The Besties - The Video Game Required Reading List: 1990-1994 [The Resties]

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

It's the penultimate episode of The Resties Required Reading List! If this is your first entry, don't worry. It's easy to hop on. Our goal is to curate a "must-play" list of 25 games released between 1980 to 2020. Think of it like Video Games 101. This week, we've selected games from 1990-1994. Time to be little kids again! For the full list of games discussed on the episode, along with our previous picks for the list, visit besties.fan. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Hey everybody, welcome to the show. My name is Christopher Thomas Plante. My name is Russ Froschdick. And this is The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week we're talking about our required reading list the video game required reading list we are coming so close to the end this will be the penultimate episode of the series we're so happy that people have been following it

that means second to last penultimate second to last yeah yeah I was just making it for the people at home you have that low of an opinion of our listeners I mean maybe there's a little boy listening in. This is his favorite show in the world, and he's six years old. Only the smartest dorks listen to our show.

Didn't know what penultimate meant. Should we? Can we talk? Before we get into this, can I talk about something that I did this weekend? Yes. It's Sunday night. Thank you for your permission. It's Sunday night. And I'm like, I need a weekend. Yes. It's Sunday night. Thank you for your permission. It's Sunday night.

And I'm like, I need a movie to watch. Oh, boy. And I do the annoying thing. How sad can Chris Plant be on a Sunday night? No, I try. So I try not to do that. I go.

I did open the Criterion Collection. Yeah. So I did. You're right. I hear you. But I open it and i'm like you know what i want to watch some toshiro mifune who okay do you know who that is i've heard the name but rashomon oh sure yes you know seven samurai anytime you see like somebody kick ass

in a kira kurosawa movie it's toshiro mifune well that's not how i remember it what do you remember that was a rashmon joke oh god damn anyway there's a movie that i had never heard of starring him called red beard and the like the photo of it is him with a beard beating the living shit out of someone. And it's three hours long. And I'm like, yes, this is, how did this exist? And how did I not know about it? You know, I've consumed all of these. I proceeded to watch this movie.

It's about him as a very old doctor working effectively at like a local government clinic to help really, really impoverished sick people like come to terms with death. Three hours. Do you know that that scene of him fighting people? That is, I shit you not, 30 seconds of the movie. It is the only time like violence happens. So you're saying it's like if patch adams like did a haymaker at one point in the movie but the rest of the movie was just patch adams it's like if well

patch adams is a perfect example because patch adams are like robin williams ha funny look at the clown here he is with the red nose and then like it's children dying yeah it's exactly like patch adams i it was the patch Patch Adams of the Criterion Collection. It was. It was. To be clear, the movie was great. I really loved it. But starting off like starting your week or ending your week or whatever you call that kind of like nowhere time of a late Saturday or a Sunday night with three hours of just really sad stuff.

with three hours of just really sad stuff and your favorite guy who like kicks people's ass just being like the really downtrodden grandpa. It's like you tripped and fell into it, Chris Plant. It's almost like you're pretending like you had no control over the situation. I mean, I didn't. At every turn, you could have made a different decision. I couldn't watch literally anything else.

You could have put on an actual action movie or an actual comedy or an actual anything that would bring you joy instead of sadness. And instead, you sat for three hours. And let me just say, I can't remember the last time I've watched a movie for three hours outside of being in a theater and watching Oppenheimer. So you really made a decision with your time i will say yeah when he does kick ass in this movie he goes for broke i mean it's like 30 seconds people for 30 seconds he goes up against 12 people and he breaks

all of their arms so bad they're like coming out of their shoulder well i'll just watch that on tiktok and be very happy damn it should have done that about video games bye bye it's just a commercial break okay we're back rusty's required reading penultimate episode. That means second to last. Our goal, if you're brand new to this, is to collect a list of 25 games from Pac-Man to modern day. That is 1980 to 2020. 30, really 31 years span. These are not the best games. They're not even necessarily our favorite. And this is definitely not one of those like huge top 100 games of all time sort of list. You can find like a trillion of if you just Google it, you can go on TikTok, I'm sure you find one the second you look up games. These are the games that we feel everybody should have played if they want to have a fundamental appreciation of video games,

where they are today, where they've come from. They will give you a richer connection with the stuff that you play now, we think. And this is where I normally say, like, think of it like a playable syllabus for Video Games 101. And then you say... Think of it like you're on a rocket ship

and a black hole opens up and you travel through time and not one of those sad black holes where Matthew McConaughey is like crying about his daughter. One of those like really fun black holes. Like a reverse Redbeard or reverse Patch Adams. You are going into this thinking this is homework. And then you get on board and you realize you are in for the right of your life. There's only 30 seconds of sad, boring and actually three hours of kick-ass in my version that is what you're gonna get here you are gonna learn so much about awesome video games and you're gonna go out and try them and it's gonna be

exciting and i will say right now this is definitely one of those the journey is just as important uh as the destination because we're going to talk about so many games. We're going to miss so many games. We are condensing 30 years of video games to 25 titles. So whatever we miss, that's what the newsletter is for. You can go to besties.fan. You can subscribe. And you can share some of your favorites kindly

as recommendations in the comment section so that other people can enjoy them too. Sound good? That's so cool. I love it. Yeah. That sounds great. So we are going to get into it. The two periods that we have left is 1980 to 1984 and 1990 to 1994.

We're going to do 90 to 94 today yes and then we're gonna save 80 to 84 for next episode the final episode and because that's some like really old difficult games to like parse through we're also i mean chris plant was not even a twinkle in someone's eye when 80 to 84 happened so no you're right no you weren't how old were you well no i i was trying to figure out if i was a twinkle yet yeah not even a twinkle but i was about to become a twin almost almost i was mere weeks from twinkle status yeah um this is actually kind of gross when i think of that as a euphemism um 1990 to 94 is what we're going to be talking about. It is an absolutely incredible set of video games.

How do you feel about talking through it? Because I feel like I'm actually going to struggle with this. I'm going to struggle too, because even though we are about to talk about some of the greatest games ever made and some of my favorite games ever made i actually think it's quite a number of games that aren't the sort of games that we are looking for when we talk about the required reading list uh which we'll kind of discuss in a little bit but

i think it's a lot of examples not all of them but there are a lot of examples in here that are extremely refinements on the original concept, but not like breaking new ground or not like the origins of an idea. I look at this period as the organisms are coming out of the ocean and they're about to become the creatures on land, right? But right now, a lot of them are kind of like

this weird primordial goop that's like sprouting legs i just kind of pictured echo the dolphin with feet oh definitely because echo the dolphin is actually gonna definitely be on this list number one with a bullet um so should we dig into it yeah let's do it cool so we brought 15 games because we narrow these down ahead of time. And I think we'll just go in chronological order, kind of picking through it and starting with a real barn burner. Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo system. Never heard of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's Mario, but it's super this time.

Oh, yeah. So this game came out. It was basically the launch game for the super nintendo among a couple other titles um and it is what i was just talking about um i think it is probably my favorite of the 2d mario games ever made i think like structurally it is the absolute like peak of that form and at the same time it's so clear to see the uh sort of steps that were taken to go from i'm gonna skip doki doki panic slash mario 2 uh to go from the previous mario games of like one and three and be like okay here's how we're gonna expand it and honestly like i was reading about the development they started out really just like focusing on the

visuals and they're like they had this freedom they could like add all these colors which they couldn't do on the nes they could have way more stuff going on they could have scrolling levels in ways that they couldn't do it on the nes and in a lot of cases like they just were able to try a lot more and throw a lot more at the wall um one thing that they tried a lot more was introducing a little green fellow what's his name a little yoshi the one who wasn't in the movie a little baby Yoshi, which we'll touch on. We'll touch on plants note later. But Yoshi apparently was a dream of Miyamoto's. Miyamoto desperately wanted Mario to ride a dinosaur for many years, and they technologically could not pull it off until this game. this game uh i was reading a little bit of research the um apparently the there was a dragon that he designed in 1984 for a game called devil world which i've never played that has like a lot of striking similarities with yoshi uh but he was finally able to introduce yoshi as a rideable critter in uh super mario world it was him and nine other people that made one of the best 2d platforming

games ever made and a launch console game can you imagine that like basically the banner game of the super nintendo was made by 10 people that's i mean that's gonna be so much of what we talk about i know it's just shocking i'm gonna talk about final fantasy 6 a little bit and it's like oh it was a new director and they made it in a year and a half. Yeah. Oh, and then the guy went on and made Final Fantasy VII afterwards. And it's not even, what's also weird is that it's not even like, you know, because obviously indie games exist and smaller teams exist. But imagine an indie game today coming out in a year and a half or two years or whatever.

Like it just doesn't happen. Like it takes you know i would say three years to put a decent sized project out at least and so it was just like a completely different time and with tools that were not nearly as helpful to work with back then than they are now let me ask you i know you're a sega kid but did you play Mario World back then? Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Sega was my main thing, but my aunt bought a Super Nintendo. Yeah. And it was one of those things where she would just kind of leave it at the house for long periods of time, like an entire month. So I had a Super Nintendo around long enough to talk about like Earthbound, which we'll get to later.

Yeah. But not so much that I really dug into all of the RPGs because it was like, well, I never kind of know when it's going to disappear. Yeah. Yeah, no. Super Mario World, I agree. And I think it's kind of a perfect example as we kind of work through this exercise of it is a favorite. It is maybe the best. It is not what we're looking for in terms of this very specific list.

I think that's right. Next up, Street Fighter 2. This is not the thing that you were talking about you're right that's true despite the name it is not uh it is something very different yeah street fighter 1 is a thing that barely anybody remembers almost certainly i would i would bet 99 of the people who are listening to this have not played street fighter 1 i don't think i've played it um it's miserable i mean it i played it as a rom you know it's like one of those like kind of novelties i think i actually saw an arcade cabinet once but it's it's it's a nothing burger um but this is the game for me that creates competitive video gaming like we you could branch it out in a trillion different ways,

but Street Fighter II, for people who are new to this, 1v1 fighting game, 2D. I mean, there was Pong. Let's not forget Pong. That was true. There was Pong. Well, actually, there was Tennis for Two before Pong. And the S, it was Space Game.

Thank you. space game um yeah i mean it it is hard to conceptualize how big this game was i think we take it for granted because street fighter is just around and it's always doing well but this game wins basically the the vast majority of game of the year awards when it comes out um it makes a gajillion dollars um it makes like in the billions uh off of what's called coin drop revenue which is like the money that you're making in arcades it basically is only behind um i believe pac-man and space invaders and both those games are from the kind of golden age of arcades, which is, you know, like a decade before this. Of this kind of new arcade renaissance, it is, I mean, unparalleled. And people have been returning to it forever. I think I counted

nine versions of Street Fighter 2. And I'm not saying like nine skews skew being like you can buy the same game but on different platforms i mean like ultra street fighter 2 tournament edition yeah yeah whatever some slight change or innovation to it um in the most recent one being on the nintendo switch people are still making new versions quote new versions of street fighter 2 um and yeah the reason that it's credited for being so important to competitive gaming is it effectively creates the combo mechanic um and that combined with people playing together at an arcade with just some killer visuals and reactions, like being able to unleash these fancy powers and then actually kind of juggle people into a hit.

Not quite juggling yet, that's later stuff. That, I think, with another game we're going to talk about later in Doom is kind of the one-two punch that really gets competitive gaming off the ground, whether that is in arcades or in land parties or eventually you know in people's homes um it's incredible i mean i i it it's kind of a hard game to talk about beyond that because it's what it would create is effectively the fighting genre again these things existed before this but just not in this capacity

really whatsoever yeah no it's it is definitely formative and definitely a good contender uh for this list unquestionably yeah it's also a game that if you haven't played it like the original street fighter 2 you really should especially if you're a person who doesn't play competitive fighting games um it's not flashy and fun and like quite as immediate pickup and play but the combos that are available to you in this are so simple and limited that i find it to be kind of like a a good way of seeing what you're supposed to get about fighting games yeah understanding like the kind of core meta game of it um without like all the distractions that come with other games weirdly i think the new street fighter 6 also does this quite well yeah with the new control scheme yeah

i think i think that's great but i obviously that the street fighter 2 a little bit more important um yeah i i mean do you have any other any other thoughts on it i mean i you know i played a decent amount but not like a ton i'm not like a huge huge fighting game fan but i do agree that like it defined an entire generation and its effects still are felt today so it's hard to imagine it not making the cut but i guess we'll see next up we have linked to the past and i know that we often the show gets criticism of being like zelda pilled and sometimes i'm i disagree with it and then we do this exercise and i feel like i want to put every zelda game on this list and i start to realize have you played through links to the past like all of it no remember i

hadn't played through it and we had talked about it when we did that like zelda run through right there and i played through about half of it and loved it and then yeah there's just so many video games yeah i've been i've been doing a march again through some of the zelda titles and it is staggering how good they are still like the original and certainly this one um this is probably my favorite 2d of uh of the zelda games probably my favorite 2d one and um it once again i mean it's interesting because the original zelda was like so open-ended and so free and like wide open and guideless like like you'd get like hints from people that you'd

talk to as you were going into a cave or whatever it was but broadly speaking like you just have to try a lot of shit i think that's not as true here i think they're smarter in terms of guiding the player to be like oh that you might want to cut this tree down or you might want to bomb this wall but broadly speaking it's still like an enormous game that you have a lot of room to like explore and even early on before you get any upgrades or items um but it is like the music is oh and the music is stellar but it is like a a huge improvement visually in terms of the gameplay in terms of everything over the original zelda and zelda 2 which we're not really going to talk about because it kind of sucked but um so i love it and it it's super duper up there is it enough i'm not sure but it's definitely

worth a consideration um so something i didn't know is the game was originally designed for nes they started developing it in 88 which was a year after zelda 2 came out and they worked on it as an nes game and it's kind of like what happens with zelda games these days too where they'll be working for working on a game for like the previous generation and then it'll get so close to the next generation they'll be like no no let's hold this off until this next generation. That's what they did here. And obviously it paid off. Trivia question, Plant.

Yes. Do you know how large, in terms of storage, most SNES games are? I mean, it's like hard to say, right? Because SNES, they just kept strapping other tech onto the cartridges. Is that right? But there was like a standard especially launched a standard size ultra small like what like a meg the standard size was 512 kilobytes of storage amazing link to the past they for context yeah an image if you like pulled an

image off a website right now it would be anywhere between like that size and like three megabytes so six times that size yes exactly right your phone is taking like three meg uh photos basically and and this is like an entire game in 512 now links to the past a full megabyte of space they they got nintendo to to foot the bill for a bigger cart. This is why video game cartridges cost more money at that time. You would go to a store and be like, oh, this is like an $80 cartridge. What was going on there? And actually making the game, the cartridge, cost money

because people were adding on either extra memory or chips to power the video games. Yeah. I have one more thing to share before we move on from this game uh this is a quote from a 1989 discussion between shigeru miyamoto and yuji hori who is the dragon quest guy basically yeah uh and they were just like having a back and forth interview and miyamoto was talking about um this is a quote from miyamoto ever since i started making the first game in the series, I've been saying that the third Zelda will feature a party.

One that consists of the protagonist. Who's a mix between an elf and a fighter. That'd be link a magic user and a girl. Perfect. He actually says that the fairy that appeared in the adventure of link, which is the game boy one. I'm sorry. In Zelda two, uh, actually says that the fairy that appeared in the adventure of link which is the game boy one i'm sorry in zelda 2 uh the fairy that appeared in zelda 2 was actually a party member that was

designed for zelda 3 so it's interesting to see how they cross over but you know what we still don't have a girl in the party in any zelda games and that's a huge drag unless you count i guess the spinoffs yeah yeah um that was a translated by the way by glitterberry which has like this website has all sorts of amazing like translations throughout the years from various magazines and this one was back in 1989 so very cool that rules i um i think that part of the designing for old systems you're spending less time worrying about how to even program or design for the new hardware that allows you to figure out the game itself and then worry about some of the tech things afterwards i feel like we see this a lot with like um grand theft auto 5

with you know being designed for the 360 which is still wild to think about or last of us um how they just feel so much better than whatever was coming out on the new system god of war 2 uh another game that just took full advantage of the power of the system it was on um okay i so i have sonic the hedgehog here and i i don't know what to do about this i mean mean, you're such a Sonic stan. Let's be clear about that. Well, the weird thing is, I was. I was raised a true Sonic weirdo. And then at some point in the last 10 years, I went back and played these games and discovered that they weren't good.

And that was like a really hard thing to deal with. I would describe them as good. Well. And I wouldn't necessarily go beyond that well here's my twist then i went back and played them again with my son who had no understanding of sonic yeah and his intention was never to just gotta go fast it was to play it like a platformer yeah and once i played with him these i would say good towards great at times as a platformer yeah there are some like genuinely great like the casino levels are pretty good um weirdly i would

i would say those are the worst yeah because those are the ones where i get just absolutely irritated yeah um but yeah sonic as a game is a really hard recommendation for this list but i think sonic as a cultural object may make a case and here's here's why i think that's true mario very recently we've had like the mario movie and you know mario theme park stuff but nintendo otherwise has been actually very precious with mario outside of the video games like even if you go on amazon and you try to find like mario toys there's not a lot of them that are legal right or like officially licensed i guess the better way of putting it sonic sega went wild with it you know. It has had many cartoons.

It's had comic books, all sorts of toys and merchandise. And I think that is how the game survived. Truly off of just how likable Sonic is as a character, despite him being kind of the epitome of 90s smug attitude yeah um is like is what has kept the brand going even alongside some pretty just mediocre games the other thing i think is really interesting about sonic is it's effectively like not open source but as close as you can get with something this popular. The amount of mods out there of people making their own Sonic games is wild. I mean, if you go on YouTube and look up just random Sonic mod games or whatever, and you will find a bottomless pit of this stuff. And honestly, a lot of it's better made than what is actually being put out officially.

To the point where they hire these people to make some of the stuff. And I think that is interesting. I think it's not a coincidence that Sega would go on to be the producers of Hatsune Miku and the idea of fan-model pop stars. and like the idea of fan modable pop stars i think a lot of good ideas came out of sonic the hedgehog not intentionally yeah and i i don't know the reason i would say like if like none of that is necessarily tied to playing the game and i think a big part of this list is figuring out which games you need to play to have a better understanding and i don't yeah you don't need to look at a picture you could look at a picture of sonic and and pretty much be caught up to speed so to speak i think there's a great

book to be written about sonic or like documentary to be made about sonic but yeah i i agree i think that often the conversation around sonic is more interesting than the sonic itself yeah um i'm gonna jump to the next one which is super mario kart this was the first mario kart game it came out on the snes and the whole hook of this the reason it exists is because they wanted to make a multiplayer uh racing game specifically like a game a racing game that you could play where both racers were on screen at the same time um they had made f-zero which was a launch snes game but that was just single player only and they were like it wasn't like mario at the beginning right yeah originally the design did not involve mario characters but mario characters but after three months in um

they decided like oh it would actually look kind of cool if you were like driving by and fucking donkey kong was there um which true they were right about that one that's gonna be the most dangerous pokemon go game people are gonna have their phones out so they can catch donkey kong driving past on the highway yeah man i don't have a lot of fun playing the original Mario Kart. I can see the shades of the later ones, but it's so rudimentary. I have way more fun playing F-Zero, to give you an idea,

because it feels much faster and more interesting. But I do understand why this was such a draw. I remember playing it originally when it came out. And, like, it was fun to, like, be racing against another player. But I don't think... It's more like a tech demo, right? It is very... Yeah, it feels like a tech demo.

Like, even from, like, a content standpoint, it was so bare bones. Yeah. When it's using... Is it using Mode 7? Yeah, it's Mode 7. It's using technology where you can kind of blend 2d with 3d and f0 did right it's just f0 did the same thing um but f0 because it was a full frame it wasn't two two people at once they could make the maps a lot more interesting looking whereas because here you could have two

players on separate parts of the map they had to make the map super bare bones so that like both of them could render so that's why it looks so basic i feel like a moron that the reason it's mario kart is because the courses they are on just look like rudimentary like go-kart course and they're driving go-karts no i i know that that. I know that. Like, obviously that part, right? Like, I can picture that anytime I play the game. Yeah. I had never considered that, like, oh, yes, you're actually driving on extremely boring go-kart. Well, no, you're driving on normal human go-kart race-like courses. Obviously, later games in the series would be like, oh, shit, you're driving through a haunted mansion. Yeah, you're doing all this cool stuff, but here it's like, it's just a whole bunch of right angles yeah it's it's like figure

eights and shit yeah it's very simple although there was rainbow road was in this game that was our first glimpse so it did get a little interesting but broadly speaking yeah it is not uh a game that i like look back on super fondly but i do understand i would say like there are other mario kart games that i think were more important to the format i think n64's mario kart was probably the one that like yes went further but yeah to me mario kart is like the nostalgia bait of video games and i think its sales always speak to that you know everybody buys mario kart they might buy zelda and mario kart they might buy mario and mario kart but everybody buys mario

kart um because it's so easy i mean it is the multi-quadrant or whatever awful one describe it with right everybody can enjoy it um unfortunately nobody can enjoy the original one that much okay next up mortal combat the rival of street fighter 2 um basically just the shameless hey street fighter 2 is making a ton of money i think this is going to become a genre nobody was saying that at the time they're just saying like like, let's do more Street Fighter 2. And how do we differentiate it? And there's two things that they do. They had a shit ton of blood and they tried to make it look like real people, which is a really hell of a one-two punch.

When you add all the blood and the ability to rip people's heads off, you're also like, let's take photographs of real human bodies that we can rip apart um you know yeah i wonder what it would have looked like if it was just like cartoony but super bloody there are games like that i guess clay fighters right sure yeah i mean those they would exist um it if it needs a reason to exist is not because it's a good game it's not uh mortal combat 1 not particularly fun mortal kombat 2 significantly better yeah um uh but you could probably credit it with the uh formation of the esrb um this game and then like games that people don't hear about as often like night trap um led to the hearings with senator joe leverman um which then led to the forming of the esrb which led to this coming out on console where the Sega Genesis had blood but you had to enter a special code the Super Nintendo didn't have red blood I don't even think

did Super Nintendo even have fatalities yeah I think it did yeah it did okay i don't think they just fell over yes got really tired but they might have like trimmed some of them like i don't know that kano ripped a heart out necessarily yes the the other thing that this game uh is responsible for in some level is an abundance of the easter eggs and this is really a midway the kind of publisher of Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam which I'll talk about just in a second was just very good about adding fun little surprises into their games even when they broke tone. A lot more of this would happen with kombat 2 though than mortal kombat 1 again like moral kombat 1 really is a to me rush proof of concept um that hey it worked it turned out that just having realistic people getting their their hearts ripped out and bite out of was more than

enough to let you compete with a far better game in street fighter 2 yeah i mean yeah i agree that like i think the moral panic impact was certainly the most noteworthy and continues to be the most noteworthy aspect of the first game yeah and then the other one is nba jam which is a perfect sibling for this and talk about a hell of a year for midway um uses digitization to know in a slightly different way than mortal combat um i don't know if this is true or not but i've always heard that one of the players who did digitization actually went on to be an nba player because like so so there's a few different versions of nba. And I know the arcade version you could like tell based on looking at the faces, who the players were. But it wasn't like, I guess the bodies, you're saying the bodies were just...

Yeah, they didn't digitize every player who was in the game. They digitized like a few basketball players to get the movements. I understand. I think... So it was more almost like a motion capture thing. It wasn't like a full body scan. Kind of. Yes.

Probably somewhere between that and Prince of Persia. Yeah. Right. You're like rotoscoping it. I would. Right. Exactly. It's 2v2 basketball.

It is the launch pad for arcade sports games, which for a moment in time were the thing. You had NFL Blitz, Wayne Gretzky, 3D Hockey, NFL Street. And it's kind of just faded away. I think a mix of leagues wanting to like leverage exclusivity with their license and making a lot more money off of saying only this publisher gets to make things. And I think also leagues being really careful around the depiction of violence or like not following the rules because it turns out that sports are incredibly dangerous if you don't do those things and can lead to like traumatic brain injuries. Yeah. I mean, even before NBA Jam, there were like a couple of games that like leaned into the violent aspects.

NBA Jam is pretty tame. Like you push people over and that's basically the worst you can do to someone. Yes had some well there was also like Mutant League football at the time where you could like bust someone's spleen in half. Yeah double dribble and and uh Bill Lambert shut up and ball or whatever

it was there was some fun ones in there. Yeah NBA Jam let me just say as like a fun hangout game so fucking good i think part of the reason it doesn't necessarily have the legs is because it's so poorly balanced and so like uh hinky when it comes to like oh this team is just like will always be the best and there's some like things you can do to guarantee that people miss shots based on like what the clock is at and they coded that in for like certain teams too like i think

that there were some pistons fans in the game or who made the game so yeah right yeah like if you played against the bulls the bulls like always missed shots at the final second yeah there's some fun stuff in there but all that said like man so fun so replayably fun like the perfect game i think this was before like many players would sit around and play mario kart together because you needed like a multi-tap this was the go-to for like hey i'm having people over let's play a multiplayer game um was like this and and uh street fighter immortal combat were really like the leaders of the pack yeah also a testament to how good just the game was at this moment michael jordan was the biggest thing in the world and was not in the video game um because he had a separate licensing agreement than the rest of the nba um shack i

don't think was in the home versions maybe some other players werenq, I don't think, was in the home versions. Maybe some other players weren't too. Yeah, I don't think so. And that just was not an issue. You played the game because the game ruled. Yeah. I think Bill Clinton was in it, though. Bill Clinton and George Clinton? Oh, yeah.

No relation. George Clinton and the Peafunk. That's's the best um cool these have been some good games i do think we should take a break get some water come back because we have some real biggies coming up okay we're back and it's doomsday baby we gotta talk about doom we've got to talk about the violent shooter the game that was my i picture like my dad playing on the family computer with my uncle over and then being like just everybody gathered around he couldn't even see the monitor what the hell is this these horrific noises coming out of the awful awful speakers and barely running and then seeing a shotgun blowing demons in half and being immediately just stunned. I was definitely like a goody-goody kid, like always afraid that I would get in trouble, endlessly afraid of, you know, a timeout or like being grounded.

Yeah. Or hell. And also, yes, raised Catholic. trouble endlessly afraid of you know a timeout or like being grounded yeah so or hell was really and also yes race catholic um so it was deeply puzzling to see my father who uh until he met my mother was in seminary um playing doom really threw me for a loop of what was okay i mean what is what is more holy than sticking a double-barreled shotgun down the mouth of a demon that's true that is actually quite true um uh i mean it's doom it runs on everything did we're just talking about doom and you were like i don't know that it holds up and then you played it again recently no i said okay we were talking

about the doom what the my house dot wad the right and it is fantastic i said i believe i said i'm sure somebody will correct me on this the the the ultimate doom or ultra doom the six the mod of doom 64 where it makes it really really crunchy that's more enjoyable for me to play than to go back and play the original Doom. Oh, I'm not saying that the original Doom was the very best Doom ever made. I'm just saying you could go back and play it and have a really good time. Yes, I would. Kind of like Street Fighter 2, there are other versions even of Street Fighter 2 that i would prefer to play than street fighter 2 i'm not even talking about street fighter 3 or 4 or 5 i'm saying i understand they remade it so

many times that you can play kind of better versions of it that said yes the original is still absolutely fantastic fucking amazing so incredible good yes the music is great the like the visuals are all very readable and understandable i mean it just and it's fast i mean it wasn't back then because you could barely run it if you didn't have like a fucking super vga whatever but you play it now and any computer can run it at 300 frames a second without even blinking your apple watch can yeah um and it's it's so good yeah i mean it is a um lennon and mccartney moment with romero and carmack who are two of the designers on this i think it's like a team of four or five um just the right ideas being paired together by two people that would not. It's kind of amazing that they were ever a creative pair.

And you can read more about that in Masters of Doom, one of the few truly great nonfiction books about video game development. The game popularizes LAN multiplayer, which is being able to play over a local area network. So kind of proto online play people bring their computers to one person's house and releasing how far they compress the electric supply. They were adamant about including, and there is, I know, pushback on the team. But ultimately, I think is like the thing that has kept this game alive for so long. Obviously, we just talked about my house. One.

And then there were demo files, which I don't feel like gets as much hype, but I think is just as important. Which demo files do. Did you know about demo files? I mean, you know, like share i mean you know like shareware i mean no no no demo files were um it was a type a file type where you could record your run in the game no i didn't and then you could share like effectively a replay of your run that's awesome yeah so i mean just so much stuff then there's i mean the controversy around it there's again one of the very first games to get an m rating i think that was a later edition of it um it was tragically cited as a game played by the columbine shooters so i think that that is i mean obviously suspect

um that's not why they committed uh an atrocity um but is, I don't even know if they played it. It's one of those things that, you know, kind of is like so many of these stories gets re-examined over time. And then more recently, getting back to video games of it all, it's the revival of the boomer shooter, this whole sub-genre that I feel like

we've been talking about only more and more all goes back to doom. I mean, just immensely influential. It is everything. It's fun. It is a favorite. It is important. Yeah, there's only one without it. There's only one hesitance that I have.

A year before this game came out, a game came out from the same studio wolfenstein wolfenstein yeah but wolfenstein 3d specifically but it didn't it didn't it didn't connect i i you're right only i played no a lot of people played it right yeah but it wasn't it wasn't the yeah it wasn't the cultural phenomenon. I think the core gameplay is close to what Doom became, although obviously Doom had quasi-3D levels and verticality, which Wolfenstein didn't have. It was much more primitive. But it is worth mentioning that there was...

I mean, you've got to kill Hitler in Wolfenstein 3D. It rules. Yeah, and then you watch the slow motion replay of it. So that was pretty good. Yes. But I do agree that Doom is still felt very much today and probably deserves a place on this list. Yeah. I also think the reason that Doom ends up clicking in a way that few video games had or have is it just so matches the moment like that it's

it's heavy metal style just felt like it was hitting an audience that was completely underserved and was just humongous at the moment um it felt so so fresh which, I get is like kind of hard to see now when you play it because it looks so silly and old. But at the time, I just remember it felt like the coolest thing on the planet. Yeah. Okay, what do we have next? We've got a few more games, but I think we can go through some of them pretty quickly because I don't know that they have a lot of contention. I think you have uh missed next yeah i mean it's astonishing visuals open world that emphasize story and adventure first game i played on a cd-rom oh yeah um i think this game

is amazing probably like a like would be on my first ballot for video game hall of fame and yet at the same time i'm thinking about like our audience i don't know it's a colossal dinosaur i don't know that you could go back and have a good time it's so hard to recommend playing this game it's like playing i know well i'm gonna make another dinosaur reference it's like playing an encarta cd it's like just you're just like clicking from like low quality pixel to low quality pixel now there are more modern versions of this but i also think like the if you play the like updated 3d versions you might as well be playing like the better version of this game what like the room for example which is like an amazing series of

puzzle games so like it's just like this format could be very cool in another i don't know in other hands i think and it just hasn't long term had its impact in ways that like i think people would have expected when it was such a phenomenon back then if this is if like video game syllabus 101 mist would be on like the next class where it's like okay i know that you you have some patience we're gonna challenge you with some things that on top of being important are like gonna really test your patience i played and beat the original mist with my brother using a notebook and looking nothing up because the internet we didn't have the internet and we were able to beat it.

But we didn't know we'd beaten it. Because the game fucking ends. With you reading a book. And a little man inside the book being like. Oh no I'm trapped in the book. And no credits roll. You're just like still in the world. And I had no idea the game was over.

And I was like is there more? And we'd spent like weeks. Circling the island looking for more shit. And there just wasn't. So I'm still bitter. Yeah. Also, one of those games we're reading about it now is more enjoyable than playing it because the connections between the story and the game and the lives of its creators are wild. Oh, did they have like a rivalry going on?

Yeah. I don't remember this. I got to read about it. There's like a number of good features out in the world that people should Google. Maybe I can throw one in the newsletter. Donkey Kong Country? Next on the list, yeah, we're going to do Donkey Kong Country, which is an amazingly good 2D platformer, a series that remains relevant today.

Rare has made a couple sequels recently for the Wii U that were excellent. that they took pictures of and then imported those pictures into the game so that it just like increased the fidelity dramatically ahead of anything that had happened before just using like normal sprites. So visually it is astonishing and the soundtrack is amazing and like everything like that.

I think it's a pretty good platforming game, but I think the Mario games kind of blow it out of the water. This feels closer in the ballpark of like the Sonic games from a platforming quality, but they're good. They're good games. I just don't necessarily think they're that good. Yeah, I had a friend who lived on the street who only had this video game. Well, this game and Curvy,

the Curvy's Dream Course, which we've talked about a lot and played the living hell out of it and was trying to a hundred percent it and had missed one banana in the game. And just like every time we would go and hang out at his house, he would just be kind of like picking at it. And i'm pick yeah i feel like he just had to have like glitched it somehow and was just yeah i'm gonna find that banana sad wait i want to say one more thing about donkey kong country if okay you happen to be a subscriber to nintendo power back then you got in the mail a vhs tape that had a trailer for donkey kong country i can't imagine how much they spent just to mail this out to people because like vhs tapes i'm sure they're

not super expensive but they're not zero dollars and everyone who's subscriber to nintendo power got one and honestly it was a great ad for the thing because I was like super hyped about it. But kind of wild that that was the way to get the word out back then was the male people of VHS tape. I had one of those for Nintendo 64 that was like, here's everything that's going to come and change your life. Okay, next up. This is just a gap. And I think both of our brains. Final Fantasy VI. So I'm going to tell you all a little bit about Final Fantasy VI, and I'm going to tell about a problem that I think we

have with our list. Final Fantasy VI originally labeled Final Fantasy III in its initial US release. These are the kind of things you always hear about it. One of the co-directors would direct Final Fantasy VII and oversee the scenario for Chrono Trigger. Really heavy, heavy story stuff, including like magic war crimes. It shifts from the fantasy aesthetic to something more kind of grim steampunk. There's a lot that I love about this game. I have never played through more than a few hours of this game because the random battles are just, they just kill me. Yeah. This is a problem in general for us. We did not play a lot of these RPGs.

We did not. So there's like Dragon Quest, this Secret of Mana. So there's like Dragon Quest, This Secret of Mana. There are a lot of games that I think deserve consideration and probably like a spot on this list. So I was thinking we could reach out to Steven Hilger, who is a friend of the show. Yes. Hardcore RPG fan, co-host of Into the Aether. And we could ask him to come up with kind of a recommendation oh that's a good idea for the for the the the list from this kind of pile of games i think that

will be a way for us to have something representative in here while also knowing like we're not going to be the best at picking that for everybody although there is a game on this list that's a fair point about ff6 but there is a game on this list that i know you are incredibly fond of that was from that era and had random battles in it okay i love i love earthbound it's literally right on the list it i love this game it is an rpg for kids who never got into fantasy is a role-playing game for kids who wanted more adventure in the world that they like actually lived. It is a role-playing game for kids who wanted more adventure in the world that they actually lived in. It is a role-playing game for Midwest kids

who want a game set in the middle of nowhere America. It rules. It is such a singular thing. I guess I could find connections to something like 13 Sentinels and how they both pay homage to sci-fi. But really, this is writer Shigesato Itoi.

I think that's how his name is pronounced. Partnered with Satoru Iwata, the brilliant Nintendo executive and designer. And they come up with this absolutely bizarre RPG that begins in a small town. And it ends up being about, like, the way evil and cruelty connects from, like, small town assholes through, like, malicious cops to the, like like very idea of evil and it is written with such like enthusiasm and beauty it rules i'd also add you see the dna of earthbound very clearly in games that are a huge phenomenon today specifically undertale oh yeah that's true definitely um yeah and i think you can see it in other things too i I think even Stardew Valley,

I think just a certain tone that this game goes for. We are not for want of indie developers who cite Earthbound as their favorite game. So yeah, maybe there is a case for it. I will say, Itoi, do you know what else he did? Because he didn't make a lot of video games. So he was a famous copywriter in the 80s. He co-wrote a short story collection with Haruki Murakami.

He has a subsidiary of Hobonichi, the day planner things that like so many people love but here's one just for you he's the voice of the dad in totoro oh oh yeah okay i was gonna say uh because i almost exclusively listened to uh the dub which is the guy from wings but that's great that is very cool though um yeah he's i mean just for those people that has done so many cool things in his life and when i was younger i was always grumpy and sad that i didn't get more of these games even though mother 3 does technically exist um but no i think it's like really great that somebody had a cool video game idea and they got the opportunity to make it. We see it that like every once in a while, humanity, which was a game I really liked

earlier this year is a similar thing where it came from a team outside of game development. And every now and then that, that seems to happen, especially in Japan. And I think it always leads to really cool stuff totally what else do you feel like you have you have a couple more yeah we have uh well the next one's from you it's an x-com uh the first how about you i want to hear you talk about super metroid oh yeah i mean super metroid is amazing uh it was for many years my favorite game of all time uh for many years it was my favorite Metroid game of all time I think that is no longer the case thanks to Metroid Dread I think Dread probably trumps it but um the whole spirit of Super Metroid uh was to design something

that was more akin to an action game whereas the original metroid was kind of struggled to hold down the action elements you know you could only fire in uh you know north south east west directions you couldn't do diagonals or anything like that and they really spent a lot of time to make the whole experience feel a lot more fluid in super metroid and also add a layer of narrative where you're you know chasing after mother brain and then it you know that sends you on a new path in a new area and you're exploring like a ghost ship and then there's this uh little baby metroid that you found and how that ties into the story um it's spectacular and and and just really like moving and i think a lot of the games

that you see it uh impacting our games in the spirit obviously the metroidvania is like the hollow knights of the world and stuff like that um i i again i like the other nintendo games that we've talked about for the most part i don't think that it is so much a fault so much more enhanced when compared to those other games um that it would deserve to be mentioned i mean i don't remember if the original metroid made the cut um that would be the argument but yeah i don't know that i mean it's that's tough because it's like so many games like uh symphony of the night and as i mentioned hollow knight more modern metroidvanias really do pull from this as the source material i feel like we i think more so we would probably throw this

one yeah i was gonna say i think i would say that probably more so than the original Metroid, if only because the original Metroid didn't have a lot of the like, I don't know, world building and mobility stuff that really make this genre so important. Yeah, this is in between Super Mario World and Street Fighter 2. Like, if you make that a spectrum where Super Mario World is, the thing was already really polished. Yeah. And now they're just like flexing. Street Fighter street fighter 2 is oh they completely created a whole new thing right yeah this this feels like they got it to a place that was a much more because of that refinement it became something almost new yes yeah i i think there's a real case for this. I think there's a case because the other game, you mentioned XCOM. XCOM is responsible for, I think, popularizing turn-based strategy games.

Yeah. Famously influenced the team that would create Fallout. And like Metroid, it is really unparalleled at that time at creating a sense of like mood and space um and obviously both these are influenced by Ridley Scott and other kind of artists at the time but they're doing I think a very different thing it's funny you can you can really see the alien aliens influence on something like um super metroid but then it goes in such a different direction i i mean it's really of its own thing why do you think it goes in a different direction i think that's pretty consistent throughout the alien aliens thing like tonally

it's pretty close oh i think i think i think totally the the kind of like creepiness but then the design of the characters or the fact that you are a you know a person in a giant super suit that can turn into a ball and like yeah your rocket cannon right um yeah i mean a lot of that is just having to convert art that was on the nes that was very simplistic but still you had to like make it readable and then they're like oh we need to modernize this now but we can't change what samus looks like yeah so i think that i think there's more intentionality to it than that like it's a good thing i think it's kind of blending um the kind of flash gordon you know oh yeah matinee aesthetic yeah with something that is so much moodier.

And I think it produces something that is wholly its own, like all the credit to it. And then XCOM, I think is interesting because it takes the alien thing, but then converts it into something, because you were literally at your computer when you were playing this, that feels like almost dry and clinical um yeah like well like you're actually doing the things but it is so like removed from the actual action that you're like an overseeing like an officer pilot yeah right um i mean in the game for folks who haven't played the original XCOM, you start with a map, like a globe of the world.

And then you have to shoot down a UFO. And then you go and get face-to-face with the territory wherever it crash-landed. And, yeah, it's that sense of scope. For me, it always worked better than something like ActRaiser. I feel like there were a lot of games at this time kind of playing with scope in that sense yeah um and and this was the one that really really got it um i i don't know like where it would fit onto this list we don't have a lot kind of similar to rpgs we do not have a clear strategy game on here. We have StarCraft with real-time strategy.

So maybe it fits on here, but it is a pretty tough game to go back and play. I think it holds up fine, but when I say tough, I mean difficult. Like it's really difficult. For people who are curious about it, there a youtube video but on the channel ahoy and it's retro retro ahoy x-com and it's like a film length documentary and breakdown of the game in the series that i think is like a must watch if you have even passing curiosity in it uh we have one more game uh real quick and it's system shock

which came out in 1994 uh it's included simply because it is in a lot of ways the birth of the immersive sim the birth of the immersive sim genre uh i hadn't played the original i did play the remake that just came out this year we talked about it on besties and um i found it extremely difficult to play as like and well not only to play but also extremely difficult to enjoy like i found it really uh so uh just like stiff and limiting and it it i don't know it kind of felt like it lacked the open-ended creativity that i think immersive sims have later uh sort of enjoyed and and why they are one of my favorite genres i don't consider like oh i'm gonna throw mine on the ground or oh i'm gonna hack this turret like that's not enough for for me uh although i do see the dna there uh i just don't think it got to that point like i

would look to a system shock 2 i think is really where it started like reaching those or even thief the dark project i think is another really good example of like more representative, uh, immersive SIM games, but we did want to shout it out. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's right. There's a bunch of other stuff that we were not able to get to dragon's quest or,

uh, Ultima King's quest, F and B games, wing commander, things like civilization. We didn't talk about Madden. Um, I, that's just the reality of there's a lot and yeah

it's very difficult yeah it's very difficult if there is anything i'm trying to think of anything from there that i think is not eventually represented by other parts of our list i feel pretty and we will again look at the final list and see if we we need to tweak anything but i just in looking at this uh the ones that jump out to me immediately are street fighter 2 um probably doom and maybe super metroid okay so to review the 15, it's Super Mario World, Street Fighter II, Link to the Past, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Kart, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam,

Doom, Myst, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Earthbound, XCOM, UFO Defense, Super Metroid, System Shock. Of that list, yes. Of that list, I agree street fighter 2 doom and yeah i i feel like super it feels it feels weird to not have super metroid on here considering how i mean it's it is my favorite genre it remains my favorite genre yeah it is because of that game that is my favorite it's not because of the nes game like super metroid and i played both of them

but super metroid was the one that like made me realize how amazing this could be and i'm still playing them to this very very day so okay this is good um dare i catch us up on everything that we've nominated so far let's do it quickly let's do it okay here we go uh from 85 to 89 super mario brothers the legend of zelda sim city from 90 to 94 street fighter 2 doom super metroid from 95 to 99 super mario 64 pokemon red and blue final fantasy 7 and starcraft from 2000 to 2004 counter-strike grand theft auto From 95 to 99, Super Mario 64, Pokemon Red and Blue, Final Fantasy VII, and StarCraft. From 2000 to 2004, Counter-Strike, Grand Theft Auto III, World of Warcraft. 2005 to 2009, Resident Evil 4, Wii Sports, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Demon's Souls. 10 to 14, Minecraft, Spelunky HD, Hearthstone.

15 to 20, Stardew Valley, Fortnite, Breath of the Wild, Outer Wilds. All that is left is 80 to 84. Oh, boy. I think we're going to go over 25. Oh, no. Right now. And that is okay because, again, next time we're going to come back with our recommendations for 80 to 84 pre-decided to kick off the show. And then we're going to get back with our recommendations for 80 to 84 pre-decided to kick off the show.

And then we're going to get into the meat of it. We're going to try to figure out this list. And this is the, for real, the starting point. All of these episodes are kind of research for us to figure out what we think this is. There might be some shuffling, maybe some things get cut, maybe some things get brought in. I have a feeling the vast majority of what we think this is. There might be some shuffling. Maybe some things get cut. Maybe some things get brought in. I have a feeling the vast majority of what we have here will make it. But it'll be fun, I think, to kind of finalize this. I am very, very much looking forward to it.

If you have anything that you feel just absolutely rules and is a game that everybody should play if they want to appreciate video games, let us know at besties.fan. Just give us a heads up. You know, worst case, somebody who reads the comment sees it

and they give it a try. Best case, maybe it makes a list. And that is it. Do you have any personal recommendations before we wrap up? I don't know, man. If you haven't played link to the past that game fucking rules i'm replaying it right now and it is so good that's that would be my personal pick if we had to pick one but yeah it's spectacular i don't even know what i would do here you know

it's it's so hard to even think about like what what game meant the most to me at this time because i don't know i didn't think gotta be earthbound right it meant so yeah i guess it's earthbound yeah actually you're right baby chris plant in kansas city he loved it you're right um uh any any other recommendations before we head out I think we got everything that's great I can't wait for everybody to go check out Redbeard on the Criterion channel let me know what you think it's a real blast

30 seconds of great combat 2 hours and 59 minutes of tears until next time we've done it again. This has been another episode of the, of the resties.

I'm Christopher Thomas plant. You are cross fresh day. And we're the resties. We are the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Resties.