A quick note before this week’s episode. Sony hadn’t confirmed that the PS Vita, PS3 and PSP stores were due to close this summer before we started recording. Now, they have, though users will still be able to re-download their purchases in future. Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s things going, Matthew? How was the movie Relic? I thought it was quite scary. It was one of these films where it’s kind of art, like slightly artsy horror, I’d say, or kind of like worthy horror, where it’s also like a metaphor for like a sad family thing. So you can kind of rub your beard while also pooping yourself, which is a perfect combination. Wow, you should write for Empire with that kind of… Listen, it’s quite early in the morning. It is. It’s like 10.15. But this always happens. I see these films, they get like five stars in The Guardian, which is obviously my film review source of choice. And so I go, oh, I better watch that. I better have an opinion on that. But then they are also horror films, which I’m very bad at watching. I get very easily scared. So, yeah, we ordered a big pizza. Eating a big pizza is a good antidote to horror because it’s quite hard to be scared while you’re also eating pizza, I find. Again, like was this in The Guardian’s review? Like, if you find this a bit scary, order a big pizza. That’s just a classic Castle life hack. Yeah. Also, your whole thing about stroking your beard. I mean, I’ve never seen you with a beard, you know. No, I can’t grow one. So, I like scratching my sort of slightly teenage bum fluff chin. Okay, good stuff. Well, what about on the game side, Matthew? Have you picked up Monster Hunter Rise? I’ve got it by my bedside table at the moment. I’ve played about 10 minutes of it, and it does look nice for a Nintendo Switch game. I haven’t. It’s my birthday next week. In fact, it’s my birthday when people are listening to this episode, I think. So, happy birthday me, if that’s okay. So, I haven’t bought anything, because I thought I’d ask for some stuff. So, maybe, hopefully, I’ll be playing that and enjoying that on my birthday. I’ve been playing… What have I been playing? Oh, God. I don’t know why, but I tried that Balan Wonderland, that hectic thing, because I thought maybe, just maybe, this looks gaudy and awful, but it might be secretly brilliant. Like, I like 3D platformers, you know, you’ve got to try them, just to make sure. You know, just in case, but it’s pretty terrible. Good music, though, very lively music, which listeners to podcasts will know counts very highly, in my opinion, of games, as long as it’s got some big jaunty tunes. I just think… Because it’s a huge Naka game. Ah, yes, one of your nemeses. Well, I just don’t think anyone’s… I don’t know if he’s made a good game since Sonic the Hedgehog. Looking over his career, I don’t really understand this sort of let’s keep giving this guy money. I mean, no offence to him. And this isn’t just because he was cross with me at E3, because I wouldn’t move off the Luigi’s Mansion demo. But a very weird career arc. He must be quite frustrated to have created Sonic and not really had the run of it that, you know, like Miyamoto has had, for example. I imagine he’s had a pretty good life. Didn’t he make Nights Into Dreams? Is that not one of his? Yeah, but even that was like, I’d say he’s like, he’s the classic in films, like the person who makes the killer first debut film and then it’s all downhill from there. He’s like a Richard Kelly, I think. Brutal. I think he’s the Richard Kelly of development. And there aren’t many of them. There aren’t many people who start as high as Sonic the Hedgehog and end on Balamb One Land. Are you saying this is the box of his career? Yeah, and Nights is the Southland Tales. Wow, that was so brutal. Yes, I find that quite funny actually when them, you were on this podcast, I find it like, you kind of have these accidental grudges where you sort of like fall into a trap of kind of like calling out the same people or things over and over again. And I find it very funny. Yeah, so yeah, Balamb One Land. Instantly, The Box is the worst film I’ve ever seen in the cinema. Do you think The Box is actually worse than Southland Tales? Because that film, I tried to rewatch that a couple of years ago and that was like a disaster. Like it’s such a scattershot bad film. That’s the thing is Southland Tales, yeah, is total shit. It’s terrible. It’s a one-star film. But The Box is that. And it’s just so, it’s such like willful nonsense. I just, I cannot stand like real student film. Like, ooh, isn’t this weird and quirky? Awful. Awful. Maybe, maybe it’s unfair to call Balanwonder and The Box a video game. But just, not for me. Oh, well, fair enough. I start playing a Hitman Space Outlaw, actually. Yeah, that’s this kind of like, you know, old internet set game. I’m sure many of my listeners already know what it is. It’s on Game Pass. And you can actually play it on Xbox, which I find really curious because it’s definitely like a desktop PC gunner game. That’s what it emulates. It emulates surfing the internet in 1999. And yeah, that’s it. It absolutely submerges you in its setting. I was extremely impressed by it. I kind of knew I’d like it. And then you sort of immediately think of games like Her Story where I like games where you’re sort of simulating a computer or like the movie Searching, for example, which I think does quite a good job with that sort of thing. I like, yeah, I think it’s a novel conceit. But nonetheless, that was a nice little bit of chatter there, Matthew, to break the ice, to defuse the tension between us. I don’t know what I’m talking about there. So this episode, we have like temporarily paused Games Magazine covers from Heaven. That we will revisit next weekend. And I promise we’ll actually like do the episode teased on the prior episode this time. Because I realize like two weeks in a row now, we’ve not done that. But yeah, we’ll go back to our regular plan next week. But this seemed like a good opportunity to talk about something else. The website The Gamer this week, Kirk McKeehan, reported that the PSP and PS3 stores will be closed on July 3rd. That is the PlayStation stores, the digital stores. And the PS Vita store, meanwhile, will close on August 27th. Now, I don’t believe Sony has commented on the reports around this. But it’s widely expected to be announced at the end of the month. That is the end of March. So by the time you’re listening to this, it might have happened. It might not have happened. It’s worth caveating that before we talk about what we’re going to talk about in this episode, because the entire premise of it could be kind of like false. But those details were pretty specific. And I don’t think Kirk would have reported it unless he was certain that was the case. That would be a very strange, specific thing to pull out of your arse, wouldn’t it? It definitely would, yeah. But it’s quite interesting, because we’ve talked on this podcast before about, when we talked about 3DS games, for example, we talked about the idea that eventually Nintendo will probably close that store and make it so you can’t actually download a bunch of its more interesting titles. And here, it’s quite a lot of major stuff that Sony is potentially going to lock people out of. So in this episode, we’re going to talk a bit about the idea of, say, games preservation. That sounds really boring, doesn’t it? Just the idea of what do console manufacturers owe you when it comes to their back catalogs. And then we’re also going to recommend a bunch of games around 10, maybe slightly, yeah, around 10 games that we think are worth picking up before these stores close. And then finally, we’ve got like a whole kind of like bunch of honorable mentions where I feel like there are games that are worth discussing that either I haven’t played, that’s a few of them, or some I have played but I don’t think are like essential. So yeah, that’s what we’re going to discuss in this episode, Matthew. To kick off then, do you have any thoughts overall on like what console manufacturers like owe us when it comes to their back catalogs? I mean, with the digital side of things, it’s much trickier and I think the reason this stuff kind of like sort of upsets us when we hear it is because it’s, you know, like the first of its kind, like it’s, you know, these are only problems we’re running into now. Traditionally, you know, you’ve got your games, you’ve got your physical copies of your games, and everyone kind of knows the deal. Like if you can own it, you can, you know, if you can find a copy and buy it, you can own it. That makes sense. With digital, there’s always been a sort of vague thing hanging over it, you know, of what happens eventually, you know, with these services. And we just haven’t run into many of these situations where people have actually had to answer it. So it’s kind of interesting to see, you know, this has actually happened already with DSiWare on the DSi. You can’t download that stuff anymore. So that’s like a little chunk of it. It’s not like Nintendo have avoided this entirely. It just seems more egregious here, I think, because of the size of the library. It seems a little off because I feel like Sony, definitely more than Microsoft, not as much as Nintendo, have like lent into their history and like the sense of you are a PlayStation fan, you know, it’s an identity, you know, that they’re much more aware of like anniversaries and you know, nods and tips of the hat to their older games. So it seems, it then seems a bit rich to turn around and say like, we are going to cut off from quite a large chunk of that. Or maybe I’m only thinking that because I recently played that Astro Bot thing, which is obviously like PlayStation Nostalgia, the game. But like that feels like a very different company who made that decision to make that game to the company that goes, you know what, you can’t play any of these things anymore. You can’t buy them anymore. Bye. Well, so Nintendo also did this with the Wii, right? Like there’s a bunch of virtual console games I own on Wii that I can just no longer download on my Wii U because, you know, it’s just it’s gone. Yeah, I think it’s one of those things where the decision to do this stuff, I don’t think is malicious. It’s just like nobody’s objectives for the year in a company, like a publicly listed company. It’s going to be like grow PS3 or PS Vita digital sales. I saw some people suggest that Sony specifically was doing this because it doesn’t have like pride in this era of its history. And I’m like, I don’t think there’s as much intent to it as that. I think it’s just like this stuff doesn’t sell. They have like, you know, PS4 and PS5 mega selling like, you know, kind of digital game formats and the store that they use, the storefront seems slightly different. So for whatever reason, they can’t support the storefront on these consoles. It doesn’t help, I think, that in Jim Ryan, they’ve got someone who is quite bullish. Like, he’s not very good at being sympathetic to like weird gamer quirks. You know, so when people ask him about like retro stuff, he’s quite sniffy about it. He’s like, ah, who wants to play old shit? He hasn’t actually said who wants to play old shit games. But like the quotes that you see are basically that. You know, he’s like, oh, why would you want to play a PlayStation 1 game? You’ve got a PlayStation 5 game. You know, it’s kind of his vibe, which doesn’t seem great. Like, it’s probably better to say nothing than that. Yeah, I think it was Grand Turismo that quote was doing the rounds. Yeah, right. That’s the one. Yeah. And like, he’s been around at PlayStation for quite a long time, right? Like, since the PS1 days. So, yeah, it’s almost kind of weird. I mean, again, like he’s like a business guy. It’s not like, you know, he’s not there to be like the caretaker of these old games. It’s just, it’s a job. And like, you know, Sony has a very different identity now to what it had during its like PS3, PS2 and PS1 days. Like, it just keeps changing. So, yeah, I think it is a shame, though. Even without the intent, like Sony, the biggest casualty when I was looking at the back catalogue here of the different games, like PS3, you can pretty much get most of the main PS3 games boxed, right? There aren’t that many games like that are specifically digital. There are a few, but like that you can’t get anywhere else. So that is like not the biggest like issue here. And the PS Vita, meanwhile, has, you know, very well renowned for being like a kind of like an indie first console. Ultimately, it wasn’t massively successful. But weirdly, it’s the only Sony console that’s ever become like synonymous with its digital store. Like it’s people don’t I don’t really know that people buy loads of physical PS Vita games, but people bought a lot of like, you know, kind of like digital versions of interesting Japanese games or indie games. But I actually think the biggest casualty is Sony. If things if Sony does this, this is like loads and loads of PS1 classics. You will no longer be able to buy them like from Sony. Like they will you can go and hunt down the box copies on eBay. But basically, if you if you think that you should be able to play the original version of Metal Gear Solid on PS1, and you want to buy that legally, Sony is going to remove the opportunity to do that. I think that however, whatever way they tear it, it doesn’t look great. And also, it’s not like Sony is struggling at the moment. Like, whatever the the sort of overheads are for keeping this store going, surely they can afford it. So I do actually agree with people’s criticism here. I think that like, I don’t know, there’s even if there’s not intent, it’s like, why is what’s it to you to like, why is it more important to stop people buying these games than to kind of keep the store going? I don’t really get that. But yeah, I think particularly when you’ve got, you know, Nintendo, you know, are obviously famous for kind of reselling NES ROMs like 25 years after the fact. But they are there. If you want them, you can buy them. If you want to go down that legal route, you know, they are there. And Xbox have gone out of their way to do more of that. You know, they went out of their way in the last generation to bring back Xbox One backwards compatibility, which is kind of, you know, in a limited form, but like an attempt at it. So it’s like everyone’s going in one direction, Sony’s going in the other, which is probably why it seems extra odd, I’d say. Yeah, I think Nintendo is also the worst for like every single generation will start again with accumulating its like old digital library on the new format. Like, yeah, I mean, that’s really irritating. That for me is why, you know, I think one of the best things about Xbox and currently, currently it’s true, but this may eventually just become a line. It’s this whole like, you know, if you own an Xbox game, you know, it will work on whatever we build is basically their line. You know, that’s if it currently works on an Xbox, it will always work on whatever the future form of the Xbox is. I mean, it only takes one generation to disprove that. It’s something they kind of bought in in Xbox One. You know, I remember we interviewed Phil Spencer in Official Xbox and they were talking about this like shift to like the mobile basically shifting to a mobile phone model of the way they think about their like, you know, operating systems and what works on what. But even better than a mobile phone thing, because you don’t have to keep updating your games for like newer versions, because that’s the curse of like iOS development is having to constantly update everything to hit new standards or whatever. And I think it’s a real drain on people. So people just let their games go sort of defunct. But yeah, on Xbox, you know, now it’s kind of crazy that, you know, the brand new console also plays always, you know, original Xbox games from 20 years ago, some of which have been like upgraded. So they’ve got like weird 4K elements to them, which is kind of, yeah, I mean, they don’t have to do it. I don’t really know what the benefit of it is, other than looking much better than Sony in moments exactly like this. Yeah, I think as we sort of touched upon in previous episodes, it was kind of almost like a big PR move to say, hey, you know, we’ve remembered that backwards compatibility is interesting. But regardless of the source on it, the fact that if you bought a digital game on an Xbox format 15 years ago, you can still download it. That is pretty cool. Like that kind of continuity of digital purchasers is something that only Microsoft is doing. And yeah, like you say, this suggests that Sony is kind of going in the opposite direction. And I think their argument would be, well, a bunch of games are on PS Now. Like PS Now is a, you know, a digital streaming service that gives you access to like PS3 games because none of Sony’s, neither the PS4 or the PS5 can natively play PS3 games because everyone knows the PS3 was a kind of weirdo architecture sort of console. And they’ve kind of given up on that. But I think that to the vast majority, at least of my peers, people don’t want to stream these games. They would rather just own them. And I don’t think digital streaming, we know that this is like not culturally embedded enough for it to be like an adequate substitute at this point. Yeah. Do you have any interest in PS Now, Matthew? No. I mean, if you could download all those things, I don’t know you can download, I think it’s all the PS4 games you can actually just download and play. So it basically acts like game pass for those PS4 games. But the streaming thing is it’s just rough. It’s not an ideal way of doing it for me as a delivery thing. I think for me, the bigger concern is like, you know, the two big conversations around PlayStation 5 at the moment are like how expensive the games are. And now, what is the lifespan of a digital purchase, which together is a bit of a rotten cocktail, because it’s like, do you really want to pay 70 quid for something which you can’t guarantee how long you’re actually going to own it for? I mean, that seems like an especially bad combination of things to have like floating around. Yeah. My hope is that Sony will at least keep the function to download games that you already own, even if you can’t buy new ones. But again, they haven’t really, obviously this is like reporting, so we don’t know what the exact plans are yet. But yeah, I agree with you. It’s a bit kind of daunting. Also, like, I don’t know, I mean, do they just keep, I don’t know if there’s a technical reason for this. They have to just keep redoing their store and they can’t just offer the same games on the store each time. Like, I really don’t get the sort of thinking behind it. It’s just a bizarre thing. Because they had a period where it felt like with PS, I want to say PS3, PS Vita and PSP, there was quite a lot of interplay. Like, you could buy, you know, you could play like a, you could kind of play like a PSP mini on a PS3. Yeah. Basically, going through my PS Vita library, there’s lots of stuff which I can download on Vita, which I definitely never bought on Vita. I got on PS3 or maybe, it must have been PS4, actually, some of them. And there’s like a little bit of, there’s like a little window where it feels like there is a bit of interplay and a bit of, you know, if you buy it on one thing, it will work on these other things as well, which is kind of like the Xbox sort of promise. You know, like if you buy it, it will work on anything we have. Which is kind of exciting. So it is a show. Again, it’s just another little example of like, I think that thinking was there once. Maybe just whatever they are doing, because I know they have always had problems with, like they have had some wider problems with back compat over PS3 not being able to play. PS3 basically has, they have to basically put a PS2 inside it, right? That’s what I am understanding. Which is kind of mad. I know that’s a super broad version of that, but it’s like not building platforms with that in mind is probably like a huge, a huge ball ache and I hope going forwards that they, you know, people don’t make that mistake again. Yeah, I think that Sony itself as well isn’t like, doesn’t seem to be great at understanding which games its back catalog are that important. So I think everyone kind of considers the PlayStation Classic they did, the kind of mini console, to be like the kind of the worst of that generation of like smaller versions of old consoles next to like the NES and SNES classics and the Mega Drive one that’s apparently very good. Yeah, so I don’t even think that they kind of like truly understand the value of what they’ve got, which is a weird position to be in. It was just 20 copies of the Star Wars fighting game, wasn’t it? Masters of Terrascarcia. I’m never going to live that down with this podcast. But hey, if you write it… You’re like, wow, that’s all this console plays? And they’re like, yep. You love Star Wars? Yeah. There’s actually like, there’s one area here where I think I actually do want to praise Sony a little bit. So when I was trying to come up with games here that you can’t get on, you can’t play on like a modern format, so like PS4 or whatever, Sony was pretty good at getting like a lot of its best kind of like digital-only games onto PS4 from PS3. So Super Stardust you can play on PS4, you’ve got Twin Stick Shooter from Housemarque doing Returnal obviously, a £70 game, still can’t get over that price point Matthew. And Flower, The Unfinished Swan, Journey and the Pixeljunk games, these are all available to play on PS4. Sound Shapes and Loco Roco, they retrieved both of those off of the console. Patapon as well, like a lot of like kind of PSP or sort of like PS3 digital games, they did actually find a way to get them on to run formats. And if you did own the original, I believe in most cases there, particularly with Flower and Journey, if you own the PS3 version, you got the PS4 version for free. So it’s not like Sony, you know, has done nothing here. It’s just, yeah, I think the PS1 games thing is like the biggest blind spot here they may not have thought about when they made this decision. But we’ll get into that a bit more. I was wondering, Matthew, if you had any kind of more thoughts about these consoles generally and like what they’re kind of associated with. So with PS Vita, I was sort of like amazed by how many like weird looking visual novels I’d never heard of came to that console. And when you look on the digital store now, that’s kind of like one of the main offerings. I think like smaller European publishers have just sort of brought them across. But is there anything you kind of like firmly associated the PS Vita with? Yeah, I would say that’s basically it for me. There’s a lot of indie games on there which were also on PC, but I played on Vita. I think Switch has taken over that role now. The Switch has kind of claimed that weird indie Vita audience. So people who maybe got to know things like Hotline Miami on Vita or whatever would now be discovering similar things on Switch. But otherwise, the visual novels, which I think it helped. For me personally, a portable console is a much more natural home for those things. I occasionally play them on PS4, PS5 now. I always feel like, oh man, I’m just sitting in front of my TV reading this. It’s not a very comfortable experience. It shows that they’re quite redundant on the TV in a way. Likewise on PC, the visual novel stuff. It just doesn’t quite work for me sitting at my desk, you know, looking at static maids. But on a portable, yeah, it just fits so much better. There’s very rarely a visual novel I’m playing where I don’t think, oh man, I wish I was playing this on Vita instead. And it is a nice thing. I’ve just booted mine back up actually. I was looking over my library and was remembering all my good visual novel times. So that’s, yeah, that’s sort of very much it for me. But I mean, that’s also like a crazy niche really to try and build a console on. Yeah, I don’t think they even like plan that to be the case. It was sort of like originally they treated the PS Vita like it was a sort of full fat PlayStation console. They got like an unchartered onto it around launch and then they, you know, like an OK unchartered, I would say. If you play it, it’s like it doesn’t quite feel of the same quality. But it’s, you know, it’s it definitely looks the part on the console. And then, yeah, it has like a… I’ve played it, but it’s got some like weird touchscreen implementation. It’s that classic launch game where it’s trying to show off like every feature. So like whenever he goes in the water, you can like rub his trousers to dry them off and stuff. Yeah, that which is definitely the missing piece from the first three unchartered games. Oh man, I wish I could rub that butt. Yeah, you can like touch the screen to make Drake climb across different cliffs and stuff. You sort of draw onto the screen to make him do that. You’re thinking I would rather just not do any of this. But also the PS Vita is a very over designed console. It has a touch screen on the back as well. Or like it has like a little kind of like touch pad thing on the back. It’s like, why does it need this? But yeah, it’s like once in terror way to make your fingers burst through the screen, which is quite cool. But you are also like, man, this is this is quite pretty quite an expensive addition to the console for this one game. For this five seconds of one game. Yeah, I totally get people’s like affection for it as an indie playing device though. Like I agree with you. Turn it on. It is a really nice console. The menu screens are really nice. I’ve got the I think it was an OLED screen, right? It was a really fancy screen for the time. Like, yeah, I managed to pick it up quite cheap. If you want to get a Vita now on eBay, they’re about a hundred quid, I think. And like, yeah, but again, I’m very cautious in this episode, not to like recommend people buy everything we discussed because I do think a couple of our listeners do do that. And I’m like, I want to just be like more responsible with my recommendations. So, yeah, but I bought a PS Vita in 2012 and very quickly kind of like realized the box games weren’t really where it was at. Sony sort of gave up on it. I kind of wish that games still came out on Vita, probably would have played like Hades or Into the Breach on Vita had the Switch not existed. It’s quite weird booting up now when you go into a store which is still functioning but hasn’t had any new updates and like all its promo spots are held by games that came out like two or three years ago, maybe four years, you know, it’s like, hey, the first, you know, Lego Star Wars, The Force Awakens, do you want to buy that? And you’re like, no, not really. But it really kind of, I don’t know, just instantly dates the console. I think someone should go in there. Like if they are going to close it, someone should go into that store and basically like push all the weird stuff up top and just turn it into like a celebration. They should just go, here we go. Here’s all the good stuff. Drop everything to 99p. Just really go, you know, have like a, like there should be a closing down, you know, sale version for digital storefronts. That’d be so cool. Like the works on the High Street. Yeah. Do you want to buy a load of crime novels for 99p and like a Southampton Football Club annual from three years ago? If so, this is the digital store for you. Yeah, it’s like, if I go in there looking for graphic novels, say, I can find like volume four of like the worst Avengers series from like eight years ago. And that’s, yeah, that’s what we’re saying to do with the PS Vita. Yeah, basically. Yeah. What I found really funny is for a long, long time, I think it was about like three or four years, it might still be on there. The Martian was on there on the home screen. Just like buying, the idea of like buying it digitally on PlayStation video, which actually I think is something they’re getting rid of, isn’t it? The PS video store. But yeah, just the idea that the Martian had a home page and like a console sort of like storefront for years and years. And then when you go to the top sellers on there as well, it’s like Undertale has been like the number one selling game on PS Vita for like about six years now. Yeah, very bizarre. Do you think there’s going to be like a guy really kicking off because he can’t buy the Martian anymore on his Vita? Yeah, it’s like this is, you know, this is clearly the ideal format for this film. But yeah, I have quite a lot of affection for it. I would have, I like Sony’s handhelds. They were like, it’s an interesting little sort of substrand for them, just quite poorly tied with the rise of mobile gaming. And they, like you say, the USPs that that console naturally sort of figured out really weren’t like mainstream friendly. So it was just kind of a doomed enterprise, particularly when they stopped making games for themselves. But yeah, it’s almost like it’s just a little bit too early for like everyone being like as indie game literate as they are now. But the appetite now is just, it’s just different. You know, that’s what, you know, that is definitely a string to the Switch’s bow is just, there’s such an appetite for that. There are, you know, there are so many games being made, not, you know, digital only, not in the kind of AAA space that, you know, a place where you can just get easy access to them that you don’t have to sit at PC is really attractive. The Vita like, I think a lot of people who owned a Vita were basically like early adopters of that kind of mindset, which now way more people have. It’s so much more mainstream. So, yeah, it was a cool thing for sure. That’s totally true, yeah. I could see, yeah, there’s a whole bunch of games that I could see doing well on Switch that would have been great on Vita. Maybe it might be worth its own episode down the line. Maybe if you hit like an anniversary or something. Definitely not a write-off. But yeah, I thought the other thing I thought I’d mention Matthew before we get to some sort of game recommendations was that PlayStation, when it comes to digital games, they launched their storefront with the launch of the PS3 basically. I think there might have been a PSP storefront that predates that actually. But on PS3, Sony started trying to like, I think a lot of the early days of Xbox 360 and PS3 was Sony and Microsoft figuring out what digital games looked like. And for Sony, I think it was like finding and publishing games that we would eventually understand to be like more kind of indie style games. So stuff like Flow, for example, smaller projects. Over time, they did make some good ones and it was, I would say one of the rare bright spots of early days of covering the PS3 was that they would like intersperse disappointments like Leia and Hayes with genuinely good little digital games. At the same time, I think Xbox Live Arcade was taking off and I think Microsoft had splashier games on that front. So Sony didn’t get loads of credit for it. The PS3 wasn’t that successful. But yeah, they certainly built something good and they had games with an identity. Did they actually, working on those Macs, did they actually push them to you? Did they ever do preview events? Or was it… My memory of covering digital stuff on Endgamer was very much like we bought it when it came out. They sent out review code and preview code and stuff. Yeah, I remember playing, I think I remember playing early builds of Echo Chrome and Corleal Cars. I remember they brought down. Yeah, they pushed that stuff for sure. It didn’t come out of nowhere. I think they did consider them first party games. But it’s interesting because my understanding is now Sony doesn’t really make those kind of games. Neither does Microsoft really. I think instead, console manufacturers are more into teaming up for either an exclusive release on that format or a marketing agreement or something like that. Yeah, that’s definitely the idea Xbox’s deal. I don’t know if they’d necessarily push you specifically for exclusivity, but they’ll take you to indie game expos and E3 or whatever in exchange for being associated with you. The idea that Sony used to commission these types of games is quite interesting. But yeah, a lot of the best ones, like Journey and Unfinished Swan and stuff like that, you can play on PS4. There are a couple of highlights in our next section that I will pick out that I think people should check out. So yeah, those are my thoughts on the digital side of PlayStation. Matthew, anything else to add before you progress? Uh, no. Great. What amazing audio this is. Yeah, and the end of content. I will say this. I am looking forward to hearing some of these games because this is a bit of a blind spot for me. So yeah, we should see what you got. Yeah, so in the next section, we’re going to fire through. I’ve basically got like 10 things that I think are worth downloading on either PS3, PS Vita or PSP, though I doubt many people are using the latter, to download before Sony basically closes these storefronts. I hope the person who stole the PSP from our house is listening to this podcast so they can get some good wrecks. It’s good to get that anecdote out for the third time and give it a little bit more mileage from that story. To be honest, though, it is a good story. He’s got my PSP in one hand and the family Dyson vacuum cleaner in the other hand. What a specific burglar. Wow. This is a true story. They actually did catch the person. This is going to sound like bullshit. I swear this is true. They bought five Dysons to my parents’ house. My mom had to identify her Dyson from a line up of Dysons. Like an usual suspect. That’s true. Where did they get the other Dyson? To make sure they got the right person who had stolen the thing. It was like, which of these Dysons is yours? I like the idea that that’s number four officer. And then all the other Dysons leave. You know what I mean? I had like one more PSP related story that I kind of thought. I’ve derailed our PSP chat with my terrible Dyson anecdote. No, no, this is just to kind of like, I was kind of obsessed with getting the most out of the PSP when it didn’t have particularly great games. In about 2006, I kind of got one because Liberty City Stories came out. And that was obviously like this GTA sort of spin-off game set in Liberty City, the GTA 3 setting with a new story, new characters. A very impressive console for the time. It was an entire GTA game squeezed onto a handheld with no compromises, like a 3D GTA game. But to be honest, it wasn’t all that really, like it actually kind of highlighted how tired the PS2 formula was getting for the older GTA games. But I remember after that I had almost like nothing to play. And I became obsessed with trying to get entire seasons of TV shows onto my PSP. And like just to kind of demonstrate how much spare time I had to waste in the noughties, I got like an entire like three discs of the OC Season 1 onto my PSP. I spent like an afternoon ripping them from the DVDs, converting them, putting them on there. And when I had to switch it on, watched Episode 1, the audio was out of sync with the video for every single episode. And I reckon I wasted three days on that. So yeah, that’s my story. But to be honest, it can’t compare to your anecdote about identifying a Dyson from a lineup of Dysons. I’m Jesus. That reminds me, I used to have a little creative Zen media player. I still have got it, actually. And that’s got a tiny, tiny screen. I mean, the screen is like, if it’s like two inches across, I’d be amazed if it’s even that. And I remember putting an episode of Sons of Anarchy on it. And it’s like, do you want to watch Sons of Anarchy, the size of a postage stamp? What a terrible, terrible idea that was. I thought, oh, this will keep me entertained on a flight. And it’s a double whammy because it’s so small, it’s almost unwatchable. And it’s also Sons of Anarchy. I watched the first two seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I watched on an iPod. And I realized how old that makes me sound now. That sounds like something that a pensioner did 50 years ago. But yeah, on a holiday in Spain, I watched two seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia turning my iPod sideways. What a time to be alive. So there you go. Enough stories about us being relics of the mid-naughties, Matthew. Let’s move on to the next section and talk about some games. It’s time to talk about some digital stores. Is that exciting to you? Yeah, well, definitely, if I’m gonna get some good wrecks to get downloaded. Yeah, so, okay, here’s how I’ve done this, right? So I’ve picked out about nine, I think there are like nine things here. I’ve either done games or series that I think are worth spotlighting on the PlayStation Vita or PS3 stores. Before they go, you can go download them. And yeah, I think these are like worth playing. And then after that, I’ve got like a whole bunch of honorable mentions of stuff that you can only get on these formats digitally. Some you can buy in box form, but not in a way that’s like easy or practical. That are worth kind of like thinking about, I guess, or other just bringing to your attention. Like, I don’t want to recommend everything because I don’t want people to turn into like mad hoarders like me and just end up with loads of bullshit and think, well, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So then I’ll have to put you on trial in Game Court. Yeah, exactly. And that’s already going to happen again. Anyway, I just bought another code on DS for £8.98 yesterday, Matthew. Oh, well, that’s, I mean, that’s not guilty. That’s a good purchase. Oh, there we go. So we’re blowing our good content already. All right, so I’ll kick off. So first up is The Last Guy on PS3. People who listen to the Mailbag episode will know that I mentioned this. It’s a game set on like Google Earth photos of real places. And you’re essentially helping to save survivors, like a top-down game. There are survivors being like guarded by these kind of bug alien things. And you have to gather the survivors and save them. This arcade-y game that was like an early HD game that actually looked really nice. The aesthetic of it being real places is quite odd. But this is a kind of true oddball sort of like PlayStation download exclusive. When I thought about this, I didn’t wanna just recommend all of the obscure stuff because I don’t think all of it is great. But this is one where I think if people play it, they will at least find it interesting, if not amazing. It was well reviewed at the time, but yeah. Can you, does it take specific backgrounds or does it like, how does the map element of it work? I don’t know, it’s specific backgrounds. So the levels are built around the different photos of the places they’ve taken. Yeah, so it’s not like your, it’s not like it’s auto-downloading new levels, as you go. All right, so it’s like a flight simulator or something. Yes, it is not that complex, I’ll be honest. It hasn’t got an entire simulation of the world in it. And you’re like, I wanna go to Bays and Stoke next. Yeah, exactly, it’s not, I’m afraid it’s not like that. I think it’s mostly, mostly Japanese settings they picked for this. But yeah, the last guy, that’s available on PS3. It’s not that expensive. I quite like this game. It was quite interesting for the time. This is like, of the ones I’ve got here, probably the most like borderline, like sort of like, I don’t know, whim purchase recommendation. The rest I think are like completely solid. So next up, Matthew, I’ve got Persona and Persona 2 and Persona 3 Portable. So the PS Vita is actually like the only console where you can play every Persona game. Minus five, of course. But like, yeah, it was Persona 4 Golden is like the best reviewed game on the system, I believe. That’s amazing. Yeah, and also like, a game that I hear from people, it’s on PC now, but it’s definitely like at home on Vita more than it’s at home on PC, is my understanding. Do you think that’s probably fair? I’d say again, like I was saying about the visual novels, there’s something about like the pace and the sort of tone of it. It just suits portable play really nicely. Like you can dip into that game, enjoy like a little bit of the dungeoneering or a little bit of the social play stuff. The kind of the character portraits look absolutely amazing on the Vita screen. I mean, it looks nice on PC, but it is a bit of a straight port. They’ve not done much to jazz it up and playing it on a massive screen like reveals quite a lot of rough edges. So the Vita is definitely like the place for this game still, I’d say. Yeah, I can’t vouch for Persona 1 and 2, but I’ve played quite a lot of Persona 3. And basically if you like Persona 4 and 5, this is just a slightly more… All the same ideas are there, like the social simulation stuff juxtaposed with the kind of dungeon crawling, kind of like RPG stuff. It’s got good characters, Persona 3. Persona 4 and 5 are like better versions of this game, but like this, that is like a… That’s another game, Persona 3 on PSP. Physically, that sells for like a lot of money on eBay. And it does have some visual compromises from the PS2 version. And the PS2 version, you can actually play on PS3, Persona 3, FES Edition. That’s available on the US PSN store. So a few of these, I will caveat, you can get on the US PSN store. Yeah, this is something I wanted to highlight. If you enjoy Persona 5 then, and you want to check out the older games, like the PS Vita has basically a complete archive of them. And I think that it will suck to get rid of that if they delete these PlayStation stores. So yeah. Next up, Matthew is God Hand, a game I discussed on Best Games of 2007. This is available on PS3. My understanding is, apart from the PS2 physical copy, which sells for £40 plus on eBay, this is the only way to play this on a HD console. Like you can’t play on PS4 or anything like that. It seems very unlikely that Capcom will ever revisit this game. They revisited Onimusha and only did one of those. The idea that they would ever remaster or re-release God Hand is preposterous. But this is basically a 3D brawling game directed by Shinji Mikami, made by Clovis Studio. It is a fantastic 3D beat-em-up with a real offbeat, slightly offensive sense of humor that I really rate. You build your own combos in the game. Basically, as you go, you spend money unlocking new components to your combos, and they become more and more complex. And you build a rhythm of fighting that you like, like a real one-off game. I think the closest relative to this is that game that Devolver Digital published, the modern kind of fighting game that the developers are making that SIFU game on PS5. Oh, Absolver. Yeah, Absolver. Like when I interviewed the developers about that E3, they said that God Hand was one of their points of inspiration. So that might help you to know whether this is worth picking up on PS3 or not. Do you have any thoughts on God Hand, Matthew? I don’t really remember much about this because as I think I’ve said on this podcast before, I’m pretty sure Rich Stanton still has my copy. Yeah, Rich Stanton, the unseen third host of this podcast. I think he denies this. No. I think in his head, I’ve got his copy. Which isn’t true. I see. I thought he’d copped it on Twitter that he’d taken your copy of this, but… I don’t know. It’s all a bit tense. Yeah, so God Hand, I really do recommend this on PS3. If you like this kind of PS2 era of Capcom games, this is, I know a lot of my peers have played this, but this is very likely a game that most people missed out on. It was poorly reviewed by IGN, but that’s one of those IGN scores that gets like dunked on over and over again. And you know, it was a long time ago, so hey, we all grow and learn. So next up, a really obvious one, but Metal Gear Solid and the Metal Gear Solid Special Missions. So you can’t actually buy, unless you go onto eBay and buy a physical copy of Metal Gear Solid, there is no other way to like buy this game brand new apart from the GOG version on PC, which I understand is the very basic like, it’s not considered the best version of the game by fans. It does look nice in the PS1 version, but if you want the PS1 original, which really holds up, and you got a PS Vita, I can’t recommend this enough because the PS Vita is like the best console for playing PS1 games. You can download them onto your PS3, but I think that just like, if you’re kind of worried about this storefront closing, my recommendation is really to like find all, to just go over like A to Z, sorry, A to Z, A to Z in the PlayStation Store. Find all the old PS1 games you like or are interested in, and then just like kind of grab those that way. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing with the system. So yeah, Metal Gear Solid, obviously like a classic stealth game, and has quite simple controls that work really well on the PS Vita. And the Metal Gear Solid special missions, which are like the VR missions of the game, that basically give you a bunch of challenges to do in the Metal Gear Solid universe. Not as essential, but again, as a pair, this is by far the easiest way to play the best versions of these games. The thing that gets me every time with playing PS1 games on the Vita is when you start them up, it’s got the PlayStation 1 boot up logo, which they’ve obviously remade for the Vita, because it’s crazy HD and it looks so sharp. And whenever I see that, I’m like, wow, this game is going to look amazing. And they do look fine, but they are definitely, the logo is separate to the game. So you get this incredibly sharp PlayStation 1 logo, and then it goes into like fuzz-o vision for the game. But that’s like just a weird quirk of the console. I say that, and that specifically happened this morning, because for some reason, the only PlayStation 1 game I have on my Vita, downloaded anyway, is Urban Chaos. Do you remember that? What, is this like the firefighter kind of game? It’s sort of IDOS, like police, like fight. I think it’s like a, it looks a little bit like siphon filter-y. Right, okay, yeah. But instead of setting people on fire, you put out fires. Yeah, so setting them on fire with an awesome taser. Yeah, it’s basically, yeah, it’s the flip, it’s the flip side of that game. You have to go around putting out the people who, Gabe or whatever his name is, has been setting on fire. Is that his name, Gabe? Gabe Logan, yeah. It was the late 90s, Matthew. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know how good we had it. But yeah, I do need to, I need to, I need to pick your brains about good PlayStation 1 games because that’s a bit of a blind spot of mine. Yeah, well, I think a lot of them are just really obvious. So, you know, Metal Gear Solid 1 is an obvious one. Like, and I actually think that, like you say, a lot of these games do look old as hell and some of these are going to date better than others, but like, that’s a really nice little console for playing. Like, the size of the screen is kind of perfect for the resolution of PS1 games. Didn’t you play Resi 2 on PS Vita? Oh, yeah, I played, yeah, I played Resi 2. Yeah, annoyingly, because Resi 2 is only available on the US store. And if you change region, it basically, so I’ve basically got two accounts. I’ve got my UK account, which has got like everything I own except for Resi 2 and a US account, which only has Resi 2. So I played Resi 2 and then basically switched it back to the UK and, you know, that’s Resi 2 gone again, so. Yeah, the PS3 is a better bet for this because all you gotta do is keep the account on the system and it will permanently give you access to those games that you’ve bought. So unlike the PS Vita, which like Matthew says, seems to wipe. It’s a huge pain in the ass. Yeah, we’ll circle back to Resi though, because I think that’s actually an interesting one to discuss, but I was curious, Matthew, like do you think my verdict on Metal Gear Solid 1, playing it this way is like the best way to play it? Did you ever play the Twin Snakes on GameCube? Do you have any thoughts on that one? Yeah, like Twin Snakes is cool. I think Twin Snakes is really, really well done, but it’s not like, the style of Metal Gear is, the original style of it is so kind of key to its appeal. I would never say that like, Twin Snakes is a complete substitute for it by no means. I first played it on PC. I first played it on PC. We had Metal Gear Solid 1 on that PC version and it’s nice, but even then like, you know, the texture of the thing, it’s just like a definitive PS1 looking game. So, you know, it makes sense to own that original. I should go and buy this because I don’t actually own it on PS1. Oh man, it’s still terrific. Like I think it arguably holds up a bit better than Metal Gear Solid 2 does, because it’s not as built around like 3D elements. And I’m sure, as I’m sure you remember, Metal Gear Solid 2 has things like first person aiming and that top down camera and stuff. And it’s a kind of weird mix between 2D and 3D. I’ve got the two of them though on the Vita, the HD Metal Gear 2 and 3. Yeah, that’s worth highlighting. The reason I didn’t put it in this list is because obviously you can play that on Xbox. It’s backwards compatible with Xbox, but that’s worth highlighting. The HD editions of the Metal Gear games on PS Vita are just lovely. They look fantastic on that screen. So yeah, MGS 2 and 3, well worth playing as well. So next up, this is a very Sam Roberts choice, is Dissidia Final Fantasy and Dissidia 012 Duodecim on PSP. I mean, I will say, fuck that name. Yeah, so I think this is actually one of the strongest Final Fantasy spin-offs that they did. So ostensibly, it was their kind of like effort to do a Smash Bros-style team-up game where heroes from the different Final Fantasy games are all kind of merged together in one like big, very silly story. But it kind of comes down to these like one-on-one duels in arenas where you use abilities that are like tailored to the different characters that reference the different games and to kind of like beat the different heroes and villains of other Final Fantasy games. So, you know, like in the case of basically like Cloud can do like Cross Slash for example, or like, you know, Sephiroth can do is sort of like, I think he can do like Meteor and things like that. And so you’re basically doing like tons of these one-on-one encounters over and over again in like a row, but it’s actually like, there’s a really nice stop start field to the fights that suits the handheld very well. The best part about it is that Dissidia 012, the second one actually comes with the entire campaign of the first one, so there’s no need to buy both. You just buy the second one, but I kind of wanted to group them together so people had an idea of why they were good. And I poured like 100 hours into the first Dissidia, but my little brother played it for like 300 hours. He really got into it. I think it was one of those games that was quietly very popular. And then they brought out that one on PS4 that was like a three-on-three fighting game and no one seemed to like it. And it just, it was a real shame that they kind of missed what was good about this one. It was actually a legit good like, hit them with a circle attack and then eventually batter them with your square attack kind of game. So yeah, I rate these two. Did you ever play these, Matthew? Did they ever enter your orbit at all? No. We said like, it wasn’t something to do with like rail grinding in these, was there? Yep, that’s right. Like the arena is all based on different father fantasy games. You could skate across these kind of like light, kind of like bars to get to. Yeah, I remember someone showing this to me as like, oh wow, look at this. I mean, we’ve definitely said this on the podcast before, but like Square Enix, I think it was on the, maybe on the 3DS episode, like they do do a pretty amazing job of like throwing everything they’ve got at like wherever they particularly, wherever their games appear, they don’t really phone it in. They always produce some of like the best looking, kind of maddest things on each respective platform and, you know, whether or not it’s personally for me, I don’t know, but I kind of dig a publisher that doesn’t just do it cheap. Yeah, there’s a bunch of, PSP in particular, Square Enix seem particularly interested in doing like quite big, interesting games for it. So I didn’t actually highlight these as like personal favorites because they’re not all necessarily my sort of thing, but like the third birthday, which is a Parasite Eve continuation, that’s not that essential. It’s kind of a fairly rough shooter where your main characters clothes fall off as she gets shot or like damaged, which is very silly. It reminds me of the extras, Patrick Stewart, and then her clothes fall off kind of like a thing. But Tactics Ogre, that’s a very, let us all cling together. I think that’s like a remake of the original Tactics Ogre that was very well reviewed on PSP. That’s probably worth picking up. That breaks one of the golden rules, which is the word cling should never be in your game title. Yeah. No game with cling will ever be at the top of the charts. Is there another example you’ve got of this, Matthew, where cling is- No, it’s just a weird word, isn’t it? It’s a bit of a weird word, yeah. But yeah, I think that some of the best PSP games, or the ones that I cover, like Crysis Core, Final Fantasy VII, that is actually not available digitally on PS Vita. So I can’t recommend that you go out and download that because you can’t actually do it. But the Dissidia games, they had a lot of rearranged Final Fantasy music. It’s a really, really good little bit of fan service. It’s got music from every single one of the different games represented in here, which I think is like the first 10 games in this one, in the first one, and then it goes up to 12 or 13, I think it’s Lightning’s in that one, 13 games in the second one. So if you like fan service from Final Fantasy and lots of voice acting from the different characters and seeing them interact, it’s a good little couple of games. But yeah, next up, Matthew, I’ve put the original Silent Hill here. So this is the same deal as Metal Gear Solid, really, where there will be no way to play the original Silent Hill. If Sony takes the store down, this is the only way you can play it as far as I know. Obviously, we know Konami doesn’t appear to be that bothered about how you can access its games. Maybe that’s a bit harsh because they’ve been getting some of the older Castlevania games onto newer formats. But certainly, they don’t seem as diligent with it as people would like. Silent Hill actually sells on eBay in the UK for more than 70 pounds now. So yeah, as a PS1 classic, it’s definitely not the best one. To go back to it, it’s a real step back from Silent Hill 2 and 3, which are excellent games, but yeah, a worthy purchase. What do you think of this one? Yeah, like you say, it’s kind of a key bit of survival horror history. Probably worth getting, considering it’s what’s going to be, I know those PS1 games are like what, five quid or something on there? Yeah, they’re not much at all really. Basically like every classic Konami game is on there as well, like Symphony of the Night and stuff like that. One I didn’t put down here because I think you can play on PS4, Symphony of the Night, so that’s easy to get hold of. Don’t get confused and accidentally buy Silent Hill the film, which is the kind of thing which you can probably buy on there. And if you’re on eBay and you’re actually trying to get a physical copy of Silent Hill, don’t accidentally buy the Silent Hill film on UMD because… UMD, imagine like… Most defunct video formats have an aura of cool around them. If you’ve got a laser disconnection, no one’s going to be lame. But if you’ve got a UMD collection, you should just chuck that in the sea. No one cares. Yeah, it’s not going to be a way to win the affections of a person in your life. They’re very cursed looking things, UMDs, which is why I’m recommending a few PSP games here to buy digitally on PS Vita, because I actually don’t think that tracking down UMDs on eBay is actually… I don’t like turning my old PSP on and putting a UMD in. The disc spinner thing in that console feels really fucking rickety, and that will definitely break at some point. Just the disc themselves look like they’ve got too many parts to them, with that slightly see-through bit on it. I’ve never ever been entirely comfortable with UMDs. Yeah. So this next one, Matthew, I’ve put Dino Crisis 1 and 2 here, but maybe this is a chance to highlight that the US PSN, generally speaking, has a better collection of the fixed-cam review PS1 Resi games than the UK PSN does. So you got a Resi 2 on there, but I believe all three of them are on there, the PS1 games. And Dino Crisis 1 and 2, which I don’t know if listeners necessarily know these games. They’re pretty popular, pretty successful, but they are essentially like different versions of the Resi formula, but with dinosaurs and dinosaur facilities and stuff like that. But yeah, they’re more offbeat. They’re obviously like the PS1 Resi games. You’re taking a step down in terms of usability from modern Resident Evil games. But if you grew up around this era of games, you’ll probably still appreciate the Dino Crisis titles. Yeah, I haven’t played them and I always feel bad because definitely two, anyways, Shutakumi is involved. Mr Ace Attorney, he wrote this one. Oh right, I think I knew that because you told me that. Yeah, but that’s what he does before Ace Attorney, anyway. He’s involved in those. So I should probably get around and play these at some point. Yeah, they’re on USPSN like I say. I can’t wipe my Vita again. Have you got a PS3 at home, Matthew? I’m not plugging it in. I kind of refuse to plug old stuff in because I don’t want to have to put my hand down the back of the TV with all the cables. It’s just too much. Fair enough. So that seems worth highlighting. And finally, if you’re going to buy a game on the US PlayStation Store and you have the exact intersection of interests that I do, then Parasite Eve is like a perfect kind of purchase. So it’s an adaptation of a book. I don’t know if you’ve read the book, Matthew. It feels like something you might have read, but… I haven’t, no. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s by Charles Dickens, isn’t it? Yeah, I believe so, yeah. No need to fact check that. Yeah, it’s kind of like a Square Enix era, like a PS1 era Square Enix RPG where you kind of pause and battle and then choose to shoot at enemies and stuff like that. But with Resident Evil vibes, you play like a cop and then, I think it’s on New Year that New York goes wrong and kind of like this sort of demon entity sort of takes over the city. Yeah, it’s not that long, but it’s like a great little curio. It has those gorgeous Square Enix or SquareSoft PS1 era fixed backgrounds and the character models look really good. So yeah, sort of like it’s a Tetsuya Nomura character design game, but it’s a bit more mature than you get in his Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy designs. Like a really odd game from Square Enix, like an odd little series for them to have done at this time. But yeah, I think that, I don’t think people would regret picking this up. And it’s another one that I would be surprised if Square Enix salvaged anywhere else. But what do you think of this one, Matthew? Any thoughts on Parasite Eve? Again, I’ve never played it. It’s a game which has only ever existed on the pages of Games Master magazine. But I always thought it would look quite cool. Which is basically how I felt about most PS1 games. Yeah, fair enough. But this is legit good. I think this is worth picking up. If you’ve got a PS3 anyway, because as Matthew mentions, doing US PSN games on PS Vita is a bit too much of a pain in the arse. So yeah. But Matthew, you had one here that you wanted to highlight as well. Yeah, so I was looking over when you said we were going to do this episode, I was like, I don’t really have a huge amount to contribute because I didn’t do a lot from this era. What I actually forgot is there was a period of time where I was writing basically a PlayStation digital reviews column for Games Master. So I only worked this out from my library of stuff that I own in that there’s a weird like year period where suddenly there’s tons of like PS minis, PS1 games and some like PS3 digital things. So yeah, I literally don’t remember doing this as a freelance thing. So that’s how big an impact it made on me. But one did jump out at me, which is this is a PS mini. So only this, this really will once it’s gone, it’s gone. Cool. It’s called a space shooter for two bucks. I mean, it’s literally two. That’s how much it costs. It’s two dollars or one pound fifty nine or something. Actually, when when I did this, we probably had an amazing currency rate. So it was probably a quid or something. A little scrolling space shooter, not rogue, like some unfair. But when you die, you maintain your permanent upgrades across the campaign and you’re back to the start. But you’re basically powering up this little ship to be like super powerful. Quite funny. I remember it. I have no idea who made it. It’s not a big studio or anything. Might have just been like a little one bloke or something. But with a slightly kind of future armoury sense of humor, like the main guy was a little bit kind of… Who’s the really like preening space captain in future armour? Zat Branigan. Zat Branigan. It’s kind of got a bit of like Zat Branigan energy. It’s kind of like Captain’s Log kind of voiceover, but quite funny. Like for like less than two pounds. I remember this being pretty good. But I have re-downloaded it to play again just to make sure that it stands up, which I should have done before this episode. But I remember that being quite good. And that’s, yeah. None of the other PSP minis, PS minis or whatever they’re called, jump out at me for that reason, or that they are available in like other formats. Yeah, so there was a sort of mini sort of like shooter series that I enjoyed. I don’t actually think they were PS minis, but the Velocity games, I don’t know if you played those, Matthew. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, those are legit good games. I’ve got one on the PS4 one. I think it’s Velocity 2X. Yeah, so that was the other reason I didn’t actually highlight it in my list, is because I did play this on Vita a fair amount. But yeah, you can play them on more modern formats, so they’re not like lost to time. But yeah, those are cool little games. I got recommended those by Chet and Jon’s Finite Gaming Playlist podcast, which is obviously an influence of ours in our Endless Top 10 list. But yeah, so yeah, I didn’t have any other things I wanted to like firmly recommend. Those are the ones I wanted to recommend, because I think that once they’re gone, most of those are from big series, but once they’re gone, I think that it will really suck to not have easy access to these older games and these mega popular series. So yeah, that was kind of why I highlighted that. But I’ve also got a fairly exhaustive list of honorable mentions and oddities here. So I actually bought a bunch of these this week or redownloaded them just to remind myself what I thought of them. And so that kind of shaped where they ended up, where they ended up in my recommendations that I just went through on this list. And most of them ended up on this list because we’re talking about games, particularly on PS3, that are around a decade or more old now, so not all of them are going to hold up. So I’ll fire through them, Matthew. First up is Calling All Cars, which was a kind of like PlayStation Network download-only game, directed by David Jaffe, who worked on God of War, and someone I would never follow on Twitter. But nonetheless, it’s a cell-shaded car game where you chase thieves, and you are competing with other cars, essentially, to grab thieves and take them back to the police station first. And you want to try and catch as many of these robbers as you can. Cell-shaded graphics, and obviously, because Jaffee is the Twisted Metal guy, you can also pick up different power-ups to shoot the rival cars, and get them to drop their robbers, and then you pick them up and take them back to the station yourself. So a very simple arcade-y game. Looks quite nice, mega cheap. I think it’s £2.49 on PlayStation 3, so it’s not that much. But I played this at the time a bit, but yeah, you can play it in multiplayer as well. I picked it up this week. It’s okay, but I don’t think people need it in their lives. Did you ever play, this is a diversion, that Yuji Naka playing catch game on the Wii, the WiiWare game? Yeah, that’s kind of like the weird little where my theory doesn’t entirely hold up. He did Let’s Catch, which I quite like. I think he did a game called Let’s Tap. Yeah, Let’s Catch is quite a nice game if I recall. Yeah, it’s quite chill actually. We’ll probably bring those up when we get into the games of those respective year podcasts. I’m pretty sure his studio was Prope, was the name of it, and he did the Wii game which came with a cardboard box that you had to put the Wii remote on the cardboard box and then he controlled it by tapping the box, which is actually is rad as hell and means he isn’t very Richard Kelly-esque. But then it all goes a little bit Rodea the Sky Soldier and Balan Wonderland. So, I don’t know. Maybe the jury’s out. Maybe I’ve been too quick to judge. Didn’t he also do a platforming game involving not a hedgehog but something else, Ivy the Squirrel or something? Was that one of his? Maybe. I mean, he’s into all that, isn’t he? Yeah. Well, anyway, nonetheless, let’s catch. Let’s stop dunking on Naka for a bit. Yeah, let’s catch. I remember being a game where NPCs told you their sort of problems while you played catch with them in the park. It’s quite nice. It’s one of the weird, quite good WiiWare games. Yeah, cool. We should definitely talk about that when we get to it. So, next up is Tokyo Jungle. This is one of those games where I feel like you can probably get the measure of it by watching it on YouTube. You don’t necessarily need to buy it. It’s fairly well known. It’s like a permadeath survival game set in post-apocalyptic Tokyo where you play as different animals. The humans are all gone. They all mysteriously vanished one day. Now it’s just like the name suggests, a jungle out there. So, you pick one of a different range of animals. You can play as herbivores as well as predators and stuff. While you start with a Pomeranian, you can build up to some bigger and scarier creatures. Basically, you’re trying to keep your hunger meter up and stuff like that. Survival game mechanics, it’s a bit more of a Japanese arcade game, really. There’s a bit of stealth in there too. You can hide in tall grass. The idea is you try and get… If you can sneak up on an enemy and attack them, you can do an insticle attack. You eat their flesh and then move on. That even means that, yes, a Pomeranian can eat the flesh of a wolf or whatever, and that’s considered part of the game’s ecosystem. I think this actually, Matthew, the reason I put it in Essential Games is because I think it kind of counts… It’s a bit too borderline novelty to be a firm recommendation from me. It’s like one of those films which is better in a trailer, where you work at it and go, that’s classic. Like Southland Tales. Like Southland Tales. Yeah. But I played this this morning and it’s definitely well made. It’s just… I think it’s something you’ll probably pick up and play like twice. Sony made this? Yeah, Sony Japan made this. See, they’ve sort of gone defunct now, haven’t they? Yeah, I think it might have been published by Sony Japan, but made by an external developer. But yeah, they have kind of gone defunct, but they’ve had a weird sort of output over the last few years, haven’t they, the kind of stuff they’ve been making. Or like, the bit they’ve kept is the bit that makes the Astro stuff. But yeah. So yeah, Tokyo Jungle is not that expensive. I think it’s about 10 quid, maybe slightly more. But yeah, I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s definitely a game worth looking at. It’s one of the oddest things that got brought over from Japan on the PS3. A genuine like, curio. It gave you some good tweets this morning as well. Yep, I think that’s… There you go, that’s it. If good tweets are all you’re after, then by all means buy it. But yeah. So next up is… A lot of meanie text in that one. Yeah, for sure. Either because it’s been weirdly translated on purpose or accidentally. But yeah. So yeah, I actually like the… One of the things I put in our show notes here was like, one of the tutorial prompts it gives you is when the bite icon appears over the beagle, evade, then counter. That’s the kind of game we’re talking about here. And then the game does indeed label a Pomeranian as a predator, which itself is quite amusing. So yeah, next up. Vagrant Story on PS1. So this is a game that I’ve played a bit of, but not enough to truly recommend. I found it quite dated and hard work, but I think it’s worth highlighting to people because a lot of people discuss this as one of the best RPGs on the system. It’s a Matsuno game with designs by, character designs by, I think it’s Akihiko Yoshida. Aren’t all the heads massive? Well, not really. I mean, they look kind of like… Okay, maybe I should give something else. I think they’re correctly proportioned, but the character designs are very specific. So yeah, it’s kind of like a bit of a precursor to Final Fantasy XII, this one. It shares the kind of Ivalice sort of setting. But yeah, not one I massively got into, but probably worth picking up on PS3 or Vita because I can’t see Square putting it anywhere else. Okay, so next up is MotorStorm RC. So this was a spinoff of the MotorStorm games on PS3. I think a slightly underrated series of racing games. The second one, Pacific Rift, is a great game and might actually be on my top 10 for when we get to that year. So this was like a kind of, they did a spinoff where you control these remote controlled cars going around a track. It feels like a clear throwback to the likes of RC Pro-Am or Micro Machines. I’ve not actually played RC Pro-Am, but I understand that’s what they’re kind of going for just from the language of the game. You can play this on PS3. It’s better on PS Vita. It’s quite a pared down, very basic looking game. Rates like these cars top down around these racetracks. It’s very simple, quite cheap. It’s about five. It’s kind of like a mobile phone size game made for the PS Vita by an in-house Sony studio. It’s polished for what it is, but I don’t think it’s essential again. You’ll probably play it a couple of times and get your fill, but it’s an interesting exclusive that will, like many of these, disappear if Sony shuts the store down. Next up is Lingering Shadows, a game I mentioned on the previous episode. This is one you can definitely get your fill of on YouTube. I don’t think you need to buy it, but it was kind of like a demo scene game where it was like this interactive video of all these smoky versions of animals moving across this weird sort of cityscape, and then you pause the video to pull out secrets from within the video, kind of like a hidden object game where you were kind of moving the video backwards and forwards. It’s a weird thing, but I think the video itself is only like seven minutes long, so the game isn’t very long. You can do it in about two hours. I don’t think you necessarily need to buy this, but yeah, it was an example of the kind of like weird experimental stuff that Sony was doing on PS3 at the time, so worth looking up. Next up is Loco Roco Coco Retcho, which I believe is on PS now. This was a really strange game. I remember on Play Magazine, we didn’t know what this was. It was a PS3 game. Obviously, we knew what Loco Roco was. It’s like a tilt the screen and make you a little blob man, get to the other side of the level, a really nice 2D platformer. I put it in my best games of 2006. Yeah, and you can get it on PS4 now, so it’s out there still. But this was almost like a screensaver. You put it on in the background, and then if it was night or day, the game would change. But essentially, it has no point to existing, in my opinion. I remember we just all thought, oh, they’ve made a Loca Roca game for PS3, and we got it, realised it wasn’t that, and then it was like, oh, and then we just kind of forgot about it. The idea of this image of all these sort of games journos gathered around a TV, just scratching their head, trying to work out, like, is it broken? Do we not understand it? What’s the deal here? Yeah, my recollection is you can’t really interact with it all that much. Yeah, but still, hey, it was a thing that happens to all of us. It reminded me, when I was a kid, I used to go out to my friend Craig’s house, and he had an Amiga, and I remember for ages, he had a copy of Worms, and what we didn’t understand was like you had to press a button to actually get it, because it was basically stuck on like a, you know, like a holding screen, and then you press like F5 to start the game or whatever. But we didn’t know that, and I remember him saying like, oh, we’ve got this really weird thing where you put this disc in, and then these like worms fight, and you just watch these worms fight. And we were watching it going, oh, that’s weird, what a weird thing. Like, who, what, what, what this is all about. And then it was only when we worked out how to actually start the game that it then became like an obsession. We played it like endlessly for two years. The idea that you thought, so he thought the entirety of Worms was just watching the background of that menu screen. Yeah. I mean. I don’t think it had like a press space to start queue, or if it did, it was so like, you know, the mad thing was it had the instruction manual, which had like all the game in it. So like, if you read that, you’d have been like, well, this doesn’t reflect this at all. And also, I think it was only reading the instruction manual that we worked out. You had to press a button to make it to actually get in, you know, get off the whatever it’s called. What’s that called? Not the tempting screen. There’s a word for it. Like, you know, the kind of demo reel that plays when you’re on an arcade machine, whatever that’s called. Yeah. I don’t know. Sizzle reel type thing. Yeah. But we thought it was just like, yeah, an interactive, like, worm simulation. Well, I guess it was. I’m guessing there wasn’t a hidden level to Locoroco, Coco Retcho. Well, when I was looking up, people were mentioning that it had trophies and stuff, but it was described as an interactive screensaver. Next up is Infamous Festival of Blood. I’ve put this down because the infamous games like on PS3, I think the second one is actually pretty good. The first one is really dated and janky looking. I don’t think you necessarily need to play it. I’m only mentioning this for completionist’s sake. It’s the only place you can play this. Basically like standalone Halloween themed spin-off they did of this superhero open world game on PS3. You can buy a disc copy that’s got it on there, but the disc copy is very expensive. If for some reason you’re an infamous diehard, this is a thing you can buy. Imagine that being your identity, your gamer identity. I’m an infamous diehard. I’ve got a tattoo of coal. I feel like the existence of Insomniac’s Spider-Man game basically killed Infamous for Sony. I feel like after that they were like, well, we can just put an actual superhero in this and not just a bald dude who speaks with a gruff voice. Who was the actor who was the main character in that? He was from something weird on TV of the time. He was a bit part in Battle Stars. I know what you’re alluding to. You’re talking about the guy who played Betty’s brother in Mad Men. That’s the guy. Yeah, him. He’s like a blonde guy who’s in five episodes or something like that. Oh my god. Now I’m just imagining Infamous with any of the other Mad Men characters as the main character. Well, look, if you want to play a game with Mad Men characters, you just play El Inuar. Yeah, but that’s like Mad Men characters and you have to go around telling… You’re like, oh, awesome, it’s this guy. I love him from Mad Men. Then you have to tell him that his daughter’s been killed. It’s quite a grim interaction. It’s not like, oh, legendary, we’re going to have a crazy party. We’re going to get really drunk with this guy from… With Paul from Mad Men. Instead it’s, oh, I’m afraid a child molester murdered your kid. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, Infamous Festival of Blood is not that, just to be frank. Do you know what I like? Infamous is really from that generation of games where developers realized, oh, people like Mass Effect, so we should have moral choices in our game. But all of the moral choices were like, keep this bridge from collapsing or collapse this bridge on purpose and kill 80 civilians. You’re like, I know I shouldn’t, but I really want to collapse this bridge. It’s a great moral dilemma. Exactly, I’m there stroking my chin going, wow, what a complex depiction of morality. Like, oh God, I shouldn’t kill these people, but I do hate bridges. It was similar, was it Army of Two? Which had like, do you want to kill this panda or not? Or something? It was like the 40th day, the second one. Yeah, that had like a thing in a zoo where I thought the moral decision was like, basically like, do you want to stick a chainsaw through some kind of endangered species? I haven’t played it. If that much is clear. Yeah, Infamous Festival Blood, there you go. Like, not a recommendation, but a thing you can only get on PS3’s PlayStation Store, as far as I know. So, Resident Evil Chronicles HD Collection is the next one, Matthew. So, this one’s a bit more in your wheelhouse. They basically ported the two Umbrella Chronicles games from Wii to PS3 and HD and have PlayStation Move support for each one. Do you rate these? I rate the second one, Dark Side Chronicles, because it’s based on… It covers… Because they’re basically light gun games that cover, you know, the original games remade as light gun games. And Dark Side Chronicles is Resident Evil 2 and Cove Veronica, I think. And they’re just more action heavy games. They make more sense as light gun games than playing Resident Evil 1 as a light gun game, which is quite sedate. It’s just truer to the spirit and, like, all the mad bosses, you know, all the mad stuff with the tyrant or whatever in Resident Evil 2, like, just works really, really well as a light gun game. Yeah, I genuinely rate Dark Side Chronicles. Yep, so if you’ve got a PlayStation Move controller, which if you have a PSVR headset, you’ll have one of those around, you can use that to play this, is my understanding. I’ve actually only played this with a controller, and even then only briefly. But I did play a bit more of the second of these Umbrella Chronicles games on Wii, and remember the Krauser stuff from the start fairly well in that jungle where you’re with them. Yeah, you see Leon and Krauser teaming up. But yeah, that’s a thing that you can buy here. I can’t imagine, I mean, obviously, you can buy the physical copies on Wii, but on PS3, there will be no other way to play these games, is my understanding, if they go away. So next up is Savage Moon. So back when tower defense games were huge, I forgot just how big this genre was. But it kind of blew up in the late noughties and then kind of died off when people realized they were all sort of the same thing. So this was one of the stronger ones. This is Savage Moon. Came out on PS3. You can actually play on PS now. So when they close the store, you’ll still be able to play it. I think it’s, I played it again this week. I really liked it at the time. I gave it a score in the 80s. Kind of like a sci-fi, more kind of alien-sy sort of looking kind of tower defense game. I think it’s pretty strong for what it is. But it looks a bit jank by today’s standards. But I wanted to flag it as a kind of like, oh, remember when tower defense games were a thing? And people were kind of doing different stuff with it. There was a South Park tower defense game on Xbox that was, I think, slightly disappointing. But yeah, there were too many of them. And then people got sick of them. Do you remember the genre, Matthew? Do you ever get into any of these? Yeah. Never my cup of tea. But yeah, they were just everywhere. Everywhere. Too many. Yeah, way too many. So yes, next up is Muramasa Rebirth. I’ve not played this, but I wanted to highlight the fact that if you have a PS Vita, then Vanillaware, the developers of cult hit 13 Sentinels, Aegis Rim, their games are, most of their games are actually on PS Vita. But this is the only one, Muramasa, which was a Wii game, that is only available on PS Vita and not PS4. So yeah, Matthew, you played the original Muramasa a little bit, right? Yeah, I actually do have this on Vita. I’d completely forgotten that I had it. Yeah, quite like all the Vanillaware games, like beautifully sort of painterly visuals. It’s like a 2D sort of hack and slash brawler game. Like, it’s quite combo heavy, like a sort of 2D kind of… not Devil May Cry is the wrong kind of vibe, but you know, it’s big aerial combos and stringing things together with quite a cool kind of samurai sort of sword energy to it. Structurally, it’s a little odd. Like, there’s a lot of like… I remember there being like quite a lot of weird backtracking and whatnot in it. So I don’t know if it’s like, I wouldn’t say it’s like an action classic, but it looks beautiful. And I booted up just before this podcast. Actually, it looks really, really nice on the Vita as well. I think the reason they didn’t, they ported it only to Vita was they liked the OLED screen and how the colors popped on it. So it’s certainly a gorgeous thing. Yeah, like you can actually buy this physically, but it sells for a lot of money on eBay. I think it’s only about 16 quid or 18 quid on PS Vita. It’s one I’ve picked up because I’ve enjoyed Odin Sphere in the past. The other ones you can get from Vanillaware on Vita are Odin Sphere and Dragon’s Crown Pro. I can’t speak for Dragon’s Crown Pro. I’ve not played that, but I have played Odin Sphere and I really rate it. I think they share a lot of DNA, Muramasa and Odin Sphere. If you’re curious about their games, the PS Vita has basically an almost complete history of them. Next up. It has very impressive wheat. Corn, or is it wheat? Fields of wheat or fields of corn rafting in the wind. Very painterly wheat, which is a big plus. Yes, Fields of Wheat, my favourite Sting song. Nonetheless. Yes, so. Such a bad joke. Okay, so the other thing I wanted to highlight was that if you got into Shin Megami Tensei off the back of the Persona games, and I did a bit in the in the noughties. I played Digital Devil Saga and I played Nocturne, which is Shin Megami Tensei 3. They basically have every single PS2 era Shin Megami Tensei game across the US PSN stores and the UK ones. So you can actually buy, I believe you can buy, Persona 4, the PS2 version if you wish. The golden one has more stuff in it, is my understanding. But basically, if you are curious about this series, you can buy them all on PS3. Nocturne is the one I rate, but they are actually remastering that this year. You can play that on Switch and PS4 later this year, and PC, I think. So that’s cool. That’s like a very kind of like moody, sort of like gothic sort of game. But like all of the sort of like the Persona games, features a similar types of like weird imagery and strange enemies and stuff like that. And also features an appearance from Dante in the Devil May Cry games. Nocturne is the one I recommend, but I played a little bit of Digital Devil Saga. It’s a similar sort of deal. It’s a game set in the the internet, taken over by demons, I believe was the plot. Very silly, but like solid Japanese RPGs. Finally, on my honorable mentions list, Echo Chrome. So, this is an MC Escher-esque looking puzzle game, which does a really novel thing where basically your little kind of like dude is walking along these platforms and they, the paths ahead of the character will click together based on the perspective. So it has that kind of impossible architecture thing of MC Escher. But when you when you tilt like two staircases to click together, the character in game will, the game will recognize that you’ve done that and the character will walk across the new staircase you’ve created. So you’re like permanently twisting the level around to get your guy to go to different places. It’s a novel little puzzle game. It’s cool. Actually, this one didn’t get salvaged and put on PS4 is my understanding. I think there’s like a sequel as well. But it’s on PSP and PS3. I like it. I think that probably if you kind of like this sort of puzzle game, there’s so there are so many indie games that are enough like this that you’ll find it, you’ll find yourself satisfied by other offerings. But it’s one I wanted to highlight. It’s like a kind of, you know, another game that will basically vanish when the store closes. So yeah, this one you ever played, Matthew? I think I own it, but I haven’t played it. So I should probably remedy that. Yeah, it’s such a simple looking game that it’s really beautiful. I was playing this morning and yeah, it’s cool. So yes, those are all my honorable mentions. I also wanted to flag that if you like Japanese RPGs, the US PlayStation Store has like a whole bunch of them. That’s where I bought Chrono Cross, for example, the spiritual sequel to Chrono Trigger, Xenoguise, which is a famously unfinished feeling Japanese RPG. My recommendation is basically like, so the games, the list of 10 are the ones where I think, well, these are definitely worth buying. These other ones are more just like trying to capture the breadth of stuff that Sony put on the system, but I recommend having a good look through the US and UK PlayStation stores before they go away, just because there’s like, there is heaps of stuff in there. And if you like an old PS1 game, like the old Crash Bandicoot games, and you don’t want to play the remaster for whatever reason, you can buy all of them on there and Crash Team Racing. So basically, it’s like the best living archive of the PS1 that exists. And if and when they close this store, that will be the biggest loss, that you can no longer access the original versions of these games. Which seems like such a shame. They’re not for Crash, but for all the other games, definitely. Yeah, or Spyro. But yeah. If I was the person who had my finger on the button, actually that would be quite tempting. I’m like, I know there’s an awful lot of collateral damage, but if I get to delete one particular path to Crash and Spyro… Hmm, that’s tempting. I’m more tempted than I was at the start of the podcast. That is depressing to me though, that a place you can buy the original Metal Gear Solid would go away. But if I still wanted to buy the Crash Bandicoot N.Sane trilogy from Sony on PS4, I could do it. And that just shows you there’s no taste behind the decision. It’s just like, it’s all business and that’s kind of depressing. That’s the PlayStation way, it’s all business baby. My hope though is that Sony finds another way to salvage these PS1 games. That’s the other thing, is that PS Now does cover PS2 and PS3 and PS4, doesn’t cover PS1. So, you know, all you’ll be able to do after this store closes is go and buy the games on disc on eBay and obviously you can’t play those on your Vita. So, I don’t know, like, it’s just a shame, like, playing PS1 games on Vita is a genuine treat. So, yes, if Sony doesn’t change its mind, then you should at least, like, pick up a few of these before the store’s gone forever, I think. Maybe they’ll shut it down and release a proper virtual console in its place. Well, that’d be good, but also very unlikely. So yeah, Matthew, did you have any further thoughts before we get to, like, our work? No, I’ve just, my belly is full of exciting, well, my belly isn’t full of games. I’m going to eat the games and then they’ll be in my belly. My eyes are set on lots of good games to eat. That’s a terrible metaphor. Yeah, it was a bit rough there, but, you know, again, it’s Saturday morning. Like, what do other people expect from us? Listen, I’ve got the death of Crash Bandicoot playing in my mind, so, you know, that’s quite distracting. Yep, I’ve got like a big cheeseball loaf from Waitrose waiting for me over on my kitchen counter. So, you know, my mind is wondering. But no, there’s a bunch of stuff there that I think is kind of worth checking out. And if, for that second half, like I say, don’t buy all of those games, I really don’t recommend it. I just recommend checking out some of this stuff that’s likely to vanish as soon as this store is gone, because there are some definitely like interesting oddballs in there. Even if this was Sony’s least successful period ever as a console manufacturer, they were always making some interesting stuff. Not always successful, but definitely interesting. So yeah, Matthew, do you want to read out our one listener question this week? Oh, I’d love to. So we have a listener question from David Burrows. It says Matthew says that he couldn’t even begin to respect someone who dislikes Mario Galaxy. Did I say that? That sounds very aggressive. He just wouldn’t know how to engage with them. What would Sam’s equivalent game be? So when people say they don’t like Breath of the Wild, that is such a red flag to me. Like, that’s like, if you believe this, how can I take your opinions on anything else seriously? I certainly wouldn’t leave you to care for my child. Surely if you don’t find it that fun, you at least appreciate the ambition of it and respect that. That’s the thing I get. There’s a difference between like, it’s not my favourite game of all time, okay, with like, I don’t like it because I think it’s bad. And it just, I don’t know, it just stinks of contrarianism to me. Yeah, I think that’s fair enough. Like yeah, there’s a few others like this. If someone told me they didn’t like Dishonored, I’d be like, well how? Like, you can play Dishonored any way you want, so you can find a way to play it that you will enjoy. But yeah, I don’t, Breath of the World is the main one, where people say, it’s the ultimate like bad contrarian take on Twitter, I don’t like Breath of the Wild, I’m just like, nah, nah, mate, like, if I even think, if I let even think about this for more than five seconds, I’ll just be deeply, deeply hurt and upset, so, yeah, that’s, that’s probably mine. Yeah, couldn’t engage with someone who, because all their other opinions must be like tainted in some way. And I’d be horrified. I’d be horrified if I… The thing is, I will like, I wouldn’t say it to their face, I’d politely be like, oh, that’s interesting, but in my head, they are like marked for death. Yeah. And I will like, and I’ll instead we’ll just complain about them on this podcast, like namelessly. I have, I have like legitimately like muted and unfollowed people on Twitter for like bad gaming opinions like that, where I’m just like, ah, nonsense. Yeah, well, there you go, like, watch out. If you, if you listen to this podcast, you don’t like Breath of the Wild, and Matt Castle follows you, who knows, it could be curtains, you know. Oh, no. But thank you for the question, David. Yeah, Breath of the Wild is the one. That’s just the one where I’m like, ah, dear God, no, not today. Not today, world. So yeah, Matthew, that’s the end of the episode. It’s wrapped up, finally did an episode that was under two hours long. It’s taken us. Yeah. I felt like we covered a lot of stuff as well. Yeah, I was kind of shotgunning through the stuff there, because I think my knowledge on the games kind of varies wildly across the, across the different games we discussed. So yeah, I wanted to give them all a bit of like equal footing. But yeah. That’s good. That’s good. I enjoyed, I enjoyed this tour. It saved me from having to like bollock on about Nintendo games. So that’s good. Yeah. You need a week off from that, I think. Yeah. But yeah. So next week, we’ll definitely do the games magazine covers from heaven sort of episode that we promised previously, where we’ll highlight less kind of like covers that we can slag off. So there might be a couple of funny cover lines here and there to kind of pick apart and talk a bit more about magazine cover craft. I think that’s probably going to turn into a little regular series where we just sort of like, you know, expound on our memories of working on certain issues. So it should be a fun one. But Matthew as well, like it’s probably worth noting that the podcast has become like quite popular. People seem to really like it. How does that make you feel? Oh, great. You know, obviously I’m thrilled. So there’s always the risk of these things, that it’s just sort of, you know, two old men looking back on their kind of glory days. You know, we always chatted about this stuff in the pub. We always hoped people would also enjoy hearing about this stuff. So yeah, that’s nice. I’m pleased. Yeah, in terms of our sort of overall plan when we started this, we’ve always want to do like new game chat when we do this stuff. But like, there haven’t been that many new games this year, as I’m sure people have noticed. When new games come out, we’re going to do like themed episodes around them. So when it’s kind of something that, you know, mutually sort of like reaches our interest, like Hitman did, for example, we’ll talk about the game then have some kind of like list feature attached to it to go alongside that. So yeah, but luckily we’ve picked quite a good year to do a sort of like more retro themed podcast because more of our games are just getting pushed to 2022. So yeah, but when we do definitely Matthew, we should definitely do a kind of either an immersive simmy or an arcane based kind of like list to go alongside it. That might be fun. Yeah, well, I’m prepping some big detective thoughts for Famicom Detective Club as well. Yeah, so that will be in May and we’ll do a Resident Evil 8 or Village episode as well where we rank either like best Capcom games or best Resi games. So yeah, just so people know how we’re thinking. And then best games of 2008, Matthew, we’ll probably do in like a month or so. And yeah, we’ll continue that little mini series. So yeah, thank you very much for listening. And if you want to drop us a line, you can tweet us at backpagepod on Twitter. You can also email us at backpagegames at gmail.com. If you send us a letter, we’ll read it out. If you’d like to leave us a review on the platform of your choice, particularly Apple podcast, like review is really good for our visibility, helps people find the show. And we’re very grateful for all the reviews we’ve had so far. So Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I am MrBassle underscore pesto on Twitter. And yes, thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now. You have a swig of water. It’s a bit loose, this one, but I think it’s all right. Oh, I like it, I’m enjoying it. That Dyson story is so good. How have you never told me that before? Cause it’s, I normally get, I normally get the PSP DS, you know, that they stole my, like, you know, the jokey line is this stealing the PSP and like no real loss cause of the games or whatever. So I never really get to the bit where they bring all the Dyson’s around for the lineup. It’s weird cause it’s not like the Dyson committed the crime. No, but, oh man. And I was, cause it’s, yeah. You are, it’s like the idea of like, you know, unusual suspects, they get them all to say something. It’s like turning them all on so you can listen to them or something. They’re being a slightly mad, sort of Benicio del Toro Dyson. I think the idea that this would be quite a good case for Detective Basil Pesto, you know, as we discussed. That’s exactly what I could, the kind of level of crime I could see Basil Pesto investigating. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right, then. Thanks for watching.