The Besties - The Greatest Vaporware + Half-Life's Black Mesa

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

Some games take a year to come out. But some games? Decades. This week The Besties are looking at some of their favorite vaporware, including a project that's been in the works since the mid 2000s: Black Mesa, a fan-made Half-Life recreation. 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!

Y'all, I have pigeons. Oh, you hate to hear it. See a doctor. I don't know what to do. There's pigeons on my, it's the middle of winter. It is freezing outside. Pigeons do not care. They have found my balcony and they love it.

New York love story. I've purchased fake snakes I've purchased weird reflective tape I've seemingly stalled enough it's time to deal with the pigeon problem Russ here's a knife

and a blindfold that rests up to you I tried some very safe sticky stuff that apparently they don't like they don't get stuck to it but they don't like it on their feet try that and now they jump in it and then they jump all around my balcony and now my balcony is covered

in it have you tried doing any of your characters that's pretty repulsive sorry Brenda Fricker I don't have anything for you but you just gotta make your peace with the birds My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of 1998. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Plant, and the cake is alive! My name is Russ Froschek, and I'm Gabe Newell.

Welcome back to the besties, a weekly game of the year book club that goes all year long. We are talking about the latest and greatest in digital entertainment here on the besties. And this week we're going to be taking out our little jeweler's glass and hauling it up. It's called a loop, actually. Jeweler's loop. hauling up and a loop actually jeweler's loop thank you russ that's hey that's two episodes of straight pedantry for you so that's a wonderful the one a wonderful streak that's my dream we're gonna be talking about half life no sorry black mesa zen x e n a half life Zen X-E-N A Half-Life Adventure I think is the full title Black Mesa, Colin Zinn, A Half-Life Adventure

A Gordon Freeman Joint A Gordon Freeman Joint made by best friends Can you turn on the time machine? Because we're going to have to go back in time for us Okay Why does it make that noise? welcome now uh back to the year 2004 um people are buying seinfeld dvds like they are hotcakes valve has just released a little game called half-life 2 to help them i don't know get people to download steam their new digital storefront people don't

know if it's going to work. People are mad about it. People, oh, Steam, you're going to make us download a thing to play a video game? Whew, that'll never happen again. They also, during this period, release updates of some of their classic games, including the original Half-Life. This time on the new Source engine, the new edition of it. And people are like, oh, I can't wait. Half-Life 1, it's back, better than ever before. And then they start to play it and they're like, oh, yeah, this is just okay. I thought this was going to be a real fancy

remake and it's mostly just fine. So video game fans do what they love to do most, get pretty angry online, and then decide to take it under their own hands. And a bunch of people decide that they're going to remake Half-Life 1 in the Source engine on their own. So many people that there are actually different groups trying to do it,

and some of them merge together to create what is called the black mesa project now we are in the year 2005 uh only 14 years ago so these projects merge and i mean it's getting a lot of love on mod forums, but like a lot of people think this is kind of a doomed prospect, mostly because they don't own Half-Life, even though this is a mod, yada, yada, yada. By like 2009, 2010, Wired is listing it on their vaporware of the year, right alongside that sweet baby Duke Nukem Forever.

What happens with all these fan projects is like new versions of Source comes out or game design trends change and different leadership comes into the projects and they keep changing the scope of this remake of Half-Life 1. And it's a fan-made project. It's a fan-made project. Nobody's getting rich.

It's impossible to make a video, like the fact that any video games get made ever is a miracle let alone like a company designed from the ground up to create video games in which all people creating them are offered fair compensation and working wages and that's not true of a fan-made project most of them and yet and yet the the year 2012 comes along eight years later, and it gets released as a mod for Half-Life 1 on Source. I thought it was a Half-Life 2 mod. Sorry, but yes, of Half-Life. Yes.

Done in the Half-Life 2 engine. You can play Half-Life. No, Half-life 1 source is the official remake and this is a mod that allows for a better version of half-life 1 on source it's standalone in steam now you that so the point is yes on in 2015 three years later they got the blessing of valve which again a thing that never happens to actually sell this on Steam in early access. But why are we talking about it now? That was four years ago. And the answer is it was incomplete because they didn't make what are called the Zen chapters. They've been releasing the Zen chapters

in chunks ever since. Why did it take so long to make the zen chapters i'm gonna throw to my good pal russ frushtick to explain what the zen chapters are okay real quick so half-life came out i want to say 96 97 the original half-life and 98 i think 98 thank you and it was universally beloved like people absolutely loved it i realize if you go back now it doesn't seem that amazing but when it came out it was felt like this sea change where most shooters were just like ridiculous, you know, Doom games where you're fighting giant demons and stuff like that. But this was set in a real realistic grounded world and the graphics were really ahead of their time. And it was really amazing. Until.

Until. Well, you go through this whole game and you're fighting in Black Mesa mesa which is a big science facility as referenced in the portal song um and then you get to the end and you jump into a portal throwback and you land in a place called zen which is effectively an alien planet on the other side of the galaxy filled with all the monsters that you know and love from half-life such as the head crab and those like cute little dog things that send sonar attacks at you and various and lots of platforming just and lots of platforming and that was just what you wanted right so that was kind of the issue is like all of half-life feels very ahead of its time and then the game ends in like a very i wouldn't say traditional but certainly not as engaging sequence where you're

jumping on jump pads and flying through the air and it just ran counter to the spirit of the original game it is acknowledged by the creators like it's not much like gabe newland folks that like this this part of the game was rushed they didn't have the time or budget to sort of do the proper like sort of pre-production on it and it is widely acknowledged even by the people that made the game that it is the weakest part of the yeah it should have just not been in it it sucks it look if you go back and look at the video of it it looks terrible it's not even that the graphics were bad it was just like no just like completely unenjoyable like not fun watching the footage you expect the the guy to be picking up like containers of crest because you bought you got this on a free cd-rom i can understand why like this was not the priority then when the black mesa project was like trying to get something out there standalone i mean it kind of works as a game development

i i guess test they didn't have to do a ton with i guess the core design of the Black Mesa era. Like, space, right? Make it look a lot nicer. Make it feel nicer. But the actual stuff that you do in it, you don't need to change that too much. People love it. They don't want big changes.

With Zen, I mean, you can go wild. Nobody's married to the original design of those chapters. So I think for that, it was, I imagine, more freeing for the people who had been working on this project. And you can see it the second you start the Zen chapters. It is gorgeous. It's beautiful. Considering it's fan-made, I would say it has a certain avatar meets blacklight head shop aesthetic that is it's like a yes album cover yeah it's tasty yeah it looks like the entire thing could have been painted on a van yeah and and um i i actually kind of dug the platforming stuff the shift because there is

something really thrilling about playing through this game you're getting more and more powerful things are just getting absolutely chaotic on earth and then you get zapped to this alien world and it's almost like the beginning of the game all over again where there's not a lot of combat for the first kind of half hour or hour even of this i mean you're shooting a few things but a lot of it is just kind of navigating this weirdly serene alien landscape and then it kind of builds all over again i'm not sure we made it completely clear that like this is not a remake of the zen chapters of half-life this is like taking some of the ideas and concepts and aesthetics of that and like completely making something reimagining basically how they could have done

them if they weren't dog shit the first time and that was that was true of the you know the first chunk the black mesa levels to a lesser extent but like plant said like there was a lot to fix here yeah there was a lot to reimagine here and so i forget where i read this but it's like four times as long as the zen chapters were. It is really long. I was not expecting how long this game would be. I was like, there's a boss fight about halfway through the Zen chapters. I was like, oh, okay, we're getting to the end here. And nope, there's a lot more.

I thought it was really, really interesting. I found myself missing the more narrative aspects of Half-Life. I think that like, it is all very, the things that you're doing from a mechanics perspective are very clear, but like you, especially if you're hopping in without like playing Half-Life recently, it's all sort of very disconnected from the narrative. And I was kind of missing that as much as I dug the sort of like the

aesthetics and some of the narrative and i was kind of missing that as much as i dug the sort of like the aesthetics and and some of the mechanics and stuff i felt like i was i was kind of missing a sort of connective tissue that that wanted me to keep that yeah i i definitely feel that there were moments where like they'll let you like look out at an alien vista and there's like a bunch of aliens flying through the sky and you're like oh wow this is cool but you don't have the like hey here's the doctor eli or whatever his name was that uh would you know show up and be like hey you need to it just needs to be more grounded um which is ironic for something that has so much jumping in it uh i do want to talk about the jumping real quick justin when you watch the original i don't know this but when you watch the original was were there just like jump pads or was this double jump mechanic that's in this remake the dumbbell jump was a long jump in the original half-life

you do a long jump by sprinting right crouching right before your jump and then jumping like mario yeah it's it's wild and it is wild that that was the mechanic yeah that you were using to navigate this world and in zen it's a sprint basically a double jump but instead of like increasing your height yeah you're increasing your like it's like a jet pack boost kind of you're just like thrusting hurling yourself with a pretty thrilling amount of speed uh across the level and that's what's so wild about this and like my main takeaway from from this this zen update is that like that was some of my favorite stuff in it and not the actual shooting

running around shooting the same aliens like over and over again in this alien world this is not like my genre like this is not where my my wheelhouse necessarily uh i did not play half-life one until much much uh later after it came out i think i played it after i played like the orange box and so like i don't have much affinity for it but the sequences in this where you're like running away from things that are going to myrtleize you and like blasting down like a sheer rock cliff like that stuff was is that stuff was like actually super exciting yeah i liked it a lot i i think that design choice where they changed exactly the way that you navigate through the world was really like made this for me i will say on the on the sort of

negative side one of the things that doesn't get a ton of attention is the fact that half-life 2 is like effectively a puzzle game in a lot of places where you're playing with physics and stuff like that. And they integrated some of that stuff into their Black Mesa levels of this release. And they try to do it on Zen as well. And generally, the puzzles, in my opinion, feel a little bit flat. A lot of them have to do with just like lugging cables around, which is not a super fun thing to do there's one clever puzzle where you're like using a force field in an interesting way but by and large they seem i don't know a little weak and it does sort of leave you with the combat which again feels very retro and not that thrilling the thing i would say about the combat that is again this is somebody who's like jumping into

this from not having played half-life by the way that we should mention how you i guess you can just google it if you want to there's like a level skip cheat you can i'll put it in a tweet uh for people to understand how they can skip to the zen chapters if they want you have so many weapons when you start this and i don't feel and obviously like you're not walked through like the best weapons to use or or whatever you're not walked through these individually because you're theoretically at the end of the game. But I don't feel like there was a great reason to use one weapon over another. A lot of the time, it's just sort of like whatever you sort of felt like the enemies don't have ammo. So you're kind of at the discretion of whatever is sort of lying around.

whatever is sort of lying around but like i i wouldn't say that the certain enemies uh a lot of times certain enemies didn't necessarily um you know reward using one weapon over another it's just sort of uh left open yeah i think that part was just very much tied to the old design one other huge thing oftentimes uh kind of design stars can come out of these projects or entire studios can come out of these sorts of projects. One that I hope becomes a bigger star in the games industry is Joel Nielsen who did the score for this game which is exceptional.

It's so good. It sounds like something coming out of AAA studios and not the sort of thing you expect from a project of this scale. And here is the great news, everybody. You can listen to it on Spotify right now for free. And you're literally already on Spotify,

so it works out nicely. They didn't make us say that. We just thought you're already on Spotify. It would just be the easiest. I'm gonna put it on my workout mixtape and just like just because in the game like you'll be in a big serious alien fight and have these sort of chill vibes going on in the background i want that while i try to run so fast that uh i get the sweat going that workout

sweat i do want to say one more unpopular thing that has nothing to do with half-life zen except it's not half-life zen's fault i should say uh the enemies in half-life are garbage um head head crabs extremely annoying to fight not satisfying i still get chills russ may i well let me talk about the head crabs before you do the full list real quick i get chills every single time they attack me in the face every time for the last 20 years i've been getting chills because it freaks my shit out so bad they're annoying they're so annoying the tentacles look like part of the environment until you just randomly get damaged from somewhere it's like okay i guess i'll turn around and shoot you if you if i must and barnacles that suck you up from the actually fuck off. That's so annoying. All the enemies in Half-Life are straight dookie.

But there are no water ones that come up. The zombies are okay. The zombies are fine. Why do you think the zombies are okay? Because they're just slow and it's funny to shoot the crabs off their heads. That's funny. I like the zombies because they put the crabs in one place. Just stay there so I can shoot you, you dumbass crabs.

There's a moment an hour in where you go down a giant uh elevator that is the type of elevator in the streets of rage series where it's like i don't know why people need this 100 foot wide elevator but sure and out of nowhere it just starts raining head crafts on you and it's so deeply upsetting i wish you could just skip that part of the game entirely yeah i don't know if this was in the original but like was there a mommy head crab in the original zen levels i don't think so because there is now and it just farts out about 10 000 head crabs at one point and it's just the worst. Well, shall we throw to an ad? Yeah, let's do an ad. Black Mesa, as Christopher Thomas Plant mentioned,

was vaporware for some time, which I still don't think is fair for a fan-made project, but whatever. What are some of your guys' favorite vaporware projects? Actually, really quick, Justin, can you explain what vaporware is for people who might not know? Sure. It's a game that is announced, i mean software of any sort is announced and just doesn't come out and sometimes vaporware is a permanent state and sometimes it is vaporware for a very long time and then is released and is no longer vaporware but that is that is my

that is my summation is Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think so. It's always in sort of like, it's very classically sort of in like a very ephemeral stage of development. It's still in development, like not canceled, but just sort of shambling along

in a sort of undead state. Usually Peter Molyneux is involved in some way. Drag him. He's just trying to live a quiet life i'll start because uh mine's mine's pretty weird uh deep down is my favorite one which was the capcom sort of dungeon rpg i think the way of talking about it sort of back when it was first sort of a thing that people were talking about it was like a monster hunter dark souls hybrid which in i want to say like 2013 is when like critical buzz like hit for this that was hot shit like that was the the genre that everybody was sort of on everybody's lips uh it was a if if memory serves it was like a a centerpiece for

like playstation for, the raw graphical power of it. Wasn't it part of the announced, when PlayStation 4, before it got released, I feel like Deep Down was sort of one of the titles that was being bandied about as a powerhouse? It was introduced at the same meeting where the PlayStation 4 was debuted. I mean, the two were debuted at the same meeting where the PlayStation 4 was debuted. I mean, the two were debuted at the same time. Yeah, so it was going to be like a co-op sort of very dark dungeon crawler that Yoshinori Ono was going to be, I think, a director or producer on.

He's the street fighter producer. I think that's the best way of summarizing. And I played it. I went to TGS in the Tokyo Game Show in 2013 and got plunked down in front of a PlayStation and played it. I went to TGS in the Tokyo Game Show in 2013 and got plunked down in front of a PlayStation and played it. It was at a state where it was playable. It sucked and I didn't like it at all,

but I don't think that was a reflection of the game being still in its infancy. I thought it was just sort of a bad, boring game design. It was like playing a bad version of Dragon's Dogma, which is already not the best game. But it kept being a thing that people were talking about. There was a public beta that came out in Japan when the PS4 got released. So lots of people could play it. And then nothing for a very, very, very long time. Five years in, Capcom registered or extended the trademark for the game. And then I guess two

months ago now, Yoshinori Ono was talking to Eurogamer and said that the game. And then I guess two months ago now, Yoshinori Ono was talking to Eurogamer and said that the game has, quote, not been completely given up on. That's classic vaporware, baby. A juicy vaporware quote. Yeah, it's just weird to me because it seemed like it had manifest

in such an actually tangible way and then they never quite finished it. I have two that are sort of tied because every once in a while, I'll go through my inbox and see how things are going. The first is Space Venture, which is created by two guys from Andromeda.

That is from the team that made the Space Quest games. We saw something similar to this with Hero U, which was Laurie Ann and Corey Cole from Quest for Glory. We made an updated version of that. Space Venture is an updated version of Space Quest. I kickstarted this project in 2012, and I now have seven years of emails and updates in my yeah the last one that i got just to catch everyone up was june of 2019 they had the box the completed box all right yeah the box art was done and they printed a bunch of boxes for it and it's now been six months over

six months since i've heard anything from them the other one that i wanted to mention was is just called barkley 2 it is the sequel to tale of games studios presents chef boyardee's barkley shut up and jam guide in chapter one of the hoops barkley saga which was an amazing rpg starring charles barkley that is fantastic i kick-started that one and let me see here that would have been it's still not out so obviously this one's a bit of a sad one this one is sad yeah it's also 2012 yeah and the project is kind of falling apart and the team is drifted apart in a way that it is yeah it's a bummer seems to be some some some rough feelings there maybe on in the whole thing and the people that are would still be sort of on the hook for delivering it maybe aren't the same people that made the first one and maybe don't exactly know where to go with it uh and it seems like the money is not there

anymore and it's just sort of shambling along it bums me out but but it's one of those things where like i am positive it bums out the people making it much much more but yeah those are my two i'll take it in the full opposite direction and talk about a giant studio making a giant promise in july 2007 at e3 sony and rockstar game is partnered on a playstation 3 exclusive called agent it was going to be a single-player campaign set in the 1970s cold war and there'd be political assassinations and i don't know it just looked like well didn't look like anything what was it yeah the promise sounded cool uh you know you could picture like it sounded like i mean this is one of those games i feel like i've heard so many rumors of that who knows

what is true anymore but it sounded like oh yeah it's gonna be kind of you know soviet espionage but then like also moonraker type of space 1970s spy stuff what's the game though this was always my thing with agent like what's the what does it do when i press the x button like what's the game my favorite thing about agent now is the rumors of like what happened to it because supposedly they made a ton of the game and rockstar was just like oh well we designed these underwater levels and now all of the underwater stuff in grand theft auto 5 is the remnants of agent it's like i don't know if that's true at all but it sounds cool yeah uh russ do it baby oh boy the sword down into the beast's eye. Arguably the most, currently the most famous piece of vaporware,

a little game called Beyond Good and Evil 2 from Ubisoft. Famed Michelle Ancel, director of Beyond Good and Evil 2. Okay, so Beyond Good and Evil was a game that came out in 2003. It was well-regarded. It was sort of a

game where you've had a pig friend and you shot photographs of people. It was an action adventure game. It was like sort of Zelda but also you were a journalist. You couldn't invert the y-axis. Among other things, yes. The sequel which has actually turned out to be a prequel has been rumored for many

many years. The first rumors started coming around to 2007 that they were working on a sequel. And throughout this time, over the course of seven or eight years, trailers would actually leak out of the development studio showing early footage of the game and people get very excited.

A trailer leaked around May of 2009 and people got very jazzed because you saw the lead character of the first game running around in a crowded street. And everyone's like, oh, my God, this is going to be amazing. And then nothing kept happening for many, many years. E3 2017 press conference with a definitely not a gameplay trailer of basically, you know, the pig guy was there. They're flying through space. All the great friends.

All your best friends from Beyond Good and Evil 2 are there. What is the game? I don't know. What is the progress of the game? I don't know, because it's basically hasn't really been seen extensively. That's that's that's that's OK. It's fun to dunk on Beyond Good and Evil 2, but that's a little bit unfair. Well, what is the game?

Well, there were presentations at the E3 where they sort of revealed the new scope and scale. So that was later, yes. Then we later got to see those presentations where they're like, you can fly. You're on this giant planet. It was sort of a no man's sky situation where it's like an infinite universe and the planets are like to scale

and you can just fly down and there's no loading and making all of these wild promises. Wasn't there also an aspect of like, we're gonna have fans make assets for us? Yeah, that was like a Ubisoft thing, kind of like a hit record joe situation yes i think that was the uh like thing that they cited like that the uh joseph gordon levitz yeah so effectively they've announced or quote announced how the game is going to work but

again that was i want to say two years ago was the last time we heard, if not longer. We've seen some gameplay videos here and there, but yeah. It's still not really a game as it were. And it is also kind of funny and bizarre because the original game tanked like a lead balloon, like really did not sell well at all. Commercially, yeah. So it is funny that there's this project that is like taking forever and is massively expensive and there's really no guarantee that this one's gonna soar because the first one

didn't i look michelle ansel makes very good video games the rayman games recently like the reboot of rayman have been excellent but like between this and do you do you all remember wild which i think got announced in like 2014 yeah It does ring a bell. Yeah. And it was like, it's supposed to be this big sort of, I want to say like Celtic inspired, like open world thing. It's hard for me to remember details because it's been five years

and Michel Ancel was also in charge of that project. So it's like, what's going on over there? Yeah. I do love his, his like roster games, like Raymond, boom, Raymond two, i do love his his like uh roster games like raymond boom raymond 2 raymond m like okay now you've earned it go make something big beyond good and evil whoa whoa whoa whoa uh we need you to make something that's guaranteed money and they're

like i don't know peter jackson's king kong and he makes the most abstract shooter this side of far cry 2 and like no no no get back to raymond's good that game is fucking great that was a huge uh anyway beyond good and evil is never going to come out i we asked some of you for your memories about half-life uh ben uh didn't play it until 2012 and was shocked at how well it held up the level design still felt super sharp and interesting environmental storytelling was still powerful uh it's immensely playable he says so many of the games that era are near impossible to play now for one reason or another playing goldeneye now is like what using those goggles that simulate drunkenness but half-life was almost seamlessly

as they just pick up and dive in maybe it's the tree of game design evolved from half-life as a main branch yeah i think that is true certainly half-life half-life 2 what is an inspiration for like the shooters that we play today i imagine half-life 1 again like that was not my genre back in the late 90s but left an impact this is cool from jeremy the half-life series uh such important games for me creatively i didn't want to stop playing with the hammer level editor. I didn't have to. I spent so much time making dumb little levels for just me and my friends to share and play. To expand the scope of my levels, I would go on

to learn how to make new textures, sound files, 3D models, and do basic programming. This skill set helped me find an amazing creative outlet later in life, making simple little games for just me and my friends to share and play, and maybe more someday. And that guy is now Reggie Fils-Aimé. Michelle Ancel.

This is from Fog Enthusiast, who describes, they describe themselves on Twitter as a disappointed Jets fan, which is relatable. The beginning on the super long railway is one of the best intros of all time, which I don't know if y'all just skipped

to the Zen chapters or played the beginning, but it is a trip to sit on a trolley for 10, maybe more minutes with multiple loading breaks throughout all of it. I mean, it is impressive. It sets a tone. Yeah. Well, and it set a tone that no one had set before in a shooter,

which was we're going to slowly introduce you to this world. We're not going to have you jump through a teleporter and suddenly be face to face with a pinky demon. Like it legit is like a slow experiential thing that I remember replaying like multiple times when it first came out. Do you play anything else? Yeah, actually. I know Griffin mentioned Witcher recently,

but I've been playing really for the first time Witcher 3, specifically on the Switch. I've tried to get into Witcher previously. I know a lot of us here have bounced off of the Witcher. Part of the impetus was that it came out on Switch and the Switch version is actually really good. If you play it on handheld mode, it like looks perfectly fine. It's not as gorgeous as the other platforms, but really looks all right. And this frame rate's very stable. But the other reason I was like super jazzed to play it is because I've gotten very much into the TV show,

The Witcher, which is now on Netflix. And it like is a really good fantasy TV show that is funny and well done and gorgeously shot and well acted. And it made me like really engaged with the world in ways that I hadn't been previously. And so now when things happen in the Witcher game that I've witnessed in the Witcher TV show,

I'm like, Oh wow. I'm like super jazzed. And there's a ton of those. Like they constantly are referencing the major events from the show, which is sort of like the origin story of the series in Witcher three, which takes place many years after the show's events. So I think it's been terrific. I highly recommend both.

I finished Shadowbringers. I know I talk about it every episode. I thought this was an MMO. I didn't even know you could finish it. Well, that's kind of what I want to talk about. And I think it's a thing that I didn't really appreciate about 14 until I started uh actually invest some time in it is that final fantasy 14 essentially has at this point four single player final fantasy games inside of it uh because really you only need the one character you can switch jobs at any time so it's not like i'm constantly re-rolling and starting over and doing all the shit that I used to do. It's like the gig economy. It's, no, it's not. Um, and so like the, the main hook of the game is like playing through these,

uh, these, these story quests and playing through like a final fantasy story. And Shadowbringers is the most recent one. And it's kind of why I got back into the game is because everybody was talking about how fantastic it is. And over the course of like two months, I played through it and finished it. It's long as hell. And it is also like my favorite Final Fantasy story I've ever played. A lot of that is just building off of the fact that like the characters in it are the same like characters that you've been working with since for some of them, like since the the original game and so you are so invested in those characters that when things happen to them in this storyline it creates an investment that like obviously no mmo is i played wow for forever i didn't give a shit about any of the

characters or story or anything so it's like stronger than any mmo but also like because i have been playing this game for a while and have known these characters and seen stories with these characters for so long like it hit me harder than any final fantasy game had uh before it's just it is uh miraculous i don't know if it's worth the investment to play everything before it to get to it although most of the stuff before it is also really really good but shadow bringers is like it's legitimately i was like cracking up laughing while playing it i got a little bit teary-eyed at one point like and it's an MMORPG like I the fact that it's capable of doing that at all is kind of fucking wild to me I have two games that I've been playing one that gets a lot of love and the other one

that's totally forgotten by I think everybody in the planet Forza Horizon 4 which is my one of my go-to games when I don't want to think about much stuff if i just want to zip around a really pretty uh chunk of the world and a really fast car that has an anime livery uh on top of it it is a hell of a lot of fun and the other one which fulfills somewhat of the same need, is Steep. Y'all are still playing Steep, right? Oh, man. Oh, my God. Steep is so good. Steep, I need to go back and put it on my game of the decade list.

I adore this game, and it breaks my heart that truly nobody plays it, and I know nobody plays it. Have they renamed it Chris Plant's Steep yet at this point? Because if you're the only human playing it, it's technically yours. They keep making updates to it there is new content for this game it's like in season 13 or whatever um i don't know that name

for three years i have to imagine this is like their like intern program where they can like train like they have maybe some really experienced people who train up people in a safe space where they don't have to worry about anybody ever seeing the results of their creations i don't know what ubisoft's logic might just be beyond good and evil too like maybe but if y'all i i there were some issues with steep at launch to say the least a lot of those been fixed and if you ever find it a good sale i i seriously recommend checking it out if you're the type of person who just loves a game where you get to go down a really giant hill really really fast it it will do the trick i'm playing remnant from the ashes it's kind of a soulsy uh is it good should i hop we talked about

playing that together and but i haven't hopped into it yet are you yeah hop into it because it sucks to play it by yourself okay uh because you die and you re you you know you gotta respawn but if you're playing with other people they can bring it back to life okay it does not seem to be designed for one player it's kind of neat but i wouldn't say i'm exactly getting it i've only played it for like an hour or so but it's it's kind of cool uh it's got um it folds gunplay in in a more meaningful way than those games those other From games that I mentioned have done previously even Bloodborne I feel like those are sort of like an afterthought

not necessarily handling like weapons like firearms. It's a parrying tool more than anything. Yeah right exactly but it's kind of neat. If you're listening to us now I'm assuming you're doing it on Spotify but if not if you're not following us there yet, please do that and do us a favor

and tell your friends that the Besties are back. They like video games. They can check the show out or you can tweet about it at thebestiespod and share the show that way. There's a link. If you type in besties.fan, it'll auto-generate a link to the show with a little clip and everything.

So that's the best way of sharing it around. Besties dot fan next week. Secret. We've got a secret game. We can't talk about just yet. Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Oh, you said it.

Um, we will let y'all know what it is. You should follow us at the besties pod and that will be the first place that we talk about what this game is and we'll post some questions for y'all there when we have it

that is going to do it for us for this episode so for my compatriots here my name is Justin McElroy thank you for listening to the besties and be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!