The Besties - Eating Snakes and Frogs with Metal Gear Solid 3

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Our retrospective series on Hideo Kojima's oftentimes inscrutable spy thriller franchise continues today, as we discuss the highs and lows of jungle espionage in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. How does this pre-sequel hold up almost 20 years after its original release? Let's find out, together!Also discussed: Alan Wake 2, Super Mario Maker 2, Warcraft Rumble, Chants of Senaar, Rogue: Genesia, Like a Dragon: GaidenSubscribe to our newsletter at besties.fan! 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!

You know, I don't know whether I should be offended or not, but recently, Plant and I recorded an episode of The Resties, and I was... People speculated that I was sick, but actually I had just been to the New York Knicks game the night before, and I got a little shouty. Such a brag. This is such a brag. It's not, actually. It's not a brag.

Yes, it is. To be clear, it's not. Tell your story, and then we can all decide whether or not this is a brag it's not actually it's not a brag yes it is okay to be clear it's not just not tell your story and then we can all decide whether or not this is a brag okay so the episode goes up and then like all of the comments in the newsletter were like wow ross's voice sounds amazing it's incredible i assume he might be sick but you know what it's great and and i know what plan is thinking it's a brag but honestly what it is is 90 of the time my voice is terrible and that was my takeaway from that um yeah i had a i had what i could only characterize as adult croup uh two months back and i was serving up some some colm Wilkinson realness in a way that,

uh, I was really, I, I may have gotten video of myself just sort of like speaking and singing because I wanted to remember what I could, like what my peak was, what my Zenith was. Yeah.

Um, so I have, I have taken up chain smoking, um, and, but it's aesthetic. It's like, I hate the way it feels, but the aesthetic is on point for me.

Yeah. It's dark times for us. I don't know what we can do. I mean, go to more basketball games. Yeah. Do you feel good now that you let everyone know that you have a sexy voice? Do you feel good? How only temporary?

It's like I'm Superman, but only one day a month. Oh, that's good. That's good. My name is Justin Backer and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of like 2004. Yeah, my name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game and hardware of the week. My name is Ross Froschek and I'm the best game of the week Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment It's a game of the year show

And it's a club also It's a club and a show It's a multimedia experience And just by listening you have become a member Up on the docket today is metal gear solid 3 snake eater but what's that it's a stealth espionage action game released in 2004 continuing those sweet sweet kojima games but this time set in the past 1964 a soviet jungle trading all those you know like military environments for something a little bit more natural

where you can eat snakes. That's it. Well, that sounds pretty fun. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Well, let's talk more about it right after this. So I feel like people might be wondering why we're talking about this game. Just as a reminder, this is not the first Metal Gear Solid game we've talked about this year i actually think it's the fourth because we talked about that gba or the game boy color one at one point and we've kind

of been going down the road of metal gear solid games this will probably be the last one for a little while because at least the next one is death stranding for Griffin to play. The next one is Metal Gear Solid 4, which is next to unplayable outside of a PlayStation 3. And also that game is bad, so I don't super want to play it. But that's okay, because this game is good, and I'm happy to talk about it. And Justin's going to just wait a few seconds before getting sad and no no i'm not gonna get sassy i wanted to ask what's the deal with four like what what what is there something is there

some other complicating factor that keeps four i think getting a really yeah my understanding is it was designed for the like nonsense cell architecture of the playstation 3 and re-releasing it would require like a full re-engineer of the game that's kind of not based on any quote that i remember but i remember seeing that but that's true of a lot of playstation three games right like the reason we got um demon souls remake is because they fucking remade it right from the from the at the cellular level right And that is not something that I think Konami is willing to do at all unless they can, you know, put it in a pachinko machine.

I don't think there were actual cells in the PlayStation 3, though, for what it's worth. Also, we will see a re-release sometime maybe soon-ish because you can now emulate Metal Gear Solid 4 pretty pretty damn well so i think like that i think that they were just waiting for machines to get powerful enough to be able to

emulate it because obviously there's a difference between the power to run the game naturally and and run it through emulation well that's actually a good segue because the reason i love metal gear solid 4 by the way if we're not going to talk about that fucking game i'm not going to accept i think we might eventually one this is my favorite one it's not the day to talk about it but it is good to hear that you enjoy that awful awful game that i hate for it is with two old men beating the shit out of each other on a big robot conceptually i like it but it's it's okay we're talking about metal gear solid 3 today and and the news peg of that the reason we're able to easily talk about it is because this game was just re-released as part of the metal gear solid

collection what is this thing called master collection volume one which begs the question was volume was volume two gonna be because you put all the ones that everyone knows about in volume 1 no no no you could metal gear solid acid hasn't been that's stranding too and oh they'll fully do they would they would yeah they'll do all the psp ones and not do the bigger ones because i think a lot of people could we actually talk about the the port itself um because i i... Port's a funny word to use for this. For right, yes. Okay. Whatever this is. Maybe that's like a... Do we want to set up the game a little more

before we get into the really nitty gritty of it? Sure, sure, sure. Okay, so the important thing you need to know about Metal Gear Solid 3 is that, in my opinion, outside of maybe 5, it's the best place to start if you've never, ever played a Metal Gear Solid 3 is that in my opinion outside of maybe five it's the best place to start if you've never ever played a Metal Gear Solid game because narratively speaking it starts at zero like there's oh that's kind of a pun but it starts with very little background and it um I

think is from a gameplay standpoint the most modern feeling of the early metal gear solid games it has like an actual third person camera and um has like some very cool stealth mechanics with like you know camouflage and and uh using cover and stuff like that so it is in my opinion most approachable and yet it is still not very approachable because it still uses the crazy kojima control scheme of yesteryear um so i i would argue it would be a bit of a confusing a confusing start because if you played this game and then you played any other metal gear game this one is such a wild uh like outlier it feels like in terms of genre and maybe not genre but at the very least like not being a sci-fi convoluted uh like future thriller i mean arguably it's sci-fi for 1964 right yeah that's a good point i i i get what fresh is saying in that the same way i think if you're starting the persona

series always play the newest one first because it's the least complicated and is trying to actually help you out. And then you can de-learn some of that to go back and play the old stuff that is not going to have as much hand-holding. It also just helps that, yeah, the story is not full-tilt bonkers just yet. It's like 60% full tilt bonkers,

but that's definitely a far cry from like even Metal Gear Solid 1, which is like, I think far more bonkers than this. It is genre bonkers. So like if you've seen any sort of Cold War spy thriller, then you know what you are in for, which is in my book, a bit of a disappointment. Like what i like about

these games is how it is just kojima just presenting his uh his banana cakes sort of take on uh on spy thrillers and this one feels so informed by media so much so that there's a character whose sole job in this game is to be like hey hey hey snake what are you doing what are you doing fighting a vampire cool cool cool cool did you see dr strange love that's a good one man you're not doing anything else are you you got time okay cool so stanley kubrick was uh yeah so what what versions did did everyone play i played an emulated version of metal gear solid 3 subsistence on the playstation 2 interesting okay which is uh according to some cursory google searching i did the one did the one to do i was tempted to play i actually

own metal gear solid 3d uh on the 3ds which is also a well-regarded version of the game, surprisingly. But I opted for the, well, not original, but almost original. Yeah. Juice? Yeah, I did the Master, whatever it was. The new one. Master Collection Volume 1. Which, man, that would have been great to have a little bit ago

when we were trying to get Metal Gear Solid 1 through whatever dark channels. To celebrate this collection a little bit, it is nice that you can easily play MGS1 again. And it was two in the same boat, or was it just one? Yeah, they're all in there. So that is nice. I gotta say, though, and I like the other Bluepoint stuff that I have checked out has been pretty impressive.

I mean, very sound. I felt like this, like, as a package or as a, you know, everything that is this remake part about it is just, I mean, it seems so bare bones. It's so chintzy. so bare bones it's so chintzy it's so i mean just not a thought has been spared to making this feel or even really look particularly modern i mean it it there has been almost no update to a point where like i mean even like easy cost of life stuff or quality of life stuff that you like you can't exit the game to the desktop without going back through all the like loading screens and menus and stuff it's like a it's the controls are still like i'm sure you you like it russ because you're very used to it but like it does not it is not

modernized in any way shape or form it also had no accounting for display size so i was playing as a squat little stretched out maniac what really yeah yeah man i know i i do i did notice about the display size but um yeah so i would agree with you on the controls which haven't been touched but i kind of think that is a little bit part of the nature of this. It's a different scale project, right? I mean, you're talking about the difference between the Dead Space remake and this. Right, they were not modernizing this. But I would agree that if you're looking for a version to play, unfortunately, if you're looking to play Metal Gear Solid 3 on PC,

this is like the only game in town unless you go the emulation route. Like this is the first time, I didn't even realize this this the first time metal gear solid 3 has ever been on pc is today this year of our lord 2023 and uh unfortunately the version is not great for a lot of reasons uh it runs at 720p uh it has like some bad textures i've watched the whole digital foundry like highlighting a lot of the issues there are mods and and people have kind of stepped up to try to fix the work uh you mentioned blue point for what it's worth i'm pretty sure blue point was not at all involved in this they basically took the hd re-release that blue point did work on many years ago and kind of just like popped it on here so so that's why it feels a little dated and it definitely feels like a little

bit of a cash grab and we'll kind of have to see if konami sticks with it and gets it going justin did you try to play it on steam deck by the way uh yes it did not yeah so if you're looking stop does not so if you're looking to play it on steam deck a metal gear solid i didn't try the other ones but three specifically it does not currently work it has to do with like it not playing well with linux or whatever so you do have to play it on like an actual pc i i it's just it's too powerful i also wanted to say i know we're talking about metal gear solid 3 but the like wildest thing about this release is that the original metal gear solid runs at 240p 30 frames per second that is literally what the original playstation 1 put out nice um astonishing level of not giving that's all you

need when putting this i mean there's plenty yikes uh let's we've we've done the thing we said we were going to do which is spiral off into version differences and not talk about the game itself. Let's do it, because the game's good. There's a lot to talk about in that regard, right? Because Metal Gear Solid 2 was just Metal Gear Solid 1, but in a bigger map and with a way more sci-fi jargon babble story. More cartwheels. I love that shit. Definitely one or two more cartwheels this is a more stealth focused traipse through a more open jungle environment that has

a survival element of you have to catch and eat food in order to keep your stamina up. And then you also have to do some very menu-based surgery on yourself very frequently. A lot of the game is based around having these different types of camo for your face and body. The reason why those two are separate is bewildering to me. I've never been like, I think I'm gonna go zombie face and woodland body.

That's gonna really sit. In order to increase your sort of stealth rating uh and because it is the cold war like you don't have access to a lot of the high-tech shit like uh you know being able to see the cones of vision of people uh you know in off of your screen uh which is very cool and vibey but that that is that is sort of some of the big flavor here is that it is a survival experience as much as it is a a stealth action yeah i think a lot of the uh things that people are used to when they play modern stealth games of like marking enemies and seeing enemies through walls. And yeah, you mentioned the radar.

Um, obviously you don't have a lot of that, but you do over the course of the game, I think get more tools that will make it easier to like, not just blindly stumble into guys. Um, and you've got again, so an arm and other forms that are like track nearby enemies.

Um, I've, I like it if only cause it feels, again, sonar and other forms that'll track nearby enemies. I like it if only because it feels less linear than really any of the other ones except for 5. Even though it does kind of lead you down a path, it makes me feel like I have a lot more control over the environments and how things play out versus i think a lot of the uh combat encounters in in one and two feel like they more or less have to play out in a certain way based on like the gear you have whereas here i feel like i can really use the environment to my advantage yeah i i feel like time is not as kind to games that are carving out

new genres or new spaces and the metal gear solid one and metal gear solid two despite being 3d felt like evolutions of the original 2d games for me where this like you said it is playing with a little bit more open world stuff um a lot more of like survival game stuff and so much of what it is picking at has now been done so much better there's there's just decades of polish done to that and i think that's what makes it like a little bit hard to go back to play that said it's what at the time made it feel so special and i i completely lost myself in this game and this was honestly the first Metal Gear Solid game that like really really got me and it was um I think it was like the summer of like 2005

so maybe a year after it came out and my jaw was broken I could not talk I was like stuck in my room for weeks and this sort of game this like you are just in it that sort of escape i think is like what i was seeking at the time and i feel like people have a lot of those games right where it's games that just really lets you get in and things that would normally annoy me all of this busy work becomes like the stuff that really hooks me uh at least at that time yeah i don't know i think the stealth stuff is great i think the stealth stuff in in this game is it did more to sort of inform stealth mechanics in in other games uh than the first two metal gear games like the first two metal gear solid games are their own thing really and most metal gear solid games are sort of their own thing they play

their own way they feel They have their own feel. And there haven't been too many games that have emulated those particularly closely. I think that the stealth stuff in this game did sort of establish a lot of genre norms that other games, even ones that aren't exclusively stealth-based, would build on. aren't exclusively stealth-based would build on. The survival stuff, though, is so... Rough. It's bad. I mean, it's so bare-bones. Like, if you get shot, then you go into the menu,

and then you have to use the sequence, the correct sequence of items, of, like, knife, then suture, and then whatever the anti-bleeding medicine is, and then a bandage. And you have to do that a hundred billion bajillion times for these different types of injuries. And there's not that many.

It's not challenging. It's not particularly exciting. It's just like menu-based busy work that you have to do over and over and over and over and over and over again almost to the point where maybe the best way to play it is emulated with save states so you can just reload a save state when you get spotted like it's almost at that point yeah it really makes a lot of the other stuff of the game more punishing because now when it's like oh shit i got spotted it's not like oh no i'm i'm in trouble it's oh no i'm gonna get shot and then i'm have to do a few minutes of pretty tedious menu navigation uh yeah i don't think any of that is in four or

five right they pretty much know that dealing and and it's it for a series that is so far ahead of its time in so many different ways like it, I found myself genuinely shocked at the number of times I was playing this game and felt like this is so antiquated and bad. It's not even antiquated because it's not like any games before it were doing that nonsense with healing, right? No, but I mean, survival as a genre is like its own fucking thing now. And obviously it's not particularly fair to compare a game from 2004 to a game released 19 years later. But it just sucks the moon out of the sky. I do sort of feel like it's, and I'm not saying to diminish this because I do agree like it happens a lot. But it's really just the healing stuff because the having to eat food stuff is pretty tame like you do not need to like spend a ton of time shooting frogs in the face to keep your food meter up no but i could also make the argument

like counterpoint to that like if that is all that that is that is also not the most sort of yeah it's not engaging considering the game is called fucking snake eater yeah like you don't actually spend all that much of your your mental ram concerned with uh meal prep so your problem is that you don't eat enough snakes that should be a bigger it should be more like pac-man yes rolling around i want to see him slurp up snakes like a spaghetti uh i think that do you think maybe they came up with the name and then they went through all development and like five days before release

they were like fuck you know what we forgot right I am saying that both of these elements which constitute like pretty much all of the survival stuff in this survival jungle experience are like so half-baked would you all like

would you like to hear a differing opinion about this game in this survival jungle experience are like so half-baked. Would you all like, would you like to hear a differing opinion about this game? Yeah, sure. Listener, it's not good to play. It doesn't hold up. It feels terrible to play it. The fact that they expect you to watch people talking codec

for as long as they do is honestly unhinged. If this game were released in its current state today, it would be widely regarded as one of the poorest examples of video gaming available. It's nonsensical. The controls feel terrible. Stealth, when you can't actually do anything, like sneak up on dudes, is terrible. It is a non-enjoyable video game. anything like sneak up on dudes is terrible it is a non-enjoyable video game i lowered the difficulty to easy so i could see as much of it as i could to be able to talk about and what that

means in this game is you can't die really without a lot of work so what would happen to me is i'd get caught and think oh fuck they caught me and then i would just try to die. But then I found the secret to this game is to get your knife. And then just run around with a knife. So now what I've done is I've found a new game within Snake Eater that is good. And inside this game, you are a knife-wielding maniac who has no patience for weapons. He has been inserted into an extremely sensitive geopolitical situation and he is just running around slicing people to fuck this is this guy's only thing is just a big pile of slices up bodies he finds guns and he throws them on the

ground he doesn't need them he's got a knife. I mean, it all feels so bad. It feels so bad to play all of it. And I really went into it with an open mind, as I always try to. Don't listen to the end of the last episode. Don't listen to the end of the last episode, please. Man, it sucks. I just wish that this was, if this is just a little bit more pleasurable to play, all the menu stuff is so boring. I just, I think.

Have you liked any of these, Justin? I like one and two. That's weird to me. Yeah, I like one and two and I like four. I'm in the same boat. I think three is my least favorite of the Metal Gear games. I will also say, I think the environments are so boring. It's like, I played for hours

and I'm just wandering around through the jungle. It sucks. And then there's like these shitty little like huts and you can go in there and there's like so much crap littered everywhere, by the way. Like, oh, don't go in there. That's where we keep 50 smoke grenades

and a bunch of snake meat and like it's just laying all over the ground. And you pick up all this camo and it's like i'm not gonna do i mean the camo once you're stabbing it doesn't really matter right yeah you're not using the stealth mechanics the camo isn't gonna help you at all yes okay so you agree that this is a problem right what's the point of the camo if you're just running around slicing people up with but you're not i mean but you had to dial it down to easy for that to be a viable gameplay mechanic. So you're saying that there's, this is

a, lowering the difficulty to easy is a non-legitimate way to play. I wasn't saying that, Justin. Wow, Russ. This is great. Can I tell you all a story? A happy story? Please, sure. Yeah, please.

Okay. So, Hideo Kojima. Originally, this game was much more about space. And he was like, you know what I want, David? Wait, like outer space? I want to do David. Yeah, outer space. Got it.

He's like, I want David Bowie. I want space oddity to end this game. They're making the game. And over time, they realize's not this isn't really as much about space as we thought it would be how what what are we going to do what are we going to do how are we going to get a song for the ending we know we want to get like some big band to do it this isn't going to be like a big setup a plant for like a gag right no this is just true this is like i'm reading from his blog right now. Okay. Okay? Okay. And he, one of his friends comes to him, and he's like, hey, I know a rock band that the director would certainly enjoy.

And he tells them the name of the band, and Kojima listens to them, and he's like, got it. I love this. got it i love this and they go through the entire licensing process and they get this song way to fall by star sailor and they put it in the credits and they ship the game and he's like great that that worked out so well and his friend is like no the name of the band was stella star you just literally looked up a different band heard one song song, and were like, great, this will do. And now that is just in the game forever. They've credited the band incorrectly? That's fantastic. No, it's the right band.

You looked up the wrong music. Yeah, he never even heard the song that was recommended. He just heard a random song by a band with a similar name. Talk about you never know when good fortune's gonna find you man like what are the odds that band's gotta be stoned like oh yeah metal gear yeah for sure um i feel like the bosses are what people talk about hell yes with this game because the the i feel like that's what people talk about a lot with metal gear solid games uh to varying degrees right like metal gear solid one psycho mantis is like the big the big one uh metal gear solid two uh i mean fuck i don't know the vamp fight what's like the big what's the big memorable

fight from mgs2 would you all i mean the sword fight on top of the robot at the end yeah probably the end this this one goes so hard in a way that I really do appreciate. I think there's a couple clunkers in there, but the whole fight against, I think it's the fear, is the one who's like a spider monkey that is like climbing all over the trees. Oh, interesting. That was not the one I was thinking of.

Yeah, go ahead. I mean, the end is also very neat. The end is the old man sniper fight. That's my, like, I think it's maybe the best boss fight in the entire series is the end is also very neat the end is the old man that's my like i think it's maybe the best boss fight in the entire series is the end fight but yes famously you can turn the game off and wait a week and then come back to that fight and that old ass man will die of old age that's fucking incredible well done well done kojima so fucking good the fear you can drop poison food on the ground and he'll be like yum yum and eat it and die

which is also great uh there's also a very very cool uh moment i would i would uh hesitate to call it a boss fight where all of the enemies you have killed in the game come back as ghosts to take you down so the more pacifist of a route you take through the game, the easier that moment is to kind of get through. It does make for like a very boring five minutes as you're walking down a river of death and then through no one there. And the whole, the boss fight at the end.

Wait, that wasn't in four? No, that's three. That's three. That's three. That's the sorrow? What's that dude's name? Yeah. Was there a similar thing in another Metal Gear Solid game

with the River of Death and there's the whole... I think you're thinking three, my man. Yeah, I think it's three. I think I've seen it. I barely played three. I do. I have a boss tactic for... Oh, have you not played...

Was this the first time you've ever played this game, by the way, Justin? Yeah, man. Well, the first time I played more than 45 minutes. Yeah. I have a boss 45 minutes. Okay. Um, yeah, I, I have a boss strategy for the paid. He's a man that covers himself in Hornets. Oh yeah.

And you're going to be tempted when you first go in to, uh, slash him with, slash him with your knife like a million times. But that strategy is not going to work this time. So what you should do is get a shotgun and stand in one place and shoot him with a shotgun until he dies yeah so that's one of the clunkers that i referenced earlier that is unfortunately i think the first boss fight really of the game uh there's

the ocelot fight before right before that uh oh yeah like that oh man revolver ocelot comes out of this game smelling like a rose that's a fun character what what a bold thing to do to take like uh who would eventually become like a major series antagonist and one of the most sort of like recurring characters in this game and just turn him into the biggest fucking dork yeah he's a big do we miss this game biggest loser idiot i did enjoy in the world see there's parts of this i i am having trouble separating how unpleasurable I found to control this game with a lot of the other stuff. Some of the stuff is regardless, like, I think the environments are boring. I think there's way too much management of your, like, in menus, way too much time in menus. It's wild.

It doesn't, it's, the curing thing is, I feel like the fact that the curing system is in the game should give my argument more weight because it's so clearly a nothing burger where like they tell you what to do and then you have to do it manually in the thing that's so clearly like disrespectful of the player's time and intelligence that like i don't know why you don't question more of the the other parts of the game. If that part is in it, I feel like the rest of it becomes suspect. You were so close to saying something nice.

Because you're clearly dealing with a bad actor. You were like inches away from saying something nice. Yeah, you were about to say something nice. And then you jerked the wheel towards the exit. No, what? You were saying that- If it controlled better, I think I would be able to like vibe on it a bit more. It's just I found the Ocelot fight was cool.

You're on different sides of a ravine. You can't get to him. So it's just about ducking between cover and stuff, and that would be neat, except it all feels so bad to do that I didn't want to do it. And I couldn't get to him with the knife, and that was a big problem. That's a knife-off kind of fight of fight so you got to figure out something else here's what's vexing to me and this applies to griffin as well i'm like honestly stunned to hear

that you like to metal yourself too better than this because from a control standpoint they are like almost identical except this one has a camera that works and from like a narrative standpoint this one is like dramatically more cogent so i don't uh you don't think so i mean let's let's talk about cogent right none neither of these fucking games are cogent for kojima they're kojima yeah it's both of these games are are fucking babble nonsense right and this this one just happens to be extremely like spy uh familiar in in tone and subject and doesn't require like prior knowledge of every fucking universe that's ever been created about this franchise doesn't require it it does help but it doesn't require it i i'm saying i if you took this game and you took its writing and you took its script and you removed it from the context of Metal Gear and Kojima's work and you like gave it to someone like, hey, what do you think about this?

They would say like, oh, that's not very good. Like a lot of the characters are pretty vulgar. The main antagonist is dog shit. As from a character standpoint, like there's a lot that is very cool, but there's's a lot that is just junk i think you would probably say that about every character in but at least metal gear solid 2 is bat shit like at least metal gear so i think that the ending of metal gear solid 2 where everyone you thought you knew ends up being a fucking ai and then you have to have a sword fight with like the president on top of a robot like that's it's it's also not cogent but it is entertaining more of a swing it's more of a swing it is way more entertaining

to me by a by a uh i've never finished this game i've finished every other metal gear solid game three i've never been able to finish because i cannot i don't give a shit about most of the stuff that happens in it and i don't really enjoy playing it. Metal Gear Solid 2, like I am willing to put up with the stuff I don't like about that game because I think that it is so weird and entertaining and yeah, that is my take on it. I thought maybe this was gonna be the time. I thought maybe this was going to be the time.

I thought maybe it would click with me this time. Yeah, I think it's more that I'm driven by the gameplay. And I think from a gameplay standpoint, even though I agree that the controls still feel dated, this gameplay is more engaging to me than the gameplay has been in either one or two. But I realize there's some dissension there. It is interesting to me.

It is fascinating to me that this is, and I'm not saying this from like a jaded game critic standpoint. Like I, it is interesting to me that this is, I think in most Metal Gear fans estimation, like the best of the, the best of the bunch. And I don't understand that, but i think that it is you know maybe a testament to the uh the the vision of kojima uh that that that is true for a lot of folks um yeah i mean it's not i i genuinely like it better than anything you know the only one that

comes close apart from this from a gameplay standpoint is five and so i genuinely do like it but i also understand that you're you're competing against a lot of decisions that were made in an era where like third person cameras and these sorts of games were kind of a little bit more of a rarity and he just also does some like buck wild shit like you know the like pressure sensitive button stuff that was you know in previous games and like you know so i i get the critiques and all that stuff but i also think i understand why people who love metal you're solid love this most because this feels like the most realized version of a stealth game whereas the other ones really don't um i do want to say we should mention that this game was pretty like for 2004 it was pretty there it did a lot of

pretty revolutionary stuff like this game is this game was ambitious in a in a way that uh a lot of games didn't that a lot of games weren't it was sort of part of this sort of swan song era of the PS2. And so I think that that is worth mentioning. But I will also say that there are a lot of other games that came out in 2004 that I would much rather go back and play, be it your Half-Life 2s or GTA San san andreas or halo 2 uh like i think that there

are other games that you could say the same thing about that i would actually have a great a great time with um but it makes me wonder if next year maybe we do a half-life retrospective that'd be fun for old people it'll be fun to play burnout 3 takedown came out in 2004. Man, what a fun year. That was a good year. Weird year. Okay, I think we've done it. Again, I don't know exactly when or if we will ever do the remainder of the Metal Gear Solid games. You know, let us know in the comments. If it's, you know, I don't know. I mean, you can't play the first one, and we still did that. So I don't understand why we've decided that this is the cutoff.

Well, you can emulate the first one on literally anything. Oh, good point. Yeah, it's a little bit trickier to... Yeah. The first one, Marry a Dog 1? If they make a remake, if they do put out a remake of MGS4, I think we should for sure go back to it. Yeah.

But I don't think we can ask people to join our book club for a game that you need an extinct console to play. No, I think that's fair to say to play okay i think we have some other stuff to talk about in the second half of the show so why don't we just kick it to a commercial break let's go hey guys want to talk about the new steam deck what there's a new steam deck i didn't even know that's a thing by the time that this episode is out people will have known about the new steam deck for like about a day and it is called this is

very strange to be talking about this because i have not said this out loud it is the steam deck oled uh it is not the steam deck 2 though valve does suggest that that will be coming in like two to three years they're waiting for like a generational upgrade in terms of power. But the Steam Deck OLED is, in my opinion, a much more substantial upgrade than like the Nintendo Switch OLED was. So here's what you're going to get with it. Which was not. I mean, that was just the screen. It's just the screen.

Just for context. The Switch was just the screen. And it had a bigger kickstand. Okay. It did have a bigger kickstand. That's important. And I hate to break it to you, the Steam Deck OLED, no kickstand. It looks and feels identical to the original Steam Deck, except for it's a little bit lighter.

It's like 29 grams lighter. Steam Deck, except for it's a little bit lighter. It's like 29 grams lighter. It has an HDR OLED display, which I believe this is the first OLED on a portable with HDR, which is killer. When I say portable, I mean other video game handhelds. The battery, because the OLED display is thinner, there's more space inside those guts so the battery is bigger which means that they're estimating 30 to 50 percent longer battery life i can say like in my experience playing it i played a lot of uh the new yakuza game on it and i was playing not plugged in way longer than i ever felt like i could with the the original um and then there's a bunch of like smaller little details like it has standalone bluetooth so you can um you can now boot it up

from a controller if you wanted to keep oh that's cool a tv and actually use it like a switch yeah um it has wi-fi 6e so if you have a router that actually supports that thing like faster downloads the haptics are it has a wider frequency band which means that there's just it the haptics feel better they feel richer um i was gonna ask about the haptics i'm a kind of a snob for haptics um i think the right now the right now the high point for haptics is the PlayStation DualSense controller. I think no other controller comes close to that. It feels like that? No, I mean, it feels intentional now versus feeling like you have a small animal trapped inside your controller.

Yeah, okay, understood. I think where it benefits it most, honestly, is on the touchscreen, because the touchscreen is usable now. I don't know how many of you tried to load emulators or anything. Side loading anything was a real headache, and you just had to plug in a USB keyboard. And now I have had no real issue using the touchscreen keyboard. It just feels very nice and not unlike using your phone, basically.

Yeah, it's lighter, it's cooler. They put new thermals in there. Did you notice any difference in the fan noise? I have not heard the fan since I've started using it. That's bananas. But I will say in my experience with devices like this, fans get louder the more I use them. Yeah, dust and stuff like that gets in there. Yeah, so it's still new.

Dust and stuff like that gets in there. Yeah, so it's still new. The thing that I think is going to excite Griffin the most, and hopefully he's already ordered this by the time the episode goes live, is there is a special edition of the top-end version that is a transparent shell, and it looks sick. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm trash for shit like that, so I probably will do that. I'm trying to get, how many grams lighter did you say it was?

It was 29 grams. 29 grams. 29 sweet grams. About the weight of a soul. That's true. A little bit more than a soul. More than a soul. It is the weight of a slice of bread.

The weight of a Steam Deck is 669 grams. So we're not talking about a pretty big deck. I will be honest. I was thinking about a Steam Deck is 669 grams. So we're not talking about a pretty big deck. I will be honest. I was thinking about my Steam Deck today because I picked it up and it had a layer of dust on it. Oh, wow. I have not played it in quite a long time because I genuinely don't enjoy the weight of it.

Like, we've joked about that in the past, how Justin needs a special little shelf in his lap in order to play this thing. I love my- I felt like that was me disclosing my infirmity to you in a place of safety. I play everything on Switch Lite if I can. And there have been a couple of times

where I've played a game on Steam Deck and put it down saying like, well, it's gonna come to Switch in like a month or two and then I'll just play it on my much more delightful little handheld that weighs like a quarter of the weight. That's just play it on my much more delightful little handheld that's why i completely i'm the opposite way that's that's why yeah i would rather the like horsepower of the steam deck and like get games actually even at 40 fps versus like i know this the switch you usually have to take a pretty big hit uh if you're playing a 3d game from a performance standpoint yeah, also trusting that those games

will still be available to me in 10 years. Like, that is the part that I always struggle with with Nintendo so far. Maybe we'll be proven wrong with the Switch 2. I know that it was said that there will be some transfer over, but Steam Deck or Steam Library feels much more reliable. One other thing that I think is big for people who do not have a Steam Deck right now and have been considering it, there are three entries just like the original models.

And they're all the same price as before, but they get all these upgrades. So you are not like, it's not like, oh, well, if you want the OLED, you need to go spend more money for it. The mid-tier Steam Deck now is now just the Steam Deck OLED. And on top of all that other stuff, they doubled the storage of it. So the top tier now has one terabyte of storage. So if you were thinking about buying a Steam Deck, this doesn't really change the calculus. You're just going to get more for whatever the same price was that you're better so they're just gonna stop three days ago well they've started what i've seen a lot of sales for 20 off on the original models

and now that makes a lot more sense so yeah and they're i think they're selling like old ones like 50 off or something until they run out um And they're still making the very bottom base level of the three models that are currently available now is still LCD. So it's that mid and top tier. That's the OLED version. So my question to you plant, and this is putting you on the spot a little bit because no one can ever, if, if I'm someone who has a steam deck and I'm, I mean, other than the obvious quirks that we've talked about before

i'm fundamentally okay with it is this like upgrade worthy for most people do you think or is this more like hey there's never been a better time to get a steam deck um i don't think this is a most upgrade worthy for most people yeah i mean like if you're um um you know a multi-millionaire you'll never think about it if you are destitute you probably don't have a steam deck right so it's like a visual snob thing right that's what it comes down to more or less and i guess yeah i mean i i how many of us have nintendo switch oleds you know like me yeah i mean i i i did well i think i got mine from nintendo so and probably gonna be pretty much a lot cheaper though.

Yeah, probably about half as much to, to, to make that jump, I would guess. Yeah, that's true. I, I think, I think this is, if you have not gotten the Steam Deck yet, this is a, this is, this is it. Like, I don't, I don't think the other options that are available to you um barring again like we said when we talked about the asus uh rog ally you know if you really want to tinker with windows stuff uh or you have for whatever reason you're really married to the epic game store um but otherwise i i think this i think this is it it does it feels it feels like territorial a little bit doesn't it with the wrong ally stuff it feels like and i know feels like territorial a little bit, doesn't it? With the ROG ally stuff, it feels like,

and I know there've been a couple of other sort of pretenders to the Lenovo. Yeah. Just put out another one. This has got to be like, oh, well, we're already like at the top of it. And like, by the way, we just moved the goalposts like quite a bit. It seems like the,

the edge that steam still has is that game developers are specifically optimizing their games to run on Steam Deck, and they are not doing that work for Rogue Ally or Ace, who's... It's called The Legion. So that... You know, I think it makes a big difference. Is Legion out? Yeah, it just came out like a week ago. Legion Go is from

a... It's bigger than the Steam Deck dramatically, and from a horsepower standpoint, I think it's probably the top end. dramatically and like from a horsepower standpoint i think it's probably the top end but you're not necessarily getting that like overwhelming support that you would get from a steam deck yeah i i also i'm sorry i don't know if i mentioned this for the the panel itself the oled it's the same resolution um but it's 90 hertz now so that means one it's just more than 60 which was the previous thing it's not as been not as much as what the ally does but at 90 hertz that allows for frame doubling up from 45 so a long story short of that is things look really smooth on it. It just looks nice. Okay.

Yeah. This is definitely a tough call because honestly, I love the Steam Deck. It's the device I use more often than any other. And I have seen the benefits of OLED. And before I played the Switch OLED, I was not a convert at all. I was like, whatever, I'm colorblind. I'm never going to notice.

And you can immediately tell the difference but i do think a lot of people who are like you know maybe play an hour of steam deck here and there and and that does the trick will probably be totally fine but this does get me uh scratching my head a little bit i gotta admit uh do you guys think there'll be the the same sort of like crush to get these that there were with the original ones or do you think it might be a little more subdued i think it'll be it's certainly not as hard i think their production uh cycle for these is probably up to speed now the and i i also think to plant's point about whether it's a good time to get one if you've never gotten one before i do agree that i don't see steam releasing like new like uh processing power hardware upgrades in the next year or two like i i think they will wait as long as possible because they have that

software support where developers are building specifically for these specs and the more skews they release the harder that becomes so it does seem like they also told me as much that's like that's not a guess so here's the only reason i'm gonna be a little skeptical of that is because in june someone who works at valve was like it's gonna be i don't know when it's gonna be an oled is gonna come out because we actually looked at the hardware and it will require a full rework of the internal hardware to support an OLED that was in June of this year. And now, four months later, I mean, Valve's a weird place to work. They do like silo a bit, but yeah, I'll also push back on that. I went back and read that interview. And it's not quite that it's they, they say like, hey, an OLED would take a lot of work to get done and then the writer

of the story is like so so much for an oled and it's better they're not making an oled anyway um so it's one of those like i don't know i think that writer stretched that one a bit i think they were it wasn't that only that writer that was the main takeaway from the community was that that's what they were saying is because it's going to be a really long time yeah that that speaks more about how one story goes up and then 20 different forums repeat it over and over again i i'm not trying to give them like you know a free pass here but i yeah that story was not quite anyway it seems like very good hardware and especially if you haven't i bet some people are feeling pretty smart right now about not buying a uh a steam deck yet congrats to you

so what else is going on let's play anything else uh i finished alan wake 2 oh so i finished that did you use your words to shift the story i oh my god did i all every single word i used shifted the story uh that game is dope uh i don't fully disagree with any of the critiques that were voiced on previous episode the previous episode regarding some of the bugs i did ran into run into at least one bug that was a narrative bug that like required me to like do some work to actually see a video that wasn't playing properly um i also would say that like the narrative is the star of the show to the point where i would actually recommend dial down the difficulty if you have any like if you're dying at all really just move it down to easy so you can experience the story and unless you really really like plumbing the world for like

secrets and puzzles and stuff like that which i do it didn't bother me but unless you really really like plumbing the world for like secrets and puzzles and stuff like that which i do it didn't bother me but unless you really like that stuff um don't worry about collectibles and stuff like that just like go from mission to mission and like experience the thing because the thing is pretty fucking sick i lowered the difficulty to story but then i was still sort of compulsively looking at every nook and cranny and what i found that i kind of messed up the rhythm for myself was i didn't need every advantage in fights right like i didn't need to go get the one charm that increased my shit like 10 so a lot of the rewards for uh running around were were not commiserate with the the effort some are are like cool yeah

and some of them are like just sort of mechanically flat. And if you're playing on EZ, you don't need those edges anyway. You don't need them. So it's fine. You don't need them. Just stick to the thing. You could just run around stabbing everyone. The best stuff is in the main.

I've seen some. There have been some cool. Some of the, there are these little nursery rhymes in there where you can move around these toys to trigger effects in the world that change the world um and some of those come up with some pretty cool little little things but other than that i i i don't know it's cool i'm gonna finish it i'm i am but i'll be honest i i have been tempted to do what griffin did yeah uh i just kind of watch the end i made it a little more than halfway through the game, maybe two-thirds of the way through the game.

You were pretty far, yeah. I got pretty far, and I just hit a point. I hit a part of the game with Saga that I just was just not having a good time with. I don't have, like, my gaming time has been pretty limited as of late, and I just felt this pang of, like am i doing like if i'm not enjoying this why am i doing it and the answer is because i'm so deeply into the story and vibe of the game and

so i just i watched uh i watched the rest of it on youtube and i i don't regret that decision i jumped back into chance of sonar oh yeah oh yeah did you finish that yet it's uh no i hadn't it's uh it was a little tough to get back into but man that game's great if you let that one slip past you go go check that out it's so satisfying it it you know what i was thinking about what i really dig is that it is so specific to being a video game like this idea of unearthing a language and translating it and figuring it out like that is a very pleasurable activity for the brain that is normally something that like people do that that inside of a video game is not something you normally get to do because the light they want you to understand everything that is happening all the time like they so it is specific to this because the language evolves mechanically

so it is like a very pleasurable way to experience a world and and honestly makes the whole world come alive so much more because every bit in it is a little bit of information so like the whole world becomes uh mechanically charged because every little thing could be a clue to uncovering another bit of the language and the game also expects you to it becomes a lot less um uh prescribed as you go on and you're having to make some larger logical jumps in terms of like what the language means and like intuit more rather than see a picture next to a picture of a bird and know that that is bird um so it's it's really great if you didn't play it man it's it's in that case bird is the word all right man uh we have been getting really into this one's surprising we fell off of uh super

mario bros wonder uh fell off i mean we enjoyed our time with it we just didn't and when you say we i mean me and henry got it for the most part um but henry discovered i think just through like youtube videos super mario maker 2 and he's like i want to try this and he is way into that fucking game he is like met playing love making levels for me to play that are pretty challenging, I would say. Pretty malicious, I would say. But also just like going into the popular courses of that game now that it has been out for whatever, three years. There's so much good shit in there. And for somebody who has like a developing interest in, in,

in the mechanics of Mario and platformers in general, like it is a genuine treasure trove. They added the ability to like bundle courses together into like a world map. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the last updates was the like world feature where you can make your own almost like campaign. Well,

campaign makes it sound like more than it actually is, which is just like you put all of your levels on one map yeah um but it is neat we haven't even been messing with that stuff like a lot of the stuff we've been doing it's been stuff that was there you know when i first played the game but um it he has such an interest in like uh rudimentary sort of game design stuff like he is interested in in making his own sort of like worlds and and stuff like that and so this game is like i i is one of those things where as soon as i saw him play it and be delighted by it i was like ah shit why did i not think to introduce it to this to this game because it is kind of perfect. So if you had a similar experience with Wonder where you have a kid who is getting

into just playing that game then I would heavily encourage you to get back into Super Mario Maker 2 because it is fantastic. Point? You got anything? I also played the new Warcraft mobile game for like an hour and

it's not very good. Wait, what's that one called? What's that? It's like Warcraft Unleashed or something. Warcraft Rumble? Yeah. It's like you drop little minis onto a map, and they march forward and fight stuff, and they have different abilities,

and I just don't get it, man. That's too bad. I have been playing a lot of the new Yakuza, which is now actually called Like a Dragon because they changed the name with the previous entry, which is even more confusing because I think the last entry was called Yakuza Like a Dragon. But yeah, anyway, it's called like a dragon gaiden uh i think the

subtitle is the man who erased his name and it is a kind of spin-off yakuza game where you are playing as kiryu as a superhero slash secret agent and from the like literally from go you have a spider-man like powers to hurl people across the streets of Osaka. And I like it a lot. Yeah, we're going to be doing a deeper dive into it in a couple weeks on Resties. In a couple weeks, yeah. It's video game junk food. And right now I have been craving some video game junk food.

And it was exactly what I needed for testing the Steam Deck deck just having something that is a joy to pick up um i really quickly can i mention one more that is kind of a hidden gem that i found yeah you guys like hidden gem you bet um it's called rogue genesia it's g-e-n-e-s-i-a but it's an auto shooter in the mold of you know the others like, I don't know, Halls of Torment, Vampire Survivors, 20 Minutes of Dawn, you name it. I love games like this. So I'm always looking for a new one. This is like my bike game. If I'm riding the exercise bike, I like that.

You can auto shoot or you can do it out with. Rogue Genesia does a cool thing where there is a main mode that's just like vampire survivors or whatever where you have 30 minutes to survive whatever um there is also though a mode that is structured like slay the spire or one of those other like branching type things where you're choosing what kind of level you want to go to so it's level based and you decide what kind of like conflicts there's like really hard levels there's ones that have like weird victory conditions there's usually like a sub um goal that you're trying to meet like kill certain number of enemies at a certain amount of time or something to get better rewards

but it's consistent like across the the run trying to get through as far into the the level as you as you can um or as far into the world as you can choosing different branching paths and just like in slay the spire some are treasure some are just bad some are just narrative um but it's really it's an interesting way of like uh structuring a game like this and i've been enjoying that um it looks like octopath, the art style. Oh, yeah, kind of. Yeah. Cool. Did we do an episode? We did.

I feel like it's an episode of a podcast. I want to thank the following people for writing reviews to the besties on Apple Podcasts. We have Pat Brown 64. We have Steamy Robot Love. And we have HGHGHGHHH. Thank you for writing reviews to the besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to the newsletter. We actually have a bunch of questions that we didn't get to this episode, but we will

next episode. Please feel free to drop other questions or thoughts or recommendations in the comments of the newsletter at besties.fan, because we like them and read them, and they're great. Next week, we are talking about Persona 5 tactica

everything's great i'm excited about that uh i am excited about it too i don't know if justin's excitement is genuine but mine is actually genuine i'm trying to keep it more open-ended i mean this one played out where I thought it would be bad and then it was, but then we had the Sea of Stars where I thought it would be bad and then it was good.

So I'm trying to keep it a little bit like, I'm trying to think where I try to reserve judgment until I actually experience it. I like that. That's interesting. A bold new vision for games criticism from Justin.

I'm 43 years old today as a reporter. It's not that Russ or Plant has said anything and I'm turning over a new leaf where I'm gonna give things a fair shake for at least a few minutes

I like that hey Justin Plant happy birthday fuck you Russ thanks for listening to the besties be sure to join us

again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!