The Besties - Revisiting Metal Gear Solid's Weird Game Boy Color Port

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

We continue our dive into the great and stealthy works of Solid Snake this week, as we've recently played Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel on the Game Boy Color. Does it hold up? We should probably stop asking that question of these things.Also discussed: Atomic Heart, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Destiny 2, Physical: 100, Analogue Pocket 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!

You know, we don't always have to say a funny thing here. We don't? I thought we did. I thought that was the rule. People come here for the games. And that's why I'd like to announce my new tagline for the besties, for the gamers. We get a lot of comments saying, like, this joke didn't work, gang, or please stop talking about eggs so much. Just do it for the gamers.

Yeah. And so I'm proud to announce today's episode will be a very sort of straightforward, pared-down affair. I'll begin with this. Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babble has 13 levels. The graphics are good. How many weapons are there?

There are five weapons. One is your mind. One is your mind. One is your cigarettes. Nope. See, right now, juice what you're doing. Okay. It's not for the gamers. Do you understand?

Yeah, it's just for the gamers. Wait, wait, wait. So like this. Knock, knock. Who's there? Gamers. Already bad, but go ahead. Who?

Gamers who? For the gamers. No. It's not practical. It's got. No. It's not practical. It's got to be. They just want to know the bullet points, y'all. Can I tweak your tagline to make it the besties, a declaration of independence for we the gamers? That's cool.

I feel like it's like us saying it's just about games. Keep politics out of it. Well, hold on. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can I just say that we're leaving money on the table here? Keep it simple, stupid. Besties for gamers

for the gamers. That's too confusing because what you've done there, it's so funny, Chris, is not for the gamers. By making it cute like that, it's not for the gamers anymore. What if I put a Z on it? How many pixels are in this game, Griffin? That's the serious question that people want to know.

How many? Exactly how many? 1,228. Okay. So at least the gamers have that. And where can they go from here? That should be it. The tagline should be besties for the gamers.

Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babble has 1,228 pixels and 13 levels. There's five guns, and here's how to get all of them. I'm sorry. Are we still in the tagline? Yes. The tagline is it's not for new gamers. It's for old gamers. The four gamers.

That's good. That's a great addendum. It's for for new gamers. It's for old gamers. The four gamers. That's good. That's a great addendum. It's for the four gamers. So it's four gamers. So for the four gamers. Like the original four gamers? For the four gamers? Yeah, our predecessors, the four gamers.

Oh, yeah. For the four gamers. Four, and it's all golf games. For the four gamers. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It should be for the four, four gamers. Like, F-O-R-E, the original four gamers. Steve Wozniak, Ralph Baer.

Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison and the kid from The Wizard. Four gamers. You can go to South Dakota and you kid from The Wizard. Four gamers. You can go to South Dakota and you see their heads right in the wall. Their actual heads. They've been lopped off. Thank you for your sacrifice, four gamers. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game in the 1970s.

My name is Kirby McElroy, and I also played Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babble. My name is Kirby McElroy, and I also played Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babble. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I have memories about this game that do not align with my current experience of it. That's it. My name is Russ Frushik, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment.'s a video game club for the four gamers four and just by listening you are a member of this club today we're going to be talking i want to be specific about something today we're talking about a game called uh metal gear solid or that's it or no not no there's two titles. Can I ask you a question? Two titles. Nihon Jin desu ka?

Hi. Ie, Ie. America Jin desu. America Jin desu. You're not Japanese. Oh, you said Nihon Jin, not Nihon Go. No, I'm not Nihon Jin. No, you're not.

America Jin desu. You're not Japanese. This game is not called Metal Gear Ghost Battle. It's called Metal Gear Solid. Game Boy Color. Igarisu-gen desu ka? No. This is giving me...

Are you ready? Here it is. It's in Europe, which this game was designed for. It was the priority market. It was called Metal Gear Ghost Babble and Metal Gear Solid, the Game Boy Color version, it was such the not priority

for this development team that they didn't even include all of the game in it. Oh, did you know that? Did you know that, Justin? We're getting way ahead of ourselves. Hey, here's what the game is. It's not like he's just talking

about the production of the game. People don't even what the game is. It's not like he's just talking about the production of the game. People don't even know what it is. Here's what it is. Metal Gear Solid for the Game Boy Color, aka Metal Gear Ghost Babble, is a mix of the original Metal Gear games that preceded Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid,

which preceded this by like a year or so, thrown, stuffed, crammed into the game boy color for better and for worse and we're going to talk about it two megabytes that's how we're going to talk about it because it's right after this break was metal what they call it ghost babble because? Because of GB? Because of GB, yeah. That's exactly right. 100%. Hideo Kojima even said yes to that in an interview. Yeah, I've played like six or seven chapters of this game,

and I don't know that Ghost Babble is a term that has come up organically. Maybe I... When was the last time a term came up organically in a Hideo Kojima game? Well, I mean, you do eat snakes pretty frequently. That's true. I do think they say, wow, damn, damn, snake, you really are a big snake eater, huh? So I think that that one works. I mean, if you're completely unfamiliar, I think the best way of understanding this is if you look at like the

original metal gear for the NES, the way that looked, the way that was presented, a lot of it, the way it played and you sort of just blended it up with aesthetics and narrative from, it looks like from the, you know,

the PlayStation version, it looks like almost, it almost feels like a, a D make or something like that. Yeah. That's how I felt too. Yeah. If someone was tasked with like playing through the playstation version of metal you're solid and then they were like how do we fit this into two megabytes right and into a game boy color and that's exactly what this feels like and honestly in a lot of ways

the gameplay is actually kind of better yes the playstation version because in certain ways yes in certain ways there are like first of all you could see where you're shooting and looking like where enemies are yeah so there are actually improvements to it but i would also say there are also detractors to being jammed into two megabytes which we'll certainly talk about but i would say like from a sheer accomplishment standpoint it's pretty fucking impressive like yeah i will grant you that i love this era of games specifically i feel like in the game boy color era is where developers started to get a little bit more ambitious with what they tried to port over to to this platform uh game boy you

saw some of this right like this shit that pops to mind is like uh odd world there was a game boy odd world game that was i mean i think a fairly um faithful if not terrible recreation of it right uh this this one i think they did a decent job with considering the the you know spectacle of the original functional yeah perfectly yeah it's like it considering what the brief was i think they they achieved they they crushed it and approaching a genre that that no one had really done on the game boy or game boy color which is like a stealth action genre had like really hadn't happened also most game boy games suck like they are a really unenjoyable do not hold up well yeah they just haven't and i i think this game ages far better than most and going back

and playing this i am both a little crushed because it is not what I remember, but I can see why I adored it because there's so much more going on here. And it's so much more interesting than 99% of Game Boy games. Interesting is a great, great term for this. Yes. From a sort of historical standpoint, I think it's a very cool game. I did not like playing it with my hands and brain and eyes um it's a more mechanical i think uh take on stealth where i think in metal gear uh solid the main line if if you um get trapped or stuck it can

feel a lot more like a death sentence if you get caught or yeah you know someone spies you um this almost has a little bit of a puzzle element where like enemy movements are very mechanical if you get spotted it's not a big deal to run back out of the room and back in so like which usually will kind of reset the the the warnings um and to try like a different approach um but it's much more like because of the graphics and to try like a different approach. But it's much more like because of the graphics and the way it plays and the way it's laid out, it's like, it's fairly straightforward, I think.

That's true sometimes. I will give this game a lot of credit for its AI, for its like enemy AI, because sometimes those motherfuckers will follow you to the death, which is not technology that I thought existed in the Game Boy era where you run off one screen to go hide in a truck. Sometimes they'll just follow you into that truck.

And as silly as that sounds, I thought for sure that that is not something that these Game Boy enemies were going to be capable of. I also wanted to call out specifically the art design of the game and this relates to the enemies as well it's pretty astounding how much they were able to pull off in terms of the pixel art of this game the resolution we joked about in the intro is 160 by 144 pixels which is like i don't know man a postage stamp on your modern monitor like it's tiny yeah but you can tell like kind of where a guard like when a guard is like whatever smoking a cigarette or looking the other way or you know tapping his foot and and the snake model

in particular has just so much detail to it that really kind of blows any other like Game Boy Color model out of the water in terms of how much variety you can get out of this model. They recreate, I mean, to an extent, it's kind of like, all right, they recreate a bit from Metal Gear Solid where Meryl is dressed up like a guard. They recreate that where we know, of course. Different character, but yeah. a bit from Metal Gear Solid where Meryl is dressed up like a guard. They recreate that where we know, of course... Different character, but yeah. I'm saying the idea, yes, the idea of a woman he's trying to rescue dressing up like a guard.

You'll remember in the last game in Metal Gear Solid, the gimmick was her butt will wiggle and from the way it jiggle, from the way it moves..., from the way it moves. The way the butt jiggle. The way the butt jiggle. It's how you solve the game puzzle.

You solve it as checking for butt jiggle. This Game Boy, they know. There's like two pixels per butt. They know they're not going to swing that. So just like, okay, I'm wearing a red hat and a ponytail. So just like get at me. Get at me. I've got a red blob on top and there's a brown blob

behind my head so get at me that that that character's name by the way is chris jenner yeah wild yeah sergeant christine jenner chris jenner in fact that he makes a deal out of it she's like i'm christine jenner and i'm here on assignment and he's like can i call you chris and she's like that that feels unnecessary like it feels like you're stretching to make this reference that i'm a person like i'm a person was chris jenner like a known entity when this game came out i don't think so i don't know the way it knows um it it's i think that this would have been a more fun game had it not been quite as direct of an adaptation my mind goes to uh god i forget who made it but there was a 007 game

that took a lot of the sort of concepts of of bond but then did it in a almost like Link's Awakening style. And that game is one of my, I harbor a lot of fondness for that one. Although, you know what? I say all this shit, if I go back and play that shit now, it's probably not great. I did that this week because of this game, and I was like, now that was a game that got

it, and I went back and I don't go back, my friend. This was developed by Sapphire. You're talking about the Sapphire got it and i went back and i don't don't go back my friend don't save develop my sapphire you're talking about the sapphire sapphire game boy game it came out in 1997 yeah all right sorry 98 and um yeah you could kind of like select like karate moves and on the a button and like just standard punches on the b button and uh there was like kind of an open world thing there's rpg stuff where you have to go find people it's but oh man it does not it is it's from a different time but but it is worth remembering like how uh well received this and myself included like i love this game as well when it first came out ign gave it a 10 out of 10 game spot gave it a 9.4 out of

10 uh interestingly enough nintendo power 7.8 out of 10 game spot gave it a 9.4 out of 10 uh interestingly enough nintendo power 7.8 out of 10 wouldn't have guessed that and famitsu also was not a big fan of this game 31 out of 40 which is basically an f for famitsu um so it was incredibly well received and again i think it you really have to put yourself in the mindset of what people thought a Game Boy Color game was capable of at the time, and the fact that this went so far beyond that, with having an actual narrative, pretty amazing pixel graphics, and stuff like that, people overlook the fact that, yeah, the movement can be stilted, and the AI has moments, but also can be pretty simplistic.

Well, it's also a great reminder that, like, when you talk about reviews, it's always going to be subjective because it's always going to be viewed through the lens of what else is happening at that moment. You look at the Game Boy Color as a platform in that moment. If you have to add the context of, well, you already have a Game Boy Color and like presumably you want to play something on it. This is one of the best available offerings for that. Yeah, it's so rare that any of these games have any sort of like long-term legs as Plant was alluding to. Like I think there are maybe three or four

Game Boy Color slash Game Boy games that like you can play today and like probably more than that, probably six or seven. You know, Viking Kirby. All the Zelda ones. Yeah, the Zelda ones are pretty good. Although I would argue that... that like you can play today and like um probably more than that probably six or seven you know thinking kirby all the zelda ones yeah the zelda ones are pretty good although i would argue that ok so dragon warrior stuff just in terms of what's crammed into here because i want to emphasize how big it is there are 13 stages so like 13 whole levels and that's not like screens they're like entire environments

they have like large open open base areas yeah there are four bosses the other thing that did y'all dig into the vr training yes i played a ton of this when i first came out and i i dipped a toe in as well but there are how many missions in the vr training 180 180 yeah and many of them are from uh Gear Solid Integral or whatever that one's called. That was the PlayStation expansion pack to the original Metal Gear Solid that they converted into this game

as the actual missions but using this game's engine basically. And a versus mode. Oh, I didn't know there was a versus mode. Yeah, apparently. But you have to have a link cable so you know sure well not for us certainly the ir port i actually think game boy color if you're interested in playing this at all i actually think the vr missions are maybe where you should go at

least a little bit just to like get your feet wet because they do show off the gameplay in like really interesting ways and you unlock way more of the like tool kits that you'll be messing with in the main game quicker um such that you can kind of like get a feel for what they're pulling off um i i i mentioned earlier the the full version of the game we we didn't get it uh some stuff got cut just because things get cut while making the game. I found an interview from Famitsu that the art hound on Tumblr translated. And Kojima said that there was a point, or this is when it was in active development. If you clear stages once during the story mode, you can choose to replay that stage with a different objective. The way to defeat a boss or the number of enemy soldiers you encounter and such might be different which is just again ridiculous that they were thinking

that they could cram that into two megabytes or whatever the game yeah that doesn't feel unfinished to me that feels like bonus content yeah they just didn't do it yeah but then here's a thing that is weirdly in the japanese and the european of the game, but not the American one, which I think has something to do with ROM size for English version or American version to the games. There's a 13-part story, like, radio play thing on your, what's the... Codec. Waki-taki?

Codec. Codec, yeah. And each chapter is assigned to each level of the game. So you go into each level, you put 140.07 into the thing, and you get the story of Idea Spy 2.5, a spy in New York. And then this, Kojima liked this so much that he and the writer adapted it into an actual radio play in 2006. And now it's available on CD, too. And the entire script is on GameFAQs, so you can go and read it.

That's fucking wild. It's deeply weird that they made this huge thing, translated it to English, and it's just not on our version of the game. Kojima was just thrilled for the opportunity to make anything that wasn't a video game. Yeah. Any media. on our version of the game. I'm just thrilled for the opportunity to make anything that wasn't a video game. Yeah. Any media. I think that's the crazy thing about this is like no part of this feels like punches pulled in terms of

like Kojima shit. Like the Kojima shit is all in here from his writing style to like the you know geopolitical nonsense of his stories to like shit like the radio play to hiding in boxes to it's just like very true to him as a game again how does it age not great but like i honestly a lot of his games don't age great

so that's pretty consistent yeah and that's interesting considering he didn't really make this game like the game was made by a company called tose which yeah it was super interesting they've been around since like 1979 are still open and mostly are like the kind of secret developer on a ton of stuff that we've liked like splatoon uh scarlet nexus like good stuff um but yeah they they made it different writer different everything they just as early on as that was in kojima's career you know comparatively he had still made plenty of stuff it's wild how much you know his voice was established that they could go off of well i would say it looks like shinta no jiri was the game director for this game who has essentially worked on all of the metal gear games since really this yeah um and i think he has worked pretty directly with kojima but

again i would say like i i agree with you i think the the meat and potatoes of the actual beat by beat game stuff was probably done yeah by this external company um anyway hey i i'm i'm a little crushed this is the danger of going back home you You know, you can't go back home. Yeah, I think if I were to go through my list of like must play Game Boy Color games, like games that I would want to play in my free time, this would no longer be in that list even though it was previously.

Also, it costs a ton if you want to go buy it. Like a lot. Yeah, and probably won't be coming to uh the uh virtual console or whatever it's called on switch anytime soon unfortunately unrelated note um i've recently spent some time with the analog pocket for the first time uh i spent a considerable amount of time with it and wow that thing's a humdinger if i could just say yes sir you were using the original cart for this within that i had the original. Right.

That's wild. I don't know. Did you notice any aspects to it on there? No, it just looks freaking great. It just looks great. It's a great screen. It just looks great. It looks great.

You can save a state. You mess up, no problem. No problem. You know? Start over. That feels like cheats. Yeah, it's cheating. it's cheating but i didn't tell myself to play this old ass game rusted so it's kind of i do want to mention one more thing it's incredibly funny to see metal gear ghost babble or metal gear solids like very serious

cover art right next to the game boy colors comic sans multi-olor kindergarten branding. It doesn't quite nail, but that's okay. They made it work. Yeah. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it and we can talk about weird-ass game.

So when we were doing the most anticipated for this year, one of mine, if memory serves, was this game called atomic heart that looked like a bioshock but if you swap in a lot of like soviet union iconography and ethos in places like the randian philosophy and and stuff like that um and so i was very

excited about it and we and it released, we didn't get it early. So we were like, let's put it off for a week. And I dipped in because I thought, you know, maybe there's something, maybe there's something here. Reviews have been a little bit all over the place. And I hopped in and played like the first hour or so. And I was blown away. It was incredible. And I got on the call and i said guys we got we got to talk about this game it's fantastic chris plant's like how much you play

i told him an hour he said okay so now i that is my hot take on atomic heart uh after playing the first hour game of the year chris plant. Can you talk about what you experienced? Yeah, tell me more about that first hour. Tell me what it was. You're first person. You're kind of a meat-headed soldier type dude, but affable enough. Fuck yeah. No, but he's in a fun way.

He seems like a fun guy. With a mysterious past. Yeah, like a mysterious past. Seems like a fun guy. Doesn't trust a lot of people. Doesn't trust a glove that talks to him and gives him stuff. But there's like, the aesthetics are, like I said, sort of like, I would say like Neo-Soviet, where it's like, a lot of times that aesthetic is very much associated with being run down or dilapidated or what have you. This is like bright, shiny city of the future. A lot of robots.

Stuff that like if they were like Soviet propaganda would sort of portray. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Neo, like futurism from the 40s then gone into the 50s and 60s. So it's like set, I think it's set during like early 60s? It looks. Late 50s? It looks- Late 50s? It looks incredible.

Yeah. There's like, everywhere you look is truly, I mean like, just beautiful to look at. This is a game that has a room that you walk into where the main character's like, I love coming in here every time. It's beautiful. And that's like a pretty big cold shot, and you look around, it's like, I i get it this is pretty amazing and you're uh sort of thrust pretty quickly into robots are like a massive part of this world and the sort of inciting event is uh somebody hacks the robots and turns them all bad and they're like basically the world is falling apart um and you are just trying like scrambling to survive and make sense of what is happening.

And that is like about as far as I go. Yeah, the first hour is literally Bioshock Infinite if you made it about Soviet era propaganda. In that you are quite literally in a giant city on the sky. You have all this amazing technology that feels um antithetical to the time you and then unlike Bioshock Infinite because again it's a game in 2023 the scope is huge so the first thing that you're doing is riding in like a a little um almost like a canoe I guess or a little boat in a canal and you're seeing this this gorgeous town and as it opens up you see massive like streets like highways almost full of dozens if not hundreds of robots marching

the scale in this game is huge i mean giant ships are flying above you um there are statues that are the size of like skyscrapers there's a lot of cool panache, too. You get a key to a car that's supposed to take you to your first location. You go out and use the key on the car, and then suddenly the car lifts into the air. It's a 50s-looking car. You sit in it, turn the ignition, and then the car floats into the air air and it's being levitated through through the skies like it really out of nowhere and there's a lot of cool little little bits like that so is that literally where you stopped no i got as far as like the robots uh i got an axe okay so you got to where the game starts yeah yeah i got to where like the actual you know combat and and things like that uh start

i got into the little facility whatever yeah so at first it seems like it's going to be a good bioshock game like i mean the question that ken levine always put forward for every bioshock game was there's no such thing as utopia somebody always has to clean the bathrooms and this is like that extremely literal as in you see robots cleaning the bathrooms in the streets from the very beginning and it's like well they're not happy and satisfied i wonder what they're gonna do once they become sentient um and that that is what happens i bet they fuck us up. They fuck us up. But then things, just like in the game, that things seem a little bit off, the rest of the game goes a little bit wrong. That talking hand, it keeps talking to you.

And if you thought forespoken was bad uh there there are multiple scenes where instead of walking to a room and going wow i'm you know it always touches me when i come here you walk into a room and say fuck me they're doing it again fuck me a bomb in here and then in the in the hands like hey maybe chill out and it's up, hand. Don't fuck with me, hand. And then it gets worse and worse when that transitions into full Duke Nukem talk. And you meet the upgrade. Did you say worse and worse or better and cooler? Well, let me tell you. You can tell me how you think about this.

You meet a vending machine. And this is where you upgrade your weapons and your sci-fi hand powers, right? Except for the vending machine is a lady, and she wants to sex you. Oh, cool. So every time you try to do any upgrade, she's, like, extremely horned up. She's like, you gotta leave that hand. You gotta let me fuck your brains out. And it's like, what?

I'm just here to upgrade my axe but i mean does it does it look like it does it look like it does like regular vending machine yeah it does and it opens up its guts and there's just meddling gears except for it really wants to have sex really um and then all the levels are beautiful until you go into a factory. And the factory is a huge, you know, endless, endless rooms, including a room where they make the polymer, which is the central thing of the game. And there's these pools where they're churning the polymer, right? Massive room. There are four of them.

And what do you got to do? You have to climb up to the ceiling and get on a rail car that moves at roughly one inch per minute and let it take you all the way around the entire giant room so that you can zap one by one each of the pools. But every time you do that, it releases flying robots that come at you and knock you off the thing. And if you fall off, you have to start the entire thing over again. Even if you electrocute all of them but one, you then have to go back in and just wait.

I literally just put my controller down and started surfing the internet. Surfing the internet, you know, like a cool kid from 1995. You were surfing the web, man? I was surfing the web. I signed on to AOL.com. I don't want to brag, but I had mail. You fell on a keyboard and I can't get to any of my sites.

It is in – it's just – it's so crushing and infuriating because this world is so interesting and at times so beautifully designed. There is so much going on. there is so much going on and the writing is just i mean it went from cringe to just outright like disgusting and shitty um then there i haven't even gotten to the point that there's an open world at the end of all this the way you get to the open world is by doing multiple find key open door quote puzzles then you get out finally into the open world and everywhere you go there are alarm systems that anytime you're like hey this is a really beautiful world it's like yeah but what if wherever you went it triggered alarms that released more and more and more enemies um and gave you like a heat level and after you destroyed the alarms more

robots came and just rebuilt the alarms so you could never just go and enjoy it it's i i i i'm i don't know like i i i can't think of a game like this in a long time that so completely undercuts itself at every single turn every time i was like whatever i can put up with that bullshit. I'm really into this. Then it would do something else and be like, I see that you're having fun. What if we stopped that? I mean, it seems like, and, you know, big game development follows this route of, you know, large development teams being specifically assigned, you know, art design or level design or gameplay design, whatever. It sounds to me, and you're talking about it, designer through the roof amazing like fantastic and in terms of like i don't know cinematics i guess if you count those as like quasi-interactive moments very good vending

machine designer a a plus great great work but it but it does sound like from a, yeah, they just didn't know what the actual gameplay was and the writing just like maybe culturally translate or something. I don't know. The gameplay can be interesting because, again, it's very Bioshock. Like you're effectively unlocking these plasmids that let you zap things or freeze things or telekinesis. And you're doing the things where you hack the robot to sneak past the guard kind of stuff? Oh, yeah, we haven't even gotten to the hacking minigames. I don't even want to.

It's not worth it. Is it pipes? Is it like pipe dream? Oh, no, there's multiple hacking minigames. And, Fresh, you're going to love them because there's some move ball around inside of thing puzzles i hate nothing more than the move ball inside of a wooden puzzle oh well what if i told you there was a move ball in a giant 3d space and you have to move it around while things try to kill

you i don't know that sounds like monkey ball i'm kind of into it uh no no you are not the ball you're doing it with your your physics hand so it's like doing a puzzle in real life it's like the worst breath of the wild puzzles it's it is so weird and and again there are these little details i mentioned like the the bioshock combat justin did you get to the point where you can just use your hand to empty any um containers no it feels like luigi's mansion you hold instead like to search um trash cans and stuff bioshock style you hold down the tele the hand power or whatever and you just start like vacuuming up everything in the room like all the i like that shelves fly open that's good though yeah papers fly off the table it's very very clever and very fun um it's too bad the rest of the game isn't that well bummer yeah i mean you should hey it's getting very good reviews on um on steam

on like user reviews so it could just be that you know this is one of those classic cases of game critics play too many games and have less tolerance for this sort of bullshit. It's also on game pass, which I didn't realize until this morning. So if you don't want to spend money and you subscribe to it, not to turn this into an ad for game pass, but that seems like a pretty good way to just play the first hour.

First hour is cool as hell. There's no combat. Um, anyway, I'm, I, I'm probably going to try to try to play why because i feel like i feel like there must be more here play metroid prime which you won't finish but you should play

more of that because that game is spectacular and i love it yeah that's a better game there are so many like very very good procedural like this I mean, there aren't a ton, but certainly over the years, you know, both Dishonored Games and, you know, Mooncrash, which I know you love. There's tons of great games like this. No, I agree. I just, I keep feeling like, hey, am I, like, not giving it a fair shake? Like, there must be more. It has, Justin, here's why I think you might play some more. It has some real, like, you know, like, hurt little puppy-ness to it.

Like, maybe it's good. Maybe if I look past enough of this, I can see the great game that's just waiting around the corner. Life is a finite resource. That is true. Then, well, we can't start fucking wielding that logic down we close this browser window and we never play a video yeah um so you all been playing any other games uh i have finished uh yakuza Like a Dragon. Wow. A turn-based RPG. Yeah, you know, once you start kind of moving at a clip through that game,

it actually, you know, tracks through pretty fast. It is not, I don't know that it's as sort of long-winded as a, well, a Dragon Quest game, which is what it's sort of emulating. But I loved it. I could not get enough of it. It's really, it does everything that, like, I enjoy about this series, but I have never stuck with it just because the gameplay never really did a whole lot for me. But, you know, making it into my favorite genre of video games arguably uh fix fix that

problem but good uh it's just it is zany and the story is surprisingly like great and the characters are all great and i i just i just really really loved it we we just talked about um like a dragon eshan on resties is that something you think you would try? No. Definitely not. Because it's not, that one's not turn-based, right? Correct. Yeah, the next one that I believe, what's it called?

Like a Dragon Gaiden is the next one. My only temptation to dive further into the series is to really be able to get the like character cameos a lot of characters from other yakuza games show up in uh in in this one and so i'm sure that if you like know who you know goro majima is when that cameo happens, you get stoked out of your mind. But, um, I did not necessarily have that moment.

but yeah, great, great game. I also didn't realize that, uh, Destiny expansion is coming out in like a week, a pretty big one. Uh,

and I saw a bunch of people talking about this dope cut scene at the end of the latest season. So I did back into Destiny 2. Oh my gosh. Just to see how it would treat me. And the answer is there's so much shit, y'all. Does it make sense? They're adding-

Did we just say just wait for the expansion when all that stuff will be... I honestly think... ...swept in the dustbin of history. So, yeah. I was nervous. I mean, when you talk about getting caught up with Destiny, there's either, you know, you're talking about story stuff, which is, I mean, better than it has been.

Or, like, I gotta get this gun that everybody's... Gotta get this god roll so I can be ready. I have tried, and I think mostly succeeded, to like, not get obsessive about that. And I will say this, to Destiny's credit, that game's pretty fun whenever you're just playing it. Whenever you're not like fucking like... Shooting into a cave to make rifles pop out.

Yeah, when you're not shooting into a cave for four hours or playing the same event over and over and over again because your awestranger didn't get the god roll that you wanted. It's like... When you're not doing it that way, Destiny's really fun. It's a really fun game. And a lot of the stuff they're adding in Lightfall sounds pretty sick.

They're adding a whole new element and grappling... There's fucking grappling hooks in Lightfall. Grappling hooks, yeah. They're adding in lightfall sounds pretty sick like they're adding a whole new uh element and like grappling grappling hooks and like grappling hooks yeah uh they're adding like sounds like loadouts that you can save so that that part of the game which is pretty great and has always been like really inscrutable and inaccessible is finally going to be something that you can you know manage in game and not in some third-party extension in a browser window i'm still in the loop are these expansions still the kind of thing where you like you buy them in chunks yeah so it's a basically the the the schedule that destiny is on destiny 2 is on now is uh there's an annual big expansion the last one was the witch queen which came out uh last february uh and then

there's uh four sort of quarterly seasons um so i played witch queen and really liked it but then i stopped i didn't play really any of the other seasonal content there's like two raids that they added that i didn't just didn't fuck with uh they brought back the king's fall raid from destiny one which i would be curious if i could do that just from sort of fucking muscle memory um and i didn't do any of that uh but at the same time like i don't know i loaded it up the other day and i had like an exotic just waiting for me uh because i owned a previous season and just messing around with that and messing around with the way they've changed all of the subclasses so that you can like fully customize them in any way that you want. I like it, man. I anticipate I will probably do exactly what I did with Witch Queen, which is

when Lightfall comes out next week. That's the name of the new expansion. You know, I'll play it and pound through that storyline and have some fun with the new content and then i would be shocked if i got as deep into it as i have gotten into destiny 2 in the past but yeah maybe that's the approach is just like treat it like a six-hour campaign yeah man single part campaign yeah it works for me and you still get that dopamine hit anytime you get like a well what what on god's green earth was that fucking psycho mantis let's justin are you doing some goofums with the soundboard i'm not trying to i don't know why you guys heard that did you hear that

oh that is like yeah that's i forgot you? Oh, that is Psycho Manus. I forgot I had that button. That's a funny one. Next time I press that, it's going to be intentional. Yeah. Those are my two things. Oh, no. We haven't finished Physical 100 yet, but I'm still watching. Almost there.

Fucking great. Justin? If you remember me talking about Not not for broadcast it was an fmv uh game a really really good one um that is now it has not gotten a vr uh release if you don't know or you don't remember it's a it's a game where you are manning a control booth for a television studio that's doing live broadcasts. And you are in the background sort of. You're being controlled by a hierarchical, like tyrannical government. You're basically trying to push out propaganda.

And what starts out as pretty basic stuff like switching between camera shots to make the broadcast good or bleeping the occasional curse word eventually expands to wild stuff like certain buttons will get an electric short that shocks you if you press them, or you have to blow cool air on something that's overheating, or you have to pull tapes for ads to play, and you're getting these dictates over time that are like, censor this, cut away from this, don't show this, and you're having to make choices on the fly. But it's all really, all the broadcast stuff is really funny and well shot. And in VR, it's very know i was about to say it's immersive but that's kind of obvious but it is very like you you feel sucked into the moment

a lot more and again that already requires a lot of attention it's like it uh it's hard to not feel sort of uh swept up by it but it's called not for broadcast and you played it what on a quest or quest two yeah if you if you never play if you haven't played it before, it's a really interesting one. I would not file this way with a lot of the other FMV cruft that I bring before you like a cat lopping a dead bird on its owner's feet. This is an actual good one. I appreciate your honesty. I've been playing, I talked about it, Metroid prime remastered i'm playing i'm pretty far into

it um it's fucking great man i don't know it's so good i play it with headphones the sound and the music and the uh yeah the audio design overall is just so fucking good and i just find it very satisfying and and uh exactly what i'm looking for from a metroid game which is like basically zero dialogue but all atmosphere and there's just so much atmosphere in this game fucking sick i would also recommend the psychonauts 2 documentary which is now fully out it is wait for it 32 parts on youtube i have a great thing i've not gotten into it yet but if you are remotely interested in the process of game development specifically game development at this scale so figure a team of like probably 100 people somewhere on there um it is uh very

illuminating in terms of basically every process from level design to art design to how you pitch a game to publishers and get it sold to various pitfalls that come out of game development. I didn't actually watch the Double Fine Adventure, which was the first documentary that they did. But having played through all of Psychonauts 2 and now watching this just really fascinating context and uh what i could i find it fascinating if i did not play much of or i think you would yes but there's probably a lot that i think i find more interesting because i know the end result so like when i'm hearing them debate oh should we do this or this i know what the end result was. So it kind of adds another level to it.

That's gravy. But I think if you've ever worked in any creative job, like collaborative job, like Griffin, just working on the site, you are going to have a lot of emotions. have a lot of emotions. Like, I find that, like, not bad, but I don't know, kind of like PTSD at times watching this of, oh, yeah, I remember working in that era. I remember that philosophy. Like, I remember how crunch, there's a warning before every episode that's like, hey, bear with these people. Like, these are people figuring things out in real time, and culture is changing, and they are changing, and their beliefs are different now than they were then. And I'm glad it's there because, yeah, the way that the first episode talks about crunch for the original Psychonauts, there's a lot of, you know, bad. But there's almost everybody involved is like those were the best days of my life.

Right. And it's wild. I watched the first two episodes, and there was a very late episode that I watched a bit of just because I wanted to see a specific detail. And transporting myself from that culture to the very, very modern, buttoned up, I i think healthy culture it was like a shock of yeah wow these are just two totally different companies two totally different worlds um yeah it's it's really fantastic i'm really glad fresh mentioned it to me the other day and i'm i'm really glad that i prioritized it because it's it's something special who made who made it there it's the same team that

made the documentary on um the it was called the double find adventure and uh so the team that made it is called two player productions and they basically just embedded with the psychonauts development team for fucking seven years or something it was just like it's an astounding range um and they must be part of the company right they must do like other stuff for the company yeah i think that i think that's right because there's really no way you could fund this if they were an external um entity which is bonkers too because i mean credit to tim schafer here in in all of i mean everyone involved because this thing does not pull

punches I mean the stuff that they're showing I I am shocked basically it feels like the only thing that you're not seeing is stuff that is like truly HR like it would be you would raise some legal flags if if this stuff was included But otherwise, the access is incredible and allows people to not always look good, really at all. I can't believe it exists. Yeah, it's excellent. I've been playing Atomic Heart.

I don't have anything else. Cool. Well, we did it. Uh, I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple podcasts. We have beach urns,

Tamarin tails, and captain Dana. Thank you so much for writing reviews for the besties on Apple podcasts. Thank you to everyone else who has written reviews or talked about the show or shared it or done fun fan art of me making eggs that's always appreciated we love it and we love you guys plant recap what we talked about uh we talked about metal gear uh ghost babble or metal gear solid for game boy color depending on you know how you like to frame things we talked about atomic heart and then we talked about all the other stuff that we're playing.

I don't have the document in front of me right now. I'm sorry. We also talked about Metroid Prime Remastered, the Psychonauts 2 documentary, which is on YouTube, not for broadcast, VR, Yakuza Like a Dragon, Destiny 2, and Physical 100, very briefly. Love it. Love it.

Thank you so much for joining us. What are we doing next week? Kirby's Return to Dreamland Deluxe. God, this game looks fun. Yeah, man. I can't wait. It's going to be a great time, and I hope you'll be there for it.

And be sure to join us again next week for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends make the world's best games Besties!