Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how are things going for you in this unseasonably warm April weather? Well, now I’m feeling especially bad for not going outside and leaving the house. You don’t feel too rotten about that when it’s grim outside. In fact, it factors into your thinking. But now it’s hot, I don’t particularly want to leave and go for my walks, which I have been trying to do. It’s too hot. It must be hard for you to leave the house when you’ve got all those Kingdom Hearts games on PC to play. They all got added to the Epic Games Press account. So I assume you’ll be playing those right away. Am I right? No, no, that’s not going to happen. I did start playing Kingdom Hearts 1 on Xbox Game Pass a couple of weeks ago. And they are strange old games. Absolutely rancid platforming. I have no idea how a series that popular can have platforming that bad. But I guess that’s not what they’re built for. No, I mean, it was Square Enix trying to expand its remit a bit in the early noughties. I will say one thing for the first Kingdom Hearts. It still looks really nice, I think, for considering it’s a PS2 game from about 18, 19 years ago now. Yeah, and there are definitely moments in it where you completely understand the appeal of the series and the magic and the achievement of getting Disney to sign off on it. You know, when they basically have quite an early cutscene, which is like all the villains, but they’re all kind of in the shadow. It’s sort of like a James Bond kind of specter layer type deal. And, you know, they’re just really iconic silhouettes. So it’s obviously like, you know, the sack man from Nightmare Before Christmas and, you know, the queen from Alice in Wonderland or whatever. There’s just something quite, you know, like, oh yeah, that is quite cool, actually. Like, having these characters to play with, I kind of get that. It’s just a shame that it got so bogged down in, like, its own bollocks and became less about the pure magic of that idea and more about the weird lore of Kingdom Hearts, which is the worst lore ever. Yeah, I think that just to kind of defend Kingdom Hearts a little bit, because it is very trendy among our peers to, like, dunk on Kingdom Hearts because I think partly because, as we’ve alluded to on previous episodes, a lot of the writers who like it are about 5 to 10 years younger than us and they’re people who played the games as, like, kids and therefore, you know, their brains had the capacity to absorb all of the lore nonsense, whereas we’re all very suspicious of it. I think that the first one is the best for that kind of whistle-stop tour through Disney World’s, married to some not particularly challenging combat and obviously that very nice music. So, yeah, it’s got something about it, but I don’t think that you in your mid-30s are going to become the world’s biggest Kingdom Hearts fan. I’m going to be honest, that’s just how I feel. Yeah, I thought that’s probably fair. I didn’t go in with this like, oh, I’m just going to dunk on this game. You know, I really wanted to give it a go, so I actually had some substance to my later dunkings. And yeah, you know, I am open to saying that there was stuff in it. I was like, oh yeah, I get why, like, I can see why my brother, you know, dug this all those years ago. You know, there’s a, you know, there is a great idea at work here. What about other stuff? You’ve been playing anything else lately in these slightly quiet times for new releases? Yeah, I’m really, really jonesing for that new Ace Attorney that’s been rumoured to come out the ports and localisation of the great Ace Attorney series. So I’ve been really hungering for Ace Attorney. So I’m going back and playing the Ace Attorney games again. I’ve just done a big Ace Attorney thing at the moment. So I just played Miles Edgeworth 1 again, which is my least favourite, but also the one I played the longest ago. And playing Miles Edgeworth 2 at the moment, probably gonna replay maybe 5 and 6. I don’t know, I’m just in the mood for it. Fair enough, fair enough. I mean, it feels like at some point we’re going to see this big array of re-releases and a new release and stuff like that. But this has been rumoured for a long time now, so it’s surely just a matter of time. And in this game-starved year, it’ll really hit the spot, I’m sure. Yeah, oh, I’m so excited. They’re great, I just, I don’t know. It’s sometimes nice to leave your favourites for quite a long time and then go back to them and have that renewed thing. You know, if you play, especially games which are so story-heavy, you need a bit of a break to sort of see them in that fresh light again. What about you, what have you been up to? So I actually picked up the third Phoenix Wright game again this week, having given that a big pause. So I’m very slow at getting through these. I am, as I mentioned in a previous episode, it took me over a decade to finish Phoenix Wright 2. Was it Justice Rule, the second one? I think it is, yeah. So yeah, I’m on Trials and Tribulations, or Trials and Tribs, as I’ve trendily abbreviated it. And that is, I’m on the second case, and towards the end of the second case, there’s some good twists in that one. And that’s the Mask de Masque, or whatever it’s called, that character stealing the urn and all that business. So yeah, that will take some big twists. I mean, it’s very much enjoying it. I’m treating it like it’s my nighttime reading a book before bed, and doing that instead of reading an actual book. That’s how I’ve been playing them as well, which is bad, because I have loads and loads of books waiting to be read. And I feel like I’m, you know, I’ll also play games other times, but I probably won’t read in the day. So I really am eating into what little book time I have. Well, a key cultural difference between you and me, Matthew, is that I will only read books that have Wolverine in them. So, you know, that’s, you know, and as I understand it, Wolverine doesn’t appear in like the majority of works by, you know, Dickens or, you know, or your favorite Japanese crime authors. He was created by all the Brontë sisters working together. So he does appear throughout all their works. Okay, good stuff. So, yes, other than that, I’ve been playing a bit of Yakuza Zero. I’m trying to get through a bunch of that. So next week’s episode is a Yakuza special. And we’ve got a nice, cool special guest coming on who’s an expert in the series and can speak to it. That’s right, it’s Majima. That’s right, he’s going to climb out of a bin and he’s got a Blue Yeti microphone at home, which is handy. So yes, look forward to that. So I’ve been doing a bit of that. And otherwise, I still kind of like working through hypnospace outlaw a little bit. But I don’t know, I’m between games somewhat at the moment. And that’s fine by me. So Matthew, this episode, we’ve been promising this for a little while. This one is very much a sequel episode to our popular Games Magazine Covers From Hell episode, as seen on the website rockpapershotgun.com. That one proved popular. It was to the guy who said that I was driving on the motorway while listening to that one, and therefore it was confusing as hell in the comments of that story. I really sympathize. So I will say that in this episode, we’re going to talk about covers that… well, in the previous episode, we talked about covers where there was some kind of challenge involved, or there was something we weren’t particularly delighted about when reflecting on it. This one is more of a positive bent, though I think that in hearing the stories behind these covers, you’ll get an equally interesting amount of insight on how we actually make these. But like last time, I will put all of the covers in question on Pinterest with little captions so people at home can look at them and understand what we’re actually talking about. So yeah, it’s kind of like a scratch and sniff podcast. Isn’t that exciting? What a pitch. Indeed. So how are you feeling about this one, Matthew? Did you enjoy going back through memory lane for more covers? Do you feel like you got more to say on the covers subject this time? Yeah, I had this the first episode we did as well, which was going back and realizing, you know, the longest stint I had as editor was on OXM, you know, I edited like the last year of O&M, you know, I wasn’t editor on NGamer, you know, edited like the last couple of issues of Nintendo Gamer. So like, I don’t have, you know, the meat of my kind of career, you know, I wasn’t really involved in covers, you have a lot more covers to your name than I do. So I have less to choose from, and there’s quite a lot of repetition in there. Also, one of the challenges is that we’re talking specifically like covers, not wallets. I don’t really have the wallets anymore. And a lot of the wallets were just quite garish and designed just to get you to pick it up. So finding sort of more traditional kind of cover structures and everything’s a little harder, but I think I’ve got some good ones for this. Yeah, perhaps I’ve cursed you here because I didn’t really work on a magazine with a bag that often. So just to kind of summarize that, what Matthew’s referring to there is some magazines arrive in bags on the shelves and other magazines like PC Gamer tend to not arrive in bags. So what you actually put on the cover of the magazine itself is slimmed down significantly when it’s presented inside a bag because you don’t have to do the hard work of saying to people on the shelves, you know, like, this is the kind of cover up front and here’s all the details you need to know. So, yeah, information goes in the bag and then the cover itself can be a bit more slimmed down. I have one cover that came in a bag. I did find an image of the bag, but I didn’t want to confuse people listening by providing too many images. So I’ll just have to explain my way out of that one. It’s like you need to get two phones for this one and have them next to each other. Yeah, and enter the Konami code and then hand over your credit card details. And that’s our motorway listener now dead. Yeah, exactly. In which case, yeah, that’s interesting to note. But nonetheless, Matthew, in looking through the covers you’ve got here, your covers from Heaven, there’s some beautiful covers here. I’m looking forward to discussing them. So to kind of explain how this one will differ a little bit, because last time we very much covered all of the different parts of magazine covercraft in terms of like how you make the cover, what you look for in a game, that sort of thing. We don’t feel like we need to go over that stuff quite so much this time because, you know, it was all covered. Listen to that episode first, I would say. Yeah, exactly. Consider this a successor. So yeah, that covers all of that kind of like meat and potato stuff. And in this episode, instead, what we’ve got is two different sections. So the first section will be covers that we worked on as writers or section editors. We weren’t in charge of the magazine. So other people were responsible for the covers. But in doing that, we’ve got like a slightly different angle on covers. And some different stories about how they were made. And then in the second part, we’re going to go through five of our favorite covers each, one by one. So it’s going to be fun. And Matthew, I wondered on that subject, did you have anything new to add on the kind of process of covers that you didn’t cover last time? It was quite interesting because I was looking at O&M and Endgamer along side by side. And I was actually looking at what O&M were doing at the same time I was on Endgamer. Because I was curious to see how we both tackled the same subject matter, or who decided to do what each month, and whether anything interesting emerged from that. It’s quite interesting actually, because O&M, I think in those slightly earlier days there was maybe more, not necessarily pressure, but certain key Nintendo games that we never put on Endgamer, that they did do, that was slightly more unusual, and actually they had some quite interesting things they had to do. I almost wanted to include some O&M covers, but I wasn’t working on the mag, so I didn’t, because I thought it would be cheating. Do you know, O&M did a cover for the Notebook memo service on 3DS. Wow. Wow, I mean, you mean like the half a screen that you can draw on, that thing? Yeah. PictoChat, was that it? No, not PictoChat. No, this was on 3DS. It had like an inbuilt messaging service where you could like… it was called like Notepad. I forget the name of it, but you basically like… if you could send like little sketches and things to your mates on your 3DS friend list, I think you could exchange them on StreetPass as well. So it was like the inbuilt software on the 3DS. Yeah, that’s pretty bold, I must say. So they did it, but yeah, and it was literally like a pretty much a blank cover. I’ll include it in the folder actually so you can see it. It’s pretty much like a blank cover, and it was like a write your letter here on this cover. It was like the game. It was like write your memo on the cover and then take a picture and send it in and it’s a competition. It’s kind of crazy and out there. Like it’s quite experimental considering I’ll try and sell End Gamer as the kind of zany one. That’s far zanier than anything I ever did. Next month’s cover will be the settings menu. Just the concept of Mii’s. Well I guess these were… I can see exactly how these things happened just from how fallow those times were. Yeah well yeah. There’s some that I didn’t include of End Gamer because I don’t particularly like them where I remember we really struggled and we had to like come up with some mad concepts. There’s an End Gamer cover which is a bit like 2001 Space Odyssey. It’s like Mario’s hat like rising like a planet in front of the sun. It’s really odd. I remember Andy made it. It looks nice. The image is fine but I remember looking at that and going like yeah we had absolutely nothing that month. Like you had to pretend that like Mario was some kind of space monolith. That’s when you know it’s hard times. I must admit that when as soon as you said 2001 of Space Odyssey I thought oh it’s going to be like the star child but it’s Wario. That’s what I thought you’d go for. Is this Professor Layton in that light tunnel with his big freaked out little eyes? Mario dying in bed after rapidly aging. Yeah. I think it was 2011. I think it was 2011 like a Nintendo Odyssey. I quite like that. I must admit that I had more affection for the PlayStation magazine play I worked on going through this process than I thought I did because some of the covers I worked on originally, I had a few good memories of working on different cover features for them, reviews and stuff like that. But as an editor, it was the first magazine I actually was responsible for the covers. The first two or three, there’s a lot of nonsense hits on those covers. That was kind of the style I sort of inherited and so I don’t get particularly excited when I look at those. But I have in my covers from Heaven that we’ll talk about included one from there that I remember thinking this is the first cover I’ve made as an editor where I think this looks good. And even though it has a bullshit render of a PS4 on it, which we’ll get to in the discussion, it’s nonetheless something that conjures up a few happy memories. So that was my big revelation is that I enjoyed periods of time that I didn’t think I enjoyed as much at the time. So it was a bit of a nice sort of nostalgia trip there. It took some digging through Futures Archives actually to find a few of my covers. Again, I think this speaks to the fact that your lineage of Nintendo magazines is very well loved by Nintendo fans and PlayStation mags don’t tend to have the same sort of like, fevered following as it were. So Matthew, should we kick off with… Yeah. So first up then, in this section, we’re going to discuss covers we didn’t edit but from when we were writers on the magazines. So we’ll talk a bit about the covers themselves and then we’ll talk about some of the stories behind them too. It should be a fun little section. So Matthew, we’re going to kick off with one of mine, right? Yeah. Yeah. So to people listening, apologies if you hear occasional clicks on this one, but it’s just simply so I can see the covers in question. And if you hear Metallic rustling, it’s Renny’s. Yeah. Or possibly some fruit pastels on my end. So, yes, first up is a cover of Play with Uncharted 2, and Nathan Drake is there, hanging from a train, and it’s mocked up to look like an old-timey poster. Matthew, what did you make of this one when you first saw it, assuming you’re not eating a Renny right now as I’m talking and you expected this monologue to go on a bit longer? No, it’s fine. I really like this. I am big into, like, the let’s commit to the game identity. Like, it’s not something I ever did, like, I never had… you know, I think you need an art editor who’s open to particular ideas, but I really like this one. I really like just the framing of it, the language of it, the look of it. Like, to me, it looks kind of authentically uncharted-y, but it doesn’t feel, like, cheap enough, which it easily could, if done wrong. I think this is a good cover. Yeah, this is one of my favourite play covers that we ever did. I was kind of really surprised by how it looks. It mocks up this kind of matinee-style sort of movie poster, like an old-style font and stuff like that. The image that matches, you know, this very memorable set piece from the opening of Uncharted 2, where Drake wakes up in this train that’s been unmoored by some kind of snowy mountain. Very memorable. The image looks great. And it has kind of like these sort of mock cast listings and then a bit of developer stuff. Probably the only part that doesn’t quite hold up is Chloe Fraser as the love interest. I’m sure some people would take some… I was looking at the rather half-arsed PlayStation O-Vision at the end of the credits. Yeah, that’s true. Eight thriller second pages. I mean, that’s odd as well, because pages aren’t really a unit of time. We’re getting into the Parsec’s Millennium Falcon argument there, I think. This one was from… I think it was from early 2009. I wrote this cover feature. This was… I remember my perception of the PS3. I was very down on the PS3 at launch, starting to change around this time. Uncharted 2 was by far the most anticipated game on PlayStation 3, because the first one had been so good, and then the second one looked great. I don’t think we saw it before it was announced, but I think we saw some of the first gameplay ever. The first part I remember them showing me was… I don’t know if you remember the bus that drives after Drake down that collapsing street. It’s in the war-torn streets near the start of the game. That was the first sequence we saw, then Drake goes into this ruined war zone where fights going on and walks through it. It did seem incredible after being stuck in the one jungle and ruins that make up the setting of Uncharted 1. This game looked incredible. I saw that and it was combined with… We didn’t go to the studio or anything, but I interviewed Amy Heddick and Evan Wells from Naughty Dog and a few of the other people, Christoph Balestra and Bruce Straley. There were like four different interviews with the developers, which getting that kind of access to Naughty Dog now is pretty much unheard of. It was a very different time. It makes me cheerful looking at this one. This was in a bag, actually, so yeah. Yeah, it’s good. I like that one of the cover hits… well, one of the… part of the strapline under it is idiotic bungling, which is fun. This to me… this is like a cover an official mag can’t do, because this is where you run into like official branding issues. Like it’s quite hard to like mess with, you know, official logos and things. We ran into this again and again doing Official Nintendo. So like it’s fun, I think, you know, if an unofficial mag can’t really go for this stuff, like who can? Yeah, yeah, it’s very true. And you’ll see as well that there’s kind of like these creases that the designers put into the cover as well. And, you know, they obviously they’re not real creases, but when you hold the magazine, it’s a nice effect. So, yeah, fun one to revisit. Thank you for your kind words. I didn’t design or edit this one, but, you know, those for the people who did, what a treat. So, next up, Matthew, let’s do one of yours. Okay, so this is a endgamer cover with Knights on the cover. I didn’t pick this one because I particularly like the Knights are. I mean, it’s it’s it’s like colorful enough, though, looking at it now, I’m instantly irritated by Knights sort of invisible flute, which is just very much sort of the kind of irritating thing that a dreamy jester would play. We didn’t… this was kind of an odd one because it was in a period where, like, we had come out, we was massive, but we also didn’t have, you know, the first round of like really great Wii games. So the actual early issues of Endgamer kind of once that once the actual launch is out the way, you know, can’t really rely on your Twilight Princess anymore. So I remember it being a little bit like some of those early covers are a little bit odd some of the choices. So this isn’t necessarily like a killer game. I mean, the promise that a Sega legend flies again. That’s true. But why this game changes Wii forever? I don’t really know why it changes Wii forever. I wrote the cover feature on this and that definitely wasn’t like the pitch of the feature. The pitch of the feature was me basically greener going, you’re writing about Knights and I’m like, I’ve never played Knights. And then I had basically to school myself on something which I instantly disliked. No offense to the Knights fans, but it’s like, it’s such an acquired taste. And as that was basically my whole process with this issue, you’re like, wow, this is a really acquired taste, this thing. I’m kind of surprised for putting it on the cover. But it was an exclusive and whatever. But what I like about this and what I like about the early issues of Endgamer, and I mentioned this on the first podcast, was for the first ten or so, the covers just really represented the flavour of the mag inside, particularly the side column, the sidebar, which basically has some of the big features. But they’re quite bespoke fonts and visual approaches. As I went on, mags became a bit more simplified and streamlined, but these early issues of NGamer are quite hectic, without seeming, I don’t think, garish, and it captures the flavour of it. I was really pleased with this, because this is the first cover where I felt like I’d had a direct influence on it, because there’s a hit for Super Mario Galaxy, 15 Things You Didn’t Know, and above it are the words, Big Space Lips? Which is because I had to do a feature on 15 things you didn’t know, and I had 14 things, and I thought I could see something which looked like a pair of lips in space, and so the last entry in the feature is just like giant space lips, and it’s just a picture, a very blurry picture taken from a YouTube video of me, and it says, I think these look like lips, I don’t know how these are going to factor into the story, but let’s keep an eye out on them. And I remember it really tickled greener, and back then, kind of like, impressing my editor was quite a key part of the job for me, so it was like, oh wow, I know this really registered with him, because he ended up putting it on the cover, these big space lips. So it’s a bit of a vain pick, for that reason, but also there’s other fun stuff, you know, how the handheld could change your life, DS, I think that was about Touch Generations, it’s a hit for the thousand dollar Wii, and eight other Nintendo overdraft smashes. Yeah, it’s just fun. It’s got Galaxy on there, it’s got an exclusive game. And the good thing about Nights as well, is it’s got the sexiness and the pull of an exclusive, and it’s only when you buy the mag, and read the feature that you realize it’s too late, you bought the mag, and you’re reading about Nights. So it’s like, really a winning strategy. Yeah, so I think that Sega were kind of big on the Wii, weren’t they? They, at least in the first half, were very much like a second-party sort of developer in terms of how much stuff they brought to the system, making exclusive Sonic games and Nights and the light gun shooters we discussed in previous episodes. And Nights was like, I think Nights was a bit of a flop, wasn’t it, the Wii one? Yeah, it wasn’t very good. I mean, it’s such a strange game to revive, because it’s like making a sequel to a proven cult classic, you know, cult is in its thing, the Wii, you know, the mass appeal of it. And I can just remember like talking to him thinking like, what the hell is this game about? You know, it’s so strange, the kind of pitch of it. And you know, I mentioned last week, the Balan Wonderworld stuff, you know, similarly, like I wonder like, how did this happen? You know, like, who is this for? Who wanted this? Which is kind of how I felt about Nights. But you know, it’s quite a nice bit of art. Yeah, for those keeping, for those keeping track of Matthew’s grudges as well, he’s found another way to bring up Yuji Naka. So he’s moved on. Yuji Naka was, he wasn’t actually involved in Nights on the Wii. But you still managed to dunk on original Nights, which is, you know, you found a way basically, you know, life found a way, Matthew. I felt a bit bad off that last week because I was looking up Yuji Naka and like, he’s a producer. Like, he produces a lot of stuff. You know, the games that he makes, I’m not a big fan of, but he also produces, it’s basically him and Nogoshi are kind of like the two producer guys at Sega for like the early to mid noughties. But he’s doing all the stuff I don’t like. So Nogoshi is all like Super Monkey Ball, Yakuza, F-Zero, GX, all that jazz. And he’s, and old Naka Man is basically, you know, Sonic Adventures and Shadow the Hedgehog and all that crap. So yeah, just a run of it. Very much the Richard Kelly of game directors. With the brackets with the exception of Let’s Tap and Let’s Catch. But yeah, so I think that this, they could have probably solve the Knights problem a little bit by just putting the first game into that Wii game. So people had both the new one and the old one, but I remember there being loads of boring sections where you played as a little kid in Knights and didn’t have the Knights powers, which is, it’s like basically, look, we’ve got an analogue stick, the game, that’s kind of what Knights is. Yeah. Yeah, sorry to all the Sega fans out there who have no doubt trusted them. You know, there’s some Sega games we love, like when we hit that Yakuza episode next week, oh, it’s going to be Heaven. I like this cover too. I like big space slips. It’s got big Matt Castle energy and I think how this handheld could change your life is really nice. This is my last question about this one before we move on. Is this the one where you had to guess from the E3 footage what was going on in Mario Galaxy and kind of figure out the level? No, this was maybe the issue after that. This was very much the, you know, well, we’ve done this once, you know, we need to get another Mario Galaxy feature out of this trailer. So, it was a real, like, frame by frame breakdown, but the problem is that the screenshots, the screen snaps, which was, I think, back then, just me, like, print, screening while watching YouTube and then copying it into Paint or something, they’re so low quality, you can’t really see any of the things I’m talking about. And also, I think probably, like, a good 13 of the 15 things were, like, absolute nothing. It was just such a nonsensical deep dive, like, I thought I saw a feather, there was, like, a particle effect that looked like a feather, and I was like, oh, maybe it’s going to be this, like, bird boss. And it was like, no, probably not. I think that was one of them. And then another of the entries was, oh, actually, I don’t think it’s a feather, it’s probably from this dandelion, so you can ignore that point about the bird boss, which was how desperate this feature was. It cancelled itself out as it went along. Yep, that sounds like working on a magazine to me. Yeah, so great stuff. We’ll move on to another one of mine then, Matthew. So this is a Killzone 2 cover that we made for Play Magazine. I say we made, I didn’t make it again. It was an editor and an art editor at the time. So it was quite bold, like the style of it is like a kind of computer sort of HUD, crashing. I remember the artwork being slightly strange, like I think the red eyes suggest it a little bit, but the artwork doesn’t immediately say Killzone. Killzone you kind of think of the Daft Space Nazis that make up that game. And yeah, I think it’s the hits get a little bit buried in this, but the style of it I really love and the logo, what’s interesting about this is we had a little sort of run on play where the editor would try and get these different studios to put their own spin on plays logo, because the play logo, as people can see, as they’re looking at the Pinterest where I put all these and is like, kind of doesn’t have much definition to it. It’s white. You can kind of change the color and stuff like that. So yeah, I was quite happy with this one. But at the same time, I wrote the cover feature for this one, and it was one of my best cover feature experiences. I went to see the game and play the game, both the single player and the multiplayer, in 2008. And it was right, it was the day after Barack Obama was elected in the US. I remember waking up at 4.30am to get a flight to Amsterdam to see Guerrilla Games and putting on the TV, and Obama had won, and being completely knackered for the entire day, because I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 4.30am. And so yeah, it was a fun trip. But Matthew, what do you make of this, first of all? Yeah, this is wild. Like there’s so many words on this, like hidden in the style of a kind of, you know, computer sort of scroll. I kind of like it. I do think it is, like, you really have to look at it to kind of pick out the hits, which is maybe like a flaw in a magazine that makes you work a little too hard. But you know, as we’ve got terrible art, but we like the game, or the game is valuable, you know, is like a dilemma people hit over and over again. You know, you’re like, oh, man, we really want this, but look at this. Yeah, it’s cool. I’ve never seen this one before, but I like the Uncharted one. I like it when mags try and kind of go a little wild and kind of, you know, play with the game a bit. I guess it’s hard to kind of like fun up Killzone 2 too much, just because it’s so self-serious. Yeah, it’s good. I like it. Yeah, I think that this is another one that I think was in a bag as well and had a big Killzone logo on it. Yeah, I think this might actually have been a clear bag so people could see on the shelves. But yeah, I reflect on this as one of Play’s more stylish covers, a bit non-traditional. So yeah, while I don’t think it’s an amazing traditional one, I have good memories of it. I do like the translucent cover effect that Guerrilla added to the magazine, so that’s cool. So, yes. I like that. After the main cover line, we’ve got the logging off. It just sounds like, ugh, I don’t want anything to do with Killzone 2. It’s like, Hellgaster here, and you’re like, that’s me logging off in Killzone 2. Yeah, I mean, by the time you get to Street Fighter IV, I would have logged off, because I’m not the biggest fighting game fan. All of my peers at the time were obsessed with Street Fighter IV. I remember that being a big deal in our office. Yep, went completely over my head. I was about a year or two too late to really get into Street Fighter II when that came out, so yeah, never really engaged with the series, but nonetheless, yeah, a fun one. The trip was probably the most notable part of this. We got a tour around Amsterdam from Herman Hulst, who’s now Sony’s head of worldwide studios. Yeah, and then we learned interesting stuff. They’re this beautiful townhouse by the river, Guerrilla. I think they’ve moved offices since then, but they had to put a generator in the basement of their building, because the city of Amsterdam couldn’t give them enough power for all their dev kits or whatever, so those are some interesting tidbits I learned from that trip. But Killzone 2 was a good game. I went to Amsterdam on my honeymoon, and as part of it, we went to this famous tulip garden called, I think it’s something like Kirkenhof. And the idea is, it’s basically like a tulip thing park, which sounds like something from Ace Attorney, but it is real. And you go there, but that particular year, the spring was quite late coming in, it was quite dreary. This was the end of March, three years ago. And so we got tickets to go to this tulip world, but we got there and like literally nothing had bloomed. And because of that, it was just mud, it was just flowerbeds. And they all had little signs next to them called like, this is called, you know, this, this tulip montage is called, you know, Mysteries of the Orient or something. And it was just dirt, because nothing had grown yet. And they’re like, oh, if you come next week when there’s sun, it will probably have grown. You know, this theme park’s only opened when the flowers grow. We thought they might have grown today, but they didn’t, because apparently it can happen that they can bloom that fast. So there’s all these pictures of me looking very, very unimpressed next to big mud patches, which will one day turn into like a tulip picture of like Paul McCartney. Apparently it’s amazing when they grow, but when they don’t grow, it is just a, it’s just a dirt field. Yeah, it could just be like, you know, Ringo Stavro, you know. I mean, yeah. Yeah. So that’s, that’s my Amsterdam memory. It’s not as, not as fun as yours. That’s good. I mean, I, yeah, I appreciate it nonetheless. So why don’t you talk me through your next one, Matthew? Sure. I am going to talk about, this is an end-gamer Xenoblade Chronicles cover. Again, it was in a very hectic bag, which had some like full length Xenoblade character art, which actually isn’t that nice. The actual character art doesn’t look great in isolation, so I’m just going to stick with this cover. This one, I was just glad that we did it because, you know, we were big on import games, but we often didn’t, sort of, we didn’t take a punt on kind of a lot of Nintendo stuff that wasn’t already proven. At this point, Xenoblade Chronicles was quite kind of, there was like a moderate amount of hype about it. Nintendo kept showing off sort of little video clips of it in images where it was kind of impossible to work out what it was going to be, and you’ve got the feeling that what they were promising was like way too ambitious for the Wii, and it was probably going to be like very disappointing. And I think this cover was based off importing a Japanese copy, and it was just so like obviously amazing and, you know, Xenoblade Chronicles went on to become, you know, one of my favourite games of all time, and it was just this… I’m just really pleased that we got to do a cover and celebrate it, you know, something that we were genuinely really really into. I just really like the cover art on it. It’s very straight back. I think this wallet had the infamous cover line… a lot of these Japanese RPGs were like announced only for Europe and not for America, and there was like this big kind of campaign, and about this, it was like projects. Operation Rainfall, wasn’t it? Operation Rainfall, that’s it. And we used to get quite… well, I say we. I’m not a big fan of people who are like, we’re gonna boycott all this stuff until we get this one game. And it was just a very irritating, very nerdy kind of group of people. And one of the cover lines on the wallet for this was, like, Inside Xenoblade Chronicles, the game that’s too good for America. Which I thought was so funny, because it’s just, like, just purely, like, just a completely unneeded dig. And lo and behold, like, when someone took a picture of that wallet and then sent it to one of these American sites, they all kicked off about it. It was just… and everyone in the comments on these stories, if they were from, like, Europe or the UK, they were like, ha ha ha, that’s endgamer being endgamer. And all these Americans were like, burn endgamer! It was like, you know, Salman Rushdie writing the Satanic Verses or something. It’s exactly the same, yes. It was absolutely ridiculous. Yeah. And so I’m fond of it for that childish reason. I also like the art. I like the game. And this was actually our, like, you wouldn’t think, like, a bit of a bold choice to do this. This was our post E3 issue. So there was Skyward Sword, Super Mario 3D Land, and Wii U’s debut year. And this is this is what we went with. And yeah, the features are so great. This was my first E3, the first time I went to E3. So after all these years of like faking it, I actually got to go there and actually play the things and write kind of authentic coverage, which was nice. So yeah, like, don’t just a lot of happy memories from that one. Yeah, I really like this cover. And I think that the fact that you were doing you put Xenoblade on there so early just sort of suggests that, like you say, even if you were being a bit safer at the time with the types of games you were putting on there, the fact that you took a punt on something that would end up being one of the most significant modern Nintendo series is really cool. I think I vaguely recall that hit being discussed on the internet, like in the recesses of my memory. It may have actually been from a later wallet. It may have been the review issue. I think it was maybe reviewed, the game that’s too good for America. That is such a spicy hit, and like I say, a very unnecessary dig. How could you not laugh though? That’s great. Very cheeky. Yeah, that’s great. You can find the threads about it on game FAQs of people kicking off. I sometimes look at it just to entertain myself, and remember I used to have the slightest hint of edge at one point. Yeah, like the bad boy of Nintendo, Matthew Castle. Yeah. That’s great. The people on game FAQs forums, they definitely deserved it. How come Skyward Sword wasn’t the cover of Choice here? Is that because you’d already done it a bunch of times, or you were going to do it a bunch more times? Yeah, I think we were… I struggle to remember because there was quite nice art for both Skyward Sword and Mario 3D land. This may have been a, we don’t do the same cover as O&M. That might have factored into it. It was a good Skyward Sword because basically, when I went to E3, what I discovered was that a Nintendo E3, you only see like a quarter of what everyone else sees because there was no games being made. So you basically just stay at the Nintendo stand and try and get as much time as them as possible. And the Skyward Sword demo timed out after 10 or 15 minutes. And it was like this dungeon from the game. And I just noticed that because a lot of people were picking it up, only getting to grips with the controls after like, you know, half there a lot of time, and then they’d maybe make it through a couple of rooms. Even if you knew what you were doing, you really had to like cane that demo to get through it. And I basically just kept replaying it and replaying it until I could complete the whole demo, you know, and see the whole demo through. Because that’s, you know, the quote on here, we’ve played it more than anyone else. Like I literally played that demo like 15 times on this stand until I could get all the way through it. And then that was the structure of the preview. It was about like each run and how I got a little further each time and kind of what I learned about the game through that process. Yeah, that yeah, it was fun. I was like, I felt like I used my time at E3 well. And even though the people on the Nintendo stand were like, oh, this fucking guy. So yeah, when we get to June, we’ll do an E3 episode and talk a bit more about about what going to E3 is like, because you and I have a lot of experience with that. I am remembering the same thing with Breath of the Wild, actually. I think I played that demo twice. And when I was there at E3 2013, I played every single track in the Mario Kart demo like twice because, yeah, yeah, like you say, it loops, but you can find more each time, which is, yeah, that’s no, that’s cool. I am. Yeah, I look forward to hearing more about your E3 adventures, Matthew. So next up is another one of mine. This is an Alan Wake cover on X360. Now I don’t think this cover is amazing. It’s Alan Wake stood in front of the words Alan Wake. You can’t see his feet. They’ve disappeared into the mist or possibly they’ve been sliced off by his enemies. We can’t be sure. But I tagged this because I wrote almost everything in this issue because I went to an event called X10. They used to do like X09 and X08 and stuff like that. Microsoft used to have its own kind of like press event basically and this is the only one I went to. But in retrospect, I actually think that this was the last moment that Microsoft was really on top. So this event had Alan Wake, it had the first showing of Halo Reach, it had Fable 3 being formally unveiled for the first time, Crackdown 2 was hands on and yeah, there was I think there was a Forza game there and then there was like Dead Rising 2 and like Perfect Dark Remastered and it was like, I remember thinking this is Microsoft at the top of its game. It’s got like, you know, pretty much everything that anyone kind of wants from Microsoft was there in some capacity minus Gears of War and it was right before Kinect comes along and just sort of like blows the doors off. So not blows the door, so that’s a completely wrong phrase to use there. Oh yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, exactly. Kinect was… Kicks the doors in. Slams the door. As it rages out onto the town. Yeah, destroys the door with some kind of winch and says, excuse me, I’m Kinect. So Kinect was obviously a big disappointment. It did sell quite well, but it shifted Microsoft’s focus elsewhere and probably fair to say it ultimately ended up with them bungling the early days of the Xbox One because they took their eye off the ball and stopped making games that people who play games actually wanted to play. So, you know, a big fail all around that they’re still trying to course correct. So this was a flip cover with Crackdown 2, actually. I couldn’t find the flip cover, but yeah, I just thought this was a big moment in Microsoft history. And even though I don’t think the cover is that interesting, Matthew, there’s some nice birds in front of the logo. I like the birds. There was a Batman cover which had a similar thing with bats, right? Yeah, well, on the Xbox 360, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s possible it’s just the same effects used twice. Wait, wait, aren’t these bats or are these crows? Yeah, I don’t even remember. Were there birds in Alawake? I genuinely don’t remember. Yeah, there probably were. He was in a forest. That’s where birds live. Yeah, I actually saw a rumour just before we started recording this that Alawake 2 might be the game that Remedy is making for Epic Games. So I guess we’ll see on that front, but nonetheless. I hope this art editor kept on to his bird JPEG. Yeah, exactly. I hope he still kept the air. I hope he’s still got it in PNG form if they need to break it out. So yeah, I thought the array of hits here was just quite exciting though, like Lost Planet 2, Crackdown 2, Halo, Reach, Fable 3, Alan Wake, that’s just… you’ve even got Red Dead Redemption down there and Fallout New Vegas. This is a more exciting time in games than the moment we’re in now, I would argue. Yeah, I remember, mainly because we sat next to Xbox World 360, there was just a period where it felt like they were just the only game in town kind of thing. Everything massive was at their E3 conferences, there was just so much buzz. They had that absolutely amazing 2007 to 2009, just an unbelievably fun time. Oh yeah, that’s good, I like this cover. Yeah, they’ll get there again someday, hopefully. But yeah, I have good memories of this one. Microsoft gave you really good access as well, you spoke to Bungie. It was the only time I met Sam Lake from Remedy as well, Mr. Max Painface. So yeah, good times. Why don’t you talk me through your next one, Matthew? So this next one is an Official Nintendo Magazine cover. This is when I was Associate Editor and Chandra was Editor-in-Chief. So Chandra put this one together. I was involved in the process, but I can’t take kind of credit for it. This is a classic, let’s try and make a cover out of something we haven’t really got, which is they’ve just done a Nintendo Direct and announced Wind Waker and A Link Between Worlds, which wasn’t called A Link Between Worlds. They just announced we’re working on a sequel to A Link to the Past, so it hadn’t actually got a name yet, which is why I think it’s this quite vague The Legend of Zelda Returns hit rather than anything in particular, like Link Reawakens on 3DS and Wii U, because we didn’t really want to run with a Wind Waker HD cover, because, you know, it just… while cool it felt a little old hat. So we just tried to make this sort of big Zelda feature and turn it into a bit of a Zelda special. What I liked about this one, like, I just thought the art team did a quite nice job on it. I mean, kind of, they took the kind of classic logo, but then they also did a bit of their own kind of… I don’t know where these images… there’s sort of an ocarina and a sort of harp on there, and I’m not entirely sure if they’re like official art or they drew them themselves. This cover was matte, didn’t have a shiny gloss on it, which was weird because, like, on the whole, I always preferred the matte covers. I always felt they felt classy, so, you know, the gloss was the standard. Didn’t cost anything extra to take it off, you know, it was just like a thing you could do, but it kind of gave it like a slightly kind of tome-like sort of leathery feel, which really suited the art and the image on it. I like the little Pikmin kind of wandering in. I’m just a big fan of the Rock Pikmin because he just he’s got like very big me energy. I look into those eyes and I just I see like a lot of my own soul in those eyes. It’s very much how I felt working on O&M, while I guess in this metaphor, like Joe and Kate have the raspberry, I don’t know. They’re the staff writers carrying all the juicy fruit of the mag. Yeah, I just like that. I like the little link pulling at the logo at the top, the little link sprite from link between link to the past. That was cool. I mean, unfortunately, it’s slightly spoiled by there being a Sonic kit on there. Sonic Trilogy, three amazing new games on Wii U and 3DS. I bet all three, three amazing, I don’t know if any of them are amazing, none of them, three Sonic games. Yeah, I remember two of them. So two of them were Sonic Lost World and there was a different 3DS version to the Wii version. And I reviewed both those for Games TM, but the 3DS one was particularly shit, is my memory. And then there might have been one other bad like 3D Sonic game that they were making at the same time. But yeah, that’s my best memory of that. But yeah, here’s Sonic to ruin another. I actually gave Sonic Lost World like a good review. I went mad. Like, I know I give it all this big talk about Sonic on here, but actually when it when like push came to shove, I like gave him quite a generous review just because the music was like Mario Galaxy and it had a level set on giant fruit, which I was really into. I can remember, like, Joe thinking this was mad as well, he was like, what’s wrong with you? Why have you scored this as high as you’ve scored it? Like, I may have even given it like an 80. Well, again, it was the time, right? It was like, you know, it was something you could play on your Wii U you couldn’t play elsewhere. Yeah, I don’t know. I just loved the meat. I really like I stand by it. Sonic Lost World soundtrack is not as good, but it’s got big galaxy energy and anything which reminded me of galaxy, like instantly gets like a tick. I’m such a sucker for just a big trumpet. But that’s all the game needs. And I’m like, I’m in, I come into like the tune of seven out of 10 straight off the bat. So yeah, that’s terrible. I may be able to do an episode where we like, let’s let’s get into this, this psychology around Sonic. There’s something there. I’ll just save it for therapy. No, we should do it. We should do like the best Sonic games and you and I have to mutually agree the list. That would be a good episode. We should totally do that because they’re not all bad. The Nintendo ones are not all bad. Sonic Colors on the 3DS, I recall, sorry on the DS, I recall being alright several years before this. So yeah. I’m pretty sure Sonic was like massive and this for another time, but it was always massive. Like I’m pretty sure one of the best ever selling issues of official Nintendo was Sonic Unleashed, the one where he turns into a werewolf. Or a werehog. Sorry. Yep. Half good levels, half terrible levels. That was the pitch of that game. Yeah. But that was like, yeah. So we’ll get into that in the eventual Sonic episode. Yeah, I dunno. I thought this was about a good an attempt to make a cover out of nothing, as I’ve seen. Like there was no art for the games. That was the other thing. Like there was just, you know, they’d just been announced on Nintendo Direct, so you know, there wasn’t cover art yet for any of these things. That was a big problem, particularly on L&M, when we got into the… when they were doing more Nintendo Directs, like they just wouldn’t put out, you know, cover assets, because why would they? But you did get those at E3, so yeah, this was a valid attempt, I think. Yeah, that is tough, because there was eventually some very nice cover art for the Wind Waker HD version, but yeah, such as it is. What did you make of the Wario game at the time? And this is my last question about this one. Was that a bit disappointing in that way? There was a big disappointment. It was the… oh, I can never remember its name. Game and Wario? Game and Wario, that was it. It was just kind of like… it was just very like, stingy in intent. It felt like something that could have been a pack-in. It wasn’t like classic Wario where it was like some bad WarioWare minigames. It’s got the one quite good game where you’re basically playing WarioWare on your Wii U and then you have to put the controller down when your scary mum sticks her head in the door to make sure you’re in bed. And it’s kind of like weird horror vibe to it. Like the mum is… she’s got like light torch beams coming out of her eyes. A bit like that scary guy in Ghostbusters 2 who steals the baby. So like it really… it’s actually like quite a shocking work of horror. It’s up there with like hereditary for me. It’s like hereditary meets Wario. People will best know that level from Smash Bros, right? It’s a Smash Bros level. Oh that’s right, yeah, of course, yeah. It had some nice ideas, but it was just like 50 quid for something which was over in a matter of minutes really. First review of Wario’s crazy Wii U outing. Wow, that sounds pretty zany and yeah, the Rock Pickman here, his expression is my expression looking at that cover line. So yes, Matthew, that finishes this part of the episode and after we take a brief break we’ll come back and talk about more covers that we edited, from Heaven this time. Matthew, welcome back to the year 2013. Oh, God, have you got a cover ready to go to press next week? What’s gonna happen next? Oh, what a shocker. I’ve instantly just come out in a cold sweat. The idea of it. And you’re naked, and you’re taking a driving test. I mean, you know. Oh, no. Yeah, wake up from this. I failed my driving test because I was trying to open our magazine cover Pinterest while driving, which you shouldn’t do. Yeah, Matthew failed his test because he kept trying to throw blue shells at the car in front of him. And it’s the only driving he knows. That’s true. But yeah. So in this half, then, we’re gonna talk about games covers that we edited. It’ll largely be like the games magazine covers from Hell, but there’ll be a slightly more positive bent with the occasional slamming of a lame ass cover line here or there. And believe me, there are plenty of them. So let’s kick off with one of mine, Matthew. So the first one here is issue 228 of Play Magazine. It has Lightning Returns on the cover. At this point, I think I’ve been on Play for about three or four months. And I was essentially… It was me and one of the writers, and this was kind of like my proving ground to eventually become editor of Games TM, which was probably up there with Retro Gamer as one of the more prestigious games titles that Imagine had at that point. So, yeah, so in this case, I picked this cover because I don’t think Lightning Returns is that exciting. In fact, I think it very clearly illustrates where PS3 was at the time, which was, as I’ve mentioned on previous episodes, the end of the PS3 era was just kind of grim. There was like a God of War Ascension, and then basically nothing to put on the cover but Assassin’s Creed games. Like every seven months, it would be like a new Assassin’s Creed on the cover, somehow. And it’s a bit depressing, especially because this is like Assassin’s Creed three times, so, you know, largely considered the low point in the series. Although obviously Black Flag would be very good. But yeah, so this cover has one extremely, like, naff element that I want to cop to you straight away, which is PS4 games revealed as like the main hit. And we were right, Dragon Age 3 and Battlefield 4 were like the first PS4 games. It was pretty obvious they were from their first showings that made them look extremely pretty, far too pretty for the PS3. So there’s that, but that’s not so egregious but then there’s like a fake render of a PS4 there. It looked like a kind of a big dinner tray console. I think, imagine… What was it based on? I don’t know. I feel like this might have been commissioned as like original art for a cover of Games TM and then we maybe like just used it in a kind of cover hit to go alongside. But yeah, like… Why do you think it looks better than the actual PlayStation 4? That’s a bit, that’s a bit kind. I think it looks more like one of those bootleg consoles from like the early noughties where it’s like, it has 5,000 games on it and it has like one launch party with like Russian gangsters and then it’s like gone. I’ll tell you what though, you can see where the button is on it. That’s a plus. That is very true. And like… That’s the big problem with the PlayStation consoles. I can’t find any of the buttons. Even after using them for years, I have to like run my hands over the whole thing. It’s a bit like one of those animations in the Reboot of Thief. I have to run my hands the full length of a concert before I can find the secret button. Yeah. I get the impression that the reason they didn’t do that again, that kind of weird hover your finger over the thing button, is because loads of people had like a self-ejecting PS4 error and on the PS5 they were just like, fuck it. Here’s a button that gets the fucking disc out. And fair play. But yeah. So, yeah, so I kind of want to spotlight this because talking about games consoles before they’ve actually been like formally revealed is something you kind of have to do to kind of like, you know, it’s something that your readers are interested in. Obviously, at this point, the PS3 was around six years old, so people were expecting something new to come along. And you have to kind of tap into that and try and like stoke interest in it based on very limited information. And I really burned out on doing that with Play. I think I got really sick of writing about the PS4. Although it would have like a nice reveal a bit later on that made it a lot easier to discuss, especially versus like the Xbox One with the reveal of which was famously a bit of a disaster. And yeah, I like this cover because it was the first cover I got back and thought it was like genuinely good. So Lightning Returns, not that exciting a game, but the artwork is really nice. We put on a red background, which I think is quite striking. I think we might have had a matte finish behind like, I think we had like, kind of like a glossy effect on the Lightning Returns Final Fantasy bit and the hits. And then the background is, is matte. So it actually looks literally nice on the shelves. So yeah, what do you think of this one? Yeah, I like it. I mean, you run into that challenge of like, your main cover line is quite small in the world exclusive first look. Like, but it’s, I don’t know why I’m being that nitpicky. Well, I mean, I can’t change it if that’s what you’re hoping for. Yeah, I don’t approve it. Yeah, you have to send this back to the art designer. Yeah, I think that the problem is that Square Enix insisted on putting loads of words in the title of the game and so there’s no room for a hit basically. Oh, that is difficult when they do that. That’s why you just want a nice short game. Or a game with like, lots of short words so it can stack in a tower. That’s what I like. A good tower title. Lightning Return, so yeah, that’s a pisser, that one. I like Vita one year later because it’s got a big, like, something terrible happened energy, you know, it’s like 28 weeks later, it’s like, Vita, one year later, we talk to the survivors. Yeah, I think it was a bit like that though with the PS Vita. It was like, oh, well, I think the crux of the feature was nobody bought this, so, but some nice indie devs are making some good games for it, so that’ll be good. We’ve spent the whole year rubbing Nathan Drake’s trousers dry on the back touchpad, and now it is time to look to the future. Yep, indeed. Yep, Grand Theft Auto V, New Info, I like this easy trophy guide thing, like, Platinum PS3’s easiest games, that’s actually quite a good hit for something that I would generally find nightmarish to try and sell on a cover, the tips and stuff, whereas these days obviously you just research the term on Google Trends and then put it in the title of your headline. Yeah. But yeah, so, yes. Any more to add on this one, Matthew, or shall we move on to one of yours? Yes, yes, let’s move on. I like it. Good, good. Yeah, there you go, reluctantly approved by Matt Castle. So what’s your next one? So, this one I’ve actually picked is the first ever cover I did as outright editor of O&M, so Chandra at left. This was my first one. Kind of lucked out a bit in that we finally had some Mario Kart art, so we hadn’t run Mario Kart up to this point. Like, we’d had lots of little flashes and it had been revealed at E3 the year before, which is Mario Kart 8. So obviously a lot of buzz for it, but I just had this… yeah, I don’t really know why we set on this art or whether it only arrived at a certain point. It was, as you can sort of tell from the hits under the Mario Kart, it’s another slightly cobbled together cover. Like, I don’t think we’d seen more Mario Kart at all. I think we’d probably had more access to the demo again. So we shoved in Mario’s greatest tracks, so that was like a retrospective of all the games, history of Mario Kart, I don’t know what that is. Mario Kart’s Highway Code, which I think was a Joe Scribble’s comedy special, classic, you know, what would the Highway Code be like if it was all Mario? It’s gold. Yeah, one of those features you can never trust. I’ve got it here, I’ll read one out. Oh, it was done as a quiz actually. It was the Mario Kart Driving Theory Test. Nice. You encounter, so see if you can answer this one. You encounter strangely dressed babies driving tiny cars. What is the best course of action? Accelerate, force yourself to believe you saw nothing. Get home and have a lie down, repress all the memories of this day. Beep frantically. Use the fantasy squid creature you picked up from the shimmering box to blind them with ink, sending them spinning helplessly into a nearby abyss, never to know adulthood. D. No add-on words. You can tell this is the future author of the Spicy Prestige Memes account on Instagram at work. And finally, D. Against the advice of the law, quickly take a picture using your smartphone and reap the rewards on Twitter. The Official Nintendo Magazine Alternative Awards, which I think we’d ripped off, because you know that Edge used to do their End of Year Awards, and then they always had a funny page of awards at the end, where it was like, Weirdest Beard or whatever. I think you’re being a bit reductive there, but sure. Yeah, it’s good. Listen, I’m not smart enough to write for them, so I couldn’t parody it if I tried. But we had some good awards. We had an award for The Glummist Scott, which was the Scottish hero of Mirror of Faint. And just glancing over it now, I can see it’s full of Ken Loach gags, which is great. Yep, just what you want to see here in Official Nintendo Magazine. Good stuff. One of the awards is Best Amputee. I think that stood the test of time, Matthew. Yeah. Listen, the weirdest thing about going back over old O&M’s is it’s actually got, like, some surprisingly mad shit in it. When you tell me about it, it’s like you couldn’t help but have the end-gamer sort of attitude spill over into it. Maybe that’s just, like, inevitable from having your influence on it. Maybe. Maybe. I think it was just, like, we hired people with that kind of vibe, so Scripps and Kate Grey, like, just naturally fit into that. But back to the cover, Maric Art does a lot of the heavy lifting here. I was always a little worried that, like, the art’s kind of strange in that there’s nothing really in the middle of it, which I was always quite paranoid about. Like, everyone’s sort of—Marie is driving into the screen. He’s quite small for, like, the main image. It almost looks like it’s wrong in a way, but what can you do? Yeah, I suppose you could have zoomed in on him and then, like, you know, I mean, you could have adjusted the angle of the art, but then that kind of defeats the point of him being on a little gravity car. I think, like, looking at this now, I remember being a little stressed out about it, like, are we using this art right? You know, does this look strange? Is, you know, are people’s eyes drawn to, like, Peach’s weird castle in the background instead of Mario? I don’t know. I also like that the Kirby Triple Deluxe hit is he sucks, but his game doesn’t. Yeah. Yeah, it’s all right. Yeah. What I like is… It’s all right for a first attempt. Yeah, I do like that this is Kirby Triple Deluxe’s second appearance on these cover podcasts, which again, is just a lot about Nintendo circa 2013-2014. But yeah, that’s a very nice cover, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s pretty… Hyrule Warriors, Zelda, plus Ludacris, Kassar Solos equals best game ever. It equals a very solid 7 out of 10. Hey, it’s one of Catherine’s favorite games, as we established. Yeah, we went really big on that in the mag, because I think Jo was a big Dynasty Warriors nut as well. So yeah, we ended up doing a lot of that. Yeah. With his permission, it would be cool to put that Highway Code thing on the Twitter feed. So yeah, maybe we can give Jo a buzz and see if he’s up for that. And yeah, just so it’s not lost to time. And yeah, so next up Matthew is one of mine. This is an Overwatch cover that ran on PC Gamer. So the one thing you can’t get from looking at this image is that the orange text for Overwatch disappears into Tracer’s leg here. And obviously on the shelves, that would look a bit weird. But that orange was actually like a fluorescent orange. So it looked really nice and it really popped. And my memory of this is that it was right at the tail end of 2014, which is my first year on PC Gamer. And I remember being a really hard year to find covers because a lot of the big traditional big PC stuff wasn’t really in season. So Total War wasn’t really around, for example. You know, there wasn’t like a relic RTS around. There wasn’t really an MMO. MMOs were dying at this point. And they were kind of like a real staple of PC gaming and PC Gamer covers. So yeah, it was a bit of a tough one. But Overwatch, I remember taking a punt on. It was BlizzCon. We sent Tom Senior on the team to BlizzCon that year. And I was kind of aware that something new and big was coming. I think I’d been like not debriefed on what it was, but been told that something big was happening. And I kind of like remember sitting at Bristol train station, going to see my ex-girlfriend, looking at my phone, and kind of waiting for what the big reveal was going to be at BlizzCon that evening on a Friday. And it was this, you know, really unusual kind of hero shooter. But it rode a wave of such massive buzz. Blizzard announced it and had it playable at the same time at this BlizzCon. And it was, as this cover says, their first new universe in 17 years. So obviously it’s the Warcraft, Starcraft people making something new. And this was the first time… I don’t think it was on another cover for quite a while after this. And I think we had an interview as well. So it’s an interview and hands-on, like a really good combination of access. And it was about something new and exciting. And yeah, this was a successful cover, if I recall. What do you make of this one, Matthew? Yeah, it’s one of these weird games where you look at it now and you’re like, it’s so big, it makes perfect sense. But they’re always a gamble at the start. Particularly games which are going after like an online kind of e-sporty kind of energy. Because whenever anything like that crossed my desk on OXM, I was always filled with the fear of like, is this game aimed at people who don’t like magazines? Like I never really knew what to do with online shooters. But like, this is such a… the story at this point is such a PC Gamer story, like you say that the whole It’s Blizzard, you know Blizzard are like the definitive PC developer arguably. And it’s their first new thing, like it’s such a big deal. Yeah, it all makes perfect sense. And you’ve got a nice big Best Games of 2014, which everyone always likes. Yeah, that was also fluorescent orange on the cover at the time. So that really popped. And yeah, actually an amazing free gift with this one too, which is some free Alien Isolation DLC. So yeah, yeah, and a making of Alien Isolation. You can see a little character down there. A tiny Sigourney Weaver about to be crushed by Tracer’s foot. In fact, it kind of looks like Sigourney Weaver plus foot equals, I don’t know, because there’s a little plus sign there. Yeah, it’s quite abstract, isn’t it? Now I look at it. I also quite like the cover line in the Extra Life box of the ever satisfying grind of Epic’s Gears of War. Yeah, I think I don’t remember what that was even about. I think there might have been a retrospective on the original Gears. That was like ever satisfying. You don’t see that combination of words on a cover that often. Well, it must have been okay, because Tony Ellis let me put it on there. And if it was nonsense, he would have told me it was nonsense, so that was a good part of working with Tony. I’ll tell you what, actually, when we redesigned PC Gamer, we did get rid of the Extra Life hit. And I actually kind of missed it. It was a really good way to sort of stack up the different hits in the magazine. The Extra Life section, for people who don’t know, it was like the back section of the magazine. It had like a retrospective, what people are playing right now, little how-to guides, your typical end of the magazine sort of stuff. But yeah, I really loved this cover and it was one of the first major ones that I was proud of on PC Gamer. So hit me with your next one, Matthew. Very nice. So my next one is Professor Layton, Ace Attorney vs Professor Layton. What is it? Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney? I always get it confused. You know the game I’m talking about. It’s the one with Ace Attorney and Professor Layton. Oh, in fact it says it on the cover. That’s helpful, isn’t it? It’s Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney. Of course. Lawyer Man vs Bayes Tube. People are like, maybe I understand why all these masks kept closing under this guy. He’s an idiot. You can’t read the game name of the thing in front of him. This was… The only reason this is on here is… The only reason I picked this is I was just so thrilled that at some point I got to do an Ace Attorney cover because that was just never in contention for anything at any other time. Like, you know, as beloved as it is, it’s so niche. But this was like a Nintendo-backed game. If Nintendo had a hand in it, then, you know, basically it was… You could put it on the cover of O&M, was sort of the logic. I love this art. It’s the only art where infamous bass tube, Professor Layton, like, has any kind of shape or, like, energy to him, because he’s pointing, just like Phoenix Wright. I just, yeah, I really, really like the art on this. I mean, Move Over Sherlock. As we talked before, I did a lot of Move Over lines, so… It’s like a terrible cliché that I relied on. I was always telling people to move over. Sherlock was big at the time, I should say. This was when Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock was, like, big on TV. It’s the final verdict on the smartest game on Nintendo 3DS. Just a pure vanity cover for me. I just wanted to do something I really liked. The issue inside has got… It’s got, like, a really big interview with Shooter Kumi, which I’ve mentioned before. It was, like, the second one that we did. It had a really fun feature about who was the best crime fighter on Nintendo, which Alex Dale wrote for us, Freelancer. Which was, like, a knockout tournament of always different, like… It was, like, Professor Layton vs. Carl Hyde from, you know, Hotel Dusk and things like that. That was really fun. Again, slightly soured by Sonic Boom being on there. Which is a game with my covers. It’s a theme with my covers. Things I really like, and then also Sonic. But that’s because when I took over the job, I was told Sonic Unleashed was one of the best ever performing covers. So of course I was going to keep sticking Sonic on there. Kids like Sonic, apparently, teenagers like Sonic. The idea that Sonic would share a cover with these two legends is so wrong. Not just any Sonic, but Sonic with a small neck of chief. I think you’ll find that makes a big difference. This is the Sonic which was like the Uncharted game, apparently. Yeah, I’m surprised I was going to say that. On these covers so far, I’ve not seen a single It’s Uncharted meets Sonic, or a Beige Tube, or Bayonetta, or something like that. For shame, I say. No, there is probably the weakest cover line of all time, though, which is Bayonetta 2 plus Monoliths X, which was Xenoblade Chronicles X, but wasn’t called that, it was just called X at that point. Which was incredible Wii U shots. Well, melt your eyes. Melt your eyes. What is this? That’s terrible. That’s like… I’m amazed that anyone let me put that on there. Yeah, the fact that they didn’t call it anything for a long time, though, was probably quite frustrating from an editor point of view. Monoliths X sounds like wrong. It doesn’t sound like a game or something you should be recommending to teenagers. It’s just sort of sinister sounding. Yeah, I like how you’ve got the twin red boxes of Vroom and Swoon as well. That’s good. That’s a little bit of Castle Magic. It’s just a combination of heroes I really like. The subscriber cover gets rid of all the hits, so it’s just a nice art and it looks really nice. I think we put it on a poster as well. Oh, that’s a great… I really, really like that game. That’s a really lovely image. I think, like you say, I think the fact that they’ve had to contextualise Professor Leighton next to Felix Wright, a normally proportioned man, means that his beige tubeness has been downsized slightly for promotional purposes. Yeah, it’s still odd, the idea that characters with actual eyes would meet this man with basically just sort of pinprick holes in his skin and they’d be fine with him, but, you know, what can you do? Take it up with Capcom and Level 5? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s a lovely cover. And of course he’s still got his little potato son there, Luke. He’s not actually a son, I know that, but, you know, his travelling companion. And we won’t make any more lewd jokes, lewd or obvious jokes around that subject. My next cover, Matthew, is Hitman. So this was 2015, this is our E3 cover. You can see here that, like, all of the E3 sort of, like, touches apply. You’ve got a big hit top left. Fallout 4 was the big game of that year. It was revealed by Bethesda and it looked amazing. The E3 presentation of Fallout 4 was one of the best reveals, I think, of a game. They are really good at them. Like, whatever you think about Bethesda. I think the reason people are always disappointed is because they do such a good job of getting you excited with that first reveal. Yeah, the way they would show off the different features by cutting between gameplay from different parts of the map was really impressive. It was good because it gave you a lot to chew on for coverage. Yep, got that in there. The big deal here was that Hitman had finally been revealed. What was the one that everyone hated? Absolution. We had Absolution in the years before this, 2012. So it had been a long time at this point, close to a decade in fact, since there was a traditional Hitman game. This is obviously the start of the World of Assassination trilogy that would culminate in this year’s Hitman 3. They showed it off with the Paris level that looked beautiful. It took a bit of… it was quite hard work to pass. I would say that one of the reasons that Hitman’s episodic rollout wasn’t entirely successful is that I think they all did a bad job of explaining exactly what they were doing with it. So, straight away, people didn’t entirely understand what they were buying. But I think this is a lovely cover. Just a classic shot of Agent 47 on basically a blank background. I think there might have been some kind of textured kind of colour image he was on. And yeah, we’ve got a nice big 20 best detective games hit there too. From LA. Noire to Discworld Noire. Which for one second I absolutely panicked that we’d misspelled one of those and was about to freak out about a cover that went to press six years ago. And of course, Mice Rated, which is a very exciting hit. What do you make of the cover otherwise, Matthew? Yeah, I like this one. I think it works particularly well going quite kind of like minimalist with Hitman, because that’s like Agent 47’s thing. I think when you see that character actually on the quite sparse background and the quite clean hits, it’s nice. He’s a really useful character in that he’s quite easy to put words on top of him because he’s so dark in that suit. I dread art, which is impossible to put stuff on top of. Yeah, if I was making a Games Master cover with this art, there would be like a little Splatoon dude next to his head and then like Mario driving a car over him and then like Donkey Kong throwing a barrel at him, you know what I mean? I’d have some Pikmin putting that raspberry in his ear. Yeah, yeah, so the other thing about this cover is that it was the E3 cover. I was at this E3 and I wrote this cover feature and I wrote it in about five hours, six to eight page feature. I don’t remember which and you know, this is where like having amazing team back home of editors really helps when you’re making a magazine because it was E3 and then for some reason every year the E3 deadline would be like the second day or the first full day of E3. You’re trying to cram stuff in, in this very tight period of time. I wrote this straight after we did the first ever PC gaming show at E3. So PC gaming show, I’m sure a lot of people know what it is. It’s like PC gamers kind of curated E3 presentation and you know, I played a bit of a part in bringing it to life, which was, you know, a cool thing to have my name to. And I was kind of on a, I was a bit wired off the back of it because I do remember being very proud that I played a small role in this amazing thing that had rolled out. But I could only get artwork straight after that show. So this cover was designed in like probably half a day, something like that. And then I had to write the cover feature the same night. And I remember getting slightly drunk at our party after the show and then writing this almost like 2000 words and then like passing out for three hours, then going back to E3. That was my memory of making this issue. So does that all sound familiar to you, Matthew? Yeah, very, very stressful. I think I had to do a… the worst I had of that was I did a Gamescom where I was sending the mag or finishing off the final bits and I happened to be sharing… I think I was sharing an Airbnb with a load of other future people and I think I was the only person who was on a magazine deadline in the group, which is always a recipe for disaster because you’re trying to write stuff in your Airbnb. You don’t want to be the guy who’s like, keep it down. But that’s me. Yeah. Also, I shared a room with… I won’t say who, but the worst snorer. I mean, like, I don’t think… I have no idea how this person made the noises they made in their sleep. But it was powerful. Yeah. So, good stuff there. Some nice insights. So either you have a room with someone who snores badly, or you shatter your knee and become a living cursed object. I literally remember lying in bed and saying out loud in an attempt to wake them up so they’d stop snoring, like, are you kidding me? Like in a passive aggressive way and they still slept through it. I don’t think anyone could hear me say, are you kidding me? It was drowned out by the sound of basically like a digger reversing. I like that in this scenario you’re the Steve Martin to whoever this John Candy was. So yeah, without dwelling on that further, it was quite an experience to write an entire cover feature in about four or five hours. But I did it and I remember this being a great issue. So, next one of yours, Matthew. This is the second to last Official Nintendo. This was Super Smash Bros. for 3DS. It’s just great art. Smash Bros. is like a dream game to cover on magazines because it means Nintendo are going to put together an amazing bit of art with like everyone who is good to sell magazines. So like if you ever want a cover where like Mario, Link and Samus all look amazing and Pikachu like Smash Bros. all the way. Like slightly bittersweet in that at this point we knew the mag was coming to a close. My little hint at that, there were lots of hints in the issue that it was coming to a close about like lots of references to like it begins and it’s the beginning of the end and all this kind of stuff. The reason we did this top 200 Nintendo games of all time, we did the first 100 in this issue and then the last 100 in the final issue. We actually split it, we did the top 100 third party games this issue and then we did the top 100 first party in the next issue. Really good feature. We basically got in like all of our freelancers, you know, I basically sent out a list of what it was, you know, we constructed the list and then we sent out to all our freelancers like just pick games off this and write X amount and so it was really kind of built from everyone who had been writing for that era of O&M anyway. It’s a really strong feature. Yeah, otherwise I think this is just like, I was glad that we got to go out on like something sort of semi semi cool with Smash Brothers. The rest of the cover construction isn’t particularly exciting like it’s a little bit a little bit listy on the game names. There’s not a lot of messaging on there. That little box at the bottom is a little a little dry. See Bayonetta on the SNES. I’m interested by that. That’s just the guys used to do the SNES demakes and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it was a pretty good beginning of the end. I thought. Yeah, that is cool. I would love to see that 200 games list. Is it anywhere on the internet like archived or anything or? No, I had there was a reference to like Majora’s Mask but it was like the number of days between issues. It was like, you know, it’s the dawn of the whatever, you know, 31 days remain or something. There were lots of references to Alexis being the last one, which no one seemed to catch on. Yeah, a big the big 2000 word transcript of the meeting where you’re offered the OXM editor job that gave it away slightly as well. Yeah, my editor’s intro was like, does anyone know a removal firm that will drive to Bath from London? It’s funny because we didn’t actually, in terms of the game itself, we didn’t talk about Super Smash Bros on 3DS in our 3DS episode, but I remember being a bit disappointed by it. I don’t know if you had any thoughts on that one, but I thought it felt more like a sort of proof of concept or like a demo. I mean, it had lots of stuff in it, but it wasn’t the same as like a full fat Smash Bros. Do you have any thoughts on that game? Yeah, I liked that it had like 3DS exclus- you know, I liked that they were trying to put like, you know, nods to the 3DS heritage on it, and you know, then the Wii U version had the more console, you know, they each had like exclusive levels. I thought it was, you know, I thought technically it was amazing, it looked beautiful, like I actually thought it worked pretty well, and you’d obviously want to play the Wii U version over it, but I thought it was a pretty decent attempt to put it on there. It’s just whether like the controls held up with the little analog stick, you know, maybe it wasn’t the most natural thing for it. Yeah, I like the music in it, I like the… it had that weird little kind of mode where you… that sort of weird little RPG mode that was kind of exclusive to it, where you’d sort of battle your way through that kind of structure. I can’t remember the name of it, it’s been yonk since I’ve played it. Yeah, you know, I thought it was good. I don’t think it was just Nintendo, Stockholm Syndrome kicking in. Yeah, I think, yeah, I’m probably being a bit harsh there. I think, just like you say, it was a feat having it on the handheld, so, yeah, and I just know you would have begrudged putting that Pokemon hit in there too, so that makes me happy. Look how many words it takes up as well, Jesus, that’s like every editor’s nightmare. The worst thing about Pokemon and covering Pokemon magazine is trying to remember the weird combination of keys to put that weird accent above the E, and every single time being like, oh, well, how do I do that in this font, and having to look it up on InDesign, which we used to make the magazine, it’s just a huge pain in the arse. Yeah, I think better off not covering it, but it’s not really an option you have on Official Nintendo. I think I eventually when it came to using like an E with an accent, I would use the insert button every single time in InDesign and do it manually. Yeah, I think I was doing that too. Next one, Matthew is Doom on PC Gamer. So, this was actually straight after the Hitman issue that I mentioned previously. What a run you had. Yeah, it was good. This was like 2015. When we get to the best games of 2015 episode, people will be like, oh, holy shit, that was actually like the banner year of the last decade. There was just so much going on that year. And that made the hits here very easy. So Doom is your main cover hit. You’ve got the, what’s his name, villain from the game, I’ve forgotten his name now. The dude with the shoulder guns, they’re, you know, the iconic Doom villain. Skeleton Pete. Yes, that’s it. Yeah. So you’ve got that dude there and then you’ve got a little Fallout hit top left with a little Vault Boy there. And Fallout 4, that feature was based on like nothing but the E3 presentation and trying to pick out every tiny detail from it basically, because there was no more access to Fallout 4. And there were a couple of interviews with like Todd Howard as well and it was like strip mining it for information because it was the big game people wanted to know about. I think we got a good feature out of it, but it very much reminds me of you trying to make those Mario Galaxy features, Matthew, where it’s like, is that a pair of lips? No. But the Doom stuff was good. This was off the back of QuakeCon and I believe it was sort of off the back of QuakeCon anyway. And yeah, we got access to the game and interview with the developer. This was cool as well because Doom 2016, like when they first showed it at E3, this looked legit. I actually remember that E3 presentation in 2015, Bethesda’s one being extremely good overall. And yeah, this was another part of it. I was actually sat next to a guy in the theatre at that presentation who had brought his girlfriend there, and when there was a part where one of these monsters appeared on screen and Doom guys started chainsawing through him, and he just went, oh shit! And just squeezed his girlfriend’s hand really tight. And I always remember that dude as being iconic, he was so into it. So yeah, Doom, really cool. And then the other hits were a lot easier, Star Wars Battlefront was around that year. So this game was huge this year, and I remember this, every time you managed to find a way to put this on the cover, I seemed to recall it being successful or a big deal. And so we married that to this very cool Witcher 3 making of feature, which was about the sidequest, the very famous, was it Bloody Baron sidequest? Yeah, I remember this, Andy Kelly went super granular on it, right? Yeah, so I interviewed the writer and then the quest designer and had all this cool imagery from it and it was, yeah, the type of feature we tried to do on PC Gamer was just this really deep down into a really iconic moment from a game or a level or stuff like that. So yeah, I remember this being a very good issue and, again, don’t ask me any questions about the free gifts, Dirty Bomb, that’s like a long forgotten game. I’m glad that says Fraggr for one second, I thought it said something else, but yes, good stuff. What do you think of this one, Matthew? Yeah, I like this because it reminds me of the same period on LXM where there were games people were super into, the Star Wars fallout. I mean, yeah, we saw probably the best sales when I was on LXM during that period. Like, we did a Fallout 4 cover which really did the numbers. I think this was all of us covering the same sort of events. Yeah, I mean, as you’ll see in a second, I’ve got a Doom cover myself. I was super up for the game, super into it. I didn’t necessarily have a read on how popular it was going to be or if it was popular, but I thought the art for it was really striking. It was just a great time for kind of classic, well-loved things looking into good health. So it was a lot of very familiar kind of game series, but they were like back in a big way or they were, you know, the strongest they’d ever been. It was a really good couple of months. Yeah, I remember this period just being really, really strong. It was the year we redesigned PC Gamer as well. So this actually isn’t actually straight after Hitman, I recall. This was actually the second issue after a redesign issue. And the redesign had XCOM 2 on the cover, which again was like a really easy, this is a perfect kind of PC Gamer sort of game. And yeah, it was definitely, I agree with you. It did seem like there were actually more games than you could put on your cover at the time. And that was almost never the case as an editor. Yeah, yeah, this must have been this you must have been doing this at the same time. Because the Mafia 3 reveal was at the Gamescom, where I was stuck with the Snore Machine. So yeah, so fun times, but I like this quintessential PC Gamer cover. Nice Doom logo. So what’s one of yours, Matthew? What’s coming up next? Next up, I’ve got our Metal Gear Solid 5 cover. This is one where the wallet had a lot more on it because this is super sparse. So it doesn’t have like much to break down. Mainly because I loved the art for Metal Gear Solid 5 Phantom Pain. It was just absolutely amazing. Kind of had all the characters on. There’s just interesting colours, but you also get the classic big boss on there. Just looks awesome. This was, I mean, it’s weird. I think there was a little apprehension about it because everyone was still feeling that Metal Gear kind of belonged more to Sony. It wasn’t necessarily a big pull or as big a pull on an Xbox mag. I was really keen to do it, mainly because I just really wanted to play it. This was an absolutely shameless cover where I 100% did it because I just wanted access to Metal Gear Solid 5 because I was so pumped for it. We went over, we played this at Konami’s Los Angeles studio where they made the multiplayer, which then got shut down subsequently. Yeah, we basically played Metal Gear Solid 5 Phantom Pain for two days at preview. It was wild. It was so good. I mean, the features, one of my favourite features I’ve ever written, just because I had so much, you know, I had like two full long days with the game to talk about it. Two funny things happened on that trip. At one point, and not massively on board with this, but like it was one of these trips where like, you could tweet about it, but it was very much like on their terms. So there was literally a point on the trip where it was like, at this time, you can tweet for an hour about the game. And you realised, oh, we’ve actually been turned into a little bit of a kind of PR stunt for this game, like this rush of tweets. But I remember, I tweeted that something cool about like the attack helicopter coming in and it was playing one of the 80s tracks, I can’t remember. And then they went mental at me because apparently it wasn’t allowed to say what songs were in the game, but they hadn’t told us that. So that created a weird kind of tension. But like it was phrased as like, Kojima himself wants you to take this tweet down. And it’s like, I would have done it if you just asked me, you know, as yourself, you don’t have to like throw the threat of Hideo Kojima at me. But I like the idea of him reading and being like, no, I can’t believe you’ve said a horror in this, whatever. The other weird thing was, they asked us if we wanted to be in a documentary about Metal Gear and like do some talking head stuff, which I probably should have said no to because like fundamentally, you know, I was there to cover it for the mag or whatever. But like the curious part of my brain was like, oh yeah, sure. You know, I’m just interested to see what like what they want this for. And I kind of did it and they just asked us questions about like, you know, what we thought about, you know, our classic Metal Gear memories or whatever. And then it actually ended up being included on a special documentary which came with Metal Gear Solid 5. But the really weird thing about this is everyone else interviewed in it is really famous, apart from me and Matt Pellet. So like it’s literally the talking head. So like Guillermo del Toro, like, maybe like JJ Abrams, you know, Mads Mikkelsen, and then me and Matt Pellet. And you’re like, why weren’t we also in Death Stranding, you know? I wondered if people watched it and were like, who the fuck are these guys? This is odd. Like, oh, some nobodies. Oh, and it had, what’s his shops? The guy directed Drive. Oh, Nicholas. Yeah. So it’s just really odd to cut from him to cut to me, not really being able to remember how the boss fight against the end works. Like most of what I said, like, I think there’s only a very brief bit of me because I basically bungled all my anecdotes, couldn’t quite remember them. Well, Kellett’s in it loads because he was like really on top of it. But yeah, that’s, so that’s, that’s quite funny. Yeah. They only use the clip where you’re saying, I believe you fought the end in some kind of shopping center. Yeah. So I think you can actually watch the documentary on like Steam. I think it’s like part of the digital ownership. If you buy Metal Gear Solid 5 Phantom Pain, you get a copy of this documentary on Steam as well. But yeah, but I mean that, that’s weird. So, yeah, maybe I just picked this cover so I could talk about those weird anecdotes. I don’t know. But it’s a good Metal Gear cover. There’s not much else going on here. 20 new games inside. Assassin’s Creed, very vague. Which one? Who knows? Mass Effect 4, Gears of War, again, vague. I mean, it’s almost like, I’ve had my fun this month. I’ve seen Metal Gear Solid 5, I’ll just phone in the rest of this. Yeah, this is just, this was all done in one email to your art editor. Well, I imagine Matthew that this was in a bag, right? So, you know, people… Yeah, it was in a wallet, had a lot going on. It’s a really good issue. It’s probably my favorite issue of Official Xbox that I did. The features in this issue were just really fun. There’s a really good feature about, like, the 20 best side quests. And as you go through the feature, there are then side quest features inside the feature to distract you from the feature. So it’s like, oh, no, you’ve hit a side quest feature, and then you had to do this other feature before you could carry on reading it, which I really liked. Yeah, just this was just like everyone on the team doing their best work with some really exciting access kind of dream, really. Yeah, I remember this Metal Gear event. I remember kind of being very, very jealous that we weren’t involved in it. I think that we knew for quite a long time before it was revealed that Metal Gear Solid 5 was going to launch on PC. I don’t remember if at this point maybe it was known and they’d release Ground Zeroes on PC, but in any case I recall there being like some kind of… I think the original release of Phantom Pain was set for after the console releases and then they brought it forward. So it was never really considered like a PC game. And I remember you and other publications going to this event and telling me about it and just being like, oh, holy shit, that sounds fucking amazing. In fact, yeah. Yeah, it was mad. If anything, playing that much of it, almost 20 hours of it or something, probably the most access I’d have to something outside of having something to review. And it was like, how the hell do I get this down? I remember I had a notebook that was just almost full of just… I was just trying to write down everything about the game, and it just kept throwing up like new mad stuff. And it was basically that you could play it, you could just keep on playing it and basically cover what you could get through. And, you know, it was all new information as well, because they’d done a lot of trailers, but, you know, it put everything in context. I remember just thinking like, how the hell am I going to tackle this? Like, whatever I write about, I’ll kind of be doing this access to the service. But it was, yeah, like, really, yeah, a great, a really great trip. I mean, you know, one of the best games of the generation as well, so. It’s funny to think of them telling you, you know, Kojima himself would like you to take this tweet down, and then like four months that same company, like, what is the story there? One day that story has to come out, what actually happened there? Maybe him kicking off about my tweet was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Yeah, maybe they said, you’re not going to use this prick in my documentary, are you? I’m fucking out. Yeah, that’s a nice cover. We’re featuring lots of imagery that ultimately ends up not being that relevant to the game, like the fucking fire horse. All that stuff in the prologue that has nothing to do with the rest of the game. But no, beautiful. So my final one for this episode, Matthew, is a Deus Ex Mankind Divided cover that we did in 2015 as well. So you know you’re seeing a theme here, 2015 is clearly where I thought we were doing our best work on PC Gamer. I think it’s… You don’t get more PC than this. Exactly, yeah. So Deus Ex Human Revolution was considered a very successful revival of the formula. I think they took too long to bring this one out. It came out almost five years after the last one, which is like a really, really big gap. And rumours suggest it’s because they were simultaneously working on a follow up that was ultimately doomed because this one didn’t sell well enough, which seems like a very flawed approach in retrospect, but that’s never been confirmed by Square Enix, I think Jim Sterling circulated that. But nonetheless, I picked this cover because I think it looks amazing. We had gold foil on all the different gold bits, and I think it’s probably the nicest looking PC Gamer cover I worked on. It has really nice big hits, you’ve got Battlefront, I think I’ve been to Sweden to DICE to play this, Battlefront at this point, and it was kind of like close as we could get to a review hit basically. And then the best GTA V mods, GTA V had launched on PC after quite a long wait, and we also have the How to Run Them hit there, which is for dunderheads like me who don’t know how to install mods properly. Side note, I still can’t really install mods properly, I’ve been trying to install these Fallout New Vegas mods and I’ve broken the game over and over again, even though the same mods worked perfectly on my last PC, and I don’t know how to fix it because I don’t know what I’m doing. In your version of GTA V, just everyone is Trevor now forever? Yeah, there’s no fixing it, even if I had to install it, including me, I’m also Trevor. So yeah, good times. There’s also the very, very funny motherboards hit here, which is, I’m going to be honest, it’s hard to make a motherboard sound fun and exciting. Which is why if you see graphics cards hit, they tend to be a bit higher on the cover because graphics cards are sexy, you know, like people want to buy them and they’re very clear kind of like benefit from buying them. Motherboards are a bit more, you know, of a utility thing. Obviously they’re very important, but they’re not that exciting. So, yep, and you got a little Vault Boy down there as well with gold, gold foil behind him too. That looks really nice. And I think this just looks lovely. If I saw this, you know, on the shelves, I would have bought it. It looks fantastic. Again, don’t ask me about the free gift hits. I cannot talk about it without getting remembering how stressful it was to arrange those. But yeah, what do you make of this one, Matthew? Yeah, this is great, I mean, we did an LXM cover with the same art like a few months later. It didn’t feel as natural of it. I loved the game, thought the game was cool, but it just feels like it belongs to PC a bit more. Yeah, I remember this one with all the trimmings and the gold and everything. It looked really great. I mean, again, takes me back to the era where like every issue we could stick Darth Vader on the cover. God bless him. God bless you, evil Darth Vader. You may have been bad for many, many people in the galaxy far, far away, but you were pretty good for Team Alex Semenbath. God damn, that layered PSD file went a long way. I love the FPS that Star Wars fans deserve. You could read that many ways. Wait, there’s a question mark there though, that’s very well hidden. Oh yeah. I didn’t commit to it, Matthew. That’s my bailout clause right there. But I don’t want to ask, what kind of FPS do they deserve? Have they been good? Have the Star Wars fans been good? I mean… Do they deserve a good FPS? I mean, the Star Wars fans haven’t been good at all. I mean… They haven’t. No. They’re like… They’ve been very naughty. They just have a bad FPS. Yeah, exactly. They deserve to be sold at FPS, and it’s actually a copy of The Last Jedi, just to really fuck them up. But no, I mean, Battlefront was… This was the moment where there was the most interest in Star Wars, you know, ever, basically, because it was just before The Force Awakens came out, and obviously EA had not rushed out Battlefront, but Battlefront, the original… I think it’s a pretty good FPS, but it’s very light compared to a lot of what you expect from a first-person shooter at that point. But yeah, and it wasn’t beloved, and I don’t think Star Wars would have this same pull again as a magazine hit, but this year, for sure, it was all over the place. It’s because they spent all their time using those 3D cameras to scan in textures from original bits of bark from the Endor and things like that. Maybe spent a bit more time making more game, maybe more people would have liked it. But they were like, yeah, but look at the ferns! They’re 100% accurate ferns! Matt Castle explains game development. Less bark, more bee wings. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I actually have some fond memories of the original Battlefront in that I was quite good at the very Star Fox-esque Starfighter Assault sort of spaceship combat stuff. It was really straightforward, but I was actually kind of good at it. And when they made it more skill-based in the second one, I was suddenly shit at it. I was incredibly disappointed. I like that I was really good at this until they made it skill-based. Yeah, that’s exactly the story I’m trying to tell there. Oh, god damn it. If it wasn’t for skill, I would have excelled at many things. This cover also reminds me of a game that I completely forgot existed, which is Homefront the Revolution. So Homefront, obviously, like a very mediocre first-person shooter, sort of riff on… it was basically like the THQ version of Call of Duty, but not as good, and had like a vague sort of John Milius sort of script element to it, a bit of a Red Dawn vibe. And they made a sequel, but the Timesplitters… well, I don’t know if they really like the Timesplitters people, but the same studio, technically, ended up making a sequel in the CryEngine, and it was quite glitchy, but the sort of thing I can imagine that in a few years people will write retrospectives on it being like unusual but interesting. Do you remember this game? Yeah, I do. I remember going to a Gamescom, I think, reveal presentation for it, and it was terrible. The demo was really bad. I think the final game is okay. It’s flawed, but it’s got something to it. But this original demo was really, really bad, and I remember coming away from that Gamescom thinking, like, that game’s in trouble, and then I felt terrible, because on the plane on the way back, basically all the people sitting around me on the plane was the team that demoed it to me. So it was all people from that, is it Dan Buster Studio, I think? And I remember just sitting there thinking, like, in my head, I am writing a really horrible preview of this thing that you’re clearly working really hard on. I just felt really rotten about it. But then they all talked on the plane a lot all the way home, and maybe I felt less bad by the end of that flight. Geez, I mean, yeah, we’re getting a lot of insight into the… Listen, that was… I just had all that day, all those days of Snoregate. So, like, I was feeling pretty raw by then. Like, it’s telling that the Gamescom where I fell over and shattered my knee was, like, a really fun memory for me compared to that Gamescom. Well, I like to credit myself and my company for that. Yeah, it was great. You didn’t snore. You didn’t moan about all the blood. Yeah. Or all the other liquids. Yeah, miscellaneous knee liquids. Which would be the name of our band, I think, if we ever had one. Yeah, I think that, yeah, if you shared a room with me now, you’d find that my grotesque weight gain from lockdown has indeed made me a terrible snorer. Oh, well, yeah, I’m a snorer now as well, for the same reason. So, die a hero and live long enough to become a big fat snoring man. Oh, and on that note, why don’t you talk me through your final cover here, Matthew? Yeah, so this is my Doom cover. This was actually, this was the OXM redesign. This is the only redesign I was involved in as an editor. You know, we’d done a redesign on NGamer, we obviously then did the major redesign to Nintendo Gamer. Official Nintendo had a redesign while I was on it. But actually being involved as the editor, it was a bit more hands on because the process of redesigning magazines, at least when I did it, was always kind of top level stuff was done by the kind of editor and senior editors and our editors. You didn’t bring the whole team in because it would just be too many cooks and then maybe like you finessed it with more input from the team. So it was kind of interesting being involved in this process. I was really, really proud of this redesign. You know, when we took over OXM, I was obviously really happy to have the job and I got to move back to Bath and I got to continue writing about games. But at the same time, it never felt like 100% mine. Going from all those Nintendo mags to an Xbox mag is obviously a bit of a jump. This is the time actually where going through this process, I felt like I owned the mag a bit more. It came out the other end. I thought it was quite a smart magazine. I thought it was designed to champion good writing. It was a very writer-friendly mag. Lots of juicy word counts without feeling too hectic. Mark Wynn, the art editor on OXM, is just an absolute magazine genius. He did such a beautiful job on it. It may not look massively different to our other OXM things, but basically the big change was we had this quite tiled design on the cover. So the main cover hit was always in this sort of square box and then we had the four hits underneath. Almost a bit more like the wallet design but it shifted to a see-through bag so you could kind of see more of it. So the cover had to do a bit more heavy lifting than say that Metal Gear cover which was inside a wallet. But I really liked it as a design to show off like good game art. It let us have some really clear hits. It was very easy to read. It was always very easy to work with. So I picked this particular one because it was the first one. I mean, Is is another unnameable character from Doom. Beefy Ted. Beefy Ted, that’s his name. We were really into the game. Doom was looking great. I mean, we were behind it as an actual game. Again, never had a great feel for whether there was a massive appetite for it. The art is, you know, Doom either is or isn’t your cup of tea, but I thought it was quite dynamic and filled the space and sort of showed off the design of what we were trying to do quite nicely. There was a lot of debate about what we put on the redesign cover to kind of make use of this space. I like the Gears of War 4 hit, which is even the wind is trying to kill you on Xbox One, which is true. That’s the most interesting thing about Gears of War 4. The wind is deadly. I quite like the future of Xbox One. Could the next-gen already be here? Anything which kind of lets you talk next-gen before it’s ready is always good. Yeah, I was just, you know, fond of the redesign, so fond of this as a kind of an encapsulation of that process. Yeah, so Mag Redesigns are an interesting thing. So the Mag Redesign process was largely done, it was driven partly by senior people, but then we did a lot of it ourselves on team, a lot of refining. And on PC Gamer it was mostly coming up with a new front end to the magazine, because the beginning of magazines are really tough to figure out. If you have a new section, it ends up being out of date by the time people have it in their hands, so you kind of want to go with more of a feature section before you get to the feature section. But then what are you putting in it that’s different from a preview section or your feature section already? It looked really nice afterwards though. And yeah, working on redesigns, it’s a cool thing. It’s really nice to update the fonts and to see it look more contemporary. PC Gamer, when I took over, was starting to look a little bit creaky. I think it had just been the same since the mid-naughties or possibly the late naughties. So it had been a while. And yeah, it was nice to give it a shot in the arm. It had been a long time coming. But yeah, I think this looks nice. And I did have a question for you, though, which is why did Doom and not like Quantum Break or Gears of War 4 seem like the thing to lead with on an Xbox redesign cover? I think in terms of what we actually had, I think we had done a Gears cover quite close. In fact, Gears of War 4 was the next cover where I think we had access lined up. That’s what probably why we did we held off Quantum Break. We just we weren’t really feeling it. We did a preview cover. We did a preview cover, like a few issues before this one. So we bet on Doom. I think it was just we just wanted something new. Like, I don’t think we wanted to kick off the redesign with a with just like something scraped together from like nothing. Like we actually wanted access and something good, something with actual substance. So it was very much a balancing act. This definitely isn’t like the dream. This wasn’t like the dream launch game. But we didn’t have any dream games at that point. You know, it was actually I kind of wish we’d redesigned the summer before and hit that like Battlefront fallout kind of period. Halo 5. Yeah, this was just this was quite quiet. This was quite a quiet period for games for us. And, you know, it picked up again once we got to E3, because then we had like Mass Effect Andromeda, which started doing well for us and things like that. So yeah, quantum break, though. Move over Max Payne. I told you I leaned on that a lot. Yeah, and yeah, I think that it’s nice to see that exist across like multiple years, three different magazines. Yeah, it’s just like, and what move over Max? Where’s Max Payne now? Just standing to the side? Yeah, yeah. Now what? It’s quantum breaks time to shine. I feel like quantum break is the ultimate like bad timing Xbox exclusive. Like this was right at a really low moment for Xbox. And I feel like quantum break just like lost out probably like would have done quite well if it had been released like two years later or something like that. Yeah, it was rough. We definitely salvaged good issues from this period, but we had inherited first party Xbox at very low ebb. And it was not a jolly time for what you could and couldn’t rely on. Yeah, it was tough. It was the redesign to try and spice it up. Yeah, fair enough. I recall 2016 being a fairly tough time for PC Gamer Covers too, which is why I probably don’t have any of them here. Nonetheless, it was good to get a little glimpse into what it’s like to redesign a magazine, Matthew. I recall this being quite a jolly time generally as well. I feel like all the mags are firing on all cylinders at this point. We’re all certainly giving it our all, is my recollection. And all editors of a similar age doing our thing. Yeah, good times. Yeah, Matthew, there we go. We’ve, I feel like we’ve comprehensively hit the subject of covers now. Like, it was really nice to go through these because I think we have a quite a different vibe to the to the ones we covered in the From Hell episode. It’s nice to take some actual pride in our work rather than just this, the whole vibe of the podcast being like, you know, 100 times we shatter up the wall. Yeah, exactly. Because that’s not like, that is does make for like a fun, A, a fun podcast title, and like B, a lot of comedy sort of generally. But it’s not really reflective of what the experience of being a mag editor is like, which is, I would say like 75% of the time, you’re pretty happy with what you get back. Like, yeah, I have great affection for it. And I can tell just from the choices of games here are very you, Matthew. And it was nice to hear about your rationale there. But, and also just the killer anecdote about Hideo Kojima demanding your tweet comes down. The helicopters playing Cure, get them off the fucking internet. That’s, yeah, don’t worry. I got him back by telling a really unconvincing anecdote in his precious documentary. Yeah, every time he watches that, he must get and you know that he rewatches it. He’ll get to the bit with me and be like, oh, this guy didn’t even play the game. It’s so obvious. And I’m like, and you’re right. And he’s eating a Renny in the middle of the interview. I mean, unbelievable. And he’s got mayonnaise on his hoodie. Oh, well, there we go, Matthew. So another episode comes to a close. As we mentioned earlier in the episode, next week we’re going to do the Yakuza series special. We’re going to talk a bit about Judgment, which is releasing on PS5 in April. And we’ve got a special guest and as yet unknown special guest. Well, I guess now we’ve promised it’s an actual character. From the Yakuza series. So it’s going to be hard to live up to that. In the meantime, if you want to follow the podcast on Twitter, we’re Back Page Pod. If you’d like to leave us a review on Apple Podcast, that really helps our visibility. A bunch of you have left very nice reviews since we recorded our last episode. And it really is lovely to get that nice feedback. So thank you very much. We appreciate it. And if you want to follow Matthew, where can they find you Matthew on Twitter? I’m MrBazzle UnderscorePesto on Twitter. I’m Samuel W Roberts on Twitter. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now.