Half-Life 2's Patch Adds an Incredible Commentary

The 20th-anniversary update to Half-Life 2 turns the game into a masterclass in game design. The Besties talk about the in-game commentary along with the new feature-length documentary. No surprise: Valve nailed it again. Plus, Griffin and Frush opine on Pokémon TCG Pocket!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Russ Frushtick?

  What do I do with the pickle shapes?

• 0:03Griffin McElroy?

  Hmm. I don't even know. I don't even. I could try and sit here and try and decipher what garbage you're talking about, what you just said, but I don't know.

• 0:14Russ Frushtick?

  I'm a fan of pickles.

• 0:16Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 0:16Russ Frushtick?

  And I like to put them in sandwiches. I'll eat them straight up. You name it. But when I'm all the pickles are gone from the jar and there's just the juice.

• 0:25Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 0:25Russ Frushtick?

  At the bottom, there's all sorts of shapes.

• 0:28Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 0:29Russ Frushtick?

  And what am I doing with those shapes? Am I just?

• 0:31Griffin McElroy?

  What? When you say shapes?

• 0:33Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 0:34Griffin McElroy?

  What does that mean? What does that mean to you?

• 0:36Russ Frushtick?

  There's rectangles.

• 0:38Griffin McElroy?

  A pickle?

• 0:39Russ Frushtick?

  No, no, no, no. It's like other stuff.

• 0:44Griffin McElroy?

  What? What's going? What's going on in your pickle jars that there's just shape? A shape describes the form of a thing. It doesn't describe the substance of it. So I guess I'm asking what the substance of the shape is.

• 0:55Chris Plante?

  Unless you are living in an episode of Sesame Street.

• 0:59Griffin McElroy?

  Are you in a Sesame Street episode?

• 1:00Russ Frushtick?

  I don't think so. I might be. I do a lot of counting.

• 1:04Griffin McElroy?

  What are?

• 1:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. So there's like, there's like balls, but they're hard and there's like.

• 1:09Griffin McElroy?

  Balls of what?

• 1:10Russ Frushtick?

  I don't know. I've never eaten them. I don't know.

• 1:12Chris Plante?

  Onions? Like little onions?

• 1:13Russ Frushtick?

  Maybe.

• 1:14Griffin McElroy?

  Like little pearl onions, maybe?

• 1:16Russ Frushtick?

  I don't know what color they are.

• 1:18Chris Plante?

  You could tell me that there could be ball bearings and like shark's teeth in your.

• 1:22Russ Frushtick?

  No, it's not made of metal. It looks like a kind of food, but not really a food that is meant to be eaten by me, maybe by birds.

• 1:29Chris Plante?

  Okay.

• 1:30Griffin McElroy?

  It could be just like a little pearl onion though, and that is, I think, okay to eat.

• 1:34Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 1:34Russ Frushtick?

  It's very hard though. It's not soft.

• 1:37Griffin McElroy?

  It's like a spice. How do you know about the hardness of it?

• 1:39Russ Frushtick?

  I've, I've touched it with a fork.

• 1:41Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. And the rectangles, let's go back to the rectangles, because that's not a naturally occurring shape in most situations.

• 1:46Russ Frushtick?

  Well, they're like long rectangles.

• 1:49Griffin McElroy?

  What?

• 1:49Russ Frushtick?

  Those might be, might be onions.

• 1:51Chris Plante?

  Talking about.

• 1:52Griffin McElroy?

  Pepper?

• 1:53Russ Frushtick?

  Maybe a pepper.

• 1:55Chris Plante?

  Long rectangles does not naturally just equate to onions. This, I feel like what we're discovering is you have been living in an alternate plane near ours, but not in ours for a long time.

• 2:08Griffin McElroy?

  That would answer so many of my questions about us.

• 2:11Chris Plante?

  Getting it. You're calling in from Earth three.

• 2:14Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, it's like herbs and spices probably, right?

• 2:19Griffin McElroy?

  What is the brand of the pickle?

• 2:21Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, it's from Trader Joe's.

• 2:23Griffin McElroy?

  That yeah, okay. Yeah, they'll throw they'll put a bunch of crazy shit in there, man. Including shapes.

• 2:28Chris Plante?

  Trust Trader Joe's for nothing, man.

• 2:28Russ Frushtick?

  They got sprinkles in the bottom there floating.

• 2:31Griffin McElroy?

  They got it's it's it's brine. It's that's just brine brine friends.

• 2:36Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so what do I? Okay, so to go back to my original question, what do I do with the pickle shapes?

• 2:41Griffin McElroy?

  Is the name of the product Trader Joe's Pickles and Shapes?

• 2:44Russ Frushtick?

  No.

• 2:45Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, well, then don't eat the shapes.

• 2:47Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so I just dump them?

• 2:49Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, you throw them away.

• 2:51Russ Frushtick?

  Can they be composted?

• 2:53Griffin McElroy?

  Compost the compost the shapes.

• 2:55Russ Frushtick?

  Okay.

• 2:56Griffin McElroy?

  The juice, you could sell. You could resell the juice.

• 3:00Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, that's.

• 3:00Griffin McElroy?

  There's a there should be a local artisanal like pops it mom and pop popsicle stand that you could sell the juice to.

• 3:08Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Griffin McElroy?

  For a dollar.

• 3:08Russ Frushtick?

  And they don't mind that my fingies have been in there.

• 3:12Griffin McElroy?

  Are you putting your fingies in the you're not fishing those out with like a special tool? You're using fingies?

• 3:18Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, they're stackers.

• 3:19Griffin McElroy?

  Remind me to net. Yeah, snackers indeed. Not for me, though. Remind me. If I ever come visit your house, I need you to remind me and I need you to swear to God, you're gonna remind me, don't eat those pickles. I touched them. I touched them all.

• 3:31Russ Frushtick?

  It's just my family that's sharing the pickles.

• 3:33Chris Plante?

  Can we talk about video games for all that's holy? Please let him talk about video games.

• 3:55Griffin McElroy?

  My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of 20 years ago and this week.

• 4:00Chris Plante?

  My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game slash documentary of the week.

• 4:06Russ Frushtick?

  My name is Ross Frush. I know the best game of the week.

• 4:10Griffin McElroy?

  Justin McElroy is he got sucked up by a big tornado.

• 4:15Russ Frushtick?

  Yep.

• 4:15Griffin McElroy?

  He's gonna be fine, but he couldn't be here this week.

• 4:17Russ Frushtick?

  It's one of the twisters. I'm not sure which one, but it's one of them.

• 4:21Griffin McElroy?

  It's one of the twisters from Twisters.

• 4:22Russ Frushtick?

  Yes.

• 4:22Griffin McElroy?

  Which I didn't see, so I just assumed that they are.

• 4:26Russ Frushtick?

  It was one of the bee story twisters.

• 4:28Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, that's fine then.

• 4:29Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Griffin McElroy?

  Welcome to the besties. We're talking about the latest and greatest in home interactive intergammon. It's a game of the year club and by listening, you're a member and this, this time it's a special doubleheader. We got a game that came out 20, 20 years ago, about probably a little bit more than 20 years ago at this point, Half-Life 2, which has received an anniversary update and a full ass documentary about the anniversary of Half-Life 2. We're also going to be talking about Pokemon TCG Pocket. Can you, dear listener, guess which one I played more of? You'll never guess. Chris, what is those games?

• 5:05Chris Plante?

  I think you did a great job, but for anybody who's completely unfamiliar, Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter that changed the very idea of first-person shooters. Documentaries are a method of storytelling where we use facts instead of fiction and Pokemon, the card game Pocket is a pocket version of Pokemon, the card game. We will talk more about all of that and more right after the break.

• 5:31Chris Plante?

  Okay, so huge thing I did not remember about Half-Life 2, going back to it, to the point that I'm wondering if like, did they patch this in? But Hatsune Miku, has, has she always been your companion through the game? I thought it used to be Alex, but...

• 5:54Griffin McElroy?

  So you, I, okay. Where did you download, where did you download your copy of Half-Life 2 anniversary?

• 6:00Chris Plante?

  I downloaded it.

• 6:01Russ Frushtick?

  The GeoCities website.

• 6:02Chris Plante?

  I downloaded it on Steam, but then Steam Workshop popped up.

• 6:06Russ Frushtick?

  Was it spelled S-T-E-E-M?

• 6:13Chris Plante?

  Steam Workshop popped up and there were all these green plus signs and I was like, I love to click things, so I clicked them. Then I started the game and then the first thing that I saw was Shaggy from Scooby Doo.

• 6:28Chris Plante?

  And his big face showed up and he said, "Welcome, Mr. Freeman." And I was like, "Okay, something feels a little off." And then I went the train, you know, you get off the train and you go into the station. And all of the soda machines had these hilarious memes on them.

• 6:48Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, good.

• 6:48Chris Plante?

  Okay.

• 6:49Griffin McElroy?

  I love memes.

• 6:50Chris Plante?

  And then Hatsune Miku showed up. And here's the part that surprised me. She had full, uh, original voiceover. This was not Alex. In fact, Hatsune Miku introduced herself as Hatsune Miku.

• 7:06Griffin McElroy?

  They downloaded Hatsune Miku. Sure. They didn't get anyone.

• 7:09Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Griffin McElroy?

  Um, I love, Chris, that we, in figuring out what this week's episode was gonna be, we're like, "Let's talk about the 20th anniversary update of Half-Life 2, because there's a lot of cool new stuff in there." And you were like, "Yes, let's do that." And also, I'm going to chop and screw it myself, T-Pain style, to make it an unrecognizable mess. And then talk about things that are not at all related to the 20th anniversary update.

• 7:32Russ Frushtick?

  It's actually fitting, Chris Plant, what he did. Yes, it is, it actually is. Because as part of the 20th anniversary update of Half-Life 2, they added Steam Workshop support. So even a dummy like Christopher Thomas Plant is able to install his favorite Vocaloid into the game.

• 7:49Griffin McElroy?

  Gary is holding his mod in his hands and crying and saying, "It's not good enough for you anymore. You need, you need easier option to put anime girls in, into my video game." Me, Gary, who made it.

• 8:03Chris Plante?

  I guess we should talk about the traditional game, but we will come back to Steam Workshop, because I feel like the scales have fallen from my eyes. And I have seen something beautiful.

• 8:14Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, it's tremendous.

• 8:15Griffin McElroy?

  I, I was not really intending to dive too deep into the Half-Life 2 side of this episode, but can I talk about the game part of things? Because I tried to watch the documentary and I got really bored really fast and didn't watch it.

• 8:26Russ Frushtick?

  I liked it.

• 8:27Griffin McElroy?

  I have not played Half-Life 2 in a long time. Um, I cannot remember the last time I played Half-Life 2. It's not one that like I return to for shits and giggles. Um, so it's probably been honestly since, uh, like, Orange Box. So a very, very long time. Uh, and with the 20th anniversary update, they've made a few little changes. If the introduction by Gabe Newell is to be believed, like patched a few little things and tweaked a few little things. But the big update, as far as I can tell, is the addition of developer's commentary all through the game and it is, we've obviously like seen this feature in lots of different games before.

• 9:09Griffin McElroy?

  I cannot remember a developer's commentary that is as exhaustive and as ambitious as this developer's commentary is, and it was enough to get me really genuinely very interested in replaying Half-Life 2. It's extremely detailed in a way that I think even a person who doesn't care that much about Valve or Half-Life 2 will like get interested in, because the cool thing they do from time to time is it's not just, you know, people talking about like, "Well, the graphics card back in 2006 was blah, blah, blah." They do do that, for what it's worth. They do do that, and it is nice that you can just like turn on one of those little nodes and

• 9:51Griffin McElroy?

  it'll be like, it'll tell you the subject of the thing. So it'll be like, "Shader compilation", and you can just turn it right off like, "Nope!". But what it does do from time to time is it'll be like, "This is the choreo system", Yeah. which is how we set up the like basically in-game cutscenes where like characters are talking. When you show up to Dr. Kleiner's lab and he's like, "Here's the ATV suit. Here's, let's get on this teleporter. Here's a Vortagon." And he's all crazy. They like, will show you behind the scenes, sort of. By which I mean like, the choreo system is like a list of commands they give to different character models that are in the game to like, "Okay, now you look at Gordon and then you look at Alex when you're talking to Alex and then you move to here."

• 10:35Griffin McElroy?

  It shows you like a wireframe like box. Yeah, there's a visualization of how it's working. A visualization of how they move. Or they'll be like, "This is like, you know, this was when graphics cards, like, you know, individual graphics cards became like a thing that you could start to do a lot more. So like, here's how we did bump map lighting and then all of a sudden, all of the textures and everything just drop out and it just shows you like the bump map of the world that you are like walking around. It's really genuinely very cool and insightful in a way that I was not anticipating." Getting interested in.

• 11:07Russ Frushtick?

  It actually makes me a little, actually very bummed at the idea of how much institutional knowledge is lost after a game gets developed because it's, you know, all this sorts of documentations and anecdotes, whatever, are buried in documentation somewhere on a drive somewhere.

• 11:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Russ Frushtick?

  And so few companies would have the time or resources to be like, we're going to bake this into this entire 25 hour long game and have hundreds of these anecdotes and give you kind of a history lesson of how this game was made. And it is massively fascinating.

• 11:39Griffin McElroy?

  It is massively fascinating. I don't know how useful a lot of this institutional knowledge is because what was surprising for me is how many of these anecdotes like demonstrated that this game was held together with twine and tape in certain cases where they were like, we actually had to use eight different renderers, all operating at the same time because like this wouldn't do this, but this could do this. And so like because of the kind of like evolving hardware of the time, like they were kind of figuring it out as they went, which like for a game as, I don't know, totemic as Half Life 2, you don't think of it being like this project where people had to like get it across the finish line through sheer force of will, but it really sounds like that's kind of what was required.

• 12:23Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, just to clarify, it was more talking from a historical standpoint, like how this stuff came about, not necessarily, oh, you could use this to make your own game today.

• 12:31Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, sure, sure.

• 12:31Russ Frushtick?

  It's like a document, basically.

• 12:33Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. The comparison that kept coming to my mind while playing it was, remember that show where they revealed the secrets of magic?

• 12:43Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, sure.

• 12:44Griffin McElroy?

  But it was always like magic that had been around for like 20 years, right? Like it's like, we're not going to ruin something that's like modern. And at this point, I love Half Life 2. The kind of core magic of it is gone in some ways, while it's still very fun. And now is the time to reveal how it works. And that's what it felt like was it being invited on stage and then literally the magician and the stage techs and everybody being like, hey, welcome. You're ready. You are now ready to see this and we're going to show it.

• 13:11Russ Frushtick?

  There's a airboat very early in the game for people that have played the game. If you haven't played it, I'd highly recommend it. Maybe you were one of the few that got it for free during this three day period a week or two ago.

• 13:23Griffin McElroy?

  It's 10 bucks. It's 10 bucks now. I can't believe I didn't own it. I don't know how that's possible.

• 13:27Russ Frushtick?

  Fucking totally worth it. But there's a moment when you're in this airboat and throughout that whole sequence is a number of jumps. You're like jumping into the air. And one of the anecdotes that they share is that like, they want to make sure the jumps all felt good, that you didn't get frustrated. So when you go off a jump, they jack down the gravity of the game.

• 13:47Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 13:48Russ Frushtick?

  So that every jump is going to feel good, even if you maybe weren't going necessarily as fast as you should have been going when you hit that jump.

• 13:54Griffin McElroy?

  I thought you were going to talk about the bit where there's like a node while you're on the airboat where it talks about motion sickness. How a lot of their early play testers got really motion sick in the airboat sequence because it goes very fast. And what they figured out was they had to make it so that like, when you, when your, when your airboat kind of like went up on one side or like was sort of like not super steady on the ground. They had to keep your plane of vision, your field of vision like flat.

• 14:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Griffin McElroy?

  So that it wasn't also tilting and pivoting as the thing rocked because that is what was making people very motion sick. And they had one person on the staff who suffered from terrible motion sickness that they made play test this over and over again. To like, make sure that they could really whip it. It's, it's, you are right. A lot of the magic of this game is, I think, lost just because it changed the game so much in a way that all future games were sort of informed by.

• 14:46Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, but how much of that is also you having played it?

• 14:48Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, sure. Yeah, no, for sure. But what I'm saying is what I think is incredible about the, the commentary is that it does kind of recapture that stuff because it does, it hangs a lantern on all of it and it's like, you know. There's one great bit where you come to this staircase and the game, the commentary like freezes and pivots up the staircase. And then you get this like commentary that's like, if you look up this staircase, there's an enemy up there. Behind him, you can see the citadel tower as it starts to sort of like wake up in response to Gordon Freeman's like running rampant through city 17. And it was talking about like, we had this cool idea where if an enemy died, they would also be subject to physics. And so.

• 15:25Chris Plante?

  This staircase was an important moment where you shoot this enemy at the top of the stairs and they would ragdoll and fall down the stairs. And it's like, yeah, man, that's how all video, that's how all first person shooters work, but it points out like, this was not a thing. This was not a thing. This was the first time that we were like, ooh, what if this enemy died and just kind of slopped down the stairs? Which is, which is a, I don't know, a historic enemy death in this genre.

• 15:49Russ Frushtick?

  I learned how auto saves work.

• 15:51Chris Plante?

  Yes, the auto save danger.

• 15:53Russ Frushtick?

  So fascinating. Yeah, danger auto save. I've always wondered this. How does a game know while it's active, when to place an auto save if there's, for example, like you're in the middle of a combat sequence that takes six minutes and halfway through, there's an auto save that loads you back? How does it know that when it made that auto save, you weren't going to die a second later? And what they figured out was if they made like a temporary auto save and then the player survived for 30 seconds after that, then it would become a permanent auto save.

• 16:23Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Russ Frushtick?

  So that way they knew for sure, oh, the player's not going to die immediately when that save was placed. So many smart approaches to these ideas that are now so commonplace in the industry. It was really, really cool.

• 16:34Chris Plante?

  It's not a perfect analog, but Understanding Comics by Scott MacLeod. Have either of you read this book?

• 16:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I've read it.

• 16:41Chris Plante?

  It's, it's, oh, Griffin, you're gonna love this. It is a graphic novel comic about how comics are made and also kind of how to read them. And I have craved a version of this for games forever. And this is not quite that, but it is the closest I've seen where the game is actually using the game to teach you how video games work. And I would like to think that there are more of these. The reality is I would be shocked to see other studios do this with any regularity for two reasons. One, Valve has a lot of experience doing this. They've been doing this since, I think Portal 1, including various versions of commentaries like this.

• 17:25Chris Plante?

  And two, they have so much money that they can do something purely for...

• 17:30Griffin McElroy?

  And, and I would say time.

• 17:32Chris Plante?

  Sure.

• 17:32Griffin McElroy?

  They're not making stuff. They can just do this thing over and over again because they don't, they're not making anything else.

• 17:39Russ Frushtick?

  Deathlock.

• 17:40Chris Plante?

  Deadlock. There's one thing about the game, because we've been talking around the game, but there's one thing in the game that I did want to talk about. Which is, the way it pulls you through the world is unparalleled. And it's strange how, how little I see other games borrowing from the Half-Life 2 model. And specifically what I mean by that, because you'll see it right away in this game, is that when you see what should be your trajectory at any given time, that will not be your trajectory. So you have something that you are always walking toward, and then the game pivots you in a new direction. And the way that this works is like, in the train station,

• 18:22Chris Plante?

  you're in a train station which has very clear pathways. It's a train station. But as you move forward, you realize they've put up impromptu chain link fence. So suddenly you're gonna get kind of redirected in weird ways. When you're going down a big hallway in the train station, you see kind of two chain link fences back to back. You go through one, the next one, they close the door on you. You turn around, they close the door on you. Suddenly, you realize there is another door to a like, security checkpoint.

• 18:50Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 18:51Chris Plante?

  This constant churn of, okay, you leave the security checkpoint to go to a back room, back room to an alleyway. You go into a hallway, but you don't just walk down a hallway, hallway, you go in and out of apartments. It is constantly making you think that you are not going in a straight line, when in reality, you're going in a straight line.

• 19:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Chris Plante?

  And on top of that, making you think that there is a very lived in world, because every time you get to a dead end, it's not just a wall. It is, something's going on beyond that world. And it feels like you could've gone that direction, maybe if you would've hurried just a little bit faster.

• 19:26Griffin McElroy?

  There, there are also no like, collectibles, or like,

• 19:29Chris Plante?

  Yes.

• 19:29Griffin McElroy?

  reasons, really, to spend a ton of time in each section. And so you are just kind of blazing through. I actually have really been enjoying my playthrough of Half-Life 2 with the commentary on, because when a commentary node is running, you're invincible. And so you could kind of like, see a commentary node, start listening to it, and just blaze through the combat section in front of you, and think like, as long as Gabe is talking, these man hacks won't chop me apart. And so, yeah, that game has a really, really great momentum to it. I, I, I think it's just fantastic. It's not like, I don't know, it's not gonna hit my goatee list or anything like that, but it's like, you don't get a lot of sort of playable history lessons like this.

• 20:11Russ Frushtick?

  I do want to say, for people that have never played Half-Life 2 before, Please play Half-Life 2 before you play it with the commentary on.

• 20:20Griffin McElroy?

  A hundred percent.

• 20:22Russ Frushtick?

  You need to have the experience and then after the fact, you'll have a really great reference point. But

• 20:27Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know that I agree with that.

• 20:29Russ Frushtick?

  Really interesting.

• 20:29Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know that you, I don't think there's many realities in which a person who's never played Half-Life 2 is like, "Okay, I'm curious about this, so I'm gonna go ahead and play the whole last game and then I'm gonna go ahead and play it right back again with."

• 20:39Russ Frushtick?

  Well, I mean, play the whole last game and, and ask yourself at that point, is this something I want to learn more about?

• 20:45Griffin McElroy?

  I think it's fine to go ahead and play it the first time with the commentary on because it is still, even if you don't have much attachment to the thing, there is a, there is a lot that that has to say about the era in which this game was made. And, and if you play PC games now and you play shooters now, uh, I, I, I think that you still get a lot from like learning about that.

• 21:04Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 21:04Griffin McElroy?

  Learning about that.

• 21:05Chris Plante?

  Here's the real question. Should you play the game before watching the documentary?

• 21:11Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, I played the game a few times and tried to watch the documentary and it could not, it did not hook me.

• 21:16Russ Frushtick?

  The documentary has a ton of spoilers in it, so I would not recommend, uh, uh, doing the documentary first. It, I did find, I found it personally very interesting. There's a lot in the documentary, obviously about the development of the game, but there's also a lot about like how fucking close Valve was as a company to not existing.

• 21:35Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Russ Frushtick?

  They were in the midst of a very, very large lawsuit with Vivendi, who had the publishing rights to Half-Life 1. And there's a moment, which I think really shines a light on like who Gabe is as a person and why he's so successful. There's a moment where Vivendi sues Gabe and his wife at the time for basically all they have, to the point where they are gonna have to put up their house. And Gabe was like, eh, okay, that's a bummer, but like, you know, it is what it is. And that's how he handles everything. He, he, he mentions an anecdote where he was recently, uh, scuba diving with sharks. And a shark approached him and everyone else in the group was freaking the fuck out and Gabe was like, "All right, well, I'll just like move away from the shark."

• 22:20Griffin McElroy?

  Well, he wasn't scared because he had four to five knives on him.

• 22:23Russ Frushtick?

  Sure, yeah. They do mention his knife making. He made some knives for Counter-Strike 2's initial announcement, which was about 15 years before Counter-Strike 2 actually came out.

• 22:36Russ Frushtick?

  You know, I found it very interesting to, you know, they talk about the choreo system, they talk about the writing, they talked to a lot of the voice actors. I didn't realize Barney and the G-Man were the same person.

• 22:47Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Russ Frushtick?

  I didn't realize the Overwatch voice that you hear throughout City 17, "There's a person, Mr. Freeman is in this sector." The woman's voice is the same voice as Gladys from Portal. That's where they first worked with her.

• 23:01Griffin McElroy?

  They talked about how originally that was a Microsoft text-to-speech, like when they were developing it for a long time, but then they realized that they would have to pay to license that. And they were like, oh shit.

• 23:10Russ Frushtick?

  I think you need to be like in a good mind. These sorts of docs and the Double Fine documentaries included in this is like, for me, the perfect, like, I've got 20 minutes during lunch, I'm gonna put it on YouTube and watch it. I wouldn't sit and watch it for two hours.

• 23:23Chris Plante?

  I would put a pretty humongous gap between this and the Double Fine documentary.

• 23:29Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, they are very different.

• 23:30Chris Plante?

  And that like, this is, and that's not to say that this is bad, it's not. It's just that this is, this is a documentary for the fans. Like, this is a gift, I feel like. So it's like, less a documentary with a story than like, "Here's all the stuff that you were like, maybe not sure about. Did you know that there were gonna be five cities in the game? Did you know that we had to cut a plane sequence after 9/11? Did you know that all the faces are people from around the area that we paid like 600 bucks? And now these iconic faces are just random people that, who knows where they are now."

• 24:07Griffin McElroy?

  The fucking Skibidi Toilet face was just some janitor.

• 24:10Chris Plante?

  So true. But like, all-

• 24:13Griffin McElroy?

  I'm amazed they don't talk about Skibidi Toilet at any point during the Half-Life 2 commentary tracks.

• 24:17Chris Plante?

  But yeah, it's very interesting, but just, yeah, definitely don't go in expecting narrative.

• 24:23Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it's not, it doesn't come off as a humanist story, even though obviously a lot of humans sweat blood and tears to make this game. It was, it's more, yeah, a behind-the-scenes. Anecdote kind of thing.

• 24:36Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, 10 bucks for like a genuinely unparalleled sort of like video game history lesson just for the game. I think is like a pretty easy recommendation for anybody into video games enough to listen to a video game podcast.

• 24:49Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, and the documentary is free on YouTube.

• 24:52Chris Plante?

  Yeah, we'll include an embed of it in the newsletter.

• 24:55Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, Valve needs our help to.

• 24:57Chris Plante?

  They desperately need our help. Finally.

• 24:59Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, wait, I wanted to hear more about the mods.

• 25:02Chris Plante?

  Oh, oh, yeah. So the all say is I had not really used Steam Workshop on my Steam Deck. And holy moly, it is unbelievable. I I really did not appreciate that you go into what is effectively just a library. You can search for whatever you want. You click a button and then it you're just subscribed to the mod.

• 25:26Russ Frushtick?

  The mod is in your game now.

• 25:27Chris Plante?

  In your game and you don't have to worry about it at all. It is so easy as somebody who has not really been modding since, I don't know, probably 10 years ago. The the changes I really couldn't get over it specifically on the Steam Deck where I like just was fully prepared for it not to work. So I am.

• 25:47Russ Frushtick?

  Well, yeah, you're not going to like dig through Linux to find a folder to drop the files in.

• 25:51Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Russ Frushtick?

  And this takes all that out. I've used Steam Workshop probably most on Binding of Isaac, which has like a shitload of amazing mods.

• 25:58Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Russ Frushtick?

  Um, and I really just like more. I wish more games would take advantage.

• 26:03Chris Plante?

  I do wish that they made it a little more present. Uh, I feel like you have to kind of go looking for it.

• 26:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 26:11Chris Plante?

  But otherwise it's fantastic. Okay, now can we take a break? Cause I want to hear all about those Pokemons.

• 26:19Griffin McElroy?

  You got it. Let's take a break. We're gonna come back with Pokemon TCG Pocket right after this. I caught them all.

• 26:25Chris Plante?

  Whoa.

• 26:26Griffin McElroy?

  Yesterday, grabbed my last card of the Genetic Apex set, which is a troubling name.

• 26:33Chris Plante?

  Yeah, sure.

• 26:33Griffin McElroy?

  For the first expansion to Genetic Apex. Sounds sounds, um, not great. Not great. Pokemon TCG Pocket. I think I talked, did I talk about it a little bit?

• 26:42Russ Frushtick?

  You have talked a little bit about it, yes.

• 26:43Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. So like, y'all, y'all kinda know what it is. It is a, I would say, very, very beginner-friendly distillation of the Pokemon Trading Card Game experience, both the collecting side of things and also the playing side of things. It has, I would say, been extremely successful so far, just based on the amount of like, coverage I am seeing of this, of this game. And right now, it's just like, the first set of cards are out with like, some beginner quests and missions and, and stuff like that. The basic concept is, every day, every 12 hours, basically, you

• 27:27Griffin McElroy?

  get to open a pack of five random Pokemon cards from this, from this set. And there's like, a few different versions of these expansion packs. There's like, a Charizard set, and a Mewtwo set, and a Pikachu set. And that's basically it. You collect cards by opening up these packs. It's very tactile. You, every time you choose to open a pack, you can like, cycle through different, like, there's like a wheel that you spin through, and you can like, pick the one. But there's a lot of like, weird, unknown sort of ritual around it. Like, when you are spinning through and picking your pack, is it actually changing the cards inside, or is that pretty much predetermined before you? And is there a way that like,

• 28:10Griffin McElroy?

  if you tear the pack, if you tear the top off the pack in a perfect line, does it increase? Like, no, clearly not, but it is also like-

• 28:17Russ Frushtick?

  Especially since there's like, a link to their legal documentation, which details the percentage rate.

• 28:21Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, sure. But like, it is genuinely very pleasurable to open up a pack of cards of any trading card game, right? Like, that is a, a very, um-

• 28:34Russ Frushtick?

  You've played a few of these. Is there any, is there another card game that comes close to the like, satisfaction that you get?

• 28:40Griffin McElroy?

  No, right? Like Hearthstone is also like, five card packs, but it's like, you, you, you buy a pack and then you click it and it explodes, and then cards come out, and then there's a little guy who'll be like, "Epic!", which is like, great. There is something different, though, about like picking your pack and then tearing it open and then watching the cards come out. Sometimes if there's a rare card inside the pack, a little light shoots out of the top of it as you tear it open and you're like, oh, fuck, yeah, what's gonna be inside?

• 29:04Russ Frushtick?

  You can also, when you, before you open the pack, if you flip it around.

• 29:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Russ Frushtick?

  You'll only see the backs of the cards, so you can have the, like, moment of like, oh, I'm gonna tap it to flip it around and see what the...

• 29:15Griffin McElroy?

  It's up to you how much, like.

• 29:17Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Griffin McElroy?

  Like, pomp and circumstance you put into the opening of each pack, which I think is really cool.

• 29:23Russ Frushtick?

  Great. They nailed it.

• 29:24Griffin McElroy?

  Once you also have the cards, you can pick them up and like move them around, see them in like 3D. There are certain cards called immersive cards that are pretty rare. There's only like four of them in the game right now, where like when you open them, it zooms into the card and then all of a sudden you're in this like scene.

• 29:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Griffin McElroy?

  Where like.

• 29:41Russ Frushtick?

  You're like living with Mewtwo.

• 29:42Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, you're like flying around the lab where Mewtwo escaped and, uh, so like, I don't know, as a fan of trading card games, I think the way that it kind of like, I don't know, makes it into a tangible experience is very, very cool.

• 29:58Russ Frushtick?

  I, so I've, I never played Pokemon, the card game, ever. Obviously, I've played basically every Pokemon game. And as a fan of Pokemon, the franchise, but not of the cards, I was really blown away by just like the artistry involved here.

• 30:15Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Russ Frushtick?

  And the, you know, they're recreating the cards themselves. I assume these are all like existing cards that actually are in the world.

• 30:23Griffin McElroy?

  I believe so. I don't know if the like immersive cards are, but, um.

• 30:27Russ Frushtick?

  They, you know, there are a lot of them are like really funny and very creative approaches to like different characters, like there's like a Slowpoke being like a total dumbass and like taking a nap and there's

• 30:37Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Russ Frushtick?

  Farfetched with like a bunch of leaks behind him. And so like that charm is doing it for me in ways that like I never got attached to the idea of like, oh, I'm gonna spend five bucks and buy a pack of cards.

• 30:51Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, you're talking about, I believe, the illustrated rares. So like outside of the base set, there's like 226 cards in this first set. And then there's also like these bonus illustrated rares, which like take Pokemon from that set, but have like the whole card is art.

• 31:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:06Griffin McElroy?

  And like the text is like, sort of like not as featured. You can still play those in your sets if you want to. But those are just sort of like rare, pretty bonuses, essentially. So, so there is a premium pass you can get. It's like 10 bucks a month and it gives you more daily missions and an extra pack that you get to open every day.

• 31:26Russ Frushtick?

  Did you do that, Griffin?

• 31:27Griffin McElroy?

  I did do that, yeah. I, I've spent so much fucking time with this game that I have not shied away from. I did that. And then there was one like, like heavily discounted, like gold, poke gold pack that you could spend to like knock down the clock from time to time, that I, that I also spent money on.

• 31:44Russ Frushtick?

  I will say, as, as someone who has only done it as a free to play, or like have not spent money yet, it's pretty generous if you don't mainline it. Which is to say, like, if you're just doing, you're playing for like 20 minutes a day, and you open your packs, and you do your quests, or whatever it is, I am drowning in resources. So I have not felt the urge, which is nice. I'm sure, I would imagine, as with all free to play games, like, that tap eventually runs out. So you need to be mindful of that. But the onboarding experience has been pretty good.

• 32:17Griffin McElroy?

  In addition to the packs, they also have what are called wonder picks, which is, you can go through, and it's, it's very clever. You can look at a list of recently opened packs by other players. And then if you see a pack that has like a card you really want in it, you can spend these things called golden hour glasses, which is another resource that recovers over time, to do a wonder pick, which is it takes the five cards that were in that pack, shuffles them up, and then you pick one, and you get to keep whatever card it is. So you can go through and be like, okay, I'm missing Charizard DX. It's in this pack, I'm gonna try and go for it. And when that pays out, it's genuinely pretty fucking thrilling to, to, to get cards. And there's also like a resource where you can just buy cards, you know, with these pack points that you get for opening.

• 33:01Griffin McElroy?

  For opening packs. So it's like it has ways of kind of guaranteeing like you can get the card you want. If you, you know, are patient enough, there is not trading in the game yet. There's like a button for it, but it hasn't been implemented.

• 33:13Russ Frushtick?

  How interesting.

• 33:14Griffin McElroy?

  Mostly because like, I think it will complicate the economy of the game in a way that.

• 33:17Russ Frushtick?

  I'm just surprised there's a button like that.

• 33:20Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Russ Frushtick?

  I thought for sure there wouldn't be trading at all. Like that's.

• 33:22Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, no, there, there, there will be trading. As far as I know, they're going to add it early next year. I think is what I've read. So on top of that, there is also a playable version of the card game that is like very streamlined. In a main Pokemon game, basically like, uh, you have this bench of five Pokemon and you have to knock out a certain number of the enemies Pokemon and get points. And if you get a certain number of points from knocking out enemy Pokemon, you win. This time it's been shortened and there's only three spots on the bench. You only need to get three points to win. Which in some cases, there's some Pokemon that award that are very strong that award two points if you knock them out. So some matches. I mean, I've had matches that have lasted a couple of minutes. It is very, very fast. They've also gotten rid of energy cards.

• 34:05Griffin McElroy?

  And now you just every turn, you get one energy that you can attach to your Pokemon. And so your decks are only 20 cards. So it's like a super, super tight, super streamlined version of the game. Uh, a lot of the nuance of the trading card game is, is I would say lost here. Which has led to certain decks becoming like extremely meta and extremely, uh, over, overplayed, which has, I would say reduced a lot of interest in the PvP side of things. But it does still scratch the itch for me and it does still like, uh, connect enough with the collecting side of things that when I get a card that I've been getting my ass kicked by, it's like, oh, thank Christ.

• 34:46Griffin McElroy?

  Now finally I can start to wield this like completely busted setup that other players are doing.

• 34:51Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. In my experience, I love the collecting part. I love the opening packs part. Even the like building a binder of your favorite cards I was like enjoying.

• 35:00Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Russ Frushtick?

  Once I got to the combat part, first of all, the like learning the combat is like a 12 step. It doesn't take long, but it's like a long enough that I was like.

• 35:09Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 35:09Russ Frushtick?

  This is going to be like homework. It like took me several days to work up the courage to actually even try it. It's pretty slow in my experience.

• 35:17Griffin McElroy?

  Really?

• 35:18Russ Frushtick?

  For in like comparing it to things like Hearthstone or what was the Marvel Snap? Marvel Snap?

• 35:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:24Russ Frushtick?

  It feels like every step along the way of like the numbers popping up on the screen and the card going down and the energy or like everything feels about twice as long as it should to the point where because the combat is so simplistic, no battle should last more than three minutes. And I've been in battles that last like 10 minutes. Like they really drag on.

• 35:46Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I will say at the higher end of things, like the PvP where players have collected a shit ton of cards, battles do not last that long because all the cards are extremely strong.

• 35:55Russ Frushtick?

  And that's just because like you lucked out on the type matchup or?

• 35:59Griffin McElroy?

  No, usually honestly, the type matchup doesn't matter a lot, right? There is type, type strengths and weaknesses, but it basically means like if you are attacking a Pokemon weak to your type, you just do like 20 extra damage with your attack, which like when you're dealing with Pokemon that have like 180 HP, it's like not a huge, huge game changer. Yeah, I think the PvP side of things, it needs to be balanced. There is a solo mode where you play against the computer, which does introduce some interesting stuff later on where it's like there are challenges of you need to build a deck that only has cards of like the base rarity, or you have to build a deck that is only comprised of Pokemon weak to the type you're fighting. So like it introduces some deck building challenges that I found very interesting and very compelling.

• 36:43Griffin McElroy?

  I'm really, really, really into it. I've, I've finished collecting the full set. When you do that, you get like a super rare Mew card, which is not obtainable any other way, which I, you know, I'm a sucker for that stuff. And, uh, you know, with the promise of more expansion packs coming and more like sets to, to collect and more, you know, different ways to build out decks and the meta shifting, like I, I am really, really enjoying it.

• 37:09Russ Frushtick?

  That's great.

• 37:10Griffin McElroy?

  It is, it is free to play. So like, I don't know if, if the Pokemon card game is something you ever had any affinity for, uh, I genuinely think it is very, very smart, the way that they have, uh, you know, built, built this one and slimmed it down so that it, it, it fits wherever you want to sort of pop it into your day.

• 37:28Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, just be mindful of the, you know, if you have free to play tendencies of like being lacking some level of restraint.

• 37:37Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it'll get you.

• 37:39Russ Frushtick?

  Probably not a good idea. But, but if, you know, I think if you are relatively patient, don't super care about getting everything real quick, you can do it for free and be fine. Like I've, I've had a good time playing it.

• 37:51Griffin McElroy?

  Um, should we go to, how long have we been going? Yeah, we should do mailbox.

• 37:56Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we got a mailbox. We got some mail questions. Reader mail. Um, we've got one question for both me and Griffin. This comes from Andrew. Request, I'm looking for a handheld gaming device to turn into a dedicated UFO 50 slash Pico 8 machine, maybe some GBA. Russ has awakened the idea when he mentioned the UFO, that UFO 50 is on Portmaster.

• 38:21Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, this is such a rad idea. I am at a point where I could not possibly start over with UFO 50. The idea is unthinkable.

• 38:28Russ Frushtick?

  There might be a way to carry your save over or something.

• 38:31Griffin McElroy?

  Probably not from Steam Cloud to not Steam. I don't know how that would possibly work.

• 38:37Russ Frushtick?

  Um, so I've set this up. I installed UFO 50 on an Anbrnec device, which is a Linux based handheld. It's called the RG35XXH. I think I've mentioned it before. It has kind of a similar form factor to like a GBA, the original GBA, that like, that like horizontal form factor. Um, and you can play UFO 50 on it. And I have played UFO 50 on it. I was sort of in the ballpark of Griffin, which is to say like, I've played a bunch on my Steam Deck and I didn't necessarily want to start from scratch, but I also like, like playing those games. So the fact that like, I didn't have my cherries completed, didn't necessarily bother me a ton, but it is a very small screen. So if you're worried about

• 39:22Russ Frushtick?

  like vision and screen size, you might want to look, there's a larger version called the 40xxH, which I've heard good things about. But just keep in mind that like Portmaster as a thing, I'm pretty sure only supports Linux devices. I don't think it is on Android. So just make sure whatever you're getting is a relatively recent Linux device. I'll drop it, we'll drop a link to a video explaining how Portmaster works and the sorts of devices that support it in the newsletter. So keep an eye out for that. But if you're looking for a quick and dirty answer, the RG35XXH

• 40:04Russ Frushtick?

  is like 50 bucks and is very, very good. Just keep in mind, you do need to own UFO50 and you basically would drag and drop the files from Steam onto your device to get it to work with Portmaster.

• 40:18Griffin McElroy?

  I feel like I have been a little bit out of the retro handheld scene.

• 40:22Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. It moves so fucking quickly.

• 40:26Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I just loaded up Retro Game Core, which is like my go-to source on YouTube for this stuff. It's just, it's all just fucking unrecognizable.

• 40:34Russ Frushtick?

  And Bernic, the company that made the device I just recommended, has released, I think, 11 handhelds this year, something fucking crazy.

• 40:41Griffin McElroy?

  It's non-stop.

• 40:43Russ Frushtick?

  It moves.

• 40:43Griffin McElroy?

  I'm looking at this RG406H.

• 40:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 40:48Griffin McElroy?

  And it looks fucking good.

• 40:50Russ Frushtick?

  That's an Android-based device that...

• 40:52Griffin McElroy?

  And the Odin 2 Portal. My Odin is one of my favorite handheld things that I have. I did not know that they were making a new thing that could play fucking everything on it.

• 41:01Russ Frushtick?

  Now, the best way to experience the handheld gaming emulation world is to buy nothing and just drool over whatever the latest release is, because there's going to be another release in about two weeks.

• 41:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Russ Frushtick?

  But eventually I'll cave and get something new. Just don't drive yourself nuts. I think the mentality to be in is here's where your head should be at. What consoles do I want to play? Do I want to play PS2 games? That's gonna put you in a certain price bracket.

• 41:30Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Russ Frushtick?

  For PS2, you're looking at at least like 150 bucks to get a device that does that. If you don't worry about PS2 and you want to play like PSP and...

• 41:38Griffin McElroy?

  You can find a $30

• 41:39Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, $50 or whatever, something like that. So just, just go into it with that sort of mindset and start cheap and see if it's something you'll actually use or if it's just gonna rot in a closet somewhere like, don't get an expensive device off the bat. Just uh,

• 41:52Griffin McElroy?

  I still like my Miio Mini Plus.

• 41:54Russ Frushtick?

  It's great.

• 41:55Griffin McElroy?

  I still think that's my, that is, I have not played one that has a better form factor.

• 41:58Russ Frushtick?

  It feels excellent. That is one of my favorites as well.

• 42:02Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, another question?

• 42:03Russ Frushtick?

  We've got another question from Matthew. "I recently discovered Red Dead Redemption 2, which is slowly becoming one of my favorite games. When it came out, I tried to work my way quickly through the story but fell off halfway through the game. Recently on a whim, I decided to take another crack at it. However, this time I played slowly, taking in the environment, talking to strangers on the street, playing poker at the saloon all night. It has since morphed into a tabletop-esque role-playing experience where I have an investment in playing the role of Arthur Morgan. At the time of its release, I remember many complaints about the pacing of the game, and this time I'm not fighting against it, the intentionally deliberate pacing. On the flip side,

• 42:39Russ Frushtick?

  I have also started to enjoy Diablo 4 for the opposite reason. Instead of scrutinizing abilities, upgrades, synergizing myself, I'm just following a build guide. The increased pace at which I'm leveling and moving through dungeons has really enhanced my enjoyment of the game. I'm curious if y'all have some more experiences where an intentional change in the pace of playing a game has fundamentally changed your feelings about the game. I selfishly ask this question to maybe uncover some more brilliant games like Red Dead Redemption 2 that I think I was simply playing wrong."

• 43:07Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, I got a pretty good answer for this.

• 43:09Russ Frushtick?

  Okay.

• 43:10Griffin McElroy?

  I tried to play Yakuza: Like a Dragon uh, when it first came out and I didn't get it. Uh, I was, I didn't understand how to play the game and get like sort of the most out of it. Um, and I, I was trying to play it like a lot of other games where I was just going from waypoint to waypoint and, and trying to progress through. And when you do it that way, it is suboptimal because you are just sort of like now sitting through a ton of cutscenes, like not actually doing a lot of stuff that is fun and enjoyable. Uh, and then I took a break from it and came back and started over and this time was like, I'm gonna like just pop around, you know, Tokyo and check, check shit out.

• 43:55Griffin McElroy?

  And then it became one of my favorite RPGs ever made.

• 43:58Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Griffin McElroy?

  So this is, this is very much in that same. I also don't play Diablo games without using a build guide because I, It is the fatal flaw of those types of games where there is a best way to play it. And if you're, and I don't have the type of gamer brain where I can like shut off that where it's like, I'll just goof around and play a build that is not very effective and waste my time.

• 44:21Russ Frushtick?

  It doesn't have, it's different from Elden Ring or Dark Souls, whatever, where there's enough other stuff in the game, the exploration, whatever, that you can feel kind of ownership over what you're finding and unlocking.

• 44:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Russ Frushtick?

  This is just like you level up and you get more power. Like you're not really doing a lot, so you better kind of do it the optimal way.

• 44:40Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Chris Plante?

  My, my one note on that is just RPGs in general. And I feel like that's been my journey over the past few years. But like, I feel like there are, you know what I'd say? It's not that I return to one game, like the example here with Red Dead, but that I can return to a series and gradually come to appreciate it. And I feel like that is how my journey with Dark Souls was. I feel like that's my, how my journey was with the Persona games, then going into Metaphor. But like, sometimes it takes a while of learning how a game works and what it expects of you before you can kind of appreciate what its pace is and meet it on its page, rather than whatever you thought it would be.

• 45:21Griffin McElroy?

  Yep.

• 45:21Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, the other thing I wanted to mention, because Red Dead was the example here. I've been playing, I've mentioned it before. I've been playing through the GTA trilogy, the remakes, because they recently got patched and they're quite good now. And one pacing aspect that these remakes changed is that you get an auto-save whenever you start a mission. And that change alone makes the pacing of those games so much more enjoyable, because you no longer have to stress about after every single mission you do, having to drive back to the safe house, do a hard save, and then drive to the next story mission. So you can kind of blaze through it in a pace that actually, I think, really helps these games maintain your interest, rather than having a lot of busy work.

• 46:03Chris Plante?

  It's cool.

• 46:04Griffin McElroy?

  Anybody been playing anything else here for the honorable mentions segment of our show?

• 46:11Russ Frushtick?

  I finished Agatha All Along, which is on Disney Plus. And I quite enjoyed it. It was, I hadn't really been keeping up with much Marvel stuff over the last several years. Definitely not the TV stuff and really not the movie stuff either. And I know it's kind of the general opinion has fallen off a bit, but I was really impressed. It's like a very different approach to the Marvel format with some like pretty amazing actors in it. Patty Lepone in particular is like someone I never really expected would be in a Marvel anything. And she does an amazing job. Aubrey Plaza, amazing job.

• 46:49Russ Frushtick?

  It's really quite cool and interesting and definitely the like most queer friendly Marvel story I've watched in quite a while. So if you feel like that's something that they've like, kind of not given a lot of attention to, I think they do a really good job here.

• 47:08Griffin McElroy?

  I am still kind of picking away at Dragon Quest III HD 2D remake.

• 47:14Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, quick cherry update on UFO 50. I'm at about 24, I think. I'm almost halfway through.

• 47:22Russ Frushtick?

  What was the most recent?

• 47:24Griffin McElroy?

  Most recent one I finished, I believe, is Block Koala, which is the Sokoban sort of puzzle game, which took, which took a while. I very much enjoyed that though.

• 47:33Russ Frushtick?

  Have there been any of the ones you've cherry'd that is like, I gotta do this, but this is not working for me?

• 47:41Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, yeah, there have been a couple that are not like my favorite genre of game planet. Zoldath is one of those. That was not, not my favorite. I did also just cherry Mortal, which is, I fucking loved that. Yeah. I put that one off for a while and I spent so much time, the way that they handle how you accumulate lives in Mortal is so brilliant and I think reflects a lot of the like great game design that goes into so many of the games in UFO 50. Mortal is a game where you Have, uh, it's like a platformer, action platformer, and you have these little guys that are trying to like get to the end of a level.

• 48:20Griffin McElroy?

  But you have to use these different rituals to get through it. So there's one that turns your character into stone, so it can make like a little block you can stand on. Or there's one that shoots you forward like an arrow, so you can stick into the wall and make like a little platform that way. Or you can just explode to kill things. Um, and every time you do that, you lose a life, but you can find more lives as you explore each level. What is very, very smart is like you get to the end of the level, into level one, and it's like you made it here with 19 lives. And then you carry those into the next level, right? And you beat level two and it's like, alright, you have 30 lives. That's great. You in that level, you take 30 lives to the next level, but at any point you can go back to level one, right? And you can say, well, if I do it this way, I can actually end the level with more lives. So now I in level one with 25 lives.

• 49:03Griffin McElroy?

  It automatically adds what you, what you sort of like added to your top score to every subsequent level.

• 49:11Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Griffin McElroy?

  So that it's like imagining like, okay, so this is what it would be like if you had had five extra lives the whole time. Instead of making you go through and replay the whole fucking game again. It's so, so, so smart. And like, I feel like every fucking game has something like that. I also beat Val, charred Valbrace, which I really liked a lot. That was the dungeon crawler punch out.

• 49:32Russ Frushtick?

  Really hard, but I, yeah, I like that one a lot.

• 49:35Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it was, it was genuinely pretty tough, but the maps don't change, so you could like sort of, uh, trial and error figure out.

• 49:41Russ Frushtick?

  Have you done Porgy yet?

• 49:43Griffin McElroy?

  I did Porgy, yeah.

• 49:44Russ Frushtick?

  Porgy was my first cherry. I really liked that one.

• 49:46Griffin McElroy?

  I liked Porgy a whole lot. I did have to look at some maps online of Porgy because there's, it gets pretty crazy.

• 49:52Russ Frushtick?

  It does.

• 49:54Griffin McElroy?

  But yeah, I've put off a lot of the very tough twitchy games. I have not dipped into, uh, what's that?

• 50:01Russ Frushtick?

  Ninpac?

• 50:01Griffin McElroy?

  I've tried Ninpac. Ninpac might be the one that makes me stop trying. Uh, no, I'm talking about like, uh, Star Wars beer, just and, uh, what, what is the caramel caramel? A lot of the like shooters seem just really fucking hard, but like, uh, Golfaria and the both golf games I've charred at this point, which I fucking really, really.

• 50:23Chris Plante?

  This is incredible because I am getting a sense of what it feels like for a normal person to listen to our show. Where it, you can't tell what's real or what's fake.

• 50:34Griffin McElroy?

  This is all real. There's.

• 50:35Chris Plante?

  I know, I know. I've, I've played some of this. I, I, I really want to go back to it this holiday.

• 50:41Griffin McElroy?

  It'd be a good time for it.

• 50:42Chris Plante?

  I, two quick things, very, very, very near the end of Metaphor, Refentazio, finally, Griffin and I are gonna find some way to talk about some spoilers about that.

• 50:54Griffin McElroy?

  Just to have made it worth it.

• 50:55Chris Plante?

  Just to have made-

• 50:56Griffin McElroy?

  Just to commercialize the time we spent with the game.

• 50:58Chris Plante?

  Yes, but the other thing that I want to talk about is the most obscure Chris Plant thing imaginable. It is a 4K release of The Blair Witch Project, which you might be thinking, why would I care about that? It was shot on really crappy digital cameras.

• 51:17Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 51:17Chris Plante?

  Why would you need a 4K release of this? Which is exactly what I thought. And then, what I learned was, when they made The Blair Witch Project go into theaters, it was still film in theaters. We were not in the digital age that we're in right now, right?

• 51:32Russ Frushtick?

  But it was shot on digital.

• 51:33Chris Plante?

  So it was shot on digital, and then they took a film print, like they, imagine like setting up like a TV or a screen-

• 51:45Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 51:45Chris Plante?

  -in a controlled environment, filming that with a 35mm camera-

• 51:50Russ Frushtick?

  Okay.

• 51:50Chris Plante?

  -and then sending that back to digital to make all the DVDs that everybody has in their homes. So this is, they went back and they actually got the masters for the original tapes, and it is like what it actually looks like in its original digital form. So it looks like you're watching a true original digital file from-

• 52:11Russ Frushtick?

  But it wasn't 4K originally.

• 52:13Chris Plante?

  The 4K is beside the point. You could watch this on, it could be a DVD, right?

• 52:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you could watch this on an RG35X8H.

• 52:21Chris Plante?

  What you're getting is like the original digital file.

• 52:24Russ Frushtick?

  Okay.

• 52:25Chris Plante?

  So it is extremely dorky. It can only play, I think, on Region 2 or Region B or whatever Blu-ray players. There's no reason to talk about it, other than I am endlessly tickled by its existence. And that's it.

• 52:41Russ Frushtick?

  It's a scary movie.

• 52:42Griffin McElroy?

  Great. Hey, let's wrap up.

• 52:44Chris Plante?

  Let's do it.

• 52:45Griffin McElroy?

  Do we want to thank any patrons?

• 52:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yes, we want to thank the patrons over at patreon.com/thebesties. Just a heads up, while I collect those names, I want to shout out, because it is holiday season, if you feel like giving a gift to a besties lover in your life, we have a gift link. You can gift them a subscription to our Patreon, which has all our bonus episodes, at patreon.com/thebesties.

• 53:12Griffin McElroy?

  Slash gift.

• 53:13Russ Frushtick?

  Slash gift. Thank you. I want to thank, we've got Evan, we've got Rebecca, thank you, we've got Ash with two exclamation points, and we've got Demi, thank you for being patrons of the besties. We really appreciate your support. I also appreciate that no one made the name super long this week, because that was a real pain in the butt. But...

• 53:36Griffin McElroy?

  And I almost forgot, Chris, what games did we, and other shit, did we talk about this week?

• 53:40Chris Plante?

  Oh, this week, we talked about so much cool stuff. We talked about Half-Life 2, the anniversary patch, we talked about Pokemon: The Card Game Pocket, UFO 50, Dragon Quest 3 2D HD Remake, Metaphor Refontazio, we also talked about Agatha All Along, Second Science UK Blair Witch 4K Restoration, and Half-Life 20th Anniversary Documentary. And lastly, but not leastly, we talked about the RG35 XXH and Portmaster, which we will include a guide to on the newsletter. You can find that at besties.fan.

• 54:15Griffin McElroy?

  Gotta get that. Next week, we're gonna be giving our Game Awards predictions, which is, which is gonna go great, I think.

• 54:24Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, it's so much fun. This might be my favorite episode of the year. These are, to be clear, this is not our game of the year.

• 54:30Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 54:30Russ Frushtick?

  These are our predictions for what will win the Game Awards.

• 54:34Griffin McElroy?

  Game Awards Game of the Year, which I believe will happen the night of the episode going up.

• 54:41Russ Frushtick?

  I love it.

• 54:41Griffin McElroy?

  Of the besties.

• 54:41Russ Frushtick?

  That's the dream.

• 54:42Griffin McElroy?

  Fantastic.

• 54:43Russ Frushtick?

  You can watch and listen at the same time.

• 54:45Chris Plante?

  I think we'll also have some predictions there for what will be announced at the Game Awards, too.

• 54:50Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:50Griffin McElroy?

  Good, good, good. Yes, that makes more sense. We are killing time until we do our goatee shit. But it's good. Hey, if you do want to hear more of us, though, again, Patreon.com/thebesties, we got some fun bracket battle episodes. We just recorded one yesterday that

• 55:06Chris Plante?

  Oh my gosh.

• 55:06Griffin McElroy?

  is a silly topic, but ended up being some of our most thorough work as game journalists to date.

• 55:12Russ Frushtick?

  Yes, I'm very proud of us.

• 55:14Griffin McElroy?

  So, join us again next week as we talk about the Game Awards. And be sure to join us every week for the Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends be the world's best games?

• 55:50Griffin McElroy?

  Besties!