The Besties - The Resties Required Reading List is complete! [Resties]

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Find the full Resties Required Reading List at Besties.fan!We have finalized the Resties Required Reading List and we can’t wait to share the results! Our goal was to collect a list of 25 games — from Pac-Man to modern day, 1980 to 2020 — that will help our listeners better appreciate this wonderful medium. We believe these are the games that everyone who wants to have a fundamental appreciation of video games should play or watch.  They’re the games that will, in ways big and small, give you a richer connection with every other game you play. Think of it like a syllabus for Video Games 101. Or as the 25 games we’d built a museum around.  Or just as a guide on how to spend some of your holiday break!Go to HelloFresh.com/restiesfree and use code restiesfree for FREE breakfast for life! One breakfast item per box while subscription is active. That’s free breakfast for life at HelloFresh.com/restiesfree with code restiesfree. 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 Blant. My name is Russ Froschek. Welcome to the Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week, we are putting a bow on the Rusty's required reading list. It has been our year-long project to collect 25 games from across basically the history of games starting in 1980, so a little bit later than Pong, but you get the gist. We'll be doing that and explaining more about it later, but first, I have an important thing to talk to you about. Oh, boy. Really, it's a question for you. Oh, boy.

Have you been doing any shopping lately for, let's say, anime statues? No. flagrantly ripping off our friends at TripleClick Podcast, make predictions about what we think will be happening during the year, and then the winner receives a gift from the other person. Last year, I won, and I received, at first, a 13 Sentinel statue that ended up being way too gauche for me to have into my house, and I traded that out for a little Spelunky arcade cabinet. This year, the year's not over.

The year's not over. It's not over. And I don't even know that we want to dive in too deeply into this. Oh, no, no, no. I'm more interested in what are you going to get me. Because while the year is not over, I feel very confident. Well, i also think you're probably going to win again in in sort of an 11th hour situation but it's worth considering

that we actually addressed this earlier in the year and i realize you might not recall but we decided that we would not be doing anime statues this year and we'd do some sort of art instead. You're right. You're right because that is a wise choice by old us. Yes. So you're thinking maybe like Monet, Picasso. Yeah, by way of Honkai Star Rail. Okay.

Hey, I mean, I'm not going to complain. I'm looking forward to it i invite uh any listeners in the comments at besties.fan to share any art recommendations and i look at this better be good art i i mean i'm not saying it needs to hang in the moment but i don't be dropping any of your weird hentai uh tentacle stuff in there keep it you're shame kinking or kink shaming i'm not i'm not kink shaming them they can have whatever they want in their house they could be you know black light approved i'm just saying we have just don't shine the black light on specifically uh never mind yeah yeah we have we have a lot of different ages in our

listenership right that's right and and i I just want to keep the comments PG. That's all I ask. That's all I ask. Oh, yeah. Keep them PG. That's right. Yes. Agreed.

So, yes, please let us know some ideas. And let's take a quick break. And then let's come back and finish up the required reading list. Okay. Very quick for people who are somehow new to this, and honestly, not a problem if you are. You'll still make sense of this project. The Rusty's required reading list is our goal to collect a list of 25 games from Pac-Man to modern days. That's 1980 to 2020. These are not the best games or even our favorite games. And this most definitely is not a huge top 100 games list, the sort of thing that you could just, you know, like Google at any given time.

These are games that we feel everyone who wants to have a fundamental appreciation of video games should play. That if you play these 25 games, you'll have a richer connection with every other game that you're playing. I like to say that it's like Video Games 101 or like if we built a museum around 25 games and it was interactive and you can go learn about things, this would be it. You like to not say that. Well, yeah. Because it's boring. It seems like the Latin of games would also be a way to present it in a very boring fashion. Suffice to say, if you're looking for something to be like a snobby asshole at a party, when someone's like, oh, man, did you see the best open world game ever?

GTA 5 was great. And you're like, well, but did you know that X, Y and Z game made up all of those things before GTA 5 did it? That's what this list is for. It's for making you sound like a snobby asshole. And you know what? You're going to feel great doing it. You're going to be great at parties. So throughout the year, we've been breaking this down in five-year chunks.

And we've done everything from like 85 to 89 all the way up to 2015 to 2020. The one that we have left is 80 to 84, which will do. Which is kind of like, you know, that scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure when he doesn't want to get the snakes from the pet store that's on fire. That's kind of like this because none of us are like super jazzed. But honestly, in looking at the list, it's not too bad. No, I think it's great games. They're just hard to talk about games.

And I think we've come prepared for that for that problem um we also have a special guest that we're gonna uh introduce in the middle of the show to help us pick some jrpgs from the uh early 1990s and then at the end of the episode we are going to uh go back to our full list of selections, and actually cement our 25 games. That sound good? Yeah, let's do it. Cool. So let's start off.

We're digging in through 1980 to 1984. And these are, I mean, these are, they're not quite amoebas. These are, you know, some tadpoles are sprouting legs and stepping onto land of yeah because again we're you mentioned it earlier but like this is after like the pongs of the world after space war these are not the first video games ever but they are i think video games growing up yeah and then we we said you know we're kind of starting with Pac-Man. And I think that is a good spot to start. Pac-Man is a phenomenon. It is a true pop culture phenomenon.

There's Pac-Man fever. Not that people are actually contracting it. But, you know, you can get a little Pac-Man fever. There was a popular music single. There was a cartoon series. Pac-Man fever. There was a popular music single. There was a cartoon series. Pac-Man was inescapable in 1980. The only problem that I actually have with Pac-Man is it's not as fun as Ms. Pac-Man. That's true.

But honestly, that's the case for a lot of the games on our list. There were better sequels that came out after the first one. I think the like big selling point for Pac-Man, you know, you mentioned the cultural impact, which is certainly relevant. But I would also say like, I don't know that there's a more representative arcade game, when you think like arcade game than Pac-Man. I think it is the like face of arcade games in a lot of ways. And, you know, still very playable, still enjoyable. But it is really, I think, the ur-arcade game. Do you know how Pac-Man came to be? Like the kind of origin story behind it with Namco? No, I actually don't. So Namco actually acquired Atari's Japanese offices.

And if not for that, like Namco was like, we want to make our own games. We'll buy up this group because Atari from the very beginning has just been in perpetual financial trouble, it seems like. And then they empower this 20-something, Toru Iwatwatani to lead a small team. And that that's the origin of Pac-Man. It really is just a young guy at a new company that could have been shuttered ends up making a thing that defines an entire medium. Pretty wild. Other stuff that year of 1980, we have Missile missile command which i don't think is going to make this list but i think is important for capturing cold war angst and it's the game

where you shoot missiles out of the sky before they pelt uh cities yeah that is grim i never i never thought about it in that context that's a fun game but it is extremely dark at the same time. Yeah, it is. Adventure, which do you have? I mean, adventure is like. Adventure is the first video game that I remember seeing in person. Really? Yeah, my father had an Intellivision whatever. And I was probably three years old.

And I don't remember playing it, but I do remember seeing that like, like you know walking around and like seeing that dragon that looked like a big s and uh yeah i mean it's impactful you know whatever fucking uh uh ready player one made a big deal about adventure being the first game that had an easter egg in it and that is i guess true that you know they had to hide the creator's name in the game itself but uh i mean yeah i think adventure has a similar problem to the other game released this year for for the purposes of this list yeah um another game released this year is rogue which by all means feels like it should be on here how considering how rogue likes are so important to our brand. Yeah, it's so ubiquitous that I don't think that people understand that Rogue was an actual game.

And when people say roguelike, they're referencing this game. But here's the problem. Rogue, immensely important. It is an ASCII dungeon crawler, which is to say its graphics are symbols, like the letters and symbols that you'd see on your keyboard. Yeah. Representing various creatures in the geometry of the world. It introduces permadeath. It has procedurally generated playthroughs.

It kind of sets the very foundation of the roguelikes that you are playing today. Here's why I think it can't be on this list. I cannot recommend. Barring the most dedicated history lovers. To actually play it. It is impenetrable. In fact I can't even recommend people watch it. It is that difficult to parse.

Yeah you need to know. You need to know that like the ampersand is a goblin, is the level of insight that you need to remember if you were to watch someone play Rogue. I think there are overlays, for what it's worth, that add graphics. When you see a question mark, it turns it into a little demon, and so you know. But if you're playing the original version of the game, it is incredibly, incredibly hard to just like get into it.

And even if you remember those things, remembering just how the world works is difficult. It's just a very difficult game to play. That said, what I do really recommend is people read about this game because the history of the game is wild and it spans many, many years. Its development spread across multiple California universities and then companies. It is one of those Wikipedia pages that is like the best sort of historical rabbit hole. And I think it's well worth knowing more about this game. It would be really hard for me to tell people to, you know,

we've always said, even if you can't play the game, to at least watch it. I don't think I can recommend either for this game. 1981, Donkey Kong, Tempest. Donkey Kong important because we see our buddy Mario showing up. Yeah, that's right.

And our buddy Donkey Kong. We get the inspiration for the documentary King of Kong. Maybe the most well-known video game documentary. Can I be real? I just, this is not the point of this, but I just really do not like playing this game. Yeah, it's not a fun game to play

these days. I think there are later Donkey Kong games that are a lot of fun to play. But the original Donkey Kong if you've ever played it in any level of recency is stiff and awkward. And I get why it was amazing back then. But yeah, no, it's not fun now. It is funny that Mario's whole thing is jumping and jumping in donkey kong is torture it feels like dog shit it feels like actual dog shit um tempest another fantastic game but not something i think that we're going to add to this list or dig too far into yeah it's got polygons in it and you're i don't like the perspective of tempest um where you're kind of shooting down this like corridor. But yeah, it's just a game that's never really clicked for me. And even now, I don't find it super fun to play. But yeah, it had its

moment back then. Here's the game that I do think is foundational. We're now getting into 1982. Microsoft Flight Simulator comes out. It is not like the flight simulator that you can play right now where you can go across the whole world. It is effectively limited to flying a Cessna, and you can fly it in New York, LA, Seattle, or Chicago. And the very first airport that you start in in Chicago actually doesn't even exist anymore. It's not in use.

But I think the important thing here about this game is it really popularizes simulation as mainstream software. That simulation is not just something that NASA is using to

practice moon landings or the military is using. It is also something that hobbyists can use to get the experience of flying planes when they otherwise wouldn't have the means of doing that i would also add that is the first sign or one of the earliest signs of microsoft's passion for acquisition obviously we've just seen microsoft buy activision uh they bought bethesda you name it but this was an instance where microsoft Simulator, which came out in 1982, was actually not the first flight simulator. This was originally a game that came out in 1980 before Microsoft bought it.

And it was honestly very similar to what Microsoft Flight Simulator would become. Microsoft added, you know, color color which is a nice touch but the fact that in 1980 there was a game that was running a 3d flight simulation game is fucking astounding like the if you've ever seen footage of the original 1980 fight simulator it is really amazing because it is running on dinosaur hardware and it is producing 3d graphics now it's worth considering the game is running at and i'm not even exaggerating one fps it is so slow to render and every bike beat where you're flying through the sky takes like literally a second to generate on the screen maybe even longer than that but it is genuinely a pretty foundational but i understand like that's not

the game that like a is even super accessible these days or and be like not the game that people think of so i understand like you know color kind of made this a more viable understandable product from a simulation standpoint because you could see like where lakes were uh which was a big update um so i yeah i think microsoft flight simulator is the one to call out but i do want to remind people it was not the original i love that those are the sort of updates that still make you know people excited about flight simulator that you still get an update and I'm like, European lakes. And people are like,

are you fucking kidding? We're getting them, baby, yeah. I do want to call out the original creator, Bruce Artwick, created it as part of his company, Sublogic. And the game was called just Flight Simulator back then. Nice.

Up next, Robotron 20 2084 important for us people who love twin stick shooters right yeah this is another one that like i don't particularly enjoy playing i do appreciate how um formative it was from a yeah twin stick shooter standpoint um i also yeah it's weird because it had humans in it that you could save and that just felt weird to me for some reason it like added like a dark layer to like what was otherwise a bunch of arcade games that were like pac-man eating cherries yeah these people are gonna die were it not for your efforts yeah Yeah. We also have Pitfall, which I, speaking of games with jumps that are incredibly frustrating, I credit it as making Activision Activision. Yeah. Like, it is the original mega hit for Activision.

For better or for worse, I guess. And then the last thing for that year of 82 is Ms. Pac-Man, which is, as we said, Pac-Man, but better. It is four mazes instead of one this time. It is smarter AI. The fruit moves to different spots around the world, which all this sounds, again, so silly,

but was big at the time. And then most importantly, it is made by a team of mit students it's called crazy auto originally and uh pitched to midway which was the u.s distributor for pac-man and then gradually becomes miss pac-man did they know when they were making it it was like more or less inspired by the original pac-man i think it was effectively like a mod i think that it was like pretty shameless yeah um i i think that i'll have to look i'm pretty sure we have a full story on the origins of miss pac-man on polygon and i will make sure to take a look for that yeah um uh 1983 we got load runner uh sure fun a fun game but yeah i don't think it's 1983. We got Lode Runner. Sure.

A fun game, but yeah, I don't think it's formative in any way. Track and Field. You have any strong feelings here? Yeah, this one sucks. I hate it. All those games that were just hit the button really fast. Fuck those games. I'm sorry. These games have immense reputation I think

amongst people who are now probably in their 50s and who got to play these when they came out. And otherwise, you know, maybe have never played them again. I think that is how you can have a love for these games. Speaking of games that are very difficult to play, but at least this one is much more interesting, Dragon's Lair. to play but at least this one's much more interesting uh dragon's lair uh do you want to tell people for folks who have not seen dragon's lair before what makes it so special so dragon's lair is basically a playable movie uh animated by don bluth known uh animator and you're kind of going through um this adventure as a knight who is like rescuing a princess from a dragon. Pretty typical stuff.

But you have to realize that like if you're in the arcade at this point in 1983 and you've seen Miss Pac-Man and you've seen Robotron. And then you turn the corner and you see something that legit looks like it was out of you know a saturday morning cartoon it looks honestly high about like higher quality than that because it was like incredibly well animated and the idea was it was all quick time events so you'd get to a moment where like the dragon is spitting fire at you and you need to hit the right button at the right time and if you don't you just die and it plays like a little clip of the animation of hit you dying and if you do then it like the story advances and you see a new scene so experts at this game would basically like you know master every little sequence but it really was just like a timing mini game kind of thing not very engaging uh but from a technological standpoint at the time totally like mind-blowing yeah i mean i

it's just a shame that playing it it's not fun yeah it's not but but but again uh it's so hard to talk about a lot of these games for that reason um i i do think unlike rogue you can watch a playthrough of dragon's lair it's quite short yeah um and and get a kick out of it um yeah it's like watching a cartoon yeah and to give you an idea of how long the this looked impressive deep into like our childhoods and i would say maybe even early teenage years there were ports of dragon's lair coming out and people were still excited about it yeah you would even see i think there was a game boy color game boy advanced port of it um it would come out on basically every platform because again you were just like it didn't need hardware

because you were just playing videos so any system could really handle the basics of it um but it still looked amazing because it wasn't you know pushing the hardware at all so it could look as good as a movie theater basically next up we have mario brothers they're getting better at the jumping i'll give them better not to be clear this is not super mario brothers no it is not super did you know that super mario brothers was a sequel um actually i guess it's the third game in the mario uh canon yeah but yeah this is this is the first time luigi shows up which is very exciting and it's a static screen which yeah it's kind of again the antithesis of what we understand mario to be and i think most people this was certainly my first experience playing mario brothers was in super mario 3

super mario brothers 3 where you could play levels that were basically inspired by the original mario brothers as like weird adversarial multiplayer levels um in mario brothers 3 as like little bonus challenges which i thought was really cool. I don't think the core game holds up really. And it is not as like defining as Super Mario Brothers was. But nice cool touch. And it did birth Luigi. So props there to Nintendo's greatest character. We have this like towering, towering game ahead of us.

Oh yeah. We enter 1984. This seems like a guarantee this is this is the lock yeah we go into 1984 and we have tetris which is maybe the greatest game of all time i i'm not saying that like oh it's not that's not subjective or objective it just is almost a thing people say. It is when you go to a museum like the Smithsonian and they have a video game exhibit, they're going to be championing Tetris. It is kind of a catch-all of everything video games can do.

It has great history. So Tetris, for people who have somehow not seen it, you drop blocks down a little vertical pillar. Are you describing Tetris right now? I know. I can't believe I'm – There's no way that anyone is listening to this. You know what Tetris is. You know. If you don't watch a movie about it.

Which is honestly – I think that's why people need to remember like why it has such an impact is there's a lot of games that we've talked about throughout this that like started in a place and then over time evolved but obviously like the core idea was really strong tetris has changed like i know tetris snobs are gonna argue about this but i think it's changed like maybe 10 over the course of its lifetime the 90 of tetris has not changed since 1984 and that is really telling of how fucking good that idea is. I don't know if it's the best game of all time, but certainly one of the best video games of all time, because how many video games can you think of that have structurally not changed and remain super engaging and fun and amazing? How many games are so able to fill your brain that you see them when you close your eyes after playing for too long? I feel like probably people that play Candy Crush probably get something similar.

You get a version of it. This is a game that is used as medical treatment for trauma. It is, yeah, to your point about it just not changing, it's not like they haven't tried. There have been games that have tried to, like, dramatically change Tetris. And some of them have succeeded, like, not dramatically, but, like, you know, Tetris Effect, which is the most recent Tetris attempt, added the idea of, like, you could freeze time and drop multiple blocks in a row. Like, people have added that and changed that 10% to mixed degrees of success. I think Tetris Effect is a great one. But yeah, they've also tried to do more dramatic changes.

And when they go like beyond that 10%, it almost always fails. It falls right on its face. It also just has a great history that has been turned into a movie with- Varying degrees of success. Yeah, yeah. If you really want to know the history i actually recommend a graphic novel called tetris the games people play it's by uh brian box brown

and it's a delight i i think that is probably the best way to consume uh all the wild stuff that happened around this game coming to the world chris point what is what is your favorite shape that's not the skinny shape everyone loves the skinny shape oh um i think the most my favorite shape is the l but i think the most interesting shape is the like t which l chris point the l is uh it shapes like an l i I guess the letter L. It looks like an L. Arguably, the other one would be a J, I guess. Yeah, either of those. Then the T. I don't like the square. I loved the square

as a kid, but the square actually makes the game too difficult for me. I'm just bad at it. Oh, and the Z? The Zs are both terrible. Yeah, and the S. Fuck those. Yeah, big L, man. Okay, let's keep moving. Elite.

A game that... Do you have any personal experience with Elite? I mean, more recently, just, again, from a research standpoint, checking it out, I know that Elite was incredibly formative at a time. We're kind of beyond that time because the idea of like 3D space exploration games

have kind of moved on. I mean, there's been a few attempts at it recently. I know there was a Star Wars one like a year or so ago, but yeah, I think when it happened, again, totally fucking mind blowingblowing like the idea that you are kind of you have free reign over an entire galaxy to trade to you know fight pirates to uh kind of just like live your dreams of being like han solo whatever you want to do. Totally mind-blowing. And again, this is 1984.

Yeah, 1984. So it is really an astonishing feat. I don't think it ages super well, again, because even though graphically it was mind-blowing at the time, it runs really poorly now because they were just pushing the hardware in ways that the hardware was never designed to be pushed. And people were much more okay with that. I think that's an interesting thing about this era is there weren't standards.

There wasn't digital foundry. And I love digital foundry. Let me be clear. But people were willing to accept that, you know, an at symbol represented a character or that wireframes could just play the entire you know galaxy and there was a lot more willingness to let your imagination fill in the gaps which allowed people to push the hardware in ways that just would not happen today i think actually that's not entirely fair i think where we have seen that today is in stuff like dwarf fortress um yeah where people are prioritizing

the computing over the visuals to extreme degrees i want to say if you're interested in that this era or i guess this genre of the space kind of combat games uh the two that i would recommend kind of close to this era like but not quite uh at least inspired by this era uh would be the tie fighter game which came out uh way back when but there's been more modern um recreations of it excellent game and also free space 2 which was a mid-90s uh attempt at it um and both of them i think do a really good job of doing narrative and also scale free space 2 has like enormous mile-long capital ships that you're doing like bombing runs on that i think really sells the magic of this while also like

telling a pretty compelling story also rip uh volition who made free space 2 they recently shuttered and it makes me really sad oh that sucks i i also for people who prefer the exploration side of things there's the modern elite elite dangerous which you can play uh right now uh that came out i think in 2015 and then there's just no man's sky which i think is also kind of an heir to this type of game yeah i think no man's sky is probably the most modern uh close comparison to this uh i think people would maybe roll their eyes a little bit at the like trading simplicity of no man's sky but broadly speaking it has evolved into something

that is more or less what elite was trying to do yeah yeah and you can land on planets which you can really do that and then we have a bunch of other stuff that i'm just gonna honorable mention here uh in 84 because now we are getting into i think an area of video games that uh most people are familiar with uh games that are going to show up on the nes or are on the nes we have duck hunt uh kung fu master impossible missions king's quest jet set willy marvel madness excite bike for any of UK listeners, some of those games will especially sound familiar. This is where we just have to confess we are limited to our experience, which is a very American one. The weird thing about this era is it's totally different depending on where you are in the world. on where you are in the world.

What is going on in video games in the UK in 80 to 84 looks so different than what is going on in America. And even literally because PAL, the video compression, whatever, was running at 25 hertz instead of 30. So a lot of the games that they were playing literally look different because it was refreshing at a different rate, which is kind of wild. Also, PC gaming is much more popular than console gaming as we start to get into the mid-80s. There's different consoles. I mean, it's still very much the Wild West of video games. It's easy to look back in the early to mid-80s and remember a history of Nintendo's dominance, right?

That we had Atari and then Nintendo. And the reality is there were tons of companies fighting it out, trying to claim this industry that would come up from it and and the the example i think we've talked about on this show before is a calico vision which i'm always so tickled by because calico was short for the connecticut leather company um people were you know just abandoning whatever their businesses were trying to get on this ride um it's just that you know the winners write the histories i do want to call out one of the games that was in their excite bike um as the first game that i ever remember seeing a level creator in that i could actually like use without like you know hacking into the files and stuff like that um it just like stood out to me as a kid of like whoa i can like drop all these jumps in a row i mean it was never fun the levels i made

were terrible but kind of mind blowing that back then they were like yeah we're gonna just drop a level creator right here in this nes game very bold it felt incredible um i loved that game so much as a kid uh so we should pick what what moves on for our discussion okay so of what we've discussed there are a few that i think very easily jump to mind i think tetris is a lock there's no question i'm walking out of here without tetris being on the list do we have a sense of like how many were quote allowed to pick at this point well we're gonna we can bring as much as we want because we're gonna have to trim down we'll trim down okay um i think tetris for sure

the other ones that i think are like potentials would be pac-man as like again a representative arcade game and um microsoft flight simulator as the like this is what simulation games kind of started at or at least very close to that. Yeah, I'm on the exact same page. That was my shortlist too. Cool. We did it. I want we have a lot more to do in this episode. So I'm going to keep things rolling.

For the record, again, 1980 to 1984, our picks are Tetris, Pac-Man and Microsoft Flight Simulator. We're going to take a break right here. And when we come back, we are going to have a special guest, Stephen Hilger from Into the Aether, a podcast that we love. And Stephen is one of my favorite people to talk with about kind of classic RPGs, especially the 90s. This is a problem that we ran into when we were doing our 1990 to 1994 and 1995 to 1999 episodes of both of us are familiar with RPGs, but didn't play everything. So we invited Steven on to do a 10 minute speed run, sharing five of the essential RPGs from that era. And then we get a pick one when we come back, having heard what he had to say. And for what it's worth, I was not part of this conversation. So I actually don't even know what

the picks are right now. I assume Chris Plant will bring me up to speed, but I'm looking forward to it. Okay, let's go to a break. Hey, everybody, we are in the middle of the required reading list final episode. And there's something really important that we have to do. We need to figure out RPGs from the years 1990 to 1994. This is the clear gap in Frush, Chick, and I's knowledge. Now, I hear you. You might also be saying, what about real-time strategy games? And you know what? I don't want to talk about it. I'm not here to talk about that right now. I am here to talk with my buddy, friend of the show, Stephen Hilger from Into the Aether, who I think of as an expert in this space. So thank you so much for joining us, Stephen. Truly, Chris, genuinely very flattered. Although I do want to clear the air a little bit, because you invited me on i've been

excited for this we've been talking about it for a long time but the last time you reached out to me about rpg specifically final fantasy was to text me late at night saying it's kind of funny how final fantasy 16 is the only fun one and i decided to sort of live with that quietly until this so i wasn't sure if this was like a Carrie prank or not for, for a thing. People don't know that most of our relationship is just me sending you things that I know will unsettle you. And usually at a time that I know you'll wake up to find them while I'm

still asleep. My alarm goes off at six and someone says, Chris says cloud isn't cool via SMS. And I just have to start working, you know, that's great. When's dragon press have to start working. You know? That's great. When's Dragon Quest gonna get good? You know? That's a question on the top of my mind.

Anyway, I want to keep this to, we set a policy beforehand because people also don't know this, but I am the, like, the guy who walks out with you in a pro wrestling match who doesn't get in the ring, but, like, carries around a big briefcase and wears a suit and says, like, get money for Into into the aether i love celebrating y'all so my marketing gimmick for this

episode is y'all have a patreon where people can subscribe to get more episodes including these awesome 10 minute bonus episodes uh called any percent that the right name right? Yeah that's correct and I thought what we would do is kind of like our own knock off 10 minute episode of Any% right here where we're going to talk about RPGs from 1990 to 1994

so I am setting the timer right now in the ring making my own knockoff yes we have you have a list of games that we're going to get to i believe it is five yep and you are going to start telling me about each of these and we're going to figure out which one is the best and needs to be on this list and we're going to start with final fantasy 2 also known as Final Fantasy 4. Yeah, just in case anyone got jump scared by that. Local RPG expert says Final Fantasy 2 is the best one.

So I chose this one. I was between two. I definitely wanted a Final Fantasy on here. The intention of your list is, from what you've said, to kind of deliver or most cleanly explain the idea of games as a syllabus. So in my mind, I was like, okay, the two Final Fantasies from this era that I think do that the best are four and six, which were released in the US as two and three originally. And you and Russ kind of touched on Final Fantasy VI in passing. It seemed like, not to speak for you,

but it seemed like it was a game you both admired but maybe failed to connect to. And I think that game's interesting in terms of its historical relevance to the series because it kind of feels like a swan song of that style of Final Fantasy game. And I was thinking about, before I heard you kind of in in passing you know say how you felt

about it I was like well is it like that's the obvious one right but I was thinking more about Final Fantasy 4 because in my opinion Final Fantasy 4 is really the first Final Fantasy game that we would recognize as Final Fantasy because the thing about the series and I think one of the most interesting things about Final Fantasy is that every game is kind of an attempt to start a new series. Even though they all have the Final Fantasy brand, some of them are, unless you saw the name, you would never equate the two. Like Final Fantasy XII to X-2 to XVI, you would never be like, oh yeah, that's all the same series. And I feel like every generation of fans has to learn this and discover it for their own. Like they play Final Fantasy 16 and they're like, how could they do it?

Right. They do it every time, Charlie Brown. And I was trying to distinguish like what is actually the thread? Like what is the thing that connects all of them? And why do I feel that 4 is the beginning of that thread? all of them and why do i feel that four is the beginning of that thread and for those who don't know final fantasy 4 is a game that kind of begins with this soldier clad in dark knight armor aboard an airship that is bombing innocent villages and thinking like this feels bad you know should we not be doing this and you know not to discredit it but the or not to simplify in that

way but the game is really about like it begins with a soldier questioning his king's orders and i think for for 91 let me just double check when that came out yeah this game came out in 91 this is an era where i think a lot of other rpgs are like very comfortable kind of like existing in trope and archetype and for final fantasy to kind of boldly be like, we're going to kind of interrogate all of these tropes and these like character concepts, I think kind of begins Final Fantasy's tradition of being sort of the edgy one.

I think the thread that connects all the games, in my opinion, is like almost a defiance of what the current norm is. And you can see that more boldly with seven i think i gotta keep us going because oh yes the 10 minutes is taken down my bud we got dragon quest dragon quest 5 yes this is slightly cheating because it came out now i realize the challenge that we've given ourselves um dragon quest 5 uh came out on the super famicom in 1992 i I played the DS remake much later.

This is a game that is essentially, it takes place like over the course of the protagonist's whole life. So it begins when they're a kid and like you literally can't read. You have to rely on your dad for everything and it ends with you becoming a father yourself. And I just think it's a really miraculous game

about kind of becoming a caretaker and it sort of flips the Chosen One narrative to be more about being like the caretaker to the Chosen One. And I feel like it's also kind of like the blueprint for like the Harvest Moon and sort of life sim genre we see now. I've loved you. It started here. You talking about this game on Aether, I've like always really enjoyed. I think it's a game that i i can feel your passion about so maybe we can find a link um to that episode an episode where you talked about it and i think that'd be really good for folks um yeah i think that was on our ds

episode but yeah we can definitely do that yeah which is not in any episode it's like five hours long yeah um next up we got shining force 2 this 2. This is the one where I was like, am I being too mainstream? Am I just coming on saying Final Fantasy is cool? So I tried to find a slightly more obscure one. I looked at the Sega Genesis. This is a game made by the team that would eventually become Camelot

and then later in life invent Waluigi. So if you want a 90s tactics RPG made by the people who would later invent Waluigi. So if you want a 90s tactics RPG made by the people who would later make Waluigi, that's my any percent pitch for this game. It's like the opposite of Final Fantasy IV where that game is like defying trope and expectation. I think this game is like, we love wizards. We love kings.

The knight character is a centaur. It's just all like like we just love the genre and it feels very celebratory in that way okay now we're getting into the stuff that i am familiar with and one that i love which is up next earthbound one of my favorite games of all time yeah this is also slightly cheating because i think if you are to say to someone like what are your favorite rpgs from 90 to 94 all the ones that kind of immediately come to mind are actually 95 right down did come out in japan in 94 but i just feel like when you mentioned that this era is sort of like organisms leaving the water for the first time yeah growing legs and stuff so i was thinking about like what

are kind of pillars for genres within RPGs? And Earthbound, I just think, I think you can see its influence almost the most clearly today, especially with indie games like Omori or Undertale. And I think it kind of reminds us that RPGs don't have to be fantasy or sci-fi. They can be anything. You know, fantasy can mean anything. It can mean like this bizarre kind of like yellow submarine interpretation of the suburbs, you know? Yeah. And I think that stretches out even beyond RPGs and fantasy titles in general. I think a lot of the silly mundane or the beautiful mundane that has become popular in video games, you know, really starts with Earthbound and Mother 1. you know really starts with with earthbound and mother one i also think you can kind of get a like a taste of dragon quest because when i finally like went back and played the older dragon quest

and then revisited earthbound it feels like earthbound is kind of almost a satire of dragon quest while still being like fully its own thing it does kind of feel like almost like how the mario rpgs and paper mario is like kind of lightly roasting both series like both you know classic rpgs and mario yeah earth down sort of feels like that for dragon quest or just the idea of like gamifying that type of story um and then this is just this is just kind of a silly move on my part blatantly cheating 95 but chrono trigger i just think is like it is the culmination of all of this it kind of feels like all of these like discrete ideas we've

brought up kind of put into one place and i feel like if you're making a syllabus of like this is the crash course on game and games and game history chrono trigger kind of gives you like a bird's eye view of like eight different series in one place. Yeah, we're actually recording this before the segment that aired before this, which is like the 80 to 84 series. But I have a feeling where that went, hopefully, is that sometimes the very, very, very origins actually don't make for good examples if you're giving it to a crash course, right? Right. You're actually not going to get a whole lot out of going back and playing Galaga. Right, exactly.

And I do, I have a feeling that you're right, and I'm curious where we'll land on which one to pick here, that Chrono Trigger, while, yes, there are games that did all this stuff before it, it's still so early in all of this that it would be the one

that truly has the, that is the table setting for where RPGs and video games would go from here. How much time, how much time do we have left? You've got a minute and a half. Oh my God. Thank you for, for kind of preventing me from filibustering this episode with the creative thread of Final Fantasy. I'll just read my strategy guide for 10 minutes. But yeah, so I think the thing about Chrono Trigger that's kind of ironic is it's so often listed as best game of all time.

In all those lists, it's usually close to number one. And we also see games now come out, games like Sea of Stars kind of just directly say, we're going after this. And I think the irony to that is that as influential as Chrono Trigger is and as much as people love it, it still feels so one of a kind, which I think is why people call it out by name when they're trying to make a game inspired by it, because no one's really done that again

in the same way that Octopath Traveler does kind of capture that old school Final Fantasy feel. I think nothing really comes close to Chrono Trigger in that way. So which of the five should it be? My vote would be Chrono Trigger, but I also feel like Earthbound is pretty close as well as Dragon Quest. I like all of them. I would say my vote is Chrono Trigger. Honorable Mention to Earthbound would be my top two for this. Although they're both kind of cheating, so if you count both of them out, then Dragon Quest V.

Thank you for your time. 15 seconds to say Chrono Trigger's best feature. I like the robot and the frog and how they can team up. And how long does it take? 20-ish hours. Perfect. You nailed it. And that is right there. 10 minutes. We nailed it. Boom.

Woohoo! We did it oh my god i'm genuinely impressed i'm i'm so glad you did your homework before this because i did not know how we would have done it and that was steven here's the thing if you enjoyed that you should go listen to into the aether it is uh i mean personally my favorite video game podcast that's not called The Besties or The Resties. Sometimes I might even say it's better, but I wouldn't say that. I'm a champion of my own brand. And let's go right to the end of the episode. Here's the final segment.

Okay, we're back and it's time to pick the final 25 from our list. We actually have, I believe, 28 that we've narrowed down over the course of this entire project. And that was like, remember, and I know for people that have listened, like we really cut some gems on our list. Like we really trimmed it back. So the fact that we landed at 28, I'm actually kind of impressed with us because we had to like really cut a lot of stuff. Yes, yes. And I guess we're going to have to cut three more as well. Some of your favorite games are not even here.

And that might make you mad. And that is okay. That's the nature of lists. That's why every time you open a list on the internet, you are filled with rage because it turns out when you limit things, you can't have everything in them. And that's, that's tough. Okay. So here's what we have right now. We have Tetris, Pac-Man, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Super Mario Brothers, The Legend simulator super mario brothers the legend of zelda sim city street fighter 2 doom super metroid super mario 64 pokemon red and blue final fantasy 7 starcraft chrono trigger just recently picked uh from steven's guidance a very strong pick a very strong pick counter Counter-Strike, Grand Theft Auto 3, World of Warcraft, Resident Evil 4, Wii Sports, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Demon's Souls, Minecraft, Spelunky HD, Hearthstone, Stardew Valley, Fortnite, Breath of the Wild, Outer Wilds.

Oh, boy. Bleh. Bleh. So. Okay. shields oh boy so okay i think from the top there is there is a game that we have to cut that's gonna crush both of us i think he goes i think you're right i think it probably has to go you know it's funny when you when i saw it on the list i was like maybe it should just be the spelunky class like the original spelunky which I think has so much DNA. But that would just not solve the problem that we're facing, which is we need to cut games. And it feels like an outlier when you read the list.

It does. It feels like an outlier. And it feels like we definitely put a thumb on the scale for that one, even though it is a fucking spectacular game. And I think our argument still stands, which is we don't have a roguelike represented here without it. Right. That's what I was thinking as well,

as we still, yeah, we would not have a roguelike. But there's so many genres of video games. I mean, that we don't have that problem. There's no, or I guess Wii Sports. Okay., that we don't have that problem. There's no sport, I guess, Wii Sports. Okay. Anyway. Yeah, we can cut it. That's fine.

Goodbye, Spelunky. So that puts us at 27. Yes. What would be one of your cuts? Well, that was going to be one of my cuts, but there was another one that jumped out at me. It's tough, right? It's really tough um man this list is like i know i i for a while it was like super metroid but then i i not having

again it's one of those like genre defining things it's really really tough. I do think... Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. I know. I think we can do something here. Okay. There are two games that I think are checking a very similar box. And I think one of them needs to go.

Zelda and Metroid? No. No. Come on. Plant. Crazy. The games are Counter-Strike and Call of Duty Modern Warfare.

I think they are both checking a very similar box. Not the exact same box. Yeah, I know what you mean. I think you're right. But they are both on the list because they defined online shooters. That's tough. This is where it gets tough in terms of our goal, right? This is where it gets tough in terms of our goal, right?

Because, again, if I am telling people to experience, like, you're really going to understand so much about video games and what's going on in video games today and what has been popular for years and what inspired everything. I would pick Call of Duty. Yeah, me too. I agree. Counter-Strike is just yeah that's really tough counter-strike is so important to its corner of video games and honestly like there aren't while there are you know valence of the world which obviously took a lot from counter-strike it's not that defining of a way to approach like more games have followed the call of duty method than they have the counter-strike method you're you're right i i agree with you i like counter

strike more but again that's not what we're trying to do here we're trying to know that i like it more but that's just a taste thing right like yeah yeah no no you're right though but like you could not you could not go into a room and casually talk about the history of video games without knowing call of duty that would be a colossal gap yeah um the most popular series of like the last you know 15 years there's another game that i am considering uh Okay, so are we in agreement we're losing Counter-Strike? Is that happening? Yeah, we are, yeah.

Okay. The other game that I'm considering dropping. This would bring us to 25, but I think we still need to reevaluate to see if there's anything that should be replaced. Hearthstone. Yep, that was mine too. Hearthstone, obviously a huge deal.

Still a huge deal. it's still pretty popular i think it was the first like video game that made um uh you know the tcgs become like more of a mainstream thing in the on the video game side uh there had been obviously previously pokemon had a card game stuff like that that became a video game um but hearthstone obviously owes so much of itself to the game that you probably should be playing which is magic the gathering um yeah which obviously not a video game but like so all of these games stem all of the card games at least stem from some level of magic the gathering and uh hearthstone just isn't as defining as you know what came before it in the physical card game space yeah yeah no i i i agree with you i i think all of those choices are right the other kind of edge cases here and it's just because you always worry about recency bias is fortnight breath the wild and outer wilds i'm i'm i guess stardew valley

i'm not really worried about keeping any of those um i i don't think we're gonna look back and be like well fortnight wasn't important enough you know again similar to call of duty it is a culture defining video game um i guess the other question here was just did we want to make sure to keep all of the ones that we brought at the beginning of this episode with tetris pac-man and flight simulator i think the answer is i think that yeah yeah i think yes we have to uh again i i think they both they all all three of them fill roles that we hadn't really filled i think the only thing that like might be an argument is like the original sim city was added and that is also off simulator in a way but they're very very different obviously

flight simulator and sim city um but yeah yeah i guess i guess here's here's the here's the thing and i'm gonna vocalize it because I think it's important to be honest like this isn't the top 25 games of all time list and I think it isn't like I think we've accomplished that goal it bums me out a little bit that there aren't like

deep cuts on here and I'm wondering how you feel about that I mean I think that that was always going to be the case and you know throughout this occasionally we would pick our personal favorite games that meant a lot to us right but i think i think that that's the nature of the beast i think if we are talking about games that are going to be again kind of like a video game starter pack that is going to give you a foundation um to appreciating the rest of video games it's not going to be deep cuts um because that's just not what those are the deep

cuts come what makes deep cuts special is that they exist in contrast to the stuff that you had played before that right um i i think about it like i i see so much through like learning a language just because like that's my you know hobby right now but when you learn a language you have to learn like kind of a first thousand words yeah that you're going to use over and over and over again and then that makes it easier to learn everything else my son is scuba diver well i guess it's two words but he does say scuba diver. Well, I guess it's two words, but he does say scuba diver like 80% of the time. That's great. I mean, very, very practical when living in New York. Yes. But yeah, I think like, I think that is very clarifying at the end

of like what this project is. I know for, I know a lot of listeners have really enjoyed this project. I know that there have been some who have been frustrated by it of like, well, what are the rules? You know, what are you trying to accomplish? And I'll be very honest with you. This is often how an editorial process works. You don't, you very rarely start out with something where you just know exactly what it is. And then you just birth it perfectly. And it's there. There are rough drafts. There's a process.

What I really enjoyed about doing this with you, Fresh, is like it's been a chance for us to do this, I think, very publicly of like, hey, let's kind of figure out what we're trying to share. And I feel like coming to the end of this and getting this 25 and yes saying that like this is your video game starter pack you can play this you could go through this entire list and you can play any of these like you don't have to go in order you don't have to play all of them you can pick any single one and after playing it you will have a deeper insight into the genre that that game was sort of trying to do.

Or even though like not necessarily genre because there are like multiple RPGs on here, but the era or the why that game was formative. Yeah. And I think you would be able to participate in 95% of conversations about video games. I don't know why you would want to, but yeah. Sure. I mean, that's really the problem is we gave you the tools to a solution that you would never want to solve. Yeah, I will add, because again, to go back to what you were saying about people being

frustrated by the lack of rules, I think this also applies to game design and just the idea that like, yeah, you're making things up that feel right at the time and a week might go by and it feels terrible and the worst decision ever. A week could go by and we could be like, what the fuck? Demon's Souls, what were we thinking? I don't think that's going to happen. Demon's Souls fucking rules. But you just have to, at a certain point point kind of like birth something out into the world and see how it goes and um you could you know make a perfectly balanced thing you know we could have gone on metacritic or game rankings or whatever and just like literally looked at the

top 25 based on reviews and that would give you quote, fair approach to what the best games of all time were. And that's just not interesting to us. And that's not interesting, I think, to you guys, because you know, that list more or less. So yeah, I'm tremendously proud and happy of how this is gone. And there's no game on here that I'd be like, Oh, no, that's a weird pick. Why did we do that? I think these all make total sense and i'm really excited to hear from people if there's anything on here that you've never ever played before and this is your first time uh please write in the uh the comments of the newsletter and talk about it because uh we're always eager to hear uh about people coming to stuff with fresh

eyes and whether they can kind of stomach it. Yeah, and also share your top 25, or not top 25, but kind of the 25 games. You can just do five. You don't need to go as ham as we did. Yeah, for sure. You can do whatever number you want. I'm sure that there are some people

who have great recommendations for tactics games and real-time strategy games that we didn't cover as intensely here. We have StarCraft, but not Civ or things like that. So there's so much room to build if you want to try this little experiment on your own. I think that's it. We have the list of 25.

We will make sure it is included in the newsletter this week, along with links to the best way to play as many of these as possible i think some of them will be harder to play than others like wii sports um but yeah uh most of these i think you should be able to play relatively easy uh do you have any uh additional kind of things that you're enjoying bonus racks anything this week i'm still playing lunacid i'm very close to the end that game rules i'm like so happy playing it i think it's uh really kind of not gotten enough attention and i hope more people play it uh again if you're looking for a game that is inspired by earlier FromSoft games like Kingsfield, it's a really cool approach to that era that hasn't really been shine a light on it in recent years.

So I've been really digging it. It's on Steam for like 13 bucks. It's like a total steal at that price. I am playing Mario Golf Advanced Tour, which I feel like shows up pretty regularly on this podcast. Have you played it before? I don't actually know. Yeah, I had played it, but I haven't gotten deep into it for a while. Yeah.

And now I'm like really in the thick of it. It is a great football season video game because it is. Can you skip watching the other player hit the ball? I don't remember. I don't think you can. I haven't figured out how to do it. So there is a lot of downtime when playing this game. And being able to pick at it and then watch some football and then pick at it is a delight.

It really is astounding how right they got this game early on. And while I actually really do like the nintendo switch mario golf i think more than most people yeah it still it has nothing on this um there's really no there's no golf rpg that is as good as that game yeah the mario golf advanced game which is yeah insane to me i mean golf story was very good uh but still as a golf game not nearly as good as mario golf advance and it doesn't see i don't want to oversimplify video game development it doesn't seem that hard to do the what they're doing again i realize video games as an idea are extremely hard, but people are tackling stuff so much harder

than just making a really good golf RPG in the style of Mario Golf Advance. I know what you mean. It feels like you should be able to reverse engineer it and basically make a facsimile. It just, you know what it reminds me of is like when we were in that period of the like early 2000s when there were just no metroidvanias at all or we'd wait three years

and one would come out and now there's like a million of them yeah it kind of feels like we're in that same period but we've been in it for like 20 years we're like no great mario like golf rpg has come out farm simulators is the other version of that right there's nothing like nailing the the farm simulator of harvest moon until suddenly it's the you know in every game you're drowning in them yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um cool well you know what video games are good this has been a really fun year of Resties, and I think both of us would just want to thank y'all for listening. It's been a real

treat doing this for y'all, and we will probably not be back before the end of the year. This is the last episode of this year in all likelihood. We might have a bonus episode. We'll see, but chances are, probably the last episode, and in theory, the next episode for Resties will be in the beginning of january and we will be doing the prediction predictions

episode which i think will be both who won which again i think plant might have taken it uh but we'll see and also what our predictions will be for the coming year of 2024, which, man, gives me so much anxiety even thinking about making those picks. So we'll see how that goes. But yeah, I think I went too hard this year. I think I made it too hard for myself. I was ambitious. I think you're right. Cool.

Well, that has been it. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday break. Um, and we can't wait to see you in 2024. This has been another episode of the rest, where the holy cow. Oh my gosh. The final episode of the year, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Resties.