The Besties - Revisiting Metal Gear Solid

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

To kind-of-celebrate the almost-25th anniversary of Metal Gear Solid, we went back and played a couple different versions of the game to see how well Hideo Kojima's super spy thriller holds up. And hey, how's the pilot episode of HBO's adaptation of The Last of Us? Also discussed: Sea of Thieves, Traitors, Neon White, Industry, The Shout 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!

Hey guys, sorry that I was running behind for today's recording and you know that I said that I was in the bathroom, but really it's a new new trailer for that 90s show dropped. I heard it has some exclusive footage that had a few frames, but still some exclusive footage that hadn't been seen before. And so I just, you know, I had to prioritize it because I got to get some reactions. Did they have the scene where Fez gets pogs? No, Fez is a hairstylist now. Okay. And he runs a hair cutting place.

So that's kind of his deal. And he gives them all the Rachel? Yeah, I bet there's a lot of conversation about the rachel um the two old dogs for the last one they're back and the dad is not happy about all these teens running around oh i bet if you're worried about if they're the kids of them they are yeah yeah no problems there they are the kids of them curtwood couldn't just skate by on the residuals from Grobo Cop. I was going to say, I always hoped that that would be the ending. That they'll do the 90s show.

Gradually, he'll become a nemesis of a new modern cop. Who is part man, part robot. And at the end, he will be exploded by the front of a truck. But it looks good. I mean. Sure, man. We're excited for this one. But it looks good. I mean. Sure, man. We're excited for this one. Cool.

Fingers on the pulse. Going to be cool. Going to be cool. Weird intro, I would say, to the besties is Justin's sort of street team viral marketing for that 90s show. We're not even paid for that. Yet. Really kicking off some dust. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

That's not how you say it. Best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I am a super soldier clone made up from soldier genomes using the 20th century analog cloning and the super baby method. Les enfants terribles. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and thanks to having access to your podcast feed, I know that you also like... Beep, beep, beep, boop, beep, beep.

Giant bomb! My name is Russ Froschek, and I know the best game of the battlefield. Oh my gosh. Welcome everyone to the besties where we talk usually about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. But this week in our video game club that you have joined just by listening, we're going to begin a journey through the metal gear solid franchise um all the way back we're going to take you all the way back to i guess by my math this year will mark the 25th anniversary of metal gear so look at that

we got a news peg there's our news peg right there i found it i mean metal gear did exist before metal gear so if we did exist before Metal Gear. So if we did want to go back to the roots of it. We don't. Okay, good. Yes, we don't. We're just talking about Metal Gear Solid games. We're just talking about Metal Gear Solid games. That's how it all starts.

Don't think about it. How many Metal Gear Solid games are there in your all's view? Yeah, but are we counting? Are we counting Metal Gear 1 and 2? I said don't think about it you know what i mean how many metal gear 17 games seven games i said 17 17 okay that's wild are we counting metal gear rising revengeance um sure yeah count metal gear rising revenge. Are we counting portable ops? Sure, yeah. Just looking for an estimate, gut check. I think it's more than that.

I think it's probably closer to 20. I think it's 23. Huh, well, I don't know. That's just a guess. Wait, Justin, do you not know the answer to this? No, I'm just interested to see what you guys thought. Jesus Christ. Write in and tell us how thought. Jesus Christ. Write in and tell us how many games there are.

Write in how many you think. Looking at... Okay, count real quick. It's 23. Is it 23? Yeah, I'm on the Wikipedia page. And there's seven main ones. Yeah. Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid, and then those five... I feel like Ghost

Babble should be a main one. You can feel however you want. I feel like VR missions should be shot to the side. I wasn't saying VR. Yeah, it also gets tricky because Metal Gear 5, Metal Gear Solid 5 is two games. Yeah. Oh, that's a good one. We're off, guys.

We're off to a fucking great start with this. This is great. This is great. This is like really entertaining. What are we talking about today? I guess today we're talking about Metal Gear Solid from 1998. Came out on PlayStation. Good year for games.

Yeah. Came out on PlayStation. Here's my old man memories of Metal Gear. It was, of course, a very big departure from a lot of other NES games when the original Metal Gear launched. And that was, it was really hard. It was really hard to play. That's what I remember from being a kid. I also, my other exposure to this franchise

is that I read the Worlds of Power book. Fuck yeah. Metal Gear by FX9. Great book. Which is a novelization that probably the novel, the American novel with most references to colored key cards would be Metal Gear by FX9 from the Worlds of Power franchise. But that's still a rough transition to what we are talking about today.

But it's a long gap is the main thing I wanted to say. There's like a 12-year gap between, or 11-year gap between Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid. The other thing I remember is reading in a magazine that Metal Gear Solid would feature Red Book audio. And I was so excited, even though I didn't know exactly what that meant, I was really excited about it having Red Book audio.

Is that like red shoe diaries no it's uh it's it's like digital actual recorded audio versus like what you would get the synthesis the synthesize effect of of cartridge game got it we should we should probably take a break and then we'll jump in yeah that was that we've given you everything you need to know before the fold yeah but now we're turning the page to this commercial should we start with what was all our first time that we played this game should we start with what metal gear solid is yeah maybe that's even a better idea it's simple. You are a 1980s action movie type of spy named Solid Snake, and you are being sent to Shadow Moses Island up in Alaska. And you need to stop a group of terrorists who are going to, I don't know, set off nuclear weapons, you think, unless they get their ransom,

which is a billion dollars and access to the body of Big Boss. And then you go about killing them all. And it turns out that that's not actually exactly what they want and why they're there. Yeah, there's a whole lot of other reasons. That's like it, right? Yeah, not bad.

Thank you. This was the first game to have a sort of twist plot in it. Hideo Kojima was the first one to kind of do like a surprise. The first ever surprise? Yeah, because you play it and you're like, I can't wait to get the coolest gun, blow up the big bad guy. But then at the end you find out that maybe America... This is going to sound weird, like maybe america's a bit

the bad guy anyway yeah well i can't pretend like i understand the intricacies of the plot of the metal gear friend that's actually not true i the first apartment i ever lived in i lived with a dude named jacob dunkel who was the world's biggest fucking metal gear fan and i learned it was a master class in this franchise uh it was when ps what was the ps3 one metal gear solid 4 guns of the patriots yes just a lot of buzz about that i know everything there is to know i'm an encyclopedia thanks to my friend jacob dunkel oh good you'll be useful here yeah any questions you have uh i i can answer okay so now now should we talk about how the game works or do you want to now do you want to go into personal i want to humanize it a

little bit because i feel like a lot of people uh listening may already at least know the outlines of this game where you're a spy and you run through places when was the first time you guys played this game we got it i think I think, for Christmas at launch. Most of the video games we got in our household growing up were Christmas presents or completely lopsided Babbage's trade-ins where we gave up every game we owned in order to get Ocarina of Time. But this was, I believe, a Christmas drop in the McElroy household. And we probably were all playing it at roughly the same time

at different save places. And you played it on PlayStation, correct? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This followed a brief period of video game indifference from us. Like we had, uh, uh, super NES and we kind of fell out after that for a while. Like we played in 64, but it wasn't as much.

And it was final fantasy seven being released on the PlayStation where we're like, well, guys, we got to get a PlayStation. We got to do it. Um, we used to get official PlayStation magazine and it would have a demo disc with a PlayStation. We gotta do it. We used to get an official PlayStation magazine and it would have a demo disc with a bunch of different games on it. I don't remember if Metal Gear was one of them, but I'm trying to put a pin in the time period.

Right. This is what you come to this show for. Right. Invaluable historical recollection. Vague recollection. Honest to God, you talk about this game, you talk about this franchise,

you talk about pretty much any hideo kojima game and like the story is the long the long narrative weirdness of the games right like that they are military fantasy spy fantasy without editing yeah it's it's like if no editing it's like if tom clancy took a bunch of mushrooms and then wrote a script basically and then and then the editor was like all right i'll take a pass and then clancy was like no you won't it's gonna go out like it's gonna go out exactly like this which is like now in 2023 when video games have been doing narrative shit that has you know we've run the gamut right this this uh this medium

has sort of technologically and narratively evolved a lot in the 25 years since since metal gear solid came out but when metal gear solid came out and had this like huge branching story with hours of cut scenes and you know uh hours of voiceover and all of this kind of polish, it was like an event. It was a blockbuster in the truest sense of the word. And so it was tens, tens, tens across the board, and it was this hugely, hugely influential game, which is being there for that,

I think was necessary to kind of understand this this game's place in the uh the pantheon yeah because if you come at it now if you come at it now holy shit it's been it's been a minute since i've sat down with metal gear solid i do want to say i played uh twinakes, the GameCube version, which was a mistake. Twin Snakes was the GameCube version that came out, God, I don't know how much later

it came out. The GameCube was a full generation after the PlayStation. But it folds in some of this. 2004. Okay, so six years after. It folds in some of the stuff that Metal Gear Solid 2 uh adds in like

there's you can think we're getting in the weeds a little bit okay maybe a little bit but uh yeah holy shit this game this game is really by today's standards pretty far up its own butt uh pretty pretty far up there i think even compared to you know a death stranding or a more modern kojima jam uh it's it's it's pretty deep in there man really i i thought the exact opposite me too oh interesting i thought it was like you you mentioned like no editing it felt like oh this is before kojima could truly just do whatever he wanted and everybody had to accept it there's like a an amount of restraint here that's like i could follow the story for one that is true that's a rarity um the the perviness

is like uh uh it's bad email character uh sways her tush and he's like i noticed you because you have a butt um it's a plot point yeah it's a plot point yeah. It's a plot point. Yeah, it's a plot point. Yeah, the butt is a plot point. But if that were done in like Metal Gear Solid 5 period, that person would just be entirely naked. And it would be like, they can't breathe unless their butt has air. Yeah.

Most of her DNA is the constitution. Yeah. There is a restraint here that um yeah i don't know i found it very quaint most of this game uh one thing that did jump out at me uh obviously graphically it's been a long time since this game came out but i did think and and i think having the the uh rudimentary graphics kind of highlights this. You see almost immediately the difference between Kojima as a director and most other 3D games that have aged so poorly. Because Kojima, more than a lot of people who are making games at this time, knows where to put the camera.

He knows how to make camera movements that feel engaging. Are we talking about the cut scenes or in the cut scene specifically yeah i mean i i think that it is the opening especially yeah the opening all of it like he's the the camera angles are interesting right it's not just like a a blank wall with characters standing in front of it you get like uh a lot of different zooms and cuts that make it feel like more dynamic uh considering how much uh chat i was there is i was reading about his uh backstory a little bit just to refresh myself and apparently when he was growing up his parents would force him to watch a movie a night regardless of like homework or anything they would all have to sit and watch a movie so he was essentially

programmed from a very early age to be like fully obsessed with film which tracks for his entire career really yeah i i i really liked the limitations of this game i'm curious how the later games are going to be for us you know revisiting them yeah but it felt because it's on playstation one because there just wasn't a whole lot he could do that he couldn't go like full all out i'm just making a movie you know he can frame the camera he can do those things but like scenes can't go on that long because effectively these it's like watching a puppet show inspired by movies but you're like these characters you know their faces don't move right they're just like human puppets i do miss i do wish i'd play the playstation 1 version because

i actually really fucking love that vibe that aesthetic it looks so sick to me and this just kind of looked like you know a shitty playstation 2 era facial animations. I want to say real quick, because I talked about how the lack of editing. I do think that you all are giving Kojima a lot of credit. Me too. Because I think that the reason that this game doesn't go, you know, as ham as, say, Metal Gear Solid 4 does with its hours-long cut scenes is just because of the technical

limitations of the time right if the hardware was stronger my man would have gone even more bananas I don't know how far everyone got uh into the game but I remembered the almost 20 minute long monologue that Liquid Snake gives at the end of the game where he kind of like, he doesn't even explain the plot. He like explains like a lot of minutiae about genome soldiers and all of that jazz. And I watched that cut scene this morning to really get in the right headspace. And y'all, it's fucking, if you, it's fucking bananas. If you have never seen or played this game, just watch that 20 minute long bit where he talks about fucking how Gulf War Syndrome

is actually an undercover operation to create super soldier babies. Are you complaining right now or are you praising? God, I don't, it's not like anything else. It's not like anything, it's not like another thing

that I've seen. It's not good writing, but it's like also not like anything i've ever seen it's engaging writing i don't know that even i yeah i found it engaging i find it more engaging than like metal gear solid 4 right there there are hills and valleys for kojima stuff like i mean obviously i like dust tranny i can sit through the die hardman monologues um i agree i agree that it's like it's because the restraints that this works better but i also think that kind of almost is beside the point like i i mean well actually

let's talk about the restraints because i think the irony here is the restraints make kojima better as a director and make him worse as a game designer because the game holy moly does not hold up yeah well in terms of a fun object um this isn't like mario 64 where you know it both creates the genre and is like still good to today this game is tough to to to eat just just to give a simple example most of the game for people that haven't played it i'm sure there's a number of them because there really hasn't been a recent re-release of this game in ages for people that haven't played it the most of the game is played from a top-down perspective your range of vision while you're running around top down is about 10 feet

you will constantly throughout this game be firing off the screen at enemies you cannot see even though you know they're there because of the radar hoping to god that your shots land and kill them or take them out or whatever it is and you'll you'll use like the energy meter and this was sort of alleviated in twin snakes with griffin and actually i played more twin snakes than the playstation version because you could first person aim and shoot people further on but the game was not designed with that in mind so the game essentially breaks if you abuse the first person aiming which is to say there's a lot of things in this game that just do not i mean they make sense because the technical technical limitations but from a design standpoint just have aged horribly and aren't very fun not a

joke every boss fight is bad and i don't know how except of course for fucking psychomantis which is like and that's not fun because of the gameplay reason we'll have a special breakout session to discuss but every boss fight is just like fire a rocket at this tank from i actually like the vulcan raven fight for what it's worth that's the one where you have to steer the missiles no it's the one where he has like the giant minigun and you you're like hiding behind the uh crates and stuff like that yeah uh that one's pretty good it's it it is sort of it's mechanically pretty clumsy uh i will say though it's interesting uh the what jumped out at me about the mechanic which does feel i mean it feels there's the key thing to me that feels bad about this game the camera is probably number one but close after if you sneak up on somebody and you're like running up behind them if you're holding the

attack button then you'll flip them yeah and it's like so you have to get but if you're still you'll choke them out so it's this game of like run up close to them and then let go at the exact right time to choke them um because again the the guns are so disastrous to use that i i typically go with the um choking people out but it what i was going to say uh it is interesting i think that this game has so many different like it it doesn't super get into like a repeatable rhythm that's true um it's weird like you know they talk about i forget which one of the halo designers was it was like you find your like 30 second loop of fun with the thing that's fun and then you repeat it and this game like really doesn't get into a rhythm and i mean that as a

compliment even though it's usually a negative like the things you're being asked to do from moment to moment are very different from i mean one second you're steering a missile through these hallways and then you know you have to uh uh find like a hole in the wall that you have to use c4 on to blow it up and it doesn't explicit like it hints around it but it doesn't say like i know it seems weird to you but you're going to use first person camera to find a crack in the wall and then you see for to blow it up. Like, but different stuff, uh, just moment to moment, like it's not a repeated loop. It is a, uh, um, uh, you know, a specific situation. Yeah.

I wouldn't, it's not a series of mini games, but it almost feels that way which which makes sense if you think about like a james bond movie like yeah it's not gonna be the same him running through a corridor shooting guys over and over again it's gonna be like oh i need to deal with this scenario in this scenario and that's obviously what he was pulling from it's also very weird to get it took me forever to get used to the idea that enemies can't hear you i you don't know how many times you can do like the knock that's true no i mean like walking on a steel you know catwalk above them but now the catwalks now okay some of the catwalks do make noise actually that's the most of them like you can run right up behind a guard he does not like it is just vision cones, and their vision cones are not impressive. That's not to say it's a cakewalk, because again, the camera's really working against you pretty much all the time.

Kojima is best when he's kind of getting a little silly with it, and this game has that a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. I think that pretty much every soldier that has dialogue in the game is like oh my diarrhea is so bad i'm gonna die like all of them like every one of them is like oh i farted on my porno mags like all of them wait you two are an otaku right and even though at the end of the thing the fucking 20 minute liquid snake thing reveals that every soldier in the island is like technically your genetic clone of these soldier babies from fucking uh the gulf war uh and even though like you're cool and smoke and do flips and shoot rockets and they're like oh man this

die die though it's so bad i live on the toilet um psycho mantis is the i think pinnacle of this because it is just it's a psychic villain uh floats in the air and he mind controls meryl and tries to make her kill you but then you're like hey cut that out and he's like okay i'm gonna talk to you for like 15 minutes and he will it's so fucking funny to have Solid Snake standing there gun in his hand while fucking Psycho Mantis floats five feet in front of him and is just like

I'm gonna scan your memory card I'm gonna talk about Luigi's Mansion you like Super Smash Brothers Melee and it's why does he do this thing? And then he's like, set your controller on the ground. Oh, I love that.

And I will move it with my mind. And me, Griffin, age, you know, 11, is like, you're going to vibrate. He's going to use the vibration. And I'm like, shoot him solid state. What are you doing? Shoot him to death. But instead, you're just going to stand there and watch and be like, you like the Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, don't you?

It's fucking hysterical and funny and great still to this day. Still the best shit ever. And it's my favorite Kojima stuff. And it's the only thing I want out of these games. And I actually think like that becomes more common in later games absolutely where he gets just way sillier with his shit low-key my favorite Metal Gear Solid game is two because it's bananas it is out it is completely ridiculous okay and that's that's fun for me the the rest of my i want to talk about twin snakes

for a second because i know twin snakes gets a bad rap and griffin already confirmed that like he would prefer to play it and i do agree with griffin the visuals of the playstation version are preferred i like that aesthetic better but the cut scenes in twin snakes which were fully redone by a different director not kojima they brought in a different director to do the cut scenes are actually way closer to Kojima's later style than they were originally. Cause there's like full on butts. There's a, the scene when you first run into Meryl and she's already knocked out a

guard and you're like confronting her cause she's, you know, in disguise, whatever it is centered in the middle of that scene is a guard whose butt is in the air and they like blur out his butt crack but like yeah you do not get that level presumably that's in the yeah but he's wearing underwear i think he's not like no it's i believe it's blurred out really and it's a butt i'm pretty sure well regardless there are a lot of there's like a number they added a bunch of like uh otacon like falling down hills repeatedly which i think yeah

funny they added funny just hearing about it man uh so i i just think that i'm not necessarily saying it's better but it is more consistent with like the physical humor of his later games yes the real kojima game is the one Kojima never made. I, uh, uh, just another, we're talking about the look and stuff. Fun facts. Fun, fun, fun facts about Metal Gear Solid. Um, uh, the lead character, Snake,

is actually a hybrid of three different, uh, famous actors. The voice, obviously, by David Hayter is modeled on Kurt Russell's performance as Snake Plissken in the Escape movies, both of them. His body is modeled on that of Jean-Claude Van Damme in this one. And his face was modeled on, does anybody know this? Christopher Walken.

Oh, hey. What? That is what the Wikipedia entry says, that the body's Jean-Claude... I mean, the body... Faced by Chris Walken. The body feels like a reach, because, like, PlayStation graphics,

what are you looking at? It's like 16 polygons. Is that really him? I think it might be more his, like, stance. I mean, I don't think he modeled for it. No, sure. I think they just be more his stance. I don't think he modeled for it. No, sure. I think they just looked at his butt.

Let's put a bow on this. I didn't finish it. I think I may have actually made a swing at finishing it if I was playing original PS1 Metal Gear Solid. I really did not enjoy Twin Snakes. And if you are going to follow along uh in our footsteps do play the original not twin snakes i really feel like that yeah i agree with that that is the way to go uh but it was i i i enjoyed the sort of weirdness that i remembered about this game i really didn't like playing it uh really really at all the playing of it it had a bad hand feel i would say

uh with all my time with it and i don't know that that improves right i've never really known this except for five which no no no it definitely zany definitely improves i would say to a lesser extent in two in three i think three holds up as like a modern game still. Especially the remastered version. Yeah, subsistence specifically, which fixes the camera. I'm primed for a remake on this. I hope we get it. It has been rumored, so it is possible.

And Konami, you know, can essentially do whatever they want with it. So, wouldn't surprise me. Yeah, and probably won't be through Konami, I believe. I think there's like a sony partnership with konami and it would be coming from the studio that did dark souls oh wow um demon souls that's a big rumor that's that's the rumor is that confirmed from chris plant no no not at all that's it's like an ongoing rumor that would be um very unfair yeah blue point uh at austin texas before we wrap up um this section so metal gear solid one it's done you probably did not get a chance to play it alongside us that's for the

better if you're gonna play metal gear solid play the game boy color version it's great kind of separate to be clear that is a completely different game yes Yes, it is. It is. It is. But the point is, it's really, really hard to play this game. So a question that we were asked by Gray and Sam on Twitter, cutting a little bit of listener mail right here, is how would you play it? And the answer is, good luck. The easiest way to play this game legally is with the um playstation mini console which you can still buy on amazon or best buy and it's included in that otherwise it is it sucks right in the playstation mini like not great i mean i think like by like digital foundry standards but i

think for most people you can play it and be like hey it's the game um but for otherwise like emulation or buying an original playstation and getting an original copy of the game and if you're doing emulation you should own a copy of the game anyway is there no like ps1 classics so unlike there's there is a ps3 game called metal gear solid legacy collection and you could buy it there i know and it was like a limited disc um for people who want to play metal gear solid 2 and 3 uh coming up with us because those are still a little more difficult there is an hd collection that was available on ps3 and xbox 360 um you can also play metal gear solid 1 and 2 on pc through good old games for For what it's worth, that's the first place that I played Metal Gear Solid 1

was on PC in like the year 2000. Yes. And then Metal Gear Solid 3 you can weirdly play on the Nintendo 3DS. Yeah, that's true. But yeah, we'll keep you all posted. Metal Gear Solid 2 is coming up. It'll be, I'm sure, a little while. And I can't convince you guys to do an episode on Ghost Babble, right?

Because it genuinely is like one of my top three favorites. I think Ghost Babble kicks ass. be i'm sure and i can't convince you guys to do an episode on ghost babble right because it it genuinely is like one of my top three favorite i've been ghost babble kicks ass wait ghost babble is the game boy color yeah it's the game boy yeah i will 100 to it i love that game it is so fucking good that i think what about metal gear acid the card based no oh man deck builder no i think how about? Let's do Ghost Babble as an all of us episode. Maybe we should bring our own special weirdo

Metal Gear game. Oh yeah, we'll each pick our favorite for a trusted fucked up. Yeah, we can do that later in the year. Yeah, I love that. Okay, so we will give you warning when we're going to do the Ghost Babble episode. We'll probably give you a week's worth of warning, so just keep an ear out. It be a little while basically when things are slow we will do it you like castlevania don't you it's a great it's a great read great read perfect it's a

great read no notes but we're done talking about Psycho Mantis Did we even say the cool thing That you had to do? Where you switch your controller port? Yeah, that's so cool It was a really smart idea It was so cool, that freaked me out as a kid But I probably read it in some magazine We wanted to try something new

With this TV segment Where we're going to talk about The Last of Us And we're going to have kind of like a point counterpoint okay fun yeah yeah i thought this would be kind of cool and so chris and i really wanted to watch it but we're coming at it from the perspective of like people who didn't want to watch it you know what i mean and then griffin and russ are coming at it from the perspective of people who are really really excited to watch it that's interesting see i'm actually coming at it from a perspective of people who are really excited to watch it. That's interesting. See, I'm actually coming at it from a third perspective, which is that somebody who didn't want to watch it

but was told that they were going to discuss it on the podcast that they do. That's also me. Assuming that 100% of the members of that podcast would do the homework, I guess, if you want to call it that. No, Russ, you just said you didn't want to watch it. So if we have four people that didn't want to watch it, why did you choose to watch this? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I did want to watch it, but I didn't. So watch it so if we have four people that didn't want to watch it what did you but i watch this wait wait wait wait i did want to watch it but i so four different positions didn't want to watch it didn't didn't want to watch it didn't watch it did want to watch it

did watch it didn't want to watch it did watch it we got our own little punnett square of disinterest just to be really clear i don't know let's get as clear as fucking. I don't know if it's... Let's get as clear as fucking possible. I don't know if it's disinterest as much as whether I had a stomach to experience The Last of Us again, given the tonal darkness of the series. Straight up. Let's do this thing. I'm not willing to pay the dead kid tax to watch a piece of media if the film if the film or television show is like hey i got a great story for you really gripping lots of drama and action and excitement and the child does die pretty horrifically right in the very beginning that is not and then they go ahead and toss in

one more just for good measure man they do two back-to-back yeah kid deaths in this film uh in this in this tv pilot um here i uh we're coming at this i think pretty hot and heavy i did actually think it was pretty good and i think it's extremely good i think it's extremely good i think it's shockingly faithful that's the thing that is like most surprising maybe the thing we can focus most on because i think it would surprise anybody, how at certain points, almost frame by frame. Yeah, pretty uncanny. It is a recreation of the opening of The Last of Us. And, you know, a lot of this is A, going to have spoilers in it, and B, you know, might not make a ton of sense if you haven't played The Last of Us.

But there are sequences like the intro sequence, the cold open, if you will, where you're essentially escaping from a mushroom zombie apocalypse. Well, you're escaping from the opening moments. The way that the pilot sort of builds that tension of something is terribly wrong from a radio report that you hear from Jakarta in the morning, and then in the afternoon it's like oh man mrs henderson sure is acting weird yeah uh to like you know the almost one shot driving away from their house and you know getting stopped by traffic and then the car explodes and then

they're running barefoot through this it like all that shit works really really well and was expanded like that's a lot more than what was in the game the game really just has like 10 minutes of like it's nighttime and something's going wrong um i think it uh i i for what i think it really hit that opening sequence hard for me because when i played the last of us originally uh i was in austin and the game you know starts out in austin and there's like a point where you you reach an intersection in the car in this like long uh one shot uh and are you running in the in in front of the car is that you know yeah you're no you're you're driving in the car

and you reach this intersection where it's like well i'm gonna get on 71 uh and i remember seeing that shot in the game and be like oh wow that's like i know i kind of know where they're supposed to be right now and that exact thing happens in the tv show anyway really really really really faithful yeah and i i i think that that is probably the most surprising thing about it is that it adheres to the script and the scenario of the game like religiously. You know what it made me realize? Does that make you realize the game itself? That's what I

was going to say. Is the problem? I think all it did was highlight how much of a better movie and watching experience The Last of Us 1 is versus a gameplay experience which is a i actually think it's a fine gameplay experience i don't think it's bad by any means but narratively and the cut scenes and the performances are 100 the star of the show there and uh you know more

or less we're we're chopping out a lot of the like dryer puzzles puzzles and the stealth sequence like all that stuff and it's just the fucking prime beef of that series all right and so i mean that's pretty fucking good and and like just like it's shot beautifully the production beautiful the performances from uh pedro pascal and um bella ramsey are like through the roof, insanely good and faithful to the game without being like, I guess, beholden to the game. And I was just like pretty blown away by the effort.

And with that said, I do not think that I can continue watching because it is just not the show that I have a stomach for right now. There are tons and tons of people that watch the walking dead and loved it so i know that there is an audience for this show especially for people that haven't played the games and don't know where it's going but i just don't know that i am one of those people so i i'm curious to watch a few episodes in a go having like talked with the team at Polygon who have watched it, it sounds like it's more episodic or standalone almost. The individual episodes you mean?

Yeah, yeah. I would hope that the episodes would be episodic. Well, so what I mean by that is like it's not serial. Like it's not, it is not, hey, we're just going to continue on from where this first episode went that like, oh, now we meet these two characters and we get their very deep, beautiful story. But that's in line with the game. The game was structured episodically as well. That's true. But it's smart, though, to that point, it allows you to trim some of those more mechanical segments.

Like there's not going to be a direct one-to-one and and it it's smart if they're pulling the segments out to allow themselves to like forward fast forward past some of the more mechanical and it lets you breathe like what you're saying of you know is every episode going to be as dark as the beginning of the last of us one game you know getting different characters different tones somewhat different genres like i i think it's a clever approach yeah but again i would say like i don't think it's a departure from the game which also had like tonal like oh this is a moment you could really breathe and take it in and here's like a visual like a like a really pretty landscape or whatever yeah joel was just such an asshole their relationship was

just like so tough and just everything about him trying to convert his ward slash like human cargo i don't i don't know a good way of describing that into his makeshift daughter i don't know that that it's so dark it's such a tough hang even more than the zombies and the apocalypse talking about the game specifically yeah in the game and the idea of getting a break from that uh on the regular seems like a way for me to make it through this show but i i agree i was listening to um the watch which is this like a ringer podcast about television that i i love and they made the point of like an up elevator versus a down elevator that you know when you watch station 11 that's an up elevator like all the bad stuff has

happened and now you're watching society get better and last of us is a down elevator like you're you're just at the beginning of the shit sandwich and i that makes perfect sense for what you're saying of the idea of getting on a down elevator right now seems tough yeah and we only know it's a down elevator because we've played the game like i think most people would think oh the apocalypse happened people made society they figured things out more or less and now it's sort of like dealing with that but we i mean it just gets more and more fucked up as it goes and that's not like this is is, this is why I feel really ill equipped to talk about shows like this in that, like,

uh, same thing with like Chernobyl, right. Which has the same, is the same director, same showrunner, same showrunner, Craig Mason.

Excellent. Amazing show. I watched the first episode and was like, I can't fucking hang. Like, this is a brutal watch. And I, I guess it just comes down to taste uh like like all things when you're

consuming media where like i can watch this and be simultaneously like really impressed with the adaptation with the faithfulness of the adaptation and with the quality of the production and acting and all of that and also not want to not want to watch it anymore because it feel it's a bad feel it's a real bad feeling show uh i i think and it's hard to honestly we used to watch walking dead too and i it was honestly around uh the pandemic i think uh when when old covid19 first started to hit that we were like i don't actually want to watch a show that is such a bleak view of uh of of humanity at large in a time where that view is of you know not uncommon irl uh and so yeah i't know. I don't know what it's going to take for me to get back on board with a zombie show,

but this seems like a good one of them. Did any of y'all watch Station Eleven? No. No. Strongly recommend it, especially for anybody listening who is enjoying Last of Us. It is a fantastic TV show.

Also about a... I mean mean it's basically covet the tv show of airborne virus spreads and kills like 99 of the population and then the people who are left have like kind of formed societies and it's about a traveling theater troupe um that is going from town to town to make money. That sounds good. Very, very, very, very, very good. Is it a movie or a TV show? It's a TV show, but it's a one-off. Not that you can really tell the difference these days.

I think it's like nine or ten episodes, and that's it. There's no more of it. So we got the email about how to play it. Here's a question from sludge an mgs movie has been in early development for years could a faithful film adaptation ever get made what would have to change to make it work as a hollywood blockbuster a faithful film adaptation could get made it would get fucking ravaged by literally everyone no one would come away happy even the diehard roommate

jacob dunkel would eat that shit up yeah but he wouldn't be happy because if you for the people that like want a literally faithful adaptation they're never going to be happy with some small aspect that will spiral for them to the point where it ruins the entire project and then for everyone else they're going to be watching something that is almost intelligible, unintelligible, I should say. So everything would need to change, really. I don't think there's a good two hour, two and a half hour,

three hour even thing inside of this, inside of any of the Metal Gear games. The problem is, the problem is this right metal gear is a bunch of basic like standard almost cliche spy and action movie tropes that have been implanted into kojima's brain and then he builds a bunch of weirdness to justify all of these like tropey action spy things. If you take away all the extraneous stuff and all the Kojima stuff and you get back to brass tacks, you're just left with something completely reductive. Like nothing, none of the original quote unquote original stuff

is in the bones of the thing. It's all in like how he builds on top of them so i feel like it would just be utterly generic once you chipped away everything that it required to get you back to a to a two hour long movie also this movie is happening right i mean it's in like pre-production but it's the furthest along it's ever been does it have a direct like any yeah jordan vote roberts is the director who directed Kong Skull Island. Oh, I like that movie. Damn, that movie kicks ass, though. You know what? I kind of, that's a good director pick.

It says Oscar Isaac on here. Is that right? Oscar Isaac is, yeah, a solid snake. Sure, why not? Honestly, it doesn't matter. You could literally put anyone in that role. It's fine. It's more about, I think, the direction and also just like, are you willing to get fucking zany with it? And he's more about i think the direction and also just like are you willing

to get fucking zany with it and he's a good director he said he wants to do like yeah i mean that's the right fit for that conch skull island is a zany fucking movie i oscar isaac has always had the vibe to me and this is about my perception more than anything else but he has always seemed to me to be like a quote-unquote serious actor that's slumming it in drama stuff or in genre stuff and i don't know how many things he has to do before i accept that like nah he's just here he has moved in to to genre territory and he is just gonna be the king i mean he does both he's yeah but right like, Star Wars and Marvel and now Solid Snake, I feel like, I don't know, I feel like,

I don't feel as uncomfortable when I see him in genre stuff because he seems to enjoy doing it rather than a serious actor that's grabbing a paycheck for a genre stuff. Yeah, I don't think he's grabbing a paycheck. That's all I'm saying. I agree with that. And I think it's just a matter of him being a big, big star star and any big big star is going to have a lot of genre stuff on their these days because it is dune of course the biggest also dune yeah uh fucking dude that

that movie rocked um yeah no totally i i don't again i don't think the movie is going to get made but if it does get made i am encouraged by that director choice yeah okay the movie is going to get made, but if it does get made, I am encouraged by that director choice. Yeah, okay. The movie is not getting made. Never mind. Oscar Isaac was talking about it in October of last year, and he was like, we want it to happen. What's the script? What's the story?

What's the take? But hopefully it comes to fruition. It's my favorite. It makes more sense as a TV show right i mean right if anything i think this i think this shit is unadaptable gang oh yeah it would be cool as hell as an anime an anime would be cool yeah what if they did a video game um okay uh we got we got a question from jskfm real quick what the fuck is the deal with kojima and character names and this this game certainly has a lot of wild character names but when i was doing research for this episode um i was reading about the plot of metal gear 2 solid snake which

came out before this game um which had i think the best character names in any kojima project just to run through a few of them um running man pretty typical red blaster ultra box one of the enemies uh jungle evil night sight which was later changed to night fright in later versions uh it's fucking great he's great at character names what's funny is that like okay that game came out in what 90 night like maybe 1990 like in that nes era yeah we're like yeah 90 games could have enemies named that and it wasn't that weird yeah like they're like megaman enemy names they were like megaman enemy names right but then to also use that fucking death stranding a million years later is like you're still doing that shit huh that's cool that's great some of them are

references like hal emmerich is obviously like uh rolandich, the director, and probably Hal, the computer from 2000, I would guess. What about Night Fright? Night Fright is tougher. Some of it is probably stuff that sounded cooler in Japanese. Yeah, for sure. And then once you translate, it's like, I don't know, it doesn't seem that cool to me, but I'm not a native English speaker, so I just got to roll with it. I mean, I like it as somebody who has trouble remembering names exactly you know i'm never gonna forget die hardman i know exactly

who die hardman is also do you know die hardman's real real name in in in death stranding hi dardman john mclean that's great that's kind of like the die hard guy not quite a question but would love to hear the besties discuss any other games that use slash reference their physical copy, like how MGS uses the game case to find the codec code. Now, if you don't remember this time period, I mean, it's copy protection, right? Like, that's what the CD case thing is. Yeah, but in the case of MGS, I don't think it was copy protection.

No, I don't think that's what it was. Yeah. yeah but in the case of mgs i don't think it was copy protection no i don't think that's what it was yeah in in metal gear solid if you don't know there was one bit where the only way for you to know the like correct frequency to punch into your codec was that it was featured on a screenshot on the back of the game case yeah which is fun which is great. But there was DRM, very, very proto-DRM, especially in the old PC adventure game days. I remember the Quest for Glory games had some of this. A lot of those old classic adventure games had it where, I think it was Quest for Glory 4 had a alchemical book of formulas in the manual that if you did not have that, you could not solve one of the necessary puzzles

to progress in the game. So you couldn't just rip a disc and then have the game without that manual or else you could not proceed. That shit was not super uncommon for games of that era and genre. Didn't Monkey Island have something like that too? Star Tropics had a page in the instruction manual. Where it would reveal a code that you needed to beat the game.

So great. And I know that there you needed to beat the game. So great. And I know that there was a Monty Python game where there was a cheese wheel, and it was like a code wheel that you had to turn with the coordinates they gave you at the beginning of it to figure out what kind of cheese they were referencing. And that was how you would start the game. So they had to prove that you had a valid copy copy of it um hilariously by the way that star tropics uh there was a switch online version

of uh star tropics and yeah and it they just kind of put it out and then people got to that part i guess and they were like hey um i mean the internet exists it's fine well yeah right you could if you downloaded it you have access to the internet. But it is funny that I guess it was a fix in a Wii U version that was released. Oh, they changed it? In the virtual console, but the release they did for the online version. One of your favorite games of last year did this. Tunic.

The whole gimmick of Tunic. I mean, it's referencing that. mean it's referencing the game i mean right i mean it's in the game but it is like they they found the modern way to do it i thought of tunic because they sent a pr package to me and it had like things tied to the game in like really subtle ways so it reminded me of that but yeah i think it's a little different how tunic does it in game um computer games used to come with this isn't exactly the same thing but it is fun to talk about it um a lot of pc games used to come with what were called feelies and they would be like little props not unlike i guess what people do with limited edition uh stuff these days where you get you know a prop

from the game but like uh the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy comes with like some some glasses there was cool stuff with like detective game that would have a bunch of like clues in there that you could uh i mean just have a lot of cloth maps with a lot of like PC RPGs. Yeah, Ultima would come with a lot of this stuff. I hate the name Feelys. I couldn't hate it more. It's like reverberating in my brain, Feelys. No, it's bad. It's bad.

I get you. It's bad. We've been playing anything else? Is it that time? It is that time. Yeah. I want to give a special shout out. We've been streaming now a couple times

sea of thieves that game's fucking fun now i don't know if you guys know or have kept up with it they made it fun they made it fun there's a lot of stuff in the game now and a lot of things to do and it's very fun to play i was playing by myself yesterday i'm not ashamed to admit i hopped on a sloop and was like i want to see what these sea forts are all about i'm clear i see your fort got some money uh the way that they've sort of like changed progression and your like ability to captain your own permanent ship uh like all that shit's really cool and it's got me playing the game trying to earn enough money to buy a ship for our next stream uh it's it's i i i really have been enjoying our time with that game. Fantastic.

I was mostly playing Metal Gear, so I don't have a lot new to talk about. And I watched our homework. So what do you want from me? I started, well, not even started. I watched several episodes at this point. A show called Industry. Oh. It's on Instagram.

Max was what? No, I've seen it. Why'd you laugh at me? No, it's, it's funny. I like that show, but it's funny. It's funny. It's funny. It's sort of like a, you know what? Here's the best pitch I can give.

Like Grey's Anatomy crosses secession. Like if that's like your, if that sounds like your kind of thing. You know what it reminded me of was MTV's Skins with bankers. Do you remember that show MTV's Skins? Just a bunch of sexy bankers. I guess is what this show is. Basically a bunch of sexy bankers. This show is basically a bunch of sexy bankers that are trying to make money

and climb the ladder in that world. There's a lot of hijinks that goes hand in hand with that. There's a lot of jargon in that show. I really have a tough time keeping up with all the jargon. You were, but you've been on CNBC. How is that possible?

I know. It seems unlikely. It's no worse than medical shows. I mean, you get what's happening. You understand when things are bad and when things are good. Yeah, that's all that matters. Which I think is about all you need to know. I obviously comprehended all of it,

but it's good. We're going to keep watching it. And the new episode of Paul T. Goldman is absolutely wild if you're not watching that show. There's also, this is not a, this is a warning. This is not a review because I haven't watched it

yet, but I'm about to go ham on it. Have you guys seen this show called Traitors? No, I've heard it's very good. There's a show on Peacock. It's called Traitors. It's a reality murder mystery show hosted by Alan Cumming in a big mansion, and there's a lot of treachery and

murder and it looks outrageously good it's got some reality show people some favorites that i've seen reality shows before and uh i i mean i haven't watched a single episode of it but i can give it my stamp of 100 is it gonna be the fucking, I think Fox did Whodunit, which was a murder mystery. It was ABC and it whipped ass. It was a murder mystery reality competition show where at the end of each episode, the player who got eliminated was murdered and then was the

murder that they had to solve for the next episode. Yeah. What a classic. If it's anything like that, I'll watch every episode of it. I have one. Have y'all ever heard about The Shout? No. Okay. So there's this movie from like 1978 called The Shout.

And it is about a man who meets Tim Curry at a like mental institution, right? And they're watching a game of cricket. They're keeping score. He's like, I have to tell you a story. And they're watching a game of cricket. They're keeping score. He's like, I have to tell you a story. And the story is about himself going to a small town and revealing that he has the power of the shout,

where he shouts so loud, everyone dies. Cool. And then the whole movie is building towards, will he or will he not shout? And let me tell you, it rules. It's a great movie. Tim Curry is very delightful in it. I cannot recommend it enough.

I think it's on Criterion. It's on a few places. It's one of those movies that I can't imagine people have to pay big licensing fees for it. But it's great. I want to give a shout out. GDQ, or I guess AGDQ, the Wintertime uh event was last week uh and it was a great event they're still doing it remotely i can't wait for it to i don't know if it'll ever awesome games done quick for people awesome games done quick it's a speed running marathon for charity uh still

still kicks ass even though they're not doing it sort of live in person i miss that energy a lot but i get obviously why they're not doing it that. Anyway, as I expected, the neon white speed run for GDQ this year is fucking radical. I don't have the name of the runner on hand, but it was really cool, really informative about all the tech that goes into speed running that game. It's just a level by level speedrun. They don't do the cutscenes and all that shit. You'll be glad to hear, I'm sure, but it is breathtaking

if you play that game and endeavor to ace every level. Watching somebody just fucking dissect it in that way is really, really good. It's my biggest recommended watch of of the whole event looks like uh bladen and tordana were the speed runners in that thank

you to everyone for uh listening to the show and specifically for the people that took the time to write reviews for the besties on apple podcasts uh specifically to diana fey17, Todrick, and BigB135. Thank you for writing reviews. Thank you to everyone else. The games that we talked about this week included Metal Gear Solid 1, The Last of Us and The Last of Us TV Show, The Shout Industry, Paul T. Goldman,

Traitors, Sea of Thieves, Awesome Games Done Quick. uh the shout industry paul t goldman traders sea of thieves awesome games done quick uh next week we are doing fire emblem engage the newest entry in the long-running turn-based strategy series fire emblem that's good i've heard it's good i'm excited me too cool but i'll have to wait to talk about it and play it because we don't have it yet and that's all the time we have so we have to stop now and that's just podcasting folks I'm sorry but we hope you join us

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