Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a podcast about video games, and sometimes some chatter about magazines. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined by Matthew Castle. Hello. How are you doing today, Matthew? Yes, I am good. Looking forward to Christmas. Yes, which in no way dates this episode at all. Maybe we should add in some more topical references. Wonder what will happen with Brexit. Yeah, and the end of Star Trek Discovery season three. Yes, exactly. I heard David Cronenberg is in this season. Anyway, he is, yeah, it’s quite odd. Yeah, he’s got a very interesting voice. Okay, so this episode, Matthew. So when we started doing this, you and I are both fans of the podcast, The Big Picture, a film podcast that you can listen to on The Ringer. And I think that’s one of the reasons we started doing this in terms of inspiration, because those are really good personality-led podcasts and the hosts have very specific tastes and all that stuff. But one of the things that really stands out about that podcast is they do something called a draft for each of the, they’ve been doing it since 2010, I think. They did the last, they’ve been doing it the last 10 years. They started with 2010 and then moving forwards. And basically this picking the best films from each year. And you and I thought we could do something similar with games, is that right? Yes, but maybe without the confusing sports analogy that they use. I don’t really know what a draft is. That’s the problem is me and Matthew don’t understand sports. So we thought we’d settle for a simple top 10. And we thought we’d do that on all of the years where we worked in games media, although I didn’t work in games media this year. So anyway, it’s the year before. But we thought we’d do that because it would be a really good sort of potted history of, I think, an era that people now consider retro, perhaps tenuously. I don’t know what retro really counts as these days, but I feel like 10 years or more kind of is retro. Looking back over the years, to compile my list for this, I was thinking, wow, actually some of these look and feel really old and the kind of things we were talking about really date these games. Yeah, so we’re talking about the beginning of the HD era and like the end of the PS2 era. We’re obviously on PS5. That’s actually a long time ago. So also you see on Twitter a lot these days, you see name your favorite games from 2010, kind of like tweets to try and get people to, I don’t know, divulge their credit card information or whatever. And that’s sort of part of it as well. People seem to have nostalgia now for this era of gaming. And so we thought obviously our combined magazine experience, it will yield some good anecdotes about what was going on in each of those years. Well, you will decide that at home if they’re good or not. Matthews definitely will be, but he won’t think they are, but they will be hilarious inadvertently. So Matthew, what were you doing in 2006? So 2006 was the end of my university years. So that took me up to about May. And then began my search for work, which culminated in a job on Endgamer, which I started in October. But between May and October, I basically did fuck all, because I had applied to go to film school to do a screenwriting course. And it really had kind of pinned my hopes on this. Failed to get in, failed to even get an interview. It was a complete absolute no, which was obviously pretty rough. So I pretty much stayed at home eating. My family went away for the summer. So I basically just ate all the ice cream in our freezer while watching Smallville, which I was renting from Love Film. So I genuinely spent days where I maybe only ate ice cream watching about five seasons of Smallville in three DVD chunks and whenever the postman delivered them, it was terrible. But within that time, I picked up the first issue of Endgamer, saw a job advert for a staff writer, a tiny little thing. It was in like a side news column on like the third page of news. It was a jaunty little picture of the editor Mark Green doing the old We Want You, like the old war poster. And yeah, it was just sort of 30 words saying, if you think you should be our staff writer, apply for this. And I did. And I didn’t really apply for any other jobs because I just had no idea what I wanted to do. And after about three months, got an interview. No, two, maybe two months, got an interview. And then it was about two months before I heard anything. So it was a really long, drawn out summer. And then, yeah, I got it. The rest is history. So one of the things that I didn’t know about you until we’d been friends for enough time that you invited me to your stag do, is that you went to Oxford University. Yeah. And you’re very quiet about this. You’re very reserved. And that’s funny because everyone else who I’ve ever met who’s been to Oxbridge will tell me in the first 30 seconds that they meet me. I think it’s specifically because of Working at Future where it was basically social death. If you announced that or anyone knew. I say social death, people would have been fine, but it meant you’d get it absolutely ripped out of you by mainly Tim Weaver, the editor of Xbox World 360. Because if you even mentioned it once, he’d make like, it’s all you ever talked about, you know? And so I just lived in total fear of it. Like it was quite funny actually, there was almost like a secret support network of Oxbridge people, none of whom would ever admit to it. Like if anyone did admit to it, I’d think, oh man, you know, I don’t like it myself when people talk about it. But yeah, I mean, that’s more of a future thing rather than any kind of huge shame. Also, I just didn’t really achieve much while I was there. You know, I wrote an extended essay on James Bond, as mentioned last week, and it didn’t score very highly. And that was probably the highlight. Maybe it’s because you asserted that the wrong Bond was the best Bond and whoever was marking it was like, well, this is bullshit. Yeah, I don’t know if that factored into it, but yeah, it was kind of weird because of that, being in the tail end of university and like at Oxford, all the exams come right, there’s no like coursework. It’s all piled up right in the last, it’s basically a week decides how you’ve done after those three years. It’s probably the same in lots of places. I’m not saying it’s special, but because of that, like gaming time is quite limited. Although the 360 had come out, you know, just at the end of 2005. That’s right, yeah. And one of my friends foolishly bought one, which was obviously amazing, because I hadn’t known enough cash to get one or, you know. And he bought one just as we were having to do, like all this intense revision. And we became semi addicted to Call of Duty 2, split screen multiplayer. Oh, it was amazing, absolutely amazing. But at the same time, you know, we would be playing it and people would be sticking their head in the door and like, you know, and saying like, you know, you do realize you two are going to fail because all you’re doing is playing Call of Duty 2. And other people who were also lazy were basically using us to kind of feel better about themselves. So they just stick their head around and be like, few, these two assholes are still playing this game. I’m okay. I’ve done more work than them. So we became like the absolute baseline. So that was a pretty wild six months. So what you’re saying is you not only dragged your own grades down, but the grades of others who felt like they didn’t have to try because of you playing Call of Duty 2. Yeah, basically. Yeah, it’s fantastic. Well, it’s very much against the kind of, we’re all in this together ethos of Call of Duty and sort of soldiers working together to achieve great things. This was like following two people who’d kind of gone AWOL and using them as your moral compass. Hey, I mean, what ended up being more relevant in your later life? Call of Duty 2 or whatever you had to write about your English final? Definitely Call of Duty 2. Yeah, there you go. I mean, history has proved you right, question mark? Yeah, maybe. I went back a few years after I left for a kind of a, there was like a dinner for all the people in our year or those who wanted to go. And the principal was kind of doing the rounds and talking to people saying, oh, you know, what do you do now? Basically sounding people out to see if they were, you know, how rich they were and how much sort of money there was potentially in them. And if they were like, oh, I’m a lawyer now and she talked to them and be very nice. And it’d be like, oh, what do you do? I was like, oh, I’m a games journalist. And it was just, you’ve never seen someone disappear faster. It was truly, truly embarrassing. But there you go. Yeah, that’s amazing on so many levels because when I became a games journalist later on, I did email an old English teacher of mine. They were very proud that I’d landed a professional writing gig. But I never really got beyond, I never got beyond A level. So it’s very different. And this was, you know, a filthy old state school. So maybe the standards were just lower, I guess. I know, it’s all good. I’m proud and that’s all that matters. I think so, yeah. So did you have, what was your history with that whole lineage of end-gamer, NGC, N64, Superplay before you got the job? Yeah, so I’d been reading since N64. It was kind of a sort of a communal thing. I had a couple of friends who were really into it. So we’d sort of share stuff. Some of them would, it had a big focus on them. There were lots of like leaderboards for best times because this was before online leaderboards. So you’d send them into the mag and I had friends who really got into that kind of culture. I was always too bad at games for it, but we were all, you know, we were all super into the mag. And yeah, I’d read N64. I’d read NGC, not like 100%. Like I, you know, I’d say I read it like semi-religiously. There were, you know, periods of my life where I was just busy with university or whatever. And a few bits went out the window, but you know, enough that when it turned into Endgamer, you know, I was excited to see that transition, kind of knew that transition was coming. So yeah, it was definitely like the main magazine I’d read. I dabbled with others, not really got into them. I’d bought a couple of issues of Edge and just not understood half the complicated words, which should have probably sounded some alarm bells for my Oxford success. And Games Master as well. I read a lot of Games Master. I had, I used to get letters printed in Games Master. I could never get one printed in N64 and NGC, but Games Master, I had the kind of, I thought they had a format. So I used to send in letters to this very fixed format under different names as an exercise to see if I could get them printed and did. Yes, that’s because magazines don’t receive like loads and loads of letters. So they were probably just delighted to have them. Yeah. I suppose it depends on the magazine, but the ones I’ve worked on, it varies. PC Gamer definitely had loads of letters, but it varied on some of the other mags I worked on. Yeah, so yeah, it’s interesting stuff. I guess I’ll tell you a tiny bit about what I was doing in 2006, just to kind of set the stage. I’ll talk more about getting my first job in games media next week, sorry, not next week, next time we do another of these year podcasts, so 2007, when we cover that year. So in 2006, I had just finished my A levels, I did quite badly, I didn’t really revise. In 2005, I kind of scuffed my AS level results via a much more embarrassing game than Call of Duty 2, which is Dynasty Warriors 3. I kind of played that instead of revising. But to be honest, I kind of had some bad experiences in college, I just sort of fell out of love with education, I guess, and the kind of the systems of it. But really I was just petulant and should have just been revising instead of, beating the shit out of Lubu or whatever. That’s a wild guess. I wouldn’t have known anyone back then who was playing, those were games that only existed in games magazines, as far as I was concerned. Then the kind of the, the sort of Dynasty Warriors, sort of renaissance seemed to happen, you know, much more recently, that they suddenly became kind of hip. But, well, you were the guy, you were the guy who kept, Koji going in the UK all those years. Well, there was, there was a demo of Dynasty Warriors 3, with the issue of OPSM2. I don’t know, I don’t remember how you abbreviate that magazine. Yeah. OPM, it’s OPM2. Where they had the ICO demo on it. So I remember it being a very, I remember just like playing that over and over again. And Dynasty Warriors 3 was one of the other games, not the top game on there. There was like what, there were like seven games and that was like seventh or whatever. Right, right. I tried it and kind of impressed that there was this game where there were hundreds of men on screen you could beat up. Because that seemed like a really novel game type. I think those games always do, then you play one, you feel like you’ve played them all. Which I think is still the case, no matter how pretty they look these days. But yes, that was me in 2006. And then I was kind of just wandering around. My period of doing nothing was a lot longer than yours. July 2006 to March 2007, I was basically just working at a convenience store. Did you also eat ice cream and watch Smallville? I did watch Smallville, but I was watching it on E4. So I wasn’t in control of my fate like you were. What’s funny is that period is where I really fell out with Smallville, actually. What do you consider the best season of Smallville? For me it’s three, I kind of nailed it, but do you have a preference, Matthew? It sort of all blurs in together. Which is the one where, spoiler alert, his dad dies. That’s season five, I think. Oh, I quite like that. I hate myself. Yeah, I can’t remember, but there was a certain point where it started getting a bit more Superman-y. There were early glimpses of there maybe being a cape in the mix or something. When it started leaning a bit more into the, oh, this is proper Superman-forming stuff, I kind of really got into it, but I feel that was a few seasons in. Yeah, so that was around season five. Early on it was just him spending his whole time trying to keep that woman in the friend zone who went on to set up that sex cult. Yeah, Chloe Sullivan, yeah. That is crazy. Yeah, that’s like a better plot than any of the plots in Smallville, I would say. That’s a pretty fair criticism. Okay, so changing tack then. I thought we’d go through some of the headlines from 2006 and I wrote down in our notes five headlines from 2006 and then put seven headlines in eventually. I kind of just wanted to give people an overview of what was going on at that time because they’ll probably hear a couple of these and think, oh yeah, that is what was happening then. So E3 2006, big E3, this is the year that the PS3 launched in Japan and North America, it launched in 2007 in Europe and then the Wii launched worldwide, I believe in 2006. So it was a big E3 for everyone involved really. And so one of Xbox’s big gambits against the PS3 for the 360 was Peter Moore revealing a ludicrous Gta 4 tattoo as it was announced the exclusive DLC would come to the 360 version of Gta 4. So Michael Pachter at the time, the analyst said it cost 75 million this deal. So you’re saying a tattoo? Oh my god, they had a lot of money to throw around. This was like really the start I think of those bullshit, this is exclusive to this platform announcements because that DLC turned out to be The Lost and Damned and Ballad of Gay Tony, two excellent expansions for Gta 4. They both came to PS3 a year later so it was kind of horseshit this whole thing really. It did feel like, it felt interesting that something that had been defined by PlayStation up to that point, you know, felt like a big power play at the time, you know, Xbox, GTA. And I think it, whether or not there was any one game that did this, but that generation definitely had, everyone was on the side of Xbox, it felt like definitely journalists. You know, anecdotally in The Office, everyone played 360, even most of the people on the PlayStation magazines did most of their home gaming or multiplayer gaming on 360. And that kind of in my head, I sort of always throw that in with those exclusivity deals. I don’t think one necessarily made the other happen, but it just felt like the wind was in their sails. Yes. I think the big thing here is it was a perception win for Microsoft, it showed that they meant business this generation. Like you say, GTA, the very coveted PS2 exclusive, although it did come to other platforms, but it always came to PS2 first, and for whatever reason, Sony didn’t manage to secure their own deal here and lost out to Microsoft, and it was ultimately good for everyone involved. I imagine that that $75 million, I think Gta 4, I think it had a $100 million budget, so you can imagine that’s covered a massive amount of their costs, and that was obviously an amazing game for the time. But it was a big E3 for Xbox generally. They had Mass Effect, Bioshock, Prey, Fable 2, Forza 2, Halo 3, and Rockstar Table Tennis were all shown in some capacity, and that was like, they are at full strength, and they really made the most of having that extra year ahead of the PlayStation. Yeah, absolutely. It was a great year. It was a weird year as well. I think some of these things were a little vague when they were shown. I remember Bioshock wasn’t quite, it was quite early days, well it wasn’t early days, but they weren’t quite showing what it was, and I think it felt like the first big year of slightly confusing hype trailers as well, which is obviously now just, you know, comes fitted as standard. This was like a real E3 at its peak kind of moment in terms of the spectacle of it. So yeah, I think the tattoo is obviously quite a famous moment, but I would say that all of the manufacturers did have famous moments around this time. So the second headline I got here is the PS3 price was revealed as a massive $599 in North America, ended up being $424.99 in the UK, but Ken Kutaragi of Sony at the time said it was probably too cheap. And the PS3’s problems had already began the year before, like the console was revealed at E3 2005, I believe with the banana-shaped controller that was later revised into just being the DualShock 3. And yeah, there was the sense that, I don’t know, Sony just didn’t quite have the games and there was this bloated, really expensive console that people didn’t really want, even though it had the Blu-ray player, which was kind of coveted but not as attractive as the DVD player and the PS2. Yeah, what did you make of Sony at the time with all of this stuff? Yeah, I must admit, I’d spent so many years not being… In 2006, I should say, I was a big Nintendo head and I think this was still a time where a lot of people were quite tribal or due to age, I wasn’t in a place to go, well, I’ll probably pick them all up. That just wasn’t something that happened. In my head, I was, well, I’ll get the next Nintendo thing because I like the revolution and what then became the Wii. That’s what I was excited for. I was quite excited for the 360 having seen one in the flesh and it almost derailed my life because of Call of Duty 2. But I don’t know, the PS3, because I wasn’t a big PS2 person, I had one but I wouldn’t call myself a super fan, like I came to it quite late. And likewise with the PS3, eventually I don’t think I got one until after Uncharted 2 came out. I got it for Christmas in fact, it was the last games console I got for Christmas. You know, the grown man asking for such things is always slightly shameful. My parents did buy me a Nintendo Switch actually. Oh nice. But they rolled it into a birthday present, it was that old deal. Oh yeah, that scam. A Christmas console is so exciting. That’s a proper childhood thing, even when you’re growing up and it happens you’re like oh this is great. That was like the PS3 Slim you got that year, I think it came out. Yeah, I think that’s what, yeah, I wasn’t necessarily waiting for it. So I kind of came to it particularly late, can’t say there was much about it, I was interested. I don’t think I even probably registered the price of it at the time. I wasn’t engaged across all games. I was quite, the stuff I read and the stuff I was interested in was pretty much purely Nintendo. Unlike now, where I feel like I have to have a basic grasp of everything, I didn’t feel that way back then. So I had no idea it was going to be a job. So I wasn’t prepping for that. Yeah. So for me around that time, I had an original Xbox, I had a PS2. I was definitely PS2-focused, but I kind of always wanted everything and as an adult with disposable income, I have made that happen for myself, including buying a GameCube and a massive collection of old games because, I don’t know, emotional problems or something. But the 360, I did pick up a couple of the magazines around launch and was sort of blown away by the amount of games they seemed to have and also games that didn’t seem to be coming to PlayStation. So, obviously, Perfect Dark and Cameo ended up being kind of a bit of a, not a beloved one-two punch from Rare on the 360. But they did also have Condemned, which was a really cool first-person game for the time from Monolith. And then Oblivion was already kind of around at that point. People were talking about Oblivion as being like a big deal off the back of Morrowind. And yeah, Prey was around and everyone knew Halo was coming. I think Mass Effect maybe existed in some form. But it just seemed like it had really fulfilled the promise of being this kind of like console that also has PC DNA, you know? So Nintendo at E3 2006. The Wii name had been revealed before E3 that year, according to my research, which I think was a good idea because it meant that the E3 presentation that year wasn’t about the name, even though obviously journalists would make jokes about the name or whatever. Instead, I don’t know if you remember this, Matthew, but this was the year that Miyamoto was on stage being a conductor and waving the controller while a whole bunch of software was playing on the screen. And it’s a real good spectacle, I would say, that sold a lot of people on the potential of the Wii, even though what he was doing didn’t really correspond to how the Wii actually worked. Well, I think they got away with a lot then because, you know, basically until December no one really knew kind of what it really did or how it really behaved. So they could do stuff like that. It felt like that was the beginning of their big, like, you know, Miyamoto had always been famous obviously in Push, but like, they definitely stepped that up and those Nintendo E3 conferences became pretty spectacular in their own way in that year as well. It was, yeah, it was always a fun, it was definitely a fun period to cover. They just went Miyamoto crazy and pushed him for, like, you know, everything regardless of whether or not he’d actually had too much of a hand in it, I think. And you mentioned that later on that Nintendo would roll that back and focus more on the individual creators, which ended up being a good move. Yeah, maybe that’s just because he’s getting, you know, he’s, you know, getting a bit old and doesn’t want to kind of be up there, you know, pretending to conduct or other strenuous activities. They have a lot of cool games there though. They had Mario Galaxy there. This was the third E3 for Legend of Zelda, Twilight Princess, the final E3 obviously released later that year. Wii Sports. The reception to Wii Sports is really positive at the time. People were really sold on it. And they also showed off Metroid Prime 3 too. So there was a lot going on there and they’re really going to have good early burst of software. Even then, Red Steel looked kind of good on the, we’re gonna reopen that one later, I’m sure. But yeah, it was just, they just really sold you on the kind of dream of it. It was just, I don’t know, a really good bit of marketing, like a really good bit of marketing. Okay, so other stuff going on that year, DS Lite launched in March in Japan and then June around the world. It perfected arguably the best Nintendo handheld ever. Do you remember the DS Lite coming out? Yeah, I, again, I think it, yeah, just because generally where I was at, I wasn’t like counting that, you know, I didn’t have the money to buy one. The first thing I did when I got my job on Endgamer was go and buy one because I didn’t actually own a DS. I hadn’t owned one at Uni and yeah, I took a bus into Winchester and bought one from Argos alongside Castlevania Dawn of Sorrows, a majestic game, and Phoenix Wright, also a winner. Yeah, so, you know, I loved it, I, you know, I was instantly like super into it, but I also felt like shit, I have to sell myself as this huge DS expert because this is like going to be half of what I’m writing about from now on and I didn’t even own one. So yeah, that was kind of exciting, but also terrifying. Yeah, so at this point, the DS was firmly entrenched as the, they were doing these kind of like, casual friendly, I suppose. Touch generations, I think they called it. Yes, these kind of advertising campaigns with, you know, like you say, generations of people playing these different games. This was the, I believe this was the year of brain training as well. So yeah, and that coupled with the DS light bringing, you know, kind of a better lighting to the screen of the DS and a better overall look. They kind of look a generation apart, actually. It was a really nice device for 2006, the DS light. I had the white one and it looked beautiful when it was closed and the screen was nice and bright and the amount of software they had was amazing at the time. It was definitely the most exciting thing going on in gaming at that point, I thought. But yeah, so you have that. And then this was also quite a big year for Final Fantasy. I would say it’s the start of what seemed to be quite a lot of problems in getting these games made by Square Enix. So you have Final Fantasy XIII revealed at E3 2006, only to release in 2010 in the West. It did come out in 2009 in Japan. A long wait for that one. And again, not everyone is delighted by it, but these days seem to have its own fan base that appreciates its very good progression systems and combat and strategies and all that stuff. Alongside that, Final Fantasy XIII was revealed, a sort of action game that was meant to tie into Final Fantasy XIII in quite a tenuous way, I think. And that would release as Final Fantasy XV more than a decade later. What a mess that was. What was the kind of overarching name for all those? It was Fabula Nova Crystalis. Blimey. Just from that you’d know it was a disaster. I was very excited at the time because I was a big Final Fantasy head and they had all been pretty good up until that point. 12 was yet to come out and I was pretty excited about their future at this point. This is probably the peak of my Final Fantasy fandom, watching Advent Children and being kind of obsessed with the characters and stuff like that. So I thought these games were going to be amazing. And to be fair, I love both those games so it just took a long time for them to come out. And Final Fantasy XV didn’t even really resemble Versus XIII that much beyond the kind of main characters and the idea of a road trip together. And then there was one more game in there and that was Final Fantasy Type 0. That was a PSP game that eventually released on PS4. But yeah, that didn’t come out till 2010 either. So you got a big old wait here from announcement to release. They seem to be a bit more on it these days with actually getting stuff out and made. I think some of their directors just seem pretty good at this stuff and I think the upcoming 16s are in very good hands. But yes, another thing Matthew, Capcom closed Clover Studio, a very well regarded Capcom staff who had formed a spin-off studio that was still wholly owned by Capcom, made a few beautiful Joe games but their two major games were God Hand and Akami and Capcom announced their plans to close the studio at this point. Did you have a lot of attachment to this studio and their games? From afar, I kind of came to them late. I mean, I liked Beautiful Joe on GameCube, it’s not my favourite of Kami’s games. And God Hand I played after the fact and like it enough, I’m not like a major God Hand nut or anything. And I call me obviously a great thing, but yeah, at the time, it was all tied up with those, was it the Capcom 5, the games coming to GameCube? Yeah. They had that sort of exclusivity to do. And really, the only one I was ever properly interested in was Rezzy 4, which I was sort of more interested in that side of things, I guess. I don’t think I was as tuned in to creators back then, necessarily. So I don’t think I’d be able to say like, oh, this is made by Cameo, this is made by whoever. That came later. So I don’t know, studio kind of comings and goings were maybe lost on me a bit. But obviously in hindsight, yeah, you see kind of what a powerhouse this is. And then sort of what a strange decision, but, you know, wherever Capcom were at, that they couldn’t kind of house those those particular games. Did you watch the recent McCarmy interview? Yes, on the channel Archipel. Yes, it was a fantastic documentary. What did you think of it? Yeah, I thought it was really great as well because he’s a man who you don’t hear a huge amount from. Like I would say, you know, again, from friends who’ve interviewed him, they say even at those opportunities, you know, he’s pretty kind of private. You know, he’s not like a, you know, a big kind of gregarious tell-all type. So just to see someone have this huge chunk of time where he was going to talk quite openly about all his games, you know, his current studio happenings, you know, just as an insight, it’s like an invaluable thing. Yeah, and some of his insights are funny because, you know, you sort of see actually he is, you know, what he values and where Mikami is at odds with certain, maybe certain preconceptions of stuff that’s important in these games and what he does and doesn’t like. I thought it was quite funny. Yeah, for sure. That is well worth tracking down. I talked about every single game he had a credit on, I believe. Yeah, and yeah, very, very honest and very, very confident of just as such a like a kind of unimpeachable confidence to him driving around. I think he’s got Ferrari that he’s driving around in that video. He’s in this kind of like, I think it’s the Tango Gameworks studio, empty because of the pandemic, obviously, being interviewed there. And it has a really kind of like just a really cool, odd atmosphere to it. He’s wandering around this empty parking lot. Yeah, just fascinating stuff. So, yeah, I was I was very tuned into it at the time. I was quite big on Capcom games at that moment. I’ll talk about this a little bit when we get to the games of our games of the year. But I was yeah, I was just getting really I just come off the back of being massively into Resident Evil 4, which launched in late 2005 on PS2, which is when I first played it. And so yeah, it was at this point that I bought Viewtiful Joe for £3 from Woolworths and got massively into that, even though it’s an infuriatingly hard game, but it looked amazing. Oh, yeah. To be honest, it was it was good, but it’s a bit incoherent to play in terms of the action going on on screen. It’s not as legible as say Bayonetta would be, you know, a few years later. But yeah, nonetheless, I was kind of aware of who Kamea was and who Mikami was. So this seemed like a big blow because it was Capcom saying kind of goodbye to these creators who had basically defined all of their software for the last five, ten years. Yeah. And then they would kind of have a weird few years where they hadn’t quite figured out what they were in the next generation. Yeah, it’s odd because I always think of Shutokumi, who was kind of of that group. He’s the creator of Ace Attorney for those that don’t know the name. You know, he kind of joined at a similar time to Kamiya. They both came up under Mikami. They are both sort of acolytes of his and he kind of produced their games. You know, Mikami produced Ace Attorney and kind of helped that kind of come to be. And like, yeah, all that lot seemed to leave and in Arbor as well. Then all that lot seemed to leave together apart from Shutokumi, who seems to be stuck there. Occasionally they throw him a bone and make a ghost trick or something. And otherwise it’s just sort of, I don’t know, this image of him sort of chained to his typewriter, churning out detective plots for various Ace Attorney spinoffs. You know, and I wonder why he didn’t, like, you know, go with that lot and sort of give them all the good writing that their games maybe needed, I would say is maybe, like, the weak spot of that group of creators is in the actual words. But, you know, I guess we’ll never know what happened there. Yeah, exactly. It was weird. I couldn’t quite tell if Mikami had formally gone with Platinum, or if he was kind of brought into work on Vanquish. I think he was actually part of Platinum at first. Right. And then he left, obviously, to form Tango Gameworks later on and make The Evil Within. But yeah, it was, he had a lot of interesting stories about what led to Vanquish at that point and pitching and stuff like that. That documentary really is worth watching. Yeah, it’s great. But that channel in general, like the developers, the interview are absolutely fascinating. And a lot of them is like the best interview with them that you’ll have heard. So like the creator of Persona or, you know, Pseudo 51, there’s a really good interview with him as well. Yeah. Yeah, I love that channel too. I ended up, there’s an interview with Yoshitaka Amano as well, the Final Fantasy artist. Where you see inside his studio and he’s got all of the old pieces of artwork that form the logos and the concept art. And it’s just what a treat to get. So yeah, at that time, then Capcom, I think then basically was figuring yourself out for the rest of that generation until I would say the last few years with their Resident Evil 2 remake and Monster Hunter World, they seem to be have reestablished their identity. Yeah, definitely. We’ll have to do an episode down the line about like Capcom. Yes. They’re just one of the craziest rides. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, right. And so yeah, finally, I was going to I already mentioned this, but the obviously the Wii and the PS3 launched basically. So from here, the next generation console war had begun and it was kind of the waning days of the PS2. The original Xbox was basically already done at this point, apart from third party titles, and the GameCube had struggled for a couple of years as well. So yeah, it was it was definitely like a tumultuous time and everyone’s fortunes would change in the next couple of years. No one would be where they were before, which was really interesting. So Matthew, we’ll take a short break here, but then we’ll get into our top 10. Yeah, let’s do it. Welcome back, Matthew. It’s like we never left. So, with this, we’re going to count down our top tens. Kind of borrowing this from the podcast, now defunct, Chet and John’s Reassuringly Finite Gaming Playlist, where they would alternate. But they do this on the big picture as well, don’t they? They alternate when they do a kind of, you know, their favorite movies by a director, they alternate. Yeah. Plus, you know, counting down top tens, it’s an easy format to understand. Yeah. So Matthew, I’ll allow you to go first, and blow me away with your number ten. Right. I’m just going to put forward and say some of these earlier choices speak to the fact that I was at university and came to certain things late, and we happened quite late in the year. So I would say there’s a gulf between the very top of my list and the bottom. Should I also add, Matthew, that we, for our criteria here, we have basically picked the times, in terms of when they kind of count for the year, we’ve picked games that released in Europe in 2006, so. Yeah, I have got a couple which I played through work that I wanted to include, but I’ll hopefully justify them. That’s fine, I’m completely fine with that. But you might also see a couple of games that released, if you’re an American listener, a couple of games that released in North America in 2006, that would later release in 2007, they will be on my list for 2007. So yeah, that’s basically the rules. And we’ve gone for, it’s the best games, we’ve gone for our favorite games. Yeah, they’re my favorite games. So I’m going to kick off with number 10. I don’t know if this is a surprising choice coming from me. I’m going to pick Guitar Hero 2. Hmm, yeah. So a huge moment for rhythm action, right? This was the first one to come to 360. And this was the point where it was becoming a proper cultural phenomenon, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think technically Guitar Hero 1 and 2 both came out in the UK in 2006. Yeah, yeah, you might be right. I played 2 on the Pierce 2. My brother got it for Christmas. And I still to this day, whenever I go to a friend’s house, I will inevitably see a plastic guitar mouldering away somewhere in a corner or under a sofa or in a cupboard. Like there’s an elephant’s graveyard of this peripheral, which speaks, I think, to how prolific it was. I thought it was just, you know, I’m not particularly into like rock music. It’s not really my deal. But I thought this was just such a fantastic idea, so brilliantly executed. I love the fact that, I think it’s one of the weirdly most sort of accessible games on a difficulty front, the fact that even on Easy, you still get the appeal of that game, you know, playing with the three keys and strumming away. You can still get the basic feel of it. Oh, I’m just too cack handed to do any of the extreme stuff that people post on YouTube or whatever. But yeah, I just, I love the connection between, you know, what your fingers were doing and what was happening on screen. I actually quite liked a lot of them. I did actually end up quite liking a lot of the music in it, stuff that wasn’t massively familiar with. I went out soon after and bought a best of cheap trick off the back of Surrender, which it kicks off with early. Were you a dad born in the 1970s or something? It was only a best of. It wasn’t like I did any research and found out an album I should get. Yeah, I loved the sensation of playing this game. I love rhythm games in general. I always have. This one felt like just so close. The actual sensation of playing it was so satisfying. I loved the posturing of it. Hilariously, when I play it, I’m hunched over and so nervous about missing it that it’s like a kid plucking their way through their first guitar lesson. I’m not strutting around the living room or anything. I feel very nervous about that. You kind of kick it up to enter star power and I don’t want to do that too hard just in case I lose where my fingers are on it. Yeah, I thought this was great. So polished, just crazy kind of production values like the actual music they had in it. I know they were covers, but I thought they sounded absolutely amazing. You know, and it kind of, I don’t know, I think they drove that particular game into the ground. Activision definitely did. By doing so much of it. But it’s really like, when I was thinking back on it, I was like, yeah, that was brilliant. Like when I, you know, that’s a game where in one song, you have the full extent of how brilliant that game is. And yeah, I think it’s a real winner. I can’t speak to the song list. Maybe one is better, three is better, whatever. But yeah, Guitar Hero 2. So I remember there was a period of about two years where every single games media party we had at like, imagine a house party, we would have Guitar Hero 2 there or Guitar Hero 3 or whatever. It was such a staple going to those kind of parties. Did you have that sort of scene in Bath as well? Annoyingly in Bath, it was always fucking SingStar and I hate karaoke. And it’s basically SingStar because there’s like two or three people who are good at SingStar and like have their song and it became, there was always this sort of weird ceremony around it, which I really hated. It gets to the point of the evening where, you know, you’re all at someone’s house having a nice chat and then suddenly someone’s telling you to shut the fuck up because we all have to pray silence for the Lords of Rock as they emerge to do their legendary duet. No offence should they listen to this podcast. They know who they are, but as someone who is too shy for karaoke, I think I’ve mumbled my way through a bit of Common People or something, but yeah, I just can’t do Sitting Star. Give me Guitar Hero any day or Rock Band because then someone can show off on the mic and people can play the guitars and someone can do permanent damage to their wrists hitting the hard hard plastic of those drums. I do like the idea that you did the William Shatner version of Common People in Sink Star. I want to live like Common People. Yeah, that’s a great choice. I didn’t pick that one because I didn’t quite get into Guitar Hero till about 2007 to 2009. Basically ended for me when The Beatles one came out, which I very much enjoyed and probably will feature on my list that year. But that was the one where I was like, oh, this is kind of the peak of it and then it was already being overdone by then, that series, the Guitar Hero series. And then, yeah, there were just too many and people lost interest pretty quickly. But yeah. All right then, my number 10. I suspect this will be higher up on your list, Matthew. My number 10 is Gears of War. Is that on your list? Gears of War isn’t on my list. Wow, okay, interesting. So people might think this is quite low down because I would say that this was one of the most acclaimed games of that year, possibly the most acclaimed, up there with Oblivion. But I don’t think Gears of War appealed to me in the sense of its fictional universe. I found very irritating and the big dudes shouting at each other, but I can’t deny it was technically an incredible third-person shooter. And it was really, really like a genre changer. Just instantly people were like, okay, they’ve solved what third-person shooting is. Well, and that’s what all we were playing for the next four years, it felt like, which was cover shooters that weren’t as good as Gears. When you play Watch Dogs Legion now, when you’re in cover shooting at people, that is the Gears of War system. People haven’t figured out a new way of doing that. That was it. Gears of War was the solution to that system. I do think that it did lead to a lack of variety because there weren’t many interesting spins on it from other developers. Here and there there were. I quite like how Max Payne 3 fused together, cover shooting and bullet time. Generally speaking, there was a bit too much of it around. I didn’t have a 360, probably factored into it. I remember, I think I’ve spoken about this before, when Edge got it in, going down and just being blown away that that was happening on a console. I just couldn’t believe it. I think I got into it a bit more around Gears 2 and 3 because I think they just went fully preposterous. I think one still, you know, I had a couple of friends who were like, oh, one is really tongue in cheek. It’s actually a very sort of subtly funny game and I’m like, I really don’t know. Is it though? No, it really took itself seriously. It thought those guys were cool and they look disgusting. They’re so meaty and muscly. They look like just gristle, don’t they? So unpleasant. Yeah, it wasn’t just the cover shooting that was pervasive. It was this whole game characters looking like this really kind of like right down to like the Arkham Asylum game. Yeah, where Commissioner Gordon is just like… Beefcake. basically a cupboard. Yeah, and I think that for a long time people mischaracterized this as when you make a game in Unreal Engine 3, this is what a character looks like, which is obviously preposterous. But that’s because that was such an influential type of character design. So I must admit, I don’t like the way that Gears kind of appropriated… Well, that’s not fair. Other people appropriated Gears to make quite NAF tutors for a few years afterwards. But I can’t deny that Gears of War was like a real moment and also a proper next-gen game. Like that was the thing. It was the big game at E3 that year. And I believe Kojima went and played it. And it was… I think, yeah, quite a few luminaries went and saw the big deal. I swear, it’s one of these games where… I think there’s probably an infamous Miyamoto quote, where there’s a picture of Miyamoto looking at it, looking very unimpressed, and then someone will ask him about it and say, oh, we saw you looking at Gears. Why don’t you make that? And he’ll say, oh, I could, but I choose not to. Which seemed to be a recurring thing for E3 around that period for about five years. There was always a big story of Miyamoto as dismissive of someone else’s shiny game, like Assassin’s Creed, I think was another one. But I’m pretty sure there’s a Miyamoto, yes, I choose not to make Gears. Yeah, I mean, I just, yeah, obviously, and I wouldn’t want to play the Miyamoto version of Gears. That’s not the right fit, really. But I think it’s interesting because I do think this series had a bit of a shelf life. By the time Gears of War Judgment came out, I think people were kind of over it by the end of the generation. It didn’t quite have the same goodwill that Uncharted did to last it through. I think it sort of on the way back, I actually think Gears 5, I really rate it. I thought it was a real standout game from last year. I just thought it had a great sense of fun and spectacle and it had a little bit of open world stuff which kind of changed the flavor of it. I felt to me like, oh this is actually, of all Microsoft’s kind of teams that they’ve built to kind of carry on all their classic games, which is kind of their business model, this was one where I was like, actually the coalition have kind of clicked into place and Gears 5 is good and I’m genuinely excited to see what they do with Gears 6, which after Gears 4 I wasn’t quite feeling it, but I’m way more confident of Gears than I am Halo now. Yeah, which is a whole other thing. Yeah, we can talk about that next year. So what’s your number nine, Matthew? My number nine is Tomb Raider Legend. Not on my list. Which was not a stunning game, but sort of triggered, it was like the first big sort of reboot, I guess, for Lara Croft after Angel of Darkness, which was the sort of disastrous cause, sort of disastrous goodbye to it. This was Crystal Dynamics coming in, and they made their first trilogy, which is Tomb Raider Legend, Tomb Raider Anniversary and then Tomb Raider Underworld, which are games I thought got progressively better and will probably be featuring on my lists in later years. But Tomb Raider Legend kind of began this and took some important steps, like by making Lara Croft quite nice to control, like she no longer can, I hate the controls in the original Tomb Raider, that kind of tile-based movement. It had its day for sure. Yeah, I remember I asked for Tomb Raider 1 for my birthday on PC because I’d just seen the images of it and Tomb Raider was everywhere and it was really like forced down your throat. I was so shitted, I don’t think I could even get through like level one of Tomb Raider because I found the controls so baffling and confusing. Admittedly, trying to play it on a keyboard is just like bleh, but you know, I love the idea of it. You know, I think Tomb Raider Anniversary when that came along completely like delivered on the promise that I always knew was sort of there, but this one took like important steps towards it. It was a bit of a dumb action blockbuster, it had always terrible chase sequences and the combat is bad, which is true of this sort of middle trilogy of games, like they never ever got the combat right, but it had some tombs with slightly sort of physics-y puzzles, some quite nice platforming. I quite liked the Lara Crofts, it was where Keely Hawes came in and did the voice and they just kind of like reinvented itself, it had a bit of a bit of a feel to it. It’s quite an easy game to sort of like rather than love, not a classic, I don’t think people kind of think much of it now, I think Anniversary and Underworld hold up much better, but for me I kind of prefer this middle trilogy to the gritty thing that they did at the end, you know, with Tomb Raider and the other ones Rise and Shadow. This is more like kind of where I wanted the games always to sit and be and I thought this was Crystal Dynamics really nailing it, so yes, Tomb Raider Legend. It’s quite interesting, Tomb Raider now seems to find itself in the same position that this trilogy was at the end with Underworld, where the last century doesn’t appear to have been a smash hit when the first one seemed like it was a massive deal and sold really well. And yeah, now I would imagine having similar conversations about what is the next, what does Lara Croft look like next time we do this? I mean, they’re going to bring her back at some point short, like she’s too valuable a thing. Yeah, I think that there was, yeah, it was, there was definitely like a hunger for a good Tomb Raider game at this point too, like it had been a fair few years since Angel of Darkness and yeah, and, and even longer since the series had been sort of fresh and exciting. So yeah, Yeah, it’s sort of weird, because I remember reading the reviews all throughout those early games and they were never like absolute knockout, you know, 10 out of 10s. Like, I think people really liked the first Tomb Raider, I think Tomb Raider 2 was probably even better received, but I think it was slightly downhill from that point on, is how I remember it anyway. Yeah, it was just a perfect game for the PlayStation 1, the, just the controls worked well with a d-pad. Yeah, right. And it was just, and it looked nice for the time. So yeah, I can see why it caught on. But yeah, Tomb Raider 2, I remember being good, but I must admit this trilogy passed me by. Well, you’re prepared to hear a lot more about it in the coming episodes. Yeah, I look forward to it. Okay, so my number nine, Matthew, is Kingdom Hearts 2, which is another game that I think released the year before in Japan, but released in Europe in September of this year. Yeah. So Kingdom Hearts is very much a series I feel like I’ve grown out of. It’s this, you know, like- And that is why we are friends. Final Fantasy creators, basically making a kind of a Japanese RPG infused action game set in Disney World. And I was really fond of the first one. The first one came out when I was 14. So I was very young when I was playing it. And then this one came out when I was, I guess I was 18 at the time. Yeah, 18. So it was just at the tail end of I think like, I would say Disney is one of those things where I loved Disney until I was about like a teenager and then fell out of love with Disney until I was kind of an adult again. And then, you know, now I really enjoy watching Disney films because you get over the hump of like, this is for kids and all that stuff. You became more of a Shrek kind of kid. Yeah, I was big into the DreamWorks kind of thing. Yeah, you had that DreamWorks attitude. I could tell. I felt like they had more cultural cachet, you know. So yeah, Kingdom Hearts 2 came out. This is where the story gets incredibly confusing. Obviously, Kingdom Hearts has roundly mocked for its lore, for the ludicrous names of all of its spin-offs and all that stuff. I would say that the series’ number one drawback is the fact they just did not get them out fast enough. It was, I think, Kingdom Hearts 3 came out either 2019 or 2018, but either way it shouldn’t have been more than 10 years after the last main entry because surely there’s a ticking timer on how old your fan base is. I mean, maybe some younger people picked it up with the HD remakes, but I was in my thirties when Kingdom Hearts 3 came out. I didn’t even play it. I just wasn’t quite there. My introduction to Kingdom Hearts, my brother really liked one and that was fine. I didn’t really want anything to do with it, but we had to review a couple on DS, maybe one on 3DS. They had just, you know, the names are infamous because they look like maths equations. It’s like 365 days divided by 2 times by heart equals bollocks, it turns out. Is that what the endgamer review said at the time? They just weren’t the platforms for those games because they were so, the production values were so key and core to them that they looked and had all these like Disney quality stuff going on in them. To then see that on the DS or whatever was just totally rank and they were, oh, awful, just awful games. The 3DS one, I recall being quite nice looking. That was quite lavish in terms of production values, but the DS one was definitely pared down I would say. Just don’t they do that? The thing that always amazed me was the fact that it had all these Disney franchises and they’d get like all the original cast members back in to voice their role in the game. I used to think, wow, that is someone throwing some money around. Yeah, it definitely has its moments, I would say, Kingdom Hearts 2, because of that. So the Mulan world has mostly original cast back. One of them, a very nice looking world, they do a Steamboat Willie level, which I think, again, looked amazing for the time and sounded really good. The worlds were very well put together. There was a Tron level inside a computer in the game and it was a really good whistle stop tour through all of these different Disney worlds. There’s a really good Pirates of the Caribbean level in this one too. So yeah, I don’t want to kind of like just roundly mock Kingdom Hearts, because I do think the second one, I was incredibly excited by it and I did think it lived up to the hype at the time. It’s just one of those things that it’s okay that you grow out of stuff, you know, and it’s okay if you haven’t grown out of Kingdom Hearts, that’s okay too. It’s just that’s how I personally felt. It felt like years later, I just didn’t quite have the same love for it, you know. One of my like very early memories on working on Endgamer was being very nervous to be there. You know, I was like, Oh God, you know, this is quite my first job. And it was a big open plan office, so there were loads of other mag teams. But I remember one of the things that made me weirdly reassured was every day without fail the deputy art editor on PSM3 magazine would bollock on about kingdom where he was in Kingdom Hearts 2. And just hearing a grown man being like, Oh, I just can’t beat Ursula the Seahag. And I remember thinking, Oh, this is okay, actually, like this office is is full of like silly people, yeah, and with silly concerns, like they can’t be Ursula. And he just kept talking about Ursula and the Little Mermaid. So that was that was quite nice and reassuring. So I am, you know, Kingdom Hearts to a couple of bonus points for that. Yeah, I don’t have loads more to say about it other than to say that it’s one of those games where I feel like there’s a generation below me, I think that got really into Kingdom Hearts. And when the third one came out, those are the people I saw giving like mega review scores to, to the third one. So, you know, I get that these things are a bit generational. A lot of, I’d say heart scores overhead scores probably. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so your number eights, Matthew, my number eight is Psychonauts. Not on my list. Oh, there you go. It’s not a lot of crossover so far. I never played it. So yeah, you have to talk me through it. Yeah, so Psychonauts is Double Fine’s characterful action platformer, I guess in the vein of a kind of Mario 64, probably more like the Rare Things in terms of there was a lot of collector thonning in it. As an actual platforming game, not stellar. And I would say what Psychonauts does is begin my relationship with Double Fine of really loving their art style and concepts, but not really rating any of the games they make. And Psychonauts is a total triumph, probably their best since they’ve been Double Fine, of kind of concept and style over content in terms of it’s not a very great platformer, but the worlds that you explore. You’re basically sort of a summer camp for you’re this sort of psychic kid at this sort of summer camp. Are they all psychics? I can’t remember if they’re, I think they’ve all relatively oddball characters. And you basically pop into the heads of people and solve their mental anguish in a level which is shaped around that. So the things that trouble them, their sort of personalities manifest as these quite abstract levels, you know, and it’s interesting geometry and almost like something that got like early hints of my galaxy with sort of spherical platforms and like weird bending things. But you know, you go into the head of an army guy and it’s all kind of like a war zone and there’s little mini tanks and there’s this very sort of controlled sort of German guy and you go into his head and it’s this big kind of abstract cube and you have to kind of break into it. And so it gets by, I think, on the charm of its art design. I think the writing is really, really funny, which has always been, you know, I think Tim Schafer and his team are gifted at kind of lifting, maybe like lifting seven out of tens into like eight or nine territory, just because you’re laughing in a way that you don’t, you know, genuinely laughing at good jokes, which is a rare thing. Has this huge cult appeal, obviously it’s sort of spawned the little VR thing, which I haven’t played, and Psychonauts 2 on the horizon. I’m interested to see if like, it’s just a more technically sound game, not that this was like massively broken, but it had like, it had the problems that all platforming games had kind of, you know, back then, which was like, slightly duff cameras and not maybe not the tightest controls. But yeah, real sense of style. I was excited to carry on playing Tim Schafer games. I was a huge, huge Grim Fandango fan. So I’m, you know, I’m glad he’s still out there doing his thing. Yeah, kind of a, just a good little one. And it seems to live on in enough places that you can still pick it up and play it. I think I played it last on, I think it’s an Xbox Live arcade game, maybe. And it should still be available there. But yeah, so I cannot, it’s a nice funny, funny little jumpy thing. It ended up being a really good calling card for Double Fine, I think. It was very much, you know, I’ve touted, I think Byshaper himself as this game did not sell well. But we’re really proud we made it. And so a lot of the games that they get made in the next generation, like I think they made quite a few games with THQ, Costume Quest and Stacking. These really cool Xbox Live arcade sized games. That really gave them momentum, I think, and credibility. And obviously they made Brutal Legend as well, which wasn’t a huge hit. But I think all of that probably leads to Microsoft buying them. Like it all starts with Psychonauts. And yeah, definitely, even if it didn’t sell well, it’s ended up defining the studio, I think. And yeah, that’s a cool suggestion. Okay, so my number eight is Loco Roco on PSP. So I don’t know if you ever played this, Matthew. I would imagine you never had a PSP. I had a PSP very late in the day and then it got stolen by Burglar. But he didn’t steal a DS, which I thought was hilarious because the DS had way better games. So he was clearly an uninformed burglar. Yeah, that’s a terrible blunder, I think, on their part. I think in it at the time when he stole it, it had the Daxter game, the Jack and Daxter spin-off. Oh yeah, which I imagine you hated because… So really more for him. If anything, he did me a favor. He took Daxter out of my life. That was a game that I bought. I bought Daxter and I bought it because I think GameSpot gave it a really big score. I should have waited for… I think a couple of the other reviews gave it more like 6 out of 10, which is what it was worth. But I think it got like a 9.2 or something. I just automatically bought it. I had a PSP with a little bit of buyer’s remorse. I bought Gta… I think that was a feature on the back of the box, it’s like buyer’s PSP comes with buyer’s remorse. So, it was a big deal, the PSP, Christmas 2005 in the UK, it like sold out and I did end up getting one by importing one and I was really invested in it because I really wanted to play Gta Liberty City Stories on PSP, which was amazing for the time, just to look at a whole Gta open world PS2 quality on this screen. The PSP screen was amazing for the time. But, Liberty City Stories was a lesser Gta for sure and the appeal ran thin quite quickly so I was really struggling to find other games I wanted to play on it and I think the PSP did eventually get a very good library but it was a real slow bird. You didn’t go for Metal Gear Acid. I did, I enjoyed that and I considered actually Metal Gear Acid, I’ve got a few honorable mentions I’ll bring up later, but Metal Gear Acid 2 was a game I very much enjoyed on PSP but it was still not Metal Gear and obviously Konami were weirdly obsessed with the PSP and did four Metal Gear games in total which is more than they did on PS3 which is very strange. But yes, so Loco Roco, it was a game I read about on an old Japanese gaming news site, Gimatsu is its modern successor but I don’t remember what the site was and it mentioned this demo of this game that had released in Japan. If you did X, Y and Z with your PSP, you could download it from the Japanese PlayStation store and I did that to play it, download this 8 megabyte file for a Loco Roco demo and it did just seem like not quite a system seller but just a really good match for the console. The PSP was hobbled by its lack of a second analog stick which the Vita would later fix but no one cared about the Vita obviously apart from indie devs and people who enjoyed indie games but the PSP had this platforming game with these very colorful, friendly blobs. A couple of the designs were a little bit racist and just to kind of caveat that but like felt really good to bounce these blobs around you, separate them, you put them together. There’s a nice reference to it early on in the Astro’s, what’s it called? The Astro’s Playroom? Yeah, the PS5 demo that comes with the console. And yeah, I just really loved it. So yeah, I picked up the full game and yeah, it was one of the few PSP games I really loved. Do you ever play it? I think I did. I wasn’t a real, oh no, I always get it confused with Patapon. Same developer, yeah. Yeah, it was like a yellow ball that ate other balls. Yeah, you had to find the other balls around the level, a lot of them were hidden, 2D platformer. You’re controlling the environment, not the character. I don’t think I played it seriously, but I remember people being into it. Yeah, I just really enjoyed it for the time. I have a good memory of sitting in my college library at the time and downloading that demo and playing it and just being like, wow, this is actually something really cool on the PSP. And then yeah, I did like the PSP. It just took quite a few years to get going. I had a really good God of War game eventually, a couple of the third person shooters weren’t so bad. Was that the Ready at Dawn one? Yeah, they had two Ready at Dawn ones, Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta, I think. I think I played the second one and it was good. Yeah, yeah, really impressive for the time. I think they’d like overclocked the PSP so it could run it or something. But definitely, yeah, one of the few really, really good, here’s a PlayStation experience on a handheld. Yeah, so yeah, LocoRoco kind of sums up my relationship with the PSP, but it is the highest PSP game on my list. So, yeah. So, what’s your number seven, Matthew? My number seven is Wii Sports. Wow, another one not on my list. Wow, look at this, total divergence. Yeah, I mean, you know, we talked about this a bit on the PS5 Xbox Series X episode. I love a pack-in. This was the ultimate pack-in. Arguably, I think there are a large portion of Wii owners who think the Wii is a machine that only does Wii Sports. I don’t think a lot of people who bought it understood what a console was, that you had to buy other games for it. I mean, the numbers of the games sold would speak to that. The gulf between the bestsellers and the units sold. Yeah, it was such a polished thing. It’s not massively deep, it’s not massively complicated. I know there’s some argument over how deep it is, and some people will say there’s a lot of subtleties to it, but based on what we now know about what’s in the Wii Remote, which is not a whole lot, it’s not really about that. If you move your hand at the right time, you’ll probably win. I’m only really, really into Wii Tennis and Wii Bowling of the five. Golf’s okay, I guess. I feel like those are the two people who really remember, particularly Wii Bowling. I think some people remember the boxing, just because it used the Nunchuck as well. Also, weirdly, the generic me who you smashed living daylights out of looks just like Justin Lee Collins. That’s a very 2006 reference. Yeah, there are a lot of Justin Lee Collins jokes in, if I remember correctly. Wii Sports was great. Taking it home, you know, I was obviously really excited about the job, you know, being on the magazine. I bought the Wii for Christmas and taking it home and just seeing my family actually be into it and not everyone give it a go, just like any advert was nice. It was, you know, it was like, oh, yeah, mission success, this has done what it set out to do. Also, it’s got some absolutely banging music in it, like really, you know, music that wouldn’t be out of place is like, this is the theme of actual baseball, or, you know, the Olympics opening tunes, just really like, yeah, you’re gonna win. Yeah, and I know it is tied in with like me being excited about the job and playing this with, you know, friends on the mag, who I’d made and, you know, and all that. But it is just undeniably like the game that defined that console. I mean, you know, whenever I see it in, you know, you watch like, you saw it in a lot of films and maybe it dates them a bit, but, you know, when you just see people casually playing a bit of Wii Tennis in a scene in a film or something, I always think, oh yeah, it seems so much more sort of natural than other games, you know, it really did feel like a big shift had been made and it was a good thing. I really, really rate Wii Sports. Yeah, I think that obviously people are very torn on the legacy of the Wii and I actually feel like I listened back to our first episode talking about it. I think I was a bit too harsh on it as well. I think the result of the Wii being so popular is it kind of, I think it sort of helped the Switch now in a lot of ways where people are returning to Nintendo with a very, like a pre-existing relationship with the kind of hardware and types of games and the experiences. Yeah. And even though there isn’t really anything like Wii Sports on the Switch these days, well, I don’t know, maybe you can speak to that. There’s a couple of things a bit like it. I don’t know, it is sort of how Nintendo have kind of basically abandoned that whole kind of chunk of their library, you know, the touch generation stuff. Like I know that there’s a brain training on the Switch, but I don’t know if like, you know, they brought all these things. They brought the Wii Sports jazzed up to the Wii U and they just made no impact whatsoever. I think Bandai Namco ported them and they had like Wii Motion Plus, so they were slightly more advanced than their base versions. And yeah, I don’t know, there’s nothing really like that on the Switch. You know, they had those early games which used the kind of Joy-Cons and like that they were played almost without the TV, they used the rumble and the sounds and stuff. The, was it 1-2 Switch? Yeah, yeah. I think it’s called, which is probably the closest thing to it. You know, maybe like, I don’t know, like they realized their natural strengths or like their old favorites are just so re-energized that they don’t need to dip into that. It’s kind of a weird thing, so much of that era of Nintendo thinking around the DS and Wii was like masterminded by Iwata and with him now having passed away, it’s, you know, you just don’t hear much about Nintendo, they don’t talk as openly about their philosophy and what they’re actually trying to do, you know, they haven’t got a sort of an Iwata figure who is as open, you know, they’ve got people who step in and can talk about specific games, but, you know, I find it much harder to pin down what their philosophy is these days, other than just, you know, they’ve just made a console and great games that people really like, which seems pretty basic, but it seems to have worked. Yeah, so yeah, I don’t know, maybe we just, this era is interesting because it was so different and so much was known about it and there was so much sort of, it was such a success that, you know, everyone was asking Nintendo their secret and they were constantly talking about it, about their sort of various business strategies and things. Yeah, it’s a really weird time. I mean, it was a weird time to be making a magazine. I’d much rather have been making a magazine about the Switch. Like this is a console you can make a great games mag about. The Wii was almost sort of, you know, counter to the kind of the hardcore Nintendo fan in in many ways and so it made our mag kind of you had to be a bit more experimental to kind of deal with that. What was the vibe like on the team then? Were people actually excited about the Switch on Endgamer at the time? Greener was like, who’s the editor, was super into it. I was really into it just because, you know, it had like when you had to play everything on a console you find out all its weird niches and you realize that they do exist and people may just go, oh, it’s the Wii Sports, the machine, but you know all the other games that are there. I think Kitsy was… He was into it, but he was like big into the 360. You know, he was like super into the 360. I think he used to write a section of the mag called Mean… I think it was called Meanwhile, which was a two page spread about everything that was happening on other consoles. I used to think that was where his most excited writing was. I cried for help. No, not at all. When they came along, he wrote really amazing stuff about the big Nintendo games. He was really into like Xenoblade, I remember that, but there was definite… The vibe in the office, maybe, was so 360 centric that basically, like I said, everyone on the PlayStation mags were playing on the 360. We all had 360s, we were playing that, and socially, 360 was the place. But obviously, I really liked the games on the Wii U. It wasn’t like we felt we were lumbered with a dud console, but you were definitely in a very different place and you never really forgot that. But then, when we had the Wii U, it was like, oh man, what I’d give for the Wii era again, because that was like true laughing stock in the office. I mean, they were wrong about it in many ways, but you know, it’s a tricky thing. Did the DS being good at the time help temper the fact that the Wii was kind of hard to grasp? I think there are some people who are like hand-held minded and open to what those kind of games and what that console can offer, and then there are people who want Gears of War, and there’s not a lot of crossover there, I don’t think. I feel like I had quite eclectic tastes by being on Nintendo. I loved the 360, but I also loved the Wii. I loved the DS, absolutely fantastic machine, but what it was trying to succeed on was so different. I don’t necessarily think you’d… Yeah, it wasn’t the place for big graphical excitement. Well, that’s why we made mistakes, like we were talking about on the reviews episode with Resident Evil Revelations on 3DS, where you were like, oh yeah, this feels like a big proper console game, and you need to overscore it, and it actually didn’t have the spirit of a handheld game that made the best DS games. Yeah, I feel lucky I got to cover this stuff. Yeah, I agree with you, actually. People weren’t as energized by the handhelds, they were the home consoles. This extended to Imagine as well, where the 360 was very dominant. You can’t underestimate just what a great thing Xbox Live was in terms of the friend system and matchmaking and all that stuff, and obviously the quality of the games, a lot of which we’ll talk about, I’m sure, in the next year that we cover, but it was the center of the universe for everyone. I still think of a lot of my old colleagues as their game attacks. I remember back in the day, Andy Harthup was shark in a jar because he had a shark in a jar on his desk, and there are other game attacks which I can’t repeat. Yeah, actually, when I turn on my Xbox One now, it’s like a graveyard of former colleagues from Imagine because people don’t seem to consistently use Xbox as often as their PS4s, which PS4 is obviously very active, so I’m always seeing people I know on there. But yeah, it’s like, this is what I thought it would be acceptable to call myself in 2006. All right, so my number seven, Matthew, I wonder if this will be on your list. It’s Tetris DS. It isn’t. Oh, really? Okay, so did you play this at the time? I didn’t, no. Okay, so I have not played Tetris Effect, or Tetris Effect Connected. Everyone tells me it’s a phenomenal version of Tetris for what it does in terms of bringing kind of like music and visuals into it in an amazing way. But this was a Nintendo-designed DS version of Tetris that was full color, had loads of great Nintendo-themed mini-games, like a Metroid theme, like a Donkey Kong theme. Just a really like a comprehensive version of Tetris. It had like a battle Tetris mode, and obviously the basic endless play mode. They did make it a bit easier because you could save a block, which obviously that’s controversial. You don’t have to use it, I suppose, if you want to play it pure like the Game Boy version. But no, this was a really just probably the DS game I played more than any other just by default. It was a really good, okay, I’m traveling, I’ve got 10 minutes on the train, I’ll just play Tetris DS. Yeah, yeah, it looked beautiful. And I think the person I think the best part about it were they had these touch screen Tetris, kind of like, they’re kind of always like challenge rooms, I guess, where you had a screen of blocks you could move around and then it had to drop correctly to to eliminate every line on the screen and they’re about right there about 50 of them in the DS version. And those were just really good use of that touch screen on the DS and I love that game. I thought it was I thought it was great. How come it kind of passed you by at the time you’re just not really I’m not really a Tetris guy. Well, I say I’m not I wasn’t ever really a Tetris guy, you know, I can appreciate what the game’s, you know, art is, but I am terrible at it. It really stresses me out. I don’t like the pressure of that stack building up. I I just haven’t got the dexterity mental or physical with my fingers to actually play it. That said this year, like one of my favorite games of this year is Tetris Effect Connected because I felt like the first Tetris game I truly connected with that isn’t a part of my sister effect. Yeah, like just there are so many accessibility features now and just the style of it really, really won me over and got me over that that hump of the kind of panic and associating with the old Game Boy game, which used to stress me out as a kid. So yeah, it’s purely like I know it’s I know it’s a beloved version of Tetris. It’s just I didn’t love Tetris at the time. Yes, it just kind of really summed up what the DS was about in terms of Nintendo being at the peak of its powers and making all these great versions of kind of, you know, of old Nintendo classics. They did. They were very good at games which had, you know, the central game was awesome. And then it was surrounded by like a surprisingly good spread of like mini games. Yeah. I think New Super Mario Bros. DS, the first one, had a really great suite of like 50 party, like almost like Mario Party mini games, which were almost better than the game, I think. Like you could play it local multiplayer and it had that download place who only needed one copy. So if you had a friend, you could just jump into this just amazing spread of mini games. I think that was 06 in the UK. Did that make your list? It didn’t make my list. I thought it was a really nice looking game at the time, but I didn’t love it, I must admit. I kind of, I sort of, it sounds pretentious like I’ve moved beyond 2D Mario, but I’m just sort of, I’m a bit of a 3D Mario bus person these days. At some point it just, you know, it could just, there are limitations to it. Well, people might not agree with that, but that’s personally my thought. Maybe that one or two will make it into future lists. Okay, cool. Alright, so what’s your number 6? My number 6 is Trauma Center Second Opinion. Nice, okay. This was, this came out in America, so this year it was a launch, it was a Wii launch game in America. It didn’t come out until a year later in the UK. We did import it though, because NGamer was big into import reviews. I hadn’t played Trauma Center and the DS much. I tried it a little bit when I joined the team, because they had all these games to hand. Trauma Center is an arcade surgery game. It isn’t a surgery simulator, it’s not like a madcap physics thing, neither is it like a really serious surgery simulator. It’s a game where you have quite abstract visions of body cavities, they’re all kind of neon lumps, they’re quite hard to identify as organs, I’d say. It’s almost like a shoot-em-up vibe in practice, because there are certain wounds that have to be dealt with, certain weapons which are your surgical tools, certain processes, you’re just trying to remember the sequences, fire them off and control things. Actually shoot-em-up is the wrong example, it’s more like a sort of time strategy element to it. So you’re like, well, if I, you know, this wound, I can sew it up, but I’ll have to put a plaster over it and then put the healing gel, but maybe I’ll do that second. Maybe I’ll stitch everything first, then slap everything down. On the DS, this was a natural fit because it had the stylus and you could tap the things. What I loved on the Wii was it was a Wii pointer game, which was really the strength of the Wii, I think, beyond the motion controls. I think it was the pointer stuff and my favorite Wii games were the ones which made use of the pointer for that kind of precision. And you had all the surgical tools on the nunchuck. So it really felt like you were focusing all your like mental power on the remote in your hand and the nunchuck was just making everything else really, really fast. It’s a brutally difficult game. I mean, you know, this is it’s a high score challenge. I would scrape through with like the lowest ranking on level after level. I die all the time. There were levels where you just had to be so fast and like perfect with like your stitching and making sure you did everything in the right order. The story was anime as hell. It’s made by Atlas. And like all Atlas games, you know, the character art could be persona character. It’s the same kind of character artists. So it’s got that really cool kind of anime look to it. But it’s all about this like evil virus called guilt, which kind of sort of mutates in the body. So as the story went on, it was all about like wounds that just when you’re on top of them, they turn into like even worst versions of themselves. That’s very persona, actually. It’s so stressful, you know, it’s really melodramatic. It’s loads of people crying like, Doctor, I’m dying of guilt and all this kind of stuff. And you’re like, yeah. The characters were named after… Scrubs, right? Was it Scrubs? Yeah, Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy, I think. Right, yeah. They were all kind of mixed and matched from famous TV doctors. It’s got a great style. It’s not the best in the series. That came much later with Trauma Team, which added a lot more medical disciplines to it. But as a weird, only-on-we kind of, and DS, sort of exercise with a real sort of sense of character to it and very different kind of arcade energy, I really, really rated Trauma Center. Well, I remember that first DS one being a surprise hit. I think it was just right at that time where people were just up for this different kind of software on these Nintendo platforms. Also, I love the idea of someone selling a game with the subtitle Second Opinion. Just the idea that this will get people excited. Second Opinion. Brilliant. Nailed it. I think it was originally called Trauma Center Under the Knife on DS. Yeah, that’s a little bit of a name, but hey, you know. Yeah, it was Second Opinion. Yeah, because then there was the one which they added, there was another, there was like a sequel which added co-op. Third Opinion? Yeah, and they gave it, I remember Nintendo, when it finally came out in the UK, they did these really cool promotional t-shirts that were black and then they had like a white stethoscope on them, which I was very, very taken with and wore it until the white stethoscope rubbed off and it was just a black t-shirt. That’s a great story. Yeah, it’s one of my killer anecdotes. I wonder what happened to that series, when did that, when did the last one come out? Well, my team never came out in the UK, it was easily the best. It felt like they threw a lot at it, and it was basically five games. The traditional Trauma Center gameplay was one of five disciplines. One of them was like, you were basically Dr. House doing diagnosis, and it was like a text adventure. And then there was one which was about like an emergency responder. And it was kind of like very quick, it was all about like prioritizing the right first body to kind of go to first. And then there was another one, which was just about sticking cameras up people’s arses. It was literally like a whole storyline was just like feeding a camera through guts. So maybe that explains why it is no longer successful, because one fifth of that game was Asscam. Did that, so what console did that come out? Was that Wii U game? That was still a Wii, no that was a Wii game. Did it come out in North America? It came out in North America, yeah, Trauma Team, really underrated. Oh really, you want to play it now? Yeah, it is great. We’re going to send the value of copies skyrocketing on eBay. Also, it doesn’t get more fucking 2006 ass than Scrubs reference, Jesus. Wow. Oh man. Okay, so my number six, I’m certain this has got to be on your list, right? Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. Is it higher on your list? That is higher on my list. Okay, in which case we’ll return to that later. So, what’s your number six, Matthew? My number five. Sorry, yes, number five. My number five is Bully. Ah, yeah, that’s higher on my list. Oh, so we’re back to you. Yes, we are. Yes, so. Your number five. My number five is Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition. Oh no, that isn’t on my list. Oh, thank God. I thought we were just going to keep doing that till we got to the end of the year. No, so yeah, Devil May Cry 3, I didn’t play the original Devil May Cry 3, which released I think a year earlier, and yeah, it was well received, but it was very hard. And then this new version came out, added Virgil, Dante’s brother and the main antagonist of this game as a playable character, and also added a whole suite of difficulty settings, which was very welcome. I played the first Devil May Cry and rented the second. The second was very bad. It was like a famously shit in the bed, right? Yeah, it was made by a different developer and released a year later. And I don’t think the original team had anything to do with it. And so… You know, it’s a bit like a monkey threw a bus at you. Yeah, the creature designs got really, really strange. And you were kind of in a city and it just didn’t have the same vibe at all. And Dante was much moodier. Whereas the third one starts with a very good cut scene where Dante is in his… I don’t know what his business is. His business is called Devil May Cry. He sits behind a desk, right, and takes phone calls and then just goes out and beats up demons and I don’t know who pays him. I don’t know how that business, like, if he secured investment. I thought it was like a Ghostbusters deal. I mean, I guess so. I thought there was a receptionist who’s like… Devil May Cry and then… Devil May Cry, and then it’s like, oh, someone’s got a werewolf, you’ve got to go and kill in a castle. Yeah, I suppose that’s kind of how the first game starts, but then, like, is he in the Yellow Pages? I mean… Under what? Under what? How long… Who pays him at the end of it? Because that job in the first game takes a long time. And then… And in this one, too, he doesn’t seem to… This one is set before the first one, and he hasn’t set up his business yet, but his brother has kind of leveled the city, and he has to go beat him up. And so, I’ve never quite understood the core business element of what Dante’s going for. Do you think that’s what the ranking is at the end of the fight? Do you think it’s some unseen employer who’s going, like, that was D grade, I’m only giving you 10 quid for that? It might be his credit rating or something. Oh, that was like SSSS, so that means you get a thousand pounds because you killed that snake in a really sexy way, and I liked it. Oh dear. So, I bought this edition on PS2 for, like, 12 quid from play.com, which again makes this very 2006. And I really, really got into it. That first one’s good, but this was, this really kind of solidified just the, it added the different styles of combat, so you had, like, Royal Guard and Trickster and four different styles that you could use to beat up enemies. And it was just really replayable. I just played it over and over again when I was, when I was, this year. And yeah, I just really loved it. It had a really fun tone. I mean, people just, people are really kind of dismissive of games that have, like, a really kind of silly scripts, but I think that sometimes that can just be purely entertaining and it really works in this game’s favourites. Just Dante is just a fun character to be around and he’s a really, I just really love that character design. I think it’s a really, really striking bit of design. I got the impression that a lot of the positive reviews for Devil May Cry 5 were kind of reacting to it being a bit more like 3. Yeah, so 4, I reviewed 4 later on and it added a different playable character and Nero and has a lot of repeated environments and definitely felt like they were struggling to make it kind of thrive in HD. And so yeah, 5 obviously added another playable character and yeah, very well received and kind of called a return to form. So I think you’re right. Yeah, this is the one where, Kamea didn’t work on this one, but it really felt like it kind of pushed what they had in one further. One was set in this kind of gothic castle, but then like the kind of rock music would kick in and you start juggling enemies and the whole thing with Delmey Cry is you switch between sword and guns and movement, you try not to get hit and you form these great combos and yeah, 3 was just the best version of it until Bayonetta basically. Right, right. So that was what I did in 2006. That’s a great way to spend 2006. Yeah I think so. So what’s your number 4, Matthew? My number 4 is Hitman Blood Money. Ah, not on my list because I didn’t play it until years later, but talk me through it. Yeah, so this was, I feel Hitman Blood Money’s reputation has improved over the years. I feel like it’s now a bit of a cult, not a cult favourite, but people who have played a lot of the Hitman games will come back to it, it certainly features very highly in best Hitman levels, a lot of them come from Blood Money. At the time, I didn’t have much of a relationship with Hitman, I’d played Hitman 1 on PC and thought it was so rank. It’s a game with a brilliant pitch, but that Hitman 1 is not a good game at all. I think everyone will be probably on board with that. It becomes what it was meant to be in Hitman 2, which I only played a little bit of, and then it was always just a game in the back of my head of the bald assassin game. I loved the idea of an assassin game because I was probably the right age for that edgy bullshit. The idea of just going around perfectly sniping out people and stuff ticked a lot of boxes. This one, I think, added… I just think that the concepts behind some of the levels and the freedom of approach really opened up in a way which they take to the best extreme in Hitman 1 and 2 in 2016. Was it 2016? Yes. This almost… of all the other games, this feels the closest to those to me in terms of like, there are spaces where you can do a lot more experimental stuff. I mean, some of the famous examples is the opera level, Curtains Down, where you can replace the prop gun with the real gun, so the actor shoots each other on the stage, or you can snipe him when the actor shoots the fake gun so no one realises the bullet came from you and not that gun. Things like that. It just felt very open. It has the legendary A New Life, which is the suburban level, which is like, it feels like Hitman 2’s Whittleton Creek is like a very much a kind of homage to that. Definitely, yeah. And it’s just such a like mundane environment and that to me is like the heart of that game of kind of, you know, you are in this very recognisable space and you’ve got to do something really awful there. How do you do it? Yeah, it’s a fantastic kind of combat puzzle. Mechanically, it’s a bit shaky, like for my money, like Hitman 1 and 2, the new ones are the best of the series just because it finally feels like mechanically as tight as it needs to be. It always felt a bit vague. Weirdly, I think some of that comes from some of the decisions they made in Absolution, which while not a great game, does mechanically tighten it up. And then they take that into Hitman 1 and 2. But this, in terms of like style and tone, I think is really like a sweet spot for the series. It just a lot of affection for it. It did some other sort of semi interesting things with in your single player playthrough. You had a sort of notoriety that built through the game. So you know, if you were kind of very messy in the levels or whatever, people might be a bit more suspicious in the next level is how I sort of remember it. It’s been a while since I’ve played it. I really like that it presented your mission sort of ranking as a newspaper with a newspaper headline of like man is killed total mystery and it’s like silent assassin or whatever. Yeah, just a really good little adventure. I don’t know why after this they decided to, you know, take such a break and basically reinvent it as absolution, this very sort of cinematic thing, because I feel like going back and reading a lot of the words written about this game at the time, there was a lot of affection for it and I felt like they were on the cusp of like a big breakthrough. I think what it lacks and what Hitman 1 and 2 really, and absolution again, really nail is like a really nice progression and motivation system around the game to kind of actually explore those levels. There are tangible rewards for finding all the different kills. Where in Blood Money there kind of wasn’t, you just left your own devices and that’s true of a lot of games back then, but for my money, I love the structure of the new Hitman games, which is also another thing that they introduced in Absolution. So yeah, kind of Absolution plus Blood Money equals Magic Hitman of today. I just love this series, IO Interactive, god-tier studio in my book. I’m always concerned about the future of IO Interactive, just because Hitman didn’t seem to do well enough that obviously Square Enix severed ties with them and the series went off with them and it seemed like they’re having a moment there. The other thing is that it’s 10 years between this and Hitman 2016. That’s so long that they obviously did the Kane and Lynch games. I know the second one has a cult following. They weren’t really, for me, tone-wise, very much of their time, I think. Oh, so horrible. I appreciated stylistically what they were going for with that second one in terms of the presentation of it, but then they made Mini Ninjas as well and it was kind of just like when are you going to just make a good Hitman game? Yeah. And that lasted for six years and some people really liked Absolution. I like bits of that. I think it might feature in my Games of the Year for that year where we can chat about it. Yeah, I agree with you that the structure of the new ones is just perfect, but definitely the kind of types of… I did play a lot of Hitman 2 actually, the original Hitman 2. And that… I remember the demo that came with Official PlayStation Magazine. It’s that one where you’re at the first level where the postman’s arriving at that big mansion and you… The Italian one. Yes. And that is a beautiful level. It was a beautiful level for the time. You can hide your gun in the delivery boy’s basket. Yeah, the basket fruit, but then obviously there are all these other different ways in, and that was such a great… It’s all there. Like, what Pinman is now, it’s all in there, and it’s just, yeah, it’s just this very slow period of progression until you get to these near-perfect modern games. And yeah, it’s cool and it’s interesting. This game seemed to cast such a shadow on the series. And yeah, is there also like a Vegas level in this one? Yeah, there’s a Vegas level. They’re all… Well, not all America. There’s a lot of American locations, which kind of makes it feel a bit closer to home. And some of the satire as well. Like, I feel like they get a better idea of like, you know, the kind of the people you’re after. You know, the scenarios are a bit clearer. Your kind of motivations a bit clearer. Yeah, it’s quite funny. I was reading some like old list features for this just to remind myself and make sure there wasn’t anything I was missing. And one of the wildest things, go back and read the games writing of 2006, totally is so different. And there’s so much of it wouldn’t fly. I mean, there’s a there’s a go back and find the Eurogamer Readers top 50. I read this list for 2006. Are you going to reference the opening paragraph and how it ends? No, I will remember the Hitman entry, so these were comments from readers that sites would print and the one for Hitman was just a reader and over and over again in capital letters, it said, I love strangling hookers. I love strangling hookers. I was like, there is no fucking way anyone would print that and write that on a site in 2020. I think we’d agree that’s a good thing. That is a good thing. But like the laddish tone of like even that I couldn’t but I was like, wow, I’ve really like forgotten the tone of games writing just 14 years ago was so different. It’s a big caveat actually that I feel like I should have mentioned the first episode is that like, I, you know, I’m really kind of enjoying this process of going through these memories, but they were they were definitely like white straight male dominated spaces. They just were like it was it was a kind of sad reality of it. But obviously that’s kind of slowly changing. So what’s your number for? Animal Crossing Wild World on the DS. Is this in your list? This isn’t. I didn’t think it would be because I don’t think you’re that big on Animal Crossing. I’m not. No, no. So this was this was my Animal Crossing basically. So this year, obviously what I think everyone would agree is the best Animal Crossing game was released on the Switch, New Horizon, and I played it for about 45 minutes and I just realized that being stuck in a small location during a worldwide lockdown was not for me this year. So I may return to it at another point, but I also think it’s a slight amount of I burned myself out on this Animal Crossing, which I had a lot of time on my hands and I played it loads and loads and it was a really good DS version of Animal Crossing. I think a really great example of when Nintendo makes a game that strikes a chord with people outside of its core user base, but also it feels very Nintendo, like through and through and it is actually surprisingly hardcore when you dig down to it. This looked beautiful on the DS and I was really taken with the personality of it and the different types of animals you meet. I was sad it never had the GameCube’s unlockable arcade games where you could play NES games within the game. It’s such a weird one on Animal Crossing because I am so envious of people who play it properly because they form this amazing real-time relationship with a game and it is meaningful and that you are exciting about the coming of seasons and people and that stuff can happen in that world that is so mundane in and of itself, but in the context of Animal Crossing seems hugely important. I wish I had the patience for it, but did you go full in, play every day kind of… Yeah, there was one day where I didn’t have a lot going on at the time. I think I basically played Animal Crossing in real time for the entire day. How? What is there to do? I don’t even really know. Once you’ve dug up your two fossils and you’ve shaken down all the trees to get some fruit, you can endlessly fish and sell fish in Animal Crossing. But yeah, definitely I don’t really know what I was doing with the time. This DS1 is actually pretty feature-like when you look back on it. It doesn’t have the same sort of town customisation they’d add with the 3DS1, and now it seems very elaborate, the stuff you can do with it. I must admit as well, I kind of missed this time, though, of people just talked about Animal Crossing too much this year, and there were just images everywhere of it. I feel like they kind of, the internet did its thing both in discourse and guides, and they kind of strip-mind it, and that isn’t kind of what the game’s for. No. Like in my head, it’s something you dabble with for 20 minutes a day, but you had people who were kind of like, I’ve played 100 hours of Animal Crossing in the last week, and you’re like, I don’t really know if it’s intended for that. And then the week after, they’re like, no, it’s boring now. And it’s like, yeah, because it’s like a sedate light. You’ve basically come in and just sort of like bulldozed this rural wonderland into your sort of horrible kind of, you know, into a housing development. And that’s it. You know, that’s all there is to it now. That’s, you’ve exhausted it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s sort of, I don’t resent people for having their own way of dealing with this whole year. Oh yeah, for sure. And it also, Animal Crossing definitely, I would say like a definitely more of a split in terms of the types of people who talk about it on social media, which is great too in terms of how it resonates with people. But yeah, just, I didn’t, I agree with you, I didn’t like, I don’t like seeing screen grabs of any game constantly on Twitter all day. Like I just never, I always have to mute people when a new Assassin’s Creed comes out. People take screenshots of every single environment before I’ve had the time to go in there in the game and see it. And that’s just a personal thing, but yeah, I didn’t want to see all the, I don’t want to see all the animals. I want to see who moves in and then who moves out and all that stuff and yeah. But this one really just, it was just a perfect match. It was one of the two games I got with my DS, like the other one was Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. And that was a great one-two punch of like, I feel like I’m having new experiences on this beautiful handheld. I was really just, I was mega into the DS at the time. So yeah, that’s my number four. What’s your number three, Matthew? My number three, and I don’t think this is on your list, is Rhythm Tengoku. No, I’ve played some of the other entries in this series. Great, the Rhythm Heaven Paradise. Yes. Yes. Yeah, so this was the, this is a Game Boy Advance. I think the last game Nintendo themselves made for Game Boy Advance came out in August 2006 on the GBA. So well into DS Lite time. It’s a rhythm game, which I guess probably has the most similarities with something like WarioWare in that it’s very short, snappy rhythm exercises. It’s not like playing a song in a traditional sense. Each game is a comic scenario set to a very catchy tune, and there is a one or two button input that you just sort of tap along in certain ways. So in one of them you’re plucking hairs out of this very hairy onions face, which is actually really sinister because they make this horrible quack quack sound whenever you pull them out. There’s another one where you’re hitting like balls. And then after you play four or five of the games, you get a remix which puts all five together into just like a mega track. And even though this is GBA, so the sound quality isn’t amazing, the music in this game is just absolutely phenomenal. There’s a one of the mini games called the Bon Adore, which is a kind of geisha dance. They’re dancing girls at some festival and it’s got this tune. And the reason I played this is because there were loads of references to this tune in the early issues of Endgamer before I joined, which has the chorus don don pan pan, don don pan pan. I’m going to really petition you Sam to put this as one of the pieces of music in this podcast so that people can understand the power of this very catchy song. I think this is a game that, even more so than Guitar Hero, which is quite complicated in itself, it just taps into the very basic human urge to tap your foot or a finger to a tune. If you can tap to a rhythm, you can play this game. You can play it with your eyes closed because it’s so tied to the music. Incredibly satisfying. The games are short, but they escalate brilliantly. I love the music. There’s a really abstract art style to it. It doesn’t really rely on any Nintendo heroes. There’s no like Mario in it. It’s very, very sort of strange and surreal. Absolutely brilliant. There’s a really funny Iwata Asks interview about one of the later Rhythm Heaven games where they talk about Rhythm Tengoku. Basically, the guy who created it, who’s called Kazuyoshi Asawa, seems quite ditzy by Nintendo standards. They’re like, oh, this is this weird thing he wanted to make and none of us really thought it was going to be good. Even he didn’t think it was going to be good, but we kind of made it anyway and it was good and the cert was happy. There’s this brilliant Iwata, I wrote this down because it made me laugh. Iwata says of Asawa, he says, you must see him going down his own road and you can hear his spirit crying out, figure out which way I’m going from the aura that surrounds me. Which is just such a scathing, like, managerial assessment of someone of like, oh, here’s this man who kind of, you just have to get this sort of general read of what you want to do from him. I just, it’s a characterful game made by clearly characterful people. I, yeah, I absolutely love this, I love all the Rhythm Heaven games, Rhythm Paradise, I love them but I can never remember their damn names because they’re called different things in different countries. One of my favourite Nintendo gamer covers that I edited, I only edited like four, but one was Rhythm Paradise and it was just a beautiful, beautiful, technicoloured, crazy splurge of life. Yeah, this is a great series. Yeah, I think WarioWare is a really good comparison point in terms of the, how abstract some of the imagery seems, but also how inventive it is and yeah, I actually played, I’ve played a couple of these, I played the DS one they released, it’s the GBA one of the best in the series, do you reckon? No, they’ve probably got sort of slicker in the production, in fact, like just the thing that lets it down probably is just the quality of the music, there’s like audio with like people singing, but it’s recorded at a super low level for the, for the GBA. Some of them may be in some of the later versions and they’ve been remastered and things I can’t quite remember, but they’re all great, I mean, play any of them. Like WarioWare, I think there’s a kind of a gold kind of like compilation of them on 3DS. Yeah, that puts everything together. Yeah, that’s probably the one to get these days. But yeah, I actually, I also played the arcade machine version of this. Oh really? Oh, no, I’ve always wanted to, I’ve never played it. It’s at the, I hope it’s still open after the pandemic, but it’s the Las Vegas Arcade in Soho in London, which is an amazing arcade, the best arcade I’ve ever been to in the UK for sure. It has the drums game that I’ve forgotten the name of, but everyone loves. It’s like a Tatsujin Tatsujin. Yeah, yeah. So obviously that’s incredibly popular there, but yeah, it also has in the corner, yeah, I believe, I think it’s like the original Japanese arcade cabinet of- Yeah, it was, and me and my girlfriend played it and we just had a, we had the best time there. Yeah, I really recommend tracking that down. Yeah, it’s really nice to play that on a massive screen, you know? Yeah, it’s cool. What is your number three? My number three is Bully. Ah, finally. Canis Canum Edit, as it was called in the UK, at the behest of PlayStation, I believe. But yes, it was, this was a Rockstar open world game. Rockstar was obviously very well known at this point for making GTA and other adult games. This moved the GTA sort of format to a school setting in the US, I think like a New England school, I believe it was, in a fictional town called Ballworth. You played as Jimmy Hopkins, is that his name? I don’t know, I should have researched this. I’ve played this, I’ve completed this game three times, but I had to ask. And you know, kind of like a sort of a ne’er do well with a cart of gold, I would say. And you kind of work your way up from the bottom to the top of the sort of social strata and navigating, doing missions, sort of these different sort of factions who represented like preppies and sort of different archetypes you get. Geeks and… Yeah, like archetypes informed by both real life and also pop culture. Yeah. But just, I really love this game, it’s also on your list. And I definitely have made £1,000 or more writing retrospectives on this game for different future publications and imagined publications. The goose that laid the golden egg. Yeah. So thank you for that Rockstar. I’m definitely like, you know, the return on investment for buying this game is quite high. Yeah. What I loved about this was it was Rockstar on a much smaller scale. It almost, the town itself is tiny compared to everything else they built. It’s still big enough that there’s a sense of place and a sense of exploration. It really puts the focus on the missions. I actually think the missions here were like a bit more creative and characterful than maybe the missions in GTA had been up to that point. GTA had always been slightly uneven games, I think. Like amazing, like real achievements for sure. But never quite, maybe the missions themselves, I don’t think were ever quite as good as the kind of promise of just driving around the open world. But here everything kind of fit. I think it’s tone, given that there was a bit of a furor about, you know, endorsing bullying and being a thuggish thing. It’s actually a much sweeter game. But it still feels like part of the… This could be a place in the GTA verse, I think. This feels like where GTA characters grow up and learn to be the shits that they are in those later games. Yeah, this game also features… The main antagonist of the game is Gary, a kind of sociopathic kid who you meet early on, who just wants to turn the different factions at the school against each other. And he is a phenomenal rock star creation, a really great, vivid character who I felt like I’ve met in real life a couple of times. And yeah, I agree with you about GTA being uneven. I think that’s partly down to the GTA games were way too hard on the PS2, way too difficult. And this is completely doable by comparison. You won’t get stumped on a mission for too long. Nothing about it is that annoying. It feels like it was made for a younger audience on purpose as well. It feels like rock star kind of knew that teenagers couldn’t play GTA or at least they shouldn’t have been. And like, here’s a game that you can play if you’re that age group. It was rated 15 in the UK. I just loved it. And yeah, I mean, people are kind of a bit harsh on rock star for focusing on GTA Online, I think, because obviously it’s such a cash cow. But I must admit, I would swap all those cars in GTA Online for a new Bully game. I just would. And I doubt that financially that would make sense. But Bully was just real special. And Rockstar was a really interesting publisher at this point. It made Warriors the year before. And the first Manhunt is a really good game. Second one, I think, a bit less acclaimed. But yeah, then obviously leads to this really amazing generation to follow of games. But yeah, this is just great. Like you say, the town is small. But you really remember the different districts of it. The industrial district with all these caravans and this sense of class strata. Then the preppies all live in this quite posh neighborhood where you do paper rounds. And then there’s the fun fair, I think everyone remembers as well. Just a really great environment to walk around. I love Bully. So good. Great game. So what’s your number two, Matthew? My number two is The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. Thought this would be on your list. It’s not on mine, I’m afraid. I missed this one and bought the Wii U version, but I assumed this would… I actually thought this would be number one for you. No, this is… I love this game. I think it’s absolutely fantastic. It isn’t my favorite Zelda by some way. It’s like… I guess if you haven’t played it, and I imagine a lot of people listening to this probably have, it’s a bit of like a kind of Ocarina of Time redux. It’s kind of how it feels to me. Structurally, it follows a lot of the same kind of patterns as that game. Tonally, it’s way bleaker. It’s probably the bleakest Zelda there is. You know, very kind of melancholic, very sort of autumnal, the color palette’s very muted. It looked like someone at Nintendo had played a lot of Ico and maybe Shadow of the Colossus. It had that kind of slightly bleached sort of look to it. It’s a bit of a confusing game in terms of like, it’s got quite a lot of ideas in it. You know, there’s this sort of dual world element to it where you’re Link and then you can turn into the Wolf, which I know is a classic Zelda trope, but I’d say it’s a bit messier here. I didn’t really like the Wolf stuff in this as much. When I went back to it, when they did the HD remake for Wii U, I kind of re-evaluated it a bit and didn’t like it quite as much as I did when I first played it. What I will say, and why it’s still like, one of my favorite games of this particular year, was I think it’s got the best dungeons in any Zelda game. They are absolutely stunning constructions, so brilliantly built around the item you find in them, which again is a big Zelda thing, you know, each dungeon gives you the item you need to solve that dungeon. But the items here were really inventive and weird. A lot of them haven’t been in other Zeldas, all were quite unlike things, so there was like a spinner, which was like a gear that you sat on, and you could basically, you could sort of skim up tracks on the wall. It was a bit like a Technic wheel. You could kind of spin it into these sort of grooves, and it acted like a gear for kind of realigning dungeons and things. You had the dual hook shots, which gave you this amazing dungeon in the sky, which was all kind of, had giant holes in it, so you really had to sort of swing between space to space with these two hook shots. That was really cool. You had the Dominion Rod for kind of bringing these statues to life, moving them about for the Temple of Time. Had a really spooky dungeon called the Snow Frost Peaks, I think. Snow Peak Ruins, which was like a haunted house with this creepy yeti and something like bad had gone down there and you had to like work out what. So like in those dungeons, I thought they were like, that was just Nintendo. You know, they haven’t done anything like that as good since, dungeons wise, but the Overworld stuff never quite did it for me. Felt a little bit shoehorned onto Wii with the sword controls. I like the pointer controls for arrows, but yeah, there’s some stuff here, which is a bit flawed. I think loads of people loved the idea of this very serious adult Zelda, because there was the trailers for it had really sold people on, you know, I guess, I guess this is probably a bit post Lord of the Rings, but it had that kind of epic like, wow, Nintendo’s really grown up after The Wind Waker. But I didn’t necessarily feel they had to. But, you know, it’s a Zelda team. They make great games, you know, a lesser Zelda, which I think is maybe is is still better than like 99% of other games. And I love the equipment and the dungeons. They really are. They really are special. I want to dig into this a little bit further, because I feel like a lot of people listening who have come to the podcast from kind of like enjoying your work will definitely enjoy hearing you talk about Nintendo games. I’m not joking. I’m being serious. I’m curious. So my memory of this Zelda from like the outside looking in was obviously the reputation of Wind Waker is very different now. But I remember the notorious Space World realistic Zelda demo for GameCube didn’t turn into anything. Yeah. And there was a massive backlash, obviously, to the Wind Waker’s look, which has obviously faded over time. But to what extent do you think this was an answer to Wind Waker by Nintendo into criticism of Wind Waker? Yeah, I mean, I don’t think they’ve ever actively said that as much. But it does feel like that. Like that’s probably the thing I was trying to think of that that Space World demo. This feels a lot more like that game. You know, it is the adult. It’s a kind of human sized link, you know, battling in quite a dark, kind of epic environment. I think it mistook kind of sad kind of decay, almost sort of like early Dark Soulsy kind of vibe for like adult. I think it’s not as charming as other Zelda games. I think it’s kind of a mistake it makes. So I guess, yeah, I mean, it’s about as far as you can get from Wind Waker. You know, it’s definitely going that other way. For me, the important criticism I’d say they answered isn’t necessarily the art style, which I loved in Wind Waker. But the fact that Wind Waker doesn’t really feel finished. You know, it’s a game that famously runs out of dungeons about halfway through and then just has a massive, terrible fetch quest. You know, what is there is really good, but it doesn’t feel complete. Well, this game is like stuffed. It’s like nine main dungeons, a couple of smaller dungeons. You know, the amount of busy work, flip-flopping between the two worlds in between. You know, there is no way this feels like, you know, half done or whatever. So, yeah, in that way, it feels like a reaction, both good and bad, I’d say. Was there a massive endgame dungeon either in the original or added to the Wii U version? Like a 100 level dungeon or something like that? I vaguely recall this for… If there was, I can’t remember it. It might have been added for the Wii U one. I just remember reading about it and being like, wow, I can’t imagine doing that. They had it… Well, because Wind Waker had the thing where you drop down the levels and it was like floors of fighting. It wasn’t like a dungeon per se. Yeah, it might have been that. Yeah, sorry, I should have done more research there. No, I should remember my Zelda games better. Yeah, this one’s good. It’s very good. I tell you what, they released it at the right time. Like, this was a very good December game. It’s very autumnal, very wintery. It’s very cold and sad. Yeah, weirdly sad Zelda. Like, very, yeah, very strange. But then it also sticks to the model of Vokarina so closely, you know. And, you know, you can almost put some of the dungeons side by side and say, well, this is that dungeon. This is the, this is the Twilight Princess version of that dungeon or whatever. More closely we can with other, other Zeldas. And they did improve it, you know, in a lot of ways. I played this in really weird circumstances because I got the Wii and I ended up house sitting for the Deputy Art Editor on Endgamer. Because at the time I hadn’t got my own flat or room yet in Bath. I was living in a B&B and she was like, well, we’re going away. Do you want to come and stay and like look after our flat for a week? Because they had rats and they’re like, do you want to feed our, not wild in cage, deliberate. They had deliberate rats and they were like, do you want to come and feed our rats? And I was like, great. Yes, you’ve got a TV. I’ll sit there and I’ll just play Twilight Princess in your nice warm flat. And I’ll have to have a proper shower and I won’t have to have a cooked breakfast with tourists every morning, which you do in a B&B. Such a quintessential staff writer experience. But so I remember playing in this quite cold flat, so I couldn’t work out how heating works. So it was extra wintery and the game’s full of mysteries. Her flat was full of mysteries. So I kept finding rat poo in the middle of the living room. And I was like, are they getting out? Like, what’s happening here? This isn’t right. It was really troubling me because I didn’t want to do it wrong because I was trying to like befriend everyone in-game. I didn’t want to be seen to be kind of a chaotic person. I was really, really worried about this. And then she got back and told me that her rats had the disgusting habit of putting their arses against the bars and projectile shitting across the room. Oh, wow. So there you go. I bet you didn’t expect the anecdote to go that way. I think you might have told me that before. Yeah, so that’s my… So whatever thoughts I share on Twilight Princess, see them through that lens. I like that you couldn’t remember about the dungeon I asked about, but the rat shitting is something that stays in the memory forever. That really stuck with me. I was thinking, that is not right. That is odd. This is a really trivia question, but I believe the Gamecube version and the Wii version… The Wii version was flipped, right? Yeah, he’s left-handed. Link is left-handed, but he’s right-handed on Wii. And so, the Gamecube version sold out quite quickly and then became very hard to get hold of. I wonder if you ever played the Gamecube one? I’ve never played the Gamecube one. I don’t think I’ve even seen a copy of it. I imagine it would be a real collector’s item. Yeah, I don’t know. It would probably be a better fit in a way for Gamecube. But yeah. I better hold on to my Wii U copy of Breath of the Wild in case it skyrockets. I think more people played that on Wii U than played Twilight Princess on Gamecube. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Well, some thoughts. I imagine, not to get too ahead of ourselves, we’ll probably do a Zelda episode at some point. Yeah, for sure. Especially with the anniversary coming up next year and probably another Mario 3D All-Star style compilation. What is your number two? My number two, Matthew, is Shadow of the Colossus. This is not on my list. Yes, so this did release in 2005 in the US but then released in Europe in March 2006. My friend Andrew at the time bought a PS2 copy and lent it to me. I was very aware. I had never actually finished Ico or Ico at the time. I loved what I played of it but it became very hard to get hold of in the UK. There were only 50,000 copies printed in Europe, I think. By this point, copies were more than £60 and I had no money. I was never going to play it. When they brought this out, they released Ico, re-released Ico for 20 quid on PS2. They released this, so I played both at the time. Shadow of the Colossus, it’s been talked about over and over again. I don’t have anything that fresh to say about it. It’s a game where you are trying to… It’s very ambiguous, but you carry the body of this woman who’s unconscious into this mysterious land where there are these creatures. You, on behalf of some kind of old god or demon, are slaying all of these monsters that roam this amazing empty valley. You’re using their power for some kind of nefarious means to save this woman. Yeah, it’s been discussed too much, really, but it really was an amazing PS2 experience to see those monsters on screen. The way they looked and sounded was unbelievable. The very clever thing they did with the environments. They’re very empty, but how I think the game makes the world work is you have these distant images of all the mountains and trees you’re seeing in the distance. Then when you get closer, they turn into 3D objects. You don’t really see the limitations of the PS2 other than the frame rate when a monster smashes the ground and then it judders because it’s ancient hardware. It looked amazing for the time. Some of the creature designs in it were just so memorable. A few of the encounters just became incredibly… You would think you knew what the game was and then there would be a creature that flew and you had to work out how to grab onto its wing. Then there would be another one that would bury itself into the desert and you realize, oh, I have to run on a horse and get it to chase me, then hit it in the eye. That’s when it’s Weak Spots of Vulnerable. Just a really inventive game. I think somehow there are only 3 games by that kind of, I guess, that vague association of people who made Ico, Shadow Colossus and The Last Guardian. Ueda, is that his name? Ueda, yeah, Fumito Ueda. It’s a shame really that that’s all there is to show for all of those years. They’re making a game with Epic Games now, I believe, Ueda and whichever his studio is. Do you think they’ll start putting the Colossuses in Fortnite and it’ll be these sad, majestic winged beasts with horrible teenagers dabbing on its back while that majestic soundtrack plays? Yeah, just like John Wick skin landing on it and shooting one of the things. Well, yeah, I know a concert by, I don’t know, I actually don’t know who would be in a Fortnite concert. Master Chief driving his warthog up the back of that thing from The Last Guardian. Yeah, and then Galactus just punches it in the face. Just like, yeah, it would be a real rich use of that iconography. Yeah, just a fantastic game. Just a real great end of the generation PS2 game. Just as good as everyone says it is, even though it’s been talked about. I found it to be very scary. Really? Did you play it at the time? No, maybe a couple of years after or something, but I found the approach, how empty it is, and then suddenly the screen is full of some giant, I mean, they are giant. It’s a game that captures scale in a way that very few games have. Yeah. And they are like, you just look at them and think, oh, Christ, what am I going to do? You know, here, the tone of it is so bleak and so sad. Yeah, there are a few really scary ones. The underwater one is pretty scary. The idea of something swimming beneath you that’s gigantic and you can only get glimpses of it, that’s really scary. And there’s a couple later on that are just, yeah, in some quite oppressive environments and seeing eyes in the dark and stuff, it can be, yeah, definitely, yeah, you’re right, it’s definitely scary in places. I had some really cool cut creatures as well that live on in kind of like small bits of like, I know, Famitsu screenshots and stuff. But they were just originally a lot more of them in the game and yeah, there’s a real kind of scene of people digging into the lost content for this game, which I think Eurogamer did a really good article on a few years ago. Oh, I kind of feel bad for not putting it on my list now because it’s like Shadow of the Colossus, yet not as good as Tomb Raider Legends. But these are my personal favorites. Which of these games will we be talking about in 10 years’ time? Whoops. I think I associated with just later, I don’t know why. Oh, I think it’s because there was a very nice re-release of it on PS3 as well. So a lot of people played it and I co-ed then. All right then, Matthew, what’s your number one? My number one is, well, as hinted at earlier, it is Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. Which is a real score with the heart, not the head. I think as a game, this lawyer adventure game is solid enough as an actual adventure game. Going around, talking to people, collecting clues. And then in court scenes, you use those clues to try and find inconsistencies in testimonies. It’s basically the loop of the whole game. Very, very linear, visual novel more than anything else. But it is probably my favourite game world set of characters. I love the music, I love the melodrama. I think it’s brilliantly written, brilliantly localised anyway over here. But I think the actual mysteries and the characters are brilliantly written by the mighty Shootakumi, who is a big crime nut, as am I. And I think it really shows. Yeah, this was the first DS game I owned when I got the job in Endgamer. I knew exactly what I wanted to buy. So I bought a DS Lite and I bought this in Castlevania. I played this and was just absolutely like instantly fell in love. And it’s a series that I’ve kind of feel like I’ve sort of brought with me like through my whole kind of through my whole Nintendo career anyway. You know, they made them regularly enough that they were always there. They have their ups and downs. I don’t even think Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney is my favorite of the lot. I think it’s probably the second best. But we’ll go into the other ones down the line. Don’t want to spoil some future thoughts. But at the core of it is this great character, Phoenix Wright, who is doing battle with their prosecutor called Miles Edgeworth, who is another awesome character, a really great villain with his own sort of motivations. I think a lot of people focus on how funny and silly the games are. And that is true. But underneath them is a really sincere thriller as well, in terms of like you want to succeed, because otherwise your clients are going to get the death penalty. And we are fundamentally talking about murder. So, you know, the stakes are pretty high. I think weirdly it’s a very like focused like analysis of this fictional legal system, which sounds crazy. But the games are about the relationships between defense attorneys and prosecutors. It’s not just a simple like good versus evil thing. Like there’s a weirdly specific element to it, which I really, really connect with over the series because they explore it in lots of different ways. The music is absolutely banging. The animation is beautiful. This wasn’t even made for DS. It was made for GBA. It came out in Japan on Game Boy Advance in 2001. This was the DS port, which added a extra case on the end, which had some DS elements like fingerprint dust and blowing into the mic and what not. It’s just a great anime series that you play. I love these characters. For me, this is just the beginning of one of my favorite game series. And yeah, I just really love it. Yeah, well said. I mean, just thinking how blown away I would have been if I played this in 2001 on a Game Boy Advance. Oh my god. Yeah, I didn’t feel like the visual novel was really a thing on GBA. So that must have seemed pretty revolutionary. There’s a bit of tradition in terms of, like, in Japan on Nintendo platforms, you know, way back on the NES, there were detective games, which I imagine Shirokumi was kind of tapping into. Oh, as a detective club, something like that on NES. Also, I guess I can’t discount the fact that obviously the visual novel is more than maybe any other genre, quintessentially Japanese genre, so I’m sure there would have been a lot more of these games on GBA. But over here, something like, and it probably, like, helped usher in that genre over here, show that there is an appetite for these weirder things. It’s really great. There was a big Capcom leak recently, and it’s rumoured that some of the ones that haven’t been localised are going to be brought over to the West. Specifically, there’s a spin-off series set in Victorian London, kind of a Phoenix Wright meets Sherlock Holmes. If that does come out and come out to Switch, I’ll be so excited. Yeah, I believe that, just anecdotally, I think that the re-release they did of the original three games was incredibly successful on the different platforms you can get on. You can get on almost anything now, which is, honestly, I’ve always kind of felt like the DS was the perfect venue for those games. I think it’s the only one which has got the right sprite art. The synth sound, the little MIDI soundtrack is perfect coming out of that console. The font. Yeah, everything. It is a handhold. It’s a Game Boy Advance game. It’s a DS game, fine. I think all the subsequent versions have done weird HD illustrations, which just don’t have the same charm to me, but they’ve still got the story smarts. This was a big deal for me, too. I remember this being… Like I said, I bought this in Animal Crossing with my DS Lite, and it was just a real kind of revelation in terms of expanding my sort of taste in games. To be honest, I’ve still never finished the third one. It took me a decade to finish the second one. I only finished it a couple of years ago. I have actually played… I finished the first 3DS one, actually. I played them out of order, because I had to review that one for Games TM. And that was pretty good. The second 3DS one is actually genius, I think. Yeah, I’ve heard that. I remember you saying that was like a return to form. And yeah, long been rumoured that a new one has been made too, right? Yeah, that team should definitely be able to do more, because they’re brilliant. I even like the Ace Attorney Professor Leighton crossover. I really, really rated that. It’s a great series. The case I really remember from the first one was the Steel Samurai one. I just remember there are times where obviously it is very slapstick, but like you say, there is that kind of, a murder happened here, and every now and then it does just become a bit like a kind of horror film or something. Well, that’s, yeah, that tends to come when you break people. Like everyone’s very cocky and comical, and then every once in a while it gets to the heart of the matter that someone here has been killed and someone here is a murderer, and they snap and they break, and then they sort of become, you know, there’s a famous moment in each case where, you know, you’re really hammering your main suspect, and they eventually snap, and the animation, like, they’ll explode and sort of turn into, like, a mad demon or something, and that moment is, like, really kind of big, kind of cathartic thing, and then it does somehow tread between very silly, light-hearted, kind of buddy comedy between Phoenix Wright and his sidekick and the fact that this person is going to get the electric chair, which is kind of, or whatever, you know, they’re put to death is the implication. It’s quite a sinister game. The third one is super sinister, and it’s one of the better ones as well. A great series. I should, yeah, I should already finish that third one. You’ve 100%. Sam, what is your number one? I actually just have one small note to add on Phoenix Friday. If I had one criticism for this first game, they kill off Mia Fey too early. I think that she just, I feel like their dynamic was really good. Yeah, it’s dramatically satisfying, though. They use her in some interesting ways in the other games as well, because there’s a weird kind of apparent sort of supernatural ghosty element. It’s actually one of my lesser favorite things about the series is that the supernatural is so prevalent, because in a game which hinges on how awful it is that someone’s died, the idea of people coming back with possession and stuff, it sort of undermines it a little bit. You can’t come back to life in this universe, but you can kind of have a second go in weird ways. Yeah, yeah, that was my only note to add. Yeah, no, that’s fair. Okay, cool, so my number one. Yeah, what is it? I’m really struggling to even imagine what it is. Right, so Metal Gear Solid 3 subsystems. Of course. Right, so there was a period of about a year and a half where I didn’t really play games. I kind of blame Final Fantasy X-2, a game I was quite disillusioned by when I was 16. Just wasn’t for me in how kind of like cheesecake-y it was. In retrospect, I’ve heard some really thoughtful, some people really love that game, and I think particularly young women, it really resonated with them to have this all female party of characters in X-2. It definitely had innovations in terms of the battle system, but I fell out of love with games and then didn’t play anything for a while, missed Metal Gear Solid 3 when it first came out, and picked up this new edition of it, which added basically the third one, it’s set in a jungle, it’s set in the 60s as a prequel. I was massive on Metal Gear Solid 2, but I was quite bummed out by the fact that this didn’t continue the story of 2, which had a pretty massive cliffhanger where the ultimate villain of the game had died 100 years before and was living on as an AI and all this stuff. Which is part of the reason Metal Gear Solid 4 which we discussed before ended up being so bad. But yeah, I don’t think I quite, I just wasn’t interested when they announced it and revealed it and stuff, but then people were telling me, no, this is an amazing game, and this has the best story of the series, and this was the point where I finally bought it and got to enjoy this 3D camera they added, which made it feel a lot more contemporary. Yeah, the camera was top-down in the original and didn’t quite work, but this is a great game. Just, yes, Cold War set, you are playing a kind of, the character known as Big Boss, or who would be known as Big Boss, the predecessor to Snake, Snake is cloned from Big Boss, we don’t need to get into any of that. But the point is, it’s kind of quite a James Bondy adventure where you jump into, you land in this… Yes, exactly. You land in this South American jungle, and yeah, you are basically, you’re looking, your former boss, your former mentor has betrayed you and rejoined her old unit in defecting basically. And so you are trying to hunt her down, you know that you have to hunt her down, and you have this kind of Heart of Darkness slash Apocalypse Now-esque journey through confronting these different members of this cell and before your inevitable meeting with her. And it’s a really strong story. Yeah, really exciting in terms of stealth. They are absolutely like iconic boss fights as well. Yeah, they really are. So yeah, I was just massive on this third entry. The end is the most famous boss fight. It’s a sniper battle, which did take me about three hours to do the first time. Now I can do it about 10 minutes, because I know exactly where he is and how to track him down. And you had to use a microphone in the game to find him in the jungle. It was just really something. And even though I think the jungle stuff only really constitutes the first half of the game, and then the second half is more like you’ll be in buildings and then military bases and stuff. But I think everyone remembers the ending of this game very vividly. It’s got a real gut punch of an ending in a couple of different ways. A great final couple of twists with some of the characters you meet in the game. I think it’s his… For someone who is so obsessed with film and cinema, I think it’s his most satisfyingly cinematic game. If I was to make a film of any of his games, this would probably be the one which would work best. Particularly the ending, I think. Yeah, I mean, they’re obviously making a film of Metal Gear with Oscar Isaac, a Solid Snake, it turns out. I assume that would be based on the first game, which has a lot of baggage already, I think. It’s a bit difficult to make a film from that. Potential, for sure, but yeah. This third one is spot on, I think. Do you like the ladder a bit? Yeah, I do. I like it as a kind of oddity to discover in the game. Obviously, it’s got a function in terms of masking a loading screen. But yeah, do you not like the ladder? No, I do quite like the ladder. I just feel it needs asking. I like the song. It’s a great theme tune. And I like the fan service bits in this as well. I love the young revolver ocelot stuff. Oh, he’s great. He’s such a fun character. Oh, he’s fantastic. Very strong. I love that you can’t kill him without it being a time paradox. That’s a great touch. I mean, it has all those kind of like detailed Kojima touches that Metal Gear Solid 2 had as well, but in a much more interesting environment with better characters. Yeah, everything’s just spot on. I don’t think I’ve actually played the subsistence version with the nice camera. I think I played it when it first came out, the original version. Yeah, the HD edition has got the subsistence version, so yeah, it does make a big difference. It’s quite hard to go back to the top-down Metal Gear Solid 2 ones because that jungle is really hard to see anything. PS2 is quite blurry, the original. The HD one is really nice, though. The survival stuff was a little bit ahead of its time, I think, in terms of how big that type of stuff got in terms of sustaining an injury and having to repair yourself and hunting down food and stuff. The whole survival genre is built on that type of gameplay. I definitely think that the conversation gets a bit overblown around Metal Gear and Kojima generally in terms of the cult of personality stuff going on there. But justified with this game. I was at my most interest in Metal Gear at this point. So yeah, that was my number one, Matthew. That’s a very strong pick. It’s actually a pretty good year, isn’t it? Yeah, it was good. It was a transitional year. We’ve got some next-gen games, well, next-gen then games, but also a bunch of older console games, too. It was just a really good mix of those kind of mid-level games with those big blockbusters, you know. Yeah, and some great stuff, which I thought came out in 2006 and did come out in 2006 everywhere else other than the UK. We were robbed of, I’m pretty sure, Akami and Final Fantasy XII. Yeah, those were both kind of like ones I considered. They were next year, so was God Hand. That’s something, well, obviously I don’t miss that, but I’d almost forgotten that era of seeing the reviews of something and then realizing you couldn’t play it for a year without importing, and I just didn’t have the money or inclination to do any of that. Yeah, I never import a game. There was one game I had on my list until like 10 minutes before we recorded this, and then I realized it had come out in a different year, which was Elite Beat Agents. Because I missed a Wendan. That was a game I never played, but I did play that one. So that’s an example of the types of games that missed the cut here because they came out later in Europe, therefore I didn’t play them until later. But yeah, it was fun to go through though. Yeah, I’m surprised we didn’t have more crossover actually. Yeah, I think it just shows the different backgrounds that you and I have, the different kind of angles we had on things. I should have played Twilight Princess. I did own it at some point, but yeah, the Wii was just nether there. Yeah, well I’m intrigued to see what happens when we hit 2007 and you start work on the magazine because like I say, I was really out of the PS3 pitch for quite a few years. I’m genuinely ignorant on some of its early hits, if it had them. So I am intrigued to see what that does for your lists. Yeah, that would be fun to dissect for sure. Yeah, thank you very much for listening. And it’s been a long one, but I think it was worth it to really get. I feel like we got some good detail on all of these games. So yeah, hopefully you enjoyed the nostalgia trip. We welcome your feedback. You can email us at backpagegames.gmail.com. As Matthew pointed out, that sounds filthy. There’s also Back Page Pod on Twitter, if you want to follow us on there. I’ll tweet about new episodes on there whenever they come up. I’ll make sure Matthew’s got the details too because I’m the one doing the tweeting at the moment. I don’t know if I’m wrecking his personal brand. Yes, and so I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Matthew, you can be found here. I’m MrBazzle underscore Pesto. Yes, and we’ll be back next Friday with another episode. Bye-bye. Bye.