The Besties - The Worst Games of Our Childhood [The Resties]

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

To follow up on the best games of our childhood, The Resties discuss the worst ones. The funny thing about "bad" games when your kid is that they're often just as formative and memorable as the beloved ones. Join us as we wax poetic on the Sega Activator, bad licensed games, and the infamous SNES Superscope. In the back half of the show, we discuss the best Gameboy that money can buy: the Analogue Pocket. 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 Frustik. And welcome to the Resties, where the rest of the best discussed... Discussed. Ah, damn it, I had it good this time. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Sure, why not?

It's better. I would say that's the best version that we've done thus far. Sure. I'm so emotional. Jay, if you're joining now, this week we're talking about the worst video games of our childhood to go along with the worst introductions which are supplied by me uh if you listen to the best use main podcast which i assume you do if you're listening to this uh you'll know that we talked about the best video games or kind of hidden gems

of our childhood and this is you know i don't want to say it's going to be the negative version because i think i don't know about you but like i love the bad video game memories of my childhood i mean they're very formative they certainly like stick in your craw yes they do they're going to stick in in your ear craws ladies and gentlemen yes uh and then after that we're going to talk about the analogog Pocket, because I think the world's best new Game Boy fits well with games of our childhood. Sound good? Sounds great. Let's do it right after a break.

Okay, so the worst games of our childhood. We each brought kind of like three games slash kind of categories. We did. And before we get into them, I do want to call attention to something. And I should have done it on the main besties, but I forgot. And now I'm doing it now. You might recall when we talked about our favorite childhood memories from the main besties, I talked about a game featuring Baby Mario.

And you crawled around as Baby Marioio and you would get like a star or something and when you did that you would be able to run uh on two legs and and one level you crawled on the ceiling and everyone either thought it was totally made up and i was having a fever dream or they thought it was yoshi's island that's all those people were wrong however they were a small handful of people who correctly sleuthed out the true name of the game that i was talking about which i did not remember and now i know it is bio miracle bokut upa the japanese It is Bio Miracle Bokut Upa, the Japanese-only Konami-developed platformer in which you play as a baby. Technically not Baby Mario,

but that was the game that I was trying to think of and in watching gameplay of it, indeed. It was Bio Miracle Bokut Upa, which is a wild fucking game. And thank you to everyone who found that out. Yeah, we'll share a YouTube link on the Twitter because it looks like a pretty fun game. I think I did, actually, already.

I already did. So if you've been to Bestie's pod, it's on there. Yeah. Okay, now let's talk about the worst games. Okay. Now that we've talked about the best. Do you want to kick it off with with a game sure uh i'm gonna start with i'm gonna start with act razor 2

now act razor 1 or act razor it was as it was called it's a great fucking game a really bizarre game a game that really doesn't have any parallels where half of the game is like a platforming action game and the other half you're flying around as a naked baby angel building buildings and giving bread to random people and uh making roads it's like a weird sim city thing it's like a god simulation right it's like a god simulation but with an action like side scroll or mixed in with that yeah like a god simulation but with an action like side scroll or mixed in with yeah like a god simulation if you were thor the god yeah but like way darker there's like moments where these this couple sacrifices their kid it gets it goes really crazy places anyway did the

kid deserve it no big time not he was was a sweetheart. That's sad. So ActRaiser 2 happens, and this was, you know, I was a youngster. I think ActRaiser 2 came out in around 1993, so I was like 10. And back then I did not do a lot of research, so I didn't know what to expect. But I was like, damn, I love the first ActRaiser. I'm going to get Actraiser 2. Actraiser 2 fully removed the naked baby space city builder. Fully removed it. Gone.

You are no longer an angel. All you are is this guy with wings and a sword. And every single level is just the side-scrolling action parts of Actraiser. Which were fine, but never the thing that stood out to me. I always loved just flying around building roads as this little baby angel. He was great.

And that was gone, and it was so disappointing. It's like the opposite of modern video game development. Like, modern video game development, they'd be like, it would start out as, you know, a side-scrolling beat-em-up, and then be like, hey, for the next one, what if we added your god? And they'd be like, oh, okay.

And then for the one after that, like, what if we also added, like, survival elements? They just get bigger and bigger. Here. Scaled it back. Yeah, I'm guessing that they, you know, the flying baby god element wasn't a big hit. You know, compared to... I mean, it was for the fans, but I've heard, and this is not substantiated, but I've heard that there was like a rogue, like, what is that?

A focus group that came in and was like, yo, action. People want action. Forget about the city building stuff and uh that's what ended up happening i want to say i think dylan cuthbert worked on the sequel i'd have to go back and look at it but um i remember someone tweeting about the fact that like oh yeah i worked on this and it was really disappointing because they totally like gutted everything that made the first one great yeah for people who don't know who that is dylan cuthbert worked on uh starfox and was kind of like a wunderkind very young guy who worked on like some of the most formative games of this

kind of generation um okay so you mentioned you know not doing research. I don't, I mean, I know what was wrong with me. I was a child and I wasn't thinking right. I researched obsessively. I read GamePro front to back multiple times over each month. Great source. Great source. And, you know, I would look at the reviews and reviews and i'm like what are they telling me and it would be like oh you've gotta play this like i don't know like legend of mana you know it's five scary

larrys which is to say like a really great score oh yes now i'm like i don't know because that does look okay but i don't know anything about these legends of mana but i do know about eek the cat i wonder if this eek the cat tie-in game with the saturday morning cartoon eek the cat is gonna be good and it would be like no like one out of five eek the cat so game pro new game pro they knew credit to game pro and then i'd be like, I'm going to Blockbuster this weekend. I can rent one game. And I'd rent Eek the Cat. And that is like a formative memory of my childhood. I skipped so many games that people love now because I was playing like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game or a Simpsons NES game or Eek the Cat.

And the worst thing about these tie-ins is there was always one that was good. Like, there is a good Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade game. I mean, there were a couple. Yeah, it happened now and then. But there was a lot of junk. Yes, that is true. I did want to ask one question about Eek the Cat. He would always say kumbaya

right right but i believe that's right not in the context that you would say kumbaya because he'd say it as an exclamation like something crazy had just happened and not the chill kumbaya like the meditative kumbaya what do you think what what should someone say as a catchphrase in this scenario i mean holy cat would have worked i don't know i'd have to come up with like an original catchphrase for eat the cat i'm just saying i think he picked the wrong one kumbaya like it'd be like like say eat the cat and this applies really to any character but we'll use the cat sure they go through their 30 minutes of hijinks they live to see another day and instead of saying kumbaya they shout die new that would have been enough yeah i think i think that would be it would be the equivalent of like

no i'm gonna stay on this it would be the equivalent of like a ghost popping out at you and you screaming namaste that's the equivalent of this a ghost popping out at you and you screaming namaste. That's the equivalent of this. No, that makes sense. It's bad. It's bad. How many people do you think are listening to this right now and going, what the fuck is Eek the Cat? And why have they talked about it for more than anything else on this episode?

That's a valid question. But those people are going to do some research and learn much about the mid-90s cartoons. That's true. Do you feel like people are maybe a little spoiled today when it comes to tie-in games? Like that they don't just, like, just really stink? They are. I feel like there are a lot of bad tie-in games, but they just happen on mobile. But, like, bigger games do not happen as often because they're too expensive to shit out.

bigger games do not happen as often because they're too expensive to shit out so yeah back in the day you would just like hire like 10 people and tell them hey we were working on a new i don't know asterix and obelix and we need uh we need i mean fucking golden i was made by 10 people like back in the day you could make those games with a small team it was pretty wild um yeah no it's a different era there are just aren't as many times i mean there are franchise games it's like guardians of the galaxy and stuff but in terms of like actual tie-ins like oh a movie's coming out and alongside of it here's the gamization of that movie does not really happen anymore which is we don't get like a Star Wars video game where you fight, well, what is it?

Spider, Scorpion, Darth Vader. That was in a Star Wars movie? In a game. What? Do you not know about this? Oh my God, no. Oh, there's a Super, yeah, at the end of the Super Nintendo,

I think it's Empire Strikes Back. Oh, Super Empire Strikes Back, sure. Yeah, you fight like a insectoid Darth Vader. Whoa. Yeah, it rules. The positive of this is there's just zero oversight. Somebody's like, I don't know, video games, do what you want. Just make sure it comes out within a week of the release date.

And they're like, okay, sure, whatever. Yeah. Okay, should I jump into my next yes please thank you that was a nice little detour uh i'm gonna bring a group of games that you sort of talked about tying games i'm gonna talk about shitty three game 3d games that tried to be mario 64 but were not nearly as good as 64. Um, one of them is Gex 64, which I believe that I've talked about on the podcast before, but just to remind people, Gex 64,

I bought without doing any research, played it for five minutes, realized it was so bad that I went straight back with my mom to the Toys R Us. The guy wouldn't let me return it. So I cried and said it was broken. It didn't work. And it broke my N64, a lie. And he let me return it.

So a horrible game. Gex in general is pretty brutal to play. It's this like wise talking gecko who is not selling insurance. He's just like doing spy shit but uh this was the first time i think that they had gone 3d and man just like not fun at all super stiff the same voice lines over and over again brutal yeah he kind of was uh before him there was james pond yeah and bubsy falls into that group yeah but i mean where it's like i'm a mascot but also i'm i'm a spy yeah it's like wait wow that's true yeah james why

did you do that um so yeah i see you have bomber man here yeah bomber man 64 not as bad as geek 64 actually it's an okay game but it was also that very early era of N64 where it was like, I will buy any 3D game to try it out because I want to recreate the magic that was playing Mario 64 for the first time, and nothing came close. So it was just this like,

yeah, this is okay. I'm like playing a lot of it, but it just was not very good it just it felt stiff and uh i mean bomberman games are only fun with other people and i had no friends so i'm so lonely so did you play glover 64 i didn't play it but i I am familiar. There was a glove. Yes, your glove, a four-finger glove. And you have a ball and you move the ball around a 3D space. It's a bad, it's a bad game. Yeah.

But my experience with this, and there are a handful of these games. I call them Ohio games because when I had to go to see my family in Ohio during the summer, I could not bring my video game systems with me. So I had to make do with whatever was available. So that would be, there was an old Nintendo entertainment system in my grandparents' house that had a copy of Bo Jackson Baseball, which I played into oblivion. Same with Super Mario Bros. 2,

which was my favorite Mario Brothers game, just because it had to be. You had no options. Yeah. Like I said, I had to play it all the time. And then Glover, it was available for $10 in the bargain bin at a Toys R Us. Good deal. So I got it for my cousin for his birthday.

And then for years, way too many years, I would hijack his 64 and just play through Glover because it was the only game he kept. Makes no sense. That is bizarre. Yeah, he didn't even like it. He just kind of got rid of everything. My best guess is he gave his games, like traded them to other people for other stuff.

Yeah. And then just couldn't find a home for Glover. No one has a home for glover that's true except for i guess people were trying to make a sequel for it without getting the rights to glover which raises a lot of questions like how much could the rights to glover really cost and also like is there a second glove, actually, that makes a lot of sense. It does. Co-op. Oh, I don't know.

What was the tagline? What was the tagline for Glover? Yeah, yeah. Give this guy a hand. That wasn't it. No glove, no love. Oh, was it? No glove, no love.

I love it. It just rhymes. It doesn't really mean anything oh it means something okay um okay here's here's here's my second one um did you ever see the sega activator no so i will try to describe it to you i believe it's a hexagon it is a shape that you would put on the floor a big plastic hexagon okay put on the floor right and you would stand in the middle of it and it shot up i'm assuming like infrared lasers up from the hexagon sure so that when you moved your hand over a different side of the shape, it would trigger a button press in the game. It was like Connect 1.0.

Connect 0.01. Sure. So what it made it look like when you saw the commercial was like, oh, you are going to play Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis. You are going to put the Sega Activator in front of you and you are going to fight to the death and it will be like one-to-one in the game. In reality,

it was none of the above because, again, you had to control an entire controller with your body. So, not only were you like you could hit punch sure but you also had to communicate that you wanted to move like up or left or right so if you wanted to input a combo it was more of just like a uh interpretive dance yeah it was like a bop it yeah yeah exactly

and it uh similar to your experience i i i saw the reviews, knew it was not going to be great, but was convinced somehow because marketing rotted my brain that it would work. I plugged it in. This was like the nicest gift my parents got for me for Christmas of any Christmas. Plug it in. Try it for five minutes. Instantly know that I have made a colossal mistake yeah but then have to basically perform that i love it and that it works for the next like week to not insult my parents yeah oh there you're, sweet little boy. Yeah. You're a sweet little Chris Plant boy.

Also, I was like, I did not exercise a lot during this period of my childhood. Sure. So I was winded most of that week. It was a rough time. And then what happened? You just never touched it again? Oh, yeah, I hit it. I broke it down and I hit it under my bed.

Yeah. And I must have just told them that I let a friend borrow it and they never gave it back and like, oh, I blame them. But yeah, there's a video of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, the film critics, using the Sega Activator. Did they get money from Sega for that? I think they were doing like a, it was like one of those Christmas time, film critics using the Sega activator. Did they get money from Sega for that? No, I think they were doing like a,

it was like one of those Christmas time. What's happening in the world of video games. Yeah. And it's them boxing each other in, uh, Roger Ebert seems very confused and exhausted. And Gene Siskel seems just extremely proud of beating the living shit out of uh roger evan in a video that's his dream that was always his dream that's true that's true thumbs up okay what what is your

what is your your final thing my final thing is the super scope the super scope i think this was like a it was like a it looked like a rocket launcher it looked yeah like a, it was like a, it looked like a rocket launcher. It looked, yeah, like a bazooka, like a shoulder mounted bazooka. And it was basically, you know, on the NES, they had the zapper, which was like a pistol for duck hunt. This was the Super NES version of that. And it looked like a bazooka. And there were a number of games that you could play with this bazooka type device on your shoulder uh you know they're all like shooting light gun games basically the technology was exactly the same as the as the zapper the difference it fucking sucks to keep a bazooka on your shoulder while you're playing

video games it's not fun at all it's not accurate and um all the games kind of sucked and then suddenly i had this horrible plastic thing in our house and like same deal with you i played it for like a week trying to like convince myself that i had made the right choice with my brother and it never clicked and i just felt stupid like it was it was like a big gift for us it It was like a really big deal. And I felt like an idiot. And I was, I, I was, I grew up to never make that mistake again. Cause now I do all the research and I make sure what I'm going to be playing is great. Unless I have to play a bad video game. Never.

Never. Um, yeah. Were bazookas. Is a bazooka still like a thing for like people now i feel like a bazooka like when we were a kid it was like a bazooka is like the coolest thing in the world yeah and i don't think are you talking about toys are you talking about like the the very idea of a bazooka i mean it i mean the closest analog is in the real world is a rpg a rocket propelled grenade yes essentially that and it's used quite a bit in war yeah i

guess in a piercing games i guess i don't know i think of like anytime in an imaginary play with friends you'd be like oh you've got a water gun well i've got a bazooka yeah it was the it was the ultimate it was the nuclear option without being nuclear it's true it's true anyway here's my final one down memory lane as we go pit fighter did you did you yeah no i i played it in the movie theater oh basically at like they had like an arcade pit fighter it was terrible yeah so before mortal combat there was pit fighter and it was like one of the first two or three games to do that thing where they put an actor in front of a green screen or blue screen i think was in this case and photographed them and then animated the characters using photos of real people yeah um i did not play it in the arcade i played it on the

sega genesis the only selling point of this game was the lifelike photos in the arcade version the fighting was atrocious yeah it was really bad punch kick not much else uh the sega genesis version didn't have that lifelike visual look uh and it also didn't have good fighting so it was just bad but i this was the age of uh john claude van damme this was the age of blood sport being the only thing that my friends wanted to watch was their brother's vhs copy of blood sport um and we just played it because there was nothing else and that's how i feel about all of the mortal kombat like predecessors but also like all those clones i have a real soft spot for these games that are not good but they saw the mortal kombat hype and they're like let's go for it let's dress up a series of like actors you know working actors in st louis or chicago or wherever the game studio

is at let's get them to uh look like i don't know like an alien a chef and um a dj at a rave and we'll just have them fight yeah it was pretty like 70 bucks yeah it was pretty easy to just like use the model because it's not like you needed like a license you didn't need like the nba license or whatever you just like copied the format i mean there were doom clones as well like everyone was sort of of taking the basics of something and then making a shittier, cheaper version of it. And yeah, there were a lot of Mortal Kombat clones. I don't remember liking any of them. No, and it was also a thing that's, I guess, hard to believe now, but the whole selling point was like,

oh, it looks like real life. Yeah. Because they're photos of real people and now i i don't know what the appeal would be for like revisiting it unless you had really bad nostalgia yeah do you think this is the like most i walked up skill this is the most i walked uphill both ways to school type of episode that we've ever done. In so far as we're very old. Yeah, it feels like very like I can't imagine listening to this and being under the age of like 25 and being like, oh, my gosh, these these these geezers.

Well, I also kind of wonder whether people that are like in their teens and 20s now are playing very many bad games. Because there are so many resources to tell you whether something's bad or not that I feel like most people are not just like buying stuff sight unseen. I also just don't feel like that many bad games get made. That bad? You mean that bad? Yeah, like this bad. Yeah, and it's like, I mean, you can always find, you know, just go on Steam and see the 30 games that got released today. But I mean, anything that people are mildly aware of or actually gets a hard copy of that game,

they can be rough and they can be not great. But they're not like, oh, this is borderline not playable. Yeah. Right? Like that Superman 64 is the one that always comes to mind. Like, I can't believe that this is a thing that people put out into the world. And they asked for money for it. But then again, Battlefield 2042.

Yeah, that's a good point. That's true. Got them. That's true. That's true. You got them good. I'm sorry. Well, we did it.

That was, you know what? Like I said, it makes me miss some of these. I sincerely want to go back and play some, like, bad Simpsons NES games tonight and just see like how I like it. I mean, you have the device to do it. That's a good segue. I do. How about we talk about that right after the break?

Sounds good. Okay, I'll let you steer this because I feel like you are more of a pro classic gamer. You think that's true? I don't. I feel like when it comes to something like a game boy games i feel like you might have me beat i did play a lot of game boy games and and the thing that we're going to be talking about and we've talked about a little bit on uh main

besties i know griffin mentioned it in passing is the analog pocket which is a handheld device that was made by a company called analog the company is famous for producing these um consoles that basically will run old cartridges just like you plug it in and the old cartridge works using a technology called mister that i'm not going to explain here because i only halfway understand it and chris grant is not here to explain it for us but the big news is that they've this they've gone ahead and released the analog pocket which is their first handheld console and it is specifically designed to run games from the game boy game boy color game boy advance game year era of games um some of those you need an attachment to actually run the cartridges but it will run all of those and um yeah so i've been using mine for i guess probably a month now probably you're the same yeah about that yeah um it is a very interesting device it uh is like the most high-end version you could of like playing

those games from that era so it's this weird dichotomy of like these are very generally very simple games like if you play a game boy game it's pretty simple but you're playing it on like the best possible screen with like very fancy software driven filters trying to like recreate the accuracy of what it was like when you originally played it, but not even because when you originally played it, you played it, let's say on a Game Boy that didn't have a backlight and you were trying to use the streetlights as your parents were driving to like light your game of Samus 2. parents were driving to like light your game of samus 2 so you couldn't save and you had double a batteries that were gonna die any minute right so it sort of smooths over a lot of the like really pain in the ass aspects while making it possible to play these old games yeah i mean for example with the screen i believe it's four times the resolution of the original Game Boy, but it's the same aspect ratio. So it looks just like the Game Boy did, but it has four times as many pixels. So it's extremely, extremely, extremely crisp.

Yeah, it's very sharp. Whereas if you were to go back and look at like an original Game boy screen there is some mushiness to it yeah yeah the best i can explain it yeah and it doesn't lose some of the things that when you play these games on an emulator they they kind of disappear like i don't know the effect but it's like a ghosting or flickering effect uh that can happen if you see a ghost in a certain games it was used, but it's a hard thing to emulate. And this version of it, the Analog Pocket using Mister, again, it effectively recreates the exact same setup as an original Game Boy.

It is not emulation in the traditional sense that you think of emulation when you are playing it on a PC or even on any of the other handheld devices that you can buy on Amazon. Yeah. Now, a couple of things to note. One, this is not me like bragging, but these are like more or less impossible to find right now. The pre-orders for this, I think, go to 2023 at this point. We ordered ours two or three years ago. I think it was early to mid-2020 is when...

Was it? I think so. You think it was 2019, maybe? It was a long time ago as a story. Yeah, it was a long time ago. And here's what I'll also say. It's not a perfect experience right now. It's a little bit janky uh just me you know cartridges work fine but there's some the software is definitely not finished they've

been very uh up front about the idea that it's going to take a month or two before most of the bells and whistles are actually working in the software so you can run the games but for example there's features with like saving like backup saves and stuff like that that just aren't working right now and the community is sort of working its way towards making you know fan software this thing can run like homebrew if you want to like design your own game for it you could do that too but the community is still like just kind of getting the getting to grips with the hardware so i feel like there hasn't been very much uh movement on that front apart from like the community kind of recreating a lot of games

to work natively using like the os do you have any games that you went back to? Yes. What are they? So, I have a tough time going back to Game Boy era games. There aren't too many of those games that I think hold up. If you play Super Mario Land, for example, it's just a shittier version of Super Mario Bros. There's really no reason to ever play it. But there are a few games that I like totally love and will always boot um the Mario Golf game on Game Boy Color fantastic I do not have it on a cartridge on Game Boy Advance if I did I'd be playing that non-stop amazing game

um I also want to call out you talk about kind of tie-in games the metal gear solid game on game boy color is holy shit so good like one of the best metal gear solid games ever came out on game boy color which is very bizarre but it just uh captures everything that i love about metal gear solid without being kind of totally burdened by the like shitty parts of Metal Gear Solid games, which are like overlong cut scenes and kind of cringy writing. Here it's just like a really good stealth game with interesting characters and upgrades and great pixel art. Really amazing. It looks beautiful.

It looks really, really nice. What about you um uh i went and tried this game hey uh hey on kyo alien okay you ever heard of this no so i i had kind of a list of like oh i should go and try these game boy games one day and then never did anything with it. And then it accumulated them when I saw like, oh, I saw this at a shop for five bucks, you know? So I was excited to finally give this a try. It's pretty great. You are, from what I understand, a police officer and aliens are attacking your city.

Okay. And you dig holes, which they fall into, and then you cover them up with dirt interesting and that's the whole game and it's kind of like it's a top-down view so it kind of like dig dug yeah that's pac-man it's not like somewhere between those two um and i'm yeah i'm really i really like it um it's one of those games that I think I will play more once the software for the analog is all fixed up because I am kind of waiting for them to figure out all the save state issues.

Yeah. But yes, that, and then I believe it's called The Legend of the Fisher King. Oh, yeah, sure. Is it? Yeah, I think it is called that, yes. It can't be Legend of the Fisher King. I think it is Legend of the Fisher King.

Because Fisher King is a movie. I know. No, it's Legend of the River King. Oh. That would be such a different movie. I've seen the Fisher King. Yes. Yeah, no.

Legend of the River King, which is, there's a game boy color version of it that is great i think this is actually available on switch if people are curious i think maybe maybe not um uh it was definitely available on 3ds and it's just a great fishing rpg if you like really basic fishing mechanics in your video games and then want that kind of, I guess, Mario Tennis RPG style thing that was going on at the time, this is a great option. Really recommend it. There is one game that I have not played yet, but I keep hearing people talking about it. And it is The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls. What? Have you heard about this no it is a japanese only

game it never came out in the u.s and it uses the lynx awakening engine it came out before lynx awakening and apparently it's really fucking good oh yes you're like it's really interesting you're not a frog you're like a person at least i'm going off of the box art here but um everyone's like real everyone says this is like the like sort of forgotten game boy era game because links awakening sort of gets a lot of attention as like the must play game boy game and this was the predecessor to that um is there there's an english fan translation uh there is i've heard that the patch is still a little squiffy in terms of like running smoothly but this is like a internally developed nintendo game using the links awakening

and it's like an alternate reality that just no one ever experiences outside of Japan. And it's very, very cool. I'm very much looking forward to playing it. I'm looking at the Wikipedia page. Did you know that several characters from this game appear in Link's Awakening? No. That means that they should be in Smash. Definitely.

Actually, you know what? Looking at this Wikipedia, main protagonist appears as a cis-trophy summer character in Smash Brothers. That doesn't surprise me. Man, I was so disappointed by all those Smash

DLC characters. Talking about a grumpy old man, like, none of that was for me. None of it. it kingdom hearts don't give a fuck uh give me give me the frog boy from the who the frog the bell told that's true the the cover art for this is really really nice it's gorgeous. Yeah. I want a copy of this on my wall. I know. It's frameable.

It's very frameable. Okay. I think we did it. I think that's the Analog Pocket. It's a great little thing. I think we'll be talking about it more once it gets cleaned up. You know? Yes.

Maybe as a Rusties, we can talk about for whom the frog bell. Oh, that'd be fun. It'd be nice, right? Yeah. I think that'd be good. Should we do some read or mail really quick, and then we can get to our recommendations? Yes. Okay.

This one is from Joe. If Doom is the embodiment of metal in video games. What is or would be Ska? Oh, I mean, what immediately jumped to mind was Tony Hawk. But maybe that's because Ska is in it. Yeah. But I guess metal is in Doom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, I think that probably is the fair comparison, right?

Because Doom literally just has metal in it. Yeah, I think that probably is the fair comparison, right? Because Doom literally just has metal in it. Yeah. I think you're right. I wanted to say something kind of goofier, but I think you nailed it and won. Did it. This question is from Anthony. Is Vampire Survivor and Snake RX a look into what phone games are going to turn into over the next year? So, Frush, have you seen Vampire Survivor?

No. Oh, my gosh. So, Vampire Survivor, I mean, SnakeRx is a good comparison here. SnakeRx, we talked about, I'll get this first, we talked about this in a previous episode. It's like Snake, the game Snake, that used to be on every nokia phone back in the day speaking of being old uh except for you uh could have combat and you added powers to your snake you added like different kind of like characters effectively in your little group vampire survivor is another game where there are just massive swarms of enemies 2d top down that are i guess kind of isometric that are attacking you and as you kill them you just keep getting upgraded powers so you're just moving

around kind of like i made a game with zombies in it for okay us and nobody else um and uh but the the reward system of these upgrades is, like, very cheeky. Like, a big treasure box comes across the screen, and I think, like, balloons and gems fill the screen. It's very popping bubble wrap, opening a can of soda, makes you feel good sort of thing. Right. I think these, I guess, I don't know what to call them other than distraction games because they're not idle games they're like games that just you know they're pure it's just the dopamine hit of a video game yeah um i don't know if i think that's like where mobile games are going

but i do think we will see more of those and I could see those being like a thing that pops up on Game Pass because they seem like games that you only need a person or two to create them. But they can be very addictive to a large number of people. I also think like Steam Deck will be a big home for them. Yeah. Yeah. But like in terms of mobile games, I mean, I think the direction that mobile games are going, I guess maybe not in the next year, but I was going to say it's just game games, right?

Like it's Genshin Impact. I don't know if that's fair for the next year because I think it's going to take a little while. But, you know, we talked about the Microsoft Activision acquisition and the future for Microsoft is getting Game Pass on your phone and letting you play whatever you want on it. And then maybe porting things directly with King, who are the people who created Candy Crush. Yeah, I think you're still going to see, like phone games coming out, but not as frequently. Whereas you will see cloud-based gaming on phones.

I think that is just going to become the norm where it's like, oh, instead of pulling out your Switch, you're pulling out your phone to play whatever. One more question. this is from nanu when do you predict the next gen consoles will be quote worth it uh okay so if you don't currently have a next gen console which i assume you don't based on the question i think the best way to do this is if you currently you have a whatever and by next gen obviously we're talking about like series x playstation 5 if you have a current gen console playstation 4 xbox one what have you it's really once the games start running painfully bad to you that you should maybe consider upgrading and to you is the big part here and to

you is just totally subjective like you might not notice the difference between 60 fps and 30 fps or you might not notice screen tearing for example some for some people that's like eye bleeding territory you can't deal with it but other people they have you know they're having a good time so who cares because all of these games are coming to both you know it's really up to you and whether you can tell the difference between that i certainly can i get a lot of value out of like playing games on next gen consoles because i'm very very picky when it comes to that stuff but i think most people probably can't and that's great that means you can like ride the wave of the last generation and play all these great games

and new games so long as they run fine i don't know that for example like god of war ragnarok is going to run super great on a playstation 4 launch device like probably going to be pretty clunky but maybe you can't even tell the difference so if that's the case go go with god like live it up yeah this isn't the perfect metaphor comparison but it reminds me of like uh wine like if you only drank 10 to 20 bottles of wine or cheaper because trader joe's is down the street and tastes great you're gonna be totally fine with $10 like cheaper bottles of wine right yeah and the the problem with once you start spending more money on wine or on video game graphics is it does i think get to this diminishing returns part um where become maybe like us, where you start worrying about PC gaming with high-end GPUs because you can spot the difference between 1440p and 4K graphics.

Or like ray tracing. I'm like, I care about this stuff a lot. Gun to my head, I can't tell when ray tracing is on or off. I really can't. I've tried. I can't. So like everyone has their like blind spots and if you have that in this case blind spots are good because it means you can enjoy stuff at at its height without worrying about like what you're missing out on because you're really realistically not missing out on much yeah i think i think that

is same token never buy expensive headphones because the second you hear really good audio from really good headphones, you will be disappointed to go backwards. So never buy those headphones. That is a really great advice because- Isn't it? Yes, that is the advice to end all advice

because it really does ruin it. Yeah, it sucks. That's a good point um okay you got any recommendation for the week uh i was thinking about it i i don't think i have anything new mostly i've just been playing um fortnight and because of that i learned about a song called dance monkey which i hadn't heard about. But now the fact that I'm learning youth culture through Fortnite is extremely funny to me. So I don't particularly like the song, but they seem nice enough. It's not for me.

But people got really excited because they added an emote with Dance Monkey. So that's what's been going on in my life. Fortnite is a really good game though and a lot of fun highly recommend it wonderful uh because i want to go even older skewing i watch bringing up baby i've seen it have you seen it this might be the first chris plant snobby pick not a snobby pick because i've seen it but it might be the first one that i've actually seen and it is a blast i actually really really like this it's a delight it's carrie grant and katherine heppern and it i it is the proto manic pixie dream girl movie yes uh which i mean i don't know if it's fair to say that because that's just what a lot of screwball comedies were then all the way up to what's up doc with barbara streisand it was a different type of thing than the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind era of this but what a delight

and what a terrifying movie to imagine being filmed because there is a leopard in it and i keep waiting for it to like eat everyone on the screen you want you want to give the quick quick premise quick pitch on what it's about the premise is there's an uh uh well they call him a zoologist but i would assume he's an archaeologist who uh is trying to get funding for his dinosaur exhibit at a museum and then just happens to come across katherine heppern who is well i don't want to spoil it who's relevant to the plot yeah and then she gets a leopard in the mail and she calls him over to help her take care of it and by the way he's supposed to get married tomorrow to a different woman. Yeah. It's one of those plots that only in a classic movie, you know, like it would not work today. But when you're watching it and it's in black and white and everybody's just having a good time, you're like, sure, why not?

Of course, the thing that the thing that stood out to me about that movie when I saw it was how many scenes take place with the leopard for sure definitely on set right next to the stars of the movie in like really dangerous fashion like this could have gone south really quick sometimes chewing their clothes yes like the leopard is in the car with them the leopard is in the hotel room with them. Very easily could have gone bad. Yeah. And also like two of the biggest stars in the world. Yes. You know, it's not like these people were just, you know, they would do anything to get in a film.

Yeah. Yeah. It's fun though. It is a laugh. It is fun. It's very fun. Screwball comedies. Turns out pretty good.

They don't make them like they used to you know that's what i like to say uh okay recapping what we talked about game wise and everything wise we talked about oh my act razor 2 for the super nintendo we talked about tie-in games for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, and of course, Eek the Cat. We talked about 3D platformers in the Mario 64 era, including Gex 64,

Bomberman 64, and Glover. We talked about the Sega Activator, a proto version of the Microsoft Kinect in some capacity. We talked about the super scope which was a light gun for the super nintendo we talked about pit fighter and uh just in general mortal combat predecessors and clones and then we talked about the analog pocket and you recommended people try metal gear solid i recommended that they try, I already forgot its name.

The Alien Game. Yeah, The Alien Game. Hyankyo Alien. And you also mentioned The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls. Yes. Which apparently there's an English translation out there that people can try if they really want to. We also talked about Fortnite and the song Dance Monkey, which Frushik keeps telling me is with the Youngs,

and I am convinced it is not, and it has been around for years. And I also recommended checking out Bringing Up Baby, which I believe is on HBO Max right now. If you want to give it a watch. And that's it. We did it. Did it. Do we know what we're doing next time?

Steam Deck games? Is that that week? Wow. I mean, they keep telling us that Steam Deck's going to happen. I don't want to get my hopes up. Some people do have them. Really? Some people have them.

Yeah, developers have them. Well, yeah, sure. Not normies like us, but developers have them. Yeah, I guess I'm just like really skeptical that it's going to happen, but let's stick to it. I hope it's good. I hope it's good. I really hope it's good. I think we'll keep it under an act of radical optimism that this thing is going to actually ship.

Fair. Okay, that's it. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, Fresh, for being just my number one best pal. Oh, you're welcome. You can follow us. You're top three, definitely. Top three?

I'll take it. I mean, I assume that includes your wife and your child. It does, it does. It's a pretty good ranking. I won't tell you the order, but... You know what? I would actually be concerned if I was in the top two there. You can follow us on Twitter at TheBestUsePod.

You can leave a review on Apple Podcast or on Spotify if you want. Or you know what? You could just share the show with a friend and some family because that does us a huge solid. And that's it. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Resties, where we celebrate the best of the rest. That wasn't what you said at the beginning. And done.