The Besties - The Video Game Required Reading List: 2015-2020 [The Resties]

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

The Resties Required Reading List continues with games from 2015-2020. Yes, dear listener, it's time to pick some games that you've probably played -- and that we've definitely discussed! Our goal is to curate a "must-play" list of 25 games released between 1980 to 2020. Think of it like Video Games 101.  Where do modern hits fit into a list of all-time classics?  Let's find out!Previous picks:85-89 - Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, SimCity95-99 - Super Mario 64, Pokemon Red and Blue, Final Fantasy 7, Starcraft00-04: Counter-Strike, GTA3, WoW05-09 - Resident Evil 4, Wii Sports, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Demon’s Souls10-14 - 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!

Oh, hey everybody, it's me, Christopher Thomas Plant. And it's me, Ross Farsting. And we're the Resties. We're the rest of the best. Discuss the best of the rest with you, dear listener. Thank you so much for being here. It is another very special episode of our Rusty's Required Reading List. The three R's. We were doing these three R's before RRR was.

I don't think that's true. I think we may have hopped on the bandwagon. It was close. I'll give it that. I will tell you all about how this works after the break because there's a whole rigmarole. But you will want to stay around because we're going to talk about some of the best games of all time specifically from the years 2015 to 2020 very recent uh but first you you said you had something to talk about

i got a birthday question for you uh-huh I got a birthday question for you. Uh-huh. When is it okay to not open presents in front of people? So, is this about your child? This is about my child. He's turning two very soon, and I don't want to open presents in front of people.

He's going to... Who knows how he's going to react. He's going to throw stuff on the floor. He might spit on it. Who knows? Who needs that drama? I think this is just some parenting... Who knows how he's going to react? He's going to throw stuff on the floor. He might spit on it. Who knows? Who needs that drama? I think this is just some parenting tips. I don't think you need to open presents in front of people with your kid until at least like five or six. Because kids are super boring unless they are your kid.

Yeah. Or like if you're a grandparent right so if the grandparents are over yeah you've got to open the gift with them but otherwise everyone's winning nobody wants to like they don't need to see your kid open the present but there will be grandparents there well you pull them aside at the end or at the beginning that's the trick you carve out a little time okay yeah but you do it like That's the play. This is pro level. And honestly, I kind of think that's true in big group settings anyway. The process of having to watch other people open gifts to me.

It sucks. It's deeply weird. No one likes it. No, there's so much social pressure that you're putting on the person who's opening it. This applies to like baby showers and wedding shop what do they have wedding parties pre-wedding parties whatever they're called everything and let me be clear big fan of gifts in general yeah gifts are nice great if you can find a way to open one-on-one with the person who gave you the gift a delight though even then sometimes you know like a little a little

awkward because maybe you know like i think like uh christmas gifts that's always a tough one because it's like i got my aunt or uncle a gift i don't really know what they want and then they don't want to make me feel sad so we're both kind of in this like stalemate of midwest politeness. Yeah. You know what the trick is? What? No one is ever disappointed if you go right to the source, Hemmiker Schlemmer.

Oh, yeah? Only the best for Hemmiker Schlemmer. If you want balls that you rotate in your hand for meditation purposes or a foot bath, they got you covered. This is a real testament to a deeply Midwest family that gets uncomfortable with all of these sort of niceties is around the time I think I turned 10 or 11, my entire Kansas City-based family decided that we would just all go in on like a donation gift. That's great. For someone else.

That's fantastic it ruled it immediately took all the pressure away you just understood like i'm not getting anything i'm also not giving anything and all of us feel good and we were like part of something it is i i am a huge fan of it um i love it if you have the opportunity and the means yeah um hey should we actually talk about video games? Let us do it. Cool. Let's do it right after the break.

Okay, we're back. It is another episode of the Rusty's Required Reading List. I will catch you up on what this is and how it works very quickly. Our goal is to collect a list of 25 games from Pac-Man to modern day. So that's 1980 to 2020. These are not the best games. They aren't even our favorite games. It is most definitely not one of those huge top 100 games of all time sort of list.

You can find gobs and gobs of them all over the internet. sort of list you can find gobs and gobs of them all over the internet these are the games that we feel everyone who wants to have a fundamental appreciation of video games should play they will give you a kind of a rich connection to everything else that you are enjoying when you listen to the besties or when you just dive into video games on your own i like to compare it to a video game syllabus for video games 101. Frush does not like that. And then I will normally say. I find that sounds like homework and boring. Yeah.

And I'll say like, oh, but no, maybe it's like 25 games we'd put in a museum. And then you're like. Even more boring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're still working on the marketing. It's 25 games you'd put on a roller coaster. That's, oh yeah. No, I think that's good.

I think that's good. think that's good or like um your first 25 games you know like i think that like if you have if you need this starting point to kind of build your vocabulary to play video games these are a great first 25 metamorph a bit i think i like that i think that's a game it. That was my son's very first game. Oh, I thought that was the name of the show. No, no, I can't take credit. It's a very good iOS game for babies, basically. Sounds nice.

We have already picked 17 games, and I will share them along with the final ones that we pick here at the end of the show, because I want to get right into it. This week, we are picking games from 2015 to 2020 this is the biggest chunk of time that we'll do in the entire show usually we talk about five years this is actually six years um and what a what a busy six years this is could not have

picked a worse time to have to pick uh only two or three games because this is this is video games finding itself period in my opinion i think like the last like 2015 onwards is when video games uh again it's like always tempting to use film like 1960s film where it's it's largely uh toys that have transitioned to like full-on regular uh works of art they're blending and they're doing everything i want a game to do all at once and many games are doing it not just a few each year yeah it's fucking nuts that's that's all i can say about it i don't even know how we want to dig into this last time we narrowed it down to 15 games if that helps before this we were doing episodes where we talked about gobs and gobs and just became impossible

this time we're going to narrow it down to 20 um just because just initially just so we're not talking about every game but but we still will be culling this list ever further until we get down to what is it three two or three yeah probably three for this episode how could we not yeah um do you just want to start in 2015 yeah let's do it okay so 2015 there's a game that didn't even make the top 20 but it's worth mentioning it's bloodborne we know we hear you it's an absolutely fantastic game maybe the best souls game we already have yeah we already have it represented on this list yeah if you're wanting to get that experience it's already here um but something that we don't have on the list is her story which was polygon's game of the year i think in 2015

i think that's right um and i look at her story is making good on this either like ambition and or threat by the video game industry to make video games more like movies um there i think has been this like little sibling attitude with video games for, I don't know, as long as I can remember of being the like art form that had to justify itself as art. And often they did that by doing something I just did earlier in the show, which is comparing themselves to film. And the natural endpoint was this where film and video games blurred together. This obviously wasn't the first time this has been done full motion videos if you've listened to any justin mccrory podcast

you know that these have existed for a long time but this is i think the first time that full motion video games like made sense were like actually interesting games um but i'm how does her story hold up for you you know like over the years i mean it's it's cool it's very cool uh it you know you have a very intriguing story ton told with like a very strong actress um and the format of it of trying to uncover this mystery is very cool i mean it doesn't really outside of san barlo's other games doesn't really have a lot of analogs to other games out there yeah so apart from it being a very cool very well done experiment i don't think it belongs on this list but it is a very strong title yeah i i think that's right and i think when this was on polygon's game of the

year i actually don't know if I was at Polygon. I might have been at The Verge at this point. But I think that there was an assumption that this would become more of a thing as a genre, kind of like when Walking Dead, the episodic version, was blowing up. That was a Game of the Year because it felt like we were watching

the beginning of something new. And then that idea kind of fizzled out. There's still plenty of other FMV games that barlow doesn't make but they none of them are nearly as big as his work and even his work is still compared to the rest of the industry like relatively small um i think it's a great game i think people should play it i think they should also try is immortality the new immortality yeah I think is interesting the I agree I don't think it makes a list 2016 do you want to kick that one off uh sure the witness um was a puzzle game first person puzzle game um from john blow this I guess is similar to her story insofar as it's very well made it has incredibly clever puzzle design uh it's basically like a first person thing and at first you you

think that the puzzle is very simple where it's all just line based stuff but then the way the game design works like new mechanics are layered into these very simple puzzles so maybe you're hearing like a bird tweeting and that's like a clue of how to solve the puzzle that's in front of you once again i don't necessarily see a lot of analogs to other games in the witness although i guess you could say like there's an element of like the koroks in breath of the wilds kind of manifesting in the witness a little bit yeah um not to say that they were an inspiration because the game came out next year but it's a very cool game I just don't know that it had the impact that uh some of the other games on this list had yeah I I think Blow's interesting in that he managed to make lightning strike twice

um he made Braid and he he made braid as an indie game that was on the xbox marketplace where he had like it is a very good game he also had a tremendous advantage because there were just so few games yeah it was one of the first it was like alongside like super meat boy and one of the very very first like when you think about xbla games braid was like in the top yeah but then when by the time the witness came around i mean that was peak steam like there was a lot more competition and uh he managed to do it again i think blow from my perspective has almost been as much of a gift to journalists uh as uh video game enjoyers just because i feel like every few years

we get an interesting profile written about him because he's extremely quirky and his philosophy which is both in his games and outside of his games is a lot um but i agree i for me it's a it's a great puzzle game if you enjoy puzzle games and it's not a must play otherwise yeah I'd agree with that um but there's next up is a game I think will almost certainly make this list I think I hope I think you're right um and that is Stardew Valley so Stardew Valley comes out in 2016 and it is effectively hey this one person really missed harvest moon in farm life simulation games uh that really kind of popped off in the super nintendo era and then it became something so much more i mean to me it has fully usurped harvest moon that oh

yeah it's unquestionably the best farming sim that's ever been made. Yeah, well not just the best, but culturally the Kleenex of this type of game. You know, where it's like when you say this type of game, nobody now is like, oh it's like Harvest Moon, oh it's like Stardew Valley.

I was trying to think of a comparison for this and the closest I could think of was it used to be like Doom likes for first person shooters. And then it became Call of Duty. Yeah. Stardew Valley is not just a reference point from like, oh, there's another farming game. Oh, it's like Stardew Valley. It's now a reference for like any game where you feel like cozy and comforted by playing it.

Yeah. Any game that you play to just like chill out that's a stardew valley-esque experience and so yeah that clinics example is a perfect one because it really has become you know the default cozy game that people think of yeah i also think it it and we can mention it right now because i think they kind of play nicely together. No Man's Sky, which comes out the same year, ended up paving a lot of the very modern ideas of how living games work. Sure.

Way ahead of everyone else. Yeah, I mean, Stardew Valley and No Man's Sky have survived in no small part because of updates. I know Stardew Valley was way more of a critical success at launch, whereas obviously No Man's Sky launched to critical derision. But both of them have basically stayed in the mix

over the course of the last, however it is, seven years because of these free updates they've dropped. And they've only made the game dramatically better over time yeah uh and really come closer and closer and closer to what the creators dreams were for these titles um and it's actually like a apart from being like great for the people that bought it early it's a business model because in both cases the sales for these games spike whenever they do a big update because it's like oh i've never heard of this game.

Look at all the stuff they have. Yeah. So it's completely genius. I think Stardew Valley is, you know, if that's the standout aspect, which I don't think is the only reason Stardew Valley is on this list. I think Stardew Valley does this even better than No Man's Sky does. But both of them are pretty remarkable titles. Yeah. does this even better than no man's sky does but both of them are pretty remarkable titles yeah i don't know how intentional this was but i think the very clever thing they figured out in terms

of dlc and expansions is that there are just millions and millions of people waiting to play your game who have not dove in and the standard idea in the past was you created a fan base and then you actually shrunk it with each new dlc you had and their idea was well we'll just keep going after we'll take more and more bites of the apple because there are so many people that we didn't get the first time around and there's always new you know players entering the space ready to try something and the more you add to the game the more value it is so it becomes more and more and more enticing um yeah terraria for what it's worth is another example i don't think it's on this list but another great example of a game that has followed this model

and been massively successful because of it yeah i also think unlike uh you know the witness or her story, I feel like we see a farming Sim every quarter, maybe not more than that. Like it fully revived the genre. And if it's not farming, it's like, oh, I'm a wizard and I'm collecting potion ingredients. But it's just like a skin for what is essentially a Stardew Valley game. Right.

I mean, his next game is Haunted Chocolatier and it's a stardew valley game right i mean his next game is haunted chocolatier and it's basically stardew valley but you're running a chocolate factory instead of a farm yeah i i this game to me just feels as fresh today as it did when it came out which is a miracle i think i honestly think 20 years from, people will still be playing Stardew Valley. No question in my mind. I think that's right. No Man's Sky is the other one that's kind of on that tier. But it had to keep updating kind of out of necessity.

Yeah, sure. It just didn't launch. It didn't follow through on the promise that it had made ahead of launch so i mean you were following hello games before this game came out right yes can you talk a little bit about like what they were i mean they were they were in very much an indie studio making like neat indie games but like nothing that was setting the world on fire they made a series called joe danger which was like a side scrolling like motorcycle game and they were good games but they weren't like you know major e3 press conference trailer games and then this you know no man's sky comes out as a trailer and everyone's like losing their minds over the prospect of like being able to have this infinite universe at your

disposal and they're doing a lot of interviews saying like oh you know how incredibly unique the experience is and how you know you can meet your friends on the same planet maybe and they were making a lot of big promises and at launch they just weren't able to execute on a lot of them and it just was like a pretty weak launch yeah this was also seven years have made it uh much much stronger game yeah it was the weird period where indies were getting some funding from like sony or xbox right but not fully getting support that a major studio would so yes they show a trailer for no man's sky at e3 i think or maybe gdc and they're basically like you can go anywhere you can see the entire universe there's you know

thousands of planets you'll never see the same i mean honestly it was starfield before starfield like that's what people wanted was like a elder scrolls style game in space and that's what it looked like and it looked like that yeah and then um it didn't make sense because the team was so it was like 20 people small yeah and the head of the studio sean murray was like doing demos and talking about it and didn't have that kind of pr infrastructure that a video game studio typically has and i do not i i want way more transparency from video game studios i think that is like very important at the same time i think there is a value in people understanding like why they get pr trained and why they need to be careful with what they

say what to share versus not like yeah you need to be selective you can't just like shoot off at the hip in the hopes that like everything's gonna work out because people are gonna be spending money according to what you say i i think no man's sky again if you haven't played it play it today it's an amazing experience it's amazing vr experience if you have the setup for it it's amazing on like a steam deck it's amazing on consoles. It's great everywhere, but it took years and years to get to that point. I don't, again, I don't think this game

is going to make our final cut list, but it is tremendous. Yeah, yeah. I think that is spot on. Also, maybe this is apocryphal, but I think Sean Murray mortgaged his house to fund Joe Danger. which i think i wrote

that story did you write that for kataku i think i wrote up that story as a freelancer i love that um uh next up this is such a wild year pokemon go yeah i mean you're still playing this right no i'm not you're not played in about two years oh did fire emblem take it over no the pandemic took it over and i couldn't leave the house that'll do it uh amazing amazing game so it's hard to imagine any other video game anytime soon reaching the level of insanity that this game reached uh where people were sprinting around central park in masses of like hundreds because a dratini spawned like that shit was bonkers i've never seen anything like it

i don't know when i'll ever see anything like it again it's interesting playing it now without the i mean there's still a very strong fan base there's still a lot of dedicated players but it's not the like obviously the talk of every office like yeah morning and stuff like that so i do think an element is now lost and it has become while it's a good mobile game it has become like a much more insular kind of hardcore mobile game um that can be a little bit tough to jump into. I think it's I think for when it came out, it was like if you asked me that year, I'd say 100%. This is like

a world changing game. I think it has simmered since then and they've made so many false starts on other games like it. Yeah, they've tried to basically, I mean, Pokemon Go came from another game called

what was that game called? Yeah, that game. Whatever that game was called. They used basically the technology to build Pokemon Go and then they did a Harry Potter game and they did an NBA game and blah blah blah. So they've used that model a lot and none of them have really done what pokemon go

did which is maybe just a sign of like it was a perfect storm of pokemon go being a perfect fit for the idea of people running around collecting monsters and i don't know that they'll ever hit that level again i wonder if they'll ever reboot it or give it a sequel of sorts maybe that feels like the the play if they had the opportunity i i i agree i again never seen anything like it i mean people were accusing the game of like getting people killed because they were you know walking into traffic or whatever trying to catch a pokemon through the lens of their iphone um it was it was hysteria um but i wonder if the legacy of this game is going to be more about like the data that it collected than the game itself because the company that made it yeah is branched off from it's part the person who runs it branched off from google maps at google

and this is this game is collecting just massive amounts of data about the world around you through your phones um and what they've done with that data i don't know i'm very curious but i think it's very interesting that they continue to make games that are about effectively asking its users to hold up their phones and capture the world around them. Is this the Chris Plant Paranoid Minute? Yeah. Yeah, it is. We're going into 2017 now.

How do we talk about Breath of the Wild? Because we've talked about it so much. Yeah, I don't know that we need to go at length about it. I guess the weird thing about breath of the wild is that its inspiration is obviously felt in its sequel tears of the kingdom which just came out a month ago um there are a couple other games that have used it like the format of it for their own like releases. But largely speaking,

like I think a lot of people were expecting like, oh, every company is going to have their breath, the wild after this game came out. And it hasn't really happened mostly just because like no one can match the raw scope and incredible game design that Nintendo can can throw at a thing yeah i mean and i want to be clear for for the list we're creating it doesn't have to have spawned you know a million clones or ripoffs but i think that's a piece of the wild as because of that like a sort of

turning point for the ambitions of video game developers and i look at tears of the kingdom is like part two of that and that you're right breath of the wild came out and i think a lot of people thought we could do that we could do a breath of the wild in fact we will not even put like our very best teams and all of our money on it we'll just have what was it immortals phoenix rising right like we'll we'll just do that as a type of game and discovered oh these sorts of things that nintendo is making especially in with zelda are just colossally difficult and expensive and take uh immense talent and money and time and r&d and i think that was a learning lesson for a lot of studios post breath the wild it's it's not that we didn't see people try it's that they just didn't pull it

off except for maybe elden ring elden ring is really the only example that I can think of that like massively, totally 100% succeeded in this. Right. And I wonder now with like Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom and GTA 6 on the way next year or the year after, if now we are entering like quadruple A, I don't know. I wish there was a better phrase for that. But this sort of tier of game that is so big and expensive and ambitious and difficult we are entering entering like quadruple a i don't know i wish there was a better phrase for that but

this sort of tier of game that is so big and expensive and ambitious and difficult to make that people don't even try to like do it because it's it's truly out of their scope yeah um and i guess like that that is important i would also say breath of wild significance is that to me it's the first truly great blend of hand like portable console game right like it actually the promise of the nintendo switch is immediately obvious because of this game and i don't know if the switch is as popular if it didn't have this game within its first six months oh yeah no i completely agree i definitely think the switch um owes so much or to breath of the wild and its spot on success yeah i i we can kind of come back to it in terms

of like where if it is on this list or not but yeah if you want to hear more about breath of the wild just listen to the entire besties back catalog because we've talked about it for thousands of hours i do want to mention before we wrap up breath of the wild uh if you're looking for an indie studio trying to pull off breath of the Wild and actually succeeding pretty amazingly uh check out Chia which is spelled T-C-H-I-A uh it's definitely not the like full-on Tears of the Kingdom like you could tell their budget was obviously much more strapped but wow yeah that's like a really interesting approach to how you do Breath of the Wild in a total unique way. Yeah, and you mentioned the budget thing. I mean, that game's just so impressive to me. They seem to really get,

hey, what's the thing that we care about the most? And that seems to be the exploration in that game. Yeah. Yeah, that game rules. It's still just on Epic Game Store. Is that right? It's on PS Plus. Oh, it's on console too.

Or it was on PS Plus for free that year. But yeah, it's on consoles. What a game. Next up, Nier Automata. Have you heard of it? I have heard of it. I played it. Start to finish with all the endings.

You probably want to be the one to talk about it then, right? No. No? Nier Automata may be my favorite video game i don't know who needs to be on this list but i gotta talk about it it means so much to me because it works as a game and a critique of games and speaking of film and what i like about film is it can be two things at once that you are both watching the movie and you're also able to think about the creation of the movie and the mise-en-scene and all the stuff around it and

i think that near does that in a way that few games had up until it and still have quite often since then and by that i mean it doesn't feel like it is a game where it is telling me what I should feel it feels like it's giving me prompts whether that is hey you are now in a level that looks like Galaga or you are in a level that looks like a Mario platform or you are in this different place and alongside you being in a different kind of genre the story has fundamentally changed and the genre of the story has changed. And also the way these characters are behaving has changed. And why? Why did we make that choice?

We were leaving room for you to interpret that. I don't feel like a lot of games have the confidence to do that. And the ones that do, I think, often don't deliver on that that uh that confidence this one does um i love it so much i don't know if it belongs in this list but i think it would be a better anime to some extent no no that doesn't make sense at all and also it is an anime they're making it right now i know and maybe that's the better way to experience a story like that i i i understand your point about it being critique of video games and sort of also being a video game and very interesting i mean i you know i've talked about it before i i think it's it's over long and uh there's a very interesting point that's being made that is

kind of buried underneath a bunch of things that aren't that interesting i think my counterpoint to it would be good as an anime is i don't think the story is like that great like i i think the reason it works is because it is playable and it's toying with the history of video games like quite literally by recreating it so i think if you if you yeah i mean i just didn't find the game play to be that engaging yeah that's i mean that's fine um thank you for letting me talk about it let's talk about a game that will almost certainly be on the list it's fortnight fortnight baby rounding out 2017 the biggest game now still 2023 and we're still talking about it um yeah it's it's fucking wild yeah i mean you

you you're still playing it right you're still playing fortnight um i mean it's obviously worth noting that fortnight a launched as a ridiculous base defense game called fortnight save the world that no one really very few people comparatively play but obviously when the battle royale mode launched uh essentially cribbing what pub g had done before it um it just turned into this whole other massively popular thing um and that game has just like, I guess what's so interesting about Fortnite is just how willing they are to like really constantly tinker with every tiny little aspect of everything in that game, whether it's the map or whether it's the weapons or whether it's, hey, let's do an event with fucking Darth Maul in it. and it just has become part of the zeitgeist in ways that i just never imagined a lot the fact that there are live concerts happening within fortnight um i think even though it is not necessarily the like go-to game i think for like every kid these days i think within it there's so many interesting aspects that like while it's not necessarily the coolest uh it's still one of the most interesting games around and and i'm

constantly very impressed at just the amount of random shit they're able to do and do it really well the fact that they can throw in spider-man web swinging and it's better than any most it's better than most spider-man it's not as good as the like uh most recent spider-man sony game but it's pretty fucking close to that it feels amazing and uh i mean i guess it's the luxury of like throwing just enormous amounts of manpower at a game until it is just like soaring. Yeah. When we were doing Game of the Year for Polygon in 2017,

and especially when we were doing Game of the Decade in 2020, I remember the conversation of Fortnite versus PUBG or PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. And PUBG is largely credited for creating the battle royale genre. But I think the thing that has changed now in hindsight is that genre came. It's not gone, but it is less important.

But Fortnite is everything. I mean, it is it's a it's a battle royale, but it is so much more too. And I think that's why its legacy will go beyond PUBG and why it, you know, even if it started as a PUBG clone, which it certainly felt like when it came out to be like super clear when I, I mean, when we first saw the trailer for Fortnite, the battle royale mode, it really felt like they were just cutting loose from the version of the game that hadn't worked they saw a real opportunity on the horizon and they were going to chase it as fast as they possibly could with all of the developer talent

they already had epic and whether or not that is like quite literally what they were doing they kept going and have like never really slowed down since i mean the cadence at which they add stuff to this game is mind-numbing yeah i do not know how they do it it's like every two to three weeks there's like a pretty significant update it's nuts yeah it i mean it's just huge it's inescapable we we're not gonna add to the list but feel like i should mention red dead redemption 2 um astonishing cutting edge uh systems uh mired by extremely outdated gameplay ideas and a story that i find like comically absurd by the end but come on like this no we we we do have too many games so okay i agree with you it shouldn't be on this yeah like i if you want to climb the same mountain over and over again i

wish you the best well i do that in tears of kingdom for what it's worth but no no well yeah that's true that's true hey you know what it's very cool i just don't dunk me don't ruin my life obra dinn the return of the obra dinn amazing first person detective game that uh i just uh need to go back and play again because i played a bunch but never finished it and now i think i've forgotten everything and i'm dying to go back and play it again um so fucking cool basically the invention of a genre of detective game that again hasn't had a lot of like follow-ups in its style but man it is just like so creative and and wicked i don't know yeah i mean i i i this game stuck out to me when it came out because it was a first-person game where I didn't use guns and used a mechanic

that I just was completely unfamiliar with. I mean, The Witness doesn't have guns. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot. Myst doesn't have guns. Yeah, yeah. Do you know what I mean? There's a lot. They feel precious to me. Each one of them is my baby.

I would say Return of the Ob uber din is by far the best first person game without guns that i've ever played yeah i i think i probably agree with that detective wise um i also feel like it was an actual detective game after batman had kind of i don't know boosted the idea idea of detective gameplay without actually being much gameplay. Where you would go into a room and hit your sensory button and little things would light up. And then you would go touch them and you would learn a little bit of story. And then you would move along. Where this really does ask you to figure things out on your own

did you keep a notebook for this game no no and i should that's what i would do the second time around yeah i mean the game itself is kind of its own little notebook that's true but i think it would really help yeah uh i mean i mean yeah i i'm not sure if it's my favorite first person game without a gun but i will say it is my for my favorite video game in which you play as an employee of an insurance company so i feel pretty confident about that yeah next up uh celeste go ahead amazing uh 2d platformer in the style of like Super Mario World's really gorgeous art, interesting story, incredibly well made from the creator of Tower Fall, Maddie Thorson. I think it's in a lot of ways, while it's not a sequel, I think it feels like the refined version of what like a lot of 2d platformers were

doing before um so i don't necessarily know that it is like required required but it is super great yeah i mean maddie makes nintendo games better than anyone except nintendo yeah like that's that's just the thing of it death strand, the game of the pandemic before the pandemic and the most coherent and fun Kojima game, which I feel even more certain about after we've played and revisited more than Metal Gear Solid games. Yeah, 100 percent. It absolutely rules. And I think it is required playing. And I think it is required playing if, you know, if we did like a second syllabus or a second class after this, we're like, this is advanced gaming where you have to play the really heady stuff. Again, not because it's super smart, but because it's challenging.

I think this would be on that list. I don't know if I would put this on a list of, say, this was one of the first 25 games that you should play. I think there's maybe a little bit too much going on. And I think to appreciate Death Stranding, you kind of have to have a really good grasp of the history of video games. I would certainly put it like if we were doing a roundup of like the most interesting open world games unquestionably yeah this would be on there that's actually a good reason to keep uh near automata off this too now that i think of it and that both these games i think are in such deep conversation with video games at large that they certainly are not like the 25 games that you should play first

to have an appreciation of the medium. They're the games that you, you know, maybe the 25 games you play last. After this, Outer Wilds, which I think I first played as a GDC demo many, many, many years ago and took absolutely forever for it to come out. It finally came out. it made you nauseous you bounced off of it and then miracle of miracles you returned i did a changed person is did you change so much that you would put it on the list yes really i i this is i it would not surprise me if this made the final cut.

Outer Wilds is such an incredible accomplishment that they made this like ticking clock of a mini galaxy, or I guess solar system, that is all working in tandem with one another in such a creative way. This game is, I will never forget this game it is really astounding and i hope everyone has the opportunity to play it and has the experience of trying to like quote solve it without looking stuff up because of all the games that i've ever played that way this was by far the best.

I completely agree. I mean, I think it's a pretty fucking perfect game. Yeah. Everything is getting me all sweary today. We'll come back to it, because I think you're right, that it'll make the final list. That's 2019. 2020, this is a funky one, Kentucky Route Zero.

Really, this game is released over the course of an entire decade but 2020 is when the game ends i love this game more than most anything uh it is my game of that decade i think it is a summation of that decade both in terms of like where video games went. This game started as a Kickstarter and ended as being published by one of those major indie labels, which just shows how those games evolved. I think all the experimentation that it did for free and in between interacts. It did some VR.

It did some art installation. It's so interesting. And I think the kind of journey that its story goes on, and I think it begins with a bit of nihilism. And ultimately, I wouldn't say it ends up with a place of grace, but a place of kind of understanding is just a joy and i felt like i was i felt like i was maturing alongside of the artist making this game as i played it that said kind of goes in the same camp as near automata and death stranding of is this like exactly the type of game that i would recommend for a must playlist or is this like just my personal biases you know shining through yeah i i i it hasn't stuck with me in a way a lot of the other titles on this list have i think it's a very good like game and series i guess and visually unlike anything i've ever played uh and the music is stellar um but yeah just overall i don't know it just hasn't hasn't been with me as much as i thought it would be when it started and maybe that was because it took so long for it to fully come

out that so many people were kind of like maybe using it as a little bit of a guidepost and and pulling inspiration from it before the whole thing was actually out and so when it finally did it it felt like a little bit behind the times yeah i think that's right um two other things from 2020 we have uh hades and animal crossing new horizons um I mean, Animal Crossing is similar to Pokemon Go insofar as I think the moment was the pandemic. It was the pandemic game. There's no doubt about it. No other

game personified the pandemic more than Animal Crossing New Horizons. I think to play it now, you would probably lose a lot of that because you don't you aren't surrounded by other people playing it still a great game it's probably the best

Animal Crossing game but I think it is at this point basically a vibe game and we have a vibe game on the list it's Stardew Valley and it's amazing so yeah I think also my fall off on Animal Crossing is just sharp and that I fall deeply, deeply in love with it. And then I start to feel like I'm wasting my time or quite literally doing work instead of playing a video game.

And I really take a turn in that. That's just not the same for Stardew Valley. turn and that that's just not the same for stardew valley there's there's a bit more meat and story to stardew valley that that i i don't know i feel like i'm being rewarded and a bit more white but like you said the moment was i mean nothing quite like it um and then hades this this is a tough one for me because it's kind of a perfect video game. You know? Yeah, I mean, it's great. But I don't know why I don't feel like I would want it to be on this list because it's kind of perfect.

It's roguelike, which we love. The combat is really good. The art is gorgeous. The music's incredible. The voice acting is killer. The script is really good the art is gorgeous the music's incredible the voice acting is killer the script is really great i guess what what what what would you say hades does that teaches you about video games as a medium i i don't think anything because i well it does it does something it made they made an incredibly good fucking game. Yeah. But I don't necessarily for the purposes

of this list, it needs to be more than that, right? Yeah. And I don't know that Hades is more than being a really fucking good game, which it is. Again, this kind of awakening that I feel like I've been having with Death Stranding and Nier and the like of, oh, some of these games

are what you play after you have this kind of like base level laid. Yeah. That feels like Hades 2 where, how do you marvel it? Maybe we'll do a sequel to this list someday. Who knows? Maybe. Maybe.

The threat stands. I think you're right. I think that's true. We have, I think, five more. Yeah. Before we get into those let's take a quick break and then we'll jump into those and then we'll narrow it all down and you'll walk away very pleased okay we're back we've got five more and these are these are five that you want

to make sure that we talked about so these are kind of scattered across these these six years yeah super mario odyssey came out uh right after breath of wild did like in that same ballpark um but again i think this falls in the line of hades which is like damn this is a good fucking mario game probably the best 3d mario game there is um but is it like breaking wholly new ground i don't think so i think it's doing amazing work with its own ground i would almost say them the most interesting thing today about mario odyssey like if you were to play it today is that luigi mode they added which is actually pretty fucking cool. Do you remember that mode? No.

Oh, is this where you try to get coins? You hide, I think it was a balloon or a hat or something with other players. It was like an asynchronous multiplayer thing where one player would basically hide an object somewhere in these open world maps. And the time it takes you to like find that object would have to be less than the time it took them to place it so it was this weird asynchronous

multiplayer like race game set in the open world uh areas of mario odyssey super fucking creative the rest of the game is excellent but i don't know that it like again breaks wholly new ground as much as just does um the 3d mario thing just super fucking well yeah yeah yeah there's a great um mode in gravity rush 2 that is similar to that yeah take a photo of an area and the person has to find it yeah i like that um yeah what a delight resident evil 7 you also have down here yeah i'm too scared to play this game, but I wanted to put it on here mostly because I think it's a really great example of

how to reboot an established franchise in a really interesting way. Obviously, Resident Evil had been third-person forever, and then they were like, well, I guess Resident Evil Survivor, I think, wasn't, but for the most part, third-person forever. And here they changed the tone of what a resident evil game is they changed the look they changed how it's played and people fucking loved it and it really rebirthed the franchise into this new era that is now like both third person

and first person that's really cool uh again i don't know that it is going to make the list, but I did want to call it out. I also credit to Capcom for taking risks because obviously they've gotten very much in a loop with Resident Evil of making increasingly weird versions of the same thing. In this whole period, I mean, Devil May Cry is doing some interesting things. This game, Monster Hunter, I think finally clicks with a really massive audience. It's just a really interesting window at Capcom. And I think, honestly, it's still going with the latest Street Fighter, which I think has, from what I understand, a really young creative team compared to previous Street Fighters. And I think making big changes with your franchises is scary but you have to do it or else you die see breath of the wild

see breath of the wild uh hollow knight i mean you're the one to talk about this one i mean again i don't expect this to be make it on the list i think it's the best metroidvania ever made it's fucking incredible um i don't know what more to say about it uh we're all still waiting for silk song to come out uh yeah you know if you if the genre interests you um i would either play this or metroid dread or like the two i think most well-crafted and approachable takes on this genre hollow knight is a lot harder than metrodread but they're both uh excellent yeah um we also have control and half-life alex which i think are kind of technical marvels in two different ways and are making use of technology uh that is still pretty fresh and I think still kind of has question marks around it.

Control with ray tracing. Yeah, I think with Control, it's an interesting title just because it's such a weird game and it has a AAA feel to it, but because Remedy made it, they made it like as weird as fucking possible. Yeah.

And in addition, it's got ray tracing out the ass and is gorgeous and uh very cool but yeah i i just wanted to call out control because i i really do think it is a standout title and has um you know really breathed new life into that studio which hadn't had like a smash hit like control in many many years and they'd also gotten out from the microsoft wing yes like i yeah this is yeah an example of maybe it you should give people more creative freedom uh controls like the sort of game that i felt ubisoft or ea made back in like 2007 2008

like the kind of uh assassin's creed mirrors edge days and yeah it's hard to imagine one of those publishers taking this sort of risk these days yeah um and then half-life alex which it's the best big vr game i've ever played i don't know that it's the best VR game experience. I think Super Hot is probably the best VR game I've ever played. But as far as like a AAA huge. Like. 30 hour thing. The fact that I like played and loved Half-Life Alyx. Through the entire thing.

With a giant heavy headset on my face. Is really a testament to how fucking good it is um i don't expect vr gaming to be much of a thing for i don't know i mean it'll it'll continue to exist but on the periphery for probably the next five years um i mean that's the most damning thing i think that can be said about VR gaming, right? Is we've got a new Half-Life game. And people largely don't talk about it. Yeah.

The technology is still not there. It needs to be my glasses. It needs to be as heavy and as small as my glasses. Yeah. And it needs to not be $3,000. Sorry, Apple. It's one of those games that I don't think belongs on this list now. And it could be added to it in 10 years.

Yeah, I agree. But it really depends on which way the world goes. And right now, I am very skeptical of VR being a thing. I mean, Apple really is making the final big go at it and it's hard to believe that's the big go when it costs 3500 um just absolutely bad shit anyway we should pick three games because i got definitely three right i mean dev is it gonna be like probably the hardest three oh well honestly okay i'll tell you the guarantees for me yeah i think stardew needs to Is it going to be like probably the hardest three? Well, honestly, okay.

I'll tell you the guarantees for me. Yeah. I think Stardew needs to be on there. I think. Fortnite. Fortnite needs to be on there. And then it really comes down to outer wilds and breath of the wild. No coincidence.

They're both wild. You forgot about breath of the wild, but it, that's the problem. It's like, do you leave Breath of the Wild off? The game that like has just like, you're right, sold the Switch, is like the most ambitious reboot of a franchise I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. How about this?

Where does that leave us? How about we add all four well here i think we're going to end up going a little bit over but we've said in most in recent episodes that we're going to do a final episode where yeah um yeah we will we form the final list so i think we add all four i think we add stardew valley we add fortnight yep We add Breath of the Wild. And we add Outer Wilds. Yes. That means that we have 21 games, and we have 10 more years to pick from. So in theory, we have four more games to add.

Okay. I'll read the whole list so people know where we're at. From 1980 to 1984, we have not selected games. Hopefully that will be fine because I don't think you're going to need to play many games from that period. We'll see. Again, takes that I say out loud and I can already feel the heat. 1985 to 1989,

Super Mario Brothers, the original one, The Legend of Zelda, SimCity. 1990 to 1994, no selections. Again, in a very important window. We haven't done it yet.

1995 to 1999, Super Mario 64, Collections, again, in a very important window. We haven't done it yet. 2005 to 2009 resident evil 4 wii sports call of duty modern warfare demon souls 2010 to 2014 minecraft spelunky hd hearthstone 2015 to 2020 stardew valley fortnite breath of the wild outer wilds it's a good list of video good list of of games. We do have to figure out the very origins of video games. So that's going to be tricky. And we have to figure out games from the Super Nintendo era. Oh, dear. It is going to be a bloodbath in future episodes. And I can't wait to get soaked in viscera with you.

I actually think we're going to be okay. Yeah? Yeah. You're just going to say Donkey Kong and we're done? Yeah, Donkey Kong. We're done. Donkey Kong math. Oh, perfect.

Mario does painting and Donkey Kong math? Fuck yeah. Any other... Oh, do you have a personal favorite for this? Yeah, it's probably Hollow Knight. Yeah, that makes sense. You know what I'm going to say? I'm going to say Kentucky Route Zero.

Oh, okay. I mean, obviously. I thought maybe Overden or Nier. There's so many good games. I could pick Death Stranding. I don't know. I feel like I'll change every five seconds on this particular list. Any other recs before we wrap up? No, I think we've done it.

Yeah. The only thing that I have is there's a new book out that I wanted to recommend people check out. It is actually coming out, I think, July 11th. So soon. Robert langdon's new adventure and you won't believe what he's up to this time what symbols will he uncover now this book is called the he-man effect how american toy makers sold you your childhood and it is by brian box brown and i think we've talked about Brian's work on previous episodes because Brian wrote Tetris,

the graphic novel, which is like a history of Tetris. If you watch that Tetris movie on Apple and you are extremely disappointed, I have great news for you. This graphic novel exists and it is a million times more enjoyable. He also wrote a graphic novel about Andre the Giant.

But this one I am really excited about. I just started it, so I cannot speak to it being the best or the worst of his work. But, I mean, considering the topic, it seems extremely promising. So, yeah, that's it. Cool. We did it. Cool. We did it. We did another episode. Hey, thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoy the show, you know what you can do? You can leave a review. That helps a lot. Or you can share it with a friend. That probably helps the most. Sharing the show, spreading the good word of the Resties and the Besties, it really, really does mean a ton to us, and we always appreciate it. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant.

You are... Russ Frosty. And this is The Resties, where the rest of the best discussed the best of the rest. Resties!