The Besties - The Video Game Required Reading List: 2000-2004 [The Resties]

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

The Resties Required Reading List is back, baby! 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 2000-2004. Join us as we revisit our high school and college days of video games! Previous picks -- 1985-89: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, SimCity. 1995-99: Super Mario 64, Pokemon Red and Blue, Final Fantasy 7, Starcraft. 2005-09: Resident Evil 4, Wii Sports, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare; 2010-14: Minecraft, Spelunky HD, Hearthstone. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Hello everybody, my name is Christopher Thomas Plant. My name is Russ Farshtick. And this is The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. And this week we are talking about some of the very best. That's right, we're going back to the required reading list, an ongoing editorial experiment here at Therestes, in which we try to collect the 25 games that everyone should play, from Pac-Man to modern day, 1980 to 2020. These are not the best games, they are not our favorite games. This is most definitely not one of those just humongous

list of like the 100 greatest games of all time. You know how to use Google. You can find that. These are the games that we feel if you want to have a fundamental appreciation of video games, how they work, what they mean culturally, these are the ones that you should play. And sort of how they

evolved, I would say. So if you're looking for the original version of what, you know, GTA San Andreas, or whatever, GTA 5 is today, looking back and figuring that out

is the source of these things. Think of it as a playable syllabus for, like, Video Games 101. Wow, that sounds very boring.

Or, how about this? Maybe the 25 games that a museum would build an exhibit around. It still sounds pretty boring. Maybe like a playable roller coaster through a fun house ride. A time machine through history. Yeah, just as long as people don't feel like they're learning anything, that would be ideal.

Yeah, you're not going to learn about video games mostly about shooting people because we are talking about the years 2000 to 2004. For folks who are just hopping on board, we're doing this in five-year chunks. We've already done four of these. So I'm going to share with you the 14 games that we've picked so far of the 25. From 85 to 89, we picked Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, and SimCity. 95 to 99, as you can see we're not doing this just purely in chronological order, Super Mario 64, Pokemon Red and Blue, Final Fantasy VII, Starcraft. 2005 to 2009, Resident Evil 4, Wii Sports, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, Demon's Souls.

In 2010 to 2014, Minecraft, Spelunky HD, and Hearthstone. We also picked some personal picks, which you can catch on those episodes. And if that list sounds like, hey, that seems kind of obvious, I assure you, it's not. Go back and listen to the episodes. There are so many games that we had to cut that seem quote obvious uh it is a hell of an exercise to try to narrow things down to this so without further ado we're gonna hop into uh 2000 2004 in just a moment uh and here's the one thing you should know we're changing it up again this time because there are now just so many games for us to work through,

Fresh and I have narrowed down a list of 15 that we think are like real contenders. We'll talk about them on this episode and narrow it down to three. And that's that. That's a lot of table setting, and we did it. We did it, and we'll take a quick break and then jump right in. Okay, so Fresh, we're back we're back this is a learn this whole project is kind of like an editorial learning exercise of how we want to i don't know get a rough draft of this list and then i think at the end we'll have 25 and we'll probably you know maybe polish it

at that point yeah there might be some you know how they reevaluate tier lists at the very end. We might have to like shift some stuff, but I think by and large, I'm pretty happy with what we have so far. Yeah. Going back to it, I definitely feel that way in terms of the episodes that we've created. It's been a journey because I think what we discovered in some of the most recent episodes is there are just too many video games and Yeah. And you fall into this trap of just kind of being dumbstruck by the awe of how many titles there are. So we put the dumbstruck part off tape to spare our listeners. And we did all of that behind the scenes to come up with a list of 15 games.

That itself was quite difficult, but I feel really good about the 15 games we have. Do you want to kind of work through this now in chronological order, starting with 2000 and working our way to 2004? Sure. And again, like if you were to go back and look at a game of the year list, there will be games that we don't talk about that were on those lists back then. Huge games. But again, we are really just looking at these formative games that we think sort of kicked off something in the games industry so um we're going to start with a game

called deus ex which was the original installment i guess of the deus ex franchise which obviously has had a number of games since then but um really and a very early iteration of what you would see in games like bioshock or dishonored basically the immersive sim format a lot of it was birthed within deus ex and a lot of those team members went on to go form their own studios and make these exact games yeah i i think of this as being weirdly important ahead of the new Zelda game coming out. You know, did you talk with Maharty? Mike Maharty oversees our reviews team at Polygon, but he also did our preview for the new Zelda game. to me like kind of over and over was oh my gosh they took all of these ideas that used to be kind of reserved for complicated pc games these like immersive sims where you feel like you can do

anything with what's in the world and they put it in a nintendo game and that because it's nintendo and because it's open world and because it's zelda that's like a little invisible yeah what you're doing is like you're given a problem there is an enemy on a giant floating mountain and the answer to solve it is well you have a world of thousands of tools like surprise me yeah and that that was the pleasure of of these immersive sims at the time was that you could go about things in any variety of ways you could go in gun blazing but you could also hack your way in or you could find different ways in deus ex there's a lot of um in the series a lot of a lot of body

modification right yeah you're you're installing augments and stuff like that to give yourself an edge there's also like a lot of diplomacy stuff so you're you know deciding what to say in a certain moment um and then obviously you're deciding the basics stealth or you know high combat or hacking or whatever and it's very easy to see the like roots of games like bioshock or games like dishonored within deus ex and everything that was done there you know there are other examples obviously that do similar things system shock jumps to mind but i think davis x was really a big turning point for this format um and a game that i think still is super interesting to play and and think about yeah i'm also just perpetually interested in games like this or media like this in the matrix that is

pre-911 but gets a lot of like 9-11 post-9-11 anxiety yeah um for like younger members of the audience this period of like the 90s going into the early 2000s like the biggest fear was that your clock wasn't going to work on your pc when it switched midnight right like like the level of anxiety in the 90s is like hard to even imagine today and yet there were these sci-fi writers and creators who had a sense of, okay, behind all of this, you know, supposed happiness of like white middle class America, there are a bunch of companies that are like vying for power. And it's just been concealed because of our relative comfort. And at any moment that that facade is going to fall and reveal itself. And correct. Like that was,

that was the next 20 years. Yeah. Um, after this game came out, um, this game also had a briefcase that controlled the inventory, which was cool. Yeah.

That's also true. Speaking of damn the man, Tony Hawk pro skater too. Yeah. This is interesting. Obviously this is a sequel. It does feel like when Tony Hawk pro skater 2 yeah this is interesting obviously this is a sequel it does feel like when tony hawk pro skater came out uh like it certainly was a big deal when the first one came out but the second one was like the moment yeah i mean you probably attached more to it you were a

skater kid and and stuff like that i played it on dreamcast, but I, you know, I liked it. It was a great game. I lived and breathed this series as a, like, kid who could, you know, do an ollie, maybe did a kickflip once

and nearly broke my ankle. Does it count as a kickflip if you don't land it? I mean, so many people I've seen fail kickflips over the years.

So, that's like the default. So, there we go. Yeah, Tony Hawk can't always do it. No, I think this game is really interesting not in terms of where the tony hawk brand went but what it represents for sequelitis and the entire activision business model um we've seen activision you know like do the annual releases with call of Duty and before that Guitar Hero.

But this is where that the Activision business model like really finds itself. We are going to milk this property dry. And for a moment, it is going to be the biggest thing in video games. It's like hard to even think back on how popular these games were. I mean, they were humongous. They were the Call of Duty of the moment. It's like hard to even think back on how popular these games were. Yeah. I mean, they were humongous. They were the Call of Duty of the moment.

Well, and they also didn't have competition, you know, and then obviously with its growth, other skating games, skate franchises showed up. But at the time, there was really very little that was anything like it. And because of the like licensed music and the like whole vibe of the thing, it just totally blew up. It's also wild to think that there was a competitive game like this that wasn't a traditional sport, like, you know, soccer or football,

and it wasn't a shooter. And like, that's what really helped this game explode was, you know, local multiplayer in this game was a trip. Yeah. I don't think it like will end up fitting on our list but i do think it's worth mentioning because to me this is the peak of tony hawk and if you've ever thought about like hey i really want to go back and try it definitely try the tony hawk pro skater one plus two remake it captures basically everything you

could want from the original without a lot of the kind of like pains that come with the original. Although I do find the original's like low poly aesthetic pretty charming. Yeah, I wish that they had that option that was in the Halo release where you could like flip back and forth. Yeah. Okay. So next up is Majora's Mask. And here's where I'm honest. so next up is Majora's Mask.

And here's where I'm honest. This, this, this like bunch 2000 to 2004 is when I am in high school going into college. And I did not play video games. Like you were just too cool at that. No, I will.

Let me be clear. I wasn't, I wasn't theater at this point. I was, I was decidedly not cool. I wasn't. I was in theater at this point. I was decidedly not cool. You were popping your jean jacket collar up and rolling a pack of cigarettes in your sleeve. I was in Greece, apparently. I was performing All's Well That Ends Well in Richard III, thinking I was hot shit.

I was, in fact, not hot shit um i was in fact not hot shit uh so there are a few games here that are i mean like the most important games of all time that i have not played much of at all yeah majora's mask is one of them yeah i mean to give you more context like i'm slightly older than chris plant uh so i was in college when all these games came out which is to say i played all of them and have strong feelings about all of them that's great majora's mask is um certainly i would go out i would go out on a limb and say it's the weirdest legend of zelda game ever made um obviously it involves the total annihilation of the world that you're on and it happens every three days and there's a crazy like time tracking system to it and like you're following it's like a groundhog day type story and it came out very soon after just a i

think it was a year and a half after ocarina of time came out and sort of it was sort of towards the end of the n64's life cycle and it just did some totally wild incredible things i don't see a ton of majora's mask in later zelda games or really many other games there have been games where they played with time and schedule and stuff like that i don't think it's like a formative game in that way i do think it is a totally buck wild experience and indefinitely, definitely worth playing. I don't know that it's belongs on this list, but yeah,

it's a sick, sick game. Yeah. Yeah. I, I agree with that. And I think like for our list, you know,

a lot of them are games that inspire genres or things like that across the industry. I think there are a few that have shown up on our list that are just, you know, massive cultural moments. Yeah. But I, I don't think that's this, at least in, you know, in my experience, again, kind of outside of games at this point, Majora's Mask is this kind of weird anomaly. It might be the both the best Zelda game for a lot of people and also like, kind of separate from it at the same time. Yeah. Which is weird.

I will talk about a cultural phenomenon, which is the next game, and it's Counter-Strike. Okay. I was into this. Okay. Right on. This is one of the few that, yes. So Counter-Strike for a year was the thing for me, I guess. I guess my connection with games here was like, oh, I had time for one thing, or I just had a friend who pushed one thing on me.

But my best friend from childhood had set up a LAN connection in his basement between four computers. Both his parents were teachers and they got like scrapped computers from the computer lab and we would play counter-strike and i remember just blowing my mind playing together on a land connection um it was such a upgrade over the goldeneye experience and for me this is like when competitive shooters like really began. I think that's like, I don't think that's like a surprising statement. I think most people agree with that. Yeah, it's certainly when they, I think, reach the mainstream, because at this point, obviously, people have basically everyone had an internet connection, or at least a lot of people did.

That was fast enough to play games. I think even in the Quake era, like I didn't play a lot of online Quake. Yeah, like Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament existed. Yeah, I played a little bit of them, but like not a ton. But Counter-Strike was like fully accessible and just like it dominated our college land like obsessively. It was so popular. And I think that, you know, talking about about formative the game effectively hasn't changed much i mean it's changed for like people that are hardcore fans of counter-strike obviously

there are changes but the beat to beat core of it has not really changed over the years and that includes the fact that they just announced the quote sequel which when they announced that they were like okay so we going to make the smoke grenades ultra realistic. And they are. That trailer rules. They're very realistic. But it is telling that like the stuff that they're obsessing over for changes isn't like we're going to completely re-envision how a Counter-Strike game is played.

All they're doing is like basically just further refining something that has been refined into the floor. Y'all, if you have not seen the trailer for counter-strike 2 you need to google it immediately it's amazing it's like if somebody was like yeah we're making soccer too and people are like please don't like soccer is in fact great and we prefer that you don't they're like hey don't worry we're not actually making soccer too we're just making all the stadiums look a little nicer yeah you're like okay who that was that was close because i thought we were going to change soccer um no it is such a tricky tricky needle a thread and i think they're doing like a really surprisingly good job of it

um uh speaking of things that are coming back this uh this year man it is this is kind of jarring how much this is still just the present diablo 2 yeah i mean i think everyone that is now making like these sequels effectively grew up on these games and are now like just like reliving those moments for themselves so yeah diablo 2 came out in 2000 obviously diablo 4 comes out in june of this year um and diablo 2 was basically like what made diablo the franchise it is today it's an enormous hugely popular franchise and while the first game is very good it's also if you've ever played it like so raw and so rough and so like around the edges of what diablo would become in terms of the like uh loot centric like building a like a really like curated build around like

specific skills and abilities and stats or whatever that all happened in diablo 2 diablo 2 was the first place that like you saw currency come up where people were trading like specific items there was a stone of jordan which was like a basically just like an ir ring that you could find in the game and people figured out okay this stone of jordan is worth like x amount of dollars in real world currency and people were like genuinely trading that as a currency mechanism. It was, yeah, really the dawn of Diablo as the franchise we know it. And really the dawn of this action RPG genre or this loot hunting genre that has only grown from there. Yeah. If there was a place for this on this list and kind of like the contribution to games,

it would weirdly be for like mobile games in my head. A lot of the kind of clicky gameplay loops and like very, very clear power scaling and rewards feels to me like a model that would eventually lead to the dopamine style of mobile gaming and like kind of casual action gaming. But I like I'm being honest. That's like a long walk for that argument. I think it's like it's yeah, it's like protoplasm of that sort of stuff. I think it's more felt in games like Borderlands or even in like games like God of War, the newer ones, which emphasize the idea of like armor sets and perks for armor sets and making a build using the loot that you find in the world.

Like that's where I see Diablo's impact most even though i agree with you like the the like clicky uh you know kind of mindless aspects of this certainly manifest elsewhere but but that is i think where it made the most impact yeah i think you're spot on okay next up uh halo the original one halo combat evolved combat evolved microsoft says we're going to get into the video game market and how will we do it we'll buy apple's exclusive video game yeah i mean their their dedicated studio bungie uh was basically purchased and released as uh the game was released as an exclusive title yeah yeah that's forever one of those weird like um i don't know quantum leap moments of like where would we have gone if it had gone the other way

and and halo became this game that was going to launch on apple laptops or whatever but but totally different reality because i think it was going to be a role like a rts at that point yeah i've seen the early demo and it is i mean it was going to be a shooter but like a weird third person kind of thing yeah so this is this is the the um i guess what is it online shooter experience coming to consoles though really i think that's halo 2 when that right exactly so that's right very important to remember is Halo Combat Evolved when it launched did not have online play. Yeah. That started with Halo 2.

So you had to, and I actually did this, go to someone's house and set up like multiple Xboxes and do a land thing, which was a blast, like totally amazing and super duper fun. But it was not the online moment. Well, also, were you in college at this point or just? Yeah. OK. So my first year of college was when Halo came out. Yeah. That's where like all of this stuff gets kind of figured out because colleges have two things going for them.

One, many dorms have land networks already in them. So you could like connect land wise inside of your dorm right you could yeah you could literally just like run some cable between yeah i don't know if that worked on xbox necessarily but yeah yeah that's true but or i mean or you could also literally just like run cable to down the hall to a room right sure like you should be able to create a LAN network living all that close together. Yeah. And then the other thing is colleges at the time had some of the fastest internet pipes that were available to you. So as, you know, Halo and especially this is more of a Halo 2 thing. But as those games did go online, if you were in college and you had like, what was it called? T1 pipes?

Yeah. Yeah. T1 internet was yeah yeah yeah you were you were you know just a god you know it was the fios of its day yes yes um it was probably like 100 meg or something who knows um but but yeah i i feel like that was kind of this like weird perfect uh storm or perfect like meeting of things that would not seem to go together, which is really, really strong internet that is largely meant for universities to transmit more important data. And a whole bunch of like young people being together bored when they're not studying and having access to like video game consoles that are like cheaper than their PCs. Yeah, I would say the other big Halo Combat Evolved thing was split screen co-op, which if that wasn't one of the first, if not the first split screen co-op shooters that I've ever played, it's certainly up there and was like such a huge hit.

Obviously not super relevant these days especially as they like have stripped that from future games including halo infinite they didn't do a split screen co-op version but um you know i think it it made a real impact then you know looking at our overall list we don't uh do we have a shooter at the moment? Oh yeah. Modern war call of duty, modern warfare, you know, uh, between this and counter-strike, I think counter-strike has a more,

more of an overall impact to some extent. Yeah. I feel like modern warfare really is the conclusion or the transition point for console shooters into like the thing. Yeah. Um, Halo definitely kicks it off, but into, like, the thing. Yeah. Halo definitely kicks it off. But similar to, like, you know, Counter-Strike with PC, before that you had, I mean, Unreal Tournament and Quake Champion or Quake, wait, Quake Tournament? Quake 3 Arena. Quake 3 Arena.

Yeah. I mean, these were not small games. They were huge. But they were kind of building towards something. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right the other thing that i'd give some credit to halo for uh though our next game does it much better is hinting at the power of open worlds there is the famous island stage in halo c what's the name of that island where you get to ride the warthog and you can go around the entire space yeah i'm not

sure i know what you're talking about and and that hinted at you know kind of what was to come and a lot of you know halo infinite was supposed to deliver on that that promise from this one amazing stage yeah um but the next game grand theft, I mean, is just ginormous. experience that i remember playing um that had like the vibe of oh this is a living breathing city and i can do whatever i want within that city and they've only rockstar has only like heightened that and polished that since then but the experience of playing this was unlike anything i'd played before yeah i i i think that's right and i think there's practically no way it's not on the final list the the the like rob is grand theft auto 4 does it all so much better but arguably they all do it well well

they all do it better the other difference is gta4 was like i mean a cultural moment it was it was absolutely wild especially being in new york when that game came out yeah i think we've talked a little bit about this the the just seeing how it sort of owns the city everything yeah i mean if we're taught it's not on this list rightly, because I think GTA 3 is the like, the moment for this franchise during this era. You know, I certainly think San Andreas and Vice City are like better games, unquestionably better games than GTA 3 is. deny the evolution of open world games that came out of GTA 3 and how much it still is felt to this very day. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's not going to be a fun time to go back and play it. Here's what I would say. It's not great. It's not great, but it's not miserable. I've certainly played some of these older games that are like, oh, this is brutal.

It's also like more enjoyable if you remember when it was made. Yeah. Really carry that with you. Like there are sometimes, you know, you go back and you watch, I don't know, Citizen Kane or whatever, like an old movie. And Citizen Kane, while it sounds like homework, actually a fun movie. Because if you watch it, it's like, holy shit. Like, how are they pulling off these shots this long ago like it just watching it is like an actual trip because it does not mesh with your idea of how a movie should look from that time and the same thing is going on here

if you play like a bunch of games from 2001 and then you play gta it it's so it's reaching so far beyond its grasp that it feels like a miracle. I mean, let's kind of roll that into what we're talking about right after this, Silent Hill 2, which I don't think we have to spend a ton of time on. But to give you an idea of what it felt like to move around in a 3D space and how limited 3D spaces were, I totally different games again that's like not entirely fair part of silent hills 2's point is it is claustrophobic and all these things right but i mean we're talking about a game coming out that was fully open world that you could run around that we could take any vehicle you want in an era where like we were still seeing tank controls in small rooms you know like it's it's wild and also the idea of like like story quality notwithstanding

like gta3 is like fully voiced has actual actors in it like joey pants is in gta3 and like has actual like cinematic tone that you see throughout all rockstar stuff even though it is rough and like you and obviously on early hardware. So yeah, no, it's incredibly formative for really where games ended up going. I mentioned Silent Hill 2. I don't think we're going to spend a whole lot of time on that one other than just acknowledging that it exists

and is fundamental to the horror genre. But I don't think either of us felt like, oh, it's likely to make the list i was too scared to play it a friend of mine on our dorm floor played it he had speakers that were bigger than me and i would walk in for 10 minutes watch him play in the dark and be like no fucking way so i'm aware of how good it is uh But I don't, my understanding is that it is a pinnacle in the horror genre, but not like a total world changing event for the horror genre. You know, I think both of us should try to play this game before the end of the year. Too scary.

You don't think you can go back and do it? I can't even play Resident Evil, the one that came before Village. Resident Evil 7. Too scary. I forgot about that. Okay, I'm going to try to play this game. You play it and tell me. I know Pyramid Head's in it. That's true. That is true. That's in the movie. Yeah, I'm going to try to fit that in and maybe that'll be

a thing that we reconsider when we finalize the list. Yeah. But back to like big open world things. Morrowind. Actually, before we get into M morrowind let's take a quick break okay and then we'll come right back okay so morrowind is the next on our list that came out in 2002 um it is the part of the Elder Scrolls franchise, obviously the follow-ups to that being Oblivion and then Skyrim. Morrowind was in that same model of open world, enormous RPG where you could essentially go anywhere you wanted,

craft your character however you wanted, talk to various people. It is very formative. It's also funny because i think in a previous episode included oblivion as one of my fan picks um because i you know i think that was where uh this franchise really became like the like refined approachable moment that it needed to be um i didn't play a ton of morrowind full disclosure i did play it recently like within the last three or four years i think i played it when it was backwards

compatible on xbox and that you talk about games that are rough to go back to wow really brutal to go back to morrowind it is it's ugly as. The controls are really stiff. Doesn't feel fun to play. I'm sure for people that are connected to it, they probably can overcome that stuff, but I don't want to do that to people. It's tough.

There are cat people? Well, in all the other Skrulls games, yeah. They're called Khajiit. Okay. That's all i gotta say i i am not elder scrolls fluent so i'm gonna have to trust you on on this one yeah i mean they're they are amazing feats of technology especially for the time um but uh i think the biggest aspects of this are like open world aspects and i think gta 3 does all that stuff much better next up we've got metroid prime which we just did like an entire episode about yeah i i now am awakened yeah i definitely prefer metroid in 3d space than 2d space that's a discovery yeah um but why should it be here beyond it being like just a really great game so metroid prime uh a couple of the things that it does interestingly and i again i don't know if that means it should be

included is one it totally reimagines a very well-known franchise in a completely different way while still staying incredibly true to the franchise and uh enhancing the experience really like making you feel actually in these environments rather than like the remove of a 2d platforming game um i it's weird because that this format of game is not very common this is a first person effectively metroidvania uh exploration game single player exploration game and there just aren't a ton of those these days so from a again formative, I don't know that there's a lot of games that necessarily pull from Metroid Prime. But, man, incredible level design and world building and music and everything. It's a great, great game.

But I agree with you. I'm not sure that it is what we're looking for in this list. Yeah, this to me is like one of those like, oh oh it could be in a top 10 games of all time list and yet i think you could have played a lot of other games and learned more about gaming history through them than if even if you skipped this one yeah if if our list was 50 games overall i think undeniably it probably would make the cut, but given that we're having to be so picky with so many great games, uh, I think it's going to have a tough time. Yeah.

Speaking of picky next up burnout, three takedown, man, this game is so fucking good. Uh, the burnout franchise is essentially dead. Now, uh,

the studio is now working on need for speed games um in criterion but there were a couple years there where burnout games were the best racing games bar none without a doubt and burnout three takedown is the peak of the burnout franchise in my opinion it uh of the burnout franchise in my opinion it uh has the best car crashes i've ever seen in a game it has the best side mode of a racing game in its like crash mode where you launched your car into these increasingly complicated pinball style like environments to try to like rack up points and create these amazing combos um again i don't know that it has a lot of uh impact on the future of racing games if anything the legacy of burnout is is one of disappointment yeah because well i mean not entirely in that ford star horizon exists as a series and for Forza Horizon has carried on the mantle of, if not entirely burnout, what Criterion would eventually do with Need for Speed, Hot Pursuit, and open world racing games.

And just arcade racing, right? Like having fun, using your cars in clever and unexpected ways. expected ways what's crushing about burnout three takedown and the end of the burnout series is they predicted the cultural moment around fast and the furious just a little too early yeah and they would have been a perfect partner for the rise of fast and the furious because the the whole magic of fast and the furious is what if you take different genres of film and you replace human beings with cars? So, like, what if you do a heist movie, but instead of people, it's cars that do a heist? Or, like, an action movie or a, like, you know, like, international spy thriller. And you write the scenes as you would with people and literally put cars into it.

You write the scenes as you would with people and literally put cars into it. And that is the pleasure of Burnout is they just, cars are a starting point. They are not like, it's not about it being like a real or being about racing. It's about like, what would you do with these objects in a fun and clever way? Yeah, I forever am bummed about that series. It the opposite of tony hawk pro skater to me and that tony hawk pro skater kept getting sequels but it didn't really have any new ideas and there wasn't a lot more room for it to go after a while we're like burnout i felt i feel like there's still plenty of room for that oh 100 in different ways and yet it it just burned out oh i don't i don't know what happened there i feel

like ea just reprioritized how it was using those studio resources yeah my interpretation and this is a total guess is that because of the nature of burnout which was entirely focused around causing car crashes it basically prevented ea from having uh actual cars in those games because bmw or whomever didn't want to see their car get like fully like crunched into a cube which is what you could do in burnout three so they basically pivoted all their resources into what was arguably a bigger and more known franchise in need for speed but because Need for Speed is not around crashing as much as it is racing, it just didn't allow for that level of like silly fun.

Yeah, I mean, to this day, you still do not see that kind of damage in a card game. Yeah, what I will say is if you're interested in Burnout, you've never played any of the Burnout games, really the only game that you can easily play these days is Burnout Paradise, which had an HD re-release a couple of years back. the burnout games really the only game that you can easily play these days is burnout paradise which had an hd re-release a couple years back it's excellent uh the hd re-release runs great on every platform including switch um and it's a great game i i don't think it's the best i still

think burnout 3 is like the height of this franchise but uh Paradise is also really, really fucking good. I wonder if Burnout 3 is on either PlayStation now or on the original Xbox game store. It might be. Might be. I haven't looked back. Games that are hard to find and play legally.

Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater. Metal Gear Solid 3. I know we have a whole episode coming up about this one probably soon-ish, like early this summer maybe. Yeah, we'll have to find a hole for this to go into. Yeah. Yeah, I was, so it's kind of a weird thing. So we've talked about all the metal gear solid games so far before snake eater essentially and snake eater was the pinnacle for me actually to be clear

subsistence which was a re-release uh was the pinnacle of the metal gear solid games for me because it combined like play Playability with actually. Comparable story like. An actually understandable story. With. Some really great stealth mechanics. With some really great like. Very very clever boss fights.

But. As with all Kojima games. Seeing the. I guess the DNA. In their in his games which are so weird and seeing that kind of carry through to other games is very rare because it's so hard for anyone to kind of match his level of insanity um but fuck man uh mgs3 uh specifically subsistence is just so so good yeah it does two things that neither of the games or any of the games because they're the spin-offs too had done at the time which is made it very

playable especially the subsistence and then um the story's just like quite clever and rewarding the ending in this game is fantastic and i won't go into that maybe we'll talk about that on on the episode but dude like sticks a landing here yeah very well it should be noted that subsistence came out in 2005 so technically not eligible but i think even it had it come out in 2004 i don't think it necessarily would apply to our list. But excellent game. And we will talk more about it. Okay. Now we're getting to two games that I feel like are also, how did they not end up on the list?

Okay. World of Warcraft. A game I have never played, but I've watched, I don't know, dozens, hundreds of hours of over the years. Have you really? Yeah. I mean, more like, more like oh in college a friend was playing it yeah sure i don't know that it's the most watchable game no it would be like i would watch them especially 2004 2005 play while we like hung out in a dorm room yeah um in half

life 2 which both these are effectively like established their parent companies as unstoppable forces. Yeah, Half-Life 2 launched with Steam, I want to say. Right, right. It is the game that gets people to use Steam. And by doing that, effectively establishes central, mostly singular marketplace for downloading pc games yeah and at the time that was like heresy people like why would i download a game i don't own it i want to go buy a box yeah i recently was like i was looking through my steam catalog and i was surprised because i didn't own half-life 2 even though i knew that I bought Half-Life 2 and it's because I bought Half-Life 2 as a disc

when it came out. I can't believe that you didn't get it for free over the years in one of the sales. Well, not for free, but like that's... So just recently I was like, oh, I don't own that. And then there was a sale for every Valve game ever for $3.

I was like, okay, let's just do that. So I fixed that problem. But yeah, okay, let's just do that. Uh, so I fixed that problem, but yeah, no, that was, that was the first, just this year I bought half life two digitally for the first time.

You, you were a big wow player, right? I, yeah, I played a lot of wow. It was my senior year of college. It's the only,

it's not the only MMO I've ever played, but it's the only MMO that I got like deep, deep into and like hit max level and dipped into rating and had that whole experience and a lot of that has to do with like just the approachability of it it was not the first mmo it was not the first mmo that like really struck it big but it was the first i guess approachable mmo it's i view it as sort of like the iphone of mmos which is like normies could get into mmos in a way because of world of warcraft yeah i i feel like there are like four periods of mmo there's like pre um like ever ever oh my gosh everquest ever pre everquest yeah everquest which is the beginning of like

kind of like really clear visualized mmos and. And I guess Ultima, Ultima Online. Sure. And then World of Warcraft, where we have like quote mainstream. And then now, where, you know, I as someone who is like actively tried not to play MMOs because I only have so much time, I want to focus on other types of games, have ended up playing them because I play something like Fortnite, which I get is like technically not an MMO by these definitions. But come on, like, yeah, I see more of the DNA in a game like Destiny, like WoW's evolution is almost in a game like Destiny where you're doing a lot of the same stuff over and over for the gear grind or a loot drop or something like that. and over for the gear grind or a loot drop or something like that um and and obviously there are other like more traditional mmos final fantasy what is it 14 uh that people love so so those

games 100 exist um it's i guess it's the question of like whether making something approachable and palatable to the mainstream is enough of a uh kind of way to set set a game apart yeah oh man do you think epic would ever make like a adventure section of fortnight like an mmo uh i mean they're already adding i mean the tools allow for people to create that people to kind of create that i not certainly nothing on the scale of like an enormous open world map like wow had but it wouldn't surprise me if if uh they were to go down that road or someone creative were to go down that road and try to build something like that yeah yeah i think that's right and then half-life 2 i mean the the cinematic and you know adventure-y puzzly first-person shooter plus

helped launch steam um yeah i mean it's really the steam thing even though i i think you're right like it is really one of the first games that played with physics in a realistic way in a clever like puzzle solving way um incredibly cinematic but i do think the like cinematic elements were more uh they they felt more groundbreaking in the original half-life even though it was rough that's right um i think that was the moment where it was like oh wow you could actually do this in a shooter like have it feel like a movie where you slowly and quietly ride a uh a moving tram for 30 minutes yeah i the problem is i don't think we could include half-life 2 because of the steam thing because that's like outside it's truly outside the game i agree with you i am deeply worried that on a previous episode we were like yeah we don't

need to include half-life we'll get half-life 2 i don't know man like, we don't need to include Half-Life. We'll get Half-Life 2. I don't know, man. I don't know. But I don't know. And then here's the last one. Katamari Damacy. Okay. Okay. So here, let me make my case.

Sure. This, to me, is the first writer on the apocalypse leading to indie games. I say that as a compliment. This was a game that I remember the very first time I saw it, I went into, there is a dorm room like two or three floors up, which was like the dorms drug dealer

slash place to play Halo for free on land, which is a great business strategy, right? Get people in the door with free video games and then see if they become customers. And whenever I would go up there to play Halo, they would like, there always be like another two TVs playing various stuff. And it was always like God of War 2 or something, right?

And then one day it becomes Katamari. And then a week later, it becomes Katamari on two other TVs. And then by the end of like that week, every TV for like a solid month is just everyone playing Katamari. It was absolutely bizarre to me because I up until this point thought, you know, I know a lot about video games. I, you know, I grew up on video games. I care about these things. And I had like not heard of this studio. I had never heard of this series.

I had never seen a game that even looked like this. When I like tried to play it, I didn't, I wasn't automatically good at it like I was at every other video game. And it completely puzzled me. And I know it's not technically an indie game, but it... It certainly has the energy of an indie game. To make a game and distribute it at this point, this is kind of the compromise that you made, right? It was made with a very, very very small team with a very artistic mindset um i was i was the original one one of those like budget games in japan where it was i don't know i can't yeah i don't know but i i think that this

game has inspired just countless people to like think differently about what a video game can be. So when I think of a game that like is inspiring, does it direct? Are there like many games that are Katamari likes out there? No. But I think if you speak to basically any millennial indie game dev about games that influenced them very early on and got them to think about video games differently,

I think this would be on that list. I think that's probably true. And yet. And yet. We are, I mean, that is the last of the 15 that we've picked. And we've, I think there are three, unfortunately, that will happen. I could be wrong,

but I think there are three that are a stronger case for inclusion give me your three my three right now of the three that we would add are counter-strike gta3 and world of warcraft probably world of warcraft yeah yeah what else would you put there i mean i was looking at like deus ex would be another one and maybe diablo 2 but yeah i think i think counter-strike i think you're right counter-strike gta 3 and wow are just so so important so important um it's it's hard to deny those but on the bright side there is room for fan picks or i guess our picks personal picks as you were as it were and certainly we can share some love for katamari dimasi that way yeah i'm i'm adding katamari from my fan pick and then are you gonna take uh are you gonna pick. And then are you going to take Deus Ex?

Or are you going to take Thief 2? Thief 2 is great. Great game. No, yeah, I would say Deus Ex is probably the one that I would pick as my fan favorite. I think this is good. I think we're making good progress. This feels good to me. And again, like people will, I don't know, man, scrub back. I think this is good. I think we're making good progress. This feels good to me.

And again, like people will, I don't know, man, scrub back. How do you not include Halo? How do you not include whatever? It's tough keeping to a list of 25, man. You have to really go deep to the bone. Yeah. I mean, and like I said, this is all building towards the episode where we actually do this. I think sometimes I've seen some listener feedback where it's like, oh, the process is changing, or how is this official or whatever.

One, it's not official. It's just two friends trying to come up with a list. But two, this is honestly how editorial often works. You keep working the process until you find what what you like. You get a rough draft and then you can clean it all up. So I'm I'm really looking forward to treating whatever the final episode of this series is as kind of like our end of the year episodes. Right. Where it's like a really big episode where we review all of this. And yeah, I think there are going to be some things that get shuffled in and out of it. episodes right where it's like a really big episode where we review all of this and yeah i

think there are going to be some things that get shuffled in and out of it um and i think it'll just be fun to like once we do have get you know the rough draft ready for us to go back and play a lot of those games um and get some you know some feedback so i feel good i think we're good me too i think we're great is that it do we do we're great. Is that it? Did we do it? Yeah, we did it. We did it again. We did it again, baby. Thank you all for listening. This has been another episode of the Rusties.

Required reading list 2000 to 2004. If you want to know more about the required reading list, you can check it out on Twitter. I'll make sure to drop the list that has all of the games that we've talked about. And until next time, this is the Rusties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. I'm Chris Plant. He is...

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