The Besties - Boltgun is a time machine to '90s gaming [Resties]

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Boltgun is the latest game in the Warhammer 40k universe. But good news: you don't need to know a single thing about Warhammer to enjoy this little surprise. In fact, this new shooter will more likely click with fans of Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem. We dig into the latest "boomer shooter," and then reminisce about the early days of the FPS. Was Plante accidentally buying pirated games? Can Frush explain shareware? Learn the answers to those questions and more on this week's episode of The Resties.Discussed on the show: Boltgun, Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, Doom, Hexen, Toy Story, Chex Quest, Super Mega Baseball 4, and the NYXI Wizard Wireless Joypad for Switch.    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 Plante. My name is Russ Frashtick. And welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week we are talking about... Bolt Gun? Bolt Gun? Bolt, Bolt Gun? Bolt Gun? Bolt, bolt gun. Bolt gun.

Why do you keep saying it like that? Why? Do you ever, like, have a word that you see it and you say it and it doesn't seem like it could possibly be right? And you just repeat it over and over? Yeah, no, that's right. It's a gun that shoots bolts. It shoots bolts.

A bolt gun. Bolt gun. right it's a gun that shoots bolts it shoots bolts it bolt gun here bolt gun is a boomer shooter from the warhammer 40k universe but two great things you don't need to know a thing about bolt guns and you certainly don't need to know anything about warhammer 40k to enjoy this video game you don't even have to know what a boomer shooter is this is one of those games that you just pick up and enjoy and i can't wait to talk about it but first i had a thing that i need to talk with you about okay so i'm coming to new york city soon like i don't know like a week and a half and we'll definitely see each other you know it is the concrete jungle where dreams are

made of i think it's just the orange polluted hellscape where dreams are ruined. Yeah. Well, everyone's spreading the love when it comes to fire safety. And I guess New York's turn. I think it'll be better by the time I'm there. But I've been thinking, like, I want a slice of New York pizza. And I'm trying to think, like like what is the number one slice for you like if you you and and and this is a much trickier question i think people appreciate

because when you have to ask or answer what is the number one new york slice you are both saying like the number one slice of any type there there's rich people pizza there is like kind of like italian pizza what's rich people pizza you is like kind of like italian pizza what's rich people pizza you know like you're in the west village and they're like this is like pizza cooked on a single stone that was oh and it's always the the crust is always like super hard and there's like yeah goat cheese and shit on it it's not like good yeah it's basically a salad on bread yeah you know but then there's like a buck fifty pizza. Yeah.

But that has its own problems too because it's, I mean, you're dabbing the, you need to get the 500 napkins. Yeah, it's very oily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what, like, if you were coming into town, pretend that you're me now. You could have one slice of one pie. You could have a whole pie. Where would you go? I mean, the problem is that the my like New York pizza is not in New York City.

I apologize. It's in Mimarinik, New York, which is where I grew up. And it's a place called Sal's Pizzeria in Mamaroneck New York plug for Mamaroneck it requires a train ride from New York City is it like so life-changingly good that I would take the trip just for that pizza probably not it's very very good New York pizza if you want like very true to New York New York it's great. And if you happen to be in the neighborhood, also great. But I wouldn't necessarily take the trip because you'll get like 80 to 85% of the way there with most like $2 slice places, so long as it's not like a chain, you know, you're not going to Sabaro's or something like that. you know you're not going to sabaro's or something like that that said if you want the best goddamn hot dog i've ever had it's also in mamaroneck new york and it's a place called walter's hot dogs and uh i hadn't been there in about 20 years and i went back for the first time

uh this was like a couple weeks ago and i got in line and got myself a hot dog and i'm like there's no way this is gonna live up i got a hot dog and i got a vanilla shake and a shitload of lactate to let me digest that of course and i was like there's no way this is gonna live up and holy cow it lived up it was spectacular and that i'm out of you like a super soap here? No, it was fine. I took about 16 lactate and it was fine. Okay, that's good. Yeah, a lot of fiber too. Yeah. I mean, well, you've kind of like walked into my beef here,

which is New York pizza. I think if you're going to get a buck 50 slice, right? Like a $3 slice now. Sure. Nothing better on the planet than New York pizza. Yeah. But if you want like the best pizza on the planet austin texas oh like because and i i've been trying to i tried to piece together why this

is over the course of living there because they don't have a claim on pizza yeah and they have a bunch of like people moving there they have like a really great version of every type of pizza that makes sense so you want like a good new york slice is it going to be the best no but it's going to be pretty damn good you want detroit style they got via 313 down there one of my favorite pizza joints on the planet you're going to be solid um and and then the flip side uh austin barbecue wildly overrated like great if you want to just absolutely obliterate your stomach and feel crappy and have to wake up at like four in the morning to go to someplace two hours out of a city

to go to it uh but but not my favorite barbecue at all people sometimes i say things like this like look at this you know this try hard with the reverse opinions here's the secret it's just how i feel and austin pizza it's very good and it's barbecued not as good as kansas city that's just how I feel. And Austin pizza, it's very good, and it's barbecued not as good as Kansas City. That's just like, that's the real talk. But to answer my question, what I'm craving the most is artichoke pizza. Is that place even still open? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's still like kind of an establishment. Yeah, that's like, I like remember that from like college, and I haven't had it in a while. That's on 14th Street? I think it's on, yeah, or 2nd Ave somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who knows? It is very good.

I want to say this, though. We're going to end this brief introduction. This six-minute introduction on pizza. We're going to end this brief introduction with a statement, which is the very best crust for a pizza is not New York style pizza it's Domino's Domino's crust no no no no just normal

Domino's crust is so fucking good that thickness is like the perfect thickness for pizza I think the rest of the pizza is pretty bad but man those that crust and that's why the cheese the breadsticks that it comes with are so good it's because it's just crust so we just need to find a way to bridge the gap between

those two and we'll be good i think we could do it and i think we'll do it right after this break okay okay we're back and now we're actually going to talk about bolt gun and i'm not just going to say bolt gun over and over again until bolt gun means nothing oh no warhammer 40k bolt gun is a shooter it's modern it's brand new you called it a boomer shooter which i've i guess i've heard that statement before i don't like this genre name i don't even know what that means you just boom things it's a complete misnomer no boomer shooter it's for old people old people but like the frustrating thing about it is boomers did not play shooters boomers is a generation like It's for old people? Yeah, exactly. And now I sound like a boomer because I'm like complaining about the phrase boomer shooter. But it is it's going off of that vibe. It is somewhere between a doom, which is what I think it looks the most like in a quake. And there's a difference if you haven't played these games. Doom is 2d like you're on a flat plane and you you aim forward and quake you can aim around in three like 3d direction right and this it wants to look like doom it wants to have this kind of like you're in a 3d world but

um the characters themselves are like 2d images almost um but it wants to give you that like that visual freedom of like a more traditional 3d shooter yeah they're not you know doom basically faked 3d it was very convincing but like the way they hacked 3d was very creative whereas quake was literally like a 3d poly polygonal world and so this uh yeah is kind of in the middle ground between those two yeah there's a few other kind of like hallmarks of boomer shooters or just shooters from that time and i would say those are um like heavy metal attitude yeah um uh or just like fuck the man attitude in general it doesn't have to be just heavy metal like a duke nukem yeah or um redneck rampage which we can talk about a little

bit um locks and keys where there is like they didn't have a lot of complex like mission or like if than structures in video games so it was like i don't know if you get a red key you can open the red door and that was the level design for like every level in the game yes and then secret rooms um so the way that they they kept it from feeling like super linear which is ironic because it's what shooters would become you know a decade or two later um they wanted it to feel a bit more like oh you could go get lost in these 3d environments then you would you know press up against random walls and hit enter and it would open a secret door and inside you'd find various stuff and yeah bolt gun is all of that i mean like to a t um and then most miraculously it's also fun because if you

actually go back and play a lot of these games if you go back and play doom they are not fun in the traditional sense doom is i don't know if it's i don't think it's nostalgia because i didn't play doom as a kid and i think doom holds up because it is so fast i mean it's it's primitive but especially if you have mods on you can turn on like the graphic gore i don't need fucking ray tracing no not not ray tracing the what is it ultra ultra doom or whatever oh my gosh yeah it's the one where it just makes everything like very crunchy i think doom holds up as a game more so than a lot of games from that era i do but but i think this game makes a lot of smart

upgrades to that format to make this even more palatable so can you talk about what some of that stuff is sure so i the big one the one that i think people will immediately uh gravitate towards is the uh i guess it's a chainsaw so if you're familiar with the warhammer franchise which i certainly wasn't there are these guys called ultra marines they kind of look like uh i don't know the the like humans in starcraft which i think is where i was coming from yeah yeah they they look very much like that they're in heavy armor or like mandalorians effectively and they've got like chainsaw arms which i guess they use in one hand and then the other hand

usually like some sort of gun i guess a bolt gun in this case and so the chainsaw arm thing is in this game and they did a very very good job of making it feel incredible which is rare for a first-person shooter usually first-person shooters have really shitty uh melee attacks but this in this game you basically if you're close enough to something yeah teleport it's a teleport grab um if you're close enough to someone it will basically latch on you'll charge ahead and basically like devastate them with the chainsaw arm if you've played the new doom games the like what is it 2016 and after games um the the same feeling that you get out of like doing that rip and tear move where you like rip enemies apart that's exactly how it feels here so they've kind of like brought their own spin on it um this doesn't require like a super low health state necessarily, but it just feels really great and crunchy and satisfying.

Yeah. Oh, and it gives you another way to interact with the world. I think that's a trouble going back and playing Doom is like the way that you interact is by firing the gun and it hitting a target. And then like games grow from there where it's like now you can also fire a gun at an explosive barrel. And that builds things up. And, you know, each step you're getting more and more language. Having that kind of teleport to an enemy allows for like a variety of things. One, just doing the melee attack.

But two, you can jump behind barriers with it. You can climb up objects you otherwise couldn't like reach um it gives you like a new way of getting around the environment that adds like just a little bit more brain candy to to the recipe you know yeah um and then there's the bolt gun itself which is i've never seen a single gun come so dangerously close to breaking its own game as the bolt gun this gun guns bad guns in real life horrible this gun in a video game rules like instant nominee for best video game gun of all time it is it shoots bolts, sure. But effectively, it has all of the components of every other weapon you enjoy. I don't think it has any drop.

And it can shoot as far as you want it to. So it's effectively like a sniper rifle that fires like a normal weapon. It hits with like the devastation of a rocket effectively or like a magnum from golden eye um and it's just auto fire last use yeah it is so fun that there are other weapons early on you get a shotgun and kind of this like large electric orb weapon yeah um and they they certainly have their use and there are times where you kind of like have to use them but i i really was not motivated to use anything but the bolt gun when i when given the choice yeah it is difficult to sort of summon the enthusiasm for the other guns because it is just so fucking good and maybe that's why you know it's the title gun so i guess

it has to be good it's certainly better than it just like falling by the wayside like you're starting pistol and doom so it's i get it i i understand why they made it so good yeah and it almost feels like they designed i mean i i'm probably three hours into this i think there's probably another three more as my guess but it feels like they designed most of the game around it yeah um like that their interest wasn't so much in getting you to cycle through lots of different weapons the other weapons are there is flavor um but like the main way of engaging with this game is world can you tell me about like the i guess biomes or the architecture because that was the thing that i found really interesting but i'm curious if it clicked for you yeah i mean i i did like the world design i i guess you kind of start

with like a it reminded me of like german world war ii bunkers is that crazy there's a lot of fascist imagery in warhammer in general so yeah i think that's fair yeah the signage and stuff like that um but you're also kind of like dipping into like quote the nature of whatever this world is i know so little about warhammer and i've played i mean i think the first warhammer game that i played was what did we just play like a couple months ago was that multiplayer whatever that was called the left for dead style game yeah yeah and um so i know so little about where we even are and so i can't like reference a specific planet or anything like that but um i guess what jumped out to me most was not necessarily specific environmental things as much as the aesthetic overall which has a very n64 era aesthetic it's blocky but like uh kind of like messy

um it rusted moss is like a similar vibe in 2d but in this case obviously it's in 3d which is to say like there's a there's a like a roughness to the whole experience that makes it feel very lived in. It kind of looks like those demakes. The game we played last year was Darktide. Darktide, right. In some ways, the architecture here feels like a PlayStation 1 demake of Darktide. Yeah, which works for me in a lot of ways. Honestly, works for me more than it did in Darktide.

And I think a lot of that has to do with just like the overall tone of this game, which is very silly and like leaning into how ridiculous Warhammer is, which it is very ridiculous. And every other Warhammer thing I've played has taken itself so seriously. So to see this like coming at it with a wink and a nudge was like great yeah i mean i think it's also just the readability of that era i mean i i love modern video game graphics they're incredible i i'm ray tracing is quite cool but the trouble with something like ray tracing is it emphasizes shadow and darkness which means inherently that you cannot see things as well and that there isn't as much intentionality to light. Light isn't being picked and steered and directed so much it is.

I know there are exceptions to this as I'm saying it. But like part of ray tracing is that it is natural light. It is the way light actually works. Where older games, you effectively like picked things that would be lit up. And with this game i feel like everything is just brighter and more colorful and therefore just easier to like parse as i'm zipping through the world i did get lost a number of times and i think this is like a level design issue that i should just mention briefly because i don't think there's a map i'd really

tried looking for one right there's no map i I'd really tried looking for one, right? There's no map? I never used one, but I also never got that lost. Okay. There were like a couple moments in several of the earlier levels where I was like, I know it wants me to progress

and there's like the floating head guy that like gives you tips somewhere to go. But I did genuinely get a little bit turned around and without a map map it was kind of tricky and even doom had a map so like i mean there might be maybe i just didn't spot it but i did get a little bit uh turned around in some of the areas i you know that's not a knock on the aesthetic as much as it is i think there are more tools at their disposal for guiding players whether it is like pl pointing placing signposting

or whatever it is and i don't know that necessarily went as overboard as it should have been because finding your way around these worlds isn't necessarily the fun of it i i think that is true i think that kind of gets it the picking what to bring back from the classic games and what not to that to me feels like very much a choice where people who do love these games, that is part of the fun is like figuring out how to get around these labyrinthian worlds. Yeah.

But doom had a map. That's, that's what I'm saying. Doom had a map. Doom one had a map. Yeah. I never used that as bonkers. Yeah.

And very useful useful because you would like find like a yellow door and then find a yellow key and be like where the hell was that door and you wouldn't have to like stumble around in the darkness for a while no that makes perfect sense um i i mean then no excuses there but i i do think like that is i think that is a choice that i just wonder about all those incremental choices when saying like, okay, we're going to make a classic shooter Warhammer, right? Like even from the drop, having to choose between like Doom and Quake, you know, flat worlds where you can't aim in every direction and worlds where you can. Yeah. Are we going to kind of like use the limitations of that era so in this game the reason i mentioned the architecture

is there are huge environments like humongous scale spaces um that just would have never been possible in games back in that day and i think like that's that's what i find really exciting about boomer shooters or any of these games that are kind of like going back to genres that have been kind of dormant is it does let you like throw modern technology at them and see what happens but at the same time you run the risk of like taking away whatever the thing was that people enjoyed to begin with and i think overall what impressed me about this game is i feel both like this feels like the rose colored glasses of going back and actually

playing doom and quake which i mean you dunked on me with the ray tracing which is very fair and deserved but yeah going back and playing quick with ray tracing i can really admire it from like a intellectual point of view it is not a thing i will choose to play because i want to have fun this evening right and this is the exact opposite i mean i swear every time i turn this on i played for like another 30 minutes more than i intended to yeah and it is good for that is it's the missions are short and uh you know you can do it in a sitting and feel like you accomplish something which helps a lot do you feel like warhammer games are inescapable?

Like they're just everywhere. They are way more common than they were even like three years ago. It seems like there's like three or four coming out each year. I looked up on Steam and there were five last year. They're two out this year. But if I'm going off of like my like Polygon PR inbox, I feel like there are like 50 more coming out in the next six months and they're they're also working on a show right i mean they have to be right i think henry

cavill is involved in a warhammer show right because he's a big warhammer dork yeah it's it definitely seems like the new like marvel lord of the rings Rings franchise that's being fully plumbed for every little piece of its juices. I mean, it's fine. It's not necessarily my favorite thing in the world, but I know a lot of people like it. So good for them. It has also kind of been like a, oh, I know this game will be fine. Which is weird because, again, i have no interest in warhammer at all but when i see warhammer on a game at this point because they've been so consistent you know

blood bowl solid game the shoot us blood and teeth do you remember that one no i think you're making stuff up now no no no it's like warhammer 40k i think it's called shoot us blood and teeth oh my gosh and it's like you this is like your speed type of game it's like a 2d run and gun game um yeah it's it's very good the dark tide was solid right i feel like the stuff i mean i we we did not talk about Total War, Warhammer 3, but I know that that is like one of the best games of last year. If you're the type of person who plays those sorts of games, I'm sorry that that's not us.

But yeah, I can't think of many properties or licenses that are this consistent in getting good, if not great reviews. Yeah, they're usually like sevens and above and some like nines and which is hard in the world especially when you are not a massive studio and you are kind of caught in that weird in-between space between um mega publisher and indie it looks like they're treating this like a label insofar as they're going out and reaching out to talented developers and being like, okay, you can make a Warhammer game using whatever skill set you have. You know, Nintendo did this with the Necrodancer developer, Crypt of the Necrodancer. They released Cadence of Hyrule, which is like an indie rhythm based twist on zelda and it was

awesome and it like made me want to do them to do that more and they haven't which is a drag but it's it's really cool to see that with a big franchise like this yeah no i i i'm really into it um anyway i think that kind of wraps up bolt gun. It is an absolute delight. It's a very simple, simple delight, but I think most folks would enjoy it. And I think it's available kind of everywhere. It's on. Yeah.

It's on basically everything, basically everything. Yeah. Um, I would add that if, uh, you like this game or you like these kinds of games and they want more Proteus,

which came out, I think a year or two ago, uh, is also like very much in this vein and i like that game a lot as well yeah i mean there's i if you go back through the the besties backlog i feel like we've kind of hit every major boomer shooter of the last three or four years yeah um was it devil's daggers we old yeah this is the sort of thing we're into which is gonna going to take us to the second half. I want to talk about the very first shooters we ever played, what playing first person shooters was like in the 90s and just kind of that culture of that moment, which is deeply weirder than both. I remember it sometimes and people might not know if they're, you know, say, born in the 2000s or later. So let's take a quick break.

I'm going to get some tea, and then we'll come back and take a time machine to the magical years of 1991 through 1999. Bye. Okay, we're back. And we're going to talk about the 90s and shooters and what the fuck it was like playing these deeply weird what felt extremely violent things back in the day what was the very first fps that you played played was uh wolfenstein wolfenstein 3d was the first one that i played uh i think i've talked a little bit about it my grandparents got it for me because they whenever i visited them in san diego

and i was there for like a week and they didn't know what to do with me they just get me like a pc game to play that week and one of the times it was wolfenstein 3d and i was about i don't know eight or nine not appropriate for an eight or nine year old uh i mean it's great to see hitler get melted into goo from a ton of bullets but maybe not something i should have been watching but it was also like cartoony i remember getting very scared from that game it was like a very scary game uh you know looking at it now it's not scary but you know you open a door and there's a nazi behind it that's scary that is that is true it's pretty rough um the game i around the same time the game that i remember seeing i remember which one came first was

faceball 2000 which came out on the game boy and it was like a first person shooter but you shot these like round happy face balls that would just like float through like a maze and i don't think i ever played it but for somewhere i remember seeing it maybe in a nintendo power something like that and uh so that was probably one of the earliest i saw but wolfenstein i like played a ton of i remember if you're not familiar with what this game looks like, it's worth just looking at it because it makes Doom look high tech. It's pretty primitive. And I remember having to play the game at like probably 15 FPS

because the PC that I was running on could not handle Wolfenstein. So it's kind of a throwback. But yeah, it's a fun game. Yeah, I mean, that was like the era where you had to get a custom graphics card and a custom sound card. Yeah. If you really wanted to live the high life to be able to play these things.

You couldn't look up as well. There was no looking up in that game. Yeah, that's true. I don't even think I had a mouse. I don't know that I played with it. I think I was just playing with arrow keys and WASD maybe. Yeah, I mean, yeah. What else would you have been playing with?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah. For me, the first one I watched was Doom. When it came out, it was like, I mean, it obviously blew up. My dad had, like, the family computer, and it was not meant for video games. I didn't even know video games could play on it. And then he was, like, I remember there was, like, a week where after dinner he would go up and, like, use the computer every night. And, like, you would hear, like, horrific noises.

That sounds so much worse than i intended to and uh and i was like oh i i need to i need to find out what this is and finally i like second and saw that you was playing doom and was you know like shocked you know super super violent but the weird thing is my parents where they set boundaries with video games and violent video games makes it made zero sense um they didn't let me play resident evil 2 but they let me play resident evil 1 and they didn't like me playing doom but they did let me play wolfenstein because they wanted to be able me to be able to play a game by John Carmack because he was from Shawnee Mission, Kansas, which was like very close to us. I think – I don't know if this is apocryphal or not. I think he was the child of our weatherman.

That's what people always say. And I don't know if that's like true. And I don't know if that's like true. But I just know that like that was a whole thing of, oh, you know, like this is a Kansas City made video game. You know, we should support this business. And that like kind of continued throughout my childhood. I again, like how much of this is apocryphal versus not? don't know do you remember the gamer uh fatality yeah sure jonathan windall he was like the first like ninja before ninja was a thing yes and like i was always told like oh he's from my hometown

so like you know like you you when when my teachers would see me they're like you you're gonna be like you could do that if you wanted to really get into games um but again i don't know like how much of this is true i literally just did a wiki it looks like he grew up in kansas city so maybe he was maybe he was very close by um but there was there was this moment of like fatality and john carmack and um something. Some of the founders of the Something Awful forums were also from where I lived. So you could use that website? Oh, yeah.

I had to use Something Awful. My parents were always forcing me to use it. They're like, we heard you're into Faces of Death. The John Carmack thing is funny because he also made Commander Keen, which would have been probably a lot more appropriate for you. Oh, I did play that too, but they understood that that was not cool. Oh, sure.

They weren't so, so uncool to look at that and be like, well, you're not a baby. No, it was just a weird moment. I guess it was a weird moment in general. weird moment i guess it was a weird moment in general and then it was like a weird moment specifically where we were where it felt both like i lived in the middle of nowhere and also i lived in the center of this like very particular culture yeah um of like weird hardcore gaming culture that was like i mean it was very early at that time it was very like there weren't a lot of people doing it no no no i mean do you remember going like how did you get these games did you did you download off shareware for them

no no uh well a little bit of shareware but mostly the shareware stuff i was downloading was like uh like the kind of game for it's like send ten dollars in and you will send you a code for a free whatever with a full version of the game. Shitty shareware games like that. You want to explain what shareware was? Because I I mean you would basically just go on a website and you'd download basically

indie games at the time. Games that were made by two or three people and it would be It could be like the first two or three levels of Doom would be like the best case. Yeah, sure. But oftentimes it was, yeah, like total junk. Yeah.

But, yeah, so I downloaded a few of those shareware titles. But mostly when I was buying like full games, I would go to CompUSA, which is a store that doesn't exist anymore. It was a chain. It was basically like a best buy for computer shit somewhere between a best buy and a micro center yeah precisely and um so they had a bunch of games and i remember buying half-life one from a comp usa and i remember uh you know a bunch of different um different titles what was that egg head store what was that egg uh a new egg yeah yeah but it wasn't didn't new egg come from another oh like uh oh i wouldn't be surprised

i wouldn't even be surprised if they owned company like all those but i also yeah that was another mainstay i think that's what the the the store that we went to in San Diego was in Newark, I believe. Yeah, I did a little bit of CompUSA, but it was further from the house. And my dad would also take me to computer trade shows, which was like, I don't know. It would be like the American Royal is like a place in kansas city where they would have rodeos but then they would like sometimes be like oh we'll set up booths there on the like floor ground and you people could bring in like a whole bunch of discs to sell and my dad would be like oh this is great we can go because the games are so cheap there

and now in heimstead it's like yeah they were a hundred percent all pirated like it was just illegal copies of video games yeah that tracks um but i do want to correct one one aspect i got this wrong um so it wasn't a new egg because new egg founded in like 2005 it was an egghead software no way which is a retailer that doesn't exist anymore because they got bought out by amazon but it was like a small boutique sold computer shit store and their logo was a little einstein with an egghead oh my gosh so yeah you can uh you can look that up it's a different time. It is. Yeah. When you played this sort of stuff as a kid, did it feel violent to you? Or is it just like... I definitely knew that it was not appropriate.

I didn't feel violent in the way that like none of these games necessarily feel violent when you're playing it. Because it's like a means to an end almost. But I understand why they are viewed as violent certainly they are violent insofar as if you're looking at it like if you're watching someone play mortal combat and someone's head gets ripped off you're like holy shit this is the most messed up thing i've ever seen it's certainly not appropriate for a super young kid but while you're playing it it doesn't really it's like oh damn i actually made the combo. I was able to pull off the fatality. Awesome.

This isn't an original thought, but I do like that the Summer Games Fest this year, Keeley's thing, opened with new Mortal Kombat footage and just a string of fatalities. And it's like, hey, I know that you probably put your kids down in front of the TV so they can hear about the cool new video games. But what if we watch people's brains get pulled out of their heads? I know I sound like an absolute prude there, but what a weird dissonance between. this job um when you would like people the pr the publicist would really really worry about age gating uh m rated trailers oh yeah trailers yeah and there was like laws about it which i have to imagine still exist and people have just fully given up on it yeah i mean on youtube sometimes you have to put your age in but usually not yeah i i cannot think of the last time i had to worry

about that maybe because i'm signed in i don't know um did you really quick before you wrap this section did you um do any like the kitty versions like toy story had the shoot like first person level inside of the claw machine or checks quest oh i don't i definitely didn't play jack's quest or the toy story yeah no i don't think so yeah that was that was a funky little thing where they were you could tell smart people realize there was a huge audience in in this space that wanted and you could just like change the graphics to be something that was like yeah okay and then eventually what people figured out was like oh no kids are going to get a hold of the violent games anyway.

So we should just keep making the violent ones because kids don't want to be seen as playing the kid games. The whole reason that they liked it is because it's like taboo. Yeah. Were there any other ones that you like loved? I mean, we mentioned Wolfenstein. Rise of the Triad was the one I was really into. Redneck Rampage.

Yeah, I mean, I got super into, like, this is later, but Unreal Tournament I got super into. That had a great community of map-making folks and modding and downloading models and stuff like that. It was really awesome. Yeah, and Dark Forces, the Star Wars, awesome um yeah and uh like dark forces the star wars like the original jedi knight dark forces was really good uh which was basically a doom clone um but yeah i didn't get i think half-life was like the turning point for me in terms of like oh you could actually do like a narrative in a game

yeah yeah yeah nice change. Sorry, Half-Life, we didn't include you in our reading list. I mean, yeah, Half-Life is also the like the end of this era, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I was really into Hexen and Heretic. Oh, sure. Where it was like. I confused those two.

I mean, they're the sequel. One's the sequel to the other, right? Oh, they are. I didn't know that. Yeah, I believe so. I believe Hexen is, it's called Hexen Beyond Heretic. Like it follows up the series, something like that. Oh, and what was the one, Descent.

I also put, I don't know if that counts as a shooter because you were in a spaceship flying around. Well, Descent's what ruined my entire invert the y-axis oh yeah yeah descent was a you were a ship but it was a shooter and it taught me that like oh i should invert the y because i'm effectively flying a ship and i think there's like an entire generation of weirdos like me who were ruined by that game yeah fortunately i've undone it yeah i don't even think about it anymore i i cannot believe i was able to to fix it good for you um should we uh do some honorable mentions and wrap this up yeah uh what what else are you playing or watching um well i've just been playing zelda whenever i have

free time um because it's great and I'm just loving it. But I wanted to mention something I've been playing it with. And it's called the I don't it's called the NYXI Wizard Wireless Joypad for Switch. I don't know if it's pronounced like nizeye wizard wireless i'm gonna go with nyxi because it's all in capital letters is this i'm okay i'm looking at this right now i mean if you look at a screenshot you'll immediately know why i'm using it or why i'm trying it out is because it's a gamecube controller and so basically it has the layout of a gamecube controller with that like giant A button.

There's like bean shaped X and Y buttons and the little B button. And basically it works as Joy-Con. So you can basically strap them onto your Switch in handheld mode and have essentially a GameCube layout in your hand. It's enormous, granted, but I use a Switch, a SplitPad Pro, which is also huge. So it wasn't really a departure for me. Does this feel good for a game like Zelda? It has ups and downs, I would say.

I actually really like the GameCube controller for a lot of reasons. And for that reason, I actually think this checks the box of like, hey, it feels like you're using a GameCube controller. I like the fact that you can like hit A and X at the same time very easily because of how they're positioned. And I like the, you know, just overall like grippiness of it feels really good. It's OK for Zelda, but big caveat caveat the buttons are not the proper layout and this is nintendo's

fault this is not nyxi's fault um for doing this but basically uh when the gamecube came out the big main button that you pressed all the time was the a button giant thing at the bottom of the controller was the a button and nintendo pushed the a to its original spot which is on the right side of the controller and the b button is now at the bottom of the nintendo controllers and so any game that you play kind of follows that mentality, that layout. So you actually have to remap the controls if you're using this for it to be remotely playable with Zelda. Because otherwise you're like,

all the buttons are not in the right spot. I'm sure this only takes like a couple minutes. It doesn't, it's not hard because you can, in the Switch settings, very easily, you can remap every single button to be any other button on the Switch. So it's really not difficult but it does get annoying if you're

switching between games you would probably want to switch back or something like that. It sounds interesting. I never got into the GameCube. I mean that is probably the largest gap I have in all of theube. I mean, that is probably the largest gap I have in all of these. I mean, it is a console for

babies, and I loved it. Is that true? Is that like what it was known as? I mean, that's what it was known. It was known, certainly. When you compare that between that and the PS2, the GameCube was the console for babies. It was purple. It had a little adorable

Link and Wind Waker uh it had adorable luigi and his mansion granted it had metroid prime but most of the games that came out on there were like for babies and i love them that's that's not a knock but it was designed you know nintendo and still is pictured as a family- company. And so, uh, yeah, it was just kind of, that was its reputation, but a lot of good games came out on there. Resident Evil four was GameCube first, right?

Yeah. I exquisite the game. So there's like, it did have that in eternal darkness. It sounds like kind of bit of a marketing issue. Yeah, it was marketing, but also it was,

it was output, which Nintendo has always had, which is, you know, they put out like 10 great games a year and that's it. So there's no like third party support or limited third party support. So that was really the big sticking point with the GameCube. Yeah.

It's gotten better on the switch obviously, but yeah. Indie gaming helped anyone more than, than yeah. I mean, it's, it's outrageous. I mean,

Nintendo now has a lot of third-party support, not just from indies, but certainly if you look at the first year of the Switch's life cycle, I think they were like, you know, Zelda and Mario Odyssey and Mario Kart, I think, and that was it. But there was just a shitload of indies coming out.

So there was never a moment where you felt like, oh, I'm going to leave the Switch alone and not even play it for a while yeah yeah anyway uh that that controller is called the nyxi wizard wireless it just rolls right off the tongue you can google it uh if you're interested uh it's worth checking out certainly would be cool to play smash on on with uh using that controller because i know a lot of people love the gamecube controller for smash uh but uh yeah just remember about the remapping thing um i have only just begun with it but super mega baseball 4 is out um it is now published by ea which is

strange but if you are new to the series, Super Mega Baseball is somewhere between an arcade and a sim baseball game. It doesn't have real teams in it. It has this very cartoony look. You are just as likely to hit home runs as you are to

hit the pitcher directly in the nuts. It's great. It's very's very fun has a ton of personality it's like rbi baseball basically like yeah the inspiration yeah it definitely is well somewhere between rbi baseball and even the kind of snk baseball games you would find at the arcade right yeah um yeah and it's a delight i have not had a chance to dig into this a whole lot but i'm curious about the ea of it all because it sounds like a best case scenario and then i think this game was already well under development before they partnered with ea um so they didn't use like a major league baseball deal for it they instead got a bunch of players. And you just have like random famous baseball players.

Who is that, Big Papi? Yeah, he is in it. And a bunch of other surprises. And yeah, I'm excited to try it more. I hope there's a demo out there. I actually don't know for sure if there is. But this seems like one of those games where even if you haven't played baseball games in a very long time,

if you can try a demo, definitely give it a shot. Because actually, this is like the type of game that when I was a kid, I would download the demo and then just never buy the game. You gave me a baseball game with two teams on it in exhibition mode. That was all I needed. I could make that last for like five or six months. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to playing it, and I'm also really looking forward to being able to play it

on my Steam Deck while I'm traveling. Oh, your Steam Deck? It runs pretty well. Or my ally. I feel weird saying the ally. Well, you should, because the branding is very silly. That's what I was asking to say yeah yeah i'm probably going to bring the ally instead i haven't done a trip

with it and i want to try and see you have a good good uh travel bag for it uh i don't i actually don't that is the benefit of the steam deck it comes with that great case at least i think on the higher end comes with that great case yeah At least I think on the higher end, it comes with that great case. Yeah, that might be a deciding factor. And also, I just know the only way to find out is to try. But I know that my portable charger will keep my Steam Deck powered as long as I need it. I don't know that for sure with the Ally just yet. Anyway, that's been the episode.

We did it. We did it. We talked about Boltgun, and I stopped saying Boltgun over and over again, which is a real accomplishment for me. Thank you for listening. This week we talked about Warhammer 40K Boltgun. We talked about Super Mega baseball 4 we talked about the nyxi wizard wireless joypad for the nintendo switch a real front runner for some of the worst branding i've ever seen um uh we also talked about a whole bunch of classic 90s shooters if you want to give them a try those games are

doom rise of the triad wolfenstein redneck Redneck Rampage, Duke Nukem, Hexen, Heretic, Toy Story, Chex Quest, and Descent. And also, I think, Faceball 2000? Faceball 2000 and Proteus was the other one I mentioned. Proteus, and that's a newer one that is definitely worth checking out. Yes. And that is it for the Resties. I am Christopher Thomas Plant.

You are... Russ Froschek. And we're the Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Resties! We were a little off on that one.