The Besties - The Besties Podcast XIII

Episode Date: May 25, 2012

The Besties square off on Diablo 3, Max Payne 3 and Quest for Glory.In what they hope will be the final rule change for at least a few weeks, The Besties introduce a commissioner to help them select the best game of the week. Also, Russ does a Max Payne impression, Justin infuriates Diablo 3 fans and Chris Plante whisks you away to Europe. 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!

um one of them is named one of the characters is named bran but not like the brand that's a major character on the show just another brand in the world awesome well they do discuss it in the books they discuss how many brands there are quite a few brands are there many is he brand the builder there's uh harry waters is a guy in there oh god and uh my favorite guy his name is Dale Tomato and he's a real ass dude just walking around and it's not like he's a pasta chef or something so here's the thing about J.R.R. Martin he is as you may or may not know

he is absolutely obsessed with food like we'll go on for like 6 or 7 pages describing a banquet like the suckling pig just and the like yeah so clearly even coming through in his character right now now you're talking about jrr martin who is george rr martin's like evil super fat twin brother yes i met him. Hello, my name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. I have already forgotten which game I'm bringing. Hey, it's Chris Plant, and I'm the commissioner. I have no idea what that means. My name is Ross Fretchick, and I've got the best game of the week. Here on the Besties, every week we select the newest, hottest releases fresh off the shelves and pit them against each other in Mortal Kombat to see which new game reigns supreme. Once we have a victor, we pit that game against the current reigning champion and decide whether or not we have a new favorite game of the year.

In what has become Besties tradition we have uh uncovered a new rule uh much like inception we've gone yet another layer deeper into the besties fiction have replaced the chris granitron 2000 uh with the concept of commissioner griffin now this is your idea. Real quick, before we get into that, can we explain how we have decommissioned the Chris Granatron? Did we do it, you know, following? You mean with a hammer, right? Like how we took a hammer. That's not, I mean, that's not ethically. I feel like we have a higher ethical imperative

than just beating it to death with a hammer. He's like off the table now. So, fine. He does occasionally still come back to life, just beating it to death with a hammer although he's like off the table now so it's fine he does occasionally uh uh still come back to life and russ will occasionally have to thwack with a hammer yeah okay uh but i was more talking about like dispose like we have to take it to best buy so that they so they can get rid of no he's a big fan of friday night lights i watch it on netflix and he watches along and every once in a while he goes i have the same name as a dancer and also his torso is a bong now that's amazing he's the greatest robot ever so i had this i had

this crazy dream last night and it was what if every week we rotated and one of us instead of presenting a shitty ios game chris uh we we took turns being the besties commissioner so we don't present a game instead we just adjudicate and lead the discussion of the other three games in contest i i really like that i think it's a great idea i don't care for it okay but it's what we're gonna do because we live the other stuff is apparently not very good to listen to right and that's like super important for this show for a for a listening thing that's yeah the the key things it's like if it was a youtube that was bad to watch that's sort of what the that's like the the sensory like equivalent like where where would you put that on like a ranking of the important stuff oh a very high on the list yeah so uh so i'll kick

things off then i'm gonna i going to take your three games. I am throwing them in the ring BattleBot style. And Justin, your bot will take this first swing. Okay. My bot this week for the best game of the week. I almost feel a little bad because this seems obvious that I'm going to win, but I'm going to just keep on trucking uh diablo 3 the devil as as the ads you've seen on all the buses they say the devil is back in town that's the tag jesus jesus take the mouse jesus take the mouse

the devil's back in town yabloablo, as I've been calling it. Yablo is back. Yablo be there. Yablo is back. And everybody is clicking on it. And I guess that's my pitch. How have you played? Have you played it?

Or have you just like. Yeah, I'm to about level 15. I got a monk. He has a strong faith in the Lord. And the Lord helps him punch fast. And he also can drop a bell on people, which is a pretty good skill to have. That's not a useful skill either.

A sizable bell. It's a literal bell. Now, I have not... I'm not a big... I've never played Diablo for any length of time. I maybe put 10 or 15 minutes into Diablo 2. And I think that the game has really conflicted me, I think. On the one hand, it is such a great way to sink a couple hours, you know,

way to sink a couple hours you know getting the the the gear looking for all the swords and magic items and and going through dungeons with a friend um and that all works great and like if you're not if that's what you're in the mood for diablo 3 is just perfect where it kind of loses me is the fact that it's not a as a game design it's not very good like it's not i mean and and this is probably anathema to people who've been super into diablo but um it's it's not a good design of a game you basically it's basically like windows you're just clicking a bunch of stuff and then things happen there's there's not a whole lot of strategy to it it's a it's a lot of reward like the reward systems are are well constructed but as a game design i don't think it's particularly particularly rewarding like what skills you choose

to use in a certain encounter and and how you approach it um almost never has any bearing on whether or not you succeed in the situation um and and i have not played the nightmare difficulty maybe at at that point you have to think through it a little bit more but um it's just a very shallow shallow experience but it again if that's what you're in the mood for and i've played it for hours and hours and hours as a as an entertainment as a diversion uh if that's what you're in the mood for, and I've played it for hours and hours and hours as an entertainment, as a diversion. If that's what you're in the mood for, it's fantastic. And playing with a friend is even better because you can just sort of seamlessly drop into somebody else's game. There's cross-game chat.

Even if you're not together, if somebody else is playing, you can ping them and ask if they want to hop into your world or vice versa. And your progress is consistent across the game, so there's really no reason not to. Even if the person is behind you in the story, you can still get all the experience and loot and gold and everything, so there's big rewards for you regardless. So, like I said, if you can get past sort of the fact that the game itself is not – is kind of dumb, is really dumb, it's a pleasant way to spend your time.

Justin, I have a question or more of a comment about what you just said. If I hadn't heard you say the name of the game at the beginning of that kind of little spiel yeah i would have sworn you were talking about a facebook game i mean it's not that far off like i don't want to be a jerk about it but this is not fair to diablo justin i've played with you in diablo and i know you're only at level 15 and you're gonna hate what i'm about to say next i realize diablo 3 specifically sort of the first i would say it's only like three hours of gameplay it's not like final fantasy 20 hours of gameplay you have to play before it gets good but once you hit about level 20 and you have character decisions to make like which loadout you pick that's sort of where the game opens up and because how do you mean so i'll put for example

my wizard. As the wizard, you start off and it's like you've got your magic bolt and you've got your, like, surrounding ice attack. And that's pretty much it. And as you level up, more skills that you can pick from get unlocked. And so you get to this point where you're like, oh, I'm dealing with a lot of little guys. I need to change up my loadout to deal with like area effect stuff and or like i'm fighting a boss so i want just like direct damage on one target and i think that's where the game gets really satisfying because you're altering your play style depending on what you're facing okay not to defend your game because it sucks, but I really like it. No, I mean, like, yeah, I guess I see that. Is that necessary, though?

I mean, like, are you... It becomes necessary to change your layout. Are you optimizing? Yes. Or are you, I mean, is it like, oh, we would have failed that encounter. I would have died. Yeah. You would have failed encounters.

I think I've played a little bit less i think i'm like character like level 14 near the end of the first act like i don't know i think my problem with the game is the i know you can change the loadouts and i i'm starting to reach a point where that's becoming important but um i think my problem is that you can you can only have access to so few abilities at any one time without having to change your loadout. I think people gave World of Warcraft a lot of shit, and they still do, for being mindless. But I feel like compared to Diablo, in World of Warcraft you have dozens of abilities that you have to be constantly thinking, what's the best thing, what do I have to use right now to stay alive especially in the in-game stuff that in i don't know it just sort of sets diablo's two primary abilities and then what is it four support abilities like i don't

know it kind of puts it to shame it seems like i don't know i i don't think i've played enough to really have the full diablo 3 experience but it hasn't really hooked me in the way that I was hoping it was going to. Yeah. And I'm not sure exactly. I'm not sure. I still like getting the new powers. I think the glyph system that they've built where basically you have everyone, every character that you play through will have the same skills,

but you can augment them with runes that you get as you level up. You just automatically get these runes that you can use to alter your powers. So though everyone will have the same skills, the collection of skills and how you've augmented them with runes will probably be pretty different person to person. But at the same time, by the time everybody reaches max level, they're going to have access to the same set of skills and the same set of rooms no no no but hold on a second because i made the same mistake that you're making which was well whatever everyone will be basically the same but because of the cooldown time required to change out skills you really have to stick with one thing for each encounter so there's a lot of strategy involved in like what loadout you're picking also to your point about like only having a few skills at one time it's six skills at

one time that you can pick from and honestly i prefer that to like the op to world of warcraft where you're like you've got this toolbar of like 40 skills and you're like constantly having to micromanage all of them i'd rather a small set that are all really useful. I have a question for you. Yeah, hit me. Maybe this is more of a crackpot theory about Blizzard games, especially like World of Warcraft and then Diablo more so.

Do you ever doodle while you're on the phone? Like you need something to do while you talk to someone? I kind of feel like these are the ultimate phone doodling experiences like they're really just good excuses to be social with people and maybe they're made for people who aren't especially social to begin with which is an unfair judgment i mean it's totally baseless yeah totally totally and completely yeah but but i'm gonna say it anyway okay great but no no i i think you're selling the games awfully short

because they are engaging, and you can't really be absent-minded in either game. Yeah, I don't mean to sell all the way down that. I mean, I'm not saying that they're bad games. I think they're probably great games, but I think they're kind of like reward loops that feel really good, and then the memorable stuff is what you remember with your friends. Do you really look back and you're like,

oh man, when that devil said he was going to get me and then I got him, that was... There are some better, there are some cooler story beats. I honestly don't know. I haven't played through it yet. Are you talking about Diablo 3? Not really. In 3? No, not really.

Not story beats, but there are neat moments, I think. The FMV cutscenes are badass. They're tremendous, but story-wise, really? You know what's going on right now? In Act 1, you know what's going on? What do you mean? Oh my god, are you telling me it's going to twist and turn? No, that's the problem.

It pretty much goes on a straight line. I just hope I get to fight the devil at the end. That's all I want. My biggest problem is that it doesn't goes on a straight line. No twisties? Okay. I just hope I get to fight the devil at the end. That's all I want. I think my biggest problem is that it doesn't let me be the standalone pretty, pretty princess that's totally different from all of my peers,

and they can't be the kind of hero that I am. What? In your real life. Like, in real life. No, like, in the game, I can't be like i'm a super no like in the game i can't be like the workplace or the gym like a specialization like some sort of specialization that i picked that maybe not everybody else yeah but you can do that that's what i'm saying a unique flower yeah but then they can just do it too by like clicking the thing and then wait

in 10 seconds so you'd rather so i would just say i like the fact that like instead of having like a whole respect system you don't have to worry about it it just cuts out the middleman and it and it also removes the fact of like oh i don't know i didn't know what i was doing when i started playing the game and i didn't pick a bunch of crappy spells and got stuck and then you start over i do like that yeah as commissioner justin give me a give me a final sentence pitch um you can play it for years and still find new loot and i bet they'll continue to support it and it's great fun click click click click click diablo is not going to sell any copies because of that pitch okay uh russ uh it's your turn so

give me a great pitch for your game i can do that that. Now, Russ, real quick. I feel like we have to address this. Are you recording inside of a construction site right now? He's actually in shop class. Yeah, I wanted to mention this because you might hear it on the recording, and I apologize. So I live in New York City, as you may or may not know. Where everyone is rude all the time. All the time. The mayor punched me in the face the other day.

It was really upsetting thanks mike bloomberg anyway uh so in new york city you have many neighbors because you live in an apartment and for whatever reason new york city people don't talk to their neighbors because they're creepy usually and uh in this scenario one of my neighbors is doing some pretty intense construction work somewhere i don't even know what apartment it is but it's somewhere in my listening proximity and right now they're drilling something so you might hear a buzzing it's not you will hear you are hearing it actively hear that sound yeah hear that sound that's drilling that's drilling so someone's being drilled i mean drilling upstairs

gross wow you're better than that i'm not really and what's your what's your what's your stupid game okay so uh instead of uh saying my game outright i'm gonna give you a quote from my game oh you ready yeah and i'm gonna do the voice too go ahead oh good i was hoping that you would do this does this character sing no my heart was like a devil's horn looking into the glass eye of a hooker down on her luck in the streets of sorrow where the dreams of a brighter tomorrow go to die is that is that really from that is That's Proust, right? No, that is Hauser, actually. Hauser.

Is that a real quote? No. In the style of? In the style of Max Payne 3. So my game is Max Payne 3. Okay. So Max Payne's been gone for a while, just like Diablo has. And also similar to yabo the core of the max pain experience has not changed in the eight or however many years

it's been since the last max pain game um it's still a game about you know diving fancy slowing down time and shooting guys in the head that hasn't changed um but there's a lot of work that they did to make it feel i don't want to say more realistic but it feels like heavier like more impactful what you're doing where i don't know all the guns feel like really powerful and like as you're moving through the world they did a lot of work on the animation so like max like moves very realistically and like gets knocked into walls and it like he tumbles and it's it just has a uh gritty i guess more i don't want to say visceral but like heavier feeling to it that's sort of substantial substantial is a good word uh that makes the uh combat feel much more interesting uh it's also kind of refreshing

because i'm used to so many games being like so cover centric whereas max pain is is very and actually it doesn't want you to cover yeah it discourages it um because if you're in cover the whole time you'll you'll run out of ammo really quickly and uh just get overwhelmed wait wait wait are you talking about max pain three yeah i i completely i um well go on well i mean it depends what difficulty you're playing on on harder difficulty levels it's sort of a mix of cover and no cover but i think you have to use the max is so fragile i think it forces you to constantly use the cover maybe i'm just really good at shooting guys maybe you're just so i found i mean it for me it was six and one half dozen and the other like you can if you're very conservative with your ammo and you can aim you know super well

you can use the cover to shoot but if you're in bullet time and you're moving nobody's gonna hit you yeah that's that's like way more effective than cover so you almost and you can dive for free yeah so like you almost always have a reason to to be moving yeah i mean you can dive for free you can always go into if you're uh even if you don't have the meter you can still slow motion dive oh okay yeah yeah i don't it's it's rare i can't think of the last shooter that i've played where it was just like like i just want to replay that level because it was fun the shooting mechanics alone were fun not like oh it looked really cool or whatever it's just like in the way that it was fun to run around mario's castle in super mario 64 i feel the same way playing max pain

there there are moments especially max pain is one of those rare examples where I think it gets better the further you get into it. And there are some moments in the later levels that aren't even moments that were scripted or something. That were just things that I did in the game that were some of the coolest things I've ever done in an action game. Just these perfect moments where like, you're almost dead and you dive and you missed your dive. So you basically just slam into a wall and slump to the ground.

And then the guy comes around the corner and you have one bullet and you cap him. And it's chock full of moments like that where like, at one point I was running down this super narrow hallway and I dove to the side when this guy came around with a shotgun. I dove to the side to try to get out of the way

and unbeknownst to me, I was walking past a window at the time. So I accidentally just slow-mo dived through an office window as i started shooting this guy and it's full of of really really cool moments like that and they do like it'll go into like uh bullet time like uh when you kill the last guy it like all slow slows down and you you look badass and the guy getting shot is like oh i got shot and then no but it it really does like they do a very good job making you feel in command of like an action

movie like yeah it constantly just watching it like someone watching you play will just be like like that was an awesome moment and it's. And when there's a pretty gory shot and you're putting a lot of bullets into a guy and there's blood everywhere and you see the holes appearing in him, you can actually hold the A button to slow that down even more. To savor it.

So you can have plenty of time. Additional time to masturbate. Yeah, that's when I lick the screen. When it's slowed down. Look at those head flowers. That's what i call them so it opens up i do you know i set up that masturbation joke and you guys just couldn't help yourself i wanted i did all the hard leg work and you guys just wanted to slip it at the end you're like the green ranger you know i had a fine team going and you just wanted the glory um pop it at the end of the fight.

I think my favorite thing about the game is the fact that you pick up pills to eat pills. You eat pills for power, for strength. Like Pac-Man. Exactly. pills which is so often uh the the fine folks at rockstar have pinned a line for max pain to say uh other than just like hey pills all right or yeah pills these are great every time you pick up pills it's like looks like these junkies have their own secrets or ah yes my oldest friend and it's different every time it is the it is the the complete and total diametric opposite of gex he never he is yeah it's like uh the the he's the pills over here guy is gonna go to the max pain school

of finding pills yeah give him all kinds of different what does that excel spreadsheet look like you know right you know there was somebody at rockstar who was just on pills writing he's like looks the sins of my past in a swallowable format there's one in the he finds him in the arcade and he says just call me pac-man gobble gobble yeah okay you stole chris plant's pac-man joke what you stole chris plant's pac-man you doubled a pac-man and then you added a fonzie bear oh wait no it's not a fonzie bear bear? Like on happy days? Hey. Hey. Hey, waka waka.

Can we talk? Waka flaka flame. Can we also, stop it. Can we also talk about the fact that Max Payne is pretty much the worst bodyguard ever? Oh, no. I wish we could talk about spoilers because you are right. His ineptitude. Well, even in the first two levels, it like he he botches like six jobs yeah yeah

he's like i'm just i'm just gonna get so so drunk hey where'd you go ah let's say let's just say this max is a bodyguard and he's really bad at it and his solution seems to be i'll get vengeance for you it's like uh i kind of wanted to live like you can keep cashing my checks i guess like it's very nice of you to go get vengeance for me i kind of wish you shot that guy like maybe stood near me at some point instead of being at a bar and then hearing me on fire and coming out to see what all the hubbub is about it's basically like playing capture the flag and he's standing kind of near the flag but only waits until someone grabs it

and starts running away. And then he shoots them in the back and might kill the hostage in the process. It's like he's a bodyguard in the very literal, literal definition of the word body. Yeah. So, yeah.

Not a safety guard. He's not guarding your personal safety. Russ, give me a final sentence. She was like a cold whore in the night. Why don't you say whores? Dreaming about whores and prostitutes and pills that whores take on the street of sorrow. You said it three different times. Wow.

Glorious. Okay. do you want to take a break anybody have any good stories they want to they want to catch up with chris plant you just got back from your honeymoon through the assassin's creed franchise why don't you tell us about that i want to say that it's chris plant's fault that we took a week off yeah definitely you say that all you want it's not gonna make it true i honeymoon, and you're going to pin blame to me for being happy for once. So here's what I did. I saw everywhere in Assassin's Creed for my honeymoon. I went to Rome, and then I traveled up and down to Italy, and then I went to Istanbul.

What about Florence? Or Constantinople. Of course I went to Florence. Well, that should have been first. Do you know where Italy is? Actually, I did it opposite. I did Rome, and then I did Florence. Do you know where Italy is? I actually did it opposite. I did Rome and then I did Florence. Is that okay?

No. Oh, well. But it was really good. But what I was telling Russ earlier, what I realized about the Assassin's Creed game, about like while in Rome and Florence and kind of in Constantinople or Istanbul, was those games are so fun.

Climbing and killing things is so great and so memorable. And everywhere I went, I would see the Galata Tower, and I'd be like, man, I really climbed that. And I would tell Steffi, my wife, and she would be wholly disinterested. But then I would think, like, I don't remember what happened in any of these games. Sure. Like, I remember climbing in, you know, in the Hagia Sophia. And I was like, yeah, but what happened?

Did he, like, in my head, it was just an empty world full of, like, bodies that I stabbed. Bodies and feathers. Bodies and towers and feathers. And my sister, who I have, I collect, i collect what is it feathers for and that is it like i don't remember a single scene from that game oh and and my cousin or brother mario i remember that oh yeah mario the stories are just totally forgettable and they really do a poor job of tying into the environment it's like you have all these amazing places. It's, like, kind of sad that I can't be like, oh, St. Peter's Basilica or the Fousey Gallery.

Like, why do I not remember something that happened here? I think a lot of that comes from the open-worldness of those games, where it's like, I mean, I guess sort of GTA, to a certain extent, falls into those as well, where because you're constantly on the move and not spending a lot of time in any one place yeah i mean maybe but i i still have like memories from gta and it isn't even exact replica like they go out of their way to not be you know new york yeah exactly but i still like know like oh i went across the williamsburg bridge and then i went in the subway

tunnel that was probably the f or the g line and then this all happened like do you think they're're going to – I bet they're going to focus more on that for Assassin's Creed 3, don't you think? I actually think even less. Really? Because there's so few actual landmarks that are still standing that were around during the revolution. I guess maybe, but in my mind, the revolution is so tied to the geography of that era. It's sort of like stuck in time in my mind the revolution is so tied to you know the geography of that era it's sort of like stuck in time in my mind like the battlefields i think you're right like i think like the hills it'll be like oh i remember but you don't think like boston and boston doesn't look anything like it did so you won't you can't really make there might be like one or two

buildings but for the most part you can can't. Well, there's Cheers. Yeah, Cheers was there. Oh, yeah, you do go to Cheers, and you see the mailman. And Norm is there. And everyone goes, Norm. Ted Danson, and then there was... Shirley MacLaine. Shirley MacLaine. Oh, God.

Miss her. She's not dead. You know what I find funny is that Chris Plant is in the most beautiful places on the planet, and he's like, I don't remember this level in Assassin's Creed. Do you know how much Steffi did not care? And I kept saying it. I was like, oh, man, when we get back, we're going to play so much Assassin's Creed together. And she's like, we're here right now.

Yeah. And I was like, yeah, okay, cool. Man, I'm going to play that game when I was like, yeah, okay, cool. Man, I'm going to play that game when I get back. By myself. By myself alone. This is where the, this is where the fault,

fault lines in our relationship start. I should have married Kristen Bell instead. Justin, can you tell everyone what your wife calls Assassin's Creed? Cause it's, it's probably my favorite nickname for a game ever. Uh, she calls it,

she, she likes the puzzle parts of it, but she doesn't really like any of the other parts. The murder. The murder and everything. So she has refused to learn about most of it. She calls the game Sneaky Aladdin. Sneaky Aladdin. Sneaky Aladdin. Let me ask you something.

Do you think altair or your wife have seen more dead bodies oh my god that's grim uh probably altair because uh sydney doesn't let anybody die at least she said she will never let me die so i don't i don't know when she does will she bend over your body in a dreamlike state and say, Requiescat in Pache? Yeah. Do you worry that maybe she's a bit like Max Payne and that she says that now, but she's going to go to the bar and you're going to give me that? That sounds pretty close to something that could happen, I think.

Yeah. But anyway. Well, great. I want to hear who else has it. Yeah, we got Griffin's game. I do. And did you say game or did you say five games? I said game.

I said game. I'm pretty sure you just said game. It's five, but it's five. My game this week is the recently released on the GOG platform Quest for Glory series. Whoa. Wait, wait, wait. Is it the GOG platform or the MAGOG? GOG with G-O-G.

Just one GOG. Wait, this is just a re-releaseG platform or the MAGOG? GOG with G-O-G. Just one GOG. Wait, this is just a re-release of a game that came out 30 years ago? Five games that came out 30 years ago? No, not 30 years ago. These are super streamlined, patched, DOS box versions of games. Have any of you played the... Justin, I know you were familiar with the Quest for Glory games. It was pretty... Yeah, I should say so should say so pretty important to our childhood chris

russ i played quest 64 okay so yeah i think that too that was a great game no all right this is a different thing though oh um they're these great uh adventure games with role-playing elements in them uh so in each game you can play either a fighter or a magic user or a thief. And in the later games you can also be a paladin. What about a monk? In the later games you can also be a paladin

but you have to unlock that class. You can be a witch doctor. No, I'm just kidding. What about a monk? Stop it. There's no monks. there's no monks there's no monks in the games can you be can you be tony shalhoub as monk the classes are fighter tony shalhoub magic user tony shalhoub comma magic user uh when i play diablo 3 as monk i i'm really careful about my inventory for people that

haven't played griffin can you tell me sort of what makes these different from a lot of other adventure so games that come out during the period what makes them different is mostly the the role playing um aspect of it right like there's the king's quest series it's sort of in in tone similar to that um it's a lot more more lighthearted than most of the adventure games that came out, which were already pretty lighthearted. Like they all have a pretty fantasy flair. But there's a lot of jokes. A lot of the games you could tell were programmed by like, super huge nerds that, you know, worship Monty Python. There's all kinds of weird cameos, you can turn them off. There's in each game, there's a silly clowns mode that you can toggle.

One game takes place in Persia, and while you're walking through the streets, you might see the Prince of Persia jump over you. In the first game, inexplicably, you run and hide behind a tree while the dad from Dinosaurs walks by. Not the mom and dad. Thank you. Thank you for that hot Dinosaurs quote. but what sets it apart really is the uh is the role-playing game aspect uh so whatever class you play the game is totally different from

what it would be if you played the other two classes like if you're a thief you'll have these missions where you have to break into places and steal them uh steal things from them and find the thieves guild and fence them uh and you still get like puzzle points like in every other adventure game from that era um so you kind of have a track of what you've been doing but your solutions for each of the puzzle changes based on what class you're playing um and the whole time you have like all these different stats and whether or not you you know fail or succeed at how you're trying to accomplish a puzzle depends on if you have high enough stats and good enough gear. So like, it's a neat twist on the role playing aspect. And just the worlds are so great. Each of the five games takes place

in like a different area that's sort of influenced by different parts of folklore, like the fourth game, which is probably my favorite, takes place in this uh like romanian setting that's influenced by uh you know old horror stories like dracula and frankenstein and uh there's hp lovecraft stuff in there uh the fifth game is all like greco-roman mediterranean influence um and you can import your character from the first game to the fifth game, and it's pretty easy to do that with all these DOS box versions. Would you want to import it to the second game and the third game and the fourth game? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what I'm saying. You go from the first game to the second game, and you play through it like that. Yeah, but this GOG version has fixed so many bugs that the franchise was notorious for having all these horrible bugs like the fourth game had a bug in like a main story area that you just like i i've never beaten it before i played this version but it's fixed in this version and it's only uh it's 10 bucks and it's a lot of game because even after you finish the whole series as a class you can go through and play as a different class and uh it's a totally different game and it's just really well written and the puzzles are all so

clever there's no like weird combinations that you couldn't have figured out everything is like it's really well directed and uh you almost always know what you're doing it's fantastic and it's only 10 bucks so first first question yeah will it work on my Mac? I don't actually know. No, I think it's only PC. I've got a question. Were you drinking New Coke and voting for Jimmy Carter while playing this game? Encounter question, were you just on Wikipedia? Russ.

Yes. You know, Tony Shalhoub had a birthday that year. You know, Tony Shalhoub had a birthday that year. Okay. I'm assuming everybody who was alive had a birthday that year. Then what about the next year? Griffin, what's the... Did you find the... There is a training academy, a magic training academy,

that is referenced several times in the in the series do you know i'm talking about here oh wit yeah wit yeah sure did you find that oh absolutely game because i i can remember so are you asking for game facts right now right now i'm asking for game facts on a 70 year old game okay i forget where on the wax cylinder I was when I left off. I mean, I think that's the fact that you can remember that kind of stuff. Like, so many things from this franchise are so iconic. I have already played through the entire series. I didn't need a walkthrough or anything like i i i've remembered so many things about this franchise even though i haven't played it in

probably 15 years now griffin how much of it is now i remember the first time i played through one and two it was really heavy on the text entry oh yeah no no no there's a it comes with the vga remake of the first game and there's also this uh agd interactive i think is the name of the indie developer who did a remake of quest for glory 2 which you can download on their website for free um which is uh which is really great i actually played through that instead of the version that comes with the anthology but you can import your stuff into that pretty smoothly and export it out to the quest for glory three that comes with the collection. Oh,

that's nice. Yeah. It's really neat. It's basically the same. It's like a VGA version point and click version instead of a text entry version. Both have their charms. Um,

but, uh, yeah, that's another option for people who just don't want to mess with text entry at all. How'd you have so much time to play when you're so busy at the signing of Appomattox? Good.

That's really good. That's a good one. Yeah. So are we ready for a decision or what? I think so. Yes. Okay. Okay.

So I'm going to review these really quick. I'm going to just kind of type up a few i like that we're incorporating gog releases by the way because i i mean i wish i'd known so i could have gotten gabriel and i go up in this no but i feel like this is a slippery slope like i think the whole point is to pick new games you might right the only i think i think quest for glory i think it justifies itself based on the fact that it is it fixed. Like, it's so... I've never been able to beat the one game before, before this version came out. Like, the amount...

I don't know how they would go about developing patches for a game that is kind of old, but they did. Well, Noah's had... And it really is one of those games where so much of the... So many of the games that have come out during that time period have been mined for their nostalgia worth already like they've been repurposed or reimagined yeah or or remade and quest for glory is one of those very few games that's just sort of sat there in time you know there's no fps remake on the way like it is a singular experience that was pretty much a casualty of the

handover from sierra to activision yeah i remember seeing its name on the ledger on the death ledger and i was very very sad yeah it's i mean it's that's almost heartbreaking in a way because when you finish quest for glory 5 and it lets you export your save to play in quest for glory 6 which does not nor will it ever exist it's it's pretty crushing i don't know if someone has dug up the rights to this game like if that if this part is someone somewhere knew enough about the rights to quest for glory that they can sign them over to gog so no kidding i would i would kickstart a thousand bucks towards this the the i i franchise so very, very much. It was also really noble for them

to make a game that the Jews could play after they finished building the pyramid. Chris Plant So, yeah, I found a winner. I'm going to just review my notes. First, Griffin. I'm going to shoot you my notes. First, Griffin. Yeah. I'm going to shoot you really straight.

Okay. I think you technically have what sounds like the best deal of the week. Yeah. Five great games that I'm like, everyone seems to love them. I haven't heard any naysaying. You know who really loves them? Gilgamesh. You know, maybe I'm'm gonna change my opinion because i was really for max pain right now i i really don't know if i want to reward ross

but my point is it sounds like a great deal I don't know if it was a convincing enough argument to make me say that we should let that be that old of a game. I mean, it was around. When was it around, Russ? He's actually out. He is bone dry. You're out. You literally went too far back. Dinosaurs.

The 80s. Oh, great. Okay, dinosaurs. Good job. Okay. So the point is, no. The 80s. Oh, great. Okay, dinosaurs. Good job. Okay. So the point is, no. Not the Roma. That is not our winner for this week.

Though it does sound great, and I think everybody should download it and support it. I just bought it. Oops. Great. Now we're down to Diablo and Max Payne. Diablo, you just did not give a good argument justin i'm really conflicted like i'm trying to be honest about it i'm just grabbing that puppy by the scruff of its neck and you threw it under a car i don't have the sort of blind nostalgia that i think a lot of people have and i don't

mean that to be dismissive because i i have that for lots of things. Like Quest for Glory. Like Quest for Glory is a good example. So, like, I don't know, guys. It's not, as far as game design goes, it's not a good game. It's not. It's not a well-designed game. Sorry. It's fun. It's not a good game. I mean, it's not our game of the week, according to you.

Sorry. Which only leaves Max pain three i love that we can we can reach our besties decision by the process of elimination right what game's not the worst they were all no they were all good i think they're all good games this week i think we've we've brought a lot of crap to the table in besties before and i know that is mostly my fault yeah yeah uh i'm just trying to be less combative and more honest about the games and i'm glad i'm glad you were and i think we found that i think we found the right winner because of it yeah max pain 3 is thrilling and i would recommend everybody play it because i think you're really going to dig it uh now here's

the question what's our current game of the year so i think because it's been so many weeks, I think we have to retire Walking Dead. You think we should send it to the Hall of Fame? I think we should send it to Besties Hall. Besties Hall. Okay. I'm very happy with that. I think I'm fine with that, yeah. Okay. So we have a new standing Bestie. Ta-da! Max Payne 3. Now that means, at the end of the year,

that means Bestie, that means what, Journey and SSX and Walking Dead are all up for contention. They're all going to come back. I like that. People keep saying they want a really long episode. Oh, guys. At this f***ing pace. Ugh.

Man. So anyway, thank you guys for listening to The Besties, our show that we make for you about video games. I've had a lot of people ask if Polygon is going to do a quote-unquote real podcast. That's okay. That always kind of hurts my feelings a little bit. But yeah, it's a little hurtful. But yeah, I mean, we'll do other podcasts, but this is the podcast we make now, so I appreciate you supporting it. Can you tell a friend, say,

hey, there's this podcast I like. It's called The Besties. Listen to it. Can you let us know if the commissioner thing worked for you as an ear listener? Or would you like more iOS games? Do you want more iOS games? Do you want more fictional robots

to make these decisions for us? Do you want more games from the dawn of time? We can make that happen for you yeah okay do you want me to murder russ frustic or i'd love to hear russ frustic murdered by a shovel although like you'd have to get past all the guys drilling and hammering around him you can just pretend to be how do you feel about the drilling how do you feel about the fact that r Russ's neighbors are apparently trying to drill to the molten core of the f***ing planet? Hey, Griffin, can you do me a favor? When you're editing this, just slowly

fade into the theme song from Cheers. At the end of the episode? Well, who needs a theme song? Who needs to edit into it? We've got it right here. On Vox. We've got a man making the noises welcome back okay mr cotter that's mr cotter oh great yeah you got him russ good catch buddy can sing them be sure to join us next friday for the besties because shouldn't the

world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!