The Besties - COD4: Should We Feel Bad?

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

OORAH! Stand at attention and listen to this week's discussion of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare you maggots. In the second episode of their mini-series on games from 2007, The Besties examine the franchise's first foray into contemporary battle. Plus, Russ tests his co-host's knowledge with some Call of Duty trivia. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

so i don't have a child as you well know and i there's no uh future i mean well i smell an announcement there it is there's no announcement to report but i do want to suggest you know you get to a certain age you start thinking about these sort of things and one of the things you think about are names and one name sort of came to me and i wanted to float it past you guys to see what you thought of a potential name for a Frustic Scion in the future. Sure. I can't wait. Yeah, let's hear that. What do you think? I should say I don't like thinking about this as an idea

because there's a lot of things that would have to happen for that to occur and I don't like thinking about any part of it but go on. Okay, so what do you I don't mind I don't mind thinking about it. What do you think of the name Elmo? Elmo Frushtick?

Yeah. It sounds bad. Why? It sounds, well, that's the name of the red monster on the Sesame Street show. You gotta think about this stuff. Yeah. Also, this is an epiphany that i had because

i actually thought about this too um my child's name is mo and he wears elmo clothes but when i see him wearing it i realize it just says the mo that's cool yeah it's very cool russ russ i think the problem is it's so for the record my wife just slid a note under the door and it says no exclamation point. So I guess it's not going to pan out. my name is justin mccarroy and i know the best game of 2007 my name is griffin mccarroy and this is a game that came out in 2007. My name is Chris Plant and bang, bang, bang, boom, boom, boom, war is death. My name is Russ Frushing and I know the best game of the week.

Hello and welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in interactive home entertainment. It is a game of the year show that goes there all year long a book club but for video games and we're continuing our mini series delving into what you the fine people of the besties nation which we i guess we would just call them besties is Is that the name of besties fans? It's just besties. I still appreciate referring to a fan base as something nation. It's extremely mid-aughts to me in a way that feels like nostalgic and comforting in these trying times. I'm just going to throw this out as an option. The best eye.

What? The best, what do you mean? The best eye. Like a plural of. Like a plural of a high ofies. Yeah, that's nothing. Wow. So this week we're talking about Call of Duty

Modern Warfare Hoorah! Hoorah. Guys, when that first hoorah dropped, my testicles went up inside me. I was like whoa, we're doing this uh hey i'll kick i'll kick start the conversation once we've once we figured out how to arrange

the ancient bones of this fucking video game in a way that it would allow us to play it without our computers uh squealing and passing away in protest uh i was i was instantly reminded you run that fucking training course i did that shit like 30 times trying to get that score down because i remember like oh yeah this game feels really good to play and then in the very first mission you go into a bedroom where a bunch of soldiers are just sleeping and you're like oh look how sweet and your squad mates shoot them to death while they're sleeping and you go like wait a minute this game doesn't feel great to play in some other regards let's let's talk about them separately can i float that that that idea that we single player and multiplayer or no fun factor and political yes okay political factor right fun factor i was

actually really surprised because i had not i mean i've kind of been like hot or cold on the call of duty series i feel like i played most of the single player campaigns uh i don't think i finished the most recent one but i was surprised going back to this how much it's so open-ended and but so smart in the way it sort of nudges you towards what you need to be doing i mean obviously there's a a marker for like objectives or whatever but it's it gives you a very open area with which to achieve those objectives and it makes the firefight seem really open-ended it's like are you looking for cover are you finding the right places to like attack from are you you know going around and i really was impressed especially for like a 2007 game and i feel like this is less so for more modern call of duties where like it just felt

very um open-ended and there was like a lot of freedom with how you could approach like different tactical situations. I wanted to, I was like trying to think back of like when this first came out. And obviously this is the first like modern combat game, hence the name, Call of Duty Modern Warfare. And before that, it had just been World War II Call of Duty games. And thinking back to those, like those, the first Call of Duty 1 and Call of Duty 2

are very, very good games. They were both made by Infinity Ward and they were like really well-designed and there are spectacles like of their time, but they, it didn't really coalesce until this game. And I think a lot of it has to do with just like, they just nailed pacing and like uh player direction as justin was sort of saying that makes it feel like this much grander epic like it really even now like i was

even playing the original now i still am impressed by how well it's aged whereas a lot of games from that have not aged that well and it has to do with lighting and like timing and music and sound cues and voice acting and like it is like a true spectacle that like launched a thousand spectacles that came after it right yeah which is pretty amazing i was trying to think about what makes it different than those original cods because i love call of duty 2 especially and i think it's that uh call of duty up until this point was like a theme park ride. It was very linear. And you got on the track and the game very sharply moved you from one action set piece to the next. And you saw exactly what they wanted you to see. It could be a video for all you wanted.

Which, to back up to that lineage a little bit, that's really a descendant of Medal of Honor. Which started in 1999. And that was very much the first game that turned a first-person shooter, especially a military first-person shooter, into something much more cinematic. Steven Spielberg was involved with that first game. Produced again. It was very much

that cinematic. I mean, he cast a check. I don't know how involved he was. But in the story, Steven Spielberg wasn't like yeah i think the r button should reload the gun no he did that for boom blocks that he hand coded that he yeah no but that that idea of like a cinematic first person shooter i feel like especially military theme was like a very middle of honor thing that led to call of duty yeah but what i think is different here is now it feels like performance like it's wild how much the game is you have the freedom to go run around like a real asshole

and just like smell the roses but there's so much um subtle direction like i mean the game literally just has a director and it's either the character that is like hey i think you should go literally over here and do exactly this because that's's where it's going to look the coolest. Or somebody like is in your earpiece or there's another character or the characters line up to breach a door. There's all of these moments that are, you have the power as kind of the cameraman to catch them. But again, you have more freedom. It's okay with you not doing exactly what it wants, which is, I mean, that's the trick, right?

It has more trust in the player to like, to show up. The other thing that I just want to get in really quick on that note too is, this game is easy. Like really, really, really easy. And I think that's the thing that I love about this game versus later Call of Duty games is it is obsessed with just being a performance and it doesn't want to make it too

hard and it does want you to just be able to kind of flow through this world as the cameraman where i think later on they saw the popularity of multiplayer and it becomes like a skill training test yeah training ground yeah multiplayer i did want to talk just specifically on your point of the like director aspects of it and like following direction um my favorite level in this game is a level where they literally every single step of the way tell you exactly what you need to be doing otherwise i think you just fail i don't even think there's like you can range off i think it's just a fail that's the chernobyl level which is like a big flashback level that happens at the end towards the end that is like kind of the big like storytelling reveal moment and that i think was like the perfect coalescence of like this idea of like okay you have to run here in 10 seconds okay stay under this bridge while these guys walk over you and even though

it's not like as interactive as or open as justin was just talking about like it it still makes you feel like it is and that's the level people think about when people talk about this campaign is that's the level people talk about right because it was it was so uh so the opposite of the bigger blustery USMC just like charge in there and fuck everyone up. Yeah. There's a lot of touchstones that I didn't realize. I wasn't really thinking of this as like, oh, was that one?

I didn't realize how many were established in this game. Like the ghillie suit mission is wild. It's so cool. Is it AC-130? Is it the plane? I don't know know i'm not that kind wow that shit is wow that shit feels when i was younger i was like fuck you i'm i'm gun superman i'm like superman if he had just guns coming out of his torso like udders as he flew through the sky i was like fuck yeah this is awesome and now as a 33 year old'm doing this like, that was a human life I just extinguished.

That guy was a dad. Nothing. Speaking of opening a thing, I had the strangest thing that I experienced in the ghillie suit mission. There's this part where you climb to the top of a tower where you can climb up there after taking out a sniper. And I got up there, and there was a javelin, like a rocket launcher. And then a helicopter pops up. And he's like, Soap, lay down. The helicopter will see you.

And I tried like five times, like, why did you guys leave a rocket launcher here for me? I'm going to shoot this helicopter down. It's like, no, Soap, he'll see you. Like, no, I can, I'll handle this. Don't worry about it. I got it. The game wouldn't let me. I don't know why they left a rocket launcher there.

But that being said, the AC-130 mission is a nice, that gives us a way to turn into this, segue into this. I feel like this game, the thought that occurred to me with this game is it feels like it suffers from the Fight Club problem, by which I mean I feel like modern like fight club is it's based on a novel that was supposedly satire and i think fight club is even less satirical than the book it's based on and fight club the movie never plays its hand enough to let you know that hey this is not necessarily all cool and i this is actually some of this is bad and i feel like call of duty modern warfare revisiting it really wants to have

its cake and eat it too there is a there is an amount of awareness i think of i i think when they brought this into the modern era i think there is an awareness on their part which i would i should give them credit for. I feel like in 2007, we weren't having as many of these conversations. I feel like there's an awareness of some of this feels bad. Like, I feel like I want to believe

that the AC-130 mission, which is, by the way, it's just like black and white. You're taking out these little specks of human humanity with a gigantic gun entire task as you hear just this sort of dispassionate like like okay that's all pieces yeah fuck them a click of lego man i feel like they want i feel like there is some amount of commentary being made with that but i don't think it says anything enough to where it can really stand behind it i agree with you but i think i think this lives better as a historical object or critique of war or just like where people were at than any of the modern call of duty games do

and that's because after this they became obsessed with like okay we've hired our like debatable war criminal oliver north to consult on this and and like we're going to hone this to it's going to be gross and crass but it's going to have like basically a you know a private military contractor's pr firm go over it with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it's like the type of crass that a certain audience is okay with where this this game is wild like you can tell that it was made by a hundred different people with a hundred different

opinions just by going off the quotes in the loading screen where sometimes they're like the quotes in the loading screen some of them make them sound smart some of them clearly don't one of my favorite quotes is friendly fire isn't attributed to unknown like yeah every quote is like they are so wildly alternating between like war is fucking cool like and then somebody the very next quote is like war actually sucks it's actually so bad we

shouldn't do it but anyway here's your rocket launcher fuck about and then just like the price of like one missile yeah yeah what are you proving yeah but i think i i think going through this game there's something about it again the ac-130 mission i'm not saying it's good there is obviously a lot in this game that's like very wrong but i felt like i i myself was left to really come away from the game pretty um cynical about the military industrial complex because because it doesn't have that extra layer of polish that like if you play the new modern warfare it does everything to be like hey it's bad but also like bet you know it takes bad guys to do good things i played through the whole campaign of the 2019 modern warfare did anybody else no i thought it was pretty good all things

considered like the character work that they did was like actually decent it's the first uh call of duty campaign that i finished since the fucking kevin space one. Griffin just loves Kevin Spacey. I can't try to tell you. Oh, wow. He's like, I'll finish anything that gets in. We're gonna cancel your brother. Now I can't remember what point I was making because I'm so horrified.

Modern warfare. Yeah, for me, there is almost a, the new Modern Warfare game campaign does try to walk that line. It does try to walk that line. It does try to walk that line. And I think the equivalent of the AC-130 mission in the new Modern Warfare is the one where you are going through the townhouse with your night vision goggles on, which that technology has come a long way in the 12 years since the original Modern Warfare came out. So it looks hyper

realistic and you are having to, you know make these difficult decisions as you are seal team sixing it in in this place and that's the scene with the famous like a woman has a baby and so like do you do you shoot the baby like that's the that is what they are that's any that's what that moral decision is actually that's an easy they don't let you they don't let you uh they they they reload the like, hey, don't shoot the baby. Hey, listen, we're going to give you the freedom to make the right sort of moral decisions that you want, but don't shoot the baby. For me, there is something almost like,

not refreshing, but like this 2007 Modern Warfare, I feel like doesn't try nearly as hard to do that. War is full of bad decisions that don't feel good even when you're doing the thing you have to do to succeed. And to me, there is something less crass about that than like- Shoving it in your face? Really, shoving it in your face in a way that's like,

we really, really want you to feel the effects of war. And we have a lot to say about that. And also check out this new fucking weed skin you can get on your ooze like there is that dichotomy that doesn't make a lot of sense i i also i i do want to mention just kind of related to that the like series of games that came after um the first modern warfare like the 2007 one yeah it just got so it basically just turned into even more of an extreme of what plant was talking about it basically turned into a fast and the furious experience because they realized that the only way to one up what they had done

previously was like well we're gonna give you a drill like they had in teenage mutant ninja turtles and you're gonna drive underneath the ground and then pop up in the middle of a bank, and everyone's gonna have lasers and drones and shit. And, like, at a certain point, they, like, constantly had to one-up themselves. And then I think Modern Warfare was, like, them trying to, like, scale that back a little bit. Yeah. So it has been this weird

road. So, the thing that I did really dig about going back to this game is how benign everything is. Like like this is a boring world like they yeah the world is just full of crap um the example i'd give is you go to one mission you you uh break into a tv station to uh i do do whatever mcguffin you have to do in that mission and the tv station is just so. There's like a room that's full of data servers. There's a break room that just has, you know,

a generic fridge and like crappy food left on the table. And there's just so much boring stuff in this game. And I think it's really important that this existed because until this point, technologically, there just wasn't like room or money for this. You know, older hardware, you could only effectively load in so many assets and you only had the money for so much so you when you designed a room it had to be like okay these are the things that really capture the

character or whatever the point out room is and then the rest of the room is just gonna be full of i don't know barrels and everything's gonna be set in a factory um we're here suddenly you had all this memory that the xbox 360 had you had asset farms um activision was just spending more money on games and you could put stuff in a game that was otherwise low priority but when you're in the game it feels so real like it feels so real for the first time to be in a room where it's like oh this is just somebody's like paperwork or post-it notes that are around here or like a dumb poster. And I think I remember loving that so much. And it's such a bummer how quickly COD got away from that.

And I think Modern Warfare 2 is like where they kind of jumped the shark. They have a mission set in, you know, the fast food joint. And that's when it starts kind of skewing in towards irony. And then after that it just goes full-on like yeah whatever like sci-fi do a bond movie yeah a bond movie and and yeah i think like that and then the other thing i'm curious did y'all play the remaster or did you play the original i played the single player remaster okay i could not get the multiplayer which we really need to spend some time talking about because it's wild if we went this whole time i thought i could only get the multiplayer

to work in the original so that was something uh the this is not like i don't know this is not me being uh a hipster i don't think you can be a hipster when it comes to quality modern warfare i actually think the original looks better than the remaster does weird yeah what feels better like that was my thing is i talked about this benign stuff it feels i don't know it feels almost like artsy is such a silly thing to say here but you can feel the ambition of the game reaching so far beyond the power of that hardware right you know there's a big open area but then like all the textures on the mountain are identical and repeating. It's like, wow, they were really reaching outside their bounds.

We're like, you play the remaster and don't get me wrong. A lot of people did some really great work on it. But it just feels like another game. That's it. Yeah. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for that like Xbox 360 era, like grainy brown filter. Okay. Multiplayer.

Did anybody get a chance to play multiplayer? Yeah. it's hard as hell to get that to work man it still kicks ass it is i hopped into a map uh and it was shipment which is that very very small square uh symmetrical uh battlefield with like the shipping crates all over it that it it has been in every Call of Duty game since, with like 32 people packed into this one place, everybody with like whatever weapons they wanted with like 10,000 times XP modifier on it. And it's just like, I was spawning and dying and spawning and dying and shooting someone and spawning and dying.

And even though it was like on speed, it was, I was still like, yeah, still like yeah all right yeah i remember this is fucking fun i think the customization of the the the class customization still like yeah that is what hooked me i played a lot of this one i played a lot of modern warfare 2 because that's where they really stepped up the multiplayer game a lot and it is that the formula the feel, the time to kill of modern warfare really was like fucking revolutionary. Yeah. So there was a bunch of things that were like totally broke new ground. So the idea of perks in a multiplayer game like really hadn't happened before.

The other big thing is the unlocks. Like the idea of like, yeah, I can use this gun now and customize like a custom class with this gun that i just unlocked this perk that i just unlocked so it made like previously you would just play multiplayer and hey i won or i lost the match and that was it but like the idea that you were making progression and unlocking new features as you played was really cool i do want to mention so griffin talked a little bit about the time to kill which is a very grim term in the context of what we were just talking about it's like a shoot it's a shooter multi-player terminology right it just means how quickly how many shots you need to do to shoot to kill someone in a multiplayer game it's very very short in this game like much shorter

than any other call of duty game i think or at least one of the shortest and you would think that that would make it a much more like skill intensive game but it actually levels the playing field because you can't do the like crazy i'm gonna slide 50 feet jump and shoot and use a jet pack in midair and then like dominate people it's so grounded in terms of like what you can and can't do um that like even someone like me like i can actually like whatever it's a little bit like camping but i can like hold down an alleyway with a machine gun even though i haven't played the game in forever because i can actually get the drop on people right you can drop where there's just the only chance if you're somebody like me who's like not super skilled right but i can think a little bit and be a little crafty

and get the drop on somebody and then have them not turn the tables there's there's also no me there's no health or armor or pickups on the map, so really all you have to know is where's good bottlenecks? Where's good... Where do firefights tend to... Where are the hot spots? It is the opposite of Halo from this point. I could not get

into Halo at this point because you could get the drop on somebody and they would just somehow turn around and jump around and duck and you would be dead. Yeah, it was a nightmare. They were shooting a stegosaurus at you like they had where did they get that it is funny though because what we now like now that people have played a lot of these that first call duty game was so poorly balanced um specifically like perks so one of the perks gave you 25 more damage and that was the only perk you should ever use it was literally like that powerful another perk you get 50 more health so those two like they did not

really balance it very properly so what ended up happening was that a lot of people ended up just using like the same four setups but it set the stage for a much more complex set of options over time, which, to be honest, I think have gone a little bit overboard in newer games because I can't follow it. But I think this was, I mean, really groundbreaking and continues to impact a lot of things. Before we move on to the second half of the show, I did want to, because a lot of this talk has been about history,

I went back and found from joysticks top 10 of 2007 oh fuck yeah the write-up of modern warfare that they did who did it um here's the frustrating thing about trying to write about call of duty 4 is that all of the phrases that best describe it have already been applied to and in turn drained of their impact by far less deserving games it's a non-stop thrill ride its graphics are quote almost photorealistic and it is in fact quote so real that you'd almost think you were there what call of duty 4 so authoritatively managed to do is reclaim those action game cliches and in doing so infuse them with a new fresh power what call of duty 4 single

player campaign could best be described as, though, is a master class on making good game design choices. From beginning to end, moments last just as long as they need to. Difficulty is perfectly balanced and the action ebbs and flows between full-on chaos and chilling silence. From a pulse pounding start to the final desperate

ending, it's a meticulously crafted experience. We haven't even made mention of the game's multiplayer yet, which mixes the game's explosive presentation with some RPG fundamentals to predictably addictive results. Perhaps the most surprising thing, last paragraph, perhaps the most surprising

thing about the game is how few actual revolutionary concepts are still contained within. It selects existing game design tools, hones them to practical perfection, and creates what is, in our opinion, the military shooter against which all others must be judged. Justin McElroy. Who wrote that?

Yeah, it was me. It was me. It was me. My dumb ass. The last time that Justin McElroy would be selected as our military shooter expert. Who can best capture the URAW spirit of the U.S. military?

Y'all, I want to share one last thing before we go to the B segment. And this is just something for all of us to chew on because you mentioned history. What 2020 is to 2007 is what 2007 is to 1994 just like that's grand plant yeah yeah we're man that doesn't i we're actually going to cut that out and just do mine because it was a much better energy to move on with

i could play that game too 2006 is well i can't do the math. No, I only mentioned it because I was a retronaut when this game came out. And I was like, oh man, all those games from 1994. That was a long time ago. And now like, oh God, it's happening. So yeah, anyway, let's go to the break and think about good stuff on pad. And we'll be right back.

Hey everyone, welcome back. Do we do that? back hey everyone welcome back do we do that do we introduce yes we love doing that man we gotta welcome people back they're in our house how will they know yeah yeah i wanted to uh bring a little call of duty trivia to the show today and test my fellow besties knowledge of the call of duty franchise broadly. So what I've done here is I've copied down a single sentence from the plot description of the individual Call of Duty games. And I want to see if you guys can pick out what Call of Duty game they're from. You ready?

Are we limiting it to the modern warfare trilogy? Okay, the whole franchise. Okay. Can I say something real quick before we move on? Yes. I was very relieved to, I liked that there was a character named soap and i it made me wish that all the characters had names of regular household objects because i think i could have kept track of this story much better over the last 10 years so it was like soap and broom and And Broom and Ashtray are back. Fair point.

Okay, here we go. In 1986, Alex Mason, now retired from active duty, pursues an obscure existence in Alaska with his son, seven-year-old David. That's Black Ops. That's Black Ops 2? Any guesses? Black Ops Declassified.

Griffin is correct. It's Black Ops 2. Very good. Okay, here we go. I knew Alex Mason was Black Ops Declassified. Griffin is correct. It's Black Ops 2. Very good. Okay, here we go. I knew Alex Mason was Black Ops. Didn't play that. I don't think I played any of the Black Ops campaigns. They're good.

Those are good. Yeah, the first two are good. Yeah, the first two are good. Okay. When the meeting is underway, Price attempts to assassinate Zakarev with a Barrett.50 caliber sniper rifle. However, the bullet only severs his arm. That's's this one that's the one we've played for that's not a very challenging one okay that was me just testing you guys to see if you were paying attention to this

story as the police approach the hotel a victorious price smokes a cigar watching makarov's twitch twitching corpse fucking Fucking three and spoilers. Three has the best ending of any video game ever. Three is the one where you and your buddy dress up in rhino suits of armor and just like go into the bad guy's hotel and just like get like shot, but it bounces off you like you're fucking Iron Man.

Okay, counterpoint. Advanced Warfare ends with you severing off your own robotic arm to let Kevin Spacey drop into a fire. To his death. That's a pretty good one, dude. Griffin didn't like that part, though. He thought it pushed him into kind of a tragedy. Why is that one so sad?

Hey, guys, did you think the new Call of Duty was super sad? They did that to K-Pax. Fuck. Can you believe that? Okay. Dr. Ludwig Maxis, whose brain resided in a mechanical drone at one time, arrives at Argatha

and is given a new body by Dr. Monty, a self-proclaimed omnipotent being and member of the Order of the Keepers. Infinite warfare. What the? What what the fuck it's infinite warfare sounds cool as hell oh infinite warfare i can't believe i skipped that one no wait did i play that one yeah i did that had a robot in it that gave its life for humanity or something fresh is like the one person who loves this game great game but not correct really it's it feels like an early it feels like that feels like so close to some wolfenstein shit that i want to say it's one of the world war ii it's black ops 3 maybe

plan is correct it is black ops 3 i forgot black ops 3 is like a weird weird well it's the zombies no no it wasn't in the campaign it was was from the zombies campaign. Oh, that doesn't count. That's cheating. It's in the package. Okay, one last one. Okay. One last one. Ready? Diane makes it out of the house and onto the property's salvage yard. Here she meets two troll-like creatures by the names of Bobo and Little Devil,

the judge's severely deformed grandchildren. Cheers. It's the plot of Cheers. Diane. Is it Cheers? That's right. Yeah, Chris is right on this one. It's the plot of Cheers. Diane. Is it Cheers? That's right. Yeah, Chris is right on this one. It is the plot of Cheers. I have no idea.

It is actually nothing but trouble, a film with Demi Moore and Chevy Chase, and Dan Aykroyd plays a very old judge. Excellent film. Highly recommend it. Check it out. Cool. I mean, Russ did say that it would either be a Dan Aykroyd movie

or a Call of Duty game, so shame on us. We all knew it couldn't be Call of Duty because the protagonist was a woman. Yeah. It's like a giveaway. I do enjoy that the one woman soldier in this game has to be rescued.

That is the one mission. She goes down in a helicopter and you have to go rescue the one woman in this game. I did, a few people shared their memories. This actually, this person hits on a topic we, a point on this game we didn't cover. My dad and I played Modern Warfare's campaign all the time when I was growing up. I hardly

ever played multiplayer, so I got really attached to Modern Warfare's campaign, and to this day, I can still remember the big surprises. I think it was the first game where I had a main character actually die in a helicopter crash after the nuke went off i think to this day is has some of the best set pieces in call of duty mile high club is one of the best missions i think modern warfare is genuinely dynamic and memorable cast for a call of duty game uh good all around it hasn't really shifted from being my favorite the um nuke going off and the character dot like i think that that was like very very jarring very wild um and then they

it is incredible and then they and then they tried to do it a lot including and right after that in modern warfare 2 at the end of the uh the no russian mission it's like whoa what won't we do yeah i do want to mention he he called out the mile high club mission which is it takes place after the story in like a post credit scene that you play this whole like assaulting an airplane mission which is like i mean ignoring the political connotations but like as a as a level it was very very cool it's fucking rad i remember there was like a miniature speed run scene that popped up around that one level because there's a timer on it and i remember watching videos in 2007 and people like streamlining their routes and doing all kinds of dope shit that's an alley-oop to uh a tweet reply that we

got from mike i used to beat mile high club and veteran for people at college for weed i was like an independent contractor for microtransactions. Yeah, so there was a trophy attached to the finishing that under a certain amount of time, and it was insanely hard, so I'm not surprised that he was able to, I guess, get some weed for that.

Yeah, congrats. We got a question from Greg. Even though the single player in this is pretty great, do you think Call of Duty's rise to big fame has left the industry in the worst condition overall? I don't think so. No, I don't think so. It did in the immediate aftermath of Modern Warfare 1 and 2

where you started to get the fucking Medal of Honor, tried to do this, right? Medal of Honor Warfighter? No, there was like a modern Medal of Honor game that they tried to do this, right? Medal of Honor Warfighter? Was that? No, there was like a modern Medal of Honor game that they tried to do. You saw Battlefield start to move in that direction. What was the Battlefield 4, I think, was the modern day Battlefield, right?

3, I think, was the first modern day one. I feel like, I don't know, maybe this is not a detriment to the industry or whatever. I just don't think that those games made as much of a splash necessarily yeah i think you're right also that um maybe in the short term but call of duty was so dominant that similar to wow at a certain point people were just like whatever we can't compete like we gotta do our own thing i definitely think it led to the like uh proliferation of rpg mechanics in online multiplayer modes and

shooter modes which is like which i love which is pretty sick right yeah it's like my favorite shit it's funny you mentioned that medal of honor griffin just to to fix the chronology here this game comes out in 2007 uh at the same time as medal of honor Airborne. Oh, yeah. Which is World War II. Not a bad game. And then 2010 Medal of Honor, the reboot, just called Medal of Honor, and it's a modern day shooter. That was the tier

one operator game. Talk about panicking and you're like, uh, uh, uh, no one likes this war anymore. We've done all we can with this war. Also, I believe Steven Spielberg's son worked on that game. The lineage continues. Fantastic. Anybody been playing anything else they want to hit on?

I've been messing around with Supernatural a little bit, which is Exercise Beat Saber. It's a VR game. And it is basically Beat Saber, where you have notes flying at you that you have to cut with your two different swords. One is white, one is black instead of the red and blue dichotomy of Beat Saber. Only it is a lot more sort of dynamic movement based.

You have to like pivot and turn around a whole lot. You have these little triangles that fly at you that you have to basically do constant lunges and squats to get under. Like it is a more sort of physically taxing experience. But the big thing is that they have like trainers and like training regimen that, they add a new one basically every day. So they have somebody like,

yeah, get in that fucking triangle, dude. Yeah, get that, squeeze that meat or whatever trainers like to say to get you hyped up to probably not squeeze that meat but you know what i'm saying uh and it's been it's been a fairly uh uh it it has whipped my ass like it has it is genuinely i used to play beat saber for for exercise for like a half hour at a time and you know get a get a good sweat going but like 15 minutes with this game and i am like in the ground it dynamically scales the difficulty based on how you're doing in the song which is troubling for me because i have gotten pretty good at beat saber but not good at

being healthy and exercising so it's like oh damn this dude's a fucking legend. Let's give him all that. And so it's just rough. It is $20 a month. You do have to subscribe to it. But there are daily, I've been doing it too. They have a new workout every day. And the songs are actually like real songs that you would know. I mean, you're paying, I think you're getting more probably like real licensed music than you would, you know, were this not. But yeah, I mean, $20 a month is considerable, but new workouts every day and new songs and stuff.

But I've been enjoying it. It's hard. It's hard as fuck. It makes my body feel bad. I don't know that I, so I tried it too, and I don't know that I love the people yelling at me as much. Oh, yeah. You seem to be used to it. I've never done Peloton or anything like that,

but it just seems like, I don't know, they're up in my space, and I don't need to know that I'm doing a good job. It's okay. I'll be fine. I love that. Are you kidding me i don't know i need that faulty i would pay a hundred dollars a month if that was a plug-in i could put into any video game so if i'm like raiding on final fantasy 14 and just have like you know

one of these extremely fit human beings just pop up on the screen like yeah bud you're really maximizing and optimizing your dps don't forget to avoid the aoe attacks here comes a big one yes keep those dots up bud keep those dots up refresh your dots bud yeah work it it's like a human clippy and it makes me very uncomfortable i uh played i have been playing a neat little thing that i just randomly switch is so frustrating. Cause like I, they have so many games on there and there's, it's so hard to tell what's worth your time and what's not.

I spent so much time like opening stuff and trying to figure out like, is this anything? Uh, but it's called ministry of broadcast. You guys heard of it? I've heard of it. I just saw, I was doing the same thing,

like perusing the eShop and saw that and looked into it. It sounds cool. It's cool. It's a, um, it's a platformer that the story is that you're in sort of a 1984 style like oppressive regime and to win freedom for your family you have to compete on a reality tv show that is presented through a platformer and the very close to the best like prince of persia like

that style it has that sort of like uh graphical look to and it feels kind of like a prince of persia where you're like solving puzzles and you know jumping puzzles to to uh win your freedom but it's very narrative focused so there's like breaks in between the stages where you're like meeting the other contestants and um it's really cool it's like a a neat a neat sort of thing i haven't gotten deep enough into it to figure out sort of where it's going but um sort of tonally kind of like papers please around that area maybe a little bit sillier but like mechanically it's very cool uh and and uh i don't know it's a neat thing it's called ministry mechanically it's very cool uh and and uh i don't know it's a neat thing it's called ministry of broadcast it's it's it's cool looks good too fresh how about you uh yeah no i yeah nothing nothing really jumping out uh apart from what

we've mentioned supernatural and and uh half-life alex which my wife is now playing and loving as well so it is a big hit yeah i i can say i'm definitely am not playing the super mario 64 port that is on pc definitely not playing it but no i think as an idea it is very interesting to see what a port of a nintendo 64 game looks like on pc versus emulation. I had never like thought about the fact that there are huge differences between an emulation of a game, which is making it exactly how it runs, ran on the Nintendo 64, and something that's a true port where it like is matches the resolution of what's on your screen and can be widescreen and connects naturally to modern controllers and the idea of what that could look like down the line i don't know if like i i seriously doubt

nintendo will be a company to ever even try that because they're so um keen on limiting their games to their hardware but in terms of like bringing back that kind of era of 3D games on PC suddenly seems like a really interesting idea to me. And I hope that more companies that did have console exclusives consider doing that down the line. I mean, we're already seeing it with Sony bringing its exclusives to PC from this current generation. I mean, I hope that,

I would love to see stuff like that happening in the future. Did they make that thing from scratch? I will not talk about it because I think it's legally dubious. I mean, it 100% is, so there's no question about that. Yeah, dubious even is too great. Legally, we're all clear on. Now, morally, though, that's a harder question. Next week, we're going under the sea.

Under the sea. Talk about Bioshock, the original. Thank you, Plant. Appreciate that. So play Bioshock and share with us your Bioshock memories, if you got them, or any sort of, you know, if you find any sort of neat ephemera from the time, things that stick out to you from the original release back in 2007,

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