bite sized: The 2025 Backlog Beatdown Rule Set

That fades out really quick. But anyways. Hey, guys, it's Nate and it's time for another bite size. So Josh was supposed to join me tonight, but he's a lame flake and he had better, cooler stuff to do, like visit with his family in Texas or something. I guess. I guess. But it's okay. Tonight's gonna be a pretty easy one. We're gonna talk through the backlog beatdown 2025 rule set. Not too much different. If you've been, you know, playing along over the last couple of years, the meta is pretty at a pretty good place. We've got a few, like, basically one issue of, like, streamlining a little bit of a clarification on some things, and we're actually going to be introducing a new mode is I guess the. The term that I would use to describe it. But I'll get there all in good time and hopefully we'll be able to sort of just clip through this pretty quickly and all the stuff won't be stupid because this is the third time I've had to do this because, you know, hardware failure, which is awesome, but just sort of kicking off. If you've. Again, if you've been, you know, participating in the meta, you have a general drift and if you don't, or if this is sort of your first time hearing about it, you're just jumping on. This is a pretty good place to jump on too. I'm going to go, like, try to do a pretty quick but thorough overview of the rules there. It's not too complicated, but. Yeah, but there's a little bit of a preamble that I just want to read through real quick here that our buddy John wrote up. And it goes like this. As Christians, we want to be good stewards of what we own, especially with respect to our recreation in the zeitgeist of constant entertainment and entitlement. It is easy to get discontented with what you own and chase after the high of the novelity. To help mitigate the temptation of FOMO or the fear of missing out, particularly with respect to video games, we developed what we call the Backlog Beatdown. The goal of the Beatdown is to finish and enjoy and prioritize what you already have, to limit and to limit or restrict mere accumulation. Okay, so just kind of move it along here. It's a game and so there's scoring, and the way that it works is you want to chase a low score, you want to push down into the negatives. Like, think of it as if you've got Your back list of backlog games that you're subtracting games from that. Okay. When you buy games, that actually adds to that. So there's a positive thing. And we'll just go through this real quick here. There's basically I think six, five or six scoring states. I think six, seven. Yeah, but we'll talk about that. So there's purchase or acquisition, purchasing a game in, in the current year. So 2025, the season starts January 1st. It ends December 31st. If you purchase a game, you're going to take in. In 2025, you're going to take a plus one. If you start a game that you purchase in 2025, you're going to take another plus one. Okay. Because we're trying to encourage you to play what you already own. Now if you start a game, a backlog game, a game that you own prior to 2025, there's no penalty. So 0, 0 points. You beat a game, you get a negative one. And beating the game. We all know what being a game is. It's rolling credits. It's. It's getting the end state, whatever. It's like the un. It's rescuing the princess, you know, it's defeating the big bad evil guy. You can also. So we all know what beating a game is. You can also abandon a game and for the, for the purposes, because let's be honest, like sometimes you're playing something and it's just not fun, it's just not catching you. And so we wanted to give people a scorable way to utilize that. There are a couple of stipulations or considerations to just grip up on here for a second. So if you're going to abandon a game, what we would really encourage you to do is make sure that you've, you know, giving it a solid 60. Okay. And the solid 60, all that means is like you've given it enough time to really sit with it for and figure out whether or not like to feel the game as it is to let it present itself to you. Right. So for shorter game that might be an hour, might be an hour and a half. For a longer game that might be three or four hours. There's no real hard and fast on this. It's more of a like. But just make sure. And again, this is sort of like it's all honor code. It's all sort of spirit of the game. It's all like sort of help you think about these things a little bit more. So just give it a solid 60. The other thing is One of the ways that we kind of like keep track of all of this is in our Discord server. We have a 2025 backlog beat down channel. We talk about it, we sort of keep track of our scores there. We also use the GG app to sort of cultivate lists and everything else. So there's a couple different tools that we use in order to, to track all of this. And it's, it can be a little overwhelming if you let it get to you, but with abandonment. The way that you're going to do that is if you're participating in our Discord into 2025 and you're like, I was just say I'm playing Super Mario Wonder. And I'm, I, I might start really playing that. But anyways, but just say, for example, you're playing that, you get three hours into it and you're like, this is just not my thing. Like I'm out. You can abandon that. But what you do is you, you say like, hey guys, I'm gonna abandon Super Mario Wonder and you're gonna. And instead of just saying it's I don't like it, think about some of the things you didn't like and sort of give us a little bit more there. So say like, hey, I just really wasn't vibing with the controls. I might have liked the design and overall the game, but I just realized that maybe, hey, like platformers aren't my thing. I don't really whatever. But something a little more substantial than just I didn't like it. And that's especially relevant this year with some of the new mode that we're going to be rolling out. There's also a completion scoring. So completion for the sake of the beatdown is any 100% platinums count towards this 1,000, you know, getting, you know, 1,000 achievement, you know, gamer score on a game, you know, like getting all the achievements for the purposes of this game. That's, excuse me, pardon me, that counts. I have a little bit of a head cold cough sort of thing going on, so I'll try to limit that. But so completing it. We all kind of know what completing a game is. It's, you know, and if a game isn't like some older arcade games don't have that. What we're going to say is like if you want to like just say like Mega man, you know, or maybe, maybe that's not the best one. Like, I don't know, I can't think of anything off the top of my head like DuckTales you know, the DuckTales game. Like if you can beat that on one save file without taking advantage of like save scums and you know, like save scumming or doing like the rewind feature or whatever. Like if you could beat something like that on like basically one save file without cheating, you know, and I hate using the word cheating, but taking advantage of like modern technological sort of quality of life, ease of access kind of stuff, you could count that as a completion as well. And that's honor code stuff. So that's like. Yeah, there's. There's also like websites that like, if you Google like I remember I was looking at Earthbound, I was like, you know, what would people consider like a 100% earthbound? And it was like, you know, fill out all the bestiaries and all that other stuff. So yeah, anyways, just to sort of give you a little bit of a, sort of a practical application for how this might work, just going to run through this, this right here and we're going to sort of apply all the different categories here. So for example, you purchase triangle strategy in 2025, you'll get a positive one. If you play triangle strategy in 2025, you'll get an additional positive one. If you roll credits for the game, you get a negative one. And if you continue playing the game, complete all major side quests. Oh, there is a long game bonus. And this is you go to how long do we. I skipped right past that because my brain went. So we'll double back here. If the game you're playing, if you suspect that it is 30 hours or longer, go to how long to be. Check the time to be under just main game. If it is 30 hours or longer, you can claim a long game bonus. Okay, so. And again, well, I'm going to roll through this, this example here and that'll sort of, that will even it out. But so you purchase triangle strategy in 2024, you get a positive one, you play it in 2020 or 2025, get a positive one, you roll credits, you get a negative one, you complete it. So you do all the side quests, you 100 it, you get another negative one. And because it's over 30 hours, you get another negative one. So the net is you get positive one, positive one, negative one, negative one, negative one,. You get a net total of negative one to score that out. Now if that's backlog game, you know, it's all, you know, it's all bonus or whatever to say in an alternate use case. Say you buy triangle Strategy and you start it and after about 10 hours of gameplay you decide that it's just not your thing again, you go into the discord. You sort of talk to everybody about it. You say hey, like I really like. It's just not, it's not vibing. Here's like, you know, turn based strategy, things like it's just like I didn't like the weightiness, whatever, whatever. But just a little more than just I didn't like it. But you could do that. So you would take one plus one for the purchase, plus one for the start and then you'd actually lose negative one. You'd lose one off that for abandoning it. So it would. Your net total at that point in time would be plus one for that. Now there are special cases, right? So let's. Sometimes you're gifted a game or like you know, pre orders and kickstarts like our crowdfunded games. Like there's some wrinkles there that we need to talk about. So let's start with pre orders and crowdfunding. Pre orders and crowdfunding, you basically it's pre orders you treat as acquisitions and crowdfunding. And the way that it works is like if you preordered something last year so in 2024 or you crowdfunded something in 2024 and it comes out in 2025, there is no penalty for, for playing that game. However, you know, because it was paid for before the beginning of this season. However, if you preorder or crowdfund Something in 2025 and it comes out, that's just a purchase, it's just an acquisition and standard scoring applies. Okay? So it's the year that the money was spent. Everything else it's just the same. And if you like pre order or crowdfund fund something this year that just counts as an acquisition, but you are free to play that game whenever it comes. Like let's say they come out in 2026 free to play with no, no worry about penalties, gifted games and trade ins. Again, a little bit of a wrinkle here. Any game that you receive but you don't pay any of your actual money for that is a gifted game. Okay. And there are some different scenarios. So obviously like stuff that you get for your birthday or Christmas or stuff like that. Games now and with the following, I just want to make sure that we're crystal clear on this when it comes to the in store credit and all the other stuff we're going to talk about the in store credit, the trade in the gift cards, whatever that has to cover the entirety of your purchase for that, but you can acquire those. And the only penalty that you would take is one for acquisition. You don't count that as a purchase. And so you don't take a penalty, a positive one penalty for playing that game. So you can acquire, you, you register the acquisition and then you can play the game. And standard scoring applies. Okay, fairly simple, right? Moving on here. So we've got some extra wrinkles here. And for the most part, all of this is going to be folded into basically flex plays. So last year we had some categories we had. You could play a borrowed game or a game that you share a digital library with somebody with. And yeah, my, my brain skipped this, but you could, you get borrowed games and shared libraries. You can, you know, like my brother and I, we share PlayStation libraries with each other so that when one of us buys stuff. But those count as borrowed games. And this year you'll have three flex plays that you can redeem towards borrowed games, subscription games, or replays. And we'll cover all of those here in due time. But let's just sort of like the way this works is that you beat the game. You can't apply any extra bonuses outside of. You can apply a completion bonus. Any initial completion of a game at this point in time is worth negative one. And there's a little bit of a completion wrinkle to here too, that we'll get into in just a little bit. But not trying to, not trying to dogpie you, but borrow games and share libraries, you can redeem Flex plays to do that. You can use all three of them, you can use two of them, you can use one of them online and subscription services. So that's, I mean, again, you borrow a game from a friend, he gives you the disk. Like, you know, the whole, like, hey, this is how you lend a game to your friends, like the PlayStation dunk or whatever, or just again, shared digital libraries. Those all count as borrowed games. So we all know how that works. Just for the sake of scoring, though, because it's not really helping you beat down your backlog. It's not really adding to anything either. But for online and subservices, we do draw a bit of a distinction. Online services are things like PS plus Essential, Nintendo Switch Online, the base version, and Microsoft Game Pass Base. And those are all necessary to use online components of those different game ecospheres, so to speak. And so the games that come with them. So the three games that come with ps, plus the default NSO library and whatever comes alongside with the game Pass Base those. There's no penalty for acquiring them and there's no penalty for playing them. Right. So you can just jump right into them. That's. That's really. However, sub services we treat differently. We treat those more as like borrowed games. We recognize that subservices are a really great deal. Things like PS plus Extra and Game Pass and Game Pass ultimate, they're the best values in gaming, you know. But again, it sort of runs counter to the. The meta of this game. And so we don't really reward. But we also don't want to be too punitive. But what we want to say is like listen, you can. That's a way. But that's a way to play games and it's a perfectly valid way, but it's not for the intensive purposes of this game. It doesn't really have a place. But however, for sub games, you can redeem those three flex plays that you have. Those can be redeemed towards those and treated like you can score a negative one and again can score on completions. So you could beat a game and complete a game. And again the initial completion, initial beat, whatever. So moving on here, just replays. We all have games that we love. You know, I love Chrono Trigger. I play it every couple of years. I. I probably actually do. But for the intensive purposes of the Beatdown, it doesn't really make much sense. And like it's. It's more about beating the things that you haven't played, you know, Anyways. But we wanted to give people a path forward to saying like replays. And so again, those flex plays can be redeemed towards replays. And maybe you've beaten a favorite game over and over again, but maybe you've never 100% at it. Like maybe you've never gotten all the endings or whatever. You can score out again on the initial completion moving. So just those are the three use cases for flex plays, is sub games, borrowed games and replays. As far as other scoring complications, perhaps you have bundle games and compilations. Like Capcom has all those fighting Game compilations going on right now. Those are like. It's like you buy one package and you get like seven games. The way that that scoring works is like if you were to buy something like that in 2025, you would take one point for the acquisition and then when or if you played those games in 2025, you would take an additional point for playing them and then just again, standard scoring applies, but it's per title, so you don't take. You take one point for acquisition period and then there'd be in another. Another per title, there'd be a negative one for beating. So just something to think about. Like, you know, there's actually like a way like you can sort of like pile on, especially if you're like beating and completing all those games. Those compilations actually represent a bit of a. You, you can, you can score to a much more, greater extent using like scoring out on a compilation. And again, same with like the bundle games like you buy like, let's just say there's a bundle through Humble Games and you, you buy this one thing and you get six games, one acquisition point. And then when. Or if you play those games in the, if you play those games in this year, then you would score the. The play. You would take the play penalty for each one of those remakes and remasters. At this point in time, it kind of like these things become a bit of a discussion and it becomes basically like, how substantial is the change? You look at the Final Fantasy remake and it's very clearly a different game, but some remakes are just basically they're up res. There's sort of, there's not really any significant change. I think about like the Alan Wake remaster. That's basically the same game with slightly better models. So it's like there's no penalty. There'd be no penalty for Alan Wake if you already own that. Right? And again, if you like, and this is basically coming to like, if you were to buy these games again, like I owned Alan Wake back in the 360 days. I. We played it for the podcast. I purchased the Alan Wake remaster and there was no penalty. I could do that with no penalty and I could play and beat that, you know, because it's, it's essentially kind of like the same game with like some minor quality of life improvements but no substantial changes to the story or the game mechanics. That's, that's really sort of like the defining issue there, like with remakes and remasters and it's only this. It's like, you know, you're buying a remake of a game that you've owned forever. Like there's a. I think a game called Splintered or shattered for PS3 and I bought the remaster for PS4. I owned it on PS3 years ago, bought it for PS4. There was no penalty for me reacquiring that because that remaster or the remake doesn't offer any substantial changes. It's just, it's, it's. It's more about like versus seeing remakes and remasters because a lot of times those. Those actually serve to bring older games forward. You know, I think one of the things is like, you know, great example of this are the Resident Evil 4 Dead Space remake, stuff like that, the Silent Hill 2 remake. So if you own previous versions of those games, I think actually we pretty much ruled that all three of those are. There's substantial enough changes that would just be new acquisitions. So those are bad examples. But if they were just more of like. Yeah, so but yeah, that's something that like if you're buying a remake or remaster so that you can play like an old favorite in sort of a more modern setting, talk to us in the Discord and we'll. We'll see if it should count as a new acquisition or if the. Again, if the changes aren't substantial enough. It's just. It's just you're reacquiring a game. And again the. So we've got the. The replay bonus. And again just sort of distress like any initial completion on a game in an ecosphere. So we wanted. This is something that we wanted to sort of like hammer out a little bit because there were some questions. Initial completions in an ecosphere count. So for the example I'm going to give here is like I own Bastion in like five different places. In theory, I could play through and complete each one of those. Now I've already beaten the game, so I'm not going to be able to take any points for beating, but I could in theory play and complete Bastion in each one of those. Like on my PC, on my Nintendo Switch, on my Vita, on my PS4, you know, I might have it beaten on PS4, I don't know. But. But on PlayStation, I don't know. But because I also own it on 360, I like Bastion. It's a pretty good game in theory. I could complete those and every. For each different environment that that sort of rests in, that would be a negative one. There's no beating it. It's kind of counterproductive. But we did just want to give a nod to like and that. And again, this is a way to score out additional. Maybe additional or just score out subscription service games. Like if you really like a subservice game, you can complete it to get a negative one. So that's really it for that. This pretty much covers all of the scoring variables and all the whatever but what we wanted to do. And again just sort of reiterating most the Replays, the sub services and the borrowed games. It's now just, it's one category that all falls under Flex Play. And you can use those three flex plays a year however you want. So you can. One from each pillar, all three from replays, all three. You get it. You're all smart. I believe it. So what we're introducing this year, and this is something new. And depending on how this sort of rolls out, we, depending on how this shakes out, we might keep this going. But we also just want to sort of like, we also don't want to encourage like we. The. The beatdown is meant to be sort of a tool to help you think about your concern, your, your habits, your, your time and your, your consumption patterns and, and all of that. It's, it's just, it's there to help you pump the brakes a little bit and just be a little bit more mindful when it comes to this hobby. So what we did want to offer like a little bit of a gamification and there have been people who have asked about like, ways to score like bonus points. And so what we're doing is we're introducing the backlog beatdown 2025 locked and loaded Special. Okay? And that's, that's what we're calling this right now. And it's, it's mouthy and it's, it's wordy because we are really good at being bad at brevity. So the way this is going to work and I'll read this description but, and then we'll sort of talk about this in how this is going to actually work. So like, I'll just give you an example, right? These are games on your backlog that you're going to commit to focus on playing this year. For an added bonus, you're going to submit a list of games. A minimum of three, no maximum. Okay, that's, that's important. Minimum of three, no maximum that you currently own. And you're going to do that in the Discord channel and the, the, in the 2025 beat down channel. So you're going to submit that list and you're going to say in 2025, I'm going to commit to beating these games. Okay? So you're going to submit that list and you must each start, you must start each game on your list from the beginning. So if this is a game that you've sort of been like, we don't want any of this, like, you've got sort of like it almost up against the finish line and you're gonna just like knock it off for like an easy, like no exploits, right? This is a game that if you have an old save file for it, you don't go back to that. You start from the beginning. You start with fresh playthrough. Must start each game on your list from the beginning. You may not pick up from a previous save file. If you finish all of your games before 2026, you will get an additional bonus equal to negative one multiplied by the amount of games on your list. List. Okay. That bonus is granted once all the games on the list are finished, not as each game is finished. So this is an all or nothing thing. You either do it or you don't. Okay? Now if you don't meet the goal of finishing all the game yeah. If you don't meet the game the goal of finishing all the games on your list, you get no bonus for the year. Write a bigger list for more bonus points, but don't get in over your head or you won't get anything at all. Finishing a game. Now for this, we talked about those different end states. So abandonment, completion, etc. Finishing a game means reaching the end state or rolling credits. So beating the game. Abandonment also qualifies as finishing. However, what that does is it basically zeros out that game. So let's say you take 10 games on your list and you. And this is where we're really going to really encourage people to be. If you're going to use abandonment in this, we're going to really encourage you to be a little more robust in the explanation. Okay, but like, and, and, and kind of like this, what, what happens though is like you have 10 games, you get seven of them, and you're like, I play through them, I like them. This is fine. This is good. And you get to, let's just say like Josh abandoned Mike Tyson's punch out last year. So like you have Mike Tyson's punch out on your list, you get to it and you get kind of get into the same spot where Josh was, where it's like, was just too much. He just realized like he had sort of aged out in the sense that like he couldn't keep up with the game anymore and so he abandoned him. You can abandon those games and it actually counts towards the progress of your bet. But what it does is it actually zeros out that one. So it's, you don't receive a bonus for the abandoned game, but it does allow you to finish your entire list of games and collect the bonus for the games on the list. Which, which you have reached the end state. So am I making like if you put 10. If you do a wager of 10 and you abandon three of those games, those are justified abandonments, you will get a seven additional beat down, you know, or an additional negative seven applied to your beatdown score at the end of the year. So. And again, there's no max, but there is a minimum of at least three and okay, and so just in closing thoughts here, as is the case with the entire backlog beatdown minigame, the backlog or the backlog B Town 2025 locked and loaded special is meant to be a tool to incentivize you to focus on the games that you already own. These special bonuses will run through the 2020, 2025 season. And at the end of the year, we're going to reeval. Josh and I are going to re. And John, we're going to reevaluate this. We're going to see if we was useful, if it was good or if it just was kind of like whatever. And so yeah, just be cool. And if it turns out to kind of be like not great, we might not do it again. So anyways, so just, we want this to be help. We want this to kind of like gamify it, make it a little more fun and so just be cool. Like, you know, be down those backlogs, my guys. And that's really it. Like those are all the rules. That's all the updates. I don't, I don't have anything else. It seems like everything actually worked this time, so. Hey guys, I'm so glad we, we had a couple minutes to chop it up here and you know, like, do the things and until next time, you know. Yeah, just do the things. I'll catch you sa.