Two new games transform the past into the future
Added 2024-06-11 07:01:01 +0000 UTC
Was May one of the best months in the history of video games? The Resties debate that question and talk about what the answer means for the future of gaming.
But before that, Frush and Plante talk about two great games for two very different audiences:
Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip is an open-world game in the mold of Grand Theft Auto -- but family-friendly!
Selaco is an FPS built on an ultra-upgraded version of Doom. And it plays like a gory spiritual sequel to F.E.A.R. and Half-Life!
Plus, Plante finally has a spoiler-free elevator pitch for 1000xResist, and Frush praises the magic of modern save states in retro games.
Games discussed:
Plante on the state of indie games in 2024
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May 2024 should be remembered as one of the greatest months of all time for smaller games from smaller studios, and yet, it might not be. Because this, perhaps, hints at a new normal. In April, we got Minishoot Adventures, Another Crab’s Treasure, Felvidek, Snufkin, Maniac, Harold Halibut, and Children of the Sun. Before that, we got games as small as Balatro and large as Palworld.
More people are making more games than at any point in history. And for these smaller teams, game development is getting easier and cheaper, at the exact moment it’s becoming more difficult and expensive for their AAA peers.
The video game industry is changing. How it will shake out will take time to see. There is, however, hope to be found in a month like May, and a year like 2024, when so many artists put so much greatness into the world. Sometimes it’s a little difficult to notice, without big PR teams and expensive ad campaigns, but we’re living in a time of plenty.
The rest:
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Comments
Just want to say: Plante, I’m glad to hear you sing the praises of 1000xResist. It feels very much to me like the Citizen Sleeper of this year—that is, you tell the rest of them to play it, they blow you off, and then they eat their words at the end of the year. Much like Citizen Sleeper, it has reinvigorated my interest in what games can do with narrative that is unique to the medium.
Boz Luhrmann
2024-06-29 22:39:27 +0000 UTCRuss your New York is showing. There is lots of interesting stuff between KC and Toledo. Except for Indiana which is totally and completely forgettable
Robert Francis
2024-06-28 14:37:51 +0000 UTCMy summer game memory is Darkwing Duck on the NES. I could not beat it despite repeated attempts, and I just wanted to give up. But my brother wouldn’t let me. He told me to not quit and to keep going—and I beat it the final boss the next attempt. It was one of the few times I had a positive interaction with my older brother and the very first time I bore down and didn’t walk away when a game was too hard for me. (Shout out to Faxanadu for being an NES game I absolutely don’t regret walking away from.)
Prof and Dev Play Games
2024-06-22 23:48:44 +0000 UTCPokemon Emerald is my summer game :)
Will Metzler
2024-06-19 15:58:37 +0000 UTCLate to listen but had to shout out NW Ohio. You probably passed my house on the turnpike going to Toledo lol. I remember my dad bought a CD rom drive and he bought Myst and my brother and I spent the whole summer trying to figure out that game. Still love Myst and all its lore. They are releasing a remake of the much better sequel Riven next week and wonder what you guys think of these old puzzle/adventure games and if they still hold up 30 years later!
CK
2024-06-19 12:14:36 +0000 UTCHearing Plante mention World Series baseball 95 made me so happy. I remember sleeping at a friends house who had a Genesis and staying up all night building the perfect roster, only to have my save deleted the next day. Pretty sure I overwhelmed the cartridge
SlimLeaper
2024-06-18 17:18:49 +0000 UTCA very vivid memory of mine from a summer road-trip is playing Golden Sun: Dark Dawn on the DS. I had no idea what the game was, my parents just picked it off a shelf and hoped it was good. The puzzles and mechanics were fun to figure out and it was my first RPG ever, definitely a memorable game for me
Devon
2024-06-18 15:05:58 +0000 UTCI don't remember much specific gaming when I was a little kid, but I played a lot of Ultima Online over the summers '98/99.
Matt Zimmerman
2024-06-17 12:46:22 +0000 UTCJumping in here a little late to tell Plante: You missed one! Another great indie from May! It's called Isles of Sea and Sky by Cicada games, and I guess if the other puzzley games of the month didn't work for you, this might not either. But I'm not usually a sokoban guy and I think this "sokovania" that turns every screen in its Zelda-ish world into a block-pushing puzzle was a delight. And you don't have to solve every puzzle on every screen to complete the game! Check it out. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1233070/Isles_of_Sea_and_Sky/
Christopher Floyd
2024-06-15 18:29:59 +0000 UTCHey, stupid question (no judgement just legit curious)- how come Resties still kinda does the “throw to a break” after the intro despite not doing ads?
Patrick Hynes
2024-06-15 18:13:20 +0000 UTCNo defining qualities???????? The GREAT LAKES. Ever heard of em! Tell me you’ve never been to Tony Packo’s without telling me. Lol
Keith O'Brien
2024-06-15 16:45:51 +0000 UTCTheir Stellar Blade was really interesting!
Chris
2024-06-15 16:27:13 +0000 UTChttps://y.yarn.co/9147e857-1721-4e11-ab64-eb1826aec661_text.gif
Chris
2024-06-15 16:23:14 +0000 UTCI feel like name checking Zwan was an important step in the development of my parasocial relationship with Chris Plante.
Jon
2024-06-15 00:12:02 +0000 UTCI second this!
PaxSnax
2024-06-14 12:33:23 +0000 UTCI was a pretty active kid so I was usually outside but the summer between 7th and 8th grade I had a broken arm and couldn't do much. That summer I discovered Animal Crossing for the gamecube and got completely lost in that amazing little digital world
PaxSnax
2024-06-14 12:31:30 +0000 UTCSummer memory -- spending hours inside playing the mmorpg Tibia on 2 giant desktop computers side by side to get around multi client restrictions
Bret Scofield
2024-06-14 03:22:57 +0000 UTCFor the next bracket, Best Battle Music could be fun!
skych
2024-06-13 23:39:05 +0000 UTCDevil Blade is awesome! I also cleared easy mode on my first attempt and felt pretty good about that. Somehow I got the YouTuber Electric Underground up in my algorithm, he certainly counterbalances the general tastes that are promoted by the Besties... anyway, one point of agreement is that Devil Blade is a great game for getting novices hooked on shmups.
Jon
2024-06-13 20:33:02 +0000 UTCSpeaking of great indie games last month, did Yall have a chance to check out Abiotic Factor? Probably one of my favorites of 2024 so far.
Taylor
2024-06-13 20:28:10 +0000 UTCThis elevator pitch is confirmed Correct!
Chris
2024-06-13 14:13:07 +0000 UTCSummer video games really remind me of my cousin coming to stay with me and us spending all of our money at KB toys on PlayStation games: Tenchu super violence and grappling hooks, finding Lara Croft’s 4-wheeler, 100% Tomba, Monster Rancher CD hunting (why do I feel like Matchbox 20 was my favorite monster?)
E2theMFD
2024-06-13 11:59:24 +0000 UTCSo my most vivid summer game was playing Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube. It was my first Tales of game but also my first sort of dip into the JRPG outside the tent pole series of Final Fantasy Dragon Quest and the likes. I remember enjoying it so much I beat in like a week and started another playthrough. It actually changed how I played games over summer vacation as a kid. I often would wait until the summer to buy a new rpg or long game and spend my summers diving into a new game world. Now that I have a job and life I still try to recreate that feeling on long weekends or mini game cations where I sit down just to play a single rpg and immerse myself entirely.
Josh Andrews
2024-06-13 11:05:22 +0000 UTCMy most sensory gaming moment was being inside on a rainy day during summer vacation and starting up Link to the Past.
sven sven
2024-06-13 07:11:09 +0000 UTCHey guys, don’t know if you’re still open to ideas for brackets or topics but to shoehorn relevancy here, considering the example of castlevania being shorter, I wonder if you guys would ever want to discuss your best or favourite “short” games? I know you’ve all discussed before how both your time is limited to keep up with all the new games all the time and Russ has pointed out in an old episode that the steam deck is great for catching up on backlogs and I personally love it for playing games that I can finish in a week in a couple of chunks less than an hour long. Short is obviously relative, and for me I take longer than whatever HltB says by like twice as much, but yeah I’m curious if, because of the context of fitting so many games into your lives, you have ended up really appreciating some star titles on the <5-6 hours side of things?
EtherEli
2024-06-13 02:45:29 +0000 UTCJust catching up on recent shows, but has someone who was lucky enough to experience the Galactic Starcruiser before its closure, I'm really bummed to hear the championing of Jenny Nicholson's four hour video on the previous episode. She gets tons of details about the core of the experience incorrect within the video, instead offering wild assumptions for entertainment's sake. The dogpiling of hate I've seen result from people who are taking her word at face value (the length of the video alone gives it an unearned sense of authority) is really disheartening for the future perception of any similar experiences. I don't personally have the time to write an extensive critique of a four hour YouTube essay, but I agree with the majority of this take from NYC game dev/immersive writer Nick Fortugno: https://nicholasfortugno.substack.com/p/a-response-to-the-spectacular-failure
Stackhouse
2024-06-13 00:47:57 +0000 UTCThis is the first time I've felt inspired to leave a comment! My most sensory-laden memory of playing a video game is from summer vacation, sitting on a loveseat in a cozy little corner of my family's apartment, AC blasting, playing hours and hours of Wind Waker.
CC
2024-06-12 17:59:01 +0000 UTCLike most summers nowI’ll leave my home in Milan to take the family to my in laws in the US. I have a newborn, a toddler and also a Steam Deck of 2 months. I already bought BG3 on my PS5 and have not started it, but this trip is making me seriously consider an insane double dip. Advice?
Francesco Zabban
2024-06-12 15:57:03 +0000 UTCHey Plante, the creative director of 1000xResist Remy Siu just appeared on one of my favorite podcasts Anime Sickos. You might enjoy the interview, but their elevator pitch for the game was "1000xResist is a game where you walk around and get told a story that kicks ass"
BassToad
2024-06-12 15:29:18 +0000 UTCA lot of childhood gaming memories kind of blur together so it’s kind of ironic that what I can accurately place still happens at “school”. More accurately at summer day care because both my parents had to work all day. But in a combination of day care rules, parent rules and their worry of the loss of expensive gaming machines, and being “meant to be actively playing cause we were kids and it was summer”, i wasn’t allowed to bring our Gameboys and such. Though this would backfire in the long run because it would only serve to build resentment for the time spent away from said games and become unable to properly regulate my attention on anything else once back home, especially when other kids weren’t as strictly bound by those rules. But a couple days out of the summer were the exception. We would have “Game Days” where we were allowed to bring them in. And those sit out strongly in my memory. Playing my old grey gameboy, playing the first few hours over and over of my copy of Pokémon gold with a dead save battery that my dad found out in the parking lot of his warehouse job next to everyone else playing their gbas, playing Pokémon mystery dungeon red rescue team when everyone else had moved on to their DSes. That certainly was summer.
William (Biggggg5) Mason
2024-06-12 13:48:59 +0000 UTCI feel like the gamer faithful schismed over the last generation or so, and it's just now you're seeing the industry fully caught up to that fact. I don't think you can say that the industry isn't doing well when it's got its call of duty, hogwarts legacies, maddens, assassin's creeds, horizons, etc., still making outrageous money for companies, even if it's less than they would want given that investors care about further growth always. Right now we've got a mainstream industry and an alternative scene, and every once in awhile you get a breath of the wild or elden ring that appeals to both demographics. But otherwise there's a lot going on in this industry, it's just not necessarily interesting to people who are more into the alternative, autuer scene. I know this because I have a bunch of friends who were all into video games in our teens and young adult lives, and for the most part we all still play them together, but out of the five or six of us I'm literally the only one who's ever talking about stuff like animal well and hades. The rest are just happy to play destiny and call of duty and sometimes a horizon or a elden ring.
jtingl
2024-06-12 12:17:18 +0000 UTCThank you for this extremely kind and encouraging note!!
Chris
2024-06-12 06:17:23 +0000 UTCI want to just say thank you. I really appreciate the Resties and The Besties! It is my favorite podcast. I even went back and listened to a lot of the podcast backlog and am all caught up again. Listening to old episodes gave me a new respect for games I didn't click with back when they came out. Hearing yalls excited perspectives made me go back and try a bunch and I have changed my mind on a few. (Hollow Knight, Loop Hero are big examples) So Thanks for that too! I am thankful for video games and am happy I found this cool video game club to listen to! Appreciate all the hard work and time that any and all who make all things Besties possible!
sirusXsirus
2024-06-12 02:15:48 +0000 UTCI think it ironic that they discussed a couple of indie games that dropped off their radar, how important any publicity is to an indie game, and then forget to put them in the newsletter.
Matthew Williamson
2024-06-12 02:07:28 +0000 UTCThe childhood summer gaming experience that stands out most to me was Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand. Yes, that wild Kojima joint on GBA with a literal SOLAR SENSOR in the cartridge. My depression always peaked in the muggy New England summer, and I largely considered the sun to be my enemy, but this game managed to flip that for me. The more oppressive that big helium orb was, the stronger my solar gun attacks were in game, and the weaker the undead became. Dragging a vampire’s coffin out into the daylight and purifying them with the pile driver, powered by the sun, felt sick as hell. The game came with me on every family camping trip, and my cousin was obsessed with it too, so we’d play side by side in camping chairs for hours, until the sun went down. I probably got lasting sun damage making the solar tree blossom and turn pink, but at the time, it sure felt worth it.
Ben Anderson
2024-06-12 01:42:45 +0000 UTCI played through the entirety of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess over a two week span one summer when I was in high school. It was the first time I ever had unfettered access to a game and no other summer activity. I remember it clearly because my parents were having their bathroom redone and the folks who were coming in to do construction kept walking past the room where I was sitting in pajamas all day with messy hair swinging a wii remote wildly. I remember trying not to feel self conscious, just allowing myself to enjoy the game.
Michael B.
2024-06-12 00:58:46 +0000 UTCWould love to hear them cover Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom. Wonderful memory, too!
Sweet Wizzle
2024-06-11 22:54:40 +0000 UTCSo glad to hear you’re enjoying Selaco. Also wanted to add that, sometime during early access, it’s supposed to get an incursion mode, which is like a horde mode. I imagine that’ll push the gunplay even more to its limits in exciting ways. Also, I have two summer games if the past. The first is Halo 2, which is mainly because my cooler older brother got grounded one summer, so we spent a lot of time at home playing multiplayer. (Me by choice, him because he couldn’t go hang out with friends) My other summer game is Final Fantasy X. I don’t remember playing it specifically during the summer, but I got sucked into it so hard that I know that there were at least a few summer days where that would be all I was doing. Similarly, my “summer games” as an adult are the Pillars of Eternity games. I’ve been working through them this year, and they absolutely reward committing the time to learn their systems and explore their worlds. It’s been an immensely enjoyable experience and has made me want to just sit at the computer all day like I did as a kid.
Devin White
2024-06-11 22:45:48 +0000 UTCFor me, my summer game memory has to go to Crash Bandicoot: Warped and spending all summer trying to 100% complete it with my best friend. We were not good at video games, admittedly, so we never did manage to do it as kids. Then about a decade later she was pregnant and I went to her house to help her prepare for bringing a beautiful child into this world and instead we finally sat down and spent 4 straight days getting that 100% completion. God. That felt so good.
Sarah Yarcho
2024-06-11 22:13:32 +0000 UTCI had an incredibly strange experience in middle school where a kid who actively bullied me the entire previous year, in a moment of disinterest I suppose, lent me Final Fantasy 7 along with the game guide going into summer of '99. I'd never played an RPG up to that point and it blew me out of the water. Spent the whole summer playing The Working Designs release of Lunar: SSSC (the first game I ever pre-ordered) and champing at the bit for the release of FF8 on 9.9.99. P.S. I too had parents who facilitated family-car roadtrip campouts. They were the best and I'm glad I'm not dead.
Sir Robert Cashew
2024-06-11 19:37:19 +0000 UTCA good point!!
Chris
2024-06-11 19:02:22 +0000 UTCI have two different summer memories for y’all (and shows my age just a bit): - besides the use of handhelds in the backseat during trips, my go-to game as a kid was Super Mario RPG. It was the first time a non-platform game really made sense for me (I wasn’t exactly the brightest child). But the humor, the challenge, all of it clicked for me. - By high school, I was a CoD MW gamer. Summers were spent increasing rank and prestige, honing my reaction time, and probably becoming slightly more toxic than I’d like to admit.
Kevin Proff
2024-06-11 18:21:45 +0000 UTCMy biggest summer video gaming memory is Psychonauts. It came out in April of 2005, right at the end of my senior year of high school, and I played and finished it just before our last ever family summer vacation. We went to Hawaii! It was the first time we'd flown ANYWHERE, which was huge in and of itself, but it was also an amazing place to visit in general. Going straight from the wild imagination of Tim Schafer to flying on a plane for the first time, and then being in a new environment unlike any I'd seen before, made me forever associate the game with those experiences. That vacation has a ton of great memories, too, and it's also the last time our whole family was together for more than a few days. I loved the game and saw how great the reviews were, so I assumed at the time that it was a massive hit. Knowing now how low Psychonauts' initial sales numbers were - less than 100,000 copies sold in North America in that first year - I feel kind of special having been part of that first group of people to give it a chance. That it's also a part of one of the best summers of my life in general just makes it feel a lot more significant.
BucklingSwashes
2024-06-11 17:27:30 +0000 UTCThe game I associate most with summer is Rune Factory 4. I bought it at a GameStop on my senior trip and played it as long as I could every day until I started my first semester of college, and it's still one of my favorite games I've ever played. As for this summer, I've been playing The Thaumaturge recently and plan to start Yakuza Like A Dragon later in the season.
JoAnna Allen
2024-06-11 16:50:26 +0000 UTCHighly recommend, Nine Sols when you're in the mood for it. Its fantastic.
Shmeliot
2024-06-11 16:20:50 +0000 UTCAsking again for you guys to play Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom! For summer game, I think a lot about the first summer I had Animal Crossing. It became part of my summer routine. Wake up, do the morning exercises in the plaza , do my AC chores before doing my real life ones. I played so many hours of my GameCube the summers where it was the latest Nintendo system.
Addison
2024-06-11 16:03:23 +0000 UTCTHE definitive summer game experience for me was the Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the Gamecube, it was my "reward" for good grades & graduating 8th grade. I was right at 13 yrs old, so my brain was still very much in development. Which is arguably the perfect time to absorb Sonic in my opinion. Lmao. I think in my spare time I was consumed with Chao farming/figuring out the Dark vs. Light versions, how to raise them to have abilities & such. But the gameplay was top tier for me at that time. My cousin would come over to play it, and that was the formative year of our friendship (we're both married in our 30's with kids now and still send each other memes about the game). Looking back at it, it's easy to see how that gameplay experience became one of my like... main core memories for my life. Such a ridiculous game, so over the top, so beautiful.
David Miller
2024-06-11 15:16:42 +0000 UTCIn early summer 2000 my aunt and uncle gave me a copy of Age of Empires 2 and I played through it the entire summer. I started making fake swords and shields for my room and pretended to be “The King” all summer. I was a lonely and undiagnosed child.
Garfunkel Horseman
2024-06-11 11:47:22 +0000 UTCIf you don’t enter the zen state it “ruins the whole purpose of the genre”. That’s probably fair for bullet-hells, but I don’t think that necessarily applies to all shmups? (I apologize for nitpicking, but it seemed like the discussion is aimed at novices to shmups, so it might be worth spelling this out). It did inspire me to try more bullet-hell style games, which I’m not too familiar with. Shmups were my favorite gene when I was growing up, but as bullet-hells became more prevalent my tastes went in a different direction.
Nat J
2024-06-11 09:33:07 +0000 UTCMy definitive summer gaming experience would be Pokémon Silver, which I completed fully during a week-long stay at my family's summer cottage. I was one of those kids who loved to imagine Pokémon in the environment, too -- I'll always associate that place with Pokémon and vice versa. Another one from a few years later is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. This summer I'll be all about Elden Ring and Alan Wake. Looking forward to hopefully playing TTTT this weekend!
Sweet Wizzle
2024-06-11 09:17:28 +0000 UTCReferring to the last PoP episode, what is Nickelodeon made Rougerats? I’d play it
Overcooked cucumber
2024-06-11 08:04:33 +0000 UTCAlways love getting a new Besties episode y’all 💜 thanks for the hangs and good vibes as always!!
Thomas Barker
2024-06-11 07:27:07 +0000 UTC
