The Besties - If You Like Halo 3 You Should Put a Ring on it

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

This week The Besties are discussing Halo 3! Together they look back to its highly anticipated release in 2007. The criticism around the infamous cliffhanger ending. Their favorite vehicles, weapons and campaigns. Plus, get nostalgic for H3’s limited edition gaming soda. 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!

Anybody, when they played Halo 3, check in on that old 13-year-old KD ratio you had on your Xbox Live account? Anybody want to fess up? Because mine was not up to my current 2020 standards. Mine was.91, which is not terrible. You know, it was 2007. You had baby hands.

You didn't have true gamer reflexes like you do now. That's true. I know you've been working hard i know you've been doing your wrist exercises um justin you look like you have a shameful confession vis-a-vis your katie race i i don't even monitor it it's about the love for the love of the game. For the listener, Justin slipped on his gunner glasses right now, so we know that he's playing for keeps. Yeah, whenever he puts those on, his Katie Raish increases by a few good percentage points.

He's also wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and the contrast is sending me places. Damn, Chris, drag him. No, he looks good. Drag my brother's style, Chris. That's my fucking brother, dude. No, it's fine him. Drag my brother's style, Chris. That's my fucking brother, dude. It's fine. You know what? I have children now. The only KD

I'm concerned about is being a killer dad. The only KD I care about is my kid. My kid, who I love. I is my kid. My kid, who I love. I love my kid. My name is Justin McElroy, and I'm ready to finish the fight.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I already done did finish the fight. My name is Chris Plant, and I wish we were talking about Destiny. My name is Russ Frasher, and I know the best Halo of the week. Welcome back to the besties. Welcome home, if I may be so bold. Usually, this is a game of the year show that goes all year long, a book club, but for video games, where we talk about the latest and greatest in interactive home entertainment.

But while there is a brief pause, a brief respite from the new release calendar, we are dipping back into 2007 in a limited miniseries, as all miniseries are limited, I suppose. We are talking about the games of 2007. So far, we have talked about Portal, Bioshock, and Call of Duty Modern Warfare. You can go listen to those episodes if you so choose.

But today, we are talking about Halo 3, a Halo game. That's the third one. It came after one and more briefly after two. Can I give a little context about why people were so amped about Halo 3? I think it's important

to give a lot, a lot, a lot of context about Halo 3 in this episode because like that is the stark contrast of how I remember this game and the lead up to it to like what I have been playing over the last week is like not the same thing at all.

Okay, so Halo 1 comes out on the original Xbox. I want to say, what was it? 2001. 2001. And people were very happy about it and it introduced multiplayer and all sorts of features and the campaign was a lot of fun and people were jazzed about that and then big open spaces you could like drive vehicles these these were kind of like fresh new things and more importantly it

like microsoft exists as a gaming entity today because of of halo 1 it was a a it is i feel like it established the term killer app for the xbox it was the reason that the xbox survived in the landscape of of uh you know playstation and and and nintendo absolutely like it is it is it was a very important game to this company yeah fast forward a little to halo 2 yes halo 2 multiplayer online halo 2 i played so much halo 2 so much in my college i'm i want i'm not saying my drug dealers i'm just saying a drug dealer's dorm room and that to me is like i felt like i got the true halo 2 experience i was surrounded by people smoking hookah um they were drinking uh the the predecessors to what is it what is that loco

for loco did you forget the number of locos this was like this is pre-for-loco this is homemade for loco um and uh yeah we would have like land on on the college network and that was the dream so whether or not halo 2 i don't i don't want to ever revisit it because experiencing it that way was precious to me yeah i do want to mention one thing about halo 2 specifically because plant rightly has talked about the multiplayer and the online multiplayer which was groundbreaking it was incredible not the very first time there had been console online multiplayer but it was the first time they like someone nailed it it was xbox it was xbox lives like yeah real time to shine and xbox live was like transformative nailed it it was xbox it was xbox lives like yeah real time to shine and

xbox live was like transformative in how it made online multiplayer accessible to like every single person who had an xbox 360 totally i do though want to talk about the campaign of halo 2 which has moments it does have moments but it has a lot of fucking cool it does i went back and watched a lot of cut scenes from halo 2 but but it ends in maybe the worst ending of a video game that I can remember. The basic, basic idea is that you are fighting with the Arbiter alien guy and Master Chief. And at some point you're fighting a big gorilla man because he's the bad guy for some reason. And then Master Chief is like,

we're going to go to Earth and finish the fight. And the game fucking ends right there. It is not even a smash cut to Black. It's like kind of a weird, awkward, slow fade to Black. And you're like almost like a scene transition. And then, but then there's not any more video game after that. Nope. Because the game was like fairly rushed right like it came out

in 2004 so they had three years uh but you know they were developing for a new console and so they basically had to cut out the entire final act of of the game and so the campaign is famous for that i will say my excitement to replay halo 3 was based around my memory of certain moments from the campaign that I really dug and was really excited about. And in playing Halo 3, I remembered, oh wait, all those moments are actually in Halo 2. The opening sequence of Halo 2 rips ass. It's the one where you have to,

I'm giving the Covenant back their bomb and you jump out of a spaceship and ride a bomb into it. It's fucking rules. Halo 3 though. Knowing all this context now right we know where halo 2 ends a question for you knowing now where halo 3 starts would halo 2's ending have been any better if it instead ended with you falling into a forest and just walking through

a forest for the first hour it's not an an hour. It is excruciating. That's a long mission. It is excruciating. The beginning of this game, again, I'm sure this looked great at the time. Apparently it did, because I went back and read a lot of reviews, and people are high on this game.

There are a lot of hundas. I think it still looks good. I think it still looks good. You all are. I think the environments actually get worse as the game goes on especially as you get into like flying and vehicle segments things get much less detailed and much less cool looking but i think some of these earlier environments like the effects and stuff um but you were playing you were playing the hd like remaster of it correct justin no i guess i got that i was playing on the master chief collection

yeah so that that is upscaled i didn't think that i didn't think that was out it's not it's out on xbox it's not on console oh if you're playing on xbox one you would probably play in the remastered okay no no i was playing the xbox 360 uh whatever it is classics how you can play so i played the xbox 360 version and like i don't know the faces on that one looked pretty fucking busted the faces are not good um i i want to i want to before we get into the game itself i just i want to continue to uh i don't think we can overstate especially if you were working in the business at that time like what a big deal the release of halo 3 is which i think is partially because of the cliffhanger ending

of 2, where it's just like there was this massive groundswell of like people really giving a crap about Halo 3 and like actually wanting to the big tagline was

as we've talked about, finish the fight and it was like, they were pushing the fight and it was like they were pushing it everywhere and it was the i think the apex of like massive game marketing i don't think any game since has lived up to do you guys remember i have a treat for you i have a brief treat if you can grant me uh 45 seconds of silence i wanted it, for our listeners that have not observed it, I have a classic ad for you that was a bigger news story when it came out, like made more of a splash

than the release of a lot of games do today. Some of you probably know what the ad is, but let's listen in real quick. Can you tell us what you remember about the battle? We'd been fighting for a while. On the seventh day, we ran out of ammo. We had to scavenge all we could from the weapons that had been left behind. The pistols, shotgun rounds, a handful of grenades.

Do you remember where you were? When Master Chief armed his grenade, I was in the back of an overturned warthog firing an M41. How did you manage to keep it together we knew master chief was still in the fight he gave us hope that's the whole act that's not that's just that's the is it that that the diorama one yeah it's like an old man looking at a diorama of a battle. And that ad, which is called Museum, was massive. I mean, it was gigantic.

And it was also serious. The game was being marketed as a serious cultural event. And this is also, if I can say one more thing, this is also at a time where i think games were pushing harder for credibility and acceptance than any other time period that i can imagine they wanted this to be treated like a gigantic movie release and that's how it was marketed and that's how i was being treated by everybody and i think that that like for halo 3 it actually it actually worked just to contrast that though,

the other big marketing push that was going on around Halo 3, and thinking of this, like literally is a full-blown synesthetic sensory overload for me, was fucking Mountain Dew Game Fuel. A limited 12-week run of this citrus cherry-infused bright red Mountain Dew drink

that came in a full Halo 3 wrap can. And I think that was the dawn of Game Fuel, right? That was the first- It was, yes. That is where they introduced Game Fuel. And it, man, can I say something? I'd fuck up a Game Fuel right now. Yeah, I'd fuck up a Game Fuel for sure.

And I was actually so excited about Halo 3 that I just bought game fuel just to feel closer to it was the chief the biggest game like the biggest game release ever it was the first first first midnight launch i can remember going to like it was huge huge huge huge huge and again like looking back at the critical response it is flawless like literally flawless and i know that we have like the privilege of 13 years of like more fucking games coming out or whatever but the uh and i've been playing a lot of 2007 games in the past couple months that's fair uh and also i think we have to state that like the big thing

about halo 3 was the multiplayer the forge which was the complete like multiplayer level creation tools game creation tools griffball uh like it's whole a whole different sort of rocket league-esque sport that came out of the forge like it was so huge the multiplayer is what griffin called halo 3 multiplayer yes i don't know he insisted that's confusing uh and and we have i think fair to say limited access to halo 3 multiplayer or at least i did playing on the Xbox 360 version. I got into like three games and it was not like peak Halo. So keep all that in mind when I say that I think the campaign sucks a big pile of dog shit. I really didn't like it at all.

I thought it was not fun. The second mission of this game is you are in this military compound and the Covenant attack. And you're in this comms room, like this central comms room. And the admiral or whatever is like, oh, you got to go and get us some safety. You got to save some guys in the hangar. So you run through some hallways and you shoot some guys and you get to the hangar and kill all the coming in there. And they're like, oh, okay, come on back to the comms room. And I'm like, is there a teleporter?

You actually want me to fucking just walk through this? Literally for several minutes, just walking through empty hallways back to the comms room. Like stepping over all the corpses. Yeah. And then it's like, okay, now you have to go up to uh the the the crew quarters and save some people there okay do it and no fucking kidding now go right on back to like three times they make you do this and it is not fun it is the opposite of the warthog escape sequence like that is in these halo games every time it is like conceptually on the opposite and i couldn't

stop thinking like what the fuck were they thinking this is terrible designually on the opposite. And I couldn't stop thinking like, what the fuck were they thinking? This is terrible design. I think the big thing, and this reference is what you were just talking about. The crazy thing that I did not remember until I was replaying it is how fucking slow Master Chief is. He is the slowest man alive.

And I get it. I bar myself up with a grenade trying to push every button to figure out which one made it right true story i slowly walked into a grenade as i tried to figure out like certainly one of these buttons and also how i did not remember how slow he was and how fucking high this dude jumps yeah he does have hops though so that's the and i think that's why this game feels so dated to us that is like a big part of it because the gunplay is fine like the guns feel fine uh most of them at least feel okay um graphics obviously have aged not great but that's

reasonable it's an old game but the actual movement makes everything else in the game feel so slow and we're so used to at this point you knowungie's made a lot of games since this game came out. And in every game, they have improved on the core 30 second loop of gameplay that they've been making for shooters. So this is like going back and like eating a raw cookie after you've just had like a Milano. Like this is on its way way but it's in the middle

of the process that we are now familiar with like the end result is at this point destiny 2 which is like speedy and uh you know very vert while you've got good in every way like mechanically good in every way so i i think like that that goes back to what griffin was saying with like that that dang second stage where you're just running through the hallways. I think you can feel them fumbling towards destiny or what they wanted to eventually accomplish, but there was no precedent for that.

I mean, this was the first Halo game that had four-player co-op in its campaign and also had the score attack mode in that. Yeah, you had two-player co-op in Halo 1 and Halo 2. Got it. Yeah, that's true, yeah. So you like the score attack mode in that yeah you had two player uh co-op in halo one halo two got it yeah that's true yeah so you had this like score attack mode where you could play with four friends and then you could also like go for like score runs to compete even though you're kind of playing together and it was starting to toy with that and it wanted to start you know mess looking at like not open worlds but i mean for you know i don, I don't love the first stage, but these are big spaces.

It's a series of big, open, interesting spaces. When you sort of get to that base, you have that overwatch of that big base. It was pretty, I remember it. Yeah, of destiny in that. And there's all these other things they're experimenting with. I don't know if you remember the infection multiplayer mode where some of the players start out as zombies

and they have energy swords or whatever. if you remember the infection multiplayer mode, where like some of the players start out as zombies. Oh yeah. And they have energy swords or whatever. And then every time a human player gets killed, they become a zombie and last human alive wins. That's so standardized in like shooters now. Yeah. And there's the forge map editor.

The other thing that is in here is it was automatically saving game footage from campaign and multiplayer and it had a like an actual cloud storage for video and images and your forge creations and this is like you know i believe pre little big planet era like this is the cusp of ugc so the game to its full credit does a ton like halo 3 is a an extremely important game unfortunately it is the first to do most of these things and as the first it you know it's not mario 64 sort of thing like it's it doesn't just you know knock it out of the park on the first go i want to stress that i i don't feel like we're being entirely unfair to specifically the campaign of Halo 3

because I went back and watched some videos of the campaign of Halo 2. And it starts with that sequence of you like receiving a medal of honor on board this spaceship that just gets fucked up by the Covenant and like everything's falling apart around you, like pretty cool level.

The whole new Mombasa sequence, which is like the second big sequence in that game, has the part where you're just driving the tank over the bridge and just trying to keep it alive the whole time the sequence where you have to land on the two big walking spider tanks yeah amazing and blow them up from inside like that that shit is very memorable it really really kicks ass uh the the first sequence that you have with the arbiter you're on this big covenant uh rebel uh like mining station or something like that that's hanging over this huge desert on a single cable and like everything that is is happening at some point you have to like cut the cable and everything's in free fall like those levels once

i watch them instantly like i snap back to remembering how fucking cool it was. So it's like, it's, it's not like, uh, we're looking back on it 13 years later and being like, Oh, they didn't know how to make a campaign,

blah, blah, blah. They like Halo one was full of discovery and, um, was so novel in the first place that like it, it, it got by just on that.

Halo two though, had a cool campaign. Like Halo two had a cool campaign with cool levels that didn't end, which was not ideal, obviously, but everything up to that point was pretty good. Halo 2, though, had a cool campaign. Like, Halo 2 had a cool campaign with cool levels that didn't end, which was not ideal, obviously. But everything up to that point was pretty good. Halo 3, they had a lot more time with the engine, with the console, with everything. And I think it's just a case of all the stuff that Chris listed that was so important and so revolutionary.

Like, I think that maybe that got so much of the attention that just the story and campaign of halo 3 was just not not there something that i did notice while i was playing and i was thinking about a lot is that in terms of a synergy between music and gameplay i'm not sure that there have been many franchises that have done it better than Halo. One thing it does is people remark whenever you're around, like in a way that makes you feel like, you know what? I am the coolest.

I'm the coolest guy. I'm the best guy. I'm going to do this for America. But the themes that kick in, there are so many moments in this campaign where I was like, this is feeling cool. This is a cool this is this is a cool thing i'm ready for it and then the theme would swell and it would just like elevate

it so much uh with just like the the the the work that marty o'donnell did like really really really i think gave it like an epic feel that and which is a term that's like really overused but i think really made moments feel like awesome yeah in a way that i don't think a lot of games nail um we don't have game many game themes that are anywhere near as memorable maybe the best game music like the best it's absolutely i remember for two weeks before this game came out, I would be just like washing dishes, and in my head, I'd start doing this. It's Halo 3. Finish the fight.

Let's do it right. Do it tonight. It is Halo 3. Yes, it is Halo. I would have that on a loop in my head. There are very few game themes that can do that, that would still get me amped in that way. Super Mario guy, get those coins and eat the guys,

get the mushrooms and get really tall now. It's also beautifully orchestrated. There's so much attention paid to the instrumentation that really gives it a really grand epic feel. Yeah. I do think part of the, like, the distance between that moment, like those musical moments where, like,

the game really peaks and the actual game itself has to do with kind of a false promise that they made where, like, Halo 2 ends with this, we're going back to Earth, we're going to finish the fight. And all the marketing. All of the fight. And all the marketing. All of the marketing. And all the marketing was that. It was like, you're on Earth, you're going to save Earth, including that ad that Justin played. And

most of Halo 3, I don't know, at least 50% of Halo 3 is like, I'm in an alien space station and I'm in a Covenant ship. And none of those levels are nice to look at like no one wants to be on that ship it's when jason vorhees goes to new york you're like i can't wait for jason vorhees or the predator to go to new york and then they spend most of the time on a boat or

something yeah like really on a boat in new york what struck me is uh the the arc is where most of this game takes place and it's like uh to really condense a lot of halo lore the halo is this weapon of mass galactic destruction that will kill everything in the whole universe and it's this series of rings and they are operated out of this arc which is like the central facility that makes the halos that's where this game takes place it's like you know this one's for all the marbles i actually think think that the design of the forerunner tech and the forerunner settings of this game are really cool in the way that a lot of the aesthetic

and a lot of the art design of Destiny 1 and 2 have been really, really cool. And then I was struck with the storytelling in Destiny, especially early on, fell so flat. Fell so flat and fell so flat, and the campaign really did not light my fire, but you are surrounded by all this cool shit and all of these kind of cool world-building ideas

that then you don't necessarily get a great payoff for, and playing Halo 3, I felt that in such a big way, because I don't know. I actually really like the arc. I like all the forerunner shit i want to uh i want to have i have two brief observations uh one is man seeing 343 guilty spark again you guys really really really just wanted to make more halo huh like the ghost is the guilty spark it's so weird that they fight i've completed this before but the idea that you would be like we're finally free of the shackles let's do it again let's

take it from the top get that spark back floating orb man yeah um the other one i the um as long as we're dumping uh the fucking AI in this game of your partners is so laughably horrid, but it is presented to you in a way where it's like, hey, if you want them to drive and you worth the guns, totally fine. They've got it. And they're instantly like doing donuts in a ravine.

Like, sorry, chief. I don't know, bud. Like, okay, let me drive all right i'll shoot no problem chief blast into the sky like i'm circling a tank and you're not shooting the one thing maybe maybe if i had a sexy robot in my brain i could drive the car good that's why i almost always would get a ghost because at least then like i can drive and shoot at the same time uh but anytime where i'm not the one driving it is laughably bad it is like really wild uh how horrid the driving ai is it's bizarre

that it's even an option for them to drive because they do not know where they're going um do you guys like the vehicle stuff do you like like the the oh yeah the hornet uh stuff is really cool i think uh and i like obviously the tank still feels great i still fuck around with the warthog like if warthog is ever available as long as you're driving it the what's funny is the ai if they're on that cannon they're fucking like snipers with that with that uh the chain gun in the back of that thing like they are incredibly incredibly competent so it sounds like it sounds like like Justin had a different experience, though. It's target, like deciding on targets.

Oh. Like, the priority is not the gigantic tank that's blowing us to hell. It's the one grunt who's just running behind us shitting his pants. Can we talk about the ending really quick? Yeah, I also really want to talk about multiplayer just for a second. Yeah, let me just... It just feels like it'd be unfair not totally let me just briefly touch on the ending the ending is fucking stupid sorry you show up you're you're in like a snow land and you end up in like the heart of this entire epic end of this trilogy and there's 343 guilty spark and granted he is just a

little floating robot orb so i'm not expecting a like a mech to rise out of the ground and have an amazing boss fight there but as bad as and frustrating as the boss fight was in halo 2 the halo 3 and boss fight is him just floating around shooting one single laser at you and you step to the left and shoot him back with a laser, and then you drive away. That's the ending. They had obviously realized, like, you driving a warthog out of this exploding facility, trying to, like, land on a spaceship to escape at the last second.

Like, that escape sequence is classic, right? Sure. The boss fight with 343 Guilty Spark, after he just unceremoniously fucking blasts a hole in Johnson, who is, like like this beloved character that the whole phrase is i i thought that that was so tonally weird they like kill off a lot of characters in this uh game with like no real like taking a moment to like stop and reflect on it and i read something about how they were like struggling to come up with the the the story of halo 3 and they had just seen uhenity in theaters, the Firefly

movie. Oh my god. Another real piece of garbage. And I read, ooh, wow. I'm gonna unpack that. And I read this quote like, yeah, so we just had this idea of what if we killed some characters off? It's like, yeah, that's a great starting point for your story

because none of those deaths feel especially impactful. Did any of you play any multiplayer during this? No. No. I played a lot of it when it first came out. I played a ton.

I managed to get into some games playing on the original Xbox 360 version. There were 1,100 people playing. Wow. Which I love, but because it has fairly rigid skill-based matchmaking,

nobody was playing the free-for-all unranked stuff i had to wait for quite some time uh so i only managed to get into a few games as slow as the uh single player feels like as soon as i got back in that multiplayer i was like oh yeah that's right this is fun i played crazy king just like on one map that i instantly remembered and was like oh okay i i i I, I, I get this now. Uh, shooting it,

playing this right after cod is interesting. Cause you have to shoot somebody so much to kill them, uh, in, in this game. Uh, for, for all my problems with the,

with the campaign, like it really only took a single match for me to remember like why I got so, so, so, so deep into this game. I wish I could dip back into the forge and really relive some of those classics. People would build warthog obstacle courses. I would love to revisit some of that shit.

Do we all agree that Modern Warfare is better than Halo 3, the campaigns? Ooh. Yes. The campaign, unquestionably. Definitely the campaign, not a question but the the like full product i mean that's like that's tricky because again like that's hard that's a more contextual but i feel like going back the i feel like the three i know we've only done first person portals

like not technically a shooter i guess but um i feel like the other three have held up so much better than this yeah and i think that's because, like, if you look at games like Call of Duty and how it's evolved, like, it hasn't changed that much. It was close. It was close. Modern Warfare was close to what, like, I do not want to undersell, like,

how much they have, like, fixed and innovated. Sure. The many, many teams who have worked on Call of Duty games, like, have done some cool shit. But it's more nuanced. But, but but well yeah it's more nuanced the the bones are so visible and they are still so good the the quick katie or the the quick uh time to death like stuff like that game has a feel that was fairly well like ironed out right even even when modern warfare came out halo 3 playing that in the

context of how many the the hundreds of hours i've spent playing destiny 1 and 2 i could not help but think like wow this is like 10 of what they have what they have like they have done so much to this uh since since since halo 3 came i also just get the sense playing this game in pretty much i don't know like every microsoft first party game since this game came out microsoft seems so afraid of letting its like biggest ip evolve to like it being a huge detriment and halo 3 feels like more halo in a lot of ways halo odst and reach feel like the last time that we saw somewhat experimentation i think odst goes one way in this like weird jazzy open world thing that doesn't quite work but is interesting reach goes the other way in this big action set piece

you know spectacular that does its own thing and then we get back to we get these like three four three industries games of four and five that are just like back to the more halo thing and i'm not saying those games are bad i'm just saying boy are they just more halo and gears of war has the similar problem i mean the newest gears of work again it does a little bit more experimentation but holy cow are these games loyal to whenever they first became popular and i think they feel i mean like they i have not felt the the idea that i would not finish halo 5 back in this era in 2007 would have been kind of unthinkable to me but like i feel like you play a couple hours of those games and you like yeah get it you get it uh did anybody else was any i know maybe infinite

will be different though that's what i'm doing for that it it feels like they didn't call it halo 6 so but but at the same time like i don't know this game made me want to put out an apb on halo infinite like it's pretty fucking weird that we don't know anything about halo very weird it's quite strange okay yeah everything i've heard about that game is like all over the place um that's really in a bad way but i think i think they you know once destiny popped uh i think there was a lot of soul searching um and i'm sure like a lot of internal debates of like okay but seriously what are we gonna do with this franchise like we have to do something they just made it infinite piece of cake that's true they

just they put an infinite on it what's your guys favorite um halo three weapons i'll give you two because you can do a you can dual wield and you can have one on your back uh i really like the uh the dual wielding smg uh just like the human smg is is pretty fun And I mean, you can't really, what is the battle rifle? I forget what it has a cool acronym. It's like the BR something. Yeah, I think the Covenant Carbine is very good. And I like the, not the Needler, but the other one that shoots like shards.

Oh, the spike gun, yeah. Yeah, the dual wielding spikers is great. Needler and the hammer. Oh, the hammer gun. The spike gun, yeah. Yeah, dual wielding spikers is great. Needler and the hammer. Oh, the hammer is quite good. It's a fun hammer. Okay, well. Mine's the needler. You can't beat it.

It's just so fun. I mean, there's no aiming. You just hold it down. Yeah, good. Exactly. And my wife, when we were first dating, used to call it the stegosaurus gun. I have very fond memories of that.

There was a song stegosaurus gun is coming to get you stegosaurus gun oh yeah man that's two halo song where's the album listen 343 call me baby yeah i got two two original tracks just in this episode for free um do we feel like it's time maybe to take a break and move on with our lives? Yeah. How does that grab y'all? Yes, please. Hey, everybody. Welcome back.

We have no shortage of discussion about Halo that you are, you, the people are demanding. And of course, it is our pleasure to deliver. Chris, let's talk about Halo. Well, we're not going to actually. None of the questions about Halo. I'm not going to actually none of the questions about halo i'm just gonna pop up for the mailbag honestly even better if i could say that it's like even better that we're not uh open up mailbag uh from mike imagine you are the owner of a cursed arcade machine one which you can never get rid of and never turns off and is always in a

prominent room in your home where it beckons to strangers who then ask you about it what machine would you want it to be uh oh fuck i mean it would have to be a game that has a decent like splash screen right like there's a lot of arcade games have silent splash screens for this like exact reason like the you know it shows the title but there's a lot of arcade games have silent splash screens for this, like, exact reason. Like, the, you know, it shows the title, but there's no sound, because if every arcade machine played, like, the theme song to the game as loud as possible, it would be a fucking nightmare. Uh,

phew, I don't know. Yeah, well, let me ask you, would it be inappropriate to have that, um, fortune-telling lady that was in all the movie theaters asking for quarters? Would that Probably, that would not be great. So yeah, NBA Jam. NBA Jam is where my mind went,

but then I remembered that the, when you left that game running or the arcade machine running, all you would hear is just the sound effects of the basketball game. Yeah, creepy. So you, like, I'm imagining sitting in my office and just hearing like.

the sound effects of the basketball game. Creepy. So you, like I'm imagining sitting in my office and just hearing like, he's heating up. Like, I don't want that. I think I would want it to be Daytona USA.

Oh my God. Daytona. All day. All night. Justin, do you ever think about the fact that the high school that we went to had a Daytonaa usa machine and it's so good there was like a student school worth it yeah but not quite but yeah man you'd be eating in the lunchroom hear that thing echoing down the hallways uh this is uh from centarius it's been about a month and a half since animal crossing was released

are any of y'all still fully invested in it i I am not, but I know some of you deeply are. No, not really. I mean, I have probably put 200 hours into that game. Like I've played it so much and have just kind of hit the point where I don't really, my approach to that game was so project-based and now like I would spend a lot of time on projects.

I built a green municipal power plant. That took me a while. And I finished that and I was like, oh, I beat Animal Crossing. Cool. I just don't really, until like some new stuff is added to that game, I just, I dip in every day to get my recipe,

my free recipe and that's about it. I like that you're not still playing, but you're still logging in every day. So Mazel Tov, that's good. Yeah. I am still playing, but I am starting to get to that end point because i've almost run out of free space on my island to do stuff uh i'm working on right now a gnome garden

situation uh but yeah i it is a project-based game and i think you need to make your own fun with it so i basically will like hey here's an. I can do like a fun like jazz nightclub or something like that. And again, I'm running out of acres. So, uh-oh. I've got a question from Emma. Oh, yeah, go ahead, Justin. No, I don't play it very much anymore. Oh.

Okay. Dynamite Drop It. My wife and daughter got into it enough that there was a lot of ecosystem stuff that i didn't want to get in and like gobble up all the fossils and all the resources and and do my my chores and without the chores there i don't really know what i'm logging i kind of like after kk slider came i was like and i got terraforming after i got terraforming i was like okay i kind of got everything i need out of this um

so i don't know i i feel like they some more in god it sounds insane to say more in-game content yeah hardcore raiding uh yeah exactly slip those gunner glasses back on i do want to mention i uh played over the weekend with my niece who is six years old, and she has her own Switch, and she was playing at her house, and we were playing over FaceTime. And let me just tell you, convincing a six-year-old to buy something called a pocket organizer is very difficult.

I'm like, no, no, no. No, this is, you're gonna, you want this. This is more inventory space. And she'll be like, I have a garden. And I'll be like, yeah, but don't you want to hold more flowers? She'll be like, no, I'm good. And that is infuriating. Drag her, Russ.

Yeah, get her, bud. A question from Emma. How did you guys meet? Justin? Whoa. I mean, I feel like you probably know this. I mean mean we all know it the best but i i i i'm you and griffin you met each other through uh well griffin and i have a family connection there um the because we're related so that one's easy i'm trying to actually think i feel like

i don't think i met russ and Chris until Polygon like until we had that first meeting at Polygon I remember we hung out a couple times just seeing each other I think were you guys both at UGO? Yes and I would see you guys at like events and stuff

but that was sort of where that's like the earliest memory I have yeah I briefly wrote reviews for Justin at Joystick yeah there wasn't like a momentous thing it was just because obviously with Twitter and everything like that

like you know everyone in the industry sort of knows each other just kind of but yeah and first time was probably probably right an event for justin and griffin uh yeah dawn did you freelance for us russ i think i wrote one maybe one piece for joystick in between jobs at one point yeah weird and then fresh and i met at ugo at ugo yes many many moons ago many many many. Last question. This is from Kylo Ren.

Who is a better kisser, Master Chief or Mario? Mario. Mario. It's Mario. Like, obviously. Do we know that, though? Do we know that? Because Master Chief does take off his helmet just because it's not shown in the game.

That's dog shit. Listen, he doesn't fucking... That's dog shit. He may take off his helmet from time to time, but he's not making himself accessible. He may be able to deliver the single greatest smooch in the entire fucking galaxy, but if he's not putting himself out there,

if he's not making himself available sort of physically and emotionally, then what's it fucking... Why does it matter? He's not making himself available sort of physically and emotionally, then what's it fucking, why does it matter? He's not available. His closest relationship is a woman that lives in his brain, and you're never going to compete with that. I mean, you're not.

You're not going to be able to compete with that level of intimacy. Problem, problem, though. I think you're thinking of it from who would be better, right? But I'm thinking of it from who is less worse. And I've heard that Mario never washes his mustache. So it carries decades of food stink. Apocryphal.

Apocryphal. Apocryphal. Don't come in here bringing your fucking archive of our own bullshit in here. That's nothing. He washes it every day. You know what I'm thinking about, though? I've never seen him kiss. I've only seen him be kissed by Princess Peach.

And he's kissing. Man, maybe he doesn't understand how it works. Maybe that's why he gets so excited when Princess Peach kisses him. Cause he's like, what the fuck did you just do with your mouth? That's crazy. It's also the height differential

makes it very difficult for him to be the aggressor in that situation. Aggressor. Maybe not the right word, but he would need a stool. Probably not. Almost certainly not the right word, I would say. Hachimachi.

What do we got for next week? Oh, boy. This is the one. This is a good one. We're going to do Uncharted and God of War 2 we're gonna go we're gonna be a bunch

of Sony ponies gonna get real talk about some Sony games how the fuck don't know how to play these yeah Uncharted I mean

the Nathan Drake collection is on PS4 I think yeah right so like that's that's doable might be PS Now too right yeah PS Now is gonna be

the easiest way to do it you can get a seven week free trial of PS Now on PC that's doable. Might be PS Now, too, right? Yeah, PS Now is going to be the easiest way to do it. You can get a seven-week free trial of PS Now on PC. That's generous. Yeah, and then you can play Uncharted in the Nathan Drake Collection, and you can play God of War 2. They're both right there. I mean, they literally released Uncharted Collection

for free to everyone because of the situation. Yeah, we tweeted that out, so hopefully some folks downloaded it before they took that down. So we addressed the fact that we were going to do Assassin's Creed and have recently discovered that it is not playable on the internet anywhere?

Yeah, so that was the plan, was to do Assassin's Creed 1, and we have had considerable trouble getting a controller to work with it on pc there are apparently hacks so far none of them have worked for us assassin's creed is bad but it's like such a bummer how hard it is to play some of these games like from just from a preservation and cultural perspective it's like it's it kind of bumps me out yeah i i think it's funny with how PC gamers always talk about like well you know everything's backward

compatible on PC and it's like mmm not always not really GOG wouldn't need to exist if everything was truly backward compatible and then all these like dopey hacks that we've had to do for nearly every game just to get them to run

the fucking 2016 remaster of Bioshock is like, dude, look how wide your fucking screen is. I'm flipping out. You expect me to run a game? Would you Kylie get a smaller screen? There's so much to fill up. I don't even know what to put over here.

Yeah. I think that's it. Everybody. But yeah, that's it. But. But yeah. That's it. That's it. But check those games out and we will join with you there again. If you want to send us mail about them, mail at besties.fan is the address to do

that. You can also follow us for free at Spotify if you follow that link. Besties.fan. It's a great way to share the show too. Just besties.fan. It's easy great way to share the show too. Just Besties not fan. It's easy. Just do that. I also want to mention like there are actually new games coming out in the semi-year future.

Which is pretty psyched. I'm pretty psyched. Minecraft Dungeons comes out next week. And everything I've seen about that game weirdly gets me excited for Minecraft Dungeons. It looks like a fucking cool like Diablo hack and slash loot game. It looks fun if you have not looked into it. And also, obviously, Last of Us 2 comes out in June, I want to say, and then Ghost of Tsushima,

as well as the game that I am most excited for, fucking Paper Mario Origami King, or whatever it's called, looks sick as hell. Yeah, I can't wait. So there are actually games coming out. So we will definitely, as are actually games coming out so we will definitely as the new games come out we will be uh returning to that uh so you don't have to worry about missing out on those also man eater comes out in two days and i uh legally am not allowed to say anything

about it but i will say that it comes out in two days i mean if it comes out in two days you are because we we can see you blink a number of times between one and ten of what your official rating of the game is. Fun factor. You know Polygon doesn't do review scores. For reviewers' tilt, can you just lean to one side or the other? I bet our listeners fucking love GamePro references from 1994. Stick out your tongue to represent the fun factor

of it and i'll sort of what is sushi x thing okay we're a hundred thousand years old we are mummies uh thanks for listening be sure to join us again next time for the besties 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 Dorff. Besties!