The Besties - How to save a dead franchise, or: Old men play Half-Life Alyx

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

After 15+ years, the influential game franchise is back with Half-Life: Alyx! Follow along for an extremely nerdy conversation about The Besties' experience playing the VR first person shooter and what other franchises they would like to see return. 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 here's the situation i'm trying to avoid a maximum number of people while doing laundry so i've been doing laundry during the week but that doesn't really jibe with my normal schedule so where i'm at now is i'm down to two pairs of underwear both of which i purchased in japan and in japan the sizes are different so these underwear do not fit. Okay. Oh, man, Russ. I am just all over the place. I knew things were hard up there, but I had no idea. Russ, I hate thinking about where the underwear goes on you. You know, it basically goes everywhere.

I like to imagine that it's not that they're too small. It's that they're so big that you have built a canopy in which you live now. It's more of a poncho, to be honest. But yeah, that's the dream is a canopy. Oh, wait a minute, Russ. I thought that was a Papa's on chair. No, you've woven your giant underwear. We can see you. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best virtual game of the week. My name is Russ Fraschek, and I know the best virtual game of the week. My name is Russ Fraschek and I know the best game of the week that no one's ever going to play. Welcome to the Besties where we celebrate the latest and greatest in electronic interactive entertainment. It is a game of the year show

that goes all year round. It is a book club, but for video games. Game of the Year meets King of the Hill.. It is a book club, but for video games. Game of the Year meets King of the Hill. I don't know who came up with that, but I kind of like it. Game of the Year meets King of the Hill is good, except it is a descriptor of the show we did two years ago, but not this one

at all. Yeah, but it doesn't matter. I don't even know why I say Game of the Year. I mean, it doesn't matter. We don't compete. The games don't compete. They do eventually. Maybe. Maybe do eventually. Maybe Half-Life Alyx. Maybe, who knows? Can you imagine if more book clubs operated like this? How nasty it would get in the neighborhood?

Calling this club is better than fried green tomatoes. Calling this episode a book club also feels wildly disingenuous because we invite you to play the games along with us. And in the case of Half-Life Alyx, we're essentially saying like, hey, you've got like $4,500, right? Hey, you guys have like $2,600 to drop on the tech required to join us in this virtual environ, yes? Even if you have the money right now,

there's no guarantee that you can play the game that we're talking about this week because the gear is sold out everywhere. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah, speaking speaking gear so we're going to talk about half-life alex to frame this discussion real quick let's go around the horn what um what like uh setup hardware setup uh i'm using a uh quest that i'm using the oculus link on uh which works and has worked shockingly well i built like a new sort of top of the line pc in january and

since then like so it's outdated yeah it's already but no since then like it works better than like when i had the like uh vive pro like whatever i forget i've had so many fucking headsets at this point it is the it is the best feeling one i've had so far and i think it's just by virtue of the like pc it is connected into. And you're basically just so people are aware that the quest can be connected via USB. That's what the Oculus Link is to like any desktop, even though it traditionally is used for like a mobile wireless experience. If you're playing a hardcore game, you can wire it up.

Yeah. So it no joke. Like I get like a GPU warning every time I start up the game. It's like, like hey just a heads up you might this might affect things but it is it is fucking butter smooth yeah i think it might be looking at like the maybe it's looking at the hardware on the the quest or something because i get the same uh i get the same alert every time you're on the same setup juice i am on the same setup only only weird hiccup i've had with it is that the, and this is very specific, but the quest maps my position wherever I plug it in initially, and I can't update my position in the room.

So it thinks that the center of my play space is basically right in front of my computer where I have plugged the headset in. You have to go through the SteamVR app preferences. I had to do it once, and it's very arcane, and I can talk you through it. But yeah, that's why I do that now. Which is wild, because with just the regular Oculus Quest, you just hold in the Oculus button, and it automatically resets around you. So it's wild.

Once you're in the game, it doesn't matter that much, except I'm afraid to walk around, because I'm standing right next to my computer. But yes, that is my setup. I'm on an OG Oculus Rift. I borrowed the Oculus Quest, but I do not have the usb cable for it so i am using an og oculus rift and i'm using a original oculus rift with a completely unrealistic

uh gtx 2080 ti and a top-of-the-line intel cp does the original oculus rift know what to do with that uh it surprisingly once you get it to work it took me probably three hours to get set up so uh here's a fun thing that i did not understand uh griffin very generously loaned me uh an oculus quest to like play around with and i've like really enjoyed it oculus quest uses oculus touch controllers so does the oculusift, right? Yeah. Except they don't work interchangeably. Oh, yeah. No, I knew that. I did not know that, so I was trying to

pair my one set of Oculus Touch controllers versus the other, and it was a nightmare. Listen, we're hanging with the console cowboys in cyberspace right now. This is top-of-the-line tech shit. You gotta have... You gotta be real dialed in to the web. I will say this.

If you are not a dummy, it takes about 10 minutes to set up. It was not hard to set up with an Oculus OG. I'm gonna give a real quick summary of what this game is. Half-Life Alyx is a prequel of sorts to half-life 2 it stars alex you play as her she was vance alex vance she was the uh ai controlled partner character in half-life 2 people probably forget this at the time having a character that followed you around the game and like it behaved mildly like a human was revolutionary um and not a pain in the ass i remember like people made a big deal about the fact that like oh you had a companion but everyone

had played these games where you had to like shove this companion through doors and like they were totally weak and pointless but here she was like a real asset like she was actually like character building but also like helpful in fighting and all that stuff. Am I correct in remembering that she would like find ammo and toss it to you? Or am I thinking, you know what? I'm thinking of a live shock. Live shock, yeah. Yeah, I think, I honestly think that there's a few like, I think that context is going to be really important for this episode.

I think the context discussing Half-Life Alyx, like that conversation has to be framed by a few other things. And I think one of the big ones is understanding like just how much half-life 2 kind of innovated in in the shooter space the 3d like video game space um but like sort of quintessential like if you did not if you missed out on that moment like the quintessential moment of the combine um soldier knocking a can over, and then you have to bend down and pick up that can and throw it away in the garbage bin. And that being a sort of revelation of the physics engine in this game and just how much shit you can do with it,

there's so much stuff that Half-Life 2 did that informed literally every other 3D shooter that came after it. The importance of what Griffin's talking about is like a double whammy of one, yes, physics in a shooter or physics really in any game, but also mundane physics. So up until this point, it was like, yeah, we have physics objects, the red barrels, and they're like limp bodies. It's like a jump, like a jumping pad. Yeah, the hook with Half-Life was something as mundane as having to throw the trash away is now possible.

And where that goes in VR now is you walk into junky office rooms and you can open every filing cabinet. You can look inside of trash cans. There is a lot of supposedly meaningless physics that you can do in this game and i think what is like so special about that is it feels like a lived-in world right like we're so many games on your head yeah yeah of course hell yeah i put a traffic cone on my head the sex so funny

i have a few qualms with this game as as like a vr thing but i was not disappointed by the number of times that like i saw a hard hat sitting on the ground i picked it up and I was like I'm just gonna put this on my head and it goes right on your head or there's like a breather a rebreather like sitting on the ground I'm like I wonder if I can put this on and like I just put it close to my face and it stayed there I was like oh okay that's fucking cool it did not have any sort of mechanical

I thought if I have a hard hat on my head head crap shouldn't be able to I should be good right we chat about these games a little bit in the ramp up to the episode but try to save the bulk of our discussions but we have had some like glancing talks about this game and it seems there's

a little bit of a split with Russ and Plant kind of digging it and Griffin and I sort of maybe less digging it so before we get into less digging I'd love to hear from Plant and Fresh Dick about like maybe start with Fresh because we turned from Plant like about what maybe less digging it so before we get into less digging i'd love to hear from plant and fresh dick about like maybe start with fresh because we turn from plant like about what worked for you about this experience so uh let me start by saying i am well aware i mean for the people that are still

listening that are interested in half-life i am well aware that like the half-life moment has long since passed there was a moment about 10 years ago when everyone was super jazzed about half-life as a franchise and the bulk of the i mean i wouldn't say the majority of the world but a lot of the people that play video games are folks that have no affinity for half-life i uh you know i'm an older gentleman i'm getting up there in my days and i actually wished a distinguished man a distinguished gentleman smoking are you talking about half- are you going to take us down a long walk down an autumnal path as the leaves crinkle? But I care. I genuinely adored the original Half-Life.

Half-Life 2, when it launched, it launched with Steam. That was the first game on Steam, which is a pretty revelatory moment. So I loved Half-Life 2. I loved the episodes. And if you recall, the episodes were originally planned. Episode one was originally planned. Oh, we're going to do these smaller games and they're going to take six months and we're going to put them out and it's going to be great.

And then episode two came out and it's that happened. And then it ended on a horrible cliffhanger. You've got 10 years to learn about the history of the Half-Life franchise, people. So just I just wanted to bring up to speed. And my affinity for this, I was super jazzed when I heard that this was happening, even though I realized people might not be. Now, all that being said, the second that you start this game, the very first thing that you are doing is standing on a balcony overlooking the streets of City 17, which is like the typical, you know, Half-Life 2 setting. It's like a European style, like quarantine zone kind of setting with alien ships flying overhead and all that stuff. And that moment alone was just like, I'm like in this universe. And then

once you realize that you have like a lot of control in terms of not only what you can do with the objects around you, you could pick up stuff and throw it and put it on your head or whatever. Just the fact that you can go anywhere. So, you know, within reason, you know, it's not locked to like specific areas that you can go to. have essentially complete control, which really lets you play it as like a legit shooter rather than it being like, well, here's this rail, very strict setting that is like kind of typical in VR shooter games, like even Superhot, you know,

you're essentially locked to individual spots while you're playing. Yeah, I mean, that's two completely different genres. No, no, I love Superhot. Don't get me wrong. But it is worth noting, like, there are pretty significant differences in how these two games play. It feels like a complete world. It feels like a complete world.

I felt unlike any other VR experience I've ever had or really any very many video game experience I've ever had. I feel completely immersed in this world. video game experience I've ever had. I feel completely immersed in this world. It is a living, breathing, grounded, despite the aliens, grounded world. And that is like super empowering and also terrifying and also exciting and everything about video games. So it really has been, I think, a really exciting thing for me. Yeah. And for me, what I love about is the pace. thing for me yeah and and for me what i love about is the pace i mean this is this is not a half-life game at all i mean it has the characters of it it has the world of it you can do like physics but in terms of like it is not a shooter in the sense that half-life especially half-life one and really half-life two and episode the episodes are a cop like a really intense combat scenario for the first three or four hours sure is

one thing is in the room and it's terrifying or it is navigating um uh a dark corridor that has the uh where the things with the long tongues are that pull you up towards the ceiling yeah or uh when you finally do actually face off against the the combine which are the more human like enemies it'll be two of them um and they're like across you know a train track and yeah you're like picking them off what i loved about it was that it did force me to actually slow down there was a moment where i was in a train car and uh i think a lot of people probably had a similar experience who played this game where they're combine waiting outside and i kept like i died the first time it happened because they just kept just peppering me with

bullets and i realized like i need to kneel down like i just need to kneel um to hide behind the wall and then i bashed out the window with my gun and then kind of blind fired which got them running and then when they were running i like looked back up looked out through the window put my hand out the window and started firing to like hit them as they were running to get inside of the uh the train car and like that feeling of oh you know fighting two people in any other game but just like whatever i pop out of cover and I just shoot them. And like, I take the bullets were in this game. I was thinking about strategy that's like, I don't know what have I seen in a movie? Like, how do people respond to these like combat scenarios? And that level of role playing is so fun when it when it really

clicks. Yeah, I do want to real quick just just address something the plant said because because i think people kind of forget because they view half-life half-life one i agree with you is a traditional predominantly an action game but people forget that half-life two and the the episodes are are like half action games and half like physics puzzle games because they physics was the identifying characteristic of those games and i do think they carry through that in this where there are there are puzzles where there's like a crank and you have to like pull a pull a pull out of the uh spokes of a wheel to actually be able to crank it like they they i think they uh wear both of those hats really well justin um yeah i'm curious to hear

what you think yeah i was i was fully bought in on It's weird. I was fully bought in on the stuff Russ was talking about. The interactions in the world all feel cool. Like, walking around the world is really neat. When you see a tantalizing glimpse of an open world of City 17 before it jams you into a hallways from which you'll never emerge, it is very compelling. I don't know what you're... You saying that it is open and you can go wherever you want is honestly the craziest thing i've ever heard

anybody say i i i don't know what you're talking about you're literally going from a to b and you're led the entire way no i mean i don't mean it's an open world game i mean like in the way like you mean like locomotion literally in the space yeah in the space oh okay okay and also visual design that you know it's like i love super hot it's a series of white quarters that you flash between stages but that's but that but there are there are vr games that are open like they are more like half-life 2 in being like a large open world that you have complete freedom to kind of explore so i i don't know that this is necessarily shifting the paradigm. I like the physics puzzles,

especially the literal puzzles. There's some of you little ones that you use to unlock doors and stuff that are actually really cool. You're manipulating a globe with one hand and trying to line up icons and stuff. That stuff's cool. Where it really fell apart for me and where I eventually

was just like, I'm not doing this anymore. I just think the encounters, in trying to integrate the VR components, I feel like they've made encounters much less enjoyable. And I know they're supposed to be stressful. I just found them irritating. Sure. One example is like the pistol holds X number of bullets. If you, if you drop your clip to reload,

you lose those bullets. Bullets are extremely scarce. So you don't want to do that. So you end up in a lot of scenarios where you'll start an encounter and then have to go through the, like, I mean, it's 10 seconds,

but it, you feel them. They're long 10 to like reload your gun by dropping the clip out, encounter and then have to go through the like i mean it's 10 seconds but it you feel them they're long 10 to like reload your gun by dropping the clip out reaching behind you and taking a clip and jamming in and which i like in theory sure i just feel like it it makes the combat encounters a lot less enjoyable um there's also stuff like can i just talk about the clip thing real quick just before you move on i i've played a few like real quote unquote realistic shooters that do this where you lose the ammo if you go to reload if you haven't fired off all your bullets you just lose whatever was in the clip and in every other scenario i've always

found it to be a major pain in the ass in this scenario the very cool thing about this that i realize is not for everyone but for me what i found myself doing was okay i'm going down a hallway there might be an encounter coming up i look literally look down at my clip and i see i've got three shots left in this clip and i'm i'm thinking to myself am i going to make a decision right now where i lose these three shots forever um and do a full clip reload and i think those decisions are like really interesting just from a game design standpoint. Like it's interesting to force the player to like decide between those two choices. Yeah, it's not. I think I think there's absolutely merit to that. If it felt better in the moment, like if I felt like I had a lot more control over one is placement.

You can teleport in this game. In fact, I think it's the main way you, you you know i think it's the default method of moving around that's a really weird fit for like a survival horror vibe that a lot of this game is going for where you don't know if someone can get to you or not or if you can just like teleport past an enemy um there was a lot of that that felt really weird where i'd like run up to try to drop a gas canister or something and it like have to you know chunk my way back around it just felt uh weird and bad the tentacles especially from the ceiling like not knowing the ear like so irritating to know if i was going to be stepping into one or not or trying to like work my way

around and i'd get caught up on them uh enough times where just like it just like felt annoying like i don't know that any of the combat stuff for me just like really drove me away and when it takes you into like a more narrative thing um i i found it really cool uh but uh like talking to other characters you mean well like the there's bits of interstitial dialogue between you and um russell uh russell and then uh the one bit where you i don't know how to talk about without but but uh where right before you get the head crab to eat yes okay yes that character so that's like cool as hell like being in the in in the world and not having to worry about like shooting people is great you You know what I think it is? I think that the stress of being in VR

and the stress of survival horror mechanics for me, like just the two cancel each other out. Like there are two different kinds of stress that didn't like gel for me. I guess it's the best way. It's just not scary. It wasn't scary. Like, and so I don't think it was necessarily successful

as a survival horror game for me it felt like they were making a Half-Life game in the vein of the Half-Life games which were more sort of you know shooter focused with scary moments but not yeah I would not call Half-Life 2 a survival horror game sure but then they realized like this isn't working but there is a scarcity to the resources here that maybe we could kind of pitch it as a survival horror game and that's fine but like there's way too much repetition to be scary the the the third hallway full of barnacles with their hanging tongues yeah that i came across i was like okay i get it and and i've i'm i'm on like chapter five or so right now and so your past just just so i can uh without spoiling anything your past like the flashlight sequence oh yeah yeah and you

didn't find that no because even in the dark when you have a flashlight and you have a few bullets, you're facing off against zombies with a headcrab on them. Sometimes the headcrabs have armor plating and sometimes the headcrabs fall down and are alive. And sometimes the headcrabs are stronger than usual. It's like fear. Fear is predicated on the unknown. And very quickly, like I knew what this game had.

And that's not me, like, decrying the whole game as a failure, but it's not, like, there has to be some element of fear. I want to talk about the flashlight sequence, because it's, like, my favorite thing that I've played in forever. So the way that this sequence works is, like, you learn all the basics of the video game right like you learn how to do the reloading ammo there's a um kind of like the game's equivalent of the gravity gun where your hand can attract objects to it um so you can collect ammo

or there's these resources that you can collect that are scattered throughout the environment you've learned all the basics learn how to shoot a few things then you go into a pit and there is a body hanging upside down that is has a flashlight on its chest you rip the flashlight off you attach it to your your whatever hand you're not using your gun in effectively uh so you have your gun on one hand you have the flashlight on the other the instinct here is that you now have to affect hold your left hand under your right hand you gotta jack bauer it yeah jack bauer it the problem is if you're also looking for resources you have to use that other hand to then kind of scan for resources so now it's no longer

working quite as well and things start blurring as to like what is what um which can be annoying for i i'm not surprised if people think this is annoying but i i really loved it you would go into one room that is under construction and the scaffolding in the room looks almost identical to the tongues of the monsters that are on the ceiling so you're like skimming the room to see like what is what there's a point where one of those tongue monsters picks up an exploding barrel and there is a headcrab monster coming from right behind it and the question is like okay what do i do this room is full of explosives all together do i take out the thing that is on the ceiling

so it drops the explosive barrel if i let it go too long is it going to blow up the entire room like there i i just felt such tension there and yeah it's also gorgeous there's a part of with the flashlight there are kind of like living i don't know like fungi on the walls that in dark are bioluminescent but when you shine a light on them they look separate so if you skim the light across you see them as like like a soft yellow or whatever in the corner and you skim your light on it and they look entirely different because you're actually seeing inside of their bodies with the bioluminescence and like those touches i was just the whole time i was just completely blown away by it i gotta say also about resource management

this is personal but i feel like if you're going to severely limit bullets, you gotta have a good melee option. Okay, and that's my big thing with the game. I think I probably would enjoy all of it more if I'm like, you know what? I can save my bullets. I can handle this one guy without. without and it's like like fuck like okay i'll give you when you get the you get a shotgun and you get the guys walking around with the headcrabs on their faces there's a very satisfying like one shot you get close enough to them you risk the danger of getting close enough to them right and you take the shotgun shot and blow the headcrab off their face and they go down

awesome then you have to let the headcrab is fine so you you have to switch to your smaller gun and then annoyingly shoot the headcrab three times. It's like, how is that enjoyable? Headcrabs have always been garbage. Give me a fucking crowbar or something. Mix it up. Make it a fucking pry bar. Make it a wonder bar. A very quick point,

and then I really want to hand this off to Chig Griffin because I know he has a lot of feelings about this in Boneworks. But something that I love about this game is everything that i and fresh like about it i think are what y'all don't like and everything you don't like are what i love like that that like having to like quick switch to the pistol and like ice a thing like on the ground before it has a chance to like roll over and attack me was amazing to me which is i i think that's like that's i don't know if we've come across many games like that where things that are like just the negatives for half of us are the positives and likewise like i i just think that's strange that's yeah that's fine but like i i did it no i mean it just for me it reads as like inconsistency think that's strange that's yeah that's fine but like i i no i mean it just for

me it reads as like inconsistency and that's that is like the biggest most disappointing thing right you talk about half-life 2 being this like physics like reinvention like you talk about half-life 2 being this this checkpoint in the development of like 3d gaming of that they changed everything with that game. And that's a huge part of Valve's like whole ethos. And it's the reason we haven't gotten Half-Life 3 is because they've said like, you know, we don't want to just make another Half-Life game.

We don't want to just make another shooter. Like we want it to change shit. And I do not think that Half-Life Alyx pulls that off. I think that it has done a lot of stuff to make, I think there's been a lot of consideration put into it to make it a game that people uh it is a more comfortable vr game to play comfort is like an actual sort of like measurement of of vr games uh and i know this is something that russ struggles with and it's not a read on russ but like uh you move very fucking slowly in this game even if you use the the uh movement stick option like a regular shooter which is what

i used you move very very very slowly uh you probably move slower if you're walking right because teleport yeah because i tell i would just yeah so eventually i just got to the point where i was like boop teleport teleport teleport teleport you also fall very slowly which is like wild it's wild to me. How do you fall? You can fall. You can walk off an edge of a thing. There is a moment in the game where you're reaching out for someone's hand as they're hanging from a cable. Okay.

And it's during like a cut scene sort of thing. So when you're reaching out, you're on the edge of this bridge and there's no railing, but you can't go over. There's like an invisible wall keeping you from going over. So I'm reaching out for this guy's hand, trying to grab him. And then he falls. Oh no. But then he saved at the last second.

And at some point during that cut scene, after he falls, the invisible wall just disappears. So I'm reaching out for this dude's hand and I look up and he's saved. And they're talking to me like, okay, you have to get to the vault. And I'm like, uh-huh, uh-huh. And my finger accidentally nudges the button. And my point of view just goes boop. And I fall very slowly like Mary Poppins. And then the screen goes dark.

And I hear Russell like like Alex, Alex. I'm like, did I just fucking die? And it's like all the work that you put into making it like you can pick up a bucket and catch a head crab in it. Like all of that work that you put into like the physical realism of this world, that consistency like for me shatters in a case like that or a case like there's little things too. Like you pick up an open can, right? And then you pick up pick up like i don't know a screwdriver or something and you think like oh i'm gonna put this screwdriver in this can but like the top of it is like an invisible shield is

on there so that it doesn't actually interact like a certain object doors are a fucking crapshoot if anybody else in this call can tell me what happens when you get to the top of a ladder like this is the kind of thing i'm talking about you climb to the top of a ladder and then you just kind of wait there and then you teleport up and now you're on top of the ladder wait you mentioned bone works and like it didn't have the issue with a ladder i don't know what i can get opening the doors is garbage you're like i why do i have to get out of the way of i have to get out of the way of the pretend door right in my house i agree with the door i own this building that i'm in so like right this is my home this door is fucking pretend yes i shouldn't have

to move my physical meat carapace around to get around an imaginary pretend door it sucks you know what i want to do i want to open the fucking door i don't want to mire this we've gone long already so like i don't want to mire this whole conversation and like being VR snobby, but like I've played a lot at this point. I played Boneworks earlier this year and it blew me the fuck away because that did for me, that invented a framework for physical interactions in a VR space in a way that I, that Half-Life 2 did. And then I thought Half-Life Alyx would. In Boneworks, you can climb up onto like any ledge, if you can get your hand up over it and you can like somehow physically pull yourself up and like pull your, there's a button to like crouch and pull your legs up. You literally have to go through the motions to do that. In

Half-Life Alex, you put your hands on the rungs of the ladder and then you get to the top and then you just kind of boop up to the top. And it's like, these are minor arguments, but it's the, it's the kind of thing that when you are trying to create, like, a tangible, real-feeling world, that it is a failing, and enough of those add up to sort of, like, shatter it for me. And eventually, like, I just wanted to know that I wasn't being an asshole about this, and I went back and replayed some of Boneworks, and it's just night and day. Also, in Boneworks, like, there's a million different weapons. There is physical combat

in Half-Life Alyx when you like pull the pipe out of the door and then there's a zombie there and then I swung the pipe at him and he just kind of it just kind of like went through him like I was like I'm not gonna I don't know that I'm gonna be into this this is fucking Half-Life and I can't hit a thing with a crowbar shaped object

I do I would say this though about Boneworks specifically and I do and I appreciate't hit a thing with a crowbar-shaped object. I do, I would say this, though, about Boneworks specifically, and I appreciate the, like, level of that realism that you're talking about. 100% accurate. They put, like, so much effort into making Boneworks. Like, everything you pick up, you can pry things off the walls

and, like, use all sorts of physics in Boneworks. You can stab a thing into a thing, and then when you try to pull it out, like, you feel the resistance. Like, yeah. I think there is an element, and this runs through all of Valve's stuff, where they pull punches in the name of, as you said, accessibility, comfort, and stuff like that. So the reason you can't necessarily—why they didn't design it to have that much like infinite possibility, um, I think was an,

was in the name of accessibility. Now that doesn't excuse things like I think I agree with you. I think you should be able to bash something with a pipe or stab something with a knife in this game. I don't think there's a reason you can't. Um, but I think predominantly like this was designed in the way that like portal two was designed as a thing that like everyone who puts

on the helmet can play and get through it and experience it and appreciate the storyline without having to worry about nausea or mastering like complex like controls or anything like that because i've tried boneworks like it is not an easy game to pick up like it's cool when you know at the front of the game like this is an expert level vr totally 100 and i think they're just two different like i think it's the difference between disneyland and like a paintball park like like a ton of money went into this very linear but incredibly purposeful world you feel like you're in the experience but there's not a whole lot you can do outside of what they demand of you versus something like Boneworks, where it's like, I don't know, man.

It's like a renegade paintball park, where they're like, you bring your own gear, we don't care, we've set up some obstacles. If you end up killing each other, can you call 911, because we don't own a phone. I don't want to be an asshole again, but actually Boneworks has a fucking cool story with like-

It's better in every way. I mean, the story, the tone is more consistent than than half life like you can talk about like half life they they've designed it to be accessible that's fine but like that physical being able to hit something with a thing and have it hurt that thing that's not an accessibility thing that's like uh we couldn't figure out how to make melee combat feel good. So there just isn't any. Also, if you're not going to have melee combat in the game, the gunplay should be fun.

And like in this game, I'm very deep in it now and I have shotgun and I have pistol. And so when I'm walking around the world, I find shotgun ammo, pistol ammo, or these little resin spheres that you need fucking 50 of in order to like make your gun a little bit better. Or sometimes there's a little canister with a worm that gets gooshed up and then you inject that right into

your hand i guess yeah um pretty cool city that you have going on there it's it's i i i it is an accessible game it is i would you know there's no argument there it is more accessible than boneworks but it can also be accessible and still be fun and feel good and And I don't, I just don't. And I think the reason that I have a, like, this is so wild for me is it is another sort of instance that I've had so many times in the past couple of years where like, this game's getting tens, tens,

tens across the board. And I'm like, I don't, wow. I just don't, I just don't get it, man. I don't get it. I think we can all agree though, ahead of our b section uh half-life alex 10 out of 10 10 out of 10 10 out of 10 it's settled uh we're gonna take a break and then we'll be right back with more video games that's our thing it's our whole thing

i feel frustrated talking about this vr stuff i feel like we're still developing a vocabulary there's like a weird gulf that i feel like we don't have the words to like express like why it is or isn't working for individual people it's it's weird to talk about yeah i think it's just they're super early still there's a new box next to fun factor and it's like yeah it's like stab factor the stab realism quotient honestly if they cut the ceiling things i'd probably go up two points i just i think it's so irritating um it's oh god uh so hey we wanted to talk about franchises let me frame it half-life has been long dormant uh for a decade or so and then it

came back from the dead and we thought we'd go around the table and talk about games that we'd love to see, franchises that we'd love to see, make a big comeback. Okay. Long past due. Yeah, so when I was in high school, the computer had two,

the library computer had two games installed on it. Oregon Trail, but like an old version that didn't really run as well. And the other one was Snood. Now, I don't know how many people remember Snood. Snood. Snood was a bubble, what was it, puzzle

bobble or like one of those types of games where you match three and you shoot goofy aliens. It's just like you thought that our Half-life discussion wasn't going to be alienating enough to our younger listeners so you're like let me swing in here with some snood uh now who am i i'm not a game designer i don't i can't tell you how to update snood but there's got to be a way to do it and i honestly think there's a demand for it

whether it's on mobile whether it's a vr experience whether it's i mean i think we could do like a mashup half-life snood mashup they did a peggle mashup with half life what's stopping them from doing snood a snood half-life yeah did by the way rest did you know great news if you didn't know this uh there was a snood 2 that came out on nintendo dds in 2005 and it is called snood 2 colon on vacation so you can just go play that if you wanted to wait wait wait they were working before it's what in Snood 1 they were like

that was their office that's a fucking job is they gotta shoot themselves at other ones of themselves of the same color so that they can finally die and then they get paid I guess wow I want that job that's fun it's like you don't even know about the economy I guess I don't even know about the economy i guess i don't griffin what about you uh mine is uh a fighting game that i did not realize how much i missed it

until one chris plant uh had some some folks over to his place to play uh an evening's worth of it and that game is bushido blade uh that franchise is bushido blade what do we play bushido blade two two yeah yeah two is two shit hot it's got like so many so many weapons and things like that i just like uh i like fighting games conceptually like a whole lot uh but i don't like playing them for the most part just because like uh i will try i will you know buy a stick and buy the game that everybody's talking about and try and play it and just realize like, I'm shitty at this. And this is like it uses a type of, you know, gaming language that I just don't understand.

It, you know, the matches take so long and I want Bushido to play. It's just like you fucking run at each other and there's a moment or two of precision required. And then like someone is like their arm has been chopped off. It's the one hit kill fighting game the one hit kill fighting game is shit hot uh obviously i guess dive kick is the spiritual successor but i want something obviously a little bit beefier than that uh shout out though to deadliest warrior the licensed fighting game that came out into uh one and two yeah they're both fucking fun they are they well based on the, what, USA TV show or something like that.

Yeah. I remember playing that at a convention. Like, I got like, I think it was 505 Games or something like that. I like got an appointment

that I was like, not so psyched for. And then these dudes like had me play the deadliest warrior game and I was like, yo, hey,

is this Bushido Blade? And they're like, yeah, man, we made a Bushido Blade. And I was like, what? Yeah.

Nobody told us we couldn't so we just did it. How do they explain away the like this guy has an assault rifle this guy has like a pole oh no i mean it was all like melee it was uh yeah i mean that's a fun formula for a game i'm like amazed that there are not more of it let me do mine real quick because it's genius fucking listen uh-huh i want to say hold on i want to get the video chat window back up so i can see your guys faces dino crisis vr i mean how is it different from dino crisis the scale it's in vr

you fucking idiot didn't you hear the two letters i said after dino crisis yeah okay the real answer of my heart would be legacy of kane yeah but i was thinking about i mean legacy kane is a franchise that like there's very little affinity for they actually tried to do random uh like a oh bud noskoth you don't love noskoth you're not still playing noskoth which should have worked uh but i'd love to see the legacy of kane franchise come back um it's weird that it hasn't but i feel like i was thinking about that like the resident evil remix that we get and then they put in vr but like the idea of like doing a survival horror game and being able to live out like the like hiding in a cupboard from a dinosaur that's walking around the room with you that would be it would be good as hell oh yeah i was thinking dino crisis is the light gun game

but i guess not no it's the resident evil but instead of zombie dinosaurs got it uh i'm just gonna spam you with a few because Machinimate was my option. Oh, did I steal yours? I'm sorry. And it's the best option. But here are some things that I would like to see come back. Chibi Robot. Where's it at?

Oh, yeah. Mario Golf Camelot. New Mario Golf. Where's that at? They keep trying and not making good ones. It was like 2014 was the last time we got one. Here's the big one that will never happen wwe all-stars the thq xbox 360 generation wrestling game in which you can fly

40 feet into the air as your created wrestler and and just absolutely dunk a mega juiced hulk uh hogan through the floor why Why can I not do that? Every generation of video games. And then like a very easy one is SSX, but controversial take, a sequel to the Xbox 360 era game, which I love. I'm the only person on the planet.

Oh, what? Just the reboot? Oh, I loved it. It's so good. I would do Tricky, which is the only one that deserves rebooting or remaking. Yeah, Tricky is tremendous. It's no steep, though.

We have a few minutes, I guess, to talk about what else we've been playing. And I know Chris and I have been dipping into Persona 5, The Royal. Do you have any salient thoughts about it? I just finished the first dungeon, so you may be further than I am. have any salient thoughts about i'm i i just finished the first dungeon so you may be further than i am i i really wish i had more to offer other than more persona 5 is good and how nice it is to revisit this game especially right now i think persona ever since i got into it is kind of like animal crossing for me and that it's it is a perfect escape game um it just feels like you get to visit somewhere nice where things are chill um you go outside and there are like hundreds of people and everything

is like cool yeah um so i i don't have a whole lot to say about like what's new here um i'm sure you can probably speak to that better than i can but i would say that if hey if you were hesitant about persona and you've been thinking about giving it a try now is a great time to get into a 140 hour uh jrpg that is really accommodating i mean this is the friendliest i think uh jrpg barring you know we'll see how the final fantasy 7 remake is i'm sure that will be pretty friendly too i i think it's pretty great i i had some issues with persona 5 just because uh in comparison to persona 4 like i love the tone and the setting of that game a whole lot more like i love the sort of chill rural slow-paced vibe uh and like the aesthetic of persona 5 i

think is like pretty uh you know pretty solid and they've done like a really good job of fleshing that out but it just didn't like hit for me as well and i don't know that necessarily persona 5 like fixes a lot of that stuff like as far as i can tell the localization hasn't been changed and there was some rough spots in in said localization and like the characters are still like not my favorite characters but my feelings about persona 5 were that like the gameplay itself was so fucking fun and so much better than persona 4 was and that is where from what i played so far like where most of the emphasis has gone uh there's just so much cool shit with the combat that has been added. There are like exploding enemies

now that you'll run into where if you hit them and knock them out in one shot, they'll explode and hurt like everybody else in the party. So now like the battles are even more of a puzzle to like figure out how to like baton pass and like get everything going without the enemies taking a single turn. And there's like challenge fights where you go for a high score, like just trying to keep your chain going like that. They've done like a ton of smart stuff gameplay wise. And maybe we'll have like more to talk about like once we played a little bit more because so far that's like all I've seen. But I think most of like the new story stuff and character development stuff and writing stuff, which is like what I want out of this comes later because they've added like

a whole nother semester to the game and they've added a whole nother character who I've only had sort of glancing interactions with. But yeah, I mean what Chris said, if you've never played a persona game, like personified the Royal is, it seems like a pretty good place to start and you're going to get your money's worth. It seems like a lot of reading,

a lot of reading. Sure. But I mean, if you don't want to read, don't play it. That's a good, thank you Russ for pointing that out. You're welcome. Sometimes you don't like things and then you shouldn'tRPG. If you don't want to read, don't play it. That's a good, thank you, Russ, for pointing that out. You're welcome.

Sometimes you don't like things, and then you shouldn't do those things if you don't like them. So like if the oven is, if the stovetop is on and it's hot, don't put your hand on it. This is a PSA from Russ Freshdick. If there's a type of, say you don't like eating broccoli, then don't eat the broccoli. And this is just more wisdom from Russ Freshdick.

You should probably eat broccoli whether you like it or not. You should eat broccoli it's got iron and shit juicy you're playing anything no not really boneworks is very good we just kind of glanced off it but i want i i completely missed it um it's really good like if you want to play something uh not in i'm not comparing it to half-life currently but just taking on its own merits is this really genius idea of putting the vr aspects of it at the absolute forefront and tonally it's uh fantastic it feels like you still can't teleport right no you can't teleport there's a no i will say that it is a little bit of a shame that something this cool is like uh hampered by the fact that like i i got

nauseous playing it and i don't ever get nauseous in vr ever and i'm this is a uh nigh universal experience the steam forums are equally split between people saying this made me sick and i've never been sick yeah and people saying no it didn't just try it didn't make me sick the game opens up with a museum of VR innovations, like showing you how to play the game. It's so fucking funny. And the first thing you see is a exhibit about teleportation, and it's a caveman with a spear, like a robot caveman, like hunting a tiger, like teleporting forwards.

And a little voice is like, in the past, we were restricted to short-form teleportation. That shit's hysterical. You're such assholes, guys. The fact of the matter is there's a reason teleportation that shit that shit's hysterical you're such assholes guys the fact of the matter is there's a reason teleportation is a thing because most people can't play your game yeah but those who can 50 percent of people are getting nauseous playing your game there's a reason teleportation exists they're like ignoring the reason for it to even be i think the reason also the half-life comparisons come up so much is that there

are head crabs in these games but in in boneworks but it's a vr helmet with sentient legs that jumps on you and tries to pull itself over your head so that it traps you in a virtual environment which is a fucking cool idea but also you can grab them out of the air and like grab another one and slam them together until they die i just want to be able to do that stuff like why can't i do that stuff and ignore the walking parts like that's what i don't understand i think that's completely fair i don't i i'm not stringent about this i'm just saying i i wish it didn't make me sick either i don't like puking all over my floor someone should come clean this up no one will come plant you have anything yeah i have a few uh reader submissions i asked for feedback

on half-life in vr from alex murphy uh what probably from alex it's a different last name oh i always i always thought of vr as an isolating activity but playing job simulator drunk in front of a group of friends felt strangely like doing a solo improv performance loved it uh and from at slipper jam my cat angus wanted to play with the dangling wrist straps on my controllers and decided to jump at them just as a headcrab leaped at me i just about threw him i'm not sure how valve trained my cat to make alex more immersive and make sure he's out of the room while i play now i feel like that i've heard that a version of that anecdote from many people that uh pets are the most dangerous thing to uh to have in your house while playing vr yeah or a three-year-old i would also argue it's not the

best but i mean yeah my wife scared the living fuck out of me yesterday while i was playing a half-life alex so yeah it really doesn't matter who it is um we uh we all have to go to the bathroom so bad so uh this is the end of the show next week yeah we all go together we have a four-hole next week we're gonna talk about resident evil 3 so uh any specific prompts for us anything you'd like to hear from people i've never played played it. I've never played that one. I'd love to know the most underappreciated Resident Evil game, because there are a lot to pull from. And a justification.

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Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!