The Besties - The 5 best "bang for your buck" games + Vampire Survivors [The Resties]

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

A great video game doesn't have to be expensive. Inspired by the $2.99 phenomenon Vampire Survivors, The Resties choose their five favorite "bang for your buck" video games. Then, Frushtick brings a surprise B-topic that has Plante reconsidering his obsessions! Discussed on this week's episode: Vampire Survivors, the Earth Defense Force series, Fire Emblem Heroes, Drop7, Fortnite, Stardew Valley, Red Faction Guerilla: Re-MARS-tered Edition. Plus, The Rescue on Disney+ and Doom Patrol on HBO Max. 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!

Hey everybody, my name is Christopher Thomas Plant. My name is Russ Verstig. And welcome to The Resties, where the best of the rest discuss the rest of the best. This week we are talking about Vampire Survivors. That's right, tons of big budget flashy games with entire marketing campaigns that appear in like the Super Bowl or whatever are out there. And we are talking about a game that is available right now on your laptop for $2.99. And when I say your laptop, I mean probably any laptop because it works on PC and Mac. We'll also, in the spirit of Vampire Survivors, be talking about our top five

best bang for your buck video games. And in the back half, I don't know. Fresh Dick has a surprise for me. So we'll see what that is. It's a surprise topic. I don't want people to get too enthusiastic about the potential, but I do have a topic I wanted to discuss.

That's true. It does sound like there also might be a guest star. And I don't think that there's going to be any other guest stars. I think it's just the two of us today. Yes. Well, first, let's get into Vampire Survivors right after this break. Okay, Fresh, how much do you know about Vampire Survivors? I mean, I've seen screenshots of it.

I know Justin talked about it on Besties this past week. He played it during a mention or two weeks ago. He mentioned it in the honorable mentions. I read a bit of his review on Polygon.com, which is very glowing, but I have not played it myself. I haven't had the time and I want to. It seems very much my kind of game. Here is my elevator pitch it is either a 10 out of 10 or a 0 out of 10 wow my opinion of it changes depending on where i'm at like

interesting existentially it's okay here in the way the way it works visually i actually don't think this is the way it actually works but the way way it appears to work, if you watch a video of it, is it is a top-down 2D game in which you are the titular vampire survivor. It looks like, you know, bad Castlevania art, right? Yeah, it's like Centipede or like old-timey arcade game. Old-timey arcade game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And enemies are surrounding you from all sides at first it's like a handful then it's dozens then it's hundreds then it's like it feels like thousands i don't know it's fills the screen

with with these 2d characters and all you have to do is move around there are no button presses uh your character automatically fires off their weapon and that could be a whip that fires off every second or so it could be like a little magic missile it could be uh a power-up that you retrieve like garlic which makes a plume of garlic stank around you and and kills off obviously vampires because vampire survivors um and the goal is to kind of mix and match so you're not a vampire just to be clear you're not a vampire survivor you're surviving vampires yeah right oh you're you're oh i see what you're saying you're not like a vampire who's playing the game survivor or something or like who is also a survivor because he's been drinking blood to survive no no no no it's like that you have a so there are actually

multiple characters that you can choose from yeah the many survivors they're the plural survivors and you are surviving vampires and none of them are also a vampire not that i have like an alucard situation where there's a nice vampire well it's actually that's a good question because we'll get into the lack of story and why they're a game like this should have a story okay but first that that's the game the whole goal is to like uh kind of manage which upgrades you get because every time you find you basically when you kill enemies they release little uh gems and then you can step over the gems to collect them and as you get the gems you get xp and the more xp you have the more abilities you can unlock and those abilities could be

like i said garlic or it could be flames that go in random directions uh any variety of skills there's like a boomerang cross that fires to the thing that's nearest to you, but then slings across the screen in the opposite direction. So you actually kind of use it to fire behind you to do a lot of damage, right? It's choosing which of those are the best and then matching them up.

And it's extremely addictive. Runs can last between like 10 minutes. I think if you get to 30 minutes that is when you beat the game i've made it to about 26 minutes wow um i'm i'm pretty good um but and here's the here's where i i the rub is when you do these runs you make money you like collect coins you can find a little treasure chest right and that money goes to permanent unlocks between vampires surviving and there's a lot of unlocks there's unlocks kind of like hades you know of unlocking the speed of the projectiles that you fire or your

health or your shields or or your ability to revive all that stuff right and this is where i'm torn on like what do i want from a video game because effectively what i found after you know probably six or so hours of this game is the game is the grind yeah like there there is nothing else so far and it's an early access they could add more but it's not like this is like you know a visual feast there's no story and the game in the marketing compares i think like they use a phrase called like be the bullet hell but it's not that because bullet hells to me are skill-based you aren't unlocking unique permanent powers that you know the 20th time you play the bullet hell somehow it's easier you're just getting better at bullet hells where this is like i don't necessarily feel like i'm getting better i feel like i'm just giving the game more time and then it's giving me unlocks that will make it

easier for me to win yeah so a few there have been a few games like this that have done something i mean hades you mentioned hades rogue legacy same thing and what those games do is once you more or less unlock everything it sort of unlocks what i would describe as like an end game where the difficulty is basically static like you have all the tools at your disposal and then they can ramp up the difficulty because you're not getting more unlocks and you you know can like add challenge that way and again if it's early access i would imagine that's something that maybe will come later but i do agree with you like i know what you're talking about where it's like not the most satisfying thing to feel like inevitably you will beat this game yeah well you know what i i

mean you could say that about like i don't know every bethesda open world game like you just get more and more powerful until you beat it right yeah well my problem isn't necessarily that and like the transparency of seeing you know the reptile part of my brain just being triggered it's that there's i think it's the nothing else that gets a little under my skin we're i mean let's use any of those examples right like the bethesda games there's still story there road legacy even still has something to say about like lineage yeah like it's silly to say it feels a little silly to say it has a message but it actually does like well and also the minute-to-minute is enjoyable. Yeah.

You get satisfaction out of a good run versus a bad run. Yeah, but I guess I really admire when a game with really interesting mechanics then is using those mechanics to get at something beyond it. I think of like Universal Paperclips, right, which is one of those idle games that we've talked about a lot and idle games are the ones where the game kind of plays itself and it's just accruing numbers and then you tap now and then to fuss with the the math formula so that the numbers go up even faster and universal paperclips takes that idea and then asks okay what

if an ai was told to do this to just create paperclips what would it end up doing if it just had to keep creating over and over and over again and it becomes this like work of like sci-fi horror um and i i think that's the thing that i guess i'm missing here and i hope that's you know again it's an early access that that's what gets added hades is another great example right like sure hades has this the same mechanism but hades has like a trillion things to offer yeah but when it came out it was an early access game that's true that's true and didn't have a trillion things when it came out i mean it was a good game when it came out but wasn't it was not a game of the year game that's's true. You know what? Now you're pushing me back towards the 10 out of 10.

Boom. Yeah. Anyway, I like a game like this that messes with my head like this and gets me thinking, like, am I wasting my time? Yeah. And, like, what does it even mean to waste my time? Like, would it be bad if I was playing this and it was doing literally nothing else than, like, triggering my pleasure parts of my brain? Yeah. That's a thing, yeah.

I don't know. Do you worry about that or am I just, like, very anxious? this stuff and try to play games in the most probably not the best way but it is i try to play games the most productive way possible which is to say like i'll dial it down to easy if i feel like i enjoy um the gameplay more that way or i'll see more stuff that's cool um i don't know i'm very targeted in terms of how i play games yeah so you know you know i i get i get the argument um i think there are good and bad versions of this again i haven't played vampire survivor so i can't say how i would feel but i do agree with you that just the power curve alone is usually not enough for me unless it's cracked down credit to like the only example yeah credit to the the designers here the power curve here is incredible

i mean they are just straight up using the playbook of like pay to win slash free to play games in terms of visuals and just constantly being fed that that uh just pop of color and whenever you open a treasure chest it just rains vertically like upside down coins everywhere um yeah it's something and i i don't know i i'm really struggling with my words with this sort of thing because i you know when you put i put that much time into it i clearly i it's clearly working with me but at the same time it feels a little bit like addiction where i i knew it would do this the second i downloaded of you know oh great this is going to take over my life and sure enough it did which makes it kind of a strange recommendation because i feel like oh do

i really want to recommend something that is going to consume people like this this is actually i mean we'll we'll get to it in the second half but this is actually a really good segue to the second half discussion so i'm looking forward to that in the meantime though i do i know my at the top of the show you mentioned that we were going to figure out our top five but i i think that might be too wide ranging and maybe we should probably just focus on like personal faves in terms of bang for your buck games okay five seems like a lot oh i i have a list i'm ready oh really you brought a whole list i came prepared i i i feel like i know i mean i have i have a list in my head, but I don't know. We'll see how it goes. How about we start putting some games together of what are our, like,

you're going to put down a little bit of cash here, and you're really going to get your money's worth. Okay, sure. What's your first one? What is the thing that comes to mind? Well, my first one is you're going to put down no cash whatsoever. Okay. You're going to save $4,000, aren't you?

Unless you have bad impulse control control which i have done in the past uh i'm gonna say fire emblem heroes oh okay i think we should include one free-to-play game in this category and fortnight would certainly apply that as well. But at this point, Fire Emblem Heroes is a game that I have been playing for over five years. It is my, like, I have to wait 30 seconds for the elevator game. And there is no other game that I play with that level of consistency. I play this game very weird. We were talking about how i play like certain games and what i get out of it i play this game very weird such that every decision

that i make in the game is fueling me not having to spend money in the game and i turn the free to play aspects of it as into the game. So the only characters that I ever like, you know, there's like a loot box, gotcha pun, you know, slot machine thing, but you can earn free currency to like get them if you're careful. So the only ones that I ever go for are ones that I know will make the game easier for me

to continue getting more currency. And not because, oh oh this character is pretty or oh i like their backstory it's only oh they're a meta character and i want to like min max the way i play this game so that you can then unlock more opportunities to min max the game exactly get the characters that you actually like exactly so now great now let me i mean i'm not saying this is a healthy thing but i'm just saying how i play it let me also add a caveat if you have any level i don't this is not i'm not saying this is like a denigration because i certainly have this to some extent on some things as well if

you have any level of like lack of willpower when it comes to like loot box mechanics gambling mechanics anything like that do not play this game it's not for you i mean it is for you but not in a good way um it is definitely designed for to take advantage of those sorts of people and make a lot of money and it has made a ton of money um but i don't know for me again i get a lot of satisfaction out of but i don't know for me again i get a lot of satisfaction out of playing the game to not spend money and from that i've really enjoyed myself i don't know if that makes the list necessarily but for strictly from a bang for your buck game there's probably no more bang for your buck at least for me than fire emblem heroes i think i think that is a good recommendation and it's a game that is

meant a lot to you and i think you're right to include it will it make the final five i don't know i don't know so my my version of that game is drop seven oh yeah remember that game yeah sure yeah so drop seven is a puzzle game where you you line up numbers and make them disappear, Tetris style. And it, I believe, was originally developed for the TV show Bones. What? Yeah, it was like a SponCon game. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, the developers, Area Code, made their own version called Drop 7.

And then that game got purchased by, well, all of Area Code, I believe, got purchased by Zynga. And now Drop 7, I believe, is still available on iOS and maybe Android. And it's great. It's just, I wish I had more to say about it, but I don't. It's a pretty straightforward puzzle game, but there's something about the feel of it that is transcendent. Yeah, I think if you've played Threes, it definitely is kind of similar brain action going on, and the feel of that also matches. Yeah, and it's that same thing, like you said, of I've just and the feel of that also matches yeah and it's that same thing like you said of i've just over the course of i mean it was one of the first iphone games i think

it was very early on and i have had it on my phone ever since then so i've been playing it longer than almost any other game i play yeah it's funny for puzzle games like that i usually after i'll get into it for like pretty heavy for like a week or two, and then I'll bounce off of it. Just because like you get so good that like games start lasting a really long time, or you just hit a ceiling where you feel like you're not learning anything new or doing anything new. And I just sort of depart. But that's just me. That's, I mean, that's just me that's i mean that's very fair okay so what is what is uh another one that you have well i guess i can't pick fortnite at this point because i just i mean i think fire emblem are very different games i think that is true um i would say they both be free they are both free um i think fortnight

is less a lot less gross on the um on the like loot boxy element because there are no loot boxes in fortnight uh you uh for you know i don't know if i need to describe what fucking fortnight is but it's a Battle Royale game. And originally, it launched as this weird, like, player versus environment, like, defense, tower defense thing, hence the name Fort Knight, because it's F-O-R-T

Knight, and there's zombies attacked at night. And now it's just, pretty much just a Battle Royale game, and there's, like, 2% of the player base plays the weird PVE mode. Which you do to once again, scam money. Yeah.

It's the same. It's the same thing as heroes is I get actually a lot of satisfaction of playing that mode just because I've set it up in such a way that again, I could play, I can set it to run and it'll go for like an hour and a half and i'll come back and i'll have earned currency that i can then spend in the game that i actually enjoy playing just mining bitcoin basically they could hook up my computer to like a bitcoin server and probably do pretty well

oh my gosh but unfortunately it's not bitcoin it's uh v bucks which are the currency in fortnite and all you can do with v bucks are buy like batman skins and like a grappling hook and like aloy from horizon zero dawn uh you just buy like cosmetics and i get a lot of satisfaction they do a really good job on a lot of the cosmetics. They just, they didn't announce it. It leaked that they're doing like old timey cuphead style versions of some of the characters that in the game, like the banana character and stuff. And like, that's a satisfying way for me to spend the dumb currency that I'm earning through this free to play system.

But it's a great multiplayer game i think uh i really can't think of a better like online ease of jumping in game because it supports cross play and it's very easy to get in you know into a game with your friends and um yeah i've i mean i started playing in 2017 whenever it launched and um off and on i've i've jumped back into it now i'm back into it pretty hardcore um so yeah destiny is it has it fully replaced destiny for you uh yeah i mean i have not touched destiny in several years at this point and again i you know i think i've talked about this but the the drop off on destiny was purely just i couldn't keep up with it and fortnight it's the opposite of that because the fact that i played at the origin at the beginning of fortnight

actually gives me not an advantage but like a little bit of a cool factor because i'm using like characters that you can't get anymore because they got retired so like little 12 year olds will run up to me and be amazed i'm not proud of that but i'm a little proud of that i think i was gonna say i think you're pretty proud um i have another game that is another online game with co-op where you shoot things it is earth defense force oh god the entire series that's i don't okay bang for your buck sure it is it is the of of all the things here i would say the quintessential bang for the buck game. Because it was originally conceived, okay, first, what's the game?

The game is open world maps where you are the Earth Defense Force, and you have to defend the planet from giant aliens and bugs. And they are huge i mean we're talking like godzilla them like all the blob like that sort of stuff going right yeah and uh and it is a mess of a game series for the most part uh it the open worlds are fully destructible so you can shoot down skyscrapers. But it looks more like, I don't know, like the geometry just like sinking into the ocean. Yeah, it looks like a PS2 game. It's not. It's never been a pretty series.

No, no, no, no, no. But the reason that it looks like that and the reason it does all these weird things is because they set out to create cheap games it was part of a series of games uh made in japan that i can't remember the the specific price i want to say it was like basically 20 us uh uh where the game was like not fully finished or polished and was one great gimmick uh and then it just kind of ballooned into this ongoing series which you can play tons of these games on steam uh i love these games they are broken but i feel like you can just play this forever it is like perfect mindless cause some mayhem with your friends i i would say it's like the modern equivalent of what the beat-em-up was back when we were kids yeah i

played like the arcade beat-em-up and it's like is this really challenging me or is this really great no but it does give me something to do while i like hang out with my my pals yeah i i would agree i mean this is obviously it goes down to personal preference and i know you have a lot of fondness for edf i think it feels and plays like dog shit like it's not a fun game to play and there are other games that are like that wacky and outrageous that feel like way better um and aren't like the menus and the controls feel like totally clumsy and weird. Oh, I wish it felt better. I can't argue with any of this.

I love the trappings of it. Like the giant ants and stuff. I love it. It's great. Destructible. Awesome. Giant like rocket launchers. Super cool.

It just doesn't feel very good. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I mean, I'm not, I can't argue with it. You're not wrong. Yeah. But I do have a very special place in't argue with it. You're not wrong. Yeah. But I do have a very special place in my heart for it. What about you?

I think we actually agree on ISLU right down. This was my next one, too. Got to be Stardew Valley for my next one. It's kind of incredible. You know, people gave us a little bit of crap because we did not include Stardew Valley in the best portable games list that we did on the last Resties. And that's fair.

It is definitely a valid addition. There was, in the back of my mind, I didn't vocalize this, but a hesitance on portable, Stardew being friendly to portable. Stardew, weirdly, you cannot save in the middle of a day. You can, like, sleep your switch and that's fine but you can't like if it's 2 p.m and you your switch powers off or whatever you lose all that progress um and that makes it kind of not the best portal game but ignoring that one minor fault it is so good and for $20 has given me just years of free content that

Concerned Ape, the developer, has added over the years. I mean, we just fawned about this game during Game of the Year very recently, or best games the last 10 years very recently. But, I mean, man, talk about just a boatload of stuff that has just poured in for free or since that initial paltry 20 investment 20 is nothing

for the amount of value i've gotten out of this game it's so good yeah and it was great at launch like yeah that's that's what's wild. For me, I had this on my list because of all of the stuff you mentioned, but also because of the mods. Like, the amount of creative content that is made by the fan community for this game is tremendous. And that and the developer's own, like would say, favoring PC with updates is why it wasn't on the mobile list for me. I look forward to playing it on Steam Deck.

I think that will be very nice to have some overlap. But yeah, that's why it didn't quite make the list there. But it definitely makes it here. It's fantastic. I'm trying to think of other stuff. So, I mean, I'll just share some other stuff that I have because we're getting into some of my classics, so I know where we're going to go here.

I have on my list, I have NCAA college football. And the reason I have that, I'm not saying we're going to add it, is because it's the last one that was made has just had to continue to be NCAA college football, and people are left to keep updating it. And I think there are a few games like this, like Tecmo Bowl, people keep updating it, NHL, I think 95, 96,

the Fire Pro Wrestling games. They're these games that have kind of taken on a life of their own post-release um but whether or not any of those should be on here i don't know i have kentucky root zero because you know you bought the first episode and then you got the rest of the game over the course of a decade but is that like a recommendation i can make right now not not as much and here's the one that i think you will agree on but i don't know the perfect perfect example of this kind of like pseudo genre is open world games where the fun part of the game is just being in the open world so it's not like

going and climbing towers and unlocking things yeah. It's just cause to red faction. Uh, gorilla is like one of these. Yep. I mean, breath of the wild is one of those too. Yeah. I think breath of the wild is,

is definitely one of those. Um, but it's breath of the wild is a Nintendo game, so it will never cost less than it. That's true. Um, yeah, red factions,

probably the one of those. Cause it's so old at this point that it's probably pretty cheap to buy. And I think they just re-released it on modern consoles. Remastered. Remastered, yeah, because it's set on Mars. It's funny. Ooh.

Okay, I feel like we have a good list here. Do you have any other ones that you would want to add? No, I think this is pretty good so long as we delete edf i think we're good yeah i think i'm gonna i'm gonna delete edf and i'm gonna delete fire emblem heroes that's fine and that gets us down to that's four wait that's oh fire emblem hero stays yay wow okay i'll accept it you know what there is broke playing it please i feel bad there's an earth defense force in Red Faction Guerrilla.

So in a way, I still kind of won. That's true. Great. Those five games are Fire Emblem Heroes, Drop 7, Fortnite, Stardew Valley, Red Faction Guerrilla, either the normal edition or the remastered edition. You can't go wrong either way. Those are our top five best bang-for-your-buck video games. way those are our top five best bang for your buck video games okay chris so we are coming now off of uh super bowl sunday are we allowed to say that super bowl we don't have to say the big game this has been a little while since the super bowl when yeah it's a couple weeks but sure at this

point uh that you're that you're listening to this. And your team, the Chiefs, didn't quite make it this year. Came very close. Very close. But lost in the game. What is that? The AFC? NFC?

Which division? The AFC Championship. AFC Championship. And I wanted to talk a little bit about, and I don't want to scare people away because I just want to, this has been running in my head for the last couple of years, but it is about sports. Please don't be scared. I think you might find this interesting. So when, you know, I was raised as a diehard New York Knickerbockers fan, the Knicks in the NBA. I was a Mets mets fan i continue to be uh new york giants you know i have my teams but what i've found over the years is the more i care

about sports the more anxious and stressed out i get like if my team start doing well it makes me not super happy because it just stresses me out and kind of throws my entire life on its edge yeah um the the most recent example many of the teams that i follow are not very good but the most recent example this brings to mind is when the mets played the kansas Kansas City Royals in the World Series. And, you know, throughout that entire playoffs, I was like staying up super late to watch the games. Every pitch, my like heart rate was spiking. I was like super into it. And I'm obviously disappointed when they lost. And given the fact that almost every team except for one has that experience every single season invariably you are going to experience a lot of disappointment when watching

sports and i guess i wanted to talk to you a little bit about whether you feel like you get the right things out of watching sports or whether you think it's uh not necessarily worth the time and and this is not to denigrate sports as an as a catalog as a group but just as a as a watching yeah a watching effort i'm curious whether you think it's yeah it's good or bad i'm glad you brought this up because i think this has a lot to do with games obviously sports or games and fandom and parasocial relationships which are becoming like much bigger things thanks to podcasts uh twitch streams youtube right uh i don't think that there's like a huge huge gulf between uh the people that we like to follow on the internet and the sports teams that we're fans of.

So there's that. In terms of what do I get out of it, well, I think I get why you might have a problem. And my theory is that you should not be a New York sports fan. That's your problem. And it's not because New York sports fans are good or bad. It's because the expectation in New York

City is that you're a New Yorker and you should win. I mean, not for the Mets. I know it's not for the Mets, but they're still not underdogs. They're still a New York team. That's true. They do spend a colossal amount of money. Yeah. So the

Chiefs are like kind of in the middle of it for me of teams i i love but whether i get pleasure out of them the team that i have enjoyed the most watching and enjoy watching now and i enjoy when they succeed are the kansas city royals because the kansas city royals a bad baseball team. They won the World Series when I was born. They were basically terrible from then until they had a, you know, kind of a two-year, almost flukish run. They went to the World Series twice. They won the second time against, obviously, Fresh's Mets.

And then they immediately went back to being awful. And I had no expectation for them to be good ever again. And when they were good, you were right you know it was it was very stressful it was all consuming for like as as the season went on i could see them doing well and as we got into the playoffs i had to watch every game but every win felt like a gift and i never i never felt entitled to anything and that's good and healthy sports fandom when it gets bad is when you like like good teams in my opinion so i have a lot of family in uh uh ohio i think we've talked about this in the toledo area and toledo is right between michigan uh ohio state

and notre dame three Three excellent football programs. Well, varying degrees. And I'm an Ohio State fan. Being an Ohio State fan is awful. Because you just expect to win. So when you watch the regular exhibition games, you're not taking pleasure in it a whole lot. You're mostly waiting to see the desired outcome. And then if you don't get it you're like upset it's all downhill basically you're starting at 100 and

you can only lose points at that point right right right so the season isn't super fun and now and most recently obviously the chiefs have started to do very well. We have one of the greatest pro athletes in any sport, Patrick Mahomes. And that puts us in a really funny spot. Because here we are, the Chiefs, a team that, you know, I would not small to medium market team that suddenly has a, you know, Hall of Fame coach, a Hall of Fame tight end, a Hall of Fame quarterback. And we are not the underdogs. But at the same time, like, we are not the underdogs but at the same time like we're not we're not the patriots you know we sure we haven't we don't just win win win every super bowl um so i don't know i there was a part of me if i'm being really honest when we lost this year in like the

game before the super bowl there was a part of me that felt kind of good about it and i don't know if that's because my brain is a little broken but i was i i don't know if i like being that team i don't know if i like the idea that like oh i i now i on this thing is going to be a came that i a thing that i feel entitled to and that the national conversation will be about dynasties and how much can we win that doesn't seem i mean i know from experience experience with Ohio State that that's not fun. Yeah. I would also add that I think, for me, the, like, best moments, best sports memories that I have are as simple as, like, going over to my buddy's place, drinking a few beers. I mean, I remember going to your apartment, and we watched the Royals.

Well, that was not the World Series where they played the royals well that was in not the world series where they played the mets it was one of the yeah when they played the astros when they played the astros right and that was like a really fun like memorable experience that for the last two years has been sorry i played the giants that year we beat the other no don't worry about it well done uh but but for the last two years has basically been ripped out of it and i think watching sports from your house alone i mean i mean that's the only safe way to do it for the last two years but it really you definitely lose something that that's a good point and and that's actually why i've really cherished like football during all of this is because it's like,

it gave Steffi and I something to look forward to. Like it was something to break up the week where like during the pandemic, everything felt the same. And she really loves football and like knows every player's name. And that gave us something like to look forward to and talk about. And it felt, it was like something that was happening was happening outside in the real world. We honestly watched way more football games that were not teams that we cared about.

It was something to do and watch out, either in Texas or in California. We would just watch it outside. It gave us an excuse to be outside during the fall and winter. I almost think for people that aren't necessarily a fan of a specific team, I kind of think fantasy is the way to go, fantasy football, because it really does take a lot of the emotion out of it because you're just rooting for individuals at that point. So you can get excited when this individual player makes a big play,

but you don't have the like legacy of like the team that I've been following for 30 years might make it to the Super Bowl. Like that's a lot of pressure. Instead it's like, oh, you might win a dumb trophy that, you know, is like a shoe box that your friends made. It's gray painted gold. I think this is why the NBA has become so popular

because, you know, a lot of baseball and football fandom is based on like where you live and your team. While the NBA feels like it's much more player driven

and that seems kind of natural, especially with our generation is more people live in different places than where they were born or have lived multiple different places. Learning to just love a sport because you like to watch people do really incredible things yeah um is i i think great and i i mean i i hope this can connect with people who you know

watch streams or anything like that um because that ultimately like that's what i really like about it is i love just seeing incredible things happen and it's why i i honestly struggled to watch like any video game sports is because i used to have trouble reading it um you know when i watch a great football player a great baseball play i can tell what the hell is happening yeah and and and i would just say like to that same extent on the video game side like just like sports is like constantly examine interrogate what you're getting out of it and whether the things you're getting out of it are positive or negative are you more often than not coming away angry or upset or are you satisfied or are you getting like social engagement

that you weren't getting previously like constantly like look inside yourself and make sure you're getting the right things you know that the same thing applies to what you're talking about in the first segment about uh you know playing a game with a power curve and not feeling like you're actually in it it's really up to you whether that's a satisfying way to spend your time or not and uh just kind of listening to yourself uh is important and i think will make you a happier person did i did i ever show you or tell you about my my what i consume spreadsheet yeah i've seen it you posted on twitter correct yeah, yeah. And what I love about that is it makes it really obvious where I'm spending my time. And the way this works for people who have not heard me talk about this is I document any media I consume.

So this could be books, comics, games, podcasts. Now I include my learning Japanese as part of this. And I document it all in 15 minute increments in a spreadsheet. So if I put 15 minutes in, it goes in the spreadsheet under that thing, and I label the category. And then at the end of the month or the year, I can see how much time I'm spending in things both compared to other things that I do, but also just raw hours. both compared to other things that I do, but also just raw hours. And what is good about that is like what you said, it really helped me see, oh, wow, I am spending a ton of time watching football,

or I'm spending a ton of time watching movies. And that's not necessarily bad. I might actually feel like very good about that. When I decided to start learning Japanese, it was honestly because of this. Because I looked at it and I was like, oh, you know what? I bet I could do half that amount of time in movies and put all of that towards learning Japanese in my week. And I would still feel pretty good about everything. And I don't think everybody should do that. I think that is very much just my own

weird neuroses. But I completely agree with you of being really mindful of your time. It's an easy thing to not make time for, but you get so much from it in return if you do actually take a moment to think about it.

Very good. What a nice little think about it. Very good. What a nice little sports topic. What a surprise. I know. Do you have any recommendations for outside of video games and sports?

Yeah. You go first. Okay. Have you heard about the rescue no okay so it's a documentary came out i think like late last year it's on disney plus and it is about the uh the cave scuba divers who saved the uh the young boys uh soccer team in thailand was that the one that elon musk got involved in briefly elon musk said he was going to fix it made a whole deal out of it and didn't do shit did not yeah and instead it was like these like just average folks from across the world who happen to have a very very specific skill set and a lack of fear basically and the documentary goes over day you know day to day over the course of i think it was like almost two weeks maybe more or less of them rescuing these kids and it's like it's a crowd pleaser that said fair warning even though it's on disney plus this is about children in like profound peril yeah um and you know they're

the the children are in a cave system that's fully underwater and i think they're like two hours away from the entrance of underwater so like you can think of all the reasons that that could go wrong and the film enumerates them um so quite tense uh but just really cool to see a movie about this sounds so trite but like average people who are just really passionate and good at one thing and seeing them put that to use. I don't know. It really, it really got to me. And I think people will like it. I will not watch that because that sounds very stressful.

But I'm sure it's very good. Those are the sorts of things that i'm very into and uh you know i like those docs free solo is another example of like people doing very dangerous things he doesn't have as good of a reason as these guys do but uh yeah it always stresses me out um i wanted to talk briefly about doom patrol which is a show that I think I've mentioned in the past. Doom Patrol is great. It is following in the same footsteps. You know, I've been talking a lot about Peacemaker, which is also great, another HBO Max superhero DC show.

doing a much better job than they were a couple years ago in embracing the idea that superheroes while they can tell interesting deep stories and like character-driven stories really need to acknowledge just how ridiculous they are for it to be okay to watch because if you just lean into the like self-seriousness of it, I'm sorry. You know, the Zack Snyder stuff is not for me. I know some people like that. That's fine. But like, I can't get into that stuff,

but the stuff I can get into. I mean, even the Marvel stuff these days for me, it's becoming so caught up in its own lore. I'm struggling. No, you're right. But I think what Doom Patrol does very well is there,

the stakes are like not, the stakes are always small and a little bit ridiculous, but wild shit is happening in every single episode. I watched an episode last night where all of the main characters died and went to hell. And it wasn't like an end of season episode. It was just like a one-off episode. And there's another episode uh

where the entire house is infected with sex ghosts and there's ghosts having sex all over the house and the only way to get rid of them is to call in the sex men who are like the x-Men, but they handle sex crimes like that. Like ghosts. Ghost sex crimes. Ghost sex crimes, specifically. And they're not even crimes. They're passionate. Yeah, it's a very bizarre show,

and it brings me a lot of joy, and everyone's in it in a really big way. No one is not committing brendan frazier does uh plays a robot man who's terrific um it it's it's great and and i want more shows like this i would say of the like great superhero shows they're on right now i think peacemaker is like the top for me but doom patrol is is really terrific and um it seems more my energy yeah it is i think tonally because it does go to some very very dark places which i know you love yes um but so does peacemaker so it's it's hard to say anyway doom patrol it's great okay i'll check it out uh okay here is

everything we talked about in this episode. Vampire Survivors is the name of that $2.99 game where you can just grind and kill vampires. We also talked about some of our favorite bang for your buck video games. Earth Defense Force sadly did not make the cut. But Fire Emblem Heroes, Drop 7, Fortnite, Stardew Valley, and Red Faction valley and red faction gorilla either edition maybe the remastered edition made it we also talked about sports baseball football basketball the olympics is happening i guess it's kind of over i don't know it's going um then i talked about the rescue which is on disney plus you talked Doom Patrol, which is on HBO Max. Yep.

Right? Yep. And that's it. We did it. We did it. Oh, one other thing. I listened to that Finding Drago podcast. I want to tell you this.

Oh, yeah. That was Justin's recommendation. Oh, my gosh. It's, oh, my gosh. It's a goodie. Yeah. It's a real goodie it's a very goodie yeah it's the sort of podcast i was i would listen to on a long drive so that might be coming up in my near future yeah i think that's or or if you if you enjoy taking walks around the neighborhood you know to clear clear your head that'd be nice yeah yeah i say that to you realizing that you probably get very few of those

these days one of these days anyway that's it for the show uh i am christopher thomas plant i'm russ frushtick and that's the rusties where the best of the rest discuss the rest of the best