The Besties - Metal Gear Solid 2's Great Switcheroo

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

This week, we're joined by GameSpot's Tamoor Hussain to discuss the second installment in the Metal Gear Solid series. How well does the game's AI-controlled vision of the future match up with our own reality two decades later? Also, what's Raiden's whole deal? Like, what's he even DOING here? Also discussed: Diablo IV beta, You Must Build a Boat, Destiny 2, Octopath Traveler 2, ForeTales, There is No Game: Wrong Dimension, Dark Souls 3, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Dredge 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!

Have I pitched flossing to you guys yet? Has that happened? Sorry? Have I pitched flossing? There's two types of flossing in this world, and there's only one that I feel like aligns with your personal brand. The Fortnite one. So I'm going to guess you're talking about the sort of dental cleansing.

It was definitely the dentist one. Because you're right, I can't do the Fortnite one. I lack rhythm. I lack music in my soul. But I have started flossing and man flossing's where it's at i'm sorry what could you could you use your dental flossing as a kind of practice to build up to dance flossing because if you think about it the kind of motions are quite similar so you just need like a musical beat. You would think so.

I've tried it. It does not translate at all. Well, actually, see, in my dance class for kids that I teach, I just give them like a little string or a little rope, and that helps them sort of visualize the motion of the flossing maneuver. Yeah. So you're not wrong. And do you throw red paint on them to mimic the blood

no i don't the parents don't like that when you do that during the kids dance classes that implies that you've tried it yeah yeah once once just once it's a bad idea flossing's great i love the idea of this dance class full of kids that can't dance for shit but they've got the cleanest teeth you've ever seen oh for sure for sure what what were you doing before now russ you say that like everyone in the world flosses and i'm the freak who like wasn't regularly flossing on a daily basis i um i'm working with the water pick over here so it's sort of a like how cool like i have floss picks in my car like i have thought what are you doing i i mean you're right you're completely right i was living in a very unhealthy oral world at that point but it's not like you saw a tick talk about it and it's like

flossing like you know you know i knew it but like you know what it was it was the brush picks that changed my life because I couldn't, nothing was happening with the string. The string wasn't doing shit. And then I started using the brush picks, and it was, like, the feeling you get when you eat popcorn and then two weeks later the popcorn kernel, like, pops out, it's that every single night for me.

Do you know that you said, like, that feeling when two weeks later it pops out, and did you notice how no one else on this call was like, oh, yes, that feeling when two weeks later it pops out? And did you notice how no one else on this call was like, oh, yes, that. Yeah, sure. That happens. Oh, yeah. Two two weeks.

That's about that's about OK. It just got it got, you know, it was in there. It was deep in there. It wasn't going anywhere. It's a lot of problems to unpack here that's what we call the besties yeah my name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of 2001, I think.

My name is Ross Frosch, and I know the best game of the week. And welcome to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest home interactive entertainment. Welcome to our special guest, who's about to to introduce himself because he's a podcasting professional. I was going to say I am not Chris Plant, so who knows what I know. Tamar Hussain, welcome to the Besties special guest. Thank you for having me. Tamar is the managing editor of GameSpot and the creative director at Giant Bomb,

two jobs that at one time were very different from one another, and now they're the same person. It's a wild, wild world, and I am at the center of it, apparently. Yeah. And it scares me. Which site do you like better? Oh, wow.

This is brutal. You know what? No, it's easy. You know. You know what? Just answer. I'm going to say it. Gamespot.com.

Wow. Okay. All right. to say it. Gamespot.com. Okay. All right. This is good. How's that? I mean, I say that because Giant Bomb obviously is a spinoff of Gamespot.com. So by liking Gamespot.com, I like old spinoffs, which means. That's great. I don't like that.

How do you like that? I like that. I approve of that. I'm a Metal Gear fan. I'm ready to come up with all kinds of weird explanations for my life. We're going to be talking about Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty today. I'm very excited to dig into it. Normally, this is where Chris Plant would explain what the game is, but he's not here.

So we're just going to toss it to an ad break and then we'll get right into it. Timur, as our resident Metal Gear expert, if you could summarize the plot of Metal Gear Solid 2 in, I'll give you a full minute. Wait, let me pull a timer up and you could just summarize it and that'll be great. One second.

Here we go. And go. Metal Gear Solid 2 is the sequel to PlayStation 1 stealth tactical espionage action game Metal Gear Solid, developed, designed by Konami, but headed up by author, director Hideo Kojima. It is ostensibly a sequel that is subversive, as well as being a sequel to the one of the most critically acclaimed games it's a game that uh asks people about agency um it poses we need plot plot oh it's it's about it's about a solid snake uh going to a tanker and then sinking the tanker and then a dude that you've never seen before becomes the main character and you're like this guy sucks and then you do a loads of loads of like stealth

shit you save the president uh through because his heart hurts and then at the end everyone goes this guy sucks and you're like they do suck and then an ai goes yeah but we made him a suck on purpose because you guys all suck and we wanted to show you why everyone sucks that was crushed staggeringly good yeah it's really really good um i wanted to just because this is like the first this is the rare time when like being old it has value uh i i have very clear memories and i'm curious if you all do too of like when the trial edition for sons of liberty uh was released the demo you made well it was it was called sons of liberty trial edition it's a demo for sons of liberty it was a separate disc in a game that also kind of kicks ass in my memory. Hugely kicks ass.

Zone of the Enders. Oh, yeah. By the way, fucking very good name for a video game. Congrats to all involved. But it was like a separate disc. It was as big of a thing as like when Wing Commander had the Star Wars trailer. Oh, my God.

You're getting so old now. Yeah, but it's like that same idea. There was one with Halo and was it Halo and Crackdown? Yes. That had this same kind of connection, but it was such a massive deal. Like it was giant. Everyone bought it. Threw off the sales figures for Shadow of the Enders because everybody wanted to play

this. Didn't Final Fantasy VIII have a demo included with some other game? That was... maybe it was a pizza hut thing i think of no there are no other demos that are more deceptive than the metal you're solid 2 demo how do you mean just because like everyone was under the fucking impression you were gonna play as solid snake everyone's favorite gruff bad boy i i would love to hear your all's memories uh again we're talking a little bit about memories

because Tamora was so kind as to give us a context for this. When you start playing as Raiden or Jack, I have like, it's really one of those where were you moments. Like I remember I was at Jason Eldridge's apartment over at 1544th Avenue. We were all like gathered together to play this because we'd all been like looking forward to it. And there was like this sustained sort of like waiting for the punchline that

lasted like, in my memory, hours. Like waiting for like Snake to pop. I think it was, I think we started to let go of it once Snake appeared and did not immediately like sucker punch right into all of his stuff tamor do you remember when you uh first uh came to the realization that this is the game that you were playing yeah it was it was very much that because obviously like the the the kind of uh bait and switch is part of the game itself like you because the demo that we talked about earlier zone of the enders is is

the entire tanker section which you play as snake and it's very much built to be the sequel to the game that you want in the way that you want it to the point where technologically and like design wise it was it was mind-blowing like it was like absurdly detailed and to the point where i remember it was such a kind of leap in in what people expected that in the uk at least i remember watching an extended demo of it on the bbc which the bbc being you know the stuffiest news network in the world that has zero interest in video games somehow i was watching snake peer out from behind a box and then shoot watermelons and i was like this is absurd like i cannot believe this game it's going to be that typical gamer thing where it's like this is going

to be the greatest game of all time before you've even touched it so when i got that and that's what that tanker section was and played it i was like this is going to be the greatest game of all time this is going to be another 10 hours of this so when it switches to riding i was like okay this is this is kind of weird but i i mean the gameplay is still the same thing and it is and yeah but it kind of also isn't it's like a like the the tanker is great because it's a density of detail and like what it requires of of you is like so close together and the tanker and then you get to the big shell and everything's kind of spread out and it never like the different systems don't demand and coalesce in the same way that it does in the tanker where and then you get to the big shell, and everything's kind of spread out, and it never, like the different systems don't demand and coalesce in the same way that it does in the tanker,

where it's like, you know, you shoot in a fire extinguisher and then crawl in, and then, you know, you've got a boss fire. It's like run across this entire, you know, shell structure, and you'll fire a couple of enemies on the way. But it started off really like I was shocked, and then the longer it went on, the more upset I got. And the more like I was like, I hate this guy. But when Snake appeared, oh, sorry.

When Iroquois Plissken appears, I'm mixed up. My character is a different human being. Iroquois Plissken appears. I was like, this guy is a pretty good standing for Snake. I like him. So it kind of like dulled it. But I don't think on the credits, it pops up David Hader's name. It's like, this guy's a pretty good standing for Snake. I like him. So I kind of like dulled it. But I don't think... I like the, on the credits, it pops up David Hayter's name.

Just like, believe it or not, he's playing this guy too. But yeah, I think by the end of it, like I was satisfied. But I didn't understand the point of writing for many, many years. Do you understand it now? Yeah, I think I do to a degree. The thing about Metal Gear is, and obviously I'm going to sound like one of those Metal Gear fans, and also I'm a big FromSoftware fan,

so I'm finding connections to things that may or may not be there. But I think I understand it as much as a person can understand the intention behind something like this while also having like a personal read on it do you think it's a narrative uh thing or a mechanic thing or a thematic or just like a troll like is there an element of like go fuck yourself fans we're gonna do something completely different i think it's a bit of everything right like um and that's the fascinating thing about it like because i think there's been interviews where kojima and team were like we need someone to represent you know a different kind of gamer and that's why they have

uh right and being this like androgynous character as a kind of counter to a snake but then also it's about taking this this character who is ostensibly not the hero that you want you want it snake but instead we've got this character who's you he's a gamer he's someone who who when he's asked about oh are you ready for this scenario he's like of course i've done hours in vr which is just a gamer being like i've played loads of video games so i'm ready for war and and like it's taking that character and showing that through different through the ways that they absorb and are given information and directives they can be molded into literally anything and be taught to believe a fantasy

that they want confirmation bias and that's kind of like what the whole game is building towards at the end when they reveal you know they have the gwai and and that kind of stuff and they're like hey the reason we did this was to show you we can socially condition people into doing anything and we're going to use that to stop you from killing yourselves because we're about to get to an age where the internet is going to be full of nonsense and it's going to be impossible for us to figure out what's relevant to future generations so where this benevolent ai that's going to help you get there and right and it's kind of like the test case for that it's funny because it's basically doing the Bioshock thing, right? Yeah.

But it does it in the like classic Kojima way of like nearly impossible to follow your first time through that people didn't even like. When I beat the game the first time, I was like, oh, that whole thing was a VR mission. Okay. Yeah. Because there was just like so much cruft in there

when you go to save fucking Otacon talks to you for 45 minutes about why boats are built the way they are. And you can't pull out the strands that are actually important until multiple playthroughs later or multiple wiki readings later to understand here's X, Y, and Z that happened. Yeah. here's x y and z that happened yeah some still truly uh truly bizarre choices throughout um which i really relished with history on my side here especially your i guess girlfriend rose who is working on the mission and understands the importance of the mission, but would also like to take a half hour of your time to talk about the day you met. And any time that you, just if you have a spare 15 minutes, I know there are bombs or whatever, but do you remember the day we met?

Because I would like to talk very much about it. And presumably these communique are being monitored by somebody, right? Who's like, one note, this is all good stuff. I love how you let him save his game. One note. If you could just not spend quite so much time talking to him about the day you met, that would be huge. I mean, everyone does that. It's not just her.

Like, literally every character over talks throughout well really every metal gear solid game and i guess that's just part of it yeah every kajima product i feel like this uh i feel like this game really establishes what metal gear solid is in my brain much more than metal gear solid one does interesting because uh it's so the the plot is so much more outrageous than metal gear solid one and so much more um it handles some heady concepts and i will see that there is a lot especially in the you know ai dealing with sorting out fact and fiction and signal and noise in the internet age that was pretty pretty uh ahead of its time for when the game came out but the extent to which you play the game for 45 seconds and run across a big bridge over the ocean after just watching a 15

minute long cut scene and then hop right into another 15 minute long cut scene after 45 seconds of of uh gameplay is to me what this game what this franchise is in my in my brain yeah but maybe metal gear solid 5 well i would say i think three like moved away from that a little bit and actually was like a quasi cogent story ish like certainly closer than this was and again i i agree with you on five i think four and two are almost aberrations in that way because they are so constantly distracted with the narrative and the the dialogue and the back and forth but i do think i think three and five are like and and one to some extent like much more concerned about the gameplay um so just every even metal gear yeah

it's like the star trek thing where the odd where the even ones are good and the odd ones are bad i think it's the opposite of that yeah i think like two is where like uh or like kojima and writing team because obviously he he writes these games with different people like uh tomokazu fukushima and um for for two and i think it's shigemurata for three and i think think that this game was... And Peyote, you forgot the Peyote. The Peyote, various drugs, like a lack of sleep. He loves McDonald's, so that kind of... I think it's like this is the game that started to create, like it created a fork in the Metal Gear Solid

kind of timeline almost in how he approaches games. And they kind of every now and then, it created two versions of Metal Gear. You get the one which is Metal Gear Solid 1 one which is like very character focused i think and it has a general it has a quite a ambition when it comes to themes but the scope of it is kept relatively focused yeah two was like all right i've got something to say and i want to try and tackle these very heady subject matter and do it in a way that's subversive and it was the first time i want to just say the first time i've ever heard the word meme before exactly exactly and it's it's

him kind of looking at what's my world view and how can i express it through this game and then then that's the two kind of versions of metal gear solid you have that is constantly going back and forth between in that odd and even number like three is going back to the style of one where yeah it's got a much better story than one probably has and it's more but it's more focused on gameplay it's about these characters for it where it was like okay i'm being forced into making this game again i'm gonna try and have my cake and eat too i by having this gameplay style thing and also having this wild story and it kind of works it kind of doesn't work and then the same happens in five but i feel like

metal gear solid after two is is like the two versions of how kojima approaches storytelling and games just constantly conflicting for the for the rest of the franchise and it's it's really interesting i think yeah his his design history and like including death stranding super fucking fascinating like you really never know exactly what direction he's going to go in and where he's going to succeed and fail but it will at the very least be fucking ballsy like you will you'll have a and an interesting time with his games some of that really bother in the lead up to this when i saw we were doing this episode and i and i would love to hear to more speak on this as well it is a real in my opinion a real tragedy how hard it is to play

these games i mean for for someone who might just have a passing interest i i obviously you know i i am not a child i understand that there are you know uh legally gray ways to procure almost anything digital these days but the fact that these are um these are really seminal works i mean these are really important important games and the fact that there's not an easy legal way to play them seems a real a real tragedy to me yeah it's it's rough now it got harder to do fairly recently um because at one point the best way to play these or access them was probably through the xbox um which is ironic given that it's a very much thought of as a playstation franchise for the longest time

um you could buy the metal gear solid hd collection which is the two the second and third game in a package and if you own it if you bought it back in the day digitally on xbox you can still play it that's how i generally play it but because of the all the archival footage that's in it um it kind of constantly goes out and in of like availability i'm not sure if it currently is available i think they took it down a little while back yeah if you don't currently or if you don't already own it you basically can't get it yeah you can't buy it anywhere that's yeah that is a real shame you can still pick up that game on Amazon for reasonable prices and even stuff like eBay and stuff. And then you just got to hope that you've got a console now and in the future that will be able to play it.

But you're right. It is a shame that you can't play that game easily. Same for the original Metal Gear Solid. It's like so tricky to buy that stuff. The easiest way to currently play that game is through GOG, ironically. And it's like not the best version. You have to grab some mods to make it a little more palatable.

But yeah, it's a real shame. And 2 was on GOG. Yeah, 2 was on GOG and also removed. Yeah, yeah. Do you think it's AI controlling it? Do you think AI is like, we can't let more people play this game. They're onto us.

This Hideo Kojima guy,'s he's he's gonna rumble us yeah um you mentioned mods i want to mention there's a mod called the sos mod for metal gear solid 2 subsistence specifically the pc version which again you can't buy right now but if you happen to own it previously that basically people spent a ton of time integrating a third-person camera akin to the camera that was in metal gear solid 3 subsistence which is to say like an actual modern controllable third-person camera that isn't the like pretty obnoxious top-down metal gear solid 1 and 2 camera and it is way more fun with that how does that how does that not completely just fuck up the game there are a couple parts that do get fucked up so like if you're going through a door normally you wouldn't be able to see through that door because the camera wouldn't be behind right right in but in this case you can you kind of see just like

a blank space of nothingness behind that door you see that you see the enemy soldiers like backstage like in the truman show yeah like oh shit what but but you have to keep in mind like because you can go first person at any moment in this game they had to make it at least look kind of okay to let the camera be anywhere so it really doesn't break the game as much as, like, say, Twin Snakes kind of breaks the game by letting you go first person in a game that it wasn't designed for. Right.

So it's actually not bad. And in terms of the implementation, it is spectacular. They did an amazing job. So that would be, if you're looking for a more palatable gameplay experience, I'd definitely recommend it.

Hey, how y'all feel about the boss fights in this one? Oh, God, I love them so much. Really, Dal? Yeah, I love them so much. I mean, like, I can never talk bad about these boss fights because amongst them is Fat Man. And I think Fat Man is one of the greatest characters of all time. That is where I made it to in this playthrough.

I played the game up until fat man and then i watched the last like hour of the game uh on youtube just to refresh myself on how wild that is and uh hoo boy that's that's a that's a that's a but i i guess it's we're this it's a sliding scale you want to refresh your that boss fight plays out what's that you want to refresh people on how that boss fight plays out it's it's a mad dat it's a caper i would say for you to disarm bombs while also fighting a a large man on roller skates that's more or less it uh it does have a delightful ending where there's one last bomb that you have to find. You know what? I'm not going to spoil that because maybe there's folks who haven't played the game before.

And that is a delightful moment of discovery. Yeah. The thing I love about it is how they're like reflections of boss fights in the original game, in the original Metal Gear Solid, which is what they're intended to be. But when you really think about it, it's like, oh oh the fat man boss fight is the Vulcan Raven boss fight from the previous game and you know oh the vamp fight is the revolver ocelot fight from the previous game so I think that's why I enjoy them so much I had that like epiphany moment during each of those boss fights when I was playing them for the first time like wait a second this is just like

the time I played this game and so i think that's why i have a special kind of soft spot for them yeah and you mentioned the from your love of from software obviously they did the same thing with dark souls 3 calling back to dark souls 1 and i think it's it is like a relatively common trend in game making to like have those nods whether they're like extremely explicit or at least like thematically nodding back and this game's obviously kind of premise of the reason that that is that way is because it's training you on a simulation of snake to be snake um yeah it's kind of like what extra sells it for me um this is a this is a completely non-impactful aside, but in 2023, it's a wild experience

to have been playing this game and looking for bombs in a bathroom and opening a door, and there's the Britney Spears FHM centerfold spread, which really carbon dates this thing, I feel like. I can tell you the date that this game came out i feel like based on the uh that that wild sort of historical artifact yeah talking about just like ephemera from this game that is that is truly bizarre i have to give a special

special note to the big reveal of the character stillman who is a bomb disposal expert and in one of the wilder moments i think i've ever seen in any video game this cat is like there's some bombs that that that riding and snake aren't gonna be able to get to and stillman who to this point we've been told it has a prosthetic leg um says he can go get them and they're like no way they'll notice right away that you uh are you know you won't be able to blend in and this guy's like well actually on that note the thing about that is i have been pretending to have a prosthetic leg because some some kids something real bad happened at church and i didn't want people to be so mad at me so what i did was i told them all

that my leg got blown up in the explosion but that has that is not actually true and i'm sitting there with my mouth at gabe thinking like i i know this is really offensive and i'm trying to nail down exactly everybody to whom it is i mean i know our nation's heroic bomb disposal experts that's it's high on their list, but there's probably several different factions that wouldn't be wild about this particular reveal. Don't you think it's possible that they did all the animations and the mocap

and then realized, oh, we need actually this character to be highly mobile? We don't have time to program this guy. And then you find his dead body floating in a flooded shell core yeah maybe you deserved it but who knows

um okay do we have any closing Metal Gear Solid 2 thoughts before we move on to the future of video games uh I will say this because I gave the games boss fights a bit of a razzing pretty badass final boss fight yeah pretty fucking cool final you can't do much better than a fucking katana fight on top of a huge sort of mech mind in the middle of new york city that's

pretty dope crashing into the original capital of the united states against against the former president of the united states who is wearing a uh is wearing a doctor octopus like suit and fighting you it's so great this is my very favorite also he's your dad yeah i forgot about that that's my favorite thing about kojima he's like i've got a lot to say about the information age and the pitfalls that I see us falling into based on my own values. And also, you're going to have a katana fight with your dad president. After that Katana fight happens, there's a very honest portrayal of New York City because Raiden and his girlfriend sort of meet up and they're just hanging out in front of in the middle of downtown Manhattan. And everyone is just going about their day. Just chilling. Just walking to work, picking up some subway, doing their thing as a fucking giant mech just crashed into the middle of a George Washington statue. Also, if you look closely,

if you look closely, like, vampire standing there in the background, like, in the middle of everyone, like, this giant man who clearly looks like a vampire is just standing there looking at these two men. I gotta be real, I wouldn't, I would not stop a beat. Yeah, I guess it's new york

so it is cool well i think we did it on metal gear solid 2 well done all um i am so excited for metal gear solid 3 can i admit something i have never played much metal gear solid 3 and i hear it's one of the best ones oh my god it's so fucking good i know i don't know how i've i've i've missed it for as long as I have. Is that your favorite, Tamor? Just out of curiosity? From a story perspective, I think 3 is my favorite. Overall, I'm asking overall.

Overall, yeah, I would say so. Yeah. It's 4 for me. I just think 4 is so weird. 4 is so wild. It is weird. Yeah, 4 is one that I love as well for various other reasons that you talk about a game that is going to be difficult to play for a lot of people i have no idea how you get mgs4 these days is that game did that game only come out on ps3

yeah i think so yeah there was no like subsistence no oh jesus yeah i don't know how we're gonna do that gang i don't have a ps3 no more we'll figure it out i think it was on playstation now but i don't know if it's still there it might have been taken off yeah sheesh uh all right let's uh let's take a quick break and then look forward ahead to the future uh so the diablo 4 beta was accessible to some of gaming's uh glitterati uh not me beloved co-host justin mccroy but some of the other luminaries on this call got to uh to step in and uh i mean it's pretty much anyone that pre-ordered the game but we also got codes for people that wanted to try it also as coverage standpoint it's pretty much anyone who is

willing to go to kfc and get a double down oh really was it about that too so you could also by going to kfc and getting a double down you'd not only get a double down in diablo code but also the rank of luminary uh so whoa awesome um yeah i played uh i played until level 20 of the diablo 4 beta specifically because i knew that if you did that you unlocked a little baby puppy that that lives on your back in the main game well you gotta have that and that was a motivator for me um but i hadn't played it or really seen much of it even though i know there's been like preview events and stuff like that i've been i guess not really paying attention. And so this was the first time I like dove in kind of blind.

And I was actually pretty impressed by, uh, what they put together. It, it felt like this interesting middle ground between Diablo two and Diablo three that I was not expecting. Yeah, I was, I,

I played a lot of Diablo three gun to my head i could not tell you what the story of that game is or why you should care about it um and so the much heavier emphasis it feels like uh on on story and a lot more cut scenes in this a lot more cut scenes a lot less of your character just being an empty you know chain mail shirt uh which which i appreciate um it's still to to me the aesthetic of this fucking bloody hell goddess is gonna fuck up the whole planet and eat all your blood is not necessarily the most sort of appealing to me uh but i i get it um it is a lot did you notice it's a lot darker than diablo 3 like just like tonally darker i don't to me i don't reckon i don't necessarily know that it gets much darker to me it's it these are all shades of gray sure in that uh it's a game about murdering angels and demons and getting uh green gear that

lets you do your barbarian whirlwind faster that to me that's the story of diablo um uh yeah i don't think i played enough to have a necessarily like cohesive opinion about it but uh i mean i i have mained barbarian in every diablo game that that option has been available oh interesting it feels real good i wouldn't have thought that what's that i wouldn't have thought that you don't what is it about me that you find not saying anything you know in particular i've seen you physically but i i just for whatever reason you physically okay i've seen you won't say you won't say why you don't think it's a good fit, but you've seen me physically. Yeah.

They're two unrelated insights. Ideas. Cool. No, I thought it was fun. But I'm also, I don't necessarily dig playing sort of beta early first look things like this when I know that I'm going to play the main game a lot and I'm not so crazy about just starting over once the game comes out. Yeah, but no wolf puppy.

No wolf puppy. That's fine. I will have to find a way. Does the wolf puppy help me get the green pants that let me do the Barbarian Whirlwind faster? No. Then I'm fine. Purely cosmetic.

Doing okay. Tamor, what was your impression? Had you played it before, like at BlizzCon or anything like that? So I played the alpha version. They gave us a little bit of access to it a while back um and uh it was mostly the same like um and i think yeah it's it's interesting because uh diablo 3 is a very good game um it started off as a very bad game not Not bad game. Like, it functionally was great and fine. But, like, I think a lot of the decisions around marketplace and some of the balancing was a bit off whack,

and people really hated it. You could sell a fucking axe for $65 and people would buy it. Yeah, I think a lot of... It's really interesting because, as is typical these days, the kind of story of that entire game, regardless of how it changed and evolved, was defined in the first week. But for the people who continued to play it,

they found that it eventually got to a point where it was really fun and playable. And the kind of big thing that they figured out with the Diablo 3 era, especially Reaper of Souls, is how to make that game work on places outside of the PC. And I think that's evident in this game here um especially as someone who has developed rsi in my recent years like you can play it on a controller and it works alarmingly well it's like fantastic um so i think like the baseline of it is

like it feels like the most playable diablo in a long time and i think what they've done here is like let's take the our learnings of how to make this game more approachable to play and take it with the kind of aesthetic and the tone and the kind of atmosphere that people love from diablo which is diablo 2 it's a lot more of that darker tone and in terms of how a darker tone manifests like it can be in the story but the story is is where it is always like evil thing is here gonna kill it i think how it manifests in in this game a bit more is like kind of like graphic uh depictions of imagery like you know it's it's all about grossing people out and you know that yeah or the art design yeah exactly the art design like it wants to do the maggots coming out of the

eyeballs to like freak you out and and i think like you know diablo perverts are all about that so um and like this is this is what it's like and i as someone who likes that stuff um and likes that tone um i'm i'm way more into this i like that it has an identity that is a little more defined and and distinct now and and obviously like it plays really really well like i i played it a bit and i was like i could see myself getting like really obsessed with this again so so far like so good which is which is a good sign for diablo because it's had a lot of ups and downs post diablo you know diablo 3 being one of them and then immortal was this nightmare hot mess of of like drama for the entire industry so i think i'm excited for it to kind of hopefully

get the diablo franchise back on track to a degree and just have a like unequivocally enjoyable experience hopefully but who knows what what lies in store yeah i i think the thing that jumps out at me about uh diablo 4 is the it feels a little less on rails specifically about the gameplay on a less on rails than diablo 3 did just because it felt like in diablo 3 oh you hit level 3 your build is going to be identical to anyone else that has level 3 right like there's no room for the way they unlocked skills and abilities and stuff like you just didn't have options because they were kind of railroading you into this thing and then once you hit level like 20 or something you could start kind of diversifying a little bit and here you really start immediately like you're picking between four basic skills and

those have like little variants attached to them and then you unlock another tree and that has like another four skills that you can pick from and so it felt like i had a lot more control which is really exciting overall do i think it's gonna land i think it'll do very well i think the biggest concern for everyone after diablo uh after diablo immortal is just like is it gonna be like how gross are they gonna get and i know they've said very specifically it's just cosmetics it's just cosmetics i i guess i have concerns because there's only so much you can i guess go down the cosmetics route in a game like this before people stop caring because i don't know the armor sets are cool and all but like it doesn't necessarily motivate me to spend money after i

have 50 armor sets to pick from so i'll be curious to see how they kind of scale that long term but then again i i'm pretty excited about the wolf pup so they do have levers they can pull uh i'd like to talk to you all about other stuff you've been playing in between um i i kind of randomly found an interesting little thing called uh four tails um uh f o r e t a l e s sorry it shouldn't F-O-R-E-T-A-L-E-S Sorry, it shouldn't be so hard, but there's a lot of different spellings for these. It is a deck-building game. Not deck-building game. It is a card-based narrative game.

So you are going through kind of a standard RPG fantasy adventure, navigating labyrinths and dungeons and guards and all that kind of stuff. But the mechanics of it are all purely based on cards. So the world navigation, like the world that you're going through, is a stack of cards that you have to make your way through to go from location to location. You have skills that are all based on cards. Each one is dependent on whatever characters you have to make your way through to go from location to location. You have skills that are all based on cards. Each one is dependent on whatever characters you have. And each of these skills are a different approach to a situation. These are really like narrative.

So one is like use your bow and arrow to threaten someone or use your senses to find food at a place or what have you. And then at each location, these different skills have different effects that can give you resources that are also cards. And these resources are things like food and money, but also, um, fame and, uh, darkness sort of like doing bad stuff in the world. And those resources can help you navigate situations too. So maybe if you have a gardener who you need to enlist his help to get through a maze, if you have fame that you have accrued through your actions, you can spend that fame on the gardener to win him over to your side. Or if you have accrued darkness, you know, you can threaten him or, you know, maybe he's hungry and you can use food

to whatever. So it's a really interesting way of gamifying a lot of different narrative elements. Like it is, it is abstracted. A lot of things that you see in these sort of like borderline visual novel games, it is abstracted them to a point where they're sort of like it's all mechanics um it kind of reminds me of this is a weird like reference point but the way keith baker and and and uh approach the adventure zone board game um where it is all sort of like a narrative thing but it's all very mechanical and card based um but it's it's very cool i played on steam deck it's not really well optimized for that yet, but if you don't mind using the thumb pad to sort of do the mouse clicking thing,

it's perfectly readable and playable. But it's called Four Tales. Cool. It's very interesting. I started playing Octopath 2 after talking about it last week. I haven't put enough time into it to really have a great impression of it so far.

I think I picked the wrong guy to start with. Whoops. Because the story I started with is— Daryl the Accountant. I picked Daryl the Accountant, and it's very—there's a lot of spreadsheets. That's not particularly fun to—no. Yeah, I'm going to put some more time into that. It looks gorgeous.

I just haven't played enough to know why it's better than the first one. I finished the Raid, the new Raid in Destiny 2. It was super fun. I really liked it a lot. I got the Raid Exotic my first try, which means I don't ever have to play it again. I watched some people playing it and i like how fucking buck wild the like aesthetic of that raid is yeah it's really cool it's uh

at the beginning of this new expansion the traveler which is like the big god orb that gives everybody their powers uh fires this huge beam of light into the pyramid ships that have been sort of plaguing the solar system. And it blows a hole into it and makes a bunch of like glowing white trees. And then that's where the raid takes place. So you're just running along the bows of this huge white tree weaving in and out

of this big spaceship that is just open to the void of space. It's very neat. I like it a lot. It is way simpler than any other, I think, raid I've maybe ever played. It's all about, there's a lot of platforming and there's a lot of ad clear, but there's not a lot of like, okay, you have to run into this room, memorize this symbol, one of 36 symbols, and then try to describe that to five strangers but it's mirrored remember you're looking on the other

side so you got to flip it right uh yeah no it's i i played it with a very kind pickup group of nice british players which is just the optimal destiny experience for a raid for in my book and got it like start to finish in like two hours which is nothing for like a raid you've never played before um so yeah i really enjoyed that and i needed something to play on my phone picked up you must build a boat again fucking great game can't beat it i would i need more games from that that dude that made you must build a boat similar similar uh angle uh charlie my eight-year-old started playing there is no game uh wrong dimension on her phone and it's great it's what a great game to play with kids it's it's really hilarious to to watch them employ

that kind of lateral thinking what a wonderful game uh tamora you have anything yeah another game that's great to play with kids, Resident Evil 4 Remake. Yeah. How much can we say? Are we under embargo? No, I guess not. No, reviews are up. Yeah, the reviews are up. You're right. I've been playing a bunch of that,

and it's fantastic. Pretty much ideal for what I would want out of Resident Evil 4 Remake in that it takes the spirit of it but doesn't remake it down to the letter of the law. They try and figure out what the intention was back then and whether they can achieve that any better they look at what the best parts of it were and see if they can create more of those moments and they also kind of reshuffle things around and make it a smoother experience that makes more sense in terms of narrative and characters contextually make the improvements that need to be made to like ashley's bits and and and like make sure that leon is goofy still but also cool and give the

merchant more lines and it's it's just a fantastic another fantastic resident evil remake from a team that is just absolutely knocking on park um out of the park for the most part. Yeah. Yeah, we're actually going to do a full episode on it next week because poor Justin and Griffin have been without code, but they will be experiencing the game quite soon. I would be very surprised if it isn't in my top five for the year. It is fucking spectacular, in my opinion. It's great. But the game I would love to kind of, not recommend,

but like suggest to you guys is one called Dredge oh that's so funny we actually just got code for that we're going to talk about it on resties soon but please yeah download it's it's a it's a fishing game where you have a boat and you every kind of day go out into this open water and you fish. The fishing part of it is very simple. You kind of hit buttons in time with a kind of a moving line that goes around a circle. And there's like zones where you want to try and tap it. And you pull up your catch. You take it to a fishmonger and sell it and make improvements to your boat. And go, you know, travel to other islands and fulfill requests

and improve your fishing capabilities by adding more stuff to your boat. The twist is it's also a cosmic horror Lovecraft game. And over the course of, like, it's got a kind of daily routine, a daily clock where, you know, when you're moving around in your boat, time is advancing. Obviously, you get to night um and as as the days go on you start to uncover weirdness in this area you know you start to learn about previous fishermen who suddenly have vanished and you know there's people here where you you give them a fish that is like nice and clean and they'll give you a little bit amount of money and then you give them one that's just absolutely disgusting and like weirdly mutated and they're very into that and they want more of those and you're like what's going on with this place it's

very weird and then you know a mysterious man will be like i need you to give me this thing because i'm working on something i'm trying to figure something out and the kind of cosmic horror part of it slowly starts to creep in. And as it does, you know, the game starts to morph into something that's a bit more unsettling. And then it's also got like the, the kind of inventory management system of Resident Evil four, where it's like, yeah,

the grid, yeah, the grid based thing, which is, you know, it's a layer of kind of strategy that you need to think about. And it's, it's a bunch of these really simple familiar mechanics that are,

that start to coalesce in a way that's satisfying. I wouldn't say it's exceptional, but it's just got that kind of forward momentum and the kind of satisfaction of doing one thing and having a knock-on effect on another thing so that you can continue doing the other thing in a kind of routine that is very, very engaging and compelling. And then it just wraps that in an interesting aesthetic that is not very common in something like a routine that is very very like engaging and compelling and then it just wraps that in a interesting aesthetic that is not very common in something like a fishing game um yeah i recommend it yeah that's awesome i'm very much looking forward to picking it up um i've been playing uh the resident evil 4 remake which again we'll talk about next week i've also started replaying dark souls 3 because i hadn't played it since launch and i never played the dlc so i thought it'd be a nice little treat on steam

deck and fuck man that game is gorgeous on steam deck it runs great um i mean it's pretty much gorgeous on any platform but um you know obviously there aren't many games that are on the level of like the FromSoftware games from a world design, art design standpoint. And having a blast trying to do like a different class and stuff like that. So it's been really fun. Have you made it to the DLC stuff yet? No, no, I really just, I beat, you know, the ice guy at the very beginning.

So I'm still very early, but I am very curious to see what the DLC is like. Cool. I think we did it. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Cat Face, Meowmers, Subnonymous, and Trey Pitts. Thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts.

Thank you to Timur, who's saying- I feel like we're running out of usernames, right? I feel like we're desperately clinging onto the last gasps of available usernames. They're doing great. Thank you to Damore for joining us and talking a little bit about Metal Gear Solid 4, among other things. Where can people find you and listen to you and experience the magic that is you? Thank you. I am on GameSpot and Giant Bomb.

And then I am on Twitter at Tamor bomb um and then i am on twitter at tomorrow h and then i stream on twitch pretty regularly tomorrow h as well before i do end this i want to fulfill my role as chris plant standing and remind everyone that there's currently a 24 hour 50 off sale on uh criterion.com so give it a yeah yeah thank you thanks Chris we appreciate it I'm sure Plant appreciates it as does Jean-Luc Godard if he was still alive and these are on discs I'm seeing here

oh yeah you like a disc? alright I want to let me recap because Plant is not here I'll recap what we talked about we talked about Metal Gear Solid 2, which is difficult to play, but I'm sure you can manage.

We also talked about the Diablo 4 beta. If any of that sounded interesting to you, there will be an open beta. This episode goes up on Friday, starting that day and running through the weekend. Basically anyone who's interested can play it for free. So feel free to do that. We also talked about Four Tales.

There is no game wrong dimension. I talked a little bit about Dark Souls 3. Griffin played Octopath Traveler 2 and the Destiny 2 Lightfall Raid, as well as You Must Build a Boat, which is on iOS and probably Android, if I had to guess, but definitely iOS. And Tamora mentioned the Resident Evil 4 remake, as well as a game called dredge which is coming out on march 30th to basically all platforms we did it fantastic that is going to do it for us

uh for for this week thank you so much for joining us and be sure to join us again next time for the besties because Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!