Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. It’s a me. Ah, very good, Matthew. That hints a little bit about what this episode is about, which to be honest, if you’ve downloaded this, you’ll know anyway, because it’ll be in iTunes and all those places. Spoilers. Yeah. So Matthew, we have a guest for the first time. Katharine, would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, I’m Katharine Castle, the hardware editor of RPS. From my surname, you probably, I’m also Matthew’s wife. So yes, there are two castles in the world of video games. Yeah, that’s me. That can only be a good thing. More castles. Yes, castle crashes. I’m sure people have made that joke before. Sorry, it’s barely even a joke, to be honest. Trace amounts of humor detected. Katharine, I’m really happy to have you on. You are, to me, like one of the most underrated writers in games media. That’s very kind. Well, I always used to love commissioning your work on PC Gamer, and I know that you kind of work really hard covering numerous graphics cards and benchmarking tools and the like, and SSDs on Rock Paper Shotgun. A lot of graphics cards. Yeah, and so you kind of have a house full of peripherals. That’s back when it was legal for me to visit the castle household. That’s what I noted, the sheer amount of keyboards and mice. Yes, yeah, I think we probably could serve a small land party with peripherals with the number of bits and pieces we’ve got in our spare room stacked up. And boxes. It’s like the Argos warehouse in our house. Yeah, our cats like it, though. They are very fond of the box forts that we construct every now and again. And maybe we should have a land party when COVID’s over. That would be fun. So Katharine, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself. So you’ve worked on MCV in the past, right? So you’re kind of like industry side, then went consumer side. Tell us a bit about your sort of professional history. Yeah, so I started as a tech journalist a little bit before MCV. I worked for a, it was sort of a combination of a website and a magazine, both with different names, which is confusing. The magazine was called Computer Shopper and the website was called Expert Reviews, very original name. So yeah, I was a tech journalist on that for about four years, kind of reviewing all sorts of bits of consumer tech. Spent most of my time reviewing very cheap smartphones. The number of smartphones I’ve reviewed in my time, I still get kind of mild flashbacks every time there’s a new Apple or a Samsung launch. You’ve been in the room with a celebrity when they announced a phone, right? Well, actually, I was just outside the room. Henry Cavill. Henry Cavill, I agree. This is already not shaping up to be the strongest anecdote. Well, that’s the thing. We were all in a queue to basically get a review sample after this press conference. And then they suddenly stopped handing out, they suddenly stopped handing them out and said, Henry Cavill’s coming, you know, he’s on stage now, kind of introducing this phone that we’ve literally just sort of been sitting through an hour, an hour long press conference. And they were trying to get us all to go back in this room to kind of watch Henry Cavill talk about this phone. It was the one that they got both him and I think, Gal Gadot to kind of mark it. Scarlett Johansson and stuff. Yeah, there were sort of quite big name celebrities associated with this phone, but we were all in this queue and there were so many journalists and I was quite near the front and I didn’t really want to lose my place in the queue as much as I would have loved to have seen Henry Cavill. Yeah, sort of aka, you know, The Witcher and Superman. That’s like, do I want to see Henry Cavill or do I want to get the mini burgers from the free bar? It was pretty much that decision. So I unfortunately had to stay in the queue. I chose to stay in the queue and miss Henry Cavill. But yes, within sort of, you know, not exactly spitting distance, but almost, of Henry Cavill. Yeah. So if this was my girlfriend, she would have definitely picked Henry Cavill every single time, even if I was also at the venue and with the mini burgers. But yeah, so I did that for about four years. And then I moved over to MCV, which is, for those who don’t know it, is kind of the video games industry’s kind of like business magazine. So it’s kind of very, very much B2B. But that’s also kind of, the Computer Shopper had been like a monthly magazine, but this one was weekly. It was weekly deadlines and it was horrendous. Yeah, whenever you told me about this, the idea of a weekly deadline. I mean, I suppose I work online now where you have daily deadlines. Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of like, as you say, even though having worked online before, which is, yeah, every day is basically your deadline, having to basically corral a fresh batch of interviews, features, and we did a lot of original news reporting, mostly taken from the interviews that we did every week because there was just no, there wasn’t time to do anything else that was separate. But yeah, doing that every week and trying to get marketing people and sales people to just kind of actually respond to your emails, that was tough. That was definitely a different set of challenges to working on a consumer tech mag. Yeah. Yeah, you didn’t get a chance to play many games in that role, I guess. Well, we sort of, yeah, I never really sort of played games for review or anything like that. We sort of got occasionally, if there was, I think we tended to get a lot of extra peripherals. If people would send us merchandise to include, we had like a couple of- Great, the fun bit of video games. We had like a couple of pages of like, because this magazine was largely going out to retailers and things like that. It’s like, here’s all the game tap that you can fill your stores with. So yeah, we sometimes got sent that sort of stuff. But yeah, we didn’t get sent a huge amount of games. Luckily, it did actually go bi-weekly. Shortly after I arrived, it sort of became the kind of, it’s still tough doing a bi-weekly magazine, but it’s definitely better than weekly. The mega nightmare, I used to think, I pitted you a lot of the time with these deadlines, but the one that used to kill me was when you were doing the, was it the mini-mag at Gamescom? Yeah, oh man. So we, yeah, we had like a deal with the people at Gamescom that MCV would be like the official magazine of Gamescom, which meant doing a daily magazine. We had to make a magazine in a day. So we’d be at Gamescom, which was just like, it was actually nightmarish. Like we’d be sat in, because we didn’t, we’d be sat in like Yuki’s stand, which is kind of like the UK consumer trade body. That’s a nice stand to be fair. That’s a nice Gamescom stand. Yeah, but like we’d be sat there on a tiny table. There were three of us on MCV, and we’d be sat there on this kind of like, a table for basically one person making a magazine. While the rest of the industry was having all of their, like, you know, their Gamescom drinks. It was like, oh, come on. Because Yu-Ki would always do their stand as kind of like, it would look like a British fate. So it would have like a little white fence around it, and they’d be bunting everywhere. And, you know, I don’t know, maybe someone dressed up as a Morris dancer, which is just like something you do not want to see when you’re trying to make a magazine. No, yeah, we sort of had like really packed mornings. We sort of packed in as many interviews as we could, and just sort of like, yeah, kind of scraped any bit of quote that we could, just to kind of turn it into a page news story. I mean, these were tiny magazines. They were kind of like A5. So they weren’t like normal size mags, but yeah, even so, it was, yeah, that was an experience I don’t wish to repeat. Yeah, that’s fair enough. Yeah, so how about working on Rock Paper Shotgun, Katharine? What is your sort of like day-to-day look like? So this is actually, yeah, so I’ve sort of gone back almost to what I was doing before on Computer Shopper and Expert Reviews, kind of like consumer tech again, but kind of with a much more kind of strong kind of PC gaming angle. I don’t have to do any smartphones, which is good. That was my one thing. As long as I don’t have to review another smartphone, I’m good. So yeah, I now review kind of all manner of graphics cards, SSDs, mice, monitors, basically any sort of like, if it’s a lump of plastic to do with your PC, that’s what I test every day. I do get to write about games occasionally, which is quite nice. It’s quite a nice balance of tech stuff and games. But yeah, mainly it’s testing hardware and benchmarking. And you have to deal with the ludicrous naming conventions of PC gaming hardware, which I’m constantly bewildered by the numbering systems of like graphics cards and CPUs. I have no idea what it’s really based on. And also peripherals that have lots of LEDs stuck on them. It’s all about the RGB lighting. Peripherals named after deadly snakes, which is just such a terrible name for a mouse because it’s the one thing you don’t want to put your hand on, it’s a snake. And they’re like, here’s an adder. And you’re like, no, like, psychologically, it’s a huge leap for me. It’s not even an adder half the time. They’ve kind of got, they’ve, you know, they’ve got like death adders and very, you know, kind of like quite serious kind of, I don’t know. They feel like, yeah, lethal bits of… They should name them after things you want to touch, like, you know, a lovely soft cat’s back or something. Well, you know, I mean, despite the silly name, Matthew, it’s a bloody good mouse, you know. The death adders top, I’ve got one myself. It is good. But yeah, would I like to, you know, explain to my parents what the name of this mouse is? Probably not. No, definitely not. Yeah. So, Katharine, tell me a bit about your sort of gaming background. Like, what were your sort of primary formats growing up? And, you know, what do you sort of play these days? So, I was very much in a Nintendo household when I was growing up. My two older brothers, they had a NES, pretty much kind of, I think they, I was asking them about this, because as far as I’m concerned, like it’s basically been around for as long as I’ve been alive. And I think, yeah, they got it probably like a couple of years after I was born. So, yeah, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve, there’s always been a NES in my house, as far back as I can remember. And like, you know, they had a Game Boy as well. So yeah, I mean, at the time, obviously, I was far too young to like actually play games properly. But I used to like watch them play games, like on Saturday mornings in our tiny kitchen TV. And kind of, you know, thought like, oh man, they look so cool. I played like a lot of the openings of games because I was either too, you know, too young or too stupid to actually work out how to play them properly. Because, you know, there were no walkthroughs back in those days. Well, also there were NES games. And NES games are like just like, you know, this is going to be awful and you will never finish it. Hard or broken, you can never tell. But yeah, so I was kind of like, I was fed like a very, you know, a strong diet of Mario and Zelda games from like quite an early age. And, you know, that only kind of like grew as the years went on, you know, we eventually got SNES and, you know, I got my own Game Boy and then we got the M64. Like we never owned like a huge number of games, if only because like, you know, back then they were like properly expensive. And, you know, you only really ever got one for like Christmas and birthdays. But we got like, you know, most of the big first party Nintendo games were what I kind of played growing up. We did have a PC in the house as well. I think around like 1994, again, this is kind of based on what my brothers have told me. I think they got it when Doom 2 came out, back in the days when, you know, you couldn’t just launch a game from Windows. You had to kind of go into MS-DOS prompt. And I remember kind of like, whenever I wanted to play something, bearing in mind I was probably about six or seven around this time trying to play Doom 2. I sort of always had to get like someone to kind of boot it up for me because I just didn’t understand how to use MS-DOS prompt. But yeah, we sort of, we had like a, again, like a kind of a handful of PC games, like you’re Doom 2, Theme Park, Warcraft 2, and Magic Carpet is the one I always remember that no one ever understood how to play Magic Carpet. I will say that your MS-DOS prompt thing is actually triggering a memory of mine, which is I remember my dad paint, like blue-tacked onto the wall, like C backslash, backslash, X-wing backslash, backslash, like B-wing or whatever. And like, so I knew how to do it without getting him to help me boot it, basically. That was like kid-proofing, that was. I do remember feeling quite proud when I sort of eventually, you know, after many tries and efforts to, you know, actually remember the combination of how to, how to kind of play Doom by myself without having to get anyone to come do it for me. I remember sort of feeling like, yes, I finally conquered the PC. But yeah, so he sort of- I think, I think I literally had games from that era that I didn’t know how to make work. And so just thought, oh, well, that’s that then, this is broken. We just had games we never played because I couldn’t work out how to use that. Yeah. Yeah, so Katharine, were you a big Smash Bros. player growing up? Well, kind of, yes. And that like, I had, you know, while I had two older brothers, I always had a younger brother as well. So there were like four of us for, you know, particularly when Super Smash Bros. first came out in the N64, like that was prime sibling, you know, multiplayer times. And that, you know, we also had GoldenEye as well, Perfect Dark. And that was, yeah, kind of one of our, one of our big multiplayer games. Yeah, I raised this because I think it was like a couple of Christmases ago, we thought we’d play, you know, you two and me and my partner would play Smash Bros. Ultimate on the Switch, just for a bit of fun. And you absolutely fucking demolished us. And it was like an American sports movie or something, like the natural, and then I immediately just twigged, oh, she has three brothers, like, that’s exactly why you have been in the like the fires of learning how to like master Smash Bros. Yeah, it was basically, you know, like sink or swim in those times. And I was, you know, a prime, prime competitive kind of environment in that, like, often I would be beaten by in basically in anything it was, if we played anything together, the winners were pretty much in order of age. So I’d never really come first or second, I was always near number three. Or, you know, if I was particularly lucky, I’d always come last or things like that. So, yeah, I sort of I had to learn how to kind of play these games in order to to try and, you know, claw back the odd victory every now and again. Yeah, a tale of child ship. OK, great. So the one last thing I kind of wanted to ask about before we jump into talking a bit more about Super Mario 3D World, which is the thing we’re going to discuss the most in this podcast, but also Mario a bit generally, you two met at an event for a kind of fairly obscure Wii RPG. Is that right? The last story? Can you talk a bit about this? Yeah, it was an RPG for Wii made by Sakaguchi of Final Fantasy fame. And he was, to promote it, they brought him over to do a talk at BAFTA, kind of like My Life in Games and like the making of The Last of Us. I think Keza McDonnell posted it. Yeah, she did. And we were covering it in that issue on Endgamer. Was it Nintendo? No, it would have been, maybe it was an even Nintendo gamer at that point, either way. And we’d done like an interview with him, and as part of that, the PRs were like, oh, if you want, you can get your ticket to come and see this thing. And it was an evening event in London, and it wasn’t actually going to benefit the mag. I so nearly didn’t go to this event, which now seems like crazy to me. But it was like, do I really want to go? I don’t know if I can be bothered. But I think I probably only went because it let me get out of work early. Yeah. And then we just ended up sitting next to each other at this interview event. Yeah. This was even pre me working at Computer Shopper. I was working for a Japanese newswire at the time called Gigi Press doing, it was a very boring job talking to analysts and stuff. But I also had the scope to do basically anything that was Anglo-Japanese related. You know, to write news stories for the newswire in Japan. And I basically kind of jumped on this as like, finally there’s something I can write about. So, you know, like kind of there wasn’t a huge amount of, you know, Anglo and, you know, kind of like Britain slash Japan, you know, Japan related news going on. So I sort of jumped on this as a kind of like, I can finally do a proper news story rather than just collecting very boring comments about the gold market every day. So, yeah, as Matthew said, like we just sort of happened to sit next to each other. I think sort of at the time, I was, because I was kind of quite bored in my job, I was sort of trying to kind of make freelance inquiries to various magazines. And I was sort of, you know, I actually recognized Matthew. I think, yeah, I think it was Nintendo Gamer at the time. And I think a friend had put me in touch with someone on Edge, and they sort of said, you know, you know, Nintendo Gamer’s just had a big redesign. You know, maybe try and, you know, they might be looking for people to write some stuff for them and… Classic Edge deflection. But yeah, and so I actually sort of recognized Matthew from his picture in the magazine. It’s like, oh man, it’s that guy. It’s him. Wow. I mean, yeah, what a shocker. He’s so memorable from his photo. But yeah, I sort of, it was sort of one of those… It wasn’t kind of starstruck, but I was like, I’ve got to act cool. I’ve got to not stare because he probably, I don’t know. I didn’t really know very much about the world of games journalism at all at that point. And I sort of, you know, didn’t want to come across as like this kind of like weird, starey girl at this event. So I just kind of tried to play it cool. And then, yeah, that’s funny because after the event, I turned to Matt Pellett, who was also there and said, said, oh, that weird, starey girl seemed nice. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, I think we ended up talking quite a lot afterwards about Skyward Sword. And I remember, because I think I was, I sort of had read the, the Edge review, which I didn’t know that you’d written at the time. I was saying like, oh, I just don’t think it’s a ten, you know, like. Yeah, great. Did you just drink, just drink like a glass of wine immediately and Matthew will walk off? That’s a very nice story. It was a very bold choice of you to have Sakaguchi later officiate your wedding. One I feel very much, yeah, made the day very special. Well, thank you very much for the little breakdown of your sort of career and taste there, Katharine. I think that was, yeah, it was definitely, it was cool to hear about that stuff. So we’re going to take a short break and then we’re going to come back and talk about Super Mario 3D World and Bowser’s Fury and a bit about Mario 3D in general. Welcome back, the two of you. I’m not used to welcoming. I’m not used to welcoming back two people, so I got a bit frazzled by the thought of it. So we thought in this episode, we’d talk about Super Mario 3D World. So this is a Wii U game released in 2013 that is now being re-released on Switch with what is apparently like a brand new game attached to it, albeit not a very long one, according to the previews we’ve read. So yeah, but by the time you’re listening to this episode, this will be out and you can play it on your Switch at home. The Super Mario 3D World, we’ve discussed it a bit in past episodes and yeah, so the kind of general gist of it was Matthew says, boo, and Samuel says, good. But yeah, Katharine, you’re our guest. Like, what’s your take on this game? Did you play it at the time when it came out Wii U? I did it, I actually reviewed it. This was one of the few games, or certainly few, one of the only Mario games I’ve actually reviewed kind of professionally. This was back when I was in a computer shop and expert reviews, kind of doing it for the website, because they wouldn’t allow Nintendo games to go into a largely PC magazine, understandably, no matter how much I kind of tried to persuade them to put in a tiny half page review of a Nintendo game. They wouldn’t have it. But yes, I did actually say, yeah, I did actually review it back. I gave it four out of five. I’m probably more on Matthew’s side of the fence here. Oof, wounding. I’m sorry. But yeah, I think like my verdict at the time was that it never quite breaks out of the shadow of Super Mario 3D Land, which was on 3DS, but it’s still, you know, it is still fundamentally like a great Mario game, both for, you know, if you’re playing it alone or with friends. And I think, you know, that still holds true. I think because like 3D Land, I really like 3D Land on the 3DS, and this felt like it was a kind of bigger, shinier version of that. Like, I think it was trying to maybe combine, like, you know, the kind of the popular format of like the new Super Mario Brothers, of the 2D Mario games with like the big 3D blockbuster kind of ambition of your Mario galaxies and sort of thing. But yeah, it did, I think it, you know, it did sort of suffer because it came, you know, in terms of being on console, it did come after Galaxy 2. Like, you know, it is following, you know, I think Matthew said this before, that like it was following like one of the best games of all time. So it’s kind of like, it’s a sort of tough position to be in, I think, you know, being in that kind of like, you know, if say there had been like another big console Mario game in between that and Galaxy 2, then maybe, you know, it might have felt like a bit more of an event sort of thing. But I think like, I think my main problem with it, as I say, it’s still like a really fun, you know, I sort of actually been replaying a little bit of it this week. And it is a really fun Mario game and it’s great. I think I largely played it by myself at the time, but you know, I’ve been playing with Matthew this this week and it’s, it is like, you know, it is really good fun. And the music still is still brilliant. Just like the sheer amount of ideas that it has. And you know, the number that it throws at you is just really good fun. But like at the time, I just remember feeling like it was, it felt like too much like a handheld game. I remember in particular, like the Captain Toad sections, you know, I just felt like they would have been such like the perfect thing for the 3DS because there was sort of like little kind of cuboid levels that you’d, you know, spin around and change the camera to find sort of stars and stuff. And I just sort of like, I just felt like, you know, if only there was like a 3D slider, this would look amazing in 3D on the 3DS. Did they have a port? Captain Toad did 3DS. Yeah, they did. They sort of, they released it on, they did Treasure Tracker on the Wii U and then later sort of did a Switch and 3DS release at the same time. So it did eventually get there. But yeah, sort of like very much after the fact. But yeah, I think kind of because it was, again, at the time it came out, it felt like it was being pulled in like two different directions. But yeah. I think that, I think that like, if I can pick up on what I think Matthew’s and perhaps your Katharine, your kind of main sort of like point on why this doesn’t compare to the likes of Galaxy. It’s the gulf in imagination, isn’t it? And like the ambition and like level design, which I don’t contest. Like I don’t actually think this is a better game than Galaxy. I think that it’s a really, really good meat and potatoes Mario game. And actually, as I was doing a bit of research on what the Bowser’s Fury element includes, Joe Scribbles and IGN also made the point that this is kind of part of the Mario Bros 2D lineage, more than it is part of the Galaxy Mario 3D, sorry, Super Mario and Super Mario 4 lineage, you know. Yeah. So do you think that’s fair? Is that the difference here, like the kind of ambition and the kind of escalation? There’s some of that. I think there’s this weird thing that you got from some of the, I can’t remember which of us are us, but it’s definitely been raised that basically they made Mario Galaxy, which loads of people love, loads of journalists love. If you love your 3D platformers and you’re very familiar with 3D platformers, you will know that that is a beautiful, almost peerless game. But sales-wise, obviously it did really well, but it did nothing compared to new Super Mario Bros. And I think that lodged with Nintendo, and Nintendo have had this slight bee in their bonnet about is it a Mario game everyone can enjoy? I think that’s actually the metric by which they rate things. And so despite having made Mario Galaxy, I think they were constantly trying to make a more accessible game. And I just got this sense that somewhere there was the feeling that Galaxy was too much to be accessible. Because I don’t know if you remember, when Galaxy 2 came out, it came with a… I don’t know if it was in-game or a separate DVD, but there was a video series on how to play Mario Galaxy to try and explain. They were like, oh, one of the big challenges in this game is people getting over the initial hump of how to control, you know, how to manoeuvre in 3D space. It’s too confusing for people. So the logic of a Mario that sits more between 3D and 2D, you know, the movement in this game is not fully analogue. It’s eight-directional. It’s, you know, it’s D-pad movement, which is one of my big problems with it, because you just lose the grace of 3D Mario, you know, the character that initially showed us how good an analogue stick could be. It seemed perverse to me to be stepping back. But then that move wasn’t aimed at me, you know, it was aimed at… They wanted to make a Mario that could really bust out and be as big as New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, which, you know, they’re entitled to do. But I think that’s the… maybe the problem at the heart of this game. Yeah, it feels like that’s a real hangover of the kind of Wii era, where, you know, where, like, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, I believe, did have a setting that let players to let the computer take over if they got stuck on a section. So this is kind of what Nintendo was thinking at the time. And, yeah, I think Mario Galaxy was still a mega selling game, but not compared to, yeah, it was like three times more. Yeah, exactly. And with that, I just think it comes to limitation. But there’s also, like, the aesthetic of it, the side on view, it just limits some of the things that they can do visually with that space. I would say that replaying it this week, I was struck by, like, the density of ideas. I think it has as many, like, mechanics and ideas as a Galaxy, but they’re just presented in a bit more sort of stripped back, kind of bare way. Like, I think Galaxy has, like, a much more magical wrapping on it. Yeah. What do you make of it then, though, replaying it, Katharine? What kind of stood out as, like, parts that you thought it did well versus other 3D Marios? I think, certainly, like, playing it in co-op definitely changes the whole dynamic of both kind of the pacing of those levels and just kind of the sheer chaos that comes into you. Like, I think it’s actually a lot more fun in that, you know, particularly, like, we’ve sort of had this growing rivalry about who gets the crown at the end, which, like, through each level you kind of accrue a certain number of points, you know, depending on how many enemies you kill or, you know, stomp on the head of and how many coins you get and how many green stars, you know, you get points for all of these things. It’s all about the green stars. That 4,000 point bonus. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and kind of at the end of each level, all those points are racked up and the winner gets this kind of crown that they wear in the next level. And you can lose it. You can either kind of get it knocked off your head if you get hit by an enemy or if you die within the level, it then doesn’t come back. But if you then… That’s good. I like that because that’s like destroy the crown so no one can enjoy it. It’s better that there’s no crown rather than the threat of the crown goes to the other person. It’s like Crusader Kings or something. If you then bring the crown to the end of the level, you get another 5,000 point. Bonus, which is worth mega points. Having that extra competition to spice up a level, that definitely brings an extra kind of energy to it. It’s especially fun if you force the player who doesn’t have the crown has to refer to the other player as your majesty. Only you do that. I’d forgotten some of the power ups in 3D World. I’d forgotten how much fun the cat suit is. Oh, they’re great. I think that helps give… Mario, he jumps, he does wall jumps. Mario levels have always had a certain height to them. But I think the cat suit, because you can climb up any surface to an extent, that opens up the level, or it feels like it opens it up a bit more than traditional platforming sections where you’d be stuck in a bit that you had to jump out of. The double cherry, how has that not made more of an appearance over the years? That’s a really fun, playful power up. It’s quite a sad power up because it raises the same questions as the prestige about which Mario is the real Mario and which Mario is in the box. Shrouding as Mario. I’m glad that it is getting another outing on the Switch because I think it is a game that is a lot of fun and it deserves to have more people play it, much like most of the Wii U’s catalogue. I’m glad that it is getting another outing. While it’s not an all-time great Mario for me, there is something about it, particularly in co-op, particularly now when we’re turning more towards co-op games more than ever, while it’s not as magical as a Galaxy in single player, there is a magic to it in co-op. I completely agree. I actually thought, Matthew, that you might have been quite cool on the cat power, because it does make you incredibly powerful and it turns the level a bit chaotic. It’s okay. I think Katharine’s right about the height and stuff, and that’s fine. I guess the problem I have with it is I find the climbing quite not very enjoyable as a Mario movement. I was always very sore in this game that Mario lost the triple jump, and the idea that they took away a jump and then the big power at the heart of it wasn’t really about jumping. It was about climbing, which isn’t a particularly exciting motion. I don’t know. It’s funny. I tell you what I do like. I really like the diagonal downward pounce that he does just because you’re an absolute missile when you do it. And there’s quite a lot of level design and challenges where there are like tiny gaps. You can kind of fire Mario through, which is quite fun. That I like. That’s definitely caused me a lot of accidental deaths, sort of accidentally hitting that button. I’ve sort of plummeted to my doom down many holes. A death plummet move is always a gamble. Yeah. And I like that too. I think the cat… I like that you only ever really feel about 80% in charge of how the cat Mario moves. I sort of also like that it gives Mario a bit of a sort of like Primark onesie, like sofa masturbator energy. Less so the other characters, but Mario in particular. Anyway, yeah, sorry to disgust you all there. So I was wondering what you two made of the Bowser’s Fury content they’ve talked about. So it’s quite complex by the sound of it. You pick it as a separate game from the main menu, and you have like an AI companion at times, and there’s like this black ooze and a more open world with more open worldy kind of level bits. And there’s also got the kind of Breath of the Wild blood moon element where Bowser goes kaiju at midnight, and you can become giant cat Mario. Have you done much reading about this? Does it sound interesting to you as an additional element? Yeah, like because it’s new, and like any new Mario, I obviously want to play and get excited about. Like I’ve avoided too many like deep dives into it. I’ve read some stuff. I actually haven’t watched much because I want to kind of play it for myself. But it doesn’t look much like 3D World, you know, in that it’s… And correct me if I’m wrong, like I don’t think you can do like four player co-op in it. It’s a bit more of a sort of single player thing. The fact that it’s like one massive world is a bit more like Odyssey or like Sunshine 64, that kind of thinking. I really like the dual state idea that there’s like, does this maniac can turn up at some point and make everything much harder? But I also get the feeling that there’s certain things you can only do when he is, when Bowser is in his like giant state, like there’s bits you can only get to or things you can only interact with. So it’s like a fun risk reward thing. I mean, I’m super intrigued by it for sure. Yeah, same. I like, yeah, same here. I mean, just whenever they do these kind of re-releases, they tend to add some new elements to them, right? Or at least collect all the DLC. So yeah, I’m sort of curious too. Maybe they’re using it as a kind of like sort of experimental, sort of like, I don’t know, sandbox for if people like this, maybe we’ll make a full game of it, you know? Yeah, I mean, like, I’m assuming this isn’t just what the team’s been doing since Odyssey. Like, they’ve been making like a, that whole Mario team has been making a Bowser, a one Bowser level for a add-on of Super Mario 3D World. You know, I really want them to do like another Odyssey or another Odyssey-esque game. So maybe this was just to like keep them busy in like, you know, between big projects or something. But yeah, it’s annoying. I think if there are very few series where I would consider putting down 50 quid for an extra three hours, or I think that’s what people say, it’s roughly three to six hours or something. But like, I will buy this because of this. I feel like I don’t have any control over that. I almost wish that 3D World was like a parallel series to like the likes of Odyssey. So, you know, in the same way that New Super Mario Bros. was like a parallel game to the Galaxy games. I feel like then maybe it would seem, you know, it’s relative like lack of sort of imagination would seem less egregious, perhaps. Yeah, I mean, like, it must be very, very difficult for Nintendo with the Wii U generation to like extract any lessons from that particular generation of console just because it sold so few. You can’t really compare it to anything. You can’t say, well, what does this teach us about the appetites of people? Because they only sold whatever like 13 million of them or something. You know, they sold like fewer Wii U. They sold about a third the number of Wii U’s as they did individual Mario games on the Wii. I mean, that’s bad, you know. And so they can’t, you know, I imagine their original idea, you know, they probably made this as a test of like, is there more of an appetite for this? We don’t know. I mean, if Super Mario 3D World goes on to sell, you know, 15 million, 20 million on Switch or whatever, which can and does happen quite often for these games. Maybe that will be it. Maybe this will be the point where Mario branches into two 3D series and, you know, you’ll get Kat Mario forever more. You’ll be a very happy man. Yeah, I think like, particularly now that there’s not that, you know, not that distinction between like handheld Mario and console Mario. Like, yeah, I definitely would like, I’d like to see a return to this kind of Mario as a palette cleanser to those like big, you know, to your Odysseys and all that sort of stuff. I would definitely much prefer this to another new Super Mario Brothers for sure, definitely. Because I don’t know what it is about those new Super Mario Brothers games, but I just didn’t get on with them at all. They’re probably like my least favourite type of Mario game. Yeah, Matthew has dunked on them in the past. I think like my sort of feeling is that I, years ago reached the limits of what the joy that 2D Mario can give me. And other people I know do not feel that way. But yeah, that’s kind of how I feel about it. Is that your sort of take on it too, Matthew? Yeah, I just think I’ve been spoiled by just like the pure imagination of 3D Mario. You know, I think 2D Mario like began that innovation arc, you know, through the NES and the SNES. Those games were getting increasingly more complex and interesting, and they all added something new. So, but then the pitch of New Super Mario Bros. seems to be, oh, this is going to be really pure like those old games. And you’re like, well, those old games were innovative. That’s what sort of defined them. So this idea of like, well, it’s the iconography and it’s the feel, and that’s kind enough. And that’s fine for some people. There’s lots of people I really respect who absolutely adore these games and think they’re masterpieces of, you know, design and control. And that’s absolutely fine. But I find them so flat compared to Super Mario Brothers 3 or Super Mario World or Yoshi’s Island. You know, that’s actually the heritage. These don’t feel like the next step in that at all. They’re kind of, I don’t know, they’re like my least favorite bit of like Mario nostalgia where just showing you stuff from old Mario is considered enough. That doesn’t really do it for me. Well, it’s that harsh criteria that we look forward to hearing on this podcast. So after this, there aren’t that many Wii U games left to be ported to Switch. So Katharine, I wanted to ask you, like, is there anything on your wishlist from Wii U or even like earlier Nintendo formats that you think deserves to make its way to Switch in an enhanced re-release? Or do you think we’re nearly done? I think we’re definitely nearly done. Like I was looking through the games that I, you know, I owned on Wii U because I was sort of, I wasn’t in a position to review games while the Wii U was like, you know, it was probably like the worst period of Nintendo to actually be, you know, in a professional capacity to kind of review. But it did mean that I did actually kind of own a large portion of the Wii U’s library. Like, yeah, they have already done like a lot of what I would want, you know, would have wanted, you know, they’ve done, you know, Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze, they’ve done Horror Warriors, they’ve done Bayonetta 2, Pitman 3 just came out. You know, they’ve even like, they’ve even plumbed the obscure depths of, you know, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, the kind of fire emblem slash Shin Megami Tensei crossover, which was a very strange game. But and yet that’s, that’s, you know, that’s got a Switch re-release. I think like the one that would, the one that I’m waiting for is Xenoblade Chronicles X. I would love to see that game kind of get another, another win, you know, another, another girl on Switch. I felt like it’s, it’s, it is probably my least favourite of the three Xenoblade games just because it, it sort of didn’t have that core story or set of characters that, you know, they, that you get in one and two. And that dreadful music when you’re in the base. Yeah. Yeah. It had a very, very strange rap kind of soundtrack, very, very unlike the excellent scores of the other two games. But I would like to see it get another go. If only because I think, you know, the fact that Xenoblade has had a bit of a renaissance on Switch, like it is like the missing piece of the puzzle. Like it’s a really interesting game because it’s sort of like it’s the Xenoblade that you know and love in that, you know, you’ve got this big expansive worlds, this mad soundtrack. And yet, you know, like the second half of it all, you know, it sort of turns into this like giant mech game, which is quite unlike the other Xenoblades. And I only ever really like I still haven’t finished it on the Wii U. Like I think I got about three quarters of the way through it. If only because I sort of I’m mildly traumatised by having to review it for I think I reviewed it for Games Master as a freelancer. And I had like four days to review it. It was a really short turnaround. And I sort of broke myself trying to do it because I was sort of I was determined to like get the mech. But you had to do this like really obscure, you know, you had to do basically a set of side quests. And it was one of these. The last one I had to do was just like this collect a lot of materials, which on the map are just kind of orbs of glowing light, you don’t know what it is until you until you run over it. And I had to pick these, you know, this sort of certain thing, which I just didn’t know where it spawned. And obviously, because it was before release, and you know, the only sort of walkthroughs were in Japanese, and I just couldn’t work out how to do it. And I sort of like had a mild breakdown, kind of like, I need to get this copy done for Monday. And it was, you know, like at this point, it was like Saturday afternoon. Because yeah, I sort of had Yeah, that was a that was a fun weekend. It was, as I say, it was mildly traumatic. I’m sort of, yeah, still mildly traumatised by that experience. And I would quite like to relive it. Not relive it, just like, you know, do it at my own pace. That would be nice. I feel like mechs are a bit like not, they’re not like massively mainstream, but there may be a bit more mainstream than they were, you know, seven years ago. Like, it feels like whenever a mech anime comes up on Netflix, people go nuts for it and watch it. I think people are more into mechs, maybe. That’s my vibe. It’s the kind of like, it’s the reason that it was a bit more mech-heavy, maybe. Like, wasn’t Xenosaga a bit mechy? Maybe there’s a little bit of that in there? I don’t know. It’s part of a lineage of games with Xeno in the title, right? It’s definitely in their DNA, for sure. I mean, even sort of Xenoblade 1, you know, it did have big robots in it. You just didn’t pilot them. So, yeah, this sort of felt like, you know, they’re, yeah, almost kind of going back to their roots a little bit and actually giving you the robot to mess about in. But it’s sort of, it’s mad. And then it sort of turned what these, you know, these massive worlds were on foot. Like, you know, you think that adding a giant robot into the mix would just make them feel really small. But actually, like, suddenly then, like, you know, you became just as small as you were as a tiny human on the foot. Like, this whole other layer of these worlds kind of like opened up when you got the mech, which is kind of like, you know, that’s pretty impressive to pull off, I think. So, yeah, I think that’s probably like the one that’s top of my list. Like, obviously, like, the other big ones that they haven’t done yet are the two Zelda games, Twilight Princess and Wind Waker HD. I feel like those are kind of like, they must be in the works somewhere, particularly as there’s like a big Zelda birthday coming up. Yeah, that feels like a dead cert, doesn’t it? And like, the question is whether they sell them together or separately. And you’d hope they just sell them together for like 50 quid. I think people would be fine paying that. With throwing a Skyward Sword remake. Yeah, definitely like a Skyward Sword remake. Like, those three sort of seem destined to be re-released on Switch, I think. But yeah, like apart from those, like I think, you know, the only other games that might be notable for a re-release are like, you know, you are kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel in that you’ve got like Paper Mario Color Splash, which is a bit, you know, it’s a fine Paper Mario game, but it’s not like a kind of, you know, I wouldn’t be like, oh yes, I’ll replay it on Switch because it was so great on, you know, Wii U or, I don’t know, sort of, you know, Star Fox Zero, which is just, was just awful and I don’t think deserves another outing. And yeah, like… Not even if they revamped the controls for Star Fox Zero, would that make it any better, do you think? I don’t know. I think… It just feels so, it feels so old. We were looking at it last night, weren’t we? It’s just, it’s so… I don’t know if that just idea was fully delivered back when they did it and it just doesn’t have a place. I don’t know. It just is so, so flat. That’s a weird series. They just have never quite figured out what to do with after the N64 era. Exactly. I sort of like, one experience I reflect on fondly is the ghost hunting mini game in Nintendo Land. Oh yeah. That would be quite a fun one to play on Switch if they could salvage something from Nintendo Land which is basically just like another version of Mario Party. Yeah, I was sort of thinking like, you know, yeah, Nintendo Land would be a good thing. But it’s sort of so uniquely tied to the gamepad. I wonder sort of how it would work on, you know, when you don’t have that second screen. It’s things like that that you feel like, oh, you know, if only we could play that again. But then you realise that actually like, yeah, it’s got some actually kind of crucial Wii U gamepad mechanic that wouldn’t really work. The question you end up asking yourself is if only Nintendo hadn’t made the Wii U. No, no, I am, yeah, there’s, there are many examples of games that are like, you know, have that kind of those native elements, but there’s, clearly they found a way to make most of them work on Switch. And yeah, yeah, I think it is cool that they’ve managed to mobilise and get most of those games across so people can actually enjoy them for the first time. I never thought they’d do Tokyo Mirage Sessions. I think they’ve made a massive mistake with that one by not putting Fire Emblem or Shin Megami Tensei in the title. Well, they sort of did. The full name of the game, which is, it’s mad, but it’s like Tokyo Mirage Sessions Sharp, as in the musical, you know, the music notation, Sharp, not a hashtag, FE which, you know, it’s so, like, that is the Fire Emblem nod, but it’s so kind of… Who abbreviates Fire Emblem to FE? Oh, God, I love me some FE. Fire Emblem? Oh, right, no, OK. Matthew, what about you when it comes to Wii U? Do you feel like we’re about there, or are the Zelda ports basically… Yeah, I think the Zelda ports are like the big leftovers. Yeah, it’s… There’s nothing that sort of jumps out from my time, and they really have brought so much of it across. I mean, it’s… If you’re a kind of completionist, completist Nintendo collector, this generation has been a nightmare, because you basically had to buy the last generation again, which kind of sucked. But, yeah, like… I’m very much on the Zelda front. I mean, the Wind Waker port on… or the Wind Waker remake even on Wii U was absolutely beautiful. Again, we booted out last night as well, and it looks lovely. If they could get that, like, you know, 60 frames, that would be nice. It just fits the style of it, you know. It’s such a beautifully animated game, the way the water moves and everything. I think that would really… that would actually become extra special. I’d rather the Wind Waker port. The Twilight Princess HD was pretty basic, I thought, as an actual port, and kind of… I don’t know. I didn’t get as much out of it a second time as I did the first time. I don’t think it was made by Nintendo that Twilight hit a Princess port either, right? I think an Australian developer might have ported it. It certainly doesn’t… Did they get Grezzo to do it? Because they did the Ocarina of Time 3D. I can’t remember whether it was Grezzo had anything to do with it. Perhaps I’m just spilling misinformation here. No, I looked it in and thought, you don’t have the immediately… Like, both versions of Wind Waker look amazing for slightly different reasons, with the colour palette and stuff, but you definitely get the feeling that that remake was quite deluxe. And the fact that it has the small gameplay tweak of, oh, you can sell your boat quicker across the world by adjusting the… I think you changed the sail on the boat or something like that? That was a cool touch. So yeah, yeah, I guess they’re almost there. But yes, I would say just close this section by praising you for even plugging the Wii U in, which is an ordeal in 2021. Yeah, it’s surprising. Especially now that everything… Certainly all of our controllers have run out of battery, so you’ve not only got to find a plug for the Wii U. When you’ve now got other consoles plugged into your TV, it’s difficult. But yeah, you’ve also got to find an actual wall plug to plug in the gamepad and charge that up, which, you know, two plugs! How many consoles these days require two plugs? It’s madness. Is this the only one? It’s absolutely not. It’s also quite sad because, you know, the whole console was designed around that interesting online space of like Mii Plaza and the Mii-verse and now all that’s like dead and defunct. It’s just a bit like, I don’t know, it’s actually quite going, loading it up now is actually quite kind of Covid relevant, it feels like. It’s like walking through Bath Town Centre. Or, you know, going, oh, that’s where the old Vodafone shop used to be. I must admit, like, on my floor right now, there is a hard drive, the controller and the console, and loads of plugs. An attempt was made early this week to plug it in, and I just thought, oh, I think I remember this game enough. I would rather bluff it on this podcast than plug all of these things in, because with the hard drive, Nintendo recommended you got a separate hard drive, an external hard drive, right? And the one that has its own power supply. So, plugging in the controller. Exactly, controller, console and hard drive. That’s madness. Three plug sockets. You can see why it didn’t take off. I’d forgotten about the hard drive plug as well. We had to find a third plug for that too, because I can’t even remember how much storage the Wii U’s got. Probably 32 gigs or something. The vast majority of my games are like… Yeah, there was a 16 and a 32, and 32 is the deluxe. You’re like, ooh la la, 32, you’re spoiling us. I haven’t played the Wii U in a long time, and booting up was like a huge memory trip for me back to O&M. The thing that triggered me was actually the loading times between the options menu. I remember thinking, god, there was a console where it legit took 15 seconds to transition between certain modes of the home interface. I mean, that was just so painful. There was so much stuff we had to ignore to praise that machine. Yeah, I don’t think I really regret buying one in retrospect, but it’s certainly a fun little… Well, I mean, you can play Wii Games output in HD, which is something at least. But yeah, I can’t say… I’ve got like three HDMI ports on my TV, and if there’s like a football-style league table of who’s going to get one of those ports, the Wii U is at the bottom. All right, cool. We’ll take a brief break there then, but we’re going to come back and we’re going to talk a little bit about writing about Mario and the challenges of doing so. Matthew, to kick off, why don’t you talk to us about what it was like to write about Mario? How do you make writing about Mario interesting? So I think there’s kind of, there’s like two tiers to this. I’d say like the very broad top level of just like writing, say you’re writing one piece about Mario, that is very difficult in itself. I think Mario is actually the hardest thing to write about for my career anyway. I always found it very difficult because so much of it’s like joy and pleasure is simply in the doing, in the playing, and it’s sort of apparent simplicity. It’s not really a game that like kind of reflects on much or kind of says anything in particular. It’s very like, it’s like the purest like mechanical joy of playing these, you know, you get from playing these games. And as a result, like, I don’t feel like a lot of tricks you can lean on, kind of like emotional reactions or how it maybe like reflects, you sort of reflect on yourself in a game, kind of a lot of stuff that I think a lot of people lean on, particularly in modern writing. It’s quite hard to apply to Mario. You know, it’s quite, you know, you don’t get a lot of like very big, oh, it meant this or it did that, or it reflected this period of my life because it’s so abstract. You know, it’s like a dude who collects coins and like sometimes dresses up as a cat. You know, it doesn’t say a huge amount. And I think that’s like a basic challenge of writing about Mario is kind of getting around that and having to engage with something which is quite like mechanically pure. You know, mechanics writing can be quite boring. So trying to kind of breathe life into that. But I think what like elevates it, the next level of challenge is just like, and this is probably very specific to like Nintendo magazines, but I’m sure there are equivalents for other people is, you know, he is so the main event. He is so important and has to be treated as something that is so important. And he’s the kind of bedrock of everything you’re doing, you know, and as a result, like trying to find a way of writing about him. And this may sound like silly and overblown, but trying to find a way to write about him that kind of respects that and respects him and captures the excitement and the size of it. It’s not just enough to just write a simple preview, review, whatever. I feel like everything you write about Mario, like has to be as good as Mario. It has to make you feel special. You don’t want to seem crap compared to Mario. And that was like so much of my time on on gamer was like thinking about that. Does that sound mad? No, I don’t think so. To raise something that I kind of noticed in the previous section of this podcast is that I didn’t say much about Super Mario 3D World because I don’t entirely know how to articulate why that game is good beyond saying that the level design is cool or the music is nice or the power ups are interesting. Yeah, so it is actually quite tough. Like, even when you’re talking about Breath of the Wild, it’s a bit easier to articulate how the systems interact with each other. But you’d sort of like, I don’t know, to describe a section from a game in Mario, you couldn’t quite do it and relay the experiential joy of it in a straightforward way, you know? Yeah, that’s what I meant. So this trend of very first-person accounts of writing, that’s what I’m talking about, about people writing through the prism of themselves, I guess, you know, that kind of cliche of like, oh, I’m doing this sort of, you know, the first person lived in account of playing a Mario game is like absolutely baffling, you know? It’s like, I jumped over a hole, I ran forward a meter, I jumped over another hole, I ran forward a meter, I got a coin, and you’re like, yep, that’s Mario. But it’s not the same thing. Like, it doesn’t feel like a game where you make a lot of choices, you know? It’s a challenge game, and writing about challenge games in general is difficult. I mean, you know, I kind of, you know, I look back with, you know, great respect for the magazines I was reading when I was growing up where games were a bit purer and more arcade-y. I think they are harder to write about, and the ability to capture that. And people may laugh and joke about the kind of, the cliches of breaking things down into like, graphics sound, playability, da-da-da-da, but like, they didn’t necessarily have the overarching ideas to kind of hold them together or elevate them into something else which you could then kind of try and kind of capture. So, you know, I kind of really sympathise with them. I think writing about Nintendo games is like writing about quite an old game design in a way. I’ve, like, personally for like the individual pieces, like when I’m reviewing a Mario game or whatever, I’m just trying, like, I find, and I hope none of this sounds too pretentious or wanky. Like, I’m just trying to capture, like, the energy of the thing. I find these games have incredible momentum. They make me incredibly excited and that excitement builds. And I’m trying, you know, I try to get, like, the rhythm of that a bit in the review. I want you to get to the end and feel like this is, yes, 100% I want, you know, I know I’m gonna have fun with this. This was fun. This was fun to read this. Like, it builds in the right way. Like, I really want everything in the world to be like a Mario level. I want it to build in that way and end in a spectacular fashion. So, including my writing. Catherine, you’ve obviously, you noted earlier that you reviewed Super Mario 3D World. Yeah. What did you find the challenges of writing about Mario to be? Yeah, I think it’s a similar sort of thing. You’re trying to convey, like, you know, the thing about Mario is that, as you described earlier, like, trying to relay, like, a set of levels or communicate, the pace of ideas is so sort of rapid fire that, like, trying to describe those is really difficult. And I think, like, the joy of Mario is, yeah, it’s that kind of, you’re trying to convey, like, a sense of movement and what that feels like. It’s a, you know, a feeling of movement. I think, like, the hardest one that I’ve had to review or, you know, write about is Super Mario Maker, which is just, like, you know, basically one giant level editing tool. And, you know, I’m really bad at making and designing game levels. It turns out, surprise, surprise, you know, I just don’t have, like, the drive or the inclination to kind of spend that time. I sort of had to, I think, you know, especially with things like that, where it’s so community driven, you’re just kind of left relying on the, you know, Super Mario Maker did come with, like, a bunch of pre-made levels. And, you know, you were sort of then left just sort of playing other journalists kind of quite bad kind of attempts at kind of a Mario level. Ouch, want to name any names? I can’t, like, my memory of that game is so sort of, like, spotty. I wouldn’t be able to pick out any in particular, but, like, that, you know, as you say, and particularly with that game, you are talking about, like, you know, the fundamental building blocks of a Mario game. And I think probably, like, it’s a similar challenge to talking about, like, a normal Mario game in that, yeah, it’s like, what kind of weird alchemy of, you know, what is it that makes these individual components a wonderful thing to play? And, you know, where does that magic come from from these, you know, bits of cloud and poles and, you know, falling blocks? It’s a, yeah, I definitely don’t envy, you know, the writers who do have to write about this a lot more frequently than I do. So when it comes to the kind of hype side of Mario, Matthew, when you were covering them on Nintendo magazines, like, to what extent do you kind of feel that when you’re writing about it? Like, how much does that kind of come through in the writing in terms of how much you psych yourself out when you’re writing about these? Because, like, when we talked about the game review scores you got wrong episode and also the game reviews episode, it sounded like you took the process of covering the big Mario games a bit too seriously. Is that the case? Yeah, I mean, the reviews, the reviews are almost like a different, a sort of different things onto themselves because they were, you know, they were like the end of the process, which was, you know, on Endgamer, which was, you know, we would have been covering Mario Galaxy, you know, every month, maybe every other month, you know, for a year or whatever. And then the review felt like, well, this is it. This is the big goodbye. So it felt like all eyes were on that. That’s where the pressure of the review. I actually much preferred the kind of the preview feature cycle. I think that’s where we did some of our best work and we really like differentiated ourselves from other Nintendo magazines, or basically any other Nintendo public, any other Nintendo coverage out there. You know, we just went nuts on these games. So we went so in depth on them and we had such limited access. I remember the first big thing I wrote about Mario Galaxy. I hadn’t played it. We didn’t get to go to E3 on Endgamer ever, I don’t think. So we had to always cover it from afar. And we took that as a kind of challenge of like, well, not only did we not get to see this, we still want to have the best coverage of Mario. And some people may say, well, that’s going to obviously ring false. You’re never going to be able to capture it in the way that someone’s actually played it. But I felt like we basically took everything. We took everything anyone had said or seen about that game. We went over every frame of video of Mario Galaxy that was online, and we just pieced it together and said, basically, we’re going to rebuild the Mario Galaxy E3 demo in the magazine without having played it. We glossed over that bit. But we were piecing it together. I remember literally getting our art editors, we spent a whole month drawing out the levels from the demos using tens of different videos where people went different routes to work out how the level worked, how it was actually designed. And that was agony, because it’s slightly like YouTube was around, but it wasn’t as prominent. This was like having to use a lot of people’s, kind of filmed off a television with a camcorder on like IGN or game trailers or whatever, and then trying to kind of piece together this level. And I remember like a few months later, we went to Nintendo UK to play all the E3 demos, like after the fact. And it was like a real, did we get it right moment? And I remember us playing these demos and being like, oh no, like we missed like an entire island out of the honey galaxy, because we hadn’t got it right. But at the same time, like when they gave us access to that demo, like, I remember, cause like a lot of this came from Mark Green, who was the editor of Endgamer when it relaunched and when I joined and he instilled a lot of this in me that like he was just like, just a crazed fan boy and just wanted to just, you know, blow this stuff kind of wide open. And that was really like infectious. I really loved it. You know, I really loved that, that kind of period. And I remember going to Windsor, sitting in their little review room with this demo and it was like, right, we are gonna break this demo. We are gonna go to places no one has been. And in the Honey Hive Galaxy, which was one of the E3 levels, which we first become B Mario Mario Galaxy, I remember that it was like star one of that level. So it was a very particular route. But if you did some quite creative wall jumping, you could get up to the bits of the level for the later stars, but they weren’t finished. It was all sort of broken up there. And like, oh, it’s weird, like fucked up textures. All this kind of stuff. I remember this Nintendo PR being in the room with us, watching us try and break this demo and thinking like, uh-oh, is this right? I mean, they’re technically playing the demo, so I guess they’re not breaking the rules. But we were like, oh yeah, quickly, let’s go. Let’s try and get under the level and see what’s under there. And it was just so like, that giddy-ness was just what I wanted all of our coverage to be. And I really took that forward with me. Even right up until now, when I cover not Mario games, I’m trying to find, at preview events, trying to find the thing no one else has found or do the weird thing that no one else has done, just to try and get something fresh, something new. Because you have to have something new. Otherwise, we all write about the same thing. But yeah, I don’t, I probably didn’t answer the question. No, no, I think that’s interesting because it’s basically how people enjoy games now. Like when you look at subreddits for games and you look at the hype cycle of a game like Cyberpunk, every single detail seemed to matter to people. To the point where it truly was boring to read about, this car is in the game and this music is in the game or whatever. But with something like Mario, I mean, if you’re a Nintendo specialist magazine, like you want to be number one for Mario, right? And like you say, you’ve got to show people something they’ve not seen before. So I really like the idea of like the logistical challenge of making someone draw a level of a game you’ve not even played. That’s like madness, but like I really admire the hustle. Yeah. The other thing that always jumps out at me from that period, it’s probably the happiest memory of my entire gaming career, was we decided to make a model, like a physical model of the first planet in that you land on in Mario Galaxy. As in Papier-Mache, a giant balloon. I mean, as in this balloon was like a meter, like a meter and a half across, it was huge. Like, Greener bought this industrial balloon. It was so big, everyone was scared to blow it up because like, and I remember Greener going into, we did it after work, so we wouldn’t be like disruptive. I remember Greener going into this little side office in the, on the future floor. It was like a meeting room that you had like, you know, little secretive meetings in. And like, blowing up this balloon and then halfway through getting really scared of blowing it up, because he was like, if this bursts, I think it might actually blind me. And he was hiding under his coat with this like industrial balloon pump, blowing up this balloon. I remember looking through the little glass like porthole in the window and just laughing my ass off at this image of my boss hiding under a coat, being scared of this balloon. And then we covered it with papier-mache. And then the next day, like the building manager was walking around the floor and she was just like, what is that? Because it was just this giant orb of like papery gloop at this point. So we hadn’t painted it and decorated it. It just, she just wanted to bin it. She didn’t think we should have made it at all. And we had to like protect this giant crap orb. And then finally, like it ended up looking terrible. Like it was so bad. Like we stuck, like we couldn’t paint it properly. So we stuck like green tissue paper all over it. I remember Greener bought these gold chocolate coins to stick all over it. And then he ate them all before we stuck them on there. So we only had like the mangled wrappers. So like, just like it was so, so much of what we did on Endgamer was like an amazing idea if it had been done properly. But what we actually made took loads of work and was still totally shit. And once we had it, like the feature, all the annotations were just us pointing out like, why it was as bad as it was. So it was like, oh, sorry about this. Like, you know, one of us stood on the props, you know. One of us ate the chocolates. So it was just like a really apologetic, sad thing. But like, that to me is, like that’s what Mario makes you want to do, is like something terrible like that. Yeah, so Matthew, one thing you’ve got in your notes here is about, you were going to ask us something about Mario, our versions of Mario. Yeah, I was just curious, you know, like if you had that equivalent, you know, is there a Mario of the things you’ve worked on, like PlayStation, what is the Mario of PlayStation and PC? Like internally, what meant the most to you? And like, if, you know, if that changed how you approached it. How about you, Katherine? Do you want to kick off first? Ooh, I mean, in turn, like- Are you going to say Nvidia graphics cards? Well, yeah, I was probably like, in terms of hardware, like, I think it’s got to be an Nvidia graphics card launch because, you know, most people have an Nvidia graphics card. And that’s the thing that people care about most. Like, you know, if suddenly, if AMD, you know, if everyone had an AMD graphics card, it would probably be an AMD graphics card. But I think because the majority of people right now have Nvidia cards, yeah, it would definitely be from a hardware perspective. Yeah, and an Nvidia launch. But I think like in terms of PC, like, I don’t know, I sort of like, Half-Life, I guess, is certainly one of the big ones. Like, it’s difficult for me to kind of like, in terms of games, just because I’ve never, you know, I’ve always kind of been on the periphery of the games world, like, you know, in tech. You know, even when you’re on a generalist consumer tech magazine, you know, we never kind of went, you know, quite as in-depth on probably anything. Like, we, you know, even when there was like a big Apple launch or a big Samsung launch, you know, we never kind of, like, did anything particularly special in the magazine for it. You know, there would be the preview or the review of that phone, but it wasn’t kind of treated in a way that was, you know, any different from, you know, any other product that we looked at. It was probably, you know, like, compared to games magazines, like, tech mags are quite dry and, you know, not very fun. You didn’t try to make your own iPhone, then? No, we didn’t, no. Out of papi amache. Yeah, I think, like, probably one of the most kind of fun. It wasn’t even a thing that ended up in the magazine, but we sort of did a group test of, like, mini PCs at one point, and I sort of, like, you know, I put them all in a tower, but, you know, to kind of, like, here’s all this stack of mini PCs, 10 PCs that are as high as, you know, like a 30 centimetre ruler or something, which, you know, but again, that wasn’t in the magazine. That was just kind of, like, something that, you know, having got all of these things for this feature, you know, I just sort of did that kind of as a fun photo thing, but yeah. I really liked it last year when you tried to do the, like, make the Xbox Series X as a PC in a similarly small box. Yeah, I think that’s probably… I think, like, if I’d done that for a, you know, print magazine, it’s sort of… it was a really fun thing to do online for RPS. Yeah, kind of like I found a similar kind of rectangular PC case that looked as much like an Xbox as I think probably any PC case is going to look like an Xbox Series X. Series X and yeah, kind of like put together this set of components, which I originally like I was going to try and match the price of the Xbox, but that was that was quickly, quickly that that’s been possible because, you know, the the cost of the case alone was basically like half half the price of the Xbox. Just fill it with potatoes. But yeah, like something like that would have like, yeah, of all of all the things I’ve done, that would like if I had done that for print, yeah, we could have had, I think we probably could have had some real fun with that, you know, kind of like breaking breaking it down and, you know, doing a more in-depth, like this is how you build it, you know, and things like that. But yeah, alas, I’ve never, never been on a magazine where we’ve had to, you know, had the scope to do that sort of thing. It’s either been very dry reviews or, you know, an in-depth interview with someone’s marketing manager about, you know, this weird film series that they’re making to accompany this latest game or something that you should make a papier-mâché model of the marketing manager and show it to him and see what he makes of this. A bald man is this right, isn’t he? Yeah. No, I guess it is very specific to working on mags where you’re like desperate, hungry for information on games. And obviously Nintendo is, Nintendo mags offered the most challenge in that regard because there were fewer third, big third party games to cover. So you weren’t making the most out of those first party games. Yes, I think I’m probably selling it as innovation when actually it’s necessity. Well, it’s certainly made for a good story there about a disgusting creation that wasn’t impressive, but made for a fun feature. For me, I like, do you know, just talking about that really just brought back a memory of GTA V when it got announced, about a year after it got announced, they did the first like Game Informer cover from it. And that was the only information on GTA for months and months afterwards. So we basically had to do second hand coverage from Game Informer’s piece, you know, to kind of talk about the game to our readers. And that really like, I was quite angry at the time just thinking what I kind of made of it was I did like a hundred things to know about GTA V and just pulled out every single detail of like, you know, here’s like, Michael can go into slo-mo like Max Payne when you do this, this and this. And like, we did like a map of like Los Santos with like, matching them to a kind of like Google Maps sort of overview of Los Angeles saying, oh, well, this building is here and this building is here. So here’s how much of the city they might be covering. And that’s the kind of example of like, how can you make good content out of something that we don’t know much about? God, I looked at that Game Informer piece so much. I think there were just some JPEGs that had been fucking ripped to like Imgur or something. And then like, I think I did actually buy the magazine just to like have it, just to get my peace of mind, if nothing else. I was always like so jealous, so jealous of Game Informer. Those guys worked super hard. I’m not saying they didn’t, but like, you know, the kind of the lengths we were going to to stretch what kind of like sort of meager, you know, crusts we were thrown into a magazine. And you’d get that and like they were just given the works in a way that no one ever got. I remember every one of those issues being like, oh God, what I would give, what I would give to have like a 20 page, you know, dishonored feature or whatever. Yeah, they always had like lovely cover art. And it was definitely like throughout the sort of first period of me working on Mags, like from the late noughties through to like the middle part of the last decade. It was kind of like the Game Informer were always first of those big games. And it was like, you’d keep an eye on the calendar for what the next month would be, because you know they’d have like Bioshock 2, first information or whatever it might be. Yeah, so like, you know, I think I remember they did some amazing Bioshock Infinite covers as well, they’re like designed in the style of Columbia, the world, and like had like, I think, authentic adverts in them and stuff, without the racist bits that are in Bioshock Infinite, the in-world racist bits. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, but GTA V is definitely one. Yeah. And I don’t know, Metal Gear Solid 4 was another, like I say, but like that I don’t recall being interesting or there being anything interesting to pick out, but there was another one where like I’d see other mags get better access and be like, oh, for fuck’s sake. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve never worked on anything where I’ve had to cover Rockstar, like open worlds. Like I’ve never done the mag or online cycle for a Red Dead or a GTA, but I imagine, you know, they are like the biggest games in the world, aren’t they really? Well, when they show you the games, it’s really exciting. Like there was a bit of a wait, I think, until we saw GTA V. But I remember, like, seeing it at Rockstar’s office for the first time, and they showed the different character swapping, and that just seemed amazing. You know, you just go to a different part of the city, and Trevor’s like on an island with all these dead guys. And then, like, I think they ended the demo with jumping out of, like, a plane for the first time and seeing the whole city from above. And it was like, ah, holy shit, that is incredible. And, like, I just remember, I remember buzzing from those demos, you know. And they said, one day, Sam, you will grind for 15 weeks so you can buy a submarine. Ah, well, see, my dirty secret, Matthew, is I spent 10 pounds on a microtransaction, so I didn’t have to do it. And that’s how they get you. Yeah, that’s it. My relationship with GTA has drastically changed from, like, wonderment to, why can’t I afford a fucking booster for my flying car, you know? Yeah. So, Katharine, to wrap up the podcast, we also have one listener question I’ll read out shortly. But I wanted to kind of start a new format where we ask our guests who will come on to talk a bit about some of their favorite games of the last generation. And that’s because we did our Best Games of the Generation podcast. It’s actually our two most popular podcasts to date, which is cool. But we just want to get a flavor of the guest tastes and what they’ve been enjoying in, like, the last few years. So why don’t you talk us through a few of your favorite games of the last gen? Yeah, I think probably that the game that’s at the top of my list is Dishonored 2, I think. That’s probably one of the, you know, I was… At the time, I was one of those fortunate people that didn’t have all the problems. I played it on PC and somehow miraculously didn’t encounter, like, any of the crashes that I think seemed to kind of, you know, plague literally everyone else that played it at launch. So for me, it was brilliant. Like, I really enjoyed it. I had a really good time. And that’s all that matters. But it’s particularly… Like, I look back on that game particularly fondly, mostly because I think when I played Dishonored 1, I didn’t really understand how the chaos system worked. And I thought that, like, you know, if I pull it, if I’m really good and don’t kill anyone, like, you know, in the second half of the game, maybe I can pull it back. And, you know, I think because my chaos rating was inching higher and higher and higher. And that’s not how Dishonored works, unfortunately. Once you’ve hit a certain chaos level, you’re stuck there. So I was determined for Dishonored 2 to play the game in basically, like, low chaos. And I, for whatever reason, I got it into my head that not only was I going to not kill anyone, I was also going to do it completely unseen. I was going to do a ghost run on my first go. I don’t know why I thought this, but I thought this is a weird challenge. I’m going to set myself. And it was really good. Like, it took me. I remember it’s sort of particularly like the Jindosh Mansion, which is probably one of the best sections of a game of all time, probably. Like, that’s such an amazing section of, you know, of that game and just, you know, as I say, I think it’s probably one of my favourite levels of, yeah, certainly The Generation, if not, you know, of all games. It’s such a good little space. And it probably, because I’d imposed these weird restrictions on myself, it probably took me about five or six hours to complete that level. I spent, I spent an inordinate amount of time in there because I kept getting spotted by the guards, which meant, you know, quit loading every, every other, every other second. But it was such a good experience. And I sort of, I look back on it fondly for, you know, not only for that, but, you know, it is just a great game in, in and of itself, I think. Good choice. I think, like, also like Outer Wilds as well, which I think, you know, certainly had very high on Matthew’s list. Now people can understand why they’re married. Outer Wilds was a… It all makes sense now. Yeah. It was, that was great. I really loved the, the, you know, the sense of mystery in that game. And, you know, I think that the looping time mechanic worked really well. And just like, you know, the sense of like wonder and awe that you had at this universe and this, you know, even though it was like relatively self-contained, you know, it’s far smaller than most of the open worlds that you, you know, you could encounter in like, you know, an Assassin’s Creed or any sort of Ubisoft game or GTA or anything. But there was, there was something that still felt like massive about it. It’s an entire solar system. Yeah, it’s an entire solar system. And the way it’s sort of like, you know, the planets linked back to each other and was, you know, I just loved that sense of like, you know, that there was a breadcrumbs trail to follow. And but, you know, but you could do it at any. It reminded me a lot of Obra Dinn in that, you know, you sort of you had these fragments of information that you were working with. You were left to kind of your own devices to kind of work out how they all fit together. And yeah, I mean, yeah, speaking of Return of the Obra Dinn, that’s certainly like another top one for that. Well, you’ve been disqualified from our list, Katharine, because that came out on PC first. Oh, OK, fair enough. You can never come back on the podcast now. That’s it, you’re banned. Bastard. How dare you violate the criteria like that? I apologize. No, I’m sure we’ll talk about that game a lot in depth at some point. But yeah, briefly, what was it that kind of really spoke to you? I think like I’d seen Matthew play it first. I played it, I sort of tried to kind of like, you know, not look at what Matthew was doing because… I mean, that’s just a general rule for living with me. Oh, he’s eating again. You know, because so much of that game is like about the mystery of it. And once you’ve worked out the answer, like, you know, it’s kind of hard to kind of forget how, you know, how these pieces all fit together. So I was sort of I was I was aware of, you know, kind of what the game was, what he was doing in it, but kind of tried to kind of distance myself from the specifics. But I just sort of remember these like, you know, these mad theories that people were coming up with, you know, it’s like, I identified this batch of people with like, by just looking at their socks and their shoes. And there’s sort of something quite magical about the games that generate those sorts of stories, you know, that people come to these different conclusions, or they work out the same people via different methods. And that’s, you know, that’s that’s something like really cool and neat to kind of like, just both experience for yourself, you know, like to see how your method of working it out, you know, differ to other people. But it’s just like, you know, it’s a really fun mystery, and it looks amazing. And I love the way that it sort of structured, you know, it sort of teases the story in very kind of tiny chunks that, you know, it’s sort of like you’re gradually kind of peeling back these layers of what happened on this ship, you know, by kind of this paper trail of different people’s perspectives. And then, you know, just sort of from a structured point of view, you know, that’s super interesting, trying to, you know. And yeah, it was just… What else has made you less, Katharine? I really, really liked Hyrule Warriors on the Wii U. I would never have guessed. No, I’ve never played like a Warriors game in my life. But there was, it’s probably like, it’s a similar thing, the similar kind of like magic to like Super Smash Brothers in that like you just got this like kind of melting pot of Zelda characters all together. I just really like seeing, you know, the way that those games function is that it’s all about just like mowing down hordes of enemies on screen with like these outlandish kind of, you know, over the top attacks. And, you know, it’s just something you don’t get to see in a Zelda game. And I think that it actually, you know, it’s a nice kind of alternative. I don’t really know what the right word is. It’s just refreshing to sort of see Zelda games kind of with that kind of combat in them. It’s almost like it’s like the epic big that is usually consigned to a cut scene at the start of like, there was a huge war. Yeah. Also, I think like seeing certain Zelda iconography in 3D for the first time, like I’ve ever seen the Wind Fish in that game and it’s not particularly well done. It’s still just seeing the seeing it at all in 3D just seemed mind blowing before they made the the remake of Link’s Awakening on Switch. So yeah, from from a kind of fan iconography perspective, it’s definitely got some value. Yeah. I mean, you know, I like this game so much that I also then played it again on the 3DS when they did the 3DS version. I haven’t I haven’t bought the Switch version, but you know, I was I was tempted. It’s a matter of time. Well, if only so that I don’t have to plug in, you know, the three million plugs to play on the Wii U anymore. You know, I could just. Well, look, that’s defensible. As we’ve established, it’s easier to pay someone to get someone in a warehouse to send it to your house than for you to like plug in three different electronic items. Do you have like one last one as well, Kath? I think I’m probably going to go with Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I think just off the top of my head. I don’t actually like I’m not one of these people who is like a diehard Final Fantasy 7 fan. Like I sort of I don’t really have a particularly fond relationship with it. Like I don’t look back on it for like, oh, yes, 7 is the best. Like I’m much more, you know, I’m much more in love with like 8 and 9 and 10. Like I don’t really sort of have particularly kind of like a great affinity with 7. If only because I think at the time I played it very like, you know, the original PlayStation 1 like very much after the fact because I didn’t get a PlayStation 1 until I think after the PlayStation 2 had come out. You know, I remember sort of buying 7, 8 and 9 all together because I think, you know, my friend, a friend of mine was like really into them and thought like, you must play these games now that you’ve got a PlayStation. And so I played 8 first, which I think is why I like that one so much. And then sort of played, I went back to 7, played the bit where you kind of leave Midgar and get like the Chocobo Farm. And there was this big like, like big worm boss, like in the kind of marshland, like next to it, which I just… The Zolom. Yeah, which I just couldn’t, I just died a lot on. And for whatever reason, I kind of stopped playing there. And I didn’t come back to it for like a year. And then, you know, as is often the case with these big games, I couldn’t remember for life with me what had really happened. I sort of, you know, had kind of completely forgotten what happened at the start of Final Fantasy VII. And, you know, I still, I then, you know, went on to complete it and I enjoyed it, but I sort of, I think because there was that gap in between me starting it and finishing it, as I say, I don’t kind of, I don’t have a great nostalgia for it. But I really enjoyed, like, what they, you know, when Seven Remake came out, you know, I’m sort of, I was intrigued to see, A, what they do with it, you know, how it would translate into 3D, what they would do with the combat system. I actually really like the combat system in Seven Remake. I think it’s a really good blend of the kind of, the turn-based original kind of mechanics that were in the original and, you know, the kind of more action-led stuff, you know, that you get in 15 and the later games. That, you know, that in itself is really satisfying. The music is amazing. I really loved how, you know, they’ve re-tooled that music for, you know, with an orchestra and re-arranged it. I’m actually quite excited by what they’re actually doing with the story. Like, I sort of, again, I sort of didn’t play it immediately when it came out. I sort of played it pretty soon, but sort of, you know, certainly after the reviews and stuff had come out. And I was sort of trying to avoid, you know, any sort of spoilers about it. I sort of had heard rumblings about, like, you know, what people thought, you know, the ending did something weird. And it sure did. Yeah, exactly. But like, I’m quite interested that it’s, you know, I’m certainly interested to see what they’re going to do with it. Like, I think I’m quite, I’m more interested in it now that I know it’s not like a straightforward remake. I don’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t played it. But yeah, it’s definitely not just like going to be a straightforward rehash of that game. And I think that’s actually more interesting. And I sort of like to almost like, you know, there are sections in that game that are, you know, very tedious. I think you’ve spoken before, Samuel, about how, you know, there are entire chapters where you’re, you know, finding children in a slum somewhere that’s just like, oh, this is just the worst. Matthew articulated it best, where there’s lots of sliding through gaps to retrieve urchins. That is all I saw of that game. Like, as I say, it’s definitely like far from perfect. And I would much rather that those entire side quest chapters just be like, you know, exercised from that game. Because they just don’t need them. It’s sort of extra padding that that game never needed, as I say. I would be less excited about it if it was just going to be a straightforward remake. But I think because of what they are doing with it, like, you know, I know plenty of people who are like, aghast that they’re tampering with the formula of, you know, that they’re not doing the straightforward rehash that they maybe arguably want. But I think it’s definitely a more interesting game for it. And you’re like, you’re like, oh, bullshit. Interesting. I mean, you know, there’s every possibility that it will turn into like a Kingdom Hearts sized mess of a, you know, lore dump, and it probably end up being horrendous. But, you know, I got to hope. Yeah, exactly. We shall see. Well, hopefully we’ll still be doing the podcast when episode two or whatever comes out, and then we can deep dive into it then. Yeah. What’s funny, though, Katharine, is that even in your first playthrough of Final Fantasy when you were young, you still got further than the territory this remake covers. Yes. You got to the Chocobo Farm. That’s not in this game. Yeah. No, thank you very much for sharing, though, Katharine. So, good insight. I look forward to spending… I will also spend my 30s and 40s playing Final Fantasy VII remake chapters as they roll out. And I look forward to Chapter 18, which is just the weapon boss fights from the third disc. Yeah, okay, great. So, one quick listener question here. Thanks for another great episode of The Back Page. I tend to be a last-gen gamer these days and have compiled a hefty list from the two top 30s that you ran through with Matthew. Oh, they addressed this to me specifically, I should say. The Witcher 3 Game of the Year Edition is currently £6.99 on the PlayStation Store, so I’ve grabbed that after the praise you both heaped on it. Dishonored 2, Titanfall 2 and Sekiro are games I have also ordered thanks to this. What a treat discovering those three. Yeah, absolutely. I bounced off of Bloodborne and Dark Souls for similar reasons. The combat did nothing for me, particularly compared to gems like Bayonetta 2, which I thought might be on the list. I think Bayonetta 2 is a lesser game, but that could get to another episode, I’m sure. I wondered whether you played the Nioh titles and if they just missed the top 30. I have the first one downloaded, having enjoyed the Ninja Gaiden series on Xbox. It was great to hear how your tastes in games differ, and I had an idea for an episode. Favourite games from genres we don’t like. I noticed there were no 1v1 fighting games, puzzle series or sports titles. I think we had one puzzle game. Isn’t Kalimba a puzzle game, Matthew? Yeah, kind of a puzzle platformer. Maybe Mario Golf, Soul Calibur 2 or Chu Chu Rocket rocked your socks off back in the day. It would be great to hear. Anyway, keep up the great work and have a lovely weekend, Grant Jones. So, a very nice question there, Matthew. Did either of you have either of you played Nioh? Same. I always heard it was a bit too heavy on the loot side of things and the boss battles were kind of quite annoying. But that’s not to say I’ll never play it. I also couldn’t decide whether to play on PS4 or PC. I know a couple of people who really rate this and say that of the Dark Souls alike, it’s pretty good. Apparently it is absolutely, even by those standards, rock hard. That’s largely the reason why I haven’t played it. I’ve never really got on very well with these Dark Souls games. From what I know about Nier, it’s a very similar vibe. I don’t think I’d get on with it. It’s probably too hard for me. I think I probably could play it after playing Sekiro, but I don’t know. Maybe I’ll play the remastered PS5 ones. As for the favourite games from genres we don’t like, I do quite like that. However, I resent the suggestion that Rocket League is not a sports title. How are lots of cars driving into a big ball? How is that not a sport? That’s what sport is. Yeah, I don’t know. Sport games have to be delivered to me via the medium of big cars, so I’m not interested. That’s not a bad… I’ll tell you what. My brothers and I were really quite into Mario Golf 64 back in the day, weirdly. Yeah, that was like another one of our big multiplayer games that we’d often crank out. Is that the best of the Mario sports games, Mario Golf? I’d say probably, yes. I still think the N64 iterations of golf and tennis are held to be the best of their respective. Yeah, we played a lot of Mario tennis as well on the N64. They’re games that have only ever gotten worse. I’m pretty sure that’s fair to say. I 100% agree. Okay, great stuff. Well, that was the question. I think we’ve pretty much answered it there. That’s not a bad idea for an episode. I’ve got some thoughts on those genres, but that will definitely go into the bank as we think of our next season of episodes to do. So thank you very much. But yeah, that’s the end of the episode. Thank you very much for listening. And Katharine, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, great. I’m glad to hear that. Because, yeah, you just, first time we had a guest, I kind of thought, well, you know, like, how will it go? Three people, the dynamic and stuff, even if two are in the same house. But no, it’s really awesome to hear about your experience working in media and to give us your top five. So thank you so much. No worries. Thank you very much. Where can people follow you on Twitter, Katharine? So I’m on Twitter at AtBurninator, which is, this needs some explaining, because I made it before I got married. And my maiden name was Burn, but spelt B-Y-R-N-E. So Burninator is B-Y-R-N-E-inator. I should probably change it, because I keep, every time this happens, I have to explain it, which is just very long-winded. And I should probably change it to something that doesn’t rely on people knowing how to spell my formerly, you know, my former last name. But yes. It’s got big, Burninator’s got big Xbox Live gamertag, 2008 energy. I think I probably… This is so badass! It’s cut forward 15 years. Yeah. It’s not great. Hemsforth, yeah, Hemsforth referred to me as Castlenator. Yes. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it? I don’t know. I probably will change it. But yeah, for the time being, it’s at Burninator. Awesome. Thank you so much. People can also check out your work on rockpapershotgun.com. They can, yep. Yep, that’s cool. And Matthew, where can people follow you? I’m MrBazzill, underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. You can also follow the podcast, Back Page Pod on Twitter. You can also tweet us questions there that we’ll read out on each episode. You can also email questions to us at backpagegames at gmail.com, where we’ll pick them up. So thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week. But no, no, that’s good stuff. So yeah, just to wrap up then, we have like a listener question here. Katharine, I’d like you to answer the question too, because you’re our guest here. So actually, is it a question, really? Actually, sorry, I’ll cut this bit out, but I’m just like, I should just read it back, because I just kind of got it in my inbox and pasted it in without thinking about it. There is a question about Neo at the end, I think. Oh yeah, have you played that, Katharine? I haven’t, no. But I could talk about why I haven’t. Yeah, I think it should be fine. I just sort of like, I wouldn’t mind if only like one more way to bring you back into the conversation, Katharine, before we wrap up, because I feel like I talked for a while. I’m sort of trying to think if there’s anything more on the Mario side. I feel like we’ve kind of covered it. What do you reckon, Matthew? Yeah, it’s a bit weird. It’s not really a question, is it? It’s like, the question is, have we played Nioh? Which is pretty niche. It’s also like, you know, if those games missed, like we could talk about, or certainly you could talk about, like, you know, what did miss your top 30, I guess. I mean, I could, like, I could ambush you, Katharine, with like, what were your sort of, like, five best games of the generation, because you’re joining us? Could you think of those off the top of your head? That’s probably quite too big an ask, isn’t it? I should have thought a bit more about this, like, what’s the last kind of guest element I could bring into this? Let me just load up my big spreadsheet of games. That would give me a… You have a spreadsheet of games. Katharine is incredibly organized in every element of her life. I see. It’s the contrast that works so well in this relationship. I’m like, let me look at my pile of games. Looks across a pile of games. They are on fire. Oh dear. Guys, I appear to have an open fire in my room. We’re just talking Wii U, PS4 and Xbox, right? Yeah. We could always… We could always do your top five games of last year, if that’s easier to do, Katharine. It just might be cool to ask you a little something, and then maybe we can ask each guest a simple question. It’s almost good if it’s a format that we can roll out whenever we have a guest, isn’t it? Yeah. It is quite neat to be able to say, one of our popular episodes we did, we did Games of the Generation, so we like to ask people, what were their games of the last generation? Yeah, I think that is good. I’m really sorry, Katharine, I shouldn’t have planned this, probably. Yeah, I mean, I’ve got a list of the games I played last year, but I could also probably pick out a couple of, you know, I’d sort of largely play stuff on… Yeah, it could just be a top five. It could just be a couple of picks of their favourite, you know, here are a couple of my favourites from the last generation. Yeah, that’s cool. Right, let me just… By all means, take a minute to give us some thought. I think we should keep this all in. You’re kidding, right? It’s a bit too warts at all, isn’t it? It’s… Samuel hasn’t planned the podcast. People are like, wow, this is really experimental. This is like Birdman as a podcast. I would listen to that. It’s a bit like how whenever he interviews anyone on The Big Picture, he always ends with like, what have you been playing? What have you been watching in lockdown? Yeah. I mean, it says a lot really that I don’t think I’ve ever heard that said to a guest because I never reached that part of The Big Picture. Oh, yeah. Listen to the interviews. He’s like, oh, yeah, now I’m speaking to the director of this film. You can stream now at a service not available in the UK. Oh, time to put The Simpsons podcast on. It’s about a Czechoslovakian shoemaker. And you’re like, hmm, I think I’m OK. You’re like, oh, that’s not going to be Denzel Washington, is it? To be fair, I listened to his interview with Ed Norton and it was all right. He’s a very good film boy who knows his films. Some of the interviews, I get the impression he does them quite late at night. And he’s doing them at home because it sounds like he’s almost whispering so not to wake up someone in the next room. It’s a very strange one with Amanda Seyfried. He’s got a very weird vibe to it because it’s almost like he’s like, so what do you enjoy in your last film? It’s very kind of muted and creepy. And when you respond, Amanda, can you please keep your voice down? Whisper me your thoughts on Mank. What was it like to be the one person who had to do any acting in Mank? We’ve not made our way through Mank yet. We watched the first, I don’t know, five, ten minutes and then thought, did we watch half an hour? Well, shows how much I’m paying attention. Well, I mean, the first half an hour or the first ten minutes are still Gary Oldman shouting in bed. Sitting in a bed. Where’s my whiskey? I think what really bothered me is that I watched Citizen Kane fairly recently for the first time, as I mentioned on the podcast, and it’s like a hundred times better than Mank. I was quite annoyed that people were like, if you don’t know Citizen Kane really well, you won’t understand why this is amazing, and I was like, nah, I’m pretty sure Citizen Kane is amazing, and this is just like some self-indulgent wank, but, you know, yeah. How’s it going, Katharine? Do you think you’ve got a couple of things to talk about? You won’t be held to this. It’s only for the sake of the podcast. Yeah, I’m just making sure. I’m just going through my list so that I haven’t missed anything massively important. Have you got a column of scores that you arrange by, and then you’re like… It’s just a list of games that I’ve played and or have completed, just so that I keep track of what I play every year, just so that I’ve got some… I don’t know. Sometimes if I… Probably a couple of years ago, I thought, when was the last time I played X game? It’s mainly a thing to aid those weird memory moments where I thought, when was the last time I played this particular Zelda game or something? Then I could look at my giant spreadsheet and say, yes, I played that game in 2012. I did start doing this for films, actually, because I found that last year, I could scarcely say that the time happened at all unless I wrote down that I did a thing on a day. So the only history I have of that last year is my Twitter account and the list of films I saw. Right. I think I probably… would you reckon? I’ve got about five or six. Great stuff. All right. Thank you.