Half-Life 2's Patch Adds an Incredible Commentary

What do I do with the pickle shapes?

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. I'm a fan of pickles.

Right. 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,

at the bottom, there's all sorts of shapes. Okay.
And what am I doing with those shapes? Am I just?

When you say shapes,

what does that mean to you?

There's rectangles.

A pickle? No, no, no, no. It's like other stuff.

What?

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. Unless you are living in an episode of Sesame Street.

Are you in a Sesame Street episode? I don't think so. I might be.
I do a lot of counting.

What are...

Yeah, so

there's like balls, but they're hard. And there's like...

Balls of what? I don't know. I've never eaten them.
I don't know. Onions? Like little onions.
Maybe. Like little pearl onions, maybe?

I don't know what color they are. You could tell me that there could be ball bearings

like shark's teeth.

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.
Okay.

It could be just like a little pearl onion, though, and that is, I think, okay to eat. Yeah.
It's very hard, though. It's not soft.

How do you know about the hardness of it? I've touched it with a fork.

Okay. And the rectangles.
Let's go back to the rectangles because that's not a naturally occurring shape in most situations. Well, they're like long rectangles.
What? Those might be onions.

Might be onions. Talking about pepper.
Maybe.

Long rectangles do 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.

That would answer so many of my questions. You're finally getting it.
You're calling in from Earth 3.

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

What is the brand of the pickle? Oh, it's from Trader Joe's.

That exp yeah, okay. Yeah, they'll throw, they'll put a bunch of crazy shit in there, man.
Including trust Trader Joe's. They got sprinkles in the bottom bottom there floating.

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

brine friends. Okay, so what do I do? Okay, so to go back to my original question, what do I do with the pickle shapes? Is the name of the product Trader Joe's Pickles and Shapes? No.

Okay, well, then don't eat the shapes. Okay, so I just dump them? Yes.
I mean, that's a way. Can they be composted? I can't.

Compost the shapes? Okay.

The juice, you could sell. You should resell the juice.
Okay, that's good.

There's a there should be a local artisanal like popsicle mom and pop popsicle stand that you could sell the juice to for a dollar and they don't mind that my fingies have been in there

Are you putting your fingies in the

you're not fishing those out with like a special tool you're using fingies

I mean they're stacking remind me to

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 going to remind me. Don't eat those pickles.
I touch them.

i touched them all it's just my family that's sharing the pickles we just made video games for all that's holy please let us talk about video games

My name is Griffin McIray and I know the best game of 20 years ago and and this week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game slash documentary of the week.
My name is Ross Fresh.

I know the best game of the week.

Justin McElroy is he got sucked up by a big tornado. He's gonna be fine, but he couldn't be here this week.
It's one of the twisters. I'm not sure which one, but it's one of them.

It's one of the twisters from Twisters, which I didn't see. So I just assumed that they were.
It was one of the B story Twisters. Okay, that's fine then.
Yeah. Welcome to the Besties.

We talk about the latest and greatest in Home Interactive Intergamement. It's a game of the year club, and by listening, you're a member.
And

this time, it's a special double header. We got a game that came out

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? 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.

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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

Hatsuni Miku,

has she always been your companion through the game? I thought it used to be Alex, but

so you, I, okay.

Where did you download? Where did you download your copy of Half-Life 2 Anniversary? I did the GeoCities website. I downloaded it on Steam, but then Steam Workshop popped up.
Was it spelled S-T-E-E-M?

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.

Awesome. 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, and 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. Okay.

Okay. I love it.
I love memes. And then Hatsunimiku showed up.
And here's the part that surprised me. She had full original voiceover.
This was not Alex. In fact, Hatsune Mikiu?

Hatsuni Miku? Hatsunimiku introduced herself as Hatsuni Miku.

They downloaded Hatsunemi. Sure.
They didn't get anyone.

I love, Chris, that we, in figuring out what this week's episode was going to be, we were 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 message. Well, we're going to talk about things that are not at all related to the 20th anniversary update.

It's actually fitting, Chris Planet, what he is. Yes, 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 Gary is holding his mod in his hands and crying and saying it's not good enough for you anymore you need you need an easier option to put anime girls in into my video game me Gary who made it 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.

Oh, it's tremendous.

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.

I like it.

I have not played Half-Life 2 in a long time.

I cannot remember the last time I played Half-Life 2 2. It's not one that I return to for shits and giggles.

So it's probably been honestly since like Orange Box. So a very, very long time.

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 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

people talking about like, well, the graphics card back in 2006 was blah, blah, blah, blah. They do do that for whatever.
They do do that.

And it is nice that you can just turn on one of those little nodes and 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.

Nope.

But what it does do from time to time is it'll be like, This is the choreo system, 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 Vortigan. 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. It shows you like a wireframe like box.
Yeah, there's a visualization. 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 like getting interested in.

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 the sorts of documentations and anecdotes, whatever, are buried in documentation somewhere on a drive somewhere.

Yeah.

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. 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 take 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 just 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 just to clarify it's 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 yeah sure sure it's like a document, basically.

Yeah. The comparison that kept coming to my mind while playing it was,

remember that show where they revealed the secrets of magic? Oh, sure. But it was always like magic that had been around for the past 20 years, right?

Like, it's not, we're not going to run 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 being invited on stage and then literally the magician in the stage text and everybody being like, hey, welcome you're ready you are now ready to see this and we're going to show it there's a um 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 uh a week or two it's 10 but 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

totally worth it but um

there's a moment when you're in this airboat and throughout that whole sequence there's a number of jumps you're like jumping into the air and one of the uh anecdotes that they share is that, like, they wanted 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 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 did that jump.

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 playtesters 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 shit, 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 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 playtest 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 it.

I mean, but how much of that is also you having played it? Oh, it's a good idea.

But what I'm saying is what I think is incredible about the commentary is that it does kind of recapture that stuff because it does put, it hangs a lantern on all of it and is 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 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 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 game, 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 slurped down the stairs, which is, which is a, I don't know, a historic enemy death in this genre.

I learned how auto-saves work. Yes.
The autosave danger. So fascinating.
Yeah. Danger autosave.
I've always wondered this. How does a game know while it's active when to place an autosave?

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 autosave 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. Yeah.

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. It's not a perfect analog, but Understanding Comics by Scott McLeod.
Have either of you read this book? Yeah, I've read it. 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. And two, they have so much money that they can do something purely for.
And I would say time. Sure.
They're not making stuff.

They can just do this thing over and over again because

they're not making anything else death talk death rock 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 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, 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 going to 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.
Yeah.

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.

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.

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 have gone that direction maybe if you had hurried just a little bit faster.

There are also no like collectibles or like 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 can 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 think it's just fantastic. It's not like, I don't know, it's not going to hit my goatee list or anything like that, but as like a, you don't get a lot of sort of playable history lessons like this.

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.

100%.

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

But I don't know that I agree with that. Really interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that you, I don't think there's many realities in which a person who has never played Half-Life 2 is like, okay, I'm curious about this.

So I'm going to go ahead and play the whole last game and then I'm going to go ahead and play it right back again.

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

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 lot that that has to say about the era in which this game was made.

And if you play PC games now and you play shooters now,

I think that you still get a lot from learning about that. Sure.
Learning about that.

Here's the real question.

Should you play the game before watching the documentary?

I mean, I played the game a few times and tried to watch the documentary and it could not, it did not hook me up. The documentary has a ton of spoilers in it, so I would not recommend

doing the documentary first.

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 how fucking close Valve was as a company to not existing.

They were in the midst of a very, very large lawsuit with Vivendi, who had the publishing rights to Half-Life One.

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 going to 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 mentions an anecdote where he was recently 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.

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

You know, I found it very interesting to, you know, they talk about the choreo system, they talk about the writing, they talk to a lot of the voice actors.

I didn't realize Barney and the G-Man were the same person. Yeah.
I didn't realize the Overwatch voice that you hear throughout City 17. There's a person, Mr.
Freeman is in the sector.

The woman's voice is the same voice as GLaDOS from Portal. That's where they first worked with her.
So 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're like, oh shit.
I think you need to be like in a good mind.

These sorts of docs and the Double Find documentary is included in this is like for me the perfect like I've got 20 minutes during lunch. I'm going to put it on YouTube and watch it.
I wouldn't sit

for two years. I would put a pretty humongous gap between this and the Double Fine documentary.
Yeah. They are very different.
And that like this is, and that's not to say that this is bad. It's not.

It's just that 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 going to 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? The fucking Skibbity Toilet face was just some

janitor. So true.

But like, I'm amazed they don't talk about Skibbity Toilet at any point during

the commentary tracks.

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

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

It's like

the documentary is free on YouTube, so yeah, we'll include an embed of it in the uh the newsletter. Yeah, Valve needs our help to

they desperately need our help. Oh, finally, oh, wait, I wanted to hear more about the mods.

Oh, oh, yeah, so the all I'll say is, I had not really used Steam Workshop on on my Steam Deck in holy moly.

It is unbelievable.

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 you're just subscribed to the modding. The model

is 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 changes,

I really couldn't get over it. Specifically on the Steam Deck where I

just was fully prepared for it not to work.

Well, yeah, you're not going to gig through Linux to find a folder to drop the files in. Yes.
And this takes all that out.

I've used Steam Workshop probably most on Binding of Isaac, which has a shitload of amazing mods. Yeah.

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

I do wish that they've made it a little more present.

I feel like you have to kind of go looking for it. Yeah, that's true.
But otherwise, it's fantastic. Okay, now, can we take a break? Because I want to hear all about those Pokemons.

You got it. Let's take a break.
We're going to come back with Pokemon TCG Pocket right after this.

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i caught them all whoa yesterday grabbed my last card of the genetic apex set which is a troubling name yeah for sure expansion to genetic apex sounds sounds um not great not great uh pokemon tcg pocket i think i talked did i talk about it a little bit you have talked about it a little bit last week.

So, like,

y'all kind of 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 game. And right now, it's just like the first set of cards are out

with like some beginner quests and missions and stuff like that. The basic concept is every day, every 12 hours basically, you get to open a pack of five random Pokemon cards 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.

Every time you choose to open a pack, you can like cycle through different 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 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 especially since there's like a link to their legal documentation which details the percentage probability yeah sure uh 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 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 no right like hearthstone uh is also like five card packs, but it's like 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 going to be inside?

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

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 it's up to you how much like yeah like uh pomp and circumstance you put into the opening of each pack, which I think is really cool.

Great.

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. Yeah, where like you're like living with Mewtwo.
Yeah, you're like flying around the lab where Mewtwo escaped. And

so like, I don't know. As a fan of training 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.

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 away by just like the artistry involved here. Yeah.
And the, you know, they're recreating the cards themselves.

I assume these are all like existing cards that actually are in the world. I believe so.
I don't know if the like immersive cards are. But the

they, you know, they're 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 far-fetched 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 going to spend five bucks and buy a pack of cards. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like, the text is like sort of like not as featured. Uh, you can still play those in your sets if you want to, but those are just sort of like rare, pretty bonuses, essentially.

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.

Did you do that, Griffin? I did do that. Yeah.
I have spent so much fucking time with this game that I have not shied away from. I did that and then there was one 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.

I will say, 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 requests or whatever it is, I am drowning in resources.

Yes.

So I have not felt the urge,

which is nice.

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.

In addition to the packs, they also have what are called wonder picks, which is you can go through and 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 hourglasses, 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 going to try and go for it.

And when that pays out, it's genuinely pretty fucking thrilling 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, for opening packs. So it's like, it has ways of kind of guaranteeing like you can get the card you want if you are patient enough.

There is not trading in the game yet.

There's like a button for it, but it hasn't been implemented mostly because like I think it will complicate the economy of the game in a way that I'm just surprised there's a button. Like,

I thought for sure there wouldn't be trading at all. Like that's.
No, 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

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.
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. A lot of the nuance of the trading card game is, I would say, lost here,

which has led to certain decks becoming like extremely meta and extremely

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

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 now finally i can start to wield this like completely busted setup that other players are doing 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 yeah once i got to the combat part First of all, learning the combat is like a 12-step.

It doesn't take long, but it's like long enough that I was like, 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. Like really,

for in like comparing it to things like Hearthstone or what was the Marvel, Snap, Marvel Snap. Yeah, yeah.

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, 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 i 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 and that's just because like you locked out on the type matchup or no usually honestly the type matchup doesn't matter a lot right um 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.

Um, yeah, I think the PvP side of things 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, uh, or you have to build a deck that is only comprised of Pokemon weak to the type you're fighting.

So like it, it introduces some deck building challenges that I found very interesting and very compelling.

I'm really, really, really into it. 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,

you know, with the promise of more expansion packs coming and more like sets to collect and more

different ways to build out decks and the meta shifting, like I am. really, really enjoying it.

That's great. And it is free to play.
So like, I I don't know,

if the Pokemon card game is something you ever had any affinity for,

I genuinely think it is very, very smart the way that they have, you know, built this one and slimmed it down so that it fits wherever you want to sort of pop it into your day.

Yeah, just be mindful of the, you know, if you have free-to-play tendencies of like being lacking some level of restraint. Yeah, it'll get you'll get you.
It's probably not a good idea.

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 had a good time playing it.

Yeah.

Shall we go to

how long have we been gone? Yeah, we should do a mailbox. Yeah, we got a mailbox.
We got some mail questions. Reader mail.

We've got one question for both me and Griffin. This comes from Andrew.

Request: I am 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 uh yeah this is such a rad idea i am at a point where i could not possibly start hoover with ufo 50 the idea is unthinkable there might be a way to carry your save over or something probably not from steam cloud to not steam i don't know how that would possibly work um

so i've set this up i installed ufo 50 on an Anbranik 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 horizontal form factor.

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 liked 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 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 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 is like 50 bucks and is very, very good.

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

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

It moves so fucking fast. 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.

Anbernick, the company that made the device I just recommended, has released, I think, 11 handhelds this year. Something fucking crazy.
It's non-stop. non-stop.
I'm looking at this RG406H. Yeah.

And it looks fucking good. That's an Android-based device that.
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.

Yeah.

everything on it.

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.

Yeah.

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 going to put you in a certain price bracket. 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 you can find a $30 thing. Yeah, $50, whatever, something like that.

So 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 going to rot in a closet somewhere.

Like, don't get an expensive device off the bat.

I still like my W Mini Plus. It's great.
I still think that's my, that is, I have not played one that has a better form factor.

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

Another question? 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 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.

I have also started to enjoy Diablo 4 for the opposite reason. Instead of of scrutinizing abilities, upgrades, and 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 asked this question to maybe uncover some more brilliant games like Red Dead Redemption 2 that I think I was simply playing wrong. I mean, I got a pretty good answer for this.

I tried to play play Yakuza like a dragon

when it first came out and I didn't get it.

I didn't understand

how to play the game and get like sort of the most out of it.

And I was trying to play it like a lot of other games where I was just going from waypoint to waypoint 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 and like not actually doing a lot of stuff that is fun and enjoyable.

And then I took a break from it and came back and started over. And this time was like, I'm going to like just pop around, you know, Tokyo and check shit out.

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

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 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.

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.

Yeah. 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.
Yeah.

My one note on 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 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.

Yep. Yeah.

The other one 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. That's cool.

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

I finished Agatha All Along, which is on Disney Plus, and I quite enjoyed it.

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 Lapone 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.

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.

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

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

Jesus. Got that cherry.
Which is the most recent?

Most recent one I finished, I believe, is Block Koala, which is the Sokoban sort of puzzle game,

which took a while. I very much enjoyed that, though.
Have there been any of the ones you've cherried that is like,

I got to do this, but this is not working for me. 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 my favorite. I did also just cherry Mortal, which is

fucking love 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 Mortoll is so brilliant, and I think reflects a lot of the 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, 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.

Um, what is very, very smart is like you get to the end 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, all right, you have 30 lives. That's great.
You end 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, it can actually end the level with more lives. So now I end level one with 25 lives.

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

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, uh, instead of making you go through and replay the whole fucking game.

It's so, so, so smart. And like, I feel like every fucking game has something like that.

Um, I also beat Val cherried Val Brace, which I really liked a lot. That was the dungeon crawler punch out.
Really hard, but I, yeah, I like that one a lot.

Uh, 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. Have you done Porgy yet? I've did Porgy, yep.

Porgy, Porgy, Cherry, I really liked that one. I liked Porgy a whole lot.
I did have to look at some maps online of Porgy because it gets pretty crazy. It does.

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

Ninpek.

What's that? Ninpek. I've tried Ninpek.
Ninpek might... be the one that makes me stop trying.

No, I'm talking about like Star Waspier.

And

what is the caramel caramel?

A lot of the like shooters seem just really fucking disordered, but like Golfaria and the both golf games I've cherried at this point, which I fucking really, really disappeared.

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

There's I know, I know.

I played some of this.

I really want to go back to it this holiday. It'd be a good time for it.

Two quick things.

Very, very, very near the end of Metaphor Refantasio. Finally,

Griff and I were going to find some way to talk about some spoilers about that. Just to have made it worth it.
Just to have made it worse. Commercialized the time.
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. 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 to go into theaters, it was still film in theaters.

We were not in the digital age that we're in right now, right? But it was shot on digital. So it was shot on digital.
And then they

took a

film print. Like they like they said, imagine like setting up like a tv or a screen sure in a controlled environment filming that with a 35 millimeter camera

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 but it wasn't 4k originally

The 4K is beside the point. You could watch this on

an RG35XIP.

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

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. It's a scary movie.
Great.

Hey, let's wrap up. Let's do it.

Do we want to thank any patrons?

Yes, we want to thank the patrons over at patreon.com slash the besties.

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 slash the besties.

Slash gift slash gift thank you i want to thank uh 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 uh patrons of the besties we really appreciate your support i also appreciate that no one uh made the name super long this week because that was a real pain in the button but And I almost forgot, Chris, what games did we, and other shit did we talk about this week?

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 III, 2D HD Remake, Metaphor Refontasio.

We also talked about Agatha All Along, Second Sights, UK Blair Witch 4K Restoration, and Half-Life 20th Anniversary documentary.

And lastly, but not leastly, we talked about the RG35XSH and Portmaster, which we will include a guide to on the newsletter. You can find that at besties.fan.

Gotta get that. Next week, we're gonna be giving our game awards predictions,

which is which is gonna go great, I think. 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.
No.

These are our predictions for what will win the game awards. Game Awards Game of the Year,

which I believe will happen the night of the episode going on. I love it.
The besties. That's the dream.
Fantastic. You can watch and listen at the same time.

I think we'll also have some predictions there for what will be announced at the Game Awards, too. Oh, yeah.
That sounds like that. 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 slash the besties.
We got some fun bracket battle episodes.

We just recorded one yesterday that

is a silly topic, but ended up being some of our most thorough work as game journalists to date. Yes, I'm very proud of us.
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 pick the world's best games?

Besties.