Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s it going, Matthew? It’s going fine. If people could see the truly ludicrous setup we are using to record this, or rather, I’m using to record my end of this, you could see that it’s basically a huge pile of jumpers masquerading as a sound studio. It looks like some child has built a kind of shelter away from an alien invasion in their living room. But that’s very much the vibe I’m going for. Well, I respect it. So this is a new podcast, obviously, if you’re listening to this for the first time, hello. Me and Matthew have known each other for a few years. We’ve got a similar background of working in games, media, print. We’ve both worked in online subsequently, but that’s the sort of like the thing we’ve spent the most of our career doing. And so for a while we’ve talked about doing a podcast that’s kind of about that sort of thing and video games through that prism, I suppose. And the other thing was that recently I saw a Twitter sort of rant saying, can someone please recommend me a podcast that’s not just two guys chatting, but like poor production values badly edited. And I thought, I’m going to make that podcast. Yes, it is. At last, it’s two white guys talking about their slightly wonky memories of working in video games. I mean, what? Yeah, wow. Is the world ready for it? I mean, the thing is that we definitely have to kind of point that out upfront. We’re definitely aware of our limitations and down the line sort of we’ll look at getting guests in as well to vary up the perspectives for sure. But yeah, me and Matthew are good friends, so we thought this would be a cool thing to talk about. And so in this episode, we thought we’d start with the big thing going on in games right now, which is, of course, the launch of the next generation consoles, Xbox Series X and PS5, both of which launched in November, are available now. Well, in theory, they’re available now. You can’t buy one, but in a world where there’s more stock available, you may be able to, but… You may also end up with a five kilogram bag of rice instead of a console. I had planned to do this hilarious bit on this podcast, where I talked about how much I’m enjoying my PS5, and then as I talked about it, it became obvious that it was actually a bag of rice. But I think it’s a bit of a sore point for people, and I kind of focus tested it on Twitter, and it didn’t seem to land particularly well, so I’ve decided not to do it today. Well, that’s the kind of level of effort we’re going to put into this podcast. AB, joke testing, to see, will you laugh at this? I thought that’s what we could kick off with, Matthew, is they are launching these consoles, Sony and Microsoft, in a pandemic year. It’s been a bit of a weird year in terms of promoting them. How have you found that whole publicity cycle of console reveal to launch? Yeah, it’s been an interesting year. I’d say for myself particularly, because I feel like I’ve been approaching this whole thing as a punter again, because for the first time, I haven’t been working on a magazine covering any of these particular launches, so I’ve only absorbed them as they have been presented to the public, which I guess is the same for you. And yeah, it doesn’t feel quite as exciting when the information is delivered to you from Phil Spencer’s wife’s office, which is kind of the vibe they’ve gone for. I mean, I know some people find the whole E3 thing quite obnoxious, but it is quite… there is a long tradition of people presenting these things and debuting a console is such a key part of the kind of console hype cycle and experience that it can’t help but feel quite muted. I mean, I think the hunger for something bigger probably manifested most when they did the first big PS5 reveal. And do you remember how everyone was watching it and there was like this instant rumour formed that all the developers saw in the video were actually being, like, digital models being played on PS5? I think that’s the kind of drama and that’s the kind of big theatrical moment people look for and there wasn’t really one. We all had to watch everything and we had to watch them through streaming services that don’t actually present the games in the high visual quality that they’re being sold on, which is kind of preposterous. It’s like, do you want to see a really low-res video of a high-res feature? And you’re like, no, not really. Yeah, I think it’s been a weird year, for sure. I think Microsoft kind of made an early mistake with saying we’re going to reveal the first Xbox Series X gameplay and it was like Dirt 5 and then a kind of bunch of other smaller games and people went into that thinking there was going to be more. I think Sony capitalized on that in that June event they had, just going all out by saying, these are the games we’re making. Here’s what the console looks like, which is a big surprise when it happened. And yeah, I think that it’s made for a strange year. We’ve had no moments like that Keanu Reeves appearance at the Xbox conference last year. And whatever you think of E3 as a kind of idea, if it’s outdated or whatever, and that gets talked about a lot, it does create moments like that and does make gaming the kind of center of the world’s attention for like one week. And I think you have definitely lost that this year for sure. There wasn’t that special moment where they say, and everyone’s got one of them under their chair, which I think they did with, I think it was Kinect or something one year. But I guess you couldn’t do it this year because the PlayStation 5 is literally the size of a bungalow, so actually kind of hiding them away would have been an unlikely and unreasonable request. Yeah. I mean, you’ve had to file the kind of like journalism, kind of like impartiality rules, a spreadsheet. You’d be like, okay, this is 450 quid of stuff. You have to import it from the US to the UK, which would be a nightmare. Really, we would have spared all of those headaches. But I’m kind of curious, I think the consoles have struggled to differentiate themselves much beyond the exclusive games. In terms of feature set, they’ve ended up looking quite similar to me. From the outside looking in, I’m not sure most people would know the real difference between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X. On paper, the Xbox is more powerful. But I don’t think most people care about that when it comes to actually making a purchasing decision. So, yeah, I was kind of curious what you thought of the differences between the consoles. Like, do you think they’re different enough going into this generation? I mean, it’s a tricky question because there’s the difference between the two consoles, which you think is the obvious question. But I actually think that the weird question, particularly with the Series X, is how much it continues Xbox One, which I didn’t really appreciate how much of a continuation console it’s going to be. You know, they’ve always talked up the back and back stuff. So, you know, actually, it feels like you’re weighing PlayStation 5 against Xbox One, like a more powerful Xbox One rather than a new machine. The fact that it has the same interface, the fact that that interface was introduced to Xbox One before the Series X came out, that’s quite an odd, hard thing to kind of get your head around, a hard thing to get excited about, you know, like you get a, you know, the Series X, you know, it’s beautifully packaged and it’s, you know, it’s very well presented in the box, but when you plug it in, it looks like, you know, the experience you’re used to, which instantly, like, took me out. And just by dint of PlayStation 5 having a new, like, face on it, you know, when you turn it on, instantly felt like, oh, this is new, you know, regardless of the specs or, you know, how new they actually are, the PlayStation 5, I think, plays by the rules of a new console a bit better. Also the controller, I guess, but we’ll probably talk a bit about that later. Yes, the controller is a very fair shout. And I think the interface thing is worth pointing out because, yeah, this is the interface that Xbox rolled out early this year, I believe. So when you turn on the console, ostensibly, it feels very similar. And yes, I suppose it depends what your expectations are in terms of what a next-gen console should provide. But it’s true that when you turn on the PS5, the UI feels very different to the PS4. Yeah, there’s immediately a slightly different vibe. But yeah, so in terms of us getting the consoles, Matthew, I’ve bought a PS5. I’ve spent a bit of time with it. How about you? You’ve got both of them, right? Yeah, so I’ve bought a PS5 and I have experienced the Series X through one being in our house for work-related issues with my wife. So I’ve conveniently dabbled with that to get a feel for it. I did plan to buy one, but, you know, it sounds terribly corrupt now, doesn’t it? But now I don’t have to. So I think that’s legit. Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah, my wife has acquired me an Xbox Series X. Yeah, it’s not mine. It’s hers. It’s not hers. It’s her works. It’s everyone’s. It’s very communal. It’s nice. If Microsoft wants it back, you have to send it back immediately. Yeah, there is that. We live in fear of that. In which case, I will buy one. So yeah, I’m curious what you kind of made of the console so far. So for me, the Xbox was… It was not a no-brainer purchase because I have a PC and everyone kind of knows that PC gaming… Microsoft is more focused on it these days. It has Game Passer PC. It has started releasing all of its games on PC simultaneously with Xbox. It’s been doing that for a few years now. So to me, it didn’t feel like, other than the appeal of potentially playing Shadows of the Damned in 8K via EA Game Pass or whatever it is, they’ve just rolled those into one. I didn’t really see the need to buy an Xbox Series X. And I think that Microsoft is becoming more platform agnostic. They’re more about services, subscription, getting you to sign up to Game Pass. Whereas I quite like that the PS5 is a traditional console in a lot of ways. These are the games, you can’t play them on Game Pass. You have to buy them. But it does feel like more of a clean break, like you say. What do you make of them so far? Yeah, I’d agree with most of that. I mean, the appeal of the Xbox is you bring all the games with you and they play up the back and back thing. And I have had fun with that. I think it’s unfortunate that I play games quite quickly. I consume them quite greedily when they come out. So it’s not like I’m sitting on a huge pile of things that I want to revisit again and see them reborn. But I have been kind of tinkering with the library on Game Pass and seeing how things play and how they stack up. And where they are improved or your loading times are gone or they’ve tweeted them in various… They’ve upgraded some of their games to run a bit better. That stuff has been sort of impressive, but it is just old games. There isn’t an amazing new showcase. Although, I have only just started playing Tetris Effect Connected, which I didn’t play any of Tetris Effect back when it came out on PSVR and PC. And for me, they’re kind of treating it like an Xbox launch game because it’s this connected version. That’s actually really good. The multiplayer in it is properly special. We play all these mad kind of individual games of Tetris that morph into this big co-op game. And that’s pretty magic. I wouldn’t say it’s a system seller. If you buy, spend 450 quid for new Tetris, that’s kind of… I don’t see many people doing that. Yeah, and PlayStation, again, just because it has a couple of things I haven’t seen. I think the actual controller demo thing, the Astro’s Playroom, is probably the thing like feels most next-gen just because a lot of the experiences in it literally couldn’t exist anywhere else. Whereas with Spider-Man, I know that can be on PS4, and I’ve been having fun with Miles Morales, but it is very like, I’ve only just played the original Spider-Man on PS4, and it’s very, very similar. So it doesn’t feel like a massive leap. And actually, well, I don’t know. Have you tried the performance mode on that? Yes. So I think that Miles Morales, it does look a lot nicer than the PS4 one, I think. And that’s partly because they’ve got these ray tracing reflections and stuff to make the kind of, I don’t know, where you’re running against a window. It looks really nice in New York. But yes, one of the sort of extensions of an idea they had with the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X is that you can choose between visual fidelity and performance mode in some games. Miles Morales’ Spider-Man is one of those games. And yeah, I would say performance mode, playing that game at 60 frames per second, it makes the web-swimming feel a lot better and the combat feel a lot better. And it already felt really good. So I personally find that great, meaningful. Yeah, I’m not sold on ray tracing as a thing because it’s such a huge kind of power glut, you know, and it’s, I don’t know that what you get in exchange for that power payout is particularly worth it for me. You know, like reflections don’t massively change like my perception of something. Like I’m impressed by any reflection in any game because I don’t really know how any of it works. And even if it’s like a tree in an Assassin’s Creed game and it’s reflected as like a mountain in a river, I’m still like, hmm, reflections. Because I’m very easily won over by shiny things. You know, like it was quite telling with Watch Dogs Legion on Xbox Series X. Like we didn’t know if the ray tracing had been patched in and we were trying to work out if it had. And I was showing it to Catherine and saying like, oh, look at this. You know, do you look at the ray tracing? She was like, that’s not ray tracing. But to my eyes, you know, the reflections were accurate enough. So that stuff doesn’t really do it for me, but the frame rates are, they are like important. Or not important, that’s a much bigger leap for me. And going back to some of the older games, which have been given like high frame rate modes, that to me feels a lot more next gen. I mean, you put me on to the Ghost of Tsushima update. And that game’s like, it looked nice before, but it’s pretty amazing, you know, when it’s all flowing, particularly considering it’s got this like wind element, you know, which kind of ruffles the environment and to see that moving all at 60 frames really brings that idea to life. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think that the fact that some of these games, like Ghost of Tsushima, Days Gone, God of War, I think God of War’s case already had a performance mode on PS4 Pro, but the other two have been patched specifically to run the games at a higher frame rate. That to me is like, that’s kind of what I want from next gen because I haven’t finished either of those games. And so I’m quite excited to play them with these kind of upgrades, especially because Ghost of Shima, when I did play it, I was a little disappointed there was no option for 60 frames on PS4 Pro. Right. And so PS5 to have it day one is a real treat. I think I’ve got one major criticism for Sony. It’s that they’ve been so late in their messaging for how backwards compatibility works that it’s a bit inconsistent the way that some developers of their major exclusives have produced like high frame rate modes and others haven’t. Yeah. And it seems like Microsoft’s been very good at marshalling one, you know, everyone, like Sea of Thieves, Devs, Rare and Halo Master Chief Collection and Gears 5, Forza, all that stuff is already on day one to run as well as it can on next gen. And Sony’s just not done it in the same, with the same consistency. And I don’t know why, but it’s a shame because it’s such an easy way to show off. I don’t know if it’s easy resource wise, but it’s an easy way to show off what the console can do. Yeah, I wonder if like cynically it spells out that there is going to be quite a few sort of cases of Spider-Man remastered. Where actually they’re like, well, this thing is in demand so much that we can probably bundle in a remastered Horizon Zero Dawn with the next Horizon. And we can probably ask, you know, they remastered The Last of Us from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4, which is arguably the kind of upgrade you are naturally seeing with the free patches for Tsushima in Days Gone. And they have charged you for that in the past. So, you know, I think they’ve got form for wanting to like squeeze as much money out of these games as possible, where I think, you know, the big difference with Microsoft is they have firmly established themselves as the kind of friend of the back compact. You know, they don’t see it as a remaster. They see it as a taking old games and polish them up. You got to remember, like, you know, when when back compacts Xbox, OG Xbox and 360 came to Xbox One and Xbox One X, they were updating like original Xbox games to play in like 4K. And, you know, that show, I think that just shows a totally different kind of philosophy. If Sony was doing what they did with Tsushima for every game, that would be like an amazing showcase, an amazing act of generosity. But I’ve just feeling the games that don’t have them seem to be things which have ties to future games. And, you know, they’ve done it with Spider-Man. You can sort of see a timeline where they do it again with Horizon Zero Dawn. Yeah, I think you’re probably right about that. It’s something I wondered about, but then I would have thought that God of War would have marked the same kind of game that they would do that for. And also the other difference is that the PS3 notoriously difficult to develop for as a console. And so when those games were brought over to PS4, part of it was because there was no backwards compatibility between the two machines. So you could justify it more on that level. Whereas now I think that if you bought The Last of Us Part 2 a few months ago and it runs on the hardware you just bought, I don’t know, it’s not your right to have an upgraded copy of it, but it’s just, it’s weird that some devs are doing it and some aren’t. And that lack of consistency is just a bit strange, I think. Whereas, yeah, but again, I don’t even know if Sony would be doing this. This is my guess, if Microsoft hadn’t had such form with backwards compatibility during this previous generation, because we’ll talk about this a bit later on, but last generation, backwards compatibility was not part of the conversation in any way, shape or form when it came to the last generation console launchers. So it’s become a bit of a battleground for the two of them, you know? Yeah, it’s quite an unsexy battleground. You know, because it’s sort of, you know, it’s old battles being rethought. And, you know, I like the idea that you have this games collection, you can bring it with you, but it’s not like 100%. I mean, you know, the Xbox message isn’t as clean as everything that you’ve ever owned from Xbox will run on the Series X. That’s not the case. You know, there is a limited list of OG games. There is a limited list of 360 games that worked on Xbox One. All those make the move to Series X. But it’s not quite, you know, the knockout punch for either of them, I don’t think. Yeah. And it has bugged me that I’ve had to, like I’ve literally had to watch Digital Foundry videos to understand what the back and back offerings are on both of them, which feels like a huge failure of messaging for something which probably a huge amount of work to actually get it working. Yeah, I think that’s, I definitely think that Sony’s more in the wrong for that than Microsoft. Yeah. And that’s because Microsoft were very clear from early on that if there’s a game that runs on your Xbox One now, it will run on Xbox Series X as well, because they’ve been building all these emulation profiles for these games, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas obviously on PS4, it’s just been a bit more ad hoc and strange. They kind of had Mark Cerny, the chief architect, I think he is, of PS4. And Mac. You talk about that at the start with that very weird conference at GDC time, where they pretended there was an audience there, but there were like three people there because it’s early lockdown. And he talked about like, oh yeah, 90% of games are going to run. The top 100 games will run really well. And then they didn’t really say much about it until very close to launch. And so it’s all been a bit of a weird surprise. Like a good surprise in the case of those patch games, but yeah. So in terms of the launch games, Matthew, I think that this is something where Microsoft has dropped the ball. I don’t necessarily think it’s their fault because I think moving Halo is probably a very difficult decision. Halo Infinite meant to come out this year alongside the Xbox Series X and Series S, which we haven’t mentioned actually, the other next-gen hardware from Microsoft that’s cheaper and less powerful, but still very powerful for what it costs. And meanwhile, I think Sony actually has a really good little lineup. Spider-Man is very much a safe pair of hands type exclusive that you know people will want to buy on day one. And as you mentioned, Astro’s Playroom, which comes bundled with every console, that shows off the hardware incredibly well in terms of what the controller can do, mostly the controller, I would say, but it’s just a fantastic 3D platformer in a kind of Mario vein. I think you made that comparison. And then there’s been a Sackboy game that’s apparently quite a lot like Mario 3D World on the Wii U as a kind of co-op 3D. I believe it when I play it, Sam. And then there’s one other one that I’ve forgotten the name of. What’s the other one? Demon’s Souls? Oh yeah, the remake of Demon’s Souls by Blue Point Games, the remake specialists who also did Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, the Shadow of the Colossus remake for PS4. So what do you think of those two lineups and how they compare? I like the two lineups. There is not an Xbox lineup. They’ve kind of been leaning on Yakuza to sell the Xbox, which is wild. And that’s weird, and it’s great. And it’s not on, well, there isn’t a PS5 upgraded version of it. I think you can just play the PS4 version of it on PS5 if you want. Yakuza is great. It’s really fun. It’s not like a big technical showpiece or anything, but it’s certainly a big meaty solid game that will keep you playing through Christmas, which is important. And it feels like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was kind of positioned as a bit of a launch game, even though it’s on everything. Xbox had one of those marketing kind of deals, which they’re probably a bit annoyed about now, because by all accounts, the PS5 version runs a bit better. Again, according to a recent Digital Foundry video. I must say, of everything I’ve played, Valhalla on the Series X felt like the most next gen thing in terms of I’ve played those games on console before and just seeing it run at 60 frames, which to my eyes was pretty smooth and there was a bit of screen tearing, but it’s a really amazing, amazing looking game. And I’ve played it for about 90 hours on Series X now, which is just obscene. Too much really, so to say. It’s mad, but yeah, I can’t really get enough of it. But that to me felt like, it’s kind of how those games run on PC. And so that takes a little bit of the wow factor away from it. But the fact that it is on a console and it has the ease of use of a console, but I’m doing it on my sofa with a controller, I really enjoyed that. And I thought, oh, actually, I can see myself playing console stuff more than PC, just out of ease of use. Because if they run like this and they look like this. So I think Valhalla was actually a pretty good shout for them because it shows off their hardware better than most of the other new games. In terms of actual PlayStation stuff, I’ve only got Spider-Man and Astro’s Playroom. Can’t speak to Sackboy, but I don’t have high hopes because I’m not a big little big planet person really. He controls how he looks, you know, like a little weak body with this giant obnoxious head. It just, you know, and that is how he controls and which is terrible. And Demon’s Souls is no, I’m just not interested at all. I’m not a Souls-born person and 70 quid to see if I am now a Souls-born person seems unwise. Yeah, they’re not impulse purchasers. But Astro’s Playroom, yeah, you know, I likened it to Mario on Twitter and things and it really does. It has that Nintendo level of charm. It leans big into nostalgia in a way that, like, Xbox can’t really do because they don’t really have that history or maybe they’re getting there now, but PlayStation actually probably does now have the history to kind of pull that off. It’s quite weird that it’s very hardware. I mean, there’s lots of, like, nods to the games in there. There’s lots of, like, little alien or robot guys, like, cosplaying as Snake and, you know, various other PlayStation luminaries. But you unlock all these, like, you know, it’s the memory card. It’s the multitap. It’s that horrible portable screen that you could plug in to the chibi PlayStation One. And, like, I’m not a big PlayStation guy, so I love that, you know, I’m like, okay. Whenever that stuff unlocks. But it’s nice that they’ve got to that point. And as a show off for the controller, it is pretty magical. I mean, the adaptive trigger stuff, which is where they can basically change the resistance on the R2 and L2 buttons to kind of mimic all kinds of stuff. You know, one of the very first things you do when you turn the game on is you have to like squeeze the triggers to sort of power some jets from the bottom of the controller. And I actually thought, you know, the resistance is so tight, you know, you think you’re going to break it, you know, you’re pushing down on it and you sort of snap through and you’re like, oh no, I’ve broken it. And then the fire comes out and you’re like, oh, it’s meant to do that. And it’s, I didn’t really appreciate how kind of nuanced that stuff was going to be. You know, that got me really excited. But then playing Spider-Man kind of not took the wind out the sails of the DualSense, but I wasn’t that blown away with what they did with it. I’ve seen some people in their reviews go like, wow, it really feels like you’re web swinging or you can feel like the electricity of the electrical attacks kind of zipping around the controller. And it sort of rumbles when you punch someone with electricity. But I didn’t really get much more than that. So that was a little off the Astro’s Playroom. It was a bit of a disappointment. Yeah, you do wonder if some of the controller’s features, the haptic, whatever, rumbles in different places and the adaptive triggers, they’re going to be used as widely as they are in Astro’s Playroom, which is designed specifically to show off those features. Like I can’t see everywhere doing it. I mean, I was playing a bit of Watch Dogs Legion on PS5, which I actually found very disappointing because it only runs at 30 frames per second, as far as I can tell. And I would rather switch the puddles off and have a higher frame rate or whatever it is they’re doing. And not to say that the game didn’t require a massive amount of effort to make and all that stuff. It’s just, apart from there being some speaker sounds coming out of the controller, I couldn’t really tell why it was a PS5 version. Or like what was meaningfully different from the PS4 one I played last week, you know? But I know some people would be like, great, you know, I don’t like controller gimmickry, but it can be brilliant. You know, I come from a Nintendo background, you know, and that is like gimmick controllers, the company, and when you lean into them, you can achieve great things. I mean, I’ve also seen that people are very quick to dump features if they’re too much work or you just can’t be bothered. But you know, what’s capable, I think, is really exciting. It really makes me excited for certain developers who I know have that experimental streak. You know, like when I played that, held that controller, like the first thing that goes into your head is like, Kojima is going to do something amazing with this. And it’s kind of a shame that they don’t have, those people like lined up, you know, in a clear way to kind of go, oh, yes, I know this, I know this good stuff’s coming. And I know the first party will do some nice stuff with it, but I’d like to, I don’t know, I feel like that’s, it’s such a benefit to that console if people do engage with it. I’d like to see people kind of getting a bit more excited about it. Yeah, I think that, like you say, Sony’s own developers, so I’m thinking like Gorilla, it kind of feels like a controller that’s made for that Horizon Zero Dawn sequel, Forbidden West. And yeah, I’m sure Naughty Dog, you know, you could see them doing something kind of like, interesting with it too, the way they kind of play with different novel bits of PlayStation hardware in their games. To be honest, I was trying to think of examples and I can only think of balancing Nathan Drake with the DualShock 3 and the 6-axis controller, which was actually quite a terrible feature they took out for the PS4 remake. But yeah, so talking of the games that are coming up then, I think that obviously like the kind of hardware features, Sony will kind of build on, try and make that stuff appealing to people, including the different activities tabs that they show you in the games. I didn’t find those particularly meaningful in any of the games I played, to be honest. Yeah, I don’t really understand any of that. Yeah. In fact, I was actually kind of horrified that when you press the PlayStation button, a completely different UI comes up with like a million different options. And I was like, oh, so it’s like a UI on top of the UI. I’m not ready for this right now. I couldn’t actually find the power button. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s very well hidden in that little bar. Yeah, I’ve just lent the controller to my sort of game consult to my partner and said, this is how you turn it off in case you don’t know, because I didn’t and it took me a few minutes. So yeah, I think that looking ahead, Microsoft has kind of launched without any really compelling exclusive software. And that’s kind of a continuation of a problem that Microsoft’s had for a few years now throughout the Xbox One generation, not having the kind of developers or the games ready to go. And it’s kind of playing catch-up and it’s been making these major acquisitions. I think it has 23 in-house developers now that it’s planning to acquire Bethesda and all of its studios. So they’ve thrown money at the problem, which I respect. But I was wondering what you thought about next year. Because I was kind of scoping out and Xbox probably has Halo Infinite, The Next Forza and Everwild out next year. I would say like at most, that’s probably the three major exclusives, barring any surprises, stuff like Fable. They might get a Hellblade 2. Yes, good point. But yeah, I think the part of the problem with them is they bought all these studios. And then, you know, the story that is largely thrown around is that they’re just there to sort of feed Game Pass with exclusives, which doesn’t necessarily mean, they’re not buying studios with the aim for each of them to make a Horizon Zero Dawn. You know, they’re getting these studios because they want them to make things like Grounded, you know, that Obsidian back garden thing. And whatever that one was, that was about roller skating. That looked terrible. There’s also that Bleeding Edge game that Ninja Theory put out. Oh, I think that’s the roller skating one. Oh, okay, right, yeah. I mean, I played that at E3. I forgot that game was just out. You can just play it now. And I don’t think I ever realized it came out. Yeah, I think they’ve got to get away from that. I did feel like a glimmer of hope when they did that first party presentation a couple of months ago, where they revealed Forza and Fable. And… Avowed, the Obsidian game. Yes, stuff like that gets me excited. And the Bethesda stuff, that’s really exciting too. I’m definitely up for some really unpleasant corporate shenanigans where they don’t bring that to PlayStation 5. But yeah, in terms of next year, it still feels like it’s going to be a bit of a transition year. We’ve got a lot of sequels coming. Things I’m excited for, like Hitman 3. I’m really, really up for that. And the next… What’s the next Batman thing called? Arkham… No, it’s not Arkham, it’s Gotham Knights. I don’t know, can we fairly call that an Arkham sequel? I don’t know. It’s got numbers flying out of enemies. I was immediately alarmed by that. While also acknowledging it looked kind of amazing. It was a beautiful looking game. I look Batman-ish in terms of their combat and stuff. But yeah, in terms of Xbox’s exclusives though, I think that… So to your point about Grounded and the reprehensible roller skating game, I think that those had the width of projects that were kind of around before they were required. And then they kind of got finished and put out. Not to say that, I mean, I haven’t played those games in great details. I can’t really pass comment on them. But they don’t feel like the kind of stuff that you would buy a studio for. Whereas I think those kinds of games, Avowed is an example of what Microsoft probably had in mind when it bought Obsidian. They thought, please make a Skyrim-like game. But that was before they knew they were going to buy the people who owned Skyrim. But still, more the merrier, I guess. So yeah, I think that they’re still going to play catch-up because they’ve got, you know, there’s still recent acquisitions, so they’ve got a long way to go to make these big games they’re working on. So Microsoft could still have a slightly quieter time while that’s happening, but I guess it just needs to get Halo right next year and then it won’t really matter as much about the other stuff. I feel all kinds of confusing thoughts for that game. I mean, I always feel bad when people like back down in a public fight, you know, where they reveal something and then all these people start making memes and making fun of it, and then you’re like, all right, we’re delaying it. And it’s like, you know, you had your kind of courage of your convictions up until this point. You know, you’ve been working on this thing for all these years. The idea of taking it, you know, taking a bit of time. You know, they’re very slow moving things, games. You can’t change course that radically in a year. So I kind of, I don’t know, I feel that game’s, you know, all eyes are on it now. It’s only drawn more attention to itself and its potential problems by delaying. And I worry that it’s, I don’t know, it’s going to be a big old mess. I’m not massively attached to Halo emotionally, but it is always a shame when, you know, what is meant to be your big showcase or what is meant to be your, you know, your absolutely, sort of their mascot. You know, Mario would never drop the ball like that. And it is sort of, that is sort of disappointing. Just to sort of see. The literal man Mario would never drop the ball like that. No, well, Mario’s done loads of awful stuff. I mean, you know, outside of his main games, you know, he’s got about as ropey a track record as anyone, you know, when you get into the realms of some of the sports stuff he’s been in and whatnot. But they would never, you know, he’s just too precious to get wrong. Yeah. And I think Master Chief should also be too precious to get wrong. Yeah, too big to fail is kind of how I feel about Halo Infinite at this point. It’s just it’s not a good look when senior members of the team move on or move around. That happened fairly recently, I believe, with Halo Infinite. It’s not good optics. And like you say, a year is not a long time to fix whatever it is they think they’re going to fix. I mean, I don’t know, make the aliens look better. I’ve got no idea what the potential fix is there. But yeah, it’s a shame because it just leaves… I don’t think it makes a difference because the consoles are in such demand right now with people being indoors a lot more, that Microsoft will probably sell whatever they make next year, regardless. So it won’t matter. I think Phil Spencer even said something like that. Like we are selling so many consoles, you know, what difference does it make? But Sony by comparison has quite a big year planned. How it gets, you know, whether any of this gets affected by COVID or not is yet to be seen, but there’s Horizon Forbidden West. That’s their biggest game of the next year probably. That’s expected to arrive later next year. They’ve also got Returnal from Housemarque Games, I believe they’re called, the studio behind Dead Nation and some of those games. They’re kind of like rogue-like shooter they showed in that first showcase earlier this year. And then they’ve also got Gran Turismo 7 and two Bethesda games, ironically Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo, which are expected to come to PC. I think Deathloop is confirmed for PC. I’m not sure about Ghostwire Tokyo, but that’s quite a packed year. So Sony’s looking good. I think they’ve just used, they know that they’re all about make these big games, get these big games out, get people excited about them. And they just have a good pattern of that now. Yeah, I think they, yeah, I’m a little disappointed that they back down on their, their initial line of, you know, this is going to be the next generation. I don’t expect these games on PS4. And then, you know, over time, quite a few of them are, which just puts some limitations on them. You know, like the fact that Horizons, Zero Dawn, Forbidden West, is coming to PlayStation 4, it naturally puts some limits on it. You know, like Miles Morales, as good as it is, you know, it’s comfortably a PlayStation 4 game with bells and whistles on it. And that’s fine. But I also want, you know, staggering things. We didn’t have that last gen, you know, everything that came out on PS4 arguably couldn’t have happened on PS3 from their first parties. I know they’ve got that huge install base and the costs are going up, but I really want them to throw in. I think Ratchet and Clank isn’t going to be a PS4 thing. No, I don’t think so. Because doesn’t that hinge specifically on the speed of the loading? It certainly looks like it just can’t be done. It certainly looks like it. That’s what I want. I want things that just can’t be done. If you’re going to spend that much money and you’re going to ask people to spend that much money on a new box, it has to do something the old box can’t. Yeah, I think Sony didn’t handle this very well, I don’t think, by initially going with the line of these are PS5 games, like you say, and then either they changed their mind or they decided to reveal them later, whatever it might be. And then, yeah, and then they’re kind of now just saying, well, why wouldn’t we want to give games to our 100 million install base? But it’s like, well, why did you initially not announce it? What was your actual thought process there? So I agree with you. I wonder if the difference with something like Horizon will be, you get no loading times between areas of the map if you’re on like PS5, but in PS4. Yeah, but even that trick, well, cool, we’ll get old, so you know, it’ll just be what we expect from this generation and it better use the adaptive triggers for some like amazing bow strain or something. Yeah. Or I’ll be disappointed. I was a little disheartened to see the head of Sony being a bit non-committal about God of War being only on PS5, which sounds like it will be on PS4, because why would you be non-committal unless it was good news? Yeah. You know, because that to me was like, I felt like that was straining at the edges of what was possible. And I’d like them just to go whole hog with it. But we’ll see. Yeah, I agree with you. Okay, so Matthew, moving on to something else I want to discuss around console launchers. So we have covered console launchers working on magazines over the years. I’ve worked on a couple of generational launchers. And you’ve worked on a few too, right? Yeah, I was there for the Wii when I worked on NGamer and, well, the 3DS as well, I guess, and then the Wii U with official Nintendo. Yeah, so for me I worked on, when I was on Play Magazine both times, I worked on PS3 when that launched in Europe in 2007 and PS4 in 2013. So I was around for those more or less. And yeah, it’s quite interesting to see how much it’s changed. What do you think the key differences are now between a console launching these days and a console launching say like 13, 15 years ago? I’ve obviously never worked on a kind of PlayStation Max. I don’t know how this was handled, but Nintendo always kind of kept us quite distant from the hardware for quite a long time. And my memories of that time are largely kind of having to steal kind of very limited glimpses at something to form quite dense opinions. You know, we had to write whole mags where actually we sort, you know, our access to the Wii was relatively limited. And it feels like that’s changed a bit in terms of, you know, I think people had a Series X units for about a month before they came out and we’re almost like beta testing them as journalists from at least that’s the impression you’ve got from the articles. You know, they were getting like updates and it’s like today, these games can now be played on it. Where that wasn’t the case. I mean, do you know about the infamous Wii house? No, I don’t think I do actually, go for it. So this is when the Wii came out, obviously the big kind of push back then was to try and make it seem sort of, they were going for this big family push, you know, falling on the heels of the DS. You know, they weren’t treating it like a normal console for, you know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t trading on being cool, it was just trading on being super accessible. And the way they kind of framed this was that if you wanted to play the Wii, they hired this, they rented this very nice townhouse in London and rebranded it the Wii House. And if you wanted to play the Wii, you had to go to the Wii House and each room was themed around like a different member of the family and then they try and like put games in that room to kind of, that kind of best suited that sort of personality. So like in the living room it was like Wii Sports and there was a WarioWare the WarioWare Wii game as well, even though that wasn’t a launch game, that was there too. What was in the toilet? I need to know what was in the toilet. There was nothing in the toilet. I think that was like the only room the PRs could sit in in peace. So it would probably just be a Nintendo PR sending emails. But it was a really, really nice house. They had a boy’s bedroom, which is where they had Call of Duty 3. But I remember that was the idea to begin with. I went to this place probably five or six times over a month. I had to keep going back to play different things. you can see that they were getting strained and they were booking people into different rooms and it got to the point where they were just having to swap consoles. So I remember having to sit in this young girl’s bedroom. It was all pink, unicorns, rainbows. They didn’t have seats. I had to sit on the bed, a child’s bed, playing Call of Duty 3, knifing people in the throat and thinking this is so weird and not at all the message that they want to send. They were getting big mainstream coverage because the Wii was obviously becoming this sort of phenomenon thing even in the run-up to launch. You’d often be there as a journo and you’d get like turfed out of the room because someone more important, you know, it’d be like the one show’s here, so you have to get out of here, you have to go and sit in the attic and play WarioWare with you scum. I remember being there at News Note Review, went there to play the Wii. It was all like Mark Kermode and Tom Paul and Jermaine Grier, who were quite snooty art critics. We all had to leave the living room so they could film their News Note Review segment. So I had to go and play like Barnyard in the kitchen. But that was, and then as like the excitement died down, they downgraded it to a flat. It was the Wii Flat, which is where you had to go and play like Wii music and things like that. But they had a massive bowl of sweets, which was great because there was never anyone there. Like the PO would just let you in and then leave. So I’m just sitting there eating this massive bowl of sweets playing Wii music. Is that why you kept going back there? Yeah, going out of my mind on sugar. It’s probably why I rated Wii music as high as I did. Just because I was out of my mind on freaking drumsticks. Nothing has changed. I mean, by contrast, I came along slightly too late for the PS3’s launch in Japan and the US because it launched in 2006 in those two territories and then Europe later on. So when I arrived at the Imagine office, I joined in like March 2007, there was like a cupboard that had a chaotic kind of like array of these PS3 obelisks that all had different stickers on them saying like, you know, debug PS3, Japanese PS3. I think there was one from another Asian country. I can’t remember what it was, but they got like an American PS3 and then like there was like two European ones and it was just kind of a mess. It was like this gigantic power pack that you needed to plug it in safely and all this kind of stuff. Actually, for my job interview when I applied to work on Play Magazine, the first thing the task they had me do was play Motor Storm on PS3 before it launched in Europe and then write a mock review on it. I’m sure the mock review was terrible. But that was really eye-opening because I would argue that that generational leap from standard death to HD was probably the last massive leap and probably is the last time we’ll see a massive leap like that. Just a huge difference in fidelity. So the visual blurring effects when you’re driving or the mud effects on Motor Storm were just amazing. There was nothing like that on PS2 that could handle it. Being offered that in an interview, that must have been painful from like, oh man, I’ve had this glimpse of what this job could be. What a tease to leave a potential kind of application with. I mean, when I was 18, I didn’t have any qualifications. I’d kind of messed up my A-levels. I didn’t even think I was going to get the job. So I think that my radiant enthusiasm probably helped get me over the line. This guy just lost his mind at the idea of playing Motorstorm on PS3, which is a very good game, a very good launch game. But yeah, so that happened. But then the PS3 was now regarded as not a failure for Sony because it did sell very well, but it wasn’t a first place winner like all of its other consoles have been. So it’s quite an interesting time because even though it was very much a premium console and it was priced that way, it was £425, the demand for it, while high at first, doesn’t seem comparable to PS5 where people seem to have such a strong connection to the PlayStation hardware or their PSN account, their PSN friends, whatever it is. The continuity is now like I have to have a PS5 straight away. There’s definitely a change in temperature on that stuff, I would say. Yeah, it was weird. The Wii was where the generations sort of split apart as well because Nintendo were just on this other track from PS3 and 360. We were in the office, we were the only Nintendo mag. There was Games Master and Edge also covering Nintendo consoles, but everyone was so excited for PS3 and 360 that the Wii didn’t really matter what the Wii could do, it just couldn’t get anyone excited outside. We were excited, I was excited. But we shared a communal space for playing it and no one cared what was happening on the Wii compared to what was happening with PS3 and 360 just because they seemed so shiny and sexy. I remember when, not a launch game admittedly, but when Gears of War first came into the office as preview code, I’ve never seen a crowd that big in the office, because Edge had it. And Edge famously, they used to put cardboard over the windows and sit in this. And I think they even took the bulbs out of the ceiling. So they basically worked in darkness in this dark corner of the office. And you could just see all these people down there lit up by a TV screen. It was almost like an advert for it. Like one of those abstract PS2 adverts. Just all these gaunt 20 to 30 year olds staring in wonder at something. And you went down and it was just like a big muscly man chainsawing a white lump of skin. And you were like, wow, yes, this is the future. We were reviewing games on a console which didn’t even work with HDTVs. We were the only people with a CRTV which was infamously stained with yoghurt. And we were playing everything in YogoVision. Next we sat next to a PSM3. So it would always be Andy Kelly playing something amazing looking on a flat screen TV. And us playing something grim on this giant, hulking CRT stained with f***ing Danon. It was a really weird golf. And I was stuck with that golf for about 8 years. Yeah, the funny thing is, I think that so much of the perception that we would have changed if they’d have had a HDMI cable sort of support, just because of the output. You could have had the games look exactly the same, but output in 1080p, and it would feel more like a proper games console to people, I think, than it just be plugged into a HDTV, and it just looks blurry as hell. And that was like, well, that’s your Wii experience, you know. Yeah. And you did later get the occasional game, which I think even despite those limitations, would break out of them. And they were obviously spectacular, like Mario Galaxy. But yeah, there weren’t a lot of them. Yeah, definitely like, it definitely created, like you say, kind of a gulf between those. But I would say that having worked on a PS3 mag at that time, the PS3 felt like it was firmly in the 360 shadow in that first year I was working there. So it was a really complicated console in a lot of ways. It was really hard to upgrade the firmware. That was a pain in the ass. It was really hard to capture screenshots with this extremely elaborate technology. The PS3 was quite bad at detecting what you had plugged into it, and you had to hard and soft reset it a lot. Obviously, the console itself was very cold when you turned it on, whereas the 360 had those nice blades and stuff. I thought you meant physically cold. The 360 was so warm and nice, it was so warm to have in the room while we were there, the Dickensian urchins gathered round our frosted PS3. It was just a very odd console, the PS3. After the initial very good one-two punch of Resistance Fall of Man, which is quite a solid 7 out of 10 FPS, and Motor Storm, which was really good. They didn’t really have much for a long time, and when they did have games, they ended up being quite disappointing. Like, Heavenly Sword was a bit disappointing, even though it kind of set up Ninja Theory to go make some better games subsequently. But it was like five hours long and just really quite a bad pompous sort of story, not a very good hack and slash game. Disappointing. It had one of the worst six axis features of that time, bad motion control. And there was Lair as well, which was a famously bad motion control game from Factor V, the old Rogue Squadron, Rogue Leader developers. Yeah, it was the end of them. That was their last game. Very unfortunate, I think, to make a PS3 exclusive in the early days of that console. Not good. Like, the install base. Pretty lean, I think, until they got the new models and the price cuts and stuff and some bigger games arrived. Was Hayes a console exclusive? Yep, yeah. That took a little while to come out. But yeah, that was early 2008. That came out and it was kind of a disaster as well. So Sony made some quite… They had some good stuff. They made Warhawk for PS3, which is actually a really solid dogfighting game, but was like… It was on a console that hadn’t sold amazingly and it was an online dogfighting game. I think you can kind of tell from Star Wars Squadrons now that that’s quite a niche genre. It doesn’t get people really excited. So the PS3 to me, just working on play that year, and all the ports of games were worse than they were on 360, like in every single case, and it was like that for a while until I think Epic made Unreal Engine 3 work properly on PS3 or something, but there were a lot of bad ports in those early days. So, yeah, meanwhile, the Microsoft, they were starting to get like… you know, they had like Bioshock and Halo 3. Bioshock, because I got a 360 just around the time Bioshock came out. That was the one where suddenly, and it was admittedly because of PC too, but in the office there was this instant buzz of like, oh, here’s the game everyone is talking about. And I didn’t really know what it was at first, because you’d keep hearing people talking about like powering up their arms so they could basically spanner things to death. And there was always references to like magical arms and powerful arms. And I’m thinking, what the hell is this everyone keeps talking about? And going to the pub on Friday nights where everyone at Future would be at the same place and just inevitably there’d always be a patch of conversation about Bioshock. And it felt like this is like the first, this is the first really universally big game of this generation that everyone’s super excited for. And I was like, I have to get it. You know, nothing up to that point had made me want to get one. I was like, I just have to get a 360 to play this thing. Yeah, same thing happened with me. I picked up a 360 for that and also to play Gears of War, which Gears of War came out in late 2006. And that was arguably the first massive 360 exclusive, a very, obviously a very influential game in terms of third-person shooters. I kind of bounced off of it, but I saw the appeal of it. It was a very good, very good, technically good shooter. It looked amazing. I was going to ask you, Matthew, so you then worked on the Wii U launch as well, right? Yeah. So the Wii died down fairly quickly in terms of it was enormously popular, but after about three or four years, kind of went dry for new games. So what was the Wii U launch like? The Wii U was sort of baffling from the start, because I remember being there at E3 when they first revealed it and showed its form, and it looked so strange. And a strange thing happens when you work on a Nintendo publication, where your job is obviously to see the bright side of things, or at least to try and spin it’s the wrong word. You don’t want to take a massive dump on the thing which is going to be at the heart of your publication. Your enthusiast press, you know. Yes, and so you give it a break, and I still hold that there are some amazing experiences that can only happen on Wii U that were like worthwhile and made the Wii U worth having. You know, like genuinely when they showed it off, some of the stuff in Nintendo Land is, you know, definitive multiplayer where it’s two sides that are different. Asymmetrical. Asymmetrical multiplayer stuff. That’s just genius, you know, absolutely genius, and that second screen really made it worthwhile. But now, whenever I see our Wii U in the house, I do always sort of chuckle to myself at the sight of the controller because it is so obscene. It’s a real Fisher Price feel to it. Oh, it’s so plasticky and the triggers on it are horrible. I mean, it just, it was never sleek. And compared to the Switch, which is like smaller the controller and better, you know, it just really like hammered the nail in the coffin for that one. I would say that Nintendo did later on did some amazing, amazing games on that console. And I think actually it saw a lot of their teams mature in a way that is now like really paying dividends on Switch. And it had to kind of go through that process, sort of work out what it wanted to do. And it was juggling the 3DS and the two of them at the same time. And it was in that weird transition phase where it clearly wanted to be working one thing, but its heart wasn’t quite there in either. But from a sort of morale point of view, it was really depressing because our jobs hinged on the excitement around Nintendo and the magazine. And I didn’t want to be fibbed. I came from an unofficial Nintendo magazine. And my nightmare was this sort of idea that official mags kind of sugarcoat everything. I wouldn’t be able to write. And I didn’t want to have to write about something which was bad and say it was good. And so dealing with some of the stuff on it, you had to be pretty generous with some of your thinking, I think. I can’t remember going to the launch for it. And it was really very bad. It was a London HMV. And I knew it was on the ropes when they asked the then editor of the magazine, Chandra, to actually host the launch event. And you were like, why is Nintendo doing this? Why haven’t they got a celebrity doing this? And the alarm bells went off. I remember they were doing demonstrations on stage and Chandra was doing whatever it is he does with a microphone. And we had to play it off stage to be projected onto the screen. So we were having practice sessions in the office of playing this weird thing. So it all felt quite, I don’t know, it was a bit murky really. We were involved in the launch event for this thing we were meant to be covering. It was a bit of an eye-opener about how close Nintendo and official Nintendo were, I guess. But the actual console itself, I thought its launch games weren’t horrible. I thought it actually, if you look at the titles, if you lived in a bubble and had never experienced any other console, there was some stuff on there you’d be like, this is pretty good. You know, like it had a lot of ports of like Mass Effect 3 and Batman Arkham City and things like that. But by this point, they were like a billion years old to everyone else. So the idea of being like, whoa, Batman, when everyone else was getting your sign for Arkham Knight. Wow, just Mass Effect 3 and not the other two. It’s like, do you want the end of a story you’ve not heard? And it’s like, the famous thing about this is it’s a famously unloved ending to a story that you haven’t heard. So, you know, there’s always characters turning up and they’re like, remember me? And all the fans are like, nope, absolutely no idea. Stuff like that. And like, full whack, like, you know, it’s like, do you want to buy a port of a four-year-old game that you’ve not got the other versions of for 50 quid? And you’re like, no, not really. And it had a, like, its big first party thing, Nintendo Land aside, was New Super Mario Bros. U. Which I just can’t get excited for the New Super Mario Bros. There’s lots of people I really respect who love those games and enjoy them as technical platformers. But after the wonderment of a galaxy, they are so underwhelming to me. The idea of being like, that’s your dose of Mario. And it was like your only dose of Mario for quite some time. I think we had to wait a reasonably long time for 3D World. 2013, late 2013 thing. Yeah, oh, it wasn’t that long then. Well, in my head, it felt like an age, because we were really paddling to sort of, you know, stay above water. And it did eventually get good stuff. Pitman, Mario Kart, absolutely fantastic. Smash Bros. Smash Bros. But it all just came sick. For the mag, it came very late in the day. That first year was really hard work. Like, it was us giving a lot of 7s to things that should have been 5s and 9s to things that probably should have been 8s and things like that. It was nothing. You couldn’t… I wasn’t very proud of the console as a fan. Even though I had lots of quirks that I liked. But quirks don’t sell a machine. You know, like, having the Miiverse being weird. I mean, it’s cool, but in the grand scheme of things, sadly, it doesn’t make a huge difference. Especially when you have to write, you know, 114 pages about it every month. Yeah, I had one too. And I agree with you that, like, there are some games that just truly benefited from having that controller. And I think Breath of the Wild is a genuinely better experience with the Wii U controller. I’ve never actually played it on Wii U. I’ve only played it on Switch. Well, I just think the inventory management on the screen works really well. And so, you know, he’s carrying a Wii U controller in the game. That’s what our slate is. Like, it’s not a Switch. It’s clearly a Wii U controller. So, yeah, I think that that’s one example. Mario 3D World is another one where I think the kind of touchscreen stuff worked very, very nicely and blowing into the controller and all that stuff. I’d be curious to see how they kind of sort that out on the Switch, which doesn’t have some of those same features. But, yeah, it was definitely… Just from the outside looking in, the Wii U seemed like it was a very mainstream success, but not a specialist success, if you love gaming. The Wii U just seemed like it wasn’t for anyone. And a real kind of misfire, underpowered and badly timed. But it feels like in the long run it really set Nintendo up for a very good run on the Switch. Oh yeah, a lot of the important stuff that happened at Nintendo was behind the scenes, was its teams. You’ve got to remember, Wii U was the era, we got Splatoon, and you started seeing developers in interviews that weren’t just me and Moto. Nintendo, all through Wii, would always put out me and Moto to interview for just about anything, regardless of his level involvement. It really felt like this was the new generation. Likewise on 3DS, you suddenly had some teams who were doing their best work. Animal Crossing on 3DS was phenomenal. You got Fire Emblem’s Awakenings, which rebirthed the Fire Emblem series as something really substantial and important. I actually think that’s like… It’s kind of a shame. Obviously, what happened with Mr. O’Arter is terribly sad and a shame for many reasons, but I used to love the interviews he did, and I would just have loved to have heard more about that process in those interviews, because I feel like a huge change happened at Nintendo in that time, and there’s such a mystery to so many people, any outsiders basically. I’d love to know what changed their philosophies, because based on their first-party output on Switch and then later 3DS, they really… They became something else. It’s a shame that there was no Nintendo magazine to cover it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I agree with you. It kind of speaks to something else I wanted to just loop back to the next-gen consoles here, actually, which is bad generations tend to lead to good generations. And it’s a pattern we’ve seen with Sony, the PS3. I mean, PS3 had plenty of good games. It sold well, but it was notoriously tough to develop for. Sony has admitted this. And then the PS4 was a much more conventional console and how it looked. It didn’t cost as much. It was kind of like a PC in terms of its hardware and was enormously successful from the start, partly helped by Microsoft at the same time, having a very bad launch, very misguided focus on making a multimedia console and not really having any games, which was kind of mystifying because they’d come off the back of a generation where they absolutely caned it with exclusives. They just had so many good exclusive games. Yeah, but then you compare it to Series X now and you look back at it and you’re like, yeah, I would settle for a Rise about now. That’s how, like, when you’ve got no first-party launch games, and literally not a one, I mean, you really are like, actually, I would settle for a Dead Rising 3, a Rise and a Forza. Not to rehash this, it is amazing. There wasn’t a Forza ready this year, given how cyclical those games are. That is weird, actually, yes. I mean, like, you always launch with a shiny sports. Isn’t that, like, isn’t that a lot of lore? Like, why is there not a, you know, there has to be a racing game, because how are you meant to tell how impressive graphics are without shiny bonnets? That’s the mark of all great graphics. It was also like a weirdly lean showing for that Forza game when it was shown off for that showcase event. It was like a 30-minute long trailer and didn’t show much. So yeah, I agree with you. Very, very strange. But yeah, like, you’re absolutely right. I mean, they were, they had Dead Rising 3. They had, you know, a bunch of smaller exclusives, like Loco Cycle. I don’t remember that one. There was like a Panzer Dragoon type thing called Crimson Dragon. That was bad, unfortunately. So, yeah, I think that, yeah, by comparison, not so bad. But I think in terms of their philosophy, obviously Microsoft’s kind of sorted them out, sold out a little bit. Do you think that either of these consoles are destined to truly shit in the bed this generation? How do you think it’s looking prospect-wise? I don’t think so. I think if there’s any bedshitting to be done, it’ll be the Xbox Series S, which I think is going to do very well because of the price point. But I find the messaging around it so vague. I think there’s going to be a lot of disappointment. On paper they’re like, oh, it’s basically Series X but 1440p, but even in these launch games, it’s become increasingly obvious that isn’t the case. It isn’t seeing the 60 frame update in Valhalla, for example, at 1440p. And that to me is like where Series X does feel next gen is in things like that frame rate performance boost. To not have that, I really can’t see how it’s different from Xbox One X. If anything, at times it feels like it’s less powerful than the Xbox One X. And the way they talk about it, if there are games which have Xbox One X updates for them, they will be boosted on the Series X but not Series S. And to me that says, Series S and Xbox One X, not that different. And the idea that people would go for something so, even though the price is amazing, like cheaper than the Switch, no arguing with that, but to not really know what it is, and to not really have, you know, Microsoft put out more demos or videos of like, this is how it’s going to perform. I just feel like it’s a console that probably seems quite neat now, but you know, the unspoken thing around this machine is surely it’s going to become more disappointing as the generation goes on. You know, way faster than Series X does. You know, all consoles naturally kind of get a bit tired as the years go on, but this one is already not really doing what it should be doing. But then in the reviews people are like, but I love the form factor so much. And you’re like, yeah, but you also bought, if you’re going to buy a new machine, don’t you want it to do something new? I mean, I don’t get the S at all. I think that is a bed shitter to be. Tiny, tiny SSD as well. Something like over 300 gigabytes of space, under 400. People seem, I will say, like all the people I follow on Twitter who do have one are really, really happy with it. People seem to dig it. It seems to be ticking their boxes. I don’t know if that’s just because when you buy stuff, you can never see the limitations of it because you just spend money on it. So you’re proud of your purchase. It’s the opposite of buyer’s remorse. Or is that what buyer’s remorse is? I don’t really know. Well, yeah, I think you’re right there. I hope it’s not the case, but it is messy. And it’s messy for developers as well. You’re having to develop two versions where on PlayStation 5, you only have to optimize it for PlayStation 5. It’s bound to cause some drama down the line. Yeah, I think that Sony has done this better by cutting £100 off the console with a diskless digital edition. That’s a better solution in terms of making the price point accessible, I think. But yeah, I think that the Series S still has merit as a kind of like game pass machine. So you do, if you do just see it as, okay, what is the easiest way for me to get access to play these games that Microsoft will eventually release on their next-gen consoles, then that’s a good way to do it. It’ll be a way you could play Elder Scrolls 6. I mean, that might miss this generation, who knows. But it’s a way you can play Starfield for £250. I kind of get that appeal. Yeah, that’s certain. And the whole thing with the sort of paying instalments is very palatable and smart. You know, the idea is that in two years, when you’ve paid off this console and maybe there’s, you know, a price cut for Series X or there’s another iteration of Series X, perhaps, you’ve got this machine to trade in and you’ve just paid it off comfortably and it’s yours to sort of sell on. When we interviewed, I think we interviewed Phil Spencer when I was working on OXM in about 2015 and a lot of the chat then was about mobile phone model, the mobile phone model being desirable to them where they were like, you know, you spend 300 quid on a new phone every two years, you trade your old model for a new model, like that’s a much better model for us. It’s almost like PC Lite, you know, it will get you to upgrade. You know, you won’t be upgrading every seven years, you’ll be upgrading every two or three years, but you’ll have like a range of models and if you buy the cheaper one, you accept, it won’t perform as well as the Dada. And it was a weird little thing that they said in this one interview, interviews at that time, and they never seem to repeat. But that to me feels like completely at the heart of what they’re doing now, like they’re trying to treat it, even the pain in installments, you know, that is how you buy and deal with mobile phones. They want you to think of consoles as more disposable than they are. And I think they want to do that because they want to hit you with more consoles sooner, where PlayStation doesn’t, I don’t think. Yeah, and hence the continuity between like stuff like the UI, like you talk about. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So yeah, it does feel like you’ve, you know, you’ve just switched on the more powerful version of the thing you already own. Yeah. And that’s by design, you know. Yeah, it’s about getting you in their ecosystem with Microsoft. That’s what they’re all about. Okay, yeah, so I agree with you. I don’t think either of them are going to really mess up this generation. Like I’m not sure about the Series S yet. I think it will sell very well. But I’m not sure how I feel about it exactly. I might feel better about a model of it that’s got like a terabyte hard drive or SSD that comes out later on, costs about the same, but obviously has that extra storage capacity, so a bit more usable. But I think Microsoft will have… I think Microsoft’s going through a similar pattern to Sony last generation, where it’s got big designs on releasing a slew of exclusive blockbusters, but it’s going to take a little while to get them done. So the second half of this generation, I think, will be really good for them when all of these big acquisitions start paying off for them. Whereas Sony, I think, has demonstrated that it’s already got stuff ready to go. And probably more games we don’t know about, a long-rumored Silent Hill reboot, for example. I’ve heard about that from enough different sources on the internet where it seems like more than just smoke, you know? So I think they’ve got some big stuff planned. But yeah, the last thing I wanted to ask about on the subject, Matthew, was why are console wars so nice now? Because this is another thing. Brands congratulate each other on Twitter, on launches and stuff. It’s all kind of like… I feel like it exists because they want to counter the toxic kind of like discussions between these fanbases. But I still kind of find myself being like, it’s a bit like there’s less drama to it than having ludicrous stuff like Peter Moore with his GTA tattoo. Yeah, I like the idea of these people who are fighting for you as a fan of their brand. I like the idea that you’ve paid all this money for this console and I want some real brawlers in my corner making sure my console is treated best. And this whole talk of… Also, so much of it is like, I feel Xbox are a lot nicer to PlayStation because they’re like the underdog. I don’t think they would be if they were in the number one position. And I don’t think they should be if they were in the number one position. Like, I would gloat at something rotten, and that would be absolutely fine. I think it’s okay to, like, throw your weight around a bit. If anything, I think PlayStation are a lot cooler to Xbox. And it kind of… I don’t know. When you have someone who is unsuccessful compared to someone else, and they’re, like, you know, praising them or whatever, it just sort of smacks of the kind of… Well, like, how I was in school, where there were people who were much cooler than me, and you’d sort of suck up to them so that you were, like, within their sort of sphere of influence. You know, you want to be acknowledged by someone who’s bigger, you know, and better, regardless of whether or not you think you are, you know. You know, it’s… But you don’t want to… I don’t know. It’s a little… it’s a little bit kind of… It’s a little naff and sort of saccharine and… You know, I’d rather everyone was a bit more bullish. I know that’s, like, kind of goes against the grain a little bit in terms of what people want. You know, everything is so sour these days. Why introduce more sourness? But I also miss the days of, like, just maniacs trying to kind of outdo each other and being boastful and, like, as a fan of something. And maybe it’s just because now people are, you know, you get the feeling there are people who own more than one console. It’s a bit more of a regular thing now for whatever reason. And so there’s less need for it. But back in the day, you know, the console wars kind of partially existed because you only had one. And, you know, there was a lot of sort of tribal behaviour around that and you wanted the most, you know, you wanted the heads of that tribe to really be kind of pulling for you. But Phil Spencer, he’s just very soft on that front. I’d love for him to be a bit more obnoxious with it. I bet they are behind the scenes. Well, I mean, yes, it is a competition, ultimately. Like, despite what they say, they are fighting the same battle. And I know they have different goals in terms of, you know, Microsoft said they’re measuring like users, I think, overall rather than hardware sales now. But they are like, it’s the same audience they’re targeting. It’s the same games in most cases. It’s like, yeah, I just, it doesn’t do much for me. I think it was like one Xbox UK tweet that was taken down about like turning a console on its side or something. And like the idea that… Too spicy. Yeah, exactly. The idea that like a tweet that was probably approved by like three brand managers anyway is like, I know that is crossing the line, sir. I mean, how dare you make fun of what a console looks like when it’s turned on its side. Like, I mean, yeah, it’s kind of embarrassing really. Yeah. But I think buying Bethesda is like, that’s the kind of big obnoxious move I get excited about. I think the buzz around that was because people were feeling for the first time in a long time like, oh yeah, that’s what it used to be like. You know, this is obnoxious in a way that I kind of like. I want more of that. It’s like Microsoft buying Rare before that generation started. Yeah. That didn’t quite pay off immediately. For quite a while, it didn’t quite pay off for them. But it was a big move to say, we’ve just taken Nintendo’s arguably second most important developer away from them. It’s a similar thing, isn’t it? The timing of the announcement was very specific. It was designed to cause that kind of upset. And yeah, is Microsoft throwing its weight around? And why wouldn’t it? It’s a corporation with billions of dollars. Yeah, because they keep saying, we’re still looking out for more acquisitions. There’s got to be bigger scalps and things, but maybe we should save that for a future episode. Yes, that would definitely be a good talking point. Dream of noxious plays. In which case then, Matthew, to take us out, my last question to you is, which console had the best launch lineup in our lifetimes, as we’re talking about console launches? I did a bit of research beforehand on this, I’m sure you did too. What did you go with? I feel like it’s wrong. Are you going with the head or the heart? I’m going with the head, I would say. But there’s a bit of heart in there. But I think that… Yeah, head. Are you? Don’t say we’re you. No, no. Actually, I don’t think we… The one thing I would say from doing this research is a lot of launch lineups are weaker than I remembered them. Yeah. I don’t know if it’s just excitement or nostalgia played into that, but there’s a lot of stuff. And there’s very few which… I think the best ones are like… They maybe have, at tops, four or five great games. Everything else is terrible. Yes, I get that. It’s all a little bit like, you know, one great game and cell damage, which seemed to be a launch game for a lot of things. It varied as well, depending on whether you’re talking about Europe launch. That tends to be a lot better than the original Japanese launch for some of these consoles as well. Oh, God. I’m looking at my thing. I think this is actually a terrible, nostalgic heart pick. Go for it. I was really torn between the Wii and the GameCube. Right. I had GameCube in my top three. I think GameCube lacks a knockout punch, but I think the strength of Luigi’s Mansion, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2, Super Monkey Ball, Wave Race Blue Storm and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, even three, even though a little old by the time GameCube came out, I think that’s pretty strong. I think Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2, Rogue Leader, is like a surprisingly heavy hitter launch game in terms of like, when I think of games that showed the sheer oomph of a console and felt like a jump, that is one of my go-to memories. Yes, absolutely. And that game still looks amazing now. And it really like, that was, that’s a dream launch game. It’s totally cutting edge and you can show it to your friends and they’re just instantly jealous and that’s what it’s about. Yeah, the GameCube launch lineup is so good that I looked at it on paper, thought about the fact that the console costs like £129 and was like, why did this lose the generation? And then it hit me like, because they didn’t have GTA, that’s why. They didn’t have GTA and GTA was the hot shit that generation and it was the, it was that exact year that GTA 3 came out of the GameCube launch in the US and Japan. And like, yeah, that’s what it didn’t have. It didn’t have GTA, you know? Yeah, so I was torn between that and the way which like Twilight Princess while on GameCube, yes, I think is a really great launch game. I think the, I think Wii Sports as a pack-in is like just a definitive thing, you know, it defined that console. I remember everyone being so excited for it. I really like Wii Sports as well. I think it’s genuinely a really great game and Astro’s play room really got me thinking about the value of a pack-in. The idea of buying, you just have to buy the console and you can play it. I really like that. That carries a lot of weight with me. Yeah, same. Would I say the Wii because of that? Probably so close between Wii and GameCube. I’m going to say the Wii because I think Wii Sports is probably like the definitive launch game, but I don’t know, maybe that’s wet. No, I think, so I agree with you about pack-in actually. I think about even though there won’t be probably very few children getting a PS5 for Christmas this year because A, it costs so much money, and B, there are no units available. And C, parents are scared it might fall on them and crush their childish bones. It would kill most toddlers, I think. It’s an unsightly sci-fi prop. Lots of holes for a kid to stick breadsticks in. Breadsticks specifically, yeah. Just to pour umbongo into. So yeah, I think that, while I can’t envision that, the idea that a kid would turn on the PS5, play Astro’s Playroom and be like, they would just react as, wow, this is something amazing I have in my hands right here. And it’s something that comes with the console, I agree, is a very powerful launch offering. So I don’t think you’re wrong there for putting the Wii down. Those are two very good examples there. And a much stronger line up, I would say, than the Switch, which had Breath of the Wild, obviously one of the greatest games ever made, but nothing else really. Yeah, and that’s the thing with a lot of these launch lineups. A lot of Nintendo launch lineups have one of the greatest games ever made within it, but then outside, and you’re like, is that enough? Is it enough just to have Mario 64? I don’t know. Yeah, the N64, I’d say, is one of the worst in terms of quantity. I think I agree with you that the GameCube spread is really good there. You’ve got lots of 8 out of 10 kind of games. Yeah. Yeah, and also, I think the… So my choice is the original Xbox. Right. Now, I think you were probably deliberating that a little bit. You discussed there… There was a lot of crap in there, like Fusion Frenzy and Cell Damage and those kinds of games. But I think both the original Xbox and the GameCube benefited from basically arriving two years late to the generation. I mean, three years if you count the Dreamcast as well. And so, you know, at that point, you are getting some of the best games of the generation, like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and stuff like that. So I think the original Xbox, because if you just take the North American launch, you’ve got Halo, obviously, one of the best launch games ever made, if not the best launch game ever made, in terms of saying what the console is about, that kind of PC mentality filtering down onto consoles, which is sort of canary in the coal mine on Xbox Live, becoming the biggest driving force of the Xbox brand. And then you have Oddworld Munchers Odyssey, like an offbeat but very acclaimed comedy platformer puzzle game. Dead or Alive 3, back when Dead or Alive wasn’t really embarrassing, I think it was embarrassing. I just think that we weren’t shaming ourselves as a people of Earth. It did have the same TNA nonsense in it for sure. But I think people just kind of liked that series more then. I recall it being a pretty good fighting game, quite a good tag team fighting game to play with friends. Then you had Project Gotham Racing as well, a very strong series. Then some slightly unusual ones. They had a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2X, which was kind of like a compilation of the first two games with nicer graphics. But when you throw in the European launch as well, you also get Jets at Radio Future, phenomenally good sort of sequel that has been lost to time, sadly, allegedly because of music rights lapsing, but really good kind of like roller skating, kind of graffiti, cell shaded game, looked amazing for the time. You also get Amps, the snowboarding game, and you also get Max Payne, and it was the best console version of Max Payne. It didn’t run very well on PS2, but the Xbox one was like fantastic. A really strong lineup, I think. Yeah, there’s a lot of games there that will keep you busy for those sort of fallow months that always occur at the start. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I’d say this generation just… And I think PS5’s got a decent little slew of games there, but that, I think, that was the one for me where I was like, well, that’s an amazing… You’ve got Halo at the center of it. You’ve got that 10 out of 10, everyone needs to play this game, and then a bunch of other stuff that’s worth checking out, too. Yeah, it’s weird, because I have seen some people say of PlayStation 5, like, this is an all-timer launch, and I don’t really agree with that. It is for Sony, just not generally, I would say. Yeah, maybe that’s it. That’s sugar-coating it a little, but, you know, when you’re up against zero launch from Xbox, I guess that’s easier to do. Absolutely. Well, then, Matthew, we’re going to wrap up there. We’ve talked about, yammered on about consoles. We threw in some anecdotes from our tedious professional lives to give it a bit of color. Yeah, that’s basically it. That’s basically what we aim for this podcast to be. The founding idea of this podcast, yeah, like sort of Trojan horse people in with an interesting idea, then wank on about a load of stuff that happened 15 years ago. Yeah, that’s our USP. So thank you very much for listening. We’ll be back next week with another episode. I won’t say exactly what it is in case we change our minds before we record it, but it’s going to be quite a cool subject about something related to games that we played in our professional capacity. So we’re going to mix it up with some topical stuff and some kind of like nostalgia retro stuff, I guess. But it’s going to be like a feature led podcast. There will always be like a big subject at the center of it and then a bunch of other sort of discussion points that come off of that. So yeah, hopefully that appeals to you. I hope so. I hope they made it to this bit where we tell them what the podcast is. Yeah, I just didn’t want people to wait 15 minutes till we started talking about PS5 or whatever. So I thought, yeah, we’ll talk, we’ll explain what it is after it’s over. We’ve actually got a Twitter feed, at Back Page Pod, you can follow us on there. We’ll tweet when new episodes appear. That’s probably going to be it for the Twitter feed for now until we hire a community manager. As soon as the sponsorship starts rolling in, we’ll be doing that. We are available for sponsorships. Rennie, if you’re listening, I use your products a lot and I will talk about them in a very honest way. We’ve also got an email if you want to send us any correspondence. I wish I’d made it line up with Back Page Pod now, but it’s actually backpagegames.gmail.com. Back Page Games sounds a bit seedy. It does a bit. It does a bit filthy, doesn’t it? Yeah, actually, should we explain what the Back Page is? It’s like a name. If you have to explain the name, is that like a failure of sorts? I don’t know. I suppose we’ve already mentioned the print media thing. So people who read Red Games magazines tend to know what the Back Page will entail when you pick one of those up. So I won’t explain it in too much detail. I just say thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back again next week.