The Besties - It's Necromorphin' Time with Dead Space

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Join us as we revisit the USG Ishimura, the pride of Earth's planet-cracking operations and, also, the extremely monster-infested setting of EA's remake of their classic survival horror title Dead Space. Does it still hold up some 15 years after its initial release? (Spoiler alert: Yes. Yes it does.)Also discussed: Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Mario 64, Half-Life, Fable, Burnout 3: Takedown, Metal Gear Solid, Metroid Prime, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Freelancer, Time's Ours, You Pod to Win the Game, My Perfect Console, Teardown, Vampire Survivors, Paul T. Goldman, The Traitors, Yakuza: Like a Dragon 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!

If you found my, I don't want to say body. So if you just like found me. Of course. On the issue. No, no, no, no. If you just found me on the USG Isimora and I was just lying down and I might have been sleeping. Maybe I was taking a nap. I stomp you.

I stomp you. Stomp him. Yeah, but you don't need to say anything else. Immediately I stomp you. I'm just. No, and it's not, are you alive or dead? Get his credits. Get his credits.

They're credits. They're credits in your body, and I want them. Stomp, stomp, stomp. How long would you wait? Would you ask a question? So you're asking, if I came across your body on the USS Ishimura, would I check? Do you think that while I'm playing Dead Space,

I'm going around and checking on every body? Because there's a lot. Yeah, and a lot of them look normal. They don't look like necromorphs. They just look like people that are just lying there. You're not going to ask, hey, you just taking a little snooze? Well, no, because there wasn't a moment in the game where one of the bodies sat up and was like, oh yeah what the fuck happened whoa everything's totally scary here there was

everybody's friend is a monster every every text log every person you chat with like i have a friend and you're like let me guess it's a monster now and they're like it's a monster now i mean there's the lady in medical that is just lying there and she's like hey there's some stuff in here you might need and watch out there's monsters and she dies immediately thereafter she dies pretty quick yeah pretty much if you if you see a human being in dead space they're not gonna be there for very first okay so after she died how long did it take you before you stomped her? Instantly?

What kind of question is that? She has credits in her gut. There's credits. There could be a, there could be a stasis charge. I'm just saying, I think Isaac might be quick to stomp, is what I'm saying.

Russ, if you have a stasis charge inside of you, you have to tell us it's the law. It's deep down in there. He's got the credits, credits, credits credits credits down in his guts hey down in his guts down in his guts my name is justin mcroy and i know the best game of the week yeah man my name is griffin mcroy i know the best game of the week my name is christopher thomas plant and this game fucking rules my name is ross rushing i know the best game of the week welcome the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive inter game meant it is a game club

it's a video game club and by listening you have joined our ranks welcome uh dues are due with sheila before the end of the month today we are going to be talking about a new entry in an old series that is actually old in his soul. It's got an old soul. It's Dead Space. But what's that? Dead Space is a remake of the action horror game from 2008, which itself is inspired by basically John Carpenter's The Thing Meets Alien. You play as Isaac walking through an abandoned mining station, looking for your lost love,

and shooting off the limbs of, I don't know, Lovecraftian space monsters. We're gonna talk a lot more about it. There's a lot more to say, but first we're gonna take a brief commercial break. Planned, I was really excited when I could recognize the kanji for ishimura what does it say well i mean literally translated it's like rock village

i think it's more commonly i did a little googling uh not content to trust my own grasp of the japanese language i decided to do a littleling. It looks like it's most commonly a last name issue where it does not seem to be a vocab. So do you feel like this gave you a unique game fact? Oh, I was going to say like a cheat. I think being able to read the kanji, it's like a cheat code, kind of. Because you're operating with more information than-

You are the game genie now. Yeah. Kind of. Okay. Because you're operating with more information than... You are the game genie now. Yeah. This game, y'all, this game is a really, really good game. I think, and it made me remember how much I loved

and have completely forgotten the original Dead Space. So the original Dead Space came out in 2008, right? Right. Like 15 years ago which is it feels i know more recent that's horrifying yeah um but it it's also like i'm trying to think has there ever been a this feels like one of the more recent like full remakes now i'm not talking about like an hd remaster whatever it is this is talking about there's tons of these they they keep happening do you mean you said more recent and yeah no so i'm talking about like so

we've seen remakes for final fantasy 7 we've seen remakes for resident evil games but all those are like 90s games what about demon souls or last of us are you kidding kidding? Oh, yeah. I mean, Last of Us. Yeah, no, you're right. You can just start over if you want. Demon's Souls is a good point. Never mind. You could... Yeah, Last of Us. I know about video games.

And Last of Us. Yeah, fair. This is a remake. It is... They have the original... Does anybody know what the original Dead Space was built in? Oh, the Tiger Woods engine.

Yeah, the Tiger Woods engine. I love that. Yeah, so they've rebuilt it in Frostbite. And from what I saw in, like, comparison videos and stuff that y'all sent around, it looks like the bones are all still there. They wanted to stay true to the layout and stuff, but it seems like they've made some shifts in, like, the geometry of the ship to make it make a little bit more sense because loading isn't as much of an issue?

The biggest change they made was that the original game was level-based so that you would literally have load screens when you were going from level to level. Some of those are like hidden load screens, like you're going down an elevator and it would load the next area. And some of them are like literal load screens when you like use the tram and you go to medical or whatever area you're going to.

Here, the entire ship is basically streamed in such that you won't see any loading. And there are even areas where previously you had to take the tram and now there's just a door and you end up in that area. So it makes the whole thing feel pretty much like a Metroidvania because you can can really just backtrack to wherever you'd like and that's pretty fucking cool this okay okay okay i think this is brilliant and i hope a whole bunch of modern games can learn from this which is old school level design is in fact very good and the problem with stuff like dead space was the load screens not that they weren't open world and i love that this game like it's effectively old school level design with you know like spoked wheel or the elevator effect where you're like okay do i want to go to level one or quite literally on an elevator level one two three four or do i want to go you know down

the spoked wheel of like four different paths and down each of those is a traditional great very thoughtful video game level and that is awesome and it made me realize how uh how little of that i feel like i get these days because everything has really shifted to open world game design style i also think we would be remiss if we did not mention the fact that this whole seamless uh you know no loading uh illusion is kind of in enhanced by all of the like diegetic interface displays like there is no there is no ui in the game there's like it did god of war before god of war yeah sure there's no like when you pause the game. It did God of War before God of War. Yeah, sure. There's no, like, when you pause the game, you are opening up, like, a holographic projection

that appears in front of you, and you, like, sort your inventory and stuff like that. Your health is displayed on, like, this weird meter on your back. And that was all stuff that was in the original Dead Space. I was going to say, something that struck me, sort of dovetailing with that point, something that struck me watching comparison videos between the two is this is also a reminder of the triumph of like artistic design over technical power, pure power. Because if you look at the art design for the first one it still looks pretty cool yeah fuck yeah isaac's armor makes him look like a dork and it still makes him look like a dork but like it it it looks like a world like it still is very plausible and they made a lot of

really good choices with how like the world would look that still like holds up pretty good i mean yeah obviously the remake is leaps and bounds but like uh it's working off a really really good base yes well to the point that it feels so ahead of its time that it feels more natural and especially watching those comparison videos it feels more natural in 2023 it looks like a game for now and going back and watching the old game alongside it it looks like one of those like youtuber d makes yeah and i say that as like a huge compliment it it it looks like they found a way to make a 2023 game in 2008 yeah the bones are very feel still very modern which is almost

why it was surprising when they announced the remake because it's like i don't think you need to change that much about this game to make it feel modern and it's true like they didn't you know obviously they totally revamped the graphics um and we talked about those streaming aspects but the core gameplay is let's let's talk about let's talk about the core gameplay because it's it is still my favorite like way of interacting with a survival horror game it's it is uh largely predicated on you chopping off monster bits yeah uh as as the monsters have the most shootable limbs guys y'all have no idea begging for it and and that's very fun it's very fun to chop up a monster that is trying to destroy you uh it also does the resource management stuff really well there's some like rubber banding that's happening like i found that when i had a

bunch of ammo and credits on me like i was finding garbage but if you really get in dire straits usually the game will help you out with some some good drops here and there but also uh you get kinesis which lets you toss objects at uh at the necromorphs including their own sharpened limbs to pin them against the walls and so all of this stuff that like you know i i love resident evil 4 and in resident evil 4 especially the early game you you can't just be you know firing off your your your bullets non-stop or you'll run out because of the scarcity that's in the game. But that's kind of formulaic, right?

That just means shoot the guy once in the head to stun him and then get close, kick him and stomp him while they're down. And you do that over and over and over again and you reach the end of the game with as much resources as you need. This game is much more improvisational. It's way more creative with the solutions that you are able to do. I really like how, I'm not the biggest fan of survival horror action as a rule. It's not my favorite.

And a lot of it's because it doesn't feel good. The tension comes from, man, it feels bad to shoot these guns. What's interesting to me about Dead Space is you like all the guns are great. Like you if you're willing to spend the ammo, you like no monster is a problem, right? Like even a boss, if you've saved up some some good, you know, explosive weaponry is not going to be a huge deal. So it really is. It lets you like get down to that core of survival horror, which is like resource management.

It's like, how much ammo are you going to waste on this thing? Because you can beat it. You actually want to spend your ammo because at the end of the day, you still have the telekinesis, the ability to like throw objects. So like in a lot of these types of games, I end up sitting on the most enjoyable

and fun weapons because it's like well you know i never know when i'm gonna need that ammo right we're here a mix of like the rubber banding the telekinesis it's like well whatever if i if i lose that i have like 12 other awesome and that the base weapon is arguably the best weapon in the game right for sure and so like there's there's another thing though the game does that makes all of this click into place and that's when you lose it gives you a totally fucked up buck wild death animation every time that makes it like oh shit like i was trying to be a little too prudent with my ammunition there i'll own that i'll own that and one of those weird little uh you know spitting monsters you know barfed its dissolving acid into my face or whatever there were there were areas i

did six or seven times because i was trying to do it in a cheap way yeah i'm just banging my head against like damn it justin just take out your flamethrower you've got two full tanks of gas and fucking annihilate these dudes. It's such a, the way this game handles, like, I guess gore, right? Like, the way this game handles that is so. It's very drippy. It's very drippy. It's very, like, cartoonish and over the top in a way that, like, the game earns. It is so cohesively gross from start to finish that the way it revels in it kind of protects it from feeling gross or bad to play.

It is a celebration of dismemberment. It feels like practical effects. Yeah, it does. It's wild. There's a moment early on when you're running away from it's like the first big scare in the game is you're running away with a bunch of monsters. You run into an elevator. You hit the button to shut the elevator doors. You turn around and one of the monsters bust through the elevator doors and then they slam shut, cutting the monster in half.

And you are. It's like someone took a bucket of water, but in this case it's alien gore, and just throws all over the elevator. It's this amazingly funny moment of relief, and that just keeps playing out over and over and over again throughout this entire thing. It's also sort of the meta, I guess, of the game

or the narrative really gels really well with making the lead character an engineer. It's a very pleasant, like it's very satisfying to go from like area to area, just like fixing stuff. It feels like an RPG in that way. You are playing as an engineer and everything you do is very engineer true to an engineer when all of your weapons too and the weapons are and i like that like whenever isaac's talking about doing something

it's almost no it's never like well i'm gonna have to shoot through a lot of fucking dudes it's always like man i'm gonna have to get this i want to go to this tank. I got to turn this shit on. Like, he acts like a fucking engineer. Like, the monsters are really a secondary consideration to the other dumb shit he's got to do. Which in hindsight tracks why he's so quick to stomp on people because he's just an engineer and he's not really thinking about anything else beyond the end result, right?

In the parts, yeah. Sorry, very quickly before we get off the weapons, can each of you share what your weapon of choice has been i mean it varies depending on the situation but line gun has always been my line line gun is my jam being able to line gun is great because it's basically a huge version of the plasma cutter that you start the game with yeah it's very very strong when you use it as a weapon but if you have like an army running at you, you can also throw down some laser traps that you can just turn a hallway into a fucking slap chop.

Like a tower defense game. Yeah, and not even a tower defense game. That belies some level of strategy required. You can just turn it into a blender that the enemies walk through, and then you collect their great their great credits and ammunition um i want to mention for people that are like hesitant to play scary games yes i think this is actually not a bad option because you can dial down the difficulty and

really just play it like you know like you're watching aliens which is to say we play it like an action game yeah and you don't have to worry about resources you'll get a ton you don't have to you know you'll get all the upgrades everything like that and you can just enjoy the romp of it um you know you might still get jump scared here and there don't wear don't wear headphones if you're gonna do that yeah well you kind of the sound design in this game is i mean it's great but it will make you very scared i get that what i wanted to mention is there is a whole content warning setting that you can turn on there's a content warning at the top of the game that is frankly

like great because the you know this game's got gore galore but it also uh handles you know psychosis and mental health the idea is that this marker that has been sort of transforming people into these monsters also makes them go crazy dude and the way that it handles that is pretty blunt i would say uh but not only does it give you this warning up front of just like hey we're gonna drop the ball here uh it also allows you to turn on this setting where uh if everybody's filling frosting so if everybody's an arm off frosting just out if it's about to show a scene that has you know self-harm or some and there is a lot of those uh it it shows a little icon in the corner you can turn this on and then you can i think you can choose to like just skip that sequence.

Speedrunners, listen up. Speedrunners, check it out. Any percent. I think that's pretty... Yeah, that's great. Pretty rad. It's not just... People give shit, I mean, assholes give stuff like this

a hard time saying it's just like... Snowflakes can't handle it. But the way that they have sort of integrated it into the game experience itself is really something else. I was shocked to see a game like this do that. It's a good solution for older games too because the self-harm stuff in this game sucks it doesn't need to be

there anyway like it's not adding a lot um we saw this it's cheap and it's fucking lazy every time yes yeah we we saw it with um uh stanley parable last year um which you know maybe that works maybe i don't know i mean but it better. It is a trope of horror movies, certainly. No, it is, but, you know, Event Horizon. Yes, but it's done much better. Like, it is completely divorced from the plot here. Sure.

It is literally background color. It didn't need to be there, I agree. And I think it's like, it's nice to have that option for something like this where it's like, you truly don't need it. So if it does make you uncomfortable, great. great i mean you should have this option i think either way but especially with this game i i was very happy to see it there i i want to mention something griffin briefly talked about the story and this is a dead space series i mean there's been spinoffs but predominantly there's three games and these are three sci-fi games and i don't think

i can think of another sci-fi video game series that has a more cogent narrative than dead space it is not i mean dead space three gets i mean it gets a little no i realize if you don't want to necessarily care and that's like for people that don't want to take the time to like worry about what's happening. But I think more so than like Halo, Mass Effect, like the big ones, I understand what is like what the marker is, who the Unitology Church is, why they're doing things. Like everyone has a logic behind them that isn't just like alien space magic and i think that's great and pretty impressive and very hard to pull off very rare the the also this game is broken up into chapters and each chapter takes place usually on a different sort of sector of the ship and each one really has its own personality and the things that you have to do on that sector are like logical in a way so

like when you're in mining you're having to go around and disable these uh you know uh tethers that are holding up this huge chunk of planet that you've cracked up or if you're in hydroponics there are all of these like mutant spore blasting humans that you have to uh inject this enzyme into uh it keeps it all from being like kind of samey honestly like it does the thing that i think the later resident evil game specifically resident evil village did which is just like each level is like its own self-contained horror scenario yeah bioshock is another example of that i think yeah i i i did not maybe it's just because like i had forgotten how much i liked this game i beat this shit over the course of like three breathless delightful evenings uh this is this is a i have not enjoyed a game

like this in a very fucking long time and i would not be surprised if this cracks my my goatee list uh well and i would also say i don't think this will be the you know i think this given the fact that it was critically well received and probably selling pretty well i think 100 we're gonna see two and three come out in the same engine and they're more or less just gonna follow the same model that capcom did with the resident evil games where they built this thing to you know scale and cover the new games and who knows maybe that'll mean more dead space after that but maybe it's very encouraging let's take a quick break and when we get back we'll talk about uh some other games that we'd like to see get this treatment?

So I feel like we are in an age, and we were just talking about it at the beginning of the first segment, about how there are these games that like mechanically still feel great. They don't feel aged, but they could still use an update. Dead Space is certainly one of the bigger ones. So the question is, are there games that spring to mind that were like great games still fun to play today but could certainly use like some you know refreshing or a new coat of paint or something before we name games can i kind of like maybe set a boundary for it sure which is like why why does this work because you know i mean like there are a lot of games that can get remakes and it feels like cash grabs right or it feels like why are we getting this and i i'm curious for y'all why this one like really sings or you know demon souls on ps5 like what is it that makes one of these really work and others not?

I have a feeling about this that I don't think I realized when I was actively playing it, but definitely going back and looking at some of these comparisons. This, to me, feels more like a, okay, so if you're thinking about movies and someone's restoring a film, thinking about movies and someone's restoring a film then the restoration that's going to happen is going to be like removing detritus from the image that is accumulated on the celluloid and like you know sometimes remixing the sound effects and the music and stuff but it's about the experience of seeing it and hearing it because that's how you interact with the movie and as people saw it and heard it the first day it came out in a movie theater right exactly yes yes yes so do you think that's this though well so here's what i'm saying though when you're playing it when you're talking about restoring a video game you can't just say

well we'll make the graphics and the sound more that like they need to be it is i think it's also like what are some little things that we can do to make it feel more applicable? So it's like not just updating and cleaning and polishing the sound, but like, how can we make this feel as seamless as it did 15 years ago in terms of like video game mechanics and design? I was looking at one of the things I noticed the tanks, right? looking at one of the the things i noticed the tanks right the tanks uh the red tanks that you shoot that explode have the same design in the original and in the remake that's a very small thing to keep but that to me feels like someone who is respectful of the choices that were made before where a lot of these remakes just feel like and we'll we'll make our own textures, we'll make our own shit. It's gonna look like, you know,

the levels will be kind of like you remember, but this to me really does, it keeps so much of the original that it feels like a restoration from a gameplay perspective, where it's like, we're not gonna reinvent anything. It's just like, let us clean it up. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I guess the comparison would be like, and this is a weighted comparison but the star wars re-releases that came out in the 90s of the original trilogy of star wars right and obviously not all those were great they added like bad cantina cg scenes and stuff like that but they also added like pretty iconic like x-wing shots and whatever so that's to me it doesn't feel like oh they just went in and like cleaned up the film like they they did significant work here such that it's not just like an hd re-release yeah but you're also not like those sounds are going to be mixed like okay to use those bad things as an example, right? Changing how it looked and changing big stuff,

that's not a restoration. But the updating the surround, so it's like Dolby compliant and is closer to what you are used to from, it's not going to feel like you watched Star Wars the first time if it sounds a lot worse than the movies that you're used to seeing in the theater now, right?

So how do you make it, there are going to have to be updates in that sense. Right. Griffin, what were you going to say? Yeah. I think to answer the original question, the game I would most like this to happen to is Fable 1, 2, and 3.

Sorry, wait. Fable 1, 2, and 3. Fable one and two okay not three fable one and two i think that those games fit the bill of being fun objectively having a design that was maybe a little too ambitious for the like tech of the time to really fulfill uh and with a uh an experience that looks better and sounds better and feels better could could definitely stand the test of time i think the only other game i'm thinking of like the xbox 360 era for me that is like the unplumbed depths right now that that uh could could see more stuff like this i think of that i think of uh burnout three takedown oh yeah modern remake of of that using just the same have it feel the

same have the experience of crashing into shit and and all of the you know special races and stuff you could do in that game uh but but have it look and feel like a modern game like those those are the two that i guess three that that jumped to mind i think you know you talk about unplumbed depths i think a lot of the nintendo canon is like kind of ready and waiting for this the only recent example that like jumps to mind is the remake of uh link kirby but see i don't think of those because those were right right like the bet and uh kirby superstar uh six in one that but that package on the snes right classic amazing kirby game maybe the best but also like they nailed it if that game

felt as good as it needs to feel i feel like the the generation of hardware the playstation 3 xbox 360 generation of hardware had a lot of games on it where the developers had these huge fucking ideas and thought like well this is as good as games hardware is gonna get so it's it's time but really uh you know pretty quickly that generation got swallowed up. And now I think we could see some really, really satisfying fulfillments of those original visions on modern gaming hardware. solid because i think there are two things that i want or where i think a game needs this sort of thing and one is has the the basics of control or experience changed so dramatically that it's it is unenjoyable to go back and play the original and i think tank control similar with resident evil is a perfect example of that i think the the other thing is, and this is where Dead Space really clicks for me in a way that maybe Last of Us doesn't as much. What is the main goal or, you know, I guess, graphical power or computing power of a new generation? And right now,

the two big things that you get are dramatically improved physics and dramatically improved lighting, thanks to things like ray tracing, but just i mean lighting in general has just dramatically improved and uh a game like metal gear solid would benefit from both of those things a ton um and yeah and i think dead space is a perfect example of i mean hard to think of a game that benefits more from yeah we made the controls a little bit nicer. And wow, does this game look good when you actually throw modern lighting at it? Well, the Metal Gear Solid example is interesting because we've seen what slightly better controls in a Metal Gear Solid game looks like in Twin Snakes. And obviously, they made other issues with it.

But those improved first-person aiming, et cetera, essentially broke Metal Gear Solid. Like, it didn't work. And you would have to do what happened with resident evil and dead space right which is right you have to start making more significant changes yeah i think more more so with resident evil like resident evil 2 almost completely re-envisioned how that game played um to make it work and i think you would need to do something like that for metal Gear Solid. Someone said there's only like something like 30 total guards in Metal Gear Solid. Like the guys that are walking around. There's like just a few dozen. And it, you know, the second you give anyone capable controls, it does not really scale.

So they would need to be a, you know, I know it's been rumored for a while. So it might happen, but it would need to be a you know i know it's been rumored for a while so it might happen but it would need to be a pretty major overhaul there's nothing new under the sun right a lot of these are ideas that have been like bandied about or rumored or or announced and canceled whatever uh i metroid prime is a trilogy that i would love this treatment for um yeah there's a lot of stuff in that era where they were making concessions to the, the platform, right?

You know, we specific choices, silent, whole shuttered memories is another one that I think about that, that, you know, is an amazing game that has a lot of great stuff in it that I embedding would feel pretty rough to go back to.

The only other one that kind of struck me that is a franchise that we haven't seen in a long time, but I think would be really cool to see be revisited, and that's Prince of Persia, The Sands of Time. Fuck yes. Oh, that's a great pick. Oh, man. That would be really, those were really fun the first time you played them. And I feel like with the amount of power you had, if you didn't play these, they were a, it's an update of a very old series from Broderbund. 2003, I think Prince of Persia, The Sands of Time was. And it was a third-person action game

where the big gimmick was you had this dagger that could reverse time. And that was like a resource that you were marshalling. So if something didn't go your way, you could try it again, spend time backwards and try it again. It was very cool. And I bet with modern technology,

that could be really reinvigorated. They canceled the pre-orders for that, right? Of the remake? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think they, I think when you see these, you will frequently see them in games that have series to them.

So Dead Space, Mass Effect, Last of Us. Those are the most common ones because it allows for them to scale that work to future games so you know they do the resident evil 2 remake they can do three they can do four they can do throughout um and yeah it just kind of uh gives them more a room to play with the engine that they've built for the modern stuff the website for these is still up um for sands of time for sands of time ubisoft says it's still happening but they canceled the pre-order they also say beyond good and evil 2 is still happening yeah they say let's let's

ubisoft says a lot of things i mean i think that's probably uh i want i wanted to call out just a few of them that jumped to my mind. I think Ocarina of Time dying for a Redux. I mean, the 3DS remake of that was perfect, though. I don't know. But I think the core of Ocarina of Time, sorry, is still pretty stodgy in a lot of ways. It's tough. It is very stiff and linear and could could use an update i think mario

64 like imagine mario 64 but with the uh mobility options that you have in like a mario odyssey and the last one there may or may not be a the the the fully bootable version of mario 64 on pc that is pretty close to what you're asking for yeah uh i also want to mention uh the half-life series um i think yeah would really do extremely well with these sorts of remakes i thought black mesa did a pretty good job of that yeah that's true for half-life one i i think half-life 2 is a great example of a game that like i don't think really needs to be touched from a mechanical standpoint at least significantly, but certainly could use a new coat of paint. Oh, yeah.

Half-Life 2 with the Half-Life Alyx look. Jesus, that would be – well, I mean, or VR. That would be fucked up. I'm going to give two more. Freelancer. Really, any space shooter. uh uh freelancer really any space shooter uh that that genre has been uh underserved i think uh in in this modern era i think it's really just you know star citizen's gonna be a thing people can play one day well in that in that x-wing game that came out yeah okay yeah that's

another good example uh and that was another remake right yeah uh no the new one was that was a new game that came out a year ago and uh the first two deus ex games i think if they could somehow have those running on a modern engine those were if you've only played human revolution and whatever the other one was the first two ever played deus ex uh the first first two Deus Ex games were much more system shocky, more bio shocky, and I loved those games. Yeah, those games were great. The second one was maligned, but I actually thought it was quite good.

I thought it was really cool, yeah. Yeah. And everything that David Cage ever made. We're ready, Dave. We're ready, Dave. We're good. We don't need that. One request. Hey, Dave,, Dave. We're ready, Dave. We're good. We don't need that. One request.

Hey, Dave, one request. Don't change a word. That's the one thing about it. I need the original script, original voice. Oh, boy. And maybe remove yourself from all projects. Yeah. So you can spend time on the other projects.

Of being an asshole. Fahrenheit 2. We're ready. We're ready.. Fahrenheit 2. We're ready. We're ready. America's ready. We're ready, David. We love you, David. No, we don't.

We don't. We super don't. Hey. He's terrible. Hey, David, we stan. We don't. Just to be really clear, he's terrible.

We stan in Unproblematic Cage. We love the man. Not a good person. Not a good person. Repeated sued anyway should we talk about honorable mentions yeah i would love to fucking get anything else going on the podcast sounds great great fresh dick what are you playing okay so teardown which is a game i've talked about quite a bit uh has a new free expansion that added five new missions to the game and new tools to uh blow shit up with uh teardown just a quick refresher it's the voxel based physics game where you basically have to

do heists within a certain amount of time and you make these paths through buildings using construction materials to like blow holes and walls and stuff like that to make these like perfectly you know speedy paths through these environments super satisfying super fun works great on steam deck for what it's worth um and this expansion is completely free for people that own it. They also support Steam Workshop. So there are a ton of awesome mods for Teardown, including one that I downloaded yesterday called Comet, where anywhere you click, a comet, giant comet, falls from the sky and just like fucking annihilates anything that gets in its way.

And it probably wouldn't surprise you that the Steam Deck drops down to about three frames a second, but it's totally worth it and amazing and super cool. So highly recommend it. I, having recently finished my journey through the Dragon Quest series, which was a real delight, I have picked up and am now enjoying much more Yakuza Like a Dragon.

The Dragon Quest inspired entry, the turn-based RPG entry into the Yakuza franchise. Are you playing that on Steam Deck? I am playing that on Steam Deck. It runs phenomenally. Seems like a good fit for that. It is. Yeah, I mean, I bounced off it the first time because one, it's a huge game and

I forget what it was competing against in my mind, but it just I wasn't willing to invest the time in it even though I really enjoyed the story. But now I'm really enjoying the story and the characters and the game mechanics because I've kind of reprogrammed my brain

having played all of the the dragon quest games in uh such such short order that game is really cool it's also turn-based yeah we should when we do um i mean it's not just in the game in the game the they discuss dragon quest a lot and there's an entire mini game yeah that's very funny there's there's a whole uh yeah uh very very charming game i think it's gonna be hit that dragon quest series anyway when the new like a dragon comes out we should for the b segment everybody should bring their own favorite yakuza oh boy how do i choose um the uh i really like yakuza i wish i had the patience. I just get distracted by stuff.

Speaking of, I just mainly play a lot of Vampire Survivors kind of game, guys. It's the best, like, if you ride a bike or anything, it's the best game to make your brain go away for a while so your body can do other functions. But I don't

want to talk about that. Paul T. Goldman, if you didn't finish it. Griffin, did you finish it? Fuck yeah, I finished it. How astounding is that show? Finish that. It's really good. It's only six episodes.

It's an incredible finale. It's on Peacock? It's on Peacock. So I can watch that and Poker Face. I can justify it. Oh, yeah. And the Traders. And there's one more on there waiting for you.

And it's called the traitors yeah baby uh i'm surprised i also hear killing it is good i haven't watched i don't know that one that's traitors is craig craig robinson and uh yeah no it's supposed to be right traitors is a oh okay very quick it's a reality tv show where where like 20 people who are a blend of reality stars and regular shows are basically competing for a big chunk of prize money that is added to throughout the show. Three of the people in their number are traitors, and the people in the cast are voting every night to eliminate someone they suspect of being a traitor.

And also the traitors are murdering people every night and removing them from the game. So it's a race against time, basically, for the cast to suss out who the murderous traitors are and the traitors to eliminate people who they think are a threat uh and the whole thing is is hosted by alan coming who is coming for jeff probst crown as the greatest reality show presenter like ever he is having griffin back me up here so it doesn't seem like hyperbole the absolute time of his life it one of my favorite things about this show is uh at the beginning when when they find out who is murdered they come down to breakfast and whoever doesn't come down was murdered that night

and then Alan Cumming joins them and every time he does a grand entrance down the stairwell where he barrels the camera and smiles at you as you enjoy his new outfit and that shots in every single episode and it is not

since Superman winked at me as he flew around the planet in in richard donner's original superman film have i felt such a delight at being seen he's having so much fun and the entire thing is like is a blast he's also does the thing that i think i watch a lot of reality competition shows. A lot, a lot, a lot. My favorite shit is when the host is into the game. And there are so many challenges where he comments on or is delighted by the performance of the people on the show. It's the best reality show I have seen since The Circle first aired. It is fucking essential. It is so good. I would recommend it to literally anyone. We just finished it last night and it is just start to finish.

It doesn't sound like there would be too much strategy that could go into it because, you know, it's not like the mole where they're trying to throw missions. And so people have like a ton of information to go off of just based on performance. It is entirely based on trying to figure out one who is who just is lying to you and to like why the traders are making the decisions that they make to vote off the people that they they vote off. But there's so much that goes into it. They also really smartly, the people who've been on reality TV before are, you know, there's part of the like, oh, I know them like recognition factor, but they've also got people who are really good at this. And it's really interesting to see people

like this like subcategory of like, no, they're just like really smart at how games work. Like they're very smart and like understanding the meta of this as it's developing. And like, I would say contributing to the meta of this game. Like it really legitimizes it to have a lot of really smart game players who can like intuit how the game is working and the internal logic of it. It's really, really great. Just very quick, I got a few podcasts for people.

The Kansas City Chiefs are going to the super bowl again it's fantastic you care at all about football times hours the chiefs podcast from the athletic is hosted by just some of the nicest people uh covering sports you pod to win the game uh that's yahoo's football podcast is also just great journalism like it's it's just really good sports journalism mixed with commentary. I love them both. But I know not everybody wants sports, so I have another video game podcast that is brand new

that I think you all will like. It is called My Perfect Console, and it is by Simon Parkin, who is an author and a critic. His work has appeared in The New York yorker and new york times along with euro gamer um just a really nice dude and it is uh him talking with guests like the the creator of wordle about the type of games or the specific games that they would put on their dream console um and really it's just an excuse to talk with people about their lives and what they like and what interests them and what means something to them um and it's a really good listen

cool we did it i want to thank you did it yeah i want to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcasts help me please please that is a person's name not me uh twink of gremlins and mr mercer thank you so much to everyone who wrote reviews for the besties on apple podcast three different people or should that be read as help me please please twink of gremlins mr mercer it's a haiku thank you to everyone else who wrote reviews for the besties on ipodcast we greatly greatly appreciate it what did we talk about this week

this week we talked about a whole slew of stuff we talked about dead space remake and then we talked about a bunch of games that we think deserve you know a little extra love including legend of zelda ocarina of time super mario 64 half-life 1 and 2, Fable 1, 2, and 3, Burnout Takedown, Metal Gear Solid,

Metroid Prime, Prince of Persia, Sands of Time, and Freelancer. Not three. Sorry, Fable 1 and 2 and not three. Let me be clear, Fable 1 and 2 but not three. Next week, we're talking about Hi-Fi Rush, baby.

Surprise release, release action platformer thing from the people who made uh the other thing evil within but now it's like cartoony rhythm game it's cool as hell maybe the best cell shading i've ever seen in a video game it's good um that is gonna do it for us this week on the besties make sure to join us again next week for The Besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!