The Besties - Anomaly Agent and the future of the Resties!

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

It's a big episode of the Resties! We're about to make some changes to the show, so we make time to share the results of our listener poll and reveal some behind-the-scenes info. But first, we have a cool video game to discuss! Anomaly Agent's creators have blended pixel art, anime design, 1990s arcade brawlers, and films like Inception and Paprika to create something delightful. And it's only $10 on Steam -- and a little more on Switch and Xbox. We love to hear your feedback, so be sure to subscribe to besties.fan. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Hello, everybody. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. My name is Russ Froschdick. And welcome, welcome to the Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week, we are talking about Anomaly Agent, a kind of beat-em-up, side-scrolling anime mashup that is just an absolute delight that we think you're going to really enjoy. And then we're going to talk about the future of this show, which if you have been following us on besties.fan, you've already gotten a taste of it. We did a survey about what you want to hear. And we're talking about what you can expect for the year to come.

And maybe beyond that, for all I know. Whoa. But first, you told me before we turned on the recording that you have something you want to talk to me about. Chris Blaine, are you in a buy nothing group? I just joined one. I just joined this past week. And the three things that I have seen so far, a broken baby cradle, a basically empty bag of dog food.

Yeah. basically empty bag of dog food yeah um and and a full like nice two pounds of fresh salmon okay that's weird because i was gonna talk about the fact i too am in a buy nothing group for my neighborhood and for those that are not aware um there are websites that you can join sometimes they're on facebook sometimes elsewhere specific to your neighborhood assuming you're in like a reasonably you know there's a number of people living by you you join this buy nothing group and people will post basically stuff that they want to get rid of um maybe it's old clothes maybe maybe it's diapers that their kid has grown out of, and people then reply in the comments saying,

oh, I could use that. But you can't charge anyone for anything on the buy nothing. That is like the ethos. So you get rid of like the haggling mechanic of it, and it's just people getting rid of shit. You've sort of like rounded up

many of the common posts that i see which are like things that are completely worthless like this is garbage and belongs nowhere else but in the trash things that like could be useful if you're in the right point of time where like oh there's a stroller and it's the perfect size for my kid at that age so that happens very occasionally but it does happen and then there's the weird shit and i too on my buy nothing group stumbled upon a post where someone was like hey i have these fish do you want these fish come here and it was not like a cut it was not like a like a barbecue slab of salmon you just like put on the barbecue yeah this was like had the head and everything like it was a full-on fish

and he was like it's fresh but you need to get it today there's no you can't come later it's do or die for this fish and i was like who are these First of all, where do you get a fish? Fisherman. What do you mean? Who are these people? Fisherman. No, no. But fishermen are smarter than that.

Fishermen know not to give their wares away on a website. Their best catch. Sure. Certainly not their best cat. Oh, you think they're giving bottom of the barrel stuff to buy nothing? Right. Exactly. They're like, oh, you know, like I fed the slop to first the buyers and then the fishmongers and then like the cats next door.

And what remains, you know, that's what I'm giving you. Like I've always heard, this is almost certainly not true, don't sue me Coca-Cola, that the water in a Dasani bottle is like the water that doesn't take when they're making coca-cola that it's like the truly unusable water which i don't think is true but it's just great to imagine that there is somehow bad water and that's what i'm picturing with this fish that you're describing well the good news is all water at this point is bad water because of the microplastics so we're fine on that front I think the other weird post that I saw, someone posted just a picture of a very old lady. And I was like, that's an odd, it wasn't even a frame.

It was like a JPEG of an old lady. And then I read more and the woman was like, yeah, my mom died. So we're getting rid of all her stuff. And then it was just like all old lady stuff that they were giving away. Very bizarre. But if you want some insight into your neighbors um in ways that you weren't expecting first go on the buy nothing and consider not only what are they posting but also what are they taking people are like really taking some genuine trash home i'm sorry we we really zipped pie the most important thing here did you

take that fish oh no no no no okay okay i i i just wanted to okay okay no i i uh i i did give away some diapers uh that was that was my end and uh and collected a weight vest so everybody wins you know what it feels like it feels like maybe that's a really good way to do a drug deal like you need an excuse to meet up with somebody you make it really public that you two are meeting great stuff the biggest ugliest shittiest fish you can find full of like cocaine and then then i don't think you thought this through and then people are like people like oh what's going on over there that's weird they're giving a giant fish and people like well you don't want to interrupt that that's a buy nothing like freak you think it's yeah you

think it's like so public that no one would ever expect it that's how you do it hiding in plain sight yeah yeah i saw the movie traffic i know how this works i thought it was more a john wick thing but yeah no no no no it's always a traffic thing yeah well this is good to know i am a little disgusted that both of our binoculars on two opposite sides of the country involve fish right it might be the same fish for all i know that's true it could be the same fish monger know. That's true. It could be the same fish, Munger. We should start the episode. Yeah, we should. Just one more caveat. If you're worried about going to someone's

house, totally reasonable. Please be careful. Oftentimes there are safe spots for those exchanges. Just be careful, please. Yeah, of course. You go to a convenience store in the parking lot in front of lots of people. Be somewhere with a lot of course. You go to a convenience store. We're in the parking lot in front of lots of people.

What are you doing? Yeah, be somewhere with a lot of people. That's very important. Everything about this story sounds like you had a really bad, like you. I did. It's been great so far. No, no, no. What this sounds like so far is that you got the fish.

Somebody came. They did not bring a fish. They mugged you. They took everything you own, and you're embarrassed. And now you're like, so if you ever see a guy who has a fish, just make sure you meet in a public space. It feels really caveated in a way that I'm really worried, and I feel like I need to call your wife and make sure everyone's okay. Let us talk about video games. Okay, we're back. And we're talking about anomaly agent i i am loving 2024 video games already i am refreshed i am rejuvenated i am definitely spoiled but

I am definitely spoiled. But 2023 for me was the year of big, big games. And quite frankly, games for other people. I had had this like hot streak of getting just weirdo games for total, you know, like scumbags like myself, I guess. And, you know, I got Death Stranding. I got 13 Sentinels. There were a lot of indie games I was really loving. And then last year, it felt like we got these, just these amazing quality 10 out of 10 games. And I'm over here like, you gotta, you know, it's gotta have a slight whiff of garbage. It has to have like a little bit of like,

they had to really sweat to make this. And this year, I turn on my computer. What do I see right away? I see Pal World. And I'm like, great. I know exactly what type of year this one is. The biggest game of the year that we have in our calendars is a Yakuza game and Dragon's Dogma 2. This is my time to shine.

And I've already seen that with even like the indie games and anomaly agent is definitely in that zone and that's why i'm so excited to talk about it do you do you have a kind of a pitch for what this game is sure it's a side-scrolling anime aesthetic uh beat them up with like a spy kind of a vibe underneath it. Just narratively speaking. Yeah. The, the,

the character design and vibe, it's not, there's not a one-to-one comp here. Cowboy Bebop definitely. Yeah. That was my immediate thought was Cowboy Bebop. Yes. If you watch more modern stuff,

the great pretenders, which is an anime on Netflix that I cannot recommend enough. It is an anime about heists and thieves. It's sick. It reminds me a lot of that, this game. The cool hook for the game is you work for an agency. And correct me if I'm wrong here because it was a little hard for me to follow. But you work for an agency that investigates anomalies.

And that can be anomalies of any sort of kind. That could be like space and time anomalies. It could be like physics anomalies. And mostly it seems like if there's weird shit going on, it's like, you know, the MIB in a lot of ways. I guess that's all aliens in that case. But yeah, it's like a top secret agency that's looking into weirdness. It also calls to mind Inception and Chainsaw Man to some degree.

And yeah, it starts out, I would say, a bit slow. You are, I mean, it is, it feels almost like in a really old school beat-em-up at the beginning where there's not a lot of platforming. You don't have a lot of moves. You basically have like an attack and a parry. I thought, I'll be honest, I thought it felt horribly when the game started. Yeah. I was like immediately kind of put off in a surprising way because I thought, look, the looks look great.

This is the kind of game I'm really into. It's going to be really good on like a Steam Deck or like a Switch or something like that. And I played the like first five minutes. I was like, oh, this doesn't feel very good. Like when you punch and kick guys, it doesn't feel very good. And don't worry because it does get much,

much better in very short order. But it is a weird place to start because they basically start you with a very limited move set where you really can just like um punch and dodge and that's like it and then within within the first like half hour or so they'll start weaving in all your other special abilities you can like throw a card that that stuns people you can shoot guns you can parry enemies stuff like that and once you have

all the tools at your disposal it feels great and everything feels like way more fluid but it's a very weird place to start because i mean i want games to start feeling cool very early on it it really does get to i would say normal within the first half hour and then it just keeps lathering on good good goop yeah um like by the two hour mark you are alternating there's all sorts of different weapons from other characters that you can steal from them there are ways to stun characters there's ways to poison them there are um different environmental things that you can trigger against them. You can knock them off edges into giant pits. There's more platforming.

So it really is, it's almost like playing the evolution of a beat-em-up genre over the course of those two hours where you start and it is like Atari level. Okay, congratulations, punch and block. That's it. Yeah, it felt like the original like double dragon and then as you're playing through it's like going through the sequels of double dragon where it got more interesting and it really is fast um to do that the the other thing that helps at least it did for me the art and the and the story to some, goes a long way. It is this kind of pixely, almost like 1980s Hughes art that because of the focus on anomalies, it gets to be really playful with the world design. You will have moments where suddenly characters are on the ceiling or the ceiling and the floor are the same thing. Or the entire world tilts so that you are climbing upwards just to get through a hallway.

Or there's like a giant hand chasing you for no reason. Yes, there's a giant hand chasing you. And I don't know how many missions that you played, but the missions are quite long. And each of them you are chasing a person that you're hunting down for your agency so the themes kind of evolve with that there's one that i did where you are going through a nightclub and there's these bartenders who are forcing people to dance and you're fighting them and then going up against the bartender. There's another one that is a hopping around a cyberpunk skyline as all these cars zip by. So it's kind of hitting

a lot of the classic beats of a beat-em-up. It feels like the sort of game that Konami would have made in the 90s where each level is just a little bit different than the one that came before it. They've also got some weird narrative tools at their disposal because you'll be making like dialogue choices as you play through this action game. Oh, yeah.

And they can be like, you're a jerk or you're not a jerk, which is pretty typical. But because of the choices you make, you get currency of like a happy face or a sad face. And you can then spend that currency on like med kits and shit. Yeah. It's so weird. I liked this a lot because, so yes, there's two currencies. There's happy and sad. And basically like happy is when you really pander to somebody,

and sad is when you dunk on them kind of Han Solo style. And when they both- I wouldn't even say Han Solo, because like some of the stuff you say is like pretty fucking callous. Yes, that's true. And when you the happy stuff goes towards upgrading. Yes. I think just your health kits. Yeah. So you the more of those you get, the more expensive it is to buy health kits.

But it's a pretty good incentive to try to be nice. But the more callous shit you say, the more money you unlock. And the money can help you purchase all sorts of skills in this kind of like skill tree. So either way, you are being rewarded. There's like not a wrong option, which is cool. And I never felt bad if I was like, oh, oops, I triggered something wrong there. I just kind of played it as what do I want to say in this moment? And I felt like I was always happy with the results. I never felt like I didn't have enough health and I never felt like I didn't have enough upgrades, which I think

could be the fear of that, right? If you played all healthy, suddenly you're not going to have any money. Yeah, I don't think it was like that much of a requirement to like pick one or the other. It was just like a kind of a nice fun bonus. Yeah, yeah. The big thing for me with this game is it's a $10 game. And I think I've come up with a policy for $10 games. Are you ready for this?

Yeah. If you are a $10 game, I ask that you only do one thing really well. And everything else just fine. You don't have to do more than that. If you do more than that, awesome. That rules. Yeah. But if you're a $10 game, if you can pick one thing that you do really, really well, and then you do okay on everything else, I am in a great place.

My expectations are set. I am here for whatever that thing is that you want to show me. And for me, that is the world that it's created with these, you know, the cyberpunk. And there's some very cute characters. There's a like robot vending machine that you are buying all these upgrades from. And all the characters are goofy and of this kind of like weird fiction of, you know, interdimensional rips. of you know interdimensional rips and yeah as you're talking about i remembered uh elite beat agents is another kind of yeah yeah feels very similar that's a good comp and and everything else like yes the combat the combat gets good um the platforming's fine the story's okay none of it's bad but the world design is

so compelling that it's enough to pull me through it and again I think I think it's going to be a shorter game I imagine it's probably somewhere in the realm between five hours I'm looking it up now it says 63 hours long oh good

good perfect that makes total sense let's see how long this game takes to beat about five five six hours yeah 63 hours long. Oh, good. Good. Perfect. That makes total sense. Let's see how long this game takes to beat. About five, five, six hours. Yeah. And yeah, and it's just well-paced, good game. Yeah, I guess to readdress your rule about $10 games, I would probably agree with that. Obviously, everyone's sense of value is different. And I do think that there are games that cost $10 games. I would probably agree with that. Obviously, everyone's sense of value is different.

And I do think that there are games that it costs $10 that like probably hit on more cylinders than this game does. We were just talking about Tiny Rogues on Besties, but that's fine. Like, you know, I don't think, again, every game needs to be hitting home runs at every turn. I like this game. It's not my favorite. It's weird because I'm playing this after having played Sanabi quite a bit.

And they're actually, if not totally, I guess they are kind of totally similar. And what you're doing is like a little bit similar. They're both like kind of reaction- based combat games using very different tools you have a hook shot and sanabi and this is obviously more punch and kick and parry but uh it it doesn't feel quite on that level of like a super super polished thing but i also understand that like this seems like um you know much more focused project and to extent, I think they're nailing what they're trying to do. Yeah, I think also the type of movement is not what we tend to prefer. But they do it well, which is your character is more like a brick wall.

And you're perfectly straight up. You move slowly. There's not a lot of acrobatics. There's a double jump. But this is a game where you're kind of flying around you stay at times still parrying things back and forth at people and then you walk up and then you pulverize them with a baseball bat or any other weapon or like you parry with your briefcase and stuff like that yeah and and that, it reminds me of, yeah, I'm trying, like Final Fight. There's a type of action game that is not really in vogue anymore that this feels more in line with than a lot of the other games that we play that's kind of of this genre.

while I was playing it that it reminded me of the Batman Arkham games a game we talked about recently because you will get surrounded by quite a number of guys and the game constantly encourages you to like keep a combo going with a lot of different attacks and you'll do more damage as you like

keep that combo high so that was like I mean obviously that's a 3D game this is 2D but otherwise I think there's some analogs there. Did you, you played it on Steam Deck? On Steam Deck, yeah. I, I'm curious. This is, I think, only out on PC right now.

I don't think it's on Switch. I could be wrong. I'll check. But this feels like a game meant to be played portable. I started on Steam deck and then i switched to a tv and that lasted maybe an hour and then immediately switched back um but i'm curious if we will see a trend in game design that is um mobile first for PC games. And I think what I mean by that is like,

obviously you can play it wherever you want. There's no like wrong weight or place to play this game. But the density of the screen, the density of the image that they're trying to show you looks best on a small screen. I found that on a TV, it looked kind of empty at times, but on a small screen, it looked perfect on a TV, it looked kind of empty at times. But on a small screen, it looked perfect. Like it was really easy to read, it was clear. And the opposite can be true too, right? Like there are some games that I feel like I have to play on a TV because they're

twoed ins. Yeah, it's it's too much. It gets too cramped. If you're playing a really detailed, like try playing like Doom on a Steam Deck. It's just like a lot going on in a very small space. Yeah, I kind of get what you're saying. Yeah, I think some people, I certainly prefer playing these sorts of games in a handheld form, just from a comfort and convenience standpoint.

But I do know what you mean about it's it's kind of bizarre to be tethered to a large tv while you're playing something like this which is more retro inspired yeah i i do have good news it is on switch yeah it looks like it's on xbox as well maybe yeah it's on switch uh xbox one all the way up to xbox series x um i are they still putting out Xbox One games? I guess they are. Yeah, why not? You know?

Yeah. Let's toss it up. I would definitely recommend playing this game on mobile, however you can do that, unless for whatever reason it's on Game Pass. And just to be really clear, when you say mobile, you don't mean on a phone. You mean handheld? You know, I don't mean on a phone. You mean handheld.

You know, I don't. I don't. We should really specify that. But the lines are blurring. It makes no sense to me anymore. They are blurring. You're right. You're right.

I don't think it's available on phones even if you wanted to. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I don't think so. This is a conversation we will have to have another time as more and more like Resident Evil becomes available on your phone. Right. What the hell is going on? There are also Death Stranding on iOS. Like, what are we doing? It's just all, it's all blurred together.

It's all the same. If you can play that game, the controls for that game on a touchscreen is the funniest thing imaginable. It must be the whole screen. Yes, of course it's the whole screen. Yeah. It's absolutely deranged. I will take a photo of the controls of Death Stranding like what it actually looks like it's absurd and I will post it on Besties. I mean I'm sure anyone

who's playing Death Stranding is playing it with a controller right? You know what I think so I think that they put the controls like the actual full control map on the screen the moment you turn on Death Stranding on iOS just to be like you fucking idiot you should be playing with a controller. 100%.

It is not actually a UI. It is a threat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see it and you're like, oh, yeah. You told me exactly what I need to know, which is I need to go buy a Backbone. No free ads. Or a Xbox controller, whatever else.

Yeah, yeah. Death Stranding 2, we can't go down this path. Anomaly Agent. It's a good game at, I think, a pretty reasonable price for what this sort of thing is. And I think if you are in, if you crave old school beat-em-ups, if you love that cowboy bebop style, if you like giant hands that chase you and especially if you don't mind a slow 15 it's a very brief period of time before like the toolkit i i don't mean to obsess over it i just like i'm only hyper focused on the beginning of games i wish i had known because i had that same reaction where i was a little grumpy i also think sometimes even though it's a cheaper game,

I don't know how other people are, but I think it can be tempting to be like, hey, I'm going to refund this. I played 10 minutes. This isn't what I thought it was. I'm getting rid of it. And that's not the case here. It is a different game once you get into it.

For sure. So yeah, check it out. Should we take a break and then come right back and talk about the future of the show yeah that sounds great hey everybody we are back and we are going to talk about the future of the resties first things first good news it's not disappearing forever so we got that out of the way i know you guys are used to the idea of besties things just vanishing into the ether. Yes. The resties, it is staying.

It's just changing. And that's what we're going to talk about. And we're figuring it all out. And we're figuring it all out with you. So we recently hosted a poll on the newsletter to learn more about what y'all like to hear. And we did that for two reasons. One, frankly, we just really want to know what you enjoy.

We like to take educated guesses based on comments and what people seem to like, but it's actually surprisingly difficult to know for sure which episodes are landing better or worse than others. So it's incredibly great that you guys submitted your thoughts into somewhat of a complicated poll. We're going to go over the results at the end of all this. And let me tell you, not what I expected. Very happy with the results. Extremely happy, frankly, but not what I expected. So yes, I'm glad we did that. We like to make the show with you,

not just at you. And this has been a really helpful way for us to do that process. So that's one. Two, the Rastis is about to go through some changes and we're still figuring out what that will entail, but there's like a reality that we have to get into um so we've always tried to keep the show alive off of really corporate benefactors is the only way to describe them

i guess the show yeah it started with box media and then we had the benefit of of spotify saying like hey we want to do the exclusive uh season with you guys which was obviously a bummer for everyone that did not have spotify because they couldn't access that season anyway that deal ended and the world was opened up to all those episodes and and all the future episodes since then but those have been the ways that we've sort of tackled making the show available in addition to the biggest one, which has been the most recent one, and that is ads. Yeah. And the way ads work is a fickle, often nonsensical market of which companies assign value to random numbers of listeners and certain target audiences. I mean, I'll be more pointed than that.

It's it's called the economy. Well, no, there's that, too. Right. There's like that. Yeah, it's all on top of each other. And it's garbage at times to to not to deal with. We've been very fortunate that all our sponsors have been wonderful. But the actual like being able to rely on it, that part's hard.

So in short, ads, very unpredictable. If you've ever listened to an episode and maybe this very episode that you're listening to, and we say like, oh, we're going to throw to an ad or we take an ad break or whatever it is, and no ad plays, that's because ads are very unpredictable. And it's not because there was an ad that was supposed to be there. It's because no ad was sold for that time slot. So just understand that whenever you hear that, it's nice. I certainly am like, oh, great, the show is back. That's fine. But it should give you a slight amount of pause because it does mean, oh, what was previously sold as an ad slot was

not actually sold that week yeah i will say for me on the other end when i listen to one of my favorite shows and it doesn't have an ad spot a chill runs down my spine okay it's like um we just moved a a second closer to midnight on the doomsday clock you know it's not great. So yes, that's it. We're being transparent, I would say, and what we're experiencing. And we just want to let you know that we're considering what our options are. There is not going to like, again, the show is not disappearing. We're still figuring out, that's why we did the survey. We're still figuring out what we want to do, but we also want to figure out like, how can we make it possible for us to do it? There's all sorts of options, and we're interrogating all of them, and we will keep you posted. Honestly, we would love to hear your thoughts. That has always helped us. It has not steered us wrong over the decade that we've been doing Besties and then the Resties on top of that. So if you have feelings, whether you would like to share them at besties.fan or you want to reply to the email, if you don't like to post comments, that's cool too.

And, yeah, that would really help. And we are thinking about things separate from that and we will have more information soon yeah yes pretty much cool that's everything that's that's it we should talk about the fun stuff now let's do the fun stuff can i tell you about the poll i'm so excited okay so the coolest thing about the poll is um love to be wrong, basically. There's a thing that you always want to do when you are making shows like this or even with us at Polygon. And the question is always, hey, is the thing that I want to do also the thing that our audience wants? And often the answer is no.

Pulling back the curtain of reality on journalism here. People always say like, I really want to read some like really hard journalism. I'm looking for like meaty features that are going to like crack the industry wide open. And then you write them and like five people read them. them um it is why most hardcore journalism is subsidized by you know like grants or underwriting or or all sorts of other yeah or like back in the day when like every city had a local newspaper it was subsidized by the sports section the ads for jc pennies and like the comics um that was never the thing that was you know paying the bills so we we worry about that sometimes too Yeah. Is that you want us to talk more about overlooked indie games. By a colossal margin. It was astounding.

There's nothing that even came close to it. Though there are other things that got some good votes. And we'll talk about them too. But this is thrilling for us. Because we love to play these games. And we love to talk about these games but again this isn't always at every publication the number one thing that attracts an audience readership so i i have like theories about why i think our audience so specifically is into this but i'm

curious what you think fresh of like was this what you thought would be the top pick um not necessarily i do you know i think when we started doing resties there was obviously a demand for some of these smaller titles that like we didn't have time for on besties because there's a limit of how many games we can fit in and obviously play in a single week so like that was part of it but i did we'd always have those weeks even like this week is a good example of a game that like anomaly agent doesn't have like cachet like it's a cool game i really dig it but if you put anomaly agent in a headline no one's gonna know what the fuck that is unless they've played the game already and so it did always give us a little bit of pause to say like oh we're gonna to focus this game or

this episode around a game or several games that you hadn't heard of before and yet whenever we do that for resties or we do like a grab bag episode for besties that we just did people always seem to really dig it i don't think i'll say this for besties i don't think we can do that all the time for besties because there are a lot of like big larger games that i think all of us want to talk about because they're also important but resties has been like a really nice home for the smaller stuff and and i think will continue to be yeah i i said this at the top of the episode there are so many weird little games coming out this year. What is in my calendar right now of game codes, most of them we cannot talk about yet, lines up so well with this for at least until the end of March. And who knows, beyond that, probably two.

But I have at least 10 games right now that I am so looking forward to in seeing this was like a very strong encouragement of, yeah, that's the thing I should make time for. outrageous year from a large releases standpoint but those obviously those years are not common like we probably won't get a year like that in terms of triple a releases for the next five years could be before that happens but you know what we will do because we've always gotten this even in quote slow years is like weird bizarre indie shit that like you've never heard of but is doing something really really cool so there's kind of a never-ending supply of them which is great for us and and i guess great for you fresh there is a game coming out this month called the thaumaturge do you know anything about this i watched the trailer that you put in holy shit it looks very weird it is a story-driven rpg hardcore rpg set in 1905 warsaw in which you are a magic doctor who fights people with like monsters that i think are all inspired by like Russian folklore and like Jewish history.

It looks incredible. I am so glad that I will be making time to talk about this game. And it is one of many. Anyway, I don't want to get too buried on that. No, I say that as we already have. But yes, we hear you. We are excited that you are excited. The one that came right after that, and I think may have stacked the deck for this one,

is video game history class. And we put the poll up alongside our episode about the history of Rocksteady, the team that made the Suicide Squad game that is just coming out, just out now, and the Batman games before that. And that episode was kind of inspired by a show you and I used to do with Allegra Frank called The History of Fun. You actually made a book inspired by that too and those are our chances to get really deep on the stories behind games and i have a whole bunch of those that i i personally would love to do there's a new game coming out from uh what remains of the studio that made bioshock and i look forward to telling everybody all about the stories that led to Bioshock, to all of its sequels, to how the hell we got to Ghost Story Games and Judas, which is the new game that's coming out and just was shown at the recent Sony event. But I feel like both of us, you've made a few of these in different forms, both here and at Polygon too, right?

Yeah, like history, deep dives into a variety of topics. Yeah. Yeah, no, I've done a few of them over the years. I did one on Spelunky that was a lot of fun. And obviously we did the History of Fun show, which you can still listen to. I think we had like probably 40 episodes of that. But yeah, I always love doing these.

It's interesting with games because there are certain games that are like have a ton out there and some games very, very little because of the studio culture or whatever it was that like everything kind of got locked down. But at the very least, I think we will find some fun anecdotes

and things you might not have known about as we do those episodes from here and there. And number three of the top three is franchise playthroughs, which we did last year with the Metal Gear Solid games. We did that on Besties. But a note that I did see with the feedback on this is for us to be able to go even deeper into them. And I have a feeling that that means a little bit of that blurring of like video game history of what was it actually like playing this game when it came out. I can say separate from this for Besties, you're going to be absolutely driven mad by this. Going to be pushing for a Death Stranding book club this year. You see that trailer for Death Stranding 2? We got to do it. We got to.

I watched it. We got to get the band back together. There's a rock star bad guy who came back from the dead. Here's a great thing about the Death Stranding 2 trailer. I am a diehard Death Stranding fan. Did you actually beat Death Stranding? Oh, of course. Of course.

I wouldn't assume anything. You've been fans of things that you've never finished. Well, that's true. But my identity games, the games that I just can't stop talking about, the usuals, see it through to the end multiple times if I can. I love that game. i watched the trailer for the sequel and i have no idea what is going on not even a little bit i mean i recognize some characters there were some familiar faces a hundred percent but if you told me it was the same actors in a different movie i would be like, yeah, that seems right.

Oh, come on. I mean, there are similarities. They showed some gameplay stuff that like... Do you know where Death Stranding ended? Did you beat it? I did beat it. Do I remember where it ended? We don't want to spoil it.

I'm not going to, but like... Think about the final images of that game and i mean the last hour of that game was like fucking wild it was like taking mdma so i've i don't really know i mean you're right that's a that is a question of how you even continue things from there um i yeah i can't wait i i can't wait to see Conan O'Brien. It is interesting. I am excited. So yeah, we will figure that out. I would say that when we do a franchise playthrough this year, we'll probably put that up to a vote somewhere.

Because I want to make sure that people can play along with us and that folks want to play along with us. I also want to be... Let me... full disclosure. The really tricky thing about these franchise playthroughs is whether it's for besties or resties in both cases, everyone involved needs to be like pretty cool with whatever the game genre is. So for example,

if someone were to be like, Oh, you guys should do a final fantasy franchise playthrough i would be miserable i've really tried a number of times and it just wouldn't be fun for me so like that's the hard part of this um but i do think there are franchises that are like appealing to all of everyone on the show and certainly both of us um we just need to be mindful of that uh so i guess we'll just have people pick from a list of uh things we love yes i i regret to inform you it won't be a strategy game but we will at some point figure out a way to get a strategy person on this show

to talk i like starcraft and starcraft 2 those are fun i don't think that you're making people feel better. I think you just made it worse. I just think you grabbed a handful of salt and put it in the wound. I'm sorry. Oh, man. Into the Breach? Forget about it.

Love it. Best. Okay, okay, okay. We're getting it. Hey, we're going to play so much Unicorn Overlord. Oh, boy. It's going to be great. Okay, next up is number four, the next big thing. And this is what is like just about to break big on Steam. Maybe it just has, it's blowing up that week, or it is a thing that be able to hear about it we want you to be able to go on your discord and look like you are some sort of like video game

soothsayer or prophet or uh what would be another thing that you could predict the future i like oh i thought you were looking for a synonym to profit which i don't know i can pull one yeah i don't think either of the words i picked worked like i want you to be like um that biff from the back to the future oh with the magazine yeah and you're like hey i got a game pro from the year 2085 and i know the example that i always think of is when steven spawn guessed it on the show and was like hey i'm playing a game called inscription And literally none of us had heard of it. And it ended up being like, I don't think it won that year, but it definitely got close. It won Polygon's Game of the Year that year. So that was like an example.

So we won't always know what that stuff is, but we'll try to come as close to accurate as possible. And then number five is what else you might like. And this is like not games stuff. Yeah. This is movies, books and stuff, which I think is just just beefing up, just beefing up that final section. You know, yeah, we just got to beef it up. Try to get more variety for sure. So those are our top five.

Thank you all for voting on that. our top five. Thank you all for voting on that. And again, with those, if you have any ideas of episodes that you'd like within it, let us know in the comments. You know that we're always reading it. We love to hear what you think. And we did it.

We did it. That's the future of the show. A look into the days to come. Awesome. I'm so proud of us. What else do you have going on? Anything else you've been enjoying? I mean, I do love that Buy Nothing group. That has been taking up a lot of my time.

But, no, I'm just chucking through Fargo. I'm finally watching the final season of Better Call Saul, which is just, like, so tremendous. And I feel like there must be a lot of people. I think and I'm talking to one of them who loved Breaking Bad. But just like didn't watch Better Call Saul because like, oh, it's a prequel. And oh, it's about a character I'm not really engaged with. I think.

Soup to nuts. Better Call Saul is a better show than Breaking Bad. And I think not enough people watched it so i would strongly recommend diving in if you haven't yet it is quite the watch i think my tv viewing habits changed like it's not that i think the show is bad or it's a prequel it's that i don't watch that much tv anymore especially tv that asks a lot of me and i don't know if that's the the moment of like prestige tv is coming past maybe it's just me that you know like i am older and i have a kid so it's harder for me to make the time for i mean it's taken me years to finish this show so i'm definitely sensitive to that

problem yeah and it's so silly that i say that because i watch movies but uh for me the more immediate payoff of movie i start it and i finish it and i got what i needed from it yeah is good and also the perpetual fear i always have with tv is twofold one that i'll start it and then like i'll have to go on a work trip and two weeks will pass and then I'll kind of be out of it. And then two, that I can't trust my spouse who will definitely watch more episodes after I find out. Oh.

And I think that's what killed TV in our house is we just got to a point where is i was always behind and then she's already shows for you and shows for her and then they'd figure it out that's true that's true i need to get better about like just watching something on an ipad um yeah i i say that i'll give it a try but let's be honest i i don't know when I'm going to do that. This is my year of gaming, and I'm embracing it. I got to play all this weird stuff. There's a new Granblue game. Is it Granblue or Granblue? I have no idea.

I've heard of it, but I don't know how it's pronounced. Y'all, I found a new thing, a new identity for myself. I haven't even tried it yet, but I've been looking at the reviews. I've seen it climbing up on Steam. And sometimes you just you know it's like i'm it's nighttime and i'm in the woods and i hear a rustling in the leaves and i know that that wolf is going to eat me and i just accept it i just i accept my fate and that's how it feels with this game um so i'm going to play some more of that. I've been playing some more Like a Dragon.

I'm not as far as Griffin, who I think has just finished it. But I think I'm getting close to the end and seeing that through. And hopefully at some point this year we could maybe do a spoiler cast for like a B segment in one of the shows. And yeah, and that's it i also watched a movie called used cars the other night starring kurt russell when he's like a very very young man and it is one of the like trashiest comedies i've seen in a very very long time i don't know if i can recommend it on this show i think you just did i you know You know, retweets are not endorsements. That's true. I just shared that it exists.

I shared that Kurt Russell is in it. It's a very, very dark comedy. And I didn't have a bad time. I had a really bad headache and I just wanted something like real old-fashioned goofy. And it definitely delivered on that front. And yeah, I think that's probably it for me for right now. Right on. Yeah.

Cool. Should we wrap it up? Let's wrap it up. Let's do it. Hey, everybody. We just want to thank you for listening to the show. It is always our pleasure. If you want to leave a review, you can do that at Apple Podcast.

If you want to subscribe to the newsletter, you can do that at besties.fan. And get the new issue right when each episode comes out. We include all the games and all the stuff that we've been talking about with easy-to-use links. So save you time with the Google. And that's it. That's it for the Rusties. I am Christopher Thomas Plant. You are...

Ross Frushtick. And we are the Rusties, where the rest of the fest discuss the best of the rest. Rusties! We kind of did it that time.