The Besties - Revenge of the backlog!!! (Plus, new TMNT) [The Resties]

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

To make room for the new games of the fall video game season, The Resties are clearing out their backlogs. Frushtick is finishing Dark Souls 2 on the Steam Deck. Plante sees Cult of the Lamb to its end. Plus, both Resties get nostalgic with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection.  As for the now customary movie recs? Well, it's the beginning of spooky seasons so we're tossing in an Alien AND a Predator. 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 Plants. My name is Russ Frustik. Welcome to The Resties, where the best of the rest discuss the best of the rest. This week we're talking about what we're actually playing. A twist between the weekly deluge of new games we also play stuff for ourselves and this week we're talking about it what keeps our interest outside of the new video game cycle you know how like 99 of people play video games uh it seems logical so that means you are playing dark souls 2 i have questions about that i I am playing Cult of the Lamb.

We're going to do a little bit of spoilers on that kind of at the second segment. And then we both played a little bit of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Cowabunga Collection. So, I mean, a full episode, a full episode. It is. But before we jump into that, I had a question for you, Chris Pine. Uh-huh. You wear sneakers, right? Shoes, yeah.

I do, in fact, wear shoes. No, but specifically sneakers. Yeah, yeah. Like a tennis shoe. Yeah, on like a normal everyday, you're not like trying to be fancy. Yeah. Like throwing. Who doesn't wear, do you think there are you're not, like, trying to be fancy. Yeah. Like, throw on. Who doesn't wear, do you think there are people who it's, like, either sandals or dress shoes?

Maybe. Oh, okay. I, a question I have for you is, are you the sort of person that would run shoes into the ground, or do you, like, have a bunch of shoes and you kind of rotate through them i can i it's kind of bizarre that you asked this i literally just ran a pair of shoes into the ground so much so that you could see through the sole in the bottom of the shoe right which i had never done that before i i i do run them to the ground but never quite literally to the point that you're like oh gosh wait you can see the sock yeah like i had like and you can see like um like you know like when you cut open uh like a gobstocker gobstocker gobstopper yes you can

like see the layers right wow see the different layers of plastic and rubber. Like when they hit the home run in the sandlot. Yeah, and I don't know how it happened. I didn't think I was doing... I thought everything was going fine, and then one day, I take a look, and suddenly I've taken a journey to the center of my foot. I mean, you do love to walk.

I do. That is true. That is the thing about me. I don't think we talk about that. I like to walk about one to two hours a day if possible. You're a walker. And at that point, one to two hours a day, you've got to be going through a sneaker every year at least. It's true. Is this going anywhere?

Is this just about my shoe habits? my shoe habits well i mentioned it because i was recently my wife recently made fun of me because she was walking behind me at one point and uh joked about the state of my shoes and i hadn't really computed it until i took the shoes off and realized that one shoe looked relatively normal the other shoe the sole had rubbed down so much that it was at a slant. So when I was walking, one of my feet was like slanted, which is probably not great. So at once I realized that I went and bought new shoes. So it was remedied. But I do think not just for shoes, but for all things in my life, I try to really get the most out of them. I try to like really every inch of it because I bought it. I want to make the most of it and i

don't know if that makes me a hoarder or what no that's good i wish i could be like that with technology i'm not with everything in my life is gonna be used way way beyond the point of being reasonable like we we just got rid of um the utensils that i got when i went to college oh my god yeah i know it's gross and like there are t-shirts that i wear that it's bad because there's just a record of photos of me in these shirts again from college sure 15 years ago or whatever um so it's hard to let those go but then with then with tech it's like i don't know that a new monitor does sound pretty nice i mean sure i got one three years ago but maybe another one now yeah it's funny because again i feel like i need to make use of both tech and so like when i buy a new thing

i really feel like i need to use it a lot to make use of it and that applies to games as well and part of the reason that i really try to finish games is because hey i'm already pot committed to this game i want to like see it through and i know that doesn't apply to you sunk cost fallacy yeah i know there right like for me with the game that that's a that's that's resources right like it's eating up my time you're right if i was yeah yeah you were you were like the last person i know to get a 4k tv i think yeah it was very late in the process i don't know why that is but it was it was very late i mean i know why that is but my vision is not great enough to see the difference but then i got one and i was like oh yeah it looks a little better i i it the worst thing about this and it's especially true

with graphic uh gpus graphic cards is uh for the first week it is the most amazing thing and then it just turns you into a snob yeah who expects it it just becomes the new normal almost instantly yeah and not only that it makes lower than 4k stuff look a little worse uh yeah a little bit sometimes uh should we talk about video games let's do it okay let's take a quick break and then we will talk about how about dark souls 2 okay okay we're back you you have been returning to dark souls 2 i believe because the steam deck has made this something viable in your life and you know me i i really try when i say something i really try to do it and this includes when i said on this very

podcast the games that i had on my backlog for when the steam deck would arrive i mentioned two games one of them was outer wilds and the other one was dark souls 2 and here i am i've already beaten outer wilds and i'm playing dark souls 2 so i'm a man of my word where where are you at in it uh where am i at i just finished wow this is gonna be deep cut for anyone who hasn't played the game but it's called called The Earthen Keep, I want to say. I fought like a Medusa looking lady in like a big poison swamp and there was a big tower. I mean, that name's like, that's like 50% of all From Software environments. But I want to say it feels like I'm about halfway.

I think that's around where I made it. Yeah, I mean, I don't have any aspirations that you actually beat the game because it's you. No, no, of course not. Why would I do that's around where I made it. Yeah. I mean, I don't have any aspirations that you actually beat the game because it's you. No, of course not. Why would I do that? But I mentioned on Besties, the servers are off and continue to be off for Dark Souls 2 on PC because some hacking nonsense. So I am continuing to do this without notes, which is really a drag because there are many instances in this game where notes would have been extremely useful. Are you like playing with a little YouTube, you know, walkthrough? No, I don't do that.

But I do look up like, hey, what order should I play this game in? So I looked up like, oh, after you do this environment, you should do this environment. But I don't do walkthroughs for like, here's how to get through this entire area so what is your take on this one because dark souls 2 was my favorite until elden ring yeah but i say that as as you pointed out somebody who only makes it till about halfway through every game they play yeah so i guess before i me, I want a question for you. When you played Dark Souls 2, was that the first time that a From Software Souls-like game had clicked for you? Because I guess at that point, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 had come out, and then Dark Souls 2.

Yeah, and I think the reason it did, we may have talked about this on an episode, the idea of each game in a franchise training you for the next one yes so if you play the first one and you bounce off you're more likely to appreciate the second one like that's why franchises make a lot of sense in video games is it's not like a a movie where you every movie you go to you know the process you go you go and you sit in the theater and you watch it and you know how to read a certain type of cut and then you know how you just know how to watch movies video games are very different you you have to learn how to experience them and a game like dark souls i mean a whole the whole soulsborne series i think demands that and yeah i think dark souls 2 was the first one where

i was able to sit down and kind of appreciate it on its own terms. I admired Demon's Souls. Sure. Demon's Souls before Dark Souls even came out. I was obsessed with the idea of it. I bought the limited edition copy of it when we worked together at my very first job. And I promised myself that I would play it the day I got fired.

And then I got fired and immediately started freelancing and never got to play any video games um but uh but yeah no it was it was the first one that i got into yeah so it when dark souls 2 came out there hadn't really been a souls game that clicked for me yet and uh so i remember we were talking about it for game of the year that year and it actually won game of the year that year for what it's worth and if you could go back and listen to that episode whatever year that was you'll probably notice that i don't talk a lot because even though i did play it i probably played like three or four hours of it obviously anyone who knows souls games knows that three or four hours is barely scratching the

surface and because it hadn't clicked for me like it was really nothing pulling me deeper into it at that point but then i got very into dark souls 3 and bloodborne and everything after that and since then i've gone back and played demon souls dark souls cetera. So Dark Souls 2 is the only one really left that I haven't played. And my initial thought on it is it's so funny that you loved it so much because I actually think the beginning of this game is really kind of not great.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, I think from a level design standpoint and from like artistically, like visually, like uh like viscerally visually like the art design of the early levels are a lot weaker than some of the middle game and maybe late game stuff um so it kind of takes a while before it starts getting interesting i think you see a little bit of good stuff there's like hyde's tower of flame which is pretty early but a lot of the stuff is like just a lot of like gross looking blah textures wrapped around a you know thing that's supposed to be a forest but doesn't look anything like a forest whereas you compare that

to like dark souls which has that moment where you start at the at the um campfire and you look up and you see this castle and you like trudge your way up to the castle and then you look down and you see the campfire that you started at like it dark souls 2 doesn't really have that at least not that i've seen or at least that wow factor it's a fair bit more linear in the first half compared to dark i wouldn't say that it's linear i think that it's um because you can you have like a few different opportunities like options of where to go maybe the word directed yeah it's more directed that is right because it feels like you start in this hub world which is menjula or whatever it's called and then from there you can go in like four different directions.

And two of those directions you're, like, way underpowered for. And the other one, the other two are, like, a little more reasonable. And you can kind of ease your way into it. So I agree. Whereas, like, God, Dark Souls, I stumbled into the catacombs in minute one and just got housed. Anyway, long story short i think it starts a little slow but once i understood a few things the game started really clicking for me the wildest thing about dark souls 2 we're gonna get a little technical here but there's

a thing i'm ready for it you know i love a good technical sidebar it's people listen some people listening will nod and some people listening be like what the hell are you talking about okay so there's a thing called the iframes oh are you gonna explain iframes a little bit yeah i'm actually i wish i had some popcorn to chew on because i don't fully understand iframes so okay so iframes stand for i i like literally took a drink of water just to prepare for this. I-frames stand for invincibility frames. Oh. And where they come into play in Dark Souls is rolling.

When you roll in a Dark Souls game or really any FromSoftware game, for the first, let's say, 0.3 seconds of your roll, you are immune from damage, hence the invincibility part of that. And the number of frames is how long of your roll you are invincible. So in most scenarios, your entire roll, you are not invincible. It's usually just like the beginning part of your roll, like the first 25% of your role and certain you can change certain things to make that invincibility period longer so in other souls games you can for example wear less equipment so if your equipment load is lower you'll be immune from damage for more of that role period does that make sense yes okay i i will i will i'll say my piece once you okay so that's how other souls games work is you just wear less armor and your iframes get longer pretty straightforward in dark souls 2

there's a stat called adaptability and i don't have the exact description in the game for how they described Adaptability. I think they just say like, hey, you do better at stuff. What they don't tell you is that stat governs how long your iframes are when you roll. So for the first five hours

of me playing Dark Souls 2, every time I tried to roll through an attack, I would get hit. And it felt really, really bad. Because I didn't know why. hours of me playing dark souls 2 every time i tried to roll through attack and attack i would get hit and it felt really really bad because i didn't know why so i had to look online and eventually found myself on a youtube that explained iframes and adaptability and why it's important and what stat i should put it at it's worth noting this stat never came back in another dark souls game they clearly thought it was a bad idea. Uh,

so once I got over that hump and the game started feeling good, I was able to like really get into the rest of it and like start building a character and, and feel like I had more command over the fights. And once that happens, like it's a souls game, like it feels like a souls game. And so I get all the rewarding elements of exploration and cool boss battles and and all that stuff but there's just some like

weird hinkiness to this souls game in particular yeah that made it a little bit harder to jump into i mean this is what is so goofy about video games is i remember when dark souls 2 came out and it was not as well received it It was still well received. I'm sure there's somebody who's going to share a Metacritic link. But it was like, it's a runt in the litter, I guess, of the Dark Souls series. I mean, it still is. Yeah. It still is.

And I remember the issue then was the world building. That it wasn't as open and that it wasn't folding back in it on itself like the original dark souls but you have to wonder how much of it was something like this right where it's this game's already opaque and then you change something like this and it's not clarified and the game just doesn't feel right and And most people just don't know why. Yeah. Right? That is wild to me. About this game and all games, the iframeless part, this is me just being very honest and open. And I'm sure I will be, again, shamed for this. The reason that I always bounced off these games early on is because i believed you had to actually dodge the animation

oh so when like a character swung at me i was like oh i need to keep my distance ah so that i can dodge the like the hand coming at me right but weren't there moments where you dodged and you definitely thought you should have gotten hit but weren't hit i thought the game was broken i mean well because it was so inconsistent to me right yeah sure because i didn't know how to again read the game right yeah and that i elden ring has made that so much more legible to me because the dodge in that game is so generous yes it is it is wildly generous yeah which it needs to be because i think that the bosses are so much more complicated did you understand in that game that you could roll through attacks immediately okay and and i think i probably understood it before i maybe there came a point where i started to understand it sure yeah um but it's you know i'm i'm not a

moron i know a lot of video games it's counterintuitive well yeah well i'm just saying it's wild that i someone who has grown up playing video games who works you know around video games all these things could just fundamentally misread what the game is trying to tell me well and it's also one of those fun game design tricks that makes you feel better than you're actually playing. Like the other example is like Coyote Time, where you run off a ledge and you get a split second after running off the ledge to hit the jump button and you can still jump. Like that's a Celeste thing and a number of other 2D platformers do that.

So there are a lot of small tweaks that game developers make to make you feel better than you actually are playing and uh iframes is it's one of them and that that's named after will edward coyote a famous developer quite right quite right um uh should we talk some about tmnt before we go into the break yeah i want to say one more thing about Dark Souls 2 that I think is really, really cool that hasn't showed up in another Dark Souls game, and I kind of wish it did. Dark Souls 2 has this weird thing. I don't know what the official term for it is,

but I'm going to call it torch time. And this probably rings a bell for you because I know you've played certainly enough. When you pick up torches in most Dark Souls games, you just get a torch and you can use it for as much as you want. You can light up rooms and whatever. Dark Souls 2, you have a limited amount of time to use a torch. And every time you pick up a torch, you get five minutes added to that timer.

So after you've been playing for a while, if you have a ton of torches, you might have like an hour and a half of torch time. Why that's really cool, a couple things.ches, you might have like an hour and a half of torch time. Why that's really cool, a couple things. One, the lighting in Dark Souls 2 looks amazing. I think it was improved for the re-release, which is called Scholars of the First Sin. So the lighting, even today, by modern standards, looks absolutely

stunning when you're holding a torch. It's outrageous. And B, it plays into the gameplay in really cool ways where you know you have a limited amount of torch time you'll light a torch at a bonfire and have to sacrifice using your left hand so you can't put your torch away to like hold the shield you need to keep holding that torch and eventually if you push through like a totally pitch black area you'll get to these braziers that are placed around the maps and light

up the different areas creating like a new checkpoint and that torch brazier will stay lit like forever so you're kind of creating your own mini checkpoints in between the bonfires and that was fucking cool and i want to see more games do that i love that it's morbid time baby it is um wait how is more how is that relevant it's like church time oh got it sure morbid so you're in a cave you know yeah morbius loves caves you're right um i i i do agree i i i think any mechanics involving fire and light like that just want more of them as we get into the era of the ray tracing totally you know it's like the rare thing with ray tracing where you're like hey this actually is benefits from yes i can actually tell the difference yeah um okay tmnt the cowabunga

collection i think i'm 90 sure that's the title i'm checking right now i think that's right okay it is teenage mutant ninja turtles the cowabunga collection it is um created by digital eclipse published by konami and it is a collection of 13 tmnt video games that do you know the window in which these games were released yeah i want to say this is a guess but i'm going to say like uh the first game probably came out like 88 and the last game came out and probably uh 96 fresh was i close no 89 okay so yeah the first one was close in 93 oh my god that's crazy 13 games 13 games that's four i mean i get it games you know came out fast a lot of these are kind of like ports of each other too right yeah um but still that's a lot of games that's a lot of games and if you're

wondering hey are these good games let me you, 13 games in 40 years. I mean, some of them are pretty good. Some of them are good. So I'm just going to go through a very, I'm going to give you all 13. Okay, but quick. I'll go fast. Number one, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the arcade game. Yes.

Right up top. Number two, Turtles in Time Arcade, followed by a port of Turtles in Time, followed by Manhattan Project, Hyperstone Heist on the Genesis. Hyperstone Heist, a birthday in October and a Christmas were all built towards Hyperstone Heist in my childhood.

I have never been more excited for anything in my life. And let me tell you, I put all the eggs in the wrong basket. The game is perfectly fine. You wait for anything for that long. No, sure. It's not going to live up. That was a bad choice on my part. After that, we got TMNT2

Arcade for the NES. We have Tournament Fighters, both the SNES and the nes version and the genesis thank god and then we have the game boy games which is back from the sewers radical rescue fall of the foot clan and then lastly team and t on nes yeah wow. Yeah. Oh, and also it includes the Japanese versions of, I believe, the majority of these games. And manuals. Yeah. I mean, that's...

We'll talk about the archiving stuff, I guess. Yeah. I mean, let's actually just talk about that. Okay. Because that's... Wait, wait, wait. Before... I do want to say this about the games.

Yeah. I think most of them are kind of unplayable today beyond like a nostalgia factor. There are a couple that I still get enjoyment out of, not necessarily from a nostalgia factor. Turtles in Time certainly jumps to mind as probably the best in this collection, in my opinion, the arcade one.

SNES one's not bad either. But it is difficult, it's extremely difficult to play these with modern especially on the heels of the best ninja turtle game ever made by far by far which just came out like a couple months ago what was that called um from wafer cowabunga to like a little from the game that just came out from Wayford. It was called Shredder's Revenge. Right.

Shredder's Revenge from Dot Emu. Dot Emu. Made it. Yeah. I mean, as a game, this is a hell of an advertisement for Shredder's Revenge. It is. You know? But as a work of preservation i love it i love what digital eclipse is doing i mean they're probably my favorite in the biz right now in terms of uh

these these classic collections yeah and the way that the game works you have all of those the the titles and like i said you can switch between the uh American version and the Japanese version. And then there's a museum feature that is just like a 1990s bedroom, basically. Where you can look at beautiful high-res scans of the cardboard boxes. There are cool manuals. There are images from the different TV shows over the years. There are images from the different TV shows over the years. It really just gives you the full vibe of this very intense four-year moment in which basically an indie comic. I think Team NT was originally an indie comic.

It was, yeah. It started. Yeah. It became this force that I would have never counted on it being this huge of a thing all these years later right like it a few things in children's entertainment are as steady as teenage mutant ninja turtles yes um but that said the best comparison that i could come up with for it because i i was racking my brain of what's the appeal here is a children's museum which is to say it is a lot of fun and i love playing these games with my child right yes and my my kid enjoys it well enough but at the end of the day if i gave my choice uh a choice

to mow between this and like shredder's revenge or like any you know modern theme park and the children's museum metaphor he's gonna choose that right like and i'm glad that this exists on like purely an educational level that i think it's a cool way to learn about uh retro games to learn about team and tea i think it's great that you know companies are just funding this degree of preservation but unlike oh so i i i wrote this down in our in our our plan because i didn't want to forget it with old movies i can watch them and still enjoy them but old games i don't know i i really struggle with going back and playing an old game because of the way that mechanics have evolved over the years. And I guess the comparison there is

like, video games are so young that games that are retro now are kind of like going back and playing silent or watching silent movies. If you're a movie fan. Or I'll make you another comparison. It's like going back and watching comedy from like the early 80s. Not in every scenario, but there's a lot of comedy from that era that like has not aged well yeah i would say that that's

because they're racist right yeah that's true um deeply homophobic well but also i would say like jokes even the ones that aren't offensive not all humor like some humor age like monty python uh holy grail i think ages very well but not all of the jokes you know from every movie have remained have remained funny over the years because maybe they were like super timely and they were making reagan jokes or whatever and like that doesn't land anymore yeah no that that makes sense i mean i guess the reason i go with the film metaphor is back in the day you know these games were made by just itty bitty studios yeah right and it was just a rush commercial object that has become you know

i guess kind of art in hindsight that's not to say people were making it weren't trying to make art but let's be real i mean they were making however many tmnt games were making it weren't trying to make art, but let's be real. I mean, they were making however many TMNT games in four years. Like, it was to make money. And that reminds me so much of, again, like the Nickelodeons or the silent films where it was like, I don't know. Like, this one's where the train comes at you. Yeah. Like, we just need to get something to fill the reels between the World War II news updates. This lady's waving.

You won't believe it. Her hands moving at real time, ladies and gentlemen. Two hands. Yeah, I feel like I'm, like, dunking on this. That's not the case. It's great at what it sets out to be. I just don't know how many people want to play these games. I think people, I think what will end up happening is people will buy this with,

because they have a rosy picture. Even I certainly did a rosy memory of playing these games and like what they felt like. And then you kind of start playing them and you realize, Oh, they're extremely stiff and dated and so that's a drag but in addition to that you also have this like nostalgic trip of like looking through manuals and looking through old ads and and all sorts of stuff like that so i

don't think it's it's a failure by any means but i do think that people aren't people who aren't into experiencing retro games like people that don't think about like misters and emulation and all that stuff like that someone that just like wants to relive their childhood will have a much better time just playing shredder shredder's revenge which relives their childhood but in a modern way i guess yeah and i honestly i think shredder's revenge hurts the the joy of playing these games oh because i remembered really loving both the arcade games the first one and turtles in time and going back and playing them it was much rougher than i remembered and you know i i don't know if that's just because that comparison now is there and it's kind of hard to ignore it.

But, yeah, it's tough. I think you're right, though, with, like, the retro thing. I think what I'm realizing is as I have less time to play games, maybe I'm just not as into retro games as I used to be. Especially retro beat-em-ups where there's not a lot of there there other than the visuals and yeah i would say it's also a genre that like has evolved a lot since that era whereas if you look at like there are certainly like you can play super mario brothers 3 for example or one or even whatever platformers changed, but not that dramatically since the Super Mario Brothers era in terms of their minute to minute mechanics. So I think they age better, you know,

even strategy games, same thing, a lot of like, early XCOM games and Fire Emblem games, you can still play and have a good time, because the mechanics haven't evolved that much. But when it comes to these, like when you play Castle Crashers, and you go back and play Team NT Arcade, it is a night and day difference in terms of feel. And yeah, it's very hard to go back. Yeah. So very, very, very, very, very well done. And people who already think they might like it, I'm going to tell you right now, I think you're going to like it. I think you're really going to like being able to play these uh old team and t nes games that are damn near impossible um with

the benefit of like you know modern emulation tools to rewind and things like that yeah yeah shredder's revenge is right there you have choice it's great um should we take a break and then we can talk about cold to the lamb let's do it cool okay cold to the lamb i have gone back i fell off the game and then like a i don't know the prodigal son, I returned. Yeah, sure, he does. He returns. I come back, and I really, really got sucked in. And now I have effectively beaten it, with a caveat.

I have not beaten the final boss. Oh, no. I played it too many times and i watched the ending just so i could see where things go so i can talk about it on this episode am i a bad gamer that's a question that i keep asking myself what's weird about this game is it was such a cakewalk for me up until the final boss to the point that i went the first time i bought the final boss i just dove right into the attacks and just started spamming yeah because up until that point i was so overpowered that was a perfectly acceptable way to take on the game sure um

it was i mean just bloodbath anytime i came across anything pretending to be difficult. And then the difficulty spike is bizarre. I mean, utterly bizarre in that the final boss before this, you would have a boss fight that was basically one version of the boss and you could get a whole bunch of health beforehand. And then there was even an ability where you could die in a boss fight and you can sacrifice one of your followers to come back and if your follower was like old and like valuable you could get a ton of health coming back yes so you were guaranteed to win basically the final boss has too many bosses ahead of it and then there is the boss and then the boss has two but really kind of like

three forms okay and you do not go into it with extra health there's no like level preceding it and you can't um you can't volunteer volunteer you can't sacrifice a follower to to keep the fight going so you go from having all of this support basically going into a fight to having none of it and it just turning into kind of a and yeah and the fights themselves especially the very final phase of the boss being kind of bullet hellish where i mean the screen is full of projectiles and i was playing it on steam deck maybe i can do it better without steam deck but there are what was it chugging was it running no no no it's not that it's chugging the projectiles are like a bright yellow orange or whatever yeah and then there are spikes that come out of the ground and the ground is red and the warning for the spikes is like dark red sure so my eye

could not track oh bright yellow is danger but also dark red on a red ground is also danger yeah and i i just i could not position myself so you you mentioned this to me i guess question a and i asked you this over text. So did you try lowering the difficulty? I don't know if you can. I don't know if there's a lower difficulty. I thought you could. I didn't check recently, but I thought you could do it in settings.

But regardless of that, in theory, you shouldn't have to. If you did so well in the rest of the game, there's no reason why the final boss would be that difficult. And I think the game wants to break itself i guess in a weird way so throughout the game you can also invest one of your mini points into uh getting better weapons when you start a run right and there are these godly weapons that are like almost double your attack power 1.5 i i don't know but there are a lot more and everybody on twitter has said that like oh i beat that right away but big but i got blank godly weapon right um and i think that is the issue that i might be running into is that i just don't have i you know i've

gotten the godly weapon to appear, I think, twice so far. Okay. And, like, it's not one that I am good with. And it's certainly not as damaging as some people's tweets have said that the number that they were able to get for attack power. So it sounds like I might just be having bad luck and also being bad at the game. I want to be clear. I also think I am just like not playing well and I need to play it on a larger monitor. But yeah, it's kind of a big bummer, that part.

That said, I want to talk about the rest of the game. Oh boy. Pretty good. I like that game. Pretty good. Did you bounce off? I mean, I didn't bounce off because I was actually enjoying myself but i

had too much other stuff to play because of besties that i haven't been able to go back to it i think you should go back i think i would like to it's definitely you have time because i got to a point where i was like i had like the whole setup with like the outhouse and a janitor picking up poop and my my village was in very good standing. Yeah, and once you get to that, once the village is running, that's when the game really, I mean, with all those types of games, it really sings. I did not expect to like my cult so much.

I like the people in my cult. Yeah, I like the people in my cult, and like the people in my cult and i like how i was running it okay like and i decorated it the game does a really good job of incentivizing you to make a house a home yes um and when i started the game the first time and when i bounced off i really admired the game and i like how uncomfortable the game makes me um but i was really struggling with some of the things it was asking me to do and i was always making choices that were not necessarily the easy choice but were maybe a little more morally comfortable um you know i i barely i i have sacrificed people but most of the time i'm

out here giving people funerals or like helping them ascend to a higher plane yeah you know um i have a beautiful cemetery with wreaths on every grave that only the finest graves from my fallen followers um have you revived any of them no i don't i don't do a lot of blood magic or you don't believe in that and i also don't you can um give your followers shrooms to brainwash them for a few days and i've only done that once i only did it because i was batting my head against uh this boss and i felt horrible afterwards sure so then i did a run just to get some medicine to help all of them because they got sick from the shrooms well they say just a little bit of mushrooms is actually supposed to be good for you oh they're microdosing yes yeah that was the problem is i i i didn't have a

sentence setting for them um uh but no i i i have really like kind of taken to the world and there i like the larger world there's a lot more a number of characters who show up who play that kind of um the dice game with you yeah that are are pretty cute there is a gold world like our gold area of the map full of these like shitty false idols that i think is smart i just think that they made a really interesting place to hang out which is wild because everything about the game it tells me this is a place that i don't want to be sure we talk about this all the time about how how easy it is for me to bounce off an open world game like horizon or whatever i'm just like you know what i just don't want to be here um and yet here i am like very happy to hang out with my crew um which i guess kind of gets to the

point of how fucked up colts are um and how easy it is to like forget that you are really keeping these people here somewhat against their will that you're using them. Yeah, it's a weird game. I love that this weird-ass game blended together Animal Crossing and roguelikes and then made a pretty biting critique of religion and used a really cutesy aesthetic to get away with all of it. And not to forgive it, I don't think the game's apologizing for any of those things. I just think it knows that if it had a grim aesthetic to go with all the grim things it's doing,

you would just not play it. Yeah, it'd be too much. I think it's very biting satire. I don't think, you know, certainly not applauding these things, but I think it does a very smart job of making the medicine go down smoothly without feeling like it's speechifying at you yeah and i and i feel like it doesn't do what i worry about from uh who is devolver published this yeah where there

is some devolver games where it's just like edgy but doesn't have anything to say and my biggest fear with this game was like shit i don't want a game that's just using a cult as an aesthetic right that sucks like i you know i i i cults are really scary and do absolutely horrific things to people like this is not this is not just some like edgy layer that you can you know livery that you can put on your video game car and yeah i don't think that's this i i do think that it for the most part makes sure that it's supporting the things that it's having you do in the game with some sort of conversation about or interrogation of those ideas.

Yeah. No, I agree with that. And I think it's definitely one of those games that we're going to be talking a lot more of as we get into Game of the Year territory. But it's, yeah, it's a special one. I will go back to it and try to beat it and see how much better at video games I am

you're going to beat it on your first try I have no doubt and it's going to be because the game gives you like oh the mega god weapon where you just walk right through the boss and he's dead and then you're going to rub it in my face I'm just going to be so pissed

are you playing, watching, enjoying anything else right now? Have I talked about Prey? I don't think I have. Wait, the, the immersive sim? No, it's a movie. Uh, the Predator movie. Well, that's a big spoiler.

But yes, it's the Predator movie. I don't think I talked about it on the show. Maybe I did. No, I don't think i talked about it on the show maybe i don't think so um dan tractenberg directed maybe my favorite thriller of the last 20 years in 10 cloverfield lane um and also directed this uh prey movie which is called prey but it's effectively a predator movie um set in the late 1700s following um a native american woman and her tribe and guess what the predator shows up and wrecks all sorts of shit and i've seen a lot of the predator movies. There have been a number of them.

And this is really the only one that I remember seeing that felt like an honest sort of, I wouldn't say retried because I think it's actually handled very well. a lot from the very first predator movie which was like 1v1 you know using creativity to sort of outmatch someone that is like way more technologically advanced than you are um you know home alone style and um i don't know i just found it like beautiful and really interesting and handled the cultural stuff in a really interesting way they actually shot it entirely in uh i want to say apache it was the language uh they actually did a dub a dub where the entire movie was done in apache so you can watch it like that with like subtitles um i didn't do that but uh i don't know i i think they were very smart and careful to like do a lot of respect to the uh native american actors in this and their culture while also being like a fucking kick-ass predator movie of which we haven't had

very many of those so yeah if you dig that stuff, it's on Hulu streaming. And definitely worth your time. It's a solid 90 minutes of a romp. I also brought a sci-fi horror film. In the same universe. It is, you're right. I didn't even intend that to happen. The Eat, Pray, Love universe.

Wow. Alien director's cut. I saw't even intend that to happen. The Eat, Pray, Love universe. Wow. Alien director's cut. I saw it at a movie theater. I had never seen the original Alien on a large screen. And you know what? Pretty good. I think this Ridley Scott is going to do okay. He'll be okay.

He's going to be okay. Things that surprised me seeing it on like large format one the movie just rules like no surprise there uh there are a couple jump scares that are still genuinely upsetting so that is good um the the visual effects the gore, still works very, very well. I mean, the alien is astounding. The alien is still the best. The xenomorph is still the best creature I think I've ever seen in a movie. Yeah. I mean, just nothing like it.

And there's not a shot in there that's like, oh, that looks like a guy in a suit. Yeah, it looks so real. Yeah. It's wild and the final the the end of the film where you see the alien kind of in a wrapped up spot kind of concealed i don't want to spoil it because i think there are still people who haven't seen this movie just really really upsetting um i love it the thing that was new this time is i remembered the art design of this movie being amazing. Yeah.

That the, you know, that's this like awesome, you know, 70s vision of the future, the really clean aesthetic. The costumes. Of the spaceship, right? Yeah, the spaceship, sure. Yeah. And what I didn't know until seeing it on our screen is like, that's true. It is very beautiful and well-designed. But it also looks kind of cheap at the beginning.

The sets look like kind of like they were just like ripped off of whatever the studio lot was shooting from whatever other B features. And then they just painted it kind of, I i don't know like flipping your home white or tan beige right um and and removed like any reflective surfaces or anything that was too gaudy and i i actually really really really like that because you take the thing that looks very artificial and then over the course of the film it just gets completely destroyed and by the end of the film you're you're no longer in this clean artificial environment you're in these very very realistic kind of factory spaces and vents and air shafts and yada yada yada it's very grimy very metallic and it feels like watching an entire era of sci-fi

literally getting thrown in the garbage bin yeah like because i and that that's kind of what happened like this movie comes out and then after that you don't see many of that kind of 70s chic sci-fi anymore certainly not sci-fi horror and this kickstarts this era of grime and grossness what year did this movie come out i'm pretty sure it's 79 um was it so it was after star wars uh after star wars okay um and and yeah and star wars is also responsible for a fair amount of, like, Grime aesthetic. But I would point to, like, Luke's entire design as a character as, like, deeply 70s, right? Yeah, yeah, sure. You know, the version of Grime is quite different. things that they're doing and how they play with the cleanliness of the the world of the future and the complete indifference and like unknowable horror that is powering it the other example is

there's a robot character in the film that gets just completely shredded up and the portrayal of their guts is like a mix of like milk goo wires and then these like semi-transparent balls like glass balls and it's one of those things that like the alien when you see it it's so upsetting because it defies your understanding of how things could possibly be right it looks like something completely alien to you yeah completely foreign to you yeah and like that idea of like yes you are trapped on the spaceship with an alien but also the your own people or your own you know support system is also that that is i think the horror that really hit me this time of like oh shit being out there where you you truly

can't trust anything would be just so so so scary it's interesting because the two movies predator and alien are structurally very similar to one another but tonally the most different they can be because they also both of them start with like a group of people in a situation where there's this overpowered being who is basically picking them off one by one and eventually ends up in a sort of 1v1 battle royale situation and but predator is like basically a rocky movie but you're fighting an alien and alien is, I mean, like basically like a very cold, dark,

like, uh, you know, not, not Friday the 13th, but, um, what's the one Jason,

Michael Myers. What's Michael Myers. Is that Friday? Halloween. Halloween. It's like a Halloween. Yeah. Kind of,

kind of slasher vibes. I mean, I would say without the, like, without the, like, uh, campiness. Yeahiness yeah i mean they both take the similar idea of right you know this group of people then have to face off against the big bad yeah um i think alien is like it's capitalism right like oh sure it's like kind of shocking how much it's just alien is really hey these are a whole bunch of people who are on contract on a mining ship.

And then they literally find out, oh, you're not going to get paid if you don't go investigate this thing. Well, but it's funny because Predator is actually the same thing, but it's about like government bureaucracy. Yeah. So there's always a layer. Yes. a layer yes well but what i'd say with predator is predator is about like what if the toughest dudes on the planet were suddenly chumps yeah right like what happens when the world's toughest dudes become the prey yeah um and like that's such a cool i i mean yeah i love both these moods for different reasons that is such a cool premise, especially in the 80s,

to just be like, yeah, we're going to make a movie about how all of these action stars of the 80s are actually just like sacks of meat waiting to get obliterated. Yeah. Yeah. Movies, you know, they rule. Oh, a number of people have sent me an update on the Steam Deck with Criterion Channel being added to it oh was it

i just want to say there is nothing wrong with watching criterion movies on a steam deck on a 720p screen no because like a lot of should you watch like the most beautiful visual stunning movie should you watch citizen kane on the steam deck no i wouldn't do that i wouldn't watch raging bull on it but a lot of old movies especially like swedish television they look nice but like that's not entirely the point and you should just watch old movies wherever you're comfortable watching them because there's such a barrier to entry for this stuff i love love love love love watching um classic and art movies on my ipad because it's like it's just that right i can sit in bed the lights are off there's no distractions and it's just like my headphones are on and i'm you know 10 inches away from the screen

or whatever and i'm locked in where I often find that if I try to watch a slow RE movie in the living room with a nice TV how I'm supposed to watch it then I'll bounce off because my head just starts going other places. So I'm glad it's there. I think that's a perfectly fine place for it to be.

And you could play you know Xbox picture and picture while you're watching Citizen Kane. you could play you know xbox picture in picture while you're watching citizen game and that's you know exactly as orison wanted it to be yeah amen um uh i i i also should caveat here i have not actually seen it on steam so if this is just some photoshop of somebody adding it that would also not surprise me um i mean i'm sure there's a way you could pull up a browser and oh yeah i'm sure that's probably more than likely what it is is that you could like create it inside of the linux you know desktop and then make your own version of

it um anyway that's it i'm sad i didn't get to talk about immortality maybe we'll have to talk about that at the end of the year because i have it is like the most chris plant game i think i've ever played i i am yes i i i i'm you should here's here's the deal because i actually do want to talk about it so why don't we say the next resties by then i'm sure you'll have played more and we'll dedicate like a b segment to immortality okay there's a lot more to say about that game i'm curious because i have not been like a huge fan of other Sam Barlow games. I don't think they're bad. I just haven't. This game is so involved with old film.

It's so interested in like seventies and eighties and nineties cinema that I really, it is a, I'm not saying that you'll love it, but at the very least it scratches a Chris Plant itch that exists deep within you. No, I think you're right. I think that's probably true.

Okay. Should we put a bow on it? Let's put a bow on it. Cool. That's it. This has been another episode of the Rusties. He is Russ Frushtick. I am Chris Plant.

You can find us at the besties pod on Twitter. Until next time. This has been another episode of the resties. We're the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Resties.