Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, what have you been playing lately? I’ve been playing Dark Side Detective. Have you played this? I have, yes. Very nice, point-and-click adventure with kind of like a British humour, but not in an irritating way. Yeah, it’s good. It’s great. Yeah, it’s great, because the sequel came out, and I realised I hadn’t played the first, and some people said, oh, you should really play the first before playing the sequel. So I played through that, and I’m now playing through the sequel, and it’s fantastic. I love it. It’s like the antidote to irritating point and click games. It’s really good. Yeah, I would say like it’s a really, one of the best like modern, sort of easy to play versions of that old point and click style. Yeah. With genuinely good characters, even though they don’t have faces, you know. Yeah, does everything you want from the genre, lets you combine ridiculous objects, has some funny characters, makes the correct decision, and the right distinction between like warmly amusing dialogue and like horrible snark, which is often the problem of point and click games. I find them quite kind of wearying in terms of, you know, everything has to be a joke. So you just end up with this really sort of smarmy protagonist, but not the case here. Very well judged. Excellent. Yeah, it’s got a slightly Dirk Gently-esque vibe to it. Yeah. But like, yeah, it’s like you say, not smarmy and a good foil and Officer Dooley. Good characters. Yeah, I rate it. It’s excellent. What about you? What are you even up to? I have been playing Yakuza Kiwami still, I’ll be honest. Oh, nice. And I’m also on, I’m currently with my heist crew in GTA Online on the final heist that we’ve never done before, which is the Diamond Casino heist. We finished the Doomsday heist, which was hanging over us for over three years. We had a go at it in 2017, and then we came back and conquered it last month. And it felt pretty good to do that, because the difficulty is so wonky in it, we basically needed to level up and come back with loads more silly weapons. So as soon as I turned up with my chain gun laser, it was like, okay, right now I’ve finally got a chance of destroying these invisibility dudes who turn up and kill you out of nowhere. So we were almost out of content now, so we’ll have to play something else basically. So Matthew, we’re back to one of our best games of X year episodes, and to the people listening to this podcast, we identified this chatting this week about our overall plans to the podcast going forwards. We’ve realized we have a bunch of different types of list feature that form the backbone of the podcast and make the most of the fact that me and Matthew are very much generalists. So Matthew has a few more specialties than me, I would say. But in this episode, we’re going to do The Best Games of 2008. If you’re listening to this and you’re new to the podcast, you might not know that we’ve done The Best Games of 2007 and 2006. So if you go back and listen to those, it will hopefully sequentially tell quite a good story of the years as they go. We’ve picked these years because these are the years that we were working in games media. So we can tell a little bit of a mix of kind of anecdotes and then also, you know, some bits and pieces on what we were doing on the magazines, but also, you know, discussing the games themselves and how they related to us, working professionally in games media at the time. So they’re fun episodes to do, for sure. And Matthew, I was curious, what were you doing in 2008? So in 2008, I moved in to a flat with Rich Stanton and had a very fun year living with Rich, who is, you know, an unofficial member of this podcast. He gets mentioned a lot. I was on NGamer. He was on Edge. So it was like a real games review. Like we were just always playing games and reviewing games and there was always something interesting happening. So it was it was it was like a fun time personally. On the mag itself, 2008 is actually a really weird year, like going back and looking at it. The big dramatic thing that happened at the start was that Greener, Mark Green, the editor of NGamer, left and was replaced with Nick Ellis. Obviously, you know, this is my first job. So this was the first time this had happened. Mark Green, someone like, you know, I’d grown up reading and, you know, had a huge amount of respect for and, you know, I love work. I really love working for him. So it was a bit of a shock to the system that he kind of moved on because that didn’t really happen a huge amount in mags, you know, like I thought people I just thought we’d be making this mag with this team forever. So that was that was a bit of an upset. Nick came in. He was the editor of Official PlayStation 2 at the time. Absolutely brilliant. I love Nick to bits. You know, as nervous as I was about the kind of transition and kind of getting used to it and everything, you know, I end up being like really good pals with Nick and he was editor on it for a couple of years. And that also coincided with 2008 is like a pretty horrible year for Nintendo, I think, because we come out of the excitement of like Twilight Princess, Galaxy, Metro Prime 3. And then we’re suddenly into it’s a little bit Mario Kart. It’s a little bit Smash Brothers Brawl. It’s a little bit the disastrous E3 conference of 2008. It was a hard year for sure. Yeah, so I noted that in the game selection that while there are some good games on Nintendo platforms from this year, they’re not generally games from Nintendo itself. So yeah, that was definitely something I kind of picked up on. Yeah, I will say that at a glance this year is pretty amazing. So while the Nintendo stuff specifically, not so much. Even at the time, people were saying, is 2008 the best year in gaming ever? This was the subject of a slate.com article I was reading this morning, just kind of positing that idea and talking about the different big hits that came out this year. So this was a genuinely hard list to put together based on my memories of this year. I still think 2007 is better. I think 2007 has got a few more sort of like undisputed 10 out of 10s than this year does. That’s the thing. This year, actually looking at it, this year had a lot of games that I think I personally didn’t get on as well with, which is why I’m really interested to hear your top 10. Because my top 10 actually is quite Nintendo stuff. Yeah. It’s just quite weird Nintendo stuff. Yeah. So in this, this episode, usually when we do these years, I kind of like do quite a long what happened this year section and we will do that, but it will be a bit shorter this time because me and Matthew both have loads of like honorable mentions of games that we want to discuss in this episode to kind of feel like we’re hitting everything that we were playing at the time. But first of all, I guess I’ll talk about what I was doing in 2008. I was made senior staff writer on play. So I was promoted for the first time. That felt very validating. It would be next year I became like basically a reviews editor and so have a bit more responsibility. But generally speaking, I was living the staff writer life this year. I went on loads and loads of trips, just like an extraordinary amount really. And, you know, saw places I never thought I would ever see being a kind of like, you know, from a sort of like a lower middle class family from Gospel in Hampshire. So yeah, I this year I went to Metal Gear Solid 4. I went to the review event in Paris. I’ve talked about that trip before. The notorious Hideo Kojima gaffe where my phone goes off and I have to leave. That was embarrassing. But generally speaking, it was quite a it was a weird and extraordinary trip. I also went to a Call of Duty World War event in Santa Monica. In fact, we would like the world’s first people to see Call of Duty World War. I believe it hadn’t been announced yet. We kind of just knew it was the follow up game to, you know, Modern Warfare. And I think because it was a Treyarch one, I don’t think like it was as hard to get the access to it. Because I think people thought, oh, well, you know, the Infinity Ward ones are the ones that people care about. Well, there’d be as much interest in the kind of like also ran Treyarch ones. Obviously now Treyarch are the lead developers on the series. Yeah, I always felt like through all these years Treyarch, you just heard so much more about their games. They were so much more open to interviews. You know, Infinity Ward were just sort of locked down as a sort of elite unit. Yeah, they were very, they were very open. That was a fun trip like Mark Lamia, the studio head, was sort of, I think I had a ride in his electric car, if I recall, around Los Angeles. That was interesting. But yeah, they were very open. They showed us stuff like the sound designer showing us where he puts all the sources of sound at a single player level and how it plays out and all that kind of granular stuff that I feel like you’d basically never get from a new Call of Duty game now. Imagine your job being sitting in a little room and you’ve basically got a hundred different sound files of a man screaming to death because he’s been burning from a flame thrower. What a cringe job that must be. You’re like, is this CrispyMan5.wav or CrispyMan6.wav? That’s quite a contentious game in that respect. It was a little bit using flame throwers on screaming Japanese kamikaze people. It was pretty full on. It was, yeah. It’s weird as well because it was obviously set in World War II but it had the same technology as Modern Warfare so it was a nice looking game for the time. This does mark the turnaround in people’s perception of Treyarch because they introduced their zombie mode to Call of Duty which I recall some cod purists being slightly sniffy about. I recall there being some sniffiness towards this as a mode but anyway, obviously it became incredibly popular and a staple of the games over the years. Seeing that, being the first people in the world to see that, just knowing it was like, you know, it was the next Call of Duty, it was set in World War II but it looked like Modern Warfare. I think that’s kind of what I knew before going into it. So yeah, I spent a bunch of days in Santa Monica seeing that. That was really fun. What else did I do? I went to Sega in Japan. That’s where I did the disastrous negotiate interview that I mentioned in a previous episode. I like that this year was just you going around like absolutely monstering interviews. I think it’s just, I don’t know, I was probably slightly too young to be doing it. Still, I was 19 and 20 this year. So I was incredibly young and petulant and annoying. It’s the Samuel Roberts Global Gaff Tour. Yeah, I should have my own shirts printed with Amsterdam, Santa Monica. Gaffing all over the world. So that was good. We saw Valkyria Chronicles. That was one of those games where we didn’t really know much about it and then it suddenly comes out of nowhere and you’re like, oh, holy shit, Sega’s made this really cool sort of like almost ex-commy kind of like real-time game. But we also saw Sonic Unleashed on that trip. That was my only trip to Japan, so that was quite interesting to get basically two or three days to just like ingest Shibuya and Shinjuku and a few other places, Yokohama. Did you do the old trip to Super Potato in Akihabara? I’m not sure why. I’m quite glad we did go to Shinjuku though. I feel like I had enough of a reference point to enjoy the Yakuza game slightly more later on. So yeah, that was fun. And Shibuya as well ends up being… The World Ends With You that comes out this year ends up being a significant setting in that game. So that was fun. And then finally, there was a few more actually. It really was a world tour. I went to Lucasfilm in San Francisco, the Digital Letterman Center. It’s not Skywalker Ranch. It’s basically where Lucasfilm works. This giant campus on the Presidio, which is a very nice, fancy area of San Francisco, somewhere near the Golden Gate Bridge. Just beautiful. They had a Yoda statue outside. Star Wars fans have probably seen that Yoda statue doing the rounds before. And then loads and loads of props. We went on a tour and saw, I don’t know, the Han Solo in carbonite and the poster of that dude from Ghostbusters 2, the painting. What’s his name? I can’t remember his name. Viggo the Cop, I think. Did you see Chewbacca’s legs? One of the best props they have is they have Jar Jar in carbonite there. That was quite fun. Does that happen in the films? No, that was just a fun prop. That’s a great tour to do though. That’s an amazing trip to do. That was for the Star Wars The Force Unleashed. Finally, I went to Amsterdam to see Killzone 2, which I talked about on a previous episode. That’s what I did this year, Matthew. It really was like jet setting and then coming back to the office, finding a pile of promo copies on my desk. This might have actually been a better year than I thought it was at the time. I remember this period because I did one trip in 2008. I went to San Francisco for THQ’s game day, which was a day they did every year, which actually a lot of the publishers used to do this. This just doesn’t happen anymore, which is basically like a mini E3 for one company in a fun place. Midway would take everyone to Vegas or something and then show them all of Midway’s games. Everyone goes to San Francisco to see basically the whole slate of THQ, which for us was the Blob, the rainbow-colored platformer, which I didn’t really think amounted to a great deal. I also had a mortifying press demo of the Blob with a marketing guy in the room. A marketing guy who had come, it wasn’t from Future, I don’t think, but he was sitting in the thing with me and the guy talked about the Blob, which is about this gray lump who kind of absorbs colors to paint a world, which is quite a unique little concept. I remember this marketing guy saying, so basically what you’re telling me here is that it’s Mario at the end of the talk and me just wanting to sort of fold into myself out of embarrassment for him. Right, yeah. And also we saw Deadly Creatures, which was the hilarious game about a spider and a tarantula with voice acting from Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper, which is just one of the weirdest things ever happened on Wii. I have never heard of this game. Well, that’s what’s mad about Deadly Creatures, because when you say it, people are like, wait, Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper, they like voice the spider and a tarantula. And you’re like, no, no, they’re the voices of like two blokes in the background of the game who the spider and the tarantula keep bumping into. The spider and the tarantula aren’t anthropomorphicized at all. They just walk around. But the story of the game plays out in the background, and it’s about these two brothers who are trying to dig up some gold or something. And I think you end up, like, you know, stinging Billy Bob Thornton. If this was an indie game, people would love the shit out of it. Yeah, but this was like THQ throwing like considerable money at a Wii exclusive. I think it was, it may have been on PS2 as well, which tended to happen. But yeah, it was, it wasn’t very good. It came out in 2009, but that’s what I went there to see, because everyone else was seeing Saints Row 2, which just looked absolutely hilarious. And I remember thinking, you know, oh man, I wish I wish I could be writing about that instead of to blob and, and Deadly Creatures. And I think it was a movie tie-in game for Wall-E, which dates it. One thing I do remember is like, you know, that was an amazing trip. But like my peers were going on so many trips. And I remember sitting in the office and hearing people be like, oh man, like I’d love a month where I could just stay at home. And I remember thinking, you motherfuckers, I’d love to be going on all these trips. I was so jealous. The only time that I ever really complained is when I did I did do Gta 4 review event and Metal Gear Solid 4 review event within two weeks of each other. Because I had to write like a feature on GTA while I was at the Metal Gear event. It was just like so, so knackering to do those back to back. But I’m also aware that’s a very privileged position to be in. And that actually like if someone told me now that if your next two weeks are reviewing a brand new Metal Gear game and a GTA game, I’d be like, oh, you know what, that sounds like the fucking best two weeks ever. So I don’t know why I was complaining, to be honest. I was probably just a bit tired. But yeah, it was it was it was fun. I think it was the amount of trips was just reflective of the the time a little bit. So here you’re kind of like a still a slightly pre-recession. I think that’s probably one aspect of it. It’s a little bit pre-recession. Not that trips really kind of like went away when the recession hit. But, you know, obviously, when the recession does hit, there are some changes. You know, some companies will go out of business in the next few years. Yeah. And including THQ eventually. And I’m sure not presumably not because they made the Dennis Hopper Spider game. But, you know, it kind of helped. They should have spent 20 million on getting Billy Bob Thornton to voice a gas station attendant in the background of a Spider game. So it was just a lot of it around. And also this was, you know, that period of the HD console generation where everyone had their good shit ready, basically. This is where, you know, a bunch of big hitters start rolling out and, you know, new series kind of pop up and then old series return in HD for the first time. You’re finally seeing a few games from some Japanese developers in HD that are actually like impressing people, which is interesting because it had been slightly fallacy for years on that front. I think that Capcom is an exception to that. They made like Lost Planet and Dead Rising, which are very impressive. But I don’t know. Generally speaking, I would say that it wasn’t like the best era for Square Enix or Konami around here. I guess then Matthew, I’ll jump straight into what happened this year, kind of like E3-wise and Linux-wise. So it’s not like a massive year for games industry news. So I was looking at games, sort of the games year in review. There wasn’t much in there where it’s like anything earth shaking. There were no kind of new versions of consoles this year. It was kind of relatively straightforward. So I did watch, well, I basically skipped through a bunch of the E3 conferences. This is when E3 was still small scale. It was still kind of like basically more of an industry facing show. In 2007, they had downsized. In 2008, they still had a very tiny attendance, but they were back in the Los Angeles Convention Center. But there were fewer games, as I understood it. There weren’t as many sort of like things on the show floor, etc. I must admit, though, the idea of like mostly empty Los Angeles Convention Center while I explore and play games and interview developers sounds like heaven to me compared to some of the later ones. But nonetheless, I would say none of the manufacturers had good conferences this year. It wasn’t just Nintendo. Nintendo had a particularly bad one, but I would say they were all quite bad. If these were the conferences for any of the manufacturers now in terms of the quality of stuff and the way they were presented, they would be universally slated, I think. And I think that’s partly because it was only, you maybe have to go down the line about two or three years from now to get to the point where publishers are treating them like the public are actually watching this. Whereas I think the publishers didn’t do that necessarily. At this point in time, they were still saw it as like business facing. It just happened to be that the loads of news was generated from this conference. But now they kind of see it as like, you know, consumers and press are watching it alike. You know, it’s a cultural moment. What about the showmanship of Peter Moore’s Gta tattoo from the years before? Well, that’s sure made for like a fun photo in magazines. That’s definitely, that’s public facing. Yeah, yeah. This year, Don Mattrick with his full chest tattoo of Viva Piñata 2 just didn’t just didn’t carry it. Yeah. So on the subject of Xbox, their conference is actually particularly miserable when it comes to business language. There’s a lot of like Don Mattrick saying, and this is and this is going to lead to growth and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you’re like, oh, this is really like, it’s like watching an investor kind of an an investor call instead of like, you know, any three conference. But they probably did have the best one though, still by default. So for Xbox, they landed Final Fantasy 13 as a multi-platform game this year. Kind of emerging trend around this time is that console manufacturers were struggling to kind of keep exclusivity on games. This mostly affected Sony and benefited Microsoft actually. Sony managed to hold on to Metal Gear Solid 4 as an exclusive, but Final Fantasy, you know, had been basically a staple of PlayStation since Final Fantasy 7 has kind of slipped through their fingers a little bit. But, you know, you can’t blame Square Enix because making games in this era was incredibly fucking expensive. So you think, well, you know, get the game to as many people as possible. And so, yeah, they landed that at Final Fantasy 13. They didn’t tell people at the time, though, that it was going to be on 32 discs on Xbox. I always thought it was a bold decision. Yeah, it’s funny as well how much it is just HD video. It’s actually, there’s a version of Final Fantasy 13 on PC that I think is completely miserable. The PS3 one is still the way to play it, and it’s so much. I think you need more than 100 gigabytes free on your hard drive just to install it. And yeah, bizarre. So yeah, that riled up PlayStation fanboys that Square Enix had taken it over to the Xbox. At the same time, Xbox had Resident Evil 5 on stage, which, you know, it was another game that was kind of like a series associated with PlayStation, but it had now, you know, this big presence on Xbox. But the exclusives they showed this year again demonstrate what a run Microsoft was having. So you’ve got Gears of War 2, Fable 2, Banjo Kazooie, Nuts and Bolts, Aviva Pinata 2 on stage. Someone mentioned that Halo Wars was shown at this conference too. I couldn’t find them showing it, but still. Obviously, like, this is a Halo free year for Microsoft. They don’t have anything like huge on that front, but they’ve still got loads of other stuff going on. And also, they were closely aligned with Bethesda on Fallout. They showed, like, a long gameplay demo with Todd Howard on stage. So all of that stuff was very impressive. And finally, they showed off a revamped Xbox Live interface and what avatars looked like on the system. And they would roll that out later that year. Do you have any thoughts on Xbox at this time, Matthew? I remember being impressed by this and feeling quite jealous of this, just because they had, like, they had quite a full slate. And while, yeah, you know, it’s maybe not, like, the mega announcements at E3, this was on top of the knowledge that they had all the other stuff which we’re going to talk about probably in our top tens. You know, there was just so much happening that year that it felt super busy, like, regardless of the conference. There was no denying that Xbox were just really winning at this point, and it felt like Sony was struggling by comparison. So, weirdly, both Sony and Microsoft made a big deal about the fact that they launched a video store at this conference. So they both launched it at basically the same time, where, like, you can download and play videos on your console right now. And I guess this probably was a big thing at the time, but I didn’t ever really watch, like, I didn’t ever really pay for movies that I watched on my console, so this kind of passed me by a little bit. Did you ever indulge in this sort of thing? No, not at all. Yeah. I think, you know, back then I was still in the kind of, you know, using my postal rental service, which were obviously massive, and, you know, who needed it when you had that on tap, so. Yeah, and you’re in a pre-Netflix era, so, you know. Plus, you know, Matthew needed Smallville episodes, you know. He’s not going to buy them from Uncle Sony. It’s not going to happen. Were you still watching Smallville at this point, Matthew, or had you burned out? I don’t know. I went through a bit of a weird period in 2008, where I got, like, super into Naruto. Really? Okay, that’s weird. So I watched just, yeah, shitloads of Naruto in 2008, which I think has led to Rich, who I was living with at the time, assuming, like, I’m some, like, massive dweeb. Well, I guess I would probably draw that conclusion myself, if I sort of lived with you. What was the, kind of, like, what happened there, then? Was there an event in your personal life to cause this, or was it just, kind of, like, curiosity about anime, and that was, like, the rabbit hole you went down? Yeah, I just didn’t have any friends who were, like, super into anime. I had no idea where to start. I mean, that’s obviously as mainstream as it gets. So that was, like, me going, hmm, do I like anime? I’ll watch this incredibly mainstream thing. I did really like it as well. Yeah, fair enough, you know. The one anime I tried to watch was Neon Genesis Evangelion, which, if you’re going to watch one anime, that is fucking emotionally exhausting. I’ve not watched any since, so, you know, I’m not sure it was the best decision. Yeah, so PlayStation this year then, they launched this video store. They showed off the terrible PlayStation Home again. I think this was the conference where I briefly interfaced with Ted Price from Insomniac via PlayStation Home, trying to type using the on-screen keyboard text chat, which is like basically impossible. And yeah, I think it was my memory of covering this time is that PlayStation were getting it together a little bit this year, but still not like quite that exciting. Their big games weren’t that huge. The big announcement of this conference was God of War 3. They had this kind of static image of Kratos they showed basically, and everyone kind of knew this game was coming. So even though it wouldn’t release for a little while yet, I think Sony were just desperate to kind of tell people that they were actually making it. So they did that. They showed off infamous gameplay. They’d announced that the previous year. And Resistance 2 was one of their big games this year. One of the brown shooters that came to define PS3 in this early part of the generation. But a fun game. Talk about it a bit later. But showed off the main character fighting like this huge kind of kaiju-sized monster on a skyscraper, which is one of the best levels in the game. And Sony also went big on online PS3 games that no one would really care about, like DC Universe Online and Massive Action Game. That was the other big reveal. Yep. I did play a bit of Mag, and it was just really kind of a scatter shot and boring. I don’t really get it. But I understand there’s a bit more of a kind of like US sort of like appreciation for the Socom games that maybe we didn’t get in the UK. Right, right. Yeah. So yeah, but otherwise Sony had some good PSP games. They did, they did, you know, show off some like decent stuff. This is actually a weirdly good year for the PSP. A few games might pop up in our list later on, or at least in our honorable mentions. So they won’t come. It wasn’t a complete write off, but it wasn’t that exciting. Any memories of Sony from this year, Matthew? I guess this is pre-year only a PS3, right? Yeah, I didn’t. Yeah, I bought a PSP on the San Francisco THQ trip. That’s when I bought one. So, which was then stolen a little while back. So in the infamous Dyson incident. Yeah, now we’re talking about my PSP though, did they? When it came to your PSP, it’s a shame they didn’t do the same thing they did with the Dyson’s, where it’s like your PSP in a lineup of like a Game Gear, like one of those Tiger electronic hand-helds, you know what I mean? Those all-in-one Mega Drive cheap devices you get from Argos, you know what I mean? Yeah, you’re like, can you switch them all on so I can hear the power up sound? Okay, yeah, so the PSP was doing alright. They had like some alright bespoke versions of PSP games this year, like The Force Unleashed had a specific version for the PSP that was alright. They showed pat-upon at this show. And yeah, Square Enix were making some bits and pieces. Yeah, it’s actually a pretty solid year for the handheld, but no one really outside of Japan cared that much about the PSP. So what are you going to do? Nintendo though, Matthew. So the Wii Motion Plus reveal was the big thing here, but I wondered if you might want to talk about the C3 conference a bit more, since it’s more your area, you would have been paying close attention at the time. This was a total disaster. So the month before E3, I don’t know where we got this information from, but someone trustworthy had told us that certain things were going to be announced at E3. Definitely like Punch Out and I think there was talks like some Kid Icarus revival was like really big at the time, which were obviously both things that did end up happening, just not this year. And I’m not saying that if those things had happened this year would be any different, but I remember writing like the lead news the month before of like, expect this, this and this. You know, this is going to be a really strong E3. And I remember the next month’s editorial after E3, basically apologizing for that and saying, okay, yeah, we were wrong. None of that happened. And it was terrible. It was, I felt really gloomy. This was the E3 where, yeah, Motion Plus was at the heart of it, which they used to show off Wii Sports Resort, which actually was fine. Like this, it was fine in the end, but it’s at the heart of the conference. It just isn’t what you kind of like, you know, hope for and dream of. Animal Crossing City Folk ended up being not a very good Animal Crossing, but at the same time, I wasn’t that bothered about Animal Crossing, so I couldn’t even really get hyped for its announcement. The Wii Speak thing just gave me the fear. Everything was so peripheral mad. We just had the Wii Zapper and the Wii Balance Board, and now it was, and here’s the Wii Motion Plus, here’s this Wii Speak. It was just getting unwieldy. In the office, I felt like we were a bit of a laughing stock because of it. People were like, how much more crap are they going to make you buy? Our office space was so cluttered with this stuff. Wii Music just had a disastrous showing. I talked about it on the last week’s episode. Well, I do like it, but it just wasn’t, it isn’t a sexy announcement at all. Then they got Shaun White snowboarding on stage. Shaun White, it’s exciting, remember him? Him doing his balance board thing, and it was really embarrassing. Just terrible, and it was just really unconvincing chat between Reggie and Bill Trinnen, and I think it was Cammie Dunaway, who was Reggie’s number two, who had this quite mumsy kind of persona, and it was just awful. It was so bad. I think for me, because that thing I’ve talked about on this podcast before about our E3 approach, which was just trying to go above and beyond, and that was the year we were doing all the Mario Galaxy kind of drawings and trying to kind of break down the demo, and a lot of that was also fueled by Greener’s excitement and enthusiasm. So the combination of getting used to a new boss that wasn’t Greener and kind of that settling in, and also having games which we just couldn’t do it for. There was no interest. We couldn’t apply that eye to it. It just felt like a huge step down from what had happened the year before. NGamer was such a positive, enthusiastic thing, trying to find that zip and that spark. It was definitely difficult. It wasn’t a stellar time. That’s rough, yeah. I don’t even really remember Nintendo that much around this time. I will say for their on-stage presentation, I felt slightly bad that Cammie remains one of the only female executives I’ve ever seen at any three conference. She was caught in the maelstrom of bad Nintendo times and I felt like got an unfair amount of backlash. She was super sharp in interviews. I’m not saying like a bad person or anything, but it was so clear the avenue they were going down with Wii. It was this huge casual console. That was just the direction they took the conference. Everything else was so hardcore. You know, when other people have got like Fallout and Resi and Final Fantasy, you don’t want sort of someone kind of like stand wobbling about on a balance board going, oh, this is so fun. It just looked really, really unconvincing. Yeah, yeah. Shaun White makes a pretty poor impression, I would say, on stage. Yeah, and like the thing and like Nintendo, like they really get their act together later because A, they hit into like games which are more exciting, but I think the like Nintendo’s sort of treehouse strand at E3, where they basically streamed the whole show with their localisation team, who are like quite big characters and they’re quite funny people, I think that really, really reinvigorated it, but they had some quite bad E3 conferences for quite a while. Even 2009 and 2010, like even when you get some like great announcement, they didn’t have any like showmanship or they’d lost their sense of drama. Like I don’t feel like we had any amazing like magic E3 moments for quite a long time, really. It feels like the existence of Nintendo Direct is a response to like these years, doesn’t it really? Yeah, definitely. Socially and everything on the mag, we were having a real laugh. It was fantastic and you know, we made some great issues, but like the review sections were like super depressing in the months following this. I was wondering if the DS’s like relatively good software would help make up for that on NGamer at all. Was there any side of it to that? Yeah, it did. But again, it wasn’t really stuff you could like build a cover out of. There wasn’t a lot of like big like Nintendo stuff like this is a year third party did some like really, really heavy lifting. Like, yeah, Japanese developers on 3DS, amazing stuff this year and they appear in my list a few times. That’s fair enough. Yeah, I think for PlayStation, this is a year that it starts to like balance out a little bit more because some of the third party kind of like games aren’t as badly ported as they were earlier in the generation. The PS3 obviously famously hard to kind of develop for. And I think that around this time, Sony made a deal with Epic to have the Unreal Engine 3 like optimize the PS3 or something like that, basically to help developers make it easier to get their games onto the console. Something like that happened. And I think that helps like when I look at this year’s games, there are no real like bad, really bad PS3 ports that I recall. A few more would follow later like Bayonetta is a notoriously bad version on PS3. But yes, it was nothing quite like the Orange Box in the previous year where it was like unquestionably worse than it was on Xbox. So Sony had at least sorted that out a bit. Plus, this was the year of Metal Gear Solid 4, which we’ll talk about a bit. And that, you know, basically showed that Sony finally had something that other consoles didn’t have that would manage to make the console have like this massive hype moment. But it still didn’t really seem to turn interest around. It felt like it came and went because the people who really like Metal Gear, I think just had already bought PS3 knowing they were going to play it. And Metal Gear is like is a big seller, but it’s not like what kind of Call of Duty was becoming at this time. It wasn’t like a 10 million seller. It was like a four or five or six million seller. So it was actually a bit more of a kind of moment in time than everyone kind of moved on. And it wasn’t it didn’t end up being the biggest deal of this year. So yeah, thinking that I remember thinking the PS3 was getting better. But yeah, like you just looking over the Xbox Max and the quality of stuff they had like week after week after week, they just seemed to be having a better time of it. So you can tangibly feel that. The only other thing I was going to note from the events this year, Matthew, were that plastic instrument games were on the wane already. People have started to turn on them a bit. When I was looking around for news from this time, a lot of people were calling out the fact that Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour had happened very quickly, that they’d come around the corner very fast, and that already people had played a bunch of these and were cooling down on them a bit. And I think I forgot how short the interest in this genre was actually. Like it was, it sort of started in 2006. It was kind of over by the end of 2009. It was a real short burst of life. Dooming a million living rooms to dusty guitars and drum sets to this day. Yeah, I honestly think that Activision in the A should basically partner up and turn those old instruments into like low income housing. That should be like a thing they do. But you have to play a mad drum solo to open the front door. So I was wondering if you had any other notes from this year, Matthew, before we move on to the games, because I think that kind of covers most of the big stuff. Yeah, I think so too. I think like some more stuff will come out from just talking about the games. We’re going to take a quick break here, but we’re going to come back with a long list of honourable mentions and then our top 10 games of 2008. Thank you Matthew, welcome back. So, the year is 2008. What does your pop culture weekend look like? I probably watched some Naruto by myself, because I was very lonely. Then I probably would have gone to the Little Theater in Bath, the art house cinema, and watched some really bleak Polish art house film. That sounds like a good weekend now, to be honest, minus the Naruto bit, I think. Yeah, that’s basically the vibe. Then come back to the flat and get told off for not doing the washing up by Rich. I was a slob to live with. That was probably it. I mean, as someone who makes podcasts with you, I can see that being the vibe. No offense to that. I’m a surprising agent of chaos. My pop culture weekend, I too was very lonely in 2008, a lonely staff writer boy. But we didn’t have anything like the little theater. I would have gone to see Cloverfield by myself. Then spend the afternoon maybe watching Prison Break Season 3. Nice. This was the year I gave up watching House as well, because I felt like it had gone off the boil. Also, Desperate Housewives is becoming more and more of a TV stop. I think I started watching The Wire this year, for example. What’s Lost still on at this point? Yeah, Lost is on till 2010. I probably would have watched that at some point as well. When I was working on NGamer, in the early days, there were people in the office I knew from the mags, who I really wanted to be friends with, because they were writers I grew growing up, but I didn’t really know how to instigate. If they didn’t come to the pub, it was quite hard to get to know certain people. I remember Tim Weaver used to come over and talk to Greener about Lost, and that was the one bit of interaction Tim had with NGamer in the early years. So I was desperate to get in on the Lost chat so I could be pals with Tim. My pop culture was all just stepping stones towards social manipulation. Nice. That’s the best way to make friends, isn’t it? Very, very Machiavellian. Yeah, I think a lot of the people at the time who worked at Future, if I’d have worked there, wouldn’t have taken me seriously intellectually. And I might have blundered by talking about an episode of American Dad that I’d watched. It’s funny, actually, when I joined Imagine, I was worried that everyone was going to be quite sophisticated and I thought, oh shit, I better only talk about HBO shows that I’ve seen or something. And then I think it was like day three that there was one of the PlayStation magazines, a big crowd had got around like watching Peter Griffin and Family Guy just fart. And I was like, oh, no, no, these people are like, not only on my level, they’re possibly slightly below my level. And therefore, that means I’m probably going to be okay here. I think it was kind of this pleasant to realize they were down to earth. I actually like, really, when I get nostalgic about this period, I miss the vibe of that office. It was like just, it was just fun. And you could just go to someone’s desk and talk for 10 minutes about, you know, a thing they liked. And I just, that’s something that I feel, I feel like I haven’t done that for so, so long. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s like leaning over a filing cabinet to talk to games master or something. It’s just like, yeah, I loved it. Yeah, I wasted a lot of Simon Miller’s time, who was the editor of X360 at the time. So, yeah, good stuff. So, Matthew, we’re into the games of 2008. So, shall we alternate on our honourable mentions first before we get into our top tens? Yeah. Yeah. So, I’ll start with mine. I’ve put Star Wars The Force Unleashed on here. So, I couldn’t reasonably put this in my top ten games of the year. I don’t believe it belongs there. It’s probably like a six or a seven out of ten. But as someone who was like a bit starved for good Star Wars content at the time, I did quite like this game about a secret, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice who kind of goes around doing these sort of stealth missions for him and goes to these various Star Wars worlds. In this game, they made a big deal about the fact that they had these kind of wacky physics that meant you could send objects flying by using force push. They had these really exaggerated force powers. Generally speaking, I quite liked it. Weirdly, the premise of Jedi Fallen Order is not a million miles away from what this game is. It’s kind of also about a kind of secret Jedi who’s in a set in the same time period between the two trilogies. I thought the ending was reasonably good to this game. It was actually a fairly solid bit of Star Wars storytelling, even if it overstretched it a little bit when it came to the plausibility of the lore. Did you ever play this one, Matthew? I did play it. I think I reviewed it for someone. I remember thinking the first couple of levels where you’re just throwing wookies off trees or whatever, a real laugh. That’s basically all anyone wants from a Star Wars game. And then I remember thinking it came a point where, not the challenge ramped up, it was super difficult, but your powers became less throwaway and less playful, and it became a bit more about grinding away on not very fun enemy types. But then, yeah, it ends on like… The whole thing is quite a key bit of Star Wars lore, isn’t it? Isn’t it like the forming of the Rebel Alliance? Yeah, he sort of plays a role in it. That’s what I mean by it stretches the plausibility a bit too far. Yeah, because he… Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I had high hopes for this, but it was it was very like… It was quite like a flashy version of quite old game thinking. It felt kind of very previous gen in that it was like level by level going through hacking and slashing. You know, it was nowhere near as sexy or well done as like God of War, which it was sort of going for. Yeah, it wanted to be God of War quite bad. I always remember interviewing the producer on this at Star Wars Celebration, I think it was in London for a press event. Because there was a version on Wii, a not very good version, and I remember talking to him about like how they came up with the story. And he told this story about they came up with basically like five big pitches for a game. Then they basically have to go to George Lucas and then they have to ask him like whether it happened in Star Wars. Yeah. And they were like, George, did Darth Vader have like a secret dark apprentice at some point? And George Lucas is like, yeah, he did actually. Yeah, you’re right. Well done for like tapping into my inner thoughts. And you’re like, is this really how Star Wars works? That’s preposterous. This idea that you have to like humour this maniac with pitches until he’s like, yeah, you have thought of something I’d already thought of. Congratulations, you can do it. I remember thinking, oh, I mean, I already thought Star Wars was bust at this point because of episodes one to three, but you were like, this is just madness. This is no way to run a business. Yeah, I think some people are quite sympathetic towards George Lucas these days about how much the prequel trilogy was slated. I totally get that people, you know, Star Wars fans are like a bizarre sort and yeah, overzealous. But yeah, I agree with you that that was an odd sort of way to pitch the game, because they had loads of different ideas for what this game could have been like. There was like a Darth Maul pitch, I think, and then maybe… I think there was a Wookie pitch. Yeah, yeah. If you’ve ever read the story of Lucasfilm book by Rob Smith, it’s like a hardcover book that’s not that honest about how Lucasfilm did things, I would say. At least not in the later years, where they changed presidents loads and seemed to keep switching direction. It does have like all of the different logos they made for the pictures of this game. And yeah, it’s interesting stuff. I thought it was alright. Yeah, that’s purely it. What’s your first honourable mention, Matthew? Advance Wars Dark Conflict, which I don’t have a great deal to say about. I thought I needed to mention it because A, you know, it’s the last Advance Wars Nintendo made. So presumably it didn’t do well enough or, you know, it’s presumed to be the Advance Wars which killed Advance Wars. I am not a big Advance Wars fan, which is why this isn’t in my list. Though I do understand this one to be, you know, a perfectly good entry in a series people had a lot of love for. They made the weird decision to go down this grim kind of route. It sort of dropped the kind of colour and the poppiness of the original games for this sort of like quite hard sort of, you know, war torn nation and it was all a bit brown and beige and that seemed very misjudged. But I’m just I’m not even on this cartoony level like I’m so not a base building strategy resource management type. Like it’s just not my deal. I always struggled with the original games as well. But I remember I think Alex Dale reviewed this for NGamer and gave it like 93. Like he absolutely rated it. I just thought I’d mention it in case people were like, hmm, what about Advance Wars? It’s a shame that they haven’t made more in the original style. So I think that was a sticking point with this one that they kind of lost it sort of like fun a bit. And I think it was what like the Wargroove guys were trying to tap into, which was like, let’s just do Advance Wars as it was, you know, one of your commanders is a dog, where this one I think is a bit more like, wow, this is actually war, man. And it’s hitting everyone hard. And what’s it like to live in a, you know, in an age of war? And you’re like, oh, yikes. Well, see, it’s interesting because my memory of the DS1 is that people really liked it, the first DS1, but that people did mention the fact that it felt a bit like a kind of retread of the other ones. So I wonder if this was, that’s my memory of it anyway, but I wonder if this was an attempt to try and differentiate them a bit, to add a bit of a different flavor. Yeah, it is an Nintendo series. Like, yeah, I’m not mad into, I, you know, haven’t, you know, done much of reading about. I don’t think there’s like an Iwata ass to this one, for example. So it’s a bit of a mystery, some of the thinking behind it. Yeah. And quite an old series as well, right? It predates the the GBA. So, yeah, cool. So my next one is Resistance 2. That’s another of my honorable mentions. So I mentioned this earlier. It’s basically has the ratcheting clank insomniac kind of novelty element of like these different weapons, like fire a dart at an enemy. And then if they go into cover, your bullets will kind of follow them around a corner and that sort of thing. Some really fun weapons and fun grenades. And yeah, it’s quite a brown game. You’re fighting a lot of aliens and stuff. But I would say that this is actually a really good, slightly half-life infused, wandering around American cities, empty American cities, killing aliens and fighting the occasional giant monster. There’s like a fun, they’re quite linear fights, but they’re really kind of cinematic. It’s like this, like I say, Kaiju sized monster picks you up and like throws you across the city. And before you fight it, you see it kind of in the distance smashing buildings up and stuff like that. They went for a definite vibe with this one. And I thought it was actually like a real rock solid, like PS3 exclusive. Like it was a fun shooter that definitely had a different flavor to Halo. Also had like a very, quite a bizarre, I didn’t play it that much of it, but had like a co-op mode where I think there was like eight of you walking through kind of a city. It was always Left 4 Dead style while you were like absolutely swarmed by enemies and just trying to kind of like fend them off. And I remember enjoying that a bit too. But I can’t imagine you ever played this, Matthew. It doesn’t seem like some of you would play. No, it was only a cup of tea. Though I do have a fondness for whatever genre of first person shooter this is, which is the kind of the Half-Life inspired. I guess the later version of this is like what you get in like Metro, for example. I like linear story heavy first person shooters. Yeah. I would say that Resistance 3 is probably the most Half-Life like. That’s very, very similar to Half-Life 2 in the approach. So I can’t imagine Sony will revisit this series. I could never work out how… It seemed like Insomniac was a bit down on the response to this game, but critically it was very well received. So yeah, I don’t know. I quite enjoyed it. What’s the next one, Matthew? I want to throw a little shout out for Time Hollow, which was a Nintendo DS visual novel by Konami about a boy with a magical time pen. He could draw holes with his pen into the past and then stick his hand through and like meddle with the past. And the whole kind of gimmick was… There was something else going on with some other rival kind of time tinkerer, and you had to kind of basically reach into the past to sort of save people in the presence. I like time travel stories. This was one of those sort of slightly kind of, you know, sort of back to the future-y kind of who triggers what. Does this all kind of fold in on itself by the end? So that kind of ticked a box for me there. I was so mad about Ace Attorney at the time. I was really, really up for anything kind of visual novel-y that did get localized, because there were way more of these games in Japan and they were just unplayable. There was one which was like Ace Attorney, but at the stock market where you were buying like shares and trying to like plunge the price of like evil companies and things which always looked really good fun, but never got localized. But this did and it’s not like that warmly thought of. I think it got like a Metacritic of like 65 or something or maybe 70s. I gave it a 7 out of 10, but I was very, very fond of it. And if you are kind of a fan of visual novels and you’re a bit of a completionist and you’re looking around at like pre-owned stuff, if you can find a cheap copy of Time Hollow, it’s an interesting enough kind of oddity to include in the mix. Was this the Shadow of Memories death who worked on this one? That I can’t remember. I should have done more research into this. But you are right. Yeah. There was a weird strand of time games. Yeah, for sure. That’s interesting. Maybe that will come up in a future Games Court episode. Who knows? Yeah, so cool. Right, my next one then. I’m going with Metal Gear Solid 4. Guns of the Patriots next, Matthew. So I don’t know if this has made your top 10. I guess we can’t really say, but nonetheless, I’ve put this here because when I was making my top 10, I can’t say that of all the games on here that I would replay in 2021, Metal Gear Solid 4 wouldn’t get anywhere near my top 10. It’s such a like… Obviously the cutscenes are incredibly long, famously long. It’s a very muddled game. Some bits of it are really good. Obviously revisiting Shadow Moses is very well regarded. I think the first section where you’re walking through the war zone is pretty strong too. In fact, I quite like the second chapter. It’s more like the third one and then the last four hours of the game. That Prague chapter, that blows. Is it Prague? Yeah, the one where you’re following. It’s like a mysterious Eastern European city, but yeah, it looks exactly like Prague. This didn’t make my list, so… Oh, good. I’m glad. I would be surprised if it did. But yeah, it’s a hugely… In terms of significance to me professionally for the year, this did feel like a huge moment. It was like, you know, one of the games that I joined the magazine to write about, basically. But then when it got there, it was so bloated, and so the opposite of Metal Gear Solid 3, and such a kind of fan-service-y, sort of boring nostalgia wank. It’s the worst Metal Gear Solid for me. I’d even put it below 2. Yeah, it was definitely worse than 2 to me. I felt like it’s a game which has got a thousand Kojima touches that you fall in love with and that elevate Metal Gear Solid in the Metal Gear Solid series, but it just didn’t have… The core gameplay was so muddled. It got so distracted, it didn’t know what it wanted to be. It flitted between different ideas and different segments of the game. It’s the worst game he ever made, followed then by Metal Gear Solid 5, which is the best technical game he ever made. Though I know a lot of people have a huge amount of affection for this, from maybe a wanky Kojima lore side, but that isn’t really what does it for me in Metal Gear Solid. I like his playful mechanics side, and this was just a mess, I thought. Yeah, this was basically him being indulged on any old nonsense, which is a side of Kojima’s work that is a real flaw, I would say. Like you say, Metal Gear Solid 5 is better for focusing down on stuff. Like you say, it does flip between things. It’s not actually a very good stealth game, this. It has the aversion of Metal Gear Solid 3’s camouflage system, where you blend into the environments and stuff, but I didn’t find it worked anywhere near as well as it did in MGS3. And sometimes it was just a pure cover shooter, it felt like, but not a very good one. It had this really naff return guns to that Drebben guy who lives with a monkey in a tank. And that was just like… I didn’t really get what that was going for. And yeah, like you say, sometimes it’s kind of like an on-rails shooter, and sometimes it’s follow a guy around Prague for a while. It has no good boss fights this game either, which is criminal for Metal Gear. I would say that even Metal Gear Solid 2 has at least like four really good boss fights. All the Beauty and the Beast boss fights in this are rubbish, I think. They’re like visually spectacular. Although this game is incredibly brown. When you go look at it now, it’s actually like not aged nearly as well as MGS3 has. Like the color palette is really like of its time brown and gray, HD era filters and stuff. And yeah, I just couldn’t… I don’t think I will ever replay it. I’m too old now to replay a game with this many bad cutscenes. I think it is like definitely worth experiencing though. Yeah. It’s like weirdly essential even though, especially if you’ve played any of the other, if you have a passing interest in Metal Gear, you kind of owe it to yourself to experience it. But it’s a really messed up game. Yeah. It’s a real pre-recession game. I think I’ve said that before in this podcast. It’s like every bit of nonsense that could be indulged is indulged. So, yeah. Hit me with your next one, Matthew. A little shout out for God of War Chains of Olympus, which I really liked. This is a PSP God of War. There were two. Was this the second or first one? This is the first one. The second one is called Ghost of Sparta. Yeah. I just thought this translated really, really well. I played, you know, a couple of action games on PSP where I didn’t really think the kind of the control scheme was, you know, it just didn’t have the inputs to kind of like deliver on it. But this one I thought was just beautifully made. Yeah. Yeah. I just I really, really dug it. I was sort of a secret, secret God of War like. Yeah. This was incredibly polished. Is it ready at dawn? Yep. That’s right. You can make the Lone Echo games for Oculus. Yeah. Just very flashy. Did you play this one? I really love this game too. And it almost made my top 10. Yeah. I think it is great. And actually, I think that people are a bit down on the old God of War games now because they have that dumb sex minigame. And occasionally they’ll show you some badly rendered breasts. Which game in 2008 didn’t? Mario Kart did. Everyone remembers that. The kind of bad QTE sex minigames really date those God of War games though. More than they deserved. They are still legit good games of their own. Right, the God of War games. It’s just that that side of things makes them seem really adolescent and embarrassing. I haven’t played a lot of them recently. In my head, I remember it being super naff rather than offensive. I remember some of them being a bit like, it’s almost a bit carry on. It cuts to a giant fizzing candle or something. But I don’t know if I’m just misremembering that. No, every single one of them would do that for sure. That was definitely part of it. But I also think there was a slightly, there was a horny part of its DNA as well. Yeah, you’re probably right. Either way, I don’t feel like they quite get the sort of respect they deserve. They were really rock solid. To draw a little bit of a link with the God of War game on PS4 that everyone loves, this does have quite a strong element of Kratos and his daughter, I believe. That factors into this story quite heavily. It feels like it’s tapping into some of those ideas that a later game would be built on in terms of Kratos as a father and the mistakes he’s made and stuff. It was definitely a bit smaller and a bit personal feeling, I guess because of the scale of what could be done on PSP, but that played to it, that factored into why it’s pretty strong, I think. Yeah, I really rated this game. I feel like if you were a PSP owner at the time and you bought this, you would actually feel like Sony… It was one of the times that Sony actually captured the kind of home console experience on a handheld. It started really spectacular as well. It had a big battlefield sequence where you manned a ballista and shot a big arrow at a giant and stuff. I think it was very well done. So yeah, good show. Almost made my top 10. So my next one is Prince of Persia. So they rebooted this game this year. People might remember this as a slightly cell-shaded style one. Nola North, famous Persian Nola North, voice of the main character. And yeah, I think that it wasn’t that well received by fans of the previous games like Sounds of Time. It’s not like a precision-based platformer like that was. It was a bit more in that Assassin’s Creed vein of you’re kind of jumping but not really jumping. You’re sort of like your movement slightly automated. But I got to say, I quite like this game. I think it looked amazing for the time. It had really nice music. It was a bit pre-Ubisoft just making open world games because it’s kind of like more of a Zelda-y structure where you can come back to levels later on with a new ability and then unlock a whole bunch of the world you hadn’t seen before. So it was that kind of structure of world. Yeah, I was a fan. Do you ever play this one? I’ve played very little of it. I came to it late. I think I may have even bought it on a pre-owned or something. So, yeah, pretty hazy memory of finding the combat objectionable in some way, but I can’t remember why. It’s a very, like, kind of like a counter-based, if you take three hits you die kind of combat system, like you fight these shadow monsters and he’s got this kind of like little kind of claw hand gauntlet thing that he’d use to like throw enemies in the air and then like you’d sort of hit them while they’re in the air and then… Right. Yeah, I just, I had huge affection for definitely Sands of Time, an affection which I think faded over the two sequels because they just, they went all horrible and dark. And was this quite auto-platformy? Yes, definitely. Yeah, I think that was probably what did for it. Like I was a bit of a sort of like, sort of zealot back then for like, you know, proper platforming, as you’ll see in one of my picks in my top ten. But I, yeah, that was a bugbear of mine, so that’s probably what did it. Yeah, I think that’s actually like, that’s fair enough. And in loads of other games, I’ve complained about that being a problem. But yeah, I don’t know, the world in this game, some of the nicest environments I’ve ever seen in a game are in this game. It’s a really nice mix of technology and art. I think I’ll download it on PC and take another look. Yeah, probably play it for ten minutes and then move on with your life, but that’s fine. So hit me with your next one, Matthew. Gears of War 2 didn’t make my top ten. Did it make yours? No, it didn’t make my top ten. I’m not much of a Gears of War guy. I’ve only played the first one. I’ve never played the rest of them. Yeah, I remember Rich was really into this in the flat and we played some in co-op. And I think his enthusiasm for it kind of bled into me a little bit. I’m a bit of a latecomer to Gears in terms of… I actually really, really rate five and I replayed one, two and three a few years ago when I was doing the Xbox YouTube channel. And I appreciated them a bit more. I used to think they were just dumb games for idiots, basically. But while the kind of tone of them and the kind of comedy of them and the kind of macho bro culture isn’t me at all, you’ll be surprised to hear. I do like them as like mechanical shooters and two is like really endlessly inventive in a similar way that I felt about Gears 5 actually. Two is like constantly trading up its set pieces. It’s got the famous bit where you go into the giant worm and chop through its guts and then chains through its heart, which is just absolutely fantastic. It’s got these like giant rock centipedes that move around or like moving cover. They’re being quite good. It’s solid. Yeah, I think that I actually think that at the time I was probably in that boat that you’re talking about where people would be a bit sniffy about it because of the tone. And it’s true that Gears Tone isn’t really for me, but I do really respect it when action games are incredibly sophisticated, you know. It’s like it’s a very dumb game made by very smart people. Yeah, which is, you know, a lot of the best games I like are that. Yeah, right. Yeah. So yeah, maybe one day I should just fire through these because the redo they did of the original one, the Xbox one is really nice actually. Maybe I should just try and route through these games. Yeah, they’re worth playing. They do hold up. Gears 5 is genuinely like it’s an absolute riot for like 10 hours. It’s really good fun. Ah, well, there you go. I remember the multiplayer for this one did take off as well. I knew quite a lot of people were playing Gears 2 multiplayer and it’s weird because I can’t ever really picture playing a competitive third person game. But I guess like I guess it does happen. It’s just a bit rarer. Did this introduce Horde or was it the third one? I can’t remember. I think this one does introduce Horde. Yeah, I think so. Because that was like that was a bit like zombies. This was like the year of like explosive co-op multiplayer modes. Yeah, there were loads of different Horde. I think like Horde was a really good legacy of Gears actually because there’s loads of different good variants of Horde that pop up in some of the games in the ensuing years. Yeah, definitely. Good stuff. All right, so my next one is Pure. Don’t have loads to say about this one. In fact, I’ll bottle it with the other one I’ve got here, which is MotorStorm Pacific Rift. So, yes, I always call it Pacific Rim because that’s the name of a film, obviously. But Pure is, it was by Black Rock Studios who would, their big game would be Split Second, which was quite a fun, burnout-y racing game where you bring down airplanes and stuff and create set pieces. That was fun. Before that, they did this, which is kind of like doing freestyle stunts on the kind of like ATV, those kind of like bike thingy-ba-jigs. And I gave it, I think I gave it like around 80-something percent for play. And I remember really enjoying it. It was a good racing game mixed with a good stunt game. Yeah, really solid game. And MotorStorm Pacific Rift, I think it’s like possibly the highest score I gave this year to a game. That’s not true. One of the ones in my top 10 is, but I think I gave this 93 percent. I really like it. I’m not as much of a racing game guy as I am some of the other genres. That’s why I didn’t make my top 10. But MotorStorm, the first one was like a good PS3 showcase. Had like this monument valley, sort of like brown levels. This one really mixed it up by adding like beach levels and volcano levels and all these different inventive environments and loads of good variety in the different vehicles you can drive and yeah, just an all time great racing game. So yeah, I don’t have loads more to say about those, Matthew. No, I just say it is a shame that it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but where like the kind of like the sillier accessible kind of arcade racer sort of dies off in this generation and it all becomes a little bit like Simi or SimLite. Yeah, we’re close to that time here, I think. You have a few years before you start getting like good need for speed games. But yeah, what’s your next one, Matthew? Witcher Enhanced Edition, which I didn’t make my list because I don’t like it enough. Also, I only played it in the last couple of years. I didn’t actually play it in 2008. I remember at the time hearing about The Witcher and you know what everyone hears about The Witcher is you collect playing cards with like nude women on them and it all sounds a bit salacious and grim. And I remember just writing off in my head as a sort of self righteous young man being like, oh, well, you know, I’ll never play that. And I think actually the reputation of The Witcher 1 also stopped me from getting into The Witcher 2, which ends up being like, I love The Witcher 2. I think it’s almost as good as The Witcher 3. This is a series which I really, really love. And in the light of falling in love with Witcher 2 and 3, I then went back and played Witcher Enhance Edition. And it’s naff. It is tacky in the way I said, but there’s some charm in seeing like those characters again and the fact that there is this sort of through line, the same people keep peering back up. And, you know, I finally understood some things in 2 and 3 a bit better. It’s pretty like easy. I think they changed the fighting system for Enhance Edition. It’s quite arcady. You just basically hold a mouse button. He does all this like twirling and kills everything on screen, which is quite fun. Yeah, I’m pleased I played it. I thought it was, you know, The Witcher 1 won’t ever get really mentioned in these podcasts otherwise. But a little nod to it. Just don’t like play it when your significant other walks in and you’re sort of ogling. Well, you’re not ogling, but you’re looking at the nudie guards and you have to explain yourself. It’s kind of embarrassing. I love the idea of 2008 era Matthew being being snooty about The Witcher and being like, well, I’ll just go back to watching Naruto then. I won’t be partaking in your nudie guards. No one wants their public persona to be like, I’m really horny for these playing cards. That’s true. That is true. That would be like death in the office socially. You may secretly think it, but you wouldn’t say it. Yeah, exactly. Cool. That’s a good shout. I mean, I’ve always wrestled with, maybe I’ll play other Witcher games, but then do I start with two or whatever? You say that two is the place to go. I think we discussed that in a previous episode. The weird thing about them is because they all sort of, it’s not a directly connected story. They’re almost like moments and adventures from Geralt’s life. So you can kind of play them, if you play them in order, obviously you get the accumulation of like, you know, the relationships and everything. But yeah, like I played two quite happily without having played one, it was fine. All right, good stuff. Yeah, good show. I think it might be, it was for a while, it might be free if you sign up to a GOG Galaxy account or something like that. It’s very easy to get it for free, basically. They give it away pretty frequently. So yeah, I’ve got two more honorable mentions, Matthew. The first one I don’t have a lot to say about, which is actually one of the reasons it’s not in my top 10, but Wipeout HD came out this year. This was basically the two original PSP games they’d made for Wipeout, which were very good, Pure and Pulse, I think it was, combined into one HD package on PS3. Looked absolutely amazing. You can get it on PS4 now. It’s a really nice version, just futuristic sort of racing game. I’m not like the world’s biggest Wipeout guy, but the zone mode in this is fairly famous. The entire color of the track keeps changing as your speed increases. It’s kind of like, keep going for as long as you can before the speed becomes so unbearable that you can no longer turn a corner properly without smashing your little flying car into the corners and stuff. Just a really, really good, nice looking game. I’ve got fond memories of that one. And then Devil May Cry 4 is the other one. So I got quite close to putting this on the top 10. As I cycled through my top 10 a bunch of times, this did get into the lower bit a few times. But I can’t say that I ever really fell in love with Devil May Cry 4 in the way that I did 3. It’s the one that introduced Nero, a sort of new playable character who had a little claw hand thing. And to be honest, I will confess to completely misunderstanding the fighting system of this game because I understand that there is a completely different moveset that you unlock with Nero when you do achieve certain parameters within the game and that make him the most complex Devil May Cry character they ever added. And me at the time, I evidently was not good enough to master that as a reviewer. So I found him quite simple. He was kind of like, use your claw hand, pull an enemy towards you, swipe them, etc. etc. But I understand there’s actually a lot of depth to this game that I missed. So yeah, I just think it recycled environments too many times and bosses. There’s a lot of repetition in this game. Devil May Cry 5 is a bit more my sort of flavor. But do you have any memories of this one, Matthew? No, I think I think it was a was there a demo of this on 360? Probably. Yeah, I think I played a demo of it or I played the first. I definitely didn’t own it. I wasn’t a big Devil May Cry person really. You know, not having been a big PlayStation guy, it was never really my cup of tea. I loved the recent one. I really, really loved Five and it made me think I should probably go back and explore this series in more detail. But yeah, I just remember again to keep bringing him up. I think I remember Rich being quite down on this and I, you know, he’s so super into this stuff that he was quite a big influence on like my playing habits and things of like, oh, well, if he doesn’t think it’s much cop, then I won’t play it. I think it’s what happened. Yeah, wasn’t wasn’t sort of like a massive favorite of mine, even though I acknowledged that it was. Yeah, it was it was it was good. It was just like, yeah, just didn’t truly dazzle me. All right, then, Matthew, kick off with your top 10. Let’s go with number 10. I’m going to kick off as always. This is a heart list. It’s games I loved. I’m going to kick off with a bit of an obscure, well, a slightly obscure one. I’m going to kick off with Fatal Frame 4, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, which came out on Wii in Japan this year. It didn’t come out in the UK. It came out eventually a couple of years later, I think 2010. And yeah, this was Fatal Frame is a series where you fight ghosts by taking photos of them, made by Tecmo. This one was made between Tecmo, Grasshopper, weirdly, Suda51’s outfit, and Nintendo themselves. I thought this was tremendous, though other people are a little cool on it because it’s got slightly wonky, awkward controls. What I loved about this is, I thought production value wise on Wii, it looked absolutely amazing. Like it really blew me away. It was one of the best looking Wii games. Really like spooky blue moonlit kind of schools and orphanages and all the kind of classic stuff you get in J-Horror games. It absolutely like scared the shit out of me this game again and again. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast. Basically the death of proper horror games in terms of everything becoming clever rather than scary. This is just like spooky ass ghosts jumping out. But it works brilliantly. Did you ever play this one or see this one played? No, it was one of those curios that I was always because I knew it was Grasshopper. I was always like, oh, I bet that’s kind of kind of good. This series honestly passed me by by recently moving up the first three on PS3, but never played this one. Same here. So I haven’t got any like, you know, past relationship with the series at all, which is maybe why this one seems so effective to me. But it had a couple of things I love about it. The core photography mechanic is quite arcady. It’s a sort of system where you basically have to like let the ghosts get quite close to you to take pictures. You take more damage like the better in frame they are. So it’s got this like absolutely killer risk reward mechanic built in. But what they what they added, and if this is in previous games, apologies, but I’m pretty sure this is new to it, is they had these sort of like so context sensitive like reach segments where to like interact with things in the world, you have to hold a button and the animation would start playing. And if you let go of the button, the animation would retract. So like, if there’d be like a dark hole, for example, and you’d have to hold A to reach your hand down and hold A and hold A as your hand went deeper and deeper to find an object to the bottom. And this was just such a great way of capturing that moment in films of like, Oh, God, is there gonna be something there? Is there gonna be something there? But there’s scenes where you have to hold A to like slowly pull back curtains. And you’re like, Oh, no, I don’t want to do it. And you let go of the button and the curtain kind of draws back again. I thought this was so clever. Like it’s so that’s such a weird, like cinematic thing it tapped into. Again, Rich will attest that when I was reviewing this, I was just it was so scary. Even in Japanese, where I didn’t understand a word of it, I was just constantly having to take breaks from it and put it down and leave it because it was freaking me out so much. Like I had to use like game FAQs or some translation guide to actually get through it because a lot of it’s quite baffling. Like that sort of Silent Hill puzzle design of like find a random object here and use it over there on the other side of the map. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s just completely, completely baffling. I genuinely think that before PT, this is one of the scariest things I’ve played. Well, I actually looked it up while you were talking, Matthew, and this has never been released outside of Japan, this game. Oh, OK. There must have been a there was another Fatal Frame then. Oh yeah, I think they remade two for the Wii. There was also a fan translation of this game released in 2010, which might be what you meant when you said the two years later thing. Oh, that’s maybe what I’m thinking of. I remember there being some reviews of this after the fact. That’s why I thought it’d been re-released. People must have reviewed the fan patch. Well, there then, all the more reason to pick up a copy if you can, because you can translate it. Again, I put my hands up and say I haven’t played the series, so maybe this is just well trodden ground, but I thought this was super scary and so good. Well, it’s pretty well reviewed. It also has fucking rad cover art as well. I would totally play a game with cover art that’s got here. Yeah, yeah, just really interesting, the idea that it’s co-directed by Cedar. Yeah, there wasn’t a lot of that in there. It’s not like you turn a corner and there’s like a ghost taking a big old shit or anything. It’s fully committed to scared schoolgirl being spooked by horrible J-horror tropes. But that stuff, J-horror fucks me up more than anything. I remember at the time I was convinced that it made the loading on this game, not in-game, there was lots of loading, but however it was like reading information, like the Wii made such a racket that I became convinced they’d done something deliberately with like where they put information on the disk to ensure that the Wii would rattle at certain points to be like a scary thing. I mean, that is definitely not true, but that’s like how much this game kind of spooked me. That’s what I thought they were doing. Wow, that’s amazing. I mean, Paul went out for Suda whose entire output has been reduced to a ghost shitting on a toilet. I mean, that’s like your assessment of his work. Well, I mean, there’s no smoke without fire. That’s your very, you know, very kind of like empathetic reading of his work. That and the ghost would have some dumb ass name. Oh, good stuff. Was the one that released the Wii U any good, Matthew, the Fatal Frame game? I don’t know if I even played it. Fair enough. I think it was released in Europe, but I don’t I don’t think it got great reviews. But maybe that was the one I’m thinking of the projects. They definitely did a remake of two. OK, well, interesting stuff anyway. That’s a really good show. I mean, yeah, it’s no surprise. It’s not on my list. Actually, I will say I didn’t really establish the rules of this very well. So the criteria is the game had to have been released in this year in Europe. So there are actually a couple of games that released in Japan this year or America that have not made the list, but will make the 2009 list, for example. So number 10 is The World Ends With You on DS for me. So that’s my number nine. Oh, perfect. Well, there you go. So this is a very unusual RPG like from Square Enix. It made the most of the DS. You controlled one character with the D pad and then the other with the touch screen. Two characters in this kind of like shadowy version of Shibuya in Tokyo. And had all these cool looking Tetsuya Nomura, sort of like Japanese teenagers being quite moody and stuff. And then it was kind of counting down to your death, I believe the story, wasn’t it? Quite grim. You were pulled into this sort of weird game. You may have been dead. I can’t remember the exact specifics, but you’re involved in some shadowy soul world game called the Reaper game. And you could sort of like, when you went to this Shibuya Crossing, you could hear people’s thoughts and stuff when the NPCs walked past and stuff. I liked that. But I was very fond of this game. It looked amazing for the DS, like a really confident visual style. It actually feels like this is the sort of game Nomura would make if he wasn’t sort of stuck doing Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy forever. This quite contemporary, sort of fashionable, you know, sort of like Japanese RPG. And I thought the way that it used the functionality of the DS was perfect. So much so that I actually couldn’t really envision playing this on the Switch and stuff. I understand that the mobile version they did, that the female main character is basically like auto-controlled. And I like the fact that you had to kind of use the D-pad to like enter sort of inputs for her. Yeah, the DS is definitely a place to play this. Because otherwise, yeah, basically half the game gets boiled down to like basically a summon in battle. Yeah, so Matthew, talk me through this one for you. This must have been like a really nice surprise on NGamer, right? It kind of really impressed a lot of people at the time. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I just remember playing this and thinking like, wow, there’s just nothing else like this. So, you know, I think I was aware of like persona at the time. And it kind of taps, you know, it ticks a lot of the same boxes that it kind of taps into like a very contemporary kind of trendy Japanese adventure with this sort of supernatural element. I mean, it seemed, you know, as someone who hadn’t been to Japan, but like I said, was very much sort of Japanophile. You know, it just felt like, oh, wow, I imagine, you know, not it felt real. And that’s kind of dumb. This is super cartoony, quite like abstract world. But, you know, it had all these like brands in it. And I think it definitely appeals to the same part of the brain as like a persona or a kusa. You know, it just feels like very authentic and like lived in despite its kind of ridiculous elements. It had this like awesome J-pop soundtrack. It’s very 2008, like, you know, it’s all like kids with like trendy MP3 players. And it’s, which I also had, you know, this was back in the age of my creative zen. Zen? I think it was. Yeah, this was just, this was just, you know, awesome. And it felt like it didn’t have much reach beyond Nintendo. You know, like, I don’t think anyone else on the mag played it. I remember playing on DS. The weird thing about, like, reviewing DS games is because they’re never on a TV. Like, they’re quite hard to share with people. Like, no one ever gathers around to watch you playing a DS game. So you can have these quite, like, profoundly entertaining experiences. And then you just have to say, well, trust me, it’s really good. You know, this thing I’ve been doing all week is really good. But it’s just not very, it’s kind of hard to show off in a very public way. Oh, yeah, I remember this one, like, you know, wishing more people were into it because I thought it was just absolutely astonishing. I loved all the collectible pins, like the battle systems built around, like, badges, which give you, like, different elemental powers. But there were, like, hundreds of the things. It was so customisable. It was so deep. This is such a good game. And it’s never been as good as it was on DS. But, yeah, I’m so curious to see what they do with that follow up on Switch. I think it’s cool that they’ve revisited it. And it was, it did start like a very, it started a really naff discourse, actually, of people saying like, oh, this game rips off Persona. And then like other people being smug and going, well, I think you’ll find this game came out in 2008. And then people on Twitter being critical of that and saying, how dare you gatekeep with this? And I was just thinking, everyone needs to just go outside for a bit and go to a restaurant and calm down. That really annoyed me. Yeah, it speaks to a certain, like, I can understand the feeling that this feels like it belongs to you in some way. That you have this quite like, you know, all this really, this game really gets me. You know, it’s quite kind of teenage-y. It’s sort of angst-filled. And this idea of like, oh, it’s special to me. And, you know, I don’t necessarily, you know, I feel precious about how other people kind of handle it or think about it. I could maybe understand people, you know, in a similar way that I think they are with like, Persona, for example. It inspires a certain kind of fandom, or it speaks to a certain kind of fan. Yeah, this was so, it was so good. Like, a rare light spot in this quite dark year. DS did a lot of heavy lifting for me in 2008. Yeah, that’s fair enough. No, I like this game a lot too. Yeah, I think that even at the time though, I felt like the teenagers in this were like way trendier than me, a man who was 20. And I also like that the main character, Neku, I think he was, he never ever takes his headphones off when he’s talking to people, and just seemed like a right little bastard. But it’s interesting, the pin system felt like a bit of an evolution of Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, which I believe this game was kind of a sort of a successor to a game where you use cards to perform movements and stuff like that on GBA. Yeah, I like this too. I think you’re right, I can see why people kind of covet it. So I guess then, who’s next then? Is it me still? You’re number nine now. Cool. Okay, my number nine Matthew is Little Big Planet. Now, I don’t expect this to be on your list. But I think that people, like I know that Nintendo fans and people who are big on Nintendo platformers don’t like this game in terms of it, how it feels as a platforming experience. I think that it’s a really, really nice co-op game. I played a lot of this with my little brother when I lived in Bournemouth and he lived in Gosport and we would jump on and then just like, you kind of join each other in each game and then you basically can tour any level that, any user created level, you can play in co-op, which is quite a nice experience. And some of the levels were also tailor-made for two players, so you might need one player to stand on a Switch while the other one does something else and etc. etc. So obviously the whole thing with LittleBigPlanet is like, I think play, create, share was the whole thing. Anyone can build levels and anyone can share levels. And it got a really, really good critical reception. I would say over time, like, interest and excitement for it has faded. Like, the third LittleBigPlanet came out on PS4 and PS3 and didn’t seem to kind of generate much interest. The second one was pretty acclaimed, but yeah. For whatever reason, people aren’t like as big on it as they were. But I did think this felt really kind of like fresh and different. And there wasn’t as big a community around it as maybe it sort of needed. But I did like that a friend would tell me about, like, a level where it starts with you going into the mouth of a man having a shit and then climbing through his gullet. And then you’re told to grab on to something. All the whole time, the man is going, with all these kind of like weird sound effects. You grab on to a rocket powered poo that flies out of his ass and like speeds down this kind of like pathway and lands in this toilet. You grab, Sackboy grabs the chain and then loads of like little kind of like prize bubbles drop out of something above. And like, it was a great bit of like physical comedy where it was like a Japanese level when someone, a friend wrote down like the exact thing you need to search for to find it within the game. And like, it was quite, it was quite good for this. And I think that it also… Do you know that Suda51 made that level? So, I like that. I like the campaign. I like that there was the same kind of like music and sound effects would pop up over and over again in people’s player credit levels. So, things would get recontextualized like that. You’d hear that kind of like man groaning sound quite a lot in the main story. But then to hear it again of like a man having a shit. It must have been moderated in some way, but it felt like a mostly unmoderated kind of like wasteland of stuff. That meant there were a lot of shit levels, but you could sort it by like the top rated and you could find like a lot of really good ones. So yeah, I was fond of it. But what’s the Matthew Castle take on LittleBigPlanet? Yeah, I’m one of these very boring, sniffy Nintendo fans. I think it doesn’t matter how clever it is. It’s a horrible platform. I hate the feel of it as a platformer. I think it’s just terrible to play. The weight of Sackboy’s head, that three planes of movement thing just never ever made sense to me. I do not get it. And I have very little interest in user generated. It’s like making stuff myself. And when games are built on that. I know this sounds hugely dismissive. This is just my personal psychology. Is that I don’t want to make stuff. And I don’t want to play a game which shows me how clever and creative loads of other people are either. Like I’m just not interested. That makes me feel bad about myself. I want to play a game which someone else, a game developer has made, that I can pay for. And that’s it. End of story. That’s the relationship I want. I don’t want to know that there’s some like genius 13 year old who’s completely remade Gears of War in Little Big Planet. I’m not interested. I think that the three planes of platforming thing, I do agree with you. That is weird. It is like, why not just make a 2D platformer when you can grab onto stuff. I never got it. And I don’t know. I don’t really like Sackboy. I don’t like his whole vibe, his big stupid head. It’s relatively low on my list, but there was a slight sense of this had to be good on PS3. I think people were willing it to be good. And I have no idea how much it got people into actually designing levels and stuff, because the tool was quite complicated in this. You still couldn’t build anything that quickly. Yeah, I don’t for a second think it’s a bad thing. It’s just so not for me. It’s in a similar way. I don’t play Dreams, but I can admire Dreams as this amazing tool. I get it, but it’s just not my cup of tea. I’m just not interested in making stuff in a game, personally. But I don’t begrudge you putting it in your list. No, it’s fine. It’s very much a heart choice. I actually do think that as a platform it was a really fun little campaign. But nonetheless, that’s my piece on Little Book Planet. So what’s your next one, Matthew? Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Not on my list. Relatively low down on my list. It’s a game that I loved playing at the time, but it definitely didn’t have the legs of the other Smash Bros. I don’t know if that’s to do with a change in circumstances, the fact that I wasn’t working on magazines when the first one came out. You know, I was at school and when Melee came out again, I was at college and I had loads of time to play this for my brother. And, you know, we just played it and played those games to death. I do think, like, I played less of Brawl because, you know, I now had lots of other stuff I had to play for work. I do think it is a weaker Smash Bros. I think its levels designs aren’t as fun. I think this began to like the trend towards, like, quite simple platform formations, sort of floating in front of, like, amazing Nintendo backgrounds, where I think in the earlier games, the first two, it felt a bit more like… like, the locations felt like the places you were meant to be in. Like, Hyrule Castle was this quite complicated kind of… Oh, it wasn’t the temple. Was it the temple ruins? Where, you know, these vast levels with lots of, like, hidey holes and things, where it became a bit kind of… it felt like it was becoming a bit more purer, you know, something that they then went all out on, obviously. In the most recent ones, where there’s basically, like, a battlefield formation for every level, which just strips it right back and it just says… it just treats it like a fighting game. This is kind of halfway house between that. You know, obviously all the characters they added were, you know, really good fun, you know, a huge roster. A lot to love on that front. I thought the actual, like, structure of the game was a bit off, like, the single player, the story mode they added, subspace MS3 is terrible and it’s the worst thing in any Smash Brothers game by far. I mean, I, you know, it lost points because it had that mode and I hated it so much. Just junk. Trying to do, like, a scrolling platformer with, like, Smash Brothers mechanics. Terrible idea. Terrible. And its bonus score attack modes. It was a shame that they stopped. In Melee, like, every character had, like, a target Smash built for them and in Brawl, it was just a generic target Smash. I always thought that was a big disappointment. It’s little things like that. I thought there was just a few cut corners here. It began to feel less special. But then that is balanced out by the fact that, like, it is just the most, you know, like, this is the one where they went mad with the soundtrack and it had, like, 300 tracks and it was all, you know, they got new composers, you know, composers in to, like, write new versions of, like, other games tracks. You know, it has, like, 50, you know, like, basically the creme de la creme of, like, Japanese composers all riffing on each other’s work. It’s absolutely amazing soundtrack. I mean, like, probably the best thing about the game. That’s obviously a trend that’s continued, though. I downloaded the whole soundtrack onto my PC at work and basically it’s what I wrote NGamer 2 for the next three years and, like, different periods of those three years I was into, like, different bits of the soundtrack. This is why there was a weird period where I got, like, super into the Sonic stuff, which is just abysmal, kind of, well, you know, that kind of rocky, with lyrics that basically sing the plot to the games, which are always really baffling about. So lots of lyrics about collecting rings, which is odd. And the one I remember is, What goes up must come down Where your feet can touch the ground I remember that one. That’s Sonic Heroes, Sonic Heroes. It was the PS2 one, yeah. Yeah, it had the Metal Gear bits on there, so it had, like, the calling to the night and all that stuff. Oh, this soundtrack. As a disc, forget the game, just buy it as a soundtrack. It’s so amazing. But, yeah, otherwise it just didn’t have the sticking power that the other ones had for me. Yeah, so I would have put in my honourable mentions, but I knew that you’d bring it up at some point. And I think that… Because this was, like, my first proper Smash Bros. game that I sort of owned and played a lot, I did appreciate it more, I think, because you actually come at this without that kind of prior experience and maybe knowing some of the details like you do. And it feels like such a massive package of stuff, because obviously they had built on the roster with all of these quite novel additions, like Snake, obviously, and Sonic, and also the Pokémon Trainer, I thought was a really great fun character, the Pokémon Trainer, I was very fond of that, switching between the three different Pokémon, I thought it was a really cool mechanic. And then on top of that, you also have all of these original levels they built for this game, but then they had the bonus of adding all of those GameCube levels as well, like a bunch of the Melee ones were in there. Yeah, it did have them, but I just thought they showed up the relative weakness of the newer levels. I thought that that’s probably fair in some cases. I always find it really weird that they had… The Sonic level in this is really weird, the Green Hill Zone one, where there’s that bit in the middle that keeps collapsing and rebuilding. I thought… I didn’t really get what they were going for with that, and it just made that level quite irritating, I thought. But then I did really like the Metal Gear one, where Metal Gear Rex just smashes through that door at one point, and then, yeah, it just has a kind of real heightened drama to it. Plus, it was fun to play, like I say, the GameCube levels. I hadn’t played Big Blue before, the F-series level, which is really probably my favorite level in any of the games. And so, yeah, I think… It was actually a really great bit of fan service, even if you don’t… I know it’s not considered the best of this series by that audience, but I don’t know. Like you say, at a time where maybe Nintendo wasn’t at its best, it was an amazing package for celebrating Nintendo. Yeah, and it feels like I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth a bit. I mean, it was this amazing Nintendo celebration. I just… I think I had this problem with a few games, particularly the multiplayer games on NGamer in the early years, and it’s why Mario Kart Wii didn’t make the list. That came out in 2008 as well. It’s just I had such a massive relationship with certain series, like before I started the job, that I really did bring a lot of baggage to the reviews, and I felt like Mario Kart Wii, it just… It’s so bad compared to how much multiplayer fun I had with Double Dash, and I talked about this in reviews, I got wrong. I wasn’t happy with my Mario Kart review. I kind of absolutely softballed it and gave it a decent score, but in hindsight, I don’t rate it at all. Smash Brothers wasn’t as severe by any means, but I did… When I was reading about my review, I was like, man, does some of this stuff matter? Does it matter that there’s these weird tweaks to the single player content? Does anyone actually give a shit? I gave a shit at the time, but now I’m like, maybe I should have just acknowledged that this was fundamentally going to be a game that everyone just played in multiplayer, and here are a load of great characters. It had enough of the good stages. I liked all the crazy new items. This is the game that added the final Smash, which I remember liking at the time, the kind of the mad rush for the super powerful power up where you basically nuke everyone. I played a lot of this in the office with Rich. We swore a lot. Publishers kept coming over and telling us off for being too loud at lunchtimes, which I thought was super rich, considering every lunchtime up until that point, all you’d ever hear is the PSM and OPM boys roaring at Pez. I still thought we were pretty polite and quiet compared to them, but apparently not. It’s just the way of it. I guess the sweariness and the volume actually speaks to the strength of Smash Bros. Well, I will say as well that I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong about Subspace Emissary. I don’t think it’s great, but I don’t think there’s ever been a good single-player Smash Bros. element. I probably slightly prefer Subspace Emissary to that one in Ultimate where you’re just walking down those endless roads, having endless battles with shadow versions of characters. That doesn’t do loads for me. Apart from the cool references, it doesn’t do loads for me. It’s the references, but I like that one. As a structure, I think it’s super fun and nerdy. That tickled me as a big Nintendo nerd. But yeah, maybe you’re right. Who judges fighting games on their single-player mode? It seems mad, but you know. Good choice. Maybe I should have put that in my top 10 now. I slightly regret it. Sackboy gets in. He added Pit. I really liked Pit. That’s the other thing. He was good. Good stuff, Matthew. So it’s my number 8, right? Yeah. Cool. My number 8 is a pure heart choice. It’s Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII on the PSP. I almost made my honorable mentions until last night when I made a quick change and just added it to the list. Because I thought I couldn’t really sum up my year of games for this year without mentioning this game. So this is an action game spin-off of Final Fantasy VII. This is around the time that Square Enix was doing the compilation of Final Fantasy VII, which was some mostly coolly received movies and, you know, the Vincent spin-off Dirge of Cerberus that no one liked, the third-person shooter. This was the best part of it, though. This was a spin-off about Zack, who was basically Aerith’s boyfriend, and like Zack’s, so he was like Cloud’s buddy. You kind of learn about him in FFVII. He plays like a minor role. But weirdly, this is like a slight spoiler, I guess, for Final Fantasy VII Remake, so skip this if you haven’t played that yet. But this game ends up being enormously significant to the plot of that game. Basically, the ending of this game is at the end of FFVII Remake, which is quite bizarre because there’s no reference to Crisis Core before that. But anyway, it’s a third-person action game. It was a little bit Kingdom Hearts-y, I suppose, as a kind of action game. It had this mad casino slot-style bonus system where it would constantly be running these slots in the background, and then every now and then when it hit a number, a summon would join in or you’d do a special attack or whatever. You couldn’t control it, so it was randomized, which means it’s not an amazing system. But it did mean that fights would constantly have this sense of scale, when a summon would arrive or you’d do this big attack animation and stuff like that. I think they succeeded in translating the fairly static nature of Final Fantasy Battles to this quite large-scale, exciting, real-time combat. So I liked it. I think that the story is pretty good as well. Basically, it ends where if you’ve played Final Fantasy VII, you’ll know that Zack dies, he gets killed by a bunch of Shinra soldiers. The way this game does that is very sad and very effective. You kind of know that ending is coming, and so you’re kind of building up to it, and the game gets very melancholy in its last third. Is this the Rogue One of Final Fantasy? I guess it is, yeah. I guess it is. I actually think that Halo Reach… I guess I have no way of proving this, but I feel like Halo Reach took its final idea of, you make a last stand knowing that you’ll never win from this game, which does that exact thing three years earlier, because that is how the game basically ends. It’s like you are facing an endless, endless waves of Shimmer soldiers until you lose in-game, and then you watch a horrible cutscene of Zack being shot to death on this cliff. It’s really quite, like, quite grim. The thing is, though, I don’t think this is an amazing action game. There’s quite a good retro-nauts episode about this game, actually, which made me think, well, it probably… The fact that I like it is all to do with… I was massively into Final Fantasy at the time, so the fact that it was this high-end cinematic game really sort of appealed to me, but I do think it’s got some shortcomings. Zack is a bit of a Mary Sue character. He doesn’t really have any flaws. Maybe the one flaw he arguably has is he’s too trusting of Shinra, his employer, and that’s what ultimately kills him. Maybe that’s arguably a flaw, but he’s a very nice, cheerful sort of presence. The way it kind of brings Cloud and Sephiroth into the story is really good, too. It also commits the slight sin of… I know that anime movies tend to be set between episodes of TV shows and bring in a guest character who you know will not be in it by the end of the story. This does that a little bit by introducing characters who weren’t previously part of Final Fantasy VII lore. I like this game, Matthew. I’ve rambled about it enough. Do you have any thoughts? No, I should have played it at the time. I remember a few people raving about this to me and thinking, Oh yeah, you know, I haven’t really got anything else to play on my PSP, so I should do that. I think that this and God of War actually do show quite nicely what the PSP could do that the DS couldn’t do. In terms of like, you know, just capturing that console game size spectacle on a handheld. Yeah, did it very well. So yeah, that’s my piece on Crisis Call Matthew. But what’s your number seven? My number seven is No More Heroes. That’s higher on my list. Whoa, okay. Let’s jump to your number seven. Okay, so Civilization Revolution is my number seven. Did you, is this on your list? No, I have never played this. So please fill me in. Well, that’s a shocker because I thought that a Civ game that you could play on DS would have been like Prime Mac Castle thing. But then you tell me that thing about Advance Wars, which makes me think that maybe strategy. Yeah, I’m secretly thick. That’s my problem. So I can’t play these. I think Nick reviewed this. Nick was super into Civ games, so he reviewed it. Yeah, so this is actually one that a listener mentioned on Twitter and then it kind of reminded me of how much I enjoyed it. So it was basically, Civ is obviously this PC legacy series, very quite complex strategy game. You build a civilization kind of like, I guess, like the time before Christ. And then you over time sort of develop and build sort of like build up like a market and add different bits to your to your towns and your cities, you expand and grow more cities. You build roads between your different cities, basically building an entire functioning civilization. You encounter other civilizations, you can declare war, etc. I’m sure everyone listening knows what Civ is. This game boiled all of that down to basically be playable on a console. It’s the only time they’ve done this. Actually, I think that the most recent Civ game you can play on console, which is really bizarre. I have no idea how that works. But anyway, this was this was purely made for consoles. They designed the interface from scratch to work with PS3 and 360. And then the DS game is exactly the same, just like visually very simple. It actually has a bit of a kind of like a school textbook vibe, the DS one, quite cartoony, and very silly caricatures of political figures, which is something that Civ always does. And while this is definitely not as complex as the PC one, you can break the game by basically like building as many towns as quickly as possible, building markets, then having so much money that you can just endlessly churn out military units to go and conquer other cities, which was always my strategy. It was a really nice little distillation of Civ. I actually think you would have really loved the DS version of this. Yeah, I don’t know why I haven’t played it. I’ll remedy this to eBay. Yeah, it’s not very expensive on eBay. It’s like six quid, but yeah, I liked it. So what’s your number six, Matthew? My number six is Fallout 3. That’s higher on my list. Whoa, okay. What’s your number six? My number six is Dead Space. Oh, not on my list. Really? Wow. I didn’t even make your honorable mentions either. We’re not a Dead Space guy. No, I don’t mind it. I just, yeah, tell me about it. Why do you dig it so much? Okay, so Dead Space, obviously, like this was around the time that EA briefly made a foray into creating like original games. They were known as the FIFA people and they made lots of terrible six out of ten Bond tie-ins that Matthew bought. Yeah, generally speaking, they didn’t have a good reputation. I would say that EA’s reputation is still very up and down in terms of how they received for various reasons. But this was very kind of like died in the wall, hardcore game. It’s a survival game that, sorry, survival horror that’s like also a third person action game. And it’s a really, really refined sort of like blockbuster feeling game set in a kind of alien type setting, like an abandoned space station basically. And you go around using your, you see this basically like this cutter tool, this plasma cutter to fire like the limbs off of these like monsters that attack you. All of the creatures in the game look like something from The Thing. They’re all just like, it’s quite fucked up looking like humanoid things. And you have these different powers like sort of being able to like lift, using like a gravity powers to like lift enemies or items and you can do this to solve puzzles and stuff like that. Generally speaking, I think it’s just a really good like meat and potatoes like survival horror game made for this age, like a post Resident Evil 4 game in this genre. There weren’t many of them around and it was just really a really, really like rock solid version of this type of thing. Did you have any thoughts on it at the time Matthew? Yeah, I did. I did. I did start playing it. I think I borrowed it from someone to see if it was going to be like my kind of jam. And it was just a little bit too like intense for me, I think, at the time. Because it’s, you know, it’s quite a fast survival horror. Like they’re not shambling zombies. When the things jump out, they really come at you. You know, a brilliant bit of sci-fi as well, like the design of the ship and how like industrial it is. I mean, you know, it’s got the obvious like alien kind of sort of similarities. But I feel like it really kind of commits to this sort of hulking interior. And it’s a daunting place to be in and you feel like very alone. Yeah, I just found this like super stressful. It wasn’t until like years later that I like properly played through it. I think just before Dead Space 2 came out, actually, because I thought, oh, you know what? I’m going to get on this bandwagon and really stick with it this time. Yeah, it’s not that I dislike it at all. I don’t know. It just didn’t really pop into my head when I was making my list. Well, this is actually like the opposite of a hard choice. Like I don’t think I have no like real affection for the story in this game or the main character or any of that stuff. None of that really applied. I just thought it was a really, really good solid game. It felt like they’d taken years to make this game, you know what I mean? Get everything right. Yeah, and it was definitely like an interesting period of EA who up until now, yeah, like you say, were like sports licenses and movie licenses. And they suddenly had this slate of like quite weird stuff. Between this, I guess, like what they were doing with Battlefield being like kind of going up against COD, a bit more traditional, like Mirror’s Edge, things like that. Like it felt like experimental EA kind of comes in waves, but they go big on it, then they all bomb, then they don’t do it for a couple of years, and then they’d go big on it again, all the while kind of paying for it with their sort of, sort of generic stuff in between. Yeah, it’s really hard to tell where they’re at these days. I feel like they’re kind of maybe kind of entering another period like that, perhaps, but you can’t really tell. Yeah, also Boom Blox, wasn’t that one of those around this time too? Yeah, that was that was good. I contemplated talking about that. But yeah, like that weird sort of jangery thing, which was sort of, you know, executive produced by Spielberg. We did a feature in a kind of a funny page in the mag. I say funny. We did a page in the mag of like, you know, you may be surprised that Spielberg’s involved in Boom Blox. But actually, if you go back to his old films, you’ll remember that. You’ll actually see the connective tissue a bit more clearly. And then it was just a load of screenshots from Spielberg films with Boom Blox very poorly photoshopped into them. That’s a good gag. That’s a good gag. Yeah, but it was like, you know, like Indian, you know, the idol on the pedestal at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark, except it’s fucking Boom Blox. Yeah, I suppose like you pick your films as well. Like, he wouldn’t do it with Munich, I assume, you know. Well, I think… I don’t think there was a Shinless List one. Oh, magazines. Ah, 2008. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were in our 20s and 30s. Yeah, okay. So that’s Dead Space, Matthew. What’s your number five? Geometry Wars, Retro Evolved 2. Not on my list. Oh, this is fantastic. Again, like a big sentimental choice. Sharing that flat, both me and Rich Stanton were super into this. We played this loads on the TV in the living room, specifically the Pacifism mode, which is the mode where you can’t shoot and there are these like floating gates on this sort of 2D top-down grid. And you pass through the gates and it makes an explosion. And that’s how you kill the enemies in that mode, with these exploding gates. We played that mode so much. We became slightly manic about it. The gates that you pass through, they had these sort of like weird sort of designs on the end of each gate, which looked a bit like… Do you know those honeydipper sticks? I do, yes. Yeah, it looked like those. And because of that, we used to call it… I think it was like going to Honey Town or something whenever you went through the gate. And it was just us shouting all this bullshit about honey the whole time, which really made me laugh. And when I saw the name of this game, whenever I see this game or a screenshot of this game, I always think of that. And it makes me laugh of just us doing stupid high school one-upmanship on Geometry Wars in the living room. A beautiful sequel grew out Geometry Wars in so many interesting modes, had some really famous Xbox achievements that we were desperate to get. There’s one in Pacifism where you basically have to do a loop. You have to slide along the edges of the screen twice and you have to do two full circuits at the edge of the screen. I think it’s Wax on Wax off, it’s called. And we were just endlessly trying to get this and it was really hard. It’s a great HD era game with all these exploding pixels, the crazy light of it, a really pure arcade game. I think it also… This was part of the XBLA summer of arcade, which was the big promotional push where Xbox picked a few big hitter arcade games. I think this summer it was Retro Evolved 2, Braid, Castle Crashers and something else which escapes me. But it was this idea… It felt like they were curating their indie games a bit more than they are now, where it’s just a total free for all. And it felt like, whether rightly or wrongly, they picked out a few who were the anointed few. And they were spectacular. The summer of arcade was cool. It was something I really looked forward to because it meant, oh, you’re going to get some great indie games. And they were like eight quid or whatever. So, yeah, a good time. A good, you know, my favorite of the XBLA games at that time. Yeah, I loved it. Oh, yeah. So I was big into the sort of summer of arcade thing as well, because obviously it doesn’t stop other developers from releasing stuff around that. But I looked it up and the other games around this time were Galaga Allegiance and Bionic Commando Rearmed, which is a very acclaimed game. Which I liked, but yeah, not enough to put on my list. But yeah, I thought it was good. This passed me by a little bit, Geometry Wars, but you mentioning achievements there does remind me of how weirdly obsessed I became with those. I think it was the perfect match for a young man with too much time on his hands and a kind of slightly compulsive brain. That was like, you know, yeah. When you work on games magazines or a media company, you’re surrounded by enough people who are also interested in those things that you can get quite a nice little competitive ecosystem going within. So you’re never going to have more achievements than some hardcore gamer who’s sitting at home just churning these things out. But you might be able to do better than some of your mates at work. And so there was quite a nice communal sense. Friend leaderboards in games at the time really felt like they meant something. Like now, when I play a game on my Xbox One, it’s so rare that even a couple of friends have also played that game for leaderboard stuff. But back then, those modes kind of did kick in a lot more often, mainly because Matt Pellet on Xbox 360 was like a demon at games and would basically dominate everything. He had like the biggest game of score. He was always at the top of the leaderboards for every game. But under that, the competition was a bit healthier. Yeah, I mean, like Hitman is the only modern example I can think of where it’s really like… It’s so great when that kicks in. I love, you know, I think that kind of score competition can be a really cool thing. But, you know, getting enough people at the same place with the same mindset is actually surprisingly hard. Yeah, you know, one thing I will say for this, I didn’t play Geometry Wars 2, but I do feel like this was a time where we were getting that first wave of revivals of these classic types of games for this era. And I think maybe we were slightly more receptive to them or excited about them than we are now, where a lot of different… We’ve experienced several waves of different genres finding a second life. And I feel like a Twin Stick Shooter has just felt suddenly quite exciting to play one, like you say, in HD, looking really nice and having a slightly different flavour tonally to the older ones. Yeah, good choice. So my number five, Matthew, is Fable 2. Is that higher on your list? It’s higher on my list. Thought it would be, yeah. So what’s your number five? My number four is Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Not on my list. So, yeah, do your thing about the Beige Tube Man. The Beige Tube Man. This was the birth of the Beige Tube when he first slurped out the hat. This was, yeah, like a really interesting spin on the kind of more like casual side of DS. It wasn’t a touch generation game. I don’t remember it being like branded with the touch generation stuff, which was like the more kind of, you know, your kind of brain training or whatever. But I thought this was an ingenious way of kind of taking the vibe of brain training, which was it basically took a load of puzzles, sort of logic puzzles from a Japanese series of puzzle books written by a guy called Akira Tago, or Tago, I don’t know. And wrapped them up with like quite a compelling mystery animated world where you’re this sort of Holmesian detective, Professor Layton, with a sidekick, Luke, a little boy, it’s never really explained the nature of that relationship. It’s kind of baffling. You go to this sort of curious village and you solve mysteries. Everyone there kind of is constantly asking you to solve puzzles to get like the next bit of information out of them. It’s a very linear story. But like a triumph of framing, I’d say this taking these puzzles, which maybe in isolation might have been a bit dry, wrapping them up with this narrative, gorgeous production values, you know, these sort of animated cutscenes, this soundtrack, which was very sort of kind of sort of accordion, very sort of like sort of European, reminded me a great deal of the animated film Belleville Rendezvous, which was quite big at the time. You know, yeah, a very like unusual take, but just delivered with like pure class. This really put level five on my radar and they had made stuff before this. You know, quite a prominent studio in the early noughties. But this was like next level and it was just huge. And, you know, birth this this chain of six games, which, you know, I’m very affectionate for most of them. I think All Told, Curious Village is probably my second favourite one. My favourite latent game will probably come up in a later episode, but it’s a good story. Yeah, I love the, you know, the touch screen interface was perfect for the kind of puzzle input. It’s really a really great thing. Yeah, this was a big enough game that like on the kind of import scene that I bought it on one of my trips to America because it released in the US in early 2008, but it released at the end of the year in the UK. So and obviously this was the time like pre-Brexit where the pound was like, you could get like two dollars to a pound. It was amazing. It was amazing. Yeah. And so buying DS games when you’re on like a US trip was actually quite a good thing to do because you’re spending about like 18 quid on a game instead of 25 quid or whatever. So I remember buying this and being very impressed. It’s funny because when we did our episode where you coined the famous space tube quote, you did say that everyone else at Layton Meats is quite normal. And I played this game a little bit last year actually during like lockdown madness. And this whole town is filled with people who are like, it’s a potato with a face. Like there’s a really fucked up looking people in this town. Yeah, I don’t know where that came from. That was just bad analysis in that previous episode. You’re right. Yeah. Potato face monstrosities. Yeah, I really like the puzzles in Isolation. I think that, like you say, the idea that it’s like an overarching plot mixed with these standalone puzzles makes it a really perfect like handheld game. You can just do a puzzle or two, wander around, you know, talk to people, then just save your game, then get off at your train stop or whatever. And it was really perfect for that. It’s funny because I think over time, I sort of called on the fact that Layton was positioned so firmly, I guess like these sort of more, I don’t want to say casuals, but you know, like people who have bought a DS because of the advertising campaigns and like bought brain training and then bought Professor Layton. It kind of became kind of, I don’t want to say kind of co-opted by them because that sounds a bit gatekeeper-y, but it just, it felt less like a hardcore sort of like DS thing, I guess. But yeah, that doesn’t stop the game from being very good though, and it does look very nice. Definitely in the pages of NGamer, we really took to the weirdness of Layton. It may have been true that it was very popular with mums, but it was also weird. Layton is quite a weird-looking dude. The whole stuff with Luke, there’s weird humour in it. They’ve got quite surreal minigames. They definitely get more ambitious and stranger as they go on. They’ve got absolutely ludicrous twists every single one of these games. They end with just complete… If you saw it in a film or TV show, you’d probably storm out the cinema. Absolutely the dumbest things. I thought there was definitely a strand of core gamer weirdness to them. I don’t know. Layton was a very key end-gamer figure. It felt like he was a perfect fit for us. It’s like a feat of localisation this game as well, because it’s got the three layers of hints system where you spend a coin to unlock a kind of hint, and then if you still can’t solve it, you can do it two more times and the hint… Basically, the last hint is almost the answer. That must have been really hard to localise in a way that didn’t sort of spoil the puzzle or upset exactly what the clues were in the original text. I think they actually… As they went on, or maybe even in this one, some of the puzzles, they actually changed because they were reliant on Japanese wordplay or very specific cultural references that didn’t make any sense. So they were very careful with this stuff. They were very heavily involved in that process of bringing them over and being careful with them. There was a bit of a criticism at this one. The criticisms that were leveraged at the first game was that sometimes the wording could seem a bit unfair or obscured the real solution. And they got better at it. Noticeably, the games felt generally fairer as they went on. By the third or fourth entry, they were really nailing it again and again. Yeah, I’m kind of sad that Leighton has died a bit. After the original 6, it felt like it was never as big on 3DS, which is more to do with 3DS not being as big, I guess. And then they made a lot of very good spin-off smartphones, which then became a, I think it’s a Switch game. It’s like where you play as, it’s not Leighton’s daughter, it’s like some family relative, like her niece or something, but it’s just, it’s guff. It was really bad. Yeah, I felt like there was a moment there where level 5 were huge, and now I don’t really know what they’re making. No, they were like, yeah, a real success story, while specifically in those end-gaming years, we were mad about them. Everything they made was just so polished, so like AAA, and they were like, you know, the charts in Japan, it was always a battle between like Nintendo first party and level 5 games, like they were so prominent. And now they’re, yeah, it’s all a little bit like, you know, Ni No Kuni 2 and not a lot else. What is your number four? It is No More Heroes on the Wii, Matthew. Oh, there we go. So I actually wasn’t familiar with the Studios Games before this, but this kind of looked like my sort of thing based on like the sort of weird California setting, the kind of like ludicrous premise of basically a nerd trying to impress an attractive lady by climbing in a rank of, like a ranking of assassins. And then the fact that it had these very like stylized boss fights, like these really distinctive boss characters and the fights themselves were also were all unique too. And that combined with the fact that the Wii controls were really my sort of things. This is a game where you do use the action buttons to do most of the stuff in the game, like hitting an enemy and moving and stuff like that. And instead you use the motion controls to perform finisher moves or special moves. And I think that was a really great creative choice because it means that when you can hit an enemy with your beam katana, basically a lightsaber a bunch of times, and then at the end you get a prompt to swipe the Wiimote and then Travis touched down your main character would cut through an enemy and kill them. And that felt like a really well-conceived combat system to me. It wasn’t quite Capcom level in terms of its complexity, but felt really, really good. You waggle where it counts basically. Yeah, which is a really good choice, because I think there were so many Wii games that either overdid it or didn’t do it enough. And this kind of felt like it found a happy medium. It looked really nice as well. And this kind of like not quite cell-shaded, but just a very distinctive comic book-y style. And I really like the kind of like lazy Santa Monica vibes of the open world, even though the open world isn’t… There’s not much to it. You just kind of like drive from shops to your really naff little motel room. And I don’t know, but there’s a real flavor to it. And I think we discussed this in a previous episode. When the second one removed the open world stuff, it did lose something. It’s kind of like… I think it was just… Maybe it was just being like a really nerdy, like early 20s man with no girlfriend playing this game about basically me, but more reprehensible. Maybe that’s part of the appeal. What do you reckon? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I thought this used the Wii in all the right ways. Like you say, the waggle kind of hits where it counts. It used the Wii Remote Speaker when she phones you up. I’d played Killer 7 before, which was my introduction to Suda. No More Heroes is like mechanically hands down his best game. I mean, it’s the Suda 51 game. I think you can just play and play, and it just makes the most sense. It’s mad as shit, but it’s also very coherent. I think, weirdly, all his games became a lot more playable after this, but maybe weren’t as interesting, or were a bit more conservative, or a bit try-hard in certain ways. This was like a perfect middle meeting point of like Suda madness from before, and the kind of more playable Suda that came after. Great characters, great style. I assume you played the European version without blood? Yes, I guess I did. Yeah, they always really bugged me. Some people were down in Europe, because they felt like they were being short-changed, because the US version had blood when you killed people. But I thought the kind of exploding pixel style played perfectly with its abstract take on the world, you know? This is like a guy who sees everything as a video game. That just makes more sense. Yeah, I never really felt like I was missing out from that. Yeah, yeah. No, the characters are really good. The bosses are all really well thought out, conceptually. It’s funny, because the Scott Pilgrim books were releasing around this time. They’re actually quite similar, conceptually. But I think that, I don’t know, it really spoke to me, this game. And also, just an unashamedly hardcore Wii game at a time where I guess there weren’t that many. Was that significant to you on NGamer? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we weren’t big on this. We never did a cover for this one. But yeah, I remember this was published by Rising Star and they were very big on Wii and DS. They had loads of stuff. And I felt like we were always going over to their offices to see things. And they were quite a small little outfit. But yeah, they had some good stuff. They did a press event for this. I didn’t go to it. They did an interview with them where basically you had to interview him sitting on the toilet in his hotel room. Because, you know, in this game, you save your game by taking a shit. And I think it was Alex Dale who went to do this for us as a freelancer. And when he got to the train station, because you ride a motorbike in game, they took him to the event, like, on the back of a motorbike, driving really fast through London traffic. I think it traumatized him. So, yeah, like, super full on in every way. You’ve got to love No More Heroes. I adore it. And I’m totally going to buy those Switch versions when they drop the price a bit. They’re a bit too pricey for me at the moment. But I’m well up for playing these again before the third one comes out. Yeah, I love this game. Yeah, Rising Scar, a star. What a really interesting little… Some of the stuff they were putting out this time was really cool. So, what’s your number three, Matthew? My number three is Tomb Raider Underworld. Not on my list. Which probably won’t come as a surprise if you’ve listened to our last couple of best of episodes because I really, really rated Tomb Raider Legend a really rated Tomb Raider anniversary. Tomb Raider Underworld is, for my money, the best Tomb Raider hands down. Like, it’s the best the series has ever been. A proper platformer. It’s not auto-platforming. Lara Croft’s got a really gymnastic moveset. And basically all the set pieces in this game are giant platforming puzzles. It doesn’t really do boss fights. It’s got some terrible combat admittedly, but it introduced a system where you could basically dial down combat difficulty specifically. You could keep puzzle difficulty the same, but turn down enemy health so you could just shoot everything once and they died. So you could get rid of the combat. It was really next gen in terms of taking the concept of Tomb Raider and just blowing out the scale. Most of these levels were quite traditional Tomb Raider tombs, but basically embedded in semi-small sandboxes. So the opening level to this is diving down in the Mediterranean from your boat, and you just dive and dive and dive in this huge submerged temple. It emerges from the merc and you’re like, wow, I can do any of this. This isn’t faked. It’s not a scripted sequence. This is just a huge space. Later on, there are temples so big that you have like a motorbike because you need to drive around, you need to ride around on a motorbike to get to trigger certain things to open a huge temple in the middle. I love games about excavating these ancient spaces and activating machines and then it all unfolds and there’s like a second layer to it. That’s really my cup of tea. This is just the best version of that. I really liked the rebooted trilogy, but they were just never platforming games. They just weren’t interested in playing platform games. They were action games with some light puzzling, auto-platforming. You just don’t do much tomb raiding in them. There’s some scenes in Uncharted which I feel like capture the scale, but in a very hand-held way. They’re intensely linear. It never just leaves you to really struggle. In fact, the few levels in Uncharted that really click with me are closer to underworld levels, like that tropical island in Uncharted 4, where you just kind of left your own devices. I thought this is an amazing, amazing game, and I know a couple of people who hold it in incredibly high regard, and I think it’s a real shame that they shied away from this direction from the series. I feel like this game really lost out due to the fact that there was an absolute avalanche of games at the end of 2008, and this just felt like it got pushed to the bottom of the pile because it was, I guess it felt more familiar and it was less splashy. I remember when they demoed the game to us, the stuff they showed off was things like Lara’s hand animations and grabbing individual blocks and stuff like that, and they did show us the level with the Kraken. There’s a Kraken in this game, right? Yeah, that’s like the second bit of the game. Yeah, that’s like the second level. Yeah, so I didn’t actually play it properly, but it did feel like this just didn’t get the attention it deserved for whatever reason. Yeah, there’s just so many moments in this like I’ll never forget. I remember going over to do a press trip for the second Tomb Raider reboot, that Rise of the Tomb Raider, and we did all the Rise of the Tomb Raider stuff, and then I was talking to the guy who was basically the lead creative dude on Underworld as well, and I was just, you know, I was talking about that Tomb stuff there, and maybe this is just my read on the situation. In the whole day, that was the one bit he really lit up on, where he was just like, oh yeah, we were talking about some of the platforming gauntlets in it, and I don’t know, part of me felt, this is what this studio really should have been doing, you actually, Crystal Dynamics knew they were onto a good thing with Underworld, and they rebooted it, and it’s critically acclaimed, and it’s loved now, and that’s fair enough, but I think there’s a bit of them that also just wants to get back to quite hardcore prints of perjury, proper platforming. Yeah, I wonder if the sort of environment we’re in now of some more complicated games being popular will encourage them with their inevitable next Tomb Raider reboot to go back to this a little bit more. I think the thing they ended up doing was making it a bit more uncharted-y in terms of it being cinematic and stuff, and I think that’s maybe the element this lacked that made it a bit more commercially successful. Yeah, that’s the thing. In light of the buzz around uncharted, this probably seemed a lot less sexy, and a little bit old-fashioned. It was still like old Lara, and I think Lara Croft has a bit of baggage. She feels quite outdated at this point. I didn’t care for the story of this or anything. I’m not bothered about Lara Croft as a character. She’s just someone who gets you into amazing temples. But if you like Tomb Raiding, this is the game with the Tomb Raiding, I think. My number three, Matthew, is Mirror’s Edge. Not expecting this to be on your list. It is not. Yeah, so Mirror’s Edge, first-person platforming game from DICE, the makers of Battlefield. Dead Space was one of the big original games that EA made this year, and Mirror’s Edge was the other one. They made a big deal about them. Neither of them seemed to sell that well, which is kind of a shame. I guess Dead Space did better than Mirror’s Edge did, though. So the thing this game does perfectly is, it’s like a kind of like parkour style game. You’re running through this dystopian city and jumping between rooftops and swinging on kind of like zip lines and sort of like doing these sort of roles to have safe landings and kicking down doors and all this stuff. The levels are mostly linear in this one. It’s kind of a game of figuring out how to optimally get to the location you want to be without kind of like injuring yourself or like losing momentum. It was really bold and different for the time. There was nothing else like it. The color palette is very sort of stark. It’s a lot of like white contrasted with bright primary colors. A really interesting sort of like take on things. The game, you can turn this off, but the game would highlight objects in red to tell you where to go if you were lost. I really like that as a kind of like aesthetic sort of style. They put loads of effort to the audio as well and making you sound, your character, she just feels like a real, you’re playing a real person, albeit a much more athletic version than yourself. I can’t even climb up a ladder. Yeah, I mean like in real life. I would, if I had to jog for five seconds, I’d be done, do you know what I mean? But like, yeah, it did actually like reprogram my brain this game to like when I was walking through Bournemouth Town Centre, I would start seeing like bits of buildings and thought, oh yeah, like this is a Mirror’s Edge level. You climb up there and you swing and you do this and that was how I knew I played it too much. I was, I definitely like went to bat for this game. I bought it at full price. I didn’t get a free copy of it or anything like that. As part of the job, I bought it and I played it like three times in a row. I played it hard. I played it without using guns. I kind of did most of the achievements. I like the time trial-y rooms they added to the game later on, which were set in these quite abstract kind of spaces. Very bizarre sort of like looking locations. Just thought Mirror’s Edge was really special. I just completed it again recently. I think it’s dated in some ways. I think sometimes it’s a bit too hard to figure out where you’re supposed to be going or what you’re supposed to be doing. And that’s like a floor of the game. And I actually do think that Catalyst, the one they released, is a better version of this. Even though people disagree on that. But I think that actually I think it’s pretty solid Catalyst minus a couple of mandatory combat sequences. What did you make of this one Matthew? Did you play it at the time? I played a little bit. I just want to say that you’ve now raised the potential idea in my head of Mirror’s Edge set in Bournemouth, which is exciting. Wouldn’t have done as well I don’t think. No. Everyone’s like, wow, this is so brutalist. Yeah, there’s only like three tall buildings. It’s just you jumping over the heads of like old geezers on the beach. Delivering fish and chips. Yeah, I actually never played through the whole thing of this. I think I got frustrated and gave up on it. I found the potential of it, the idea of it was absolutely amazing. I was super into it. I loved the idea of this sort of like navigational parkour-led gameplay. I remember always thinking, wow, I wish this game was like open world, which is funny because then when they did that, I didn’t really like it. It turns out I don’t know what’s best. I felt like I was trying to enact a series of hidden moves. It wanted me to do something very specific to survive in Mirror’s Edge 1. I felt like they were more like solutions rather than I had this moveset that I could use in all these interesting ways. So a lot of it was just me dying over and over again until I got what I felt was the secret solution. But like I said, I don’t think I played enough of this to like ever get my head around it and see if there was more to it. You know, a stylish thing. I’m really glad it exists just because it’s such a distinct artistic thing, especially in like AAA sort of space. But yeah, just a bit too frustrating for my meat fingers. I think there’s still a version of this game that could be made that would be like better than the two attempts have done so far in terms of like being intuitive and how it feels and stuff. Maybe I should play that Ghostrunner game that does the similar things. Yeah, that was good though. Even that like has to frustrate, you know, I just don’t like dying over and over again thinking, oh man, like I get all the basics of this. I just didn’t do the movies exactly as you wanted. It’s a little too kind of prescribed when the fantasy of that world is like, I want to be free. I just want to run across these rooftops. And it’s like, yeah, in a very specific route, which sort of ran counter to the idea. Weirdly, Mirror’s Edge is always the game that appears when EA are having their wave of creativity. Like it marked the first one, then Catalyst was there with the second. So maybe it will come back. Yeah. It’s like when they’ve got that creative itch, that’s when Mirror’s Edge gets another go. In an age of a game pass, maybe it makes more sense. Maybe people will play it more. But yeah, it doesn’t feel like either of them sold that well. But I love this first one and I did still enjoy it on a replay. Yeah, just amazing that a publisher made this at the time. But this has plenty of fans this game. It’s far from forgotten. So, what’s your number two, Matthew? My number two is Gta 4. That’s higher on my list. Whoa! Yeah. So, I guess we go to my number two is Fallout 3, which was lower on your list, right? Yeah, that was six on my list. Yeah, so, yeah, Fallout 3. Do you want to do your piece on this game, Matthew? Yeah, I had a very intense but short love affair with Fallout 3, where I’ve put my hand up, I’ve never actually finished it, but I played it loads. I think I even took some time off work because I, you know, I knew it was incoming and everyone was like, this is the shit, you are going to love this. And I think I played it for like five days straight and didn’t rinse it, didn’t finish it, but the openness of the world just like blew my mind, like the scale of it and the exciting kind of potential of what was there. I think the more I played it, that’s where I fell a little out of love with it. Once you’ve kind of got the run of the place or at least the run of the abilities or you’ve kind of seen a lot of what it does like once or twice, you sort of know what to expect a bit. But I still think the initial 20 hours or whatever in the wasteland are a very profoundly entertaining experience. The freedom of building the characters, the excitement of not knowing what was going to be behind every door. And I think that’s what wears off the more you play it, actually, is that you begin to go, oh, it’s this thing again, or it’s this room again, or… But before you kind of know how the world works, it’s pretty magical. Yeah, I just love the tone and style of it. I really like the VAT system. I loved the… because I was younger and sillier, I loved the bloody death perk or whatever it was that made everything explode into a pile of eyeballs. That really made me laugh again and again and again. Yeah, like I said, I had a kind of… I think this is a game that makes an amazing first impression, but maybe doesn’t hold me for good. How does it feel for you? Yeah, so I think this was the last… The first and only time I’ve been properly hit by a ton of bricks, by how impressive Bethesda’s world design is. Just because when you leave that vault, it makes such a great impression on you, in terms of how detailed it looks and stuff like that. It’s a true sort of… Obviously Oblivion did this first, but I think this is just way more impressive, as a kind of feat of world building. Or I should say that I’m more into sci-fi than I am fantasy. That’s definitely my vibe. I didn’t really click with Oblivion. Yeah, so I think that prophecies and mages and all that stuff are not that interesting to me, but being someone who escaped captivity and is going into a world that’s been destroyed by nuclear bombs, that’s just much more my sort of vibe, I guess. Just really, really just love the storytelling in this. I thought the main quest was really good. I like how it kind of rattles through the early days of your life and then when you leave and stuff like that. And how if you behave badly over time and you later meet your dad again, he’ll like to tell you, I heard that you did, I heard that you set off a bomb in Megaton and all this stuff and guilt you about it because it’s the voice of Liam Neeson, you genuinely feel bad. Yeah, I loved all of that. Really loved the side quest design as well. There’s a bunch of side quests in this that are great. Everyone remembers the Megaton one, whether you set the bomb off or not, or whether you let the ghouls into Tenpenny Tower and then like basically watch all the people there get killed. There’s a really nice bunch of side quests that don’t end in loads of different ways. There aren’t loads of permutations. I know that’s why some people like New Vegas more, because it’s a bit more like you basically can just knock down all these dominoes and see what actually happens. You might be surprised by the result. This is a bit more linear, but really memorable, kind of like episodic TV show style side quests. There’s a quest called The Replicated Man, I think it is, where you are looking for basically like an AI, like an android who escaped his master. And you kind of go on this long quest to find out what happened. And then the androids had been basically reprogrammed and all the memories had been pushed down. And he started living this new life. And you kind of follow the trail until you realize that the AI was actually like a security guard right near the start of where you began the quest. And it’s a really, really nice, really good, self-contained TV show style story. I think that’s what these quests do really well. Or really simple things like retrieving an instrument for an old woman that she’d lost and stuff like that. Really, really memorable scripted side quests. That, combined with the world design, just really loved it. Just an amazing world to explore, not knowing what’s over the horizon. It really does that better than almost any open world game does. Yeah, it is quite, yeah, I probably sounded cooler on it than I actually am. I just, you know, I think maybe, like, there’s so many games that kind of came after that sort of, like, take from it or build on it, or they themselves, you know, having played, you know, New Vegas and Fallout 4 and 76 and the Outer Wilds, Outer Worlds, sorry. That’s, a lot of this stuff feels quite tropey now, and maybe it’s a little hard to divorce the kind of tropes that these ideas developed into from, like, the original material, you know, but playing it at the time, yeah, was properly amazing. So many good stuff. I mean, you’re right about the, you know, I always sort of forget, like, the kind of weirdness that happens in the other vaults and the tranquility lane, I mean, that’s just an absolute killer scene. Yeah, a lot of loving this, and definitely, like, I’m way more of a fallout person than I am in Elder Scrolls, for sure, which helps. And I don’t really have much of a pass with the series as well. So, you know, I know some people are quite slightly down on three out of some kind of, like, difference in tone or the subtleties of the thing, but I don’t really have that. No, same. I feel like I’m just desperate for it. I’d love an open world game to make me feel the way this did again, but I just I don’t know if it will ever happen. It just felt like such a kind of defining HD era game. Maybe, but maybe that’s the thing. Maybe, like, it can only happen once, because that’s, you know, my general feeling with this is like it’s a game that kind of made a big impact and then faded for me over time. Maybe that’s just, you know, you only have one of those. You can only have that moment once. Yeah, you may well be right about that. Yeah, that’s an interesting point. So we’ve reached your number one, right, Matthew? Yeah, my number one is Fable 2. Nice. Yeah, a huge heart choice. And it actually pairs well with what I was just saying about Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls. I am not a big fan of, like, high fantasy. And for me, Fable series and Fable 2, which is where I really got into it, kind of like solves a lot of problems of, like, fancy RPGs in that it cuts out the kind of very high-faluting stuff, which I have no interest in. I don’t want to read, like, literal books’ worth of shit in Elder Scrolls, you know. In Fable, you’ll maybe get six or seven lines of lore max, and it’s funny, and it’s making fun of the lore, and, you know, there’s so much less of it throughout the world. It’s an RPG for people who don’t have time to play RPGs. This is often sort of mistaken as it being, like, a simple RPG or, like, too streamlined, but I think it delivers everything you want. It delivers, like, the world. You know, it has enough scale to it and enough beauty to it that it kind of, you know, it speaks to me as a piece of escapism. You meet characters who make quite a good impact quite fast. They’re not overwritten. Everything’s done with good humor. It takes as its base folklore and fairy tale rather than, like, hardcore fantasy. So everything’s sort of filtered through this lens of sort of slight accessibility. And that doesn’t mean it’s, like, child-friendly. It just means the way everyone comprehends this world is a lot simpler. You know, everyone sees it in this quite kind of charming down-to-earth manner where, you know, in Elder Scrolls, everyone just speaks in great big blocks full of, like, you know, lingo that you don’t understand and, like, weird terminology and, like, everyone’s tuned in to the lore. Here it’s just a load of bunkins you don’t really give a shit. And I really like that. That really speaks to me. It’s, like, a rare role-playing game where it really feels like you do play a role. Like, you take a character and you play up to it. It’s kind of like role-playing in the kind of sense of, like, dress-up. You know, it’s more about, like, building it. You know, clothes don’t really have any vital stats attached to them, so you can kind of wear whatever you want. The game rates your behavior and your character morphs based on that behavior. So, like, if you’re really… If you eat loads of food, you get really fat and people think you’re ugly, which maybe is a bit harsh, a bit fat or shamy, but whatever. I don’t mind, as a large man. And, you know, which of the combat disciplines you tap into changes how you look and how your character changes. And this, to me, just felt like a very, a very, like, hands-on role-playing system, one where, like, every decision I made actually was reflected in my character, which is the most important thing. You know, like, I never really used magic in this game because I didn’t like the magical scarring that appears on the characters. You’re like, even though it was, you know, made the game maybe a bit harder, I stuck pretty much to, like, ranged weapons because that makes you quite tall and thin, which is how I wanted my character to be. So you make these, like, gameplay decisions based on, like, what you want to get out the other end. One failing of the game is it maybe could be a bit more explicit in how some of that stuff behaves. You know, these aren’t necessarily decisions people all make, like, people wade in and just do everything, because they maybe don’t understand the relationship between their actions and the way they look. And by the end of it, I just felt like I had this character who I’d really sculpted and really belonged to me, was really mine. And there were a couple of quests where you make decisions where, oh, there’s one specific quest with, you’re basically asked to sacrifice someone else or to sacrifice, like, your looks. Which is, I still think to this day, probably like one of the most potent choices I’ve ever made in a game, because it took something that mattered in the context of the game, rather than some grand moral quandary. And it kind of put that in a spotlight, and it kind of really understood what you value as a player is actually going to probably carry a bit more weight in decision making than what your moral stance on a decision is. You know, like, choose between these two characters. I don’t really have any skin in the game between two AI lives. I mean, that doesn’t really mean anything. But this game, yeah, I just thought it had some, a few moments where it kind of, it understood sort of the selfishness of, of kind of how you play games and went, well, do this, you know, do this bad thing, or I’m going to do something kind of that’s regressive to your character. I thought that was a really interesting take on that decision making. Probably the closest Molyneux has come to really tapping into that kind of killer decision making, you know, which is, you know, seemed to be like his holy grail in this period. I understand that like there’s a bunch of key, like lion head devs who shaped, you know, the direction of this game. Like obviously like Molyneux has become such a divisive kind of figure, but like, I just, I kind of could never quite tell just how hands on he was versus some of the other stuff on these games. It is hard and it’s a bit murky. I mean, he’s an amazing salesman and he definitely put himself at the head of a lot of this stuff and he can talk it up. I think, I don’t know, like definitely what interests him in like what he was talking about it became like more prevalent as the series went on. And I think, you know, I think Fable 1 felt more like the work of the people who devised it, where he sort of came into it and kind of, you know, brought it to, you know, kind of brought it to fruition. I think Fable 3 is like, like the influence of modern news, like very keenly felt and it’s why it’s the weaker game. You know, it’s a game which is like Fable 3 is sort of built around, it’s basically a whole game that’s setting up like five or six very hard decisions, but it basically sacrifices the rest of the game and basically bets big that those decisions are going to be absolute killers, where Fable 2 is much more balanced. Like it just works. It’s a lot more enjoyable in the minute to minute. And it has a couple of moments where it really puts everything on the line for you, which I think are very, very effective. But those aside, it’s just a fun fantasy adventure that isn’t like weighted down with just all the fat of like an Elder Scrolls, which for someone like me who really bounces off that, it was just perfect. And it just really stuck with me as like a, you know, it’s one of my favorite games on 360. I remember I reviewed this for Xbox World 360, came out, you know, in the run up to autumn, in the run up to Christmas. It’s an amazing like autumn winter game, very like frosty sort of fairy tale kind of, oh, I’m going to tell you a story in a dark night kind of vibe. Yeah, I really, really rate this game. I replayed it recently and, you know, it’s a little shonky technically, but I still think the magic’s there. Yeah, very well said, Matthew. I think that this is the most complete feeling of the Fable games by far. It’s, yeah, like I think that the moment that sticks with me the most, I guess this is a spoiler, but I can’t imagine that it matters now, this many years down the line, but are you being taken to that island as a prisoner and then coming back? And if you had kids, your kids are grown up. And that was just a really, really great bit of storytelling. And again, I think that what’s good about the tone of this game is how it will just suddenly twist in a really dark way, darker than you might expect from the tone of the game otherwise, because it does have this jaunty British vibe, but does it in a way that’s not odious and just awful. I see that Pratchett style thing done badly in so many other places that it really turns me off, or like Terry Gilliam-esque thing. It doesn’t always work for me, but here I think it works perfectly. I actually think the only sadness with Fable for me as a series is that it did go away. I don’t think Microsoft ever should have let it go away. Obviously, we’ve reached this point now where someone else is making one, which is good, but this is still the best one. But like you say, it’s dated. It’s quite a blurry game. It’s a weirdly blurry. Yeah, it’s very smeary, like fascinatingly. I think also, I mean, the Fable games, they always chop their world up into like quite small little chunks. So there’s lots of like loading transitions. Like, I really hope that the Fable 4 they’re making has like a scale to it and feels a bit more like a open world, but kind of keeps the tone of the older games. You know, it could be very easy to fall into the trap of making something a bit more kind of Elder Scrolls-y. But there is a distinct tone and it’s something to do with the scale. It is the difference between a bedtime story and like reading Lord of the Rings, and that distinction has to be upheld. Yeah, I think so. I don’t think it’ll go away just because it seems like they picked Playground very specifically because it feels like they understood what the vibe of it is. They’ve obviously picked one of the few massive UK studios to make it happen, which is great. I’ve got faith. I think there’s still early days, but I’ve got high hopes for it. Yeah, for sure. Great choice. I love this game. Loads of affection for it. You can also shit your pants in it, which is hilarious. And it has the most broken property economy system ever, just like buying every single building in the game. And it makes no sense at all. That’s the mad thing about Fable 3. What everyone forgets about Fable 3, it’s the only way to win as a good person and maintain, only make good decisions, is to become basically the ultimate landlord. You basically have to own every property and make so much money that you can make. Thank Selfless decisions, because you’ve got enough money to power, like afford this huge war at the end of the game. And so, like, in the modern day, where landlords are so looked down on, it’s just hilarious to play this game where, like, literally a landlord stops the apocalypse through rent. Yeah, that’s very true. I still have affection for that game, though, and I think it will probably come up when we reach that year. But yeah, good stuff. So we’re on my number one, Matthew, right? Grand Theft Auto 4, as I’m sure people deduced from your earlier suggestion. So I had loads of detailed thoughts I wrote down on my iPad, which is now powered down. That’s fine, because I remember my take on this very well. You want to speak from the heart. Exactly. Just like Nico Bellic. This is a heart and a head choice. Gta 4 was the defining game of covering PlayStation in this era. I mentioned that trip I went on where I saw it in New York. I was one of the first people to see it in action ever. Seeing it, like I said, the first time I saw it was two and a half years after San Andreas came out. The gap between those games is just ludicrous. The HD era of Rockstar Games is just such a massive step up in the way they use the technology. Famously, I think G2 on PS2 had quite paired down sprites, even for the time, not sprites, sorry, paired down like polygonal characters. There wasn’t much definition to them, even though the sense of place of the worlds is really good. Then you get to Gta 4 and the characters are just so vividly detailed, really sort of stylized and the game’s motion captured and all this stuff. And the city, San Andreas was obviously huge, like a massive California basically with bits of Nevada. With this game, they just picked one city, New York, and they did it incredibly well with loads and loads of detail. And it means that it doesn’t have the same playground vibe as the older Gta games, which I think ended up being quite contentious for some people. And it’s part of the reason why Gta 5 ended up being very much in the San Andreas spirit. But I really love that they went with this cinematic story of like a kind of war veteran immigrant who comes to the US. Serbian immigrant, Niko Belic, goes to work for his cousin Roman, thinks his life’s going to improve, very quickly finds himself pulled into all sorts of criminal activity. It’s a very sincere story for Rockstar itself, like quite a bold choice. It was when it was announced it was given this very like serious kind of like this Philip Glass music and monologuing. It was a bold choice by Rockstar to do that when previous GTA games, I think like they really tapped into something with CJ. I think he was a very empathetic character with a good arc. But I think that this was like a step up in terms of cinematic ambition, making something a bit more like a Scorsese movie. And yeah, it meant it wasn’t for everyone. But I just I really, really love the focus down on his story. I like the fact they picked this one location and did it so, so well. This just their version of New York is it was just like a mind blowing amount of detail for the time. Just like astonishing. You could walk across it and just be dazzled by it, by the NPC details, by the individual buildings that they’d recreated. It just felt so much more like a real place than any of the PS2 GTAs did. And over time, Rockstar, I think got a well, this is not true because Red Dead happened. I think there’s connective tissue between this game and Red Dead in terms of their storytelling for sure. And the kind of like the sort of things Rockstar was interested in at the time. GTA 5 abandons a sincere approach. It’s much more about wacky lads doing crimes. And I think at the time I found that refreshing. But in retrospect, I think that I’ve got a lot more personal affection for this approach to GTA. What do you think of this one, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, the kind of expectation around this was just mad because, you know, growing up in the late 90s, early noughties, you’re just trained to know that like GTA was like where it was at. It was just the most important thing in terms of games like that. These were the games that would show you, you know, where games, you know, what level games were operating at any given time and the excitement of seeing that, you know, of seeing what this thing was going to be. I knew it was just, you know, being on a Nintendo mag, you know, you’re out of the loop on it. But even if you were on the mags, you know, Rockstar is still quite secretive, you know, and only limited people get to see this stuff. And so that, you know, it was never just a game that was just, you know, oh, here’s a preview build in the office, for example. So it maintained this allure. I remember building up to it, just anyone who played it in the office, just like quizzing them, like, just tell me about it. Tell me about it. Tell me it’s going to be amazing. I just want to know that it’s this amazing thing. And I remember playing it in someone’s house, like just before it came out. And it was, I can remember just seeing it for like, you know, 15, 20 minutes and being like, no, you know, I’m just going to, I can’t see any more of it like this. I have to play it for myself, you know, I can’t spoil it. This is going to be like everything. The level of detail, the, you know, just how alive that world that is, you know, the physicality of it. I remember being like mesmerized by that. The fact that like when you walk down steps, you connected with them all properly. That, what physics is that? Is that euphoria? That’s right, yeah. I mean that the ragdoll, when you pushed people, the way they like realistically like fell and tumbled, just on that level, you know, someone who grew up playing a lot of GTA, mainly for going around causing trouble, it was so much more potent in this game because you could just like, you know, push an old lady down a hill and she’d roll realistically and you’d be like, that’s amazing. That is next gen, pushing an old lady down a hill. That is 100% what I want from GTA. It took like, it actually took me like several years to get through it, as like the story, because I got so stuck on a few missions, you know, I think it never solved that difficulty spike problem that it had, that there are just a couple of bits in this game which are like so tough and the checkpointing is rotten, that, you know, as an actual single player game, like, you know, I think maybe the dramatic arc of that character was slightly lost on me at the time, but as a, yeah, as like the next-gen version of the playground and causing the kind of mischief that I like to cause, which is basically just try and trigger as many police as possible and see if I could escape for as long as possible. It still really ticked all those boxes, you know, everyone talks about it as this quite weighty thing and you’re right to, you know, it’s definitely a lot more adult, a lot more sophisticated than before, but I think it still holds up as the kind of core idea of like, here’s a big place, go and be naughty. But just mixed with, yeah, so many subtle touches and oh god, the comedy clubs. I can remember like reading about that. There’s an absolutely, at the time, like phenomenal edge cover feature on Gta 4 where they basically sat down with the houses and they talked through like, from G to, you know, they talked through all the kind of the modern GTAs and did like a couple of pages on each and then like four pages on Gta 4 and it was just basically like this, just a description of how dense the world was. I can remember reading that stuff and thinking, oh, this can’t all be true. There’s no way you can go to a comedy club and this Ricky Gervais, that’s mad. And then there he was, I couldn’t believe it and the weird, you know, oh, just it had such a huge, huge impact, like just endlessly dazzling, you know, a game of just, you know, we always talk about like the small touches, like a thousand small touches, which you just couldn’t believe they’d done, but married to like that rock solid GTA core. Yeah, this was this is great stuff. Yeah, I didn’t want to kind of overreg the dramatic side of it. I think it’s just that like even the slight difference in tone makes a big difference. Because when I was playing a lot of GTA Online now, you are endlessly called by like Belens who are basically trying to be like wise guys. They’d be like, Hey, what’s going on? Where you gonna come get these cars for me and all this stuff? And it’s like, hey, you know, I was like, hey, if you, you know, I’ll have sex with your mom if you don’t get this done and all this kind of like really like blah, blah, blah in your ear sort of dialogue. And I think there’s something to be said for like, I don’t think Rockstar necessarily needs to go this dramatic again because it does. This game ends on like a dour note, however, however it finishes. It’s got some choices in this game. And whatever decisions you make, Nico is kind of a doomed figure. That’s like his arc in the game. And I don’t necessarily think Rockstar needs to do that again. But the kind of the idea that like Gta just has to be full of absolute shitheads is not something that appeals to me. I think that I like characters who you can who you can like. And I think that both this game and the DLC they would do for it later, which I’m sure will come up in a future episode, they just really nailed what I wanted from Gta totally. And you got that kind of cheeky vibe from it, from the different characters in the game. Yes, they call you too often to hang out. But again, if you’ve played Gta online, you are called by dickheads all the time. And like, I don’t think it’s any more egregious than they were. Yeah, just really loved it. Just a really, oh, yeah, just so, so good. I agree with you about the difficulty spikes. I played it a few years ago. Like, the shooting is quite dated. Gta 5 unquestionably has better shooting than this. But yeah, what I am… You reviewed this one, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. If I was in a review session at an event and I’d got stuck on one of those difficulty spikes, I don’t know what I would have done. I’d have been like, well, that’s it. I’m just not seeing the end of this game. Yeah. I didn’t see the end of the game to complete it. I ran out of time. I got to… Right, right. I know that some people at Future did complete it. I didn’t complete it. I got to the New Jersey area of the game, which is the final third of it. But to be honest, I think playing it in a three-day burst in a dark room is not the way to play it anyway. You really do want to savor this. I do know quite a lot of people who have not finished this game and don’t love it. It’s an interesting one in that respect. They definitely get better at mission. I think Gta 5, generally, the mission quality is much higher. In terms of the variety and just how they work and the accessibility of them. I think Gta 4 has got a few things that everyone remembers, but they probably stand out because the rest of it isn’t quite as strong. Everyone always talks about the heat sort of like heist. Three-leaf clover, yeah. Three-leaf clover, yeah. But that’s because it’s like, you know, it’s noticeably the best mission. I actually really like the stuff with the kind of the sort of warring brothers where you had to kind of pick a side. There are some quite cool decisions in this game to be made. Yeah, the one between I think it was Dwayne and Playboy X is quite a good one. I think you’re encouraged to side with Dwayne, who’s like an ex-con, who’s a bit of a loser, and Playboy X is just a bit of a twat. So you make a choice that is relatively easy there, but it’s still quite hard to like, it’s still, not knowing those are in the game, like having that choice hit on you for the first time is like quite daunting, and exciting. It really was. And GTA 5 doesn’t really have that. I think at the end you can pick which of the characters you keep alive by choosing a different ending. That’s what happens. I think you can end the game by having only one of them alive if you want to. But there’s a way to keep all three of them alive. So yeah, Gta 4. Just really loved it. Defining game of my time. And loads of affection for eight years later. So, we did it Matthew. That’s the end of The Best Games of 2008. We’ve reached the three hour mark on the recording. In the edit, I’m not sure it will come out that long, but Jesus, what a long podcast. But it was fun. Well, it was a good year. Yeah, it was a good year. So many good games. So, yes, we will do The Best Games of 2009 at some point in the future, probably closer towards the summer at this point based on the episode plan that me and Matthew just came up with recently. So, yes, thank you very much for listening. If you’d like to send us an email, you can get us at backpagegames.gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at BackpagePod. If you’d like to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, if you listen on there, that would be greatly appreciated. Anything you do like that helps us find an audience. We’ve had loads of really nice reviews from the listeners, so thank you so much for doing that. And you can find me on Twitter at Samuel W. Roberts. Matthew, where can they find you? I am MrBazzle, underscore Pesto. And thank you very much for listening. We’ll be back next Friday. Bye.