Video Gamers Podcast - Birth of Battle Royales - Gaming Podcast - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Gaming hosts Paul, Michael and Josh are bringing you a can’t miss episode. Don’t let the title fool you, 2017 was a pretty amazing year for gaming overall, but it brought on the birth of Battle Royales along with a plethora of other gaming entries. We chat about them all, from pivotal games, to just some of our favorites in this incredible episode!  Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hey guys, Josh here. I just wanted to take a second and let you know about this amazing new product called MultiplayerSquad.com. It's the greatest new addition to gaming. Well, I mean, practically life. It's sure to fill you with glee,

help you make new friends, and expose you to all sorts of awesome memes. It's got the best community of gamers around, and more than that, it's the best way to help support the show and let us keep providing awesome content. What? I gotta read this disclaimer for legal reasons. Warning. MultiplayerSquad.com can cause feelings of joy, happiness, companionship, ownage, and all-around sense of being awesome. If you notice yourself acting more like Josh, please discontinue use immediately and seek professional help. Hey, who put that in there? Paul! Hello listeners, and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are three gamer dads, and today is a bonus round Monday where we are going to go back

in time to 2017. Now with five years of distance, we're going to talk about the games that released that year and how we feel about them. Please take a second to rate our show five stars, leave us a written review, and come support us on Patreon. Supporters not only help fund the show they also get bonus episodes just head over to multiplayer squad.com to sign up okay let's introduce the cast i am your host paul joining me his beard is world famous and since today we're living in 2017

he just got out of a movie theater seeing Logan, which has his beard twin Wolverine. It's Josh. That was a good movie, actually. It's a great movie. I remember when Logan came out because they've done a lot of like X-Men Wolverine type movies and Logan came out and everybody was like, yo, they did a good job, man. Rated R comic book movies. Who would have known?

Fun fact, Wolverine was one of my favorite superheroes for a very long time as well. Yeah. Great movie. Maybe my favorite other than Infinity War within the comic book movies. And my favorite character to play in Capcom versus Marvel. Me too. Yeah, he was so much fun. And also joining us, he's got his speakers on full blast playing the new hit song of

the summer, Despacito. It's Michael. Oh my the summer despacito it's michael oh my god something something despacito oh something something i think you mix up desperado and despacito in the beginning there no i got it like despacito i know all the words my favorite song ever you could tell it's all the words when uh justin bieber meets the eagles oh man that's what you're getting oh man oh goodness gracious okay well before we get into the meat and potatoes of breaking down 2017 we do have a little bit of fun housekeeping to cover we have not just one but two new patreon supporters to thank on this episode

they both signed up i think like within minutes of each other which was really fun we're like hey we got a new supporter and then literally while talking about that another one came in so we want to give a very special thank you to marble madness who signed up with Legendary status. Oh, baby. And also DevCon1, who signed up with Rare status. So air horn time. Woohoo! So, you know, Marble Madness being a Legendary supporter, it means that he gets to pick a game that we're going to have to deep dive in the future. He is still mulling it over, so we don't know quite yet what that'll be, but we are looking forward to what he might have for us. And then DevCon1,

Josh, I think is someone that you actually know. Yeah, it's actually kind of funny because I was in a fantasy football draft the other day in this gigantic league that's got like over 20,000 people in it. And it randomly assigns people to a league. And so I got put in this league and DevCon was in there. And he was like, wait, is this cause my alternate ego on that discord server and for my company is Papa Josh.

Cause I'm like one of the older people that works there. So ageism or whatever, you know? So he was like, wait, is this actually Papa Josh? And I was like, yeah.

And he was like, wait, the Josh from the multiplayer gaming podcast. And and i was like you're my new favorite guy yeah and then he was like yeah absolutely man so then he was like yeah dude he's like i i listen to your podcast been doing it since i think he said the civilization 6 episode which is a long time yeah and he was like you guys are awesome man and then sure enough today we see a new patron and it's him so big shout out to devcon1 and uh and marble madness going legendary man what a good day very special thank you to marble madness and devcon1 and then josh do you

have any reviews that people have left the show oh i got more reviews rolling in people i've been a happy a happy Josh lately, which funny is you're going to see this in one of these reviews too. But this first one comes in from LlamasAreTheBest, and it says, hi. And the review says, hi, great show. I was just wondering, what's a great shooter to play with friends that's for teens?

Ooh, interesting question. Overwatch would easily be my answer on that one. That's an easy one. Is that a shooter, though? Is that a quote-unquote shooter, really? Yeah, it's definitely a shooter. It's like a hybrid shooter slash I play a hammer game. And this might be the last time I ever utter these words,

but Destiny 2 might be another good one good one for teens uh that's you know good good good on the content um a fun shooter as well my challenge now is to get uh josh to say the word destiny 2 after this episode oh i might mention it during this episode just as a prelude to talking about 2017 yeah yeah and then all right so. So this next one comes in from DJ J Money from New Zealand. Oh, wow. So yeah, how about that? And it's titled Best Podcast Out There. And it says, I have been listening since the first Warzone episode and ever since I have been hooked. This podcast is awesome and always puts a smile on my face. I have found I look forward to my walks home from school where I can put in my headphones and listen.

So if you have not listened to it yet, you are really missing out. Pancakes will always be better than waffles. Hope this made your morning coffee a little bit better, Josh. Big thanks from New Zealand. So I got to tell a funny story with this one because this review actually came in this morning. This morning I woke up, I made my coffee, I sat down at my computer and I had no internet. The internet was out. The internet company was working on it. They actually had a thing that said, hey, your internet's going to be out for a while. And I just went,

how am I going to check reviews? What am I supposed to do? And then lo and behold, like five minutes later, internet comes on. I'm like, oh, yay. I hop on. And this review is sitting there waiting for me. So it actually made me chuckle this morning as well. Oh, what great timing. What nice reviews. We really do love it. Keep the reviews coming, guys. If you haven't left one yet, please do so in Apple Podcasts and we will read it on the show. So it's a great way to help us out. So people out here might be wondering, why are we doing a breakdown of 2017, right? It's five years later. Well, I have heard a lot of people say when thinking about the Oscars that it would be

better if we always gave those out five years later. That way you're avoiding recency bias. Even when we look at our leaderboard, we admit all the time that we rate things too high or too low with recency bias. And so we decided, let's just go back a couple of years and talk about some of the games. Let's talk about which ones stand out, which ones were most influential, which ones were underrated or overrated. And then at the end of the episode, we'll actually each give out a couple of awards. And I thought it would be kind of fun in retrospect to look back a couple of years and we just kind of picked 2017 on a whim we figure five-year anniversary why not and there's

a lot of big titles to cover so i think this is going to be a lot of fun to talk about yeah i think that um overall it's funny oscars like i know this isn't a movie podcast but that would be so great if the oscars were five years later so it makes so much sense to do the same thing with video games because when i looked at this list of games that came out in 2017 my views back then were a little different than they are today yeah oh i bet we all i have slightly different views yeah i i looked at this list and i was like man 2017 was a great year for video games to be honest. That's what really caught me off guard. We actually long, long ago did a tournament where we selected the best year for video games ever.

It was a long time ago, but I'm sure there's some listeners out there that heard that one. I'll be honest. I don't remember what year we picked. It's been that long. But it's funny because I can say 2017 was not one of those years that won. But then looking at it, man, some really great games come out. And not only that, but there are some games that I think drastically influenced gaming. Absolutely.

Moving forward from there too. So this is going to be a really fun episode. I know the title or people hear 2017 and they kind of go, eh, but trust me, this is going to be a good one because there's a lot to talk about. Yeah, it was definitely like a watershed year for gaming, talking about free to play mobile games taking over and talking about battle royales coming out, you know, so much to do. So since we're going back to 2017, let's try to get into the mindset of a much younger Paul, Josh, and Michael. So this is the year when Trump first took office. The Me Too movement started gaining footing. There was the tragedy of the Las Vegas shootings.

We had the total solar eclipse. Although, when I think of 2017, Michael, what I first think of is that this is the year that you betrayed us and moved from Phoenix to Dallas. Goodbye. Goodbye, Michael. Sadness. I still can't get over the word watershed. Every time I hear it, I picture this shack out in the woods with water dripping off it. So let's move on.

Yeah, so this was the year that you moved to Texas,as right michael and it's okay that is correct you did it for a career change you know we understand you had to do it but we did really miss you and your family when you guys left um you know i was kind of curious josh 2017 like what was your relationship with gaming what was going on at the time um i don't know, man. I'm old. I can't remember five years ago. I mean, honestly, it's funny because we mentioned Michael moving for his career, but my job is what brought us to Arizona. And we've been in Arizona for about 11 years now. So we had been set up. I think we had just moved into our new house. My kids were much younger then. Kids grow really fast.

So it's like my kids are teenagers now. But back then, they were small and needed a lot more attention during the day. Now, it's kind of like I have to beg for their attention. Yeah. And so things are definitely different. It's funny how much things can change in five years. I don't know that my gaming habits have actually changed that much, to be honest. Everybody knows I have game ADD.

I don't stick around on most games for very long. I'm looking at the games in 2017. We're going to talk about some of those because in a rare change of pace, a lot of the games that are on this list actually commanded my attention for very long periods of time. So I would say if there's anything unique about 2017, it's that my game ADD seemed to have disappeared that year. Yeah. I think the uniqueness of the games that I played in 2017 is I played almost all of them way after 2017, which I think is why I was able to play a lot of them because there's a lot of heavy hitters in here and a lot of long games too.

Well, the funny thing is that even though we have been friends with Michael for such a long time, we did not game very often with you, Michael, because you're more of like a single player gamer. We did a little bit of Overwatch back in the day. Josh and I have been gaming for years. In 2017, I did not even know what Discord was. We coordinated all of our gaming through Slack. I spend my entire day on Discord now. It's kind of wild how much things can change in just a five-year window. Michael and I each had kids born in 2017, so it was also a very busy year. I know at least for our family, my wife and I were building our foster care agency. We had our last child.

And so we were very busy and didn't have exactly a whole lot of money to put into gaming. So I went back and I looked at my 2017 purchases in Steam, and I was rather shocked. I only bought three games the entire year that were more than $10. I bought PUBG for 30 bucks, which I think we're definitely going to be talking about today. I bought Divinity Original Sin 2 for $45. And I bought a second copy of Rocket League that I gifted my friend Andrew McKinney. So like, it was not a year that I bought a lot of games. DOS 2 and PUBG were the big ones that did release in 2017 that I bought. And I bought a couple of games for two or three bucks that were on Steam sale. But I was surprised that I did not spend a whole lot of money on games.

And I think I know why, which we're going to maybe get into here. I'll let you talk about it, Josh. Yeah. So it's funny because you told us, Paul actually gave us a little bit of homework before the episode. He does that all the time. I don't like homework, man. So Paul's like, hey, guys, be professionals for once in your podcasting careers. Michael, slow down, shorten your statements. Yeah, and then he was like, go into your Steam library,

go into your history, and just be aware of what games you bought in 2017. So I'm like, okay, I mean, I'm probably sure it was like 20 games or whatever, right? You think. And I actually posted it in Discord and I went, I think something's wrong with my Steam, guys. Because in all of 2017, I bought three games for myself. One of them was Divinity Original Sin 2. People have heard us talk about that.

They know my feelings on it, but I'm going to remind you in this episode in case it's one of your first episodes. I bought Castle Crashers, which Paul must have talked me into. I want my $2.99 back, Paul. That's Todd. That game was one of Todd's favorites. He and I already

owned it, and I think we convinced you to buy it, and we might have played it like one night. I want my $3 back. Okay. And then the other one was a very cool puzzle game called antechamber um which i have not played in a really long time it's actually really really neat puzzle game and that's it and so i was like guys what's wrong with my steam and then paul was like josh and then well he was like i think there's a reason for that and i went oh yeah like nine months of nothing but pub g yes oh wow what about you michael did you look at your purchase history in 2017 i did and i had to i had to look at other systems not just steam i bought two games on steam

in 2017 now i think part of it was because the move we. We just moved to Texas. We just had a baby. There was a lot going on in our lives, and I was like, maybe I just wasn't playing games. And then I looked at my PlayStation library, and I was like, no, I must have gotten the PS4 that year because the PlayStation library went nuts. But no, I bought PUBG. I know, right? Did anybody know that I had that

game? I played that game. I played a good bit of it. Yeah, we'll talk about that later. And then I bought Middle Earth Shadows of Mordor Game of the Year Edition, probably because it was on a Steam sale. Good one. Yes. But my PlayStation library went a lot more crazy.

And I think I'm going to talk about all of them except for Call of Duty World War II today. So we'll save a few of those. But I bought a lot of stuff in the PlayStation. And then also somehow Destiny 2 showed up in there but i don't think that was through steam i think i think that that so that that triggered that that game came with my uh my gpu my 1080 that's in my computer right now that gets replaced tomorrow so that's awesome yeah it came with it so yeah oh very nice so a couple of facts about 2017 and gaming.

The best-selling games of the year were PUBG, 30 million sales. Call of Duty World War II, 20 million sales. And GTA V, despite already being four years old, five years ago, sold 15 million units that year alone. That's bananas. However, shockingly, not not shockingly but maybe somewhat surprisingly the free-to-play games of course completely dominated the market they've been doing it since 2013 there were actually eight free-to-play games that brought in more revenue than any purchase game so all of these made more money than pub g they made more money than call of duty world

war ii and those are the likes of Honor of Kings, League of Legends, Dungeon Fighter Online, Monster Strike, Crossfire, Fantasy Westward Journey, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans. All of those games made more than $1.2 billion each when not a single paid game brought in more than a billion dollars. And Clash of Clans had also been out for quite a while at that point. I think I was playing it in 2012 or 2013. Yeah yeah i think it was out already for at least a year or two so yeah this is where we see that big shift in the mid 2010s everything's going toward the free-to-play model with micro transactions things are moving more toward mobile um not a ton of news in 2017 but it was the year that the nintendo switch, the Super Nintendo Classic console came out, and Xbox released the Xbox One X, which started a series of console games.

I still can't get straight, guys. Series X, Series S, Xbox One S. I can't get them all straight still to this day um but that's pretty funny and then also ea acquired respawn the creators of titanfall and of course later they would go on to make apex legends true story whenever i do i do a lot of the socials uh by the way follow us at socials at multiplayer pod but i don't know what xbox is out either so when i tag things, I'm always like, hashtag PS4, hashtag PS5, hashtag Xbox. Xbox. I don't know.

Because it's like, wait a minute. I don't want to tag the old one. What is that one? I'm like, this will cover them all. We're good. Oh, man. The Xbox naming I've always found hysterical. All right.

So let's talk about the actual games, guys. We can talk about the good, the bad, the ugly, the influential, whatever kind of stands out. So all of us took a look at all the games released in the year. And I figured, let's just go round robin, pick a game. We'll talk about it, move on from there. We'll probably just spend a couple minutes on each game. But Josh, do you want to start us off? What do you want to talk about? I actually have a question for you guys. And I'm springing this on both of you because I didn't mention this. But transport yourself, go back in time to 2017 or maybe even late 2016. Right at the end of the year, 2017 is about to roll around.

What is your most anticipated game that's coming up for 2017? We've all looked through the list. I know we're all very familiar with a lot of the games but go back in time what is the game where you maybe i'm not saying it's the best game i'm saying that when you were back then what was the game where you were like i can't wait to play this game i believe at the end of 2015 beginning of 2016 i had already pre-ordered the day the pre-order came out i had pre-ordered horizon zero dawn i had been following that game for like four years that was the game i wanted to

play and i was following it from the very the very like way early on when they had a gameplay trailer they were talking about hey it's an rpg it's immersive has all these things in it they're a little bit different and there's no hud whatsoever at the time the biggest thing was there was gonna be no hud no health bar no And obviously, that changed a little bit, but it was very simplified. That was by far the game that I was looking forward to the most, bar none. Oh, interesting. Mine was definitely Mass Effect Andromeda. Being that Mass Effect is my all-time favorite series, that's the one I was most looking

forward to going into that year. What about you, Josh? See, mine, hands down, Breath of the wild oh this was and then you guys know i'm not a huge like nintendo you know gamer i i some some nintendo games i have absolutely loved i'm not trying to slander nintendo but my wife uh likes nintendo games a lot and i remember at the time we still had a wii u and the nintendo switch I think was either just releasing or, or was about to release. And I remember seeing Zelda breath of the wild and we were both so excited for this game that we were considering waiting to buy a switch to play it on

the switch just so it would be a little bit better. And we kind of went, nah, we don't really want to wait. We don't have the money for a switch right now. So let's, now. So let's just get it on the Wii U, which we did. But that was... I remember being so incredibly hyped for the release of Breath of the Wild because I thought everything about that game looked like it was going to be absolutely incredible. Oh, how funny. Yeah. We bought Breath of the Wild on the Wii U as well, because we ended up buying the Switch as a family gift on Christmas 2017. And so Breath of the Wild was the last game we ever bought for the Wii U. I wasn't quite as hyped as you, Josh. I always felt like these Zelda games were very hit or miss for me.

And I really loved Wind Waker, but Twilight Princess didn't do it for me at all. Twilight Princess sucked, dude. Yeah, so Breath of the Wild, I really just intentionally tampered expectations. But of course, when it released, everyone said, like, this is why you buy a Switch. It's that good. And of course, it was a classic. But yeah, how funny. All right, so Josh, what game do you want to break down first here?

I mean, I'm just going to get this out of the way right now because, like I said, I hinted at it earlier. Divinity Original Sin 2 released in 2017. I don't remember what month it actually came out. I think it was a little bit later. Was it early? February? I think it was early. I played the original Divinity Original Sin, and that game caught me very off guard because of how good I thought it was. It is a monstrously long game. So I actually played it for probably like 60 hours and didn't beat it. I made it to a really hard part of the game where you had to do

some farming for this potion that would let you get past these indestructible guys that would one-shot you and stuff. And I kind of just fizzled out. But hey, I do that in most games anyway. But then lo and behold, Divinity Original Sin 2 is announced, and they're showing off a lot of the gameplay and stuff. And I'm thinking, man, I can't wait to play this game. It came out, and that is one game that I blame my Steam purchases on because that is one of the few games I purchased on Steam. But I put over 100 hours into Divinity Original Sin 2 on my very first playthrough. I've played all the way through again since then.

But that game had me very, very hyped. I was insanely just into that game. I remember playing that game for hours and hours and hours every single day. My wife would come in and be like, you're really enjoying that game. I remember playing that game for hours and hours and hours every single day. My wife would come in and be like, you're really enjoying that game. And I was like, this is like the best game I've played in a really long time, man.

And like I say it all the time, but one of the best RPGs I think is ever made, to be honest. And it was only 45 bucks at release. Yes. It was a cheap game. Yeah, way to go, Larry. Yeah, that's crazy. I remember us joking that we would have paid like 100 or 150 dollars in hindsight based on how good it is so the fact that it was

45 bucks at release which by the way josh you were right it was later in the year it came out in september but yeah what a great great rpg i don't know that we've had a better rpg come out since divinity original sin 2 i don't think so to be honest. Because Witcher 3 came out in 2015? When did Witcher 3 came out? I feel like Witcher 3 came out in 2015. And I think I was at that point where I was really hungry for that just amazing video game again. Almost starved. Like, please give me something that made me feel like Witcher 3 did. And boy, Divinity Original Sin 2 was the fix I needed in that regard. Yeah. That's my biggest regret about

not having a DeLorean and going back in time and starting on the show earlier, is that I would really like to make time to play Divinity Original Sin 2. And I know that... I won't have the time to really go in it and and battle through it over the course of a few weeks or a month unless we did it on a deep dive which y'all have already done but I only still got a couple hours in that game and I was impressed by it I liked it I played it couch

co-op on the PlayStation 4 with my wife and we'd love to get back into it but but it seems like that's going to be a loaded one but being an archie RPG nerd I've heard you guys talk about so much how great it is. I really want to play that game. Well, it's so funny now that you're on the show, Michael, because we are playing games at a breakneck pace

just to be able to release the podcast. And we're always telling you, oh, you have to play God of War. You have to play Divinity Original Sin 2. You don't have any time to play all these games. It's impossible. But yeah, there's a few here that might be worth catching up on. I feel like Michael would love Divinity.

More so than God of War, because it's like God of War is one of my favorite games of all time. Divinity is one of my favorite RPGs of all time. It definitely ranks up there overall for me. But knowing Michael, I feel like if he got eight hours into that game, we would not see or hear from him for probably a couple weeks because he would just be like, guys, that was the greatest thing ever. Yeah, and I do binge too in spurts. And so I can see myself just falling off the radar for a week or two

and just playing that game nonstop. What game do you want to bring up, Michael? I have to. I'm glad josh didn't bring this one up because i i never get to talk about shooters ever and i played one this year i played a shooter a little known game called pub or uh pub g or uh player unknowns battleground player unknowns players unknown what a terrible dude no one knew at the time what to say and i remember when we landed on pub g i remember even thinking like outside of our friend group is anyone else calling this pub g or is that just us and it is funny when you then learn everyone's calling it

that but yeah player unknowns battlegrounds yeah you guys probably started it but i did play player unknowns battlegrounds for a couple weeks when it first came out and i think the reason why i was able to play it is i played it with a couple friends they were like hey i think it was like a free trial maybe or they gifted it to me i didn't pay a dime for this game they're like come play this game like i don't play shooter guys shooters guys i'm terrible at this and so the solution was to team up in a group and i was like that's good this is a new concept where this this you know circle starts closing in on you and all you have to do is live long and everybody else.

I'm like, okay. And so my job was to sit with a shotgun inside of a building and face the doorway that comes into the building while my friends did everything else. I'm like, I'm not good at this. But I won a couple of chicken dinners that way. I got my chicken, chicken winner, chicken dinner, whatever it's called.

I did that. A chicken to Chinese, the Chinese chicken coming on Butler going down with a shotgun at the door and it was a lot of fun and i hear it's not the same game now because the cheaters and all that stuff but i had a blast with it um and it was totally worth it and so i i wanted to bring that up because i know it wouldn't make it long down this list but i actually had a lot of fun with that game it was one of the first shooters that really kind of got me excited to come back to a shooter because i'm just terrible at them i never practiced them so my aim's bad but it was interesting like i liked how realistic

it was it had a lot of realism it had a really good feel to it and it was a brand new concept at the time the idea of a i'm gonna call it a survival shooter that's not what it's called the last man standing shooter it's called battle royale that's what i was looking for i was testing i wanted to make sure you knew it was called Battle Royale, obviously. It's not a Metroidvania. But it was cool to see this new concept come out, and it was revolutionary. And I'm sure you guys have a lot to say about it. So I'll concede the rest of my time, of which I had none.

But the representative from Arizona concedes the rest of his time to the other representatives from Arizona. Yeah, Josh, we played a lot of PUBG. We played a lot with Todd, who used to be on this pod. And what's so crazy is that it was one map for the entire year. The second map, Miramar, I looked it up. It did not release until December. So, Josh, we were not only playing PUBG for like four hours every day. It was nothing but erangel and one of the funniest things about playing pubg and our friend group is that we would often play in squads it would be you me todd and our friend andrew mckinney and you and andrew had such polar opposite philosophies on how to play pubg do you want to talk a little bit about that dude okay we number one we played the snot out of pub g this game consumed a hundred percent of our gaming time for a while most of 2017 to be honest like we played a lot of pub g and it's funny because we did have kind of our core group we had a lot of friends that would

rotate in and out we played with andy a lot we played with you know a lot of friends that would rotate in and out. We played with Andy a lot. We played with a lot of other people would kind of join for a few weeks or something like that. But there was never a shortage of people that wanted to play. But the hilarious thing with our core group was my thinking is this is a battle royale. The objective is to kill everybody else on the map. And so my thinking is if I have a clear shot at somebody, I'm going to kill that dude. Like, you know, if I see him running across the street and I know I can take him out, that dude's going down. Andrew's thinking on this game was avoid conflict at all costs. Kill the last one guy. There's guys.

There's guys. Run, everybody. I'm like, dude, I can snipe that. No, no, no, no, no. Don't give us away. Everybody crouch down snake snake go prone go prone and i was just like what are you doing man like i don't think you understand how this game works and it it would just be hilarious because we would literally get

into arguments sometimes and then there would be times where he's like no no don't give us away and i just start shooting and then he'd get mad about it and then he's like well now we're gonna die i i think that to sum up i i am exactly the opposite of you because i could sum it up by quoting jeff globlum at the end of independence day when he just goes um hide that's all i did yeah yeah josh's objective was to kill everyone andrew's objective was to survive and outlast everyone. And Josh always wanted to land at the school. There'd be 28 people parachuting at the same time.

Andrew always wanted to fly to the opposite corners. It was always Georgia Paul or Novo, I think it was called in the bottom right. But yeah, PUBG, it's hard to... It's almost impossible to overstate how much it changed gaming. It wasn't the first Battle Royale, but it was the first one that really grew big. You had stuff like H1Z1 that came out earlier. But man, it hit the industry so hard and so fast that PUBG had so many issues with connectivity, rubber banding, and we didn't even care. It was still worth it because it was something new on the market that we had so many issues with connectivity, rubber banding, and we didn't even care. It was still worth it because it was something new on the market that we had been craving

that we just didn't even know we wanted. Technically, PUBG was a mess. I mean, you got to understand, back in the day, nobody cared. Like, nobody. Because it was just everybody in the world was playing it. You were having so much fun. All your friends were playing it. But from a technical standpoint,

what a piece of garbage, man, you, you know, you'd go to open a door and your guy would, the animation would play, but then the door wouldn't open. So you'd click it again and then it would like lag.

So the door would open. Your guy would wind up closing the door. Yeah. You know, you couldn't pick up ammo off the ground. Your guy would lean down and pretend to pick it up. So it's like you had to learn how to play around the jankiness of PUBG, but it didn't matter. That was the big thing is it just didn't matter. Paul, you said it. PUBG single-handedly changed the face of gaming moving

forward. It put Battle Royales on the map. If you like war zone, you like apex, you like fortnight. You know what I mean? If you like any of these games that are insanely popular, pub G was like the OG granddaddy that made all of that possible. Yeah. And for my money, I don't know that any of the other battle Royales, which by the way, I think we agree war zone apex. those games are much better than PUBG now. Oh, yeah. But the one thing that PUBG really dialed in on was the intensity of the last circle. Because oftentimes you'd be in a grass field, you might be crawling, or if there were cover, maybe you're behind a rock and you're frantically looking everywhere.

You're chucking grenades just hoping to flush the other guy out. And the intensity at the end of those games, you never quite got that with War Zone or Apex. I think because they're a little bit more arcade combat, PUBG was just so intense. Winning a match of PUBG was single-handedly the greatest thing that could happen in 2017 gaming. Yeah, it's true. That chicken dinner, when you got that, it was incredible. And then it was so funny because it's like, that was it. Just winner, winner, chicken dinner, game over. And cue again. But you didn't care.

Yeah, right back in. I'm a snake, follow me. You know, so many stupid meme moments in PUBG. All right, let's go ahead and move on here i how about i go on the other side of things let me bring up something that i felt was a little disappointing i i want to bring up friday the 13th the game that game looked great thank you paul that is a great choice dude yes and i and we don't need to spend a whole lot of time on this, but I remember our slack went wild over Friday the 13th. Mike from the Footballers and Spitballers, he would play Overwatch with us.

He never played anything else. I think he popped into PUBG like two or three times. But he was so excited for Friday the 13th. We're like, oh, we're finally going to get Mike in this game. We were all planning to pick it up and then when it released all the critics were like this game's a mess and it's very repetitive and it's very boring and i don't think any of us even bought it other than mike mike ended up playing it by himself and i remember us being so hyped for it it was so disappointing that we ended up not playing it it had like it was like. It burned really, really bright with a little bit of hype. And then it

just fizzled out very, very quickly. I never actually bought the game. There was talk that we were all going to buy it because we were starting to get tired of PUBG or whatever we were playing. And it was like, okay, well, we probably need a change of pace. But we just never did, man. And you're right. So not ever having played a single second of that game, it was not a success. Yeah. Pretty disappointing. All right, Josh, what's the next game you want to bring up?

For me, I'm going to bring up one. I know I am a fan of this game. I know that, Paulul you necessarily are not um but hellblade senua's sacrifice came out in 2017 i had heard about it i did not play it very like initially i think i picked it up maybe a year later but what a unique game man um if you haven't played that game it's it's not the greatest game from a gameplay standpoint it has and paul you have some valid criticisms of this game so it's a story it's not so much a game it does have like melee fighting you do have a sword you do have to fight and stuff like that but that's really it's not that great

it's not hard either as far as the melee like just keep tapping the slash button you'll get through it if you ever wanted to feel like you were understanding a character the longer you played a game, that's where Senua's Sacrifice comes in. Because this girl obviously has some severe mental issues. The game starts off with she's hearing a ton of voices. I've said it before. I'll say it again. It has some of the best 3D surround audio I've ever heard in a video game. She's paddling through. You think it's like the some of the best 3D surround audio I've ever heard in a video game. She's

paddling through, you think it's like the River of Dead or something. It starts off in a really neat way, but you really get to know what she is going through in this game. So this game tells a story, not from a grand story perspective, but almost like an internal reflection style. And it's like no game that I had ever played before. And I was just blown away by it. And I'm not saying I was blown away because, like I said, best game combat ever or anything like that. It's just that I hadn't played a game like this before. And it's not perfect. I'm not saying it is. But what a different experience that that game was based off of anything else that was out there that I had played before. And the polish on that game is incredible. So while it does have some slower

moments, overall, what a masterful way to tell the story of Senua, to be honest with you. Yeah, I agree that everybody should play this game once. It's a short play. It's about a seven or eight-hour playthrough. The combat's not great. It's about a seven or eight hour playthrough. The combat's not great. The gameplay, it's not detracting too much. So it's not like it's terrible. It's just there's not a lot to it. There's not a lot of depth to it.

But it's a good marriage between not quite going full story mode, like with The Quarry or something like that. I almost said The Hag of Hackett's Quarry. But it's not like full story mode. There's a couple of puzzle parts of the game that are actually kind of exciting to figure out and so forth. But this was the first game that I played that was a third-person game that I played in VR.

I played the whole thing in VR, which was really interesting. And it actually really worked. And I think it's to the point that Josh was saying, the game is very polished. The graphics are really pretty well done for the time. But it does leave you with a feeling at the end, which I love to get from games. If you want to feel something and truly understand a character, play that game. I loved every bit of it.

Aside from the gameplay doesn't affect me as much because I'm really a story driven person. It's really well done. Yeah, I think it's a very good game. I think that's even what I said when we talked about it back in the day. I did not find it to be incredible or anything like that. I also played it in VR. I think it's a very good VR experience. I think part of the problem for me is that nobody warned me that it's very gameplay-lite. It's mostly walking around. Even the puzzles, for the most part, are about standing in the right place and looking from the right angle,

and it'll unlock a portal or something like that. The 360-degree sound in VR is pretty incredible, but the game is relatively short. I wouldn't put it on a must-play list or anything like that. But if you want to play something in VR and you run out of stuff, I think it's a great one to pick up. I was curious. I did look it up on Metacritic. They have it as an 83 overall, which makes it the 37th best game of the year. They have it tied with Destiny 2 and Assassin's Creed Origins, which I actually think is high praise. Because those are enormous, enormous enormous huge games and here you've got this very small contained game of senua's

sacrifice and it's lumped right in there with it so i think it's a very very good game i just wouldn't give it like the highest praise underrated there's been um glimpses of the sequel which looks phenomenal to me too so i can't even remember the name of it now do you remember what the sequel is called no i it's hell it's hell it's like something like legacy or something like that something like that but there's been one or two trailers here you've got it yeah exactly but that looks really good senua is is an amazing character if you've ever wanted to see what it's like for somebody to just descend into madness and follow

them on that journey, that's what this game does, and it does it in spades. Well, and it's interesting too because it does. It's a progression, and sometimes you're like, is she mad, or is this stuff really happening? And it's just a journey I really appreciated.

Alright, Michael, what do you got? game simulator yeah honestly uh somebody's got to talk about it because we we never talk about these games on this show but uh a little uh a little game that killed sim city came out this year called city skylines and it's funny because like nobody thinks to talk about this is a great game but it's a fantastic game and i'm sure we won't talk about this game for long but seriously like i was itching for a sim city-esque game because sim city 2000 was amazing sim city was great games and then and then maxis i think was the creator at the time and i think they went on and they i don't know if they were a part of the sims or not but they left the city builder and kind of went and made the sims and just left city builders completely and they left this gaping hole that city skylines filled perfectly and you can mod

this game you can put all kinds of different roads in there there's a lot of expansion packs i appreciate it i think it's totally worth playing it's one of those where if you just want to kill some time for a little bit go kill some time building a city and just do it it's fun it is hands down the best city builder game since sim city 2000 honestly there's been a lot of them that have tried to capture it but city skyline's by far the best one since sim city yeah ea bought out maxis if i'm not mistaken and they ended up rebooting sim city in 2013 and it was such a bad release because this is when like drm first started and so even though sim city was solely a single player game everybody who bought it

couldn't even play because the sim city servers were down for like the first week and that was a disaster people were furious that they spent 60 on a game that single player and you couldn't play it because of ea and so i feel like that was kind of like the nail in the coffin a game that's single player and you couldn't play it because of EA. And so I feel like that was kind of like the nail in the coffin. I think that's why you don't see anything else coming out from them. City Skylines, I never bought, but I watched a lot of video and I thought it looked great. One of the games I played the most in my life is SimCity 2000. I mean, that game just did it best.

It was so good. All right. Well, I think we're back around to me here. I want to bring up a game that I think is kind of underrated these days. Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. Like, this was a fun game that came out in 2017.

This is a great, great follow-up to Resident Evil 6, which I was not as big of a fan of. 6 was very much a shooter it was more action oriented 7 is when they went back to that stealth horror model this is the one where you're in the crazy farmhouse with the old people super creepy and really thrilling i i really love resident evil 7 i couldn't even tell you there was a seventh resident evil game but i've never played really any of them except for the very first one no i think i played the second one was

when i played a bunch of four is so good four is a classic this one's gonna be all you paul on my end i played i actually played resident evil 7 i got real excited about it because i thought it was a major breakthrough for the series the graphics were absolutely unbelievable it was the first person perspective. It was creepy. I was looking because I'm like, I did not play that game for very long. I think I played it for maybe four or five hours. And I liked every minute of playing it. But then it was just one of those examples where something came up, I didn't play it for a little while, and then I just never picked it back up. And then here's the thing.

I looked up the release dates. Resident Evil 7 came out late January. PUBG came out middle of March. And I did not pick up Resident Evil 7 right when it released. So I am actually very confident that what happened is I started playing Resident Evil 7, PUBG released, end of story. Overrode all other games on the docket. Yeah. And I think we're really

hoping to see another game like that we haven't really seen that since pub g i mean apex i guess is probably the best example where it really took over when it dropped out of nowhere but yeah i'm really hoping we'll see another wave like that sometime soon agreed i want to go there yeah all right back to you josh we're kind of starting to run out of time here so we'll probably have enough time for like one each and maybe some quick honorable mentions i'm gonna do it because i know there's a gajillion people out there that are screaming right now saying how have you guys not mentioned this game and i don't mean to make this the battle royale episode but we have to give it its due yeah that is fortnight fortnight

released in 2017 this was the dawn of the battle royale age now i want to remind you guys of something i remember paul you and i watching this video with todd um and michael i'm sure that you probably were well aware of the you know what the game was supposed to be. But Fortnite was advertised as save the world, which meant that you had to craft these bases and these traps and these ways to survive against these zombie hordes that were trying to get in. That's what Fortnite was. And that's what we were excited about. And I remember us talking about it, watching these videos and saying, this game is going to be so much fun to play multiplayer, guys. Like, look at this.

We have to defend our fort. We can do traps. Like, we get guns. Like, oh, this is going to be great. And then the success of PUBG happened, and Fortnite said, you know what? We're just going to go Battle Royale. They threw the wheel all the way to the right.

It says we're leading them. And I'd like to say that they drove it off a cliff, but they didn't. What they did is they drove it right up on top of that mountain, and they made themselves a gajillion dollars at that point. I did not realize it was supposed to be a save the world game. And just like Snapchat, it went in a totally different direction real fast.

Yeah, it really did. Yeah, Fortnite, we were super hyped and then even when it did do the shift to battle royale we were cool with that because we were stuck playing erin gell on pub g for nine months and when fortnite dropped i remember installing it on day one i was so excited all hopped in there yeah i hopped in as soon as i could and right off the bat i was like oh i i don't know that this is for me i wasn't crazy about the animation the building intrigued me a little bit because pub g we were more likely to hide in a building or crawl out in an open field and snipe

and the idea of maybe like building your own cover seemed kind of neat. We just, I remember us playing, I think it was one day, maybe two days, and we just never went back to it as a friend group. It just didn't scratch the itch. It wasn't new enough for us. I did not like the building aspect at all. I honestly think that's what ruined me on Fortnite was I just despised the building.

I think the gunplay was fine. I didn't care about the cartoony animations. That didn't bother me so much. And it was different enough from PUBG, but the building just killed that game for me. I had zero desire to try to build a fort while I'm trying to shoot people. And it's that way to this day, to be honest. My daughter plays it all the time. I was watching her last night. They came up against some sweaty dude that was building some gigantic tower. And I'm watching her and she's doing really well.

But I was just like... And I even told her, I was like, man, that guy's sweaty. And she was like, yeah. She's like... And I'm like, why do you guys play the build mode? And she's like, well, because that's what the game's supposed to be.

Yeah. Interesting. Well, real serious question do you guys play the build mode? And she's like, well, because that's what the game's supposed to be. Yeah. Interesting. Well, real serious question for you guys. Dead serious. Deadpan. Here we go. Did you learn how to floss because of Fortnite? I could never floss.

100%. Yes. I am not coordinated. Dancing is not in my genes, apparently. I try really hard, but my daughter Riley shows me up every time. Oh, yeah. The Fortnite dances really took over in 2018 yeah fortnight you know huge influential game i think it's the game that has made the

most money ever but it just wasn't for us you know once pub g started rolling out some more maps like sandhawk we would always go back to pub g until eventually the cheating just kind of took over and now with pub g being free to play you know and that's my worry with overwatch 2 maybe we're gonna get this influx of more cheaters because you can always just make another free account because they're not gonna ban ip addresses so all right well uh let's move on to the next one michael what you got uh i've got a couple i'd like to bring up but i'll bring up one that I have to bring up. I already mentioned earlier, I have to talk briefly about Horizon Zero Dawn. It's in my top 10 list of favorite games, I think, of all time.

I think it sits there. And if not, I need to reorganize my list. I love this game. The criticism of this game is that it didn't do anything revolutionary, really break the mold, but everything it did, it did really well. I think my favorite things if i keep this relatively quick about the game is that the environment that you're using you're using so much the environment but specifically like the the the robot dinosaurs that you're shooting like

for instance like if you shoot a gun off of the giant t-rex you can pick that gun up and use it as a weapon you use resources that come off things you can shoot off different pieces of plates and armor and there's just so many different ways that you can accomplish things the combat was fantastic the story was fantastic the music was fantastic the intro tutorial the way you start as a little girl and then like you transition into the adult aloy was great i thought that was really well done and of course aloy is an iconic hero character that will probably have several entries into her series of horizon games love the game would love to it again, but I'm still playing the newer one because it's also awesome. And it's great to see a new franchise spawn because you don't see

a lot of new franchises that really break in. And this one definitely is here to stay because of this excellent entry from 2017. I had to wait for Zero Dawn to come out on PC, because I think at the time I had sold my PlayStation, I was in between. So I actually had to wait for the release on PC. I picked it up as soon as it was available on PC. One of the best intros to a game ever, in my opinion. I have never cared about a character as fast as I did

with Aloy and her adoptive father. Oh, Rost? Yeah. Honestly, 15 minutes in, I was hooked. I was just like, I love both of these guys. Oh my goodness, I'm so invested in these characters. The intro, the beginning area, I thought was really cool, really well done before you go out into the main world. I'm with you, Michael. I never finished it, but I made it very close to the end the main world. I'm with you, Michael. I probably, I never finished it, but I made it very close to the end. I feel like I say that all the time. I never finish this game, guys. But I mean, it's a phenomenal game, to be honest with you.

You hit it perfectly. It didn't innovate anything, but it did everything extremely well you know horizon zero dawn i kind of ignored for a couple years i ended up buying it on disc it was the last game i ever bought physically for my ps4 and i want to say it was probably 2019 maybe even early 2020 like pre-covid i remember walking into a game stop and i had nothing to play at the time and i saw that it was used and it was like 7.99 it was incredibly cheap and i bought it i played it for like seven or eight hours i liked it just fine and i don't remember what grabbed my attention i ended up just kind of putting it down it never really totally sucked me in but i do want to give props to the voice actor of a lawyer

i think her name is ashley birch i know we've talked about her before tiny tina tiny tina yeah what a phenomenal voice actor for gaming really really talented ashley birch if you're listening we'd love to have you on the show please be our first celebrity guest i would say that we don't have hosts but if ashley birch wants to come on the show we'll we'll have you on yeah we'll make an exception all right and uh i think the last one that i'll bring up only because i thought this was kind of funny i looked at metacritic and i i'm not gonna ask you guys to guess because you're not gonna have any idea i was curious what the lowest rated game of the year was by critics and it's actually a game that's fairly popular it's hello neighbor i you know what really i almost brought that game up because what a flop

yeah but kids i was hyped our kids like josh was so hyped for hello neighbor i remember watching the gameplay previews and stuff and thinking like the ai of the guy in the house the neighbor was supposed to be through the roof. This was supposed to be the smartest game ever. And then it was like such a letdown, man. There's just not much to the game. But I feel like for young kids in particular, it was like a scary hide and seek. And it really appealed to kids. But man, as an adult, this game offered really nothing. Yeah, it really didn't. That's funny, though, because I remember the hype around that game. I think that may be one of the games that my kids were most hyped for that I've seen them.

Yeah. You know, they don't get too excited about upcoming games because they've just got the games they like. But Hello Neighbor really went through our household as like the, ooh, when's that game come out? And then was like yeah it's okay all right so let's just maybe list any honorable mentions maybe with like a one sentence thing that you guys want to bring up anything that we kind of missed here i have to say i don't think i've ever laughed harder in a video game than when i played star trek bridge crew and we are some friends. It was one of the first true multiplayer VR experiences I had had where you could see your buddies in their arms doing all this. And I

literally had to take my headset off because I was worried. I was laughing so hard that I was crying so much that I was worried I was going to mess up the little face part on my Oculus Rift at the time. Phenomenal game. Like I said, we don't have to go into it. But that was a really fun experience. Yeah, I thought it was so... It's on my short list. I think it probably would have been the next game we got to. And I'm surprised Zelda Breath of the Wild didn't come up. Because that was like, why are we talking about this? But everyone's talked about it. But Star Trek Bridge Crew, one of the things that blew my mind about that is when you're talking to your friends first of all it was a cross platform i played it on my pc and my buddy was playing on his playstation which had in vr that's impossible

no one does no one was doing cross platform back in 2017 which was awesome but like when you talked your mouths would open and talk as you talked which blew my mind i'll fly through my honorable mentions real fast um i have to talk just briefly mentioned Hunter Call the Wild. Nobody plays hunting games. If you do or ever want to play this game, Star Wars Battlefront 2, terrible game, horribly disappointing, have to bring it up. Ark Survival Evolved, great survival game. Nobody played it. Overload, Hollow Knight, Nier Automata, done. Paul, honorable mentions. Yeah, you know, I would bring up Super Mario Run, which is the most I've ever spent on a mobile game.

Spent all 10 bucks. Absolutely fantastic. Still worth it to this day. Josh, if there's ever a game that might convince you, I mean, check out Super Mario Run. You can play for free. And if you want to unlock- Is that like the Temple Run game where you just run as Mario and click?

Well, it's like, it looks like Mario 2D, and Mario automatically runs right until he runs out of room, and then he turns around and runs left, and he goes forever. And so you're just timing all of your jumps, but he can also do combo jumps, kind of like the three-step jump in Mario 64, that kind of stuff. And you can also play where you unlock not unlock but where you get all the collectible red coins in the levels so super mario run for my money is one of the best mobile games still even though it's five years old and um no one mentioned hollow night but that came out this year splatoon 2 is a great shooter that came out that we bought on the wii u and i think that really covers just about everything super mario odyssey i thought was kind of underwhelming that one didn't really do a whole lot for me and cuphead also came out in i was gonna say yeah

yep yeah um i was gonna mention cuphead came out i am i i didn't have a ton of interest in that game initially. We did deep dive Cuphead. So if you want to check that out, you can. I remember being really hyped for Honor because I remember seeing the graphics in that game and the one-on-one combat system. And I thought, man, this is going to be amazing. And then that game just never caught on for some reason.

For me, honorable mentions. It's funny, we've talked about a couple of these. Destiny 2, I was disappointed in that game. But, you know, it was fun for a little while. Hollow Knight, Star Trek Bridge Crew, Resident Evil 7. I mean, these are all games that I wanted to make sure that we mentioned. I'll just touch on Shadow of War. Michael kind of glossed over a little bit. Phenomenal game. Super, super fun. We just covered the... What's the first one? Shadow of War? Shadow of Mordor. Shadow of Mordor. There you go. There you go. I was like, it's Mordor something. It was the first one that's free right now. So while you're listening to this episode, you can pick that up on Amazon Prime Gaming.

Yes, go play it. But yeah, those games are super fun. But yeah, that's about it as far as honorable mentions go. Yeah. So let's give out a couple of awards. All right. I just gave you guys a couple of categories and we don't have to agree on this. It's not like the leaderboard where we have to have a consensus. So let's just go around first and let's just do the biggest one. Let's knock it out first. Best game of the year. Now in retrospect, five years later, what game are you giving best game of the year? Divinity Original Sin 2 for me. And yes, it's very, very close to another game. But for me, it's more memorable. It's a way better game all around for

me. So that's my choice. Close to Breath of the Wild? PUBG. pub g gotcha yeah what about you michael game of the year goes to horizon zero dawn mostly because i haven't really played all the way through divinity original sin 2 i admit that loving rpgs that might usurp it but i loved horizon zero dawn it was really a perfect game game of the year yeah i'm gonna give it to dos 2 as well i will say it's neck and neck with breath of the Wild, which I know Michael kind of poked fun at the fact that we didn't even bring it up to talk about, but I feel like everyone's played it. Everyone knows that game. I don't have anything I can say that's going to add to the conversation. It's a fantastic game. It's arguably the best Zelda. I prefer Wind Waker,

but Breath of the Wild I have second, so I would give it to dos too it's just so big so unique such interesting storytelling such fantastic characters i mean the gameplay is great the story is great uh you really have to play it how you want that's the best you play the game how you want to play it yeah and you cannot break it no dos too you can't break it like it's anything you can think of they're like try you can do that yeah i'm gonna kill this guy and this is gonna screw the game over and nope it just keeps going which is the most important thing in an rpg is that there's so many ways to get to the end creativity they embrace it man they really do in divinity original sin 2 so all right cool that's two

yeah so let's do most disappointing game of the year. So it's not the worst game of the year, just the most disappointing. Did not meet expectations. Destiny 2 for me. Ooh, Destiny 2. I was hyped for Destiny 2. I thought this was the next greatest thing since sliced bread, man. And it was very fun for like six, seven hours. And then I was like, oh man, this is disappointing. That's about how long I played it for too. What about you, Michael? I love Star Wars games.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 was a huge letdown to me because Battlefront 1 was fine. It was a fun tactical, fun shooter against your friends. Battlefront 2, I was like, yes, they're saying we're going to have a single player campaign. It's going to be awesome. Game came out, single player campaign was like two hours. You're done with it going to have a single player campaign. It's going to be awesome. Game came out. Single player campaign was like two hours.

You're done with it. It was terrible. It was Battlefront one. I was super disappointed. And now if you want to unlock characters, you got to gamble and buy loot boxes. Oh, that whole part. Yeah. I forgot that kind of like the apex, the loot box like controversy.

That was like the beginning of the end for the loot box system right yeah uh most disappointing game of the year i i if i gave this award in 2017 it would be mass effect andromeda because it was so bad at release they fixed all the animation stuff the game is still disappointing compared to the original trilogy but i'm gonna give it to friday the 13th i was hyped for that game uh asymmetrical pvp games i think can be a lot of fun i thought this was gonna be the one to really do it and it just fell flat so badly i i have to give it to that bummer yeah let's let's go on to the next one here what about the most underrated game of the year what do you guys have for this one i mentioned both this is kind of a tie for me to be honest so uh senua's hellblade senua's sacrifice i talked about it i think that game was very underrated and then the uh middle

earth shadow of war i i don't know how that game wasn't just an absolute blockbuster what about you michael you know it's funny because I would actually say the most underrated game of the year is a game we just played a couple months ago. It was Nier Automata. Nobody was talking about it a whole bunch. I really enjoyed that game. I thought it was really fun.

I thought you could get a lot out of it. I think I married that game, and I just think that because I hadn't even ever heard of it, that automatically makes it underrated because everything else I think was a game that I'd heard of that I played that year. Yeah. You know, I think for this one, I'm going to give it to Resident Evil 7. I think that there were a good amount of people that liked it, but you never hear about it anymore. So I'm going to say it's underrated at this point.

I'm not sure the last time anyone's brought up Resident Evil 7 in a conversation. All right, let's move on to most overrated game. What would you guys give this one to? A game we have not mentioned. I did try it. A game called Undertale. Undertale came out in 2017. I saw so much stinking hype about Undertale, man. People were talking about it. it oh my goodness it's like no other game I've ever played before I looked at I go man these graphics suck but you

know sometimes games don't need good graphics so I picked this game up I put probably three maybe four hours into it and I just went this game man. I don't get it. It just doesn't, it did not land with me at all. Super overrated in my opinion. I had the exact same answer. It's Undertale. And I know that that game's very beloved by many. I don't even remember a whole lot about it outside of like dancing skeletons and things are black and white, but then their color again. And then you've got some weird turn-based combat and it did nothing for me. I can really get into weird games and this game's definitely weird. And I just feel like I must've just been missing something. It just did not click at all. I'm almost morbidly curious to go back to it and give it another try

because you hear so many people talk about it being one of their favorites, but I'm almost morbidly curious to go back to it and give it another try because you hear so many people talk about it being one of their favorites. But I'm with you, Josh. I did not care for Undertale, even though it was a very cheap game, but beloved by many. What about you, Michael? Or no, did you? Yeah, what's yours? I haven't. Am I allowed to be controversial here?

Do I have to go with the status quo? Go with your heart, buddy. I'm not doing it just to do it and let me explain real fast the most overrated game of 2017 might be the most overrated game of all time and it's zelda breath of the wild oh okay and let me tell you why okay i'm not saying it's a bad game don't hear what i'm not saying here it's a great game but people talk about it like it's the second coming of jesus or like it's the first time you eat peanut butter and jelly or lobster that it's the greatest thing ever it's this great open

world game really i think it's an okay open world game i think it was the best the switch could do um the gameplay is great but it seems fleeting it seems like the world has kind of an empty feeling i walked around and didn't feel like there was a lot to do from point to point. I just I don't think it changed the world like people said it did. I think it's great. Don't get me wrong. I just don't think it's the greatest thing that's ever happened that most people say it is. And for me, it's underrated. Here's what Breath of the Wild is overrated. All right. Breath of the Wild for me is like watching Shrek as an adult. It's a kid movie, but it's got a ton of charm. It's funny. It's got some stuff for the adult. It's a kid movie, but it's got a ton of charm. It's funny.

It's got some stuff for the adults. It's a great watch. Everyone loves it and they can all watch it together. And Breath of the Wild is the same for me. Like it's a kid game. It's not hard. Anyone can play and beat Breath of the Wild. My son Jackson beat it when he was like five years old

and I didn't help him at all. But I think that the puzzles inside the temples were really fun i thought that the uh the the the giant machines that you would go into and clear out they were it was like the the octopus or whatever they were yeah they're only like four protectors or whatever they were called i think they were guardians they were like mini dungeons they were super fun i i find breath of the wild to have fantastic music it's really nostalgic to still play as link i get it i i think it's a fantastic watch is it going to give you an open world type of system like skyrim

of course not um but i find it to be endlessly charming and a pleasure to play. Michael, I just have to say this, because the fact that you brought up Breath of the Wild as one of the most overrated games of all time. Yeah. I've said it before, too, I think. It's not my first time saying this. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm a little shocked. But also, I actually wrote down Breath of the Wild originally. And then I went, I think I'm a little scared to say that I think it's one of the most overrated games.

And I deleted it. And I went with Undertale. So I will say kudos to you for being braver than me. I'm with you both. I think the game is great. I am not saying that Breath of the Wild is not a great, phenomenal video game. I just don't think it falls in that echelon of greatest games that I've ever played that a lot of people seem to remember that game as. So I'm with you. I think it's overrated. That's not to say it's bad. I think it is just overrated

in general. Yeah. And I think to summarize my whole statement on this, really, I think the reason why I think it's overrated is because I played it years after it came out and the hype for this game was so high that when I played it, I was like, I don't get it. And why is my sword breaking so much? Oh no,

that's a good thing. You get to swap out different weapons. Yeah, that's kind of a joke. So on, on Metacritic, Breath of the Wild has a 97 rating by critics. User score is an

8.7 out of 10. Where do you guys think it should be? What do you think would be accurate? I think 87's fine. I get why critics would say, hey, best thing, but it's like bread. Nobody doesn't like bread.

You're not going to say bread sucks. That's not going to happen, but you're also gonna say bread sucks you know like that's not gonna happen but you're also not gonna be like bread's the greatest thing ever yeah right now slice bread might be the greatest thing but a different different thing it's like a medium well steak nobody loves it they're like but it's still steak like i'm still getting the steak it's just not my taste it's medium well uh don't don't talk to my family who all love well done steak my family's the same way no it drives me crazy my wife basically if we go out to eat she says burn it because they're like no no because she's like if it has anything but brown i will send it

back and i'm just sitting there shaking my head saying i'm sorry please apologize to the cook for me what i always say as opposed to make it dark and charred, I say, I want you to put the steak on the grill, show it a picture of a flame, take it off and serve it to me. Very nice. Basically a beef tartare at that point. Yeah, pretty much. Sear it. Yeah. All right. And then our last award of the evening, most influential game of the year. Now, I think that there are a couple nominees that you could give here. I don't think it's necessarily obvious, but what would you guys say was the most influential?

I wrote PUBG without hesitation. There is no way that any game could get this but PUBG. It was the most influential game of 2017, hands down. I think you could make an argument for Fortnite. I think you could very easily make an argument. See, I disagree because I think PUBG influenced Fortnite. It did. Fortnite is the more successful game,

but Fortnite looked at what was happening with PUBG and said, scrap the rest of the game, guys. This is the future. And that's because of PUBG. And so, I mean, that just proves it in my mind is that PUBG is the most influential. What about Battle Passes? I hate Battle Passes, though.

But every game's got them now. And that's Fortnite. Yeah, but I mean, they influenced a terrible trend. PUBG added season passes after Fortnite. After Fortnite did. But the game itself in Battle Royale, PUBG is the influencer. Let's go ahead and just have Josh drop the mic on this one, because what he just said was perfect.

PUBG literally made Fortnite change their game. What's more influential in that? They're like, hey, we're going to make a world saver. No, we're not. No, these guys running around with cast iron skills, deflecting bullets. That's what we need. But you're saying PUBG influenced Fortnite. Fortnite influenced Halo Infinite.

It influenced PUBG. It added a seasonal pass to every mobile game that's available. I don't think it's clear-cut PUBG, but PUBG is what I would give it to as well. It ushered in the Battle Royale genre as a whole, but I think Fortnite is right there with it. I think those were the two most influential games of 2017. All right. Well, any closing thoughts, like any overall impressions after looking at the overall list? I think it was a pretty darn good gaming year in RetroSpat. It was a great gaming year, to be honest. And it's fun to just reminisce about games sometimes, man. It's nice for us

to be able to cover a lot of games in an episode and say, hey, it's neat to see like, hey, this was only five years ago. Yeah. Like, it seems like it was forever ago. But here we are only five years later, which is basically the game development, like normal timeframe nowadays. And it's like we went from the introduction of the battle royale genre, you know what I mean, to where we are right now in a short span of five years i'm very excited to see where gaming goes in another five years oh i totally agree the funniest thing is

josh you were just saying that it seems like it was so long ago to me it seems like it was yesterday because i think i played most of these games this year or during the pandemic so i'm like that was that this game came out in 20 said looks great for how old it is um but no what a great year in gaming so overall rating from a to f what do you guys give it i'd say an a minus i absolutely a minus oh i would say yeah a minus somewhere right around there yeah pretty good year all right well i think that's all that we have here for this bonus round episode we do want to let you guys know that our next deep dive a week from today will be the saints Row reboot, which will be a lot of fun to talk about. Also, Michael mentioned

it earlier, but please follow us on socials. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter and TikTok at Multiplayer Pod. We're going to try to start posting on TikTok. I posted one video. Now I have to do it. Yeah, good job, Paul. You just totally added accountability by

telling everyone we're doing that. And now I have to. Everybody follow us on TikTok. There's going to be great content. It's going to be so much better than everyone else out there. How dare you? Go unfollow The Rock. Unfollow Kevin Hart.

Come follow MultiplayerPod. In all seriousness, though. If we get a thousand followers, I'll try to floss for you guys. Oh, there you go. I uploaded one video to TikTok two and a half years years ago and it has sat around doing absolutely nothing just gathering dust and i gave michael the login info and said here you go buddy i think we should probably actually start using tiktok so we'll have some stuff on there for you guys we're hoping to post maybe like just some previews of upcoming episodes, things like that. And then also come join us on discord.

There's a link in the episode description. Our discord is totally free. It's open to the community. It's family friendly. We'd love to have you guys join us in there and also come sign up on Patreon multiplayer squad.com. We'll take you there. And I think that's all the plugs that we have for you guys.

I know that's a lot there, but come connect with us. We love our audience. We'd love to connect you in all those ways. And then we'll have our next episode on Thursday. So please join us again for This Week in Gaming. And until then, happy gaming, everybody. We'll see you next time.

I'm going to miss you guys, seriously. Cheers, all. All right. See you, everybody.