The Besties - Video game season is here! [The Resties]

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

The annual video game deluge has begun. This week, we played not one, not two, but three inventive new games. Arcade Paradise asks players to split their time between running a laundromat and launching a local arcade. Rollerdrome mixes Tony Hawk's Pro Skater with Max Payne. And Drainus is to R-Type what Stardew Valley is to Harvest Moon. What does that mean? Listen to the show and find out! 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 Glantz. My name is Russ Froshtick. Welcome to the Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week, we are talking about a grab bag of fantastic indie games. I think these count as indies, right? They're all relatively. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

No, definitely. Yeah. Not from big studios. We've got Arcade Paradise, Roller Drome, and Drainus. All three, I think, are somewhere between good and absolutely fantastic. Yes. So I am looking forward to digging into those. But before we do that,

we have a debate between you and I. And I think we should turn it to the audience. Yeah, I'll give some background. So I was writing a piece about Curse the Golf for Polygon, which, you know, obviously we just talked about Curse the Golf on Besties. And the headline

I came up with was Curse the Golf has history's Hardest Video Game Golf Course. And Chris Plant piped up and said, there is a grammatical error in that headline. And I read it about five or six times, and for the life of me, couldn't come up with where the grammatical error was in that headline. Plant, please tell the people where the grammatical error is a level can't be hard it can be difficult like material like steel

is hard a barbecue grill is hard video games are difficult yeah but also don't you think that they came up with that term like it's a hard mode has been used to describe video games forever. Yes, but that's because people who made video games in the 80s, you know, like, very talented. Not always, like, the smartest writers, you know, out there. That wasn't their skill set. Okay, but if in language for 40 years people have been using hard in that way to describe video games, don't you think language evolves in such a way that we can now describe video games as hard and not worry about a pedant showing up and making fun of us? start is you're actually right and there's not really a debate because like you're right all you have to do is say language evolves and i'm like yeah i am being wrong here fine you're like do you have any of those things in high school english where like the teacher hammered it into

you so hard that you like you just can't get it out of your head everyone has that thing there's always that you know the classic version is like maybe this is not the right thing but like frankenstein's monster versus frankenstein like we know what you're fucking talking about like good versus well like whenever somebody asks how you're doing and i'm like good and they're like i'm doing well and they like superman does good is what people say what assholes say god i am that asshole oh no it happened oh okay let's talk about video games okay okay so we have three games to talk about really two and then i'm gonna just sprinkle in a little

bit of drain us which i hate saying yeah it sounds like terrible drain the anus oh no i thought it just sounded like drano you had to take it to drain the anus terrible no but the two that we put some time into together this week arcade Arcade Paradise, Rollerdrome. Yes. Which do you want to talk about first? Let's do Rollerdrome. Okay. I thought you chose it because you just couldn't wait.

No, no. I mean, I can jump in if you want. Sure. I mean, I can explain it. Yeah, explain it. Explain it. So Rollerdrome can jump in if you want. Sure. I mean, I can explain it. Yeah, explain it. So, Roller Drone is Tony Hawk Pro Skater with guns. I mean, exactly right. Like, almost to a comical degree.

I had seen trailers for this game. It looks like 1970s sci-fi where you are a roller blader? Skater? No, skater. Skater. There are four wheels on those rollerblades. Yes, and you're wearing like a cool little helmet. It's very like 70s futurism.

I mean, you're wearing, it's like what you would wear at a roller derby, basically. Yeah, yeah. And the whole game is obviously very inspired by roller derby as well. Yes, and rollerball. Yes. And you do tricks. I mean, it's just Tony Hawk. You roller ball yes and you um do tricks i mean it's just tony hawk

you you go up ramps you do tricks you grind the only real difference is that you you can't fall like you always land your tricks but uh on top of that you have to kill bad guys who are your your rivals in the roller drone and the way you do that is by uh when you aim you get a short slowdown like bullet time which makes it actually possible to hit some of these enemies and a lock on um and you can do it at any time so if you are doing a trick and you're upside down doing a flip at the same time and then you hold aim you are immediately in max pain bullet time ready to aim easy peasy and you don't have to worry about landing so that's all taken care of and the

reason that you want to mix up your tricks and your shooting is because tricks is how you uh refill your ammo so you have to be doing a constant stream of tricks to get the ammo to shoot the enemies and then you have to shoot the enemies to complete a level yes that is exactly the loop um it feels very natural uh as they were sort of layering in in the tutorial just explaining all the different elements i was like oh that makes sense that makes sense and then once they like kind of let you loose it all just like clicked together like instantly the game felt great and all the little mechanics of like reloading while doing tricks shooting the guys with bullet time going up ramp stuff like

that everything just felt like extremely extremely tight and smooth and i was just immediately smitten by this game yeah and to make it even more tony hawk there is a list of things to do like a checklist of things to do before each match. Yeah. And some of them are just Tony Hawk. Like, it's like, do a trick, a very specific trick, like a nose grab at this specific point, or collect the five, you know, collector tokens in the course, or beat this person's high score. And I mean, maybe, I'm sure if you're very talented, you could knock out all of these in one single run.

But for me, I was going back and doing runs multiple times to kind of like, oh, this is a run where I focus on finding collectibles. This is one where I focus on just, you know, getting a combo and amassing a high score. The way combos work in this game is not just doing the tricks, but actually each time you shoot a character, it slowly keeps your combo meter alive yeah and i believe if you like finish off a character it like fully bumps up to the next level yeah so you're trying to like keep that alive well with doing tricks but also continually killing people on the map i was concerned when i initially saw the trailer even though i love the look of it just that it would be too overwhelming like there was too much going on because the idea of like being on roller skates and shooting some other guys seems like a lot but they're very smart because a few things one

the ai for enemies is like intentionally very simple um such that like you're not necessarily dealing with like people that are as you know fast or aggressive as you are but they're like you know they're like uh what you would see like a moving duck target at like the at the fair they have that many brains basically and most of the enemies and so you can feel like a badass in like getting those shots off without it being too much of a struggle. While there's all and there's also like a very generous lock on system that makes that a lot easier. Yeah. And it does at least at first gradually add on to the game. So the very first time you do it, I don't even think in the tutorial you don't even have a slowdown, which really makes it seem very challenging.

Yeah. And then it adds a slowdown which makes you i guess really appreciate that feature but there's other stuff like um wall rides which get added i think after the second or third mission um and the different enemy types at first it's yeah i think characters with bats that are effectively like impotent unless you get right up next to them yeah and then there are characters with like guns and sniper rifles and the sniper rifles are extremely easy to dodge uh you just have to keep an eye out for them there's like a red like gray that line that turns red and i think it turns white right

when it snaps a bullet and you can dodge at any point um and then uh they're also rocket launcher dudes who shoot rockets that are very slow and that you can shoot out of the air. It seems like it is doing that very classic Nintendo thing of, okay, with each stage, we're just going to pile on a little bit more. And I have not made it super far because I spent a fair amount in Arcade Paradise. But it seems like one of those games that by the end, you are doing things would have seemed totally impossible um because it just trained you so naturally yeah i think that's probably true you know the that feeling of like true mastery over the mechanics that they've thrown at you um is pretty cool and uh yeah i too want to get further into the game but it's very rare that a game grabs me as quickly and as early as this game did uh and i think not only the gameplay but also the the visual style makes a

big uh impact on that the game uses like i guess you could call it cel-shaded but it that seems kind of uh reductive because it is its own style of cell shading with like very very heavy dark line edges where it's not i'm trying to think of another game that has done this style in particular it's not borderlands which i don't think is as extreme as this game is uh it just feels i guess like its own thing and it totally works like i i really adore the art style i guess you know what it reminds me of is uh that comic book 13 and they made that shoot first person shooter i don't know i don't know who played that but this french comic book um it has that same kind of style but very 70s and retro and very sure of itself like the whole product feels

like very cohesive yeah i'm trying to remember oh my gosh i wish i could remember the name of the the artist but there is an artist who worked on that canceled dune project back in the 70s yeah that i think jodorowsky i want to yeah. Well, he was the director. But the specific artist... Oh, is it Moebius? M-O-E-B-I-U-S. That sounds right. Yeah, it looks very similar to that style. And it's the only thing that I can really compare it to.

But yeah, it looks great. And it looks great, feels great. Overall, extremely impressed. The studio that puts this out, I believe is also the Olly Olly World studio? That's correct. Yeah, it's Roll7. That's just wild to me.

How do you, I just don't even understand. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how big their team is, but it does seem kind of crazy that they had these two projects come out so close to one another. Um, I mean, sometimes that happens,

but they must have been working at the same time, um, on them. And this is really their first that I am aware of. This is their first, you know, third person game. They've done a lot of side-scrolling games,

but this definitely takes things in a new direction for them as probably their most ambitious project yet. Yeah, I mean, they made that Laser League game. Oh, maybe I didn't play that. Was that third person? I don't think that's third person, though. I'm literally just looking to see, like,

what they created. Oh, yeah, no, that's like a kind of top-down retro type of thing. Yeah, I am thoroughly impressed. Anything else you have thoughts on it-wise before we go to arcade? No, I'm just really pleased with it. And it's yet another game

that kind of came out of nowhere, at least for us. I know they've been working on it for a while. But I think we're going to see more and more as the year starts wrapping up of these games that don't necessarily have the like huge, huge studio behind them, but are just masterfully done and really well designed. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so Arcade Paradise.

I am, I'm very interested in talking to you about this one. Okay. To set it up for people, this is made by the team that i believe it's called bullstock inc we talked about it on a previous besties oh yeah i didn't realize it was the same developer that's funny yeah it's like a sci-fi clicker game mixed with like kind of like a space like retro space shooter yeah i mean yeah essentially it was like uh was that asteroids yeah it's like a progressive like clicker game where you're earning tons and tons of money and you get upgrades and the upgrades let you earn more money and so on and so forth yeah and it's

using the whole like clicker system to really just like lampoon capitalism basically yeah yeah yeah like you are running this company and you are these greedy space capitalists and you are trying to uh i mean effectively take over the universe you know bit by bit um using you know it's that old like you know rich get richer sort of thing um arcade paradise is flirting with some of the same ideas so the way arcade paradise works is it is a 3d game it is relatively realistic looking yeah i'd agree with that um and you are um the uh i believe daughter of a kind of business person who has, you know, bought up a bunch of small businesses throughout, I guess, a town and has assigned you to manage a laundromat. And while you are managing the laundromat, basically on your first day, you realize that there are arcade machines in the back. And you open that up to people, and it starts making money.

And your character quickly realizes, hey, you know, arcade machines could make a lot more money than a laundromat could. And thus begins this weird simulation of you running a laundromat. So most of the game, at first, is you doing the laundry. Thus begins this weird simulation of you running a laundromat. So most of the game at first is you doing the laundry. Is you putting the laundry into the washer, waiting for it to finish, taking it out, putting it into the dryer, waiting for that to finish, taking it out, putting it to the spot where people do pickups, taking gum off of the wall, picking up trash, taking quarters out of the hopper on your coin machine and then if you have time or if you wanted to collect the laundry oh yeah you also can empty the toilet um if you want to take a break you can play some of those arcade machines and they've they've built a number of like pretty solid clones of like classic arcade games like yeah dig dug is the one that i i enjoyed the most or it's dig dug um there's a match three game there's like a platforming game there's like

a lot of different but you you would feel very uh familiar even though they're knockoffs like you know they're all pretty similar to games you've probably played before yes but again most of the game at first is doing the laundry yes for hours yeah i mean yeah you do a lot of laundry yeah yeah so i i'm i i get what the game is like saying i think that part is very interesting and i oh yeah because you i mean there's some frustration where you make this case to your father where you're like hey have you looked at these numbers the arcade is like making way more money than the laundromat is and your father is like nah you're just trying to be lazy or whatever you stick to the laundromat don't taste this dream the funny thing is the father

is kind of right knowing the history of laundromats or knowing the history of arcades that's the the father's like you know people in this neighborhood will always need a laundromat yeah and it's like it's kind of true in the end um but yeah i mean i mean i get what it's saying in terms of how life and pleasure are often at odds with each other. That time that we spend playing a video game could be used to optimize our labor. And that we could become rich faster, and we could use that to invest to then end up having like more of our life automated and then we could play more video games later on you know it's like delayed gratification but what i kind of find frustrating about that idea is like that's not true or guaranteed so like in this game when you do laundry you're always going to make decent money when you take you know gum off of a wall you make

a lot of money and and you um then can use that to you know buy more arcade cabinets and it moves all very quickly and i get that it's a video game you have to you know shorten the timeline but like that's that's not life like life you, your success is so much more based on your, you know, basically the lot you were given at birth. And then also just luck. Like, you know,

were you at the right place at the right time? Did you make really smart investments with any of these games? Did you, you know, are your washing machines not breaking down? There's all of these things that could go wrong so the binary that it creates is like well if you put time into this it'll pay off later there's no guarantee of that which is why we have pleasure in our lives right because it's like

who knows what your future is you should make time for some pleasure now because the future is relatively indefinable no matter how hard you work sure i i guess it'd be a bummer of a game if it was like hey i'm gonna take my chance at running this arcade and just have the arcade fail yeah well and that's like it's the it's the tricky thing when you have a game like this that is so clearly trying to say something. And that goes so far as to make it a pretty unenjoyable chunk at the beginning.

Yeah, intentionally. It's willing to go so far. It also does a thing that is kind of weird for me where it gamifies reality. So when you do the laundry like these little icons pop up of you stuffing clothes in that are like pixelated 2d art of the clothes and when you like try to take the gum off the wall there's like a like not qte but like a little golf

meter almost yeah it's like a little mini game yeah and there's that stuff throughout the game which again i'm like really i'm mixed on in terms of what it's trying to say because gamification doesn't work and or is toxic like i like i think i'll give you the the counter argument to that i think the why the game is doing that, where it's adding these gameplay game elements to everyday things is you have a person who is trying to find enjoyment in the mundane aspects of their life, the various tasks there are. And the way that they might do that is by sort of imagining, oh, this is almost like a little mini game that I'm playing, even if I'm really just scraping gum off the wall. That was my interpretation of it. Yeah. Which makes it, I think,

a little bit more understandable. Yeah, and that the line blurs between the video games that you play and the stuff that you do, depending on just how you look at the world. Yeah. You know, I think they also do something very smart where it's obviously this team is not very large.

The game looks quite good, but I think it looks quite good because it's basically one room or multiple rooms, but very simple. So they can like really focus on the details in that room. But one way that they kind of save time and energy, you'll have patrons to the um to the laundromat and instead of like animating them like walking around and stuff you'll just

see these like ghostly apertures of people that will be like sitting on a chair or like reading a magazine and when you walk up to them they sort of just vanish implying that they're there but you know not necessarily like you don't need to necessarily see them moving around the world they then don't need to fully animate them they could just leave them as static objects and they have like a very cool like low poly aesthetic to them which again sells this idea of like i feel like i'm living in a video game. So trying to like, you know,

make that argument within the gameplay itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's such a weird game because I, I, I admire it a lot.

Like I, I admire that it's just taking a swing and trying to say something about like how we use our time and how we divide up our day into like work versus pleasure and the idea of like turning what we love into our job and i i want to keep playing at the same time last night i played like two days which are like i think they're about like 15 minutes yeah of of laundry in a row and the first day i did laundry basically until i fell asleep my character fell asleep um and then the second day i did it all over again and after like really you know like doing a good job in the laundromat i got to the point where i

could go play a video game literally started up one of the video games in the back, beat a level, which takes two seconds, and the screen popped up that was like, okay, it's 2 a.m., time to go to bed. And it was like, I get it, I get it, I get it. I really get the message. It's very clever. But holy moly, it hits a little too close to home.

Well, it is funny because I played it and like did some laundry but like also spent days like doing a lot of game playing and that was fine like if the laundry doesn't get done like big whoop like you just don't get that money but the but the video games in the back make a lot of money so kind of didn't matter for me i should go back and try that for for i should just i think because you know you can you're collecting money from the games in the So it kind of didn't matter for me. I should go back and try that. Because you know you're collecting money from the games in the back as well. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I looked at it as like, oh, you have to do well in the laundromat now to get to the part where you can have more time to play games later.

But I'm sure, again, it's trying to teach you a lesson of like we'll split the difference you shouldn't just play games you shouldn't just do laundry yeah so i will say for me my issue with it even though i thought it was a very creative game and i actually liked their other now that i know that they were the developers of the volstock game i like that game more simply because the minute to minute of that that game more simply because the minute to minute of that game was more enjoyable than the minute to minute of this even though i think this is a more creative game than that game yeah if you're gonna make a progressive game like this and the idea being like hey you're working so you can get upgrades to be more productive and make more

revenue and then buy more upgrades and so on and so forth. It's essentially like a power curve game, right? And you need to feel like you are constantly getting empowered to like be better, do better, whatever it is. That power curve should feel fun and exciting. And for me, because a lot of the games weren't really clicking from like a fun standpoint for me. For me, because a lot of the games weren't really clicking from a fun standpoint for me, and the drudgery of running the laundromat was not doing it for me either, I didn't have something that was really pulling me through. Whereas in another game, I might like, wow, I can fire four bullets instead of two bullets, and that feels more satisfying. I just didn't really get that from this game. It might happen later,

but I kind of read some reviews just to understand what are the upgrades, stuff like that. The idea that I could spend money for a bigger trash bag so I could pick up more trash more quickly just didn't seem like much of a draw to me. So I don't know.

I think it's an interesting game especially if you like love that era of arcades um you know early to mid 90s and that whole aesthetic uh i think i mean you'd probably dig this because there's plenty of uh nods to that aesthetic that early internet aesthetic too yeah but as a game game i didn't really it didn't really do it for me yeah i think that's spot on and and your point of like okay well what am i playing towards the arcade machines are impressive but they're like not fun yeah i mean they're fun in in the like way a lot of old retro games are fun but like it's kind of like seeing a Dig Dug machine at the bar. You're like, oh yeah, sure.

I'll put a quarter in and play it once. And that's all the Dig Dug I need for the next five years. Yeah, for it to work, you almost needed to have some of the best minigames ever made. Such that they were so enticing that you were literally pulling yourself away from the money-making endeavor to play these mini-games instead. And that makes for a very interesting thing. But these games are good, but not great.

Yeah, it's kind of that impossible thing too where it's like, you know, if you make a movie about stand-up comedy, like, you're out of luck before you even make it because you have to have really great stand-up comedy in it. Man on the moon, oh my god um yeah i i i think i think it's really interesting i do think people should give it a shot i think there are certain people who just like repetitive motions in their video games i think like power washing simulator yes this type of games and for folks like that

this that might scratch the itch i think uh yeah but i think there are much better like you mentioned power wash simulator these games are very similar to one another although power watch doesn't really have any like any like statement on anything and i think power watch simulator does what this game is trying to do much better at least from a gameplay perspective yeah yeah yeah where i think this has more to say yes i would agree it's it's a trade-off i do think that this game also just pairs well with um cult of the lamb which we talked about on on besties interesting again and like them both being in some part games about labor like, how you have to do menial tasks to get to the point where you, again, like, automate things. You don't have to think about the, I mean, in Cult of the Lamb, literally cleaning up the shit, right?

Yeah. In Cult of the Lamb, it's so interesting to me because that game is, I don't know, in some ways about religion and the idea of performing humility and doing something that is humble versus performing it. I don't know. There's a trillion ways to unpack that. But I think that game, I mean, talk about having a thing to look forward to. I sometimes was frustrated how much i was held out of going on another run because i needed to take care of my town and get them ready ahead of time and that was that i felt rewarded when i went and got to do a run and yeah that's funny because i felt the opposite which was i enjoyed taking care of the town and found the runs to be a little

bit more of a time waster. Yeah. Video games, you know? Video games. Who are they for? Everybody. Good question. Do you want to take a quick break and then I can tell you a little bit about another game I've been playing? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We're back. Let's talk about Drain

the Anus. Oh, no. It's just called Drain us. And I don't know why it's called that. Do you know why it's called that? I don't. I haven't sought out an answer, to be honest. I should. It's not my favorite title. I mean, I don't know why it's called R-Type, just as an example of a weird name, but it doesn't sound like Drain the Anus, so at least that's a better title. So you mentioned R-Type.

It is of that ilk it is a side scrolling old school arcade shooter drain oh god drain us drain us where you are a little ship and you are flying perpetually right and the the world behind you is changing and all these ships are coming in and out and you are dodging ships and bullets and you're shooting endlessly back at you know whatever's coming your way right yeah pretty familiar um the genre has i would say fallen severely out of fashion uh especially with western audiences especially american audiences i think it still has somewhat of like a click in europe yeah what is the like last big i mean ikaruga was the one that sort of jumps to mind but yeah ikaruga radiant silver gun yeah there are some that are again more popular in

japan and europe but in the states i can't i can't think of anything um but this is the game I would recommend if you were curious about the genre. For me, this is like, this is to basically like what Stardew Valley is to Harvest Moon. This is to that genre. Oh, okay. In that I think anybody could play it and enjoy it. And it takes a genre that has gotten almost too opaque and difficult, and you can play it that way. That is like totally an option, of course. But it has way more customization options and ease. So, I mean, first of all, there's just an easy difficulty that I find extremely, extremely forgiving.

And is that just like you start with 99 lives um it's like the game it's from what i can tell it's like the game itself is actually easier which i like because i think yeah that is a thing i don't like in those arcade cabinets where it's like yeah it's easy i mean you're losing constantly and you're basically just you know like a ghost floating through the map yeah um but no this like i felt like i was able to handle my own in the game pretty well sure um and then the way that the archetype in other games like this work is that you know as you progress and as you do well you build up effectively your upgrades and if you can like maintain i don't know like combos of a sort, you unlock different ways of shooting your weapon.

And in this, you can pick what those upgrades are. So you could say, okay, for my second upgrade, I want a heat-seeking missile or I guess like a ground missile that will kind of surf the ground beneath and above you until it finds a target that is like you know strapped to the ground or to the ceiling which is great for you know targets that are kind of difficult to hit since you're only aiming forwards with your normal weapon or you get a little bot that like flies around you and fires additional bullets or you get wave bullets that shoot you know like increasingly enlarging waves and there's all different ways to upgrade it and all that stuff and yeah for me when i to even pick those things you have to actually beat stages which give you like a currency to

unlock it right yeah in that loop of just saying okay we can make it super easy for you we will liberally give out upgrades that will make it even easier but we won't make the upgrades unlocked right from the start so you'll actually be motivated to like play and you'll feel like you're getting better even though probably you know like 75 of that is you just getting upgrades getting upgrades so it's getting the it's it's doing the hades thing of you play you get currency you get further in the game because of the currency and the upgrades that you're getting and you have like a satisfying loop that way yeah it's doing like a variation of that but it's not full-on like dead cells is the one that always comes to mind for me where it's like

okay well if you just play long enough you're just automatically gonna get good like i don't even you can it feels like beat yourself against the wall long enough to just be so powerful that you can steamroll the game i see what you mean yeah um yeah it's just it's a delight it has very cute pixel art it has a charming soundtrack it's doing some clever things with the backgrounds where you actually feel like you are zipping in and off planets, that you are going through massive star destroyers or

you know, not clouds of asteroids, asteroid belts? Sure, that works. But yeah, it's a delight. I don't think it's for everybody i that's why i did not bring it to besties but i do think if you've ever been one of those people curious about the genre you know you see an r-type you're like hey i wonder what that is or you see a shmup and

wonder how the hell do i get into that this is a good good option oh i completely forgot the other core gimmick of it so you you shoot, obviously, right? But then you also have a shield that absorbs all the bullets coming at you for a certain amount of time. And once you release that shield, it fires all of that back at whatever your enemies are. And they'll keep seeking missiles. So there is, you know, Ikaruga had something like this where, you know, you could flip your color to match the color of the bullets. Yeah. But this makes it a little more enjoyable because you're like, you know, it makes you more powerful.

So it incentivizes you to learn how to fly in and out of bullet traffic. Yeah. Because it makes you super powerful. And again, on easy mode, you mode, I think you could probably beat it without even using that. But it makes it all the more pleasurable and all the more, I guess, simple to zip through.

It's good. Video games are good. That's kind of like my thesis. This has been a relatively short episode, but I love that there seem to be a bunch of smaller games like this out that the i think kind of like b game used to fill you know like the destroy all humans was the type of game oh yeah the movie used to feel yeah sure um yeah like that kind of like mid-tier game from

like a mid-tier studio yeah i guess it's because like indie studios are actually getting to be that large yeah no i think that's part of it yeah that that far off um and honestly it seems like because there are so many more of them than there were previously of the b studios which really you know you needed like production and you know releasing the discs and in-store traffic and stuff like that like you really have to spend a lot of money to even put out like a shitty B tier, whatever knockoff game. And these days we have so many indie studios making so many games that kind of invariably there's going to be some really strong ones that just get out

because they're so strong. And obviously because they're digital, everyone can download them. They don't need to be on store shelves. So it's, it continues to be a very exciting time for video games, even if there aren't those like massive AAA releases every single week. Yeah, yeah. I think we did an episode probably, I don't know, three or four years ago. Who knows how long we've been doing this show.

show where we talked about like the the disappearance of the b studio that you know for a while is like either a triple a game or an indie game made by you know 10 people and now it seems like that is a thing that's disappearing the game there's not there's they still exist there are still games out there made by you know a handful a very small handful of people but it does seem like those teams are getting bigger and bigger with stuff like death's door with stuff like cults cult of the lamb um and i think it's partly that you know like you know investment begets investment that if you know a studio does really well it can afford to make something bigger next time and same thing for the publishers i think studio or publishers like devolver digital

just have a lot more money now that they can put into a project that you know maybe they couldn't have invested in six seven years ago yeah it's also so rare that you ever have one person or a couple people that can do every job that's required to make a successful video game like sardew valley is such a wild like outlier in terms of overall video game making and most games you need you know dedicated artists or several artists you need dedicated programmers you need dedicated marketing people to sell it to you know you know, get the word out, whatever. And given when you have a project that has like a lot of promise, it makes sense to like throw money behind it. A devolver is going to fund that because they know the more money we throw into it, the more we're going to get back out of it. So, no, it's cool. You know, I think there will still be those one-person projects.

But as you said, the second someone has a, you know, one-person project that blows up, invariably their next project is going to be, you know, maybe it's six people. Maybe it's ten people working on that project. Meanwhile, Stardew Valley guy is still just doing his, you know, he's making haunted chocolatier on his own, as far as I'm aware. That's nuts. You do you, bro. Yeah. I have to imagine that there's some other people on that, right? Maybe.

That seems, yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm sure he has some support. I think on the marketing and stuff. Yeah. But I know he composes his own music, does his own artwork, programming, game design. A very, very weird outlier, that project. Yeah, it's wild.

Anything else you've been playing? Not really. I mean, I've been playing Fortnite with Dragon Ball Z Crossover. It's fucking wild. I'm sure you've seen internet videos on it. It is hilarious. I finished Players last night oh yeah we talked

about uh probably a month or two ago uh it's on paramount plus it is the esports mockumentary and man it's probably the best fictional thing about video the video game industry i've ever seen um it's really i think it is a little bit of a slow burn it takes a couple episodes to really click and once it does i think it goes places that i really wasn't expecting in terms of like character development and depth and honestly they did the same thing with american vandal which is the same creative team where you think you're watching this thing about you know who spray painted all these dicks on these cars and by the end of it you're watching like a pretty moving story about a troubled teen

kind of going through something and uh i think they did a very similar thing here but obviously in the world of you know professional esports and uh man it's really great if you if you happen to be subscribed to paramount plus check it out uh it's it's tremendous yeah i i hope this like that creative group gets to keep doing interesting things yeah um because they clearly have it locked in like whatever the magic is they've figured it out um my recommendation a thing to watch so my local art house has been showing once upon a time movies so that's like once upon a time in america once upon a time in china all that stuff i've seen those first two once upon a time in china did not or sorry once upon a time in america i did not look this up before. It's Jackie Chan, right? No, Once Upon a Time in America is not.

It's Robert De Niro. Oh. And it is four hours and 11 minutes long. Oh, my God. Did not know that going in. I knew it was long, but you know, like, when someone's like, hey, that's a really long movie, you're like, yeah, like, two hours. Are they tied together in any, like, thematically, or is it just the title? I mean, in a way way they're tied together thematically

not intentionally but they're at least so far because the next one is once upon a time in hollywood oh sure okay so yeah they're all movies that are exploring like idea of american culture even once upon a time in china which i had not seen that is the one i recommend. It is wild. The first 20, 30 minutes, I was like, okay, this is kind of slow. I was expecting more here. And then it's just nonstop action, incredible fight sequences to the point it's almost exhausting. With really, really acidic critique of Western in china and like the whole idea of like westernism um which i i don't know why i wasn't expecting that i should have been um but yeah it's it's wild if you enjoyed i mean very, very different movies, but if you enjoyed RRR and its kind of critique of British colonialism, I think you would like this movie for how it talks about both the British and Americans.

And also just for the extremely kick-ass fight scenes. The fights in it are so good. And like I said, nonstop. So I think it might be on HBO Max. I'm not entirely sure. But yeah, that's it for me. Anything else or did we do an episode? I think we did it.

I think we did it. That has been another episode. I was so ready to tell you that Once Upon a Time in China is on Amazon. And it is definitely not. You can't even like rent it. That is... Hmm. That's weird.

People can find it, I'm sure. They can. I trust them. That's been it for us. This has been the Rusties. I'm Christopher Thomas Plant. You are... Russ Frustick.

We are the Rusties where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest until next time we'll see you later rusty well rusty nailed it you nailed it