Hello, and welcome to The Back Page of Video Games Podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, it’s The Best Games of 2007 episode. How are you feeling about taking a time warp back to that particular year? I’m looking forward to it. This was a very happy year for me, going over these games, brought back lots of nostalgic joy, a lot of happy memories, a very good time, a great time for games. I actually found it quite difficult making my list because it was such an embarrassment of riches in 2007. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I’m looking forward to hearing your PlayStation perspective. Yeah, it’s going to be a good one. So, for those who haven’t necessarily listened to our Best Games of 2006 episode, me and Matthew have basically plotted to, every couple of months, we’re going to do an episode based on a particular year. We’ll tell a bunch of magazine anecdotes, which is part of what we do on this podcast, but also try and capture the sense of the time in terms of gaming, what was going on. We won’t talk about the wider cultural stuff, like Heroes being the big TV show of this year. That won’t come up much. Oh my God. I think it was. I remember watching Heroes this summer and it being like, saved the cheerleader, saved the world being everywhere. But yeah, exciting. Clearly our memories aren’t as good as maybe we thought. But yeah, so the idea is that it will be a similar mix of stories from the time, followed by a top 10 list. Me and Matthew will alternate top 10 lists. I suspect we have very different lists this time, which is quite exciting. So yeah, I thought that was the same with 2006, wasn’t it? Because you and I just both have slightly different backgrounds, right, when it comes to what we played when we were young and how that fed into the jobs we did. Yeah, I’d say there’s enough of an age difference between us that it makes quite a big difference in terms of gaming diet. Yeah, I think you’re probably right. There’s also the fact that PS2 was my main sort of console in the years prior to this, to getting a job on a magazine, which I’ll talk about in this episode. Overall then, Matthew, what are your kind of thoughts when you look to the games of 2007? What did you think? Well, I thought this was a pretty amazing year. A lot of very big games happened and a lot of big trends were set in motion. You know, I’m sure we’ll cover some of the specific games in our top 10 lists, but I felt like there were some things that really defined what the next generation was going to look like in terms of 360 and PS3. And I was sort of amazed at how many of these things happened at once, because in my mind, it was a much slower process, but I was looking over the list, I was like, holy cow, a lot of people did a lot of good work this year. Yeah, it was really the feeling that this is where the HD era of games properly sort of comes to life and you get good games on all formats, I would say, particularly Xbox had an amazing year this year. But then maybe Matthew, you thought the best games came from elsewhere, who knows? It was a good Nintendo year, 2007. Yeah, that’s something we will cover. We will, like with the previous episode, we’ll go through what all the console manufacturers were doing in this year in our first section coming up. So yeah, we’ll talk about what was going on with PS3, 360 and Wii, and also DS and PSP a little bit too. And yeah, yeah. So Matthew, 2007, talk me through this. So this was like your first full year on NGamer, right? What was that like? Yeah, so I’d kind of got over my very initial, like I can’t believe I’m able to do this. So I had a few months at the end of 2006 to kind of get through that and deal with that. And then this was more into the kind of growing in confidence, being able to kind of contribute a bit more to the magazine. I was a little nervous to begin with, so it took me a while to kind of like sort of speak up and kind of try and have a bigger impact. The one thing I really remember from this year, and it’s something I’d sort of forgotten until I really thought about it, was NGamer used to have a DVD. Used to come with this thing, which was called NGTV. And I’d completely forgotten that I recorded all the retro footage for this, which was quite a big chunk of time every month. Definitely for the first half of this year. And I am terrible at like NES and SNES games. I’m really, really bad. And like so my last thing, a big memory from this time, kind of a retroactive memory that popped into my head anyway, was recording the DVD sessions, which would be me and another member of staff talking over the retro footage I’d recorded. And it just being totally shit. And the other person being completely flabbergasted at how bad it was. And it became like an on running joke that our free DVD every month was just like a montage of me dying in the first 30 seconds of every NES game. Because it was a virtual console roundup. So I think I like my magazine persona really solidified quite quickly. It’s just this sort of like totally inept goon, at least with the readers, which I’d sort of forgotten that I went through that phase. And that was my relationship with the readers on NGamer for a while, which was odd. Yeah, I sort of, I have a memory of working on the DVD as well. And it being like, oh, it’s DVD caption time and being sent like a big sheet of, a fill in all of these captions about these games. And it was so tedious to do that by the time I went on to an Xbox magazine several years later, me and Simon Miller, the editor, used to have a race to do the entire captions in 10 minutes between us. And it was about like, about 800 words each. So it was like proper stream of consciousness madness. And I think if anyone who has like DVDs from mags from this time lying around, you’ll find all of them are kind of like self aware about how fraught the process of making the DVD is. The other thing Matthew is you posted a video from yourself in 2007, you and the NGamer team on Twitter last night before we recorded this. The camera sort of goes across the editorial floor, gets to the end of like the sort of like row of desks. And it’s like, oh, who’s this fetus on the end playing the Wii? And it was, it was you. Yeah, I looked very, very young when I started. I’ve aged massively in about the last six years. But for ages, I was this scrawny beanpole. Yeah, that’s, that’s mad, that video. I think that’s actually from the very end of 2006. I think that might be just before Christmas, if I remember correctly. But I love it, because it’s such a snapshot of the time, like he comes through the doors and there’s like Games Master is sitting there and, you know, he comes through a door and there’s like Margaret Robinson, who was the editor of Edge. You’ve got Edge sitting at their dark end of The Office, which I think I’ve talked about in this podcast before, where they took all the lights out. So it really made me laugh actually, because when I was looking at it, I was thinking, actually, it’s a lot more illuminated than I remember. But it’s just because the brightness of their screens was like lighting up the darkness of the, you know, it was basically reflecting off the roof. So yeah, it was quite a, yeah, quite a fun time. I was trying to like, so much of my memories of NGamer are like tied to where we were working in the office. Because it wasn’t just like working with the particular team, it was the kind of teams around you that kind of influenced you as well. And that was right at the start where we used to sit next to an official Windows magazine, which obviously wasn’t like a laugh riot. But then, you know, a bit later we got moved and we got to sit next to like Xbox World, which had, you know, Tim Weaver, formerly of N64. So that was, yeah, a lot more fun after that. It was good. A bit of a nostalgia rush. You should check it out. It’s mostly my old boss, Greener, wheezing as he walks upstairs. I did notice that and thought, same, big mood, you know. Yeah. I mean, if that was on the second floor of Key House, I mean, you’d love to take the lift, but you would be judged. Yeah. I mean, I’d still take the lift anyway, probably, but… Nice… .back when going to an office is a thing you can do. Yeah. It’s funny, actually, because I realise I don’t have much in the way of paraphernalia, you know, from the time that really tells the story. Like, there’s the odd photo of a colleague here or there on Facebook that I’ve got, but… I think I had a bunch of videos when I was testing the PSP’s camera in my working on play, but now they are lost to time. Yeah, it kind of happens. It’s weird. I guess at the back of your head, you think, well, we’ve got the magazine, which is kind of a record of what’s happening, so we don’t need other stuff. But, you know, I’ve got a few cherished photos. I just wish I’d taken more photos of everyone, of things, because the workspace was quite fun and had a lot of weird stuff and lots of in-jokey stuff. And I wish I’d kept more of it. You know, like, there was a lot of junk which kind of appeared in the magazine many times. I wish I’d sort of stolen it, a bit like whenever they ask actors what they stole from film sets, and they always really regret they didn’t steal, like, the ring from Lord of the Rings or whatever. I wish I’d stolen the plastic truck that came with the truck game. It’s not as killer a piece of iconography. Yeah, I think I did end up with a GameCube out of the last Office refurb. Like, that was good. It must have been from the NGamer days. It was a GameCube that had the component cable slot, so a very precious item. Right. Yeah, but there was like a pyramid of GameCubes in that office for a long time. It was a beautiful thing to behold. Yeah, so Matthew, should I tell the story of how I got into games media? Yeah, absolutely, because you hadn’t started in 2006, so tell us a story. I’ll sit back and enjoy. Okay, sure. So, as mentioned in the previous episode, I sort of fluffed my education by playing Dynasty Warriors 3 instead of revising, which, you know, it happens. What can I say? Yeah, I think, like, in a larger sense, though, I was just very disillusioned with college generally. Like, I felt like I’d been railroaded into doing certain subjects I hated. And then, apart from English, there wasn’t a single one I really enjoyed. And, like, there were a couple that were quite badly taught. I thought I had a couple of bad teachers. But it doesn’t really matter in retrospect. But at the time, I was basically just working at a convenience store and waiting for something. Like, my dad was like, you have to get a job somewhere, anywhere. And I was working full time. No, I was working part time in this convenience store. And it was it was all right. I thought a couple of shoplifting sort of thieves. One I sort of knocked over. There was a little door by the counter. And the counter was by the exit. And this dude was running out with some beer. And I just opened the door as he was walking past and knocked him over with it. I just went whoops, because I thought, oh, maybe the police could get me. If I if I physically contact him, the police could probably do me. But if I just like hit him with the door of the counter, then it will probably be fine. And it was I snatched a beer from him. And that was a very heroic day. Nice. But you’re going to say he was running and he couldn’t work out which was the exit, the main door or the little door. Yeah, he runs into what he thinks is the exit. It’s actually like the stock room or he walks into an exact replica of the room. And I’m still stood there and I’m like, I got you, mate. You’re in my MCS or Eskenite now. It’s all a little bit being John Malkovich. Yeah, exactly. But I won’t dwell on any of that because it’s irrelevant and pointless information. But what happened is I was basically just thinking, well, I’d like to do something good. I’d probably go back to college or it would be nice to have a good job. I was definitely lucky that I got to wait about six months between ending college and basically my mum finding this ad for Imagine Publishing’s games portfolio in a local recruitment paper. I was very fortuitous. It was the first time she’d ever bought this paper and she was like, have you seen this, this job here? They want staff writers for multiple magazines. So that increased my chances of getting a shot. Yeah. And so they didn’t actually say which magazines they were advertising for. So I kind of just had a punt and said, well, I replay, I read play a lot of the time in my convenience store shifts. I don’t buy it. I read it. No, I had to buy it because it was inside a plastic wallet. So I couldn’t just stand like I’m like Empire or other magazines. I couldn’t just read it during my break. Foiled. Exactly. So I applied for this job and kind of just talked about it like I was applying for play. And fortunately, they were recruiting for play. I attached a review of Zone of the Enders The Second Runner to show that I had like deep cut PS2 knowledge. And that did get me an interview, which is funny because I had no other experience. I like ran my own blog, which I deleted because it was like hideously embarrassing. And I wanted it off the internet before someone put it on the internet archive and I could never get rid of the evidence. And yeah, that got me a first interview. And it’s funny because I think most places, if they’re recruiting now, you’d find the kind of applicants who go for these jobs have have always written somewhere. They’ve always got some like clippings and I didn’t have any. So I don’t I don’t really know how I got an interview in retrospect, but I’m very, very fortunate and An actual brilliance shone through. Well, I think it helped in the interview that I could like, I expect most of the people applying didn’t even read play, but I read play every month. So I could say, oh, I like this section, I like that section, I’d like to play. Oh, good. That makes such a difference. When I’m recruiting for staff writers, and I’ve hired quite a few over the years, you’d be amazed at how many people make it to interview. And then when you second you ask them about the mag, they’re like, and you can tell they’re reaching, they’re like, I like the reviews. And you’re like, yeah, safe bet, it does have reviews. Whereas I could say I could say all the names of the writers, I could say all the sections, I could say the scores I disagreed with. I think all of that helped get me help get me the job. So yeah, for sure. So fast forward through that I was 18 at the time. Very fortunate to get that like, I’d say games media ended up being sort of like university and my first job combined. Yeah, but I remember being very intimidating. Being my first day in that Bournemouth office, imagine, and like being by people who were like at least like six years older than me in all cases. Right. Yeah, I felt very, very young. And I don’t think I was very good for a while as we discussed on the game reviews. But I was but I was well up for it. I was like up for the challenge, you know, like, give me a preview of like Warhawk. And I’m like, yeah, I fucking want to write about Warhawk. And I was just so so into it. And yeah, it was, it was the Holy Grail finding someone who wants to write about Warhawk. They’re kind of like sort of breakneck change you go through when it comes to the pace of writing for games media. Like, I remember the year before I’d written a college coursework piece. It was 2500 words. And we had like three months to do it. And here it’s like, you know, I might need to write 3000 words in a day. And like that, getting used to that was really something. But I actually really, I really enjoy that you learn so much so fast when you’re a staff writer. It was exciting. This may be an odd question. Would you say you had a mentor at all? Not really. So sort of kind of like mentor sort of emerged over time. Like didn’t really happen this year. But when I first started, not so much. But yeah, I do have a, I did have a mentor. Imagine I’m not going to discuss them in case they would rather I didn’t talk about them. But yeah, I, yes, I kind of did. But more for like the editing side of things later. How about you? Yeah, well, that’s, you know, because obviously, like, I came into the mag sort of idolizing a lot of the writers who are, you know, I was working with Kitzy and Greener, who are both, you know, I love, I love their work. And, you know, but, you know, I never worked. I worked for like Tim Weaver for a little bit. But like, you know, I think I was very lucky in that my magazine years, the first five years in the future were very, were basically spent working with and under people who were, you know, I’d grown up with. And, you know, I love their stuff and kind of, yeah, it wasn’t exactly like a sort of a sort of mentor kind of trainee relationship. But I felt like I, you know, I did learn a huge amount about how they kind of did what they did for all those years, which definitely helped. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, yeah, like now you hire people and they’re like, who the fuck are you? And you’re like, yeah, it’s a sad reality. Like, I’m from like a Satan’s and they’re like, nope, what are they? You’re like, oh, don’t worry. Yeah, I suppose so. In this sort of first year, the sort of vibe was, I felt like the PlayStation 2 had sort of ended and then the PS3 started and there was a people were very down on the PS3 around the launch period, it cost so much money. I joined the week that the PS3 launched, actually, in Europe. And so in March, and yeah, it was had like a couple of good games to kick off with Resistance and Motorstorm. Neither of those made my top 10. But I did like them. They were solid little games. But Xbox is where it was at. There were two Xbox magazines in the building and two PlayStation mags. And it definitely felt like all the good times for having what happening on PlayStation at the time. I saw you on Xbox at the time. And I was, yeah, I remember like my editor being disappointed when I bought an Xbox 360 before PS3 despite being on a PlayStation. Yeah, it was a bit I just remember being like slightly put out, which I found quite funny. But yeah, it was it was just I know PS3 was just really, really dull console. You turned it on. It felt very cold. They built this premium entertainment device that felt very out of sync at the times with the times, particularly when the recession hit later on. The PS3 seemed like a weird kind of luxury item in that in that time. Yeah, it wasn’t that exciting. Being honest, like I did enjoy working on parts of play, but like all the imagine mags I worked on later, I enjoyed more. Right. But what I will say is that people were very tolerant of me. I think I was extremely irritating. And I think I think I’m quite irritating now. But as a yeah, I think I was very young and very like talking all the time. And I think people sort of politely humored me and were nice about my writing, even though it wasn’t very good, which was very good of them. I became and indeed continue to become more annoying with time. I start off very nervous and then once I warm up, you’re like, oh, fuck it, I wish he was nervous again. Yeah, I basically just rose to the point where I was so senior that no one could call me irritating to my face. Oh, yeah, that’s that’s the trick. You can be as irritating an editor as you want to be. It’s great. It was cool, though. And to be honest, like, I don’t get I’m up and down with nostalgia for this period. But what I really miss is like the people I knew at the time. Like, I miss being like a staff writer, starting a career and having the energy for it. And then, like, knowing all these people who weren’t exactly my age, a little bit older, but they were like, you know, going to the pub with these people. And oh, yeah, such a key thing. And I think the reason a lot of people listen to games podcasts is that I never knew people who liked games as much as me when I was a teenager. And I think people encounter that in their everyday lives all the time, where you just don’t you don’t get, you know, you couldn’t just say to, like, most people, oh, what do you think of the ending of Bioshock Infinite? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, it doesn’t happen. But in games media, you get to have those, like, long pub conversations about, you know, who’s your favorite Mass Effect companion and stuff. And that’s that’s what I miss. I miss that kind of that. Yeah, I was I was I was saying to a friend this week, actually, that like at times it felt like all the work on magazines felt like, you know, the rewarding part of it was that you got to hang out with those particular people and go to the pub with them and have this like really great like social circle. And it was like that. But the price of entry was you had to do this quite grueling mag work. Obviously, I liked I liked Pags as well, but it was definitely a huge perk. Yeah, for sure. Like, imagine that a really cool thing as well, where work would stop at one o’clock on Fridays. And everyone would go to this pub called 60 Million Postcards, which I think was where the Spoons owned. But they did did a nice goat’s cheeseburger. It’s quite a whimsical name for a pub. Yeah, it was a very like affected kind of whimsy. I went there last year and it was basically like a kind of kids and parents kind of restaurant. It was a bit depressing. But it was quite exciting to move from Gosport, which was where I am where I grew up, largely laughed at town in Hampshire. It took me moving to Bournemouth actually to realize that Gosport was not posh and Gosport was like considered kind of embarrassing by some people. Did you think you were a king because you lived there? Well, I thought, oh, if you live by the beach, you’re affluent, right? But no, that’s not necessarily true. But like it’s fine there before like any MPs write to me or whatever complaining that I’m destroying their perfect reputation. But yeah, so I moved to Bournemouth, did this and yeah, learned loads in that first year. Probably the most exciting thing I did this year was I was one of the first people in the world to see GTA 4 in action in Rockstar’s offices in New York. That was really exciting. Imagine that in your first year. I mean, I was going to say like one of the big things for me was this trip doing any kind of trip in my first year was always like absolutely wild. But the idea of, you know, New York Rockstar, I mean, that’s crazy. That would still be amazing to me now if I got to do it. Yeah, it was like, I think I kind of underestimated just what a big deal it was at the time. But also just in terms of how games progress now, like this was, I was seeing this, you know, just over two years after San Andreas came out. And if you think about the gap between GTA 4 and San Andreas, it’s like you’d never see a gap like that now with a new generation release. Because yeah, it just things were moving so much quicker. And even back then you’d be like, man, they’re spending ages on this. Yeah, exactly. And it’s like, if only you knew my friend. Yeah, wow, I’m happy to wait three and a half years for a new GTA game, as opposed to like, I don’t know, probably 10 years by the time it’s done. Yeah. But no, that was really exciting, actually. That was the main trip I went on this year. Did you have any others that you were kind of remember from this year? This was the year I did my wrestle trip, which I mentioned when we were talking about the wrestling cover. Which was the Wrestlemania in Detroit, which was the famous year where Donald Trump was there. And there was going to be a fight between two wrestlers. And if Donald Trump’s wrestler lost, he was going to have his head shaved. And if Vince McMahon’s wrestler lost, he was going to have his head shaved. And I remember we made placards. It was a THQ trip. And they were really good fun, the THQPRs. We did like a placard making session before Wrestlemania. And I knew nothing about wrestling at all. And I remember my placard said, Trump will be bald by night’s end. It’s like Game of Thrones dialogue. Yeah, it was too long and wordy though. Did you have to put on two placards? Shaving was like the theme of that Wrestlemania. All the other placards were like, you know, Shave John Cena or whatever. But mine was this very complicated message, which even if you saw it on camera, it would take so long to read that it just wouldn’t work as a placard. I’m not a natural placard writer. Yeah, like as I can imagine you having three placards and you have to keep alternating between them. Yeah, so like the rest is… Dot, dot, dot, next one. Yeah, also I really like that the phrase shave John Cena sounds like a kind of like an election catchphrase. Like I’m campaigning on a platform of shaving John Cena. No, that was definitely a fun anecdote, the one about WrestleMania. Anything else you sort of did this year? I did a New York trip for Fantastic Four, which I also think I’ve mentioned on this podcast, which was New York Comic Con in February of that year. And everyone else was seeing The Darkness, which was a lot more exciting than the crappy Wii Fantastic Four game I was seeing. And I remember they had a lot more going on on their trip, so I had a lot more spare time at Comic Con. I have this weird memory, not really gaming related, of sitting down, they had a big play area where they were showing off some new card game. And I sat down and this kid was like, do you want a tutorial or do you want a free trial of this so I can show you how it works? And we were playing this thing, it was a bit like a Magic the Gathering thing. And I was just like, man alive, this is so complicated, how the hell does anyone get their head around it? And then this kid was like, oh yeah, I created it. And I remember just looking at him and thinking like, what? And I was just like, well, best of luck to you, this is very good, very fun. But I just bought, I bought all this crap. I’ve still got like a box of Comic Con New York 2007 crap somewhere because I just got really overexcited and just bought all this shit even though I wasn’t massively into comics. I should probably dig out and give it to you. There’s probably something really rare in there and you’ll be like, oh my God, that’s the first issue of Blah. Yeah, by all means, when it’s safe to take comics off of you. That can be a thing that we do. That’s cool. I didn’t have many other sort of like big trip stories from this year. Next year I’ll have fucking loads. I went on loads of trips in 2008. But yeah, this is basically like figuring out how to do the job, learning as I went, learning to kind of email PRs. The only sort of other funny sort of trip story I kind of wanted to mention was there was a Pro Evolution Soccer Press Tournament where I bothered football commentator Mark Laurencen. Like I just stood next to him and made conversation awkwardly for a little while. I thought that was worth mentioning because it was… So yeah, Matthew, those are my stories from the time. Is there anything else you kind of wanted to mention before we get into what the console manufacturers are doing at this time? Only one thing which was very similar to the terrible Mario Galaxy Planet which I mentioned last year, that was a 2007 special, was when it was the first birthday of the Wii, we were like, oh, we want to do a feature about one year of Wii and how to celebrate it. And our deputy art editor, Kim, was like, I could make a Wii cake. I could make a cake shaped like a Wii and decorate it. And then that could be like the opening image of the feature. We were like, that’s amazing. That would be so good. And so we did that. But the weekend she had to make it. I think like whenever rats died or something, this was the projectile pooping rats, who I’ve also mentioned. If you’re a long term listener to this podcast, you’re gradually piecing together my entire life from my anecdotes. Just add it to the wiki, please, whoever’s listening. So whenever rats died and she was emotionally distraught, and she could have just said, well, I’m not making the cake, but she still tried. I say try because it was terrible. It was just awful. And she knows this. We joked about it in the mag. It became like the feature, like the Mario Galaxy feature, became about, look at this terrible abomination we’ve made to celebrate Wii’s first birthday. It was sort of shaped like a Wii, and she’d stuck the icing on using this red strawberry jam, but she used so much jam, it was like bleeding through all the cracks. So it just looked like a big, misshapen, bleeding Wii. It was just, just horrible. Just a real abomination. And then, I remember the first caption on the feature, there was a little flash next to the Wii, and it said something like, please don’t make fun of this cake, Kim’s rat died while she was making it. Oh my god. Well, I hope Kim doesn’t listen to this, and is like, what the fuck is he doing bringing this up 14 years later? Oh no, we like, like, at the time, like, if there was anything in NGamer like that, everyone was always on board. Like, it was a very communal thing. Because I remember being there at the photo shoot on the Monday, and like, when it came, and Kim was quite like, I’m not entirely sure this cake’s brilliant. And when she unveiled it, it was like, yep. It really made me laugh. We had a good laugh on that issue. That was just so funny, laughing at this tragedy cake. I had one other memory from this time I kind of wanted to mention as well, which is that I was sat at a desk next to a PSP Debug unit. That was my colleague for a long time. And after a while, they actually hired a news editor, a really nice guy called Chris Reynolds, who I enjoyed working with. And he was the most tolerant person for my bullshit. I would tap on his shoulder and be like, hey, I want to talk about some absolute horseshit for 30 minutes. And that was my Starfire experience. That’s a key part of the Starfire experience. Oh, yeah, for sure. It’s like, I will not do this work now and then crunch to do the work at the end of the day because that’s how writing kind of works. But man alive, will you have heard my lost theories? Yes, because the year is 2007. Yeah, cool. I enjoyed the cake story, Matthew. I feel like in every episode you should have to bring up something awful that was made for an NGamer feature that turned out to be a disaster. All right then. Well then, we’ll be back after a short break and we’re going to talk about what was going on with the different console manufacturers in this year. Give a little bit of context as to what was going on in 2007. Matthew, welcome back to 2007. Whoa. Oh, wow, I’m so skinny. Wow, they’re playing Gym Class Heroes on the radio. Wow, Maroon 5 have a new album out. Anyway, yeah, bit of a cultural context there. Clearly you lived very rich lives at the time. So in this section, like with the 2006 episode, we’ll talk about what was going on with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, and also PC, if relevant. I don’t actually have any PC observations here, probably because I wasn’t paying that much attention to PC at the time. But Matthew, 2007, E3 was massively downsized this year. It was the year I think everyone thought E3 was going to be over, because the previous year it was massive, people worried it got too bloated, and then it got downscaled to basically a series of conference rooms in Santa Monica, where people go, journalists would bike around or get shuttle buses and see games, rather than the spectacle from years past. Do you remember this at all? So as I said last week, we didn’t go to E3. So from a distance, we weren’t really absorbing that, and we were so focused on delivering these big Mario Galaxy preview features and things like that, that it took me a couple of years to get a bit of a wider appreciation. I was very Nintendo-centric when I went into the job, and was for a couple of years. It wasn’t until I think we sort of sat with Xbox World and PSM3 that I got a better idea of what E3 was looking like, because really it felt like E3 was for Microsoft and Sony. Nintendo’s thing was always quite separate, or within it, it was quite contained. So yeah, if you put a gun to my head and said, what was the character of E3 in 2007, I don’t think I’d know. But this downsizing thing, that escaped me completely. It’s not like loads of significance to it, because E3 would come back in its form later on and become even more of a consumer show, turning it into a kind of nightmare world. We’ll talk about that in a future E3 themed episode. But yeah, so it was kind of scaled back a bit, but every console manufacturer had a presence there. To talk about Sony first, like the PS3, it launches in Europe, massive sales at first. And over time, I would say like reception called quite significantly. And even though they had like big games releasing fairly regularly, most of them were a disappointment this year, or at least they just didn’t, they didn’t quite capture the intention that Microsoft did with theirs. So you had Warhawk this year, which is like a multiplayer sort of dogfighting game, which was actually really good, but probably on the wrong format at the time. Right. There was, which is online, it was online only, and Sony’s online experience wasn’t very good on PS3. You also had Heavenly Sword from Ninja Theory, it was their, I think their first game after they made Kung Fu Chaos on Xbox, which, and like, this was sort of a first run at the kind of game they would get good at, which is narrative driven third person action game. And pretty graphics. Yeah, it looked really good for the time. This is the thing, like, you know, kind of had this movie level sort of quality to it. If I recall correctly, had about 15 characters played by Andy Serkis. Anna Torv was Noriko, the main character in it. Had like, around this time, Sony was leaning heavily into six axis controls, a thing, a feature that was clearly bolted on after the Nintendo announced that the Wii was a motion control console. This resulted in some terrible ports of Xbox games where you would shake the entire controller to hit a soldier with your gun in Call of Duty 3, for example. And it culminated in one of the biggest disasters on PS3, which was Lair. The last game from Factor V, the developers of Rogue Leader. And again, a very nice looking game. Again, we controlled a dragon, lots of dragon kind of combat. But you had to control the dragon, at least at launch, you had to control the dragon with the six axis controller. And it simply did not work. Did you play this game? No, I didn’t play. So I didn’t get a PlayStation 2, a PlayStation 3 until quite late. Well, after Uncharted 2, for sure. So, yeah, like I just saw all this stuff from afar and thought, oh, how sad. Sucks to be you. Well, I don’t know, you know, obviously, like, Factor 5 had a great rep from the Rogue Squadron games. So to see them just sort of come a cropper like that was kind of depressing. Yeah. Heavenly Sword also had six axis controls where, like, you would fire an arrow and have to guide the arrow with the six axis, which that too was nightmarish. I’ve never actually played it. Was it all right? Heavenly Sword? It was OK. It was like not as good a combat game as the Devil May Cry games or like, you know, anything else that was kind of melee combat focused. And it was only five hours long. Like, that was the other thing. Very, very short. So just like came and went and no one really cared. I think it sold OK. But they made no sequel. You could argue that Hellblade, Heavenly Sword, there’s a bit of a clear reference there namewise. Maybe a bit of a spiritual connection. Oh yeah, I’ve never made that connection. Yeah, that kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? A lot of these games had amazing edge covers and then got five in edge. Yeah, that’s kind of early PS3 in a nutshell. Yeah, I think everyone who was even on PlayStation Mags at the time, I think was quite down on them, I imagine. They just, I remember like a Sony PR sat down with me, like not getting frustrated as such, but seeing I just could not play Lair. Like the preview code, I just could not make the dragon turn in the direction it was supposed to. And she took the controller off of me and she like did control it perfectly. And I was there thinking, but if it’s not intuitive enough to just pick up and control, this game is going to do nothing. And it did nothing and it got slated. They did later add, you could just control it with the analog sticks, but too late by then. But yeah, just emblematic of the bad decisions Sony was making at the time. But then at the end of the year, you get one unexpected gem. The game that, I think everyone, I remember everyone imagining getting in the boardroom and playing this, and no one really caring at the time, Uncharted Drake’s Fortune. A game that comes out of nowhere and is like, is something you can only play on PS3 that’s actually great. And it may or may not come up later in the list, Matthew. So did it really come up nowhere? Because surely for PlayStation writers, Naughty Dog have, you know, they have amazing pedigree as far as PlayStation people are concerned in terms of like Crash and Jack and Daxter. It’s not like they’re an underdog and you’d be, surely there would be some anticipation for what they did next. Yeah, I mean, to some extent, but was the, were critics ever like truly thrilled about like Jack and Daxter after like the first game? They made loads of them and I feel like the interest in them diminished over time. Yeah, I always thought they reviewed well though. I’d put, but you know, from my, you know, occasional dabblings with PS2 magazines, but well, I just can’t remember the story of this one. You know, I can’t remember if it was like some great hope that everyone, you know, was was pinning things on. So it surprises me to hear that it was a bit of a, you know, a surprise. Well, you say a surprise gem. Well, my memory of the time is that like this is just people thought Heavenly Sword was going to be like it. That was going to be the big thing. Like I remember that being the vibe that wasn’t the only kind of PS3 exclusive sort of like in the conversation at the time. So you also had Hayes from Free Radical and that turned out to be a disaster that released in 2008. We’ll talk about that later. But that basically people thought that would be a big deal because, oh, it’s the creators of TimeSplitters. They only make good games and they’re making games for PS3. So what could go wrong? Yeah, everything it turns out. So, yeah, it was some it was just a kind of string of like kind of games. Yeah. And like, it’s the one there wasn’t like an absence of them. There was a ratchet and clank game this year that everyone reviewed well, except for me. I gave it like 68 percent to make you proud, Matthew. Good. Other outlets were giving me like 80 something and I was like, why? You were laying the foundations for our eventual friendship. Yeah, it’s the only way I knew that you would accept me in your life. Yeah, I sort of it looked all right for the time. There’s a kind of HD platformer game, but I don’t know. I remember just being so down on PS3. And like the best thing about it was that it was like a HD console that could play PS2 games and they tripped that out of the cheaper model. It was the one thing you can play every game on the most successful successful console ever released, more or less. It was a few games that didn’t work and they cut that out as a feature. They did it to save cost to bring the price of the console down. It was so expensive. It was 425 quid over here. But in America it was 599 dollars. That’s just absurd. And even though it was a Blu-ray player, no one really cared about Blu-rays at the time. Blu-ray versus HD DVD, that was a thing that was happening at this time. That was so tedious. Oh yeah, I remember because the Xbox had the HD drive you could get extra. Yeah, my friend Lynch, when I went to his house in 2015, he still had that drive and a little stack of games. And I thought, what a quaint object. It’s like, oh, do you want to watch Don Travolta’s hacker film Swordfish in HD? Yeah, I’ve got Serenity. It’s one of the 20 ones that was made. Yeah, I’ve got Serenity right here. And King Kong. It’s like people who bought films for the PSP. Oh, man, I can’t wait to watch Rush Hour again on my PSP. I got Dodgeball in the sale. Yeah, it was a bit of that. I think, well, it’s meanwhile, I think people did buy Blu-rays. I think I knew a lot of people who had Casino Royale with their PS3, for example. But anyway, yeah, it was just not exciting, the PS3. It had quite a good E3 show considering. They leant really firmly into PlayStation Home. Matthew, do you remember PlayStation Home? This was like this sort of online space, right? Yeah, it’s like The Sims kind of interface. Yeah, I only remember it because I think Andy Kelly used to write a regular feature about it in PSM3 and he was often playing it for that feature when he had to play it in the games review room. I remember looking across thinking, what the hell is that all about? When it did release, it was so boring to control your character. It was a bit like the Splatoon’s Plaza bits, but as a whole experience. They think they thought you would boot your PS3 games as your in-home character in order to play them, even though that’s less convenient than using the console. Yeah, I guess Second Life was quite big at the time. So maybe they were like, oh, we can get ahead of that or get in on this. Yeah, it was a bit of a rough time. But the E3 show still had the announced Infamous, which is an OK sort of superhero game that released later on, and Killzone 2, which was actually a legit game. Killzone is a silly name, the universe is daft, but they did some damn good shooting and it did look nice. But yeah, that was it. They were basically just trying to get people excited about the future of it, but it wasn’t really happening. Yeah, so you just weren’t really in the PS3’s orbit at the time, right? No, not at all. Weirdly, because I can remember buying… What was the very cheap small PS2 called? Was it a mini or a slim? I think it was slim, yeah. Yeah, I bought one of those and basically bought the tail end of PS2, you know, bought loads of pre-owned games and also like PS2 was just having like an amazing final run. The last couple of years of PlayStation were absolutely amazing. So I was just sort of going back and playing a lot of that. I didn’t have a next gen console until quite late in the year. So, you know, it was just my Wii and my PS2 on my old CRTV. So that was kind of good. That sounds pretty good. I’d fucking love to have a CRTV now. Just plug in a Wii and a PS2. That sounds great. That’s the optimal setup I want now in my home. Yeah, so in which case, then, Matthew, there’s not loads more I want to say about Sony here other than, like, the PSP line-up was pretty good, actually, at this time. The PSP is a bit of an underrated console, I think. You had Patapon from the Loco Roca people, sort of musical, sort of drum based, controlled, some little dudes game. God of War Chains of Olympus, a legit good God of War game made for the PSP. Which I think we talked a bit about before. And Final Fantasy Tactics War of the Lions, probably the best version of that game on a console that really suited. But no one cared about the PSP, I would say. The DS was really thriving at this time. Do you have much kind of oversight of what the PSP was doing? No, like I said, I did have one and then it got stolen by Burglar. So, yeah, I liked some of these things. I did like the God of War game, that was good. Yeah, I think I was just a bit, I was in such a Nintendo DS zone, like I couldn’t really appreciate what other people were doing. I kind of bought the whole kind of console war, or at least console superiority thing with me for quite some time, you know, into the job, because that was the kind of tone of NGamer. So, yeah, I don’t know, it took me a while to kind of be a bit more broad minded, I think. Yeah, it’s funny, because I hoarded consoles this year. I bought, I don’t know how I managed it on my sort of salary, but I bought a PS3, a 360 and a Wii all within this 12 month period. Oh my god. Yeah, I must have done a lot of freelance that year. But yeah, I had to have everything because it was just because as a kid, my parents for years and years wouldn’t buy me a games console. So my very mature adult response is just to, I will buy every console I can now and no one will stop me. That makes sense. It just meant you had to drink water whenever you went to 60 billion postcards or whatever it was. It was a million actually. But yeah, I mean, maybe one day they’ll get to a billion. So let’s switch tack to Microsoft and Matthew. What do you make of Microsoft during this year? Yeah, this I mean, like the first next gen console I got was a 360 and like from the outside, it looked incredibly exciting. Like whenever a big new Microsoft thing came in, that’s what got the office moving. Like, you know, not that what happens in an office is any indicator of necessarily what’s happening, you know, at a national scale. But it really felt like instantly the 360 was just going to be the console for this generation, like based on the office chatter. You know, right back from when they got like the first Gears of War demo in and it was just like, oh my God. But that was in 2006. Yeah, like all the excitement around Halo 3 Bioshock was just massively, massively important and exciting. I’ve seen the notes you put Mass Effect. I can’t really remember what the dialogue was around, like the conversation was around Mass Effect before it came out. Very positive, I think. Like, I remember it just being talked about as this is the next game from the Knights of the Old Republic people. That was largely how it was kind of angled. But obviously it was an Xbox exclusive as well. Yeah, like it’s heritage. Yeah, just based on its like heritage, you’re like, of course, this is going to be like a great RPG. But I just can’t, I don’t know if like I just wasn’t following it massively or, you know, like I said, I had a slight Nintendo tunnel vision just because of the job. Like I wasn’t like, weirdly, this was a period where I sort of stopped reading a lot of other magazines because I was so focused on getting my stuff right. Like, you know, suddenly, like I have a bit of a blind spot, which is why I didn’t necessarily know what the conversation was around Uncharted or Mass Effect. But, you know, the few things that did break through, you could tell they were going to be pretty big. It was quite slow. It got like great later in the year. I still think it was quite slow first six months. Yeah, it was. But like, Microsoft also had Crackdown in this in this period. And I think that was like emblematic of what Microsoft was getting really good at the time, which was making these Xbox Live enabled like multiplayer hits. And as we talked about in previous episodes, every games journalist basically bought a 360 and played on 360. Now you’ll find it’s on PS4, obviously, might be a bit different these days. But yeah, it was everyone had everyone was on 360. You could pretty much guarantee that you would like log in and see at least one or two of your friends playing COD 4 and another two playing like Halo 3. Yeah, it was just that kind of really just it really just won when it came to multiplayer gaming. Just a beloved console at the time. And yeah, just a really good lineup. I remember seeing the Big Daddy from Bioshock on the cover of 360 magazine in our office and thinking, what is that? Like, I remember like this tangible feeling of like Bioshock looked like something I’d never seen before. And while every fucking smug motherfucker would be like, well, you didn’t play System Shock 2 then. It did actually look very different to System Shock 2. Very different aesthetic. And I just, yeah, just every one of these games, I remember just being on play and looking at like either GamesGM or one of the 360 mags playing them thinking, why the fuck isn’t there anything like that on PS3? Goes back to driving a dragon’s neck into the ground so you can’t control it. Yeah, it was it was very much like that. I found I’ve got a memory of walking into the games room where my friend Matthew had your hand was playing Mass Effect for the first time. I like seeing that it was the opening sequence and like, Ashley sort of takes a helmet off. And I remember thinking, wow, what’s this like Battle of the Planets looking kind of like character designs and stuff. And Mass Effect just seems so deluxe, like if you compare it to what Bioware’s RPGs look like compared to Jade Empire, the leap was like enormous. It felt like a proper next gen RPG. You know, the vibe was good around it. But yeah, that was but that was Xbox that year. Like, there’s not much to say from the E3 conference. It had Rock Band debuted there. We talked about Guitar Hero in the 2006 episode. So obviously a plastic instrument game was these. These were really big this year. And also Assassin’s Creed. That was massively hyped this year. Again, this was covered in game review scores. We got wrong. I hated Assassin’s Creed. I thought it was terrible. But obviously it was huge in the series would go on to. Well, it’s still with us. It’s still the biggest one of the biggest series around. Oh, God. But that’s what I mean, though. Like a lot of things that happened this year are still going now. And still, you know, it felt like this set in motion, like this is what the series are going to be. This is what’s going to matter for, like, the next 10 years. Yeah, COD being the other one, right? Like COD 4 was a real kind of like… Yeah, COD, you know, the Mass Effect, the general, but, you know, the kind of the second age of Bioware, I guess you could call it, like the investment people have. A lot of that is down to Mass Effect. Yeah, you could also argue that, like, the entire sort of move in RPGs from being RPGs to like these genre-plended things kind of starts with Mass Effect. Mass Effect leads to The Witcher 3 and all that stuff. Yeah. But Matthew, you were on the Nintendo beat at the time. So why don’t you talk me through what Nintendo was doing this year? Yeah, so this is a pretty manic year. Some of my memories of this period are a little muddled because we were so big into import. Certain things happened faster than other places. You know, it’s a bit of a weird year. I had to check a lot of my dates saying, you know, was this actually out this year or was it the year before? Because we were playing everything often for Japanese import review first. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is obviously the year of Super Mario Galaxy, which we may talk about later. But this felt like a very traditional Nintendo. We was obviously massive, but it wasn’t completely… It hadn’t gone completely kind of like Wii Fit, New Super Mario Bros. Mario Kart Wii. We weren’t into the age of slightly simplified kind of core Nintendo games. What we were getting were things that could have probably have lived on GameCube. Some of them were probably originally intended to. So we were getting like Super Paper Mario, Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario Galaxy. You sort of forget that we started like this. It could have been a very core line up to me. And then it’s only in later years that it begins to get into the kind of basically catching up with what DS was doing, which was using familiar characters, but maybe in a broader way, which would be less interesting to the kind of traditional Nintendo fan. This was a really great year for DS as well. You know, like it arguably… I don’t want to get ahead and like spoil some of my picks, but you know, it had like Phantom Hourglass, which is arguably like a definitive DS experience in terms of what that console was about and what it could do. I’m not going to spoil some of my picks, so I’ll talk about them later. But yeah, like it felt like a… This was just an embarrassment of Rich’s issue. You know, we just… every issue there was something I wanted to review. Like I felt like I was tackling a big game, dropping big scores all over the place. If it carried on like this, I think, you know, the memories of that… it became much more of a struggle later on. You know, and I wish I’d sort of… you know, like appreciated it more at the time, like just how good we had it. Well, I don’t know, you had your CRT TV, like you weren’t… you were playing the Wii pretty aggressively. I don’t think there was probably loads you were missing out on or you weren’t appreciating, you know. Yeah, but more like, you know, later on, the lengths we had to go to, to stretch games to fill the mag. And then I think, wow, these games were like, you know, we did a lot less with a lot richer games. Right. You know, even though we went mad for Mario Galaxy, like I was talking on the last episode with all our kind of like celebratory, like dumb previews and features and things. You know, when these things came out, there was always something big instantly we had to move on to, where like the art form of covering Nintendo in the later years became about, all right, Mario can’t wheeze out. How do we write about this for the next six months? Now it’s out where here like, you know, a Phantom Hourglass could come out and we might not go back to it again, which now to me seems absurd, you know, obscene even. So it’s just a very different time, you know, yeah, just a very, very different time. Like, I’d forgotten that the Wii Zapper happened this year. Like it’s such a good year that you could forget about something shit like that. Yeah, they were like, which was the plastic peripheral that you inserted the remote and nunchuck into to turn it into a light gun, even though holding it in your hands also worked. Yeah, they were, that was another note I put here is that when you look at the Nintendo E3 conference from this year, Reggie is on stage and he’s mostly talking about these three different peripherals, the balance board, the zapper and the steering wheel, although only one of those is actually like a proper peripheral. They’re just like plastic shells, aren’t they? Yeah, they’re just ways of like, yeah, putting the remote in a different context. Yeah, well, that’s what I mean. Like we were about to have a wave of something else, but this year wasn’t that. This year was Metroid, Galaxy, Super Paper Mario. It was like, it was stuff you were like, oh, this is what I like. This is what I’m into. And then it began to like, I don’t know, they began to make stuff to try and fit the new crowd that they had. You know, it’s almost like they made a generation of games not expecting Wii to be this huge kind of casual smash. And once it was, it sort of shifted direction. But that’s fine. You know, it’s absolutely fine. You know, we had some fun with it. The other thing I really remember about this year was the Smash Brothers was on the horizon. And they were doing the Super Smash Brothers, the Smash Brothers Dojo, which was like the Smash Brothers website. I don’t think it updated daily. I might be wrong. But it was basically like Sakurai’s blog for the game where he would just constantly drip feed like new characters, new levels, new music, new features. So like, you know, every day, you know, it became like a ritual of coming into the office and then checking to see what the new Smash Brothers thing was. Because that game was just building up in my head to be the most incredible thing ever. I understand the music clips he kept putting out where it would be like, you know, here’s this remix of the track from like Metal Gear Solid 4. And you’d be like, what? This is incredible. This is happening on Nintendo. I couldn’t believe it. That was like a big part of my working routine was getting excited for Smash Brothers. Maybe it was every day. I remember this site. Was it like quite a like by today’s standards, rough looking site? I vaguely recall it. Yeah, quite tacky. It’s still up. If you go and look Smash Brothers Dojo, you can see it and you can see all the posts. And when they post it and it became like the thing they did this carrying on. They did this with the latest Smash Brothers as well. Like it was just a constant drip feed and there’d be loads of screenshots from the game with like weird Sakurai kind of captions on. I assume Sakurai wrote it. I mean, maybe you didn’t, but it had like quite a whimsical kind of tone to it. But yeah, it was just like a real, you know, it just painted this picture over a year of this game. That was just going to be like everything Nintendo related. You know, it was like, look, here’s, you know, Will Wright from SimCity or whatever is this character in it. You’re like, what the hell is this game going to be? Yeah, that was like a big, a big part of the fun. And it was a little bit like, you know, there was social media back then, but it wasn’t as prevalent. It wasn’t as big thing. So like you had a bit more of a kind of personal, like private relation with information online. You know, everyone was seeing this stuff individually. You know, you wouldn’t learn about this stuff from Twitter. You just get it. You know, how you actually sourced information and raked through the news was quite different back then. And it just yeah, I like that part of the job. I liked, you know, the surprise of discovering something rather than just having like pals tell me about it online. Yeah. Yeah, it’s true. Now it’s like a very reactive culture. I had Facebook at this time, but that was kind of it. And it didn’t feel like it was a place that people posted games news. They just posted. Yeah. But now you hear like you hear things maybe not as they’re intended or someone else’s version of it first. And but this was very much of its time. But yeah, I was very fond of it. Maybe this is working on print as well. But like I didn’t I found that I didn’t really watch E3 conferences for the first few years of working on mags. And then by like 2010, I was like definitely watching them. That was something that kind of changed over time. I would like E3 would be a thing I’d read about when I came into the office the next day. But now I kind of I sort of see the jealousy about E3 because growing up, you know, I knew about it, obviously. And I used to love the E3 issues of Gamers Master and N64 and NGC. You know, just the amount of new stuff that would happen and the pictures of it. I used to think, oh my God, it just looks amazing. And then getting to do a job, I just assumed, oh yeah, we’ll be going to E3. And then the logistics of it are like, oh, it’s too expensive or we’re only going to send 10 people and your mag doesn’t count. So not, yeah, like to begin with, I was quite sour having to look at it from afar. But like I said last week, we kind of turned that into a bit of an art form of like a challenge to try and like make E3 our own without having been there. But it definitely became more of a thing. Yeah, I will talk about this on the later episodes when we get into the slightly darker years of the Wii. But yeah, I remember everyone would stay off to work to watch the conferences. So everyone’s conferences. So we’d be watching our desks and I can remember just watching the Nintendo conferences and hearing like, you know, Mike Gapper on Xbox World burst out laughing at how shit it was and thinking, Oh, no, this is going to be like the joke in the office for the next month. But everyone was secretly willing the other platform holders to shit the bed just for office superiority. Yeah. Yeah. This is I think this generation is like one of the most interesting ever, like in terms of how seismic the shifts were. Yeah. Both of the types of games that like, you know, Nintendo was making to Microsoft basically buying dominance, but actually working and then them kind of being like the best of the lot. And then Sony just this was like emblematic this year of Sony’s what was perceived as Sony’s arrogance as the number one for two generations in a row. We can’t fail luxury item console that was just yeah, very coolly received like still a success ultimately, but not for it took some doing and it took a few years for the good games to actually trickle in. And yeah, and everything Sony does now can be attributed back to this era of the PS3 where, you know, people weren’t interested. People didn’t like the exclusives and yeah, whereas Microsoft is like almost trying to kind of recapture the vibe it had in this era. And it’s a very, very defining time, whereas Nintendo is running the other way now and like making the most hardcore dedicated kind of Nintendo console it can ultimately with games that are still very accessible and popular. But yeah, the feels like the design philosophy is very different. Those are my observations, Matthew. Shall we move on to our top 10s? Yeah, let’s do it. Yep, we’ll take a short break, and then we’ll come back with the top 10 games of 2007. Matthew, welcome back. Oh, great. Thank you for having me back, I guess. Yes, banter. So, yes, we’re going to get to the top 10 list now. We’re going to do what we usually do, and alternate from 10 to 1. Matthew or I will go first. We haven’t decided yet. Do you want to go first, Matthew, or shall I? Yeah, I’ll go first. Cool. And yeah, if we get a game that is the same, then we will talk about it later on in the list. Whoever’s got it highest in their list, they will be the ones to start the conversation, I guess, about that game. I explain that in a really complicated way, but it won’t be, it’ll be fine. Matthew, kick off with your number 10. Right, I’m just gonna say up front, there are some really massive games not on my list. This is very much a heart list, okay? Yeah, that’s probably worth saying, actually. This is not us trying to say what are the 10 most important games of this year. This is us saying, these are the games we enjoy the most. Because my first game is definitely not the most important game of this year. In fact, it has a 69 on Metacritic. Well, is it de Blob? What is it? It isn’t, but my number 10 is Ghost Squad for the Wii. Ah, that’s a great game, though. It’s a fantastic light gun shooter based on a 2004 arcade machine from Sega. What was notable about the arcade machine is it had a sort of persistent progression system where you could save your progress to these cards. It’s basically a light gun shooter with a lot of variation in it in that there’s only three levels, but they branch massively and as you complete them, you unlock harder versions of them which have more paths. So there’s a surprising amount of shooting in this game. I really like light gun shooters. The appeal of them, you know, the appeal of the home ones. They always massively appealed, but I could never really justify them because they were so expensive for what you’ve got. And here on Wii, we had a great, you know, it is a great light gun shooter to begin with. But, you know, you don’t have to buy any separate peripherals for it. This was kind of one of the Wii Zapper games, one of the games to kind of push you to try and get a Wii Zapper, but you didn’t need it. I just, I mean, it’s probably a topic for another time broadly about why I like light gun games, but I love the kind of melodrama of them. They just move like no other shooters. They got real kind of thumping impact. I find them very, very like just relaxing to play. And you have to be engaged, but you can kind of switch off a bit and they’re perfect for like killing 15 or 20 minutes. And Ghost Squad was a game I just played loads off because it had all these different branching paths. You know, I played it for tens and tens and tens of hours. It drove me up the wall, though, these reviews. You can complete it in an hour and you’re like, yeah, it’s not really the point of the thing. It had some like weird quirks. Like it had almost like little kind of mini games, almost quick time events in some of the levels. We had to like defuse bombs or snipe someone out at a particular moment. So it felt like there’s lots of variety. I love that, you know, you’re shooting these quite generic terrorists and there were so many terrorists in every room. It used to really make me laugh because there was like a level where you’re cleaning out like a sort of like a hotel or like an alpine lodge and you’d open the door to a room and like a terrorist would jump out of a cupboard. Another one would rise up from behind the bed. Another one would slide out from under the bed. You’d shoot them. Then you’d go into the room. By the time you turned around, like another five terrorists had slipped out from under the bed. And it basically like if you just if you took it frame by frame and added it all up, you were like, there were like 30 terrorists in this one bedroom. That’s absurd. And it just it just really made me laugh. This was just such a dumb fun game. Yeah, I just a huge amount of time for it. The mag in general was very fond of it. I mean, the Kitsy reviewed this and he was really into it as well. Just a really great early Wii game. Yeah, I am. I wonder if the review scores like you say are all tied to length and not to the game itself, because I played the arcade cabinet of this. I finished it a couple of years ago down in Torquay. I spent about eight quid finishing it. And it was phenomenal. What a great… I guess I never really think about the art of what makes a good light gun game, but that is a phenomenal elegantly made game. It’s so, so good. Yeah, yeah. Like you say, they actually had this on stage at the E3 show this year. The Wii Zapper was a big deal for a while. But do you think it’s the best of the light gun games that were made for the Wii? Yeah, I think so. I actually quite like the second Umbrella Chronicles, the Dark Side Chronicles, I think it was called. I didn’t like the first one at all. The first one tried to make a light gun game out of Resident Evil 1, which is like so sedate. And you could go for like several minutes without there being a zombie, because it was almost too true to Resident Evil 1. But the second one, I don’t know if it’s just because the games it was focusing on were a bit more action heavy, like Resident Evil 2 and 3, and I want to say it had Veronica in there as well. But it was when Resident Evil became more of an action series, so it just made more sense. And to actually boil those stories down into just like a two-hour light gun game was quite a nice way of doing it. Yeah. But yeah, Ghost Squad, that’s where it was at. Yeah, that’s a good pick. I actually bought that on Wii fairly recently with the intention of playing it, but I haven’t got around to it yet, but I will because I love Ghost Squad as well. So what’s your number 10? It’s Final Fantasy XII on PS2, Matthew. Is this on your list? It’s not on my list. I’ve got to put my hand up and say I never finished this. Neither did I because my PS3 died with my 50-hour save on it. So I played a hell of a lot of it. I’ve played enough to definitely know that I liked it and stuff like that. But it’s definitely far off being my favorite Final Fantasy game. I think that’s just because I think it lacks a bit of the warmth in terms of the music and the characters and the world that the previous games had. At the same time, I think that’s why a lot of adults actually quite like this game and prefer it to some of the other ones. Yeah, you just feel a bit more grown up and sort of uncompromising in a way. Yes, I would say it’s out on PC now. It’s perfectly at home on PC. It’s something that, if you like Dragon Age Origins, for example, it’s a game I would recommend to players of that game, more so than people who enjoyed Final Fantasy X or VII or VIII. It has this very complex Gambit system in it, which essentially lets you program characters with different parameters. You can put ally, under 30% health, cast cure, and then your characters will automatically do that. It’s about basically building a clockwork, perfectly functioning party of fighters who will just do everything you want them to, one after another, no matter what the circumstance. Watching it all play out and seeing enemies collapse as your perfectly programmed party takes them all out, that’s a really satisfying feeling. I was very bad at that system. I always felt that whatever I put into the machine, the logic was like, whatever happens equals shit the bed. I just couldn’t click. I got pretty far through it, but I never felt like I mastered it. I’ve heard so much love for that system when it’s firing all cylinders. I wish I was better at it. For a PS2 game, it’s a very detailed system. The other thing is that the newer versions of it are way more worthwhile than this PS2 original because this game runs at quite a low resolution on PS2. It’s such a nice looking game for a PS2. Right at the end of the era, it was actually released in 2006 in North America, but we were kind of obeying European release dates here. And yeah, with the fast-forward on in the new version, you can speed it up up to eight times, I think, or maybe 16 times, and you can grind through the game so quickly doing that, and it’s such a great addition. Really, really good. All the Final Fantasy re-dos have a system like that. So yeah, if you were to play it now, definitely play it on the newer systems. But I did really like it. Like I say, it lacks the warmth. It’s fairly famous this game for. Apparently, at Square Enix’s behest, they changed the main character from Bolthea, the Han Solo-like guy in the game, because he was apparently too old. I think he’s in his early 20s, which I guess is old for a Final Fantasy protagonist. This is the rumour anyway. And they picked the very boring Vaan to be the main character, who’s a slightly naff version of Tidus, a character that people already think is quite naff in Final Fantasy 10. So yeah, I like it. Good PS2 game, Matthew. I like the bit where you run around saying, Bosch lives! But I can’t remember the context for that at all, just that you shout around that’s someone called Bosch lives. Yeah, I can’t remember the other thing he says, but he has two lines of dialogue that he says over and over again in this town. I think the idea is that you’re changing public opinion with propaganda. It’s very silly. But yeah, it’s very dry for a Final Fantasy game, but what a lot of people would say was the last great Final Fantasy game. And I don’t think they’re entirely wrong, but I don’t know. I like some of the later ones. So yeah, your number nine, Matthew. My number nine is again a bit of a Matthew Choice. I think I mentioned this when we did the 2006 list. In fact, it is Tomb Raider Anniversary. Classic, classic Matthew Choice there. Yeah, I love tombs. I love jumping, jumping around tombs. It’s literally a match made in heaven. That’s all I want from a game, really. I love this game because it kind of took a game I’ve always really struggled with, which was the original Tomb Raider because of the absolutely ghastly control scheme and just made it a modern feeling platformer. And they remade it and it was a substantial remake. It wasn’t just that game with new controls. They bought a lot of their learnings from Tomb Raider Legends. It’s Crystal Dynamics, that is. But this felt like just a really great marriage of past and present. It kind of had less of legends, sort of cinematic gubbins going on in it. At least how I remember it. You know, it was quite pure. A lot of the levels were just you in a tomb. Maybe a little heavy on the old shooting a gorilla in the face. It’s like the downside to early Lara Croft. Before she got a lust for murdering men in the reboot, all she ever did was murder animals and a T-Rex at one point. But if you ignore the combat, this had some great platforming. For me, one of the greatest pleasures in a 3D platforming area of any kind is entering a space or a room and just looking at it, the complexity of a space and thinking, how the hell am I going to get on top of this? And then you naturally feel your way out. And if something doesn’t happen very often anymore, because for some reason the entire games industry have decided that 3D platforming is a nuisance. So basically everyone auto-platforms now after Uncharted. The route is painted in white paint or bird shit or whatever environmental trick you’re using to show the handcribs. Yeah, I blame Assassin’s Creed for this too. Yeah, but we haven’t been asked to actually do any platforming in any games outside of character platformers like Mario, basically since Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raiders, I don’t think. So for me, I wish we’d go back to this, you know, that the puzzle is navigation. Yeah, I really, really rate this series. Plus, it was just beautifully done. Like, it came in, because I had it on PS2, and it came in a really nice kind of collector’s edition with like a… I don’t know if it had a making of documentary, but it had like level commentaries and things. It was just a real love letter to this game that also improved the game, I think. Yeah. That’s cool. That was a good choice. I must confess to being put off of this game by the fact that… Imagine Screenshot Tech at the time was so fucking awful that PS2 games look muddy as hell. And so every time I browsed the review of Anniversary that we ran in play, I thought, this game looks awful. And I imagine it didn’t. It probably looked very nice on TV. On my old CRTV, it was fine. I wonder if it did Tomb Raider 2 in this style, because it feels like that would have been like a big hit. Yeah, I don’t know. I guess because of the… I don’t know how… I don’t really know how this era of Tomb Raider was received commercially. But obviously not well enough that they then had to go and dramatically reboot it. But reboot it again, make it more like this. That’s what I want. Yeah, I must admit, after we talked about Legend on that 2006 episode, I have been more tempted to go check them out. Every time there’s a Steam sale, they’re all like 69p each. Spoiler alert, the third in the trilogy, Tomb Raider Underworld, will also be featuring on a future list. That one was a good next-gen game. We’ll save that for 2008, though. OK, cool. My number 9, Matthew, is Crackdown on Xbox 360. Not on my list, but I do like it. Yeah, so this was really an unexpected hit out of nowhere. I remember it being one of the games I bought on Xbox 360 for because, you know, a superhero game with this cel-shaded graphics jumping around a city. Like you say, Matthew, it has real platforming in it. It doesn’t do it for you. You actually have to like move the character and, you know, it’s, yeah, I much prefer this style of platforming to the Assassin’s Creed type. And yeah, it was an open world game with a great power curve. You go around the world collecting these orbs or earning these orbs for doing certain actions and you get better at your driving, jumping, shooting, etc. etc. So a really, really good sort of like hybrid of an open world game and an RPG, I guess. It was a great co-op game. You could go around the whole city together in two player. That was revolutionary for the time. But I mostly just enjoyed it solo. It was a great city to explore. Did you ever climb all the way to the top of the agency tower for the achievement? I did indeed. In fact, one of the only times I played it in co-op was with my friend Andrew where we both climbed to the top of the tower, used a cheat code to spawn in a car. He got in the car, I picked up the car and threw it off the tower with him inside. And I remember that being a good experience. Did you climb the tower? That’s a fantastic bit of just platforming challenge and the scale of it is unreal, you know. I felt like, famously, a lot of people bought this just for the Halo 3. I think it was a Halo 3 beta access, I think it gave you to the multiplayer. That’s right, yeah. It’s a little bit of a Zone of Enders Metal Gear Solid 2 deal. Yeah, except, you know, probably better received than Zone of Enders was. Well, that’s the thing, I think a lot of people bought it for the Halo excitement and then they were like, oh, holy shit, Crackdown is actually really amazing. Yeah, like I mentioned, it was just Xbox Live and, you know, just getting a big new multiplayer game and it just felt like Xbox Live could turn these games into hits. People were just so up for it and obviously Microsoft was trying to work it into these games as much as possible. But yeah, it was good. The sequels never seem to capture the same magic. The second one’s all right. I played the second one. It’s pretty good. Adds a gravity gun. That’s quite fun. But yeah, original Crackdown. Just fantastic. Great game. Your’s your number nine, Matthew. My number eight. Number eight. Oh, I did it again. God damn it. My number eight is Zack and Wiki, The Quest for Barboros’ Treasure. Not on my list. You’ll be shocked to hear. Yeah, this one of the great underrated Wii gems. Kind of a point and click adventure in that you pointed and clicked with the Wii pointer to guide a little pirate around this area, but not a point and click game in the style of Unki Island. It wasn’t like a big verb sheet and collecting items. You did collect some items, but the puzzles was quite self-contained. Every level was about you trying to get a treasure chest and either work out a route to it or like breaking down some kind of trap. It’s actually very hard to summarize. I was reading my review and sort of shaking my head at what a poor job I did of describing it back then. In that it’s kind of like a big logic kind of sequencing kind of elements to it. Like things have to be done in certain order with certain objects. It was quite easy to paint yourself into a corner and basically do things wrong so you had to restart the level which I know must have annoyed people. Interestingly, the producer of this also produced Ghost Trick, which the puzzles that I can sort of see a through line. You know, in Ghost Trick, it was all about using these like domestic objects to save someone’s life as a ghost. You could possess them and move them. And here you also had quite a limited number of items you could use. And it was more about interacting with the items using the Wii remote. So you’d kind of manipulate them in 3D space and press buttons on the remote to make like, you know, play a recorder or unfold an umbrella. It’s quite hard to like pin down exactly what makes the puzzles work in this one. But what I loved about it is amazing production values. I loved the puzzles. They were really, it was super difficult. And it had a huge Capcom energy. Like it actually evolved and unfolds like a big Capcom action game, you know, as if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you’ll know this is a bit of a bugbear of mine. It ends with like a massive basically fighting God in space, but as a puzzle, which all games should. It feels like if Platinum made a point and click game, this is kind of what would happen. It somehow has action and scale. And that’s super impressive, like how it married those two sensibilities. Yeah, I really love this game. It’s a shame that like this was this early era where like the Wii was massive. Everyone took a huge punt on it and invested like big money and making really good stuff that then sold and they never touched it again. But it meant we had a couple of years where a lot of third parties made really interesting exclusives for the Wii and Zack and Wiki is like just brilliant. If you’ve still got a Wii or a Wii U and you can somehow track down a pre-end copy, this is highly recommended. Yeah, so I have not only heard of this game, I remember talking to a colleague at the time, Ashley Day, about this game who was a big fan of it. And Ash generally followed the kind of big Wii games very closely. The Wii wasn’t massive at imagine. I don’t think people really took it that seriously either. But yeah, I remember this. This pops up on a lot of the best Wii game lists and I think it is actually quite fondly remembered even though it didn’t sell very well. Point and click, a point and click game, just seems like more of those should have happened on the Wii. Yeah, there were a few that did like broken sword and things, but yeah, it always felt like a huge missed opportunity that, you know, there was sort of a slight resurgence of these kind of story games later after the Wii. Oh well. Yeah, I might track down a copy of that. I did look at it on eBay a few months ago, back when I was hoovering up Wii games thinking that would, I don’t know, make the pain of lockdown go away. Spoiler alert, it didn’t. But yeah, that’s a great choice. Exactly the kind of sort of Wii nonsense people expect from you in this podcast. Oh good, I’m good. And what about your number 8? I was only joking there, by the way. No, that’s what I’m here for. Some of these, I was looking at this list thinking, shall I dump this for a more mainstream choice? And I thought, nah. Yeah, so my list is very mainstream by comparison, except like one that I don’t think anyone would guess. Well, maybe close friends would guess, but yeah. Otherwise, it’s actually a fairly mainstream list, so it should make a good contrast for the remaining ones. My number 8 is the Orange Box. Did that make your list? It didn’t. Yeah, so we talked about this. We agreed earlier this week that the Orange Box would come as the, would be the game that we put on the list, as opposed to its individual parts. Confession time, I’ve never finished Half-Life 2. I got to Ravenholm and then didn’t get any further. Were you too scared? I know that’s egregious for the former editor of PC Gamer, but I remember when I joined PC Gamer, I thought, is it a problem if I’ve not finished Half-Life 2? And I thought, well, everyone else would have played Half-Life 2, so it’s probably not a big deal that I haven’t. That’s true. You can’t have played everything. Yeah, exactly. I did really think the Orange Box is an amazing package for the time, like a proper… In this year, full of amazing great games on 360, the 360 was also the console that got the best version of this. PS3 One was notoriously bad. So you had Half-Life 2, you had the two episodes, Episode 2 was new, Episode 1 had previously been released on PC, you had Team Fortress 2, and then you had Portal, this standalone puzzle game. And Portal was the main reason I put this on the list, Matthew. A very influential puzzle narrative game. I would say that probably a lot of indie games have taken cues from Portal, it’s fair to say. And one of the first big game memes I can remember is that stupid cake meme, and that song that plays at the end as well. But without all of that extra sort of cultural interpretation stuff, Portal was just a fantastic little standalone game that came as part of a £40 package that had a bunch of other cool stuff in it. Yeah, I can’t say I have that strong connection to the Half-Life series that a lot of people do. Even though I acknowledge it’s an extremely important game and the type of shooting you don’t get so much these days. Yeah, I think that’s kind of why it doesn’t make my list. This is a game I have huge admiration for, and if I was reviewing it, it would get a massive score. It’s a brilliant game. It’s a brilliant collection of brilliant games. But I just don’t have a huge amount of personal affection for Valve games. It’s not a world I’m obsessed with. I will not be upset if there is never a Half-Life 3 at all. I have no emotional attachment to it. I played them growing up. I was incredibly excited about Half-Life 2 coming out, and did really, really enjoy it when I played it. But there’s something about the setting and the aesthetic. It doesn’t quite click with me. They’re cold games. They’re cold games. Well, that’s it. Portal is obviously funny, but it’s quite arch, and it holds you at a bit of a distance. There are people I know who are mad into this, and I fully understand. I know their personality types. It’s a very PC gamer game. It’s a very… You know, the humour is… I was going to say the humour is like… It’s super nerdy, it’s super smart and sharp, and that appeals to a certain mindset. I’m a bit dumber. I’m happy with, you know, Mario jumping on a giant apple in space. That will make me laugh, because it’s just, you know, giddyish, childish simplicity. But, yeah. A great collection for short, but it’s not a hard choice for me. Yeah, that’s why it’s relatively low on my list. I think it, but, you know, what a great package. You can get it for like 15 quid, backwards compatible, on Xbox One, like, that’s like still an amazing value collection. I never got Team Fortress 2 either. Like, I just don’t understand it. I just don’t know how to play it. Like, it’s, maybe that’s because on console it just wasn’t where it was meant to live, but I just baffled, considering it’s like one of the biggest things ever on PC. I think it morphed beyond recognition on PC multiple times as well, so I have no idea what the history of the console ones like and whether it keeps up with that. But yeah, still though, like you say, a great value package. Just that Portal was the part from this year that I loved. I should say in a wider sense actually, I did not have a good PC at this time because I didn’t have enough money to buy a nice PC. I didn’t play Stalker or Crysis this year, which were both big games that arrived this year. So I wanted to note that as like notable omissions. Even though I’ve played both subsequently and think they’re good, but still wouldn’t make this list. So Matthew, why don’t you hit me with your number 8? 7. Number 7. Great. Having just said that like Orange Box isn’t a hard choice, I now pick the incredibly un Matthew like game of Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Nice. Is this on your list? It is, but it’s at number 7, so this is perfect. There you go. Synergy. Yeah. I’d say I’m picking this specifically for multiplayer. I was never a big online shooter person. Definitely not before Call of Duty, but for me, this like invented the structure. As far as I’m concerned, it invented the structure that made these games worth playing. I love the character development, the unlock system. I love the kind of customization of it. I love the idea that if with the right smarts, you could maybe gain an advantage. But it just opened up multiplayer for me in a way that previous games hadn’t. It’s just an amazing feeling shooter. I used to play this awful lot with one of my good friends, Cyrus. We would play this after work like all the time. This is probably the multiplayer game I’ve played the most. I didn’t play it for like a fraction of the time compared to like most people. But by my standards, this was a big time investment. I think what I loved about the early Modern Warfare games, one and two particular in their multiplayer maps, is that they felt like a bit more like places. It felt like you were having a fight in a level from the game, as opposed to like a death match arena, which I think the games became a bit more kind of clinical. And now it just feels like a kind of like, you know, like a labyrinth that’s basically been designed for teenagers to kill me as quickly as possible. Where this was like, there are two apartment blocks. What’s the story? Like it felt like there were kind of stories in the battle. Like I loved the map block, which was two apartment blocks in sort of, I think it was like the sort of the Chernobyl kind of area of the game. And just I remember these like sniper battles between these two blocks and you could kind of put a little narrative onto it of these two sides. And then it became less about that and became more about, you know, what’s the optimal circuit to pass through this level to like shoot everyone with a shotgun? And this was a great sniping multiplayer game. Really good fun. I love that. Yeah. Why did you like it? Well, I am. I like the multiplayer too. I don’t think I got as into it as you, but I thought the single player was phenomenal in COD 4 as well. Just in terms of set pieces that you kind of knock down basically. Very like film set feeling levels a lot of the time. COD 4 was probably still the best of those types of games. Just really dramatic story. It has like the big twist in the game of that nuke going off in the middle of the city and killing one of your main characters, which was, you know, huge at the time. Just very talked about and very shocking. But like just really more than just shock value, I think it just really it was just a really great bit of narrative design for that to come out of nowhere. That was just definitely phenomenal. I still I did actually I stalled on the single player for ages and was like I don’t really get the fuss like quite early on. I think there’s it was definitely in the sort of Middle Eastern section of the game where I think you evade like a TV station. I can remember just finding the game quite hard. You know, like I hadn’t really got into the rhythm of how you’re meant to play it. The whole kind of target gallery kind of thing sort of popping out and you know, start shooting people like that. And so like I remember the first you know, I didn’t even get to like the bomb going off when I stopped playing it to begin with. And then when I finished it off, I remember thinking like, Oh, what an idiot I am. This is absolutely amazing. You know, like, you know, the bomb, the two snipers in the ghillie suits. The end of this game is like, you know, an action movie made playable. Just, you know, so exciting. Yeah, I think the vibe of it. They invented all the tricks that they basically repeat forever, but they were here and as good as they ever were here. Absolutely. Like that’s it. That’s the thing. Like you can’t this this kind of perfects it. And then every other kind of version of this just is a different spin on it that dilutes it ever so slightly. Yeah, it’s kind of how I feel a little bit about Uncharted 2, you know, like, you know, they got the right amount of ox patting and then and then and then it was just like they never got the balance quite right ever again. But this is like the Uncharted 2 of Modern Wolf of Call of Duty. There you go. Whoever’s doing the Back Page: drinking game, you can take off ox patting now and take a shot. I’m sure Crash Bandicoot will be coming up any moment now. Yeah, like the other thing is I might be wrong about this, right? But my my memory of Call of Duty 4 is that it’s a bit less who are pro military than the later games are. It’s a bit more like you’re these kind of like rad SAS dudes, which I’m not saying like that’s like good either. But it feels like later games get closer to being sort of propaganda for the military. Yeah, it’s it’s odd. It’s got that like it’s got that one. Is it is it death from above the level where you’re playing the night vision kind of drone or whatever shooting everyone? Yeah, that’s quite weird now because the dialogue in that level is very like quite gleeful. I think if anything, you know, this point’s been made many times before. There was all that when like leaked footage came out of like actual kind of drone operators and they kind of talked in a similar way and it’s all kind of like, you know, got them and like bits everywhere and all this kind of stuff. And you’re like, it’s a bit sinister. But yeah, I think you’re right. Like this was quite James. It’s almost a bit James Bondy. I think, you know, it was quite a personal mission. You know, the villains were quite personal that you were after. But that’s my man. I hadn’t played it for quite a while. I must admit. No, I think you’re right. James Bond is definitely something I think they were going for. The fact that you’re playing these sort of British main characters. I thought the… What was it called? The All Ghillied Up, that mission. That is like, that is a phenomenal mission. Oh, so good. Like one of the most amazing bits of sort of smoke and mirrors ever. You were like, oh my God, how are they doing this? And then you read like the making of that level. And the bloke’s like every, every, it’s basically a branch, it’s basically an interactive fiction in a first person shooter. Like every potential thing you can do is like programmed in so it reacts properly. And it’s pretty mad. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, but the illusion of it works very well. Oh, it’s so good. Yeah, just really good. I’d still play it now. It’s just a shame that you, there aren’t many people making campaigns on this level. I’m just convinced that like Activision’s other studios never quite managed to tap into what Infinity Ward got correct about in this one. And I think Modern Warfare 2 has a lot of it as well, even though Modern Warfare 2 is like, has an absolutely nutso story. But yeah, I like the multiplayer too. But yeah, just an era defining shooter this year. Also looked like a proper next-gen game. Yeah. Just like the gap between this and Call of Duty 2 is pretty huge. Even though COD 2 had its own things that it did well that COD 4 doesn’t do. So yeah, plus made you and a bunch of other students at Oxford fail their exams, Matthew. So Matthew, what’s your number six? My number six is Pit Cross DS. Not on my list. Again, another shooter. Pit Cross, if you aren’t aware of it, is like a grid-based puzzle game where numbers tell you how many squares on that line have got checks in them and how many haven’t, and you basically work it out. I’m not going to explain Pit Cross to you, you can just wiki it. And Pit Cross games, it basically boils down to whether or not you like the particular functionality of that game. On DS with a touchscreen, really nicely done. There are loads of people who tell you there are better ones, and I’m sure there are. There’s lots of obscure, like, Japanese import Pit Cross games you can get, and because it is just a numbers grid, you know, it works in any language. But this was the one that came out in the UK. It had really jaunty little tunes. I played this for tens, if not hundreds of hours, just mindlessly grinding away on these grids. This was like a perfect, a perfect part of Nintendo’s Touch Generations on DS. I’m also fond of it because my brother was really into Pit Cross DS as well, and he once went to a fancy dress party as Pit Cross, which really made me laugh. It was just a white shirt with a Pit Cross grid drawn on it, but I liked the idea of it, of like cosplaying as a number grid. So yeah, Pit Cross DS, not much more to say than very addictive, good puzzle game. Nintendo didn’t invent it, but they executed it well. Well, if there’s ever any doubt that you’re related to your brother, I feel like photos of that fancy dress would probably clear up. So Nintendo made this version of Pit Cross, Matthew. Yeah, it was Nintendo published. It was made by a company called Jupiter. They were doing a lot of this kind of thing, you know, like they had the kind of Clubhouse games and I think they did a Crossword one, you know. It was kind of taking stuff that like your grandparents like to do and just making a nice accessible DS version of it. I mean, that’s what Touch Generations was all about, you know, the kind of the aftermath of like brain training. So yeah, this was like a version of that. It just had good tunes. It downloaded like a new grid every day as well. On top of like there were tons and tons of grids. Like some people are more attached to the images you make. The whole thing is that once you filled in a grid, it kind of makes a picture and that’s your reward. And so you get like themed Picross. You might get like Pokemon Picross where every grid makes a Pokemon’s face or whatever. But I don’t really care about the picture. I just like the act of filling these things in. So I’m very like, you know, I couldn’t care less what the picture was of. This reminds me of when on the your episode of the Final Games Podcast, you pick Minesweeper as one of your Desert Island games. Is there anything else from Touch Generations that you think is like worth picking up for people who might be hoovering up DS games on eBay or whatever? Oh, nothing really jumps out. This is the one I really liked. I mean, there was that like the other good one. There was the Clubhouse Games, which they did a version of for Switch, which is like the 52 games in one. I can never remember the names of these things, but it had like just a very solid version of like chess and this and that. And on DS, it famously came with a, you could do like the local download. So if there’s someone else, you could have one copy of it, but you could download enough of each game. So the other person could play you in multiplayer, which was quite nice. It was good for killing train journeys on. But yeah, a lot of this stuff wasn’t necessarily aimed at me. I’m more interested in where like some of the touch generation thinking like mixed with like more traditional games. Like we won’t get to it this year because it wasn’t out in the UK, but like Professor Layton becomes like a really successful marriage of the, of the kind of ideas. I was more into that, like where it kind of worked for both audiences rather than, you know, aesthetically, the touch generation stuff is quite sparse. You know, it’s not quite classic Nintendo. It’s not full of character. But, you know, it sort of did what it said on the tin. I think Nicole Kidman was always in the adverts for these things. And sort of, you know, apparently she loves Pit Cross DS or something. I wonder if she still plays it. I wonder if this will be in her top 10 for the year, Matthew. Yeah, maybe. Okay. Yeah, very, very interesting choice there. And what’s your number 6? It’s Mass Effect on the Xbox 360. This isn’t on my list. So when did you play Mass Effect? I think I did play it on 360, but I played it a little after the fact. It took me a while to get in. I actually played like the first five hours of Mass Effect. I didn’t like it because of the kind of combat and everything. I didn’t touch it and then went back and fell in love with it just before Mass Effect 2, I think. I was quite a latecomer to it. Yeah, so I didn’t love Mass Effect. I liked it. I loved Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, but this one was, like I said earlier, it’s a true next-gen RPG. The universe of it felt so fully formed. That’s what’s kind of amazing about it. The amount of stuff they’ve built, how packed out it feels. Even though most of what you see in the game, you just see little snapshots of worlds and, you know, go to these quite barren moons to drive around your little car and collect resources, you still got enough of it that you feel like you’re part of something bigger. Yeah. And it drew its characters so well, even though I think later games had slightly better parties overall. Yeah. There was, just Saren in this game was a really good villain and there was kind of like threat of the Reapers in the background, a kind of like larger sort of threat for you to deal with it throughout the trilogy. It was like quite flawed as a combat game, as a lot of people have noted. This upcoming definitive edition would apparently do something to make it slightly better. I’m a bit unclear on what, from how they talked about it, but intrigued to see how that went. Are you hoping to handle a bit more like Mass Effect 2? Yeah, I mean, I would hope so, but it would surely require a complete rewrite of the game, because there’s quite a detailed sort of inventory and equipment system in this game. But they were bridging the gap between two eras of RPGs, so I totally get why they did things the way they were. And I didn’t really have a problem with it at the time. Yeah, I just loved Mass Effect. It really did feel like a character where you could build some version of yourself. I like the idea of you building a character where it’s not so fully formed that you can’t put your imprint on the character, but they’re fully formed enough that they can talk and be interesting in cutscenes, which the two shepherds were. It’s a really hard balance of strike, I think. It’s the kind of partway on the spectrum between dictated and user-made. It’s an interesting tightrope to walk, I think. Yeah, and some games do it better than others, including games by Bioware. Dragon Age Inquisition does it quite well, I think. And Dragon Age Origins, you’re sort of silent. So, you know, there are different approaches. You’re all very fond of the Geralt approach, aren’t you, Matthew, of having a pre-made character. Yeah, I like, you know, I just think when a game knows what its hero is going to be, you can kind of focus everything on making that character as fully realised in that world as possible. I think when you’ve got to accommodate, you know, infinite character builds, that’s where worlds get a bit vague for me. But this was a good mix of the two. I really like the Paragon Renegade system was always quite fun and good impetus to replay it. Yeah, it is a very binary system. It rewards you for being like really good or really bad. And that’s something you never quite solved in subsequent games. But it’s flexible enough that you can like do the old Renegade decision when you want to, to get the result you want and have it not impact like the outcome of the game, which is that’s what you kind of want, really. That’s what I really liked about Mass Effect 2, where suddenly like the Renegade button would flash up and you just shoot a guy in the head mid-conversation. It’s like, yep, we’re moving on now. And it’s like, that feels good. I like the My Shepard is mostly a good guy, but every now and then he’ll fly off the handle and do that. Just literally just murder one bloke. And that must suck for that guy’s family, because at the end everyone’s like saver of the universe. And then they’re like, well, yeah, he murdered like my uncle. Like the only human he killed out of malice was a member of my family. What does that say? Yeah, or like he punched the news reporter three times in the face. That’s a really weird like choice you can make in that game, actually. Yeah, the romance system was good as well. I romanced Ashley in this because I’m afraid of a boring, straight white man. I let Kaiden die as well. He romanced the space racist. Yep, and then Miranda in the next one again. When I play again this year, I’ll do some more interesting choices. Yeah, then go for the one that looks like a Dyson vacuum cleaner. I might pick female Shepard and romance like Garrus and see what that’s like or something. And then write a really wanky article about it. I also let Kaiden die, of course, as everyone did. So that was it. That was Mass Effect, Matthew. Very good RPG. Felt like it just… Wow, this is what the future of RPGs looks like at the time, game. What’s your number five? My number five is The Legend of Zelda Phantom Amiglas. Yeah, so kind of the set in the Wind Waker world, sort of Toon Link on the oceans again. This was just a triumph of making a Zelda game specifically for DS. Had touchscreen controls. You controlled it all with the stylus. You moved him around with the stylus. What I thought this really brought to the game was the items were absolutely amazing. The problem Zelda has is it has an inventory it kind of leans on a lot, and getting new uses out of those items is quite difficult. They’re so familiar. The games always find something new, but there’s always a little bit of like, shoot the switch with the arrow, throw the bomb to light the thing. It’s all, yeah, that’s fine. But this, just by dint of having a control system that was, that gave you such direct control could do different things. So you had like the boomerang, which you could sketch, like the exact path you wanted to go. So it could like pick things up and then move them to other places or move between switches in like quite a weird pattern. It just felt very, very flexible and pleasant. I love that you could like bring the map screen onto the touchscreen, like annotate it. So there was a lot of like riddles and sort of treasure map stuff. It was a bit more like pirate adventure kind of Zelda, which was something that, you know, became sort of enabled with this. I mean, there was literally a quest where you had to like draw lines on the map and where they intersected was where you had to dig and all this kind of stuff. It was very fun. I had a real sense of adventure to it. It’s quite short, it’s quite simple, quite easy. Not when I played it originally. I had to review this on Japanese import because official Nintendo didn’t review Japanese imports because they were obviously pushing for the English language releases. So this was a game where we could get a Phantom Hourglass review cover out early on NGamer. It meant having to play it in Japanese, which was mostly fine. The Zelda games are simple and characterful enough that you can understand what you’re trying to do. But there were a couple of riddles or spoken quests where I was just having to do everything in a different sequence every time until I got the right answer. That was a nightmare. I remember sitting there at the weekend. I actually went back to visit some friends at Oxford and I was playing it there in their house thinking, I’ll never be able to do this and just screech in hoping that some other poor sap who had imported it was playing it and updating their progress on game FAQs or something. It was so hard. I thought I was just completely stuck. But this was great. Also has a… Have you played this one? Do you know what? I haven’t. The big divisive thing in Phantom Hourglass is it has individual dungeons that you go to, but it has a central dungeon that you return to again and again. And the idea is that every time you return, you’ve brought new equipment to it that you’ve got from other dungeons, and that new equipment opens up new routes or lets you do it faster. And the thing with this central dungeon, I think it’s the Temple of the Sea King, it’s called, is that you’re on a time limit in there, it’s like a cursed space, and there are these sort of giant phantom knights that patrol it, and if they catch you, you know, they turf you back to the beginning, so it’s kind of like a weird stealth dungeon that you return to over and over again and discover, like, new elements to it with new items. Some people are just like, oh, this game’s only got five dungeons and it makes you do one of them over and over again. But I really liked the idea of Nintendo trying to do something structurally a bit interesting, like, you know, given how much this game did to just, you know, adapt to the DS, that was enough. Like, that could have been enough that they also had this, like, weird experimental kind of dungeon in the middle of it. I just thought was sort of them really kind of pushing themselves. Yeah, really a really fun, strange, unique game. Phantom Hourglass just felt like whatever the equivalent, you know, it felt like a AAA DS game in a way that very few DS games did. It was also sort of 3D from top down, but it was just beautifully made. The production values were unreal. It was really, yeah, really special. Yeah, I do remember this looking spectacular. And I do seem to own it, looking at a little box of DS games I’ve got. Yeah, I mean, bang it in your 3DS and give it a go. Yeah, I also thought it was quite interesting that around this time, Nintendo seemed to move the Cartoon Link stuff off to handhelds after Wind Waker. What do you think the thinking there was? Because it looked better on handheld, maybe. Yeah, I guess just as a visual style, it makes a lot more sense. Yeah, I’ve not actually seen them speak much about Phantom Hourglass or Spirit Tracks, so it’s a bit hard to know the actual logic behind it, but you would think it’s just a fit for what the DS can do. If you want to do a 3D world, it’s so broad, it kind of communicates its ideas more clearly. I’m glad that they did do it. And Spirit Tracks also I really like, though. Some people are a bit more down on Spirit Tracks because the navigation, you’re kind of stuck to rails, you know, you’re on a train where here you can kind of like chart your course around the ocean by drawing like a little route with the stylus. So I don’t know, as someone who… I got a big kick when Nintendo lent heavily into their hardware. You know, for me Phantom Hourglass is kind of what Skyward Sword was to the Wii. It was the game that was like, this is everything the DS can do and this is like the potential here if only someone else would do this, but only Nintendo ever really did it properly. There was a rumor this week that Phantom Hourglass is going to be remade. Did you see this? No, I didn’t. Yeah, I think it was based on like a trademark listing related to Phantom Hourglass in like a European country, which made them think that some kind of revival was planned. Do you think that would be worthwhile pursuit? Yeah, I don’t know if I just want a remake of it because I remember it fondly and I have done this particular experience before. I’d rather they took those mechanics and if they wanted to do a touch screen Zelda on Switch, I wouldn’t say no, but I’d rather they maybe did something else rather than just did this adventure, which was limited by the DS tech. I think if you just put it on the Switch, it would feel quite simple now. But I’d also rather they just got on and made Breath of the Wild 2. I don’t know, my relationship with handheld Zelda gets a little bit wonky after Spirit Tracks, Link Between Worlds. I’m not as fond of as some people are. It’s not technically handheld, I guess, but I wasn’t as interested in the Link’s Awakening remake. I’m kind of over remakes, I guess. I’d rather the Zelda team put their considerable brains to new things. Well, I guess the thing is that it was Grezzo who did the Link’s Awakening remake. Yeah, I guess saying Zelda team is a bit unfair in that case. I’d rather they put their general Zelda efforts to new stuff. Yeah, without getting too into it, the Oracle games were made by a Capcom studio, right? So you can still task non-Nintendo studios to make Zelda games. They are great games as well. Yeah, maybe it was just perfectly calibrated to the DS Phantom Hourglass and that is where it should remain. But yeah, a great show. I will play it at some point, Matthew. I plan on playing all the Zelda games I’ve never played at some point. It’s very short. You can probably do it in like six or seven hours. Yeah, I played a bit of Spirit Tracks too and I liked it. It was worth making Spirit Tracks just to have that Smash Bros level where you’re on the train. Yeah, it’s got good music as well. Spirit Tracks, well, we’ll talk about that in a later episode, but it does some good stuff with Zelda as well. Alright, well my number five, Matthew, is Uncharted Drake’s Fortune. Is this on your list? It isn’t. Yeah, so everyone now says that Uncharted is either like bad, actually, or clearly the worst one, and they’re correct, it’s the worst one, and it hasn’t dated as well as some of the other ones. However, you weren’t there, man. You weren’t there on a PlayStation magazine in 2007. This seemed like such a breath of fresh air. And like, as we did with the previous 2006 episode, I did look at the Eurogamer reader comments for this year, for the games they nominated. It gets confusing, because for some reason there are loads of games that didn’t actually come out in 2007. But anyway, for the Uncharted bit, even though loads of games now have these kinds of characters, people were blown away by how affable Drake was and how affable all the characters were. Like, you’ve got to remember this was a game of very sort of stiff, boring protagonists. If you look at Altair in Assassin’s Creed by comparison, he was just a complete non-event of a character. Loads of generic-looking, bold guys. After this, Nathan Drake influences so many characters that follow. Like, you wouldn’t have Ezio, I don’t think, without Nathan Drake, for example. And then all those other Assassin’s Creed protagonists who are a bit cheekier and fun. And yeah, he just brings in a different sort of side to games. Games are always trying to be cinematic in terms of having cutscenes and creating blockbuster-style set pieces. But the actual kind of like effort of this to go into like characterization and incidental dialogue, just Uncharted felt really just like nothing else at the time. And when it comes to platforming, it’s quite paired back compared to the Tomb Raider games, but it still had that kind of Tomb Raider vibe in a format that was very, very comfortable. The island setting in this one, lots of green, lots of caves. Yeah, like not as kind of lavish as future games would be. Yeah, even though it goes off the rails when they introduce a load of like Nazi’s zombies later on, or whatever they were, like those dudes who are skeletons. It is properly supernatural, isn’t it, this one? Yeah, actually, I don’t think they are Nazis. I think they’re like long, I think they killed the Nazis. Like you find a U-boat at one point, one of the more memorable sections of the game, a U-boat sort of stuck on a waterfall, which is a really cool set piece. But yeah, you awaken something and then all of these skeleton dudes start charging at you. But yeah, it is, it is properly, it does that sort of Indiana Jones thing of it goes supernatural in Act 3 kind of thing, you know? Has a terrible final boss, but yeah. They all do. They all do. Just a cut on Naughty Dog, don’t know how to finish a game. Yeah, so yeah, but yeah, I just really loved Uncharted at the time. I thought Drake was a great character and it was, like I said, it was like the only saving grace for the PS3 this year, I felt like. Yeah, the soggy clothes tech, that was amazing. Yeah, it looked really, really good. That was like the first time I’d seen that and then you were like, now everyone does it, but at the time you were like, oh my god, their clothes are actually wet. It was just nice to have like one game that kind of people coveted, even if they didn’t own PS3s, you know. Definitely, I remember, because I used to, at the time in 2007, I used to share a flat with Leon Hurley, who was working on Official PlayStation Magazine at the time. And this was just like, I can just remember the excitement of Uncharted coming, you know, of like finally having that kind of, the drought is over and check this out. And I remember watching Bitsu on his TV and being like, oh wow, that actually, it looked amazing. I mean, aesthetically, so much more my vibe than like Gears of War, for example. It felt like the consoles setting out their stalls a bit of like, well, you know, 360 is where you have big macho men and here’s just like cool Indiana Jones. What a great character. Yeah, that’s how I felt too. Like Gears of War’s tone just never really quite captured my imagination, even though the shooting was definitely better than it was in Uncharted. But yes, what a great creation. And, you know, the most significant, in retrospect, the most significant game of the generation for Sony, really, in terms of dictating its future direction. So yeah, how about, what’s your number four, Matthew? My number four is Hotel Dusk, Room 215. Another game I own, but have not played. But I’m not surprised to see this on your list. I would have guessed it was quite high. I think that’s the case for a lot of people. It’s a bit of a cult classic. I imagine lots of people have picked it up from CEX at some point. Yes, this is a DS adventure game made by a company called Sing, who are now sadly departed, had a great little run of about 10 years where they made pretty much exclusively Nintendo games. They weren’t a Nintendo studio, but they were published by Nintendo and they were making interesting interactive story sort of experiments with often quite lush or interesting visual concepts. So this is a story set in 1979, I think, and it’s about a detective called Carl Hyde who stays in a hotel, Hotel Dusk, and he gets given a room which the rumours say grants wishes to people who stay in it, and you basically mooch around this hotel, meeting the other guests, solving some light mysteries. It’s very, like, in hindsight got way more of like a television storytelling vibe than a film vibe, which is what I think probably a lot of people link it to, like, Twin Peaks often comes up when people mention it. It’s also that Americana of like the hotel itself, but, you know, it’s basically an ensemble drama where there is a mystery, but it’s pretty chilled how you actually kind of uncover it. And there’s lots of people in the hotel and everyone is hiding something. A lot of their stories are quite sentimental, you know. The way it’s sort of divided into chapters is you’re almost sort of solving smaller domestic problems for people in this hotel, and through that emerges the kind of season arc, which is the mystery of Hotel Dusk. It’s a very small space that you explore, but what I love about it is that, you know, it’s probably fewer than 20 rooms, this whole place, and you probably spend about 20 hours there, and you just get to know it like the back of your hand. You become really familiar and it’s quite daring, I think, to have a game that’s comfortable to just take its time in one space and go, you’re really going to get to know everyone here, and you’re going to get invested in everyone here. So even if their stories aren’t like the most grand sort of action-packed things ever, you’ll be so invested in it that they feel more important to you. So it’s quite low-key, if I was to describe what actually happened, but when you’re in there, you really lose yourself. It’s really immersive. I really love this game. The second game, I think, is even better, Last Window, and that will definitely come up at some point, but it almost has a lot of sensibilities that are now praised in a lot of indie games where it’s like super low-key and everyone’s like, how daring, how brave, and I love that Nintendo published this super low-key game as a mainstream thing. It’s just about talking and relationships. It’s got this amazing hand-drawn style of where they photoshopped people and then drew over them to turn them into living illustrations. You hold the DS like a book and move around on the touchscreen, and the conversations play across the two screens on the DS in a really novel way. Literally a novel way. It’s like a book. Yeah, I love this game. Great vibes. Yeah, I feel like if there was ever a Matt Castle indie game, it would be like a version of this. Yeah, if I ever get my act together, if I was to ever make an indie game, I would make a spiritual successor to this series. I kind of know where I’d set it. I kind of know what I’d do with it. It just has such a clear vibe. Yeah, it’s a really great game. A really great little mood piece. Really bizarre that these games did nothing at all, and Nintendo carried on making them until they basically just couldn’t keep investing in these sort of non-sellers, I think. Oh, it’s funny, because I remember that ad campaign that showed it being held like a book and them treating it like it was a crime novel being read by someone in a living room or something. Yeah, it’s a great pitch. This also resulted in me, if you remember the reviews episode, I think I mentioned this, that I wrote the worst ever review I’ve ever written, which was like a first person detective novel, and it was just total shit. I mean, really bad. I did a great disservice to Hotel Dusk, a game I should have just supported with a conventional review so people actually bought it rather than going, oh, well, if this asshole likes it, then I probably won’t. Well, the thing is, Matthew, we’ve talked a bit about the idea of doing a crime games episode or possibly a visual novels episode, so hopefully we’ll get to talk about it in more detail then. There’s a lot to say on this game, but if you can dig it out and find a copy somewhere, go do it. It’s absolutely fabulous. Great pick. I will say on the side, no, actually, Matthew, I managed to find the issue of play that has my Nico Bellic first person writing in it. Maybe we should do an episode where you read out your Hotel Dusk review. Yeah, let’s do that. Yeah, that will be hilarious. Maybe that will be a Patreon exclusive if we ever do that. I’ll cringe myself inside out. Yeah, okay, great. What’s your number four? It’s Bioshock, Matthew. Oh, that’s my number three. Nice, perfect. Yeah, so first-person game launched exclusively on Xbox and PC originally before coming to other formats. This was a kind of immersive simi game made by the developers of System Shock 2. The creator director was Ken Levine, but loads of different people made this game. Quite strong personalities from the sounds of it. People owned different levels within the game, and I think worked extremely hard to get this to the point they wanted it to be. I think it actually only really came together in the last few months of development, is my understanding of Bioshock and how it was made. I think it has dated worse than people probably think it has. I think the power, the kind of power structure in this game is a bit, the curve rather, is a bit odd. You are both underpowered and overpowered. You can die quite easily in this game, but because of the vital tubes, there’s never really a cost to dying. You can kind of keep throwing yourself at enemies. I think Bioshock 2 has better combat than this. They really find ways, by making you the Big Daddy, they give you a bigger armory and more enemies to deal with. You can kind of lay traps and find different ways to deal with enemies in a way that I think is a bit more true to the immersive sim than this is. I don’t think this works as well as a stealth game either, but none of that really matters because it’s all about the world, isn’t it? Rapture was an amazing creation for the time. It felt so lived in, as they say. You arrive after this kind of 1959 New Year’s party, your plane crashes in a very memorable sequence. You get into a bathysphere and you see the city, your underwater city for the first time, etc. It’s one of the best moments in gaming. Yeah, for sure. That blew me away. It’s one moment, I still get chills thinking about it. Absolutely just the voiceover and the music and everything and the way it looks. Just incredible. I wish a game world could feel like that again. In fact, I will say that Bioshock Infinite got pretty close. That was pretty amazing to see for the first time. But this was a true moment of this generation that just blew everyone away. People are right to remember that the game dips off a bit in the second half. The boss fight at the end is notoriously bad after the big twist. After the big twist, the game loses momentum, I think. But exploring the different parts of this world for the first time. Fort Frolic, yes, of course, the most famous region of the game, designed by Jordan Thomas, who worked with Stephen Alexander to build that very phenomenal level. Sander Cohen, extremely memorable character. Yeah, so good. From a storytelling point of view, an audiovisual level, Bioshock was a phenomenal game. Like I say, completely envious of it when I was working on play and seeing the Xbox boys playing this. I remember going to a colleague’s house the weekend that this came out, and he lived with a bunch of other imagine journalists, and they were all just playing it. And it seemed like, so the main event. And I just went out and bought it straight away afterwards. Yeah, my memory of this, because for ages, it had been around for a while. I remember Bioshock was always a bit weird, because there was almost a bit of Peter Molyneux-ish big talk about what it was going to do. Originally, there was always talk of this very complex ecosystem between the different, as if it was going to be a bit more of a living space, which really boiled down to some quite simple elements eventually. But I’d kind of just had it in the back of my head as like, oh, it’s that thing where there’s lots of big promises, but no one really knows what it’s going to be. And then I just suddenly remember there being a point where it’s all anyone was suddenly talking about at the pub. Before it came out, obviously, Future had a lot of like, it had Xbox, but it also had a lot of different PC magazines. So I remember people from PC Gamer and PC Format were talking about it. And like, just hearing snippets of like, you know, bees can come out of your hands. And someone else was talking about like, I took all these like things, so I had a wrench. So I didn’t even use guns. I just made my my like wrench arm so powerful, I could just batter people. I remember thinking, what the hell is this? This sounds amazing. They were all so enraptured with it that I just knew it was going to be absolutely essential. And when I eventually did get to play it, and this was the game I got with with the 360. This is the one that that that finally kind of pushed over the edge. This is the one. I remember just playing that opening segment and being like, oh, shit, I’ve never seen anything like this before. Just amazing. Amazing. And it really bugs me that like kind of like there’s a lot of sniffiness towards Bioshock now as a series. Yeah, it’s almost because it’s like a mainstream game that has some ideas and so like smart people like to put it down. You know, you think that’s clever. And actually, it’s like, well, it does have like more to say and more ideas than most games. And also, it’s just a phenomenal, like incredible polished thing to be in. I hate the snobbishness towards Bioshock, like even Bioshock Infinite. That’s a fucking rad game. I love it. Yeah, I don’t like mind people criticising the politics of Bioshock Infinite. I know you criticise its ideas for sure, but it’s more this idea of like, oh, you think that’s smart. And you’re like, well, all right. Yeah. Sure. No, I do agree with you. Like I say, the System Shock 2 people really just fucking annoyed me. It’s like, I get it. That sort of, like you say, snobbery is just kind of irritating. Yeah. And yeah, this was just like, I don’t know, this is a blockbuster game. Just imagine anyone making anything like this now. You know what I mean? Like it just, yeah, you just don’t… There hasn’t been a thing like it since. It’s had that like instant impact of just complete dazzlement. Yeah. I bought this and another game, my number one actually, on the same day for the 360. And I just felt like, yeah, just a huge moment. And again, yet another game where being on a PS3 mag, why the fuck aren’t they making games like this on PS3? That did come out on PS3 the next year. But yeah, I’m with you on that, Matthew. I think that people are worse than if you about it. And it’s like, what the fuck? What do you think mainstream games are supposed to be doing if this isn’t enough? Yeah, it’s scary. It’s a scary place to be as well. I found this quite a scary game when I first played it. Once I was a bit more powerful, less so, but you just feel so confined. You’re locked in there with all these maniacs at the bottom of the ocean. Such a great setup. Yeah, even the thing of how they use the same NPC voice actors over and over again to give the place a vibe. There’s a posh female voice in this game that I remember so, so well. If I heard that voice, I’d be like, Rapture, Bioshock. They thought so hard about those kind of details. While it may have broken the brains of some of the developers who made it, it is definitely a masterpiece. Thumbs up for Bioshock. So is it my number three? It’s your number three. My number three will probably be your number one, Matthew, but it’s Super Mario Galaxy. Yeah, it’s higher up on my list. We’ll talk about it then. So what’s your number two? My number two is Phoenix Wright Trials and Tribulations. Didn’t make my list, although I have played it. Yeah, this is the last Phoenix Wright. It’s part three. Part two also came out this year, Justice for All. My least favourite Phoenix Wright game, I think. Part two, but then followed by my favourite one. I don’t have too much smart observations for this one, other than it just delivers what a great final season of television delivers, in that it has its own stories, it has its own cases, but it also builds on everything that comes before and really wraps it up. There’s lashings of fan service. It’s not embarrassed to expect you to have played the previous two games. It really did behave like the end part of a big story. And for me, the melodrama that I really love, that’s at the heart of the Ace Attorney games, that really upped that. I love the flashbacks to seeing Phoenix Wright as a young man, and you get to play as other characters. I won’t spoil some of the twists, but the way it paints its picture to set up this ultimate evil villain is really well done. Absolutely fantastic prosecutor, Godo, who is a kind of coffee drinking dude with a cyborg visor who throws cups of coffee at you when he’s cross. It’s super weird. Very, very funny. Yeah, I really, really like this game. Just a great conclusion to the story. I think it’s also got a couple of genuinely some of the emotional moments, some of the most emotional moments in games. Games very rarely move me. I find it’s too much of a leap to jump over, but I think there are a couple of twists and fates in this game that are really brilliantly, brilliantly done. It’s great. Absolutely fantastic. We talked about this on a previous episode, but the DS is still the place to play this. Not the 3DS version, the original DS versions. Yeah, just the original art is a big part of it. You can play the version on PC and everything. It feels like a handheld game to me. It’s something you get. You plug your headphones in. You just really focus it on a little handheld screen. That’s where it feels like it lives. It feels a little emptier on a massive TV. But it’s still there. But yeah, this is so good. Shootakumi is absolutely amazing. When I interviewed him for O&M and we were talking about some of the twists and outcomes in this game and so many of these things, which I’d attributed to just being brilliant storytelling and he was like, I really wrote myself into some corners with this game because I said certain things about certain characters. So-and-so had never lost a case. So if we ever did any flashbacks with him, you couldn’t ever really beat him because of that. And that forced him to come up with some like quite bleak things that happen in the game. It’s really great. Is that Edgeworth? He never lost a case? Yeah. Because the whole point is he’s never meant to have, you know, he’s had the unbroken run by the time you meet him. So if you meet him in the past, you obviously can’t win. But then you have to win every case. And, you know, as a kind of narrative challenge, that’s quite interesting. But you kind of have to play the other two for this to really work, I think. And it’s great in its own right, but it’s the payoff. And, you know, even though I said two is my least favourite, it’s still fine by most game standards. Yeah, that’s kind of what I want to ask about, because two is one I have played all the way through. And I mentioned previously, it took me over ten years to finish this one. I did start it, yeah, like years ago. And I think I found the Psych-Lock system to be quite hard work. Yeah, and that stuff continues. I think the problem I have with two is I just don’t like Francisco Von Karma, the Prosecutor. She’s the worst of the Prosecutors. Her whole shtick, which she just calls everyone a fool, isn’t particularly spicy. And the whip. The whip was annoying. It’s not much to hang a character on. Yeah, it’s got a couple of great cases in it, but generally the vibe of it doesn’t quite work, but it all pays off in three. I thought the use of flashbacks in three, I’ve not finished three, but I thought the use of flashbacks in three was quite interesting and did add a little bit of flavour to it that the second one maybe lacked. Yeah, definitely. But then it only works because by this point they’ve got characters and you want to see their pasts and you want to get into it and see what their deal is. I don’t think it would have worked going straight into that in two, for example. But you know, you almost have to have fans before you can do fan service. Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, I should sit down and finish this one. I also remember the dude talking about his hemorrhoids a lot. That was the thing, right? The Mears boss, that guy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that dude has hemorrhoid problems and just brings them up. But that’s like his shtick and it’s like, oh, OK, interesting choice to see that in a game. No, we should do a Phoenix Wright episode at some point, Matthew, because just before we start recording this, they in Taiwan, they rated the Great Ace Attorney Collection and like we should play that. And then we should like, I don’t know, either rank. You should either rank the games or we should talk about the games in more detail or something. That’d be good. Oh, yeah. Hey, I’ll talk about Phoenix Wright forever. Cool. All right. What’s your number two? It’s God Hand on PS2, Matthew. Oh, wow. Yeah. So this was my unexpected choice. Well, I thought it would be unexpected. But to people who follow me on Twitter, it might not be that surprising. So God Hand is a game from Clover Studio. It’s directed by Shinji Mikami. It is a brawler, essentially. It’s like a 3D brawler that kind of takes cues from 2D brawlers back in the day. It has a system where you can build your own combos. So you have like a menu screen and you basically can enter what move you’ll perform on the square button on say your second or third or fourth press. And then the idea is you build up this combo system. And also you can assign power attacks as well that you can change as you go. So basically you’re building your own, you’re entirely building your own kind of fighting system. You can stick with the default, but you unlock more and more powerful parts of combos as you go. And finding the rhythm that works for you and the kind of right timings of them. That’s like the magic of this game. It’s got a very, very silly sense of humor. The world it’s set in is like… Oh, how to describe it? Kind of a bit Western-y. But it’s kind of like a really silly anime. It’s got like little strips of Japanese culture that kind of feed into it, like sort of Power Rangers style characters popping up. It’s offensive in a couple of different ways that I might as well just say that because therefore by owning it I can talk about it with some affection still. But there’s definitely a couple bits that definitely don’t stand the test of time. But yeah, as a kind of 3D combat game, I just really loved it. And we talked about this on a previous podcast, the Archipel documentary about Mikami, where he said that he made this game for like one person in his studio to enjoy and like entirely built it around them. I think it’s probably one of the reasons it’s so good, but also the reason it sold like shit. It is a very like intricate brawling game that doesn’t quite have the same iconography of another sort of a more famous Capcom style game. So yeah, what do you make of this one, Matthew? Yeah, I must admit I’ve never played God Hand all the way through. Like, I struggle with it a little bit. Also, the copy I owned of it, I lent to Rich Stanton about 10 years ago and he never gave it back. Classic. I would imagine this is one of Rich Stanton’s favourite games. Well, that’s the thing. So I don’t really mind because I know it brings him a lot of joy. I was like, this was a game I was really hyped about though. I was big into the Clover thing. Side note, Akami did not make my list this year and it did release in Europe this year. Yeah, same here. Yeah, I like Akami aesthetically, but it is kind of like a not as good kind of Zelda game. I don’t like the fact that the combat is so kind of removed from the world. Yeah, well kind of like the barrier that pops up. It’s just like an empty world with weird ghost parchments that you touch to kind of go into fights is how I sort of remember it. Yeah, it’s nice you can play on so many formats now. I think Akami is now a successful game because it’s released on so many different platforms. But God Hand is definitely kind of forgotten. I think it has a cult fan base, but it is a true cult game. It did not sell well. It came about very late on the PS2. And it’s one of the games that resulted in Clover being closed. So, yeah, I really love it. I also maintain it is like a genuinely funny game. Some of the music in it is fantastic. I think No More Heroes has a little bit of the same vibe as this game, actually, which will come up in a future episode, I’m sure. Yeah, kind of like a great, just a great kind of Capcom game in an era where they were about to take a left turn into being a slightly more watered down western-focused publisher before they’d sort of like rediscover their magic a bit later on, not with all of their games, but with some of their games, you know. It’s very PS2 era. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, Capcom made loads of great PS2 games and loads of weird PS2 games as well, and this kind of straddles the two, I would say. Yeah, definitely. Okay, Matthew, we’ve reached your number one. My number one is……drum roll……Super Mario Galaxy! Oh my god. No one, who could have saw it coming, you know? Yeah, I just… This is probably my favourite game of all time. Profoundly brilliant experience. You know, I just remember… You know, I love replaying it, but I’ll never be able to get back to that simple magic of playing that for the first time on a review trip in Nintendo UK’s Windsor HQ, in their little review room at the end. It was just me. I can just remember like every 10 minutes just turning around, like, just to see if there’s anyone… There was no one in the room, but I just was instinctively turning to people to see if they’d bear witness to what was happening on TV, because it was just so amazing. You know, it was like an instinctual, wow, like, are we getting this? Like, are you seeing what I’m seeing? Like, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, this was a game we’d obviously hyped to the extent we’d built a papi-a-mashay planet. We were like truly demented for Mario Galaxy. And it just delivered in such a big way and just didn’t disappoint, went completely beyond. Everything about this game, I just think it just escalates endlessly and it always goes one step further than you think. You know, it starts off with these absolutely sort of mind-bending kind of concepts in every level and then it just keeps pushing them and pushing them and pushing them until it just ends on such a high note. There are so few levels in this game that I don’t enjoy. I just think they’re just… the ramp up of joy constantly is fantastic. Some of the best movement… Is it the best Mario movement? Odyssey comes close, I will admit. I think Odyssey added some stuff to Mario’s movement, which is just so joyful that I, you know, hats off to it. But this, in terms of the core, like how I want Mario to move, how reactive he is on the stick, the triple jump, the long jump… Mario’s long jump in this is probably the most tactile movement in all of games, because if you remember, you play this movement on the nunchuck, on the Wii that is, and Mario moves on the analogue stick, and you press the Z button on the nunchuck to crouch, and it’s this literal, this sensation of like your hand kind of balling up, like Mario, as he gets small and then you kind of release him and he goes flying. It’s just, it’s so satisfying. I love the long jumps in this games, particularly because when you throw gravity into the mix, it’s like a long jump that puts you into orbit. That’s insane! What a notion, you know? A world where you can jump so far that you become a satellite, you know? That’s just, oh my god, like what a thing! I just, you know, it’s very hard. There is no all-encompassing line on this game of like, it is good because it’s just everything about it is good. The level concepts, the music, the movement, just how playful it is. It’s one of the few games where you can just move Mario and be happy to see how, you know, what happens when I jump in this way on this particular planet or this particular planet, you know, when you’re on one of the 2D areas and there’s up and down gravity, you know, backflipping Mario into a different gravity field and his backflip becomes like a perfect landing. That’s just conceptually so out there and just so satisfying to play. I really, and I genuinely mean this, like, I can’t respect people who don’t like this game. Like, this is a deal breaker for me. If you don’t like this game, you and I will never be friends. Like, it’s just a fact of the matter. There’s so much life and just energy in this thing. It’s such a positive thing. I love Galaxy. I love it. The music. The Gusty Garden Galaxy. Oh, my God. Oh, just what a thing. The overall soundscape of this game is amazing. Oh, no idea. Just, you know, I was listening to the soundtrack of it last night. It was just like, God, what a, you know, that’s crazy that a game ever sounded this good. I mean, just the you just want that’s what you want life to feel like, isn’t it? How Mario Galaxy sounds. Is there a particular like level in this game or like set of levels, Matthew, that you that you think is like the peak of it? Oh, for a long time, I always held. I love Boyy Base because I loved us the platform. He’s got some really nice platformings. You’re climbing it. And it ends with that absolutely classic. You use the screw attack on use the spin attack on the screw. And then the kind of the whole metal orb kind of hinges back. And it’s suddenly you’re in like an orb of a pool of water floating in the sea. Swimming in this game is mad because you’re under water. And then you’re looking out of the water and thinking that space like I’m swimming in space. It’s just such a such a wild like that’s kind of mind blowing. I don’t know. It’s kind of got that thing that sci-fi has where it just goes so galaxy brain on you that you’re like this is this is so insane that I’m doing this. I love the music in Gusty Garden Galaxy. Gusty Garden Galaxy isn’t actually the best galaxy in this game. Not by a long way, but the music is just the most heroic tune ever. And everything, every level has something that I absolutely adore. The skating on that ice donut at the start of the Freeze Flame Galaxy. That could be a game. I would pay 50 quid just to ice skate on a donut forever. And it’s just like one planet and you spend like 30 seconds there if you want. Or you just spend ages just darting around on it and having fun. I just find the space in this game, I can spend so much time playing there in a way that I can’t. That’s what’s missing in 3D World. There’s lots of toys for you to use, but the very act of just being isn’t quite as fun for me. Yeah, I think the fact that it is a sci-fi game essentially unlocks a whole bunch of different concepts that you wouldn’t have previously seen in Mario. And thematically that’s why I think it feels so imaginative. It’s like, well, we’re in space so we can do anything. And that just clearly unlocked their imaginations as level designers. I also think it’s miraculous that the kind of camera control in this game and the perspective of it, you still don’t ever get lost with how you control Mario. And I feel like that must have been so hard to do with the sort of shape of the planets and how weird your movements have to be sometimes. Just how playable it feels in spite of what could have been some big logistical challenges of making the worlds feel coherent. Yeah, very, very good. Yeah, I think a lot of people listening just like hearing you talk about Mario and Matthew, so it’s nice to hear. Oh, I’ve just been bollocking on about it for so long now. I just endlessly repeat myself. It must be very boring. People love that shit. I can see why this must have just felt like a huge moment in your career and NGamer when this happened. Like, this was the game. This was like the moment. Yeah, you know, what a thing. I even like Spring Mario. No one likes Spring Mario. You’re making me want to play it. Do you think, to somebody who has access to a Wii now or the Switch version, would you recommend playing the Wii one or the Switch version? Like, how important is the control input to get in this game? The Switch one’s good. And you obviously get, you know, it’s 60 frames. It’s like seeing it kind of like unlocked, which is obviously amazing. It’s not quite like the… The kind of pointer stuff isn’t quite as natural. You know, the chunky remote was like a better fit for some of the pointer stuff than just using the Joy-Con. Even though it all works absolutely fine, I really am fond of the… Like, you know, it is a bit wanky, I know, but I really do associate the… I think of the Nunchuck like as Mario when I play it on Wii, and that’s like psychologically quite a thing. You know, it feels very like… It fits on that set up particularly well. But it is still brilliant on Switch, and it looks even better. I mean, just plugging in my Wii… My Wii looks so bad on television that I have, so… I’ll probably just play it on Switch now, but I know what the deal is. I’ve got those happy Wii Remote memories. The only thing I’m not too wild about in it, if there’s one thing, is the Star Observatory. I think it’s quite a lot of padding between missions. It’s why, too, because it just has a simpler map, it kind of gets to the fun a bit faster. But, yeah, that’s maybe a discussion for another time. Yeah, I think I do agree with you, actually. I remember feeling like I was spending too much time wandering around that place. Yeah, it’s not as fun as a Peaches Castle to explore. There’s no secrets there. It’s quite like, oh, God, it’s just like meters you’ve got to cross to get back to another level rather than a fun place in its own right. Yeah, I did put it at number three on my list. Yeah, I mean, I am like, God’s hand, I know there’s a lot of emotional affection for that. I can kind of understand that. I am super intrigued what your number one is. Number one, Matthew, is Halo 3. Oh! Would you be surprised by that? Yeah, that, like, I didn’t even factor into my head that you might be a big Halo 3 fan. I don’t know why. Yeah, so, yeah, there is like, I would say, maybe your list seems like slightly more personal than mine does, like, which is fine. But I think that the games that were important this year did, they were significant to me, because I think in 2007, and it’s a time where I had, like, endless free time to play games, just nothing but time to just throw at games. I do miss that somewhat. When we did our Best Games of 2020 episode, it was, like, hampered by the limitations of what do I actually have time to play with the hours I’ve got. So, yeah, this is a time where I could throw, like, an entire weekend at playing a game, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. So, Halo 3, though, is definitely the game from this year I’ve played the most. Me and my friend Andrew have played this in co-op over and over and over again, and probably for, like, in excess of 100 hours, 200 hours, I don’t know. For, like, the last 14 years of our friendship, no year has gone by without us playing, at least, the Covenant level of this, which is the famous Two Scarab level. I always think that Halo… Is that the one that starts in the planes? Yes, that’s right. And then, yeah, you sort of, like, you fly around for a bit, shoot down some ships, go into, like, a facility, and then later on, you get in, like, a warthog and you drive along the, kind of, this cliff edge, and then in front of this big pyramid structure, two scarabs drop down. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it’s, like, this big battle set piece. I think that level is the best Halo level in the entire series. Easy, for sure. Yeah, and to the point where I don’t understand why 343 don’t get that this is what Halo should be. Like, I would sacrifice this sort of visual fidelity and new enemies of Halo 4 and 5 to just have something that feels like this. It’s just, you are entering a war. That’s what it feels like. Loads of the UNSC guys are flying around. There’s, like, you know, flying vehicles, like warthogs on the ground. There’s a real sense that a battle is going on. The scarabs are mighty things to behold. They’re so simple to destroy. You just have to go to the back and break their little engine thing and they blow up. It’s so, so easy. But that’s not the point. The point is that this is like the set piece where me and my friend, we restarted the checkpoint over and over again just to play with the possibilities of it. Like, what happens if we make both scarabs blow up at once? What happens if we manage to make a scarab like fire at the other one? Will it destroy the back of it and blow it up? What happens if we like drive up this hill on a mongoose, the little jeep thingy-ma-jinks, and try and land it onto like the roof of the scarab? Doing that kind of shit over and over again, what happens if we get the scarab to stand on our vehicle? The answer? It pings you into the highest possible point of the map and then you collapse from like basically space down onto the map and then die instantly. It’s wonderful. Doing that while messing with Halo’s like video editor tools. I think those scarab fights, like it’s a set piece. No one would do that for real. But that’s like a real like living set piece. It can go any number of ways. Like that is a sequence that would be scripted in just about any other game. Yeah. Yeah, it’s so good. And including like Bungie’s own Destiny. There’s nothing in Destiny that’s anything like this. Destiny is a game about hoarding guns. And the guns feel really good. The shooting is really great. But this imaginative sandboxy set piece design, that was always Halo’s magic. It seems just so lost to them now. They seem to be like more invested in what the fuck is going on in Master Chief’s head or going on with Cortana than like this shit. Like loads of like cool tools thrown into a level with loads of like big exciting enemies. Like that’s what Halo is. And they just, people just don’t get it. And it’s frustrating because, yeah, to me, this is like one of the best levels ever made. I’ve played it over and over again. And like that’s not even getting to Halo’s multiplayer stuff. Halo 3’s multiplayer was fantastic. Like you had this and Modern Warfare appear at the same time. This is just like the dominance of Xbox Live as a platform. Just such a different kind of multiplayer experience. Obviously, Halo 3 is in the vehicles. The guns feel very different. But yeah, I played a load of this. You could also do split-screen on your console, but in the online multiplayer. What a cool thing. Yeah, just Halo 3, Matthew. Very good. What’s your relationship with this game? I’m not a mega Halo fan. Again, it’s a bit like the Valve stuff. I appreciate them more than I love them. I really like… There are bits of Halo 3 where I think it really delivers. I think maybe I don’t have that co-op relationship and so many of the people I know who do love Halo, it comes from the co-op stuff. That’s where it comes alive. And having covered it on Xbox, I found it’s so dry as a fiction, as a universe, and there’s so much emphasis on it. It just kind of… I don’t know. I found it all quite draining, to be honest. I don’t mind… Yeah, I liked Halo… I did like Halo 3 a lot. I’m quite bad at the multiplayer. The multiplayer has never really clicked for me in the way that it has for some people. You know, probably it feels like old multiplayer in probably the way that, like, what I was saying about Modern Warfare felt like it ushered in, like, a new age, a new direction for, like, online shooters, where Halo is maybe… Halo 3 is maybe, like, the pinnacle of old-school multiplayer deathmatch. You know, it’s very skill-based in a way that I’m just shitty at and can’t really do. I don’t think I can ever properly forgive Halo 3 for that level that’s basically set inside an arse. If The Covenant is the best level ever, Cortana is the worst, probably one of the worst levels in any games, I think. It’s basically set in, like, an alien gut. I hate The Flood. It’s set in the guts of an alien ship with all these sphincter doors. And it’s just like, oh no, oh Cortana. I’d rather not save it. I’d be like, it’s fine. I don’t need it. Get me out of this anus right now. Get me out of this anus and get me into War War Hog. Yeah, so that’s quite a scar. To be honest, I don’t even know if this is necessarily the best overall Halo campaign. I think it’s got the best peaks of it. But there’s some encroaching nonsense with these later Halo games that I don’t love. I actually don’t think there’s a single enemy type they added after Halo 1 that improves the game. I think they’re all slightly lesser versions of what’s already there. I don’t like the enemies that fly around in this. Loads and loads of flying enemies. They’re kind of bullshit. The Brutes are okay with their jet packs. They’re not too bad. They’re pretty good. But yeah, I think this is actually… Not all of the campaign is as good as The Covenant. The Covenant is just a real lightning in a bottle kind of level, you know? I feel like your number one game is actually your 14 year friendship with this Andrew. This Andrew. This Andrew figure. But that’s a true heart pick, I think. Yeah, it is. I wouldn’t even call myself necessarily a Halo expert. I’ve just lived this level over and over again. I know it so well. Two scarabs! We’ve got two scarabs! That dialogue is burned into my head. And then just the amount of those scenarios where he would get in an aircraft and fly away. I would be on the ground. I would throw a sticky grenade at his aircraft and it would blow up. And then he’d be like, yep, restart checkpoint. And that just became the language of our friendship, me sabotaging his Halo experience. So yeah, a true heart pick. My only friend for the last 13 years has been Mario in Mario Galaxy. Well, I think that’s a great heart pick too. It’s very specific. I don’t even know if Halo 2 would have got my top 10 from that year. Because I think that campaign is pretty naff overall. But yeah, this was a big deal this year. Like I said, I bought this and Bioshock in the same year. And that sums up what a strong year 2007 was. That those games came out within about two months of each other. Just crazy town. We did it Matthew. We reached the end of the top 10. Oh, we did it. We did it. Yep. That’s another year ticked off. So 2008, that’s going to be another pretty huge year for games. When we do that podcast in a couple of months. Sure. Yeah. And we haven’t actually planned what we’re going to do for our next few episodes yet, have we? So that’ll be… We haven’t. No. So it’ll be a surprise. No. The only one that I know I want to do is the one I WhatsApped you about earlier this week. Yeah. Should I spoil the surprise? It’s going to be a fun one, right? I think you can vaguely describe it as the trial of Sam Roberts. Yeah. That’s a nice tool. That’s a nice teaser. Yeah. People will like that one. And yeah, we’ve got a bunch of other themed stuff we’ll probably do. So dry time for new releases. So yeah, we’ll come back with some inventive episode ideas to tie in with stuff going on this year. Anniversaries and such. But Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? I am at MrBazzill underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. If you want to follow the podcast, it’s Back Page: Pod on Twitter. You can email us questions at backpagegames at gmail.com. We’ve got a couple of questions this week that I’m actually going to save for another episode just because we’ll wrap them all up together. But we always appreciate your correspondence. If you want to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, that would be appreciated too. After I mentioned that last time, we had a whole bunch of new reviews, which was greatly appreciated. It’s always nice to just see your feedback on the podcast, what you like, what you don’t like, etc. But thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now!