The Besties - Gunbrella is a gun that's an umbrella [Resties]

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

The goal of Gunbrella is to find those responsible for your wife's death by wielding the murder weapon: a gun that turns into an umbrella. Of course this isn't any umbrella. It can block bullets, zip you into the sky, and grind rails like a pro skater. We really enjoyed the developer's previous game, Gato Roboto; can Gunbrella take their talents another step forward? In the second half, we make sense of this month's big video game industry controversy: Unity's baffling decision to change its payment structure, infuriating tons of developers and potentially causing a glut of delays as designers move their games to new engines. See a full list of everything discussed on the episode (plus links!) at 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 Farshtick. And welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week we're talking about Gunbrella, a 2D action game with a twist of platforming and a sprig of Metroidvania. We're also going to be talking about the Unity News, which if you don't know what that means, congratulations. And if you do, well, welcome to the horror show. We're going to dig into that. But before we do any of that, Fresh have news for you oh i have another job that i didn't tell you about separate from the besties and the resties and separate from polygon

i'd imagine and separate from polygon i knew about that one you know i i hoped you did we founded it together yeah um i am now on the board at my local indie movie theater truly becoming my evolved pokemon form of um movie snob this is this is what it's all been aiming towards everything else was merely a step a rung in the ladder if you will and now i've i've achieved my goal of working at a non-profit and feels pretty good i'm not gonna lie you know just handing out popcorn doesn't count as being on the board right that's true and that's true well you know i i didn't eat popcorn for about i don't know like 20 years of my life because when one of my first jobs was at a movie theater and I scolded my hand on the popcorn machine. Blood everywhere.

What? Gross. And they're like, don't worry about it. You just don't let anybody see you. Go in the back and put nacho chips in the nacho chip containers and it'll all be okay. What did they do with the bloody popcorn? I didn't do it.

I couldn't go through with it. The blood was all over the popcorn? Oh, yeah. Well, no, they got rid of that because that was obvious. But they also, I didn't keep the nachos around either. They were the king of shortcuts. So, you know, like behind the movie theater concession area, right? There's a floor and on the floor

there's like usually grating um where all the catch like soda and stuff yeah all of that junk right yeah and we had the grating and we had the kind of like pipe where that goo would go yeah but we didn't have anywhere for the pipe to lead. The pipe just was a pipe. So after shift, we would pull up the grating, and you would take old, like, big mega drink cups, and you would scoop out the goop and put it into the trash. No. It's so gross. Horrible. I know. I know.

And this is the movie theater you're working at now, correct? No, the movie theater I work at now is a delight. It is. It's called the Frida Cinema Plugs. It's in Santa Ana, California. So if you live in Southern California or L.A., you should come out. And it's like the most old school type of movie theater. It's literally in downtown.

It's like the most old school type of movie theater. It's literally in downtown. It's two screens. It mostly shows like old kind of weird stuff and then like a little bit of new indie stuff. That sounds like Chris Plant. It is. I truly feel seen every time I walk in there. It makes me so happy. Except for this week, they were playing The Searchers, the John Wayne movie. I've not seen it. Do you know the airport here is named after John Wayne?

I did. I've landed at that airport. So, yes, I'm familiar with that. It's a weird thing. We're kind of going all over the place. But needless to say, I just wanted to use this as an excuse to plug a movie theater because it would be great for more people to go there because that makes it healthier which means more opportunities to do stuff that i could be a part of so now i know you're talking financially healthy but from a internally healthy standpoint what would you say is the like snack of choice at this movie theater for me or like what's probably the best-selling snack uh for you and then for

best-selling best-selling i don't know for me i'm a big fan of the reese's pieces oh yeah okay like you get the you get a small popcorn you get the reese's pieces you pour a little bit of the reese's pieces in shake it up eat and then just keep doing that for the popcorn oh i guess that's salty and sweet kind of thing yeah Yeah. I don't like the new, you know what? I don't like the new candies. The like, the, it's like cotton candy puffs. Uh-huh. That's, no. You liked it back when candy was simple.

When candy was candy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You do realize that like Reese's Pieces were once new candies. Yeah, but now they're old candy, so they're okay. No, I follow that logic. Red Vines or Twizzlers, Chris Plant? Very important question. For me?

No, for the movie here. What do they carry? Which one? Oh, I actually don't know. I'll be honest. I haven't taken a close look. It's going to determine a lot of whether I'd actually attend this movie. I'll send a photo next time I'm there and I'll include a newsletter for

people to like judge our, our food options. That's a good idea. Maybe people can give us some recommendations of what we should stock. That would actually be kind of helpful. Oh my God. Very quick before I, before we move on,

because we should move on. What is the number one movie that you would like me to play at this movie theater whenever you come and visit? Cause you're going to do that eventually. Yeah, yeah, sure. Number one movie, monkey bone. me to play at this movie theater whenever you come and visit? Because you're going to do that eventually. Yeah, yeah, sure. Number one movie, Monkeybone. Oh, good call. You were ready with it.

Do you think that we could get, like, Brendan to come down? Of course. Just because he won Best Actor doesn't mean he's too big for Monkeybone. That's true. You're never too big for Monkeybone is what I like to say. Amen. Anyway, let's take a break. Okay.

Okay. We are back. And we've got a weird one. This game is called Gunbrella. And it is kind of what it says on the tin. It's from developer Doinksoft, who... I want to say Doinksoft as well, because that is a fun developer name.

It's a great name. They made Gato Roboto. Yeah, that was the game that I played of theirs previously. I played Gato Roboto and quite enjoyed it. It was like a lo-fi Metroidvania, and we all know how much I love Metroidvanias, but you were a cat, Which is cool. Who could get in a robot? Who could get in a robot?

It was kind of like a Master Blaster, Metroidvania vibe. And I think Devolver published that, but this is even more of a Devolver game, in that it is ultra-violent, but also super cute at the same time. And stylized. Heavily stylized. And very stylized.

Do you want to give kind of summary of how the game works sure well narratively you are a person whose wife gets killed by someone wielding a gunbrella which is you know it's the it's the thing that penguin uses in batman returns it's a gun slash umbrella and you find that device uh i guess next to her dead body and you take it and go on basically a murder rampage to try to figure out who uh did that so i guess it's part detective part murder rampage and uh the way it plays it's a 2d platforming exploration heavy kind of detective action game i guess yeah i wouldn't put too much emphasis on the detective other than you you thematically you are constantly given like detective-esque things to uncover like figure out where this person is or figure out the password for this

thing or whatever it is it doesn't feel like a detective game you're right but i guess there's yeah closer to side quests than there there's the the way that they gate areas is by going to places and then they will say things that will then unlock other things and that yeah fits the story but there's not like a detective mode you know it's nothing like that it is much more interested in the violence and really the movement so the way that the gunprella works is it shoots naturally kind of like a shotgun blast and it's a certain range it's like a short to mid-range blast and then when you trigger the umbrella part that umbrella can either shield you um it can ricochet bullets back to the targets if you kind of parry with it or and most interestingly you can use it to jump high

into the air so you can kind of catch the gust of wind with it i guess mary poppins style and that it kind of launches you in like a direction of your choosing. Yes, in any direction. You're right. And also the umbrella grinds rails up and down full Tony Hawk skater style. So it's a very fun, propulsive means of getting around these little screens. Yeah, it feels like really good to move around this world i'm actually like not surprised that it got turned into a full game because the immediate like 30 second loop of like using this umbrella shooting a guy with the shotgun and then like lashing onto a grind rail wherever it is feels awesome like they really

nailed the like movement of this game. And oftentimes for these sorts of games, that's one of the hardest things to pull off is just like making it feel good to move around the world. Yeah, it's kind of everything else that doesn't work as well for me. Well, and yeah, I guess I should say up top, there's nothing egregiously wrong with this game but it's like a lot of small inconveniences that i kept pushing against you know yeah sure well i guess uh well why don't you mention one

of them and we'll go yeah so i mean when we first saw it i think i don't know about you i was expecting sort of a metroidvania that's what i thought based on the screenshot based on their previous work given gato roboto but also just like looking at the game it looks like what a metroidvania would look like and it's not that and it's fine most definitely it's not that in fact i feel like i could use more not metroidvanias just 2d action games in my life the trouble is the world is designed like halfway between a linear action game and a metroidvania yeah so there's like quite a bit of backtracking and um not always knowing where you are which is made even more confusing because there's not a good mapping system or a i don't think there is a mapping system.

Or a fast travel system. Other than like there's trains that can take you. From town to town. But I. Pretty often. The deeper I got into it. The more frustrated I got. With having to backtrack through things.

I mentioned to you. And this is like not I think a common thing. I think this is a really weird fluky thing. But I actually got stuck kind of in the world because of where I had saved. And then going back and playing it, I didn't realize that a certain box had like literally trapped me in an area. I burned, I don't know, maybe 15 minutes, half hour, realizing that that was broken. That said, i don't think like that's a common thing i just think by having a map or fast travel those are the sorts of problems that you just kind of almost instinctually work your way around if they happen in other games yeah i think for me

my issue is more along the line because like honestly the game does we talked about locomotion which i think is great the like overall look like the pixel art is fantastic the music is great it's got this jazzy like vibey soundtrack to it that like doesn't sound like a lot of other games that are that are around right now so i was like super vibing. With the overall presentation. And I think you know we talk about like devolver games. And what they look or sound like. And I think this is very consistent with that. I think what bummed me out.

About the structure of the game. Was just because it made. What was otherwise like a world. That I would want to get lost in. Feel very small. It feels very like directed. And linear. But it doesn't have the density of like

a contra or something like that where the levels are like very handcrafted like minute to minute there's just like a lot of both emptiness but also like um claustrophobia in and it just like doesn't really have a thrill of exploration it's's more just like, oh, I found the thing. Structurally, it just doesn't really land for me, which is a bummer because of all the other things that are really working for me. Yeah, and that is the kind of oddness of it is I still feel like I could recommend it to plenty of people.

If you look at this game on Steam or Switch or wherever else you could recommend it to plenty of people if like if you look at this game on steam or switch or wherever else you could find it and the general look is appealing to you and the idea of just using a literal gunbrella sounds fun and you need kind of a distraction i think this game meets that which i know is like faint praise but there aren I don't know. I don't feel like I come across a ton of games that are in this kind of zone. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of these are Metroidvanias that do ask of a different kind of like patience from you. So when the game is singing, when I am zipping around from like place to place shooting evil alligators in the face it feels really fun it's just that it it feels so uh contrary to the kind of energy of the game to then have these points where i'm backtracking or going to a town and talking to people and it kind of slows things down

in a way that really doesn't amount to much in my experience other than like okay well then this is giving me permission to go to the next fun bit yeah it does feel uh gated and just kind of silly ways because you're not you know the traditional again metroidvania loop is like you're finding upgrades and items to like get you further in the world there are none in this game you know it's not a metroidvania so i get it but like you're not like it's not gear gating or anything like that if anything it'll just be like oh you found this key or this ticket and you can go to the next area but you're you're not getting like increasingly cool mobility options or anything like that the only like permanent upgrades you'll

find are you'll get like damage upgrades for your shotgun or you'll find like more health but outside of that it's it's very light in fact there like are other bullets that you can fire from your gum broa but those are all like single use consumable items which also seems like very weirdly implemented like you know i i felt like i couldn't use those because they were very expensive and it felt wasteful to like burn ammo unless i like really really needed it so it just seems like there's a lot of like design decisions that feel odd and not necessarily fitting which is really surprising just because gato roboto was like i thought really well designed and made like a lot of really smart integration decisions of

like you know how you're moving through the world and how the cat can like latch into the suit versus not it just felt like more of a holistic piece but i do think like presentationally this is much better than that so it's hard to say exactly what happened here yeah i i wonder how much the release date for a game like this impacts how people receive it not not saying we're reviewing it you're criticizing it differently because of what we're playing but more for people out there who are choosing what game they want to get right now. There are so many options. Like it's actually just overwhelming how much stuff we've been picking through for these two shows over the past month and a half and probably another month and a half moving forward. And I still don't understand why games like this get dropped into busy windows.

Games like this get dropped into busy windows. Because I think this game is way easier for me to recommend when there's not a lot of stuff out. But when you have just a bevy of choice, whether it's large games or smaller ones, one of which I'll get to in a bit. It's, yeah, it just seems like really unfortunate timing. And especially a game like this that feels like maybe even a little bit more time in development could have maybe smoothed things out. That's some real, I don't know how games are made, talk. But it does feel just a little rough in certain places.

I think it's my read of it. I think it's a scope issue. And this is probably figured out very early in design, which is like, how big is this game going to be? And I think they probably went too small with it and then had to like, make something that like touched all the bases of what they were trying to do,

but in a very linear way. So it is kind of living in both of those worlds in an awkward way again we don't know we're not the developers we're just speculating but like i i agree with you like in a slower period of time it probably would be a little easier to stomach and honestly like so many indie games make so much money after the fact when sales drop and stuff like that, that it wouldn't surprise me if this game sort of saw a second life. But I think right now it's a little bit of a tough sell. Cool. Well, yeah, I think people should.

I think you should consider this game. I think it's worth taking a look at. Also, I feel like we didn't mention the lovecraftian visuals and monsters throughout all of it oh yeah there's like squids and giant rats demons and it's all sorts of wacky shit in this game it's weird yeah it it does kind of like carve an interesting tone between extreme uh gory lovecraftian uh goop and very silly um i know that gunbrella from you know the the carve of its symbols i worked on it 34 years ago and i gave that gunbrella to a friend um which is interesting it's not good or bad. It's just, it's kind of just strange. Um, yeah, I thinkfield episode where you talked about um the kind of strangeness of that todd howard quote about like yeah we figured out what was fun about this game

you know pretty recently oh yeah there was an article i think it was gq or something and he basically said that the game wasn't fun until about a year ago um which i understand like in triple a that happens to some extent because if like all the pieces need to be put together but like if that 30 second loop is strong the game just moving around even if you're not actually doing anything will be fun and it goes a long way. It goes a long way. Yes, I think that's our kind of point with this game is there are some real rough edges here, but that core feeling of zipping into the sky with your umbrella

and then blasting Cthulhu or whatever in its snout just feels so good. Cthulhu's snout? I guess, what would you call the mouth tentacles tentacles yeah i guess they're just tentacles hey my god octopus doesn't have a snout do you want to go on to the next segment please let's move on yeah let's do it let's talk about uh some stuff hey uh y'all listener uh thank you so much we're gonna take a quick break when we come back we're gonna talk about all this unity um zaniness uh awfulness

and maybe a fresh is cool with it we will also talk a little bit about the recent nintendo direct because i have some feelings about it so we will see you on the other side. Okay, we're back. You wanted to talk about the Unity stuff. I didn't, I mean, I didn't want, it's not a joyful discussion, but it is an important discussion. And I think for people at home

who maybe have heard about the outlines of this discussion but don't fully understand it i thought i thought it'd be beneficial yes and people might be wondering hey unity if they know if you know about it and you do not design video games it is an engine it is a tool used to create kind of power video games yeah unreal is a competitor of them. There's a number of game makers. Game Maker is another one. And you might be wondering, like,

what does this have to do with me? How does this affect me? And how does it affect the people who make the things I love? And I think we'll be able to answer that. I hope so. Can you explain just, like, top level what happened? Okay, so Unity.

Most people are able to get up and running with a unity game for free without paying a single dime and that's honestly still true you can make a game within unity you can download it and make a game in unity and it won't cost you anything that's this that's true of um unreal as well you can make a game in Unreal won't cost you anything and a number of other options that are essentially free from the jump but the hook is what are you paying

long term and I'll give you a frame of reference of Unreal and what Unreal charges long term if for example you make a bunch of money so for Unreal if you make an Unreal game and your revenue is over $1 million, which is very rare, but if it is, Unreal is owed 5% of that and obviously scaling up. So if you, you know, $5 million, they get 5% of $5 million.

Okay. So just recently, Unity announced a new model for revenue for them to make money off of their product. And basically, it's going to charge developers that use Unity every single time your game gets installed. Now, this only kicks in once you've had over 200 000 installs and you've made over 200 000 but once that happens any installs after that unity is owed a certain amount of money and the amount of money changes based on what like level subscription but for most developers, it's going to be 20 cents per install over that number. It's a little complicated, but I'm going to paint a scenario why this is like a big problem for a lot of indie developers. Let's say, for example, that you have a successful indie game that was

made in Unity, and you go and make a deal with Microsoft to get your game on Game Pass, and Microsoft pays you, let's say, $50,000, and your game goes up on Game Pass, and a ton of people play it, and then you realize, oh no, because it's such a huge hit on Game Pass, I actually owe Unity far more than the $50,000 that Microsoft is paying me. So in the end, you actually end up owing money because you've made this deal with Game Pass. Now, Unity will say that you actually do not owe the money. It's Microsoft that owes the money in this scenario. And we will be going to Microsoft.

Now, if you're Microsoft and Unity is coming after you, you could either A, ignore them, possible, or B, you could pass the extra expense on to the developers that you are trying to sign deals with, where you'll say, oh, your game is made at a Unity? Well, we're going to have to add some padding to that. So we're only going to pay you $10,000 to make sure that there's still room to pay Unity at the end of the day. That's not ideal. There are other scenarios that are unlikely, but certainly possible.

If, let's say, for example, you make an indie game that has a trans character in it and a bunch of right-wing publications come out against it and push against it to the point where they realize that your one dollar game that has a trans character in it could be pirated and downloaded over and over and over again such that it would end up costing you money because all these people are installing your game regardless of whether they're paying for it like that's another horror scenario so there's a lot of like huge x factors that could come to play because of this pay per install thing and unity just seems to keep uh leaning into it in pretty awful ways such that i don't know that they walk back from this,

because I don't know that a developer will be willing to work with Unity moving forward, because they will worry rightly, that Unity will change their term of service, which is what they've done here, and not given people enough warning to back out of using their product. enough warning to back out of using their product. Yeah, I mean, I think it puts a lot of developers, especially indie developers who have not had success and have not been able to, you know, accumulate some savings and in a really tough place. Because you do have to learn how to use these engines.

You know, they're not switching from Unity to... Pico 8 or GameM unreal sure yeah it's doable but it is not just like some easy switch right you just do right away right and the cost of say that you've been developing a game for five months or a year or maybe longer and you are thinking about switching it over that that's a pretty legitimate cost, both in terms of buying yourself the time to do that, but also the cost of learning how to even use this system. But you're right. It is hard to think of many examples where a company potentially damaged so much trust. Because really what they showed, even if they walk back all of this, and they've kind of started to walk back some of it,

by the time that this episode airs, who knows? This could be in a very different situation in terms of what their business model is. But what's troubling about this is they showed it's a possibility that like this is a thing they could do and especially when you think of anything that would potentially try to push this retroactively immensely immensely uh upsetting really scary for developers yeah yeah yeah i mean this is why for folks who are still using twitter or x or whatever you want to call it might have seen some of their favorite game makers saying hey we're taking our game off of steam g and one um yeah this is in

effect we don't want to be tied to this in any way yeah the cult of the lamb developer said that they'll just remove their game because it's made in Unity, and they're worried that it'll end up costing them money if this goes through. The developers of Slay the Spire, Megacrit, basically made an announcement saying they've been working on a new game

for the past over two years, and they are, as of right now, definitely working to change their engine because of this. They actually said, we have never made a public statement before. This is how badly you fucked up. It's, it's nuts.

And it's, you know, it takes a lot of people to make bad ideas like this, but it is unfortunate that the CEO, the current CEO of Unity is John Riccitello, who was the CEO of EA during the period where I think it took a pretty sharp decline. um during the period where i i think that was the same overlap of ea being quote the worst company on the planet which to be fair i don't want to give too much credit to that that was a lot of like spike campaigns by trolls pre-gamergate but he was not making great decisions at ea he's now not making great decisions at unity and this was when he took over this company as CEO, The Great Fear. Because I can remember around when Polygon was founded,

Unity was really making a play to be the upstart in the field and was making a legitimate challenge to Unreal. Again, this is before Epic had all the Fortnite money. They were seen as the one for indies as it was easy to use it wasn't going to fleece you um it allowed you to do a lot of 2d in interesting ways that it was it was the good engine and you know epic at the time was the big corporate overlord.

And still is. Don't get me wrong. Yeah. But what I think what Unity did and what just competition does in the market is it, I think, I suspect, drew Epic into making better deals for users with the unreal engine making better rates giving people the the i think it's like the free version that you can use up until that price point and that's a good thing about competition in the market for a thing like this part of what concerns me about unity going through this is not just the immediate what's going to happen to all these games and these developers but what will it do to the market to not have competition if it were to to continue on this path um it would suck yeah it sucks like on so many so many levels yeah it's definitely scary i mean the the i guess bright spot of this is if

you are interested in making games again we mentioned unreal which is obviously the big one from a 3d game standpoint but uh there's also game maker which costs 50 a year and then you just have it uh rpg maker is just like a 25 one-time fee and pico 8 costs 15 and all those are like great i mean they make traditionally 2D games in those engines. So they're not like necessarily 3D engine building things, but they are options if you're interested in getting into that and potentially terrified of like getting into bed with someone like Unity, which is making these decisions.

But you're right. I mean, Unreal had the luxury of gobs and gobs of cash coming in from Fortnite and various other things that allowed them to make unreal so competitive and i think unity doesn't have that luxury so they are i'm sure up against the wall financially but doing this is only going to make things worse for them so again even if they back it down i don't know that we're going to be able to walk back from this and not have people remember oh is that a company i really want to be working with for the next three years or five years or whatever it is maybe not yeah yeah i i will say with the other

um tools that you recommended those are definitely going to be for like smaller games for the most part game yeah and honestly if you're for people that are just getting into games like you should be using those anyway like you shouldn't be making an unreal game from the jump yeah I mean experiment away you know but I do agree that like making something in

Pico 8 the original version of Celeste came out that's right it is a game jam version. So I do agree that something a little simpler is a nice starting point. Yeah, Unity is a mess. Can we talk about a good thing? Can we talk about Nintendo?

Please. So Nintendo Direct happened relatively recently. And I just want to talk about the Nintendo strategy and why I think it is so clever and it works so well. And that is we got a Nintendo Direct. It did not have a brand new Mario, like Mario Odyssey level. It did not have a Zelda. It didn't have a Metroid. that it didn't have a Metroid. But it had a ton of things for very specific audiences who I think felt completely served.

The example, obviously for me, there was a new Vanillaware game. Vanillaware is the company that made 13 Sentinels. It's a tactics game, so Frustic will actually have to play it, which is great you're gonna love it it's gonna be your favorite game but i felt throughout the entire presentation that it wasn't always a game for me like mario and donkey kong but then that's a game for you yeah um and then there's paper mario uh the thousand year door

which i think is one of the most beloved uh rpgs that is also extremely difficult or expensive to play um and now you'll be able to do it on the switch uh f0, I am just delighted by. As like somebody who loves old, old games would never play normal F-Zero. But I saw that and I felt like, hey, you know what? They know exactly what type of weird sicko I am and they are targeting me precisely, even if I only play it for a couple of hours.

Yeah, people are kind of reacting. there was a mixed reaction i think uh someone described it as mid but honestly it's like i don't know what you guys are expecting from nintendo at this point they're obviously at the tail end of the life cycle of this new of the switch like we're there you know i think we all agree the likelihood of there being a switch to next year seems likely although we've obviously said that for the last few years the fact that there are new releases whether they are like remakes like uh luigi's mansion 2 or a thousand year door or like new new releases like the peach game which i don't even understand what that game is but it does star peach and that's a rarity um the fact that these are still coming out is like really exciting and cool and

it's great to see like i you know i don't know what people again or you know i'm sure people wanted silk song but at this point i was thrilled that silk song wasn't there because i know how busy it is i don't have time to play silk songak Song right now. Yeah, and I'm happy that alongside, you know, two Mario RPG remakes, we're also getting something as weird as a remake of the Nintendo DS game Trace Memory, which is like a real cult game in the States. And then, yeah, Princess Peach Showtime,

where Princess Peach gets to be a sword fighter and kung fu master and detective and I'm sure many other things. And a cook. Just weird stuff. Nintendo continuing to be weird. I am thrilled by that. I don't know. These are the sorts of Nintendo Directs that I really look forward to where it's just a bunch of weird surprises. And I know all of this stuff collectively could eat up months for me versus the third Pokemon Direct or the second or third Zelda Direct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're taking a handful of dice, they're throwing it down.

Some of them are going to be sixes, some of them are going to be ones. And, you know, whatever. You'll probably have at least one thing that kind of piques your interest, and that's really all you need for even in a 40-minute presentation. If one thing lands, they've done their job. I was going to say, were there any ones? But then i saw that contra game which i feel bad about this game because it's being made it's developed by way

forward way forward knows how to make great pixel art but it's a 3d game what does konami have something against contra do they not want it to be cool as it could be? The game might still play fine. Yeah, it might play okay, but yeah, that 3D art looks a little rough. I just can't imagine hiring a studio that's that good at 2D pixel and you're like, great, we're giving them Contra and they're not going to do pixel art.

It's been so long since like a new Contra game. A new good one. Wasn't there one like three years ago that was... Oh, maybe. I don't even remember. Anyway, I thought it was really nice. I agree as far as these things go with the Nintendo Switch

winding down its life cycle. If that means we're going to get some of the greatest Mario classics getting remade and widely available after being super expensive for a long time that's awesome and if that means i have to try mario versus donkey kong i'll i'll give it a shot i am that game is good i i loved the original which was just called donkey

kong on the original game boy and then it was mario versus donkey kong and then they turned it into mario versus donkey kong march of the minis which i really didn't like it was like more of like a logic puzzle thing that was not fun i don't know i'll be interested to see if this ages because i remember being impressed when i played it on game boy advance but obviously things have progressed quite a bit since then isn't the game called donkey kong just donkey kong no no it's not weirdly the it's a game boy game where you are playing as mario and it has the same format of like these 2d side-scrolling levels and it starts like normal donkey kong where you're going up the you know the levels and then um at some point it just turns into after like donkey kong falls off the building it turns into these levels which are like

you're finding keys and you're like going across ropes and stuff like that and it like turns into a whole other kind of game with like actually pretty good controls so weird huh okay this was the first time mario did a backflip was in this series he had never done a backflip before even before mario 64 that's crazy yeah it's really good um cool should we should we wind things down do you have any honorable mentions or anything you want to share? No, I don't think so. Nothing? You haven't been enjoying anything? What have you been watching?

What have you been, how have you been entertaining yourself? Honestly, like every night is just Baldur's Gate. It's just been like me, like my wife plays the gaming laptop. I'm playing on PS5, separate campaigns. And we just sort of like and i'll be like hey maybe you should uh clear out the goblin camp now but i'm really trying not to nudge her in directions but there are certain things that like i need her to see because i know she'll only play it once and um you know there i don't want to spoil for you gonna play it multiple times maybe like five years from now okay because

because because Larian has a tendency to do the like definitive edition where they like fix a bunch of bugs and but more so than any other game that I've played in recent memory as I'm playing this there are so many moments where the game can branch off in interesting ways or I could

like make other choices that I like really want to see what happens if i like murder this guy instead of like helping him out or like how does the game not fall apart at that point did you see pat gill's youtube video on polygon intentionally not because i was worried about spoilers you know you can watch it because nothing in the game happens after. It's all limited to like the first half of the first act. Oh, okay. Up to the Goblin Camp. Okay, I'll watch it then.

Yes, he kills like every, in one of the playthroughs, because it's three different styles of play. He just straight up like murders characters before they even talk to him. Oh, yeah. I played Dark Urge. The first time i played it was on dark urge and i cut gail's hand off oh yeah like by accident i was like oh i need to restart this is not gonna work oh i probably should have done that gail drives me nuts that's like just don't use them i don't need yeah i like gail yeah but he's like then he's at my

camp always asking for me to feed him you know like necklaces or something oh yeah he's a lot he's got a necklace problem he does he's like a whole thing um yeah i i will be talking about this a whole lot more on this week's besties but i have gotten into lies of p and i am shocked how much i like it because i am a person who always plays a sorcerer in like Dark Souls type of games. Easy mode. Easy mode. Yeah. And then if I'm not doing that, I at least roll a whole lot. And in this game, rolling completely ineffective. It is a game where you need to learn how to parry. I'm doing a lot of rolling. Huh? I roll a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I'm amazed that you are having any luck. I think I know why. We'll talk about it on the episode.

I think I know why you're failing at rolling. Okay, okay, okay. It's not just tapping the button twice to do a roll. I do know how to do that. But yeah, it is really enjoyable. I probably shouldn't say any more because I guess I should save that for the rest of the episode.

We're doing a full episode. We're doing a full episode on about it but what i can say right now is i'm really enjoying it and enhance your p organ is something that's in this game i mean there's a lot of weird shit said in this game this game is it's you know it is both a brain game and a weird game at the same time. Cool. That's it. I think we've done an episode. I don't think we know exactly what we're going to talk about next time. I think we know definitely not what we're going to talk about in two weeks because we haven't really planned it.

But I'm sure it'll be great. And it's probably in bargain even if we could. Probably, yeah. So, hey, thank you all for listening to another episode of The Resties. My name is Christopher Thomas-Plant. My name is Russ Froshtick. And we are The Resties, where the rest of the best

discuss the best of the rest. Resties! Resties! We almost got it that time.