Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how’s things going? Have you seen Falcon and the Winter Soldier yet? I’ve seen one episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which kind of shows my feelings towards Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Was that because the theme tune was so bad that you were like offended and had to turn it off? I know that’s a problem with you and Marvel content. It was very in keeping with the rest of the Marvel universe in its total non-existence. I was quite unnerved by a new Captain America with a very strange chin. I couldn’t work out how that actor looks like that in the suit because I know what he looks like in real life. Confusing. And also, there wasn’t much Falcon and Winter Soldier. Yeah, there was Falcon and Winter Soldier separately, but not at the same time. And in therapy and running a fish shop. That’s fair enough. It’s been an extremely messy show, actually, considering it costs a report of like 20 million an episode to make. It’s like weirdly fragmented, has too many characters, quite badly plotted, loads of kind of like weird decisions. It’s a flawed product. I think they were quite, they made a quite good decision to go with one division first, actually, which is a lot tighter overall. And then weird Captain America tune. You see Captain America then going forwards, that guy? No, I don’t think so. Not to spoil what happens in the rest of the show, but like, he sort of like got, someone compared him to the Captain America from the Square Enix Avengers game, where it’s like… That’s so harsh. That’s very brutal, isn’t it? And here’s White Russell’s little ears stick out of his helmet, which looks a bit odd. And yeah, I think they’ve kind of like deliberately made him look a bit like a goon, and not as good as Steve Rogers. He looks like a villain. He looks a bit like Scully. It looks like the Red Skull a bit, I think. He’s got quite weird contours of his face. He’s got the kind of energy of like a Captain America who gets cancelled when people find loads of old bad racist tweets he did like 10 years ago. And then it’s like, well, look at the… And no one’s surprised. Everyone’s like, well, yeah, of course he is. He’s definitely got a Hail Hydra treat somewhere in his history. Yeah, exactly. Oh dear. But I did it with a winking emoji, so I didn’t mean it. Okay, fair enough. So, Matthew, this episode, we have done like Games Magazine covers from Hell and then we did like From Heaven as well. And one of our most persistently downloaded episodes and like very much our calling card episode was the Games Review Scores We Got Wrong discussion, which was like really good. It was because it was early on in the podcast for us. It was actually quite a short episode and that’s kind of shocking for us because all of ours ended up being like almost three hours long in most cases. But I guess it was just we didn’t want at the time, we were trying to like keep it lean and aim for like an hour an episode. So it was quite a lean discussion. But we thought in the same way, we did like a kind of accompanying like positive sort of covers episode. We thought it’d be a cool thing to do with reviews too. But this is quite interesting because this is I think going to be like two men being defensive about review scores from like 10 years ago. It’s that episode, I think. Well, I think the implication of the review scores we got wrong was that every other score was fine or that we stood by it or we thought we got it right. And when you go out of your way to do a review scores we got right, that’s quite a smug title. I could understand if you saw that title on your podcasting app and rolled your eyes at it of like, jeez, get over yourselves. But hopefully we’ve picked a selection of like interesting kind of games which were like divisive in some way or had some kind of story around them which makes this discussion less smug than it sounds. Yeah, I think the other key element here is that we get asked loads about reviewing. Like that’s one of the things that listeners ask the most about. I think it’s because it’s, you know, one of the sort of like the big things you do as a, you know, games media professional. And we have like a lot of experience doing it. Matthew has a lot more experience than me. I went over my review scores, actually. And like, I forget they kind of run out for me in about 2010 because I moved to the magazine Syfy now for a few years. So I was working in TV and film. But Matthew, you kind of never stopped reviewing games. And you’ve got a broad spread of like titles here from across, you know, basically from now back until 2006. So, yeah. There was arguably a point I should have been reviewing less. I think, weirdly, I reviewed a lot as an editor, probably more than other editors. But I don’t know if that just coincided with, you know, everyone having to do a bit more writing on mags because there did come a point where like team size has shrunk a bit or whatever. And after that point, it was a bit more like all hands to the deck. But, you know, I’ve always worked on mags where the editors wrote quite a lot of reviews. I continued doing that, but there is a case to be made I was a bit of a review hog, maybe on like OXM. When you talked about like doing that Metal Gear Solid V event, for example, I was like, you know, oh, are you sure you didn’t want to send a Starfire on that one? But like, you know, like you say, you’re a bit of a kind of review hog. But I kind of get it. I missed reviewing games deeper into my career on PC Gamer. We had so many writers in the US and the UK that it kind of made sense to spread the big games around a bit and for me to like not review that many big games because I had a magazine to make. And yeah, and there was a website as well and I had to kind of funnel reviews through to that. So I didn’t end up doing that many. But I think what that means is in this episode, we’re going to have like another sort of deep discussion about the process of reviewing games and reviewing specific games. So I’ve got a selection of games where I felt like I got the review scores right, where I’m going to talk about the process behind those reviews and why those scores end up the way they did. There was some, there’s a broad spread there, but Matthew’s, Matthew’s selection is like bigger and more interesting, I would say. You’ve got like, we’ll see. There’s like a good mix there of NGamer kind of titles, but then also a few kind of like more HD console stuff that I think will yield some interesting discussion. So, yeah, it’s going to be good. And maybe some personal disagreement between us. Yes, exactly, because when we were looking through this, I realised that I reviewed one of the games that Matthew rated quite highly here and gave it a bit of a miserable score. So that, I’ve saved that as a surprise. Matthew doesn’t know which one, so that will be fun to discuss. But we’ve got like a short section where we’re going to talk a bit more on our further thoughts on reviews, including a bit of how we felt about magazines we read as younger people and what we thought of their reviewing processes. And then we’re going to move on to the games. So we’ve each got a list, we’ll fire through them, we’ll talk about the scores we gave them and then we’ll justify the scores and have a big discussion about the games in question. So it should be fun. So Matthew, to kick off then, how do you factor in an outlet’s criteria when you’re assigning a score to a game for a review or you’re reviewing a game in general? How much do you think about how the specific outlet thinks about games or talks about games? Yeah, I think this is quite important. When you work on a magazine and when you work on your own magazine, you’re really, really tuned in to the mag’s voice. You know that it has a voice, you know what it’s trying to do, you know what kind of scores it’s giving, you know what it values, what it doesn’t value. I’ve always found it a bit weird that that wouldn’t apply when you’re writing for someone else as well. So, you know, when I was working on NGamer, I used to do quite a lot of freelance, like cross feature. I used to do a fair amount for Games Master and Edge, which are very, very different magazines coming from very different places. I felt like it was absolutely essential to appreciate like where they were coming from whenever I wrote those reviews. And I definitely gave scores in Edge that like I wouldn’t have given in, you know, they would have been very different in NGamer or Games Master, for example. Where do you sort of sit on it? Yeah, I agree with that. There was when I was doing freelance for Games TM for the first time, Games TM being a mag that like, you know, was sort of courting a similar audience to Edge and, you know, cultivating a similar sort of credibility in how it talked about games. I did feel like I had to be slightly harsher, yeah. It felt like I’d almost be dropping a point. It maybe wasn’t as scientific as that, but, you know, if something got like 80 in play, I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable about giving it a 7 in Games TM necessarily. I think it really helps actually when mags have printed in their, you know, the front of their review section, like, okay, this is what the scores represent. And as a freelancer, I would use that as a kind of like metric of, okay, well, they say that like, you know, 50 is what they consider, you know, middle of the road. And then like 80 is what they consider a great game. Then above that, it gets a bit more like, you know, only give a 10 to an elite tier, you know, all time classic, which is something that Edge has kind of maintained over the years too. But Edge had that infamous score box, which had Edge scores explained and it just said 10, 10, 9 is 9, 8 is 8. And it was just the numbers to let us that I’m sure that’s something that happened. I’m not just imagining that. No, I vaguely recall that. Was that like maybe the early noughties or maybe throughout? Yeah, that was definitely earlier Edge. But I remember a similar box in games because James TM almost had that like scoring philosophy in the mag. Was it about five, seven and nine or something? Vaguely rings a bell, yeah. This again might be earlier games TM, but it was like, you know, I definitely remember in like some of the first issues I picked up where it was kind of these are the, you know, these are actually the three most important scores. You know, we’re reclaiming five as average and seven is a good game and, you know, nine is a exceptional game or something. Yeah. What do you make of the discussion of what average is? Because I think I don’t try not to get too invested in like conversations about Metacritic. But the fact that when you get into like sevens, that Metacritic color changes from green to yellow is kind of annoying because you see it like, well, you are suggesting that average starts here a little bit. And I think that’s kind of like helped warp commenters’ minds about what an average score is. And I always try to think of like 50 as average. Actually, no matter what outlet I was writing for, I don’t think any of them would say that like 70 was average. But that was a thing that like seemed to grow in the audience’s mind that the seven was average or maybe like the review scores from the past helps tell that story a little bit. What do you think of that? Yeah, you know, it’s this kind of feeling that someone would read a review of a game that got like 55 and a game that got 61. They wouldn’t buy either of those games. I think that was the case for the seven average. It’s like once you drop below 70, like most people wouldn’t venture into that area in their like buying habits. So, you know, it’s kind of pointless putting anything there if you’re trying to be like subtle about it and go, no, it’s above average. It’s a 58, you know, and it’s like, well, you’ve doomed that game. You may as well just take it out back and shoot it in the head. But yeah, it’s a weird thing. Like, I always, I got the impression that like, you know, for as much as we said, five was average and did work to that. I never thought, you know, I thought people’s cutoff point was way higher than that. You know, it was probably wasn’t even seven. You know, it felt like, you know, I felt bad giving a game seventy nine instead of eighty because I felt like that seven cursed it in some way. My sort of attempts to remedy that a little bit was when we redesigned official Nintendo magazine, we bought in a bronze. Basically anything in the 70s got a bronze award and then anything in the 80s got got the silver award and then 90s and above got a gold award. And I felt I actually did feel like we shifted our scoring accordingly or people were more comfortable giving a game a seven score because it had this arbitrary bronze award. Like it still felt special, right, which which I think helped. Yeah, I think that average becomes quite a weird term in games as well because what is an average game like it’s like you kind of the score you’re describing is the the feeling of like I have no real strong feelings on this one way or another. And I feel like in most cases, a game will provoke some kind of feeling from you. Even if you’re even if you’re in your head, you think, well, this is what this outlet would consider an average game. It ends up being quite like a weird arbitrary thing, I think. And yeah, quite a strange thing to unpack. So, yeah, it’s weird that you do get a sense of like there’s definitely some reviews where I got a sense of like score as weapon where you’re like, you know, I think this game is quite weird. And it’s good, but it’s super weird. And I think the weirdness of the concept or the fact that it’s quite a hard sell will put people off. So I may be going to give it a little bit higher score to kind of get people over that hump. I mean, that happened quite a bit on NGamer, just because we were dealing with some quite weird Wii games. And you’re like, you know what, we’re going to champion this one, we’re going to get we’re going to get behind it, we’re going to give it and we’re going to give it a 90. Because that’s quite hard to look away from. That’s quite hard to sort of like, you know, all that brings it into people’s cut definitely like, you know, catches people’s eye and draws them out of maybe draws them out of their comfort zone. And you have to be careful because you obviously don’t want to kind of like oversell something that’s baffling. But I, you know, I think with things like that, like Little King’s story would be a great example of a game which is quite a hard sell. It’s quite weird, but I also felt it was really in tune with what NGamer was about. It had a similar sense of humor. I thought, you know what, if you like this mag, I think you will like this game. I’m quite comfortable in saying that. So, you know, it almost kind of wielded the score as a bit of a weapon in that case to kind of sort of punch through that weirdness. Yeah, I did that a few times. I remember one example of that I can think of is, I don’t know if you remember the game Fuel on Xbox 360. Yeah, so I gave that like a 7 out of 10. I think you think every outlet either gave me like 4 to 6 out of 10. But I thought it was like this gigantic open world game from Asobo Studio, who I believe worked on Fight Simulator last year. Yeah, so they’re kind of like a giant map approach to making games. What did it eventually kind of find like the right place for it basically. But I quite liked it. It was just had this very varied sort of like landscapes, this giant open world, loads of different like open world racing activities you could go and do. Maybe it wasn’t the most exciting racing game in the world, but it did have these big weather effects that were kicking every now and then. And I remember thinking there’s just a little bit more to it where I thought, well, do you know what, like if I give this a 5 out of 10, it will basically just vanish out of people’s minds entirely. Well, you give it a 7 out of 10. I think there’s an implicit like, if you see this on the cheap, then don’t be afraid to pick it up and see what you think of it. Which is I think is a fine way to use a review score. You almost, that’s almost like a more useful criteria at the start of a review section. It’s kind of like a, you know, what these scores are actually saying is like, buy it when it’s a fiverr kind of thing. And it’s, you know, this score is going to kind of kick in more in like two years time. You’re going to appreciate this. Well, there’s this sense of like, you know, a lot of people talk about seven, you know, there are some games, you get these sort of seven out of ten games, which are like nine out of tens for some people. And, you know, they’re quite kind of cherished. You know, I used to put the Yakuza games in that, in that kind of, in that selection. I think they’re now kind of, you know, be above and beyond that and into the realms of like genuine nines or whatever. But yeah, there’s sort of, slightly hard to kind of pin down sense of, oh, this is more special than a seven, but it is a seven. Yeah. What do you think like a quintessential modern seven out of ten game is? Like if I just asked you straight off the cuff, what does a seven out of ten look like now? Yeah, I always think, like, maybe just got Yakuza on the brain. Like, I always tend to think of like binary domain. Right, yeah. Like binary domain, like I absolutely love it, but I also feel it is a seven out of. Ten. So that’s kind of that kind of space I’d slip into. Yeah. It’s quite a hard thing to pin down. We did a RPS podcast all about these seven out of tens, and it was completely baffling for the co-host, Nate. Like every game he suggested was just like either terrible or actually too good to be a seven out of ten. And it was just like, I don’t get this stupid criteria, but I know it is. You know it when you see it. Yeah, I was thinking like something like I would always give an EDF game like a seven out of ten. I could never give it harder than that, but you know. That’s a classic seven out of ten series. Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I know something like Immortals Phoenix Rising. Do you give that a seven? That seems like a seven kind of thing. Yeah, I think that’s a seven. Yeah. Yeah. So it does end up being quite strange. But yeah, I think like just having to live with the sort of mag brain for so many years means that like Nate was probably the correct one in that situation. But the rest of you have been so badly warped by working games media that you were. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, because RPI sometimes doesn’t have scores as well. Like a lot of people have written online, you’re getting into the realms now where they haven’t, you know, learned writing scores or they haven’t written scores or they haven’t had to score games before. So it all seems completely baffling and probably quite a name. But I love it. I love those numbers. I’ve still got those numbers in my head when I’m scoring or when I’m reviewing an RPS. I’ve got a really weird example here of a game that, like, I didn’t give it a 7 out of 10, I gave it a 6 out of 10. But I remember having, like, conflicted feelings at the time and feeling like people were being slightly unfair to it. So this is a really weird game to sort of stand for. But do you remember Eat Lead The Return of Matt Hazzard? Yeah. Right. So I don’t think this is a great game. I gave it a 6 out of 10 for X360. And I think it needed, like, more good jokes for what it was. But I did think that it was so unusual and specific. It’s the sort of game you would never see now, like a boxed game that is a parody of other games. Will Arnett voices this kind of, like, over-the-hill kind of action hero and then encounters lots of characters that are spoofs of different video game characters. And it was, like, not considered that funny and got, like, 53 on Metacritic. But I do remember thinking it was quite a warm-hearted game for what it was. And, like, I almost gave it a 7 out of 10, but I remember thinking, the jokes have to be slightly better to go with this. Otherwise, if I’d have given it a 7 out of 10, I’d have been at the top of the Metacritic page and then I would have had to, like, live it down. So, yeah. Did you play that game, Matthew? No, I remember, like, Xbox World reviewing it in the office and just groaning at it the whole time. Because it kind of committed the kind of cardinal sin of making jokes about bad gameplay design and then having that bad gameplay design, which I know is, like, a huge bugbear for a lot of people. Yeah, I think it was, like, probably the first game to do that though, or at least one of them, and then… Yeah, it’s weird because I remember, like, people were instantly tired of it. Because now when anyone does that, everyone’s like, oh, god, not this again. And you’re like, well, only, like, two games do this. So it’s kind of funny that people are that annoyed. E.Led and Far Cry Blood Dragon, are those the two? I mean, there’s probably some more. I do hate it when they’re like, oh, this is a shit puzzle that you’re doing, and you’re like, yep, it sure is shit. It’s funny because I think that Far Cry Blood Dragon was a really good little standalone game. Particularly if you hadn’t played Far Cry 3 and it was just, you know, here’s, like, a mini open world, some cool weapons, quite a nice, like, reskin of what Far Cry is all about. But I think now when critics remember that game, they just think about the jokes about tutorials and it being a shit tutorial. And they’re just so anti that, that the prospect of being positive about that game just doesn’t even enter their minds. But, yeah. So Matthew, the last thing I kind of wanted to touch on with the further thoughts on reviews before we get into our games was we had a little think about this, but has there been a review in the past that you fiercely disagreed with as a reader, either now or a long time ago? Yeah, I mean, a famous one, and it’s like quite a tired one at this point because everyone was annoyed about it back then as well, with the edge-giving Mario Kart Double Dash of 5 out of 10, which was mad. I, you know, I bought that game because back then, you know, I was also reading NGC and, you know, they gave it a whatever, nine, you know, nine or high 80s, I can’t remember off the top of my head, as Mario Kart tended to get. At that point, it was just another good Mario Kart. And that was probably like my most played game of university. And we played that game loads. And the weird thing about that review is like it’s 100, it’s correct in everything it says about the game. It just doesn’t, it didn’t like anything it did, you know. So it identifies that it’s where Mario Kart becomes a bit more of a party game. You know, it’s a bit more kind of silly and madcap. But actually that works brilliantly. That’s why Double Dash was good. But they’re just like, you know, the review was almost like, oh, Mario Kart is no longer this serious racing game. And you’re like, I don’t think it ever really was. I know. It’s not like Gran Turismo is suddenly, you know, you’re racing is like a monkey in a fricking dinosaur or whatever. It’s Mario Kart is just more Mario Kart. You know, it doesn’t really have many more modes or anything wildly different to previous Mario Karts. It just delivers that like party split screen atmosphere really, really well and kind of got punished for that, which I never really understood. But that period, that kind of early noughties, I think was like edge at its most edge. You know, the cliched idea of what edge magazine is like is probably based on that period. Yeah, they’re quite harsh. It’s definitely had like much fairer periods. I’ve always enjoyed the magazine and I like that you do get a sense of a team. Even though they’re anonymous, you get a sense of like a collection of values behind it and you can’t really pin it on people. But, you know, there were periods of it where it just gelled better for me. You know, when I started Future, it was around the time that Edge had quite a big staff change. You know, it had like Rich Stanton, Martin Davies, Alex Wilshire came on. It was a great period. Like, my tastes just happened to align with theirs and, you know, I thought I really kind of clicked with what they were saying and thinking about games during that time. So it also makes reviewing a Marrow Cart for Edge is really, really difficult because you’ve got that, you know, that score in the back. You’re like, do I honor this? That’s going back to that question about, you know, when you factor in an outlet’s criteria, is when the magazine has said something that you really disagree with about a pass game. Do you honor that opinion? Do you stick with it? Do you score relative to that? I remember sort of connected to this. I reviewed Dead Island, the first one. I absolutely hated it. It’s one of my least favorite games that I’ve reviewed in this period of time. It was so busted, so obnoxious, just so… I hate everything about that game. And then I had to review the expansion for OXM, and I reviewed it as if it was just a follow-up review to the expansion, to the first game, which I also hated. And so basically carried on my hatred of it, without looking into OXM had rated the first one, or had given it a bit of a pass, because they’re like, oh, it’s dumb co-op fun. And that’s like one of the few times I remember, you know, reading the comments where they were like, well, this review’s mad because it completely goes against what OXM feels, and I kind of kicked myself for not having looked at it. I mean, I couldn’t have said anything different about it, but I may have tackled the review differently, giving it the same score, but maybe being a bit more careful, like, oh no, how the mighty have fallen, even though I didn’t think the mighty had fallen, it was just like, it’s continued idiot game crawling in the mud for us, I was concerned. So, yeah, that’s that seemed like a kind of raw sort of, I don’t know, I’ve seen some people kind of like that game and, you know, sort of really going to go to bat for it. But yeah, I remember playing a couple of hours and thinking this is not my sort of thing. Also, Dead Island in particular was something where I felt that that first trailer was so obnoxious. So like, I hated that. I hated the hype around that trailer. Like, I remember like getting an email on the day that that trailer was released saying, oh, have you seen that people like Simon Pegg and Zachary Levi are saying, look how good this trailer is. And everyone watched the trailer and were like, well, the game won’t be anything like that. And the game wasn’t anything like that. And I think that permanently soured me against Dead Island as a game and a series, to the point where Dead Island 2 tried to do something similar when that was announced, a game that has never come out and I think has changed developers at least twice at this point. Yeah. And yeah. I’m making it at the moment. Entwine. It’s entwine. Oh, yeah. Little Dead Island story. I remember another person who was reviewing the first game at the same time as me. They had this problem where like for a story critical mission, there was this NPC who had to like go and unlock a door for you. But they sort of stopped moving in the middle of this forest. And their save file or whatever had basically saved at that point. That’s the only save they had. And there was nothing they could do in the game until this character went and opened the door. And they got in contact with the publisher and said, listen, you know, this this problem, this character won’t open this door. I don’t know what to do. And they were like, oh, don’t worry, this happens a lot. And there is a fix for it. And the fix was you were to get this very specific vehicle. You had to drive behind the NPC at like three miles an hour and nudge them through this forest to get into the door. If you went too fast, you’d run them over and kill them. If you went too slow, you know, it wouldn’t have enough nudging power. So you had to drive at like three miles an hour through this forest, pushing this NPC to their trigger point. And I remember thinking like, that is not a game you can give anything more than three out of ten. Like if they’re like, oh, yeah, that problem is the known solution to that. That isn’t a fix. That’s madness. I mean, like, what would the patch notes say for that? You no longer have to nudge this prick to his objective point. Yeah, I sort of I think that it’s hard not to. I mean, I was always very conscious of Outlet’s previous scores because as a kind of like nerd kid, I was obsessed with like looking at the kind of directory in each of these magazines. Like, this is a real kind of staple of UK mags in particular where they would have either like a few pages dedicated to their best scores for games or in the early days of consoles, it would be easier to have like the entire range of scores. This is what the official PlayStation 2 magazine did. And this is why I was like, you know, I remember like they’d highlight in bronze if it got 8 out of 10, then gold if it was 10 and all that stuff. And I used to pour over those scores. So when I came to be a critic, I was quite conscious of, you know, I’ve talked about before in the, I think it was on the Game Review Scores We Got Wrong episode that I felt like I had to give Metal Gear Solid 4 more than the darkness because I just thought, oh, well, you know, I kind of got the darkness wrong, but, you know, Metal Gear Solid 4 is this like mega hype kind of PS3 game. And, you know, ended up kind of just like sort of like breaking the entire system, I suppose. But, you know, it’s tough. Yeah, absolutely. The more awkward conversations I’ve had with regards to that were like lower scores, like real beast things. Like I’m more nervous of an absolute like, you know, the tens and the twenties because it’s quite hard for a game to get down there, I feel. Like I, you know, and having played a lot of truly terrible games on the Wii and the DS, like I feel like I have a good gauge of what a truly like one out of ten or two out of ten looks like. And I’m quite distrusting of them when I see them online. Like I often feel like it’s for effect. There was a bit of this recently with that Balan Wonderworld, Wonderland, the Yuji Naka one. Wonderworld, yeah. Yeah, Wonderworld, where, you know, there are a couple of people really going all out on like, this is the worst game I’ve ever played, which is pure like hyperbole. And it just, you know, if it is, then you are very lucky that that’s the worst thing you’ve played. I mean, that’s it may only be a four out of ten or a five out of ten, but there’s a huge gulf between that and a one out of ten. And yeah, so that I had to have a few more kind of like, come on, you know, is this really this or are you just doing this for effect conversations rather than, you know, this is a nine, but I think it’s a seven. That didn’t happen that often. Yeah, for sure. I had like a few reviews to mention of like stuff I disagree with as a kid too. Oh yeah, yeah, sorry. No, no, that’s fine. I was like, so this will come up in a future podcast, I’m sure. But Final Fantasy X is a game that I was like huge on as a kid. And I remember that was my first encounter with the like, you know, what might be termed the sort of like mega harsh sort of edge reviewing criteria. They gave it like a 6 out of 10, which I actually kind of I can see why edge of that time would feel that way. Like there are a few barriers to enjoying that game, like the terrible voice acting that I think that some critics just couldn’t quite get over that hump. I found that sort of interesting. Edges scores generally are interesting actually. I think like you say, there was a certain time where they seemed more harsh than other times, but they actually like in 2012 ran a feature on their most controversial scores. And like, yeah, yeah, I don’t you probably remember this because you’re out future at the time. But like, it’s quite interesting. I guess I guess it was the magazine equivalent of what we do on this podcast. But like Mario Kart was one of the ones they reexamined. There’s a few others here that I thought I’d kind of like pick out as like they’re quite interesting scores to read now. So Dragon Age Origins got five from Edge, which I think is is quite harsh. But if you’re playing the console version, I don’t necessarily I could see why you would come to that conclusion. The game is simply not the same to play on a console as it is on PC. But, you know, still very low for a game that’s got a pretty good story. Very memorable, obviously kicked off this very popular series. Another one here is Borderlands got six, the original. I don’t think the first Borderlands is any way near as good as Borderlands 2. I don’t know, but all the fundamentals were there. Like the gunplay felt good and the sort of setting did feel fresh at the time. It wasn’t as, you know, over time, you know. I think I gave that like a seven for Xbox World. Well, you know, I mean, I guess opinions on it differ as well. Yeah, I could imagine giving that a six in Edge, actually. I don’t think it was me. I don’t remember doing that. On the other kind of side of it, they picked out Turok 2 Seeds of Evil, which got a nine. It’s quite funny, actually, because this week just saw the release of Shadow Man Remastered on PC. I’ve been playing it. Did you really? Yeah. Shadow Man is so a game that I thought as a kid, one of the first games I remember thinking as a kid, this looks like a kind of like seven out of ten game, but every outlet has given it like 90 or like… It was so edge lord game because it’s like serial killers and you’re going to rip this thing open. You know, it was a real like when you’re 15, it’s like an 18 rated game that you really wanted. Like it really sort of scratched that itch. I got similar vibes from like Soldier of Fortune. You know, it’s that kind of like, oh yeah, I’d love some violence. I owned the original Shadow Man on PC when it came out. Yeah, and I bought it again purely for the nostalgia because I wanted to dip in and remind myself what it was like. Yeah, I did the same with the original Turok a few years ago, actually. And like, I will say this for those Night Dive Studios kind of redo. They’re really, really nice. They know how to make the games look good on modern PCs and run well and all that stuff. But it’s quite funny that they seem to be doubling down on all of these acclaimed games that haven’t really stood the test of time. But yeah. I think it was a different Edge feature. Edge did a feature about games that should have been 10s, I think, which was separate to that one about Scores We Got Wrong, which were like, or it was part of an anniversary issue. They did a sort of like, these are maybe 10s. And one of them was interesting because it was Red Dead Redemption, the first, which I reviewed for Edge and gave a 9. And I don’t think it is a 10, the first one. That is actually a review I was really proud of. I thought I absolutely had it down. I actually almost gave it an 8. What, the original Red Dead? I really hate the end. The last third of Red Dead Redemption 1, I actually don’t rate it. Which everyone is like, this is when games grew up. I don’t know, the western fantasy thing it was tapping into. To end with all that rancid farming again, you were like, no, thank you. But I’m grown up and you’re like, yeah, it’s boring. What a boring way of… That’s not the end I want of that story. I am so in the minority on this that I’m glad I didn’t give it an 8 on that round. Because, you know, that ending is held to be a classic. But I still wouldn’t give it a 10, I don’t think. I think you’re misremembering that as the last third of the game as well. That’s more like the last fifth of the game. Like it’s a pretty small portion of it. The last sort of chunk of it, you know. Whatever happens in the, you know, that chunk of the map on the far right. Well, I guess basically after the big sort of like snow base, snowy mountain base assault, basically, where you go back to your farmstead and all that stuff. Yeah, I personally rated that, but I don’t know, people did go on about it a lot. So, yeah, my sort of bugbear with reviews of Red Dead is people who were down on the Mexico bits. To be honest, this is more of like a retrospective, oh, it wasn’t Mexico bad kind of take on Red Dead rather than what people were saying at the time. The reviews were like all positive for Red Dead, which is why I’m sort of like restraining not to sound too defensive here, because I really do love that game. I loved it too. I loved it to the score of 9 out of 10, which, you know, is a big score for Edge, I think. It’s pretty good. I just thought, I tell you what, and actually it’s something they carry on doing, I don’t want this to turn into like a weird Red Dead podcast, but it kind of really bugged me that it had all these mechanics that only existed for like two minutes. So you go to a place, you learn to do something, then you use it for that story mission, and then it basically vanishes and never comes back again. I just thought it was a very sort of weirdly wasteful game, in a way. Like it felt like it had, like, yeah, gameplay mechanics and equipment that could have been used in other interesting ways, but, you know, it had like no interest in being a kind of traditional sandbox. It was so sort of led through that, and the stories were so especially scripted, which is obviously true, you know, that’s just the rock star direction now. And I didn’t really have the same problem in Red Dead 2, even though it’s exactly the same. It does all those mistakes again. It didn’t jump out at me. It jumped out at me more than. Yeah. Maybe I’m completely wrong on the end of Red Dead. I don’t know. I think that everyone remembers that as a very sort of like big moment. It’s chasing off like horses again. I was like, oh, I’m doing this again. It’s like, oh, Christ, what a rubbish ending. I understand the epilogue of Red Dead Redemption 2 has got a bit of that as well. Well, yeah, that’s the thing. It’s that thing I’ve mentioned with Naughty Dog as well. This habit games have now of going like, I’m going to slow it right down because I’m grown up. And you’re like, that’s such a boring trick. I’ve seen that now. People need to stop doing that. It isn’t classy to have a game that goes one thing and then goes, oh, I’m going to completely zigzag and become incredibly zen because that’s how sophisticated I am. There is a sophisticated way of doing like balls out action. You just haven’t found it. So do that instead of, you know, I don’t want the game shouldn’t build to look in around a house like that’s that’s just not what I want. Fight God. I want to fight God in space. It’s an interesting point. The true dark heart of like Naughty Dog Games and Red Dead Games is they are games about killing people and it feeling good. Like that’s like that is the dark truth of those games. And yeah, I appreciate what you mean. Like they’re kind of talking around that somewhat by having these sorts of sections. But yeah. You’ll forget the 20 hours of murdering if you do like five minutes of sad guitar strumming at the end. And you’re like, yeah. Don’t you see? Like you hung out with your son for a while. It doesn’t matter if you killed like 400 dudes and like 80 bears to try and make like a new jacket or whatever. Yeah. So yeah, that was well, we should have done a rabbit hole there. Yeah, I should say that I don’t personally think that there’s anything wrong with these scores. In fact, I actually thought that Edge were really good counter-programming to a lot of the mags at the time, which were very big on hype. And Edge was kind of like a call ahead, sort of prevailing sometimes in the midst of that. I think that’s the reason the Edge 10 was so exciting. It continues to be exciting. But back then it was a real like, oh wow, you know, if it’s got past these guys, it must be amazing. The only other thing I was going to raise here, Matthew, is that Metal Gear Solid 2 was the first game where I remember fiercely disagreeing the other way with critics, where it was such, this was like, you know, for the time the most overhyped game there had ever been, Metal Gear Solid 2. It was, you know, they had this demo with Zone of the Enders. They had been like doing these like slow drip reveals of the game for like two years before it released. And while I think everyone remembers the tanker section very fondly, all of the kind of like facility stuff on that oil rig with Raiden is more coolly received. And some of the UK mags were a bit discerning about this. Like I think PSM and Play were both like, gave it like low 80s around there, which I think is probably the correct score for the time. But there were also a lot of 10s. And then I think Edge, sorry, I think Games Master gave it 96%. And Metal Gear Solid 2 just, Metal Gear Solid 2 wasn’t that good. It was one of the first games I played and thought, well, I know there are like loads of good ideas in this. And I know that the sort of stealth simulation stuff is really good. But it’s a really short game. And fucking loads of it is about diffusing bombs with like coolant spray. And like, I just, I remember it was one of the first things. Games Master love coolant spray. Everyone knows this. It was, it probably just seemed so lofty and like ambitious. And obviously a lot of people talk about how prescient it was and discussing the kind of like age of misinformation. All of that stuff is in there. But I mean, I don’t think it makes a game better being in there. It’s just like, yeah, it’s like, oh, look, I decided to attach my like thesis, you know, in the kind of like read me of a game. And it’s like, well, I didn’t I don’t necessarily need that to enjoy it more. And I think that you just sort of you didn’t get the same level of like fun, stealth action experience you did in the original MGS. And it wasn’t very replayable either the second game. So I remember that being like one occasion where I was quite down on critics take on that one. Do you have any memories of that, Matthew? I felt like we’ve talked about this before in the podcast. And again, like I’m very much a minority on this. I sort of felt that way about TimeSplitters because they were so critically lauded. And the game just isn’t for me. Like I can appreciate what TimeSplitters is and what it’s doing. It’s just not my cup of tea. And that was where I realised like, oh, all these 90s. 90 doesn’t necessarily mean I am going to love it. It just meant everyone on this mag loved it. And so yeah, those sort of jump out as like purchasing decisions. But then likewise, I bought things which had been slammed. And then, yes, they were shit. And I should have just listened. I was rotten for buying James Bond games. Even though they were all terrible after GoldenEye. Of being like, yeah, maybe this will be the one. And then the mag score, it would be like, it’s a little bit 70. And I’d be like, maybe I’ll be the one who likes it. Nope. All right. So yeah, Matthew, I was wondering if you had any more thoughts on like Game Review Scores that you were sort of down on. As you noted in our show notes, you’ve got Mario 3D World. Did you have anything on that? No, I was only mentioning this one because I thought IGN very recently gave it quite a stingy seven out of ten, the Switch re-release, which at the time, when I hadn’t played it, I went, hmm, it seems a bit harsh. Like the reviews seem quite down on this game, which was, you know, it was like a lower score than they gave it when it originally came out, even though it’s now better and has an extra bit. Now that I’ve played the extra bit, I got it for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it was absolutely fantastic. I thought Bowser’s Fury was great. I really, really enjoyed it. So that 7’s pretty harsh, I think, but, you know, it’s a 7. It’s not like a 5, but I thought I just wanted to flag up that I really liked Bowser’s Fury. That’s cool. Yeah, we should talk about that more on our next episode, when we discuss stuff we’ve been playing this year. But yeah, cool. So in which case, Matthew, we’ll take a brief break, and then we’re going to come back with the Game Review scores that we got right, or according to us anyway. Matthew, welcome back, it’s time. Oh, thanks. Oh, this happens on every single podcast, and I never know how to start the next section. So, this is where we talk about the Game Review Scores We Got Right. So, I have a few of them, Matthew, here, but we’re gonna do the same thing we did on Game Review Scores We Got Wrong, where we alternate one by one. Eventually, I’ll run out, and then Matthew can just talk on and on about the games that he reviewed. So, I think it’ll be fun. So, first up, Matthew, I’m going with my Metal Gear Solid 5, the Phantom Pain Review Score of 93% that I gave for PC Gamer in 2015. So, I don’t think this is an overtly controversial score. The reason I’ve put it in here is because the discourse about this game being unfinished really fucking pisses me off. Basically, what people are upset about is the fact that there is a cut chapter or two that resolves the story of Liquid Snake in the game. There’s a young boy called Eli who’s running around. It’s the clone of Big Boss. It’s who would grow up to be Liquid Snake. And there was a cut chapter where he’s in a mech and you fight him in a mech. I believe that’s what they did. And it didn’t make it out to release, but they talked about it on one of the making of DVDs. I don’t know if that’s the one where you featured on the documentary about the game, Matthew. Let’s hope so. I love, by the way, that you have an IMDb page. Yeah, that’s rad. And it’s just the picture of me from that documentary. Yeah, that’s something that we learned via one of our listeners on Twitter. So thank you for that. That was hilarious. So yeah, Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain. I think that there was such a push and pull with this one of how traditional Metal Gear Solid fans felt about the story in this game, which was quite poorly represented. There isn’t much of it. It feels like there’s deliberately few cutscenes in there. Whether that’s because they didn’t have much time with Kiefer Sutherland or not is hard to determine. But nonetheless, it’s very paired back compared to the story of the PS2 games, for example. So I think that some people struggle with that, but I was very keen to reward it as a rich, stealth simulation game, where I feel like it’s extremely complete by comparison. So people are upset about the story being cut short, but I don’t think there was anything significant content-wise that really went. If you’ve done the Sally Anthropos boss fight in Metal Gear Solid V, you’ll know that mech fights are not the strongest suit of the game. It really is just about those going around Afghanistan or the Angola-Zaire border, is that right? Basically just tormenting soldiers at outposts and doing funny shit. And set to a banging 80s soundtrack. Exactly, sending in your dog to kill a guy with a knife and calling in your bikini sniper to headshot a dude. I mean, yeah, very silly game. I think it’s actually a very complete feeling game when you factor in the idea that you can keep unlocking tools long after you’ve finished the main missions. You can keep going and keep doing more stuff and unlocking weird hand attachments for Snake and weapon upgrades and stuff like that. So, yeah, I think that even though people might have turned on this game a little bit and are still down on the fact that the story doesn’t give them everything they wanted to, I stick with 93%. I think that was correct. What do you think, Matthew? Yeah, I think so. I gave this a 10 in AXM, so I was big behind it. I stand by it. I think it’s the best game Kojima’s made as a technical game to play. It may not tick all your boxes, like, lore and cutscene-wise, but that’s not really my favorite thing. I’m much more interested in Kojima, the kind of stealth game trickster, than Kojima, the, you know, visionary. Yeah, I mean, I just… To ignore… There’s so much good you have to ignore to be upset with this game. As an actual stealth game, it’s just phenomenal. Like, one of the best, if not my favorite, stealth game of all time. And, you know, it’s got more actual game to play than the entire Metal Gear series combined. So… just about. Yeah, I felt the same thing. I mean, this was an interesting one in that, like, we got to play it early and review it before it came out on the mag we did anyway. So, like, there was no idea of the discourse at all that was going to emerge from it. I remember just thinking, like, coming out of that review session, we played it for a week, it was a week-long review event, I remember just sitting there and coming out and being like, wow, this is absolutely phenomenal, what an amazing thing, everyone’s going to love this so much. And they were all complaining because it didn’t have something that they saw in a second of a trailer or something, and you were like, okay, you know, these people are thickos, what can you do? You know, you can’t deal with someone that stupid. Yeah, it’s a great game. I can sort of like, the only thing I could maybe sympathise with if you add it, you know, this sense of like, this is going to be it, this is Kojima’s last go of it, and you know, the fact that it’s a prequel meant it could only do so much. You know, you weren’t going to get new, you know, it wasn’t going to go anywhere new because it was working towards a set ending. I think, you know, maybe if it has a big story floor, it has the big story floor that all prequels have in that, you know, they’re kind of, quite kind of hemmed in with what they can actually do. But that’s basically it. Yeah, I think the real tragedy of this game is that we didn’t get to see what the next version of it would have been. Like there was the foundation here to build, you know, even like richer games and more exciting stealth games in different settings. It’s all there. Like finally, you know, Kojima had come up with like a very sort of modern feeling stealth game that could have like lasted the test of time. Really nice feeling movement and shooting. It was all perfect. It just, yeah, it’s a shame that it didn’t really go anywhere. But I suppose it went to Metal Gear Survive, which we’ll have, if we ever get Stanton on the podcast, we’ll have to have him talk about Metal Gear Survive. Why don’t you hit me with one of yours, Matthew? So I’ll kick off with Wii Music, the much maligned Wii Music, which I gave 89%. This is, I do stand by it. That’s why this is in this podcast. I think Wii Music was really, really misunderstood. I think it came sort of, not, I guess, sort of towards the tail end of like the big plastic instrument boom. I think people had such a set idea in their head of how a music rhythm game was meant to behave. It was basically meant to be a guitar hero and you hit cues set to like amazing blockbuster tunes. This was a game much more about like improvisation. It’s much more about like the creation of music. It’s not just about delivering someone else’s tune perfectly by hitting buttons. It’s about making a tune perfectly with your actions. I really like the vibe and attitude. I thought it was really interesting that someone was taking that approach to a music game. I think it showed us that games didn’t just have to be guitar hero or rock band. It taps into the way you hum along to a tune or you tap out a little tune, you know, the way you play little drums with your fingers or whatever when you’re listening to a tune. Big flaw of this game is it does all that with this terrible soundtrack. The soundtrack of like verging on nursery rhymes. It’s all a little bit like My Grandfather’s Clock and Oh Christmas Tree. Which that’s a hard sell. It feels naturally kiddy-ish. And I get that. I get that’s something people couldn’t get over. But I felt a lot of people just reviewed this and went, Oh, it isn’t like guitar hero. I don’t like it. And that is how a lot of the reviews read. I had a really good time playing it. I mean, this was quite a funny review trip actually. Because I remember going to play it in the Wii Flat, which is what they had the Wii House when the Wii launched. But after a few years, they downgraded to the Wii Flat. And I went there at the same time. I think Alex Dale was reviewing Disaster Day of Crisis, which was this ridiculous kind of natural disaster. Kind of you’re escaping from a city and there’s like earthquakes and hurricanes and tidal waves. And he was playing on one TV. I was playing Wii music on the other TV. We had a huge bowl of sweets between us. So we were both off our heads on like drumsticks, which made me factored into it. That was an amazing review time we had playing those two games. Him trying to do this blockbuster survival experience while I was honking out the Super Mario’s tune with like a cat’s meow or something on my TV. It’s one I almost bought on eBay a little while ago. It goes for very cheap. I think in my head I always kind of wonder if this is the game where a lot of people’s frustration with Nintendo of this era, they sort of took out on this game a little bit. That’s not to say that people were disingenuous about their opinions on the game, but I do wonder if this represented a bit of a bum note to people of what the Nintendo of that era was. Do you think I’m onto something there or is that a bit of a reach? We were a little bit out of the honeymoon period. We had this initial rush of Twilight Princess, Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, which was really exciting. Then it all got a little bit Wii Fit, Wii Music and the very bad Animal Crossing on Wii. So yeah, that was definitely part of it. Yeah, it’s tough, because I remember reading the magazines my mum read at the time and seeing adverts for Wii Fit and thinking, I mean, I respect the fact that games did manage to extend beyond their core audience, but it obviously didn’t stick over time. And so I do wonder if overall it was something of a briefly successful experiment and not much more than that. But yeah, for Wii Music… I genuinely like this one. Yeah, I thought like I wasn’t just reviewing it from a, you know, I’m going to give it bonus points for like trying to kind of, you know, break the mold or anything. I really did, you know, connect with it and like it. I wouldn’t have scored it, you know, that highly otherwise. Yeah, but it’s I know it’s probably like the score. I think more people disagree with this than they disagree with Red Steel in a way. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I think that, yeah, this might come up in a future episode of Games Court. We’ll just have to have to say. Likewise, Disaster Day of Crisis. That was a muller soft game, wasn’t it? Yeah, Disaster Day of Crisis is actually like good fun. That’s a good seven out of ten. Yeah, perfect. There we go. Yeah, there we go. The aftermarket for that game is about to spike by 50 pence. All right, so next up for me, Matthew, I reviewed Resident Evil 5 on PlayStation 3 for play back in 2009. I gave it 89 percent. So this is considered the entry in the series where Resi goes off the boil or at least that’s the kind of prevailing narrative. So in Resident Evil 4, you obviously had this reinvention of the series with a kind of over the shoulder third-person action sort of point of view. I would say that Resident Evil 4 is most is like about 80 percent an action game. And then there’s a 20 percent of like the movement is quite stiff or your kind of resource staff that makes it a bit more like a survival horror. But basically it was an action game. Resident Evil 5 is perceived as the one where it went full action. And I won’t contest that at times it does feel that way. You have some enemies who have guns. You have some bits where they’re like this cover and a cover system. However, I think it’s a really fucking good co-op game. And it has like the best version of Mercenaries that they ever did for the series. So I have a lot of affection for it. There’s like a bunch of there’s a bunch of problems with it. The to repeat the campaign now it has weird it does have like weird long kind of pacing issues. It goes it gets really fucking bizarre. Like you end up in all these temples where there are boulders rolling around and stuff. And you kind of wonder what sort of game you’re actually playing. And also there’s like how do I put this out? I put this there are tone issues with this game. It’s like this was even brought up at the time like, you know, and it’s it’s I would say at the kind of at the least it’s insensitive. And there’s like, you know, the the choice of setting, the choice of like the kind of choices in terms of where they take you in the game and how they portray certain moments is oh, yeesh. It’s definitely like a bit of a yikes thing. So, yeah, I think that there are some real issues with Resident Evil 5 for sure. But I think this game actually like actually rules. And there’s like particularly the Mercenaries mode, which I’ve been playing with a friend for like 12 years. You know, every time we hang out, we always play this Mercenaries mode. There’s a bunch of great maps for it. You fight waves of enemies, try and build up these score combos. It’s a proper like, you know, try and hold out as long as you can. Keep collecting time. You can min max it. So if you’re playing as Wesker, you can basically headshot melee attack, headshot melee attack and keep accumulating time that adds on to the clock, where you can perpetually keep the game going if you’re skilled enough. And there are loads of good like sort of hacks for active reloading, like quickly reloading your gun using a different system in the game and this sort of stuff. I think that Resident Evil 5 is like much more aligned. But yeah, even though I definitely won’t defend the tone side of it, I just acknowledge that’s like a serious flaw with the game. I really fucking like this as a co-op experience. So yeah, that’s my Resident Evil 5 take. Do you play this one Matthew? Yeah, I need to remember this one at the time. Like what a difficult, difficult, difficult act to follow, you know, and you’re basically following what at the time and it still is to many people held as like one of the, if not the greatest action games of all time. You know, everyone was so pumped for whatever followed Resident Evil 4. Yeah, I can say it’s a weird one. Because I didn’t play this at the time. I didn’t play this until years later when they re-released it on the Xbox One, actually. So I didn’t even play it on 360 at the time. But yeah, I remember like people being reasonably down on it on the kind of campaign, thinking it was quite like short and throwaway. And actually it wasn’t till kind of getting to know you and like you talking about your love of mercenaries, like that this kind of game even kind of re-entered my brain as like, oh yeah, there’s this, you know, I do know someone who really rates this game and really rates this mercenaries mode. And yeah, so like I kind of, this sounds perfectly all right to me. Yeah, it runs really nicely on the modern consoles too. That version they did for Xbox One and PS4 is really nice. In fact, I think I re-reviewed it for you when you were editor of OXM. So yeah, I really rate it. Again, I definitely won’t deny that there are problems with the optics of this game. I definitely agree with that. But when people talk about how good mercenaries is when it comes to Resident Evil, I think they’re actually talking about this game. They’re talking about the way that this game did mercenaries. I think that the Resident Evil 4 version was the kind of embryonic version of what they do here, which is one of the best co-op modes in any game. They re-released it as a standalone game on 3DS, so it was substantial enough to do that. Oh man, that’s such a disappointing version of Mercenaries, that 3DS game. But anyway, it was technically impressive for the time. That’s my piece on Resident Evil 5, Matthew. What’s your next one? I was going to shout out for Infinite Space, which I gave 92, and I was obsessed with Infinite Space, which is a space RPG from Platinum and Nude Maker, who I know very little about, other than they’re called Nude Maker, which I think is a great name for a studio. This is like on paper, not my cup of tea, because it’s like proper epic sci-fi kind of space-opery stuff, which isn’t really my vibe at all. It’s about building spaceships and going into these huge space battles, very like a Battlestar Galactica type ship, like this huge ship with all these thousands of people on it. What I really loved about this was, one, it was really, really funny. It completely took me by surprise how weird and zany its vision of space was. There was an enemy who lived inside basically a planet. There was a giant disco ball and things like that. It had this big, huge cast. You could recruit 160 different people. A lot of them factored in or folded into the cutscenes. A bit like what’s the RPG series with the loads of party members? Sudokoden. It had a little bit of that energy. The combat in this game is absolutely fascinating. It’s almost like rock paper scissors in that you’ve got two ships quite far apart and they’re shifting into range. You’ve got very limited control. It’s not like a proper spaceship simulation or anything. You basically control energy to move closer. Then you’ve got weapons that fire when you’re in different ranges. But what’s amazing about this very simple five or six inputs in combat is how the ship you build is really reflected and how it behaves in combat. So you basically piece together a ship like a jigsaw puzzle of rooms and compartments. So you can basically fill a ship with engines, for example, so it can move really, really fast. But then it’s guns, you know, that’s less space for guns. So you may be able to get in like close range within like seconds at the start of the battle, but you’ll be able to do less when you’re there. Or you can fill your ship with like domestic compartments. So it’s got a huge crew. Then you can fill those, fill boarding ships with those crew and just try and take down the enemy by like boarding them instead. And I really loved how like every minute decision you did on this very complex shipbuilding element of the game kind of did have a really tangible impact on this combat system, which seemed very simple on the surface. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely fantastic, but it is also like very fiddly and like quite difficult. It had some huge difficulty spikes, but this was one where like a lot of review, like I definitely, the highest score for this on Metacritic, I’m absolutely sure of it, you know, scored a lot lower elsewhere. Reading the reviews, I could just see people, I could see the point in the review where they just hit, you know, a difficulty spike and not kind of punch through it, or they screwed themselves over with a save file because you had to be quite careful with where you saved in this. And they had just given up on it, you know, they just hadn’t given it a chance. And I felt like it really didn’t get the love it deserved. I think this is like, you know, probably like my hidden gem, like the hidden gem of DS. But yeah, I just don’t know if… I don’t know what, you know, I give up on games when they’re difficult all the time. Like I’ve got very low appetite for huge difficulty spikes. But for whatever reason, I could kind of push on with this one. And yeah, I just thought this was amazing. It’s a shame that it’s kind of, you know, it would be great on PC with, you know, being able to click around the mouse, you know, build the ship with like mouse clicks instead of the stylus or whatever. But yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever, ever see any version of Infinite Space again. Yeah, it was part of the Platinum Steel with Sega, right? It was one of the four or five games. And did this come before Vanquish, this one? Around the same time. Yeah, it definitely came after Mad World. I wonder like how it even came to be. Like it’s a really odd type of game for Platinum to be sort of involved with. But yeah, like I’ve always thought sort of thought of it as a hidden gem. I own it, but I haven’t played it still. And it’s huge. I mean, it’s like not like a hundred hours, but it’s, you know, tens and tens and tens and tens of hours. And it sort of just keeps going and unfolding. Gets a bit more galaxy brain as it goes on. Well, I think you’ll find, Matthew, that this kind of ship customisation was already done ably by the Kingdom Hearts series and the gummy ship system where you could. It’s way more complicated than the gummy ship. It’s more complicated than building a tower of guns with a cockpit on top and a booster at the back, which is basically what I built when I was a kid. There’s a scene in it where you go to this bar and you all get really drunk after you’ve just done this big mission and it kind of does, like it sort of flashes through the night at various states of drunkenness. And there’s a point where like one of your, a male member of crew is put on a female member of crew’s clothes and he gets kidnapped by these like space barbarians who are passing through because they think he’s some sort of beautiful lady. And then you have to go and save, then the mission becomes you have to go and save this guy. And as you’re cutting, as you’re chasing off this ship, it keeps cutting to the barbarian ship with this guy in this dress being like, oh man, what am I going to do? You know, I’m really hung over and this is going to be terrible for me. And he comes in and the barbarians are like, you know, we’re, you know, we’re going to sort of do what we like with you. And he says, wait, wait, I’m not a lady. I’m actually a man. And they stop for a second. And then they say, even better. Which I always thought was just maybe howl with laughter at these sort of like weird pervy characters. It’s a great game. I think that like that just sounds like if they ever make Yakuza in space, that’s what this would be. I tell you what, it’s yeah, it’s got a bit of that in it. It’s the platinum side of it. It’s just that it’s really mad and fun and like funny. If I had to challenge you to like name one game it’s comparable to. So like, say you’re listening to this and you’re sort of curious about it. What else is it kind of like? Is there a kind of comparison point for this one? Like should you play this if you like Stellaris or like Endless Space or something or Home World or is it? It’s just like so different. It’s so much simplified compared to those. That’s the thing. It’s not a simulation. It’s not like Elite or anything like that. It’s you know, it’s like hitting these big buttons. If anything, it’s got more like closer energy to like a… it’s not like this, but what’s that that mech game with the huge controller? Oh, Steel Battalion. Yeah, it’s almost got a bit more of that vibe in that you’re hitting these big like chunky interface buttons to control the ship. You know, it’s a bit more like, you know, hit the giant fire button. We fire like our huge kind of like, you know, onslaught of missile launches at them. It’s kind of got quite a big anime energy to it. Oh, man. I really want to play this now. Like, we’ve talked about the idea of doing a DS Hidden Gems episode as well. So yeah, to coincide with the sequel to The World Ends With You coming out this year. So who knows? Maybe this will come up again in the future, probably when we get to the list of our different years I’m sure to. Cool. Next up then for me, Matthew, is Batman Arkham Knight, which I reviewed for GamesRadar in 2015 and gave four out of five. So this one, I didn’t really do, when I was editor of PC Gamer, I didn’t do many reviews for other outlets because honestly making a magazine and partly making a website was enough for my energy levels, but I was kind of considered like the Batman guy and I think I still am a little bit. That makes you sound like you are Batman. Well, I think I was really determined to review this one because I think that, I can’t remember now what happened with the PC version. I think it came out and it got pulled, but I feel like we didn’t get review code for it beforehand. I don’t think we did and then it was just kind of a mess, but console review code was kind of floating around, so I ended up doing it for GamesRadar. So I think everyone thought or hoped this game would be amazing. I think some people were a bit down about the Batmobile generally as a kind of concept. This was obviously fundamental to this game. The previous games were you just play as Batman in these increasingly large worlds. First one set in the Asylum. Second one set in a sort of… It does feel like a full city open world. It’s not massive, but it does have very distinct districts and it looked really nice. And then this one was like the open world game with your car. You can drive around. There’s all these different islands you can go to. And it was quite a tricky one to sort of review because I had a few problems with it. One I thought that the tank combat wasn’t very good. We’ve talked about this on a previous episode. I think it was on Games of the Generation. It was not terrible, but it was like… And like you said, it wasn’t so hard that you couldn’t do it. It was just… I just don’t think it had the same sort of depth that the combat or the stealth did. And that was a drawback. But my main problem with this one was the story. So it makes a big deal about the character Jason Todd. I don’t know if people know Batman lore that well, but Jason Todd is the Robin who was killed by the Joker. He was like voted to death by like a premium phone line poll in the late 80s. What a way to go. Yes, how I’d want to go. So he was beaten to death by the Joker in like a desert. It was a really like grim storyline. Then years later, they brought him back for Return of the Red Hood, I think it was called, this 2005 storyline that was big into when I was a comic reader. They decided to do a riff on that in Arkham Knight. But the problem was that they hadn’t established any previous Jason Todd connection in the story. So I felt like they’d made the crux of this game story around that. But hadn’t put in the legwork to make it pay off. So I actually thought it was quite a weak story overall for these games. When I actually thought the, I thought the stories in Arkham Asylum and City were really strong, actually. And this I felt like sort of lost it a bit on the narrative side, even though it had some really good side quests. And I think that, yeah, even when I reflected it now, I would give Arkham City probably a nine, but this did deserve four out of five. It wasn’t like it wasn’t a nine out of ten game, even though it was like astonishing to look at at the time. So yeah, I think this is a correct score factoring in The Batmobile and the fact that it had those problems with its story. Anything further to add on that one, Matthew? No, I think I’ve said on before, like I actually I don’t mind The Batmobile myself. Like I think I like it more than most. I think this is I actually do prefer this one to the second one, I think, but mainly because it’s just it’s so flashy and it’s just so gorgeous. And like they just do some mad stuff in this game on a technical level. God, I hope their next game is good. Yeah, I kind of wish again, like wish someone would just make a Batman game again. It’s weird. That’s the series. It’s just gone away. But oh well. You’re like, yeah, we never made a bad one. So let’s stop. Yeah, now seems like a good time to never make another one. Yeah, I’m not so sure about it. It’s just been such a long wait for them to make anything else. I have no idea what the Suicide Squad game will be, but I guess we will see. What’s your next one, Matthew? Next one is Castlevania Order of Ecclesia, which Castlevania felt like it was quite a big thing in the first couple of years of NGamer, because they were coming off this quite amazing run, or they were still having this amazing run. Old Igarashi was still at Konami, was doing the handheld games, basically continuing the kind of family line from Symphony of Night. It had that amazing run of Game Boy Advance. That continued on to DS, Dawn of Sorrows. Absolutely fantastic, like one of my favorite DS games. And then they started to decline after that. Well, I felt like they started to decline, but this is where the review sort of split. There was Portrait of Ruin, which I didn’t really rate. It kind of dumped the big castle for quite this bitty system. We jumped through magical paintings into smaller worlds. And then Order of Ecclesia, which people really rated this one. It was held as, at the time, I remember some of the other reviews saying, this is up there with Symphony of the Night, where I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as Dawn of Sorrow. I gave it 75. I was actually, if anything, I think at the time, I was tempted to give it lower. But there’s like a certain level of craft in it with like the sprite work. And, you know, I love the music and the look of the thing. So, you know, I felt like it was a bit mean to kind of go any lower on that. The big problem I had with this series is that Dawn of Sorrow had a huge castle, and then it basically abandoned that for like smaller self-contained levels in Portrait of Ruin. And then Order of Ecclesia had this huge castle in the second half. It wasn’t as good or as big as Dawn of Sorrow’s, but the first half of the game with these terrible linear spaces, which were literally… they weren’t even platforming levels. They were just like five connected rooms of flats with quite a generic background. So it would be like the beach or the coast or… that’s the same thing, or a forest or whatever. And you were just walking left to right, grinding away on enemies. It just had no… it was… it felt like a test room for character movement. It just had no shape to it at all. And it was like that for the first chunk of the game. I remember thinking, this is so bad, and no one else seemed to care. There was so much… any other reviews, there was such a focus on, like, oh, it’s really difficult. I loved how difficult it was. There was a real willy waving with this one that I just… I can’t stand in reviews. Like, that’s just so tedious to me. Yeah, I thought this was… I felt like a series in decline, but I felt no one else seemed to think that. And I don’t know if I was just going mad, but yeah, I still think I got this one right, and I actually think, like, that Bloodstained is better… yeah, I really like Bloodstained a lot. You know, I don’t think it’s quite up there with, like, his best Castlevania games on that he made, but it’s, you know, I preferred it to Order of Ecclesia for sure. Yeah, I can’t say I’m that familiar with the Castlevania games, but, um… Yeah, they were… So, yeah. Yeah, it’s just weird, like, they were a big thing, like, they were huge, and they happened so often, you know, they were making, like, one every two years, and they were a pretty good standard, and they were making them on handheld, so it felt like there was a lot of, like, a lot of love and attention for a DS game, you know, this is quite a nice thing, this is like, Konami, good Konami, doing good things, and, you know, him leaving Konami, you know, is the kind of, you know, one of the first big sort of scalps which then kind of accumulate to the point that now they only make Pez, which is a thing that has happened. At the time, this felt like quite an odd one, like, wow, this guy who’s really associated with this thing is no longer there, but then it just happened more and more. Yeah, I just, yeah, I just, I’m low on Metacritic for this one, but I think I’m right. Hmm, interesting. Yeah, I always got the sense that this is a genre that had more fans in the US than it had in Europe. It seemed like the Metroidvania kind of games did just, I don’t know, they seemed to just be a bigger deal when you see the press talking about games from that era. They kind of come up more. Do you think that’s fair or do you think that I just, yeah? Yeah, I think there’s a big appetite for these things. I think like Castlevania particularly like felt like it was quite key part of like a lot of games journals of like NES upbringings. So it’s kind of ingrained more over in the States. Like, I don’t know, it felt like more part of the package over there than it wasn’t necessarily bundled in, but then it did over here. Yeah, there’s definitely that, it’s just really weird how many of the reviews of this were basically like bigging up the game’s difficulty to then say, you know, but I did it, of course. It just felt like something doesn’t happen very often anymore. There was more of a trend for it of like, people with a bit of a chip on their shoulder trying to prove something in their reviews kind of like 15 years ago than there is now. Yeah, that’s interesting. There was a games journalist who used to go unnamed, he used to infamously print a picture of the last boss in a lot of his reviews just to be able to, as like a, look, I did it, I got there. I’ve been kind of eyeballing the Castlevania games on DS and eBay, and that’s useful knowledge that Dawn of Sorrow is the only one that’s worth kind of like… Well, Dawn of Sorrow is like exceptionally good. That’s the difference. These ones are fine. They’re not like actively horrible, but like, that is the best one. Cool. If you want a big Castle to explore, which I think is quite key to Castlevania. Well, yeah, there’s something about the name that suggests that should be… Yeah. All right, cool. So my next one is Medal of Honor 2010. So I gave this seven out of ten. It was a review for X360 magazine. I was on Syfy now at this point, so I’ve been roped in to review it. But I think I played a bunch of the multiplayer, multiplayer, but the single player was like the main thing I played. Like it was the single player was… There were other times that loads of publishers were trying to figure out what their version of Call of Duty was, and it mostly resulted in a load of like quite rancid, boring military shooters. I think very few of them actually understood why Call of Duty was really good, which is… Like we kind of said on our… On a previous episode, I think it was the best game 2007. It was like basically Modern Warfare was at its best when you felt like you were in a James Bond film. And instead it felt like they were going for these sort of like very sort of boring military sort of thriller vibes. Yeah, I remember just… I remember like being reasonably hyped for this because I think EA made a big deal about the fact that Medal of Honor had been away for a few years and oh, here we go with this tier one operator, kind of like big reboot, you know, roped in dice to do the multiplayer. The multiplayer was better received than the single player. But yeah, I remember this being an extremely boring campaign shooter with one moderately interesting helicopter turret sequence. Did you ever play this on Matthew? No, I didn’t. Was this the one with like the big bearded man on the cover? Yep, that’s right, yeah. I think I remember someone telling me about a press trip for this where they had like some of these, whatever tier one operators are, to interview them and that they had, but they’re like super secretive people, like you’re not allowed to even see their faces or hear their voices. They had to like interview them in this room where they were like behind a sheet or something and masked their voices. And I remember thinking like, what’s this, what, are you worried that this game journalist is going to work out who you are and then what, like kill you? Like what, why do you have to hide your identity from a games journalist? That doesn’t make any sense. Very odd behavior. Yeah. My question is, how did EA even contact them in the first place? Like where do you get that intel from? Like maybe it’s like they say get in contact with Bill Murray, you just have to phone this answering machine and then occasionally gets back to you. Or like it’s like that. Or just go to like a house party in Milwaukee and then maybe he’ll turn up, that sort of thing. Yeah. That’s the danger is you’re ringing up asking for help and you don’t know if you’re asking for help from a tier one operator or Bill Murray. And that only depending on whether you’re making a game or if you’re on a military mission it could have a very different vibe and outcome. Yeah for sure. I say, my reason I flagged this is because it was the pure sort of like seven out of ten reviewing experience and like I remember just being super down on a lot of these games that were trying to be Call of Duty at the time, like Homefront and I think like I don’t think well, Battlefield Bad Company, people liked their campaigns a little bit more, but they weren’t really for me. When we kind of on this podcast were generally quite nostalgic about this particular period of games, the sort of early HD era, but Call of Duty clones, no, I mean, obviously most of them failed. We don’t really have, they don’t really exist anymore. They all kind of went away, but yeah, Medal of Honor, just kind of game. So what’s your next one, Matthew? My next one is Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, which I gave a 7 out of 10 in OXM. I actually think it reads lower than that, the review. I did give it a 7, I’m not saying they bumped it up or anything. I thought this was a really muddled game in that it was this kind of combination of Platinum and Konami, but my big beef with this is I think those two studios at that time stood for very different things, and I thought they were completely at odds with each other. There are times where it’s got amazing pacing and fun action of a Platinum game, but then whenever it hits any kind of like Metal Gear stuff, like attempts at stealth or the story, it just absolutely like killed it dead on the spot. This game is just so stop-start, has a couple of hours in the middle where it’s absolutely brilliant, where you’re just, you know, you’re really going for it and you’ve kind of mastered the kind of the cool chopping, which is great, the whole slo-mo and then slice things up into lots of sort of bits of ham, which is fun. But it was like, it’s this weird marriage of the two in that it’s got the grittiness, is maybe the wrong word, but the kind of the more, the slightly more kind of like conservative element of like Metal Gear Solid’s world design in that it’s sort of set in like military bases and office building. So it lacks a bit of like Platinum’s kind of zip for settings. And I think it also has like arguably like the worst like third act of a Platinum game, which is normally where Platinum games absolutely explode and go wild. You know, you have this kind of stretch in the middle, which is really fun. And then you hit this terrible end sort of as a few boss fights in a row. And it ends with my least favorite Platinum boss fight, which is the sort of Senator character, which drives me at the wall because everyone means this guy to death because of the whole nanomachine son, but he’s absolutely shit on it is a shit fight. It’s a shit level. The worst ending to a Platinum game by far. Yeah, this game is really like really flat to me, taken all together. Maybe seven out of ten was a bit high. But, you know, then there are some Platinum heads I know who really, really rate this. And I feel like I just played a different game. But I think it’s muddled development period and it’s slightly prolonged development period at least resulted in a slightly muddled game. Yeah, so this was announced back in 2009 as Metal Gear Rising to be made in house at Kojima Productions and then went away for years, didn’t come out and then reemerged as the game was this Platinum game with a Platinum attitude and it looked a lot more like a kind of riff on Bayonetta than it had previously. The kind of potential for a ride and spin-off was huge to me and I do remember, I thought this game was alright at the time. I think I reviewed it for Sci-Fi Now and gave it 4 stars out of 5. I think though that I agree with you in retrospect. Something I really noticed when I played it is that they seem to run out of money after the first level. Like, the first level is the best in this game. It’s got like the nicest looking backgrounds and stuff and then like ends with that fight against Metal Gear Ray. Is it Ray? Yeah, it’s Ray. It’s basically the one from Metal Gear Solid 2 that screams like a dinosaur, that one. You beat that, you kind of cut that up and it’s a really good proof of concept for what the game should be and then the rest of it is like these really bare looking backgrounds and like brown levels and nothing much of interest. And I actually think that for all people’s kind of issues with Raiden and Metal Gear Solid 2, I think people are a bit more positive on it these days, there was the potential for a good Raiden story in this game and it doesn’t have it. It’s a really, really boring story and I think in my head, I thought it would have been cool to have a game that was about what happened to Raiden between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4. That’s kind of what I wanted but this was set post Metal Gear Solid 4, I believe, and then it really just has nothing from the previous games. It’s a real like Monster of the Week kind of organ harvesting operation or something. It’s like a total filler. Yeah, and it sort of arrived right at the end of the generation where not much was going on generally and it felt a bit dry. I think that a lot of leftover goodwill for Bayonetta and Vanquish probably gave this one higher scores than it deserved. I agree with you about The Final Boss as well. That’s the one that’s got that terrible music playing as well, right? That like… The whole thing’s garbage. Yes. I think like the music is like, and you are you and I am not me. It’s something like that. Like terrible. I like terrible kind of like electric kind of rock song. I remember… Big Sonic Energy. Yeah, I think you’re right about this. I don’t think like it’s a particularly celebrated game these days. I don’t think there’s much kind of like cool to revisit it. They never made a sequel. I mean, yeah. It was kind of a bit of a bum spinoff for Metal Gear. Looks like an amazing trailer game. Looks amazing in a trailer for two minutes. The best two minutes of this game are phenomenal, but it isn’t that game for the most part. Yeah. And I feel like the one thing they did nail was the cutting stuff up thing. Like it felt like that was the starting point for the game. Get this right and then build everything else on top of it. I know for one that listener of the show, Rich Stanton, is a fan of this game, so apologies, Rich. Well, I’m excited about being called out on Twitter yet again, it should be good. Cool. We’ll get Rich on to defend it at some point when we do our Metal Gear podcast down the line. Cool. So my next one is Rime. It was an indie game that I gave 62%. So this is from the developer Tequila Works. It was in development for a long time. I believe it started out as more of a kind of like open world sort of survival-y game. And then re-emerged as this kind of like narrative-based platform adventure. So I picked this one because it actually came up in conversation with my girlfriend last week. It’s like a big dad story basically this. And I think I personally don’t get that excited about that as like a theme in storytelling. And like even though it looked really nice, I just couldn’t get as excited about that side of things as I know that other critics did. This did get like really high scores from some critics. And I think that particularly if you’re a parent, this story probably resonated more. But this is one where I really diverged on the fact that those themes didn’t do much for me. And it felt like I’d seen everything in this game before. But it was like one of the last really overhyped indie games, I think. Even though I did really like Tequila Works worked on The Sexy Brutale, which is a game I really love. But, yeah, this one didn’t do much for me despite looking quite nice. I was reflecting on it and thinking, was I a little bit harsh there? But I don’t think that there was… It wasn’t really a great puzzle game, a great platform game. It was kind of like a nice look at the environments game while a story is being delivered at you. And yeah, just sort of bounced off of it, really. Did you play this one? Yeah, I played a little bit of it and I never made it through to the end. Yeah, I have a little bit of kind of sort of melancholic, self-saded indie game sort of fatigue. You know, there’s only so many of these kind of light puzzlers you can kind of play really. Yeah, it just didn’t really gel or click with me. What’s your next one, Matthew? My next one is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for Crystal Bearers, which I gave 82% in NGamer. It’s definitely at the high end of it. This was again from that period where some publishers were just going all out with the Wii exclusives. Square Enix were great for this. We’ve been waiting for, you know, so that factors into my thinking a little bit. You know, there’s definitely an edge of like, I start in a naturally happy place when someone’s tried on Wii. Because so few people did. This is a really unusual Final Fantasy game. This is a sort of a third person action game where the combat is all about kind of picking things up and throwing them about using the Wii Flicks, Wii Remote Flicks. So it’s like a sort of telekinetic kind of superpower game. Very like cinematic, like it had a lot of set pieces, like one of the criticisms aimed at the campaign is it’s arguably like lots of not quick time events. They’re a bit more complicated than that, but it’s like a string of quite scripted moments. But what my kind of take on this at the time was that to me, it felt like a Final Fantasy game, which was kind of trying to deliver the sort of cinematic experience of a Final Fantasy game, but like in the action. It wasn’t, you know, because traditionally these are games where like the most exciting stuff happens in the cinematics, and then you cut to the combat and it’s this turn-based thing, and it’s quite detached from that. This I thought was a really interesting attempt to kind of put you in the hot seat for everything. So all the exciting, you know, there were like turret sections and stealth sections and all this. So there was a bit, you start the game like skydiving. It’s quite kind of hectic. And so I liked that about it. It also has a, at the heart of it, has this sort of like achievement system where there are like 300 or so kind of like actions you were trying to perform in the world. And, you know, these ranged from quite simple things of like kill this particular boss to trying to like eke out like weird reactions from the world using telekinesis. So there was like, you could pick up if there was like a skeleton monster, you could use a telekinetic powers to like pull off its skull. And then if you held that skull, if there were wolf enemies, they’d all like pounce at your feet like dogs. And then that might be like a reaction. So it had this kind of like hidden like ecosystem kind of thing to it where you were trying to use your powers to kind of create little moments. And, you know, some of them were like, like special takedowns of certain enemy types, you could like, like peel off armor from like a particular robot and then pull the ejector lever inside to throw out the pilot. And that would be a discovery. Or you could just like chuck rocks at it or whatever. But, you know, in one playthrough of this game, you’d maybe do like a third of these discoveries. And really, it was this sort of weird like playpen to try and kind of tease out these sort of hidden, hidden mechanics and hidden reactions. It’s very playful, very sort of silly. It just really, really clicked with me, really gelled. But a lot of people saw it as like, oh, it’s just really linear, too many set pieces and the combat is really basic. You just fling stuff around or you just run past them. And it was like, yeah, but it’s about it’s about trying to work out how to use those flinging powers to kind of tease out this sort of hidden layer of the game, which I really, really enjoyed. It was made by the Crystal Chronicles series is headed up by a producer called Akitoshi Kawazu, who is quite all these games are a bit odd. He’s kind of the odd final. He’s like the odd one of the Square Enix is sort of odd balls. And remember, at the end of the game, it like ends with like a handwritten letter from him appears on the screen and says like, thank you so much for playing this game. And then it’s like his signature on it, which I really liked. It’s very charismatic, strange, very endgamer, like weirdo, kind of a weirdo take on an RPG. Yeah, I like how you invoke endgamer there specifically to describe that. So this is where I ambush you, Matthew, and say that I gave this five out of ten for Games TM. Yeah, so I don’t think I played it for as much time as you, to be fair. So probably didn’t get as much out of it as you did. I don’t contest the fact that it was like a for a Wii game, a big budget feeling thing. Like it had like an overworld, I recall, and then loads of different NPCs you could interact with. And then usually interacting with the NPCs would trigger these mini games. There were loads and loads of mini games in this, I seem to recall, like fishing and stuff like that. Am I right there? I think that’s right. Yeah, so different ways to use kind of flicking system. It was definitely unusual and interesting for a Final Fantasy game. But yeah, I don’t know. I think maybe because I didn’t pay as much close attention to the Wii’s kind of journeys you did, I was starting to find that like using the Wiimote had a real kind of novelty vibe to it. And this was a whole game of like novelty ways to use the Wiimote to me. And that combined with this, you know, admittedly quite nice sort of Zelda-y overworld. It was quite a Zelda-y feeling Final Fantasy game, I thought, in terms of tone. Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah, maybe that’s like maybe that’s more of a Crystal Chronicles thing generally. I don’t know. But yeah, it’s awkward because I feel like we’ve both got separate scores on this, but we’re both right about our scores. I think this is a freelance assignment for me, and I’m sure that you played it for longer than I did. And no, it’s interesting to hear you defend it. Like this is a real sort of like Recesses of My Memory kind of Wii game. And yeah, yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it was a little bit harsh in it. I don’t know. No, no, you probably like you. Most people said what you said. Well, like it was it was very flick heavy. I just I don’t know, like the whole kind of like medal system or whatever they called them. I think they might be discoveries they were called. That’s that’s a mechanic I like in games like in my head. That’s not too dissimilar to like the like achievement system in in modern Hitman, you know, where you’re replaying something to kind of tease all this weird stuff out. And it’s obviously a very different game, a very different vibe. But I do like games where there is like a lot of secret and weird things to discover. Like that’s something that clicks with me. Does this producer still make stuff for Square Enix? I haven’t. To be fair, I haven’t. I haven’t looked because he’s I think he’s like Mr. Is it Saga and all that stuff. Yeah. Sort of a side of JLPG I’m not that familiar with, admittedly. Yeah. I’m not. Yeah. I’m not like a big enough of a Square Enix head to have played those things. But he’s kind of like, I don’t know. It’s a bit like how at Nintendo you have like Yamimoto and Anuma doing their thing. But then you also have like the weird the weirdos who work for like Sakamoto, the kind of WarioWare guys. And I kind of I’m a big fan of like the weirdos at a big company who still get to make stuff. Because I mean, basically, NGamer was like the weirdos that future get to make stuff. So maybe that’s why I like it. Yeah, I think that probably Shootakumi fits that bill a bit as well. Yeah, he’s still at Capcom just writing his weird detective in his little cupboard. I mean, you’ve added the detail of the cupboard, I assume. I like to think he’s just there by himself. Just getting on with it. Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah, that’s an interesting one to revisit. I don’t think it ever would have come up on this podcast otherwise. How do you know? It wouldn’t be one of my Games of 2008. Oh, who knows? We’ll find out in two weeks, Matthew. Was that really 2008 that came out? Yeah. Oh, my God. I’m so old. Fucking hell. Okay. So my next one is Wolfenstein II, The New Colossus. I gave this 81% for PC Gamer. It was a lower score than the first one. And that was an interesting thing to do in itself because, generally speaking, reviewing sequels, like, you know, the typical pattern with sequels these days is that the second one is usually bigger or better. Like, there’s not usually much of a downturn. And this one was quite complicated feelings about it. Like, I had to review it in basically a day, I think. I think I played the entire thing from start to finish in one day. My big problem with this game, which I did generally like still, like, machine games knows how to do good shooting. There are some really kind of like novel and interesting settings they take you to in this game, like the Nazi base on Venus, I’m sure everyone remembers when you meet gross dying Hitler. That was quite a very memorable sequence. Obviously, all of the kind of cutscenes have like a good vibe about them. There’s weirdly sort of wholesome series and, you know, wholesome protagonist in BJ Blazkowicz. I think that this game suffered a bit from repeated level design. You went to some of the same settings twice. You also, I think this has some really wonky difficulty as well. I think they later patched the difficulty settings. I played this on one of the normal difficulties. I don’t remember which one. But there is a sequence, I think, in like Congress or a Congress like kind of hall where I found it so incredibly tough and that it was like actively hard to enjoy. And I think that was a bit of a bummer. Actually, maybe I should have reviewed this lower. I don’t know. But I think that 81 percent, giving it less than the New Order, a game that I only remember enjoying, was probably about right. Just a bit of an uneven game, this. Did you play Wolfenstein 2? Yeah, I much prefer the first game. I don’t think this is as good as the first one. Yeah, which is weird because it took them years to make it. Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of like, you know, I just remember the settings being really drab. Too many things set inside quite boring factories. It’s got a few absolutely standout set pieces that everyone remembers, like the American town with the milkshake Nazi, the weird bit of the wheelchair at the start and all that kind of gubbins. It demoed brilliantly. The two bits they showed us in preview, I thought this game is going to be absolutely amazing. But I actually found it quite drab and repetitive, like you say. I didn’t like the way it reused certain levels. Yeah, I think the first game’s got more variety. I preferred the kind of use of the, you know, the way the villains were used in the first game. I thought, I can’t remember her name, but the kind of the mad woman whose face gets all chewed up was like a lot more of an interesting dynamic villain in how she was in the first game as opposed to the second. Yeah, I actually didn’t get on very well with this series after the first game. So, you know, I kind of hoping for another, you know, a better game down the line. Yeah, I’m hoping that the Indiana Jones one is, you know, like a sort of a really good fit for them and works quite well. I found the cut scenes for the second one like really overlong. They’re quite nice characters. Like you say, it’s got quite an interesting world view. Like it’s quite quirky. It’s almost like oddballs against, you know, sort of oddball revolutionaries. But I found it like very, very indulgent compared to the first game. Like there was a lot more of me just sitting there listening to it waffle on. I just didn’t think it was as interesting as it thought it was. Yeah, I think the way it tries to like account for your choice of which character you saved in the first one is a bit of a misfire as well. You get like way too many cutscenes of the drunk Scottish man if you saved him in the first one. Maybe I was wrong about this score. I didn’t really want to make the point that like it was worse than the first one, which had a very simple approach of like, here’s a level that is just a big robot shooting at you and you move down a building then you destroy the big robot and that’s the level. And I think that… Yeah, first one’s better. Yeah, and also I think that the spin-off they made about the two sisters was really cheap feeling. I played a bit of that on Game Pass, so it wasn’t very good. I didn’t dig that one either. I like the DLC they did after the first one, the kind of the… Was it the Old Blood? Yeah, the Flashback one. Yeah, that was fun. I had a lot of time for that. That was good. But then, I don’t know, the tone of it changed. It got a bit more… I don’t know. It’s not as fun after that, for whatever reason. Yeah, I agree with you. So, yeah, quite an interesting one to go back to. I was just there thinking, I don’t think I’d ever replay that game, but I’d maybe think about replaying the first one. But anyway, what’s your next one, Matthew? So, this next one is the one I thought you were going to have reviewed and you were going to disagree with. This is Resident Evil 6, which I gave an 8 in OXM. Wow! When it was re-released on Xbox One. This is, I mean… Is this a game I got right? It’s such a guilty… This is a real guilty pleasure. I love, like, how much this game is, just how, like, hard it goes at everything. I love how ridiculous the idea of, like, we’re going to make three campaigns and just throw everything at them. They are crazy, like, cinematic beasts. They’re really over the top. There’s so many boss fights. There’s just so much in this game. I kind of, like, it just, like, bullied me in submission, and I kind of really admire it. Yeah, so this is not a game that I hate. This is a game that I quite like. I think it’s worse than Five. I probably wouldn’t give it an eight, but I probably would give it a seven. It’s, um… Yeah, and I think they re-released it. Maybe it factored in that it was like 20 quid. I was like, you know what? For like 20 quid, this is kind of mad. You know, it was a really smooth version. It was playing really nice on Xbox One. There’s just so much of it. Well, the entire game is in co-op, too, right? Like, you can play all of these campaigns. There’s three different campaigns. There’s a Chris Redfield and Piers campaign. Which is, like, widely considered the worst one. You’re basically in a war zone fighting big monsters. Getting chased by the Erstenach. Yeah, that’s kind of quite silly. Then there’s the Leon one that people are quite positive on. I can’t remember who he’s teamed up with. It’s a girl who looks like Ashley but is not Ashley. No, I’m getting mixed up with the Jake campaign. Which, the Jake campaign is him mixed with Sherry Birkin, I think, right? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, so, and I understand the Leon one is a little bit closer to, like, classic Resident Evil in terms of its setting and stuff. Yeah. But I’ve actually only played the Chris one and the Jake one. And not the one that people say is actually good. And people say the Ada campaign you unlock at the end is actually the best one as well. Well, it’s quite weird. It’s almost got, like, weird puzzle-y stuff in. That’s the thing. There’s just so much in this game. Yeah. It’s really, like, it’s really something. You know, it’s just, like, so outrageously full on. It’s the Spider-Man 3 of Resident Evil. I think there’s probably a world where, like, this gets, like, a director’s cut and edited down a bit. Like, it is a very flabby game. It does feel like they spent a fortune on it. Like, this must have cost, like, a hundred million to make or something crazy like that. It’s so, like, full of, yeah. It did feel like everyone at Capcom made it. Because it had, like, when they, I think when they presented it, it had, like, film credits on it. On, like, a, you know, produce spot. It had so many people working on it. Because they did make, like, it’s basically three times the size of Resi 5. It’s like three Resi 5s happening at the same time. Yeah, I think that people were, people were really ready to hate this one. And, like, I think it confirmed a lot of their sort of, you know, feelings about where Resident Evil was going that had become this sort of silly action series. And, you know, there’s no denying it at this point, particularly in Chris’s campaign. You are playing basically like a survival horror themed slightly action game. And, yeah, I don’t know. I think that this is a really, really interesting, like, product of its time. A really, really odd game. And I think that it also has, like, a very good Mercenaries mode. There’s a bunch of, like, hidden mechanics to the combat in this. Like, you can do stuff like jump backwards onto the ground and then kind of, like, roll around. At last. I think it’s actually quite sophisticated because it means you have, like, another option to sort of, like, dodge enemies and stuff like that. So a guy is swiping at you and you’re like, OK, well, I’ll jump back onto the ground, then headshot him from the ground where I’m relatively safe, then get back up again. I remember, like, Mark McDonald formerly of 1UP tweeting, like, a Neo Gaff thread saying, look, there’s loads of, like, mechanics to Resident Evil 6 that Capcom just never explains to you, but here’s a really good primer on how they all work. And it kind of, like, revealed that there’s a lot of, like, deep action mechanics at work in this that you’re just never, like, taught to use properly. And I think that, I don’t know, like, I don’t think it’s, like, Resident Evil’s finest hour, but I don’t think it’s, like, the total disaster that people say it is. I think it’s just not what people wanted from Resident Evil at this time. Yeah, I think that’s more what I’m getting at. Like, I feel like it’s a game some people are going to absolutely adore, because it’s just wild, you know, such a wild thing. And if you like quite traditional video game tropes of, like, bosses that keep coming back in, like, ever bigger forms, there’s, like, ten of them that do that in this. Like, it’s just got so many boss fights, it’s so overblown. Yeah, I’ve really… I’ve just got a lot of time for it. I’ve got a lot of respect for something this mad, and this sort of, like, busted. Maybe it just ticks a lot of, like, specific castle boxes, but, yeah, I thought this was a wild ride. Nice. I think I like the little… On the worksheet we’ve got here, it says, I think I like games that are a bit much. That’s a good summary. What’s your next one, Matthew? Cyberpunk, a recent pick, which I gave 7 out of 10. And I think it’s, like, absolutely right. I don’t think I’ve… In the last, like, five years or so, I don’t think I’ve been more right on a game than Cyberpunk, which makes its ongoing sort of travails kind of quite interesting to me, because I think, like, it doesn’t matter what you fix on a technical level, I think it’s got this inherently flawed design of it’s an incredibly cinematic game that also wants to be a very deep RPG, and it doesn’t need to be a deep RPG to be a very cinematic game, and that’s the problem at the heart of Cyberpunk. It’s a campaign where you can bring any character in and basically get through it because it’s designed to be a real action spectacular, and then it’s quite a boring world of side tasks where more interesting hero builds come into play, but it feels like such a step down from the big story content that it’s just not very fun to play, I think is the huge divide at the heart of Cyberpunk. It just doesn’t gel the two worlds together, and whenever I see stories about it, like this idea that it’s going to magically turn into something better, I just don’t see it. I think it is what it is. Absolutely spectacular in some places. Really super baggy and unfocused and weird, but not in a good way. Yeah, so I was kind of hoping that after their recent patch 1.2, it might be fixed, and then PC Gamer literally ran a headline that was no Cyberpunk 2077 still isn’t fixed. I think what I want is I basically just want all of the main bugs to be eliminated and then I’ll play it. Yeah, I had a really smooth ride with this, so this take is very much on what the game is, rather than the kind of technical problems. I just didn’t run into any of it. I actually had a pretty good time with it on PC, that is, where I played it. And I kind of want us to get to the point where we can get past the bug conversation, and they can get it fixed to the point where we can actually just talk about it as what it actually is as a game, which is a 7 out of 10. Well, that is what I think our podcast on the game did so well, is that we did sweep aside all of this conversation around it, which is quite boring to read about at this point. It’s quite boring to read about what CD Projekt is saying about, here’s why we’re still going to keep updating it and all this stuff and how much money they made and I don’t care about any of that. There was so much that last year and I agree with you. I kind of want more talk about why it’s not a great stealth game because it definitely isn’t and why it’s actually not a fantastic shooter either, but some celebration of what it actually gets right. Like those moments where it really immerses you in a setting. It is absolutely amazing when you’re dealing with the characters up close and the voice performances and the animation on them and the setting, the attention to detail in the core story, like the key beats and some of the character side missions are just so beautifully made, but they’re so, you know, it’s closer to the craft of like a Call of Duty game, you know, it’s that like linear and that kind of control that they can layer that on, but that’s just so jarring with the kind of sandbox nature of the world and RPG mechanics which don’t go anywhere, like the fact that you can literally complete every task in this game and you know, you’ve made no dent on skill trees, but what are those advanced skills for? If you’ve smashed this game with the core skills, it’s just so unbalanced, so unrefined as an RPG. It’s very, very poor in that regard. Hmm, that is weirdly messy for a modern game. Yeah, but yeah, I don’t know, it feels like a studio that hadn’t made this kind of game before, which they hadn’t, so it’s like wrong Deus Ex. Well, hopefully their run at The Witcher 4 will be a bit better. Oh yeah, I mean, if they just make more Witcher 4, it’s like The Witcher 3, that’s what matters, that’s all I want. Yeah, so I don’t know though, I’m just sort of like, I feel like it’s like an even worse version of how people’s perception of Bethesda changed a bit after Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, where I think people aren’t as unquestionably thrilled about the idea of playing a game from that studio now. Yeah. Yeah, so they’ve definitely got something to prove. Especially when so much of your messaging was like aligned with, you know, gamers first and we’re, you know, the audience they like aggressively pursued is like the angriest audience if you kind of don’t give them what they want, so there you go, if you make your bed, you have to kind of lie in it. Yeah, exactly, which is why it’s like more important than ever that the game does the talking, and if it can’t, then it’s a fucking waste of time, the whole thing. Interestingly, one of the big things they’ve patched is that in the game, you do now lie in your bed properly. Very good. Put some poetry in that. Yeah, I think so. So we did it, Matthew. We did the games that we scored correctly. Yeah, I mean, I scored most of them other games correctly as well, but I wanted to draw particular attention to those. Yeah, I wanted to talk a bit more about the kind of broader spectrum of reviewing games, when there’s like a disappointing element or a sequel that doesn’t quite work properly or the game’s a bit racist and, you know, just trying to navigate all these issues. So yeah, it was good stuff. So we actually have a few list of questions to see us out here, Matthew. They’ve kind of accumulated a little bit. If you’d like to send us a question to read out on the podcast, you can email us at backpagegames.gmail.com. You can also tweet us at backpagepod on Twitter. So first up, I’ll read this first one, Matthew, then you can read the next one and so on and so forth. So, hello gents, really enjoying the podcast. Well done. My question relates to my dad. He’s 63. For Christmas, I got him a Series S and Game Pass. He’s enjoying a few games, mainly Forza, Golf and Fishing Sim Pro Tour. Sounds like a dad to me. He’s got on with these games because he knows the rules going in. I’ve only just realized how abstract gaming is. He doesn’t have the baked-in knowledge and muscle memory. When I was explaining that the left stick moves your body and the right stick moves your head, he looked at me like I was talking rubbish. My question for you is, can you recommend any other games on series S with a kind learning curve to get him playing more and getting better value from his game pass? Cheers, Alex. Any shouts on this one, Matthew? I mean, it’s tricky because the whole movement in games, that’s the initial problem, isn’t it? And I can’t think of many games which like actively get you over that. In terms of like a game which has got quite a nice pace to like get your grips, to get to grips with the world and can be relatively sedate if you want it to be. Maybe something like Sea of Thieves? Hmm, yeah, I was thinking that. Because, you know, while it has got a lot of depth to it, the fundamentals, I think you can pick up quite easily and it’s designed to be quite, you know, low energy if you want it to be. Like you can just poodle around in a boat and the boat kind of behaves as you would expect a boat would behave. Yeah, that’s a good shout. I think that my dad is so rigid in the game still play that most of my recommendations he wouldn’t take seriously or he’d look at and think, well, that’s a silly game and then just never play it. Yeah, I mean, Sea of Thieves is quite cartoony, but it’s also like boats and like old men like the sea. Yeah, this has been proven. You can’t contest this. They like looking at it and thinking about lost loves. Right, OK, projecting a little bit here, I think, but nonetheless, yeah. I think another one that sort of came to mind was that if you’ve got Game Pass and Xbox like and your dad’s a bit of a sports fan, I think the Fight Night games are just phenomenal. I think there’s only maybe only one on EA sort of Game Pass thing, and that is Champion. But I think you can whack the difficulty right down and then all you have to do is like mash, you know, square to sort of punch a guy and then triangle to do like a haymaker and that’s like boxing. Yeah, exactly. And all you all your character can do is move from side to side. There’s no like first person movement or anything. So yeah, I think the story mode as well is like basically like a sort of a not very good version of Rocky. So that will be perfectly fine. You know, like like most of the Rocky films. That’s a bit harsh. So yeah, that’s that’s kind of my shout. It’s a bit of a tough one, though. I agree that like making figuring out games that sort of parents might like is tough. Maybe you also think about flight simulator and turning like all the kind of assists on. So all your dad has to do is fly around the earth. That might be all right. Yeah, there we go. I think we navigate. Does your dad circling the globe for a walk by a key of… Thinks about lost loves. Okay, so next up, Matthew, read the next question. Next question. Hollywood has greenlit Games Court as a thrilling courtroom drama. This is news to me, but I’m happy to hear it. What celebrities are called in to portray Samuel, Matthew and the rest of the cast? And what shocking twist can we expect at the end of the movie? From Nick. Interesting. So, yeah, I think that Christian Bale should play both of us. He loves gaining weight and he’d have to gain weight. You’d have to do that to play both of us at different times of our lives. I think that, yeah, Christian Bale comes to mind. What do you think? That’s good. I just like the idea of him bulking up to play both of us. That’s good. I’d rather that than like Mike Myers in a fat suit. I don’t know who the rest of the cast are in Gamescourt. Crash Bandicoot is there, I think. Played by Dustin Hoffman. Played by Dustin Hoffman. I’d say all the CG characters will of course be played by Andy Serkis in a CG suit, so And Chewbacca can just be from Star Wars. Yeah, it can be the Chewbacca, who I think is… I think the actor is called Junus something or other. He can… He’s old Chewbacca died, didn’t he? Yeah, he got squashed by a moon, I believe, in the old Star Wars universe. But that’s what happens when you let Star Wars get out of control in the hands of mad authors. But yeah, I actually… I do have a quite good suggestion for you, Matthew. I’ve been watching Better Cool Soul and Bob Odenkirk’s got a little bit of your energy, I think. I think Mr. Show era Bob Odenkirk playing Matthew Castle. I think that will work quite well. I’m fine with that. He’s a relatively handsome dude. But no one really looks like me. I’ve got a small chin, like a big head and then like… I’m just quite an odd looking guy. You’d have to go like proper Gary Oldman rubber prosthetics. Just sand down his Winston Churchill outfit to blame me. I mean, Jesus. I imagine him getting into that outfit like it’s Mom in Futurama getting into an old lady kind of like Carapace. Well, there you go. That’s what Gary Oldman would have to go through to blame me. Yeah, I don’t know. I suppose you could also film an alternate ending where there’s an executioner. Who would have been the executioner in Gamescourt? Who would have put me to death? Well, it’d be masked, so it could be anyone. It’s the kind of thing where it’s masked and then after the fact, everyone’s like, did you know it was Kevin Costner? And it’s like a fun story about the film. Okay, good. Well, yeah, I think Christian Bale is still a good answer though. And he has to do the voices for both of us. And, I mean, he’s also played two guys before in a film. I won’t say which one in case people listening don’t know which one I’m talking about. But yeah, that’s a spoiler in itself, I guess. Cool. Next question. Greetings, you two. Quick, probably slightly boring question. Have you two got any favourite in magazine advertisements you came across either as a reader or while working on your mags? Or ads you thought were totally inappropriate or dogshit? The one that I remember the most is the Worms World Party advert where a giant angry looking worm is being removed from the ass of some poor patient while the hospital staff are displaying signs of shock and disgust. Not sure something like that could get printed nowadays, shame really. PS sorry Samuel, it wasn’t my place to criticise your highly questionable game purchasers, I should leave that job to Judge Matthew. So that was Chris Doherty sent that in and previously slammed me for buying Star Wars Master of Terror’s Car Seat, which I had no real objection to. And then Chris attached a picture of the worm in question advert. It’s a really elaborate looking print ad for a worms game I think. It’s got like real actors like grabbing it and it’s a kind of like The Thing style sort of horror. I don’t really know why it exists. It feels like pure, it feels a bit like coked up as an ad idea to be honest. But yeah, I don’t remember that many but the one that came to mind Matthew was the John Romero is about to make you his bitch advert. I don’t remember if I ever saw that in PC Gamer or if that was just like circulated and talked about in PC Gamer but I remember seeing that ad and thinking well that’s obviously like very of its time kind of notable thing. Any comes to mind for you? No, a lot of them are quite quite naff. I mean, I only really remember the ones which people kind of complain about. Every once in a while there will be a Twitter thread where people are like look at these terrible ads from the from the late 90s, early noughties. What went all games magazines terrible and you’re like, well, it wasn’t really we didn’t make the ads. Yeah, there was that. I think there was some quite bad ones for Hitman for like, was it beautifully executed? Oh, it was like models with like gunshots in their heads, which when you say out loud, you’re like, of course, don’t do that. So yeah, it turns out once I like, I don’t I, you know, they’re always adverts for such naff things, you know, I was just to laugh that, you know, in N64, it was always a lot of adverts for like, platforming games, they’d absolutely murdered, you know, like Gex or Earthworm Jim 3D or something. It was always that kind of stuff. But yeah, nothing, nothing jumps out. So I’d have to go back and have a proper look and see if I can spur my memory. Yeah, I think that all of the ones that were like trying to be sort of like sexy ended up being terrible. The one that’s burned into my brain is, do you remember that like, cheats line that was on the back of every Games Master book packet? Like red? Yeah, with like the badly rendered CG woman in like a sort of black skirt and how is holding a gun, I think. That was in like every games magazine, I feel like, for about 20 years. Yeah, and then you had the period, when I joined Mags, they’d stopped having a lot of that stuff. It was mainly adverts for like horrible mobile phone wallpaper ad companies. And it was all kind of like, you know, Yoda smoking a spliff and things like that. Like very, very big 2006 energy. Yeah, like phone background ads and things like that. The one I used to really like in PC Gamer was, there was a massive like, back when you used to do sort of postal orders and things, there was a huge list of like games you could buy with prices and they’re like a little coupon you cut out and it’s like, you know, send us 50 quid and then in six to eight weeks we’ll send you your copy of Hexen or whatever. And like those are quite, those are like, they stop you in your tracks when you read an old Mag now, I think. But yeah, I don’t know. So next up, you want to hit us with the final one, Matthew? It’s quite a lot. Oh wait, it’s two more, but it’s quite a long one, this one. Hi Samuel and Matthew. Thanks for the wonderful podcast, especially the episode on the closing of the PS3 and PSV to digital stores. It was a great topic of discussion and had me thinking about something that has been nagging at me for some time. I love collecting physical Switch games to future proof my gaming collection, but is there really any point? Most games nowadays are shipped with a day one patch and sometimes these patches fix game breaking bugs. Here’s where the problem is, in the future, when say, Nintendo closes its Switch digital store, will you still be able to download the patches for these games or will they disappear as well? If I were to buy a game on eBay in the future, what use would it be if I can’t patch it? The trouble is, games don’t write the patch onto the cartridge. Why? Probably because of rewritable versus read-only chips. The patch is stored on the microSD which is locked to the console and if the console dies will you be able to transfer the microSD to another console with all your patches on it? I think people are misguided thinking that nowadays the physical copy of the game is a way of avoiding digital redundancy when patches and DLC are the same as buying the full game digitally. Maybe the lovely people at Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft will offer the patches to public domains so we can play the full, fixed version of the game in the future. After all, it’s not a piracy issue, you can’t play the patch on its own unless you need the rest of the game. Love to hear your thoughts, says Mark Hyne from Brisbane, Australia. Well, thank you for listening from all the way down there. I mean, obviously, it’s the internet, so it’s not like when people used to send a photo in to a magazine of them holding a copy of N64 in Cairo or something. This weighs on my mind a little bit, obviously with the PS3 store closing, this has come up more. This is still very unknown territory because even with the PS3 and Vita stores closing, it’s unclear how long Sony will keep its online services going. But you get the sense that if they’re happy to switch off the store, at some point they’ll probably be happy to switch that off too. And then at that point, you’ll feel like whatever you’ve got is whatever you can enjoy. And I agree that this not being future-proofed is a little bit concerning. In some ways, it feels like, in terms of physical games, I feel like 3DS was the last Nintendo era where all that stuff feels like totally secure in and of itself, like you can put the cartridge in. There are patches for 3DS games, but it’s generally speaking like, it’s generally speaking most 3DS games arrive in a pretty complete state. I don’t know, it’s a big unknown. I’m not that worried about it, but I feel like at some point it will become like a more concerning factor, like someone will make a big blunder in this and then no one will be able to like patch their games anymore. What do you think, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen a few kind of patching operations, kind of external of games publishers. So like on DS, there are a few like language patches for games, which just suggests that as long as people can kind of get their hands on the patch, there will be like some online, unofficial online support going forwards. But yeah, Uncharted Territory, you know, I think you can still, you know, even though you can’t buy things on the Wii Store, you can still download them, things that you own. So yeah, I mean, so it’s not a very helpful answer with let’s wait and see. Yeah, that’s kind of a vibe. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah, that’s that’s how I feel also. So our last question is from Robert Augusta Meyer, like one of the OG Back Page listeners. How do you two, why do gamers get so defensive about critic scores? Have either of you ever felt afraid about publishing one? PS, thank you for looking into all those PS3 store games. Looks like I don’t have to bother. Good stuff. That’s what that podcast is for. The intent was, yeah, was found. So yeah, I think we touched on this a little bit. I sort of like defensive. I mean, that’s just because I think that this is the kind of like climate of games kind of discussion online where people think they can just talk absolute shit and, you know, send abusive messages and all this stuff because of, I just, gamers are just a bit like this. I’ve become so kind of like, I became so sort of immune to it over the years, it doesn’t really bother me that much. But I think we touched on this before. I wouldn’t be afraid of publishing a score. I would be like wary about making sure that we’re publishing the right score. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s not something that bothers me that much. What about you, Matthew? Yeah, very much the same. I mean, as long as I think the review is fair and we’ve done our job and we’ve kind of played it properly and given it the best sort of a proper look and a proper chance, then yeah, I’m confident in what we publish and what I have published in the past. I don’t want to get people are so fussy about very critical scores. I guess they just want to be told that all the things they’re excited about are good or bad. But you’re going to buy them regardless in the same way that I used to buy Terrible James Bond games. It’s just what we do. Yeah, the discourse is just around all pop culture is just terrible these days. It’s just a bit like that. People are like people overreacting to positive or negative scores. It’s like, who gives a fuck? Just watch it. Have your own take. It’s fine. We’ll all just try. It’s something I do miss from, you know, with magazines, it was a bit more implied because, you know, you had to go that extra step of actually paying to get the magazine. You know, you are buying into opinions. You wouldn’t buy a magazine if you really disagreed with it. There was a sense of sort of not allying yourself, but, you know, if you could feel comfortable with certain reviewers and maybe with everything being online and everything being so readily available, it’s harder to get a feel of individuals, of like where individual writers maybe stand on general things. Maybe it’s harder to find a critic who you kind of you sort of gel with, which is really key because you’re not going to agree with everyone. I disagree with most of my peers on most things when it comes to game scoring and game reviewing. So, yeah, you just got to try and find someone you do agree with and then stick with them and give them a break if you ever part ways on opinion. Yeah, I think that like I still find scores I disagree with and I’ll message my sort of peers about. So when when the Snyder Cut was getting quite high scores from some of the broadsheets in the UK, I was quite surprised. Like I don’t, you know, I’m not like massively down on the on Zack Snyder’s Justice League, but it was quite odd to see like Robbie Colleen giving it five, four out five or whatever. And it was something I was happy to talk about. I wouldn’t overreact or like start tweeting it or anything like that. Because I don’t I don’t I don’t like disagree that strongly. I just I like discussing scores. I think there’s a healthy discussion to be had around scores. It’s just obviously not everyone gets that. So yeah. Well, there we go, Matthew. I think we’re done for the for the week. A surprisingly long podcast. I didn’t realize it. Oh, yeah. Maybe I’ll slice some bits out to give it a bit, make it a bit pacer, I don’t know. But yes, thank you very much for listening. We’ll be back next week with another episode. You can follow me on Twitter at Samuel W. Roberts. You can follow the podcast at Back Page Pod. What about you, Matthew? Where can people find you? I am at MrBazzill underscore pesto. Yes. Thank you very much for listening, and we’ll be back next week. So, what’s your final one then, Matthew? The final one was Kid Icarus Uprising, which I talked a fair amount about on our Best 3DS Games episode, so you should probably go and listen to that. Again, like, I feel, you know, this is probably my favourite 3DS game. I just, I love to see Sakurai outside of his Smash Brothers kind of, not comfort zone, I think it’s where he’s forced to live, I don’t think he necessarily chooses to live there, but this is Smash Brothers factory in his cupboard next door to shoot a kidney. And, yeah, like, this isn’t, like, a massively divisive one, you know, plenty of people like Kid Icarus. I just don’t think enough, I don’t think people, many people like it as much as I like it, you know, where I really rate this as, like, an all-time 3DS classic. I’ve just been replaying bits of it since we did that podcast, and just remembering just how, how just, like, just, you know, full on its kind of blockbuster scale is, which in a Nintendo game is so, like, unusual. It really, it’s not something they’ve kind of pursued elsewhere. And like I said, I talked about this on the 3DS episode. You know, the music, the writing, it’s so, like, it’s just a really, really funny game. Really unusual characters. A game which has that kind of Saturday morning cartoon vibe, but, like, is actually kind of good. Often that means it’s kind of, like, quirky and characterful, but, you know, kind of a bit childish. But I think this one is genuinely funny. You know, it has the old hand grip problem, which I think is why some people marked it down, because it’s quite unusual. But it’s really a game that only exists in this form on this particular platform, which is why I really, really rate it. But I don’t think that’s too controversial. No, I don’t think so. But, like, I think this is the game that I feel like after our 3DS episode with Joe was one of the ones that commenters mentioned the most to us on Twitter. I feel like it’s possibly… It’s not in a go-fuck-yourselves kind of way. One listener told us that they had sold their limited edition, a version of the game which now sells for loads on eBay. But I think generally speaking, I think we touched on this in the episode, it missed the right window to become a success. Like, there wasn’t the audience on 3DS at the time this was released for it to take off in the way it probably deserved to. And I wonder if it just missed its window by a year or something when the 3DS was in more hands. I’m not sure, but I like this too. I actually did go and track down some of Mike Drucker’s tweets about working on this after talking about it and then finding some of the funny moments people were tweeting. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I just ran out of words. Yes. Nice. Yeah, cool. I’ll cut all that and then try and think of a way to wrap it up.