college justin and meet some college friends and just hang out and drink beers and go to the with them sounds like the actions of a sane happy man. Go to the Campus Christian Center, which is where I used to participate in Super Smash Bros. Melee Tournament, and then get David Berner to teach you. He'll do his Smash Bros.

rap for you, and then he'll teach you how to smash. It's terrifying. Oh, this next one. Okay, so the winner was Smash Bros. Wii U. The next round. Oh, this next one. Okay, so the winner was Smash Bros. Wii U. The next round, Dragon Age Inquisition versus Dark Souls 2. Okay, both of these start with D, so that's a good start. Yeah, you'll know where. And they have nothing else in common.

Well, I mean, they're both RPGs. Fantasy RPGs. Yeah. For me, it's Dark Souls 2. I finished Dragon Age, age actually since the last time we recorded um and i don't know it gave me some more time to think about what the game does really really well and what this sort of what sort of doesn't hold up uh for the i think I tapped out around 60 hours. And there are, the world and the lore building of it is like unlike anything I've,

I think Bioware has set the new sort of standard for that. Yeah, but did you read the Grimoire cards in Destiny? Oh, no, I didn't. You didn't go to the website and read all that? By the end of the game, like I had built, my decisions had affected the world in a way that like, I don't know, was so much more tangible than it has been in like any of the Mass Effect games.

Like I was so embroiled in like the civil war between the Chantry and the Rebel Mages and like the ending of that game is basically like how it has been for past dragon age games and i won't spoil it any of the like personal stuff probably like a big dragon or something no it's the end the the ending ending is like a rundown of where the world is at and seeing like how my decisions how whom i supported uh changed changed the world had me like i don't know i guess i guess i felt this way when i finished uh dragon age origins where i was just like so hungry for dlc just to keep keep developing this world that

i built um yeah you get i i you know i haven't played this is actually the first dragon age game i've played but i certainly felt that way playing like fallout and fallout new vegas and stuff like that uh although generally in those situations um it's like you know did you blow up megaton and that's like the big decision it you're making. It's way more nuanced than that. It's way, way, way, way more nuanced than that. One of the world-shaping things is there's a person who is elevated to a seat of power. And I didn't make that decision. It just happened based on how I played the game and a lot of other very little decisions I made. That I was just like, I don't um that I was just like I don't

know I was just blown away by uh yeah my I I am in love with Dragon Age and it's probably going to be the one that I recommend here the I literally just having played it in the past two days the one beef I have is that when you go to these different worlds across, like, the large world map, right? You'll go to the forest world, or you'll go to the kind of, like, graveyard world, or the desert world, that they start to feel like... And maybe this is, like, seeing too much

what's going on behind the scenes, but game design blueprints. Like, I just went to this desert stage, and it's like, oh, this is the one where there's lots of verticality, and to find things, I'm gonna have to find ways up and down, where it'll look like a thing I need to find is right next to me, but actually, it's 30 feet above me, and then to find the next thing i have to go 40 feet down and it's like this is the confusing confined map and then the next map is the big open one and then the one after that is the like big boss one uh and none of that's it's not bad it's just disappointing because and that this is where i feel almost weird being so critical of these things. What's great about the game is so unbelievably great and set such a high bar that when I have to, like we said yesterday, manage my inventory, it's like, how the hell is this a thing I have to worry about. So, one of the things I wanted to talk about, about, like, things that don't,

that aren't as good at hour 60 as they are at, like, hour 15. And, I don't know, it's kind of a letdown for me, is, like, I don't know what you guys were playing as. I was playing as a dual dagger rogue. And I had a fairly balanced party. You know I was rolling with iron bull you know that was my dude um yeah i was i got so powerful that first of all i stopped using the tactical

combat entirely just because i didn't need to and it started to turn into a slog where like every time i ran onto any enemy i would have to freeze time and then execute the same like commands for the same people every fight that never changed it was always get down a barrier throw down a free spell um get get my archers to use their powerful attacks that have the long cooldowns get my rogue stealth get my rogue poisoned like it was the same order of commands it never changed um because eventually like i filled up my command deck and wouldn't have you know more room to add more abilities so not only that it just i just didn't need to use it anymore like i i had my rogue was just capable of of dealing obscene amounts of damage so all i

had to do was get behind somebody, hold down the R2 button, and use my cooldowns when I had the energy to do it. That's so interesting, because I haven't touched the command deck since the first time. Likewise. Since after they told me what it was,

I didn't touch it again. What do you mean? I just, I mean, I never, I didn't do it again. Do you mean the tactical view? Yeah. Okay. Like, I don't, yeah. The most I'll ever do is tell people to attack the same target as me.

And I, that's fine. Like, I was excited about the command deck because I liked Dragon Age Origins combat a lot more than I liked Dragon Age 2s. And I think Inquisition kind of tries to find a happy medium by having both of them in there. But I don't know. I just, for me, the game ended. I wanted to keep learning about the world, right? And I wanted to keep shaping the decisions. I was so invested in the characters and the world.

Mechanically speaking, though, like, I was not having a lot of fun in combat anymore by the time i reached the end of the game because i had i had basically just been doing the same stuff since i unlocked my um inquisitors uh extra class um since i got in there and and unlocked a couple of abilities basically like every fight was exactly the same from that point on so it it started to feel honestly like a little bit long in the tooth which i know is weird because i just said in the first half of the podcast that i didn't think that was going to happen but so out of curiosity why not respec i i've done that um once and i might do it again uh i have a row that that was built around bows and bow combat, and then I swapped over to daggers just to kind of, like, mix it up and get something different going.

Why not respec and try to freshen it up? It's just not how I, like—well, first of all, by the time I would have done that, I would have been so deep into the game that it would have been, like, me completely changing shit, like, right before the finale. I don't know. It's just not how I play RPGs. I like to focus on just one thing, and then expand and evolve inside of that thing, but I wouldn't... I don't know. Yeah, I think I'm going to take this obvious alley-oop for why Dark Souls is great,

and why I generally prefer that sort of game over any other RPG, and why I didn't play RPGs up until Dragon Age basically, is you're right. It feels better to have control of the combat. And for the combat to be, in the case of Dark

Souls, I think endlessly enjoyable. That is the meat of the game, and I don't get tired of doing that, and I like the feeling of getting better and better and better at it. That said, I always just dealt with the combat in Dragon Age. I think it's pretty and fun-ish, but I think that why I was able to get into it versus any other RPG is because

for the first time the story really felt excellent it felt like it was worth getting through. I think it's the best story Bioware's ever done I really do yeah I mean I have no idea I'll agree with you so full of

it nails like character moments in quests that are completely missable. I mean, most of the things in the game are completely missable if you're taking a different path. But, like, there are some that are, like, they put amazing character work in, like, tiny little things that you may not even see. Like, that you may not, like, okay, for instance, I chose to romance the advisor, Jacqueline, is that her name? No, that's right. Josephine.

Josephine, thank you, thank you. Yeah, we're very close. Josephine, thank you. Yeah, we're very close. So I did that line. And if you follow that, not only are you doing missions where you go to find her family crest and there's some actually decently written romantic dialogue. It culminates in this scene where you – well, I won't spoil it if you're planning to go down that path but um like it culminates in a scene that would be entirely admissible and is actually like kind of moving like actually kind of genuinely romantic if you've chosen to go down that path

and that's like one of a million different roads you could go down like that the storytelling achievement of dragon age inquisition is is absolutely gobsmacking to me. I cannot believe how much is in this game. Dark Souls 2, I want to talk about because, like, honestly, it has been a while since I've played it. Because, like, it was, for me, it was the only game I played this year for maybe four straight months. Thanks to the fact that, like, I played it and played it and beat it and played it and beat it. And then the PC version came out and I was like, well, the cycle begins anew. But that was a while ago.

And I don't know, I'm having a hard time coming up with descriptive floral prose for it. Because it because like i literally just finished dragon age last night i love dark souls 2 i i loved for me i feel like the thing that it nailed was the thing that dark souls the first nailed which was like every little thing you find in that game, every little, every fucking like point that you add to a single statistic is so like desirable and so meaningful and completely changes like how you play the game. And that's something that RPGs struggle with and absolutely have to nail in order to be like really great mechanically. And I think it's something that

dragon age inquisition doesn't really nail so well um because like i don't know did you guys ever uh unlock a an ability and it's like if you unlock this ability you get plus three dexterity and it's like great i have no fucking idea what that means but if you add like one point to attunement in dark souls you're like oh yeah gonna unlock a new spell slot gonna yeah but that's not always i mean some of the attributes do not have that level of you know tangible benefit and you can also have that pleasure of uh going further than you actually need to without knowing that you need to go like not go as far with that and then wasting well you can also respect in dark souls 2 which is well

where you spend your points i should say um i just i i've never like there is still no rpg out there well that does this stuff better um like i'll find a sword and i'll be like oh that sword's tight i need four more strength i'm gonna level up my strength and get stronger and now i'm gonna use that sword like every and then the feeling of like using that sword effectively is like more and then finding the materials like oh shit now i can upgrade this sword now i can imbue it with fire okay yeah now i'm gonna go with a fire build so there is no rpg in existence that handles those mechanics better than than the soul series does yeah so here's the difference between these two games for me in terms of what i enjoy and also what i enjoy when i play dnd right when i play dnd i like the

storytelling i like feeling like i'm on an adventure and playing dragon age is again the first time where it's really felt like that when i found out that I was part of a natural elf community that had rebelled against basically the current state of how people, how elves are treated in this world, I actually gave a shit. That's sumptuous, yeah. Which was

amazing, and I was so happy that I gave a shit. Dark Souls feels like that style of D&D play that i don't like even though i do like dark souls where it's like okay uh i'm gonna roll this and i'm gonna have to use this and if i if i max out these weapons i can get through this dungeon and it's the math version of dnd which i get a lot of people love but drives me absolutely up the wall so the reason i disagree a little bit i agree with

you about the storytelling i think dragon age inquisition does that a lot better but there are countless moments in dark souls 2 that are just like first of all the um for all the problems that you had with the settings and dragon inch inquisition I think Dark Souls 2, like, has some of the most incredible scenery in, in any- Yeah, oh, yes. That's franchise- And it's- Right, that's, like, their jam.

World building. And the- I think a lot of the Souls franchise, uh, strength is, like, the monsters, like, the enemies that you run into not only, like, look crazy, not only have some really crazy designs, but then you also have to think like oh shit how am i gonna not get killed by that thing and so sort of like punch out stop it so so those two ideas come together for all kinds of really spectacular moments like i remember the first time i went into the um the uh black gulch and i'm like well this place sucks there's like poison statues everywhere and oh fuck a sarlacc just popped out of a wall.

Oh, Jesus, I hate this place so much. This is the scariest place I've ever been. Like, it has so many moments like that where these oh, shit monster moments combined with these settings to make you feel like completely oppressed. And then also, this is another another souls thing but like beating through that oppression like fuck yeah black bi-cultural just beat you is still some of the most exhilarating rewarding moments in gaming period it's really it's really an interesting dichotomy between the two because the adventure that you have in dragon age inquisition is so personal. You know, it is like, it is going to be exactly your thing. And I would argue that it is almost fingerprint-like

in like how different each person's playthrough will be. I doubt anybody, there might be a lot of similarities. Nobody's going to have, you know, the exact same stuff that they do. There's just so much. And it feels very personal as a result. Dark Souls 2, on the other hand, is interesting because it's a shared thing, which I think is really actually kind of rare. I think difficulty honestly plays a big part in that. When Griffin was talking just now about Black Gulch, I had literally pulled up the wiki page on Black Gulch so I could remember the name of it so I could mention it specifically. Like, Griffin's bringing up Black Gulch brought a response to me that, like, we actually share because we both went through the same thing.

And there aren't a lot of games, I think, that are doing that right now. That's kind of an old school thing. Right, like, there's a lot of – I call the original Dark Souls the best Castlevania game ever made because it had that idea of these when i put say like castlevania and clock tower in the same sentence you know exactly what i'm talking about like for i don't know how they accomplish it unswervingly but but from software is capable of making these incredibly iconic moments and then just stuffing dozens and dozens of them in a single game experience like the reason i replayed dark souls 2 like a day after i finished it was just because like i don't know man like i remembered it like i it's like when you see um it's like when you see a movie that has like a big twist ending and you think like oh i want to watch that again right now just because

i want to see like how that secret uh was was played out through the course of the movie like i felt that same way about dark souls 2 where it was like well now that i understand this thing that like when you first start playing it is a complete mystery that tells you almost nothing like i really want to i don't know i want to play through it again in that context again I really want to, I don't know, I want to play through it again in that context again. I feel like it's weird because the word difficulty is what we use for these games, but it's like difficult music or difficult films where it doesn't even need the twist. It's that first time through, it's so hard that you still enjoy it,

but you're also just dealing with the pressure of getting through it. And then to be able to go back and just enjoy it for what it is as, like, a work of art. And to have that pressure removed, but to still kind of see the world. I don't know. There's something very precious about that. I mean, that's, we mention it every year, but Spelunky for me is, like, that sort of thing. Or, like, on Netflix, like, Failure to the Launch. Sure. I mean, definitely. And every time I watch that,'m like the early mcconaughey yeah sure i love that in dark souls that that sense of um uh i'll tell you what it always reminds me of is that bit in princess bride when they're in their fire swamp and they've been there for long enough that they

he talks about how they can sense like well i know when this pops i need to move because the there's about to be a fire spurt like that sort of feeling i i can't name hardly any games other than maybe i think spelunky is another decent example but because dark souls is is is codified and and doesn't change each time like no that sense of like oh i know this i can get through this and it's still hard but like i know this place like the back of my hand i gotta wish more games felt that way and and that's something i think where um uh dragon age actually falls down on uh dragon age is uh expands uh on the problem that dragon age 2 had i mean mean, attempts to fix it, I should say. Dragon Age 2, you

return to the same caves over and over again. It was miserable and crappy. I would say that for Dragon Age, the landscapes are varied and beautiful, but they don't... I don't ever have a sense of where I'm at. I don't know where... I mean, I know this is the sandy place

that I hate, because it takes forever to get anywhere. But the areas don't have the character, anywhere near the character, that even one stage of Dark Souls 2 has. Right, like Hyde's Tower of Flame. I can remember so many different... What about the one place where it's all dark and you're going between different platforms? And then you have those monsters that explode on the bridges to knock you. Yeah.

Oh, man. What was that? What place was that? I can't remember the name of it. Also, the multiplayer in Dark Souls 2 is pretty great. great and then and it and it did add that layer of um randomness to it where like um you're having a really hard time getting through a certain area and so you keep playing through and you keep playing through and then finally like you crack the code you figure out the best line to run and then you get invaded and it's like well shit oh the gutter gutter yeah what a good name for

guys you know what i I don't know. Can we take a vote? For me, it's Sursals 2. How about everybody else votes? No, I'm going to do it last. Okay, Justin? Can we do a secret? How about we all just say it at the same time?

No, that's going to be madness. I'll say three, two... One, two, three, and then say the name. Sorry just say it at the same time? No, that's going to be madness. I'll say three, two... One, two, three, and then say the name. Sorry, say it. I'll say one, two, three, and then say it. Okay. Hold on, wait, I gotta think. I don't know.

Oh, I wish this was the finals. If this is how we decide the finals, I'll quit the show. Okay, got it. That's fine. Ready? One, two, three... Dark Souls. Dragon Age. dark soul dragon floating last oh you son of a bitch all right i vote dark yes oh gosh okay cool uh our first deadlock it's just guys it's a better game it really take it take it from me the guy the only person on this game who's beaten dragon age dark

souls is better that's pretty convincing here here would be my argument for dragon age we're gonna have bloodborne here next year oh no come on the very next episode but we need to stop joking about us doing that um here's the other thing uh dragon Age feels like a huge improvement over a game I did not play. While Dark Souls feels like more Dark Souls. No, no, come on. No, that's cutting Dark Souls 2 way too short. Dark Souls 2 is an enormous... No, everyone else who loves Dark Souls would say the exact opposite.

You know what? But Plants, see, I feel the exact same way. I couldn't finish Dark Souls 1, and I adore Dark Souls 2. Well, opposite. You know what? I... But, Plant, see, I feel the exact same way. I couldn't finish Dark Souls 1, and I adore Dark Souls 2. Well, that's true for me, too. Fuck. Okay, fine, it's Dark Souls 2. Yeah! I would say... Here's why I'm comfortable with Dark Souls. They both have

amazing elements, but what Dark Souls... What From did with Dark Souls that I wish Bioware had done with Dragon Age Inquisition is a pass to... As very, I think the huge variety and amount of stuff to do is a big strength of Dragon Age Inquisition. I still wish they had brought an editor's eye

to some of that stuff. Just to separate some of the chaff from the wheat a little bit more. And I think that Dark Souls 2, it is all killer, no filler. I think every choice, every area, every freaking enemy in that game is specific and intentional to provide a certain experience. So I am cool with Dark Souls 2. Praise the sun.

Now, guys, now I've got a semi. Y'all, can I talk about a mistake I made a little earlier? You didn't put Danganronpa in our top 16? Besides the obvious mistake. Earlier I said, oh, this is great, because the thing these two games have in common is they are games that come out regularly, but they're really great versions of that.

And now I'm realizing that's like half the games that we've talked about. It's like, oh great, more Far Cry, more Dark Souls, more Smash Bros. Well, Smash Bros., I don't think it's safe to call Smash Bros. release schedule regular. This is not an annualized franchise by any stretch of the imagination. Well, there were two releases this year. Well, come on. But even beyond that, when the games come out they are similar versions of the original game let me take a brief segue to say that plant maybe you

shouldn't address the table every time you make appointments because that's sort of where the mic is uh uh semi-time how have we stacked these final four up against each other? So we have Dark Souls 2 going up against Far Cry 4 in semi-bracket A, and Smash Bros. Wii U going up against Hearthstone in semi-bracket B. Okay. Hyphen X. All right. I'm ready to start throwing punches now.

Okay. Now it's popping off. Can we do the other one first? Yeah, let's do Smash and Hearthstone first just because we were just talking a lot about both. Is this the one that's going to break Griffin's heart? Let's actually talk about this one instead of being like let's talk about Hearthstone later when it

inevitably wins the besties game of the year. Let me talk about Hearthstone for a second because I have never gotten into, the last time that I got into a collectible card game was when griffin and travis and i all played that uh marvel superhero do you remember this griffin hero click uh yeah no not hero clicks it was a it was a car no card based yeah uh superhero game um and i have avoided this you know genre uh and i know that there's only sort of i guess structural ties between this and like magic or or what or you you giro uh or or whatever um but this was the game like leave, leave it to Blizzard to create a way of making a game that is both unfathomably deep, but also completely accessible to somebody who had no, like, basically no prior experience with how to play this game. every point it is there it there are so many inscrutable game experiences that are available

now that are like extremely rewarding but also extremely inaccessible i mean i i think even blizzard is responsible for some of them i i would i would put like um you know i would put uh sorry you know the space one what's the one like oh starcraft starcraft yeah uh 34 years old woof it's i'm feeling it um i would put starcraft in into that camp you know it seems extremely cool uh aside from playing the single player i i can't really engage with it but um hearthstone is so good about at every step of the way you feel like someone is there holding your hand and sort of guiding you towards the a fun thing that you are actually prepared to do i jumped into that game again not having played since uh basically august i think uh and within a couple rounds i was like back back in the groove and that's that's astounding here's the best praise

i can give hearthstone it is the best digital card game since s and k versus capcom card fighters clash on the neo geo pocket colors since the pokemon trading card game which was the only other point of reference i have for a card game. Those are literally the two I played. You guys are literally, you keep saying that you have no background or no experience in card games. I literally have never played, bam, one up to all of you, have never played a collectible card game before. I didn't know how to play Magic. I don't know how it happened. It didn't appeal to me.

Like, the idea of collecting cards and, like. They're not video games. Well, right. They're not video games. Yeah, I guess that's fair. But also it just like i didn't i don't know it just never i was never in a situation where i wanted to play one and the fact that they were able to make one that can appeal to someone not only feels like a video game a it feels like a video game but not only that like it appeals to people that don't even quite play video games like it's such a good gateway video game for people to get into it just because everything is explained to you oh my gosh

you don't need to memorize anything it's amazing i want to share a story about two of my friends uh jack and diane jack and diane i had heard that he liked magic and i was like you should try this hearthstone he's like eh i don't have time for video games in my life, and there's nothing that comes with this for like two or three months. Then I see them recently, and they don't even talk to me. We went on this like little writing retreat, and both of them on their off time, I find them in the living room lying on couches, and they are like zoned in to Hearthstone. And I was like, oh, how long have you been playing this and I can't talk playing Hearthstone?

So it ruined your friendship as well. It ruined the friendship. They don't talk to each other, they're just Hearthstoning all the time. And that, like, astounded me. As a point of contrast, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U has intensified and the

pleasures of my friendships oh nice transition in a in a um menage a octo uh the the smash brothers for wii u has only brought me and my friends closer together so i think the choice is obvious next round we have dark souls 2 versus far cry 4 i am shocked i honestly thought you were gonna go with hearthstone i am honest to god i'm torn because i'm sitting here thinking of like things to knock hearthstone for i've spent money on it you don't need to but i have so like that's a that's a problem with myself more than it is a problem with hearthstone i'm just a broken person um yeah i mean that's the thing like i'm trying to think of negatives and it's like well the daily quests are the best way of making money but you only get one of those

a day so you have to wait to play the game again so it's like my knock against her is that i want to play it every day more than an hour like that's kind of busted for me and i know i've made my my stance on smash brothers wii pretty pretty well known but what i will say is that the parallel between these two is that they both represented types of games that i if you had asked me january 1 2014 are you into i would have said no and And I think that Smash Bros. Wii U for all that it apparently does very well missed a real opportunity to

create a game that could get new players really well acclimated. I don't think it has the hooks there to get somebody who has no idea of how to play it. I kind of disagree with you.

Because I've had that exact experience. This was the game where we had a big party at our place. We had a dozen of our friends over. And half of them had never played Smash Bros. before. The other half had probably only played the 64 version before. And after setting them all up and creating characters based off the Miis that I already had on the console, having them pick their special attacks so they knew in that creation process what each button did, and then throwing them all into a fight and seeing their own little avatars in there, like, that's the kind of shit that makes you want to learn how to play a game

and how to get better at a game. What you're describing is a scenario that is not endemic to the game itself. What you're describing is like, if you had four friends around you teaching you how to play the game, it's really easy to learn. Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, I would think so. I bet a lot of games are if i had four people i bet i could learn fucking door fortress

but i don't i was just me here in front of the computer but that's like it's a local multiplayer game like that's that's what it fucking is that's how that's not true because there are like but you can say that about most card games that's why i haven't learned any card games because i don't have people around to help me get into it which is why hearthstone's such a standout i'm saying that like it by if we're gonna fucking subtract the local multiplayer experience of smash from it like well that's what you're saying like it's it's i don't have friends that play video games so being so fucked this it's almost like we're traveling back in time 12 months to the day when we were arguing the

tower fall should be game of the year and justin's like i have no friends like honestly like it's a bit of a sticking point when you don't play locally with anyone and you just can't experience the best parts of a game do you think that has something to do with it choose i do you think that like if you do with it, Juice? Do you think that, like, if you were playing... I played more local multiplayer games this year than any other type of game. So, like, for me, Smash Bros. coming out was, like, a logical, like, yes, me and my friends are going to dig on this shit. And then when we did... But I can totally see, like, if that was not an activity

that me and my friends got into every time we hung out, then... It's like having... Getting Call of Duty, but not having an internet connection like you're sort of left see i would argue that even even then you could have a rich awesome like full featured experience and like that's again i don't think that's necessarily knocking um uh uh super smash brothers like it it is what it is but i i refuse to believe they couldn't have done more to to make it so that you didn't feel so sort of over let me give you an example and i'm using the 3ds version here as an example because i've spent more time with

that but i mean there's there's a lot of similarities you could draw but and i don't think we're necessarily uh you know i think they're pretty closely related in in super smash brothers for 3ds uh i i saw uh there's a way you can learn the basic controls in the game and the way you do that is not by like some there's nothing that says like tutorial or how to learn it you can watch a video if you leave it at the title screen sitting it'll actually tell you it'll show a little video that tells you how to play and then there was like the the missions for example like that that i i heard a lot of people said that they're really cool they're like bite-sized little things you can just do

i went to that screen and it's literally completely blank and doesn't say anything about how missions appear or when they'll appear or to check back later or whatever. That's the kind of decision that I'm talking about where like there's just not the level of consideration for people who are trying to get into something. And from – I think for me, I've got a lot of value. I put a lot of value in like experiences that stay fresh and are fresh to me because I don't have the experience with them. Hearthstone does that infinitely better. I'll give you that. Like, the intro sequence to Hearthstone plays every class. Okay, now that you've finished all these things.

And there's a little story. Not to mention that, but you feel engaged and they're like, oh, the best. Go ahead and get every class to level 10 and you'll unlock and you'll unlock like 200 cards like the best example of hearthstone uh design is a simple text box that says this next challenge is unfair screw the developers they're gonna screw you over essentially and beating that challenge you feel like okay i have a handle on this game it's this sim that simple level of like they're gonna mess with you a little bit but i'm still gonna use the stuff that i've learned in the last few battles to take advantage of the situation i also grant it's not that hard but still

i love also in hearthstone that you can uh uh one of the things that i think it it also does really well this is for again somebody coming from my specific perspective, but it allows you to feel like you are competent when in the broad scheme of things you are not, but there are like, you can get to a point where like, okay, I kind of,

I know what I'm doing. I can win a few fights here. Cause it's, they're really well matched. They're really well paired. And like, you can get into a place where you feel like you have that feeling of understanding. You have that feeling of understanding.

You have that satisfaction of feeling like you know what this game is and how to play it and how to be pretty competent. When in like the big picture, you actually don't. You are a baby. Griffin, do you remember that comment on your and Phil's video? It was like, oh, I love watching people have fun even if they're sub-part players. Yeah, and like that – but like I feel like that's something that it does so well that I wish like a game like – like I think Dota is a good example of a game where I just wanted that. I just wanted to be like sort of kind of basically proficient. And I invested 30 hours in it, which I know is a drop in the bucket for Dota.

But still didn't get to that point where I felt like I had any sort of handle. But the point I want to make, and I feel like I love Smash Bros. for Wii U. I still think I'll go with Hearthstone. But the point I want to make is I feel like Smash Bros. does that too. I feel like the controls for Smash Bros. aren't that complicated. There's an attack button there's a special button justin i would agree there's a dodge and a grab button like it really isn't that hard to get a grasp on it but i do think that feeling is harder to come by

because it's dependent on you finding a character that you really like and becoming you know relatively proficient with like a few of the things that they're good at. And then you get that very slow and what has been for me, very rewarding climb to proficiency, like a more universal proficiency where you learn what each character can do, where you learn how to respond to the millions of different situations that can pop up in any given Smash Brothers fight,

especially, and that's why I love A-Player, is because it takes that to an exponentially more crazy degree of you just constantly have to figure out the best way to respond to different situations, and that's something that you do get better at, and that's something that I have really, really loved. I don't think it is an uninviting game by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't think Smash Brothers an uninviting game by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think Smash Bros. is uninviting at all, because like you said, it's a borderline party game. I will say all these years later, I still don't know the purpose of Ness' Up special. The exploding thing? The blue thing?

People? Oh, the thing that you blow your... Yeah. You use that as a save. You can hit nest with it and he goes flying and you can save yourself from falling but no no not not sorry not that one no no i don't know anyway he's got a bat there there there is yes yes there are these characters who i don't understand what their purpose is in the game right and it would be it's a ton to ask for them to explain every character but hearthstone does do that which is why again it's so incredible is within probably an hour and a half i felt like i understood every class and had a pretty good

grasp of like dozens of moves that spanned all of those classes. I think that's an incredible accomplishment. Like, I'm not discounting Smash Bros. at all. Well, there's also, like, 49 characters in Smash as opposed to nine. And I understand it's a fighting game. It's kind of my responsibility. It would be a huge accomplishment

for Smash Bros. Wii U, and, like, huge in my sort of, like, enjoyment of it, if there would be a mode that would just say here are eight characters you know play through this series of challenges with them and you'll be competent with like at least eight characters so you can get started and like really

learn them and we're really going to teach you just these eight so you have a base to work off of and then you can build from there. That is something that Dota 2 does excellently where it says okay you're going to learn this character now and we're going to put you through your paces on them so you can build from there that is something that dota 2 does excellently where it says okay you're gonna learn this character now and we're gonna put you through your paces on them so you can at least play this one and know what you're doing and i really wish smash brothers would would do that and what's funny about smash is that they could do that because almost all the characters can be fit into these boxes right where like luigi and mario play very

similarly they just have minor ways. Melee characters, defense characters. Big heavy guys. That's sort of the idea behind the me customized characters is that they represent sort of the three main archetypes. They suck so much to play with. What? I mean, maybe because I've mostly played melee,

but I have not enjoyed the moves. You made a bad character. I need to play more as a ranged one. I don't think that's fair for me to not play as a ranged one. Anyway, I think we've made some pretty bizarre and broad comparisons between these two completely different games. They're both fucking fantastic games. And for me, they represent the two different ways I played games in 2014.

And that Smash Bros. for Wii U is the perfect represent the like two different ways i played games in 2014 and that smash brothers for wii u is a the perfect like um identikit of local multiplayer like joyous joyous video game playing that i don't know like i said maybe earlier in this episode or off the air that like god i i wish we hadn't considered towerfall last year because holy shit have i played a lot of tower fall ascension this year uh and sort of fell in love with that game all over again when my friends started playing with me i feel like even smash brothers may have superseded that and like the moments of pure let's not get carried away the moment of pure exhilaration i've gotten i am looking forward to that dlc by the way for tower fall yeah oh my god okay but the moments of pure exhilaration i got from smash brothers for wii u are completely different from like the

uh house of cards ask well no pun intended uh strategy like oh you've fallen into my trap that hearthstone gives you that like they're really really rewarding and and they they're they're great in a very solitary, cerebral way. Sure. Let's have a vote. Hearthstone. I'll give to Hearthstone, sure. Hearthstone. Hearthstone.

I also wanted to mention early on when we were talking about our trading card game experience that I did come in second place in a Pokemon tournament at Mid-Ohio Con. I remember that. So I just wanted to put that out there. Is Ohio that big that they need a top Ohio and a bottom Ohio as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this one's square

in the center. I got beaten out by a kid who was like six years my minor. He had a really lucky Magneton draw. Oh, I was so pissed off. But I did meet Lou Ferrigno that day, so it was worth it. What was this, last year? Yes, it was last year. Dark Souls 2 versus Far Cry 4.

Dark Souls 2. Yeah. I don't even know if we have to have. We've talked about both these games quite a bit, and we can talk about Dark Souls 2 some more when it goes up against Hearthstone. Far Cry 4 is really, really, really excellent. And again, I think it's similar to our last comparison.

It is so dependent on what you're in the mood for. There have been days this past year where if I had sat down in front of Dark Souls 2, I would have pulled my hair out, where I needed something like Far Cry 4 that really focuses on fun and silliness and being breezy. And I think it's got a ton of panache,

but I don't think it hangs here. I don't, I mean, obviously I don't think so either. Which again, like, don't just, Far Cry 4 is my favorite game like Far Cry 4 that came out this year. I don't want it to seem like it's just like a- Far Cry 4 is the best Far Cry game of the year. Well, no, it's one of my favorite,

it's probably my favorite open world game of the year. It's my favorite, like, dumb, fun game of the year. It's... I don't know, it's... Watch Dogs. Well... Yeah, no, I... That was my other huge disappointment.

Man, I would have... Anyway. No, Far Cry 4 is really good. It's just Dark Souls 2 is kind of a masterpiece. Should we talk about something else to cleanse our palates before it gets really fucking nasty in the finals? I don't think it's going dark souls 2 is kind of a masterpiece should we talk about something else to cleanse our palates before it gets really fucking nasty in the finals i don't think it's gonna get so nasty to be honest well that's because you want it to go away i don't want it to go i'd like i'd like to i'd like to to to bring up something oh can we talk about oh yeah that we

just as a discussion point um we talked before we went into Game of the Year stuff this year I was kind of like a little trepidatious because I felt like this year had been so full of not a lot of huge releases that I really loved

as I eventually worked on my list I found a pretty solid list of 10 that I felt great about I think the most interesting thing for me about game of the year discussions is that I think they are going to get they're already headed this way but I think increasingly

it's going to be really really hard to I think the sort of games that we usually consider for game of the year consideration are, that's a great sentence, are, um, are going to get fewer and far, uh, further between. Um, you look at something like, you know, we've mentioned, um, Towerfall a couple of times. Uh, I think Kentucky Route Zero is another example of this, of a game that almost like

it, I think increasingly the really interesting stuff is not going to be the games that are like build up, build up, build up, trailer, trailer, beta, release on a disc, DLC in six months. I think that you're going to see more games that don't fit the model that are doing like the the really really interesting stuff wait you think yeah so you think there's like smaller like made by like small like maybe i don't i don't mean i don't mean independent that's not what i'm talking about what i'm talking about i mean it's happening with big games too i mean evolving experiences like yeah rust is a great example of a game that like when it came out was like what i don't even know what this is and apparently like i haven't dipped back in griffin we should dip back in by the way yeah um i hear it's it's grown leaps and bounds again and that's gonna be got yeah i forgot about

rust completely i i i don't think it would have broken into my top 10 but holy shit i had some really great times with rust i i remember um very distinct distinctly one time Justin and I wanted to build a house together, which involved us scouting out a good place to build it, and then him and I running through the darkness, running through the woods with all of my valuables that I was bringing from my satellite headquarters location to our new home, and getting chased by somebody with a torch through the woods

and being fucking terrified. I think rust had a lot of uh problems but i remember stuff like that being some of my being some of my most memorable things that happened you asked for his pants and he just the guy who i took the shirt off his back literally the shirt i think also there there are games that are major studio games that are much better. Metro 2033, I know that you were on that train way back when too, Hoops, is an excellent game that was considerably flawed. The Redux version of it, I mean, it still feels ahead of its time as what a first-person shooter can be. And it's on my top game of the list.

Right. I mentioned this a while ago i think i tweeted something like this but i really do think this year we're gonna see more um there's there's gonna be a way bigger differential between different like game outlets game of the year i feel like in years past it's been pretty um standardized yeah like last year there were a bunch of gone homes there were a bunch of uh shit what came out last year there were probably some mass effect threes in there was that last year sure well now i've said this thing and i can't here's the best example i can point to look at a game like dota 2 or or you can take both Dota 2 and League of Legends if you if you want in consideration here those are two of the like inarguably the most powerful

franchises most powerful games that are operating right now and I doubt there was ever a time when someone said this was the year that Dota 2 or league of legends should be up for consideration oh yeah as a game of the year can you know what i'm saying i mean when it came out for when legal legends came out i think people still make a big deal that uh i think game spot gave it like a 6.5 like there was it was never but now we're getting paid now it's a different thing entirely it's a different thing entirely. I remember when I was getting pitched initially for the game by PR, and I was like, yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and pass. Like, no one

in a million years would have guessed that League of Legends would be as big as it is today. I think more and more Game of the Year lists are gonna feel more like trying to pick a magazine of the year. You know what I mean? Like, or trying to pick a television show of the year like i i think

that we're gonna keep moving away from this like oh i know what this this game is fits in this box right it came out this calendar year as a whole and i think this this is not the year that this started but as a whole i feel like those determinations are going to be entirely experiential. Like the reason that Gone Home was in high in my, my games of the year last year was because of the personal experience I had with it. And I, I feel like that's only going to, I mean,

that's that very much shaped my list this year. It's why I have a bunch of local, you know, co-op games on here is because of the experience I had playing them. It was so fantastic. It's the reason that Dark Souls 2 is on top of my list because the experience I had playing Dark Souls 2 was fantastic. I feel like we're moving away from the idea of craftsmanship,

although certainly that plays a role in the equation, but I feel like that very personal experience is going to be the biggest determining factor from this point forward. And it'll be interesting to see how that changes when stuff like when we all start playing these games on like Oculus Rift, as silly as that might sound, the experience of playing that game is going to be completely different.

And I could see that, you know, easily, uh, hitting some game of the year list next year. If, if I don't know if a strong contender launches on it and you know it becomes a bit more ubiquitous i do hope that some of the

things that we saw with re-releases that they become standard that it's not just something that is happening because of the shift from one generation of consoles to the next like if you look at metro these very bizarre uh shifts and how the difficulty works or how the game itself works, I hope things like that become DLC or just free additions to the game. Or if you look at Grand Theft Auto V, that first-person mode, I hope that's not something that exists just because— And the middle finger button. Holy shit, what a great button. And the middle finger button. Holy shit, what a great button.

But, like, I'm still amazed how much I've enjoyed the stupid first-person thing in GTA. One of my favorite memories of video games this year was when I got in that mode immediately, I drove out to the beach out in the middle of nowhere. I found a group of, like, 20-somethings having their little beach party at night and tried to, like their party and then they like yelled at me and i stood there and looked at them so then they started pushing me so i shot one of the guys in the leg and then they all screamed and called the cops so i went into the ocean and looked up at the scott the

stars as i heard the police getting closer and closer. And then it was gunned down in the waves as they crashed over me. That's like a Michael Mann movie. It was. Well, it was also like a certain other drive movie. It's just so weird and it makes everything about

GTA so much sillier I guess when you put it in first person mode. Wrecking in first person mode is is amazing it's really really genuinely funny every time because them cars spin um yeah i i i don't know i feel like the this um broadening of the game of the year conversation is only going to lead to it being a less like important It's already not important. I mean, it's already bullshit. We should make it clear, if there is any confusion at all,

that this is, the besties is not Polygon's, like, Game of the Year, obviously. It doesn't, no offense to Polygon's thing either, but, like, picking a Game of the Year is fucking the dumbest, most inane thing ever. Like, it's like, best movie of the year big fucking whoop like we work it's an excuse to talk about all these things you loved all right and and we we work in our and are enthusiastic about an industry that is at its very core the most divisive industry in existence like oh yeah i've been thinking about this a lot lately. More than book critics, film critics, music critics. What about fracking?

That's not... Oh, God. Maybe music is the closest comparison. But there is no other industry, there is no other media where genres are like these huge barriers between like there are people who play fighting games who are categorically different than people who play rpgs and and i don't think there are as many genres in any other uh medium and i certainly don't think that there's as big a divide between those genres. Not only that,

the games, by their very nature, are interactive, meaning, Justin touched on this when he was talking about Dragon Age, that your experience playing the game is going to be different. So by their very nature, there's no guarantee that two critics played the same thing. So I feel like those divides and those, um, the

experiential differences that you have with a game are only getting bigger and bigger and bigger and that means something like calling something your game of the year is completely of course it is because you're the type of person who likes that type of game and you had that very expensive specific experience playing that very specific type of thing like it's i don't know it just seems kind of meaningless i doubt there are gonna be like when you if you work for an outlet and you look at your games of the year, like, it is so rare that my number one is represented. Even if I feel good about it, I feel like, like, to take 2013 as an example, like, one of my favorite, like, probably my best gaming experience last year was playing through Device 6 with my wife.

And that was complete. I got the song stuck in my head, and we talked about what the story meant and what we would do next. Those kinds of experiences are really personal, and they don't have a lot of bearing when you get down to like i don't know this game had better graphics and this game you know had more levels or whatever you know whatever bs metrics you need to come up with to justify a game of the year pick um so it's always going to be you know personal lists are always going to have more weight i think and are going to be more more useful maybe even as as games continue to be less sort of centralized to a specific product release date yeah bounding man number one all right let's let's get into it final round let me just say my top three games i'm looking at my top 10 list that i submitted for polygon voting

uh number one dark souls 2 number two uh hearthstone number three super smash brothers so pretty on point well done pretty good stuff dark souls 2 versus hearthstone could not be more similar i mean basically the same game god 2014 homogenized much uh i feel like the conversation we just had about experience playing games is going to be the deciding factor. I want to say one thing I love about Hearthstone. And again, these are silly comparisons because there's no... Well, actually, Dark Souls kind of does this too in a weird way. Hearthstone is a game I actually like to watch.

When we were talking about the last matchup between this and Smash, Smash is very fun. I find it very stressful to watch. I mean, when we were playing eight-player matches, I often lost my own character. Hearthstone, on the flip side, man, I love watching those videos where it's like somebody dealt 60 damage yeah in a single play uh i i mean i am not a competitive hearthstone player and yet when somebody uh like post a video i'm able to follow it uh and i love that i love that there's a competitive game out there that like i get because i i know i need to get better at understanding Dota and League.

So, just, I mentioned this in the first half of the podcast. I spent a lot of time watching Dark Souls 2 videos, too, because there's a lot of, I think, between, like, funny griefing videos. And, holy shit, there's so many incredible Dark Souls 2 griefing strategies out there including the chameleon tactic i mentioned before um there's also stuff where like you can there's there's these gates in dark souls 2 where you have to run through all these tunnels and fight all these bad guys and once you finally make it through the tunnels you reach the switch that you need to flip to like open up the bridge at the beginning of the level and and invading somebody's world and unflipping that switch for them is like fucking decadent so good but not only that but like i've spent more time watching dark souls 2

speed runs which i think are like the most fascinating that is an incredible game to speed run and watching people like take down bosses that took me hours and hours and dozens of attempts to take out watching them do it naked with like a broken sword that they got at the beginning of the game is like i don't know man like i feel the same way about dark souls 2 i think it's an incredible game so the way that i look at these two games and i don't want to take anything away from dark souls 2 but i really feel like dark souls 2 is a refined version of dark souls 1 and uh demon souls before it hearthstone feels like a refined version of an entire genre of games which is like such a high accomplishment that like it just i don't know for me puts it in a

totally different category but like again like i feel like dark souls 2 is the best action rpg ever made so like i'm i kind of feel the same way and it is i just feel like a lot of the work was done for dark souls 2 already if you're looking at a broader consciousness like yeah dark souls 2 is sort of the peak of a certain type of of game of that like sort of game that they set out to make hearthstone feels almost more like a base that like other other experiences like once they figured out a way to make that work and make it fun that like a lot of other great experiences are going to be spun off from both like exactly the refinement that blizzard has done but also the the sort of public awareness and like the education that Hearthstone has done.

The way I think of it is like the sea change that came from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1, which was literally birthed an entire new generation of online shooters. Well, people who loved those games. That's what I think with Hearthstone. Like, it was a certain niche. There was almost like a market cap, almost, of, like, card game players before that. And I feel like it's opened that up. I'll give you that. I understand what you're saying. Like, for me, it's a means to an end sort of thing

where, like, dark souls 2 is my favorite game in my favorite genre so like i understand what you're saying about it being like transformative for the for the genre and i don't know that that's necessarily true that it was like the the first reinvention because you had games like what was it ascension you had playdeck was like making a lot of really great digital card games for uh ios before hearthstone came out i think hearthstone's the best one but like i don't think necessarily it was i don't think it looked out at a bleak landscape and said this will not do you know i and came up with hearthstone like that i you know it's it i should be honest since we're actually like talking about this i

submitted my uh top 10 yesterday hearthstone's not even on it like why but i still what what do you want from me that's crazy it wasn't on my list i i didn't think to put it on there and through this discussion i i'm kind of going dummy i feel like I might need to go back and do a little editing. Apologies to South Park's Stick of Truth. It's weird. For me, it's more about it's important. I think Hearthstone is a really

important game, and I think it's going to do... It did a lot for uh i mean it even in the context of free-to-play games it like did a lot to make those like to to sort of make those a little bit even more ethical like showing an ethical route forward for for free-to-play games um and it's also not important in the way that a game like Heavy Rain is important, but also a really shitty game. Right. You know?

It's a fucking amazingly well-designed, fun, engaging, super awesome game. We just can't give Game of the Year 2 a free-to-play game. two games what you have for me at least has been like you're either talking about a game where all of the like strengths of the game come from how the game is built to be like an edifice for interaction with another person right like you are locked in strategic combat with another person and so all of the experiences that you get from the game come from that fact, like how you try to best somebody. It's like chess or whatever. And that's not to undersell that.

I think it's fucking incredible. I don't think you can ever undersell something by saying it's like chess. Right. Whereas Dark Souls 2 is the machine, right's it's all about the experience that you have that has been tailored for you which like we talked about in the last round they've done an incredibly well as evidenced by the fact that i can remember every single second of that game um i can remember all of the set pieces and there are so many incredible incredibly memorable

moments so i feel like as a game a human versus machine game dark souls 2 is the best game of the year in terms of like person versus person in in terms of like that experience where it's it's not something that's tailored for you it's it's more dynamic than that it's it's hearthstone hearthstone figured out a way to make it fun for me to play online against people, which I did not think would be something I would ever be interested in ever again. But I actually – the way that they sort of boiled down conversation was really smart and made it pleasurable. Sort of almost I think sort of building on what Journey did uh in in limiting conversation to make it more palatable um i'm i'm gonna vote for hearthstone but i do want to say i have enjoyed this conversation about dark souls 2 because

boy do i just want to go home and play dark souls 2 yeah and and check check this out forever now coming it's coming out on next gen consoles i. I'm going to fucking buy it again. Yeah. Oh, great. I'll finally be able to beat it. Yeah, it's coming out on next-gen consoles. I'm just going to finish it on PC. I'm just going to fucking play it again.

I'm going to play it again next year. There is no doubt in my mind because there's so many other builds. Like, I haven't made a pyromancer yet. I made, like, a heavy faith guy, and I made, like, a light mage guy. I haven't made a pyromancer. I haven't made a dual wielding guy yet. I haven't like a heavy faith guy and i made like a light mage guy i haven't made a pyromancer i haven't made a dual wielding guy yet i haven't made a hunter yet like i want to play through this fucking game with every conceivable build type imaginable and that's like i've talked a few times on this podcast about like how i don't play a lot of super long rpgs anymore and i definitely don't

replay long ass video games the same year i already beat them yeah but dark souls 2 just like demands it i want to keep playing that game forever forever and ever i still haven't beaten one of the dlc packs because they're really really goddamn hard um how hard would it be for me to get back into the like i beat the main game but i haven't touched the dlc how hard is it to get back and you know what actually um this is like the one i think dark souls 2 is pretty close to a perfect game one thing they have patched that game a lot and it was actually harder for me to get back in to play the first dlc pack because my faith-based heavy armored guy they completely nerfed the shit out of how faith damage works and basically made uh me go out and respect and they they did that with the original dark souls and i think that a

lot of the patches they did to the original one were good um they were very well balanced things um i'm not sure that that's necessarily true for dark souls 2 uh it was like they said well this is too easy so we're gonna patch some stuff in that uh is gonna make certain builds completely non-viable um so that kind of bummed me out a little bit i mean it's not like a game-breaking thing it's just like that's how i play rpgs is i like to i talked about that earlier i like to invest in a certain build and make it stronger and branch out inside that build and having to start over was just yeah i i think they took down the damage of sport sorceries a little bit yeah actually the last boss of that game was a cakewalk for me just because i had so many

crystal soul spears yeah i guess it was for me too it was just like i don't know i i was using the lightning spears and all that shit for being a faith healer and also was heavily armored so i guess i was like that ideal of a mage tank that's sort of the dirty word for rpgs um so maybe it's not so much a bad thing, but it did put a sour taste in my mouth. Boat, boat, boat. I think it's time for the boat. For me, it is Dark Souls 2. Hearthstone. Hearthstone. Dark Souls 2, baby.

Really? Yeah, it's Dark Souls. I don't care how important Hearthstone is. It's Dark Souls. Wait, wait, wait, Justin, shoot me straight. Are you just saying this because you don't want a free-to-play game to be game of the year?

No. Dark Souls 2 is awesome. Dark Souls 2 rules. What do you like about Dark Souls 2? Because I feel like you've been pretty quiet. I'm trying to get the – I mean like for me, I wanted to make it clear how like the – I got a lot out of Hearthstone. I got a lot out of Hearthstone and it like, it made me feel like it opened up a whole new genre for me and a whole new like type of experience that I never would have expected in 2014.

That really like meant a lot to me, but I still have like, I mean, I still like the kind of games I like that didn't change. I, and I love the kind of games I love. And that is Dark Souls two. It's like,

it's, it's beautiful. Justin. Yes. let me ask you something yeah if if you vote for hearthstone now we are getting into your game hearthstone hearthstone is is not even i said this like why is this yeah but it's my personal top 10 like because you then i will not fucking bend i will go to my grave with cards from a free-to-play card game clutch to my best knowing that i treasure polymorph forever and ever uh just when i thought i i couldn't have more fun i got to picture russ dead that was

with the polymorph if hearthstone is the game that kills russ i'll change my vote right now uh no i'm not betting either it's dark souls 2 but i forgot there's another person in the room who can vote the chris granitron no the uh this giraffe hey oh guys it's me no hey guys guess what i know my job at the zoo because i thought no guess what? I just quit my job at the zoo. Because I thought, guess what? I could join the podcast full-time now. I could be here every week. Oh, New York Giraffe, that's a shame. What do you mean?

It's the last episode. This is the last fucking episode of the besties. Oh, boy. Well, first of all, you know that none of us are getting paid for this, right? What? Wait, no. I mean, but you're getting like... We do this podcast because so many people love it

and because we love doing it. You get like a per diem though, right? There's like a... You get like a little... A slice. A big. We get a per don'tum. So in terms of like giraffe clothes or giraffe food,

I'm on my own here? Mr. Giraffe. Yeah, yes. Forever alone. Okay. Hearthstone or Dark Souls 2 mr giraffe okay so here's the thing about hearthstone that i like is that there's sheeps and i gotta say sheeps kind of you know kind of work my juice a little bit there oh my god what can i say things that rev my motor, sheeps,

and, you know, giraffe food and clothes. So... Oh, shit. Oh, this giraffe. Oh, here's what I would like to suggest. We have a deadlock between the four of us. The closest we have to a fifth member

is New York giraffe. I'll wheel the Chris Granatron out of the closet. Oh, no, no. I got this. I got this, guys. This is the dumbest. This is the worst ending to any podcast. The best game of 2014 and the final game selected for besties is...

Dark Souls 2. Okay. Wow. You really took a long pause. You've really, I don't understand why you did that. Guys, you can't see it, but he has a mini-disc player. Yeah. They're the hottest.

I went over to the electronic store the other day. The guy was like, mini-disc all the way. They're coming back. It's like to the electronic store the other day. The guy was like, mini disc all the way. They're coming back. It's like flip phones, mini discs. The weird thing is they only had one disc, though. It was Journey's Greatest Tricks. It is a really good tune right there. So is this canonical?

Canonically dark also. You know what? That's the only way I'm going to vote. So there you go. Oh, wow. A sheep is going by outside. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And Newt Draft is... Excuse me, gentlemen.

But Newt Draft actually just pulled his collar with his hoof. In case you never need irrefutable evidence to someone that Game of the Year selection is meaningless, tell them about the time that you listened to a podcast for four hours and at the end an imaginary giraffe no no no of the year but here's what i'm saying the giraffe is obviously a manifestation of uh of rust fresh sticks super ego and therefore counts as a canonical you could have listened to eight episodes of super ego yeah it reminds me in this time period so it's so weird that griffin still thinks that new york giraffe is not actually a giraffe it's okay griffin one of these days you'll believe when you're in new york city you'll see

the giraffe that walks the streets are we all are we cool with ending our are we cool with ending our podcast forever like this? This is the end of the besties. I can't think of a more fitting way to close it out. I can think of like four or five more fitting ways just off the top of my head. Thank you. Thank you. To the people, to those of among you with bad tasting podcasts that have helped us to keep going over the years.

Except for the past four months except for the past four months when when our distaste for this show eventually went out and the fact that like half the people on the show no longer work at polygon about it um uh that uh thank you thank you thank you for listening uh to this final actual last episode of the besties if you ever tweeted us again about it i will block you immediately we got i mean we got quality control now that's the better version of the besties i've always felt like yeah it's all right cool well we'll see you all next year don't don't say that do that don't Don't do that. It's bad. Can the four of us?

It's been fun. I once watched a show when I was like homesick every time. It was called Mike and Maddie. You guys remember this? No. It was a daytime talk show, but these two sort of milquetoast hosts, and the show was not that great, but I watched it every time. And they did a final episode where for the entire recording

of the episode they had this red phone on stage where they said that if the studio big wigs changed their mind about canceling mike and maddie that's the phone that would ring and they would get the call that they you know that they were going to stay on the air and this is not a show with a rich fiction it's a daytime talk show it was bizarre and it got to the end and like they thanked everybody for coming and the studio lights closed out and the very last shot you see is a a single spotlight on that red phone which then starts ringing but by which i i don't know if it was there like you know the dream's not dead mike and maddie may return in a different format i don't want to leave was there like you know the dream's not dead mike and maddie may return in a different format um i don't want to leave any red phones with the besties even like hint no this

is this is the roseanne finale justin actually died in january i didn't win 30 million dollars in the in the lottery uh i didn't go to space man what a fucking bonker who crashed into the sea of Japan this is the dinosaurs yes this is the dinosaurs finale I feel so cold right now we're all fucking dead as dinosaurs we've ruined the planet

we're all ghost dads now I push Chris Plant into the tar pits and that's it this is it can we still hang out though yeah I love y'all I push Chris Plant into the tar pits, and that's it. This is it. This is it. This is it. Can we still hang out, though? Yeah, I love y'all.

What if sometimes when we hang out, we record it? Okay. Maybe. We just won't be called the besties. It won't be the besties. No, we won't do that. But we will still kick it. Yeah.

Gosh, I just, you know what? Now that we're at the end, can I say something? I'm going to miss it If only you guys had other podcasts To divert your attention That's true Man, it's crazy that one day New York Draft Is going to make a guest appearance on all of those podcasts

Yeah And you won't have any idea what day that is I can literally feel Griffin's stomach churning. Yeah, did a little flip there. The idea of all of it. Thank you all very much for listening to the besties. Thank you. It has been fun.

It's been an honor. And it's also been a non-sustainable honor. Justin, you want to lead us out? Wrap it up, Justin. I forget what I say at the end Of the show That's fine I mean it's your last hurrah So maybe you could like pull together any sort of

Enthusiasm Thanks for listening to the besties where we talk about the latest And greatest in culture, art, sports Fashion, music, movies That's the opening We still need to record one more episode where we talk about sports fashion. Sports fashion. This week, we talked about video games, and I think

it's pretty clear that they've come a long way since Pac-Man. And it's not just Pong anymore. And so, for Chris Plant, and Russ Freshstick, and Griffin McElroy, and New York Giraffe, and racist Milton Giraffe and racist Milton Bradley

and racist Milton Bradley and who else was my friend? Who was your French-Canadian game designer? Jean-Baptiste. And for Jean-Baptiste, any others? Tex Arcana Tumbleweed. And for Tex Arcana Tumbleweed,

Can you break me off a little piece of Tex Arcana? No. I'm just about to, it. Let's save the besties. The end. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best game? One more. one more fresh fresh from the tap one two three besties