Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, this is a Mailbag-themed episode. We are going to answer 31 of our listeners’ questions. They very kindly sent in. This is because we had a load of them backed up from previous episodes that we hadn’t got to because either we had Joe Scrabbles in the podcast, or it might have seemed a bit incongruous at the end of the slagging of some game developers episode. That’s not what it really was. We had a bunch of those stacked up, and then we put out a call for more. In this episode, very straightforward, we’re just going to fire through them. There will be no section breaks or anything like that. It will just be raw content and some interesting subjects mixed in there, would you say? I think we’ll be able to dive into some hidden gem games. There’s some fun magazine crafty questions and some more random questions. I think it’ll be a nice blend of basically everything that we try to cover on this podcast. I did like the one there in the Google Doc for our planning sheet for this episode, you tagged, what the fuck? I wonder if I should flag that when we get to it or merely let the listeners guess. But first of all, Matthew, before I get to that, how are you doing? Are you okay? Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve just recovered from watching four hours of the Snyder Cut. Yeah, that’s going to date this episode terribly because, let’s say someone discovers this episode in a year’s time, they listen back and they’re like, oh, remember when we were stuck indoors for an entire year and right at the end of it, we had to watch Zack Snyder’s version of Justice League and it was four hours long. Yeah. What did you make of it? I thought it was more coherent than the original cut. Weirdly, stuff in the original cut that I had attributed to being more Whedon-esque was in this cut. So, yeah, some of the stuff that I thought was silly, some of the silliest stuff that I liked in the original version, that it was still in this, I was like, oh, I was so surprised that that was Zack Snyder’s deal. The kind of, the justicely kind of fighting Superman, I always thought that was very sort of like a bit more of a silly, like Whedon beat, but turns out not. Yeah, I think that’s because that’s the most egregious scene in the original cut, where you can see his fake lip that they’ve CG’d in over his Mission Impossible mustache. Yeah. But yeah, I like the, I felt the same way about some of the flash scenes, which I thought were probably a Joss Whedon joint, but it turns out that Zack Snyder, he does have a sense of humour sometimes, you know? Yeah, yeah, strange, strange stuff. Also, I was, so before I saw it, I saw on Twitter, some people saying like, oh, there’s a Batman Joker scene in this, which is genuinely up there with like the best ever Batman Joker scenes. It’s like, you know, watch, watch out Heath Ledger. And when I watched it, I was like, come on, like, what are you talking about? That’s insane. It’s one of the worst, it’s like the worst written scene in the film by Miles. And you can, no offense to Zack Snyder, but you can tell that he wrote it and not a professional screenwriter. It’s like the only, like, it’s the new scene that they filmed when they knew they were doing the Snyder Cut, I think is the deal, right? Yeah, I just don’t get on with that dude’s Joker at all. I think that scene was very much missouled as like a meditative, like one to one between Batman and the Joker. And yeah, there’s a load of other like naffily rendered CG superheroes along for the ride. And it’s got some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard in any superhero film. So, so bad, but good times. No Falcon the Winter Soldier yet, though, for you, Matthew? No, no, I will get on to that. But I’m sure I’m sure that will be solid three star entertainment. Okay, so in this episode, I should explain that in the 3DS episode, you might have noticed that we teased that we’re going to do some kind of Capcom themed episode. This is because Monster Hunter Rise is coming out. However, we thought that we needed a slightly leaner episode as a kind of break because the 3DS one, as I’m sure listeners noticed, was incredibly long and so was the game developer interviews episode. So that’s partly why we’ve parked Capcom. We might revisit it when Resident Evil 8 or Village comes out, but yeah, yeah, nonetheless, it’s definitely on the cards. Plus, Matthew might remember to message the person we wanted to guest on that episode this time. He’s got two months, so we’ll see how it goes. The truth will out. All right, Matthew, let’s kick off. Should we alternate with reading these out so there’s a bit of a change in pace? Yeah, let’s do it. But you kick off, though. Cool, yeah. Okay, this first one is from Damien on Twitter. This was regarding the eBay Games Corps episode, The Trial of Samuel Roberts. Very controversial. I really enjoyed this. Also made me intrigued as to what my DS games are worth. Turns out Harvest Moon Sunshine Islands is, I don’t remember buying it, I’ll probably play it and sell it. Do you have any games you’d never part with, regardless of how much they’re worth? So Matthew, we kind of covered in that episode that you’re not particularly sentimental about the games you own, but have you got anything that could be described that way? I mean, there’s one thing, but it’s a bit of an exception, because when I went over to interview the Dragon Quest guys, we went to the Super Potato, which is like the famous sort of game store in Akihabara, and I bought a Famicom copy of Dragon Quest IV and got Yuji Horii to sign it. And that is probably, for obvious reasons, something I would never ever sell, because that feels like very… Of all the things I have, that’s like a precious thing. But I don’t know if that counts. It’s not like a traditional game. It’s more of the kind of collector’s item element of it with the signature. I’ve got a signed copy of Smash Brothers as well. I never met Sakurai, but I think when one of the chaps from Edge went… I think when Rich Stanton went on a press trip to see it, he got him to sign a copy of it, and Sakurai drew a big Kirby on the cover for me, which was nice. But yeah, do they count? I don’t know. They’re probably too precious to sell. I didn’t know you were in those objects, so that’s a cool thing to hear about, for sure. I did think that the copy of Zone of the Enders 2 that I reviewed got me my first staff writer job on play. That feels like something I couldn’t part with, although my parents did threaten to sell all my PS2 games a few years ago, and I do worry that one day I’ll come back and it’ll be gone, but then who’s going to want to play Zone of the Enders 2 on PS2 like in 2021? Seems pretty unlikely. If they put it on eBay, you’d probably end up buying it off yourself. As we establish in that episode. Yeah, so that’s pretty much the only one. But as I’ve been collecting games, now that all these games I’ve been hoarding on eBay and stuff, I wouldn’t sell them now because I think I’ve built up quite a nice little collection. Matthew, why don’t you go ahead with question two? Yeah, so this also refers to the eBay Games Court. This is from Tom Piercy. He asks, going in the opposite direction, I once sold my copy of Tactics Ogre, Knights of Lodis for around £15. Now there are completed sales on eBay for £115. Have you ever sold a game, only see the price to shoot up after the fact? So I don’t sell many games. I sold two PS2 games a little while ago, because I saw, again, they were in my parents’ house, and I thought, well, I’m not playing them. I might as well sell them. And so one of them was Yakuza 2, which I sold for about £40 something. That hasn’t really gone up in value since I’ve sold it about four years ago. And the other one I sold, though, was Persona 3 FES, or Fez. It’s basically like the golden or royal edition of Persona 3. I bought that for £17.99, I think, on play.com all those years ago, when that was the thing you could do. And that I sold for about £34, which I thought was quite lean, actually, for what it was worth. But now, because Persona is massive business, that sells for upwards of £115. So that was a foolish thing to sell. Wow, I think I’ve got a boxed copy of that. Wow, there you go. I mean, that was the other thing. I owned the game Digity on my PS3, so I thought, wow, why would I need the physical copy? But yeah, how embarrassing. Does it matter if it’s unsealed or is that new? It’s sold as new. No, it is unsealed copies that are selling for that much on eBay. Persona is massive now. It’s just so big. God, I should dig that out. Yeah, and all people will discover is that it’s not as good as Persona 5, which is clearly the best one. But nonetheless, good for them that they can play it. How about you, Matthew? I don’t think I’ve ever sold a game, to be honest. I think I’ve maybe traded a few things in, but that’s not quite the same thing. Yeah, sorry. Not a good answer from me. OK, cool. Well, you know, on that dour note, we’ll move on to the next one. So, hi guys. How are reader letters slash letter pages viewed from a magazine employee’s perspective? As a reader, I’m really proud if I get my words in print. It would be great to know what the perspective is from the other side. Love the pod. What do you think, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, you know, the letters page is a pretty traditional part of magazines. I think people expect it to be there. I mean, growing up, I always liked the letters pages, and I was used to write magazines quite a lot to try and try and get in them. So kind of have that attachment. I mean, by the time I was working on magazines, there was like just the audiences were that much smaller, that there was like naturally less interest. Definitely as the years went on, they became quite hard to fill with. Basically, if you wrote to the magazine, you’d get your letter in, became the deal. But you can have some fun with it. I liked it when people kind of tuned in, like more so on NGamer than official Nintendo. People were kind of into the weird vibe of the mag and would write in quite weird things, or send us things which were quite kind of little notes that were total non-sequitur type things. That was good and that kind of kept the vibe of the mag going. I actually posted this on Twitter a little while back, but someone once sent us one of our free gifts back with a note saying how much it was a terrible gift, or like, I’m sending you this back because you appear to have sent me one of Matthew’s old socks instead of a gift of worth or something, which was quite fun. So that kind of vibe. But by the end, it was definitely slim pickings. There was an infamous month where NGamer and O&M both printed the same letter as its star letter, because basically some guy had been sending his letters to both mags to double his chances. So that’s an indicator of how bad they were. We never had to make them up, though. That would have been… There were some months where I thought, am I going to have to just fake a letter here to fill this gap? So, yeah, that’s a fine thing. Weird thing with letters pages, I remember this from reading forum feedback when the issue had come out. People would complain about the quality of the letters page as if it was the one bit of the mag we had no responsibility for. That was entirely on the readership. People would be like, the letters weren’t funny this month. It’s like, well, the readership weren’t funny this month. You know, get fucked. Did you print that in the next issue? Just like the Ed’s intro. By the way, if you’re complaining about the quality of the letters, get fucked. Kindest regards. I just don’t understand how they couldn’t see that. That was on them. That’s your job. We’re responsible for the other 112 pages. Yeah, so my perspective on the letters pages, I can’t say I enjoyed putting it together at all. When it came to sending out prizes and stuff, that was such a pain in the ass. You had to sort it yourself on team. So you source games from publishers to, obviously, the deal is you’d say at the top, hey, if you write in, we’ll send you a copy of this game. The game gets a bit of promotion and you also can give prizes to your readers. It’s a win-win. But actually having to post out copies of games when you’re meant to be making 130-page magazine, that’s kind of the worst. Much better when it’s steam copies of games that you can just send a code and then it’s done. Yeah, I don’t have fond memories of it. One highlight though is actually there’s a fairly notable… Actually, how do I describe it? Kind of a cult figure, sort of like PR in UK games called Ian Dixon who sent in a picture of himself dressed as Vincent from Catherine. And we printed it in Play Magazine when I was the editor. And we sort of bonded over that actually. I think he listens to this podcast. He might be pleased to hear me mention it. But yeah, also Ian, sorry for describing you as fairly notable. That’s like a terrible description. Obviously, you’re a very notable figure. But that was quite fun. When people send in pictures and stuff, that was good. Because then you could just scan it and put it in the magazine and it felt like a bit more alive. But I think they were always more fun to read and put together. We had a guy once who sent in a picture and he was like, oh, I went on a holiday and I took a picture. I think I noted something weird and Nintendo-y in this image. It was basically just a photograph of a coastline. Then he’d photoshopped just a massive translucent Miyamoto over the top of it. It was so weird, but at the same time, that was probably the best thing that was in that issue. Yeah, you’re getting into a borderline Alan Partridge territory there, I think. Yeah, that’s good. If I never had to do another letters page, I’d be a very happy man. That’s how I feel. But I think readers did like reading them more than they liked sending in letters, which was always a headache you had to deal with. That was from Zach Evans, by the way. I don’t think I read out their names, so sorry about that. It’s you, Matthew. We’ve got a bit of a long question here. I had a question for you both, and it stems from me thinking, as I want to do, about the original Deus Ex, a game I would happily listen to in an extended eight hour long Back Page episode entirely, dedicated to. Which was probably the most important game of my teenage years. I recall Kieran Gillan’s review in PC Gamer, which I think did a great job of communicating how innovative, important and influential this game was to become. I also recall that the magazine CD came with not just the first level of the game as a demo, but also included the second level, which I thought was a stroke of genius, as it showed off how the gameplay mechanics persisted through the entire game and probably got many people much more invested in the plot. So, my questions to you and Matthew are, do you have any particular strong memories of your favourite game demo slash gimmicks that you felt really helped sell the game to readers, and also, when is the 8 hour Deus Ex special episode coming? Thanks and all the best, James Highmore. So, in this case, I definitely think that PT is probably the most obvious demo, but that’s a bit too recent a choice here. I think James is probably pointing towards more historical demos. I remember Age of Empires had a five campaign mission demo that me and a friend did run into the ground. We absolutely covered the map in our own barracks and town centres and stuff, and then completely dominated the enemy by creating as many units as we could, basically trying to break the game and extend it as much as possible. That one I’ve got the memories of, because by doing that, I think the RTS genre is a bit underrated for being a creative type of game. When you build your base, there is a creative element to it, in terms of how you shape your base, where you position it, where you put certain stuff. There’s an order to it, at least, if not an art, that goes beyond just this StarCraft eSports thing of, well, what’s the most efficient way to do everything? I’m not really interested in that. I kind of like having like 14 Tesla coils just like in a wall, you know, surrounding my base. Just murdering dogs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, those poor dogs. So, yeah, in terms of demos, that was the one that came to mind. I have loads of good demo memories, though. Like, the Final Fantasy 8 demo had the Dollot mission. There was an issue of Official PlayStation Magazine that just had a Final Fantasy 8 demo and a Final Fantasy-themed cover, the ultimate Samuel Roberts magazine, basically. And it was, yeah, like an entire chunk of the game, a perfect chunk where basically your main character Squall goes on this mission to this kind of French-looking coastal town and fights all these soldiers, fights a big bird thing on top of this radar tower, gets chased by a robot back to the beach, and then is like a big escape. Is it a spider or a scorpion? Yeah, that’s right. That spider chases you. And I played that demo probably like six or seven times. But that’s a really great little chunk of the game that, you know, it’s not the beginning of the game, so you’re kind of like forced to try and work out who the different characters are. But I have strong memories of that. How about you, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, I think the demos that jump out are ones where it just had like a decent slice of the powers, or they were slightly more systemic, so you could just mess around with them for hours. I mean, the obvious one is Metal Gear Solid 2. It’s only the enders. You know, the tank, it had like a big chunk of the tanker level. And, you know, we just played that arcing around for hours and hours, just messing with the guards, you know, having fun with the tranquilizer dart, filling people with tranquilizer darts, seeing the different interactive elements of that level, messing with the sort of the stealth kind of phases. You could really play that for ages. That’s a real classic. Like, playing, I think there’s lots of games. I only ever played as demos on PC because I kind of got my fill. Like, I remember Blood on the PC, the first-person shooter, which was like very, very gory, thus the name. But like, you could kind of get your fill, you know, you got the idea of what the game was about from the first level. I think we had a demo of, I remember a friend having a demo of Siphon Filter on PlayStation. That street level, yeah. Yeah, which basically, importantly, it had the thing where you could fire a taser into someone and keep tasering them until they set on fire, which is really the only reason to play that game. So it was in the demo, so you didn’t need the full game. You could just, you know, as far as I’m concerned, that’s just a game about a man who sets people on fire in that street with electricity, which is like really all it should be. I couldn’t remember if this was a demo or not, but it may have been like the whole game and it was just freeware. I can’t quite remember. But on Amiga, we were obsessed with this game called Tanks, which was about these two little tanks firing back and forth at each other. It was one of those games where you control the trajectory in power and you’re trying to remember where your last bullet landed so that you could adjust for your next turn. So it was almost a little bit like arcade-y, kind of battleship-y. But we played that loads and loads and loads. And a demo I was stung by was the demo for Fahrenheit, the David Cage game, which was the murder scene at the start, which is the best scene in the game, the kind of the escape from the diner. And I remember playing that and thinking, wow, if the rest of the game is just like this, this is going to be amazing. And, spoiler alert, it wasn’t. But I did buy it off the back of the demo. That’s like a rare time I remember playing something and being so obsessed. I remember the day that came out, taking the bus to Basingstoke after work so I could go and buy it from game because I was just like, I have to get Fahrenheit. It’s going to be the best game ever, but certainly not. It’s funny because that experience very much sums up people’s relationship with David Cage games, which is like the germ of the idea is like perfect. And the execution is actually like pretty great in terms of the sort of style of it and the sound and all that stuff. But then it’s kind of just like robbed by some bullshit, you know, into the game halfway through or whatever. Yeah, that’s the thing with his games. I think he’s got individual scenes in all his games which are like almost essential things to play, which are like brilliant, fully realized versions of what he’s been trying to do, which is like a playable thriller film. And yeah, that scene at the start of Fahrenheit is definitely one of those. And there are a couple of other bits in Fahrenheit quite like where you’re trying to do stuff against the clock and there’s split screen, you can see the police approaching, you’re like, oh shit, I’ve got to do this. And it really captures the kind of manic energy of those scenes in films, but then it’s all a little bit like fighting an old lady who is also the internet. So, you know. Yeah, the video, Andy Kelly’s video, The Madness of Fahrenheit is one of the funniest videos on YouTube. I watch it every year or so, that’s brilliant. You kind of, a few of the ones you picked out there actually, Matthew, like the Metal Gear one, I completely forgot about that, that you get so much the tanker, you basically get all of the good bits of the tanker. Like there’s almost nothing you’re kind of missing that’s like, I think it, does it end when you go into like the hall, where all the troops are being debriefed or something like that? Yeah, it has the Olga fight, right? Mmm, yeah. Yeah, I don’t think you, yeah, it ends when you go into the hall, that’s right. I wonder if it gave away so much of the game that by the time Metal Gear Solid 2 came out, and people obviously were very disappointed with Raiden, if people had just like, had their fill of it a little bit, and I wonder if the demo sort of backfires slightly there, where you’ve given away such a big slice, in that case, you know, arguably the best bit of the game, and people are just a bit, I don’t know, put out afterwards when they’ve paid 40 quid for it. Yeah, maybe. The demos on official PlayStation 2 magazine, I remember being incredibly like, exciting in the early noughties when the console was just starting to take off. That’s how I played Ico for the first time. And I would just play everything on those discs though. I played quite a lot of Tarzan Freeride, for example. There was a good Silent Hill 2 demo in the official PlayStation 2 magazine as well, which was set inside the apartments, which is probably the best bit of Silent Hill 2. How about the 8-hour Deus Ex special, Matthew? Are we going to be doing that? I don’t know. I’m not a huge Deus Ex guy. I like them a lot, but I wouldn’t say I’m a super fan. I don’t go back and think on it. It’s not like a holy text to me in the way that it is for some PC writers, I think. Weirdly, I know the other three Deus Ex games better than I know this one. I’ve played through Deus Ex once in 2007, but I don’t remember much from it and I didn’t do it very well. I don’t know if I ever truly got to grips with it. That review, though, the Kieran Gillen review was absolutely amazing. I can’t remember reading that and being like, oh, wow, this is going to be the best game ever, because he structured it around replays of a couple of levels in it. It was basically the first big urban area after you’ve done the Statue of Liberty opener. And he was just talking about, you know, it was like 10 walkthroughs of this one base building attack. I remember thinking, oh, this game is going to be so good. And it was true. Everything he said was true. But in words, things move more smoothly than they do in the game. Like a lot of that game is quite like janky. You know, it’s quite like physically not the most satisfying thing to play. So like technically you are doing these things, but it doesn’t sound as bad as it sounds on the page. Absolutely. I would agree with that. Very unrefined that first Deus Ex. Also, it’s quite a lot that people don’t really remember about it, about how strange it gets. But in terms of like its ambition, it was just incredible for the time. So no dissing it here. But next question there, Matthew. Howdy, YouTube. First, just wanted to say that having a third person forgot her name, sorry, that’s Catherine they’re referring to there, was great. Second, my question. How do journalists get over the psychological hump of starting a new game? Maybe it’s just me, but I find the first couple of hours of most AAA games to be so tiring. The controls are always different. You have to patiently wait for the game to let you free, let you get free and try things out. And you’re not sure how the game will punish you for failure. And journalists don’t have the guides and videos I have access to. Any tips? PS, PS3 or Xbox 360? No nuance, please. Nuance? From this podcast? Yeah, I can’t say I really suffer that myself. I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve been doing it for long enough. I find that increasingly these days, everything is designed so much for ease of use and accessibility that I can’t really think of any games where I’ve just struggled to understand the basics of how to play it or get into it. Or I’m waiting for a particular thing to see how it opens up. I don’t have that impatience as such. I think that there are moments or there are games where you can miss the point of what they’re trying to do sometimes. And when people say something didn’t click with them, that’s often what they’re referring to. You can play a game and then read someone else’s review of it and be like, oh, I kind of completely missed that that was like the heart of this thing. Or I kind of ignored that element of the game. I didn’t realize it was kind of as vital. Or I’ve got to think of an example now. Take, for example, like the Desperados and Shadow Tactics, the kind of the real time strategy sort of stealth games that Mimimi made recently. You know, if people don’t get on with those, often you see like, oh, it’s really hard. I keep failing, having to keep reloading. And you’re like, yeah, but like quick saving and quick loading is kind of like part of that game’s rhythm. And maybe it doesn’t do a brilliant job of explaining that. Or maybe it could do a better job of explaining that. But, you know, if you don’t click with that element, for example, you may bounce off the whole thing and not get into the magic of it. And, you know, I’ve had that a couple of times with games where I have, you know, I just haven’t got into the groove with them. And it’s quite rare that that happens. I think that sometimes I’m like throwing myself at a game until it like properly clicks. And I’ve had that a bit with Yakuza 0 really, where I’m not like, I don’t naturally like love Yakuza 0. It’s taken a little bit of sort of like patience to kind of get used to the rhythm of it, which is this very stop-start side quest structure where you can just follow the main plot, but the game obviously wants you to dip into all these side stories because that’s kind of like where a lot of its best writing is. But yeah, that’s not something I naturally kind of adore. So there’s a little bit of like getting used to it, I suppose. That is a perfect example, though, where like the best stuff isn’t necessarily the main path. And if you don’t find the best stuff, you’ll be like, well, screw this game. But I think I’m quite, like I lean towards kind of sort of completionist tendencies when I’m playing things anyway. Like I’m quite thorough. It’s not really like a guide steam. There’s very few games where I find like difficulty is the main barrier to me actually like getting into it and it clicking. Sekiro, Sekiro was one I had to like properly throw myself at and kind of acclimatize the combat. I think everyone goes through this process with Sekiro, though. You basically, you reach the boss I’d mentioned in previous episodes, so is Genichiro Ashina. And then at that point, you either kind of understand how the combat works or you’re too frustrated by how difficult it is and how many times you’re replaying it that you kind of just want to skip out and do something else, which I completely sympathize with. Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, it’s not that big a barrier, but yeah, maybe that’s because you and I have spent so much time playing games professionally. It’s hard to ever truly get stumped, I guess, especially with modern games. Yeah. What about the other part of the question, Matthew? PS3 or Xbox 360? Well, I mean 360. So clearly, that generation was, you know, that’s what I played. I had a PS3, but just for Uncharted. Yeah, we’ve established this. And Heavy Rain, maybe? You played Heavy Rain? I did play Heavy Rain. I reviewed Heavy Rain, actually. Now I kind of want to do a David Cage games episode. That sounds like a threat, doesn’t it? But that was from Robert Augusta Meyer, by the way. I forgot to read out the name of who sent in the question. So next one, Matthew. A completely un-games-related question from a loyal listener. Galaxy or Cadbury’s? Just asking as Easter is coming up. That’s from Leslie Smith. That’s my mum. Cadbury’s. Yep, Cadbury’s for me too. That might baffle some of our American listeners, but I think that’s very straightforward. I think Americans know what Cadbury is anyway, because didn’t the government do some kind of crazy limiting on importing chocolate thing, so you had to eat lots of America’s big corporations, sort of salty, waxy, naff chocolate? I think that happened, didn’t it? Yeah, I think Americans come over here, and then they eat, because they’ve been eating Hershey’s, which is just the worst thing on earth their entire lives. They come over here and get a taste of the good stuff, and it’s just like, must be mind-blowing. Oh my God. I wonder who Leslie Smith was. That clears it up. Okay, so number six, Matthew. Where did Matthew get the Mr. Basil Pesto name from? Does he just have an affinity for the fragrant tasting sauce? I do like Basil Pesto as a thing. Short version of a slightly weird story. My dad came up with it when I was a kid. He was, we were on holiday somewhere, and we were just riffing or being silly on something. I was riffing with my dad. Who says that? And he talked about like a murder in a restaurant or something. And then he said culinary detective Basil Pesto. And it stuck in my head ever since then. And I don’t know why. I then created it just as an email. And from the email came my online username. And now it’s everything. So yeah, that’s that. It’s a good username though for like multiplayer games. Because it’s a name. Like anyone can say it, you know, if you see it. It’s not hard to pronounce. It’s a good name for like shouting out. It’s got the structure of first name, surname. So you can shout either one. And I know that you’re talking to me. Every once in a while, I forget that it’s like the name of my Discord. And then I’ll call in to like a press, like a PR interview or an online interview. These this last year, and they’ll always be a slightly baffled moment where someone, you know, the PRs or the person I’m interviewing will say, which is always an American, hmm, Basil Pesto. And then I have to go, it’s a culinary detective from my childhood. You tell them this story. No, I don’t ever tell them that story. I just say, yes, weird, isn’t it? Yeah, you know, this is weird, right? I bought Basil Pesto from the supermarket a couple of weeks ago. I felt weirdly self-conscious about it, I think, because of, like, knowing you. But yeah, Basil Pesto does sound like the name of, like, a kind of, like, late 80s, early 90s BBC kind of detective, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think that’s what he’s going for. Yeah, but clearly the sense of humour is genetic, but yeah. So back to a more gamey question here, Matthew. What do you wish games nowadays had more of? This is from Quasiotta on Twitter. What they had more of? Colour? Like, lots of bright, exciting colours. It kind of bugs me that we’ve got these television screens that do these amazing colours that pop with HDR, but it’s just used for, you know, everything’s so muted. I wish everything, you know, Nintendo obviously still doing the whole kind of bright, colourful games. I wish other people doing them too. Either natural fondness for anything with colour, even if it looks naff. What’s that Square Enix one coming up soon, that Balan Wonderworld? Like, not my cup of tea mechanically, but just the look of it, I’m like, oh, I’m glad that exists. Systems that encourage replayability. Like, you know, I love, you know, a lot of the games I played in my childhood, I played them so much because they’re the only games I had, but also because they had vast amounts to do. And I think you particularly like the GoldenEye Perfect Dark model, the way that they sort of change over difficulty modes and they’re always unlockable challenges and extra layers. I, whenever a game does that, it automatically gets us to bonus point for like nostalgia. And it’s one of the reasons I love Hitman so much is it just has structurally so much reason just to keep playing it, which I really, really rate in games. What about you? Better side quests, I wish were a thing. I got a bit bummed out by a lot of Ghost of Tsushima’s side quests of like escort a person to this place and do this and do that, retrieve this. And it feels like very, very few developers have actually put the time in to make a side quest more than that. And I guess it’s a problem I don’t really know how to solve for someone who doesn’t design games for a living. But yeah, I think the side quests are just like, here’s a bit of dialogue, here’s a thing, you go fight a room full of enemies, and then you get a thing at the end of it. And that’s kind of it. I guess I kind of always want to see side quests that are a bit like Mass Effect 2’s loyalty missions, which just were like so rich in story, and were like almost like episodes of a TV show you would play to kind of get the kind of like full tale of who a kind of character in your party is. I thought that was just a really strong hook for a side quest. And I hear that The Witcher 3 I’ve not played, but everyone says it’s got really good side quests. So, yeah, I think I just wished there was more of that. I would always take fewer side quests, but just take some like really good ones. Mass Effect 2 actually has very few side quests apart from like this kind of stuff. And I think that’s a shame that was never a bit more influential. But I also wish that games that had sword combat had actual sword combat and not just like constantly holding down a counter-attack button. I just sort of like, Sekiro’s combat system, I basically want to see versions of that in everything. But it’s quite nice when you see it in sort of like Jedi Fallen Order, for example, which is… The timing of the parry I always found slightly off in that game, but like the actual feeling of the lightsaber and pulling off moves and stuff. I feel like a proper combat game in a way that… No offense to Assassin’s Creed, which I dunk on far too often on this podcast, but Assassin’s Creed’s always had combat that’s never quite sit right with me. Yeah, those are my two suggestions, Matthew. Next up, then. Hello, you two. First off, Matthew’s take on Game Freak and Pokemon genuinely made me laugh out loud while listening to it. This is good. This is a very self-serving question. I’m glad I get to read this one out. Absolutely brutal and spot on. Yeah, you know it. Secondly, are there any games you have played recently that you wish you played back when they were first released? I just completed Rogue Trooper Redux the other day. As fun as I think it was, I would have enjoyed it way back more on PS2. Thank you and keep up the honest brutality. PS Samuel, please stop trying to buy, please stop buying dog shit games like Star Wars, Terrorist Casso, I am a Star Wars nut and even I wouldn’t touch that garbage, says Chris Dirty. So there you go. You’ve been told. I’ve been praised. Yeah, it’s a bit like carrot and stick, isn’t it? It’s, yeah, hard to know where I stand. I like this question a lot. So with Terrace Carsey, yes, I mean, I’m not going to defend that too hard. We covered it in the podcast. It’s merely a win purchase and I’ve still not played it. So it’s indefensible really. But, yeah, I was double jeopardy. You can’t be put on trial for the same thing twice. Yeah. So instead, I do have an answer to this first question about games you played recently you wish you played back when they first released. So Ocarina of Time is something I didn’t play at the time. I didn’t have an N64 until the noughties. And it’s a very hard one to play. I mean, obviously, it’s from the, like, it’s one of the founding 3D games. So to expect it to stand up is a big ask. But nonetheless, I think, like, the controls and the types of stuff it has you doing. And I just I found it quite hard work to this year. I’ve been playing a bunch more of it because I would like to be fully educated by the time we do our Zelda episode when Scarlet Sword comes out. But I think I might just have to give up on this one because it’s yeah, it’s just not. I feel like if I was going to be into it after the six hours I’ve thrown it, it would have happened by now and it hasn’t happened. So, yeah, how about you, Matthew? I mean, if going into Lord Jaby Jaby’s belly hasn’t won you over, then I don’t know what will. Hard work that. I wish I’d played the Yakuza series as they came out, mainly because I really, really like the Yakuza games. I’ve come to them quite late, and now there’s like 200 hours of them to get through in chronological order. And because the story is told, you know, that central story is told over six games. Like, I feel like I have to play them in order. So that’s a bit of a slog. Yeah, I kind of like I played Resident Evil 2 very late, weirdly. Like I played it before the remake came out to kind of familiarize myself with it. And I’d sort of like I had friends who’d played it and I’d seen it played. But I kind of, you know, that was that was still excellent. You know, I was playing on the Vita and I had a really, really good time with it. And I thought, oh, man, this would probably blow my mind if I’d played it back when it actually came out. And very recently, I’ve just started digging into the Jake Hunter series, which is a series of detective visual novels on DS3DS. I think there’s one on Switch as well, which I dismissed one of these in a very small reviews roundup in NGamer years ago. And they never came back to it, despite it being a Japanese detective thing, which is like entirely now what I am 100% about. So I’m going back and playing into that. I don’t know yet if it is a good series, but I’m kind of, you know, it bugs me that I ignored something which I am now so clearly into. So I will report back. We should do a detective game episode at some point. This is something we pondered around Disco Elysium, isn’t it? Or at least when the Famicom Detective Club games come out, maybe. Oh, yeah, yeah. But yeah, J. Contagames are weird because they’ve actually got a bit of that Yakuza vibe. It’s a similar kind of like setting like little bars in like back alley streets in Tokyo. And it’s the kind of like the jazz music and drinking whiskey in these bars. Like it’s so much my bag, but I’ve got to play more of it to see if it’s actually a good game. Yeah, it’s funny. Yakuza is one where I did play it when it came out on PS2 and it didn’t capture my imagination. I think you did actually need the sort of softening up of the whole thing and make it look a bit nicer with Kiwami and Yakuza Zero to actually like to get me into the series before the act of walking around Kamurocho was not as good in those PS2 games. It just didn’t feel as good. The way enemies would kind of appear and attack you was just quite daft in the PS2 one. It was like random battles in an RPG basically. So yeah, but even Yakuza Zero started to feel a bit dated. But I wish I had played that a few years ago and like you, I could be caught up with what’s going on now. So next question, Matthew. Dear Sathyu and Manmule. I enjoyed the episode on Super Mario 3D World. I’m in an interesting position with Mario because I’ve never had a Nintendo console handheld until the Switch. That means that in quite a short period of time, I have played 3 Odyssey, 1, 3, brackets again, World, 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, and now 3D World for the first time. And I have to say, I’ve been enjoying 3D World enormously. It feels like a true and worthy sequel to 3D World. What I’m wondering is, did it seem worse when it was announced slash released simply because of the fear that Nintendo were abandoning the 3D lineage of 64, Sunshine and Galaxy, whereas for me, coming from a future where Odyssey exists, brackets magnificently, and where true 3D platformers have had a broader comeback, I can enjoy 3D World entirely on its own terms. Have there been occasions in your own experiences where your enjoyment of something has been enhanced by coming very late to the party? So, there is quite a lot more of this question, Matthew, I’ll get to after this bit, because there’s bits to cover here already. So, let’s start with abandoning the 3D lineage of 64, Sunshine and Galaxy. Did you fear that when 3D World came out? Not fear that it was gone forever, but that definitely factored into it, you know, in terms of, you know, this game was coming off the Galaxy. We were so excited to see what could the Galaxy team possibly do next. And we’ve talked a lot about 3D World on this podcast, but, you know, I felt like it was a much safer, more limited game, and they were kind of reacting to… I was worried they had some kind of internal sense that 3D Mario was, was like wrong in some way, even though it so clearly wasn’t. I think you’re right though, like Odyssey afterwards, you were like, oh yeah, this is still 100% the people that made Galaxy, like there’s no doubt about it. So, you know, it’s a very good game. It’s just a very good blip between the natural, you know, there is a much more natural through line from Galaxy to Odyssey, I think. So yeah, we shouldn’t really have worried. It’s just at the time, like when Wii U was struggling a bit, we just wanted something which was just a 100% solid gold win for the console, just for ourselves, just for like morale. And we were, you know, if anything was going to be that, it was going to be the Mario game. And it just wasn’t quite what we wanted, which probably factors into my feelings around it. Yeah, I think Matthew has answered that one. He is the Nintendo expert on this podcast. So obviously not being in that position, I didn’t really fear that. And I did just enjoy 3D World on its own terms when it released. How about this part, Matthew, about have there been occasions in your own experiences where your enjoyment of something has been enhanced by coming very late to the party? There were maybe some games I bounced off because I was a bit young and didn’t really appreciate them or understand them. And maybe if I came to them now, I might dig them a bit more. I’d go with Chrono Trigger for this one, because when that came out on DS in 2009 in Europe, I think it was, I got so, so into that. I finished it, I played about 50 hours of it. I got a couple of the different endings. And that’s a wonderful game. It’s actually like, it’s probably the least RPG-like RPG ever. It’s kind of, it’s more of an interactive story than anything. The combat is not that hard. There’s very little to customize in the game. There’s some cool moves that your characters can pull off as a kind of team. But otherwise, it’s just a really kind of like nice little collaboration between the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest people. And yeah, I have a lot of affection for that game. Hello to you both. Thank you for this podcast. It’s been making it’s made homeworking a lot more bearable. No worries. Here’s my question. Which game would you recommend to someone that highlights the best of the medium? Even if it’s a game that you’re not keen on, keep up the great work. Jordan D. That’s a tough one. I am. It’s tough. I was talking about this with Catherine last night, actually, because I was really struggling for an answer. I’ve got one. Have you got an answer? Um, sort of. I think about like, this question weirdly made me think about what if you were trying to get someone who didn’t play games to understand how great games were. That’s how I framed it, yeah. And I remember thinking, I had a friend who wasn’t that into games in the early noughties, or sorry, late noughties, and I thought, oh, maybe they’ll think like flowers good and they’ll dig flower. And they watched it and went, it’s just some fucking wind and some petals. And I was there thinking, oh, maybe games like that that are quite meditative or a bit more of that kind of indie vibe maybe just seemed more of a tonic to us because we’re so used to games with blood, guts and shooting. What was your answer to that one? So I initially started off thinking down the rhythm route because I was thinking, well, everyone understands music and something that’s inherently understood is just like tapping something to a beat or whatever. But then I was like, well, actually, like, you know, the guitars are a bit confusing and all that kind of stuff. So I’ve been that off. It’s quite a boring idea to come down to. I think it’s probably Wii Sports Tennis. And the reason the Wii is massive is because fundamentally it is a console which got people who weren’t interested in the medium interested in the medium and it did it with Wii Sports. Like, you know what tennis is? If you can hold this thing and mimic a real life action, you can play it. And that’s like that. You know, that’s that’s the magic of getting someone to interact because I think controls are always the big barrier. Like, you know, the people I know who don’t play games, if you hand them the control, that’s what freaks them out because it’s just, you know, it’s quite an abstract thing to start off with. You know, the buttons and the sticks and all this jazz where if you can just mimic something, that’s much easier. So, yeah, that’s my slightly, slightly boring answer. I quite like that answer. If I was just going to pick something that, like, has a great combination of everything, so, you know, systems and writing and world building and, you know, music and imagination, I would probably pick, like, Dishonored 2 or Breath of the Wild. Those are the two that I would pick. It’s like, well, these are just really fucking good at everything that I think is important in a game. So knock yourself out. So next up, Matthew, we’ve got another longish one here. So this is from Gav Grier. Just started listening recently and wanted to say I’m loving it. Usually my podcasts deal with news, so your show themes are providing a lovely change of pace. My question is about GTA games on Nintendo. Why are there not more of them? I can only think of Chinatown Wars. I often wonder if it’s because it’s a franchise Nintendo don’t want to be associated with or if Rockstar have no interest in porting them to Nintendo systems. It seems like it’s a lot of money to be made by both sides here. Anyway, thanks for the entertainment on my walks and runs during this truly shitbag of a time. What do you think, Matthew? Yeah, I know a few more GTA ports. There were ports of GTA 1 and 2 on the Game Boy Color. There was Grand Theft Auto Advance on GPA. And then, of course, Chinatown Wars on the DS. Weirdly, there were news reports that GTA 3 and Vice City were announced for the GameCube. And I found the reports online, but it seems to stem from one website. I don’t really know where this comes from. And there was never any proof of these things, so I don’t know if that’s totally bogus, but there was a bit of a when Sony’s exclusivity is up on these games, they will come to Xbox and GameCube. I don’t know whether that’s true. I remember when Chinatown Wars came out, people were asking this, like, why the DS and not the Wii, because the Wii was obviously massive. And one of the houncers at the time basically said something along the lines of, you know, oh yeah, we could definitely do it. We’ve chosen not to, because we don’t necessarily have a big idea. We had lots of ideas. We wanted to do something a bit different. It interests us to try new things. That’s why the DS was a fit. So I think the decision making came from them. There’s a lot of, like, bogus theorizing that, you know, Nintendo have a certain ban on certain games, which isn’t true. They were thrilled to have Giant of Down Wars. They made a big song and dance about it at their E3 conference. Yeah, so I think it just comes from Rockstar. I mean, obviously, the power of the machines is probably the big factor. They’ve always been out of step with what Rockstar were doing. The Wii couldn’t have done the 360 games. The Switch… Yeah, probably. You know, who knows? Could Switch do the GTA V and Red Dead? It probably could, but it would probably be too much of a headache to make GTA Online work on Switch and stuff like that. Yeah, but I don’t think… There’s no real reason to… Rockstar released tons of games on Nintendo platforms over the years and some quite good ports. There was a great port of Max Payne on the GBA and they did Smuggler’s Run and stuff like that on the GameCube. I think people misremember them as being quite distant, but I don’t think they were. Yeah, I think that the main factor in the PS2 era when GTA was blowing up was that the GameCube’s discs only held 1.2 gigabytes of storage, basically. Obviously, the GTA games were full of audio from the radio stations and the voice acting and stuff like that. I wonder if that was a factor, you know? Every radio station would just have to have been redone as Nintendo tunes. Yeah, and one station would be hosted by Wario, and that would actually fit my world. But it’s Wario doing the same script from GTA, so it’s just really incongruous. We heard on that episode where you talked about the starvation of GTA on GameCube led to you to play True Crime Streets of LA, which was like, you know, there are a few games on the GameCube that sort of tried to fill the gap. But yeah, I think it’s probably, I think you’re right, I think there are more than people remember, but the modern rock star seems less preoccupied with Nintendo. They seem more into like, get GTA online to as many new platforms as possible, and then sell some shark cards, you know, and stuff like that. So that’s probably a bit unfair, because they made a massive single-player Red Dead Redemption 2 that people really loved. But anyway, yeah. Chinatown Wars. That would be a good one to have on Switch, actually, because the PSP port of Chinatown Wars, even that lacks the touch screen stuff, the DS one, looked really nice, and that would probably look pretty good on the Switch. But yeah, so there’s another one here from Gav Grier. Matthew, do you want to read that one out? Yeah. I also wondered about your thoughts on re-reviewing games post-launch. Days gone, we got a bit of resurgence on PS5 because people were benefiting from bugs being patched and the boost in framerate. I’m about 30 hours in and really enjoying it, but it did get a hard time on launch. So how do you feel about re-reviewing games post-launch? It gets a bit complicated. Like I say, with a multiplayer game I think it makes more sense, like a live service game. Something like GTA V I would find very hard to re-review because GTA Online, even though it’s something I quite enjoy, for a lot of people GTA Online is the reason they buy GTA V now. They’re not playing that almost 8 year old single player campaign. They’re basically like, I’m going to set up my garage, I’m going to set up my drug business, I’m going to set up my bunker and I’m going to start selling supplies across the city and hope I don’t get nuked from orbit, which is basically the GTA Online experience. I think it’s a nice idea. I think it sends a good symbol when you can re-review something like… Apex Legends, I think, does warrant a re-review because the maps are completely different now, there’s loads more characters. Single player games, though, I feel like a patch wouldn’t be enough to make me reassess it. What do you think? Yeah, I’ve never been on a mag which has re-scored games, but I do find newer mags do definitely deal with this, and when you re-design the mag, this was a big discussion we had on official Xbox, which was making sure that the back end of the mag had a space where we could cover games later in their lifespans. You have a replay section or the extended play articles in PC Gamer. I think it’s a bit of a slippery slope of re-reviewing. If you did outright reviews, where do you draw the line? Is it just this patch? Is it a complete overhaul of the system? Or someone’s gutted the free to play elements or something and re-launched it? Does that warrant a new score? It’s definitely part of the modern reviewing landscape. Most people seem to be dealing with this by treating bigger games almost as if some writers have it as their regular beat and they’ll just be covering it and they have that ongoing relationship with it. I think it’s much easier to do online. In magazines where page space is quite precious, I don’t think you can be giving over huge chunks of the mag to covering what was going on in quite fast-moving games a month ago, which is what would happen in mags if you do cover them. So yeah, I’m kind of lucky and I’ve never really had to deal with this firsthand because I’ve never worked on a site. Yeah, those are pretty much my views on it, though. I still don’t think people really have a codified answer for the right way to do this, but yeah. In principle, I’m not against it, but I think that just by covering a game regularly and keeping people updated, you can give people the story of that game without re-scoring it. When you’re re-scoring it, that’s when it starts to get a bit more contentious. Next up then Matthew, we’d love to hear you guys discuss generally the meta in games, things like the best gun in shooters, best character build in RPGs, etc. Are you generally in favour? Concerned about their influence on games or developers or industry, was there ever a true pre-internet analogue? I mean, I would say that pre-internet analogue would be odd job in GoldenEye being like having the hats and fucking people up. That was like, you know, if there was a tier list in GoldenEye, he would surely be at the top. But what do you make of this, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of… This feels like a sort of… Something that’s kind of passed me by a little bit. Like, I don’t play any one game enough to, like, warrant needing this information or getting into these elements. I mean, it’s kind of like the last question in a way, in that, you know, it’s about your ongoing relationship with the game from a, like, journalism perspective, particularly from a print perspective. You know, I always felt like that was… Those were topics that, like, lived in the community. Like, they didn’t… You don’t need any kind of gatekeeping. You don’t really need… You know, you don’t need someone saying this. I think where that stuff’s interesting is, like, being aware of it and being able to pluck, like, interesting stories from it. Like, I think there’s some interesting stuff where people discover something mad or something particularly broken, which, like, everyone’s always interested to hear about, like, wild tales in a game, you know, regardless of whether they actually play it. But, yeah, it’s not something I personally dig in too much, but I mainly play single-player story games. Like, Phoenix Wright doesn’t really have a meta. Yeah, for me, like, you know, I’m really going to paraphrase my former colleague of mine on PC Gamer, Phil Savage, here, who kind of made the point to me that, like, if you’re so concerned with what eSports players are doing and, like, stuff like that, you’re more likely to not to enjoy the game than you are if you just pick a character who you actually enjoy playing as. Like, it doesn’t matter if, I don’t know, like, Loba in Apex Legends gets, like, the lowest, like, win count or whatever versus the other characters. You’re actually playing the game to enjoy it, and you can still win with that character. It’s not, like, a secret source to it. And, to be honest, like, when people talk about the meta and stuff like that, I actually, I think that’s, like, the least interesting part of games coverage. I don’t give a shit, really. I just, again, think, like, talk about why it’s fun and tell me, you know, tell me how to have the best time with the game. Like, yeah, I sort of, I’m not really interested in, like, tier lists for Smash Bros or anything like that, so. Oh, yeah, that’s, it’s particularly egregious in Smash Brothers, which is just, like, a game all about excess. And if you have to start cutting out that excess to, like, appreciate the technicality of it, then, I don’t know, you’re probably playing it wrong, I think. Yeah, yeah, God help you, basically. Yeah, so, I hope that helps. I think that just, that speaks so to the fact that I do play some multiplayer games, but I don’t, I don’t, like, engage them on that level. I’m not really interested in, like. I’m just too shit at games to need that high-level strategy. You know, like, my meta is not being the first person who dies in Apex Legends. Which is, that is my role. Yeah, I hope you, thank you Joseph Nubina for that one. I hope our lack of insight there was at least entertaining. So, this next one’s a good one, Matthew. Do you want to fire away? I’d love to hear your thoughts on games that deserve contemporary remakes slash spiritual successes, because no one else has properly touched on the original concept since. No one lives forever and bullying are good examples for me, says Alex Hater. So, I have a very direct answer to this, and that is that a lot of people are always talking about the fact that Konami isn’t making a proper Silent Hill sort of game. And I would ask, why can’t some indie developers make their version of Silent Hill 2? Because when you look at the component parts of those early Silent Hill games, there’s nothing in there that really seems beyond a modern mid-sized game developer. So, I feel like I’m surprised there aren’t more horror games in that vein. We’ve seen a lot of first-person horror games and then Five Nights at Freddy’s kind of like riffs on that and stuff like that. But if you want that truly, if you want to tap into the vibes that Silent Hill 2 gave you, you can do it. Just don’t do it in that kind of boring, psychological horror way that you’ve been talking about in recent months, Matthew. Do you have an answer for this one? Well, weirdly, the first thing at the top of my list was proper pre-rendered survival hero from PlayStation 1 and 2 era, which I’d love to see amazingly done well. It can be amazing. One of the most amazing horror games I’ve played was the Resident Evil 1 remake on GameCube. I think that style of game can still work. There was the medium recently kind of tapped into it, and when I was playing that, I was thinking, oh, I remember liking games like this. I just don’t think the medium is a good version of it. Like, it’s just not scary because, like you say, I think everyone’s taken the wrong lessons from Silent Hill where they’re like, oh, there’s a big psychological twist. And you’re like, well, that’s cool, but it’s also scary. Like, before that. It’s all in the music and the style of it, and then the fact that everyone seems a bit strung out in Silent Hill, like it’s sort of, yeah, you’re right, people are taking the wrong lessons. But actually, yeah, pre-rendered did come to mind. Like, those kind of pre-rendered Resident Evil games definitely still have a scary magic to them, even with their weird voice acting. It’s all in the sound design and the weird look of the pre-rendered backgrounds and stuff like that. That’s 100% the genre I’d love to see come back in a new and better form. Also, just a couple of others I noted down. I’m surprised there aren’t more direct Ace Attorney clones. There are plenty of Ace Attorney games being made by Capcom, but I’m surprised no one’s done that style of detective game. There was the one with birds, there was Avery Attorney, which was slightly different vibes, but I obviously like more games like that. Also, a Nintendo series I’m kind of sad has sort of vanished is Golden Sun, which was an RPG series by Camelot, who make the Mario Golf and Tennis games. Two games on GBA, then one on DS. Quite traditional RPGs with turn-based battles, but what I liked about them was the kind of the magics you had that you used in combat also doubled up as skills that you used in the world, almost for Zelda-level dungeoning, so it had the nerdy stats RPG stuff, but it also had the adventure of solving physical puzzles in a dungeon a bit more like Zelda, or maybe a better, a bit more involved version of the abilities you sometimes use in Pokemon to cut the bushes and surf over the seas. It’s like that, but good. I would love them to bring back Golden Sun, but I don’t think it on DS was a big enough thing for them to ever make more of it, but I love that kind of combo. That was good. Next question is from Jamie John. I’d love to hear you both discuss in the process of reviewing games some more. How do you know where to start? Do you have a checklist of things to include? What are some things to avoid? Brackets apart from writing a diary entry from the POV of Niko Bellic, of course. Matthew, do you have a process? Do you have a list? No, I don’t really have a process. I’m just big into playing the game, seeing what registers. I don’t take many notes. I think I’ve said this before. I just play the game and what sticks, stuff that jumps out at me, stuff that sticks with me is what makes it into the review. If something’s memorable enough, I’ll remember it. I find my own process quite hard to unpick because I’m just so natural at what I do now. It’s so second nature for me. I’d say things to avoid, though. The number one thing I see from people starting out or younger writers or older writers, whatever, people who haven’t done it as much, is reviews that are too much like previews. I think a lot of people make this mistake of telling you what something is without actually offering any opinion. That’s the major pitfall I think most people fall into. They tell you, like, this is the story, or there’s this level, and then when they do go into it, they maybe don’t dig deep into the specificity of exactly what you feel and why you feel it. It’s that level of drilling down. Trying to pin down exactly what it was that got you to feel that way, I find, is very valuable. I would say, like, my very broad top line, like, that is the note I’ve given more, you know, probably nine times out of ten. That is the note. The thing I try to train myself out of is, again, like I mentioned this on the review scores episode a bit, I think, is, like, doing, well, I’ve got to talk about the sound now, and I’ve got to talk about the graphics and stuff like that, which is that very itemized, like, box-out-heavy 90s reviewing style. Not in all cases, but, you know, you saw a lot of that in Mags back then. I like reviews that are just a bit… I like reviews that are a bit irreverent, you know? That’s where they’re not afraid to kind of make jokes and stuff like that. That’s quite important to me as a reader and a writer, and I think that it can be easy to see, like, making jokes as sort of… somehow you’re not taking the process seriously enough, when really that sort of levity was fundamental to, you know, PC Gamer in its golden era and right up to today. Like, it’s… and PC Gamer is a very well-respected outlet, so I always think the jokes have a place in a review. You want to be fun, you know, it’s a form of entertainment in itself for review, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, everything should be entertaining, that you’re doing. Yeah. It hurts, yeah, for sure. I think a big hurdle, another hurdle, like, I definitely had this early on, is that you don’t have to share every thought you had. Like, I think some people are like, well, these are my thoughts, I have to, like, this has to be a comprehensive record of what I felt. And actually, no one knows you, no one can hold you to that. No one knows that you thought that. Like, even if you have this observation about music, if it doesn’t fit, or you can’t make it fit naturally, just cut it, just dump that. You know, that’s absolutely fine. It’s when you’re like, you water down the whole thing, trying to get everything in, like, go big on your most interesting thoughts, dump the other ones. Not all thoughts are made equal. You’re great at reviewing games, Matthew. Your reviews are, like, legit entertaining. Thank you very much. I think I said this on the previous one as well. I don’t feel very comfortable with the kickings. I’m not Charlie Brooker-like. I can’t do absolute hilarious monstering. And I think I tried to be more like that early on and realised that isn’t really my vibe. You know, I take a great… I take a great more pleasure in trying to make a positive review entertaining because I think that’s harder. It’s trying to be upbeat and sincere and also fun. That’s quite a hard combo. And I like most things, so it’s a challenge I kind of run into quite a lot. Yeah, your VGC reviews in the last year in particular I think have been really, really good. I think it’s a treat for people that get to see you doing your thing with some of these big games, you know. Well, thank you, Sam. That’s very kind. That’s enough praise for one week, though. It’s getting a bit too soppy in here. Go on, then, Matthew. Next one. Hi. Please ask Matthew to review Basel-related goods such as Basel seed drinks. We can look into that. It’ll be a Patreon stretch goal. Is that a thing? I don’t know. I’m also interested as a lifelong Nintendo fan for deeper insight into what is more specifically you like and dislike about Dark Souls. I’m not personally a fan of the game, but can see what makes it so appealing. Is it for Matthew the idea that Dark Souls design just goes against a lot of modern Nintendo design philosophy that the game feels wrong? Thanks, says Aaron. I find it quite hard to tie Dark Souls to Nintendo thinking because it’s just not a thing they would make, but I can’t quite put my finger on why it’s different. I wonder if the discussion of Nintendo mechanics and how things feel and stuff, just applying your expertise to dissect what is good. I think I’ve said it on this podcast before, the reason Dark Souls doesn’t click with me is because I don’t like the rigidity of the characters. I don’t really like difficulty in games which comes from what I perceive to be a huge limitation on the character. I want to have someone who is equipped for the job and then the challenges around them, where I feel the challenge comes from the character a bit and Dark Souls is a personal feeling. I also find that I feel like they’re games you have to know about before you can play them, and there’s a lot of information you get from playing them which comes a bit too late. Specifically in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, the fact that I have to make a character and pick stats and pick a class for this world, which is so uncompromising to certain classes and certain stats, I feel is a bit brutal. It’s why the game of theirs I’ve played the most was Sekiro, because it had a pre-med character and it’s like, this is what you got. This thing is, in one way or another, capable of doing this game, where I felt like in Dark Souls I’d made bad decisions because I liked the colourful class descriptions or whatever and I’m like, oh, that sounds good. And then you play it and you’re like, why am I getting my ass handed to me? Is it because I’m shit or I’ve picked a bad character? And then people are like, yeah, it’s a bad character. But I don’t know, that’s probably me. Bad workman blames his tools. No, I think that that’s fundamental to my frustration with Dark Souls too. By the way, I’m going back to playing Dark Souls with my old PC Gamer colleague Wes this weekend as we’re recording this. And I do have to do a bit of homework to upgrade a sword before I can actually take on this boss that’s become a bit of a barrier. And that’s a real bummer because, again, I didn’t know that the sword I had was going to run out of usefulness at this point in the game because nothing in the game tells you that. And I think arbitrary RPG mechanics are key to all my frustrations with Dark Souls. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the combat. Combat’s very good. I like the different ways that your moves interact with enemies, the kind of physics of it, of knocking an enemy back, kicking them. Obviously, the level design is really interesting. It’s a very muddy-looking game, I’d say, by today’s standards, the original Dark Souls, but I have no problems with that. It’s all just down to the numbers in the background. Like you say, oh, I’ve picked a melee character. Well, you’re going to need a certain sword to even get past this bit. And if you depict this wizard guy, you can just throw fire at him from across the map and maybe you would rather have done that. And it’s like, oh, and you know, this high stamina is cancelled out because your trousers are too heavy. And you’re like, oh, give me a break. It’s like, oh, you have to take all your clothes off and do it in your pants. And you’re like, I’m not doing that. It’s also things like, things like moving faster or slower because you’re weighed down by stuff. I’m like, oh, what in a game like this? Why even make that a thing I have to think about? And I’m sure fans would go, well, you know, the challenge is part and just part of the magic of it. But like, I think it’s just, I would probably have more of an appetite for this if I was in my early 20s and not my early 30s. Yeah. That’s part of it. Hopefully that helps though. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong. No, no, definitely it’s just not for me. Yeah, and like Matthew says, Sekiro was the From Software game that really clicked with me. For a lot of the reasons that Matthew says. Next question then Matthew. I listen to the podcast mostly while doing work with work for me being games development. It’s great to learn more about the side of the industry I know very little about. Since websites have taken over from traditional magazines and with the consumers having the ability to instantly and anonymously respond to something you have written, has that impacted how or what you have written? Or does that even cross your mind, especially when those same people can reach you on other social media accounts? Thanks, Chris Yules. Does this affect the way you write Matthew? No, I think I’m still writing what I would have naturally written in print. So I’m not really too concerned. I don’t mind having avenues open for discussion. If people have misconstrued something, sometimes it is nice to have the right of reply. Sometimes in the mag it would go out and I’d see on the forum feedback someone would have misread what I was trying to say and I wish I could have said, oh, for this specific person. Well, actually it’s this and clear that up. Truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever really written for much, which has been big enough to… I don’t get thousands of comments under my reviews anywhere. They’re mostly pleasant. Again, that sounds quite self-serving. No, I don’t really worry about other people. I’m pretty confident in what I’m writing. If people disagree, then we can discuss it or I can just block them on Twitter. Yeah, it’s actually like… A recent example of this I can think of is I wrote a piece about the Snyder cut and why the aspect ratio is in like 4 by 3 rather than widescreen. And one of Zack Snyder’s weird fans tweeted me saying, you do realize that… It’s because in the article I said that you don’t think about what you’re not seeing by the film, not being in widescreen after a certain point because you get used to the picture, etc. And this guy tweeted me saying, did you know that when you’re watching in 4x3, you’re technically seeing more of the picture? And I did think about responding, but then I ultimately just muted them. I thought if I blocked them, they’ll probably find that quite satisfying. And when I looked at their replies to other people, it was all telling them, like, you’re wrong about Zack Snyder. Was this at Zack Snyder? No, although he does seem to take things very personally. But it is definitely a factor. I think that on PC Gamer, I actually didn’t mind the comments being toxic, because most of the time it would stay contained in there. So I didn’t feel too fearful about what I wrote. I’m just not spicy enough to upset the right people. I’m such a fence-sitter, I don’t upset anyone. It’s the magic of centrism. Yeah. Also, if you want to hear my spicy takes, they’re all on this podcast. And it takes effort to listen to a podcast, so people will have to listen to 40 minutes of audio in order to get that. And all they want to do on the internet is read your opinion and disagree with you immediately. So, yeah. Next up then, Matthew. So this is one of yours, right? Best game that seems to have been forgotten. I always loved Ignition on PC, says Tom Pearcy. I have a good answer to this one. So when I worked on Play, there was a whole generation of slightly odd PS3 digital games that Sony had obviously commissioned in response to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade taking off. And I feel like loads of these games are forgotten. So partly because some of them are just trapped on the PS3 and they’ll probably never go anywhere else. So there was a weird movie, kind of like a video where you found hidden bits in the video, a bit of a hidden object game set within a video called Lingering Shadows, which to look at looked like something that Team Ico might make. It was just lots of weird smoky monsters and stuff like that. That was a weird game. That’s completely forgotten, I feel. Tokyo Jungle is a game that I think quite a lot of games journalists got into where you could play as like any animal in this slightly oddball Japanese game. And The Last Guy, which is kind of like you had to save civilians during the post-apocalypse and all the maps were… It was a top-down game and all the maps were taken from Google Maps. They were like real places. That was a really fucking odd game. And Everyday Shooter is another one of these games. You can play that on Steam. So that was a cool music-based twin-stick shooter. How about you, Matthew? I think the DS and Wii had loads of really great, obscure stuff that hopefully we’re surfacing in our best-of-the-year podcast that we’re doing. A game I really loved when I was a bit younger on the N64 was Beetle Adventure Racing, which was a game where you race little Beetle cars, not Beetle the Beetles, or the band The Beetles. That would be good, though. Anyway, what was good about this is it had massively branching tracks, so there were loads of shortcuts and they were quite zany. You could drive off and find a UFO under the ice and all this jazz. But there was this quite interesting layer to it where it was about winning the race and being first, but there was also a layer where you were trying to collect these boxes which were on the different tracks, and there was an optimal route to catch. If you wanted to get all the boxes, all the point boxes or whatever in this game, you had to develop, learn these optimal routes across all these different branches to nail it in three laps. We played loads of this. It was a really solid 8 out of 10. I want to say it was an Electronic Arts published thing. I want to say the developers were called Paradigm. I don’t know if that’s right. But I really like that little arcadey racers, not like combat racers necessarily. You know, I’m not just asking for another Mario Kart clone, but stuff like that. Like arcadey sports games like Tony Hawk. I know like there’s the remasters and bad one, but like there was a time these were absolutely amazing, amazing, amazing games. I love Pro Skater 4. I think it’s really sad, but that doesn’t exist anymore. Also, the SSX series seems to be a bit forgotten now. Yeah, you can play the latest one on Game Pass, I think, the one they made in 2012 for 360. That was weird though, because everyone was like, oh yes, SSX is coming back. And it’s like, you know that game where like all the mad disco characters and bright colors? Well, this one’s about like surviving Death Mountain. And you’re like, oh, that isn’t quite what I wanted. This one’s like, the original ones were like, Macy Gray is going to do like a thousand flips in the air. And this one was like, you’re going to die in an avalanche. It’s just very different vibe. Yeah, you know, it’s funny because I just, while you were talking about that, thought of another snowboarding game that has been forgotten. That was Amped 3 on Xbox 360, which was like a close to like a launch title, might have been a launch title. And the Amped games, as I understand it, were just quite straightforward, like snowboarding extreme sports games in the genre that you mentioned. But Amped 3, they made a deliberate attempt to give it like, it’s got quite a good story mode, a really funny story mode, and quite a kind of like oddball sense of humor. It’s hard to describe its sense of humor. It’s like, it’s very kind of American and sitcom-y, but it just, it was a really great fit for it. And then it does like really kind of extended pop culture rifts, sorry, like rifts with stop-motion characters, and then there’s like a Final Fantasy VII battle parody in it at one point, and like it’s just, didn’t really get the credit it deserved for being a bit unusual. There’s loads. I can think of loads of different hidden gems. I’m sure we’ll get to some more down the line, right? Yeah, yeah. All right. So next up, Matthew, this is from Owen Christie. Hi guys, loving the podcast so far. Some absolutely hilarious content. I was clearing out the loft around Christmas time and found a huge box filled to the brim with old PS2 demo discs. People really want us to talk about this, Matthew. Yeah. I have some really fond memories as a kid of getting the OPS official PlayStation 2 magazine and playing some gems on the demos. But upon finding this box, I found they were actually filled with absolute naff for the first part, for the most part, sorry. Any funny stories from working on mags regarding demo discs? Keep up the good work. We touched a bit on like your woes with recording footage for the endgamer disc. Yeah, that’s pretty much like we didn’t have demo discs. We had video discs, which were mostly me dying in the first 15 seconds of every NES game ever, which now is quite funny internet content, but at the time was kind of depressing and didn’t really like dazzle my colleagues. But I’ve never worked on a demo disc on Nintendo, just not really a thing. Yeah, sadly not, I’m afraid. Yeah, same like there was no demo disc where I worked either, but I can say that the actual like this part of it, I’ve still got a few of the discs I did when I worked on X360 magazine, which is the MAGA imagine I enjoyed the most. And that was like, those are like podcasts basically, like divided out into episode, you know, like trailer commentaries and gameplay commentaries. And I have good memories of making those. And I feel like they were like, and now that all the old podcasts are recorded back then, are just no longer online, there’s no record of them anywhere. It’s quite nice to have the disc as a kind of reminder of like, this is what, you know, the culture of a Mac was like and stuff like that. But yeah. I imagine at some point we’ll get a guest on the podcast who was a disc editor and can talk us through the process. So stick with it and we’ll get there eventually. Cool. Good answer. Next up, Matthew. Hi Matthew and Sam. Congratulations on the early success of the podcast. It’s been fun to hear about the inner workings of gaming journalism when magazines are at the height of their power. I think we’re on the dissent, but hey, let’s not argue. And I found hearing about both of your approaches to interviewing industry legends to be an interesting discussion. Phones going off halfway through included. I myself have been lucky enough to take part in similar interactions over the years, though by no means on the same scale. My first industry event was in a freelance capacity four years ago when I was invited along to a swanky Bristol hotel to play a preview of old school adventure game Siberia 3 and interview one of the game’s designers, Lucas Lacrovet. This whole thing went fine, but at the risk of sounding stalkerish, before my session began I did notice a rogue Mr Basilpesto vacate the premises and I was just wondering how well he felt it went and more importantly what he’s done with the Siberia 3 tie-in comic we were given while at the event. Was it a worthy read or destined for the bin? On a more serious note, what do both of you tend to do with the physical PR ephemera you’re gifted and what’s the worst slash best item you’ve ever received? Thanks again for reading my question and nice job with the podcast says Aaron Potter. I’m just going to start this one by saying I do not remember Siberia 3 event and I definitely don’t have the tie-in comic. Yeah, it’s a shame because I feel like did you have to run out and get some Renny? Like what would be the Matt Castle reason? I may have just been leaving the event because it was over. I mean, I imagine this was me. I’d rack my brains, but I look like a lot of people slash things. So, you know, there’s a chance it could be one of my many doppelganger. Are you sure it wasn’t Gabe Neal leaving the place? Because it could have been that. It’s funny when people, sometimes I’m tagged, or the podcast Twitter account is tagged, when people say, oh, I saw this, like, a generic, like, middle-aged man with glasses on TV. It’s you, Matthew Castle. And it’s like, most of the time to me, and maybe it’s because I know you so well, I don’t think you look like these people, but, you know, that’s not the case to the outsiders. But to answer the question, then, best and worst item. There are rules around this stuff these days in terms of value of things and stuff like that. One of the most valuable items I got given was, I went to Skywalker Ranch in 2010, a story I will tell when we get to the Best Games of 2010 episode. It’s not a great story. It’s basically me complaining in the sun. But I got given a replica. That’s all your stories. I got given a replica lightsaber that I think was worth like 100 quid. And this is like, this is not a joke. I genuinely gave it to a sick child because I felt very uneasy that I’d been given this like extremely valuable thing. So it was a really like a beautiful, a beautiful like, you know, high end bit of merch. And yeah, I knew someone whose, whose brother was sick and I gave it to her to give to her brother who liked Star Wars. He’s fine now. So yeah, that makes me sound like… Does that mean you can ask for it back? That was just a loan until you were healthy. Yeah. Hi, me again. You might remember me from 11 years ago. Can’t help but notice that you’re still alive. Do you want to just drop that in the post, mate? Yeah, so… Don’t give it a rub down with some kind of like disinfectant first. So that was like a really nice item. There was like weird stuff. Like there was GTA IV tie-in beer, like the piss-wass of beer in there. Yeah, I had a bottle of that, which I never drank, and then it just gradually over time changed into an evil colour, and I think I just threw it away. You see, I thought if I hoarded it, it might be worth something one day, but I thought, you know what? This is probably a chemical weapon at this point, so I should probably put it in the bin. If I sell this on eBay, I’ll probably end up in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah, so that was like quite a fun one. But I mostly think these things are like, there’s some really like weird ones that influencers get, where I see them like get sent vinyl players. Like, how is that? What’s it got anything to do with the game or whatever? But anyway, how about you, Matthew? Yeah. Yeah, I had to piss past a thing. I’ve got some Nintendo promo shirts from like 2008 that I still wear, even though they’re so tiny and they’re like disintegrating. I won’t ever wear them in public because it’s just a state. I think there’s more skin on the show than there is a t-shirt. But I’d wear them around the house. I think Catherine constantly wants to throw them away or use them as like dust rags, but I won’t let her because they’re precious. I think all the things that were Nintendo of them have worn off as well. So they’re just black t-shirts. The worst thing that ever got sent was the infamous bats from Saints Row. Did you get these? This is the dildo bat. It was like a replica of an in-game weapon, which was just like a giant kind of like purple dildo for hitting people with. They were like meter long and they were just in the office for years after that fact. You would shrug them off, you’d be like, oh yeah, there’s that. Which for anyone coming into the office must have just been awful to see. You’d be like, what the hell? Where is this place? What is this place? They were pretty gross. How do you get rid of that? It’s so big. You can’t put it in your bin. What would the bin man think? If you put it on eBay, there’s all kinds of questions that could be asked. Why do you own this? I think they’re probably still in that building somewhere. But it’s the cursed object. You just can’t get rid of it. It’s like radiation. It’s not like the Borderlands top drums in Matthew where you accumulate a pile of them and hope to sell them. No, I haven’t hoarded 10 giant dildos at home hoping to plan to sell them on eBay. You know, actually, I had a couple of Rockstar shirts that I did cover for quite a long time. I had a rainbow-colored one, and then I had a Red Dead Redemption t-shirt, and those I wore around for a long time. And in retrospect, I’m kind of like, well, I did kind of turn myself into an advert. Is that good as a writer about games? When I was at university, I was doing the student paper. I used to go to some film screenings in London to do the film reviews, and I used to see famous film journalists, or journalists I considered famous because they were like film journalists from whatever the times of The Guardian, and they’d be wearing their same film… One of them would have a Drag Me to Hell cap or something. And you’d be like, wow, these are sophisticated film critics, and they’re all wearing this junk. They’d all be wearing jeans which had Phos and the Furious 2 on them or something. So I think everyone does it. I think it’s just a curse of arts journalists. There was something, I really wish I had what the game was. We got sent a figure from a game once that basically the smell of it deteriorated over time. And it went from spelling like shoe polish to like a dead body or something. And it was like over time, the smell got worse and worse and worse and people would come by my desk and smell it and see how bad it had gone. That was a really cursed object. I wish I remember what the figure was, but sometimes those cheaply made figures are sometimes just incredibly nasty. But yeah, I think that kind of covers the broad spectrum there. So next up, Matthew, I’d love to hear more on how the free gifts that came with some mags came to be. NGamer’s Wiimote steering wheel thing always stuck in my memory for all the worth £7 gags. That’s from Jess Freedy on Twitter. The Wii wheel, which was like our attempt to… Nintendo was selling the wheel peripheral for Wii remotes, so we did like a really cheap nasty version of that and gave it away as a free gift. And because like you could buy a wheel peripheral for £7, I think that’s where the worth £7 came from. But it was so tacky. It wasn’t the same. It was such a tacky thing. I was actually telling this to someone the other day. I’m pretty sure that came about through mild insubordination, which was I had to write a load of jokes about this wee wheel. And I was really cross at like how naff it was. And the worth £7 thing really like stuck in my craw. And I remember putting it in. This is how I remember it anyway. As a like it was it was like me trying to be like sort of withering or sarcastic, fully expecting Nick, our editor, to remove it. Because I was just doing it to be like, you know, this is, I don’t like this. I’m not into this thing. So I’m going to write this worth £7, like make fun of the line. And it stayed in and then ended up becoming like a catchphrase of the mag where it was actually me just trying to be like, you know, bitching about this stupid free gift. It’s how I remember it. So a completely accidental catchphrase. It was good though, because it set up early on the idea that like it was a big inside joke between us and the readers that our gifts were shit, which was lucky because they were shit. So it was fine. Like it was good. Like it’s just part of liking that mag was knowing that the gifts were bad and that we could all have a good joke about it. Yeah, like there was I have a good story about one of them. I can’t remember if I told this on the podcast before. I feel like I haven’t. So I got commissioned to write the book that came with one issue of play, which was like the 100 best PlayStation games and made this list. And I had to like write it in two weekends. It was 20,000 words long. And I did it for like a sum of money that seemed like really good at the time. But while I was writing it, I got trapped in my flat and had to be rescued by the fire brigade. So my whenever I saw this book is like a little gold book. I just couldn’t help but have memories of like what basically what happened is I used to live in this poxy little flat like a studio flat. And the door had the doors like handle were disintegrated and it wouldn’t open. And fire brigade had to climb in through my like big windows and then like use a kind of winching device to smash the door open so I could escape. And whenever I Yeah, this book like it was such a cursed process writing this it was so much more work than I thought it was going to be. I think originally agreed it’d be 12,000 words ended up being 20,000. Just a fucking nightmare. And yeah, had eight firefighters in my small flats looking at all of my weird games shit. It also explains why entry 63 was just help, help. I’m trapped in my flat. Help, help me someone please. Yeah, like I don’t know. That must have been an import game. And the next one is, if I die, please give part of my possessions on to the following charities. And then it was, oh, finally, the sweet, sweet fireman is here. As a reader, though, like I used to really like the books that came with Games Master and stuff, because if you were like me and you just played GTA 3 with cheats on, then it was handy to have those books around and just like, you know, you’d usually find the information you wanted in them. But yeah, like, yeah, I have written a book, technically. It’s just one of probably one of the worst books ever written in the bottom 1%. But yeah, any other thoughts on free gifts, Matthew? I’ve got some other free gift stories, but I’ll probably tell them when we do the episodes where those gifts came out, because I feel like they’re good yearly anecdotes. Yeah, don’t want to blow them all here, like my excellent firefighter anecdote. Cool, so this next one’s from Baladeer on Twitter. I have actually edited your question to be a bit less 90s magazine-y. I hope you don’t mind. Salacious. Yes, so kiss, marry, kill. Crash, Spyro, Sly Cooper. This is one for you, Matthew, primarily. Hmm, easy. Marry, crash, because he’s rich. Kiss, Sly Cooper, because he’s the most, I don’t know, humanoid of all of them, I’d say. Kill, Spyro. Simple. I think I’d agree with that. In terms of the actual series of what is best, one to three, it’s like, it goes for me, it goes Sly Cooper, Crash, Spyro. But otherwise, I think Matthew’s logic there for which ones you’d actually like to marry or get off with line up. So next up, Matthew, hit me with the next one. Hey, both. I’m still working through your back catalogue, so apologies if this is discussed on a previous app. What’s each of your favourite and least favourite games to have reviewed? Were there any that really surprised you and how good they were, or any that you found a struggle? So I don’t think this is, like, best, worst games, but just the review process, I guess? Yeah, I’ve got an answer to this one. So I do remember… I don’t know if this is my least favourite game to review, but the Harry Potter… Oh, that was Lee Sparks, by the way. Sorry. Well, I don’t know if this is, like, the worst that I ever reviewed, but Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which was kind of like EA’s very cheap attempt to do a bully-style version of Harry Potter, where you walked across a school taking on side quests, was so fucking boring. And I mentioned on a previous episode, it was, like, primarily a Wii game, and they tried to map the Wiimote controls to the analog sticks of the PS2, and that was a fucking miserable experience reviewing that. I hated that game, and, yeah, just really… I think that game actually was probably quite fundamental in turning me on Harry Potter. I never really had the same affection for it after that. Obviously, these days, Harry Potter seems to get, like, cancelled once every week at the moment. But, yeah. I also thought of Time Shift. That was a game I reviewed for Games TM, a miserable first-person shooter. That was really boring with some slightly disappointing kind of time-based abilities. How about you, with least favorite, Matthew? Yeah, like, nightmarish reviews for, like, import games where you just didn’t know what the hell you were doing. Like, trying to review, like, Monster Hunter 3 on import and Wii, and, like, literally not knowing what the quest conditions were, because you were like, is it kill? It was like, you had the number nine, and you were like, well, I have to do nine of something. Is it nine of these deer? Is it collect nine mushrooms? And that was a nightmare. That’s awful. I can’t imagine doing that. That’s so terrible. Yeah, so that was bad. Reviewing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 over in Activision Santa Monica and flew in and got in in the evening the day before we were due to review. I remember going to the motel. They didn’t have a room for me. They put me in a room which was clearly the room of the person who owned the motel because all their clothes were in the cupboard. And that was weird. And then the next day, having to sit in this dark, quite hot room playing Modern Warfare 3, which I thought was fine, but it was so loud. Like they had the sound system turned up so loud. The screen was massive. The room was dark. My sofa was a little bit too close to the screen. It was super intense. Probably the most intense set up I’ve played a game on in this dark little room. And then they fed me, well, they didn’t feed me. They gave me a huge burrito, which I chose to eat. And so I had just the worst meat sweats all afternoon. This combination of like jet lag, meat sweats, the proximity of this screen, the volume of this game. Like, I genuinely thought I was being like brainwashed into being a super soldier, you know? It’s like some nightmare thing from a sci-fi film. That was really, that was really stressed, a very stressful trip. That was the trip I was also reviewing Super Mario 3D Land on, on the 3DS. So to go from that to that was pretty jarring. Yeah, I won’t say what the game is, but there was one event, one review event, where I was in a dark room for three days. And it kind of felt like, it felt a bit like a prison after a while. And in that dark room, I thought, I’m going to die here. I’m going to die in this room. And what if my family never finds out? But yeah, that’s… That explains your verdict box on that review, which was those words. I’m going to die here. I’m going to die in this place. Yeah, 85%. Please send Fireman. So yeah, in terms of the other part of this question, actually no, favorite games to review, I would say that Mass Effect 2, which I mentioned in a previous episode, I got to take home for an entire Christmas. That was really good. But as Matthew alluded to though, perhaps I was reviewing Christmas and not the game because Christmas is pretty good. And for the games that surprised you in the review, so I actually did manage to think of a good one for this. So Odin Sphere on PS2. I don’t know if people remember this game. It’s a vanilla-ware game that you can actually play on PS4 in an enhanced version. I knew nothing about vanilla-ware when this came out. And yeah, side-scrolling RPG with really nice graphics, a bit too sort of like, I don’t know, fans ever seeing the character design, which is kind of a perennial problem with their games. But that’s a really great little action RPG. So yeah, that was my pick. What about you, Matthew? Yeah, like I remember having… There’s loads of games that I didn’t really know much about and then I ended up really liking them. I think the one that really jumps out is Castlevania Lords of Shadow, which I thought was going to be like a fine God of War clone. It’s one of my favourite games of that generation. I absolutely adore that game. And there was so much we hadn’t seen. It just kept on going. Like every new bit I was like, oh, wow, this is great. It keeps getting better and better. And just the way that game unfolds, it’s like surprisingly long, but surprisingly good for that length as well. That was a super positive. Yeah, I love it when a game just surprises you like that, when you didn’t really have like any, didn’t really think one way or the other and it ends up being great. That can sometimes push it even higher in your affections, I think. So yeah, I really rate that game for that reason. Cool. So next up Matthew, if you could have worked on any games magazine from the past, what would it have been and why is it N64? That’s from Jez on Twitter. Yeah, that’s probably right. N64. The Tim Weaver era would have been great. I worked for Tim Weaver for a little while on something called The Games Hub, which was like where a couple of writers were. We were basically in this like internal freelance pool. So I was still on NGamer, but I was also in this. And technically Tim was my boss and it was for a while, for a couple of months, it was just me, Tim Weaver and Andy Kelly. And that is like the two funniest months of my entire life, I think. I’ve never laughed so hard as just the three of us, because no one really knew what to do with us. So we were just sort of sitting there like reviewing big games and the rest of the time just being trying to make each other laugh. And both Tim and Andy Kelly are very, very funny people. I had a really good time. And that’s what I like to imagine it would have been like on N64 as well. That’s certainly how the mag came across. But I also have huge affection for NGC, like the Jez Bickermere in particular. Jez, you know, I never worked with Jez, but he’s absolutely awesome dude. And I would have loved to have worked on that mag with him as well. I think PC Gamer in the late 90s might have been fun. That was when I started reading it. I kind of always wondered if I might have been intellectually outmatched at some eras of PC Gamer, which makes me very insecure, of course. But do you know, actually, the answer I picked was I would love to have been on Edge in the late 90s and early noughties. Because there are some really interesting people who have written for Edge and worked on the magazine over the years. And their access was second to none. And they were covering really big industry stories. They had like massive sort of columnists and stuff like that. I think that would have been a really… You’d have learned so much from doing that about the industry. Yeah, that would be my pick. Cool. Next up, Matthew. So what is a game you love but would never recommend? This is a bit tricky because I think if I love it, it’s probably good enough to recommend. Like, I don’t really believe in guilty pleasures. There’s a few things which are like a little awkward, which I know I really love and have recommended in reviews, but other people have largely bounced off them. Infinite Space, which I’ll probably talk about in more detail when we get to the Year That Comes Out episode. There’s Suda 51 port on DS of Flowers, Sun and Rain, which is kind of an anti-fun game. It’s designed to be as obscure and wonky as possible, and it does the thing which I hate in just about every other game, which it makes fun of how shit it is, which most games can’t pull off where they’re like, wouldn’t it be terrible if you had to kill six rats and then you had to kill six rats, and you’re like, yeah, this is dog shit. But he gets away with, like, there’s a weird boy in it who keeps, does this sort of commentary on how much the main character doesn’t look like his character portrait when he talks and things like that. And I like, I don’t know, it got away with it just by being so strange, but it’s kind of, it is kind of terrible as a detective game. The story is garbage, but it’s something that I have a fair amount of affection for. Yeah, so I thought of a couple of examples. So Destiny is a game that I’ve played a lot of, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it necessarily. Like a lot of friends ask me if I should play it or if it’s worth picking up. And I’m like, I don’t really know. I mean, you need to be in a specific mindset to kind of get really deep into it. I think most people would settle for just playing the campaign and moving on with their lives, which is completely fine by me. I also thought of like Kyrosoft’s games. I got really into Hot Springs Story back when I got my first iPad. And those are like, those games are just number tickers in the background. They’re like free to play games without free to play mechanics. So in that way, they’re good. But I don’t know if I got so deep into Game Dev Story and making my own game development company in that game and like, but I don’t think it’s good. I think it’s just compulsive. So yeah, that’s another one that I got really into, but wouldn’t necessarily recommend. So we have a boring question, potentially fun answer. They wrote that. That isn’t me offering my opinion. What was the first game you can remember being invested in pre-release? I remember being desperate for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES to be good and wanting to collect all the review scores screenshots I could find. That’s from Jimmy Mack on Twitter. I think for me… Go ahead. I’d say for me, it would probably have to be the rare coverage in N64 magazine. I don’t think I was reading Mags before N64, and they just had the best rare access so that when they blow open GoldenEye and then later Perfect Dark, I just remember being incredibly excited for those. I didn’t really read about games on the early internet or the internet when I finally had access, so it would have definitely been in the magazine. Yeah, probably the N64 era is when that kicked in, I would say. Yeah, I think a lot of Star Wars games in the late 90s like X-Wing Alliance, I remember being really anticipating that, but the one I can think of being like, I need to read every piece of information on this before it comes out, is Vice City, because I got massively into GTA 3, and Vice City sounded mythically good when you read about, you know, we’ve got all these licensed artists for the radio stations this time. You can fly helicopters and airplanes, which you couldn’t in GTA 3, which seemed like enormous to me, as someone who played that game for like 200 hours or whatever. I was so, so, like, invested in that, to the point where I actually did find Vice City to be slightly disappointing. It’s obviously, like, progressed the series in a bunch of different ways, but I didn’t really love the main character or the story, and I didn’t think the city was that interesting, personally. You could hit people with hammers, though. That’s magic. Yep, that’s true. I think, like, San Andreas was kind of like the, obviously, like, it was the peak of those games on that console. But yeah, Vice City, I just got, I got so carried away with that one. Just, yeah, anticipation through the roof. I don’t really do it these days, though. I think it’s just working in the press. You just kind of, oh, I’ll just play it when it gets here and see how it is, you know. Yeah, I like, I am stupidly excited for, like, whenever there is going to be a new Ace Attorney get, you know, there’s certain series I am, like, just really excited that they happen, and I’m still prone to hype. Yeah, that’s probably a bit of a lie, actually, because, you know, Final Fantasy games, that still gets me. But I’ve called on some of this stuff a little bit, like a new Kojima game would have been massive to me about 15 years ago, but these days, I haven’t even played Death Stranding yet, and that’s kind of weird for me, but I don’t know. It’s slightly cooler. Next up, then, Matthew, do you feel writing for a platform-specific mag or multi-platform mag is better? Is one more enjoyable than the other, and is the extra focus of a platform-specific mag beneficial in any ways? If you had to go back into mag writing now, which platform would you cover? Kurt Lewin, set that in. If I could do it now, I’d cover Switch, easy. Like, a great Nintendo platform, great Nintendo games. You could make a brilliant NGamer magazine from the Switch. I’ve only ever worked on platform-specific stuff. That’s all I know. I kind of prefer it. I like how comprehensive you can be. I love the fact that you don’t just deal with the surface level of everything. I’m not saying that’s what happens in multi-platforms, but it can happen. I love the fact we cover everything. A lot of my favourite games the last 13 years came from weird stuff I wouldn’t have played if it wasn’t for being on a Nintendo mag. Tapping into that weird tier of stuff is what I’m into. I think it was for me the big benefit of working on a single format. It would be a better world if you could work on a Nintendo magazine, Matthew. Maybe not for my blood pressure. Or for your Subway sandwich consumption. I don’t know. I’ve been terrible for eating. I’ve been getting a couple occasionally from Deliveroo, which is awful. What, Subway delivered to your house? Yeah. Well, I got McDonald’s last night. Oh, I think that’s worse. Really? Just because yours has got lettuce on it or whatever? Because there’s a lot more ingredients. It feels like there’s more chefing in a Subway than a McDonald’s. The word chefing is great, by the way, in that context. As in an attendant puts some things on some fictional bread. It’s not even real bread, is it? It’s not an island anyway. It’s a roller coaster in answer. For me, I’m going to go a bit sideways here. First of all, I’ll answer the bit about beneficial. Like we said, you are kind of a part mascot in some ways for your platform. Or not mascot, but proponent. You are trying to make people excited about the platform. The benefit is that when you pick up the mag and you’re reading about that format, you’re feeling like you’re a part of a community around that thing. Certainly PC Gamer did that very well. I don’t really have a platform I’d like to go back into. I’d say if I was making a dream magazine, My Dream magazine would be like Millennial Retro Gamer. Basically, it would be a version of Retro Gamer that had a PS2 game on the cover every issue. And loads of old interviews and features around that stuff. Because I think that’s basically what this podcast is to a large extent. It’s like, you know, kind of auditing like stuff I played 14 years ago for kind of content. And I think that’s just because I think one of the reasons that this podcast has sort of like found quite a nice little audience is because people are nostalgic for that era, but it’s not as well served as some other parts of like gaming history. Like, there’s a lot of like reverence for the sort of SNES era, 16-bit era. Like, you can find a lot of content around that stuff. And there is content around the stuff that we talk about, but less of it. And now, you know, we’re at the point where Gears of War is 15 years old and people are nostalgic about that kind of stuff. So, yeah, if I was making a magazine now, it would cover that sort of rough era of games from like the mid 90s to like the, I don’t know, to the noughties basically. Yeah. All right then, Matthew. Next up. This is one of yours, right? What’s the most annoyed you’ve ever been at a freelancer? That is from Sam Wait, a freelancer. Yeah. So I wouldn’t drop anyone in it here. I’d be too afraid of legal action for one. I mean, we had, there’s one piece, which I won’t say what the piece is or who wrote it, where there was like a retrospective in an issue of NGamer and it was so bad that like quotes from it became legendary on the team for like quoting this bad retrospective at each other. And I remember looking at it on the page during like, it must have had about like 10 editorial passes eventually to try and like get it working on the page because it was so dry and so boring. And every time we get back to this, you’d be finding something like a new horror. It was like if scientists in a laboratory had created like the worst bit of copy ever, it just kept like revealing fresh horrors on every read. I can’t quote it because it will be obvious what it is, but if ever one day you meet me and we become good friends and we’re one day in the pub, I may quote some of these quotes at you. Sounds like another stretch goal to me, Matthew. The indiscreet layer of patriot. For this much, Matt, you can meet me and I’m incredibly indiscreet about my working relationships over the last 14 years. Generally most people are on board, but like to be honest, we didn’t ever really use anyone. We weren’t like trusting of. So, you know, we were lucky, really, you know, I’ve always been quite big on finding like a kind of two or three absolutely vital freelancers for a particular mag and then just sticking with them, which I know isn’t great for the wider field, but, you know, it got the job done. Yeah, so yeah, like to make that clear as well, like the vast majority of freelancers, it’s like a good experience. Yeah, I can’t really recall many traumatic ones. Maybe that’s not a juicy enough answer. But again, if we’re in the pub, I would tell a completely different story. So this is just a sanitized public podcast version. Next up, Matthew. I think Sam just asked this question because he wanted us to say, no, not Sam, but I’m not going to give him the pleasure of doing that. My memories of Sam’s writing is that it was like, it was good. I remember I think a Dishonored Review for Play magazine. That was like, that was good. Thanks for tweeting about the podcast, Sam. There you go. Maybe I’m just kissing your ass because you tweeted about the podcast and we appreciate any marketing we can get. Cool. Next up, greetings from Vancouver. Now we’re older and owning all the console formats is actually a more realistic proposition. Is it too much to own them all now or is it actually maybe essential? I realize you both have them all for your job, but do you think you would if you didn’t have to? I’m lucky enough that I have a PS5 and a Switch, but I’m now hovering over the buy button on a Series S and it can’t help but feel a bit excessive. But then they all seem to be offering something different this time around. Maybe I’ll hold off until I know what you think. So there’s a second question here, but should we answer this one first, Matthew? Yeah, I always find this really tricky because I feel like as a grown-up I spend money on getting all these things and that’s something I’ve looked forward to doing my whole life, is having a job where I’ve been able to do that and I’ve been lucky that I am able to do that. So, like, these days, I’d say you don’t necessarily need an Xbox because literally everything on Xbox is also on PC. But then a PC is a lot more expensive. A PC is fucking expensive. Yeah, it’s a tricky one. I’m lucky to have all of them. I don’t know. I really like Game Pass. Like, if anything, if I only had a Switch, I’d probably get an Xbox before I got a PlayStation just because of Game Pass. Like, PlayStation will have an exclusive you want one day, but they haven’t got it yet, and they won’t have it for a while, I don’t think. So that’s my take. Yeah, I think that as someone who’s, you know, been lucky enough to afford a decent PC, I bought one like three years ago before, like, graphics cards sure just became, like, so, so fucking bad due to all the crypto mining bullshit that’s going on. That’s, like, a fucking horror of the modern age. That’s something I don’t mind slagging off, because, you know, I have no stake in it, and it’s fucking terrible to read about. But I think that… I think personally, like, I do… I think if I wasn’t in this job, I would still own all this stuff, because I think that even when I was, you know, like, a teenager, I had, like, envy when I’d see, like, the PSP had a cool game or, you know, the Wii had something I wanted to play or whatever, and, like, I think that it was… Again, it was just born out of the fact that my parents wouldn’t buy me a games console for a long time. As an adult, I can give myself this stuff, and generally speaking, games consoles, they’re not that expensive. A PC definitely is, but, like, I think the PS5 is actually pretty reasonably priced for how powerful it is. My combination would be, like, PS5, Switch, PC. Xbox, I think, I actually differ with Matthew on this. I think Game Pass is good, but I think that PC Game Pass has most of the big games, especially now, and even though you miss out on some of the cooler Xbox 360 stuff, which means quite a lot to me, I think that the PC will kind of see you through. Plus, obviously, you have Steam and access to every indie game that launches, so that’s my combination there. But part two of this question, Matthew, you’ve both mentioned Game Pass a fair bit in the past, and I’d love to know how you feel the impact of it will be on the gaming industry in the coming years. Is it the future for all the platform holders, or is it only sustainable if you’re Microsoft and can just throw money at it until it works? I always find these questions tricky, because the service as it is now is during the courting phase, and what happens now and what happens if it’s the biggest thing on the planet is very different. It’s the same with the streaming services. We’re still in that kind of honeymoon period for film streaming, where it’s incredible value, but eventually it won’t be, or eventually it will be enough of a monopoly that it can be expensive, or they have to finally pay for all the money they’ve spent building the services up. So I find it quite hard. I mean, like, anecdotally, developers who are involved in Game Pass now sing its praises. Like, I think it’s done really, really well for lots of people. And there are plenty of articles you can read about that. I mean, I must admit, I don’t really follow the business of, you know, the finances of games that closely these days because I find it quite tedious. So hard to track, but I don’t know. On a purely selfish, short sighted level, it’s good value for money now. And so I like it. Yeah, like if there’s a future where Game Pass is £20 a month, then at that point, I think I probably wouldn’t pay for it. But I think that it’s like I feel the same way about the streaming services here. I don’t mind companies with loads of money, like not bank hunting themselves, but spend like, you know, getting deep into their pockets to make cool shit and to give people cool shit. Because obviously in Microsoft’s case, then buying Bethesda doesn’t seem like it’s going to be like a net loss for me as a consumer at all, but I get to play all their games on there. And that is good. Like over time, the Game Pass library will just grow from Microsoft’s suite of in-house studios and owning Bethesda. So you’ll actually see a massive range of stuff that’s just always on there. So Microsoft might be a bit less dependent on some of the newer games coming in. But I don’t know what their long-term plan is. It’s hard to tell. But yeah, I think it’s sustainable for Microsoft just because they’ve got the deepest pockets of anyone, and they can just keep going with this and really show their teeth. But in terms of how it affects other people, I don’t know. I think that Sony has rightly identified that people like its hardware and like its games. And even though the prices on those new games are like really expensive, I think people will pay them. But that’s the problem. I think Sony’s stance comes from like a more hubristic place. It’s like, well, we know that you’re going to want to buy our, you know, you’re going to want our exclusives so we can sell you our exclusives. It’s not from a consumer-friendly point of view at all. No. Like it’s purely like we’ve got something you want, so you’re going to have to pay full whack for it. Seventy quid as well. Like, I mean, come on. Yeah. Imagine a world where they charge seventy quid for like days gone. That is what we’re talking about basically as well, isn’t it? Like that is the world that Sony is moving towards. Yeah. So, I don’t know. That works up until a point. Like Sony do have better exclusives than Xbox, but if Xbox get their exclusives game together, which they could well do, then I think Sony will probably end up just doing this. Yeah. Yeah, we’ll see how it goes. But certainly, I think it will be disruptive, but I don’t know. I don’t think it will transform the industry for quite a long time yet. I think this generation will largely look as it does now in five years’ time. But yeah, so thank you very much for the question. That was from Tim Trimming. So next up, Matthew, do you want to fire away? I recently enjoyed the excellent locomotive on Itch as well as Hitman 3’s Dartmoor mission, but do you feel there is a relative lack of detective games out there? And if so, why might that be? Let’s John cheat them. Yeah, this is definitely a Matthew Castle question, because if anyone follows the course of the detective game sub-genre, it’s you, right? Yeah, although I had missed this locomotive, and I’ve downloaded it, and I’m going to play it today because it looks right up my street. That sounds good. Yeah, it’s weird talking about a relative lack of detective games, because detective games, that there are enough of them that it is sort of a genre is kind of mad. When you look at other genres, there are probably as many detective games coming out every year as there are big first-person shooters. So from my perspective, I’d obviously love to have more detective games than I know what to do with. But I also think we get quite a few for what is quite a niche genre. It feels reasonably well-fed. I think if there is a reason why people aren’t making them or don’t make them, is that they’re very much like a one-shot deal, or at least in the current form they are. Mysteries, by their very nature, are redundant once you’ve solved them. You can either leave it for long enough and hope you’ve forgotten it, but that never really works, I don’t think. You know, mystery fiction moves at a much faster rate than other genres. You know, these authors write one a year. You know, it’s a bit of a… you kind of consume them and move on to the next thing. It’s not a particularly friendly genre in that way. And I imagine that’s even worse for game developers, because the time it takes is going to be longer than the time it takes for one person to write one book, which maybe puts people off. But I think we get enough of detective games. I think enough people are a fan of detective games that, you know, we’ll keep getting, you know, and the good detective games we’ve had recently that people will keep making them. Maybe there’s a discoverability issue. Like, there are some good detective games, like, buried on Steam that are quite hard to find. There are some good detective games, like, on itch, like, this locomotive by all accounts. So, yeah, you just have to sniff them out, much like a detective. Okay. So we’re on the last questions of the podcast, Matthew. Oh! We did it. It was longer than I thought it would be, but it’s still, it’s good. At the start of this, we were like, 90 minutes or burst. Yeah, and it’s like, gone two hours, as it always does. So, this is from Alex. A few pods ago, you mentioned being obliged to loud lord the visuals of a new Pokemon game as being a huge step forward when they were not that. Why did you feel like you had to? I had thought, slash hoped not to be, but not being the official Nintendo magazine would give you the freedom to write stuff that more honestly reflected your opinion. Okay, I think that’s a slight misinterpretation here. The very specific Pokemon example here was the, I thought Pokemon Black and White looked terrible. But at the time, the mag was like, oh, this is okay. But I will say I didn’t write that. I think the point I was trying to make was that when I saw people, other writers who did like it or were like, oh, this is quite a step up. And I was like, I thought, well, it’s a tiny baby step from a series that really holds its fans in content with content. So yeah, that’s more the point. I’m not saying like we, you know, we swallowed our true opinions, but my true opinion isn’t necessarily reflected in the magazine, if that makes sense. Yeah, it’s definitely not a thing of like, you can’t write about that sort of thing because you’re the official whatever. Like, that’s definitely not the definitely not the point. Yeah, it’s an interesting thought and it’s probably a bigger topic for another time. But like, there are different, you know, big disagreements between staff members on magazines. And fundamentally, it’s not your role to undermine other rights. You know, you have to have a level of respect. If someone else chooses that they do like something and they think it’s a big step up, I’m not going to use my words elsewhere in the mag to undermine that. You’d be an asshole if you did that. Like, I just I wouldn’t allow it as an editor. I wouldn’t expect any other editor to allow that either. I mean, you kind of, yeah, it’s a question of respect, I think more than anything. Yeah, I think like some of those clashes will naturally occur, but in kind of a healthy way. But yeah, it’s definitely like a discussion for that we can pick up again in the future. So the other part of this question, Matthew, is kind of covered by our last episode. But I’ve just gone back to my 3DS after a few years with the Switch and started rebuilding my games collection. The 3DS is a really good piece of kit, isn’t it? In your highly educated opinions, what made it such a shithole console? Anything need to say on this, Matthew, that wasn’t covered last week? No, I’d really say listen to our last podcast and go on to Metacritic. Get the ranking of games by score and just keep scrolling down until you’re out of the 80s. Get into the 70s, the high 60s. There’s still some really interesting stuff there. Just dig out some interesting games from there. Doesn’t really answer the question, but I was just, I don’t know. I’ve been looking at 3DS games and being like, oh, yeah, that was good as well. Well, I quite like that. Yeah, I’m hoarding a few of the download-only ones before that eShop inevitably gets closed by Nintendo. Yeah. So yes, those were all the questions, Matthew. We’ve reached the end. We did it. Congratulations. It only took an hour longer than we thought it would. Oh, we would. But we’re very grateful for all the questions you sent in. For the next For the Forseeable Future, we’ll go back to rolling them into the episodes themselves. So if you want to send us questions, you can tweet us at BackPagePod on Twitter. You can also email us questions at BackPageGames at gmail.com. We welcome your correspondence. If you enjoy the podcast, we’d really appreciate you leaving a review on the Apple podcast service. We’ve had lots of positive feedback on there in the US and the UK Apple web podcast storefronts. So we really appreciate that. But Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? I am at MrBasil underscore Pesto. Yeah, if that wasn’t clear from our discussions earlier about the origins of Matthew’s name. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Our next episode is going to be a sequel episode to Games Magazine Covers from Hell. This will be Games Magazine Covers from Heaven. We’re going to pick a bunch more covers that we worked on and tell a bunch of stories about how those covers came to be, that we hope people will enjoy. So thank you very much for listening, and we’ll be back next week.