The Besties - Those Adorable Watch Dogs

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

The Besties rode on a drone and hacked their way into the mainframe for this week’s new game: Watch Dogs: Legion! They discuss the impressive open world design of the futuristic post-Brexit London. Critique the play as any character feature. And question if a game release has ever been less fit for the moment? Plus, their review of The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope. 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!

so i was at um there's a walmart and i got a a little container of um halloween snack mix for my family and i was at the self-checkout and the snack mix just so you can envision it is like purple and gold and green popcorn and some chocolate covered um tiny pretzels and little m&ms wait wait wait wait i Yeah, I feel very bad interrupting already, but you are literally describing Mardi Gras food that has been sitting on the shelves. Well, no, and there's black candy corn in there. Oh, and there's like a spooky label on it.

It's got bats and stuff. Yeah, it's so spooky. So I went out to self-checkout, and I had this plastic container of Snack Mix for my family. And I set it down in the buggy. It apparently was not sealed properly. And so it just split completely open and dumped the entire contents of the Snack Mix into my buggy, half of which immediately spilled onto the ground.

And there's little M&Ms rolling everywhere. And I'm bending down to pick up the little pieces of cereal out of the buggy but every time i pick one up four other pieces cut become dislodged so it appears as though i'm just jamming cereal and popcorn and candy corn through the bottom of the buggy and spilling it on the floor the little hard candy pieces are rolling just rolling everywhere in the walmart and there's a woman in a um a novel a large novelty witch's hat who starts uh uh quickly rushing over me going oh no oh no oh so finally i got to a point where i am just pushing the snack mix through the buggy so i can get down my hands and knees and

start picking it up and i get this empty container i'm very sadly holding up the line as I put my pieces of popcorn back into my snack mix container. And a guy walks up behind me, an employee, puts his hand on my shoulder, and he says, this is Walmart. You don't have to do that.

And he takes the wheel. I like that it's not conveyed as like a, this is Walmart, it's like a nice place. It's just like, this is Walmart. It's Walmart. It's like's just like this is walmart it's just it's like texas just put your stuff on the floor I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Chris Hackerplant. Watch out. Beep, boop, beep. I'm in your terminal. Did I stun you? And my name is Russ Froschek and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties where we discuss the latest and greatest

in home interactive inter-game-ment. We talk about a game every week. A new hot release. It's like a king of the hill that goes all year long it's a game of the year book club show about video games it's a video game podcast i don't know what you want from me but i hope it's discussion of watch dogs legion point what is that game watch dogs legion is the third entry in the watch dogs series which if you don't know is just like a dude walks

around as a hacker in a city and cause real mischief to like undermine the man except this time it's not silly and light it's extremely serious because it's set in a post-brexit future london that is taken over by like i don't know mega corporations and and and one thing you can play as anybody anybody that sounds thrilling and i want to hear some more about it and i think i'm gonna right after this brief pause has a game ever been less fit for the moment it was released than watch dog food less welcome well ever less less enthused if animal crossing had come out this week the animal crossing thing is is spot on because it's like the beginning of the pandemic they're like what if there is a game that made it feel like

you could go outside and see friends and then for this they were like what if we did the opposite you are completely distressed about politics and the future of the world but what if we made you lived in a worst case scenario how how does that sit with you but don't worry you've got a cell phone right you've got a magic cell phone that can make cars crash into each other and drones get all higgledy-piggledy listen this is nobody's fault it just is what it is yeah they started making this game a very long time ago yes it is poorly timed this is part this is the uh the the sharp end of the stick when you're making a uh you know politically charged game sometimes those old dice are gonna shake out wrong on you that's just the way it goes sometimes they're gonna come up with snake eyes on the old timing front

but it still has that like infuriating ubisoft a apoliticism like despite the fact that it is about a government takeover by corporate interests and like the tension of how that lands with the populace and that is sort of like the whole thing of watchdogs legion allowing you to recruit anybody as if it is suggesting like everybody is secretly waiting to join the revolution like there's so much there and yet like nothing nothing so explicit in a way that like introduces this this dissonance that is like really really very bizarre and something that they had to work really really hard to introduce to the game it's the classic Ubisoft Ubisoft um assumption and i

think you've seen this play out in a lot of different open world games but this idea that like all the people are basically good and they're just waiting and the government is bad and they're just waiting on you to do enough spray paint and billboards before they feel comfortable uh uh rising up against the government it's just like the weirdest most naive pollyanna way of like of viewing this sort of thing especially in the face of like actual real world like political revolt where real lives are on the line like it feels very bad well let me let me i want to address that in particular so you, you know, we've been talking around it, but you're right. You control a number of people around the city. And as you do little like side missions, you, you know, fix billboards and stuff like that.

And people get happy and then they're on your side. And that 100 percent, I agree, is the like most simplistic way to present a very, very complex thing. We've also talked about the fact that this is like a really terrible time for this game to come out because of everything but i do wonder whether the simplicity of the game may be the only way to present this type of thing in this type of game because otherwise it would be like hey the last three hours that you spent saving this corner of the city nope still fucked sorry i i think that gets it the the kind of fatal flaw of this game and i want to be clear there's a lot to like in this game we're gonna get to that in a second we're gonna get to that but this is this we're in the middle of a wild contested election so like let's we gotta talk about this

talking about what the what the game philosophically is is where i just feel bad for it because i think it is a lot more political and actually has a stance than literally any ubisoft game outside of you know like that ghost recon neocon wildland hawk nightmare um but at the end of the day it's just restrained by what a video game of this style is. Like, you know, there are a few things you can do. You can either hack and do environmental puzzles or you can shoot people in the face. And sometimes that's with a stun gun or sometimes it's with real bullets. And because it is so ambitious with this, you can play as anybody. It never grapples with the things that you're doing. doing so if you are playing stealth at least my experience and you go and do i don't know like

spray paint stuff and then solve a thing solve a hacking puzzle with a drone the results are more or less the same as if you play a like former army lieutenant who goes in and literally shoots grenade launchers at people and then afterwards they're like i don't know it all worked out it's like hey quick correction uh it says in the details of the different uh guns there are in the game which you can upgrade alongside a bunch of different other things with uh tech points which is in my mind the equivalent of like uh crackdowns agility spheres that you can jump on top of buildings to go hunt every time i see one of those pop up on the map i'm like oh excuse me sorry they all say in the descriptions of the guns like this non-lethal grenade no way this it does yeah this non-lethal mp5 submachine gun some are not not all weapons are non-lethal like there there is definitely like

yeah some of them are just an ak-47 i mean maybe it fires quote you know batman rounds yeah that's that's what the the the thing they lean on i think yeah um so like that that's one thing and like i don't i think the alternative way of presenting this politics wise is like a grand theft auto or at least that's the only other example of this that we have which is like you know a big ambitious open world game that is politically charged but the way they handle the like not pollyanna side of things is just everyone's so fucking stupid look at how stupid like they're bad but they're just dumb they like dumb things like and that's not better in any way um but let me say this i did not expect to like this game at

all and i think it is fun as fuck it is the most fun i've had playing an open world game in forever i want to paint just a quick picture to put this to put this out there very quickly into the game very quickly into the game you get access to this big open world map where like i said you can find these tech points which is like the main currency you use to upgrade your hacking abilities your weapons your everything so there's this incentive to like and this is what i love in an open world game to just like run around real quick before you do anything serious and like stock up on these resources to make yourself into a a deity uh and i started doing this and i was having some fun doing it and then i hacked a cargo drone

which is just a big drone that uh delivers packages and i was like oh that's fun i'm gonna land it next to me i landed it next to me i said oh that's super fun i'm gonna climb up on top of it i climbed up on top of it i was, there's no way it's gonna let me fly around on this. I was flying around like the fucking Green Goblin for two or three hours, just like running around, throwing my spider bot down onto a building, going around and like hacking some stuff

to make it real, real sweet for me to swoop in like Santa Claus, reverse Santa Claus, just like taking everyone out. And I did it and it was so fun, like so much more fun than anything I've played in a Ubisoft game. It's really cool. You get like I had a character who obviously could summon that drone.

A construction worker who could summon that drone. And that was like their thing. Which made it felt like hacking sometimes. Like getting to the top of a building that you needed to do some computer stuff at the top of. Which is the bulk of your missions in this game is do some computer stuff at the top of, which is the bulk of your missions in this game is doing some computer stuff. I unlocked just randomly a spy. And it was hilarious because I looked at it.

You can look at the badges of anybody out on the street and look at their info card that kind of tells you what kind of person they are. And I randomly looked at this dude who just looked cool, just like this tall black dude and in a jet black ball it kind of looked like um uh lance reddick right uh and like a black tuxedo i was like that dude looks cool what's his story and it says spy and my character uh just in the moment was like that's wild who put spy on their info card that is bizarre but anyway i did a mission to recruit this dude he's got

a magic watch that disables enemy weapons he's got the cloak he can summon a spy car that can cloak invisible and shoot rockets and all of a sudden i was like i was going from like kind of lukewarm on this like, oh, this is my game. I'm this dude. Forget everything else. I'm not recruiting anybody else. Look at this guy. Yeah.

I want to go back to what you were talking about, Griffin, with being able to get on like fly anywhere but then drop that spider drone. I think what I really dig about this game, and I would love to see more open world games do this, is how wildly different all the point of views are like most open world games you're a person right and you walk around at street level and that's kind of how you see the world but being able to like go from street level to literally bird's eye view of the entire city to i'm a tiny tiny tiny little drone that is like working my way through the air vents of a building. It genuinely makes this world feel more realistic and believable than, oddly enough, all of the politics. All of the narrative stuff doesn't do it for me as much as just getting around this world

in all these different ways and seeing every little nook and cranny. And y'all, the game looks good. It runs like... Fresh, I have a feeling you want to tell us about your experience playing on pc yeah talk about how great it looks so on a on a rtx 3080 or an xbox series x what's that what's that bad boy run chris plant next on the xbox series x it looks great if you're using a last-gen GPU, Fresh had less of an experience.

Yeah, so Plant had a baller setup, and I'm sure it ran great on his ultra-wide thing with people teleporting in and giving him new graphics cards at a minute's notice. It was great. For me, I'm on a 1080, which is two years' generation behind, and I had to run the game windowed at 1080p with medium settings and it ran almost playable oh my god I would say like it would be

stable and then it would plummet to like 10 frames a second for 15 seconds and then it would be stable and then it would plummet so I would say if you have uh older hardware um do not anticipate running this game very well at all as far as i'm aware i don't know this for sure i played on pc i think the like current gen like xbox one ps4 are gonna like yeah probably cough out a lung before they can run this game smoothly so do not anticipate that uh but i but i will say despite it running kind of shitty on my computer and me having to dial down all the settings, Griffin's right. I had a surprising amount of fun just playing it because I think what they've done a good

job of is smoothing out a lot of the rough edges of the hacking stuff to the point where it's like very quick to do things like being in a gunfight and there's like a van parked in front of you and you can, you know, quickly hack the van so it drives into a bunch of guys that are in front of you was is like very smooth i know it's been something that's been in previous games but like i think they did a much better job of that i also you know i know we've talked about like justin getting his op spy guy i enjoyed just random characters like appearing and like oh this person looks different and they have like a different uh accent and yeah they're older or younger like it did make me feel more attached but i would also say like i ended up i know you can play this game with permadeath

where like if one of your people dies that's it forever i found that um i ended up like just bonding with like two or three people in total and then like considering them my core team and not really unless i was forced not really diverging from those folks um so for what it's worth i will say mechanically one of the things where i felt like i wasn't really clicking with it at first i constantly felt like i was not doing the best thing or the thing that they wanted me to do. Right. In a game, a lot of times you feel the hand of the creator kind of guiding you towards, you know, if you just look around this corner, there's this one pipe. And if you find

that pipe, that'll lead, you know, creating a critical path there. And when I was playing, initially, I could feel the edges of those paths, but I couldn't seem to get on one right where I felt like I was following one of the tracks and then i realized like the longer i kept playing like it really is open-ended i mean it really is like they it's not just lip service to like you could approach this different ways because it's a very different approach like there were times where i would see a tiny event and think god i wish i brought my spider bot in with me because i that might make this a lot easier and i'd have to find another way to do it but i find what i found is just like committing to a play style even with from character

to character but like committing to like this is the way that I'm going to do this this is how I'm going to go in it usually will like mold to the way you want to play it pretty pretty easily and once I kind of committed to that and stopped looking for like the right way to do a given situation I enjoyed it a lot more. I also found that like in that exact scenario you described of like, oh, there's a vent that has like some tech points in it. I wish I brought my spider bot. In most of those cases, if you keep looking around whatever like restricted area you are in, you will almost always find like a spider bot spawner that will then drop. Like I never had that thing that that i hate in you can switch characters

at any time right unless you're in a restricted area which is where a majority of the missions take place and in classic ubisoft fashion if you're in there and someone sees you they will freak out and try to get you um but like it you don't get that that rpg thing of just like ah fuck i wish i'd brought the thief in here to unlock this treasure chest because like it is uh in the best way that that sort of customizable character games can go like you're not completely locked out you have so many options that even when it seems like oh shit there's a hole in this gate that i really could have gotten a spider bot through it's like well uh you know keep looking around there's a switch you can flip that'll just open up the gate. It's so, so wildly open-ended. It is funny to me, though, that, like, this very common thing that happens where I'll drive up.

There's, like, a secure area. I can't go in there. If I go in there, they'll start shooting at me. I'll drive up. I'll stand, stock still, directly in front of the main entrance to the security area. I'll pull open my phone. I'll do some hacking. Chaos will fucking ensue in the secure in the secure area people are getting shocked and exploded and the spider bots running around and they have no idea that it's me yeah

just the image that i'm just standing that gets hit the problem of the game and its story in general right is like that that is the inherent problem with this game is it is a game that wants to be taken very seriously and about a serious subject but it's an inherently funny game like it is yeah the freedom that gives you is inherently goofy and i think it felt like what you mentioned the spy stuff justin that they must have realized that at some point in the middle and as a result the game is somewhere in this kind of weird zone of it i personally enjoy it most when i just kind of ignore the setting for example you learn how to use the in-game camera by being told to take pictures of mutilated dead bodies in a morgue yeah like there there are so many bits like that where it's like what are you doing like why is so much this game about um

illegal organ trafficking like i i don't get it i i i feel like this is gonna be like clint hawking had this happen with far cry 2 the director of this game directed far cry 2 which is a beloved game it's also a notorious game because it is such a grim place to be in in terms of a video game world and i think we're gonna see a lot of great ideas that are in this game used in things that are different and and probably more palatable to a broader audience i hope this game does well honestly um but i i i don't know if it will it feels like i think austin walker at vice said like it feels like an experiment or like kind of a first draft and i i think that's definitely true yeah i do think that as much as i enjoy the like multiple

multiple character thing i think it somewhat is an illusion because effectively because the differences are not that dramatic, effectively the gameplay between Watch Dogs 2 and Watch Dogs 3 maybe has changed like 10 or 20%, but because you're playing as different character models with different voices, you feel like it's more, it's almost like an illusion of like being more ambitious than it actually is, which to be honest, a lot of video game development is just that is like giving you the perception of innovation while you know playing it somewhat

safe and but that's that's what's so funny about this game is like they had to have something they couldn't just market this game as it's watchdogs legion we give you about 20 percent more things to do in the core gameplay they're like they needed this big thing to hang their hat on but the more time i spend with it the less i give a shit about the like recruit anybody and they've got different perks and different abilities like that's cool but for me it's like that extra 20 is what i've never really liked a watchdogs game that extra 20 for whatever reason gives you just that many extra options when you run into a place and oh no i broke stealth shit broke bad oh no that drone spotted me what am i gonna do and it just gives you just enough like opportunity to save the

situation or turn it into something like really fun and and that that is what i would tell people about this game is like if you've played watchdogs and you've never liked it like that's the thing to care about in watchdogs legion not this this like recruit the world thing that is the only thing people talk about also you should try all the hacking the game has so much fun immersive sim elements try it first if slash when you get frustrated switch to the like guns blazing characters because the combat in this game is surprisingly good um it borrows a lot it feels like kind of division-esque without having to like fill people full of lead but i i was splinter cell i got like yeah i i kind of avoided it for a long time and i was pleasantly

surprised how well that part of the game is you can also you can do both i i've i've been playing through like entirely pacifistically like really really going if somebody if people draw guns i run and like wait until i can come back with a better opportunity until i was cleaning out this like open air market that was being run by this like uh crime syndicate and i hacked a drone with a new like hacking ability i just unlocked and the drone had a taser gun and i was like oh okay and I just flew that drone around like fucking batman like literally taking out like 25 people and I was like well pacifism's out the window I have a gun gun like bird that now I can just like take people out with it and it doesn't really it doesn't

penalize you for that there's no like karmic system that I've picked up if you draw guns everybody else draws guns that's it that's the extent of it and that's all it really needs be. One other thing that I want to say before we wrap up, it's just a general piece of advice because I know everybody's thinking about what consoles or graphics cards they're going to buy. I played this game on both a very high end PC and Xbox Series X, played some other things that I can't talk about just yet on both systems. And I will say this, if you're having to make the choice between a very expensive and a PC and a Series X or a PlayStation 5,

go with the console. The difference is negligible. That's not to say that the PC can't do more. It definitely can. But the console versions are so well optimized with AAA games so far uh and the ease of use is just so much greater that i strongly recommend console and i i did not expect to say that i really assumed i would be saying otherwise um so if you're on the edge i hope

that that kind of helps you make your your decision yeah i was talking to point about this earlier and i basically view the this generation of consoles, at least for me having like this pretty well, couple years old 1080 graphics card, I view these consoles as like a stopgap measure almost that will get me a few generations down the road to better and video cards or whatever I'm going to get while running every game that I ever really want to run realistically. Well, you know, if there's a small indie game that comes out on PC, I can still run it on a 1080. But anything that's graphically intensive,

probably going to come to consoles too. So this seems like a really good solve. And at $500 is pretty, you know, comparatively cheap compared to like a high-end graphics card. We'll talk about it in the coming weeks. But it is kind of incredible how good some games run on the consoles. I don't know why. I expected it not to be as good as it is because generation transitions usually aren't so hot.

But wow, wow, wow. Anyway, Justin, what do we have next? I have a lot of hope for us talking about Little Hope. Thank you. That's the best I have, and there's more of it coming. We're about to enter a very intense period of time where like 19

games come out within two days. I feel like we're not quite there yet, though. I feel like we're still in somewhat of a quasi-lull outside of Watch Dogs, which is why it's good that we can talk about this game Little Hope, which is a relatively smaller game

that is also very weird. I will admit to not having played this one, despite the fact that I enjoy this studio's work, because it seemed like multiplayer was the way to go. It was the thing that everybody talked about for... God, what was the last

one that they did? The first part of this... from madan from madan of madan maybe yeah uh so i will i will rely on uh the three of you for for your hot take on it um i'll try to give like a brief overview of what this game is so so this game is called dark what is it the dark pictures anthology colon little hope uh and and all of these games basically are the same core idea which is it? The Dark Pictures Anthology colon Little Hope. And all of these games basically are the same core idea, which is it's a horror movie. And you can decide how the characters in that horror movie react to various situations. And it changes the way the story plays out. It's essentially been the same since their first game, which was called. What was that called on PlayStation?

Oh, Until Dawn. Until Dawn was their first one and for what it's worth if you're curious until dawn is now available as part of playstation plus so you can actually try it for free if you have playstation plus which is very cool uh little hope is um a you know also a horror game the the premise as a horror as horror premises go pretty typical you are a group of you know randomly thrown together students on a bus that crashes on the outskirts of a like uh what is that like a salem-esque town like village um but it's set in modern day so uh and the idea is you have to go in and you know encounter various

spooky things like all hot horror stories you're just trying to get to safety basically yeah there's spooky things are keeping that from happening for sure um but but griffin's right like i think the multiplayer is probably the most interesting aspect of this yeah there's a lot of different ways you can play my wife and i actually played like sitting on the couch um passing controller back and forth and when the game starts you actually assign uh each of the characters to one of the people who are playing i mean you play it all by yourself it's not really designed that way it almost i think it says as much in the menus but we kind of assigned it to where like we were passing back and forth between characters. And what's kind of neat about it is that for most of the decisions in terms of dialogue and stuff, there's not really time to talk about, to come up with a consensus.

It's really that person making those decisions, which is a cool way, I think, of of doing that like cooperative narrative thing yeah it reminded me of like telltale games where you really just have three seconds to decide whether clementine's going to eat human people or not so when we played multiplayer fresh and i online it we were seeing two different screens so it wasn't like we could pass back and forth uh and at one point we didn't realize who the other person was playing as and only when we got back together we realized we had been trash talking the respective person's character it's like i just hated the character i'm getting stuck with so i spent like the last five minutes being like linda woof like what a real pain in the ass how about her right like i

can't wait to throw her to the wolves and then like i come back and rush is like oh so uh linda's been talking trash about ashley over here and i'm like she wouldn't dare and i think that's where like it really sings because you're right justin it is two completely different experiences because you being justin sitting on a couch next to your wife playing you can see both sides but when i'm playing with plant online plant goes off he does his thing i can kind of hear a conversation happening in the background while plant is doing his thing but i can't quite make it out like you would if you're at like a dinner party and you can hear a conversation but you can't quite make it out so i know he's doing stuff but i'm doing my. And then how much we share is sort of up in the air.

You know, there's an early moment where Plant, like, learned that there was, like, he, like, grabbed matches early on, and then he was, like, shouting advice to me, and I didn't hear the advice in the game, so I did the complete opposite and ran into the house and burned alive. Whoops. But that sort of, like like it's like this asynchronous multiplayer that i really haven't seen in this sort of story game before that i think made for a really unique experience yeah the story itself is whatever

and i've heard i have we've not reached the ending i've heard the ending is yeah i had it spoiled for me i'm not feeling like i'm gonna play to the ending well it has multiple endings for what it's worth like there are ways to not have it be brutal but as just a an exercise in like fun like just for goofing around i think that's like the best way to go into this i i that makes it kind of a hard game to recommend at full price i think um but but i mean man of medan i imagine you can probably get on sale semi-regularly that's the game before this and i've heard really great things about that one can we talk about the framing device real quick oh yeah it's kind of it's kind of weird there's like an old dude named the curator and he's like

i've got a real spooky one for you tonight he's like the cryptkeeper he's like a cryptkeeper except there's some sort of like faux nickelback music that like brings in the title sequence and he's like anyway i've got a spooky one for you let me open my book and the music is terrible like there's this five minute action sequence of montages of this old man just walking around his house and the music's like time to die with the old man getting his book uh and it it is uh so it's so it's a little cringy it like the it's not summoning up the atmosphere they want i think is it that much worse than literally every Remedy character? It has some pretty serious Sam Lake, Alan Wake vibes to it.

Yeah, I get it. Except the tone is supposed to be... The thing that it's supposed to be trying to do is spook you out. And the Alan Wake thing is supposed to be kind of weird. Which, yeah it definitely feels

feels strange i like the fourth wall thing though i like a game where i like it and this goes back i guess this is my fmv stuff but like i like a game where the character is talking directly to me and acknowledge that really draws me in i like that aspect of it i like being like talked to directly by someone who knows that i'm playing a video game yeah i i have realized and i didn't realize this until i started playing this but it's becoming more and more clear i adore when europeans make games about america oh yeah big big heavy rain fan i love living here in philadelphia it is my favorite i cannot wait to go to an american baseball game there's a moment early on in this game where um you're in like a shitty bar and one of the guys who's like this

you know older guy he's like hey are we gonna play some darts board whoa that's not what that's called no we don't call it that reminds meinds me of that 50 Cent Blood on the Sand that was created by a British developer when you get to hear like fucking Wiz Khalifa or somebody be like, it's safe as hell, it's 50. Like, all right. I don't think so, Wiz.

Y'all, I know we are running a little late. Should we just hop directly to what we've been playing this week? I have still been back into animal crossing in a big way and i've noticed just sort of anecdotally that uh i feel like a lot of folks are and i think it's probably because of the state of things and and animal crossing being kind of a relief but i also uh i don't know i've just i've just i've just really enjoyed my time with it the halloween stuff was was pretty cool and you know

we're in a time of year where like the season changes feel a little bit more like like the changes are bigger than they are going between like summer months or you know stuff like that uh yeah i'm i'm really enjoying my time with it yeah i'm i've been dipping in just to like get the fish and bugs for a various month um i do think it's still missing like the bigger game changer gameplay things like it still feels a little like the core game hasn't changed that dramatically and i know there's stuff that people have been waiting for like the cafe and the gyroids yeah stuff like that there's precedent for that uh the new leaf came out in what 2013 2014 and then like

two or three years later they released uh welcome amiibo which added like a ton of shit to the game so much stuff like way after people really cared about or were talking about that game in like the mainstream way so i have no doubt yeah i think that'll keep expounding on it especially considering the success of that game i also dipped into wow a little bit because I was thinking about checking out the shadowlands expansion I typically dip into wow when an expansion comes out and play through the story stuff and then immediately fall off and uh it's still it is it's still world of warcraft I may I can you can play as a little robot gnome now and that's enjoyable to me they've that game is so I played so much ff14 over the last couple years that like going back to wow is so wild because it's so cartoonish and like

light-hearted and silly compared to final fantasy um yeah but i don't know with destiny next week right beyond light is next week i don't i i don't have the time to spend on multiple games of service games. And so I may just not check out WoW at all because I anticipate that Destiny is going to win me back over. I've been replaying Dead Cells, weirdly enough. Dead Cells, if you'll remember, is like a Metroidvania, roguelite side-scroller. It's on basically every platform.

And over the last year or so, they've released 20 significant updates to adding, like, various pickups to entire areas. I bought the DLC, which I guess got released. It was the first paid DLC they really put out for $5, which is a steal for how much content they've, like, thrown into this game. But if it's

been a while since you've played, I really recommend jumping back in. They added like character skins and costumes you can unlock, which I always love cosmetic stuff. It's really cool to see games like that from smaller teams that are successful, but that they continue, you know, Stardew Valley is like the ultimate example of that but just continuing to add new and also from a preservation perspective i believe you can go back and play any version of the game like all the various updates i think on pc at least you can go back and try all the different versions anyway that's neat a thing that i have very quickly an update kept playing 13 sent 13 Sentinels. Turns out, it's fantastic. It's even better than I had said last week.

And a lot of the things that I was like, eww, worried about that. Don't worry, friends. Not as bad as I thought it would be. So stuff that we talked about last week, I can now pretty confidently recommend 13 Sentinels to to everybody the other game that i have just very quickly teardown have you all heard about this uh only from you yeah it's getting a little bit of pickup on uh twitch um and the way it works is it kind of looks like

minecraft but the voxels like everything is made out of voxels are much smaller so i think there's like i don't know tons dozens of of uh little voxels inside of the average minecraft cube and the point of the game is you are a thief who gets these various levels where you need to break into buildings uh by busting open all these voxel buildings and steal stuff which on its own would be fine it would be like a totally okay formula the real trick is once you get into the game the first time you grab a thing that you're going to steal it triggers a 60 second or however long alarm and you have to go get everything else so the real fun of the game is basically turning the entire world with via destruction into a capoeira playground so that once you steal that first

thing you can sprint across the rest of the level stealing everything else by like jumping onto cranes and then jumping through holes that you cut into a building and then out a wall that you poked through that building and onto the top of a flatbed truck um it is really really really really cool and i think it's a game that will probably I have a feeling all of us will talk about later as more of y'all play it. Yeah, I did back in this, first off, obviously Hades goes without saying, just, I don't know why I'm still just playing it.

I've beaten it probably 20 times at this point, I guess, maybe 25. I just keep going to like finish all the, they're so mean. They keep throwing out little interesting stories to talk about and like little things I want to wrap up and stuff like that it's extremely cruel one bit of advice

I'd give if you're playing through Hades repeatedly go ahead and start throwing out nectars to anybody when you got nectars because you'll eventually want to give nectars to a lot of people and you shouldn't just sit on them because you don't know why you have them or else you'll end up doing a lot of people and you shouldn't just sit on them because you don't know why you have them. Or else you'll end up doing a lot of places in the game

where people just don't show up and you can't give them one then and it... Anyway. And also I dipped back into Scourge Bringer on Switch. It's very cool, especially after you guys told me you could adjust the speeds a little bit. That's really neat because I had like 10 runs where it's like, okay, I'm not getting any

further. So I just slowed things down a little bit because I wanted to see what else was in there. I think it's a really cool option for a game like this. Is that it? That's it? Yeah, I think that's it. Next week? So next week is going to be pretty buck wild, huh? What's on the docket for next week? Because there are so many things that could be on the docket.

There's a new fucking console next week. Boom! Yo. Bam. We're going to talk about xbox that doesn't happen very often series x and s and we'll talk about i don't know we should talk about a few of the games that are going to be on that like the yakuza man yakuza rules and it's on the xbox we can talk about that a little bit next week is that okay fresh yeah i think we'll talk about assassin's creed next week uh which we can't talk about yet, but definitely next week.

Just to check in, so Justin and Griffin, at present, you guys do not have pre-orders for the Xbox. Is that correct? That's correct. I do have a pre-order. I mean, the PS5 is out next week too, gang. It comes out the 12th.

That's next Thursday. Yes, we have a bit of an issue because of the timing that we record. By the time we record, will not have playstation yet by the time i record i also there's no way i'm going to be able to find a series x uh but yes i understand your your point we are spreading out the next gen love across two weeks we will be doing an entire playstation 5 episode after the week after the Xbox episode. So worry not, Sony cronies. We will be sending you love as well.

We'll have plenty of time to talk about all these games that are coming out, whether that is Yakuza or Dirt 5 or Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed. There's a lot coming out and we're going to make sure to keep you all up to date. You aren't going to have to wait till December to hear about some very good games, which i can say because the embargo is lifted yakuza is a good game and i

can't wait to talk to you all about it all right folks that's going to do it for us for this week thank you for joining us uh a reminder if you want to share the link to our show with some other folks besties.fan is the link to do that if you want to email us mail at besties.fan maybe you got some questions about the Xbox Series X you can send them our way we're on Twitter at thebestiespod where you can also find a link to our mailing list to sign up for all the latest and greatest

in besties news but that is going to do it for our episode for this week so until next time be sure to join us again for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. The besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch.

And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch.