Hello, and welcome to The Back Page A Video Games Podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s it going, Matthew, over there in your part of Bath? It’s good. It’s very snowy. Or it was when I looked out the window. I opened my curtains this morning, and the world had gone full HDR. I was like, ah, the blinding. I preferred it last gen whenever I think was dull. Well, that’s a good segue into this podcast, which is about the best games of the generation. Unfortunately, it also sandbagged an anecdote I was going to tell you about HDR, where I don’t understand HDR, so whatever I did to my TV made The Simpsons not yellow. And I thought, I must not understand how this works, because The Simpsons are kind of a yellowish shade of white. So that’s my opening gambit for this podcast, Matthew. I don’t know how that makes you feel. But I’d be keen to see that. I don’t know if it changes the dynamic of the show at all. It does a little bit. Eventually I just turned it off and thought, I’ll get an adult in before I mess with this again. So this podcast, Matthew, a two-part episode, we’re going to talk about our 30 best games of the generation, their personal lists. We’re going to alternate, as in the classic style that we’ve liberated from many other podcasts that have done the same thing. And it’s going to be fun. There’s not going to be so much in the way of industry commentary, because I don’t know about you, but I felt like we covered that fairly extensively in our first episode about PS5 versus Xbox Series X. Do you think we kind of did that? We did the whole who won this generation side of things already? Or do you think there’s anything else to add? Well, I feel like as we go through the list, it will probably paint a particular picture anyway. That was the interesting thing when I was putting together my list, I was looking at and thinking, oh, actually, you know, I kind of had a better feel for what this generation was about by the end of it. So hopefully other people will feel the same way. Yeah. I have like one top line observation I wanted to mention, and that is, I do wonder if the whole kind of like very heralded PS4 exclusives thing is a little bit overblown. Yeah. When you kind of put it down on paper, there are definitely like fewer than 10 of those games that are like these cinematic, character driven, best selling, like big exclusives that have kind of largely credited with winning Sony the Generation. And when you actually put it side by side with Microsoft, I was thinking about Microsoft, they had a lot of 8 out of 10s this generation, but collectively they don’t seem to amount to the same, at least in the kind of public consciousness of what Sony’s big games have. So you have Quantum Break, you have Sunset Overdrive, you know, you’ve got obviously the Forza games, which are definitely kind of 9 out of 10 kind of games. Yeah. But what do you make of that? Yeah, I got the same sort of vibe. I was looking at Xbox and thinking, you know what, if they’d been doing Game Pass from the start of this generation, I think people would look more kindly on this collection of games. I think for the hardened fan, there wasn’t as much to like rub in the face of PlayStation people. But there was a pretty constant flow of, like you say, 8 out of 10s, occasional 9 out of 10s. I think Sony did deliver a couple of like absolute 10 out of 10s, which I don’t think Xbox did. But at the same time, you then quietly have Nintendo who’s, I’d put Nintendo’s 10 best games up against Sony’s 10 best games easily. So yeah, I just think that the narrative also, the narrative around PlayStation kind of really snowballed and solidified really quickly, and that it was just like a done deal that they kind of won the exclusives game. Actually, when I was putting together my list, I found so many of them to be quite similar or what I thought about them quite similar. I dumped quite a lot of them from my list. I don’t, you know, they had a formula and they kind of kept doing it again and again. Like a lot of their games are very, very similar, like what they were doing in the single player, like narrative space. There was an awful lot of repetition. I don’t think it was, it wasn’t like there was some wild imagination factory by any means. They were just making incredibly expensive, polished versions of the same thing. But that seemed to be enough. Yeah. Coming up in a few episodes time, we’re going to do the best games of 2007, like a follow up to our 2006 episode. And I really think that Sony took Uncharted, that first Uncharted game, basically altered the course of like all Sony exclusives that will be made from then on. Like this cinematic, character driven, more realistic style of game. That was where Sony, I think, figured out this is what resonates with people. And now they make lots of very similar types of games, like you say. That’s not to say there’s no merit to them. There’s like this, I would say of that format of game, there’s one of those on my list. Yeah, without spoiling anything. But yeah, it’s an interesting discussion to have. So Matthew, you and I both covered this generation from a magazine perspective a little bit. You much more so than me. And I was wondering what you were kind of making this list. Did you reflect on anything from your time editing, you know, Nintendo and Xbox mags? Was there anything that sort of came to mind as you were revisiting these games? When I was looking at the Nintendo stuff, it was more just a nostalgia rush for that kind of the sort of dying days of Nintendo mags. Because this is the, you know, this is the generation, the Wii U generation that sees the end of both Nintendo gamer and official Nintendo. So I was, you know, a lot of the games I have more of an emotional reaction to because I connect it with the people I was working with at the time. The challenges that we talked about on the cover issue, you know, of just trying to stretch the same five games out over and over again. But then when I was looking at those five games, I was thinking, wow, they were absolute killers. There were some killers on Wii U. And even though we sort of drove them into the ground and they drove us insane, having to cover so little so often, they were brilliant. And they hadn’t diminished in my head, but making the list was like a pleasant reminder of actually how good Wii U could be. In terms of my Xbox years, it was a bit of a weird period because I feel like Xbox kind of got the generation sort of back on track a little bit more basically just after I stopped doing official Xbox. So my years on official Xbox were basically in the first couple of years of Xbox One where it was a little bit quantum break, which was fine, but it isn’t on my list. Spoiler alert. And so there was a bit more like sort of stress covering that. But again, like some games from that period have made my list. Like, you know, I don’t know, I think I have the distance from that general period now, which for me was a swirl of like the end of my personal print career. But there was some good stuff in there, sort of in that kind of giant deathly vortex. It’s like a ship going down in a huge typhoon. But like some treasures wash up on shore years later. That’s kind of the metaphor I’m going for. It’s very rich and I feel very deeply emotionally moved by it. But I would say that there is a big perception difference with Sony and Microsoft, as I sort of hinted out there earlier, where I think people were just very up for whatever Sony was making. And I don’t think people were as up for what Microsoft was making. So there’s a little bit of a quantum break reclamation movement on Twitter, I’ve noticed. I quite like the game. But those first couple of years, the years I was on Official Xbox Magazine, I think we were still dealing with the fallout of their messed up vision for the generation, which was that all their games were going to be these interesting kind of cross media projects with like TV shows and there was going to be a Halo TV show and all this stuff. And Quantum Break was a big victim of that. The other one was everything had to have a games of service angle, which obviously saw Fable become Fable Legends, which obviously saw the death of Lionhead. So, you know, my time covering this was spent with a lot of really good studios getting closed. And it felt like Microsoft were in quite a bad place. But then, you know, a year later, after I left the mag, they were suddenly into, you know, we’re at E3, we’ve bought eight studios, we’re going to buy eight more kind of vibes. So the Xbox story became a lot more exciting towards the tail end of the generation. I don’t think we’ll like really see the sort of the fruits of those labors until this generation. But it became a better place, I think. Yeah, I think so. What I was kind of forgetting out there as well is that when I’d see, you know, Horizon get announced, for example, people were just so up for it. And anything that Sony put out there, people were just massively up for them. And that’s not to say that the games didn’t necessarily deserve it. But I feel like no matter what Microsoft put out, they just didn’t get that response. And I think it’s just a massive, massive perception battle that they have been fighting with. Backwards compatibility with Game Pass. And yeah, I suppose what I’m saying is it’s not entirely their fault. I mean, it is their fault, but it’s like the old Microsoft’s fault somewhat. Yeah. Whereas like the new class is definitely doing its best to reverse course, or at least it seems like they are. So Matthew, without getting too much further into the punditry there, what were the trends of this generation that you noticed as you were making your list? It reinforced that there were very few new franchises that I cared for, and a lot of stuff I liked was stuff which was invented the generation before, and it just reminded me of what a fertile period that was for new ideas, and some of them got carried forward very nicely and have made the list. It was a weird time where really vital or key figures from the previous generation just vanished. The madness that in that whole generation we had one game from Rocksteady, for example, we had no games from Ken Levine. To follow the Bioshock trilogy with no games is kind of… I don’t know, that seems slightly mad to me. So I kind of felt a bit sad for stuff like that. It didn’t feel like… I don’t know. You just sense the amount of extra work that was going into games was just slowing down the whole process a lot and you really, really felt that. Yeah, for sure. So something I noted here, which is a very obvious point that people make all the time, but the death of that middle game, which is… For example, I picked out Spec Ops The Line here. It’s a sort of PS3, Xbox 360 era sort of oddity. It was like this Heart of Darkness Apocalypse Now game set in Dubai. It was a third-person shooter. It lasted about eight hours. It had a terrible multiplayer, apparently. And it just sort of like… I don’t think it was a success, really, but it was not the same size as in Assassin’s Creed 2, for example. So there was definitely a level of game that existed there that I don’t think is completely gone, but I think there’s only one of those on my list that I would categorise as that. So, yeah, I think that is something that happened. Definitely. It’s almost like the death of the plucky 7 out of 10. Yeah. And there’s arguably an indie sort of like… I don’t know, quoting that sort of fulfills that, but I’m talking about your sort of THQ level games, your Saints Row sort of style. Yeah, yeah. In fact, there were no new Saints Row games this generation either. That’s another one of like… I thought that was a good series, a solid series. I thought there would be a continuation. But hey, the other thing I noted here is that it was the true rise of free-to-play games on consoles. That wasn’t really a thing at the end of the last generation, or at least it was very minor. Now, obviously, you can kind of make anything free-to-play and it’d be good. We’ve seen Respawn making Apex Legends. It felt like a big moment to me. This is a true sort of AAA studio that has made a couple of Titanfall games, and now it’s decided this is the best course of action. It’s been enormously successful. Also, you can have more unusual types of genre, go free-to-play and have them become a success. Genshin Impact is a single-player game, and so is Path of Exile, or at least they’re primarily played by yourself. It’s kind of weird. This is the generation where retail AAA games included some free-to-play elements and people hated them. And then free-to-play games kind of went down the AAA quality route, and people loved them. And it’s something you’ve never quite been able to merit. The enthusiasm which people have thrown themselves into, things which are openly designed to kind of squeeze money from your wallet, where these other games, if they added these systems on top of the initial price, it was just like death. You know, like the bad name that EA, for example, developed off the back of things like Star Wars Battlefront II, and FIFA and all this stuff. You know, it’s quite a weird sort of… You’d think there’d be more crossover on the Venn diagram of people who liked both those things, but it just didn’t ever seem to manifest. Yeah, I think it’s because the audiences that find them are quite different. So people who feel like they’re in a sort of safe space, I guess, with 50, 60 pound games, don’t like the idea of these different genres. And I imagine that’s the difference in audience breakdown. Or at least the people who were kind of aggrieved by it were just particularly loud on the internet, which is another part of it. Also, they did have a point in some cases. I think Battlefront II is a really depressing example of how you can bake loot boxes into the design of the game. I mean, it’s still fundamental to that game, even though you don’t pay for them. You know, getting stuff and opening shit, that’s part of that game. But then it’s part of so many games. It’s part of Apex Legends as well, and I wouldn’t say it’s egregious there. So yeah, it’s a complicated thing. And yeah, you’re right, the reaction to them does seem very different. Anything else this generation that you mentioned, Matthew? Just the kind of… The big genre inspiration seemed to be the Souls-like. There were so many games which had elements of Dark Souls, or they were from software games themselves, which obviously grew in popularity and critical acclaim. I felt like, maybe not as widespread as last generation, where everything became a cover shooter after Gears of War for a bit. But similar, a genre which was big enough to really punch through and influence a lot of other designs, you found a lot of people… There were a lot of things which you could use, you know, Souls likes as a shorthand, and then people would go mental because, you know, everyone hates you, likening anything crap to Dark Souls. But yeah, that was like a mini trend, which you normally get a few of. And I guess, like, you know, the spread of kind of games as services are part of that as well, I guess, a reaction to Destiny early on in the generation. Yeah, I think a little bit of a similar type of loop to Dark Souls is survival games, where you die, lose all your stuff, and then rogue-likes kind of, you know, filtered into the conversation a little bit more, you know. And yeah, for better or worse, I would say. But yes, anything else, Matthew, before we get into the list? No, I’m kind of jonesing to get into my list and annoy everyone with my irritating choices. I think I’m going to irritate everyone with the criteria alone. Like, I don’t know, I don’t know if I was listening to this podcast and I heard our criteria, I might just lose my temper and like, you know, throw my phone out the window or something. So we’ll see how it goes. But yes, we’re going to take a short break, probably about 10 seconds, with a little bit of video games music. And then we’ll come back with the bottom 15 of our top 30 games of the generation. So stick around. Bye. So Matthew, with the generation, it can be a bit arbitrary in terms of deciding what counts as this generation or that generation. And it’s been complicated, I would say, by Nintendo primarily in the Wii U’s relative failure, and then the, well, not really that quick turnaround, but fast enough turnaround that it kind of upsets the boundaries of the generation of the Nintendo Switch release. So it was a little bit complicated to pass, but we eventually decided to go with PS4, Xbox One and Wii U. And that was primarily because the Switch is so out of sync with the other consoles and is likely to be around for several more years, that you can’t really close end the generation as much if you bring the Switch into it. So it gets a bit complicated. Did you have any thoughts on that, Matthew? No, I thought that was fair. I mean, I honestly think a lot of people in their heads, when they think generations, they are probably thinking Xbox versus PlayStation. You know, Nintendo are kind of like a weird entity to themselves that sort of float around. Like, they haven’t perfectly aligned with other generation consoles for a while now. Yeah, I’ve got no beef with that. I mean, I think isn’t the plan that we’re going to do a separate Switch list? Yes. So that was the other thing. So for Switch and PC, both of which won’t be in this list, or at least some PC games will, but we’ll explain in a moment how we’ve broken that down. We will do, you know, like a 10 or 20 best Switch games or 10 or 20 best PC games of the past decade. So, yeah, we’ve got a plan for those. We definitely don’t want to leave those out. But, yeah, so how it works, Matthew, is the game has to have appeared on consoles either first or at the same time as other formats. So that is why in this list, you will not hear games like Return of the Obra Dinn or Divinity Original Sin 2, both phenomenal games, obviously, but they’ll be saved for future lists because they didn’t primarily come out on consoles. And I suppose we’re trying to capture a bit of, you know, a console identity to this, right? Yeah, and that’s definitely what’s like emerged from my list. I found it quite helpful not having to, that I could push aside some like amazing PC and Switch stuff because that would have probably have dominated the conversation for me. So it’s a wise move. Yeah, it was a similar deal for me. It was like, you know, a couple of Christmases ago, I played Into the Breach nonstop, but it was quite complicated to put that opposite, I don’t know, games that came out on PS4 in like 2014, for example. So yeah, it can definitely seem arbitrary, but hopefully that criteria gives you a sense of what we’re trying to capture. We’re trying to capture, you know, this kind of like 2013 to late 2020 period of console games. So hopefully that’ll be helpful. The other thing I want to ask you, Matthew, is what determined your choices in this list? Was it head or heart at play here? This is a total heart list, particularly like, I think the higher you got the list, maybe the more traditional it gets. But definitely in this chunk, this lower 15 chunk, there’s a lot of like personal favourites, things I’ve championed and want to continue championing. There are some absolute 10 out of 10 games that didn’t make my list that I really enjoyed playing. But these are the ones which scores aside have stuck with me. Yeah, I don’t know about you, Matthew, but I’ve got a list of like very obvious games that didn’t make the list that I will read out after we’ve done the top 30s to say, sorry, I didn’t play these or I didn’t like these. So there’s a lot of eight out of 10 products swishing around in my bottom 15 here. Yeah, I sort of like you, I went a bit more hard. I didn’t try and measure influence too much because it just gets too complicated to try and think, what do other people think of? So you might as well just be subjective. Yeah, these are games that just had a big influence on me and I’m the only person who matters, so that’s why we’ve made the list. I’ve always been saying that, Matthew. Yeah. We should probably also note that if one of us picks a game and the other person has it higher up the list, we’re not going to talk about it until we hit the higher up position, isn’t that right? Yeah, that’s right. My prediction is that we probably have about half the games the same and then half that are different. Do you think that seems about right? We’ll see. Okay, interesting. An interesting tease there. Yeah. Teeing us up for how we go. So Matthew, do you want to start with your number 30? My number 30 is Tales from the Borderlands. Not on my list. So a good start. One of the big stories of this generation was Telltale Games and the fact that they seem to be making 15 licensed products at the same time at one point. I can literally remember a period on OXM where a half hour review section was reviews of like individual episodes of Tales of the Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Minecraft Story, Batman. I mean, it was kind of insane. And then they sort of vanished into a sort of big black hole of chaos of their own making, I think. Tales of the Borderlands really jumped out. This for me was easily the best thing Telltale made. A genuinely funny game, which is the rarest kind of game. A brilliant sort of heist story with big characters I really liked. A few characters from the existing Borderlands universe who I hadn’t particularly cared for, but came to really like. It had good writing, psych gags, really comic violence, had an absolutely fantastic imaginary shootout, ala Spaced. And each episode started with an incredible music sequence or title sequence set to a pop song. And it was just so stylish, so funny, so cool. Not at all what I expected from Telltale, who just had this walking dead formula. Yeah, I really loved this series. If anyone was gonna play just one Telltale game, this would be it. Yeah, so I’ve heard this has a very good reputation, this game. And weirdly, I was discussing with my girlfriend last night about all these Telltale games I forgot they made. So Game of Thrones was one of those. I completely forgot they made that game. And also that they’d made a Guardians of the Galaxy game. Like, I know nothing about that game, but that happened. So yeah, this stands head and shoulders above those other games, Matthew, because the comedy works so well, is that right? Yeah, it’s just really, really funny. It has the same limited interactions that any Telltale game has, but the things you’re doing are really funny. There’s a really great scene where you have to take out a man’s eye with a spork, and it’s just like a genuinely great bit of physical comedy in a game, which you just don’t really see. Like, I laughed out loud a lot at this. Yeah, I think it also seems to unite players who don’t find the actual board landscape’s funny. Yeah, which I don’t. I thought this was going to be terrible, but, yeah, really, like, I don’t know. If anything, it made me like all of Borderlands a little better. Well, there you go. I would never have predicted that on your list, but, yeah, no Telltale games on my list. So this is the only one on yours, right? Yeah, this is the only one. No, they’re all Telltale games. Imagine that. They’ve made enough that it could be that. Yeah, or you just did the individual episodes, and we’re like, oh, it’s episode three of Batman season two. And it’s like, oh, wow, I mean, yeah. All right then, Matthew, my number 30 is Bloodborne on PS4. Are there any From games on your list? There are not. Okay, so I didn’t finish this. I played about 60 hours of it, and I don’t think I’ve got that far still, but it’s one of the games I… Were you still trying to get to that bonfire in the town? Yeah, I’m trying to get past the main menu. It’s so confusing. So yeah, it was one of the first games that got me excited about owning a PS4, which felt like a bit of a waste of purchase at the time. I bought one in 2014 to play another game that’s further up this list. But in the case of Bloodborne, this was something that felt like it came out of nowhere a little bit. I mean, obviously, Dark Souls had a big reputation by this point, but I think just this sort of like Lovecraftian sort of setting and, you know, kind of overall vibe and weird audio and just the whole atmosphere of it really makes it memorable, even though I don’t really love the combat and I found it extremely difficult. And yeah, I reflect on this very fondly. I will beat it one day. I think it looks quite ropey by today’s standards and could really do with a 60 frames per second version. I think that’s a pure PC gamer sort of nonsense take there that I’m sure people disagree with. But yeah, I think this… I’ve played Dark Souls and I haven’t… I don’t think it’s really my kind of thing. And this has a lot of the similar sort of kind of combat. But yeah, the bosses in this and the overall strangeness of it, it’s just, yeah, I think it’s just one of those games you sort of have to play if you bought a PS4. Worth a go even if you don’t think that From Games are for you. Yeah. Did you play it much? I’ve only played it up to that priest you fight in the graveyard really early on and I couldn’t do it. I’m just too much of a noob. Or I just don’t have the patience for it. The furthest I’ve got with any of their games has been Sekiro, but I didn’t finish that either. Yeah, like, I wish I could love this game, mainly because for the last, you know, six years, every time I’ve gone to the pub with Rich Stanton, this is what he’s talked to me about. So it would have been great if I had played it, because, you know, I would have been a much more interesting pub partner, but yeah, alas, no. I feel like I could probably fake it from those conversations. I’m like, oh, yes, the old blood. Very deep. Six years of nodding politely and getting your phone out to check Twitter, basically. Yeah, so I like it. And I think like beating Vicar Emilia solo was one of my sort of highlights of this generation. I remember that feeling incredibly good because it took me fewer than ten attempts and she was incredibly difficult. And I also had nightmares about Vicar Emilia afterwards, who is like this sort of kind of obvious like a Vicar lady who it seems like a normal woman then turns into this big sort of like dog thing, I think. And the dog screams in a human voice and I woke up hearing that scream, that human dog scream for about like two weeks after it afterwards. So yeah, this game scarred me for life. And for that reason alone, I have to put it on the list. But I do like it and I will finish it eventually. But I think I just really admire from software sort of like just really owning how odd their games are. They don’t cut anything back. They’re like this is the thing we want to make and it’s really strange and people seem to dig it. And that’s just very, very rare, you know. So hit me with your number 29, Matthew. I realized by saying that Bloodborne isn’t in my list. Most people have now dismissed everything I’m about to say. And it’s going to seem in fact some of these are going to seem offensive. So my 29 is Final Fantasy XV. Higher up my list. Higher up. Oh, then we shall chat about it at a later point. Yes. So it’s another one of mine, I’m afraid. That’s all right. Hit me up. So number 29 is one of three indie games I have on my list. And that is Hotline Miami 2 Wrong Number. A much hated sequel to the original. Sort of like… It’s a good pitch so far. It’s kind of, it was a breakout, top down, violent, you know, arcade style game, the original Hotline Miami. This one got a bit of criticism for the levels being too big, which is definitely true in some cases, for how violent it is, and some of the other imagery in it was quite controversial, which I think, fair critique. But I think that if you really love that first game, this offered such a sort of comprehensive and exciting challenge. In the first game you played as two different characters across the story, but they’re basically similar. In this one they completely mixed it up. At one point you’re controlling two characters at the same time, who have different weapons, and then you’re controlling one character who can only use melee weapons, and you’re going into these buildings, and basically like John Wick set pieces play out, where you shoot guys, or you hack them up, and you throw objects at them. It’s basically a score attack game as you clear out these different floors. This one, the music is so phenomenal in these games, and I’ve got to say I think I slightly prefer the second one to the first now. Almost no one else thinks that, I’m sure, but I think if you just really got into the mindset of mastering that first game, this is just kind of amazing. So, yeah, that’s one of my contrarian takes, I guess, Matthew. Any thoughts? I love the first one. I actually haven’t played the second one, which is a terrible admission. I should get on that. I remember there being a buzz of controversy around some of its narrative setups in early previews and things. Isn’t this what, famously, someone’s playing this in The Last of Us 2 and then you shank them? Yes, that’s right. I don’t know if they’re playing the second one or the first, but yeah, they made a big deal about that, right? Yeah, that’s probably for the right move because, like, it would be a bit depressing if they were playing, like, Tear Away and then got their throat cut. Let’s face it, the least believable thing about that, Matthew, is that someone in the near future is playing a PS Vita. Well, just that they’re still… Is there still electricity in the future? Like, in their dire situation of The Last of Us 2, where everyone’s basically living in, like, log cabins and eating potatoes raw out of the ground, the idea that someone’s got a Vita, surely that would make them, like, the emperor of the world. Yeah, I’m not sure what that sort of cultural situation is there, but yeah, I mean, you’ve played the game, Matthew. Can you not shed any more light? Well, it’s just some kids who are sitting by, like, some water, and then you come out the water and give them a good old shanking. Yeah, it’s not much sexier than that. But at the time, I did think, oh, that’s weird product placement. That’s probably the thing that the game’s now best known for, I guess. I don’t feel like anyone talks about this otherwise. That’s definitely the defining moment of The Last of Us 2, when someone gets murdered while they’re playing Patapon on the PSP. Loco roco. OK, Matthew, hit me with your number 28. What remains of Edith Finch? Oh, it’s higher up my list, Matthew. Oh, well, listen, that’s OK. I look forward to talking about it later and hearing your 28. Yeah, OK, so my 28 is Batman Arkham Knight. Oh, that’s higher up my list. Amazing, we’re getting through this so quickly. Thank Christ, save our listeners. Yeah, exactly. I thought this was going to happen. I’m surprised, actually. So my 27 is, and this isn’t on your list, Colimba. That’s not on my list, correct. Colimba 2014 on Xbox One. I think it was on PC as well from Press Play. Press Play was an Xbox first party game, I believe. I believe Press Play were one of their studios that got the snip along with Lionhead, I think. This for me was just one of the most underrated, slash-ignored games of the generation. A really cool little puzzle platformer where you control kind of parallel sets of sort of anthropomorphic totem heads. So these little kind of wooden chunks. And a lot of the puzzles were about guiding people on dual tracks. And then they sort of met up. And I don’t know if they were puzzles. They were sort of gravity-twisting stuff. It was really minimalist visually, but it had this incredible style to it. Really funky sort of soundtrack, almost like polka music or something. It was really mixed up with weird electro stuff. It does one of my favourite things, which is when you pick up collectibles, they semi-harmonise with the soundtrack, so it all sounds like it’s meant to be happening that way. It’s a game where as you play it well, it just sounds and looks magical. And it’s got some really funny writing. The game is hosted by this guy called Ho Bear the Meta Bear, and he’s this hipster bear who explains the world and the lore of Kalimba in this very droll way. I thought this was absolutely immense. I love this game. I still boot it up occasionally and have a little play on it just to cheer myself up. You can still play on PC. I think it’s probably still on Xbox as well. Yeah, Pressplay, interesting studio. They did that Max and the Magic Marker game. Max and then one for the Xbox. I think it was called Max and the Curse of Brotherhood, which I also really liked. It was a very, very solid 2D platformer with this, like, you could draw into the levels kind of gimmick. But Kalimba, very, very cool. I feel like if it was on a… It feels like the kind of thing that would have been a huge indie breakout hit if it hadn’t been kind of consigned to, like, some weird Xbox first-party thing. Just a great, cool thing. Yeah, so, I mean, like, releasing an Xbox One game in 2014. Basically death, I would imagine. And, you know, I guess Microsoft decided that that nice bear that you liked had to die, Matthew. You know, harsh. Harsh, I would say. This really drove… Really, he is very funny. I had a very fond memory of reviewing… We were playing… I think it was like a… There was either a co-op mode or a co-op DLC they added later. And I remember playing this with Kate Gray, who is our staff writer on official Xbox magazine. And it was a real, like, super stressful kind of like, are we going to have to get HR involved? Because you get those co-op games that just drive two people to, like, murderous fury. But sort of genius with it. Really good fun. That’s a dynamic you try and forge with all your staff, isn’t it? I really want them to hate me. And I want to shout at them while we’re playing games. So that’s, yeah, tick-tick on Colimba. Oh, that’s good. It’s, yeah, I don’t, I actually don’t know much about it, which probably isn’t that surprising. I’ve heard the name, obviously. But is it on Game Pass? Uh, it should be. I don’t know if it is. I mean, I’d hope so. It’s mad if it’s just sitting there gathering dust. But, yeah. Yeah, it’s on Steam as well if people want to play it. So, Matthew, my number 27. I don’t think this will be on your list. It’s Rocket League. It isn’t. Car Football. That was the thing that happened this generation. The PS Plus generated sort of overnight smash. That was the thing that happened this generation a few times. Most recently with Fall Guys, obviously. Yeah, I think this was the first time that it really happened, where it was the day of release and you could just download it as part of your PS Plus membership on PS4. It’s such a simple thing. Apparently, Psyonix, the developer, made a game exactly like this on PS3 and Xbox 360 with a much worse name and no one cared. But they brought this out, basically the same, apparently, and it was a massive success. So I put this on here despite always having mixed feelings on it. No game makes me angrier than Rocket League. And this is the ultimate example of my girlfriend watching me play a game for like more than an hour and thinking, why are you still doing this? And I’ve started to ask myself the same thing. And I’m not really as into it these days. But I originally had Wolfenstein, the new order on in this slot. And I just thought it’s not true representation of my generation if I don’t talk about Rocket League. So it had to go in there, even though it’s lower than it probably would be if you’d have asked me like three or four years ago. So, yeah, very simple. But one of the best sort of like co-op and multiplayer experiences on PS4, really fast loading and fast matchmaking and just, I would say, like a real sort of top end game when it comes to that stuff. But yeah, I’m a bit over it now, Matthew. Any thoughts? I never really got into it. I was so bad at it. And I felt like I know that there is skilled play to it and that people play it in a serious way and people really get into it. And there’s all these little tricks you can master. But for me, it just, I mean, everyone’s like, oh, it’s so zany, you know, playing football with a car. But I have like about as much control over that car and ball as I do like my human body playing football. It was just too many reminders of just kicking a ball in a playground and seeing it kind of just whiz off at a right angle. And everyone calling me horrible names. Rocket League is just a bit too raw for me. But, you know, I get that people are into it. Didn’t millions of people have free access to it? So everyone was like super into it. Yeah, that was it. And then it was still a massive hit on PC as well. And I think just having it on PS Plus just created this massive like wave of word of mouth. Just annoying. Oh, it’s just very stressful. Like playing against other people who knew what they were doing. Again, not to keep bringing up Rich Stanton in this podcast, but another defining feature of the last few years was Rich really likes Rocket League. And as one of his Facebook and Twitter friends for a long period of time, all he ever posted was clips of him playing Rocket League set to like whatever band of the moment, like Queen music and like Metallica or something. And then it all got pulled for like copyright reasons. And he was really cross that his life’s work had been destroyed. Oh, there you go. I mean, yeah, it’s good. So even though you didn’t have your own anecdotes, you could borrow something else’s. Yeah, I’ve got other people, like really, the story of this, my story of this generation is in many ways also Rich Stanton’s story. Exactly. Are you going to have a different Rich Stanton pub story for every single entry on my list? I hope so. Yeah. So that’s Rocket League, Matthew. I have nothing further to say on it. And I think my time with it is over, but had to be here. So, yeah, hit me with your… I’m glad it made the list. Yeah. Hit me with your number 26.

1. This is another pretty obscure one. This is Hand of Fate 2. Yep. Not on my list. So go ahead. Yeah. This is 2017, Xbox One. I think it was on PS4 as well. Made by Defiant Development, who I think are no more, alas. The basic set of Hand of Fate, for people who didn’t play either of them, which both came out this generation, it’s sort of an action RPG, but told as a series of tarot cards being dealt by this sort of games master character, and this sort of dealer figure, and he deals a card, and then what it says on the card is like the next bit of the story. So you’re attacked by bandits, and then it becomes this, you’re sort of whisked away to this little arena to fight these bandits. I really liked that as a set up. I thought it was a great narrative, mechanical mix that was really, really fun. For me, the reason this game really registered was it filled a big, like the big fable shaped hole in this generation. You know, fable obviously sort of died with Blind Head coming back in the future thanks to Playground Games. But this game had a very similar vibe, like quite stripped down action mechanics, not too much RPG, was more into the kind of the sort of fun of the storytelling, it was very characterful. It had this very, like, the tarot thing sounds gimmicky, but it’s very nicely done because you basically collect more event cards as it goes on, so the potential range of events that can happen in the next story increases and you never really know what kind of combination you’re going to get. You know, you might get dealt, you find a legendary sword and then the sort of run of it’s a bit easier. So there’s almost like a few rogue-like elements in there as well. I just thought this was a really, like, really neat idea, beautifully executed. Two was such an improvement over one, which was already a cool idea, so it’s a bit of a shame that I don’t think the fine are still around to make more, but this was just, yeah, for like an indie project as well, it was pretty great production values. Yeah, just a very neat game full of surprises, quirky twists. I was a big, big fan of this and hope more people discover it. Yeah, I’m surprised actually that the card element didn’t make it a bit of a bigger success, just because I feel like hybrid card sort of games have become so huge in the last few years, like The Spires and Monster Trains and stuff. But it was like before all that, by like a good couple of years, I think, so it had already kind of been and gone. Yeah, it’s a strange one. It’s a bit of a hard pitch, I think, because, you know, people who are into RPGs have quite a set idea of what they want from that. And this was a very interesting way of doing a big RPG, but like on an indie budget. Yeah, that’s an interesting choice for sure. So my number 26, Matthew, is Fallout 4 on your list. It is not. Yeah, it was almost not on my list. It’s probably the most disappointing RPG Bethesda has made. They arrived on a wave of hype and bad Vault Boy merch, and it very much feels like more of the same with when it comes to Fallout 3, especially the ending, which both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 feature an ending where a giant robot goes through a city destroying loads of enemies. And it’s so identical that I think it was meant to be like a kind of cheeky reference and fun, but I think it underlined this game’s problem of feeling so much like Fallout 3, which is just an amazing generation defining RPG. I did still enjoy it a great deal. I played it for like 80 hours. It’s got a bunch of great quests in there. It does look nicer, a lot nicer than Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas did. There’s a generational gap there, maybe not as big as people were hoping for. It has a really pointless settlement system, which I didn’t ever understand why they thought that was an interesting addition. Like I said, it’s got a few great quests, including one where you become a pulpy superhero, like a radio serial superhero, and you assume this character while this mutated guy reads out your exploits, and you become a real vigilante. That, I think, is one of the best superhero experiences in any game. You go into a comic book shop, you steal the costume, and then you become the character, and your character starts talking in a silly voice. That was great fun. There’s that. Otherwise, it just fell a little bit flat. I wonder if after this and Fallout 76, if the series needs a really, really good run next time, or it might interest, and it might die out a little bit? Maybe not, but any thoughts? Yeah, similar thing. I got sucked up into that endless running around, protecting settlements, whatever that was, not realizing that it was just randomly generating new threats constantly. I thought there was an end in sight there. Was it the Minutemen? Yeah, that’s right. So I spent ages running around doing that, which turned out to be largely pointless. And then anytime I had to do some building for a quest, in that initial settlement, I just built the ugliest brown wooden box which just had a load of crates in for storing shit that I didn’t want to carry. And it just felt like every time I saw it, it was just a monument to how much I didn’t give a shit about that system, which is kind of depressing when you see it. But yeah, I did have a lot of fun with it. When you were talking about the merchandise, was this the one that came with the plastic pit boy that you maybe wouldn’t be recommended by a doctor to insert your hand into? I don’t know. I just remember there being lots of clothes and maybe pillows and things like that. I was like, how did this thing become so huge without me realising it? It’s really weird to see this old cult PC series become so mainstream. That was really bizarre. I don’t think this game quite lived up to it. It was exciting. I tell you what, it made people buy magazines as well, which was good. Thank you Fallout 4 for that. It sure did. The appetite for it was huge. I was actually at the Bethesda 3-3 conference where they announced it. That was so exciting for sure. It was enormous. The retrospect is not huge on it. I’m still hopeful about Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6. I think some good stuff could happen. Matthew, hit me with your number 25. Well, this is Batman Arkham Knight. I’ve heard of it. It’s also on your list, but slightly lower down. I really rate this game as… When it came out, it felt like a really sexy next-gen version of the previous game. It had technical problems on PC. It maybe had a few technical problems on Xbox. But man alive, it was so shiny. It just looked absolutely amazing. It was quite a mind-blowing thing. I thought that while Arkham City had done a lot of the heavy lifting, I just thought this elevated a lot of its ideas. I thought it was a much smoother blend of the open world and story beats. I loved how some of the villains appeared in the world. I even liked the Batmobile. I’m that freak. What did you make of this one? Well, like you, I’m kind of bewildered that this was the… This wasn’t technically the only game the Rocksteady Releases Generation because they made Arkham VR as well. But that’s a very short game. But nonetheless. So I like bits about the Batmobile. I think that you kind of have to have the Batmobile to complete the Batman fantasy and that’s what these Arkham games are all about. Obviously the tank combat sections are… Do you think those are good? Because I don’t think those are good. I think they’re fine. I don’t think they’re good, but I think they’re fine. Some people are like, oh, this is broken. I almost couldn’t get past it. I was like, what are you talking about? You just strafe. And it’s built for strafing. It’s a tank. It’s great. I definitely agree with you the point about it being properly next gen. That’s one of the notes I got here. And it still feels very next gen, I think. There are very few games this generation that look this good. Absolutely beautiful game. I think it’s a bit less consistent as a game than I think Arkham City was, which is still my preferred entry. But the Batmobile was extraordinary to behold. Just the animation on it was just fantastic. Yeah, I think that’s partly it. To try and make quite an unwieldy piece of equipment work in what isn’t really a proper open world game, it’s got much more in common with a Metroidvania. To try and find a way that that vehicle or a vehicle is relevant, I still think it worked for me. I liked the whole kind of Joker hallucination stuff throughout. I thought that was fun. I really liked that. When it first kicks off, is it the Manbat quest where he just jumps out of nowhere suddenly? You’re in the open world and then he’s just suddenly there and it’s scared the living shit out of me. Is it Manbat? I think it is. Yeah, it’s Manbat and it does… I remember how shiny its wings looked. It was a really fucking scary looking thing. Yeah, I just… It had some fun. In fact, I don’t think it was until Insomniac’s Spider-Man game that outdoor villain sections were done as well. I really liked chasing after people and stuff around that little area of Arkham Knight and some of the kind of open… It didn’t just feel like every villain was in a room waiting for a boss fight somewhere out and about. It just felt very Batman-y and I liked the whole, you know, what happens when you round them all up and everything. I mean, I don’t know if it… Maybe it’s a total affront to a hardened Batman fan from a lore perspective, but I just thought it was quite nicely done. I think it was a really… All of these games are really rich portrayals of Batman’s universe and this brought in like Professor Pig, a character who, you know, Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly created like not that long ago. And I really loved seeing those kind of characters in the mix. It had like Deacon Blackfire as well, another quite deep pull. And I think that when you compare this to… You say it’s not really an open world game. It’s definitely more like an open world game than the other two are. But like I think that they are much better at creating side quests on the whole than a lot of modern open world games give you. They’re a lot more character driven. It’s like the side quests are usually, not always, usually linked to a villain of some kind. And they were definitely fun to unpick. Yeah, just a weird one, really. It feels like the Batmobile stuff really overshadowed its reputation. I don’t think that’s fair. It’s a good game for sure. Yeah, I liked… Yeah, it was good. Very, very fond memories. I did all of the Riddler stuff. I got every last bit of it. That sounds like a problem. Like a real problem with you. No, it’s good. There was always like individual lines for like every… You know, when there are like three left, he’s like, Oh God, there’s only three left. I didn’t think anyone would do this. It’s fun. Yeah, but just the level of detail on that stuff was really good. Yeah. Do you think it’s really bizarre that, you know, we are sort of like more than five years after its release, almost six years actually, and they didn’t make a sequel. I know they’re making this Gotham Knights game. It looks a bit Destiny-ish and not really the same thing. And why? How does like a game be this successful and not get a sequel? Isn’t that really bizarre? It is odd. I mean, maybe when we see Suicide Squad, it will make more sense. You know, maybe the scope of that is just going to be so unreal that you were like, oh, this is a game that was clearly like, took eight years to make or something. But yeah, hard to say really. God knows what goes on behind the scenes. Yeah, for sure. All right then, Matthew. So where are we? Like, my 25? What’s your 25? My number 25 is Prey. Is this on your list? It isn’t. The closest we got to a Bioshock game this generation was Arkane’s Prey. Came out in early 2017, I think. It was resolutely not as good as Dishonored, another game by Arkane, another series by Arkane. Had no real nuance to the combat, really, because you’re mostly fighting, you know, black goo monsters, aliens on this big space station. But I think that it really excelled when it came to a sense of place. I think it was a beautiful space to explore. And I thought the story did some quite interesting stuff. And I really liked the whole creating your own ammo and items out of, like, bits you found in the environment. I think it has one of the most satisfying sort of in-game objects of the generation, where, like, you would drop all your stuff and then these little colored cubes would come out, and those would be your resources you could use to… .build stuff. That was cool. Yeah, I just liked it. And I think that even though the combat was a bit broad, you couldn’t really get as specific with it as you can with Dishonored’s combat. I still really enjoyed, like, the glue gun, like, gumming up enemies, even though I think that the, sort of like, the aliens taking on the appearance of objects just meant it was an endless run of jump scares, which tires you out. Yeah. Yeah, I think I still really enjoyed it. And, yeah, what do you make of it? This almost made my list. It was definitely on my long list. As a location, I absolutely adored it, like, as a realization of a space station and the, kind of, commitment to, like, the, like, the spatial realism of the place, the fact that you could, you know, really get into all the nooks and crannies of the location. And, you know, nothing was bogus. It was all there as a physical space. It all made sense, you know. You could get into the attic space and the crawl space. The idea of a spaceship having an attic is dumb, now I say it out loud. It’s not, it’s not really science fiction, an attic, but whatever the room is in the future that is above your living space, it had those. And, you know, the whole, kind of, finding the, you know, finding all the logs and the fact that, like, every single human crew member was accounted for on the ship in some way. You could trace everyone. There wasn’t, like, an NPC who shouldn’t have been there. There were, like, a hundred crew members, and somewhere on that ship there were at least a hundred bodies. So, it, you know, it had a beautiful, kind of, like, logic and truth to it. I just, I just fucking hated the aliens, you know. I thought they were shit. And hitting those guys, the little ones, they were just rubbish. They were, I wish that game had better baddies. But the rest of it, I loved. Yeah, I think the sense of place is amazing. So, when you float out into space, you can go to the airlocks for every single part of the space station. So, like you say, you can, you know, set a waypoint for every crew member that you find a kind of log for in the computer systems. And then, yeah, the fact that you can float up in space to, you know, an area you were in hours before, that’s really good. Too much backtracking in it, but I sort of wanted to celebrate this game anyway. It’s not the highest of the kind of immersive, semi-type games that’s on my list. Yeah, it was definitely like a toss-up for me, but I’m really glad I played this, this generation, even if it’s imperfect. Had a lot of secrets to find as well, and a few very good side quests. Do you remember the side quest of the chef in this game? No. The chef is not who he says he is, and it’s, I don’t know, it’s just, it really stuck with me, that one. Was he actually a black tentacle monster? No, he wasn’t. That is different. It’s just, yeah, there’s a few memorable sort of supporting characters in this. Yeah, I liked it. So Matthew, what’s your 24? Pikmin 3. Yep, not on my list. 2013 Wii U Nintendo. This was the first really good first party Wii U game, I think, or at least it is in my head, that I can remember. And it was also a version of Pikmin, which just finally worked for me. Like, Pikmin 1 and 2, I kind of appreciated, but I never really loved. And I felt that the pointer controls that they added, if you played it with the pointer, just finally made sense for me in this game. Like, Pikmin made sense. Like, it was always really a game to be played with like a mouse and keyboard, and Nintendo found a way to make it work. And because of that, just the idea came alive for me, which is you are a little astronaut, you and yourself are quite weak, so you can call on an army of small plant creatures to basically solve the environmental puzzles and fight the kind of giant insects that are out to get you. There’s, like, it’s not massively complicated, but there’s a really nice logic to what Pikmin you have to use where this one introduced the rock Pikmin, who are basically just rocks with eyes, and I always felt like a big sort of spiritual affinity with them. Whenever I saw them in concept arcs, they’re just like these tired little rock blokes sitting down, and they just look like they’re permanently knackered because they’re basically having to carry around a huge rock body, and I was like, yeah, same. So, yeah, I just, very sweet game, very well made, very polished, lovely sense of texture, like there’s a big beetle boss and you can throw the rocks, pick him out and like shatter his carapace, and yeah, just a really lovely tactile thing from Nintendo. Very good. I’m not at all surprised that they re-released it on Switch because probably about eight people played it originally. Have you played the Switch version? I haven’t, no. Does it still have the pointer controls in it? I believe it does, yeah. Yeah, I’d expect so, but yeah, I was just kind of curious. So I’m still not really sure what the Switch controllers can do, sorry, the Joy-Cons can do when it comes to that sort of stuff. I think they can pretty much do anything that the Wii remote could do, and probably better. Okay, yeah, good stuff. I remember thinking this was one of the first examples I saw of like, oh, this is what a Nintendo HD game looks like. That was a big question mark of, you know, I know that they can make Wii games look beautiful, but the idea of actually seeing, you know, a HD game, like a really nice looking HD game. I remember the fruit in this game, but really nice, and the water. Oh, it had grapefruit. Fantastic fruit. Really nice looking strawberries. Yeah, it had a nice structure as well. The whole thing with Pikmin is you’re always sort of against the clock, because you’ve got like X days to escape the planet. So there’s this sort of like pressure, sort of time pressure, which always used to sort of scare me a bit in the first two. And this one, it still had this sort of vibe, where you basically had to keep feeding your crew fruit juice. And so that’s why you were collecting fruit, but you could sort of stockpile all this juice. And the juice sloshing around in the little bottles looked really good. You know, I remember looking at it and thinking, I would hate to be stuck in the depths of space, crashed on a planet. Like I would probably lose my mind. But also, man, that juice looks great. So, you know, silver linings. Actually, I say that, juice gives me wicked heartburn. So, you know. That’s it. Just you need some little rock sort of Pikmin to carry you some Renny over. Or eat the rock Pikmin. I don’t know if they’re very like calcium heavy, but that might… And they’re like, hey, there were 97 rock Pikmin yesterday, and now there are 96. What’s going on? And I’m just there like, I don’t know, with like a little purple foot sticking out the side of my mouth. Oh, man. There you go. I saw an image. I didn’t expect to be conjured by this podcast. It’s you eating Pikmin. Yeah. Aiming the remote pointer at my own mouth. And just pressing A for go in there. Get in there. Living the dream. That could be DLC for the Switch version, maybe. So yeah, good stuff. I haven’t played that, but it’s on my list. I’ve considered picking up the Switch one. It’s a choice between picking up the Switch one, Matthew, or plugging in the Wii U. I would genuinely rather spend 50 quid on a new game than have to plug that in again. That is it. Just think about the logistics of it. The amount of plug sockets the Wii U takes up. I can’t even… It’s much easier to have someone bring it from a warehouse to my flat. Yeah. So, my number 24 is Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, which I don’t think will be on your list, right? It didn’t make my list. I thought on it for about 10 seconds and then went, nah. Yeah. I don’t think… It’s funny because I saw someone we both know tweet about how boring this game was the other day. And I sort of don’t really agree. I think it’s a good solid hybrid of that Uncharted 4-style cinematic sort of action game. And then also, you know, just enough of the old Dark Souls kind of structure and sort of combat to… Well, more like Sekiro’s combat, really, even though they were made sort of simultaneously. As a big-time Star Wars fan, this is the only real Star Wars game I liked from this generation. There weren’t many, obviously. The Squadron was all right, but this is the only one I really loved. And I think that this was really dunked on for having a very average boy who looks like he gets his head flushed down the toilet as a main character, sort of Jedi, rather than like a more interesting sort of lead. Big me energy, yes. Yeah, and he was getting dunked on so much. I was there thinking, like, if I was a Jedi in like a Star Wars film, if I was cast as a Jedi, this is what would happen to me. I was like watching it in real time. It’s like, who’s this dweeb? Yeah, but I think he’s really good in it, this actor, and I think generally the cast is extremely good. It’s a Star Wars story that fits quite nicely into the canon without overdoing it in the way the Force Unleashed games did on the 360. I don’t think it excels at lightsaber combat as in lightsaber to lightsaber combat, but I thought the Force powers were really nice in this. The Star Wars planets are really well done. The sort of Metroidvania structure, it’s sort of borrowed. I think that they made it work. It wasn’t really an open world game, but it was quite nice to look at the maps of each planet and be like, oh, you’ve only seen 60% of it. So, oh, I haven’t been in the Star Destroyer that’s like tipped on its side, so what’s in there? Some good side content that was epic, and you never had to do it, but you really missed out if you didn’t. Yeah, absolutely. Some good optional bosses. Yeah, I really rated it, and I thought that it was almost worth EA having the license for all those years just to get this game. I did really like it, and it definitely felt like the old God of War team sort of like, I don’t know, it’s a little bit of old God of War in there as well. And yeah, I liked it a lot. I thought, yeah, good job. It sold like millions of copies as well, so people were well up for this when it came out. Yeah. It helped save me from hating Star Wars after the Rise of Skywalker came out, a truly toilet film. Hit me with your number 23, Matthew. My 23 is Dragon Age Inquisition. Yeah, not on my list, but I did ponder it. I thought this might be. Yeah, I didn’t have a huge relationship with Dragon Age before this. It’s not a universe. I hadn’t played the other games all the way through. I played a chunk of one. I haven’t played Dragon Age 2. I’ll put my hand up and admit it. But this, I really love the location work in it. I thought it was a really fantastic world to explore. A little bit like video gaming in that there was, you know, 30 mystical doodads to get in every area and 10 crystals and 10 of this and some bottles of fucking wine for your cellar, which is mad. But I love the way the little fantasy worlds unfolded as little miniature sandboxes. They had some real surprises to them. I like the fact that you could find a cave that you hadn’t noticed for 10 hours, go through and there’d be like a massive great dragon in there sort of tearing up the place and you’d be like, oh, this is exciting. Just felt like a very fun take on the kind of like action RPG elements of it. And that was sort of balanced out by the fact that I really like the stronghold stuff. I really like the characters. I thought there were a couple of stretches of really good story missions. There’s that bit where you go to the kind of foreign court where it’s all about kind of… You’re sort of judged on your kind of social standing and etiquette and it’s like a weird little sort of three hour kind of spy adventure in the middle of it. I thought it had a lot of surprises in store. I just had a really thoroughly good time. Maybe that is coloured by the fact that I don’t have huge attachments to it. I don’t really know how big Dragon Age 1 and 2 fans feel about Dragon Age Inquisition. But I liked it and it gave me a lot of hope for Andromeda because I just thought, oh yeah, a sci-fi version of this would be great. And then it wasn’t quite that. But what did you make of Dragon Age Inquisition? Right, so it’s interesting that you pick up on, you don’t know how it’s perceived. I think there are two types of Dragon Age fan. And the first one are hardcore PC players who love Baldur’s Gate and love the fact that Dragon Age Origins had this very, on PC, only on PC, not on consoles, had this very tactical, like top-down control your characters sort of combat. And then they didn’t really feel like Inquisition or Dragon Age 2. Actually kind of continued that and were very disappointed. But I think people who really invested in the lore and the sort of world and the story and the characters of Dragon Age really loved Inquisition. And I think that the character work in this is fantastic. The dialogue that plays out when you’re exploring that world and the little interplay between your supporting party members, it’s as good as anything Bioware’s done before in like Mass Effect 2 or whatever. I really liked it. I think that I agree with you that Bioware, I think, struggles with what value is in an open world game and just rammed it with side quests it didn’t need. But I did really like it. The only reason I didn’t put it in is I didn’t feel like I played enough of it to truly get a grasp on it. I got to where the bit where Corypheus turns up and attacks that town and then not much further. But I liked it. The combat was good. It looked really nice, especially on PC. It looked fantastic. Yeah, good. Why don’t you think Andromeda retained it? The characters are very poor in Andromeda. I just felt the overall story wasn’t very interested. It’s weirdly similar. The whole process of you running the Inquisition and trying to spread the Inquisition’s influence in Dragon Age isn’t that dissimilar to trying to build up the reputation of whatever the fuck you’re called in Andromeda, Space Force. Structurally, it’s very similar. Big sandbox areas, lots of side quests in between. Maybe they just didn’t lean into the lore. You’re in a new galaxy, universe, whatever, galaxy in Andromeda and it felt like the big dramatic concern was something completely new and it just felt like quite a bad Star Trek episode. The kind of war between the baddies and these sort of… I think they were like dog people? I can’t really remember. In my head I can see basically a woman with a blue dog’s face. I don’t know if that’s right. But I didn’t really care about that. But I was more into the lore of Inquisition and amazingly, as someone who hadn’t played much of previous Dragon Ages, I still understood Inquisition. I think it established its stakes pretty clearly and explained itself quite well. You can just stand around asking everyone you meet like 20 questions until you basically know their personal history, which probably helps. Andromeda was just slightly off in so many ways, but basically the same game, it felt. Yeah, it’s funny because BioWare is another of those developers who, as you mentioned at the start of the episode, they were real winners from that first HD generation who didn’t quite make it happen this generation. But Inquisition, I don’t know, I’m surprised there were so few big fantasy RPGs this generation, because it seems like the appetite for them is enormous, but there aren’t that many of them when you really think about it. Yeah, it’s odd, but if anything, it’s caused the appetite to rise again, and I think we’re going to see a big rush of them this gen. Maybe it’s just a generational thing, maybe it just takes time to get your ducks in order or whatever. Yeah, for sure. Well, so my number 23, Matthew, that’s where we’re at, right? Yes. Yeah. Titanfall 2, is this on your list? This isn’t very, almost made it, but it didn’t quite get there. Yeah, so I think whenever people talk about this now, they largely talk about the single player mode in this. It’s a six or seven hour story mode that I don’t think people had high expectations for a story mode for Titanfall, even though it was made by the developers of several of the greatest first person shooter campaigns ever, I would say. And I believe the way they made it was they basically had people in this sort of lab setup where they were kind of like coming up with different concepts for levels, and then they sort of like built levels around those ideas. And yeah, it’s sort of probably the most famous level in this is the one where you can use a device to switch between two different time frames at a level. This is the first of two games on my list that do that. Matthew, I’m sure you can guess the other one. But yeah, so I think it was a really great single player shooter. My favorite level in this, though, is not that level. It’s the level where you’re in a prefab housing factory and the houses are being assembled on a production line and you’re kind of like wall running between all of them. Just a brilliant creation. So, so good. Yeah, I just I really love that single player. But while I hadn’t played the multiplayer before, it launched on Steam a few months ago and I did. I played a whole bunch of it then and the multiplayer was phenomenal in this. Just the feeling of calling down your titan, jumping in the drama of it and the audio. Yeah, it was really, really good. It’s a shame it got overlooked, you know. What do you think of it? Yeah, pretty much the same. I’d really admire the multiplayer. I didn’t play a huge amount of it. In fact, spoiler alert, I don’t think there’s a single multiplayer focused game on my list, which shows where my head is at with regards to, you know, I just much prefer single player games. I was terrible at it, but it felt lovely. It’s one of the nicest feeling shooters around and the drama of it. You know, every match looks exciting. But again, I love the single player in this. You know, like you say, it’s just really easy to recall levels and say, oh, the level where the house gets built around you and you’re like, oh, yeah, that’s classic. You know, it’s a classic set piece thing. I hope whatever they do that they, you know, while they are an amazing studio at making multiplayer games, I hope they do make single player games because outside of what they did, I thought the single player shooter this generation was no way near as good as it was the previous generation. Pretty much outside of them and probably Wolfenstein, it was pretty dry. I didn’t really like any Call of Duty campaigns this generation. So, yeah, please keep making more of those. Well, there’s the two Doom games as well, Matthew. Oh, yeah, the Dooms are quite different, though, in terms of, like… It’s not quite the same set piece driven, very linear shooter. It’s something slightly different. I don’t know, maybe. Yeah, it’s probably a fair point. You’re talking about that Call of Duty-style guided campaign shooter, right? Yeah, which I know some people are tired of, but when it’s done well, it’s one of the most exciting things around. There’s a reason everyone started doing them, because when those first couple of modern warfare campaigns came out, they were, like, stupidly good. And we all got bored of them very quickly, but at the time it was, like, man alive. And I think Titanfall 2 just showed, yes, there is an appetite, if you come up with new ideas and if you do them brilliantly, like, there’s no reason these can’t still be thrilling. Yeah, absolutely. So what’s your number 22, Matthew? Um, the evil within. Yeah, not on my list. Yeah, I sort of wondered around this one. Like, this is a total heart choice. Like, you know, I think I gave this like an 8 out of 10 when I reviewed it and I know it’s got some flaws. I mean, tonally, it’s just relentlessly bleak and quite hard going because of that. But it’s also like a brilliant, brilliant survival horror game. Like, it genuinely, like, pushes you, I think, and puts you in quite a bad, uncomfortable place and triggers a lot of the feelings around survival horror that I probably hadn’t had, you know, since playing, like, you know, the original Resident Evil 1, you know, as great as Resident Evil 4 is, I still think it’s maybe leaned slightly more towards action than survival, but I thought this was actually quite uncompromising and went, no, you know what? I’m going to, like, really starve you of ammo. I’m going to give you, like, too much to deal with. You’re actually going to have to be quite clever. Even on normal modes, you’re going to have to be quite clever with your ammo. I’m going to give you some horrendous boss fights that are going to just absolutely destroy you. And when you find a save room in this game, it is just, it is one of the biggest kind of sort of size of relief in video games. Like, the genius touch of this is the save rooms are always signified by you can hear Debussy’s Claire de Lune playing. And when you hear that tune, you are like, oh, thank God, like, I can save and this won’t have been for nothing. Like, genuinely, I was so happy when I got through each bit of this game. And it was such hard work, but I felt like it kind of, I don’t know, stressed me out and pushed me into a place that most games, I don’t think, have the confidence kind of pushing you because it does verge on like being quite unpleasant. You know, it’s, you know, I think of things like The Last of Us, for example, which allegedly are also meant to tap into like the desperation of survival. But, you know, come the end of the game, I’ve just got like 8000 Molotov cocktails or whatever. And that would never happen in Evil Within. I think Shinji Mikami just really tightened the bolts on this one. And, yeah, it was, it was, yeah, I thought it was great. I didn’t like it, Matthew. That’s fair enough. I know lots of people didn’t. So I, I definitely think like the bones of like good survival horror in there for sure. I did think there was one boss fight that I did in this that I stopped playing after after that boss fight because I just hated it. And that was where that girl with black hair chases you around that quite tight little space. You have to set her on fire. Yeah, that’s fairly early on in the game, I think. And I wasn’t really clicking with it, even though I kind of acknowledged that the style of it was very nice. And I think that piece of music, the way it’s used in this game generally is extremely effective and has a good vibe about it. The story feels very incomplete in this. Oh, it’s it’s absolute bullshit. It makes no sense. Yeah, I think that’s kind of a shame because I don’t think Resident Evil’s got like a good story in terms of like, you know, what was actually considered a good story in most media, but it’s got an entertaining story. And some characters I kind of like, even if they’re all a bit daft. But this didn’t this just felt a bit stiff and a bit flat. Yeah, that’s like I said, it’s a heart, not a head score. I fully take all on. I had some great DLC as well. Did some really fun things. There was the campaign where you played as the kind of lady detective and it was almost a bit more stealthy. She was even weaker than the chap. And then there was another campaign where you played as the guy with a box for a head, old safe head in first person smashing people up with a hammer. Really unusual mix of DLC. We had a regular box out in the news section of official Xbox, which was what was inside Boxhead’s head. Because there’s a guy and he’s got a safe for a head. And every month it was just a picture of his head being opened. And inside it was like, you know, a bottle of Tizer or something stupid. So that’s a proper like Colonel Kurt’s editor choice. That is the most Matthew Castle thing I’ve ever heard. Well, he was like meant to be like pyramid. I think he was meant to be iconic like pyramid heads in Silent Hill. But he was just a bloke with a safe for a head. He would just drop barbed wire everywhere. And he was just more of a pain in the ass than like a true horror icon. You know, he just felt like saying, pick up your barbed wire. Which wasn’t something you’d ever say to pyramid head. No, I mean, maybe in some of the later Silent Hill games that weren’t very good, I don’t know. But yeah, do you, the first person DLC in this I do remember hearing about thinking, well, that’s kind of cool. But the second Evil Within, I feel like people just entirely ignored, just didn’t feel like it made an impact. Did you play that one? Yeah, I did. It’s actually way more coherent and it does some interesting stuff in there. It’s almost like a bit more open world. It’s got a couple of quite large hub areas where you’ve got a lot more freedom to find stuff. And the way that you can stumble into some quite good optional side quests, considering that they’re quite crafted and got some good horror beats, is actually really nicely done. But generally, I found the game a little softer than the first one. It felt like the first one was a bit much, so let’s tone it down a little bit. I don’t know. I just think they really bought into that first one in a way that I admired, even though it was hard work and a lot of people hate it. Yeah, it was quite pure-blooded, I think. Cool. All right, so Matthew, my number 22 is Assassin’s Creed Origins. Do you have any Assassin’s Creed games on your list? I don’t. I undenied about putting Black Flag on as a kind of crossover right at the start of the gen, but then decided not to. Yeah, so I’m a bit up and down with Assassin’s Creed generally. I accept that probably Valhalla is probably a slightly better game than Origins, but I’ve just not played it yet. This is the one of the generation I enjoyed the most. Odyssey was just a bit too long for me, I think. I was quite threatened by how long it was when I looked at the map. I was like, oh, Jesus Christ, I’ll never finish this. Whereas Origins, I think I finished and did a bunch of side stuff in about 18 hours. And even though the game is massive, it’s a big old Skyrim sized world, maybe even bigger. I’ve been in every single pyramid. I’ve seen the main story to its conclusion. I went to try and fight some of those gods in the desert, which is quite trippy in that game. But I really like this one. I think that the way the story pans out in this is really good because you play this sort of husband and wife duo of characters. And I find it really interesting that every time they beat up in this game, they have sex, which is I like because you never really see couples depicted in this way in games. They enjoy each other’s company. They’ve got like, you know, some tragedy they’re sort of dealing with. But they’re just in love and it’s quite nice. And yeah, I am Bayek, your main character, just thought he was kind of a cool dude. And the version of, you know, ancient Egypt you see in this game is so like fanciful and beautiful. It really does look like you’re in a kind of fantasy world just from the sort of amount of color that Ubisoft have put in there. There’s like their entire regions of this game that you barely step in in the main campaign that are just full of stuff to do. And yeah, this was their big reinvention of Assassin’s Creed after, I think that it was ran out of steam a bit after Unity and Syndicate. Syndicate, the beginning of the now infamous failed Matt Castle run at finishing all the Assassin’s Creed games, which, you know, devoted listeners of the podcast will remember. Did you play this one, Matthew? Yes, I played Origins. Yeah, like you say, it’s kind of, oh, Christ, I’ll never do this. And then Ian suddenly creeps up on you and you’re like, oh, all right, fair enough. Yeah, I like this one. I never quite clicked with the action system in it. I think some of the RPG elements are a bit weak. It’s got that fundamental flaw which so many Assassin’s Creed have in that it gives you an item, which is basically the instant win, like insanity dart or something, which you hit someone with. And it drives them mad. So they either attack their mates and then it kills them. And so they’re the mates kill them. Or if it gets to the end of the time that they just die from like insanity poison or whatever. And this had one of those. So for a lot of this game, it was just me hiding in bushes, identifying high value targets, hitting them with an insanity dart and then letting the dart do all the work. So I didn’t really feel like an amazing assassin. I just felt like a guy who was very lucky to happen upon a blowpipe. Yeah, I think this is a problem with the series generally. They brought in this sort of gated, level gated combat system in this, which I think is pretty flawed. It means that no matter how good you are at the combat, there are some enemies you just can’t beat. And I sort of hate that as an idea in the combat games. I think there are always compromises you accept with Assassin’s Creed. The platforming is never really that good. The combat is always sort of flawed. The side quests are just full of total rubbish that you don’t really need to do. Alongside some extremely good high-end content, it’s quite hard to tell them apart sometimes. But yeah, this is just a really strong main campaign. I was surprised by how much I liked it. I’m sort of glad they did at least take a punt on giving Assassin’s Creed a proper rewrite this generation. A couple of times it seems like. I hope they reinvent it for the next one. I feel like Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla are kind of their open world trilogy arc. And they should move on and think of something else. I want them to really like nail it and do like historical hitman. Really go heavy into the stealth. They know won’t. But I’d love it. I feel like I’ve done enough of their open world Assassin’s Creed now. I enjoyed this whole trilogy, this generation. They were pretty rock solid and this was definitely a fun one. For sure. So what’s your number 21 Matthew? I’m afraid it’s the incredibly wanky The Witness. That’s an interesting choice for sure. Which people seem to roll their eyes at now whenever it’s mentioned. At the time, I think you just have to divorce it from some of the chat around it. People have different stances on Jonathan Blow and his opinions about games and whatnot and telling people how it should be done. But the core of this colourful island covered with puzzle panels that you have to deduce the logic of the rules of each panel set from tinkering with them is really nicely done and I think the wider puzzle game, which still to this day feels like a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll keep it light, but you have these panels which are the obvious puzzles, but the island itself is home to equally as many puzzles, which amazingly you might not realise until quite late in the day and it becomes this whole other thing. And as a landscape where it felt like every inch of that place was just integral to what you were trying to do, and it also just looked really nice and colourful, quite a chilled island, I’d quite like to live on it. Yeah, I really, really like this game. It made me feel quite smart playing it. It had some sort of pretentious, extremely wanky bits and bobs in there, which I didn’t really click with. I was kind of umming and ahhing between this and The Talos Principle, which is more of a PC game, which is why I didn’t make the cut. But I like puzzle games which are unafraid to actually have some really, really nightmarishly difficult brain fodder in there. I think the temptation with a lot of puzzle games is to have a very gentle difficulty arc so that just through the game everyone gets there. I quite like it when they go, you know what, I’m going to put a couple of really nasty things in here and you’re really going to have to push yourself to get this. And this had a lot of that. It was sort of quite kind of chewy and uncompromising. Yeah, I liked it. I liked it a lot. Yeah, I only played a few hours of this, but I sort of got the sense there was a kind of wider, island-wide sort of meta puzzle of like, when I got to a point in the map, I feel like I’d look down and see a giant puzzle being put together. I feel like that’s what it was kind of hinting at, but I never really got there. Yeah, yes, sort of. But when it did click and the whole thing was just suddenly like, oh, I get it, this is what it’s trying to do, was quite a magic moment and it’s a huge game as well. I must have played it for like tens and tens of hours. I never fully finished it because it was just too thick. But I liked enough of it. Yeah, I felt a bit too stupid for it. But yeah, I am certainly a true original. There’s nothing else like that this generation. Solve lots of mazes. What was it? What is it you’re doing in the game again? What’s the fundamental basic? Tracing lines on panels. Yeah, and trying to make them activate other panels. Yeah, interesting stuff. Yeah, I am a good choice for sure. And like, you know, definitely synonymous as this generation, it was there at the first PS4 games reveal in 2013. So yeah, good one, Matthew. Thank you. What’s your 21? It’s inside, which… Oh, that’s higher on my list. Yeah, we’ll come back to it then. So what’s your number 20, Matthew? Oh, this is probably going to be higher up on your list. This is Danganronpa 3 Killing Harmony. Oh, yeah, it’s… This is your number one, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You can’t get enough of anime school kids murdering each other. I have. Very skimpy uniforms. I have all three of these games on Steam, and at some point I will play them because I know they’re kind of like adjacent to the likes of Phoenix Wright, right? Yeah, yeah, it’s basically a riff on Phoenix Wright. It’s got a trial system, except in each scenario you’ve got a load of kids who are locked in a mysterious school, and the only way you can escape the school is by murdering a fellow student and then being found innocent of it in the subsequent trial. And in the trial you play one of the school kids and you sort of take on the kind of Phoenix Wright-esque role where you’re basically trying to uncover the truth. It’s like Phoenix Wright with this mad arcade energy to it, because instead of just selecting the clues, you fire clue bullets. Like, you literally shoot them at the testimony on the screen and there’s always not brilliant mini-games where you’re surfing the logic highway and things like that. They’re like rifts on old 80s arcade games. That stuff’s a bit naff, but the logic, the revelations of the trials, the finding of contradictions is great. The actual mysteries in this are so good. I mean, I’m a big, big fan of Japanese crime fiction. As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, it’s what I bollock on about most days. And the creators of this are also big fans of Japanese crime fiction. They’re a Japanese studio. This is created by someone called Kazutaka Kadaka. And I interviewed him once, and we had a good old natta about Japanese crime fiction, which was a delight. And he’s a big fan of a lot of stuff I’m a fan of, like impossible locked room mysteries. I actually think his mysteries are better than Ace Attorney’s because I go into the trial and I very rarely know what’s going on and you really do have to unpick it. Where in Ace Attorney it’s often a bit gentler and you’ve got the kind of shape of the thing before it starts. It’s bogged down with a huge amount of anime bullshit that I hate. I mean, the last hours of these games are always bad because they basically turn into 20 minute monologues with some terrible anime demon screeches at you about justice. And you’re like, oh god, I haven’t really got time for this. But when you’re just solving crimes, this is good shit. This probably isn’t the best of the three, but it was the only one that came out on PS4. So it’s a game of the generation. I really, really like the series. Get all of them on PC, they’re kind of rad. Yeah, they’re pretty much always discounted in every few months or so. They’re really long games, right, Matthew? They take a while to be. Yeah, like 20, 30 hours. I mean, the Phoenix Wrights can be quite long as well. But it is because they could just do with an edit. The characters are really… It’s just like that anime trope of everyone over explains everything endlessly and repeats themselves and everyone has their big monologue where they cackle about something and talk about it. What really redeems it is the kind of hook is that everyone in this school is the best at something. So it’s like, you know, the world’s greatest boxer. They’re called the ultimate. It’s like the ultimate boxer. And someone else will be like the ultimate stamp collector, the ultimate hacker, the ultimate anime artist. And somehow their skills always factor into the crimes. And this third one had like a really nice setup because one of the characters is the ultimate detective. And I think someone else is maybe like an ultimate, the ultimate serial killer. And as a setup, there’s all these like kids with like semi supernatural abilities, lets them do some like really mad stuff with the actual crime construction. And kind of unpicking all that is really, really good. Okay, good stuff. I will play them at some point. When I finished all the Phoenix Wright games, I will… Yeah, finish those first. They’re way better and more coherent. That’s cool. What is your 20? Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Is that on your list? Ooh, this didn’t make my list. Yeah, so I was a big fan of Deus Ex Human Revolution. And this was a slightly incomplete feeling sequel. I think the rumoured plan was that they were going to do two sequels fairly close together that would round out this Adam Jensen trilogy. But the problem with doing that is if your second… If the second game isn’t successful enough, you don’t get to make a third. And that seemed to be what happened here. So it kind of just ends this game. But I did still play it for 50 hours. And I feel like it’s had renewed appreciation after Cyberpunk 2077. Yeah. My personal feeling on it is it’s a pretty good stealth action kind of immersive sim game. Unlike another game further up my list, it’s quite easy to figure out how enemies work in this. And the logic of how you hide bodies and stealth kill and all that stuff works very well. It’s much more straightforward. The levels are generally laid out. So like kind of these modular sort of rooms, you take out the level room by room. Set in Prague, it’s not massive, the Prague kind of open world, but it is beautiful, has these very distinct regions. There’s a kind of red light districty area that is a beautiful place to explore. There are all these kind of like panels, like when you’re going through walkways with screens on them and you see a screen with like a plane flying overhead and stuff like that. It just has a really nice feeling of the world. It’s sort of the side quest in it, a really rich. You can break into a lot of people’s houses and rifle through their things, which I think, you know, most people who play stealth games enjoy doing that sort of stuff. And in real life. Yeah, there were some heavy-handed sort of racism metaphors in this, but I think there’s still some merit to some of the things they do in the game. I think that’s one of the bullet points on the back of the box. Yeah, exactly in those words as well. And yeah, it was good. I think just sort of didn’t really get that much attention. I think they just waited too long to release it. But like, good sequel craft, a nice shiny upgrade for a next-gen as well. Like, I find the original, I find the first one, Human Revolution, is just a little, looks a little, it feels quite old now. I think Mankind Divided is still kind of okay. Yeah, I think I played it straight before I played this one. And yeah, it definitely dated faster than I thought it would, the first one. I sort of, I slightly preferred the variety of settings in the first one, even though you probably get about as much real estate to explore here. But yeah, good, good solid game. I feel like it’s just, it wasn’t quite blockbuster enough to capture people’s imagination. If you could just drive cars around Prague and it looked like Cyberpunk, people probably would have bought it. But oh well, yeah. So what’s the number 19, Matthew? It’s Metro Exodus. Yep, not on my list, so talk away. Well, actually kind of, I guess in a sort of similar-ish way to Deus Ex. I just thought this was a very good attempt to take a rock solid game of the last generation and just work out how to use some sort of extra power this generation. In this case, what they did was they basically added some open world hubs to the game. So this is, you know, the Metro series is famously very linear and it’s set in underground tunnels. It’s literally you’re walking down a massive tunnel and you’d occasionally go above ground, but they were very scripted linear sequences. This, the game has linear sequences, but the meat of it is a couple of very large hubs where you have kind of freedom to explore. There’s some side quest stuff. But what I really liked about this and what I thought was quite an interesting sort of side trend of this generation was games that kind of mixed open world, like limited open worlds with very handcrafted linear storytelling. So Metro still delivered all the story beats it wanted to deliver. And they were very, very kind of well choreographed and controlled in the way that the original Metro’s were. But then outside of those, you had a bit of freedom to go off and find like a rare gun part or something special or happen upon one of those story beats more organically. So it just felt a bit more exciting. Like, there’s a bit of this thinking, I think, in like weirdly like Metal Gear Solid V. It kind of reminds me off, which is another like open world that isn’t quite an open world. It’s home to like linear missions and occasionally the story would interrupt in a way that it’s quite hard to do in open world games. But you feel it more clearly in Metro Exodus. I thought it was very elegantly done. I thought it ticked all the things I liked about the original Metro games, but had this extra flavor of freedom in a few key places. Yeah, it looked absolutely amazing as well. I really, really rate Metro series for e-games who make them, I think, great. And this was, yeah, really a highlight. Yeah, I think this got overshadowed a bit by how badly they did the Epic Deal stuff. That was such a huge story at the time. And now I feel like it’s no big deal really when it happens. Yeah. I played a chunk of this at that preview event that you were at too, right? Yes, yeah. In that basement under that bridge in London. A very dark preview event, which means I will definitely step on a PR’s foot at some point and they will hate me forever. I understand that you have four different seasons. Is it kind of broken down into these four different semi-open worlds? Is that how it ends up panning out? Yeah. There’s like two which are massive and then there’s like a third which is the autumn one, which is a little bit smaller and a bit more linear in places. And then it doesn’t really have the fourth open world hub. The last stretch of the game is quite traditional Metro, actually. Well, the one we played was legit. I really enjoyed it. I agree with you. Some of the creature animation was really good in this. I like the act of exploring. Like you said, you might get nothing for exploring in this game, but you might get something. Yeah, and I just like games that have the confidence to go like, we know that you’re going to find something that’s very scripted and polished and good. So we’ll let you have a little thrill of discovering it. And it just, I don’t know, it plants in your mind the thought that, wow, there could be more stuff like this out there, which is quite exciting. You play this game in quite an excited state because your expectations are so high for what you’re going to find. And I feel like a few games did that this generation, a few that are like later on my list as well. And it’s, I actually prefer it to just outright open world games. Like I much prefer, you know, you’re going to have all the benefits of an open world, like the exploration, the surprises, but the games, you’re going to see like everything the game has to offer in 30 hours. That’s a very nice proposition for me. Yeah, I think I’ve come around to that too, actually. Yeah, I think, yeah, sort of very, very much a kind of lesson of being in my 30s, I think of like understanding that a big game having, that takes loads of hours to finish everything does not equal value. Value is a very different thing. And yeah, this kind of game gets more out of it. It’s weird actually, like 4A feels like one of those developers that, under the right circumstances, will one day make a proper sort of 10 out of 10 all-timer. I wonder if that’ll ever quite happen for them. It’s hard to tell, you know? Yeah, because they’re like, they’re one of the few studios who are actually kind of still making like half-life games. Like that is kind of what metros are. They’re very cinematic scripted shooters, but with a bit of freedom in them, which is kind of half-life still. And it’s a shame that no one else was doing that this generation. That feels like a dying art, but they’re still doing it. And you know, more power to them. I hope they carry on making metro games. Yeah, absolutely. Credit where it’s due, for sure. So Matthew, my number 19 is The Last Guardian on PS4. This isn’t on my list. I didn’t think it would. Is this a game that annoyed you? I feel like it probably annoyed you. Yeah, I thought the creature was ugly. I didn’t like its energy, its vibe or its attitude. Frankly, I thought he was a dick. I just thought he was quite an unpleasant person thing to spend time with. And I just didn’t dig it. Catherine played it. I watched her play it and thought, nah, this isn’t for me. Sorry, I know that’s the wrong answer in certain critic circles, but I just hate that beast. Obviously, it was like Long Gestating is a PS3 game and then eventually moved to PS4. I think Sony kind of saw a reputational win in bringing that game back after years of nothing happening. And they took it. I think that it’s got several hours in between that are not very good or not very interesting, but I personally really like the creature and how it was animated. I thought it was an amazing looking thing. I think you really felt the weight and the size of it being around it. Doing these kind of platforming puzzles, we’d see it jump and then a platform would tilt up and you’d sort of hop across and stuff like that. You’re basically climbing like one big sort of tower or series of towers the entire game. And then, yeah, I think the first hour is phenomenal and the last hour is amazing as well. But in between, it’s quite languid. But I still think it was just a real one-off and I missed having games that felt anything like Shadow of the Colossus this generation. And I actually think this is quite a low-down position for a game from this developer. So, yeah, I hope the next project that is being published by Epic, I believe, under their publishing label, and therefore they should have a ton of money to make it happen, could be really good. I hope it’s hunting the creature in the style of Monster Hunter World with three of your mates. Just three of you hitting that idiot with hammers. Okay, well, there you go. Matthew’s got very strong feelings on this monster. I just thought the game was quite nice. I don’t wish the creature ill. Me and the creature will resolve our disputes privately. Not loads to say about it, but I think it’s worth seeing the last hour of it. It’s got a slightly Studio Ghibli-ish vibe, I think, compared to the other two games that I mentioned earlier. I like it. I don’t adore it, and I think it could have been better, but it’s one of the many 8 out of 10 sloshing around in this bottom half of my list, Matthew. Why don’t you hit me with your number 18? Well, this is where I’ve got Inside. Ah, cool. Then talk me through why Inside got to this position. Yeah, I don’t think there’s a second of flab on this game. A brilliant little three-hour experience. Probably the most successfully cinematic game ever made, in terms of visual storytelling. I think so many people, so many games, when they try and lean into cinematic techniques, are leaning into quite sort of superficial, surface-level, you know, dialogue, virtual performances. I think this leans into animated film. You know, it tells a wordless story, beautifully animated, tells you everything you need to know, has probably the greatest game conclusion of all time, in terms of just sheer release and excitement and horror. It’s… I still remember playing it, and you can only ever experience it for the first time once, obviously, but I remember playing it and being like, holy shit, I’ve never seen anything like that before. And if you haven’t played it, I mean, don’t look up the ending, just go and play it, because it is, like, an astonishing act of chaos, which very few games have tried to, like, match. And, you know, it still dazzles me now. Yeah, it’s a singular game, as they say. Yeah. It’s, yeah, just one of the nastiest worlds to explore. Just such a nasty game. Everything you’re going to go through is that, you know, little boy character, everything you sort of experience. It’s just, there are so many sinister figures chasing you in that game and trying to catch you out. And, yeah, there are so many moments of it I still remember really vividly. You never see the faces of any of the characters in the game. It’s all down to, like, animations on these tiny little figures who are, you know, in a side-scrolling platformer, basically. Yeah, I thought about how this is kind of spawned like a mini-genre of games like it, I think. Or at least its predecessor did. What’s its predecessor? Limbo. Yeah, and so, yeah, you’ve got, like, little nightmares as well, which taps into a similar thing, I think. But, yeah, this was a kind of one in a million. Like, the tone of it, very specific. And, yeah, the ending, if you had, like, a million years, you had to guess what the ending of this game was, I don’t think you’d ever come up with it. And the execution of it is, like, how did they do that? I mean, it’s truly, like, the greatest bit of video game animation ever. I mean, it’s, like, amazing. Yeah. There’s also a mermaid sequence in this game that is, like, one of the scariest sequences of the generation. Yeah, yeah. Just truly nasty. Yeah, brilliant. I would expect most people to play it now, because it’s been free on Epic a couple of times, but, yeah, definitely worth having on the list, so I’m pleased we both put it on there to retain our indie cred, allegedly. Yeah, so… What is your 18? It’s Apex Legends, Matthew. Oh, not on my list, but I was expecting… I was expecting it higher on yours. Well, I saw another one like Rocket League, where I sort of fell out of love with it a little bit. This is the third and, I think, final game from Respawn that’s on my list. For me, I wasn’t really into the whole Battle Royale craze this generation, but I love seeing a developer that I felt like was the kind of master of this genre come along and say, you know, we’re going to put our stamp on it and it’s going to be the best one. And it was cool to see that happen and it be a free game. And the way they launched it out of nowhere and it just became an overnight success. Very, very cool. And while I’m not really massively in love with it now, I think it’s just because I burned out on it from playing it for several hundred hours during Lockdown 1. Remember that? Oh, nostalgic feels about Lockdown 1. Yeah, I like it a lot. It’s like you, though, Matthew. I’m not really a multiplayer kind of guy. So pretty much everything from here is single player for me. But the different character abilities in this, the movement, the way slides feel in this game, the way it feels to ride a rope across the map in this game, the way that the maps keep changing in this is controversial to me because sometimes I think they would reverse some excellent map changes. We discussed this in our Game of the Year episode where I complained about the train being removed and was deeply emotionally wounded by that act. I was always quite jealous, though, in lockdown because whenever you talked about this, it sounded like where everyone was stuck in their house, you were stuck in your house, but you could also escape to a place called the party boat and a train. And these felt like they were very real places to you. The way you spoke about them, I was like, oh, man, he really has got an exit plan from all this. He can go to the party boat, wherever that is. And it turned out just to be a giant boat on a virtual map where you get murdered by teenagers pretty fast. Yeah, basically. But you’d have fun doing it. That’s the thing. Just my regular sort of like multiplayer pals, we just had some really good times dropping on that map. And there is definitely a correlation between like, I’m stuck in a tiny space all the time, but I can wander this big beautiful map with my friends sliding around and hanging out and stuff. So yeah, I’ve got some good memories associated with this one. And if you’d have asked me last year, this probably would have been in the top 10. But I’m happy having it here where it gets like a good solid mention, but isn’t like the main event. So yeah. I’m intrigued what the main event could possibly be. Yeah, it’s going to be fascinating stuff. Absolutely. So what’s your number 17, Matthew? My number 17 is the wonderful 101, a 2013 Wii U game from Platinum Games. Platinum had a weird generation, a good generation on Nintendo and one which has been picked up and continued onto the Switch. But a slightly sad generation of lots of wasted time, I feel, in that they were working on Scalebound famously for Xbox and it didn’t come through. And the idea of wasting Cameo’s time, to me, seems tragic because that guy makes the best games and any years he’s not made… You know, you only have so many games in you. So it saddens me that that was wasted. But the wonderful 101 is a Cameo game, probably his most outrageously inventive one in terms of control scheme. Like, it’s quite far from your bayonettas and whatnot, in which you play as a swarm of miniature heroes who can basically connect together into giant weapons by you sort of draw symbols on the Wii U pad or with the analogue stick to kind of build them into like a fist or a gun or a whip. And those different weapons and the different combinations and different combos you can do with the weapons allow you to tackle these giant alien beasts. It doesn’t make a huge lot of sense to watch. It doesn’t explain itself particularly well for those who put in the time and got their head around it and anyone coming to it now, you do so with the benefit of some absolutely outstanding YouTube videos which really explain it better than the game ever did. This is really just so frantic and beautiful to behold, when it’s in action and the Saturday morning superhero fantasy of all these hundred little dudes banding up to fight these giant creatures. Stonkingly good boss fights in this game as well. Conceptually absolutely brilliant. There’s this very famous one where you’re basically playing this giant robot which you’re controlling inside the robot by looking on the Wii U screen to pilot its fists in basically a giant game of punch out. And then you sort of deliver a huge punch to this other boss’s face. And then you run all your heroes along its arm into the other boss’s body and do all this crazy stuff. And it has got the greatest quick time event of all time at the end of the game, which I’m not going to spoil. And you should play the game and not spoil it for yourself. But if you must go and watch it on YouTube. Conceptually genius. So much fun. So colourful. So weird. I’m so glad Nintendo invested in this idea and let this very strange game happen. I feel bad that we never really did proper cover of it on O&M because it was amazing. Amazing thing. Yeah. So I have played this and I must confess to not quite getting it. Maybe I just need to do a bit more research into the sort of mechanics of it. Do you think, Matthew, that people should play this on Wii U if they can or should they play the newer version that’s available on modern platforms? You should probably play the newer version just because the Wii U had some technical issues. It couldn’t keep up. There was so much going on. It couldn’t really keep up with it. I don’t know how it plays on Switch. I’ve played a fair chunk of it on PC when they remastered it. It’s not the most snazzy of remasters, but just seeing it all move smoothly is pretty nice. I think it’s worth going back to now and still playing. Like I say, there are YouTube videos that explain the basics of it, because it’s just quite confusing. Unless you know what you’re doing, it can really just feel like you’re not making any progress with anything. But the second someone explains three or four simple points, the whole thing clicks and you can just start rampaging through it, and it is a laugh. I did feel like I was just drawing a sword over and over again. Yeah, there is a fair amount of that. But, yeah, trust me, it’s good when it clicks. Yeah, it’s quite interesting as well that Kamiya seems pretty invested in this idea of, like, Akami had it too, where you are drawing something to make something happen in the game. Yeah. He seems quite into that. Yeah, it’s kind of, it feels like there’s a mix of themes. There’s that and there’s also, you know, Bayonetta had it in that there’s, like, you know, Bayonetta herself and then the giant, like, the wicked weaves, like these giant weapons that she’s sort of summoning to fight in the combos. You know, he’s definitely interested in, like, a small thing and a big thing working together because that’s what Scalebound was going to be as well, as a human with, like, an AI dragon companion. And, you know, this was a pretty neat example of all that. And, you know, it got finished and made and released, which is, you know, a big plus point. Yeah. I share your disappointment that Kamea didn’t have the most prolific generation. And, like, I would love to know why Microsoft thought that ReCore was a game that was worth publishing, but Scalebound wasn’t. Yeah. You know, and that, and I’m sure I could pick out several other examples. So maybe they had the reasoning, but I don’t know. It seems, yeah, like you say, it seems like a waste. I kind of wish someone had picked it up. Yeah. Hey-ho. I’m sure, I’m sure maybe its ideas will surface in something else. Yeah, hopefully. That’s an interesting esoteric choice, and I believe it sold like no copies on Wii U, so I’m glad you can actually buy it now on modern platforms. What’s your 17? Final Fantasy XV, Matthew. Oh, there we go. Yeah, so Final Fantasy XV, the only mainline numbered installment that came out this generation, I think a similar thing. Oh no, last generation had the MMO as well, so they technically had two then. But Final Fantasy has been getting like, the developers have been getting less and less prolific. I guess they’re just harder to make because the scale of the games are huge. You had to have a remake this generation too though, so stuff happened. But yeah, this is a bit of a heart, not head choice, I would say. Yeah, it’s like this is very much talked about as the kind of road trip Final Fantasy game. You’re these four boys going around in a car and you are like camping out and making food and taking selfies and stuff like that. Those are the elements that the game is best remembered for while doing all your sort of traditional Final Fantasy monster killing and exploration. It definitely is probably the most incomplete game on my list. Yeah. Like there’s a second half where it feels like there is a missing open world, I would say. The first half I think is very… I always thought of it as a reverse Final Fantasy XIII, in that the first half is like the open world, and then it literally becomes a corridor, a story corridor for the second half, and is really unsatisfying because it’s actually just quite confusing. Like the villains aren’t very well established. A lot of people pop in, and this was a universe which is allegedly incredibly deep, deep enough that they did all these extra movies and anime things, and you’re like, well, where was all that depth in the game? Just none of it really manifested. I thought the guy had the makings of a great villain, but he just was a bit of the bloke in the hat, Ardyn or something. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, and then I was quite excited about coming up to the release of the game. I was really buying into the world and the imagery of some of the characters, but then it just sort of hits the accelerator for the second half and absolutely cums it and all this business on a train and giant titans appear and it looks spectacular, but you’ve really no idea what’s going on for half of it. Yeah, I would say like the main story feels very detached from what happens moment to moment in that game. It’s very much a game about that sort of road trip vibe. But yeah, the overall story. Yeah, can’t say I really truly knew what was going on all the time in this game. I thought it was an open world game. There’s something about the sort of specific way that like the kind of grass and trees and landscapes look. Just like one of the prettiest games of the generation, such a nice place to wander around, even though it’s quite barren for the most part. I just really love being in that world. Very good vibe. The vibe of being there with your friends, the fact that you camped, the weird little kind of chilled music that would play when you camped or went to little like roadside shops. It’s just a nice place. Yeah, even though I don’t think it was a great RPG either. The combat was very shallow. Very Kingdom Hearts-y combat. Just press the masher button until the enemies are dead. Not particularly strategic. I think the developers got a little bit obsessed with trying to finish it after it was out. So it had quite a lot of post-launch content and a load more post-launch content that was basically like just Square Enix was like, nah, you’re not doing that. And then it was written off. And yeah, so it ends a bit incomplete. I’m hoping Final Fantasy has a slightly better generation next time. They’re sort of going to go into it. They’ve already announced 16, obviously. But yeah, there’s something about this game. I just thought it was second open world and better combat, better story would be up there with the best ones. I think it was it was decent. Yeah. Like I said, it’s a total heart choice. I know it’s flawed, but yeah, I like those characters. I like the fact that it was mean so much, I think reflects that it kind of made a good positive impact with a lot of people. You know, I think there’s a lot of affection for those main characters, even if a lot of the stuff around them is a bit off. And there were moments of like incredible scale and wonder. I think the actual summons when they come and you see them like towering above the map and then they basically like evaporate everything around you and everything’s on fire. It’s about as great looking as this generation got in places. Yeah, music was really good as well. Oh, great. What about all theme? Oh, really good. What’s your number 16? My number 16. This is my last choice for today. This is Zero Escape The Nonary Games. So trilogy of games, right? Yeah, well, this is the duo of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward. It’s a bit of a cheat because they came out on like handhelds and things, but this particular remastered, remixed, redone collection came out on PS4 in 2017. So I figured it counted. If you haven’t played these games, they are basically sort of saw-like thrillers, people stuck in a nightmare situation, goaded by some weird puppet master to play a twisted game of murder and survival. They are half visual novel, half kind of adventure game, as you kind of do locked room puzzles and to sort of further the story. But like a visual novel, the games are also very heavy on jumping back earlier in the story, replaying and making other choices. In fact, it’s integral to completing the games, to play all the branches for science fiction reasons that I won’t spoil. Like it actually builds the visual novel structure into the kind of the heart of the story, which is brilliant. If these were a book, I would really enjoy them as a sci-fi thriller. I really like the characters. I really like the stories. Great twists and turns. The trilogy builds in a really fun way. It’s a shame this collection doesn’t have the last one in as well, which is slightly maligned, but I think it’s almost as strong as the first two. Very good, yeah, twisty-turny, lots of science chat. Introduces you to lots of like sort of poppy versions of sort of complex scientific theories, but your head swirls with ideas, and those ideas kind of impact how you think about other bits of the story. I really, really rate this series, and you know, it’s not cutting edge, doesn’t sort of say much about the generation tech-wise, but I think it’s great that things like this were being made still, and yeah, I really like these games. That’s cool, it’s an interesting choice, like Danganronpa, another one I’ve bought, but haven’t played. Yeah, very much like in line with my reading habits and interests. Is it also like a Spike Chunsoft game? Yeah, yes, both of them are, yeah. Yeah, so you’ll usually find it in a sort of similar kind of sales. So, tell me more about what you’re fundamentally doing in these games, like moment to moment. So, the actual storytelling is told in visual novel format. It’s characters popping up, speaking, you know, quite static characters, kind of listening to your kind of captor say, you know, you’ve been kidnapped and put into this game and he explains the rules. And a lot of the game is about like dicking over other people, like voting to kind of kill them off. And then the last one standing will allegedly get to escape. But the environments that they’re in in these games also have kind of themed rooms that you go into. And the idea is you have to solve a puzzle there. So it’s like those online kind of escape room games, if you’ve ever played those, where, you know, you get like an inventory for that one room, you pick up loads of objects. There’s normally some sort of number puzzles, kind of like, yeah. What like escape rooms? You know, there’s lots of props and you decipher from those props what the room is asking you to do. And you sort of solve that. And that for me is what elevates it. And I find visual novels straight can be a little dry because it’s just characters talk. It’s just reading. And they’re often brilliantly done. But here you’ve got these like little half hour kind of bursts of actual like puzzle solving, which kind of mixes it up. Often you make decisions at key points and then you inevitably die because you made the wrong decisions. So you go back, start taking different branches. But for reasons I won’t go into, information you learn going down one branch might help you survive in another. And so the story begins to like branch out and then begin to kind of close into really satisfying endings. And each one individually is brilliantly done. But the way they build as a trilogy and there’s like a sort of domino rally of ideas across the trilogy is very expertly done. So it’s just a very satisfying thriller format. Yeah, basically. Top stuff, Matthew. Yeah, that’s a very good choice. I feel like visual novels are a genre that like the PS Vita sort of kept alive and thriving. Yeah, I definitely prefer them on handhelds. I find it quite hard. There’s some which great ones on PC, but I feel like the idea of just sitting at my desk and clicking my mouse just to read through, you know, an often 30 hour story like it’s just quite a big ask. Yeah, you know, sitting on my sofa looking at a static image on my TV. I mean, yes, but just yeah. I don’t know if there’s much of a visual novel scene on Switch, actually. It feels like that would be perfect for it, but I don’t know if they’re a bit too racy or violent. Yeah, I don’t know if they’ve quite made it across. There’s a few, like that AI, the Somnium Files one. Yeah, well, the AI Somnium Files is by the same guy who made the Zero Escape trilogy. Well, there you go. That’s a good starting point then for on Switch. But yeah, otherwise, I don’t think the wider catalogs on there. So Matthew, my number 16 and final game of the podcast this episode is What Remains of Edith Finch. Oh! Yeah, another one on your list. Yeah. Yeah, so this very much represents the walking simulator, as people call it, in my top 30. And this was a very important genre to this generation that I feel like burned very brightly and then sort of went away in about three or four years. And this one kind of perfected every idea that I’d seen in previous ones and laid in a bunch of stuff on top to tell its story of this strange family that had, you know, sort of been the victim of bad luck over multiple generations. And you remember this family peeking through this house, going through their rooms and finding out what the story of the different family members was. And walking simulators tend to be, you know, you kind of walk around and enjoy a space and story is told to you. But this kind of has mini games that play out when you hear the various character stories. And, yeah, I thought this just perfected the genre and it felt like after this, I think there were more games after this in this genre, but this was the one that just kind of summed it all up. What do you reckon? Yeah, I love this game. Whenever I think of it, I always think of I think it was Sam Barlow, the creator of her story, referred to it as narrative WarioWare, which I really like in that each section of stories kind of takes a different mechanic that best illustrates it. And some of them are incredibly short. They’re all very poignant. Some are very funny. Some are very sad. For me, it was that inventiveness in how it delivered each bit of the story that kind of really caught my imagination. I’ve played plenty of, quote unquote, walking simulators. But this one for me, just the different means of storytelling within that I thought really, really elevated it and marked it out. I love the style of it. I love the world of it. I love the sense of the characters that you get. You know, the idea of knowing someone from their bedroom or how their room looks, I think, is actually a really true observation. Yeah, just a really, really great game. Have they made another one yet? I don’t think they have, but you would expect that they would like this was successful enough to generate a follow up, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, it seemed like it got a lot of attention. But I also loved how the developer Giant Sparrow’s previous game, the Unfinished Swan, was strongly suggested by the game, is one of those stories that you played. Like you go into this one of the rooms, I think, and there’s like black and white drawings everywhere. And it is clearly evoking that previous game, suggesting that you were playing another family member’s story in this previous game that came out several years before. I thought that was a really cool touch. But yeah, I love that game. I thought the house was beautifully designed. Yeah, I really loved it. So yeah, I am happy to have it so high on my list, Matthew. A good one. Yeah, it’s great. Yeah, I thought about Firewatch as well, but this kind of picked it for me. I liked Firewatch for the first hour and a half, but I liked it less as the kind of mystery took grip of it, I think. So Matthew, we’ll take one more short break. We’ve got a very short final part where we’re going to fire through a few questions that I’ve dropped into the dock here. Let’s do it. Matthew, it’s the final part of the podcast. Are you excited? Yeah, you can go to bed after this. Yeah, I’m very happy for you. So I thought I’d just put a few bonus questions into these episodes, just to kind of add a bit of spice, I guess. So they’re just meant to represent other thoughts you’ve had about this generation that might not be captured by the top 30 list itself. So Matthew, number one, what was, again, this generation, you were surprised you liked? So I picked Gears 5 for this, which is, yeah, I mean, I kind of, I liked Gears of War fine on last gen. You know, Gears of War 2 is a good laugh and 3 is spectacularly silly, but it wasn’t something I really, really loved. Then Gears 4 came out this gen, and I thought, eh, that’s kind of more of the same, and this isn’t for me. And then 5 just absolutely bowled me over. I thought it was great fun, just hugely inventive. I thought it was a team that was just like, fuck it, this isn’t important, let’s just have a laugh. And every firefight in that game has some kind of weird gimmick or visual trick to it or something interesting going on. And it’s genuinely one of the best looking games of the generation as well. And you know, if you play it on the now current gen on the Series X, you know, it’s even shinier. But back on the last gen, it was about as good looking a game as I played. Yeah, just like, I don’t think when you think Gears 5, you necessarily think of me. Like, it’s not really my energy, not really my vibe. I don’t think I could pick up one of their guns, let alone survive in that world. Yeah, I mean, they don’t think of you in the sense that you’re not the main character, I suppose. Yeah, we wouldn’t be like, who do I know that like, is like, yeah, fucking Gears. Like, I’m not like a bro or anything, so I wouldn’t necessarily, you know, you’d be like, oh, he’s probably playing some point and click game from the 90s. That’s more what you’d think. He’s playing a Japanese visual novel right now about crying. Yeah, if I was anyone in Gears, I’d be that, there’s that dude who dies in every single one of them, like that fat, there’s like a family. And whenever the guy turns up, he’s like, hey, it’s me. It’s, you know, Jones or whatever, and then gets a bullet straight between the eyes. That would be me. My death would be a joke in that universe. But this is really, yeah, just a big flashy, dumb, fun game. Kind of made me go, oh yeah, this actually I do quite like what Gears is about. Yeah, good stuff. I appreciate you asking the question. If I was a character in Gears of War, who would I be? Yeah, good stuff. So, I put Rocket League for this because I never thought I’d get into a car football game this generation. You know, it doesn’t seem me at all. I just don’t really… I was very anti-multiplayer for the majority of this generation and lockdown has forced my hand to getting more into it in order to socialize. But yeah, that was my answer for that one, Matthew. What was your most disappointing game of the generation? It’s a bit of a controversial one and I still like it. I do like it. I love it, in fact, but I say Super Mario 3D World. Yeah, it’s funny this because whenever I ask you about this game, you’re always a bit non-committal. Well, you really like it and I think it means a fair amount to you because you’ve had a really nice co-op experience with it. And so it’s quite… you’ve got very fond memories of this game and I know that. So I don’t want to shit on it every time you bring it up. Oh, I don’t mind. That’s what a friend’s for, you know? Yeah, but it’s like… I don’t know. It would bum the vibe out of the room. Yeah. Someone’s like, oh, we really bonded over this. So I’m like, that’s dog shit. So I don’t think it’s dog shit. What a tough act to follow. Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, my favorite games of all time. This is probably just me doing the thing, which I hate when I see other people doing it, which is just putting on blinkers because you want more of the same. But I don’t think this was in the same league as Galaxy. I think it’s… I think it’s got a real lack of escalation that Galaxy has. I think every idea has a really… every level has a really great idea to it, but Galaxy would take that idea and just push it to one level further. I hate the fact that it ends with the flagpole. I think that’s a real buzzkill of an end to every level, because you think no matter how exciting this level gets, it’s going to end with a fucking flagpole. And that for me kills a lot of the entertainment. I don’t really like the sort of directional controls on it, the kind of… the co-op element didn’t really do it for me. I never properly played in co-op, I should add, and I am excited about, hopefully once COVID is over, playing in co-op with you and your partner, because I know it’s a big thing that you really love. And I am sure that it will convince me otherwise. I don’t think it’s a bad game. I would still probably give it like a nine out of ten, but it just is poor compared to Galaxy, in my opinion. And that made me quite sad, because I was literally relying on this to deliver one of my favorite games of all time. I do every time they make a Mario game. That’s now what I expect, but this one did not. Yeah, so we have an upcoming episode planned around this game somewhat, with a bit of wider Mario chat. So I look forward to getting deeper into how you perceive this as part of the wider Mario canon, and also what it meant at the time that this didn’t quite live up to your expectations. But I do like it, for sure. And yeah, I sort of, I think that the flagpole mechanic, without getting too deep into it, makes more sense when you play it in co-op, and you realize that scrambling up that flag is like a co-op mechanic. And it makes a lot more sense when you’re sharing that level with people. But yeah, I look forward to getting into that one more. So my most disappointing game of the generation, I had a few thoughts on this. Fallout 4, I feel like I’ve addressed quite a lot. But that was one. But Mass Effect Andromeda was another where I felt like the shell of it was so perfectly like what Mass Effect needed. Like it looked really nice. Facial animation stuff aside, it looked really nice. The shooting was really, really good. The planets were kind of cool. All of it was like there. But the just the story and the characters, they managed to fall down so much on that. I just I could never quite get into it. And there was literally a dude in that game whose character arc was he wanted to get a sofa. Give me a break. That’s like some deep emotional development there, man. You just don’t understand him, you know. Yeah, I sort of, I just don’t quite know what happened with Bioware this generation. You do have Inquisition, which is this really strong RPG. And then it just sort of it’s been off the boil for so many years. And I’m hopeful that they’re going to get it back on track. But yeah, it does feel like they’re one of those devs. So just, yeah, they didn’t really they didn’t quite win out this gen. But yeah, Matthew, my final quick fire question, what’s the best game you didn’t finish this generation? Alien Isolation, which is just too scary. I am too scared of that game to play. I’ll put my hand up and I’m a huge fraud because it’s like, you know, a lot of my peers love that game. And when everyone talks about it, I’m like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Alien Isolation. I feel like I’ve played enough of it to know that it’s brilliant. But I also haven’t seen the full scope of that game nowhere near because I’m just so shit at it and too stressed out to play it. And yeah, I just don’t know when I’ll ever be in the mind to play it properly and get through it. But God, I wish I could because what I’ve played of it’s amazing. I was surprised you played this. So you didn’t play this, but you did play The Evil Within. That’s kind of weird. Oh, but that’s something I’ve done. Yeah, maybe that doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. Yeah, there is something about being pursued by that creature that’s quite scary. But who knows, Matthew, maybe that will feature in my Top 15 next episode. So, I put Dragon Age Inquisition here because I didn’t play enough of it to justify putting it on the list. And I do want to play it again someday. I’m deliberating whether I just start it again because I don’t think I’ve played it for five years, so it’s going to be hard to remember what the hell was going on. And like you say, it’s quite self-contained, so I think I could just pick it up and enjoy it. But yeah, I like that a lot. There’s also another game I’ve not finished that’s actually in my top 15. A fucking like monstrously long game that’s taken me two years to play. That I will talk about next episode too. But yeah. Yeah. And so we’ve got a reader question here too, Matthew. We’re still getting those through. If you want to send one to us, you can tweet us at BackPagePod or email us at backpagegames.gmail.com. One kind listener also DM’d to me directly on Twitter, which is fine. I don’t mind doing that. But anyway, yes. So Matthew, first of all, congrats on the podcast. If you do that to Matthew, he’ll kick off and report you. I’ll report you for spam. Yeah. So first of all, congrats on the podcast. It’s incredibly entertaining and the chemistry between you two is great to listen to. We’ve hidden our feud very well. Oh, brilliant. You’re a hit, man. That’s what the question says. Because of the enthusiasm you two have for the Hitman games, they decided to go grab one and two in the PS4 sales. Well, we’re glad to hear that. It’s good taste. But one quick question. Are there any annoying trends in the gaming industry you wished would go away? We reckon, Matthew. Oh, I mean… I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the… The… This new habit… It’s the Naughty Dog interactive cutscene where the action stops and then you walk around a nice place and there are some jokes. Box patting. I really hate that. It just doesn’t work for me at all. I find it incredibly smug. You know, where it’s just like, let the writers take a ride for a bit and you’re like, okay. You know, it’d be funny if in the middle of those jokes one of the clickers came in and like bit your face off. That would be a real shocker. But it basically says like, don’t worry, for the next half an hour we’re just going to be in jokes, Phil. I don’t really like that. In fact, I don’t like games that end on like a quiet downbeat note. I want the end of the game to be the most exciting bit because I’m an idiot and a child. All games should end like Platinum Games, where you basically have to fight God in space. I don’t want to go build up, build up, build up and then, you know, an hour from the end it’s like, now you’re going to fill in all your accountancy forms, which is what it feels like in some games. Because people are like, well, that’s deep, isn’t it, to end on a quiet note? And you’re like, no, it’s boring. I want to shoot Satan in the face. Is that too much to ask? I do think the idea that like The Last of Us Part 2 would have been better if it ended with you fight Ellie fighting God in space is a funny concept. Yeah, that would be amazing. It’s funny though, because I do remember your ox patting rant from the previous podcast about Uncharted 2. It’s like ever since then, they’ve been doubling down on ox patting. Yeah, it’s basically that. The other thing is big, nostalgic remasters of 6 out of 10 platforming games from the late 90s. Just leave them be. Let them rot in history. They exist as a warning to history. We’re not meant to bring them back. Yeah, so that’s a no to a Sly Cooper remaster from Matt Castle. I knew you’d somehow make that about slagging off 3D platformers from the 90s, but here we are. So I’ve got a couple. My first one is MOBA style character designs popping up in multiplayer shooters. I think this reached its nadir with that fucking Overwatch hamster in a ball. That was some bullshit. But I hate seeing it where it’s like, oh, it’s a dancing shoe, and it’s Australian, and it breathes fire. And just because you’ve basically made a Homer Simpson car of a character, it doesn’t mean it’s good. I don’t know. Even in Apex, it bothers me. I think the latest character is some sort of really explosive, heavy Australian guy. And I’m just like, oh, God. Also, Rory the dancing shoe is massively OP, so get rid of him. Yeah, exactly. His alt is off the charts, and it’s ruining the meta. Yeah, I can’t be doing with MOBA sort of character designs. I also think that open world games should be shorter. I’m sort of like, I don’t ever want to look at that lovely website, How Long to Beat. What a great website that is. You go on it, and it just like, you look up how threateningly long a game is going to be. If I ever see one that’s above 50 hours for the main story, I’m just like, oh, I just can’t play this. And that’s the reason I haven’t played Red Dead Redemption 2 this generation, because I looked at how long that game was, and I thought, I don’t have time. I need games to be shorter. So those are my Matthew. Good picks. Absolutely. So that’s the end of the podcast, Matthew. I’ve already explained where people can tweet us questions and thoughts on the podcast, and follow us for when the new episodes pop up, Back Page: pod. But Matthew, where can we follow you on Twitter? MrBazzle underscore pesto. And I do welcome DMs. I was only joking, especially when they’re like, we love the pod, you’re a legend. I’m like, yeah, great. Cheers. Yeah, flattery will get you everywhere with Matthew. Oh, yeah, it really does. We really appreciate the good feedback, actually. And if you’re listening on Apple and you want to leave us a review, we’d appreciate it. We have lots of lovely reviews already from people. Really greatly appreciated. Helps with visibility, helps with our speeding Claire Boulding’s Dog podcast, which is very important to me. And yeah, we’ll be back next week with the second half of this top 30 readings. So thank you very much for listening and goodbye. Bye for now.