Let Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how have things been going on your end? What have you been up to in these last two busy weeks? I’ve still been playing my secretive games, I’m afraid, which doesn’t make for a killer anecdote. Yeah, okay, so we don’t have any more clues on what they are, then. Like, we just know that they’re games that you like, and, well, that’s what we know, I think, actually. Yeah, I’m under NDA. This podcast is a victim of NDAs, I’m afraid. Yeah, okay, cool. Well, there you go. I’ll let whichever mystery publisher keep their stranglehold on our discussions. How have you been? I’ve been all right. Weirdly, just this morning, I was playing in preparation for this podcast. I played 15 minutes of X-Men Origins Wolverine Uncaged Edition to see if it was actually worthy of being on one of our lists for this podcast. It isn’t, I’ll be honest. It definitely isn’t. But it was fun to play something so juvenile. It was like new metal as a video game, just like Wolverine slashing guys up and there being kind of blood everywhere. And remembering how flat Xbox 360 textures were in this era. If Blockbuster Game Rentals was still a thing, that is the game they were invented for. Absolutely, yeah. But it was fun to give it a blast and see. Otherwise, I watched the Chris Pratt film The Tomorrow War, which I think I bitched about to you in Discord while I was watching it yesterday. That was not as fun as it should have been. It could have been worse. But I think Chris Pratt has found his level in that film. That’s how I felt watching it. So, yeah. It’s kind of weird how he’s gone from sort of funny man to just quite boring action hero. Not even that funny an action hero. It’s weird that he doesn’t see himself as a guy who tries to be like prestige stuff. He doesn’t really make Oscar-baited films. He just wants to make blockbusters, but quite flavorless ones. I imagine he’s making an awful lot of money. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, I’m sure he doesn’t care what two dweebs in the UK think about him. So… Cut to him listening to this episode. This is bullshit! Also, Wolverine’s Origins is amazing. As in, you like the game? No, that’s what Chris Pratt’s saying. Oh, right, okay. Right, right, right. That makes sense. Yeah, sorry. Listen, it was a confusing bit. It was, yeah. Also, I had a sleeping pill last night, so I wondered if it was the After Effects kicking in, of like hearing my own thoughts repeated back to me as, you know, in Matt Castle’s voice. I know, it was very bizarre. Yeah, okay. So, Matthew, we’ve reached another of our Best of the Year podcasts. So we’ve previously done, for the people listening, we’ve previously done 2006, 2007, 2008, and we did 2020 as well, because that was at the end of last year. So this will be the fifth one we’ve done. I don’t know about you, Matthew, but my eventual goal is that we have like, basically the last 20 years in like one big kind of like chunk of stuff people can listen to. I think that would be a valuable resource. I think so too. So I kind of want to ask, like what was it like for you revisiting this year? What did it make you think about? On the surface, I was like, great. I remember 2009 being really good. And then the second I started looking into it, it was a much bleaker picture. Is that for video games or for Matt Castle related? Kind of a combination. It was a bit of a rollercoaster putting together this episode, I’ll admit, because I went in thinking it was strong. Then at a cursory glance, I was like, oh, this was a horrible year for Nintendo. But around them, I think some other people took up the slack and there was some weird stuff as well. So actually my list of the best games is surprisingly Nintendo heavy. It surprised me how Nintendo heavy it was. But more like the mag was a little slow, there weren’t as many exciting things to cover. And also just personally, 2009 was like a weirdly kind of bleak year in terms of not achieving a great deal and just feeling a bit restless. Yeah, I’m trying to flash back to 2009 myself. So the big thing that happened to me this year was I moved from Play, the UK independent PlayStation magazine to X360, which was an Xbox 360 magazine, also independent in the UK. Both are the same companies. So it was like an internal move, but I got promotion from senior staff writer, games editor, which I’d been like, to be honest, like, you know, fighting quite hard for, for a long time, because a lot of people who joined at the same time as me were getting promoted. I felt like I was being held back because I was younger than the other ones. I think it was probably just because I was a petulant little bastard, which is actually a good reason not to promote someone, I think. But it was, it was a fun year. I’d love to see that written on an HR form. I’m sure it’s somewhere in the office. Reason for no promotion. Not that reason for no promotion is a slot on an official form. Just for my forms. They had like a hundred printed out just in case. No, I was like, so I was still not very old at this point. I was like, I think I was 21 this year, and I was 20, I don’t remember. It was around this early 20s anyway. So being promoted to like, you know, section editor. So games editor basically means that you’re in charge of calling in reviews and arranging some preview stuff. It’s not really that like in depth a thing. It’s mostly like just being in touch with publishers to, hey, is your review code coming in sort of thing? Like how you’ll see IGN has like a reviews editor and stuff. It’s kind of like that before a magazine. So I was doing that, but to be honest, outside of work, I don’t really have any personal life memories from this year. I think like for the first three years of my job, my job was just my life. Like that was, it was like the core of my identity. It takes until next year, the year after this, where I kind of like, I’m doing a job I don’t enjoy as much. So I start investing in myself a bit more. And then the rest of my life is kind of a push and pull between like job and personal life and varying degrees therein. How was it for you? I think we’re still making a good mag, but the stuff we were covering was less exciting to me. And maybe my excitement in the job wavered a tiny bit, which is maybe why the kind of the bleakness of that year sort of seeps in. This year, Rich Stanton moved out of my flat and then I got a friend of the show, Rich Stanton, of course. And I got an absolutely terrible flatmate in his place. Was it Yuji Naka? No, Yuji Naka does feature in this episode later, though. Oh, my God. I can’t wait. I’m not going to spoil the surprise, so carry on. Basically, I wasn’t very good at, or I wasn’t very sort of careful in selecting my next flatmate. And I basically just wanted to get someone in to start paying their half of the bills. Like, I didn’t want it to be a huge crossover period. I ended up getting in this long distance runner. I can’t remember what she did for most of the time, but she was like a semi-professional long distance runner. But her sort of boyfriend sort of moved in sort of at the same time. And I wasn’t very assertive. I wasn’t very assertive and couldn’t really deal with this sort of, well, it’s really not, you know, a room for two people. So it felt like I was living with two people for a year. And they were both long distance runners and just incredibly irritating. And everyone else had a good old laugh because they were irritating in all kinds of weird ways. So for everyone else, it was like tuning into like a weird sitcom when I’d tell people about it at the office. But for me personally, it was quite hard going. That sounds rubbish as well. There’s a man who I know enjoys lots of snacks as well. The idea of like, you know, probably your part of the kitchen is full of like, you know, nonsense if it’s anything like my kitchen. And they’re just eating like, I don’t know, grains or whatever shit the runner’s eating. I mean, there were two things because they were both on like, whatever creatine is, but it made them like, itch like crazy. So they’re always scratching. Oh, God. Just grim, these two really like, bean poles scratching their way around the flat the whole time. The guy was like, sort of semi-addicted to Petty Filoo. The tiny yogurts. But to the point where he’d eat them like, six at a time. He wouldn’t even break them off. He’d eat a tray of six Petty Filoo, just peel them off, eat it as like a unit, and then leave all these like, six pack, these empties, sort of hollowed out six packs of Petty Filoo around the flat. And that looks really weird. I used to say, it reminded me, it looks like a weird like, ammo cartridge or something. Yeah, yeah, like a reload gun or something. And it’s just like, they’re aimed at children. That’s why they’re so small. Yeah. And Petty, it’s in the title, Petty. Petty, exactly. I just think if you’re having to eat six Petty Filoo at a time, I think that’s like, God’s way of telling you to eat a bigger yoghurt. I’m no yoghurt connoisseur, but I do find the Petty Filoo a little bit sweeter than your general kind of like, Muller adult yoghurt sort of homogenize the market. Yeah, I think they might be fromage fraise. Right, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah. But then they’re a bigger fromage fraise. You know, just get a big pot of like, is it Yonkin or something? I mean, that sounds like a made up like, Fallout brand or something. But yeah, I think Yonkin knows what you’re thinking of, but yeah. That really sours. That’s more in 2010 that that relationship sours. And I end up hiding a television at one point. Let’s conclude that then in a few weeks when we talk about 2010. It kind of goes downhill from there, but that was stressful. The other thing you used to do was play on my Xbox when I was at work on my profile, fucking with my stats. Because people at work would be like, Oh, I see you’re playing Modern Warfare. And I’d be like, No, I’m not. And they’re like, Well, there you are. I assume you told them to stop and they just didn’t do it. Several times. And so begins the kind of period of like hiding electronics. If that was me, it would drive me genuinely mad. Like I would probably like get close to like murdering them. This is the thing, I was so passive that I didn’t know how to deal with it. And that’s why it just played out way longer than it ever should have. You’ve created some good villains there. But with that, we come to the end of our Best Games of 2009 episode. We’ve covered all the big beats, I think, Matthew. Okay, so tell me more about what was going on with you job wise in 2009. This was the year I became games editor on Endgamer. If I didn’t, it was right at the end of the year. I was Starfighter for quite a long time on that mag, and I was doing the kind of games editor job. I was sourcing review code from quite early on. That was a task Greener gave me back 2007, I think. So I felt like I was doing the job, and it was just a case of, I guess, freeing up resources to be able to pay me like 50p more or something. This was the year I did like no trips. I was basically office bound the whole year. This is the year I got quite sour about other people moaning about the trips, because I was like, I would do anything to get out of this office right now. Yeah, like we were doing lots of preview covers for just not very good games, not very interesting things. It felt like the kind of honeymoon period of Wii was like properly over. E3 gives us a little bit of hope for the future, but this particular year was quite hard. How was it for you? Yeah, so obviously I moved from a PlayStation mag to an Xbox mag. One of the last things I worked on on Play was the Uncharted 2 cover feature I’ve discussed in Games Covers from Heaven. So that was cool, interviewing four of the Naughty Dog leads, and that was a good final hurrah on Play, which to be honest, I was pleased to get off of it. I think that as my first games mag job, it broke me through a barrier of, oh, this thing that you really enjoyed reading, you now can’t enjoy in the same way because you’ve worked on it. But I think I sacrificed my enjoyment of Play to learn the job, and then moving on to X360 was kind of like a laugh. It was quite a young team. I’ll confess again, very laddish. It was like we weren’t like alpha male sort of gruff guys, but this was a male-dominated environment. I think that showed in the product, for better or worse. For worse mostly, actually. I don’t know why I said for better. Yeah, so I only wanted to note that because I thought of a couple of things last night when I was going over it, I was like, oh, I wish I hadn’t written that or whatever. And I think that just a bit more of a diverse environment would have created a more interesting product. But why am I being so downbeat? I did really enjoy working with this team. So Simon Miller was the editor, and he was a really fun editor to work with. He was the youngest editor I imagined. And he was always just a good hang and sort of good spirited and up for a joke and stuff. And so that was really enjoyable. And I worked with a couple of other sort of people too, like including my buddy, David Lynch, who I’ve discussed on this, not the film director. And yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, he’s had that joke like his entire life, I think. So just wanted to kind of spare him that. But yeah, so Xbox was, it was good to move on to Xbox where it felt more kind of like reassured. Like the entire time I was on play, it felt like the PS3 was just kind of in disarray. And then it was slowly piecing itself together as I left. And then moving on to Xbox, it had just come off the back of 2008, which was like a crazy year of Gears of War 2 and Badger Xoey Nuts and Bolts and Fable 2 and just so much good stuff. Moving on to this mag was, well, it was just cool to be on Xbox, which is where I was playing games. It’s where everyone was playing games at the time. And Xbox 360 was like the best-selling mag. I went on two trips this year. The two big trips I went on were, so I went to see Bioshock 2 in San Francisco. My memory of that is it was a really good trip, but my memory of that is, when I walked into the venue, there was a sign that said Bioshock 2 above, or it might have said Rapture or something like that above the door. If I’d have stayed under that sign for 10 more seconds, it would have fell off, collapsed, and probably killed me because it was made of metal and it just clattered onto the ground. And I do kind of always wonder, if I’d have been brained by a Bioshock logo, how different would my life be right now? That was a weird memory. That was a fun trip. That was when I met- Yeah, exactly. That was when I met Andy Kelly. Yeah, exactly, yeah, you know. I named 2K Games and Andrew Ryan in the lawsuit. And yeah, so the other trip I went on was to Czech Republic to see Mafia 2. That was quite a fun trip. They were in a place called Brno, but we stayed in Prague, because I think Prague’s very picturesque. And Brno, parts of it seemed beautiful, but I only ever seen like an industrial estate that kind of made it look like Fallout 3. So I had quite a low impression of Brno, but it was cool to do a studio visit for a game like this as well. A game set in American city made in a Eastern European city. That’s quite a cool thing. So yeah, that was it. But yeah, I think generally speaking, there were some trips this year, but I missed out on some of the sexier ones. Buddy of mine went to see Valve actually this year. And he got there and Valve didn’t send anyone to pick him up. So he had to get a bus to the studio. And he got there just as it was closing. And they were luckily able to check him into the hotel and stuff. But basically he’d been forgotten about and was in Seattle like, what the fuck do I do now? Which would have been so stressful to me. Yeah, but yeah. So apart from that, I didn’t do any of the kind of like mega sexy trips I did on my last, I mentioned last time we did this. But next year I have the Skywalker Ranch trips to talk about. So that’ll be fun. But yeah, so otherwise, Matthew, I was curious, what were you watching sort of pop culture wise back in 2009? And we like to talk about this a little bit when we do these yearly episodes. Again, lots of bleak art house cinema. This was, I think this was the year where basically every weekend, I was at the Little Theatre, which is like the kind of art house cinema in Bath. I recall having a mild infatuation of the lady who worked on the sweetie counter at the cinema. And not going to see these films because of that, but you know, thinking, oh, when I go and see these films, you have, that’s my one point of interaction with this kind of seemingly interesting person. But unfortunately, that point of interaction is always about like Tobaroons, which doesn’t really show like the full depth of my character. Well, maybe. Tobaroons are your language of love, Matthew, aren’t they? Were you still watching Smallville at this time, Matthew? Big TV from this year was, I thought this was the year that like Mad Men really got its hooks into me in season three. I was kind of cool on it up until that point. I don’t really like the first two seasons. Really? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What, really? I hated Don Draper. I thought he was such an asshole and I couldn’t get over it. It was just a show about quite repulsive people who I didn’t think were that trendy. For me, it all really pivots with the infamous lawnmower bit. I was like, oh yeah, I’m really into this now. I’m really into these characters. I just much prefer Mad Men when they go and set up their own agency. I kind of like the stuff in Mad Men about the business and about the success of the business rather than just them being creeps. It’s funny, actually, someone else told me that about their love of Mad Men. I personally think the first season is possibly the most watchable. It’s just a really easy to watch, kind of like bathe in the setting experience. Because it’s about his slow decline, I guess. Don Draper gets harder to watch the longer it goes on. So I was watching Mad Men a lot around this time too. I was like, it was definitely becoming a part of, oh, I would tell people that I watch Mad Men and recommend Mad Men, which must have been incredibly irritating. Also then, I remember this year as well, the only kind of big sort of pop culture stuff I remember otherwise is watching Inglorious Basterds and Watchmen this year. Those felt like my two sort of big films, The Hangover as well. Those were like the big films this year. I was quite a big fan of Watchmen, but I saw it when I was super hung over. So that was a bit of an experience because it’s like a three hour film. Best taken with sleeping bills. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Okay, so Matthew, should we take a short break there? Then we’ll come back. Yeah, that’s a go. We’ve got a lot of cool music we can put in the breaks this week as well. So, breaks are welcome. Cool, we’ll be back in a minute to talk about what was going on in 2009 and then we’ll get on to our games list after. So, in this section, we’re gonna talk about what was going on industry-wise in 2009 before we get into our list of the 10 best games of the year. So, around this time, Microsoft is still pumping out mega hits, but this is a slightly quieter year. They are furthering a push towards casual audiences that started the previous year by redoing the Xbox interface, getting rid of the blades and bringing in avatars and stuff. So, that happens at the end of 2008. 2009, they’re kind of furthering it. This is the year that they will unveil what becomes Kinect, Project Natal. But meanwhile, Sony is getting back on track. This was the best year of PS3 games yet, by far. The PS3 Slim also releases earlier this year and brings the cost of the console down. Releases it in a kind of form that, a visual form that looks like a console made for 2009. It doesn’t look like that, you know. I finally get a PlayStation 3 with the Slim at Christmas. Nice, that’s good. Yeah, so- And it was a console Christmas present, which is always a treat. Yep, that is, I had exactly the same thing this year because my old PS3 that Darren on RetroGamer sold me broke. So, and he didn’t offer a warranty. Thanks, Darren. He didn’t offer a warranty or anything like that. So, I couldn’t return it. Unbelievable. So yeah, that was kind of what was going on with the big kind of console platform holders. But there’s also obviously Nintendo this year. Matthew, when I was going over this, I felt like the DS was kind of like starting to die off a bit this year, or at least wasn’t getting the same investment in software. So maybe you can speak to this. There’s some interesting DS games this year, but this doesn’t feel like the DS finest hour. Going back over it, it’s not as direball as you might think. There are a few DS games in my list, for example. You get the DSi, which triggers this slightly weird wave of DSi enhanced games, which is an absolute nothing. Just doesn’t go anywhere, doesn’t really deliver anything. It’s one of the most underwhelming promises. I like the DSi itself, though. I was a very big fan. I really liked the form factor of it. I loved the little introduction of DSiware. I mean, they didn’t really get it right, but there is in Flipnote Studio, which isn’t in my top 10, because I don’t really think of it as a game, but as a piece of software is absolutely like vital piece of the Nintendo puzzle. On the mag, we really let into it. People were doing amazing things. If you don’t know, Flipnote Studio was a Flipnote animation software for the DSi. The functionality of it was beautifully simple, really elegant. People did incredible things with it. You could share it with this online site. That was quite exciting. I was really, really into that, but DS is kind of trundling away. It’s still doing mega business in Japan, mainly because of Dragon Quest IX, which kind of creates this second wave. A lot of this period was sitting in the UK looking at the amazing DS figures in Japan and going, oh man, I wish we were a magazine over there. People might actually read it. Yeah, but otherwise, this is kind of a weird year when Nintendo is still kind of leaning into the peripherals a bit. But at the same time, I see a lot of Nintendo, basically the shift Nintendo had created a couple of years earlier with Wii begins to sort of infect the other platforms a bit more obviously this year as well. I think the downfall of Xbox begins with the push for a kind of more broader casual audience. And while Sony don’t fall for it as much, the Move stuff, which is either unveiled this year or becomes more prominent this year, is very like undercooked, overcomplicated for my liking. That is absolutely a fair assessment. So this was a big bug bet for me at the time. It really bothered me that the only way that Sony and Microsoft could see themselves competing with Nintendo for a quote unquote casual audience, that is, you know, people who see this console on TV, buy it and never buy another game for it other than Wii Fit. That was the market they decided they would fight for. Their only solution to basically competing was some kind of like motion control gimmick. And it really kind of like, I think, sours the second half of this generation. And I kind of think there’s a little bit of like biblical justice for Microsoft and how badly this blows up in their face, because if you’re going to cynically chase that when you have this roster of studios making great stuff and these series that are kind of firing all cylinders, that’s kind of like, it’s just a real bummer to people who actually like games. Yeah, you think about how much Connect derails Rare for the next eight years or something. And it basically has to sort of reinvent itself as a studio after that to make Sea of Thieves. And I’m really glad they did and they survived and they got to keep making cool stuff. But these days, Rare has got a really good vibe. Really cool people work in that studio and run that studio. So yeah, it’s funny though, because Microsoft is still putting out lots of great stuff. Something that someone flagged to us on Twitter, Matthew, when I asked, like, what are your favorite games of 2009 was what XBLA was doing this year. So their Summer of Arcade, right, in 2009, they had a game a week across five weeks. These are the games, right? Marvel vs. Capcom 2, New Age of Heroes, so port of an older, you know, crossover fighting game. Shadow Complex, Explosion Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Turtles in Time Reshell, so like a HD re-release. Trials HD, that’s a fucking amazing lineup of stuff. Like that’s them really kind of nailing what, you know, should be, what a kind of downloadable game looks like, what gets people excited. I do remember that feeling like it was a big deal when I was on them, I was on the Mac. It’s funny talking about that as well, like how curated and careful both Xbox and later PlayStation were with Indies in light of all the chat this week, which I’m sure you’ve seen about like what a rough ride Indies have on PlayStation particularly in terms of like just getting their game out there and they feel like they’re not well respected or represented within the company. I sort of prefer this earlier period where there is less going on but it feels like there is like a higher bar for quality. Yeah, for sure. Like there’s less gatekeeping now so anyone can make a game. That’s good. Obviously though it leads to an absolute flood of product, but this is particularly bad on Steam, of course. You know, it’s, yeah, I agree. It was just, they felt like real events when a downloadable game came out. And obviously that can still happen now, but because it was like baked into how the publishers were marketing, it was part of the console war basically. Like the reason Sony were trying so hard at this time is because Microsoft had already invested in it and were doing stuff like Castle Crashers and, you know, Geometry Wars and stuff. Like loads of amazing stuff. So, you know, it feels like Sony only fights on these fronts when it feels like it needs to. The entire company feels like it behaves this way. It’s like, well, we’ll do this because we feel like we need to do it in the eyes of our audience. And that’s why Indies became like a battleground in the early part of the PS4. But now it seems like they feel like they don’t need them. At least that’s how it would appear to be, how they’re behaving from some of those testimonies during the rounds this week. So yeah, that’s interesting. So Matthew, I’ve got a little breakdown here of what’s going on with the different console manufacturers during E3. I’ll do Sony and Xbox, but obviously jump in whenever you like and I’ll leave you to handle Nintendo. Yeah, because obviously you would be paying forensic attention to this stuff. So Sony E3 2009, I think it’s actually not too bad a conference this year. You can tell actually they’re getting a bit more into the stagecraft of it this year. They know that they’re being watched by a wider audience, so they’re trying slightly harder. So, yeah, it kicks off with the collapsing hotel sequence in Uncharted 2, which releases this year. And I mentioned that on our Game Supreme News from Hell episode last week, so people would have heard me talk about that. But it makes a really good first impression. It’s like, here is an actual massive blockbuster, the kind of sequel of all sequels really, just an unbelievably good game. Probably the best E3 demo of that year. You know, Uncharted, the original Uncharted was just jungles and like temples and stuff. And this is like, you know, here’s all these settings and all these set pieces and stuff. And yeah, it was a treat. Sony also has a massive action game from the Socom developers. I think it had featured like 128 players in a match. I found it really incoherent and boring when I played it. So you know, I’m sure that seemed like a big announcement. Socom always seemed like a US thing rather than a UK thing. So they reveal the PSP Go as well. It’s a digital-only PSP that was like a disaster. It didn’t sell very well eventually when it released. It was a bit too ahead of its time really. I felt like people would have really sort of, would really dig a download-only PlayStation handheld these days. It’d be fine without the physical media element. Who actually bought physical games for like the Vita? Anyone? Well, I’ve got a few, but not many. I think Persona is like one of the only ones I’ve got. And to be honest, I don’t think I bought that. I think I got that for free when I went to play. So I remember at the time thinking that the PSP Go was just a bit too early really for a digital-only console. Like, if I like Sony only really had a sort of threadbare presence with how they were doing that, pushing that stuff. And also not every game was available digitally. You couldn’t get Metal Gear Acid 2, for example, or stuff like Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, which arrives the next year, doesn’t release on there. And there’s a bunch of games that only release physically and never release digitally. So I don’t think it was a great proposition personally. Elsewhere, you’ve got a bunch of PSP games. They’re still pushing it quite hard, even though the PSP feels like it’s pretty badly ravaged by piracy at this point. Like it was sort of cracked fairly early on and got turned into an emulation machine. The same thing happens to the DS. And I think it really tanks handheld specific sales around this time. But Gran Turismo, you get on PSP this year and at the U3 conference and Little Big Planet, I played that. It was pretty good, a little version of Little Big Planet. He works, Sackboy works quite well on that sort of screen. And there was a decent version of Rock Band I remember playing as well. You just press the buttons, you don’t have to plug in a guitar to a handheld console, that would be preposterous. PlayStation Home was here yet again. Regular listeners will know how much I hate PlayStation Home, a very sort of anodyne virtual world sort of space, kind of like Second Life, but just really corporate and boring. Andy Kelly had a good little story about it when he came on our Best Detective Games episode, if you want to hear that. Sony has Assassin’s Creed 2 at their conference. They show off DaVinci’s flying machine. ETSIO kind of like going across Venice and sort of like hovering over the little fire things to get more momentum on his flying machine, because that’s how that works. And they show off the PlayStation Move. They don’t make as big a deal about it as Microsoft would with the Kinect. And I think that speaks to what you said earlier, Matthew, about how Sony didn’t go all in on it the same way. It was a bit more tentative. It was such a faff though. Having to have that extra camera move was such a bust. It was rubbish, yeah. I mean, it set them up quite well for their VR headset. It meant they just had controllers ready to go, probably in a warehouse, unsold, but… Yeah, so, yeah, I just, I had no positive feelings towards it at the time. And yeah, it seemed like a bad idea. They also showed off a game called Mod Nation Racers, which was like a sort of little big planet, but with karting games. I played that. It was very easy to make tracks. And it was actually quite fun, but I don’t think anyone really wanted that on PlayStation. And yeah, the developer who made that actually went on to make Sleeping Dogs. They were quite cool. I think they were United front games or something like that. They were… Yeah, it’s a shame they kind of went away. They seemed like they were promising. Finally, they kind of end with the big guns, basically. This is where you first, you see The Last Guardian for the first time. You’ve got Gran Turismo 5 and God of War 3 and then live demo to kind of close it out. So pretty strong. Sony’s got some actual good games this year. God of War 3 wasn’t out by 2009. No, no, it took a long time. I mean, the problem is that the second one only came out in 2007, so it was… Oh my word, that’s messing with my head. I swear that was out before Uncharted 2, but obviously not. Yeah, I mean, it was just, yeah, I think there’s quite bad timing for Sony, actually, because they talked about it the year before and were obviously desperate to get out any kind of good exclusives that they could talk about. Yeah, so that was Sony. It was not a bad showing. So Xbox, right, for Xbox E3 2009, their big thing they have to kick off is the surviving Beatles and the spouses of the Beatles slash children. Basically, if you’re the most relevant person connected to a Beatle, you were on stage that year, to reveal Beatles Rock Band, which was obviously quite a big deal for this genre. To be honest, it was kind of dying off at this point because they had absolutely overdone it for several years. And it was burning brightly and would not last for much longer. And I think if it released a year earlier, it might have been a different story. That was quite a big way to kick off. Strangely long demo for Tony Hawk and Tony Hawk Ride, the terrible skateboarding peripheral game. Oh, that was so rank. It was. Did that big plastic board haunt your office for years, like it did ours? I feel like that board was fucking all over, every time I walked somewhere. There’s people tripping over it every once in a while. Cursing. Yeah, I feel like the problem is that when people would see it on a shelf, I think they’d take it off and then pretend that they were using a skateboard on it in the office, and so it would always be in the middle of a floor somewhere. That was a weird thing. Again, it feels like they were just, Activision went so big on peripheral games this year. This was the DJ Hero year as well, and it was like, just trying to get all this junk into your house, it was really, really cynical. So, the conference was really loaded, though. Had Shadow Complex, Forza 3, not Forza Horizon 3, that’s many years later. The re-reveal of Splinter Cell Conviction, which had gone into some kind of development hell with its previous iterations. That was a great demo, was that the one where he was smashing heads for your rhinos? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a really… That was a really super sexy E3 demo, also, because it had the words being projected on the buildings and stuff. I remember thinking, oh, that looks really cool. It looks pretty great for a last-gen game, this. Like, you look at it, it’s really, really sharp in its presentation, and doesn’t look kind of flat and stuff. Considering the previous version was like, I think they internally imagined we referred to it as Hobo Fisher, the original version. Right, yeah, yeah. He’s sort of, like, homeless, and he’s throwing a phone into a bin, and it’s really confusing. And this is the kind of deluxe sort of, like, third-person action game version of Splinter Cell that people say dumb it down a little bit, which is probably fair, but… Oh, it does, but it looks spectacular. Yeah, yeah. Like, every mechanic in this game just looks so cool in a demo, and when you’re playing it, this is one of those demos where you think, oh, this could all be, like, bullshit, but when you play it, you’re like, oh, it is actually that. Like, this is how this works. Oh, I love that game. Yeah, I’ve never played it all the way through, actually, so I look forward to talking about that. It’s the next episode it will come up, right, if it comes up. Microsoft also has Alan Wake. It was first announced in 2005, and finally, there we are on stage, seeing it in action. Yeah, I look forward to discussing that one in Best Games of 2010. And yeah, I thought the best bit of the conference was this, though. So there’s a Halo 3 ODST demo, ODST being this kind of, like, in-between installment in the Halo series. And then at the end, the guy goes, and that’s not all, here’s something else that a different team at Bungie is working on for next year. And then there’s, like, the reveal for Halo Reach, with a very famous trailer of basically, like, chaos happening on this kind of, like, alien world. And then there’s, like, you’ve got Spartans on the ground, and then it says Reach falls in 2010 or whatever. It was just a really good teaser. So do you remember that, Matthew, being, like, a big deal? I feel like Halo Reach was the big announcement for us that year. Like, personally, because I’m not, like, a mega Halo head, it didn’t have, like, a huge impact on me. But I remember this being a really exciting conference because it was just sort of, like, flashy demo and then followed by, like, a huge reveal. I wonder if Microsoft ever regrets letting Bungie get away. I mean, I feel like that was going to happen anyway. Yeah, I mean, that’s what Bungie seemed to want at the time. But yeah, and, you know, Bungie has kind of, like, got its own independence twice now. And that seems to be their whole thing. So yeah, so other than that, they had Left 4 Dead 2 as well. That was a surprise reveal because the previous game had only come out the previous year. So yep, Valve actually making computer games at this point, which they would stop doing very soon. And yeah, and then obviously Microsoft also wheels out Hideo Kojima to announce Metal Gear Rising, which eventually released four years later as Revengeance by an entirely different developer. So a bit of a dud that, I think. They show it at all? No, they show it next year because it comes to E3 2010 and shows, I think, like a bit of a gameplay demo that… Is this the one where he’s cutting the melon? Yes, yeah. That’s the demo they show next year, I believe. Right, that was exciting. Yeah, I think they show it. Maybe they show an image of Raiden this year, but you don’t see much, basically. And yeah, but it’s just the intent of making it. That’s really strong. Microsoft has a really kind of good pack of stuff that quote unquote core gamers would be interested in. But then that’s when the Project Natal reveal happens. So Don Mattrick comes back on stage. For far too many people, the controller is a barrier, separating players from everyone else. Can we make you the controller? And then Steven Spielberg is on stage. I don’t know why he never made a game for this thing, but there he was to talk about some, I mean, just marketing horseshit basically. But I was quite frustrated watching it back. You’re not here to announce anything. You’re just like, what, are you giving this thing credit, this peripheral credibility? Just irritated me watching it back. And then here comes Kudo Sonoda, who becomes a minor gaming celebrity over these years, kind of tied to Kinect. I sort of always thought of him informally as the Microsoft Bono. But then the big thing they show with this motion controller thing that you just put in front of your TV and it responds to your physical commands, is Peter Molyneux shows a demo for Milo, where you interact with a small boy and it’s kind of like showing that the character responds to different things you say. But yeah, so that aside, obviously that game never manifests, but the Kinect reveal is the big thing, Matthew. Do you remember this? Do you have any kind of memories or reaction to this? My biggest memory in the office was some people on Xbox World gloating that this was it. This was like the end for all other platforms. It’s like you’re dead in the water. We’ve got this thing. And I remember thinking, okay, but it’s only like a tech demo on a stage. Let’s wait and see. It’s very, very easy to do all the big talk about what it’s going to do when people aren’t actually using it. Yeah, like I say, from afar, there was this sense of you’re about to get a dose of what we’ve been eating for quite a long time. I think it’s that thing where the actual intent of it isn’t so bad. I mean, I actually do contest the idea that separating players from everyone else. I mean, to be honest, if you’re requiring physical motions, it’s not that accessible a controller. It’s actually like cutting a load of people off who who might want to enjoy games. You know, you’ve got you’re right. You’ve definitely got like the physical accessibility issue, but you’ve also got where and how people want to play games isn’t fucking waving their arms around. It’s slumped back on a sofa. The philosophy that Don Matric has has here is is better embodied by Xbox’s adaptive controller they made a few years ago, where it’s like actually trying to extend. It becomes about accessibility and it’s much more like… The problem is that because of how badly the Xbox One reveal goes several years later and because of how he frames the really kind of quite smug way I think he frames this reveal at E3 2009, makes him seem like I’m so corporate I don’t even understand what it is that you’re interested in. And obviously like Phil Spencer is the opposite of that. He’s super like conscious of how Xbox is perceived. And yeah so it’s funny because obviously his tenure, Matric, is plenty of great games come out but it seems to kind of fritter away to next year. It’s like one of the, a memorably bad Xbox conference I would say aside from a couple of reveals. So that’s the Xbox and Sony covered Matthew. But what about Nintendo this year? New Super Mario Bros Wii was their big, big first reveal. Hilariously Cammie Darnoway came out on stage and gave it all this big talk. She said, for the last 15 years Mr. Miyamoto has been thinking of a new way to play Mario that has never been possible before. And apparently the solution to that was quite a threadbare 2D Mario with three idiots who get in your way the whole time. I found this so underwhelming. To follow up Galaxy with this was just like laughable. And I know there’s some people who swear by this game and they love the multiplayer mechanics of it. I just didn’t think it was elegant. Did you find this really underwhelming? Well, I was struggling a bit with Wii games generally at the time because they looked so rancid on my TV. I thought this looked incoherent. Yeah, I must confess. I don’t remember having many strong feelings on it. But I remember someone in the office went and bought it for 40 quid, completed it in like a day. And I wasn’t very impressed with it as a proposition. It made complete sense just because New Super Mario Brothers on DS was one of their biggest sellers. But it was just a pure business decision. You know, there was no magic to it at all. And that filled me with gloomy off the bat. Then you have Wii Motion Plus with Wii Sports Resort. I always found the pitch for this really odd in that it was basically just what the Wii was meant to do to begin with. All the promotional material for it is actually pretty similar to promotional material before they launched the Wii. It feels like you’re selling me what you’ve already sold me. I think it does work really well. I do eventually really like Wii Sports Resort. It’s not in my top 10 games of this year. But it felt like they were just reheating a promise, which is quite a hard sell. And also at this point, we had like major peripheral fatigue. As the big two headline things, they were quite disappointing. Iwata came out and talked about the Wii Vitality Sensor, which was really good fun on Endgamer. We didn’t really know what it was, so we could just joke about it, about how kind of daft the notion of it was. We ran a series of back pages over the following months, adverts for this from different ages of history. So there was like a Victorian Mr. Iwata’s Extraordinary Sensor Scope, and then there was this kind of art deco-y kind of for Vitality or something with this kind of hand with the Vitality Sensor on the end. So it was a good Endgamer thing to happen, but it was also quite baffling to give over a kind of 10 minute chunk of quite a small show to basically making the pitch for like further pushing out into the casual audience in that you were going to kind of go into healthcare, which on a games mag isn’t a great line. But then around that, they had a lot of games I was into. My obvious favourite, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Crystal Bearers, which I’m a big fan of. They announced Golden Sun, which I ended up really, really loving on DS. A terrible Kingdom Hearts game. There was a weird partnership with James Patterson and THQ on Women’s Murder Club, Games of Passion. Nintendo themselves had sort of let the touch generation slip a little bit. And I think they saw this as like a, well, mums like books by James Patterson, the Women’s Murder Club. So let’s push that on stage. But it was such a budget game. I know it was a real like five out of ten. Should never have really been on that stage. They should have called it Women’s Murder Club, Games of Patterson. Yeah. I also object to them referring to James Patterson as the king of mystery writing, which is, I mean, maybe in terms of money, but come on. That’s got to be the most Matt Castle specific note on an E3 conference. Yeah. I was like, Keigo Higashino may disagree with that. But it is rounded out with Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid Other M, which were both total surprise announcements. That’s always good for Nintendo. They don’t tend to leak. Well, back then they certainly didn’t. Mario Galaxy 2, obviously, instant 10 out of 10 excitement for that. Metroid Other M. It takes quite a chunk of that trailer to actually get to it being a Metroid game. Quite exciting at the time. So I’m thinking, is this Star Fox? Yeah, and it’s not until her kind of suit builds around her. And as it revealed, this was super exciting. This kind of new iteration of this hero. The game I thought looked absolutely amazing. Like visually, it was a really strong game. People have mixed feelings about the final product, but it left us on a really pleasant note, I think. You know, you can’t really be too upset when you’re getting Mario Galaxy 2 and an exciting looking Metroid game. One thing I wish they hadn’t done was promote The Conduit. Do you ever play The Conduit? No, I mean, I could see what the deal was from the outside looking in. Oh, it was so shit. This was a story I fucking hated covering this game on NGamer, because there were a lot of Nintendo fans who had a bee in their bonnet that their games didn’t look as good as the 360 and the PS3. Obviously. Like, look at the hardware. This is just the way it is going to be. You had this company came along who were like, oh, we’re really about visuals. We’ve got all these next-gen techniques which you can’t get in any Nintendo games. That may have been true, but they made with it probably one of the worst first-person shooters I’ve ever played from an art style. So drab. But because they were the cheerleaders of graphics, all these people gave them a pass and elevated this game way beyond what it should ever have been. It felt like you had to cover it because it was such a big thing at the time. IGN gave this so much oxygen, they should never have given it. It was terrible. It was a real kind of triumph of marketing messaging, wasn’t it? Because… Oh, but like, look at it. People are like, oh, yeah, but it’s got all this interesting shading going on. It’s like, look at the art design. Oh, man. High voltage games, you make this. What a stinkeroonie. Yeah. Oh, that’s funny, that. Because, yeah, I do remember that marketing messaging being so sort of like loud and like, oh, wow, look, like a game that people would play on Xbox but on Wii. And it was like… It would be laughter if it was on any other platform. Yeah. I was like, well, you know, I mean, the people who want to play like a good first person shooter have probably bought one of the other platforms that are playing Halo 3, a game that’s like, you know, instantly better. It wasn’t just the game itself. The people who were cheerleading for it and the fans, they wanted it to be good. It made Nintendo fans look desperate and grasping. People just bowled over by the idea of like, yes, yes, graphics, graphics. And you’re like, you know, we’re better than this. Like, we hold things to our highest standard. We are Nintendo fans. We expect good games, but I don’t know, maybe I’m a bit of a seller on that. Well, it looks pretty terrible. I mean, like you say, the art style, I’m just looking at it now. It feels like their big thing was lighting. Like, really limited linear corridor shooter, which allows them to do some slightly snazzy stuff. But like compared to Metroid Prime 3, an absolute embarrassment. The Conduit looks like a worse version of Metroid Prime, basically. Like, it doesn’t even look as nice as the GameCube Metroid Prime, the first one. I mean, I don’t mean my Conduit rage to bubble up, but at the time this was just… Because we had people like, you know, on forums, writing letters going like, why aren’t you writing more about the Conduit? Why aren’t you supporting the Conduit? Have some dignity, people. It’s funny, this conference actually did feel… It did seem like it was slightly better overall than the 2008 one. It somehow felt like it was a bit of a response to the response for the 2008 one, where it’s like… Way better. Just in terms of the actual solid game, like, if you put the final score next to all those games, they are… it’s way healthier than that first one. I don’t have loads to add to that other than that I played Wii Sports Resort and thought it was a lot better than Wii Sports, actually. It’s great. The table tennis, I really love. I really like the sword fighting in it. I thought that was great. It felt like a testing ground for all the mechanics for Skyward Sword. A lot of them are lifted directly from Wii Sports Resort and, like, the swordplay handles a lot like the swordplay and the archery has got exactly the same kind of energy, so… Yeah, it was like quite a lot of… Well, there’s another light gun shooter there as well, Matthew, which was Dead Space Extraction. Which I didn’t really like it. It looks a bit cheap, I thought. We were quite cool on it as a magazine, but then other people are really into it. I think it’s got a couple of, like, standout sort of set pieces, which are quite, like, grody by sort of Dead Space, you know, a bit like the eye laser thing. And it was nice to see someone trying quite hard. I found it a little kind of plodding from what I played it. I don’t think I ever finished it, actually. Okay, good stuff. Well, yeah, I mean, it’s… On paper, there’s lots of good stuff there. But it’s that… The overall thing that, obviously, Microsoft was borrowing here was that kind of one-for-them, one-for-you approach to E3 conferences. And now that doesn’t exist. Like, you know, the Nintendo Direct is functionally made for Nintendo fans tuning in, because now Nintendo doesn’t really delineate between types of players and player bases, you know, learn their lesson quite harshly on where that kind of leads you, I think. So now they’re just like, well, it’s all core. And then we try and make it so people outside the core can kind of enjoy it. Or there’s like some games at core will enjoy that a regular person might not be bothered about. Like Metroid Dread, where it’s like, you know, it’s made for diehard Nintendo fans. I think my feeling actually rewatching this conference last night, the Nintendo one, was that if this was done in the style of a modern Nintendo Direct, that kind of pacing and framing, I think this would actually weirdly be considered a bit of a triumph. You might be right, actually, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you strip out like the, I don’t know, four or five slightly naff announcements, I mean, that’s why I’m actually quite surprised that you’re bothered about the new Super Mario Bros thing, because they announced their Mario Galaxy 2. So it’s not like you were watching Mario go in a different direction, but you didn’t have something else to look forward to. I was just depressed that they were making something that looked so bland. There were casual Nintendo things, which weren’t aimed at me, but this felt like something that probably should or could have been aimed at me, but it really looked like they were phoning it in compared to some of their other games. There’s a couple of people I really respect who really, really rate this game. A couple of Nintendo brains, I really respect, but it was just so bland, so bland. And it was this idea that this is Miyamoto’s big idea. This is a big idea from Miyamoto. And it was so flat to me. I was like, oh no, is he passed it? It didn’t matter because they’ve got this other team, but it’s a bit sad. Yeah, it was just a proper sort of like seven out of 10. I played it and just felt nothing. I just thought, well, this is just the drop of a number. That should never happen in a mainstream, in mainline Mario game. That shouldn’t happen. They just wanted my mum and my dad to play this game with me. And it was like, well, I was so anti that approach, which is a very typical sort of gamer boy attitude. But I mean, let’s be honest, it didn’t turn into anything long term. So it was kind of a failed experiment. All the people who would play games on wave now just play games on mobile phones. So it sold mega numbers. Yeah, in the moment, absolutely. Absolutely, it was much bigger than the other games. It probably outsells Galaxy One and Two combined. So more for me, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. But I think your malaise with Nintendo at this time is noted for sure. So yeah, good stuff, Matthew. So the only other two things I was gonna mention in terms of major news that happens this year, not loads of stuff, but Microsoft shuts Ensemble Studios, the Age of Empires developers. The years later, it would revive Age of Empires. But at this time, Microsoft was basically the enemy of PC gaming. Games for Windows Live was a thing, and almost destroyed PC gaming. And then Valve kind of brings it back a few years later. And yeah, and so alongside that, Square Enix buys IDOS. So IDOS kind of like struggling for a few years, and then Square Enix suddenly owns Tomb Raider, and Hitman, and a bunch of other stuff. And this was good from a press perspective because my memory of Square Enix UK office before IDOS was that they basically got you no access to anything. Like it was like a shack in a desert or something. Like there was, if you wanted to interview Tetsuya Nomura, it was never going to happen under any circumstances. But when they basically buy IDOS and turn IDOS into the Square Enix kind of like headquarters, and suddenly they’re doing stuff like events where there are Japanese devs there and stuff. So I think this is probably a good thing. But… Yeah, yeah, opening up those kind of communication and access. I didn’t realize it was like that beforehand. Oh yeah, I mean, I just, I remember I couldn’t get anything. There were like a couple of nice people at Square Enix before IDOS, but you just couldn’t get anything out of them. Like they just didn’t do events, they didn’t do interviews. It was just like, how can, you know, Final Fantasy was so badly represented in the West. It was really bizarre. So yeah, savvy move. But yeah, other than that, Matthew, I think we’re basically wrapped up. So, should we take a short break and come back with our top tens? Welcome back to the podcast. So, we’re gonna get on to our top 10 games of 2009 now. So, you’ve had like over an hour of preamble, maybe too much preamble. Matthew will decide that in the edit. But basically, yeah, we always want to lay the, sort of like what the landscape out was, so when people have that context going into the top 10s. A big difference with this one to the previous episodes is that we’re gonna do our honorable mentions after the list, because me and Matthew are a bit worried about preempting each other’s responses, so we don’t know what the other ones picked for the top 10, and we want it to be a surprise. So, we will alternate. This is where your number one is the conduit. So what we’ll do is we’ll alternate as usual, so we’ll start with number 10 and count down. If one person has a game higher than the other, but it’s the same game, I’ve explained that really badly. If one person has one game higher than the other, but it’s the same, oh, fuck me, I cannot explain this very well. I’m leaving that in. Okay, let me try. Okay, if we’ve both picked the same game, then we’ll talk about it when whoever’s got it highest, it comes up in their list, basically. I always struggle to explain that one, but it’ll make sense when you listen to it. So, number 10, Matthew, let’s start with you. So what’s your number 10? My number 10 is a Yuji Naka game. What? It is Let’s Tap for me. You’ve mentioned this on a previous episode about it being surprisingly rad. It’s published by Sega, developed by Prope, Yuji Naka’s outfit at the time. This is a real, only Sega could make it. The kind of stuff people used to love about the Dreamcast, it’s got that similar arcade hangover energy. It is a game which you control entirely by tapping near the remote. You don’t actually hold the Wii remote. You place it down on a box. The game came with two cardboard boxes, flat packed, that you’d fold out. Or you could use, it recommended using the original Wii console box. You place the remote on it and then you tap the box and the remote picks up the vibrations of your tapping to control a series of quite simple mini games. It can really only differentiate between weak taps and strong taps. So they’re very simple games. It’s more about like the rhythm of the taps, I guess. So one of them is a on foot race where you build your character’s momentum by doing rhythmic small taps. And then you do a big heavy tap to make them jump over hurdles or jump over obstacles. A surprisingly good multiplayer game that, because you just have a load of people with remotes and you’re all tapping away. You don’t even have to know how to use a button so everyone can kind of get their head around it. It’s a great pick up and play. I love the rhythm game in this. It’s again, really simple. Quite like the Donkey Konga game on the GameCube in that you’re just tapping away to a tune. If you love kind of drumming your fingers on your leg when you’re listening to music or whatever, it’s that, the game. But play to these just awesomely poppy, sort of vibrant Sega dance tracks. I will definitely use the track Tap de Papaya in this, which is like the theme tune from Let’s Tap, which a lady sings about how we’re going to tap a lot. This is just so simple, so well executed. The four main games, and then there’s like a weird sort of visual, music visualizer, but the four main games, I think they’re all winners, really. There’s like a Jenga thing, there’s the rhythm thing, a race thing, and then like a shootery thing. I just thought this was so much fun. We played this quite a bit in the office multiplayer, because as long as you had multiple controllers, you didn’t need lots of nunchucks or extra guff for it. Everyone could just get in and play it. Great music, great style, great attitude. This is like the sort of silly, pure fun Sega I wish they’d kind of do more of. That’s the fourth podcast in a row where Yuji Naka has come up. Delighted, obviously. This is my favorite Yuji Naka game. Being honest, this is exactly the kind of game that games journalists of my generation wouldn’t have taken seriously. The Wii wasn’t taken that seriously in my office, and I’m sure it was the same for you as well. I feel like people wouldn’t have engaged with this game’s whole deal. This reviewed well. I guess they found the Nintendo head on every team. Like, Keza reviewed it for Eurogamer and was really into it. It came out the year before. We were quite into the Japanese version when it came out, so, you know, then we got the UK version as well. The US version, sadly, didn’t come with the boxes, which I always thought was a shame, so you just had to find your own surface to tap. But I love that it had this big, weird, kind of orange box you had to make up to sort of play it. It was just really super weird. Someone coming at the Wii Remote from a completely different angle to everyone else wrapped up in that sort of summery kind of energy of the best Sega games. Also a minor shout out alongside this too, Prope also made a game called Let’s Catch for WiiWare this year, which was just a catch and throw, but it had this really nice sort of pincer. You catch the ball by pressing the A in the trigger on the Wii Remote, so you’re kind of clenching the remote, and it was just very tactile and pleasantly done. Yeah, I did play Let’s Catch, actually. I did own that, and it was… It’s a sweet little thing. Yeah, it was fun. Like so many WiiWare games, it’s a shame that it’s just doomed to basically… You either downloaded it and you still have it, or it’s gone forever. So, yeah, that’s tough. They should bring out Let’s Tap for the Switch. Yeah, it feels like that would work pretty well. It would still work, yeah. The text is the same in the controller. I’ve got a few boxes in my flat. I think I can make that happen. So, my number 10, then, Matthew. Can I shock you by saying that I’ve got a sports game at number 10? What? Yeah, I know. It’s not very me, but… I hope you’re not going to come and wedgie me after this one. Yeah, and flush your head down the toilet. No, my number 10 is Fight Night Round 4. So, I’m not a boxing guy. I don’t know anything about boxing. But I got mega into this. So, Fight Night Round 3 came out in the early days of the HD console. So, it was kind of like a technical showcase for skin textures and physical reactions and stuff. This kind of refines it. I guess I kind of see them as fighting games. But I know that that community has got a very clear idea of what is or isn’t a fighting game. So, I don’t care what they think, what they think, to be honest. I’d fancy the chances of a boxing fan against a Street Fighter fan. That’s amazing. Now I want to see that play out. But this is basically a fighting game where it’s controlled via the second stick, all of your punches. So, you sort of loop the stick around to do an uppercut, and you just tap it to the right to do a jab or whatever. All of the different controls are mapped to the second stick. EA was doing a lot of this at the time for its sports games, and sometimes it didn’t work very well. Here I thought it worked incredibly well. Unlike fighting games, obviously, boxing is like nine rounds, or is it ten rounds? I think it’s ten, actually. See, I know nothing about boxing. I have no idea. And it becomes like a very long game of endurance, and the magic to this is the counter-attack. So you have like a few blocking and dodging motions you can do. And when someone like misses like a jab, and then you come back with like an uppercut, the camera zooms in and there’s like a flash on the screen and a really like big rumble in the control and it feels really good to just like hit someone in the face. And like that as a kind of dynamic while you’re being wore down yourself is actually like really dramatic and fun. I thought this was just amazing. And like I say, I wasn’t a sports guy, but we had like a spare copy in the office I took at home and I played it all year. I played like a career mode with Mike Tyson. I think I took him through about like 12 years of his career. I just played loads of it. And it was tough because I kicked out. Did you get to the ear biting bit? Oh dear. Was that a quick time event? Dark. Jesus Christ. You’ve got to keep that in the podcast even though I think it’s quite tasteless. So yeah. Yeah, like there’s a whole like divorce mini game. That’s good fun. But yeah, so really, really good. I just really love this. There’s another version that comes out a couple of years later, Fight Night Champion, which has a story mode in it and it’s probably like a better version of this. It’s actually backwards compatible with Xbox One and Series X as well and still looks great. I don’t think that EA has made another one of these games in like a decade, but yeah, Fight Night Matthew. I’ve surprised you by putting boxing in there. I kind of actually have many questions to be about this one. I remember always being like wowed by these when you see them in the office because they were like such a visual showcase. They looked absolutely amazing, I’ve just got no like feel for the rhythm of the sport I guess. I’ve always been terrible at them, but definitely like to watch them and ooh and ah at the bits of lip getting split and stuff. Jesus, to make yourself sound like a sicko. I think what’s funny is as well that, so this is like a hardcore EA game, it just happens to be a sports game, but what I found funny is that if you pick Muhammad Ali, you basically have like a massive advantage over your opponents and he kind of breaks the game because he’s so tall and he’s got like such long arms. And what you realise is that was just Muhammad Ali boxing. Like he was just, he was built in a way that kind of like, you know, made him the best boxer. Like his physical form was perfect for it. So you’re basically saying he’s only famous because he was boxing on easy mode. Well, it’s just when you fight him as Mike Tyson in the game, which you can do because it lets you pick boxers from across time, I guess, time travelling boxing matches. Like Mike Tyson is just really little and like has to like get really close to do damage to him. Whereas Muhammad Ali could just twat him from like miles away. He’s got the advantage of a long arm, but he’s got the disadvantage in that he’s permanently terrified of all the modern technology because he doesn’t understand what era he’s been pulled into in the game. The thing about this game that I got quite into the minutiae of it, and it has commentary this game, from two guys. I know nothing about them, right? They’re like boxing guys on ESPN. One’s called Teddy Atlas, and the other guy’s called Joe Tessitore. These are just like made up names, preposterous names. Their commentary is just like bizarre and droning on. Joe Tessitore will jump in every now and then and just go, When my mom used to make pasta, she made it al dente. That boxer’s legs are not al dente. I was just walking out, complete bullshit like that. I got really into the kind of like nonsense side of that. I just thought- It’s not really like boxing chatter gold, that’s what people want to hear. They want to hear like analysis combined with kind of sort of like Italian nostalgia. And the other funny thing is with this, I played it online a couple of times, right? And both times the player came online, kept mashing the headbutt button and then like got disqualified after like a minute. And that happened twice, and that was the only time I ever played this online. But I found that really funny, I’ll just go online, press the cheat button to troll this player and then get disqualified. So there we go, fight night round four Matthew. Bit of a surprise entry, but you can tell from the way I talk about it, I’ve got a lot of… Oh yeah, for sure. That sounds like a great pick. Yeah. Okay, so what’s your number nine? My number nine is Assassin’s Creed 2. That’s much higher on my list. Well then we will we will park that for a later chat. I’m actually quite surprised you got it so low, but we’ll talk about that later. So, my number nine is Red Faction Guerrilla. I can’t imagine this on your list. This was on my long list of things that I played in quite light. I will say upfront, I probably only played about five or six hours of this because I got my fill of all the destruction and then I kind of hated the campaign. So that’s kind of my Red Faction take. I think that’s fair criticism. Like you play the campaign once and you kind of move on. And the problem with the campaign is once you’ve destroyed all the big buildings, there’s nothing left to blow up. So you’re just driving around like an empty Mars landscape. Just like a really sad, sad man with a car full of bombs. Basically, yeah. But the key to this game’s like longevity is getting into the Wrecking Crew mode, which I think it’s called that, which is like basically a mini game mode where you’re put in a sort of bespoke environment that’s got a lot of stuff you can destroy. And there’s like a score attack of, you know, pick your weapons and then do as much damage as possible with leaderboards. And I got into that massively, and so did a friend of mine. And we were like, we really dug it, and we still play it together. So yeah, it’s a third person shooter set on Mars with a really boring campaign that kind of rips off Firefly. It’s got the, it’s got like, I think the Reavers from Firefly represented here. It’s like, it’s a very similar kind of faction, like a native Martian faction, and then just some boring sci-fi corporation bullshit. All of that is nonsense. This is a game about take your big hammer, knock down that building. That’s the game. So, yeah. Do you have anything else to add on this one, Matthew? The tech is incredible. The building destruction and the way that you could take out the lower levels and it would creak and begin to fall realistically. I mean, I just wish this tech was used in a better game, and I still hope that it one day will be. A huge missed opportunity, but also an absolute must see, weirdly. Yeah, I think I agree with that. Like, it’s a real shame that the only other game that would use this technology is a fucking terrible sequel to this game that comes out several years later, that is set underground for some reason and doesn’t have any big buildings to blow up. Fucking rubbish. But yeah, I think it was just maybe a victim of THQ running out of money and having big problems at this time, so you never got to see it reach its full potential. But who knows, Volition still exists. I don’t know. I’d love to see a Saints Row with this tech in it, but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. Falling, collapsing buildings, probably not good optics, but yeah. What’s your number eight, Matthew? My number eight is GTA Chinatown Wars. Interesting. Almost made my list, didn’t quite, but yeah, a great pick for sure. Something we talk a lot about on this podcast is just being wowed when someone makes effort on your often ignored hardware. This is a great example of this. This is actually Rockstar generally across the board with their Wii ports and Wii versions of their games. Tried really hard and did some really great stuff. This bespoke GTA aimed at the Nintendo DS pulled out all the stops. On a technical level, it’s an absolutely gorgeous version of that kind of top down older GTA style of GTA 1 and 2 done with cell shading, but kind of married to the storytelling sensibility and some more of the sophistication of the kind of later Rockstar North GTAs. It makes amazing use of the DS with all these weird little mini games which should be naff things like hotwiring a car and defusing bombs in missions and things, but actually the variety and the execution of them is really impressive. For my money, easily my favourite of this kind of top down GTA style, I really thought they kind of elevated it and beefed out the ideas from the earlier games, so even if it looks a little bit like them, it’s got this very different energy to it. It’s got this incredibly compelling drug dealing element to it, which sounds super sinister when you say it out loud, and it’s kind of mad that this was a big Nintendo pushed game. Like, this was on the cover of Fish and Nintendo, which I always thought was wild, given it had quite a much younger audience than we did. That’s just me being jealous that we didn’t have it on our cover. But it had this drug dealing game where you buy drugs at one part of the city and then you could basically buy them and then try and like sell them high in areas where there was a drug shortage and it was like surprisingly well thought out and I like the kind of micromanagement of driving around trying to kind of build a fortune from sneaky drug dealing, which in a way like lent the game this kind of overarching like mechanical structure that’s sort of arguably missing from all the other GTAs. Like it still has the individual story missions, but it has this sort of very light management element on top that kind of ties the whole thing together in quite a satisfying manner. Just a real showcase. So much love and care. I never played the other versions that they did. I know they ported it to like PSP and I think there’s like an Android iPhone version, but for me this felt like it really belonged and lived on DS. Yeah, so I have played the PSP version of this and the DS version and the DS version obviously has all of these touch screen mini games, Matthew, like light lock picking and on screen radios, is that right? Yeah, all that good stuff. So that is very bespoke to the DS. I’m sure that works okay on the phone version, but I remember on the PSP one thinking this doesn’t quite fit as well. The PSP one compensates by having really nice visuals. It’s got ditches to cell shading style of this and is a bit more kind of classical GTA style, I guess. And so, you know, there’s pros and cons for both, but yeah, as a DS release, I thought this was a big deal. I definitely went out of my way to get my hands on it. I didn’t finish it, but I did play quite a lot of it. And I do agree that I thought the main character was pretty developed. It was like a Chinese GTA protagonist, quite an interesting choice. And so, you know, for the time as well, like, you know, Rockstar, I think get a bit of flak for, you know, a lot of things. But I thought it was an interesting creative choice and quite well written. It was also when it was the GTA 4 version of Liberty City as well, was it? So you had like two of the islands. So you had like, yeah, the first two islands basically to explore. And yeah, I remember it feeling like a pretty good facsimile. You could go to Star Junction and stuff and it was all there. It’s interesting because around the time there was a couple of other DS games which tried doing the GTA open world thing like in a 3D style. Like if you tried to make GTA 3 on a DS, I think one was called Cop the Recruit and they were terrible. The DS just couldn’t do that 3D world convincingly. So their decision to do the top down thing was just so smart. This did look amazing for a DS game, I thought. It really did, yeah. I just picked up the DS version of this a few weeks ago, actually. So I look forward to the Games Court retrial and verdict on this. I feel like it’s going to go in my favour. This is not guilty on this one. This is a great pick. I don’t know why I ever let my original copy go. I should have just finished it. How hard is it to find these days? I think I paid something like 18 quid for it. It’s not like one of those DS games like a Carmudan or Ghost Trick where you’re paying like 60 quid or something. It’s a bit more reasonable than that. So yeah, and then if you’ve got like a PS Vita, you can just download the PSP version on there for about I think like 15 quid or something. So yeah, easy to get. But yeah, great choice, Matthew. I did think about this, but I just don’t remember enough about it. And who knows, maybe there’ll be another Rockstar game higher up my list. So yeah. So my number eight, Matthew, is Dragon Age Origins. So- Oh, not on my list. This almost didn’t make my list. And there’s a very clear reason for that. So I played this at the time on Xbox 360. I’ve since played on PC, which is where you’re supposed to play it. Like big kind of like cuts were kind of made to take this sort of like the last gasp of the boulder skate style RPG. But with this, you know, quite nice modern Bioware presentation, didn’t look as nice as Mass Effect. And to try and take out all of the kind of tactical battle elements, they kind of just tried to make it into more of a Mass Effect experience on Xbox. And it compromises it a bit too much, I think. On PC, you can zoom the camera out and have like a top-down view of your party and set traps and things like that. On Xbox, it was a bit more automated. It didn’t work quite as well. But nonetheless, you know, a grand fantasy adventure. I have not finished Inquisition, but this felt like a really complete, big portrayal of an interesting world. Not as interesting as Mass Effect, I don’t think thematically, but had a really kind of memorable set of party members like Alistair and Morrigan, who were fun to kind of like go around with, and like a big, and a really good origin system as well, where you pick, you know, your species, but you also pick the situation of your species, and that informs the entire story, hence the name Origins. And yeah, all of the different origins that we’re seeing actually. And then, yeah, the way that kind of like affects the story is really cool. And then has all the Bioware stuff of romance and friendships and things like that. So yeah, I really rated it. Did you ever play this one, Matthew? Yeah, I did. I actually played this series completely out of order, though. I actually played Inquisition was my first one. And then they gave this away, I think, free on PC, on EA, whatever it is, their little loader system. Origin, that’s it, yeah. Yeah, and played it then. And yeah, I liked it. I liked the, you know, I liked the depth of their worlds and the kind of the world building of it. And yeah, the little bespoke intros is really neat. There are a few more hurdles for me with fantasy worlds for me to kind of really get into them and get my head around them. You know, it’s not something I like naturally gravitate towards a good start of a series that I’m glad exists. Yeah, for sure. It was a bit of a surprise as well because for a long time this was positioned as a PC release and console version just seemed to sort of sneak up. Has a really interesting distinction though. I think Eurogamer gave the console one a six and gave the PC one an eight or a nine. So that sort of speaks to the differences between them. If you’re playing it now, absolutely play on PC. It’s quite, obviously this kind of type of RPG has had a big revival, but a lot of PC players’ frustrations with later Dragon Age games is that they abandoned this stuff to be a bit more Mass Effect-y. Personally, I quite like that because I’m just a terrible casual, I guess. But yeah, I’m very fond of the later Dragon Age games. I think the choices I’m interested in making in these games, I like more the narrative things rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of very complex mechanical builds and things. So the sort of simplicity of the… Well, the relative simplicity of Inquisition and the Mass Effect just speaks to me more on that level. Absolutely. Good call. So what’s your number seven, Matthew? My number seven is Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box. Didn’t make my list, as I’m sure won’t surprise you, but yeah. So is this the second entry in the series? It’s the second entry. For me, it’s the second best game. We are yet to reach the best Professor Layton. The kind of combination of charming storytelling and neat puzzles, I mean, that’s what underpins the whole Professor Layton kind of thing. This being the second entry, it’s just a bit more confident, a bit slicker. They present the puzzles with more interesting, bespoke interfaces. There’s more variety to the puzzles. The story is better. It’s a slightly more menacing tale, like juicy and mystery elements to it. You know, it begins on this strange train journey, which, you know, obviously has lots of connotations for famous train-based mysteries. And you go to this sort of town with a gothic feeling mystery. It’s got an absolute dazzler of a twist. I mean, truly, truly bonkers. This is a series that does, you know, they do improve on it down the line, but this is, yeah, just a very competent bit of sequel making. I like the world. I like the vibe of Layton. And I was just still very much looking forward to these as almost like yearly releases at this point. So it was like a fun thing to be a fan of at the time. I was wondering, is the twist more baffling than Curious Villages? They’re all robots, actually. Nonsense. Yeah. I mean, I can tell you what it is if you want to know. And people can skip ahead 20 seconds. I feel like I’ve been bad. I’ve been bad giving away the Curious Village twist there, actually. I won’t give it away then. It’s wild. They get crazier and crazier as they go on. But this one about how, yeah, the strange goings on in this town and this sort of seeming vampire figure who kind of rules over it. The explanation for it is bonkers, particularly for a Nintendo game. It turned out the Patriots Wisemen’s Committee died a hundred years ago, Matthew. And the Philosopher’s Legacy has been… That’s cool. What is it that they kind of refine about the puzzles over time, then? I like the puzzles in the first one. There’s only a few where I thought this is baffling, but I thought they were pretty elegantly done. They were, but I think… We’re talking about quite subtle changes here. There’s a lot where you just input a number or a word, and the interface for these things can get better, but there’s some sort of more spatial puzzles or puzzles that you kind of interact with playing pieces, and there’s things where you kind of draw little roots on. There’s just more variety to the way you’re kind of inputting your answers. Also, I think they do a better job of matching the nature of the puzzles to what’s going on in the story. So it’s like, Layton has to cross this icy lake, and then there’s a puzzle about guiding him across the lake, rather than Layton goes to a lake and meets a bloke who asks him a thing about mice, you know? It feels less contrived, and I’d say a good 80% of the puzzles are still like, hello there, I’m really struggling with this puzzle about string, and you’re like, okay, I better help. But it makes more of an effort to tie things together, or like, can you open, there’s a mysterious door, and the puzzle is like the weird lock on the door, for example. Ah, that makes sense, yeah. I mean, that is funny in Curious Village, actually, where it’s like, oh, there’s a very portly man here eating lots of ham, and he’s like, by the way, there’s two thin boys and one fat boy, need to use this boat to get across a lake. It’s true that it’s a bit of a stretch, but that’s good. Well, I’m sure we’ll see Leighton appear in Futureless as well, Matthew. Yeah, I’ve bought this, and I will play it. I know I say that a lot, but I definitely will. It’s good. It’s just very Christmassy. For some reason, I always put this in the same kind of box as The Room Games, in that they’re just very gentle little puzzlers that I enjoy kind of poking and prodding away at. Good kind of autumn kind of Christmassy games. We should do that as a list, a podcast down the line, like good Christmassy games. That’d be cool. Yeah, I love a game with a Christmassy energy, but not necessarily set at Christmas. Matthew will wear a jumper for that episode. I mean, you won’t be able to see it, but you can imagine it. Okay, so my number seven is Halo 3 ODST. Is this on your list? It is not. So this was obviously a sort of standalone spinoff from the Halo series. It’s about these ODST soldiers who land on this city that’s been attacked by the Covenant and basically kind of like all land separately and have to sort of like reunite and then do something. I think the city is going to be destroyed and they have to get out of there with some kind of information or something. I’ll be honest, the overarching story is not that interesting to me. But I have played this again very recently on the excellent Master Chief Collection. I played this on Xbox One and even on Xbox One the frame rate is really nice and it looks really good in HD. But you can obviously play this on PC as well. It’s kind of told in vignettes. Yes, you basically play one soldier who’s finding helmets and diary entries of the previous soldiers and it tells the story of what happened to them when they landed on the planet. It’s basically an excuse to cut to different types of Halo set pieces. It’s linked together by this open world at night. This smoky jazz soundtrack, which is quite famous and it is very good. It lives up to the hype in that respect. Compared to Noir, I think that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s probably as novel a spin on the Halo concept as you can get. It makes you think about a world where, what if Microsoft just made a few more games like this that were a bit more bite-sized instead of one massive Halo Infinite juggernaut that probably cost a fortune and now has immense pressure to please people. This was when you were getting a Halo game every few years. This was two years after Halo 3 and next year there will be Halo Reach. That’s a better world to me than waiting five years for one big shiny Halo game. I know that’s not how modern game development works, but still, this was a good time for Halo. How did you feel about this one, Matthew? Yeah, I must admit, I didn’t really like this to begin with. Like, for me, the bit of Halo I’m least interested in is just on-foot Halo. I love the Warthogs, I love all the bombing around in the little banshees and all that jazz. And I know that stuff, like, does happen in the sort of flashbacks in ODST, but you do get some bigger set pieces. I never really liked the in-between bits. I found them quite kind of flat. I just don’t like the core shooting of Halo enough that when that’s just front and centre, I kind of bounce off it a bit more. I also found the city just quite confusing to, like, navigate and get my head around. Having heard other people, like, evangelise this game, when I replayed it, you know, a couple of years ago, I clicked with it a bit more and I kind of appreciated the sort of storytelling kind of cleverness of it a bit more. I just… I don’t know if it… I don’t want to say it’s too experimental for me to get my head around at the time, but there was something about it that left me very cold. Like, I didn’t even finish it when I first played it. I just, you know, and it’s not a long game. I got, like, two thirds into it and was just like, nah, enough of this. I’m not a natural Halo fan. I, you know, it’s… I wish I were. I imagine this is more interesting if you are, like, big into Halo. It’s such a weird kind of twist on the formula that it probably feels a bit more exciting, but… It’s The Sood’s choice for the best Halo game. When people say this is secretly the best Halo game, I’m like, well, it definitely isn’t. It’s definitely, like, not as good as Reach 3 or Combat Evolved, but people would like, I think, the stylistic riff on Halo, you know? It’s the one which… The first one she had Nathan Fillion in, right? Yes, I believe so. He might be a voice in the third one. Big, like, geeky, that kind of culture, kind of era, you know? It’s very, like, of that… There were a lot of games at this period which had, like, people from Battlestar or Firefly in, and that got you a lot of credit. It’s very of the time. Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, Bungie would work with Nathan Fillion for years. He was, like, a big part of Destiny for years before they stripped him out. But, yeah, like, Tricia Helfer’s in this cast as well from Battlestar, so there was a lot of that going around. And the other thing I wanted to know about this is that you’re not playing as a Spartan soldier, so you actually, like, can run out of breath when you’re running and stuff, and you also have, like, a more fragile health bar, so I think that’s quite an interesting power difference, but… Yeah, I think that’s maybe what I bounced off about when I was talking about the on foot stuff. Like, for me, it took the bit I was least interested in in Halo and made it, like, a bit fiddlier or a bit more complicated, you know, which only added to my woes. That’s fair enough, yeah. The only other thing I’d note about this is the firefight mode, which was a really good sort of, like, spin on horde, which was becoming a big thing at this time. But that’s me done with my piece on Halo, Matthew. So what’s your number six? Number six is Legend of Zelda, Spirit Tracks. Didn’t make my list, but I’m pleased to hear it’s made yours. I knew it. I knew a new Zelda game couldn’t come out without you. Yeah, I feel like I’m probably repeating what I said about Phantom Hourglass when we did that Best of 2007 episode. That was that. Maybe six, but it was around that time, yeah. A Zelda game that really lent into the Nintendo hardware, the DS controlled on the touch screen with amazing stylus controls and stylus based reinventions of the traditional gadgets. I feel like this one’s a bit more… I doubt divisive is maybe the wrong word. This feels like quite a weird niche Zelda to me. This feels more in keeping with a Majora’s Mask or Link’s Awakening in that it’s got a slightly weirder comic tone to it. Best encapsulated by the bad guy who wears two top hats to cover his two devil horns, which is just a superb comic touch and really made me bark with laughter when I saw that. He’s a weird little man. He’s got a demonic train that you’re fighting with him. I think he’s called Chancellor Cole, I think is his name. The other thing which I really love about this game is Zelda’s quite a key character in it. She’s sort of like a companion through the adventure and possesses this giant suit of armour in a bit like a sort of Full Metal Alchemist kind of twist. It’s you in this sort of possessed armour doing kind of cooperative kind of puzzling together and you plot her route and send her into areas where it’s too dangerous for Link. I really like the Zelda games, which do something a bit more interesting with Zelda. One of the reasons I like Skyward Sword is she’s a bit more prominent and that game’s a bit more romantic in its kind of depiction of her where this one is quite goofy. It’s almost like Zelda having a wild little adventure and while you do play as Link, it’s sort of as much about what she’s up to. I like the train stuff. I think the freedom of plotting the route as the boat in Phantom Hourglass was a lot more satisfying than just following these quite fixed tracks. I should explain for people who haven’t played it, your major mode of transport is this train. The original gimmick was going to be that you were going to lay the tracks across the world for the train to follow. That was deemed too complicated, so it’s quite a fixed network of tracks. There’s a lot of toing and throwing along the same routes. As you’re moving along the track, you can control weapons on the train to fight things that would attack the train. You can control the speed of it. You can pull the whistle. It’s quite a childlike fantasy of just bombing across the countryside, pulling the whistle. It’s got really great music. The central theme of Spirit Tracks has got this amazing momentum to it. I think whenever you’re on a train ride afterwards, it’ll pop into your head because it feels like the definitive energy of a train captured as a tune. Otherwise, it does a lot of the stuff that Phantom Hourglass did, but I like the weirdness of the kind of characters, the Zelda twist. And it’s just a very polished DS game which should be celebrated. I understand that, as you mentioned there, the lack of freedom to explore was the contentious element of this for some people. They thought it made it too simple. But that’s not necessarily something you agree with, even though you agree with the criticism. It is true that you don’t have that control, but the game is also relatively short by Zelda standards. You know, it bombs along at a good old pace. So I feel like the speed you’re going between the dungeons and that you’re getting new powers and new abilities and whatnot kind of counters that. You know, there is a version of this game where it stretches itself out and the limitations of the train become much more apparent. But for what it is, I think they’re absolutely fine. I think there is enough like twists on what you’re being asked to do that it doesn’t really matter for me. Yeah, good stuff. I mean, I certainly thought it looked nice. I only played it briefly. Trains are actually quite a good fit for the 3D style of the DS. I really like the Smash Bros level based on this as well in the 3DS version. Oh, it’s wonderful. I assume that’s in the Ultimate one too, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, great. Yeah, that was fantastic. Worth it just for that. Yeah, interesting pick. I look forward to seeing where that turns up in your best Zelda games list next week, Matthew. Okay, or if it does at all, we’ll see. It’s tricky. Oh, I’ll give you a little teaser. It’s been quite fraught. Oh, I cannot wait to hear your rundown of those. So, my number six is Grand Theft Auto episodes from Liberty City. Is this on your list, Matthew? This is not. This is the handheld one, right? No, no. This is the combination of the two DLCs that they released in box form. Oh, that’s right. I thought rather than picking one, I’ll just put them both together because they did release as one game, and that’s the version I’ve got now. Yeah. Yep. So you’ve got The Ballad of Gay Tony and Lost and Damned. So these released separately as expansions for GTA IV. They’re both set in Liberty City, the same setting. They cross over with the story of GTA IV, each of them. You see the characters. People actually picked up on this before this came out, but people noted that several of the characters looked like they would appear again in some kind of expansion. Everyone knew this DLC was coming because Microsoft had made a big deal with Rockstar to fund the DLC, basically, and it led to these very elaborate, essentially mini-GTA campaigns where you play as these different characters. Johnny Klebitz in Lost and Damned, and Luis, I think it is, in Ballad of Gay Tony, but he’s a bit of a non-character Luis. It’s kind of about Tony Prince, the gay Tony in the title. In the first DLC, you’re basically in a biker gang, and you’re involved in these biker wars. And then in the second one, you’re kind of protecting Tony’s business. He’s a nightclub owner and does lots of illegal stuff, and it’s that sort of GTA stuff. It’s notable, these DLCs, because they are always praised for framing Liberty City in a slightly different way. It does careful things with picking mission locations that mean it feels like you’re seeing parts of the city you didn’t really see that much in the original game, which is a really good creative choice. There’s a couple of visual filter things they do as well. There’s a noise filter in Lost and Down to make the city look a bit grittier, I guess. In Ballad of Gay Tony, they add these Michael Mann purple sunsets as well to give the game a different visual style. So it really successfully does that, I think. And the mission design is cut loose a bit more, particularly in Ballad of Gay Tony. It’s like a lot of the criticism for GTA IV was levelled at the fact that they don’t do the San Andreas style big mission stuff. And I think one of the first missions you do in Ballad of Gay Tony is you’re on a moving train shooting down helicopters with an automatic shotgun. And it’s a lot more like what people are asking for. So yeah, yeah, really, really top stuff. Did you play these, Matthew? I have. I’ve not actually finished either of them, though. But my memory was like not being as bothered about the biker one, but yes, agreeing with the kind of general consensus that they sort of found the fun again a bit in kind of Ballad of Gay Tony. Yeah, so you obviously got this very overwrought storyline in GTA IV and this allows you to cut loose a little bit and just kind of enjoy some sort of japes. And then GTA V, I think, leans much more into the tone of these DLCs than the main GTA IV campaign, for better or worse. I think it is a real shame that Rockstar’s involvement with the games, their newer games, is so focused on like the online component. Yeah. I really miss like their expand. I do miss their expansion work. So I mean, OK, I know they’ve finished either of these, but like Red Dead’s like Undead Nightmare is absolutely amazing. And I love the idea that they spent all this money building these huge worlds that then to kind of have a second pop and do something a bit different in that space is such a smart, like cool idea. And they’ve always done it so well. And, you know, I wish they do that kind of single player adventure expansion again. But I know that their focus is on online and that it does scratch that itch a bit, I guess. No, not really. I mean, I’ve played loads of GTA Online. I’ve never got close to having a high as much as playing these DLC packs. But they do try and sell it as like, oh, this is almost single player quality stuff. Like when they did that, what was that last one for GTA 5? Kaio Perico. I felt like the chat around it, they were trying to sell it as it’s closer in tone to what we were doing with those expansions. But the stuff they’re making for GTA Online in terms of like toys to play within the city, really, really good. And like the act of putting GTA Online like that is really good. And I can see that they’re motivated by money. You have to be there. They’re a publicly listed company. They have to make cash. But I completely agree with you. Like the magic of Rockstar Games to me was always cinematic single player. And these were like, yeah, you’re kind of like in the, you know, in this sort of great gold near of Rockstar Games. They still make great campaigns. I don’t contest that, but they make them very slowly. But and they make online content all the time. So, yeah, it almost feels like they’re they’re a little bit above. Does the pure silliness now of like an undead nightmare, you get the impression that they’d almost wouldn’t want to do it because it would undermine the kind of sophistication of the main campaign where it wouldn’t at all. Like, if anything, it gives you permission to make these quite po faced kind of self serious epic cinematic campaigns and then just just go wild with the kind of daft daft ideas and mechanics in your expansion. Just the same people who make them. They’ve still got that in them to do that. Just let them cut loose. Yeah, it’s weird. I still think GTA Online is like about half as good as it should be and that someone could come along and make a better version of that game if they had the resources. Riot should make that game, I think. But yeah, as it stands, yeah, this is like a vestige of something that Rockstar’s not as invested in anymore. They still make good games, of course, and amazing worlds. But yeah, it was, I put this here because, yeah, this is just a great little sort of coder to GTA, added a bunch of radio stations to with cool music. And yeah, good stuff. So what’s your number five, Matthew? My five is Batman Arkham Asylum. Perfect, that’s my number four. So perfect. It is, as far as I’m concerned, the sort of definitive superhero game in terms of its ability at capturing what makes a superhero interesting and letting you live the fancy of being that superhero. I know there’s a lot of debate about which Batman game delivers that best, that a lot of people lean towards the Arkham City. Is it a hot take to say that you like Arkham Asylum more? I think it’s just what people go with because there’s kind of like open world, a bloat I guess, in the later ones that people aren’t as into. I think it was last week’s episode I was talking about seeing an early version of Arkham Asylum and being a little bit underwhelmed and not really knowing what it was. The kind of pleasure of playing this for the first time and playing this properly for myself was sort of seeing the kind of true structure of the game, that kind of metroid-y pace to it, where you kind of go back to previous areas with new abilities. The fact that the areas were really dense with secrets. I mean, all that stuff is just like tick, tick, tick for me. Regardless of Batman, I like people who do kind of metroid-y game structures. But this particular Batman, like his gadgets, just how satisfying the combat looked, how good it made you look with like relative lack of ability, just felt like they really loved the lore and universe and the way they kind of surfaced it with the Riddler challenges and all that kind of stuff was really well done. I just found it really exciting to play, like the pace of it, the drip-feed of villains, the sort of set pieces, the weird places it kind of took you. They’d made previous games, but seeing them arrive so fully formed of this awesome thing was just incredibly exciting to me at the time. Yeah, it was just a real shock that it was as good as it was. I mean, it was emerging over time. I think I mentioned in the previous episode, they sent out preview code that had the Scarecrow stuff in it, and it suggested obviously there was more to this studio storytelling-wise than you were maybe expecting. And then I think we talked as well about how the game goes off the rails a little bit when it throws in these Titan enemies, these big dudes. But, you know, that’s only like the final third, really, that it really kind of like brings it down a bit. There’s no denying that this environment they created is incredible, like the sort of detail, the depth to it. It felt like a proper sort of like living, breathing place, I guess. It felt like something bad had happened to a very worn-in sort of location. It was perfectly drawn in that respect. Is it based on a particular iteration of Batman art-wise, or is it its own thing? It’s its own thing. I mean, the characters are very like Gears of War, sort of like infused, you know, of the time sort of designs, like really jacked looking Jim Gordon and stuff. But it’s kind of an amalgamation of the comics and the animated series, really, into its own sort of sub-universe. But it feels like a world in which basically every Batman story could have happened. That’s what’s really good about it, I think. It’s like, you know, maybe not like, you know, The Dark Knight Rises or whatever. But it feels like close enough that basically he has these pre-existing relationships with all these villains. And that’s what makes him really compelling. It’s not like you’re watching an origin story. You do see his origin in this as a scarecrow flashback. But yeah, I really like that it’s like, oh, well, we’re deep into Batman’s career here. He’s known the Joker for years. But this just happens to be like the biggest thing he’s tried to pull off taking over the asylum. So it’s like so many things which became quite hackneyed or even were a bit hackneyed at the time. We’re just so well done. Like, I love the audio diaries in this where you get like the interviews with the different villains. And because it’s got this iconic cast of characters to kind of play with, it felt like it could just have a lot more fun with that stuff than, you know, it’s way more interesting hearing a villain you recognize than just hearing like a random NPC wearing on about some backstory. It’s just packed with fan service. And I really did love the collectibles in this game. Like, the challenge of getting them, the variety of ways of tackling them, you know, it’s a really gamey game in that way that, in a way that I really, really admire. Yeah, felt like they took that scene in Batman Begins where he like arrives at the docks and beats up all of Moroni’s men, I think it is. Maybe it’s someone else. Whatever Tom Wilkinson is doing in that film where he goes, begged like a dog, his gangster character. I felt like that was kind of their starting point of like, he arrives and sort of like lands in a circle of dudes and just beats them all up. And this whole kind of like 360 degrees melee system is, you know, pioneered by this game and then borrowed by so many others. And, you know, never really done as well as it is here, I would say. No, no. Yeah, it’s, yeah, great stuff. I think there was like there’s three games I think are like the canonical, like, masterpieces of this year. I think this is one of them. Yeah. And the other I think Assassin’s Creed 2 is another one. And then the other one is, well, it will come up later, I’m sure. But yeah, good pick, Matthew. So there’s my number. That was my number four. But my number five is Resident Evil 5. So interesting. This is what I’ve talked about plenty. Obviously, like a very hyped game after Resident Evil 4. There’s quite a long wait until Capcom figures out what they’re doing next. They do this quite bold thing of taking Chris Redfield to Africa and, you know, creates its own problematic imagery in the marketing, gets a lot of fair criticism, even for the time. I think at the time I would have been a lot more defensive about it because I was just like, say, a little gamer boy. But I completely think the criticism is fair. There’s like optics problems with this game. You’d have been doxing some people. It wasn’t that bad. I would have just been grumbling in the office, basically. But just let me play my racist video game, you know? No, I agree with all of that stuff. Even at the time I was a little bit like, well, I know this is indefensible, but I’m still going to play it. And yeah, it’s really interesting because it kind of starts in these like, you know, sort of villages, I guess. And then over time it turns into a wild, weird, Resident Evil game like all of the rest of them, like Village does, where you’re suddenly in like, you know, kind of factories and oil refineries and, you know, Wesker’s base and stuff like that. I think what this loses from the sort of like darker tone of Resi 4, it does lose that bit. It has a cover system it didn’t really need. It becomes actiony in a way that’s like, takes something away from what Resi 4 does so well. It still has a really fucking fun storyline. Chris Redfield is a ludicrous figure in this. Just gigantic arms, completely jacked. Fighting British Albert Wesker who was American in previous games. They made him British to make him more evil. I respect that. Wesker’s just really fun. Who’s more jacked? Chris Redfield in this or Jim Gordon in Arkham Asylum? I think this version of Chris Redfield is the most jacked character of all time. To the point where it is preposterous that the same man is in Resi 4 Village. It has now accumulated so many of these bizarre life experiences. But I’m very fond of it as a co-op game. I think it works great as a co-op game. Like the item trading system and limited inventory. Need egg. Yeah, exactly. Maybe we’ll cut in another one of those at the end of the episode. Because every character has a line for, I need an egg and all that stuff. I don’t feel like I need to go into it in much more detail though, Matthew, because I covered it pretty comprehensively on our Best Resident Evil Games episode. Yeah, I’ve always liked your passion for this and it’s Mercenaries mode particularly. It comes from a very genuine place. I like it when these kind of weird, slightly 7 out of 10 games get, you know, just become something quite important to you in your head. I find that quite infectious to listen to. Yeah, well, apologizing for the races over at the same time. That’s my vibe. So, we’re up to your number 4, Matthew, aren’t we? Yeah, my number 4 is maybe a bit of an odd one. It’s Mario & Luigi Bowsers Inside Story. Hmm, yep, not on my list, but I did wonder if this would come up at some point as one of the big Dx games. Oh, God, I love this game. This is so much fun. This is the Mario & Luigi RPG line, which kind of runs alongside Paper Mario, the two Mario RPGs. There are sort of similarities in that there’s like a sort of timing, quick time element to the kind of turn-based battling in it, but this one is, I’d say, like, you know, a lot more kind of obviously daft. It’s kind of like a wild cartoon version of the Mario universe where anything can happen. Not saying that Mario is normally like super gritty or anything, but this is noticeably sillier than even Paper Mario, I’d say. This, for me, is of all the Mario RPGs, Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi, this is my favourite. It puts the focus on Bowser. It’s called Bowser’s Inside Story because Mario & Luigi are kind of sort of inhaled into him, like the film Inner Space. They’re kind of adventuring around inside his body, while Bowser’s kind of stomping around the overworld. So you kind of play as, you play as both parties. The stuff you do inside the body like helps Bowser sort of accomplish his goals outside in a very like prescribed way. So like, you know, he needs to be strong. So you’ll go to his arms and like mallet his arm muscles so they’re tougher, so he can lift stuff, things like that. You know, Bowser’s got like a sort of inhale ability. We can sort of suck in enemies and then it switches to Mario & Luigi to like fight them in his stomach inside his body, which is really fun. It’s really fun, like the dual screen elements of that, I think is, sounds gimmicky, but it’s really well executed. I think they find enough of this kind of inside outside playful ideas that the idea really, really holds up. What I love about the Mario & Luigi games is they really like escalate throughout in terms of like constant set pieces. You’re constantly learning new abilities so that they learn kind of like duo moves that they can do in combat as they go around Bowser’s body. Bowser is kind of freeing his minions in the overworld, which then become kind of like summons in battle so you can get like an army of Goombas. Every one of them has got a bit of a quick time mini game to them, but the concepts of them are just really like funny and frothy. It’s got these brilliant sort of set piece boss battles where Bowser goes super size and you turn the DS on its side into the book kind of position. You’ve got Bowser on one screen fighting like a giant castle or another giant enemy on the other screen. And it’s all kind of controlled with the stylus strokes and like shouting into the megaphone. And they’re sort of like kaiju battles, I guess. Just a huge bundle of cartoony joy. I actually haven’t played the 3DS remake, which has got like an extra side campaign on it about Bowser Jr. I should probably play that. But if you can get hold of this still, it’s highly, highly recommended. Yeah, I think the art style redo they did for that was a little bit contentious for the two remakes they did. But, you know, I think it’s probably the easiest way to play them now. Is this better than Partners in Time, the other DS one, Matthew? I think so. I just, I think Bowser just really freshens things up. You know, a bit like with Spirit Tracks, how I like the kind of focus on Zelda. I like it when Nintendo kind of like not go deep into the lore, but play with some of the other characters and have some sort of fun with their reputations. And the balance of the two worlds, I think, is really well done. Really, really inventive. Very sad that Alpha Dream and No More, the studio that made this, they shut down. But they had a great run and this is their best work. Yeah, it’s a real shame that I don’t really know why Nintendo let them go out of business. It seemed like a game made for the Switch would have done quite well, but sad times. So, Matthew, we’ve done my number 4, which was Arkham Asylum, so it’s your number 3, right? Yeah, my number 3 is Uncharted 2. Higher on my list. What’s your number 3? My number 3 is Assassin’s Creed 2. Oh, there we go. Yep. So, this was a shock because original Assassin’s Creed has 81% on Metacritic, Matthew, for the Xbox 360 version. That game was bullshit, that first one. It was, like, poor. So boring. Bad. Bad game. So, I was quite anti the idea of playing any more of these because I felt like it had succeeded in spite of not being very good. And that really annoyed me at the time as someone who gave it 58%. But they always promised that it was going to be more varied. And they made a good pitch with the setting, just changing it to Renaissance Italy. That was a good pick. They came up with this main character, Ezio Auditore, Difference. I think he’s called. And obviously a much more developed character, a really fun character. Kind of turns it into more of an adventure romp, which it sort of needed. Adds all of these different combat options, like a little gun you can strap to your wrist and all of these different melee weapons. Generally speaking, a complete refresh across the board. One of the best sequels ever made. Just like a phenomenal upgrade. All my problems with Assassin’s Creed’s platforming, which they’ve never fixed, and its combat is still here. There’s that layer of, like, we’ve made this as mainstream and easy as possible. But I can’t deny the spec tool of this game was great. It was a really fun story to blast through. Just a great upgrade from the first one. Is that how you felt about it, Matthew? It’s sort of a tie between this and Mass Effect 2 for, like, most improved sequel. I couldn’t believe how they kind of got their act together. It’s probably this, because Mass Effect 1 isn’t as bad as Assassin’s Creed 1. Yeah, great character. I loved all the stuff with the house that you’ve got, the mansion where you, you know, what you achieved elsewhere in the game was kind of like amassing fortune back at the house. I mean, that kind of hub world mechanic is now, like, pretty much a staple of all open world RPGs. It’s just done really well here. This game feels like it kind of creates a template for a lot of, like, basically what Ubisoft will do for the next 10 years, but in a good way. Like, it was all refreshing and exciting and, like you say, wrapped up in a really charming, lovable character. The climbing felt, like, more of a mechanic in this one in that it had the kind of catacombs, which were, like, proper platforming challenges, but even, like, scaling some of the buildings to get to the sink points, they felt a bit more like climbing puzzles, like you had to, like, work your way around and find all the right grips. This is a series which, I think, got bored of that mechanic quite quickly, and then it just became, like, hold this trigger, and you basically run over any, you know, you can basically run up mountains in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and it’s a shame, because it was something that differentiated it from other games. Like, if anything, I’d say it’s parkour, originally, was its defining feature, and I feel that this is one of the only ones where it actually came into play as, like, an interesting, you know, an interesting, like, bit of mission design. And I also liked it when you’d throw down coins, then everyone would collect them, and then you could poison a dude with a big hammer, and you’d start swinging his big hammer around, and he’d basically thwack all the peasants collecting the coins. And that was endlessly funny to me. Yeah, you’ve spotlighted so many things I like there. So, the platforming, this is the one, I think this is the one where they add the handhold mechanic, right, where you have to, like, tap B to, like, where you leap up to grab to this next level of the… Right. I think that’s in this game. And that does add a bit more spice to the platforming, you’re right. And I love the catacombs, too, as these kind of, like, sort of, like, eerie atmosphere puzzles, they were just a really good little aside. The house thing, yeah, really distinctive environment, that little estate you’ve got, piecing together the Apple of Eden puzzle, collecting paintings and stuff. It was… Yeah, it was like just a really… It really sells you on that open world format. I think that it does get… I think it gets steadily more tired after this. I’m not… Brotherhood won’t make my top 10, I don’t think. But this… Yeah, this really got me. I really, really love this game. And the flying machine stuff was quite limited and silly, but really fun. It’s fun that you’re pals with Da Vinci. That’s just a good little choice that was. Yeah, great stuff. So, have we reached your number two, Matthew? My number two is Little King’s Story. Yeah, I forgot that that was this year. I thought it was a year earlier. But this was, yeah, a surprise kind of like… Well, not a surprise hit, but just a sort of cult Wii game, the likes of which is kind of almost unmatched. Yeah, this is a huge end-gamer heart choice. I also stand by it as a game. Did you ever play this? Do you know much about this one? I know that you’re a king and you’ve got these little kind of minions doing stuff for you. This was a big like, Ashley Day on GameStream loved this game, and no one else really played it. So, I know, because, yeah, I know Ashley’s like super into the work of the game’s creator, Kamira, who now he made things like The Million Onion Hotel and Dandy Dungeon. Really interesting career, like made the, is it Chulip, which is like the kissing RPG? A super cult figure. So this is quite weird in that, you know, it got a relatively big push in the West, Little King’s Story. It is a, I say kingdom management game, which makes it sound probably a lot drier than it is. You’re a little king, you are building your kingdom by pushing into new territory to get resources and things to build up your town. In the moment to moment, it probably actually plays closer to Pikmin, in that you kind of collect your townsfolk to take them out into the overworld, and then you sort of chuck them at enemies or obstacles. And the different townsfolk all have different professions, and that changes kind of like what they’ll do. So you can take soldiers, and obviously you throw soldiers at enemies and they’ll fight them, but then there are like carpenters or wood… What are people who chop wood called? Lumberjacks, is that right? Lumberjacks, that kind of stuff. So as you build your town out, you get more professions, you can kind of push further into the map, you can do more interesting things. What really makes this game for me is it’s got this great sense of humour written in this really kind of casual tone, which will be very familiar if you’ve played Kimura’s other games, where like all the rival kings sort of send you these kind of insulting notes between missions, where they’re like, Dear King, you know, you’re a stupid jerk and I hate you and all this kind of stuff. It uses the word jerk a lot to great effect, which really made me laugh. Completely surreal touches. The rival kings that you’re taking down, each one has got this huge kind of like gimmicky boss fight to it, where there’s sort of strange personality manifests in the boss battle. So there’s this giant king who’s like basically a giant ball because he’s eaten so much. And you basically fight him on this sort of pinball table where you’re sort of smashing him around into all these like pinball sort of bounces and things to hurt him. And there’s a king who’s basically just sitting on top of a mountain, growing this massive beard. And you have to climb up this sort of obstacle course mountain in this kind of time limit to get to him. And there’s another one where it’s like a TV game show quiz and you have to answer all these questions to defeat the king. And it’s set to this soundtrack of demented covers of like classical music, which I really like. It’s got this great energy to it. It’s a distinct sort of unique vision that just sort of runs through every element of the game. It really feels like a weirdo has kind of had their say in every part of it. I don’t really hear much about this game. I don’t really know what its wider reputation is. You know, we definitely probably rated it higher than most. I think we gave it our Game of the Year at the end of the year, actually. And then Kumura wrote us this lovely letter saying how happy he was. He said, I’m dancing around my flat in happiness because you liked our game, which was very sweet. But yeah, I really love this game. You can play it on PC. There is a version of it on Steam. There was also an absolute dogshit remake on… Was it Vita? Yeah, Vita. Where it basically killed the art style. It was a different game. It had a different element to it. But they just didn’t understand what made the game special at all. They completely sanitized it. Do not play that version. It does not represent what Little King’s Story is about. But if you can track it down, great sense of humour, loads of charm. It’s fucking difficult, I will say. The boss fights in particular are a little bit trial and error. If you bring the wrong combination of professions to the fight, you just won’t be able to do them. But once you get your head around some of those quirks, it’s like a constantly amusing game. Yeah, I really love this. Yeah, great pick. I’ll consider that PC version, but it has mixed reviews on Steam, so it might be a… I haven’t played it, so I don’t know how it holds up, but I probably should revisit this at some point, because I loved it so much on the Wii. Yeah, there’s like a kind of sort of… I feel like this fits the same category as Zack and Wiki a little bit, like hardcore sort of cult Wii games that kind of got ignored a little bit, you know? Weirdly, I think it sold best in Europe then, anyway, because it got really championed by a few outlets who really kind of clicked with it. I think Kimura is this sort of vital character, really. He sort of vanishes a little bit after Little King’s Story, and he becomes a producer at Grasshopper. He produces No More Heroes 2, which I wasn’t really wild about, and then he sort of comes back later with his strange little onion game studio, and ever since then they’ve been making these really characterful, weird mobile puzzle games, which have been kind of mostly brilliant. He’ll never have a breakout here. He’s just too strange and niche, but he’s so funny, so weird and committed to his thing. I really, really admire it. Great pick. I’m sure the Matthew Castle devotees of this podcast will be heading to eBay right now to pick this up. Ash Day will be happy about that, but he will be sad because he likes Excitebots, which is not featured in this list, because I thought it was awful. Good little coda there, good little dunk there. Yeah, I just want to balance it out. I don’t want to get in too excited. Right, so my number two, Matthew, is Chrono Trigger on the DS. Whoa. I picked this because this is the first time it ever released in Europe, this game, and it is the game I played the most on my DS in 2009, so I really loved it. This port is probably the best one. It has really nice pixel art. It doesn’t have any of those weird Square Enix fonts that are so contentious these days. Really nice, like, pixel-y font. Yeah, just a great sort of, like, recreation of this SNES classic. And of all of the Square Enix 2D RPGs, this is the one now that you can play and sort of appreciate straight off the bat. It has no real complex behind-the-scenes progression systems. It is an adventure about time traveling, basically. You build a party member out of, like, weirdos from across time, like a frog man and, like, a robot from the future and, like, a prehistoric sort of, like, bikini lady, and it just accumulating sort of these oddballs, basically. And as a party, your characters have these different moves where they can kind of, like, combine powers, so the robot can use his laser to, like, I don’t know, power up your sword or whatever, or you can, like, do a kind of cross slash attack with the little frog man who’s also got a sword, and the longer you have the different party members in your party, the more developed abilities they’ll pick up, and yeah, you can eventually do these very powerful combos between the three different party members, so a really good detailed system that rewards you sort of persisting with different party members. Really love that. The time travel storyline’s really, really fun. It has, like, a kind of big variety of eras. They’re far future, kind of, like, destroyed by this kind of, like, apocalyptic kind of, like, force that lives in the planet. That’s really kind of, like, bleak and interesting when you see it for the first time, because you’re coming from this, like, quite green, luscious, sort of, like, post-medieval setting. And then, like, you’ve got a flashback to this time where there’s, like, the haves and the have-nots of these kind of, like, wizards who live in a floating continent, and then there’s all these peasants on the ground, and then, due to their own, like, hubris, the floating continent comes crashing down, and they basically have to, like, rebuild society, and it’s quite melancholy. Just a really, like, cool inventive game made by Square Enix Superstars. So, I hope you don’t mind, Matthew, that I’ve bodged the list by bringing in an old game here. No, not at all. No. A great pick. I don’t have, like, a huge nostalgic connection to it, but, yeah, I played it when it came back out on DS, and, yeah, also really liked it, and it’s, like, a great little standalone thing I think anyone can enjoy. Yeah, for sure. Chrono Cross, the sequel, wasn’t really connected, so, yeah, this is actually quite expensive to get on DS in the UK, but the, I think you can get some of the US versions a bit cheaper. I bought them DS a couple of years ago, but, yeah, great game, really love it. So what’s your number one, Matthew? My number one, and this is bold, it’s Might and Magic Clash of Heroes. Wow, I see, I was slightly thinking, well, surely Matthew will have Uncharted 2 at number one, but no, here we are. So, yeah, talk me through it. This is a Capybara puzzle game. It is a match three versus strategic battler game. We basically have a grid of units on your screen. The enemy has a grid of units on their screen. You are arranging those units to try and match like-colored units. If you arrange them in a horizontal row, it forms a defensive wall. If you form them in a vertical column, they become an attacking unit and begin to, like, ready an attack where they’re going to charge up the screen. The idea is to combine your defensive walls, the positioning of your attacking units to try and push through all their enemy ranks. That really is the kind of the basic idea of, like, a match-three puzzle game where the units you make then have this wider strategic importance. This is just, like, for my money, the best, like, new puzzle game of the last 20 years. To see someone just come up with something that you’ve genuinely not seen before, so fully formed, so elegant, so beautifully executed, and so well explored by the structure of the game. You know, it has this Might and Magic RPG wrapping, which I must admit I don’t really give a shit about. I know basically fuck all about Might and Magic and have no investment in that universe, but the story is just an excuse to go on quite a large 30-hour journey, which takes you through controlling different factions who all have different kind of unit types, different kind of play styles on the battlefield. It has one of the best learning curves I’ve ever seen in that the way it gradually introduces the different elements, the different tactics, like the way you’re playing by the end of this game is just completely unrecognizable from the way you start this game. It just instantly got its hooks into me. I was addicted to this game. It came out right… It actually came out in the UK in January 2010, but it came out in the US in 2009, and that’s when I was playing it for review. Just very rare to see something so fully formed, so different, really fun mix of missions and puzzle missions where you’re given fixed boards that you have to kind of come up with the limited moves to win them. This is just… That I’ve put it at my number one shows, I really, really rate this game. I think it is… Capybara is best games, one of the best puzzle games on the DS. I love it a bit, and people if they haven’t played it should really go and discover this. It is great. This was… I was quite surprised to learn about this game last night. I was sort of vaguely aware that there was a Mighty Magic game on DS that was acclaimed, but I didn’t really know what it was. I found out this had been ported to home consoles as well, but I think the DS version was better reviewed than they were, Matthew. I just like the sprite work. The HD version is just a little colder to me. Yeah, that’s fair enough. Yeah, that’s an interesting pick. I wasn’t expecting that, but I do know that you love a good puzzle game. I also love what I imagine is your number one. Okay, so Matthew, my very predictable number one, as you preempted, is Uncharted 2 Among Thieves. So, I’m really curious why this very acclaimed, but slightly oddball kind of like puzzle RPG game beat Uncharted 2 to your number one, because I feel like this is a signature Matt Castle game. I feel like I link the Uncharted games with the Matt Castle brand. Maybe it’s just from those covers where you were trying to compare everything to Uncharted, but I’m curious, like how come this didn’t get higher up on your list? Maybe I was just trying to keep the list spicy. There’s an element of that. It’s really close, like it’s super close. Uncharted 2 was like a really key game for me this year. This is the year I got my PS3 Slim. I got it for Christmas with Uncharted 2. So that was like a real double whammy because I’d obviously sort of seen it at E3 and heard other people talking about it and was really, really, really keen to play it. So to have, you know, that was a great Christmas holiday. Just playing out the 2009 with this amazing game. You know, it’s spectacular in so many ways and sort of like creates the model for, I guess, what Naughty Dog will kind of continue to do and what other people try to do. I don’t think it is a perfect game. This thing, I was sort of weighing it up. You know, I do have some problems with, not just Uncharted 2, like the series. Like, weirdly, it’s a game that I love while I don’t particularly like the combat in it, which is probably a factor in its placement. The sort of spectacular highs of it are enough and the general level of polish is enough that I do adore it. But like when I really sit there and think about it, I think, well, it doesn’t entirely convince, like, when it’s just a third-person shooter, I am as not into it, like I’m not as into the feel of the game. Yeah, I think that was something I really wanted to ask you, actually, is like, do you think the Uncharted games are good shooters? Because this is the kind of probably the most common criticism leveled in these games, other than the fact that when they rope in supernatural elements, they tend to go off the rails in the first three games do this. And it does kind of like throw the game off a little bit sort of regardless. But the shooting generally, yeah, like it’s definitely, it never quite feels world class. There’s something a bit off about it. I think Uncharted 4 has better shooting than the PS3 ones do. Uncharted 4, whether I just kind of clicked with that more or if there was more subtle stuff going on under the hood, I felt like the fights there were more clearly about like your momentum in that environment. It felt like less of a cover shooter and more of a game where you were meant to be like swinging onto this platform, punching someone out and the actual areas were quite big and there was quite a bit of platforming involved like around the action. And, you know, it’s like a game that kind of kills you quite fast if you stay still, so it wants it to look exciting and be constantly kind of moving quite fast. And but that that also might be true too. And I just wasn’t playing it right. But in my head, this was a game about where there’s something sort of spongy about the shooting. You know, it isn’t like a lethal precision game and it hasn’t necessarily got like the feedback of like a Gears of War, you know, thinking of other kind of cover shooters. But for the most part, like shooting is paired with other exciting stuff that you don’t really notice it. Like, you know, when you’re, you know, going down the train or whatever, you’re not like, oh, you know, I wish the shooting was better. You’re just like, oh, shit, this is crazy, you know. And that’s that’s kind of the sort of uncharted trick, I think. Yeah, I think the magic of a lot of this era of cinematic action games, and I count the Call of Duty campaigns in this as well, is all about how they’re paced, like how they distribute set pieces versus kind of like slower moments or puzzly bits or whatever. And I think that Uncharted 2, you know, fairly famously, its first half does this really well. So right up until you get to the village and slightly after in Nepal, the game’s pacing is pretty much perfect. There’s a really kind of good escalation, healthy escalation, and it’s really exciting to go through like, you know, war ravaged streets and then obviously the kind of like hotel collapsing sequence and then the train is like the, you know, the sort of thing to cap it all off really. And I think after that, when you get to stuff like the village invasion and there’s like a chase after that and obviously your final fight with them, Lazarevich, the angry, bold dude, who’s not that interesting a character, but arguably doesn’t need to be. It’s sort of like that it loses that momentum. And I think that’s where it dates the most. Yeah, definitely. Like when I got to that stuff, when I replayed it, when they put out on PS4 again, yeah, I sort of felt that a lot more this time. But it’s kind of a tricky one to go back to that because like so many games have like stolen from it. And like I say, I really do feel like it invents the kind of templates. Maybe like alongside Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1 for kind of how sort of cinematics or storytelling missions can be. Like it’s, you know, I think these were games which kind of told people it was OK for levels to be more story focused than action focused. That like interesting character work could trump like interesting shooting mechanics or stealth mechanics, you know, sneaking into that museum super early on and just like the banter between you and that the guy who looks like Lee Pace. What’s his name? The British dude. Yeah, well, you robbed the museum with your pal. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, that’s that was Flynn. Yeah, Flynn. He really looks like Lee Pace, I think. That level is just, you know, a really, really, you know, that’s almost like the sort of definite, a definitive Naughty Dog level in terms of it’s carried by bands. You know, what you’re doing is quite simple. There’s an AI companion there. You’re just having lots of really great chat. You know, they’ve done that level like maybe 30 times by this point. And but it all kind of begins here. And again, like that thing we were talking about with Assassin’s Creed earlier, it’s that step up from one to two is like so vast. I say that slightly in retrospect because two was the first one I played because that’s the one I got in my slim, then I went and played one and I was like crikey. Like this is such a such a drop. It’s a tough beat for Uncharted 1 because it was for its time like perfectly good. Like it was a game that got 8 out of 10 across the board. And only compare so unfavorably because Uncharted becomes like a wildly popular. I mean, you know, this is a this is a third play a console game on a third place platform, you know, a PS3 that was the PS3 was which was not really widely loved. And it was completely like the dominant event of the end of that year. I felt like when it came into the office, I remember I think it was games team playing it and the opening sequence where obviously you kind of wake up in the train car hanging off the cliff and like everyone every like, you know, journalists in the building basically going into cramming into this games room and when like a handhold breaks and Drake almost falls everyone going oh and just like people being really into it and wandering in and out of that room all day because they were so hyped for it. Like us on an Xbox magazine, we were just we were all about Uncharted 2 still. So yeah, I definitely felt that in the office. I think the thing with one, it’s not just to dunk on it too much, but it’s more of a shooter. Like it leans much more on the action where I think two knows that its strongest bits isn’t just his arena full of men and waist-tied cover. You know, that stuff’s important. You know, it’s an ingredient. But in one, it feels like that has to do a lot more with heavy lifting. And because it doesn’t quite land as a technical shooter, I think is why the dips felt. But yeah, I mean, this is just like, you know, there’s still stuff in two now where I’m, you know, there’s set pieces where you think crikey, like how do they do this? You know, you get the feeling that the kind of rule book they invent for how to actually execute these set pieces on a kind of like plotting level and technical level hasn’t changed greatly. Like the tech is a lot more complicated, but I haven’t ever felt like that jump again of like, oh, wow, this is like next gen. It still feels like this is like the next step on from what you were previously doing. This still feels like super relevant and super impressive. Like the hotel scene is just like this hugely dynamic space and the way everything’s kind of changing is would still dazzle today, I think. Yeah, it actually still looks really nice today as well. That Bluepoint re-release they did was really good. I don’t know if they reworked any of the textures, but I think even just for the time, it just looked phenomenal. It has that slightly, because it’s going for that slightly sort of Indiana Jonesy sort of pulpy kind of look. It doesn’t have to be like the most photoreal thing in the world. Like, I kind of like that about Uncharted, is it has this slightly more broader sort of film set aesthetic, and that’s a bit more like timeless, I think, and it’s going to hold up for a lot longer than necessarily like the kind of gritty sort of realism of Last of Us. Like, Last of Us 1 remastered feels kind of older in a way than Uncharted 2 does, like when I went back and replayed that. Hmm, that’s interesting. I wonder if that’s partly down to color palette as well, because it’s just such a… Yeah, I mean, it’s just, I don’t know, I don’t know. Uncharted 2 is just a really fun game to look at. Yeah. There’s another, just talking about your influences there, the, sorry, the influence of this game, as you mentioned. It does kind of stretch down to like loads of things where you probably don’t think it is an influence. So obviously the entire foundation of God of War is, you know, Kratos’ interaction with his son. That is, you know, that is like the Naughty Dog handbook at work. That’s probably like one of the most, you know, obvious examples of how it filters down. But then I think if you think about the cadence of third person action sequences and how things like move and are directed, like you say Call of Duty is part of that. But I think really just the scale of how Naughty Dog does those kind of moments, those set PC moments, that filters down to everything. And also the influence of this game is the fact that it is kind of character driven. So when you look at a developer like Guerrilla Games swapping the Killzone series for Horizon Zero Dawn, that too feels like an influence of Naughty Dog to me. It’s like, well, instead of making it about shooting in this very grim sci-fi world, we’re going to make a character, the game starts with the character basically. And then everything comes from that, storytelling and character. That’s at the heart of all those PlayStation exclusives. So I think, yeah, this game’s influence is much wider than maybe people think it is. Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Maybe I should have put it at number one. Maybe I was just trying to shock people with a DS puzzle game. No, I think you’re right about the shooting. I think this game definitely trails off after a certain point and then just keeps going. I think if people are anything like me, when I replayed it, I thought that the lead up to the train sequence and the train sequence in the village, that was about, I thought that was like three quarters of the game, but it’s really more like two thirds. And it goes on, the ending act is longer than it should be, and the fight against those like blue dudes in the village sequence is just kind of like really rough and quite annoying. So it’s not, yeah. I don’t think they’ve ever landed the third act of an Uncharted game properly. It’s a conversation for another day, Matthew, but I do think Uncharted 3 is slightly better overall than 2, even though 2 has got more memorable moments. It’s very similar at the end to Uncharted 3, but it’s just a lot kind of faster moving and a bit more pleasingly spectacular. It doesn’t go, oh, this is going to be like the big test of your gunplay might right at the end. It’s a bit more, it’s easier to kind of coast through it and just enjoy the spectacle of it, I think. Yeah. While 2 is a bit more hard work. Also, that last boss fight in 2 is profoundly shit. That’s where the shortcomings come in. Anytime it is like truly dependent on the quality of its combat system and your ability as a player to sort of navigate that and be, you know, good enough to succeed, just shows the shortcomings of the system generally. And 3, I think, does this really clever thing of like sneaking up on you with its ending. Like it actually really kind of ends quite quickly, like you say, the visit to… Look, basically the supernatural bit that weighs down all of these games, apart from 4, it happens like so brisk, like you say. You go in and then you see some pretty amazing shit and then it’s over, basically. And that’s like kind of perfect. And so I think 3 is a little bit unloved, actually, but we can talk about that another time. Yeah, I’m looking forward to talking about 3 in a future episode. I have lots of thoughts. But yeah, 2, I mean, it is a really, really special game. And as an outsider, you know, not really covering this stuff and not covering it too closely, it does feel like the pivot point for PS3. Absolutely. Enough said. OK, Matthew, we did it. We got to the end of The Best Games of 2009. How are you feeling about our two lists? For all the umming and ah-ing much earlier in this episode, there’s some pretty amazing games there and there’s quite a lot of amazing stuff that didn’t make the cut at all as well. So it was quite a fun year. Yeah, it was. I would say not quite as good as the two preceding years we covered, but the bar was set very, very high. And like I said, I felt like Batman and Assassin’s Creed 2 and Uncharted 2 felt like they’re the games that really were at the core of this year. They were the canon sort of best games, but I feel like we had some colourful, interesting stuff around that. So let’s do some honourable mentions then, Matthew. Let’s alternate. Why don’t you start with one of yours and then I’ll fire through one of mine. I hate to repeat myself. I’ve talked about this on this podcast before, but I did want to give a little shout out to Resident Evil Darkseid Chronicles, which was almost my number 10. But I like the joyful box whacking of Let’s Tap a little bit too much. This is the light gun retelling of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil Code Veronica. And for me, the light gun format is just a really great delivery device for those stories. They’re very action heavy. Telling them very quickly with just this constant sort of assault of zombies fits perfectly. Weirdly, I was going back over some older reviews. It’s quite funny seeing people say like, this is the closest we’re ever going to get to like a Resident Evil 2 remake. But it does do that, particularly that game, really great service. You know, the fact that you are like running around the police station in like one long take as you do in a light gun game isn’t all broken up. It just feels a lot more kind of coherent. You can kind of enjoy it in the way that you enjoyed Resident Evil 2 remake. I think that’s something a lot of people really liked was that it just becomes a more complete place. And to see it in that light in the light gun game, it was really neat. Technically very nice for a Wii game. Yeah, I’m very fond of that one. So, you know, to the pre-owned section. Talking to you about this has really made me want to play it actually. But it’s a tough thing of weighing up. Do I try and play it with a PS3 controller, which I don’t think is ideal? Or do I try and find a PlayStation Move controller, which I definitely don’t want to do as we kind of eluded to earlier in this episode. Or do I just get the Wii versions and have them look at slightly shit output from my Wii U? It’s a toss up, but I do love your passion for these. Yeah, like I’ve actually really enjoyed this kind of undercurrent of learning about Wii light gun games from you actually, because it really is like one of the better sort of like, well, I don’t know if it’s an underrated genre, but it was an underrated highlight of the Wii, certainly, that these games were right there. Like I say, I’m pretty sure this year also gave us House of the Dead Overkill, which was sloppy fun. Also, there was a version of Call of Duty Modern Warfare, which they kind of light gunned up a bit. What? I’d have to check my notes on this, but I’m pretty sure they recalibrated it so that you could just play it with the Wii Zapper more as a light gun game. That’s cool. I may be over-saying that it’s been a long, long time since I had anything to do with it, but it was called Modern Warfare Reflex. Great stuff. So Matthew, vying for number 10, but I ultimately went with Fight Night Round 4, because I think it is a better game, was Bionic Commando from Capcom. So this was a proper, it’s definitely a 7 out of 10 at most. It’s not a great shooter, but I really, really got into it. I played through it twice and I thought that it was this third person game with this very built-in swinging kind of mechanic. You have a mechanical arm and you can sort of connect to things and swing up onto surfaces, swing between locations. But it’s like you’re not really playing as Spider-Man. It’s much more limited than that. And you’re kind of going through these very bleak looking and post-apocalypse environments, fighting things and kind of navigating the world. And I must say I thought that the effort they put into making the grapple and swinging work was really strong. It felt really precise and really good to swing on that thing. They didn’t get the shooting right in the same way or the combat. But I actually I thought this is a really good one of the few like good results of the Japanese publishers freaking out and making loads of games with Western studios. I thought this is one of the better examples. Did you play this one? I didn’t. I just remember watching people play it in the office and not being as into it. But I appreciate it’s probably a game where like the feel of the thing only makes sense when you’re playing. It’s maybe not one to watch. It’s one to try. Yeah. I also don’t think they quite nailed the character design in the way that, you know, I don’t want to get too sort of like, I don’t know, sort of forensic about this. But Capcom Japan certainly seems to have a flair with character designs. And this was made by Grin, a Western studio. And I just don’t think that Nathan Spence, the main character, was, you know, had anything on Dante or Beautiful Joe or the like. So, yeah. But yeah, a favorite nonetheless. What’s another one of yours, Matthew? I really liked Shadow Complex. At a time where it didn’t feel like we were getting many Metroidvanias, obviously now there’s, you know, a lot of indie games sort of happening in that space. This one I thought was pretty great. Like, I really liked some of the weapons and some of the upgrades were just super fun, and the way they designed the world to exploit them was really nicely done. There was that sort of one which kind of shot out. It looked almost like sort of poly filler. It sort of like created like platforms. You sort of shoot out little blobs of kind of chemicals that then harden up so you could kind of build platforms, which is like a hugely empowering super ability to have in any kind of Metroidvania game. I really, really loved the fast speed in this as well, where if you got like a long enough run up, you’d go into like super running. And there were all these kind of crazy racing lines sort of hidden throughout this facility where they were just long enough to get you super fast and then you could sort of run up walls and tear across lakes and things. A bit like the kid in The Incredibles. Yeah, I almost had it on my list as well. I didn’t finish it though, so I felt like it wasn’t quite in contention in the same way. I actually am. I understand as well. Like, I’ve grabbed this epic game store version that you can play on PC now and they’ve kind of spruced it up and stuff. It’s pretty cool that you can play that on modern formats. And I think it’s backwards compatible on Xbox One Series X as well. So, easy one to pick up. I feel like, was this like the first of the revival of Metroidvanias? I feel like, at the time, everyone was comparing this to Super Metroid and there wasn’t another comparison point around at that point. No, there wasn’t a lot happening in that space. I guess there was sort of like cave story on the kind of indie scene was quite big around a similar time. But, yeah, this was definitely like a big comeback. Yeah, I liked it. Whatever happened to the developers, it was chair, wasn’t it? Yeah, chair, they made this and then they made Infinity Blade, which was one of the first kind of like iPad hit games. So, yeah, interesting history for them. But, yeah, good pick, good pick. So I’ve got another one here, Matthew, which is Flower, the PSN game where you control the wind to gust some petals around. I don’t have loads to say about it. One of those very indie game indie games in terms of like the aesthetic, but weren’t many of them around at this point. Quite a nice sort of break from the sort of, you know, louder sort of games around at that time and just, yeah, just generally quite pleasant. And actually, like one of the only games that ever used the six axis motion control in the PS3 controller well. So, yeah, you just sort of bring life back to the environment. It’s kind of a little bit like a Kami, I suppose. And then, yeah, and then it’s over in about two or three hours. But, yeah, a sort of good example of when Sony was interested in having kind of exclusive cool digital games on their service. Yeah. Any others from you, Matthew? While you say flower, I was quite big into weird Suda 51 game Flower, Sun and Rain, which couldn’t make my list because it’s just… it’s sort of fundamentally too shit. You know, it’s like willfully bad in places in that kind of slightly irritating sort of early Suda way before I think he kind of gets a bit more normal with like No More Heroes. This is one of his earlier weirder things about a man visiting a hotel and you can hack into people with a briefcase. It’s all very odd. It’s a game that is very, very slow, very cumbersome and constantly makes jokes about how slow and cumbersome it is. It makes you walk down a really long road while a nice bit of music plays. It’s basically the ladder from Metal Gear Solid 3, the game. And while it’s sort of hard to recommend REND for those reasons and it will annoy a lot of people, there are probably a couple of people who will play this and think it’s just so sort of like weird and rad that they’ll really get into it. And, you know, I kind of, I appreciated it a lot. I remember, I think like Edge gave this a four. I think I gave this like somewhere in the 70s. In my review, I did the score as a riddle, which you could only answer if you were like into other Suda 51 games. So it would only be a recommendation if you were an existing fan. A total gimmick, I actually think, was lost to a lot of people. I really want to see these pages now. Like that’s, yeah, maybe we can, maybe you can read it out on an anniversary episode. Yeah, I say a riddle. It was basically just like a load of numbers which you extracted from his other games to add up to make to the score. It wasn’t like anything too sophisticated. Still sounds pretty… I was talking about Deadline, Sam. Yeah, that’s the kind of the mad idea that can only happen when a man’s on Deadline. Yeah, I understand as well this is a big influence on Paradise Killer, which we talked about in Best Detective Games. Yeah, stylistically for sure. I mean, their game’s better than this. It’s much more fun to play. It’s also kind of a bummer that this ended up getting ported from PS2 to DS because the DS doesn’t… The PS2 original looks really good. And the DS1 looks okay for what it is, but it’s definitely a 3D game that’s been chopped down to make it work on a handheld. So, yeah, it would have been cool if you’d do some kind of HD remaster. But then if you did, we’d probably just all complain about how cumbersome it is. Yeah, it’s an interesting curio for sure. Yeah, who knows? Maybe it’ll come up in a future episode of GameCourt. Who can really say? So, I’m going to put two games together here, which is Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II and Halo Wars. So, Halo Wars was a first effort to make Halo into an RTS on Xbox. They built this quite good kind of painting sort of system for selecting units. And it actually felt very pared down as an RTS compared to what you could play on PC. But it was still pretty good for what it was. Eventually gets a sequel from Creative Assembly. And yeah, I thought it was… I gave it a 7 out of 10 for GameCertium. I thought it was perfectly fine. Yeah, it was kind of a bummer. This is the last game that Ensemble Studios made because I was a big fan of the Age of Empires series. And Dawn of War 2 I picked here is a really interesting sort of sequel to Dawn of War, which was kind of a more conventional RTS. This is more of a kind of like tactics game. We control like a small amount of units. It is a real time game, but your… Yeah, the scale of it is much smaller. And it looks really nice and had kind of a claimed multiplayer. But I really dug this as quite an innovative sort of sequel to a more conventional type of game. So, yeah, it’s good. You can get that mega cheap on Steam. It has some good expansions. So those two Matthew, I just wanted to bundle together. Any more from you? I should probably put a little shout out for Mad World. Did you play this? I think I bought it in Gamescore. That was like one of the first games that came up. But yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, incredible effort and shown love to a Wii exclusive. Looked absolutely mad. I think it’s really good for one play through, but it just doesn’t have the depth to sustain it. It’s total style over substance. So super violent, but in a way that it sort of dazzles you as long as it’s doing new things. Once you’ve seen everything once, it kind of runs out of steam quite fast. It was no Bayonetta, which I thought was 2009, but turns out it wasn’t. Yeah. We had that confusion, didn’t we? It was actually several days into 2010, so I’m sorry to have taken that from you. This era of platinum games, it was cool that they came out of the gate with this deal and made all this cool stuff, and then it seems like they’ve kind of had just been jumping from job to job in the time since then. I suppose they work with Nintendo a bunch these days, but it was just a really exciting bunch of games to see them all, like Vanquish, Bayonetta, Mad World and Infinite Space. Oh, man, they… It was such an event, like, them sort of arriving with all these huge promises, and they kind of delivered on their first wave. I like all of the first four things, because of Infinite Space as well. So, yeah, I hope they find their groove again. I think they still make amazing… I think the games they make with Nintendo are properly, properly great. Astral Chain was a real banger, but I do feel like they’re a little bit kind of… in slight limbo land. Yeah, I agree. What they need to do is get bought by someone, but not Microsoft, who cancels Scalebound. Yeah, and just let Cameo make something fucking amazing, because it’s sort of obscene that we haven’t had a new Cameo game since 1401. Well, this does mean as well that we’re going to have three Platinum games vying for your top 10 in the next, the 2010 episode, Matthew. So people have that to look forward to. It’s exciting. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, a few more here. I’ve bundled two more together here. So I’ve got two 7 out of 10 open world games, which I kind of enjoyed this year, mostly because I had nothing but time on my hands as a single man to throw out computer games. But Infamous, which I reviewed, that was one of the best PS3 exclusives of this year. It was kind of like a superhero game with really kind of poor, poorly implemented moral choices, but had a really fun rail grinding mechanic to get around the city. Looks quite grim to look at the screenshots these days, that the color palette hasn’t aged very well. You play a very boring looking bold dude as the main character. By contrast, though, The Saboteur actually has quite a sort of outstanding art direction because it’s this World War II set game where Paris is occupied by Nazis and in the occupied areas of the city it’s black, white and red. So it’s quite a striking aesthetic. And then when you clear it out in terms of this beautiful like Golden Sunshine sort of world, it was basically like an Assassin’s Creed ripoff that had guns attached to it, but had some quite cool set pieces where you blew up like zeppelins and shit. So I kind of enjoyed both of these games, but neither really needed a place in the top 10. That’s fair. I would have been disappointed if you put information in your top 10. Yeah, I feel like you would have made a value judgment on me from that. That is such a PS2 game with flashy graphics. It’s such a PS2 open world, I think. Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. The second one is a lot better, I think, in the New Orleans set sort of location. But yeah, and I couldn’t in all good conscience put Saboteur in there because it had a DLC that you paid for to see some boobies in the game. So I can’t endorse that. I only play games that have that. That’s one of my rules. Nintendo is notorious for that. Yeah, I mean, have you got any… Sorry, not sure where to go from there, Billy, but have you got any more from honorable mentions, Matthew? A final little shout out for Crystal Chronicles, Crystal Bearers, which we’ve covered in the past. You didn’t like, I did like. I thought it had a kind of a zany, anything goes approach to the sort of Final Fantasy in that it’s just about chucking telekinetic powers and like messing around more of a toy box than a satisfying combat system. Very like mini gamey, but quite good production values. Great soundtrack, I thought, for a Wii game. I was super into it. Again, like, people probably have this read on us already. It’s quite sort of oddball and underdog, which I kind of gravitate towards to a bit more, I think. I like it when weirdos get a bit of space to make just a weird game, regardless of whether or not it’s very good. I think every time you go to bat for a sort of like six or seven out of ten Wii game that a publisher put a lot of effort into, I feel like I understand you a little bit more as a person, Matthew. Right. Yeah, that is the story of my career. A lot of love at Mountainton, not a lot. So, yeah, I only have one final honorable mention here, which is The Beatles Rock Band, which came out and I played it through once and then bought a load of the DLC and then never played it again. And now I no longer own one of those plastic guitars. And it seems like you can’t download the DLC anymore. So I don’t even know if you can play this now, which, you know, how shit are these licensing agreements that a game can just vanish off the face of the earth? It’s like they no longer have the rights to Ringo, so he’s replaced with just a blue cuboid. Yeah. So that’s kind of a bummer, I think. I think a game like that, because it wasn’t beautifully made, like, you know, they put loads of effort into the animations and stuff and bringing the music into that world. But they were right at the tail end of people’s declining interest in these types of games. So I think it was a bit, didn’t sell that well. And yeah, like I say, well, I mean, it’s just really rubbish. They made something this good you can’t actually buy or play. Now we can play it on, you know, like a Wii or the Wii version or PS3 version or whatever. But I don’t know. This feels like you should just be able to play this at any time. But I like that game. It was nice. Did you play this, Matthew? Were you much of a Beatles guy? No, I quite like The Beatles, but I came to them super late. Like even when this came out, I wasn’t particularly into The Beatles because I remember Rich Stanton, a friend of the show who I was living with, was super into this because he was more into the music. But, you know, I was just sort of, give me the rock band Divine Comedy or rock band Randy Newman or give me Death. Oh, amazing. I knew that you were going to say Randy Newman then. I was just waiting for it. I would love that. That would be so good. It would be hard because it’s so piano based. Well, the only other thing that I don’t quite have a dishonorable mention by thought about putting in the top 10 was Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, which didn’t make either of our lists, Matthew. So, I didn’t play the multiplayer of this one, really. And I enjoyed the campaign, but it wasn’t as good as the first one. I played it. I did like the campaign. I actually played the multiplayer on this loads. I became obsessed with my accuracy. Because I was so shit at playing the game, I became obsessed with my accuracy rating. As that was the only thing I felt like I had any kind of control over being good at. You know, like my kill death was terrible. So I started playing like exclusively as a sniper. And I’d rather die than miss a shot just to keep my accuracy rating high. Because in my head I had this sort of like fantasy of someone looking at my accuracy rating and being like, oh shit, like there’s this sort of like dead eyed killer in the lobby with us. Like if he pulls the trigger, someone is definitely getting hit. And I had, so I was building up this little kind of myth about myself. And then my shitty flatmate played my file and absolutely destroyed it. Oh God, it all kind of ties back together. It all comes back round to that scratchy, petty, filly, gobbling motherfucker. Yeah. Oh God. I was actually, yeah, I was telling my partner about that and she was appalled on your behalf. It was just, yeah, it’s rough times. Do you think that Clint Eastwood will make a film about you as a sniper, Matthew, in Call of Duty? Bath Sniper. No, probably not. I mean, it’s sort of a… That’s my romantic telling of it. I mean, the reality is I was just a really cheesy camper in every single game of One Warfare 2 I ever played. Amazing. I really enjoyed the roller coaster ride of this campaign. It’s like it’s much closer to being sort of sci-fi or alternate history kind of weirdness than the Modern Warfare was. But I thought it was short but really intense. I briefly considered re-opening the discourse around that opening which was very tasteless and where you shoot a load of people in an airport. I think it has different connotations these days with gun violence in America and stuff like that. But otherwise from there it just becomes sillier and sillier. And it’s quite a tough game to sort of gauge. I think I’d have to replay it before I could say whether it would take a place in my top 10. Because I do remember this as being exciting but kind of a mixed affair compared to the first one. Yeah, I know. I’m completely with you. Yeah. Okay, cool. Matthew, we’ve done it. We did The Best Games of 2009. It was really long. But I nonetheless enjoyed it and I hope you did too. Yeah, absolutely. Great to go back to some fun gaming moments in an otherwise quite grueling year. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So thank you very much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider giving us a nice review on Apple Podcast. Well, it doesn’t have to be nice, I suppose. That’s up to you. But if you enjoyed it, then go for it. That helps us find new listeners. So any sort of support is appreciated. If you want to follow the podcast on Twitter, it’s BackpagePod on Twitter. You can also email us your questions at backpagegames.gmail.com. When we’re out of these listy episodes, we’ll read out a few listener questions. So by all means, drop us a line. And Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? I am at MrBazzill underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Our next episode is The Best Zelda Games, as recounted by Matthew Castle. And in the episode after that, probably something lighter, because two big list features in a row is going to make us quite tired, I think. Also, everyone’s going to be really cross after the Zelda episode, I imagine. Good stuff. So whichever subscribers are left can enjoy what comes after that. But yeah, thank you very much for listening, and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now.