The Besties - Raging Against the Dying Light 2

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

This week we're discussing Dying Light 2, a game that poses a novel question: What if dead people turned into monsters and you had to hit them with pipes and stuff? Also, we calculate the precise amount of time games are allowed to not be fun before they get fun. Also discussed: OlliOlli World, Finding Drago, Vampire Survivors, Everyday Shooter 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!

Nothing funny happened in games this week. Do you think now is the time to launch an NFT or is it too late? Russ, I'm so glad that we are finally having this conversation with you. And by conversation, I mean intervention. Because they took the monkeys already. The monkeys we can't use anymore. Yeah, the like weirdly, I guess, Nazi monkeys. Listen, folks, I'm not on twitter i have to follow this shit through like third third-hand semaphore at this point um but i do want to say people love

your characters russ yeah you're i've you've been described as the jim henson of gaming podcasts um but i'm not sure that the new york giraffe series of nfts and the far more problematic milton bradley series of nfts you've got in the hopper are going to set the market on fire except it will set our audience on fire in the sense that they will try to set us on on fire because they'll cancel the show? Because of how unhappy. Well, no, no, no, no. Besties has staying power, Russ. You will be removed from the show.

Oh, I understand. If you do launch this line of NFTs. It's more about the brand. The Besties is bigger than all of us. It does seem, though, that it would be good if I, you know, at this point, we've built such an array of possible guests on the show that if I could scam people out of a bunch of money, now is the time to do it rather than later.

Sure, sure. What if we call them NFTs for the SEO, right? Because people are searching for those hot NFTs. But then they get there and they find out they're buying a normal Fresh Dick take, and they just own the rights to your bad opinions. Oh, that's good. Like what? What's a bad opinion I've had?

Like when you did the Milton Bradley character and almost got us canceled. That wasn't me. That was him. That was him. Don't judge me. That was him, dude. That dude sucks shit. Yeah, he's terrible. I wish we didn't have me. That was him, dude. That dude sucks shit.

Yeah, he's terrible. I wouldn't... I wish we didn't have to keep letting him on the show. Big mistake. It's been a minute. I actually apologize for summoning the specter of Milton Bradley. I feel like by mentioning him in this intro, I have moved us like 20 episodes closer to a world where he makes a research.

We can't. He can't. He won't in in 2022 he won't make it he won't do it in 2022 i don't think there's no telling My name is Justin McElroy, and I have the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best zombies of the week. It's in your head. No, we can't anymore. They keep yelling at people. My name is Russ Fruching, And I know the best game of the week

I know everybody on this Show very well, I've heard everybody On the show sing like a weird amount There is no reality in which Any of the four of us singing a song could get us dinged For copyright Would the algorithms be like Is that cranberries?

It sounded a lot more like Creed. Oh, yeah, Creed. Yeah, they could knock us for being the besties. It's a video game club. And just by listening, my friend, you have joined. Welcome to the club. We've preserved a seat for you right next to the fruit punch where we know you like it. We talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment here and today we're talking about a long in the making i would say oft delayed

finally released game from tech land called dying light 2 chris plant what's dying light so easy to describe it's an open world parkour zombie game with crafting skills rpg mechanics dialogue choice trees and multiple open worlds it also has some breath of the wild in here and it has some of like i don't know every game ever every game ever they just put it all in one thing they added a pretty bad story to it which we'll get to and i'm i'm pretty smitten with this one i'm excited to talk about it when we will that is what we do. That is our MO as soon as we come back from this brief commercial message. Dying Light 2.

I want to – and Plant, you can probably help me speak to this a little bit. Yes. I don't want to spoil narrative stuff in Dying Light 2, but the structure of it, and I would say maybe the scope of it, was a surprise for me. And I do think we need to talk about that. But if you want to go in completely blind, I don't expect that. I don't think you need to worry about that, honestly. Okay. Because I think we should –

It's probably been in trailers and stuff like that. Let's knock the story out of the way as early as possible. Very quickly. Because it's not good. It's bad. It's actually easy to knock out. There is a group of cops who are pretty clearly meant to be fascist,

and there's a group of rebels who live in a bazaar, and they're fighting against the man. But this game was made in Eastern Europe and comes with all the complexities of that, which could be interesting if the writing were just a little bit better. But instead, it's a lot of like...

Just a little bit better. You know, just a little bit better. Scooch a pinch better. Yeah, but instead, it's a lot of like both sides making choices that don't really make any sense. So the story, not great. There's a lot of it.

You can skip it. Every once in a while, it does. I'll You can skip it. Every once in a while, it does. I'll be real with you. Every once in a while, a side quest kind of clicked with me. It has that weird, uneven feel of different teams writing different stories. And every once in a while, you hit one like, oh, that's pretty good. Good job, guys. Yeah.

And the structure thing that Justin's talking about, and this is kind of a spoiler but i mean you could you see it if you've seen any trailer for the game the game starts in one city which is a like small village but with like i don't know it's like a french village where two-story buildings basically yeah yeah yeah but mostly two-story buildings that you parkour over and then about i don't know probably 12 hours in you get to go to a like straight up city like with skyscrapers and it really changes the dynamic of the game um up to that point yeah well it's funny you didn't mention the uh evil medical doctor and your missing sister which are are you ready for a spoiler on that? Sure. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to everyone.

We're going to spoil this because I swear it's not going to make the game any worse. The evil medical doctor, it turns out, is superhuman and has the ability to fight, like, I don't know, like the character in Prototype. Sure. Maybe some people remember. Sword arm. Not quite like that. remember that's a really not quite like that in this world in this world that is so heavily saturated with superhero media i do love that you did touch upon the cultural touchstone yeah there was a sequel parallel though prototype two um and and it turns out right after you see that

you're like well that's weird and then you find out you also have that power, which I'm a fan of. You know, I get jealous easy in these video games. So if I see somebody out here doing cool stuff. It's sort of like when you're Kyle Katarn and you see doofuses running around with lightsabers and you're like, oh, the lightsaber. What's up, guys? Can I share a beat? Which I think on an early joystick podcast, I compared to being somebody creating a game called Help Me Spider-Man, where you're like trapped underneath a car, and you just have to wait for Spider-Man to come rescue you. I do want to share the absolute best.

Yeah, I played Shadows of the Empire back in the day. I do want to share the absolute best feature of Dying Light 2. After an hour of suffering through the horrible medical doctor stealing sister storyline and every NPC being miserable, I started literally skipping any time anyone ever spoke ever. That's a cool feature. You can do that.

You can just hit B and it skips ahead immediately. There's no delay. There's no like, you'll even like, you can stop and it'll just skip to the next line. It's not like skipping the entire cut scene if you wanted to like get through it quickly. And man, does that help? Because once you get to the gameplay, it's not like skipping the entire cut scene if you wanted to like get through it quickly and man does that help because once you get into the gameplay it's super good the game's super fun it is the gameplay is super fun we've talked about the day i think okay so that's the negatives with

the story it's not a great story um now i will say also very quick can we have like 15 seconds uh dying light one experience because i played for a few hours but kind of bounced off yeah it felt a little rigid so i want to say that we talked about it on besties and i remember this conversation because the thing with dying light one is it's very similar and both of them have a very slow gradual incline into becoming an amazing amazing game but it takes a while in dying light one you could get like the grappling hook but it took like 20 hours to get it and once you got it the game became like unbelievably fun but it took i'm gonna modify that it took it took forever for dying

light one to get good because they updated it for six years and you had to play it around the four year mark yeah there was a sweet there was a real sweet spot. I only recently got on board with it when it came out on Switch, which is an incredible port. But I just got... Honestly, and I had this problem with Dying Light 2. This is not my type of game really anymore.

But the parkour is super fun. The zombie smashing is very fun. But after a few hours for me, I felt like I had smashed all the zombies I needed. Of two. And one. Okay. I'm ready for just on this one.

This feels like such a Justin in me game. It's a huge Justin game. Yeah, it's very much in my... Okay. The... Were guns a thing in the first one? Yes. More?

Okay, I thought so. So they basically create like a story thing early on where they're like, yeah, they took all the guns. I don't know. People have been warning us for years that it happened. They finally did it. They took all the guns. And so it's very much a melee-focused game. Once you're real deep in, Rosario Dawson shows up to give you a bow and arrow.

It's, like, pretty wild that that happens. That's, like, the late title card of narrative if Rosario Dawson is there, like, 14 hours into your game. Yeah, well, the weird thing is her character from Dogma. So what's wild about the... Okay, I love the parkour stuff because it really feels like that iteration of power in a way that every single upgrade you get feels like, oh, this is really going to change the way I get around the world. There's no fast travel in this first chunk.

It is literally just like you're getting faster at getting from A to B because your skills are improving you get like for example a fast recovery from a long fall you get the ability to fall longer you get the ability to double jump to wall run yeah wall run bouncing off jumping off

enemies stuff like that and then the combat which is all very melee focused with the exception of like a sort, I would say, ancillary ability to shoot a bow and arrow or throw a knife. It's like you unlock windmill attacks. You unlock the ability to block and parry. It's like a first-person wrestling game in a lot of ways. Right. Which my biggest problem with the combat stuff is that it's all very – it's very timing-based. Like you – if you're going to block and you want to get like the ability to counter – to give you an example, if you block an attack right at the right moment, then it will sort of stagger the enemy.

And when an enemy is staggered, you get the ability to jump off of them and do like a devastating kick to somebody. That devastating kick will also stun that person. So you can kind of chain your jump kicks. I will say this. I did get bored of the combat after a while. Best jump kicks in the business, folks. Not since Bulletstorm, I jump kicks. I will say this. I did get bored of the combat after a while. Best jump kicks in the business, folks. They're so great. Not since Bulletstorm, I would say, have jump kicks been this.

Your jump kicks have an area of a... Your jump kicks do splash damage. You can jump into a crowd of like five dudes and jump kick them, and they will all go flying 15 feet. It is really nice. Which is great when you're fighting like renegades or the cops or whatever um i didn't love when you're taking on like zombies a lot of that timing stuff kind of goes out the window because they're very erratic um in the way they they respond like

parrying is possible i have done it but it's like it's not like you see them rear back and then do it. It's like you are kind of guessing when they're actually, the moment is to actually block. But there's also other mechanics of like upgrading your weapons with certain, like you can upgrade the tips of your weapons and the shafts to give like fire or shock or poison or whatever um which is kind of more satisfying than just like trying to figure out the block and parry just like okay i'll light all of you on fire yeah that'll be great yeah that'll work just fine i wanted to talk a little bit about the parkour specifically because obviously that is the one like really stand out you know no other open world games are really doing this except for dying light one and two and having played dying light one i did have some weird like residual issues going to dying light two because there are things that

i know for sure are in the game but it will take me many hours to unlock them a basic example being being able to run and sprint and then slot it go into a slide is like i know that's in the game and the fact that i can't do it right at the beginning is right makes it feel like weirdly stilted because like almost every game the fucking fortnite has a run and slide at this point almost every game has these like default expected mechanics and it does feel a little withholding at the beginning of this especially for people who have played the first one to like just start from more or less scratch in this is kind of a drag yeah i could run into a badass slide yeah and i'm not

like a strong you know maybe i'm like a bowling alley yeah yeah like a bowling alley or a dance floor yeah definitely not on like gravel no hey i did i did i we're having a lot of fun here but like i am always thinking about the audience and like what their response to the show is going to be and whether or not they're having a good time and i know that there are so many people right now tweeting at chris that rosario dawson was not in dogma and i just want to say like we like we know that like we do that's okay we oh no she was in clerks too yeah you don't need to send that particular you don't need to it's really been in your head it's really been in my crawl oh no who's in dogma fam k jansen i don't know no no j Wow I haven't seen a Kevin Smith movie In like two decades

So once you get Jersey girl whips ass dude I really like the The way that the powers sort of ramp up With the parkour stuff And you get more You like are constantly earning Like experience in parkour or in combat and uh you're

so like just by fighting and doing parkour shit you're unlocking more of these abilities which is did you very satisfying it makes getting around the open world it's it's a small thing but it makes like running around the open world feel productive because i'm it reminded me of breath the wild where you have to make those choices like do i want more stamina or do i want more health or i guess melee damage whatever it is you pick between those two and every single time i was like stamina stamina i love the parkour i'm just gonna keep picking stamina i don't know that seems i was that your experience as well just i mean justin and plant you guys know i kept it balanced because there's certain abilities that you can't unlock so that

you're talking about a separate upgrade system where you get these things called inhibitors that allow you to increase your overall stamina or overall health there's some abilities you can't unlock until your um uh stamina or health are at a certain level. So I try to keep those fairly balanced. I think what makes the combat work for me is it really feels like dynamic where a lot of games say that, but like you are a lot of times in a situation where you're like, okay, there's, oh, I just found a spear on the ground. I'm going to check this at this guy. And then like, oh, there's a bottle over here.

I can use that to stun somebody. You know, I can craft a Molotov real quick because there's a big clump of enemies that I need to take out. And there's also, there's almost always, which is really cool, the option of like running away because of your parkour abilities. Like if you get in over your head in the open world, it's usually pretty easy to bounce out, like to fly away or whatever. That's later on. But so it's kind of like a risk reward of like, is it worth staying in this fight?

Do I have other options that are available to me? Things that'll make this a little bit easier. Yeah, Freshick, your decision-making, there's a separate, because there's just so much in this game, separate progression tree where that does make sense, where when you capture forts, did you get to any of that?

I did windmills. It's late. No. No. Yeah, it's these huge complexes that you capture and when you do that you can either assign it to the like people in the bazaar oh yeah and you get perks with that yes you get perks and the the people in the bazaar perks are all like evolutions on your parkour yeah like they install zip lines around town and stuff like that. Yeah, or these like little,

I don't know, inflated bags that help you super jump like Sonic the Hedgehog. And then if you take the cop route, for his jumping prowess? Well, the springboards. Also, the little jump pads that you hit, and then it sends you in the air.

He does that. He does that in Sonic? Anyway, the cop part. Do you even play Sonic, dude the air he does that sonic anyway the cop part play sonic dude do you even play sonic the cop part has a bubsy man well that's understandable he's pretty cool the cop pirate has booby traps so like giant pendulums of like spikes and stuff and this is a thing that okay this is what i do not like about this game having a story is you only can take one path yeah so if you want the cool booby traps and you don't get to have all the fun parkour things and i get it if you're going to make a video game where the story and the mechanics really intertwine and it's really curated and it's like you know a limited amount of time that you're going to be playing the game, sure, whatever. I get that logic of game design.

But if you want me to play a game for 500 hours, and you're going to be like, okay, you're going to play for 500 hours, and you can't get half of the fun stuff, that's not going to work for me. I want to get all the fun stuff. The two big problems that I have with this game, other than sort of the narrative stuff that we've talked about, it is cool. big problems that I have with this game, other than the narrative stuff that we've talked about.

It is cool. The rate at which you get new junk is wild. You are constantly getting... Because your weapons are breaking, and as far as I can tell, there's not a way to fix them. Which kind of replaces the idea that you need to hold on to stuff that's really powerful,

because you'll just get a new weapon pretty quickly soon after. You can specialize uh one-handed two-handed ranged or medic like healing stuff um so you can specialize in one of those so i just like throw away anything that's two-handed because i just do one-handed stuff all my gear is spec towards that um the rate at which you get that is great um i love i love that but you also need to scavenge for crafting materials and you have the classic like you know press the left stick in everything's highlighted but it like it routinely takes a couple of minutes to go from like locker to locker to get the there's some trash in here i need i need this i need these cig i can just

imagine that like the world hangs in the balance and this dude's like oh nice cigarettes i think every game it's nice i'm gonna sell these for sure i think every game needs the luigi's mansion feature in it even if it's not like if you just had an upgrade where you hold x and suck in everything within a five meter meter radius like that'd be amazing it's the number of times even i'm not as nearly as far in the game as justin and chris are but the number of times that i have shoved my meaty paw into a beehive to get the sweet honey from inside like i'm the fucking post-apocalyptic poo bear yeah uh is is it never stops being funny to me where it's like oh, your sister and the suppressors and the cops are taking fascist over. Oh,

but a smack girl. The other, the other complaint, and I would actually really like you're into the city part, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. The experience, the city is very interesting because as soon as you get to the city, they give you a paraglider and it, and a lot of times you can use um there's like vents all over that you can use to basically like take off from the ground to get immediate height and um the there are vents throughout that you can like

catch and and rise up and cover a lot of distance really quickly um which i think is essential right because it's a huge environment they do introduce fast travel i can't express to you how late this is in the game not in terms of like how close out you are to the end but how far you are from the beginning like it's it's really late in the game where you're like oh okay so this is a huge open world with like city blocks and fast travel and paragliders and all this stuff i i found getting around the world, once that stuff was unlocked, counterintuitively, I found it less enjoyable than I did when it was early on. Because early on, it's like- It's a parkour game.

It's a parkour game and it's specifically designed to like have fun routes, right? That get you from A to B. Like game designed routes, basically. Exactly, right. Exactly. Where you're like, oh, you wanted me to do that like game designed routes basically exactly right exactly where like oh you wanted me to do this and this and this not a controlling way but in a way where you're like you're trying to find the yeah there was there was a moment early on where i had like no upgrades whatsoever and i saw like a military cache on top of a building way off in the distance

and i chased it down and then had to do this like insane, like two swings, like Tarzan style across a giant, like two towers that were like 10 feet, 10 stories tall and getting to the top felt like a true, like I thought this through accomplishment that didn't feel, it didn't feel like in some Tomb Raider games where they have those like very obvious, like,

Oh, this is a game designed dungeon. This felt a lot more natural and like existing in the world and I have heard that about the second area is that it loses a lot of that it's cool some of it's cool like but there's a lot of times where you like could catch the right draft and just sort of like float on to where you're trying to get to and feel like oh well you didn't okay so i didn't need to do any of that or alternately you're trying to get up and you can't find there's not like a thing and they just expected you to like you know what it's like is uh in crackdown when you get so fast that you just don't need to use vehicles anymore and it's like

oh okay i mean instantly in saints Row 4 where you're like, I have super power. Why do I need this motorcycle? Yeah, why would I do any of this? Hey, can we get a round of applause for this game, though, to what Freshstick was saying? It's a first-person game, and the platforming is great. It is really good, and that is extremely hard.

Feels good. Yeah. None of this would work if it didn't feel very very nice you can usually make the jumps that it feels like you should be able to make and often make jumps that it feels like you shouldn't be able to make which is very nice um i also think it has a very clever power curve in like making uh zombie encounters feel like incredibly dangerous early on. But then once you are able to, you know, find a few good melee weapons or craft them,

the scarcity sort of economy that they build up around that makes the first person combat also feel more meaningful in a way that like a Skyrim never could. I never play melee classes in a Bethesda game just because I don't think that first person melee combat feels very good but because of how sort of i don't know how much you rely on your weapons in this game i i feel like there is it's also tension that yeah it's also meatier than you would see in skyrim oh it's wicked gushy wicked yeah skyrim you like hit

someone with a sword and they barely react until they run out of hit points. And here you hit a zombie and they go flying and parts go flying. Or they lose a limb or something. I also gotta say, play this one with headphones, folks, because the voice acting is a rollercoaster ride, the likes of which you will never forget for the rest of your life.

It is a treats-a-pizza. Yum, yum. You're gonna love it, I guarantee it. I have a pizza yum yum you're gonna love it i guarantee you i have a question for the audience we have a number of people who listen to this show you can't hear you what you know they can't hear you no no they can right now hello um oh hey no that's too nice you don't have to say that um anyway i have a question for you who don't play a lot of video games. What does this episode sound like? Because we've talked about so many things in this game.

Does it sound like we're in a fugue state? Does any of this make sense? I know what you're saying. It's like very, it's very, there's a lot. There's a lot. There's a lot. You could actually paint this game as a masterpiece or kind of a flop depending on like what you want to do uh i will say this it's really working for me like it's it's i love being in the world i love when i do find like there are specific parkour type challenges

in the second area that are really good um they have like windmills, like Russ was alluding to, that provide a respite from the zombies at night because they have UV lights, which the zombies are, I don't know, fucking allergic to or something. So you do have that. And what I love about those is they are like parkour climbing challenges,

but every single one has one gag and it's different. Yeah. And you have to figure out that one gag and then you're done, right? It's not like 10 minutes of climbing around and edging around and whatever. It's like figure out this one little gimmick we came up with and then move on with your life. So the pace is really good in that sense. Yeah, we didn't even talk about how like nighttime is kind of roguelite-ish in this game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's so much. I mean, I have a feeling we'll talk about this game later in the year. So we can probably save some of that and let people play more of the game. Because, yeah, I mean, you know, it's the length of Anna Karenina. It's very long. I don't know when I'm going to have time to play more of this game there's so many games coming out in February

Justin and I will take this one let us know how the 500 hours me and Russ are having fun with fucking Elden Ring and you guys are like yeah I found that this bat has a big spike in it this feels incomplete but it's like you should can you do you should play this game like play this game it's it's really good like i think oh oh oh it uh maybe wait a little bit because it is

it was but it was a bit buggy uh before it came out and now that it's out it's a bit buggy so i would i would i would hold off i've not i don't know what your guys' situation has been, but mine has been full on. Every once in a while, randomly, my computer's like, I don't want to play this anymore. Hey, go read a book, my friend. I'd rather die than play this anymore.

I'm going to literally reboot my power. I'm going to the hardest possible crash out of nowhere. The only bugs I've had in this game are great. They're like ones where I like hit a zombie with a baseball bat and then he flies like 500 feet and gets caught on a light pole. That's fun.

Yeah, I'm in favor of it. It's a big Assassin's Creed energy going on. Yeah, it does occur to me, I will say, just as a closing thought, very, very few open world games in recent years have like clicked with me just in terms of the minute-to-minute gameplay and this definitely does like this blows assassin's creed valhalla out of the water like all those like kind of rote familiar open world games this makes the minute-to-minute like way way more fun yeah yeah

yeah it is also there are some cute missions there's one where you have a guy has like a version of tinder yeah a post-apocalyptic tinder where to get signed up with it you have to go like find these fake tinder profiles that people have been making and destroy them so you can get your real profile going i feel bad i haven't gone back to see if i have any matches yet i feel bad because they wrote so many words and i'm just gonna not hear any of them because so many of them are just not worth hearing that I'm just going to skip them all. I'm sorry.

It's not going to happen. You know, it's your life. It is. That's what I'm saying. Time is precious. And speaking of precious time, Justin, do you have... I think if you don't want to listen, I think, here's my feeling. If you don't want to listen to something, you should just skip past it. There you go. Anyway, it's time for our ads and we will be right back after this.

On the doc, Freshick wrote, games that justify the slow buildup? And I would say that's everything I've been playing. Well, do tell. Speak on that. I think this is Dying Light has a very slow build-up i think pokemon every pokemon ever but especially this most recent one very slow build-up right people are really fucking into pokemon legends arceus in a way that's not good that's why because

it's very good still yeah i guess you're right plant like that's the default and i think a lot of people want to get a lot of value out of their investment whether it's you know they spend 60 or 70 dollars on a new game i don't know i think there are also a lot of people that have limited time and don't want to do that and i guess the question is what are the games that, even for people that have limited time, they should still stick it out? You know, the game that jumped to my mind, even though it didn't really click with me, was Nier Automata, which has a pretty damn slow buildup,

but I know a lot of people connect to it. But I was wondering if there were others that do that. No, I think that's it i mean it depends on what you mean by slow build up i think all of these games you know like an hour is that a slow build because the dying light 2 and pokemon both i would say about an hour hour and a half before you get into like the game yeah but dying light 2 is even longer before you get into like the fun stuff right that's more what I was talking about. Like the 12-hour territory when you like unlock a major traversal item.

That seems like a long time. I see what you mean. I see what you mean. That's different than what I had in mind, which is like, I just, I feel like before we talk about the, you know, 12-hour thing, let's talk about the one-hour problem of this Pokemon and Dying Light. Before we talk about the 12-hour thing, let's talk about the one-hour problem of this Pokemon and Dying Light. It feels like I am doing a favor for the game makers in the story they want to tell. Where it's like, before you get to play the game that we advertise to you, that you are excited about, we are going to force you to sit down and eat these vegetables. Yeah.

And we won't let you enjoy the game if you don't if you don't agree to this and it's like why like it wasn't me paying you money like enough can you just let me go play the game please like i love pokemon you don't need to tell me all this but you look at games look a series that we've kind of mocked over the years but think about the original god of war games all three of them start the first level of all three of those games may be the like most action packed thrilling like mini recreation of the entire game loop within that beginning you know even halo combat evolved starts very quickly and it feels like a bit of a failing for a developer if they can't encapsulate what makes their game stellar in that first hour or two yeah like to use that as like

just backstory and like slow following someone through a forest seems like a giant waste especially when that game is not exactly reinventing any wheels or genres or anything in that opening hour. Yeah. It's like, I dying light too. I have played you and other amalgamations about a billion times now. Like I do not need,

I do not need to crawl through this part. Like I, I definitely, definitely get it already. Yeah. Yeah. I mean to go fresh, what you're saying though is kind of a trap too because i feel like i've seen a number of games do that the big like cinematic opening you know gaudy action sequence but that's not what the game is yeah i don't so so like there's a handful of open world games where they're like okay it's open world but for the first hour pure

limited action yeah no i don't want that either i'm not exclusively saying action i think last of us 2 even though obviously we've talked about it a lot had some flaws but i think the first hour of last of us 2 is spectacular in so far as like it's narrative it has some action to it it like it draws you in without feeling as you said like a chore and um i i'm not saying it's easy this is actually a very hard thing to pull off because of course again not only that i think people like while they're making a game rightfully fall in love with the characters in the world and they want to make sure everyone is like right on board with them and understanding everything that's going on and i think there are smarter ways to introduce people to a world than just like info dump right in front of you

here's what opening of video games feel like to me uh a lot these days and i have no idea if this is true so i'm talking out of my tushy it feels like the entire game is made that the people who made it know everything about this game. They know all the story, everything. And then kind of like how I talk sometimes, they over-explain the context. And they're like, okay, we want to make sure everybody's prepared for all of this information, so we're going to give you an hour of making sure

that you're fully prepped to enjoy this game. And they create it last. And as a result, it's like, okay, it was made by people who knew everything about the game, and now it's being handed to people who know nothing about the game. Which is the hugest problem when you come to character development. It's like, this pilgrim dude has a gruff voice, and his name is, I shit you not, Aiden.

Oh, so he's an acting game protagonist, huh? No shame to Aiden's. But this he's a he's an action game protagonist, huh? No shame to Aiden's. But this dude's a pilgrim, right? Which means that in the world of Dying Light, he's like an outsider who doesn't live in any one community. He's just sort of roaming around. And some people don't like pilgrims

and some people do and it's kind of whatever. But like why do you keep telling people your name is Aiden? Like, why do you want to put yourself on wedgie alert all the time? Just be like, oh, me? Fang. That's me. They call me the Dark Blade. Like, whatever. Just, like, not Aiden. And when you say Aiden, like, you wouldn't...

Me? I'm Cornelius Jasper IV. I'm a pilgrim, and I got a UV watch. You wouldn't go by Justin McElroy, is what you're telling me. Fuck no! No way. Fuck no. One, don't want to get doxxed. Yeah.

Huge. Zombies will get you every fucking time. Yeah. That's true. That's true. Do we have some reader mail? Aiden. I i think we do we kind of gave up on on that i i i i know i wonder if i can get like a giant bomb wiki entry on aiden game protagonist aiden pierce rings a bell in some game was the name of the ghost in Beyond Two Souls. It feels like the default name for like, you know, he's white. You get it.

He's a white guy. Yeah, Aiden Pierce was Watch Dogs. Yeah. Before we go to reader mail, the answer to your question is Breath of the Wild, right? That if you're going to do a slow buildup, do a miniature version of the thing that you're already doing. There's no slow buildup in Breath of the Wild. It starts. No, no, no, it starts no no no no no no no there is what i'm saying is they need to teach you how the open world works they need to teach you all these things right so they give you a smaller open world

to learn everything in sure so even though it actually is a slow build-up you you cannot go do the rest of the game they're giving you a version of the thing that you came there for right and i think like that's what i i would like to see for more games is hey you don't need to give like let me lose on the entire open world but give me a version of the thing that i came here for i can't yeah that can be hit or miss though like i think witcher 3 does that and and is still too slow in that opening area way too slow yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway reader mail here we go this one is from uh branigan's law if y'all were in a real zombie apocalypse who would be the most prepared and who would trip

and be left behind as zombie food during a chase i am i'm bracing myself right here bracing myself go ahead you would not fresh chick would not be the one to trip because Frushik would immediately push me over. Immediately. Oh, that's not true. That's not true. No, he would. Russ would not do that to a friend. He would.

He knows it. I would say New York City, probably not the place to be. Just by geography, probably not the place to be in a Zimbocalypse, right? So for that reason, Russ is- Probably tested.

I would say, if that is what we're basing it on, I think juice has the best chance of like getting out. Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Rural. Yeah. Right. We are under our second water boil notice here.

Actually, it just ended here in Austin in a year. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. We're we're fucking stoked about it. And so I did like right when it hit i was like oh shit i'm gonna go get some water so i went to um the local gas station i bought like a pallet of water bottles and brought it back home and then when i did get home i cracked

them open i realized folks this was no normal water this was music water and what's special about music water is it has it is enhanced with electrolytes quote for flavor um so i basically was like oh man i have to keep my family safe so i'm gonna go buy some vaguely salty bottles for them it's not water guys it's music water it's even better than the dirty you basically bought your family a bunch of Pedialyte. Pedialyte, I think, ain't got nothing on music water. So basically all that is to say it would not be me. I would die. I think it's really generous to think that Russ would make it to the zombie apocalypse.

Russ would be like, okay, the scientist is leaving the facility, right? He's got zombie-itis. He starts turning and loses control of his car. He plows into a, like, porta-potty that was, like, on the road. And who's in there with diarrhea? It's Russ Reshtick. He's killed instantly. Like, that's how Russ goes out. Well, the truth of the matter is I had already died from the diarrhea in the porta potty before he hit me.

Oh, boy. Though I would love to see post-apocalyptic Russ, or as he would be called then, like, Laser Blade. I would imagine there would be a katana involved. Okay, one more question from the number one potato fan. The age-old question. Which one is scarier? Slow zombie or fast zombie? So, you know what? I'm going to adjust this question

real quick. If we're making it just a single zombie, nothing scary about it. Slow zombie doesn't even have a chance here. So let's make it plural zombie hordes. I mean, hey, that's unnecessary. Know why? One fast zombie zombie doesn't even have a chance here so let's make it plural zombie hordes i mean hey no you don't that's unnecessary know why one fast zombie would kill me one fast zombie would probably kill me he's fast and he has no control over like his own his own body there's no he has no sort you

know what i mean like he's he is a perfect predator yeah he is he is optimized his gains and he is gonna tear my ass apart but we're not talking deadliness we're talking scary so if you were like tied to a chair and you were in with a fast zombie or slow zombie well now you've really favored okay yeah so yeah. So here's the scene. I'm in a train station, okay? And 50 feet away from me is a vending machine. And what's that inside the vending machine? A single Butterfinger bar that's been passed over by all the scavengers. But then, you know, 20 feet past that is a huge horde.

Okay, Bart Simpson is one of them, but a huge horde of slow zombies i'm gonna run the math on that guys i think i could get to that vending machine get that butterfinger out and get home before those slow zombies could even touch me you know that's that's an inconvenience that is what happens every time somebody gets eaten by the slow zombies is they see the butterfinger like yeah yeah you just be saving see Butterfinger and they're like, yeah. Yeah, you'd just be saving that Butterfinger and they'd just get all over you. Yeah.

You know why? You put your hand into the Butterfinger dispenser and you know what grabs you? A zombie hand. Did we just write a Super Bowl commercial for Butterfinger? Nobody lays a finger on my brains! Yeah, that's good. That's scary too. Thank you. I guess it is slow zombies. Super Bowl commercial for Butterfinger? Nobody lays a finger on my brains. Yeah, that's good.

That's scary, too. Thank you. I guess it is slow zombies. Well, I guess we answered that question, kind of. Hey, let's do honorable mentions. Can I go first? Yeah, please. This one just dropped yesterday.

It's hot off the presses. Any of y'all played Olly Olly World yet? Not yet. I really want to. Oh, baby. I fucking love Olly Olly i i have for i guess since the first one came out there's have they made any others other than they made two right right two two was my absolute jam i think i reviewed both of them uh ollie ollie is a downhill skating game

uh skateboarding not in line but i don't know maybe it's on dlc uh and it is all about sort of chaining tricks and grinds together it has the sort of um uh if you're familiar with the skate series where all the tricks are sort of executed with various flicks of the analog stick uh the same thing is happening here, but it is a 2D downhill jam, essentially. So you are going off of rails and trying to chain jumps together, but the courses are essentially like obstacle courses where you are also having to not fucking hit your head on a big inflatable duck or something. The vibe of this game is

so on point uh you live in a world created by five skate gods uh and they have a representative on earth called a skate wizard and there's a new opening for a skate wizard so you are trying to impress the skate gods enough to become the new skate wizard uh so that you can one day uh ascend to narvana uh that's with a g uh it that's all dope the soundtrack is so good uh got a lot of like synthy like future bass shit which is absolutely my jam and is also like the best imaginable music to you know replay a course a thousand times trying to like string together that perfect combo so griffin i remember really liking ollie ollie but also finding it like probably too difficult to oh it gets it it's so it depends on like each each uh course has like

lots of different sort of targets right so? So there's like three point goals, there's three score goals that you can shoot for. But then there's also in sort of like pro skater style, there are side objectives like chain together four grinds or collect these five starfish or whatever. Those can get pretty tough pretty quick. Basically about every, I'm about, i'm not that far into the game and i've already hit a few of those that took me you know not super long 10 or 15 minutes of just like playing the same course over and over again

but the joy of ollie ollie is that like it's fun every time yeah like it is i was up accidentally until about like 1 a.m last night because i lost track of time like just trying to accomplish all the objectives um it is it's it's it is phenomenal are you playing on switch or i'm playing it on switch one my one thing on switch and it's like it is uh a constant kind of annoyance is that load times between levels are like maybe one or two seconds too long, which sounds petty. But like if you knock out a course in one go, you know, it is just enough of a lag to, I don't know, break the vibe just a little bit. It's not like it's not terrible. It's just like kind of annoying.

But if you fuck up and have to restart, of course it's instant. So I suppose that's all that really matters because you're going to be restarting a whole lot. But yeah, I'm really having a good time with it and I would recommend it to folks with a bit of patience and folks who enjoy, you know,

enjoy sick ass stunts and dope music. I'm still playing Vampire Survivors. And it's- Is that on PC only? As far as I know, it would be good on Switch maybe, but it's pretty small. I'm planning on when the Steam Deck arrives, that is one of the first games I will play on it.

Why don't you guys just play it? Because I've got other stuff to do. Yeah, I'm busy, man. No, no, no. This is great. Yeah, but this is great. Is there multiplayer? No. You don't need that. I also wanted to, this is a new one

for me, but I wanted to recommend a podcast I just finished today. It was called Finding Drago um and it's from australia from the australia it's from the abc which i think is the australian broadcasting company uh they've done two seasons now finding drago and finding um nemo desperado uh is the second one i've not listened to that yet but fighting drago is like six episodes each one's like 30 minutes long uh and it is the second one. I've not listened to that yet, but Fighting Drago is like six episodes, each one's like 30 minutes long. And it is the story of these Australian journalists and comedians that find a book

that is called Drago on Mountains We Stand that is like a unlicensed sequel to Rocky IV about Ivan Drago. Awesome. And the author, Todd Noy, is, according to the Dust Jacket, an Australian Pulitzer Prize winner that no one has ever heard of

and no one can find and doesn't seem to exist in the world. And it's about these two guys trying to find who is the author, Todd Noy. And it is really, really funny because there's like an entire episode where a guy, one of the two guys, goes to the library and he's too uncomfortable about recording it. So he creates a makeshift wire to tape to his chest and then is chastised by his bosses when he returns and finds out that that is against their policies. And he's in big trouble and they can't that is against their policies and he's in big trouble and they can't use any of the audio and he doesn't know what it's a really funny but it gets into like some really interesting questions that I can't I don't even want to tip my hand but it's called Finding Drago it's it's really good it may be called Finding Desperado now because

the second season is uh has is a different name but uh it's great it's well worth listening to is a different name, but it's great. It's well worth listening to. How about you? No, I don't have anything I could talk about that's not under embargo, so it's probably fine. Oh, big shot. Big shot. I've been playing Everyday Shooter by Jessica Mack,

and I don't know if I've talked about this game a lot on the show. Thank you for whoever changed it in our document from Everyday Shorter to Everyday Shooter. It's one of my 10 favorite games of all time. It was originally released on the PlayStation Vita, but you can play it right now. I was going to say, this is an old game, yes. Yeah, it's available on Steam.

And every once in a while, I see it sitting in my Steam library, and I'm like, you know what? I'm going to play that game because it is just a perfect little video game. It's a top-down, I don't know, twin-stick shooter, but time to music in every stage has kind of a pattern that you have to discover that makes it much, much, much easier to play and survive. And yeah, that's it. The music is just pure jams. It is my chill-out video game. And it could be your chill-out video game, too. I miss...

There was a fun era in the mid-aughts that was, like, dope for games like this. I remember playing this game quite a bit on my old psp and sound shapes is another one that was yeah which also also made by jessica mac there you go that's dope but yeah it was queasy games is that the name of the dev yeah yeah yeah and um she's making a new game right now that if you follow her, her Twitter handle is mango underscore laichi. It looks awesome. Like, one of my

favorite current developer accounts because every gif from this game looks just amazing. Oh my god, do you guys remember every Extend Extra? God almighty, that was you remember Space Giraffe? Shit was cool for games for a bit.

The 2000s was good for games. That's true. You know what? It was good for indie games, and it was good for AAA games if you liked the color brown and beige. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts.

We have Tomorrow Jones, It's Me, Brian Levy uh fireball 21c your proud dad and max leds or max max l3ds i'm not sure if that's speak or not uh thank you for writing reviews and thanks to everyone who wrote reviews for an apple podcast or wherever you uh get your podcast it's appreciated, as is y'all sharing the show with your friends and folks. Next week, we're going to be talking about Us. That's right. It's a self-congratulatory 10th anniversary special where we, if I have this correctly,

will endeavor to choose the best game of the past decade. Is that correct? Of the time that we've been covering the show. We're going to choose the bestie of the first decade is that correct of the time that we've been covering the show we're going to choose the bestie of the first decade of besties so we will be pairing the best yeah it'll be the top our 10 besties will go up against our 10 alternate besties which we chose in an episode a week or two ago you should go listen to that beforehand honestly it's like you got to get the back how do you do a bracket with 20 games though it's i think that's our problem four of them are near and the other

are kentucky red zero we also do need to mention everything we discussed very quickly yeah i'm going to do that really quick here we go everything. Everything that we've discussed. Dying Light 2. A bunch of games that were too slow and nobody wanted to play them because they took too long. Everyday Shooter. Olly Olly World. Vampire Survivors. The podcast Finding Drago which might be called Finding Desperado

which sounds like a real joy. I am downloading it on my Overcast right now. That's going to do it for us. Thank you so much for listening and be sure to join us again next week for the besties because should the world's best friends make the world's best games? Besties!