Hello, and welcome to The Back Page of Video Games Podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s it going, Matthew? Yeah, it’s not bad, it’s not bad. I’ve been listening to lots of game soundtracks from 2006, inspired by that podcast episode. It made me, I don’t know, it made me very nostalgic. So I’ve been listening to some Twilight Princess music. Oh nice, that’s some pretty fresh beats there. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. I can’t say I’ve been listening to the Gears of War or the Loco Rocco soundtracks. It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure. I mean, they’re basically the same soundtrack. Absolutely. So today, Matthew, we’re talking about Cyberpunk 2077, the game from CD Projekt Red that’s been much anticipated and has launched with, it’s been a contentious launch, hasn’t it? Let’s face it, there’s, as we’re recording this, you’re listening to this, basically the week after we’re recording this, and they’ve just issued an apology via Twitter for the base versions of the game on PS4 and Xbox One for their performance issues. The game is very buggy no matter which platform you’re playing it on, and generally, there’s this feeling that it’s not quite finished. How are you feeling about the whole thing, Matthew? Yeah, I’ve been playing Cyberpunk quite intensively for about a week. I did a review of it and kind of sort of submerged myself into it. When I was playing it, it was pre-release. It was kind of free of discourse, which was nice and you know, always the best conditions to be doing it in. But yeah, weirdly like then, you know, all the reviews came out and everything kind of kicked off and I was kind of trying to write my review in that because I was doing it for a magazine. So luckily I didn’t have to hit the kind of embargo date of whenever it was just before release. So I had a little bit more time to kind of mull on it than some of my peers. But yeah, all this stuff was kicking off and it was all a bit nightmarish and I just kind of shut off a fair amount of it just to kind of get on with my review and I’ve only been kind of dipping back into it now because I wanted a bit of distance, but yeah, it’s pretty messy. Yeah, for sure. So in this episode, so we’re gonna talk about the game. I’ve played a bit of the game. Matthew’s obviously played a lot of it. So we won’t go into it in like really forensic detail because you’ve kind of already done that with an existing podcast, haven’t you Matthew? I’ve chatted about it a bit on RPS and on an RPS stream. So people can hear my sort of thorough thoughts there, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts Sam on what you’ve played so far and answer any questions you may have on for someone who has played a ridiculous amount of this game. Yeah, sure. So my feeling playing it is I feel very fortunate that I can run it at 60 frames, 1080p, which is I think a sign that it’s quite badly optimized because I have a GTX 1080 Ti and it’s not like a cutting edge graphics card anymore. It doesn’t have ray tracing, but it’s still a very good graphics card that runs most games at 1440p, 60 frames plus, no problem. And I had to drop a few settings from Ultra to get it running at a smooth-ish 60. And so you can tell it’s intensive and it’s no surprise to me that the current-gen console versions don’t run that well. And yeah, you know, my feeling with it is, so far, I don’t think it’s a great shooter or a great stealth game. And that’s my main disappointment, is I’m a huge fan of Deus Ex Dishonored, these kind of immersive sim games. And I felt like CD Projekt was sort of selling this dream of, yes, it’s an RPG with RPG progression systems, but in terms of how the missions go down, they’re meant to be a bit more immersive simmy. And there are elements of that in there. You can hack different parts of the environment, distract enemies, perform stealth kills, and then obviously if you get caught, it all kicks off. But so far, and I’ve only played like about four hours of it, so, and I’ve done three missions. There’s not loads to draw upon here, but it doesn’t strike me as a great stealth game, Matthew. Would you say that’s fair? Yeah, I’d say that’s fair. Or rather, it’s like very easy to manipulate. I think a lot of it probably comes down to the fact that those games, while absolutely beloved by us, and many of our friends, and journalists, games journalists and games critics, tend to go big in for like Deus Ex and Dishonored. They aren’t really mainstream games, which this kind of definitely is or wants to be. And I fear that that’s what sort of holds it back from going all in on some like really nerdy granular shit that would be, make both the shooting and the stealth a lot more fun. As it is, the stealth is kind of tied to hacking. I feel like a lot of the tricks you have are basically different names for the same things. It’s kind of distract a guy with a thing, or distract a guy by buzzing his head or lure a guy over to you. It’s not as sophisticated as Deus Ex or Dishonored in that sense, but it does have a stuff that those games don’t do as well. I think it’s a pretty good story. It’s pretty slick when it’s in story mode. Yes, and also not discounting the fact it is an open world game. Regardless of the number of glitches in the game, I’ve encountered plenty. This morning I was just running along the street and the sun was behind V, my character, and I could see the T-pose visible in the shadow on the floor from where my character had been stuck in the air. The running animation wasn’t working properly, so I was just floating in the T-pose and I could see it happening. Then I summoned my car and then it kind of… The summon car animation stuff, there’s some quite wild gifs out there about this at the moment. But they do the very bold thing of showing the car turning up and how it gets to you, which GT Online doesn’t do that. You summon the car and it’s just there. And that’s a better way of doing it, I would say, in terms of the practicalities and challenges. But yeah, so it’s glitchy. But as an open world, it is amazing. And if they’ve got a long way to go with fixing the bugs, and I’m not saying that they necessarily should have released it in this state, because it seems like they probably shouldn’t have. But that first moment where you step out of your apartment block into Night City, it’s a hell of a moment if you’ve got the hardware to run it. Would you say that’s correct? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s a place that kind of has constantly amazed me throughout. And even now, 70 hours in, you’ll happen upon places which are so novel and brilliantly designed from an art perspective that it makes you wonder why the game doesn’t force you into a lot of it. It actually doesn’t use a lot of the city, which is quite odd. And I know that’s true, actually, of a lot of sandbox games. But there’s some pretty amazing stuff where, you know, unless you’re really going for every little blue marker on the map, I don’t know if you’d ever really go there. And you can miss great interesting chunks, even stuff where they’ve embedded story. So one of the big hooks of the game is that Keanu Reeves plays this guy called Johnny Silverhand, who, for story reasons, is embedded in your head. And that means you can kind of visualize him and see him around the place. And he’ll pop out and offer commentary. And that’s largely in the story stuff. But there’s also some locations where he’ll just pop up because you’re near them and he’ll be like, oh yeah, I remember this place, great coffee or whatever. And when you discover one of those places in some random little corner of the map where you’ve only gone out of boredom, rather than any kind of mission marker and there’s a little bit of story there. I don’t know, it does show that it has got this amazing, awesome scale to it. It has these problems, but it’s not for a sort of want of or lack of ambition. Yeah, for sure. And also, I would say that despite the lack of polish elsewhere in the game, so far I’ve been very impressed by how the cut scenes and the story sections look. Yeah, they’re great. I think in places it’s as flashy and as polished as like what you’d expect in a Call of Duty campaign. And that the action is as sort of furious and exciting in its concepts, which is kind of crazy, really. Yeah, for sure. It’s like that it is a GTA style game in you get in a car, you drive around, you collect cars, all that stuff. But the kind of types of NPCs you’re seeing are almost like the kind of Bethesda game scale NPCs where you can walk up close to them and talk to them and stuff like that. And so it does feel like it’s like GTA mixed with that kind of open world RPG template. And it’s a compelling combination. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s gonna become such a contentious game forever now. And as a result of some factors, we’ll talk about it a little bit. But I’m wondering, Matthew, you’re deeper into it. So what are the interesting ways in which the progression affects the combat and the gameplay generally? Like how does it kind of morph as it goes along? I mean, you do become a lot more powerful. It’s kind of a confusing one to pin down, just because you can push the character in so many different directions. You know, I was very kind of stealth focused, which relies on a lot of hack work, I’d say. But at the same time, even if you don’t invest heavily in gunplay, your guns are naturally getting stronger because you’re finding new loot. It’s a very loot-heavy game, you know. It’s almost the sort of borderlands in the number of guns you’re constantly picking up and the very tiny differences between them. So it’s odd. I would say like, is there a problem with it? Well, in the story missions, I feel like the action is either so scripted or designed for like anyone to be able to beat it, no matter what V they bring into the scenario, that it almost doesn’t ever lean on anything in any particular, in any kind of depth. So it doesn’t require like too much stealth or, you know, amazing guns or make, because it doesn’t know what you’re going to have. So, you know, by that it sort of diminishes the sort of feeling of importance of some of those skills. So I wouldn’t say the story mode is definitely, or the main kind of story missions is necessarily the best place to like feel your character evolving, even though they do. And then it’s almost like around that, there’s this sort of a layer of side missions, which they call gigs, which are a lot more kind of like mechanical challenges. They’re more like the Deus Ex levels. It’s like, here’s a warehouse. There’s a guy you’ve got to kill in it. And when you approach it, you realize, oh, I could hack out all the defenses. I could go in all guns blazing. I can buy some magic jumping legs to jump onto the roof and drop through the top of the hair. Or if I’m strong enough, I can tear open this particular door. You know, there are a lot of entrances into these places and that will feel more familiar to people who played, particularly the two newer Deus Ex games. But it’s, I’d say one of its bigger problems is like coming up with proper challenges for the kind of late game character. If anything, I’ve called on the game a bit since sort of finishing the story and I really went deep into all the story and the story side missions. But now I’ve played like another 15 hours of like side content, the gigs and whatnot. And actually, I can just walk over anyone in that world, which is a little disappointing because I think those powers only really come alive when there’s something suitably difficult to overcome. Do you think it’s an interesting enough game to repeat on a harder difficulty or is it not that kind of game? Yeah, from what I can see, because I’ve been ramping up the difficulty. I play it through on hard and this was the case and I’ve ramped up again and it mainly seems to impact like enemy health and the damage you take. So it really only changes combat. Like if you’ve got stealth down, stealth kind of plays out the same way on every difficulty as far as I can tell from my like experimentation with it. And because I’ve got a large stealth build, you know, I can kind of, it’s quite hard for the game to kind of find anything to kind of stop me. Also, one of the more generous things it does is let you level up any weapon you’ve got. So that if you’ve got a weapon you love, you can kind of bring it with you through the game. And that’s obviously great, but you can do this with these sort of iconic weapons, which are sort of one of a kind, uniques, which tend to have lots of extra mad modifiers or whatever. And for the last 30 hours, I’ve used the same two guns, just leveling them up, and they are so overpowered that I’d have to kind of go out of my way not to use them. And I’ve seen some people sort of deal with this criticism online and say, well, just choose not to use them then. And you’re like, yeah, but I don’t think that’s really a good enough answer. Like I don’t, I want it to be like cheese proof, rather than asking me to deliberately ignore stuff that I have in order to find some challenge in the game. But this is something they could fix with like, you know, a big balancing patch or with DLC, which adds a load of extra high level stuff. But the end game is quite disappointing and has colored my general take on it. Ah, that’s a shame. One of the things you said on Twitter that made me really intrigued about the game was that it’s as much a walking simulator as anything else. So outside of the combat stuff, what’s the kind of interesting types of quests you can find out there in Night City and the surrounding areas? So yeah, a lot of it’s about like the people you meet and the connections you make. And one of the things the game does really, really well actually is it has this main storyline, which is quite short, but you meet lots of interesting people. And once you’ve met them in the main storyline, a lot of them will then spark up conversations and you’ll branch off and do side missions with them, which can in turn then fold back into the main storyline, like how your relationship with them changes may alter the end of the game, for example. And those side content stories are often like, not really about combat or stealth. They’re very like social missions. They’re almost like the, in Red Dead Redemption 2, the kind of stuff you do when people in your camp would say, do you want to go fishing with me? And you go fishing and you have a lot of it, quite colourful dialogue and maybe something silly would happen or there’d be a little burst of combat somewhere along the way. But it’s got this quite sort of laid back tone. I’d say a lot of the side content is actually just so purely character driven. It’s go to this place, drive this character to a location and then do something quite bespoke at that location. I won’t spoil the things because they are like the best moments in the game. And there’s some really surprising stuff, actually. You do some really amazing scenes, which are, you know, giant 20 minute long sequences that are built just for this little side mission. And you know, that’s super impressive. But the missions that kind of sparked off that tweet were involved basically Johnny Silverhand, who, you know, he’s in your head, has, in the world of Cyberpunk, has died in 2020, so many years before this game. But he has a lot of friends who obviously are still alive in 2077, and you kind of sort of deal with some of them in the side stories. And dealing with these like old rockers who’ve kind of gone to pot, or people who were really disappointed or let down by Johnny Silverhand, and you’re trying to sort of make amends or kind of give him the kind of last good night, give him a big night out in the town that he never got as a kind of big farewell. And those are just, those are like pure walking, you’re just spending time in the character, you can’t fail them. But they’re like brilliantly observed and the voice acting is absolutely superb. There’s a character called Rogue, who’s like a fixer. And the stuff with her is just, it’s incredibly like this sort of romantic and nostalgic. And it really surprises you, because everything in this city is so like brash and obnoxious to have that. The strongest moments in the game are the bits where people are just like, oh, the good old days and kind of, you know, getting off their chest, things they wish they’d said. And, you know, maybe it just appeals to me because I’m quite a sentimental person, but I thought that stuff was not at all what I was expecting. It really changed the whole tone of the game for me. No, so I completely agree with you. The Red Dead thing really makes me think of the random stranger missions you get in GTA V and IV, where you’d see like a blue figure on the map. You drive over there and it’s like what you say, basically. It’s like, here’s some rando you don’t really know and your character has an encounter with them and it’s just quite, it’s just nice to play out and you hear their story and then… Yeah, and they’re not like, you can’t really fail them. You know, they’re not designed as like hardcore challenges. They’re just really nice, colourful kind of character beats. But, you know, the flip side to that is, you know, when you’ve got this system with this huge mechanical kind of complexity and, you know, you can develop, you know, it’s got the perk trees are just obscene. There’s like 400 of individual perks or something. You know, to have a game which doesn’t really tap into any of those for so much of its content is quite odd. It’s a bit overwhelming when you first start it, I would say, in terms of like the different… It’s hard to get… I would say they’re not very good at communicating how and why you should put points into various systems. So I would say that kind of like the augmentations you get from that guy, they’re a bit easier to pass, but the kind of progression trees and the base stats, I couldn’t quite really figure out beyond a very basic level why I should be putting points into these things. And I would say generally, it’s quite overwhelming. Like you say, it is quite borderlands-y in that you can pick up every single gun that’s dropped, and you might want to because you can go sell them, kind of a vendor or whatever. But it definitely feels overwhelming when you first start it. I would also say that tonally, it’s a weird game because I’m now getting to the point where I am getting some of this dialogue and characterization I quite like and I’m quite enjoying some of the writing. But it really presents itself as quite adolescent when you start. Like the obnoxious kind of music, and the montage that you start with, with your characters pretty obnoxious too, and it’s like, oh, look how wild you are. And the character creation screen, I mean, when you select the female character, your female character is naked, I don’t know why. Your male character is too, but that too feels like a statement of, I don’t know if they’re trying to say something, but it just comes across as perv at this female character model. It’s weirdly unbalanced in the rest of the game. There’s a lot of female nudity, and I don’t think you ever see male genitals on yourself in sex scenes. You’re always weirdly wearing boxer shorts, but the female characters won’t be. They’ll be fully naked. It’s like that customization screen is there to act as a bit of a safeguard, so you can point to it and say, look, we’re all for a quality of pervenus here. But actually, in the game, it’s just not true. If you pick up a naked dude, you’ll see his boxer shorts are kind of in your peripheral vision as you carry him over your shoulder. If you pick up a naked woman, it’s just her chest right there in the middle of the screen. That’s a bit like… It’s definitely leery. What a weird game, tone-wise, then, to have that mix of stuff. I feel like such a sort of dad in that world, though, because everything I do is about taking the edge off it. So whenever I get a new car, it’s always got a radio station set to one of the raucous rock stations or some metal music. And I’m just like, quick, switch it to the jazz. Switch it to the jazz station. When I was going through the character creation, every character it gave me had like 15 piercings. And it would just be like, well, let’s remove all the piercings and see what they look like underneath and get rid of all the tattoos and all the cyberware in the skin. I want them to just look like me, basically. Clothes, I basically got a set of clothes that looked like a suit. And then I invested in upgrading them so I didn’t have to change to, you know, some kind of jacket that says fuck on it or something. Because that’s not my vibe. No, I’m not too surprised to hear that, honestly. I can just kind of imagine you, I mean, if given the option, you going around all these kind of naked characters you see, this is a dialogue option that says, put some clothes on, love. And you’re just handing them clothes from your inventory, just being this kindly dad figure. Flashbacks of sort of a mortifying childhood experience of going into a games workshop with my mum to buy some, you know, Warhammer, and her telling the staff that she wouldn’t buy anything from their shop unless they turned their music down. And I was just like, no! I wished I was the size of a Warhammer miniature in that moment. Wow, I mean, you were there thinking, will I ever regain my cool with the people in Games Workshop? What an existential crisis that must have been. Yeah, okay, great stuff. Actually, one thing that is quite sweet in the game is that it’s quite easy to pay as a non-drinker. Like, in a lot of drinking scenes, you’ll have a dialogue option for booze and one for like lemonade or something. And they’ll be like, yeah, sure, no worries. It’s not like, you’re a loser because you don’t drink whiskey with Johnny Silverhand. Johnny Silverhand may say that, but the other characters are kind of cool with it. Oh, that’s interesting. But you really can roleplay as Matt Castle in the game. Yeah. So I’m curious if there are any quests in the game, Matthew, that are a bit more like the kind of Witcher 3 quest that everyone bangs on about, like is it the Bloody Baron one? Is it the Bloody Baron? Is that a Harry Potter character? It might be a Harry Potter character. That’s a famous Witcher quest. I’d say that one there is probably famous because it’s, I think it’s a little overrated as a quest. I do like the Bloody Baron, but like, you know, it comes quite early on, which is why I think a lot of people are quite hooked on that quest. Like it’s the first thing, it’s the first big moral quandary you hit in that game and it just makes me wonder, did no one play past this? But you know, it’s brilliantly performed and acted in the Witcher, which the characters are in this as well. If anything, I think the first person perspective really lets you like see those animations better. Like they’re very good virtual performers. And it has like quite a messy moral quandary at the heart of it, which there are in this. Like weirdly, there aren’t many versions, there aren’t many quests where I was really like umming and ah-ing. Like a lot of the time it’s side with bastard A or side with bastard B. It’s not like, I didn’t feel like I was being asked to kind of make any like really outrageously horrible calls. Given how like mad and unpleasant a lot of the technology is, you’d think there’d be a lot more of that. Where it is a lot like The Witcher is in those more social missions. I think people tend to forget or not forget like the, you know, a lot of the best moments in The Witcher are just characters hanging out. Like some of the stuff with Johnny Silverhand’s bandmates is very similar to like when you meet up with the old witches in The Witcher 3 and you all just have a load of drinks and talk about the good old days. Like it actually taps into a lot of the similar kind of moments. There’s a quest I absolutely love in the DLC Hearts of Stone called Dead Man’s Party, where Geralt is sort of possessed by this ghost to show the ghost like one last good time, which is basically the entire pitch of Cyberpunk. Like that is what Cyberpunk is about. And so that obviously has a lot of similarities, but I think their quests are almost best when they just let like quite warm, like funny character dialogue happen. You have a hero who’s kind of slightly kind of taken back by how strange some of the missions are. And that for me, I get the big Witcher vibes. Less so in like the actual, I think the Witcher does like the actual kind of combat missions, you know, where you’re going to hunt a monster or whatever, are better placed in that world and better delivered. You know, there are some kind of equivalents. You know, there are boss fights in Cyberpunk and there are these sort of mini bosses called cyber psychos who kind of dotted across the map. And, you know, they’re just like boss fights that you find in the city. And, you know, you wonder if they’re meant to be a bit like Witcher contracts because you can kind of spy on them beforehand and go, oh, this guy doesn’t like, you know, electric bullets or whatever, so I’ll stock up on those before I fight him. But there was a lot more of that and a lot more depth to that side of things in The Witcher. So, I don’t know. I still prefer The Witcher’s spread of quests, even though there is a lot more of The Witcher in Cyberpunk than I thought there was going to be, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. That’s really interesting. So, I don’t want to dwell on the kind of outside factors that much, because I’ve definitely thought about the alleged crunch stuff quite a lot. But it is all people are kind of talking about at the moment on Twitter, along with the bugs of the game, and that’s been dissected so thoroughly. It is almost good just to talk about the game. Yeah, it was a really tricky one to review, because, you know, you feel like, you know, there’s a lot to say about what it is mechanically. Like, it’s very rare that people kind of try this kind of ambitious design, and it’s, you know, open world games, you know, they’re obviously very prevalent, and to see someone try something quite different in that structure is, you know, it’s quite satisfying to kind of dig into the nuts and bolts and try and pin down, you know, why it’s doing the things it’s doing, or why it makes you think feel the way you feel. So, you know, I kind of did that more with my review. I mean, I did, I think you do have to note the crunch. I don’t think you can kind of pass it off. Also, you know, the debate about, you know, we all reviewed the PC version, as far as I can tell, which is obviously like the most stable, still has the bugs, but, you know, it looks, you know, really beautiful in places. The whole, it’s totally bust on base consoles, it’s just a nightmare scenario for reviewers, and how to talk about that. And, you know, I think the best you can do is make sure you cover it, you know, once you know what the deal is. But in the review, to sit there and go, you know, what am I reviewing here? The best version of it, the worst version of it? I don’t know. It’s, I know it’s really unsatisfying to say, like, there’s not really an answer, but I personally do not have an answer. Well, I mean, the thing is that people were taken off guard by how bad the console versions were. I mean, I’ve only just, I was watching a Digital Foundry video on the base PS4 and Xbox One versions, and it is terrible. Just really kind of stuttery, bad lack of detail. And to be honest, I think each time I saw this game, it did always look like it was beyond the capabilities of, you know, these 2013 consoles. Yeah, when they announced it, I was like, oh, when they first showed that gameplay at E3, whenever it was, a couple of years ago, you know, I just took it, oh, as red that, oh, this is a next-gen game. Yeah. But then it always happened. It’s sort of weird. I’m not trying to say this makes it OK, but I feel like there probably have been equally egregious examples of this generation crossover that haven’t been reported on. Like, I think there are always, there are a lot of crap 360 versions of games which were much shinier. Maybe not as severe as this, but there have been examples. Or just, you know, a classic one, for example, is FIFA, you know, where everyone talks about the shiny version they have, where the one on Nintendo platforms has been, for a long time, the FIFA game from four years ago, and all they do is literally update the names. Like, there’s not a change to it. And that sort of stuff feels like it goes unnoticed. Is the game, is the story not sexy enough? It’s the same problem. You know, it’s someone kind of treating an older console with disrespect. But yeah, that story doesn’t tend to get picked up as much, but it happens a lot more than people think. I suppose the different differentiating factor here is the game was always planned to release a fair few months before the next-gen consoles landed. So, I mean, you know, to release in that kind of void where there is no… You know, you don’t have an Xbox Series X to put Cyberpunk in and see how it runs. It reportedly runs better on the newer consoles. I mean, it would have just… It might even have looked worse. Yeah, I mean, everyone keeps talking about, like, what happens if this had released in April? And you’re like, yeah, if it’s based on… Because back then you would have had the PC version and this horrible base console version. It would have looked terrible for them. Yes, rough stuff. It’s an interesting… Another interesting example of the hype cycle that goes along with blockbuster games. They had Keanu Reeves on stage at E3 last year. And it was a moment everyone remembers. And I don’t know, I don’t want to talk too much about the audience of Cyberpunk because it’s a massive audience and everyone wants to play it. But an engaged portion of the audience do seem to be absolute jerks on social media. That’s maybe nice, I suppose. But those kind of real gamer boys who have just kind of made the gaming discourse a bit shitty for about the last ten years, they seem to have been orbiting Cyberpunk and have now gone from being like, this is the best game in the world. How dare you even criticise a single element of it to, I’m having a meltdown because this game is bad, or at least it’s running badly, or whatever. I don’t know, it’s really… The whole thing’s been quite irritating to follow the hype cycle of it, you know? Yeah, I think anyone who sort of defines themselves by their relationship with any specific game, or maybe even just general games, I think is always on a kind of hide-and-to-nothing, really. You know, it becomes like a mad matter of pride, because you have either people who are kind of, you know, no, I’ve thrown my lot in with this game, it’s going to be good no matter what, and they’re like, well, my PS4 copy doesn’t have any bugs. And it’s like, well, it does, you know, you’re a fucking liar. Don’t be mad. That’s fine, it’s okay to say it does. And then you have the other people who just, yeah, they just turn instantly. You know, they go from issuing death threats to reviewers who say it’s not great the week before to issuing death threats to CD Projekt Red a week later because the game is not what I thought it was going to be. I think it’s a bit unfair to bundle them in and say, like, they are Cyberpunk fans or CD Projekt Red fans. Like, they’re just the maniacs who, like you say, have just amassed around the hobby over the last 10 years. I think they’re just thoroughly unpleasant people no matter what game is currently in their spotlight. Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessarily on CD Projekt Red, even if I don’t think they’ve been great at answering some of the critiques about the game’s tone and choices. It’s kind of amazing to see, you know, because I feel like they were held up for so long, and I think part of the reason there was this hype around Cyberpunk is that they’re the kind of, they’re the good developer publisher. You know, they don’t do bullshit, and they still don’t do a lot of bullshit. You know, they don’t do microtransactions. They release one version of the game. There’s not, like, loads of different premium editions. You know, they release it DRM free on GOG. You know, there’s a lot of stuff which ticks like pro consumer boxes, which is good and should be industry standards. But, yeah, then it comes at the cost of, you know, the stories come out about the cost on staff to actually make this game, the actual state of it when it comes out. I mean, these are, you know, problems too big for people to look over. I don’t think actually a lot of people are swayed by crunch necessarily. I think most, the average gamer probably doesn’t care. You know, I’m not saying that’s right, obviously. But when your actual game is broken and doesn’t work, that’s the, like no one can kind of get by that. Yeah, this feels like the kind of launch that’s going to follow them around probably for forever. Just because gamers tend to have, gamers, I’m sorry, you know, people who play games tend to have a long memory with this stuff. And so, I don’t know, for every mistake that Bethesda’s made, there is now kind of residual criticism of Bethesda anytime they do anything. And I feel like this launch going as badly as it has on such a, you know, on two major platforms is just going to be like the thing people talk about with CD Projekt. Oh, definitely. They’ve got themselves sort of all memed up for life. Those gifts are just going to be haunting them. And it was interesting, because I remember saying when I was reviewing this that, you know, a couple of other, you know, reviewers were getting in touch and saying, like, you know, story, you know, did you do this in this mission or whatever? And, you know, I remember saying, like, I feel, from a bugs perspective, this game deserves the kind of shellacking that people will give a Bethesda game or gave Assassin’s Creed Unity. And I was saying, I genuinely don’t, I’m really interested to see if the community holds it up to the standards they’ve exacted on other games. You know, I wonder, you know, is the love for CD Projekt Red so much that people wouldn’t give it the old kind of gift treatment? Turns out they have. Boy, have they. Like, I think I’ve, I don’t think I’ve actually seen any gifts of the game doing what it’s meant to do, which it does a lot of the time. If anything, it goes so far, you’d think it’s just, and it is glitch crazy, but there’s plenty about this game, which is masterful and works amazingly. And congratulations to the people who made those things. And just to see it, like, I’ve almost gone the other way, where it’s now the whole thing is just boiled down to like, you know, cars exploding into the sky and stuff. I’m like, oh man, like, I think that stuff happens, yes. But like, there’s 30 hours of the game I played where that stuff didn’t happen. And I was having a great time. So, I don’t know, rough. And to happen before Christmas, I would not want to be fixing that over the Christmas holidays. No, it sounds like they’re going to roll out some major patches in January and February. Hopefully that means the people working on it can get a break. Yeah. But it shouldn’t have come out at this point. And yet, that becomes a difficult question of, well, how long do you go on making the game in the way they have to make it to finish it? Do you extend that indefinitely? It’s such a complicated, naughty thing. I mean, imagine the conversations. Because they must have looked at it. They know, right? They’re looking at this thing and they’re like, have we got this to a point where momentum will be on our side? Or is this going to bite us in the ass? And when you have to personally put out a, we’ll help you get refunds for this base version if you’re not able to get them naturally. That’s pretty bad. I’d say that’s about as bad as it can go when you’re having to kind of actively own up to it and say, most people just say, we’ll fix it. But to say like, you know, here’s the email address if you want to try and sort out a refund for you. That’s rough. That’s rough. When you spend so long in it, they should have spent another year. The Goodwill was there. People would have played it next year. They would have played it in two years’ time. Yeah, and they made a big deal about the fact that The Witcher 3 sold more copies, I think, in 2019 or 2020 off the back of The Witcher Netflix show being so popular. It surely wasn’t for a lack of money. Surely not. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I’m sure that whoever made that decision, whatever group of people made that decision, there’s just something that’s going to follow them around now. Do you think they can fix the game in time for the native next-gen console versions that are coming out next year? Yeah, I mean, you’d hope so, because by all accounts, those versions are okay. They’ve got like 60-frame performance modes and a 30-frame kind of quality mode on Xbox Series X anyway, which is meant to be much closer to the experience. I mean, just looking at what a beast of a PC it needs to run, there’s a question of how far those next-gen consoles can actually go with what they’ve got inside them. So it’s hard to say. I’m almost more interested in what the knock-on effect is for everyone else who’s currently got a cross-gen game in the pipeline. Are Microsoft now looking at Halo Infinite on Xbox One and going, is this good enough? Is this going to be a cyberpunk? I wonder if anyone’s having that conversation. Do we ditch? When do you ditch the last gen? Because this audience has now shown itself to have been not very forgiving of people who put out an inferior last gen product in a way that I don’t think we’ve ever really seen before. Of course, we’re mainly talking about Xbox and PlayStation games here. So maybe these people, they know their consoles better than anyone and PlayStation aren’t going to put out something that looks like Cyberpunk does on PS4, you would hope. We touched on this a bit though. It’s hard to envision Horizon Forbidden West on PS4 and PS5 being comparable without some one version having to compromise for the other in some way. It does make you think, well, you have the interest in PS5, why not just move on? The PS4 does have a robust library. I get wanting to provide games for that audience, but I don’t know, it seems like you don’t have to do it for every game. Miles Morales is going to have a good choice for a cross-gen game. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe Cyberpunk is just a next-gen game. There comes a point where you just have to accept that and go, well, we shouldn’t have tried, really. Well, we’re going to take a brief break, Matthew, but then we’re going to come back and talk a bit about covering big game launches and what that’s like and how that’s changed over the years. Tasty. Yeah. Welcome back, we’re talking in part two about big games at launch. If I had just said this, if you’re listening to the podcast, so why am I saying it again? Nonetheless, we’re gonna talk a bit about covering big games from a review perspective. Maybe they forgot in the musical interlude. Exactly, yeah, you’re just so dazzled by the piece of music from cyberpunk that I didn’t license and then cut into this podcast, not to get too behind the curtain there. Yeah, so Matthew, you and I have covered big games, different types of big games, at a review stage, and in some ways that process has stayed the same, in some ways it hasn’t. So I think fundamentally, what was it like covering a big game review in the early days of working on magazines for you, compared to working on a website and covering it now? So the obvious difference is time. We’re not trying to get something up to an online embargo. We’re trying to get something good in the magazine, which will come out a month later. I mean, by the time I started working in Mags, the age of early review access, or at least early enough for magazines, was such that it didn’t happen very often. Like we were very rarely had a timely review, maybe tied to an exclusive cover. We could occasionally get early access. And actually Nintendo First Party, which I’ll talk about a bit in detail a bit later, are often finished so far in advance that they can also be reviewed in time for a magazine deadline and still be out before they’re out, which is great. But because I was on Nintendo Mags, I feel like my relationship with these big games was different because the big games for us were just Nintendo games. And so, like I say, they finished them early, you had more time with them, we formed a different relationship with reviewing them through that. I was always a lot more interested about my peers reviewing big games on 360 or PS3, which I myself as a punter really wanted to play. So, something like a GTA, for example. Did you ever review a GTA? I reviewed both GTA IV and GTA V. I mean, in my mind, they’ve got to be the big, they’re like the biggies, right? Yes, and I would say that GTA V was a much better experience than GTA IV because GTA IV was a review event done with a finite number of days, whereas GTA V, we had code and quite a long embargo, like a week, I think, before the embargo lifted, which was nice and generous. So, yeah, that hell of a process reviewing a GTA. It’s a lot of game to pack into a short space of time, you know? So, yeah, you were kind of looking at that on from afar. So what was, like, the first big game you reviewed then? So I guess it’s probably Super Mario Galaxy in terms of, like, mega hype, in terms of the magazine sort of lineage. And I’ve talked about this before, like, a defining part of N64 and NGC magazine were the big reviews of Mario and Zelda. You know, they were opportunities for writers to really, like, strut their stuff. And, you know, they were going to be big special games. You kind of knew that going in. So they required a big special write-up. They were, for a long time, those real biggies were reviewed at Nintendo Windsor. So we’d go to Nintendo UK’s office in Windsor, which is quite a funny place to go and review a game. There are quite a few publishers in Windsor, actually, 2Ks there as well. Yeah, it’s quite weird, isn’t it? I wonder what the origin of that is. I guess it’s quite close to London and quite nice. But that’s the thing, you know, the Queen’s there. So you get off the train and there’s, like, the Queen’s house, a big castle. The town is very quaint because the Queen lives there, so it’s not a shithole, because otherwise she’d be furious. I feel about 20% too tall for Windsor. I don’t know about you. I don’t quite fit in the buildings, yeah. Very big in Windsor. They have, like, regular parades because I guess the Queen likes to see them out of her window. So there’s a lot of… Yeah, it’s kind of a strange town to go and review a game. So you’ve kind of got that element. Then you obviously go and sit in a room and play a game. Nintendo UK didn’t do big review events. They were very good at getting press in early. They only had two Nintendo magazines. So they were good at getting print in early, I should say. So it would be O&M and us basically at this point. Maybe N Revolution was still on the scene. I can’t remember. And yeah, you’d just go in and it would be you in this little room playing Mario Galaxy for three or four days. And they’d put you up in a little hotel so you could play until quite late and then you’d go and stay in the hotel and get back up and come back out. There is something so strange about opening a door to a little office and seeing on the TV like the title screen of something which is mega exciting to you because you’re just like, oh, wow, here it is. It’s like ready for me. Yeah, and in terms of actually playing it, again, one of the privileges of reviewing Nintendo games is that they are quite secretive about them. They don’t release a huge amount about them beforehand, even less so back in 2007. There wasn’t all this endless treehouse streams or whatever. So you really felt like you were a very early pair of eyes on this thing. It was all fresh. It was all new. There was a huge amount of hype around it. But generally, like Nintendo games, this is a horrible generalization, generally they deliver, which is one of the big pleasures of writing about Nintendo games, I think, is that it’s quite rare that they shit their bed. And when they do, it’s a bit nightmarish because fans really aren’t ready for it, but it’s quite rare. So I didn’t really have to deal with that obstacle too much. So not on audio. You and I have talked a bit about what it was like for you to write the review of Mario Galaxy and the weight you felt of that. What was that like for you, if you don’t mind talking about it? Yeah, it was really stressful because I went in and I wanted to write a review that people would link with that magazine forever, which sounds really pretentious, but that’s what had happened with reviews in the past. I wanted to write something you were like, oh yeah, remember that absolutely legendary review of Mario Galaxy? That’s what I wanted. I wanted the review to be as good as the game and feel as special as the game. This is a game that I had a profoundly entertaining time with. It is one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s probably my favorite game of all time. And the pressure there of like, I have to pin this down. I have to convey this. I almost need to, in my head anyway, I felt like I need to step up. You know, it can’t read like any other review I’ve ever done, because I don’t want this to feel like any other game. I’m trying to convey the golfing quality here. And yeah, I kind of, I went a bit mad. Like, I’m not massively pleased with that Mario Galaxy review. I think it’s solid and gets the job done, but like, the pressure of it kind of got to my head a bit. And I was thinking about that legacy a bit too much, rather than just sort of going with the game, because the game is so free and easy. It’s so sort of smooth going and confident in itself. And that’s the energy you kind of needed to tap into, rather than this, this is momentous. The game doesn’t behave like that. Again, you may be rolling your eyes at this, listening to this. But that’s kind of how I, that is kind of how I felt about it. I ended up writing the review and listening to the tune from Gusty Garden Galaxy, which had been put online on a YouTube video. There’s a, there’s a clip of them, an orchestra playing it for the recording session and like Miyamoto sitting on a couch and the look on his face is like the quality of Mario Galaxy. It’s just a man who is pure like, this is it. This is the good shit. And I listened to that tune over and over again. And I was trying to like, I wanted the review to feel like that, like to feel like that tune. Like I even had, I had a, we had footnotes in Endgame. I think there was even a footnote right at the start that said, put this tune on a loop when you read this review. Like, this is the kind of, this is the, this is the theme to this review. And yeah, but that’s just mad. When I look back at it now, I’m like, wow, this really, this really missed the point. Like I got, I feel like I nailed down equally big games much better when I didn’t have those worries. Like for example, when I reviewed Breath of the World for GamesRadar, you know, I like GamesRadar as a site. I don’t have any emotional connection to that site at all. But when I wrote that review, you know, that is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. And I think it’s because I didn’t have all this stupid baggage of like, oh, I’ve got something to live up to. I was just trying to write a good review of the game and that allowed it to click. The Mario Galaxy 2 review is even worse for this, incidentally. If you’ve got any old copies of Endgamer, I don’t think you can find this review online anymore. But like, the basic, the last two paragraphs became like a sort of weird meta debate about whether I could score this higher than Mario Galaxy. And I put in this reference to something Greenie used to talk about, like every point you went over 90 was like when they pushed the Enterprise a little bit faster in Star Trek. It would all begin to shake and it gets Scotty going, no, we can’t take it, we can’t take it. And this idea of that pushing into those real upper echelon scores, you know, it was just such a, it’s for something to kind of like withstand the kind of pressure and actually deliver up there was super hard. And that got stuck in my head and I started talking about that. And so the review ends on this really irritating note where I start talking about numbers and reviewing rather than the game. So I absolutely shit the bed on Galaxy 2 as well. But yeah, I was just so excited to play those games. I mean, you know, I loved reading those reviews back in the past. And it’s still, you know, to this day, I think, I think it is a real, you know, again, not to be too soppy. It is like a real privilege to review something that good and get a shot at it. And you don’t want to like get it wrong. You don’t want to do it a disservice. You feel like I want to rise to the occasion. The best games ever should have the best reviews ever. Not always the case. Yeah, I definitely have the feeling of sort of a similar level of pressure, but also the kind of feeling right. This is the main event. Like there’s not going to be a bigger thing that happens this year in my career than reviewing a GTA game. And so I was also quite young when I reviewed GTA 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4. I think I reviewed both of those very close together because for some reason, I ended up doing both instead of going to… I think I was meant to do Metal Gear and then someone else is meant to do GTA. And then into… I think it was in like a two-week period, I went to the GTA review event and the Metal Gear Solid 4 review event. Oh, wow. I’m amazed they weren’t snuffed by like editors. Well, I think that… I don’t know. I guess the editor at the time had his reasons for not doing it, but no one liked Metal Gear more than me on team. But people did like GTA more than me, I think. I hadn’t finished San Andreas and reviewed GTA 4. But yeah, I don’t think I did a good job with either of those. And I’m trying to think of a game where I really nailed it. And I think Mass Effect 2 was the first game where I felt like I really nailed it. So that came out early 2010. And that also represented one of the best review experiences because EA and Bioware, they sent out… The game came out in January, and they sent out review code before the break in December. So I took a debug, which you need… It was like a developer console. You need to review these early builds of games. Just for people who didn’t know. And I took that to my parents’ house and played Mass Effect 2 all Christmas. And that was a phenomenally good experience. Even though I couldn’t import my save, which in retrospect, maybe I should have been able to do that so I could actually make a call on how important it is to carry across your choices. But nonetheless, Mass Effect 2 is obviously a phenomenally good game. Yeah, and that was… I mean, I really like… The naughtiest thing I did with that review was my friend Andrew came round and I showed him the bit at the start where the Normandy blew up and that’s definitely like breaking some kind of embargo. You showed it to an outsider. I just said to him, look, do not tell anyone that the Normandy blows up, OK? I don’t know if EA can still get me done for that, but I’m sure it’s fine. He didn’t tell anyone anyway. That was just really good because I finished the whole thing while in my parents’ house, sat on a massive couch and just drinking increasing amounts of eggnog. And then when I got back, I think I had about four days to write the review. So it ended up being pretty good. That sounds great. Yeah, it was the first 10 out of 10 I gave because I worked on play, so it was all percentages. And none of the scores are equivalent to a 10 out of 10. So yeah, putting on Mass Effect 2, it felt right. And I think that stood the test of time, that score. Yeah, a really good process. But yeah, it varies wildly. Did you have any really nightmarish ones? Did you ever run into any embargo craziness? Metal Gear Solid 4 was that, really, with the fact that you couldn’t talk about anything beyond the first two levels out of five. I think that was it. Or at least you could only touch on vague elements, so you couldn’t do a proper critique of the game. And it was kind of irritating at the time. But I don’t know. I remember one that I didn’t do, but I remember being like quite a complicated thing to work out was, on PC Gamer, when Decider 2 came out on PC, it had a whole load of problems running on PC at launch. And so it became a difficult question of like, oh, do we review the game now, when the score probably won’t hold up whenever they fix it, or do we wait and see if they’ll patch it and it’ll work? And we waited like a week, I think, and then Phil Savage, my former colleague who reviewed it at the time, gave it a really high score, and that was the right thing to do, because that game is one of the best games of the last generation, certainly. And if you give it, impulsively give it a score, let’s say you scored it like 72%, because this doesn’t work properly on PC, then it works properly a week later. Your score hasn’t stood the test of time, and if you’re changing scores, then some might argue that that kind of undermines the process a little bit. So it’s complicated sometimes, for sure. Yeah, that’s tricky. That big decision of holding back, I mean, I’ve never worked on a website, I’ve only worked on print and then video, so I feel like I’ve not really had to deal with that question myself in terms of, you know, do we sit on this past embargo to kind of get it right or see what happens? It’s kind of a call I would probably hate to make. Yeah, and there are some other things that factor in when you’re reviewing games, too. I didn’t really think about this at the time, but part of the dream of GTA V was that they were doing these heists in the main game and then the online multiplayer was going to have some kind of heist content as well. And the online wasn’t even available with GTA V when it launched. Ultimately, GTA Online is the thing that defined that game. My 10 out of 10 from 2013 doesn’t necessarily stand the test of time. If you look up a GTA V review now, you might find an updated one that factors in some of that stuff, but not across all outlets. Finding actual criticism of what the product is now, in a game that changes so often, is very hard to do. That can also happen with games that don’t change massively. One of the interesting things from the last couple of years has been reviewing games on PC, which came out on console a year or so before, and had huge, confusing discourse around them. The two things that jump out are Red Dead 2 and Death Stranding. I didn’t write a formal review of Death Stranding, I did a review video, but I did write Rot Paper Shotgun’s Red Dead 2 review, and I’m really pleased with both those things. I feel like they were almost stronger because other people had been through the wars with them earlier, and I’d read all the reviews when they first came out, and I’d seen the discourse, and actually having a bit of distance from it was really nice. I felt like, particularly with Their Stranding, there was so much confusion when it came out on PS4 about what it was going to be, and I felt like a lot of reviews spent so much time dealing with, oh, this is what Kojima did next, that they maybe didn’t get into the game quite as well as they could have. This probably sounds like I’m saying all those early reviews were shit and mine was good, but I feel generally the reviews of Death Stranding were much more satisfying to read when it came out on PC. I felt like everyone just, I don’t know, the fog had cleared a bit, and there wasn’t any kind of pressure to deal with the big Kojima-ness of it. You could just talk about what it was, and as a result, there are fewer reviews, because not everyone reviewed the PC version, but the few people who did, I think, really nailed it in a way that a lot of people didn’t on PS4, but maybe that’s just me bigging up the work I did. I think you definitely, you don’t have to answer the question of what is this as much, which is something everyone was wondering about Death Stranding before it came out on consoles, so I definitely see what you mean there. Being uncoupled from it must have been quite refreshing. It feels just generally better received on PC. Maybe it fits PC better. Maybe it’s weird walking, sim, physics-y, hiking, simulator stuff is just a more natural fit. But the fact that it won best PC game at the Golden Joysticks and has featured quite highly on some PC gaming sites, like Games of the Year or whatever, speaks to, I don’t know, if it’s just a natural fit or free of the discourse, we can enjoy it more. I don’t know, but it definitely, I feel like it’s had a proper sort of go of it this year than it didn’t necessarily last year. Yeah, I think you’ve really tapped into something there with maybe this is a better fit for a PC audience. Because yeah, the odd pace of it and the overall strangeness of it and the type of game it is does seem very PC, actually, when you kind of lay out like that. It kind of really feels like one of those kind of oddities that slowly catches on in early access. Then when it comes out, people just really love it and it just sells in the Steam sell forever. It feels like one of those kind of games just happens to have Hideo Kojima involved. It’s quite unusual, but maybe it just speaks to the ways that games are changing and becoming less defined by their platforms, particularly on next-gen hardware. I can think of a couple more points on reviews. Also, the review and progress is a tricky thing to do. I’ve never done one of these. I did a couple of these. I did one for Metal Gear Solid 5 when I was reviewing that because it’s such a long game. Just that feeling of you have to have something up on the site. You ideally want something on the site so people can make informed decisions about buying it, but also you’re not ready to give it a score. It exists as almost a preview feature meets a review. Just like a really in-depth hands-on, I suppose. I think I did… The annoying thing is I think I did a really good job with the reviewing progress from Metal Gear Solid 5 and then a worse job with a finished review. Oh, right. You don’t modify the preview into the review. It depends. I guess everyone’s process depends. I think I did an entirely new draft in that case and ended up scrapping one of my better analogies in the opening paragraph that I couldn’t quite nail the second time around. I don’t know why I tortured myself like that. But The Division 2, that was one I did a review and progress for and I did quite enjoy that actually because that is a game that I did slowly fall in love with. I really enjoyed that game even though I think people should stop making looter shooters because I just think the market for those has completely died and no one really cares anymore. I enjoyed reviewing that and digging slowly into it. I think after 20 hours I did a review and progress and 50 hours when I gave it a score. But I will say that doing it online versus print is much more intensive because you have commenters and people swarming onto the site to find out what you think of it and stuff like that. And again, I’m not discounting the fact that it’s a very, very privileged position to be in. And it’s just not quite as sort of like, it’s a lot more zen doing it for a magazine because you’re like, even if people are angry at it, they’re probably not going to send in an email or a letter or anything like that because the people who read your magazine, generally it’s like habitual purchasers. So they’re people who know who the staff is and know what the kind of overall vibe of the magazine is. Therefore, they’re less likely to get mad than some rando on the internet. The idea of someone picking up like maybe the one issue they ever pick up of a magazine and having such an aggressive reaction to the review that they have to write an angry letter to a complete stranger. So in our notes here for the show, Matthew, I really want to ask about Smash Bros. Because I never reviewed one of those and I would have done a terrible job. You said, scoring Smash Bros. is a nightmare. Talk me through that. Yeah, so I guess this sort of… Maybe this speaks a little bit to the relationship people have with multiplayer games. And we went into this a little bit with Mario Kart when we talked about scores we regret. Making a shout on something which you’re meant to play for hundreds, if not thousands of hours, with your mates in a very naturalistic setting is very, very hard to replicate any of that experience in a review situation. You know, you’re either at a review event and you get to play like five hours of it and then you have to just go, well, and here’s what I think of this game’s potential. So that’s definitely a big problem with Smash Bros. It’s the multiplayer element. The other thing is just the kind of passion around certain iterations of it and what people actually value in that game is really, really hard to pin down and varies from person to person. So I reviewed Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which was the Wii one. Not a well-liked version of the game? Yeah, but at the time it was about as exciting as anything could seem. It had so much more than Melee and I don’t think it’s loved as a mechanical game. It’s not used in any of the hardcore fighting things, but I don’t give a shit about any of that. That is not a side of the game I care about. It’s just not interested. In my mind it was just all these amazing characters and there was so much fan service. I think I’ve made the point in the review, you could just buy that game as an audio, as a soundtrack collection, and it would be worth more than 50 quid, because it’s got like 500 remixes of tunes from all these different franchises. I mean, it’s absurd. I downloaded the soundtrack onto my PC at work and that’s basically all I listened to while I was writing Endgamer for the next five years, and it was just the soundtrack to Smash Bros. Brawl. I got weirdly into the Sonic stuff. For you, that is weird. Yeah, I really don’t know what happened. Rough year. And I had some Metal Gear stuff on there. But like to get the original Metal Gear solid composers to remix their stuff for Smash Bros. That’s crazy. But yeah, in terms of trying to make it feel as relaxed as possible, so that you could kind of get a feel for how the game would play in your living room. All I really had was the other reviewers playing it, which mainly was like Rich Stanton, I think, was reviewing it. So it was me and Rich playing it every lunchtime for a month. So we imported the Japanese versions. We had it early. And just trying to play at lunch. And then I was sort of reviewing that against the memories of playing Melee with my brother, which is who I played that game with. And trying to kind of pin down kind of how it felt in comparison to that, which in hindsight is such a weird specific angle to take. You know, like this game is good if it reminds me of the good times I had with my brother. And if it doesn’t, I’m going to, you know, give this game a big nasty score. At the time, they gave it 93, I think. Yeah. And people said that was way like people across that it was low. Right. So you’ve that you’ve tapped into something interesting there, which is, I think your score there is is bang on for your audience. And also the people who are looking at your review for buying guide advice are not the people who look at Smash Bros as like a fighting game community thing. They’re going to buy the game anyway. And so you’re more kind of reviewing it for that type of person like you, who might have memories of like, you know, one of your siblings picked Kirby and completely fucked the other player up on the N64 version because that’s what Smash Bros was. And, you know, you’re carrying all this kind of like, these memories into it. And so you’re right. I mean, I did enjoy Brawl. I played like more than 50 hours of it. And the music fan service side of it and the different levels they packed in from the GameCube version from Melee, an amazing, an amazing suite of stuff. Like, you couldn’t miss it if you’re a Nintendo fan. Yeah. You think it was, so people said it was too low to use. Yeah, but I got a feeling, actually, it wasn’t necessarily end-gamer fans. But back in the day, our reviews would get pulled into CVG as like online reviews. And taken out of the context of the magazine, I think sometimes we would encounter an audience who the review simply wasn’t aimed at. And so they would be like, oh, the, you know, what he says about the actual fighting in this is, is completely like, you know, naive, or doesn’t go into any kind of depth, or these opinions are rank, or da-da-da-da-da. But yeah, and then somehow like that got folded back into just the magazine narrative that people were down on it. I think because we had a, we had like a forum on CVG. So some of the end-gamer super fans would have encountered that negative feedback as well. And it definitely bled back into the mag that it was a score that I’d either underscored or, you know, it was a running joke that people were cross with that review. I think we gave away a sticker sheet, which had like a sticker of 98 that you could go back and stick over it in the review to make it a review that was more to your liking, which is actually just a rip off of a gag that they did years before that when NGC reviewed Dinosaur Planet and gave it like 70 or something because it was a load of old shit. And people couldn’t comprehend that Rare had made a bad game. So then they did like a, here’s the 90, you know, you stick this 90 on it or whatever, if that will make you happier. I think I remember that, yeah. Yeah, I like that kind of stuff. So it was a bit, even that, like, even the conversation around that became like a bit of a reference and a nod to like magazine history. That’s how kind of wrapped up and meta it could be at times. That’s kind of what you want really, isn’t it? Yeah, well, that’s what I want. You know, I love that stuff. And to me, you know, I thought, oh, if I was a long term reader of this, you know, this would speak to me. And hopefully people did dig it. And I think people do remember those moments. It’s referenced on the Endgamer Wikipedia page, the kind of controversy of giving it 93. But I think that’s like one of the only times that I got a really like spicy, spicy reaction. Because most of the time it was just me going like amazing Nintendo game is amazing. Hilariously, I remember when Stu Campbell of Amiga Power created an account on our forums just to absolutely slam a really throwaway 100 word review of a metal slug DS port that I’d written. So I managed to draw out. But I like the idea that someone had read this thing. It was just so irate that they had to come in and do that. I don’t know. Some people have it as a badge of honour that they’ve pissed people off, you know, as if you’re doing, you know, somehow that’s doing the job right or whatever. But I don’t know. I like to feel that my reviews justified their scores in the text so no one ever got too upset. Yeah, I must admit I kind of avoided games that were like really spicy or kind of contentious. And though I did write about games around the review, doing other types of content for when things weren’t going so smoothly. So Anthem was quite an interesting example. So Stephen Messner, a PC game in the US, reviewed Anthem. He’s Canadian, I should point that out. But he reviewed Anthem. And so it was a weird one because I think there wasn’t a review code at first and the game came out on EA’s Play subscription service. And I think you could download it on PC a week before you could get on consoles, which was kind of strange. And obviously Anthem was bad in a whole bunch of ways. It was really, really disappointing. And I felt bad for Bioware. But when you read about the making of that game, Jason Schreier’s very good Kotaku piece on it, it does seem like it was so badly handled. And so, yeah, I wrote about, there was a quest in the game where they were obviously padding out the game for time. You had to repeat the same type of side quest over and over again to accumulate these resources, to open a tomb, I think it was, to progress the story. And it got such a bad response in the EA Play portion that they cut down the amount of time it took to do. And I wrote a story that said, Anthem’s worst quest has already been improved. And Mike Ibarra, who was at Microsoft at the time, an executive, tweeted, this was actually very easy to do, amazed at the whining. And there was some, I would say, some criticism of, I would say, like, inadvertent or indirect criticism of reviewers in some of the replies below. And it doesn’t happen that often, that, where an executive is kind of getting involved. Usually, you know, publishers and developers, even I’m sure they have very strong opinions on the reviews that are published, are very professional about staying out of it. I’ve had only one truly awkward review score PR experience, which was being on a press trip with someone, and them reading an issue of Endgamer that they clearly haven’t seen yet, and seeing that we’d scored, it was on a trip to see Pokemon. And I saw the Nintendo PR flicking through our new issue, which I’d had with me for whatever reason. And we’d given an absolute kicking to a… I think they’d done a 20th or 25th anniversary re-release of the original Super Mario Bros. on Wii, but tried to like package it, like basically package up a NES ROM, like it was something special. And we’d given it an absolute kicking for just being like shady as fuck that they’d done this. And I remember him reading this review and having like a real time reaction to it from him of like, oh, this is a bit fierce. And I remember thinking like, well, you know, we’re stuck here in Tokyo together, so it’s, what are you going to do? You know, you’re going to like leave me here? Like, how are you going to punish us? But that was quite awkward. Yeah, I’d almost like, could you not have, like, avoided handing him the copy? I’d forgotten it was in there, to be honest. Okay, great stuff. Well, that seems like a good point to wrap it up, Matthew. And unless you had anything to add on the review front or anything to ask me about my experiences doing it. But no, I was, you know, I was interested to hear about your GTA experiences. And I’m kind of interested to see what happens next year, because I can’t really identify the next big hype thing. It’s like there isn’t really one on the horizon. So, you know, that would be intriguing. Obviously, on this podcast, it’s Hitman 3. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it’s true that there’s no… After Cyberpunk, there’s nothing else like it in terms of… Yeah, I mean, I guess we’ll get into GTA 6 territory at some point. Yeah. And even that, there’s been rumours that that might start more than build up and be more kind of live-servicy with regular updates, which I think the suggestion of these rumours was that that would lower the workload on Rockstar to actually make it. Right. But to me, I’ve stopped thinking of Rockstar Games as being anything that comes out more than once every five years. Yeah, I think that’s for the best. Yeah, I think that for now there is no comparison point to Cyberpunk, but certainly what’s happened to it really reminds me of what I’ve seen with over and over again, it’s when games are around for two years in the marketing cycle, it just, they hang around too long, the expectations get too high, and it’s inevitably someone’s going to be disappointed when it comes out, unless it is really kind of a lightning and bottle scenario when it doesn’t happen. But yeah, I don’t know, it’s a complicated old thing, because the hype thing is it’s excited to get invested in a game, I would say, even if you’re not kind of one of the people we describe who get too invested and upset when the game’s criticized. I think it’s still good to be excited about games, it just is. You see a game getting announced, everyone in my Twitter feed was watching the game awards and saw new trailers for, people got excited about Sephiroth being added to Smash Bros. You know, it’s hype and marketing, it’s all part of the whole thing. But yeah, it’s just sometimes it gets carried away. Were you excited about Sephiroth and Smash Bros, Matthew? Not really, I don’t really care for FF27 too much. Yeah, okay. Is there a character in Smash Bros that you’re waiting on? If they added Professor Layton or Phoenix Wright. Those are good calls. But, you know, I doubt it’ll happen. Okay, great. Well, we’ll wrap up there then Matthew. So, if you would like to tweet us your feedback on the podcast with Backpage Pod on Twitter, you can also email us any thoughts you have at backpagegames.gmail.com. You are also welcome to leave us a review on iTunes. We’ve had a few scores on iTunes. It’s not even called iTunes anymore, it’s called Apple Podcast. That’s how out of touch I am with the world of Apple working on tetradar.com. Pretty embarrassing. So, Matthew, you can be followed on Twitter, right? Yeah, MrBazzle UnderscorePesto. And I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Our last podcast of the year… Actually, will this be out this year? I don’t think it will be. It will technically be out on the 1st of January. That will be our podcast on the best games of the year. So it will be a bit unconventional because, Matthew, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a very strange year for playing games. So my top 10 will look quite odd. But I’m looking forward to recording that one. So thank you very much for listening and yes, we’ll be back next week.