Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Matthew, we are taking a short break from doing very chunky episodes. So, this week… Yeah, so our listeners will know that we’ve done best Zelda games and best games of 2009, back to back, very long episodes, and took quite a lot of effort to put into. So we need to blow off a little bit of steam this week. I hope you won’t mind us doing a shorter episode. Those two have proven very popular, so thank you for your response to them, particularly the Zelda episode, Matthew. I think you’re a bit blown away by the nice words you are now. Yeah, well, I thought I was going to get hung drawn and courted for being a bit down on Link to the Past. So actually having people be open to the suggestions or the rankings was, yeah, a pleasant surprise. Yeah, people were very cheerful. So a quick note on my audio while we record this. You may hear the occasional happy child, God forbid, in the background or like loud bird or something like that, because it’s 31 degrees in the UK when we’re recording this at the moment. And I basically have to open my windows or I’ll die. So those are kind of like the… Dogs die in hot cars. Yeah, so that’s why if the audio is not as good as it normally is, normally I have all my windows shut and then we just, you know, I try and turn my sort of my weird flat into a recording studio. But today, I don’t know, just treat it like, you know, when they do like T4 on the beach, you know, it’s like a road show. Just think of me as like Fatboy Slim or something. I don’t know. I’m really, really into that sort of metaphor. Do you think that’s something we’ll ever do in real life, Matthew, is go take the back page to the beach. We’ll be like, hello, Western Super Mayor. I don’t know. I’m not really a creature of the sun. You know, I like to stay indoors. I’m quite a shadowy boy. Do you like the sun? Do you go out much? Do you enjoy basking in the sun? Not at all. No, not this sun. I mean, this sounds really bleak. But for people who have children, what do they think about when they’re our age and they have to endure whatever the future temperatures of the sun are? Like, that must weigh on your mind a little bit. It’s 31 degrees now. But will it be like 40 degrees in a few years? Like, if it was five degrees hotter than this, I might die. I might be one of the statistics on, like, the local news. So, yeah, bit of a bleak note there to kick us off. Hooray! Yeah, so, yeah, so if the audio sounds a bit compromised, that’s why. I hope you’ll forgive it. Next week, we’ll be back to normal. This is just while this ludicrous heatwave passes. So, Matthew, oh, man, we can just cut loose, take a little break, talk about some gaming handhelds. So, yeah, how are you feeling about discussing that side of things? Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I’ve actually been doing, like, a lot of handheld gaming recently. Like, I play my Switch mostly handheld these days. And I’ve also been playing an awful lot of 3DS just because, well, I kind of felt a bit nostalgic after our 3DS episode that we did all those months ago. Kind of reminded me of some stuff to play. I’ve also been on a huge Ace Attorney bender. So it’s been handheld all the way. Yeah, so I have had a similar thing. We’re obviously on Games Court. As people might remember, I’ve been hoarding a load of DS and 3DS games. Partly motivated by that episode as well. We’ve got a Games Court retrial episode coming up, actually, that people can look forward to where I have more of my ludicrous purchases to discuss. But yeah, I’ve currently got, I think, five handhelds next to my bed. Are they stacked up on top of each other? No, they’re all kind of like placed like a jigsaw onto like a small dining table that belonged to my ex-girlfriend’s mum that I never gave back. And it’s next, that’s my bedside table. It’s a bit, a bit studenty in my flat, arguably. But yeah, at least I have a couch these days. But yes, so I’ve got like this, something I will just refer to as the Anbernic naughty device. People who have one of these things will know what they do. I won’t talk about it. It’s not a sex thing, just to be clear. Right. When you said that, I was like, what are you talking. That sounds well read. I’ve got the 3DS, the PS Vita, the Switch as well. Is there another one? Maybe it’s just four. That’s still quite a lot, though, isn’t it? So I’ve been digging it a little bit, and obviously in recent times, quite a lot has been happening with handheld gaming, which is why we wanted to make that the subject of this shorter episode. So at the time we’re recording this, people will be very aware of the Steam Deck, which is Steam’s first move into a handheld kind of hardware offering, basically. You can put your name down for a pre-order now. You can’t actually pre-order it, but you can basically put some money down to be open to pre-order it when there’s enough stock to basically take your order. Four pounds is a really odd amount, isn’t it? The spend that they’re asking for. There’s something about that number where it doesn’t really feel real or big enough to justify a deposit. There’s something off about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it. It’s like if they refund it, I guess it’s enough money to buy a very minor Cities Skyline DLC or something like that. I wonder who came up with that number. The Steam Deck is a thing that’s happening towards the end of this year. I think that people were… I don’t know if people were expecting this, really, Matthew. Did you get a sense that this was sort of in the water? No, there was a rumour a few months ago about a kind of a Steam kind of Switchy device, but it was pretty vague. I mean, I would say ironically that the rumour was a lot more vague than the rumours we were getting about about the Switch Pro and in a kind of reverse of each other. You know, this ended up being a lot more substantial than what was rumoured for the Switch Pro, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I mean, I talked about this on one of the pods I do with Rock Paper Shotgun and I was quite dismissive of it because I couldn’t really picture what on earth they’d build that could satisfy PC gamers kind of across the board, whether they’d make some weird indie specific device with like specs in mind because I couldn’t really see a way of cramming a PC, you know, a substantial PC into a handheld that wouldn’t totally break the bank. So, yeah, I kind of a little bit of egg on my face with the Steam Deck reveal. Plus the literal egg on your face from the sandwich you ate earlier. Yeah, well, that’s right scrambled egg with bagels. That was a low blow. I apologize. Oh, no, no, it’s quite true. So yeah, this gets announced and it’s just to kind of dive into it a little bit. The specs of it seem to be basically like a low to mid range laptop is what my understanding of it is from reading a PC gamer analysis of this. I won’t pretend to be an expert in PC gaming hardware. I worked obviously I worked on PC gamer for a long time, but I still like I can kind of tell you what the different processes and graphics cards do and what the difference is between an NVMe SSD and a SATA SSD, but I can’t tell you I can’t tell you much more than that. So that’s because you spent your whole time giving your hardware staff wedgies that you should have listened instead. The kind of ballpark thing they compared it to was a PC that could run like Shadow of the Tomb Raider at low settings at 35 frames per second, which when you hear that doesn’t sound that impressive. And the article sort of like said you can’t quite compare it apples to apples like PS4 and Xbox One, but it seems like it’s similarly powered or something like that. Like it’s in that kind of range. So I thought the read on it was that that is its power. But because it’s like a 720 output on that particular screen, it will probably be fine for what that is. Hmm. Yeah. The only problem will come if you try and because you obviously can plug it in and use it like a PC. People basically expecting that this is like a top end PC packed into a handheld. It’s not. It’s it’s not. Like that that was that was that was a bit of the sales pitch that I had the most issue with in terms of like, it’s not just a handheld. It’s also a desktop PC and it’s like, it’s also an incredibly underpowered desktop PC. But fine, whatever. The Twitter reaction instantly was people didn’t like the form factor. But then that seemed to sort of change over time. I I’m of the opinion that unless I’ve got it in my hands, I don’t know what it feels like and there’s a lot of armchair expertise that goes with this stuff. And I honestly have no idea, you know? Yeah. The only thing is it gives me like major Wii U controller flashbacks. Like the back of it, just that massive plastic, that expanse of plastic and the kind of the way it curves around with the triggers on the back. It’s got a big, big Wii U energy, which, you know, is a console I’m fond of for many reasons. But it is also packed away in our house. And I know it upsets some of our listeners to hear that, but I have kind of moved on from Wii U. So, but I mean, you know, I don’t think you go to Valve for like beautiful form factor particularly. No, at the advice of your therapist, Matthew, you’ve moved away from Wii U. And yeah, so yeah, so Matthew, I following Twitter, you seem to preorder one of these or at least, you know, put your four pounds down and so did I. So what was your sort of thought process there? Why did it like enchant you ultimately? The simple fact of it is, is in this in biz, I feel like I have to kind of be on top of this stuff. I mean, it’s a bit of a like automatic response to new hardware, which may sound very like indulgent to some listeners. I hope it doesn’t. But like, you know, I tend to buy into stuff, you know, I think of it from a freelance perspective. So I’m thinking quite practically in terms of I should probably have this to have an opinion on it. But also like, you know, the appeal of this games library that I already have and being able to play it away from my PC, you know, that that that does hold a lot of appeal for me. You know, I’ve been trying to get into like, sort of visual novel stuff recently, or at least get my head around more visual novel stuff. And, you know, I’ve amassed this sort of library of games, which I kind of hate playing playing on my PC, like, I just don’t think they work very well on a desktop, they’re very unsatisfying. Even things like Ace Attorney, like, just it’s just not really the same game, you know, unless you’re sitting in bed playing on a handheld or whatever, sitting on a train. So yeah, that part of it definitely appeals to me is I think, oh, I’ve got a lot of stuff that I can untether from the screen, and so I’m big into that. But more than anything, it’s, you know, I’m a trendsetter. I’ve got to be up with the latest things. Yeah, that’s fair enough. I put my money down basically, so I thought, well, I only have to actually like put the money down. I don’t have to buy it when my chance comes up. So if I talk myself out of it, when I’m basically down to get in Q2 next year, which seems so long a way, so by that point, I may well have talked myself out of it and we’ll have lots of reviews in the world about how good this thing is or not, and I’m going to make an informed choice. I mean, props to Valve as well. They did the pre-order process in a way that like Sony and Microsoft haven’t done anything nearly this elegant. It’s been like a total mess of retailers who like, you know, obviously have sold en masse to scalpers, which really sucks. And Valve have done it so like you need a steam account of a few months to do this. Yeah, that’s that’s really good actually. I think that the kind of the nuking that market is is brilliant. I thought the actual announcement of the machine was quite rough in terms of like giving it to an outlet seems a bit odd for the kind of, you know, the kind of pitch here or the scale of this thing or trying to think of it as like a big game changer. The idea that it kind of gets revealed like as like an IGN exclusive. I don’t know. That’s a bit weird. Like, it doesn’t really feel like an event to me. It feels like, you know, oh, here’s something that happened on a day rather than, you know, I’m not saying they have to do a big, you know, Apple or Stadia type conference for this thing, but it sort of for what it is on paper, it feels like it could have made a much bigger song and dance about it. It’s very valve to just be like, oh, here it is, here’s the thing, go buy it, bye. And yeah, yeah, as listeners of this podcast will know, like, I’m drawn to the sort of the showmanship and the theatre and drama of the games industry. So it’s kind of runs a bit counter to that. There’s just something very like functional about Valve as a company, which doesn’t really speak to me. I find them quite a hard company to love for that reason. You know, there’s not a lot of character to them, but that is probably what a lot of people love about them too, is that there isn’t a lot of nonsense. It’s like total function over form and that also extends to the design of the hardware, I guess. Yeah, I don’t really go in for any of the sort of like Gaben memes or whatever. I like that people are calling it the Gabe gear. That is good, yeah, I like that. That’s a great nickname. Yeah, that’s good. Well done. Twitter is good for something. Yeah, I appreciate what it’s trying to do in terms of, like you say, all of the different games you’ve got on Steam already you can just play on there. Some will probably work better than others. It has a little trackpad-y thing, so I’m curious to see how they work. I think the trackpad on the Steam controller, which is a very old piece of peripheral at this point, is actually pretty good for what it is. I played Max Payne 2 with it and I thought it worked quite well. So I actually think that Valve will probably do quite a good job with making those work. Yeah. Yeah, and the visual novel thing is not something I considered, but I do own all the Dankan Rumpa games on Steam and I don’t really want to buy them again on Switch if I can avoid it. Yeah, like the whole thing that we talk about with like Vita where it had this kind of big indie scene and a lot of people treated it as their indie machine, which has now kind of been, that torch has been passed to Switch or it sort of feels that way, I think speaks to how people want to kind of consume these smaller games that, you know, I’m not underplaying the importance of PC to indie gaming, I know that’s where indie gaming is born because it’s a more open platform, but the nature of some of these experiences and the kind of the size of them and the tone of them, I think they feel a lot more kind of console friendly or they’re not necessarily things like I don’t have to, you know, power up my PC and sit at my desk to play like a weird little one hour thing. That isn’t really how I kind of treat my PC. That isn’t my relationship with it. So the ability to take all that stuff and play it in a handheld, you know, it has already been a proven good way to kind of consume those games in Vita and Switch. So it makes it makes a lot of sense for me. On the flip side of that is that the big experiences I do want on my PC, I don’t particularly want on a handheld, which is the kind of, you know, I don’t know how you sort of feel about that. So yeah, yeah, I think I agree with you. Like I don’t I never really played Stardew Valley on on my PC, but I did buy on I’ve only played a bit of it on Switch, but I did actually, you know, as soon as I knew there’s a Switch version, it was like, well, I have to play on there instead because, yeah, like you say, the experience suits the format. And yeah, whereas, you know, I do use my PC for like playing Apex Legends or Assassin’s Creed or, you know, big sexy stuff, basically. So yeah, I can kind of say I don’t necessarily think it will fill that gap. And I thought it was interesting for them to lead with like, quite well, they had a big mix of games, to be fair, but they did also have controllers like one of the games on the home screen of it, and also Jedi Fallen Order as well. And those are quite graphics intensive games, so it’s quite a curious choice to go with those. I guess like they wouldn’t have done it unless they feel pretty confident about their performance on there. But yeah, still, again, like you said, I don’t see those being the games that’s the best fit for necessarily. No, it’s yeah, it’s just not what what I necessarily want. But you know, I just I think people have made this this mistake before, and I think this is one of the the flaws of like Vita and one of the general flaws, I’d say of Sony’s handhelds is that in their first party stuff, I think they’ve they’ve tried to stick to like, like the bigger kind of console experiences. That’s probably more true of Vita, you know, I always felt like with things like the Uncharted game on Vita, it was them trying to say like, well, what differentiates our handheld is that it can it can give you the kind of experience that you can only get on PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4 or whatever. And that, you know, where I think Nintendo understand you don’t necessarily want those experiences or you want different experiences on handheld and certain games, certain genres fits that style of play better. So this blanket, the appeal of being able to play a control, say, I don’t really get. I mean, there are there are exceptions to that. Like there are some sort of, you know, quote unquote, triple A things, which I would quite happily like chip away at, you know, like Borders Gate 3, for example, I can see those kind of classic RPG kind of games being quite nice on a handheld, especially when you’ve got like hundreds of hours and you just want to be able to play a little bit in bed or whatever that that works for me. But this this idea that, you know, finally a handheld that can do justice to these big, big screen experiences has never really sat right with me. In some ways, I think this is probably most exciting to like the emulation scene. And right, because I think power wise, this should have no problem playing PS2 games, for example, on the PCSX2 emulator. And I don’t think Valve is going to stand in anyone’s way because it gets treated like a PC, even though I think it uses Valve’s own operating system, doesn’t it? I don’t know much about that stuff. I think you can like basically uninstall everything and install your own stuff on it, though. So yeah, you can like wipe it. It’s that open. It’s functionally a PC, basically. So yeah, I was curious, Matthew, do you think this will open up PC gaming to more people who wouldn’t have ordinarily tried it? Because I feel like this is the reason it exists to a large extent. Valve must be thinking what is critical mass with Steam user base. Obviously, they’ve got a huge audience and it does keep growing, but they must be thinking how do we extend beyond that to people who are more in that console space? Do you think the Steam Deck will succeed in branching that out a little bit? Yeah, potentially. I think it still has some like rough edges to remove. You know, the big appeal of console and traditional handheld gaming has always been the like it just works. And, you know, admittedly it looks like they’re kind of, you know, they’re kind of putting a bit of a console skin on this, you know, and they have done this with Steam already with like big picture mode or whatever. I imagine they’ll have their equivalent of that for like handheld mode. So for all intents and purposes, it might look and function more like a simpler console. But it’s still things like, you know, if games are optimized, do you have to go into the options and meddle with that kind of crap? Like that for me is still like a big hurdle between like PC gaming and console games. People don’t really want to faff. People want everything optimized for them. You know, the optimization question hangs over Steam Deck. You know, the entire project, I’d say, of like, are people going to go back and make sure their things are playing nice, you know, are as accessible as they need to be? I’ve seen lots of people bringing up things like font sizes. You’d probably need to rework for that screen, for example. So you know, there’s that side of things. It’s like, can they take off the rough edges that remain because there are still too many. But I still think this is going to be more like it’s just another toy for people who already have a PC and have a big Steam library. I just see it as like another string to their bow rather than a big gateway drug. But I don’t know, how do you sort of see it? Well, it did seem to generate enormous interest. Like I think at one point someone said that in North America, there were 59,000 people at once trying to like get through and pre-order one. That is like massive amount of interest. Like you say, though, it’s hard to tell. These are people who are on Steam and have Steam accounts, because you have to have a Steam account in order to pre-order the thing. So that itself is like a step people have to take. You can’t just go on the Curry’s website and pre-order this, for example. So I think that the ethos of it is actually quite spot on, because I think it breaks down a lot of what people see as the quote unquote faff of PC gaming. Even though I actually don’t think faff is the problem, I think it’s the expense. The expense is like enormous to get a good gaming PC. I bought one a few years ago with a bonus I had, because that was the only time I could ever afford a PC outright, is I got a bonus and I just thought, well, I’m going to buy a PC right now. And it was the best one I could get for the time. I would have just been like, let’s put it all on a JC’s Kitchen gold card. The volume of JC’s Kitchen content on the Matthew Castle Twitter feed is out of control. It’s like the new Renny for you, I think. Well, funnily, one follows the other. Yes, yes. So yeah, derail my trade of thought there, but for a good reason. Oh, sorry, I apologize. You were talking about the expense of PC gaming. No, that’s fine. I mean, I was basically done with that point. But you mentioned something really interesting, Matthew, which is, well, there’s two things actually. First of all, the text size thing. I didn’t even think about that until was it Lucy, the developer of One Night Stand said that on Twitter? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that was a really good point about that. But also, the Nintendo ethos was lateral thinking with withered hardware or something like that. And so it’s true that if you are presenting your console as a kind of powerhouse, there do seem to be limits to how successful that approach has been when you look at the PSV2 and PSP, which were definitely both trying to do that. Like the Vita more successfully, I think, in terms of the, you know, being able to do this sort of spectacle of modern games. The games on there did almost look PS3 quality, to be fair. But yeah, I don’t know if it necessarily will always work. So yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen a couple of people say, like PC gaming, they used to love it. And, you know, they’ve got a substantial Steam library, but like the tech costs ran away from them. And they’re literally cut off from this library they kind of own. And the idea of this as a jumping back in point, you know, because if you’re talking about games, you know, you say you’ve got games you bought 10 years ago, you know, they will absolutely be fine on this hardware, you would imagine. And so the idea, you can kind of pick up where you left off for, you know, much cheaper than you could buy any PC. That’s, that’s pretty good. That’s that’s pretty smart as well. So there’s definitely like a lot of plus points for lots of like, different niches. It’s just interesting to see whether it you know, it can bust out into like the mainstream. Not that it needs to, but you know, you do see people throwing up against the switch and that’s, you know, that’s, that’s quite a kind of Clash of the Titans, you know. Yeah, I agree. Well, that seems like a good transition point, Matthew. I feel like we’ve covered the Steam Deck pretty comprehensively there in any kind of pre-release thoughts. I mean, when we get our hands on one, I’m down the line assuming that actually happens. We’ll talk about it some more, I’m sure. But I’m sure we’ll get a review unit the size of this podcast. Oh yeah, I bet like, wow, Valve will think, well, what are we going to do without these 2000 listeners? But they are so informed, these listeners. They’re taste makers. That is basically why I’ve told the publishers who have emailed for review code. It’s like, hey, we’re tiny but mighty. So yeah, I wanted to talk about Nintendo then, because obviously in the weeks preceding this, the Nintendo Switch OLED has been announced. You mentioned the Nintendo Switch Pro rumors earlier and the idea that Nintendo was making a beefier 4K console to not succeed the Switch, but maybe run some games slightly better and all this stuff. And those rumors really did turn out to be a bust, even though they were from some quite reputable outlets. So it meant that there was a lot of disappointment around this announcement, Matthew, but it didn’t seem to be anything that Nintendo itself had said that created that disappointment. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is where those kind of rumors backfire. Normally people are pretty good for this stuff and they don’t tend to put it out there unless they’re pretty sure. Yeah, I was surprised. I mean, like, so surprised that, you know, I kind of I feel certain that this this this Switch Pro has to exist in some form, like it has to be a thing down the line, but here in the here and now, obviously not. And it’s a shame really, because I feel like what what the only OLED Switch is, is like a very like minor bump in the road in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like, you know, people feel wounded because it isn’t this thing that someone else has promised them, which is kind of a bit rough for Nintendo. Do you think this hews quite closely to how Nintendo has generally done mid cycle upgrades, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s what’s interesting about the Switch is obviously it’s, you know, it’s Nintendo’s home console and handheld teams united. This is what they came up with. And, you know, those are two strands of Nintendo with very different history in terms of how they treat their respective hardware. You know, we can expect a lot of updates from the handheld teams. They always have, you know, both the DS and the 3DS, you know, I think they each have basically five iterations apiece, where Nintendo’s like home consoles, not as much like, you know, you arguably get less iteration tweaks than you even got with PlayStation and Xbox. So yeah, it’s interesting to see like how one informs the other if we were ever going to see like more regular updates to Switch, you know, were they going to treat it like a DS. Like we’ve obviously had the Switch Lite, which you know is that’s kind of classic Nintendo, slightly cheaper, slightly less functionality. That makes sense. This like feels it’s not quite substantial enough to be put in with like your DSXLs and your 3DSXLs, which is kind of where my brain wants to slot it because it’s sort of same hardware, bigger screen. You know, it’s a very, very simple kind of nuts and bolts increase. You know, a few little quality of life improvements like the stand on the back, which is quite hard to get excited about. I don’t know how you feel about the stand. There’s a weirdly large amount of talk about the kickstand. Well, that’s because there’s a little going on with this. You have to hold on to something, right? And you’re like, well, that’s different. Yeah, in many ways, I think this is a good example of like, how the news cycle works in the pandemic of we all need something to focus our attentions on to. And then when whatever it is, good or bad, we have to aggressively focus in on every granular element of it, even if it’s not interesting and completely pointless. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s so unfortunate, really, because I think some of the changes they have made are things which are of like, then they’re like of zero interest to how I use it. So, you know, I play my switch with headphones, so improving the speakers on the thing doesn’t make a job difference. The stand, I don’t ever play in the stand position anyway, doesn’t make a job difference. You know, like I basically use my switch like a switch light, you know, is the truth of the matter. So yeah, all that stuff, it’s, you know, hard to kind of put myself in the mindset of, you know, do people play it like that? I thought it was just in the adverts. I have played it like that a couple of times in Brighton when I took the I took it out to like a pub and played Mario Kart with my partner just sat at like a table. And that actually didn’t seem to I was quite pleasant, but I can’t see myself doing it again anytime soon. It was it felt like a novel thing. Like we were deeply into Mario Kart for that one holiday and then that was it. Yeah, in the COVID age, the idea of like putting expensive stuff I own on public services just like it’s a no no. Yeah. Well, I still can’t even imagine being in a pub to be honest. I don’t think I’m going to do that for another year probably. So yeah, so that itself is a weird thing. But yeah, I think I agree with you, Matthew. It was just it just it’s kind of an also ran announcement a little bit. I’d be keen to see what the screen looks like, but I can’t get overly excited either way. Like, I have pre-ordered one, madly, because I’ve been playing it so much in handheld and I’m like, yeah, okay, I want to see that. And it’s probably just the old Nintendo sort of nerding me, you know, you know, I just I want to own the shiny thing. I want to be able to have an opinion on it. I want to be able to sort of spout forth on it on this podcast. So yeah, I have pre-ordered one. I don’t know if I’ll if my nerve will hold up as we get closer to release, but we shall see. Okay, yeah, good stuff. So then Matthew, I’ve just got a couple more things to ask about on the handheld console front then. So I was curious if you think there’s more of an appetite for handheld consoles now than there was, say, 10 years ago, when there was a lot of commentary on the PS Vita and the 3DS being a bit out of time because smartphones are obviously like fairly new at that point, or at least like in the rise of smartphone gaming was kind of meteoric. So that was kind of hanging over them. But now we’ve got like stuff like Playdate and there’s the Switch, which is kind of a hybrid console. But you know, like you say, I play in handheld as well. And I was curious if you think maybe the tide has turned on this a little bit and people are maybe more into the idea of a dedicated handheld than they were a decade ago. Yeah, I mean, I think maybe there’s like a nostalgia for it. You know, the Playdate thing is a bit like vinyl coming back. It’s like a sort of a kind of cute hipster thing rather than, you know, a substantial kind of change in appetite, I’d say. Yeah, I think the fact that these things like are a hybrid now that, you know, that they can deliver the stuff you want on the TV, but then they can also host these smaller things, which maybe make more sense in a portable is really neat. It’s just, I do feel like we get the best of both worlds, you know, like I don’t feel like we’re massively missing something. I mean, people may disagree. I don’t feel like there’s a big hole, you know, in like say Nintendo’s catalogue, where I feel like, are they used to make X but they wouldn’t anymore? You know, take Ace Attorney, you know, that is a game that would traditionally live on handheld and in my head is always a handheld game. And it lives quite happily as a handheld game on this handheld and it still feels weird to me to play it on a big TV. So the fact that we have machines that sort of do both, you know, I almost feel like we don’t have to make that call anymore, you know, and I don’t really see the idea of hardware that asks you to make that call between just handheld or just thing, you know, just a TV experience or big screen experience or whatever. I can’t really see people kind of going for that again. Okay, interesting. So you don’t think a handheld by itself from Nintendo would do the numbers? I just, well, I imagine it would, you know, do the numbers. I just don’t see them doing it. Like, I feel like they’ve actually hit on this thing that they wanted to do for a long time. I think the fact that they had these two separate teams and then they made a big conscious decision to like merge them together. I don’t know, maybe I’m being a bit unfair to the handheld stuff. And like, you know, maybe there is a tier of games. It’s harder to imagine Nintendo making because they feel like things have to also work on the TV. So like, would they make a Hotel Dusk now? Or would they make a, well, they would make a Picross. There’s Picross on the Switch. Yeah, I think there’s Stans. Sorry, I’m going around the house a bit, working out exactly what I think. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I think it is sound. Yeah, I think there’s a few games on Switch that look like they would have been 3DS games a few years ago. So I think something like Luigi’s Mansion 3 probably fits that bill. And as does Metroid Dread, you know, more so I would say that because that looks like it could have been, you know, come out like a year after Samus Returns or something. But you can sort of scale your experience, you know, if something isn’t like necessarily working on the big screen, you have the option to scale it down into a handheld experience where it suddenly feels maybe more premium weirdly. So it’s quite nifty. Yeah, I think if Nintendo had made a dedicated handheld this generation as well as a home console, it probably have done about as well as the 3DS did. Like, it would find an audience based on sort of the quality of the game. But it wouldn’t be like the monster hit the DS was back in like pre smartphone era. And it does split their like creative teams as well. Like just having to have people make basically two tiers of games for different machines, you know, where having everyone in pumping everything into this thing means you do get, you know, the embarrassment of riches of, you know, when switches is really flying, it’s, you know, maybe not right now. But for a long time, it felt like you’re getting hit after hit after hit. And that speaks to a Nintendo which only has one thing to worry about, which I don’t really miss that. Like, I’m not, I’m not sad at the idea of like, you know, their best brains aren’t aren’t kind of having to split their attention anymore. Yeah, I think we’re due as well another wave of Nintendo Switch software in the next kind of like couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that will materialize. There’s got to be a pro. There’s got to be a pro. I believe that because, you know, Breath of the Wild 1 was already pushing the Switch in places, you know, there was there was some stuff in and I can’t see them not wanting to. I don’t know. I just want a version. I just want to I just want to play a version of Breath of the Wild that absolutely sings. And I feel like Switch Pro is the only way of achieving it. So or you emulate the original one PC via. They’re so funny seeing people talk about the Steam deck where they’re like, well, it does sort of switch just emulate it. And you’re like, yeah, I mean, that isn’t technically like fine. It’s not like that’s like being sold in the shops. It’s not like that. That you know, that isn’t like legit. You do understand this, right. But they talk about it like it’s a back in the box feature of like, well, it can play everything because you just get everything off the internet. Yeah, but also no. Yeah, exactly. Yes. On a knock. Yeah. So, you know, if I ever if Matthew ever sees me emulating a game, he’ll have to turn me over to the cops. That’s just gonna happen. That’s why you shouldn’t have told me about that naughty device or the sexy box or whatever you’re calling it. So yeah, the other point I was going to make here is that I think mobile gaming. I mean, this is weirdly something people are talking about the day that we’re recording this is one publisher’s approach to releasing a mobile game based on a popular series that has generated like a lot of awful takes. I actually weighed in and then had to delete my takes. I thought, no, I don’t weigh in on discourses anymore. I’m over this. I move on. But it was over that XCOM thing and a Kotaku article. And so I am discourse man no more. Yeah, I’m sworn off of that now. And it made me think about how maybe that’s a sign of the problem. And maybe the reason that a dedicated handheld can still do so well is because people, you know, want a full fat experience on that on that on that form factor. You know, I think Nintendo have always been very careful to like with whatever they’re doing to try and sort of not let it kind of not let lose control or let go of the leash on what’s happening on their platform. And it fundamentally serves them well. And I’d say like, you know, the maybe this isn’t exactly the point. But, you know, I do go on this even the Switch store and it’s a little bit like hair raising some of the stuff going on on there in terms of like what people are selling and how people can kind of manipulate the store by basically selling their games for 5p. It’s a pretty wild place as far as a Nintendo platform goes. But yeah, I don’t know, but like mobile gaming, like I never really got into it. And it’s super weird seeing what kind of is and isn’t on there. Like I’ve been playing one of the Ace Attorney games. I bought one of the Ace Attorney games on Apple. It’s like a full price retail release. But I bought it just because I was interested to see you kind of like what that experience was like, and how it ran and how like how they treated it as a port. And I it like completely passed me by that there are companies like Capcom releasing like 20 quid ports on Apple, and what that means and how they behave and what they look like. So that’s how out of the loop I was I was surprised to see them on there. So yeah, maybe I don’t know, maybe not the most useful person to ask about the phone experience. No, it’s fine. I mean, I’m kind of the same. I played plenty of games I love on mobile, for sure. Like, you know, like you say, Capcom have a big presence on there. So Square Enix, you can play most of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games on on your phone. So you know, there are plenty of options out there. And yeah, you know, let’s say games like Gorogoa or like, you know, the Simogo games, you know, there’s plenty of good stuff that’s come out on mobile phones for sure. I think it’s just that overall, the tidal wave of mega popular stuff, I suppose, that I don’t, I don’t get as into. And things that are kind of free to play on mobile do just seem a bit hungrier in terms of currency and time and all that stuff. Yeah, that seemed baked into the ethos of the games from the start, whereas at least with the Switch, the Nintendo Switch Store, oh my god, it is an absolute fucking public toilet on there and they need to sort it out. The calculator app on there, I mean, how did that even get through? But yeah, talk about, you know, it’s the fact that you go like, there’s like a deals tab and you’re like, oh, click on that. And it’s like there are 856 deals. And you’re like, what is going to take me like legitimately going to take me like 1520 minutes to scroll through these like the, the way it manages and the way people play deals to get in the charts is, I’ve read a few things about it. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty open to manipulation. So people sell stuff for like 15 P and then it becomes like the number one game and gets, then the console kind of pushes out further and you can kind of, you can make big money from tiny amounts, which feels kind of like the sort of bad old, that aware like the kind of Apple ecosystem kind of goes wrong. So I hope Nintendo doesn’t just become a total bust because of that. Yeah, I don’t know who’s looking after the Nintendo seal of quality over there anymore. Is it Waluigi? I just remember there was the very famous GDC speech Shihata gave, which sort of ruffled from feathers at the time about basically the dangers of the Apple model and about like undervaluing your games and the kind of race to the bottom, how the race to the bottom is going to kill everyone and everything, but he was doing it to a room of like quite like indie minded developers or at the kind of birth of the kind of the real like indie breakout the kind of, you know, this would be, I don’t know, 2010 or something. And it was seen as like sort of a little bit like old man sort of yells at clouds type deal, you know, here’s Nintendo going, no, don’t do it your new way, do it our old way way where we charge everyone 50 quid for a game. And I’d say actually in the long run, like he’s definitely right. Like Nintendo, or it was right for Nintendo, like Nintendo is in a healthy, good place. It has maintained the value of its games. People are still willing and understand the price of Nintendo’s games. They’re justified. I feel that they’re justified in what they charge for them, where, you know, other scenes are just like an absolute kind of trash fire and you basically won’t invest in anything because you feel like, well, this is just a nightmare place of free games, you know, who would be foolish enough to spend any money in this land of free to play? Yeah, so, you know, I’d be interested to see what like a water would make of like the Switch Store because it doesn’t feel true to that vision at all. Fucking Phantom Doctrine, man, that game I always see in the offers tab, Phantom Doctrine. It’s always like a quid or something. It was like a 7 out of 10. It’s like a quid from like 30 quids. It’s got like a discount of like 97%. You’re like, oh, maybe this is the day I buy Phantom Doctrine. Yeah, and there’s like loads of very dodgy looking sort of platformer puzzly things in between them. And they all seem to be from similar types of publishers. It’s all a bit like, yuck. I kind of just need a button that says sales brackets only good games. And then I just yeah, the annoyingly, they’ve got some really good visual novels that seem to never come down in price, as in they’re literally like 50 quid forever. But I think that might just be like part of the anime ecosystem where they know that like, you know, anime fans have always been ripped off. You know, these are people who are paying 20 quid for like four episodes and a root on DVD, so I feel like that kind of market still exists to be kind of gouged. So they’re still selling like, I think it’s AI, the Somnium files is like 50 quid forever on Switch, which is quite frustrating. I mean, the guy who paid 20 pounds for four episodes of Naruto is you in 2008, isn’t it? Yeah, me, every every like, you know, two months, because that was the release schedule for them. I bought, I legitimately bought Naruto on DVD when I had a job, like, to this day, Rich Stanton, friend of the show, still makes fun of me. I think, like, he’s tagged me with Naruto because he saw me buying Naruto like one time. But I will forever be a Naruto guy. Oh, I mean, is that really like embarrassing in the context of the people who work in games media? I mean, there are worse things you could be into. I think at the time, though, it’s maybe like the spectrum of what’s available in anime maybe wasn’t as well known. So like, you know, if you like Naruto in 2009, you are much closer to buying like an anime body pillow than if like today. If you said you like Naruto, people would know that that’s definitely not anime body pillow. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does, which that does explain the three anime body pillows in your attic. Yeah. I mean, in this case, he was right to make that assumption. I am a deviant. Oh, there you go. You’ve got your three anime body pillow wives in your attic and I’ve got my little sexy box next to my bed. It’s people are learning a lot about us today. So yeah, cool. So the last thing I want to ask about Matthew was I was going to ask you something about what do the next five years of handhelds look like by imagine you like me have no idea really. So I was going to ask so rather than try and be like, you know, Nostradamus. Shit Nostradamus. Yeah, exactly. I thought I’d just ask you a bit about Sony. Do you think Sony’s missed a trick by not having a handheld in this generation? I’ve got some thoughts on this, but I wanted to hear what you thought first. Yeah, I’m like very broad thoughts is that Sony are just they’ve just completely doubled down on the mega blockbuster AAA single player experience and they just then but they don’t really operate in any other space is is my take on them at the moment. So I can’t really see what handheld would do for them. They didn’t do the most interesting stuff that happened on Sony handhelds was nothing to do with Sony as well back then. You know, arguably it’s the indie scene. So yeah, I mean, I don’t think they will, but I also don’t think it’s any kind of loss. Yeah, so I agree with you. I think that Sony would never have Sony would never back a handheld like it does a major console is the problem. And when it when it launched the PSP and the PS Vita, it still didn’t have the apparatus in terms of number of developers to actually make this stuff. I mean, if you look at the PSP and the Vita, neither Insomniac nor Naughty Dog ever made a PSP or Vita game. Naughty Dog were working on a Jak and Daxter game for PSP, but they offloaded it to work on Uncharted, which makes sense. That just shows where Sony’s priorities lie. The PS Vita, particularly, I think the PSP did have a big backing from Sony and they really tried to make it work, and it did, it sold really well. But the PS Vita didn’t sell well, and they seemed to give up on it super quickly and see the PS4 as the horse that they were going to back. Instead it came down to indie developers, visual novel makers, and atlas with a persona port to basically not save the console, but make it… I don’t know, it’s just so beloved amongst our peers, I would say, people really love it. The one first party exception made for the Vita was Tearaway, which was amazing. That’s a really great game that lent into how interesting and weird the Vita was in its functionality. That’s a classic bit of Nintendo design, Medium Molecule man, what a weird old studio in the current Sony line-up. They’re like nothing else. I was thinking about this this morning, I was just like, what are they doing with Medium Molecule? That’s such an interesting energy. They’re clearly backed in a big way, so I don’t think we have to fear for them, but they are like the opposite of everything else they’re doing. Crazy. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, I think I agree with you, Teraway was great. The version of Uncharted they did was perfectly fine on Vita. It’s not like… Yeah, I think that was my launch game. Yeah, I mean, it was made by Sony Bend who made Days Gone. It was perfectly fine. Just all the things that Uncharted does, basically. And yeah, it had a good version of Wipeout as well, a raft of first party stuff, a very short, but very, very good looking Killzone game as well. And then they just… Yeah, PS4 comes along and it’s basically dead to them. So yeah, I was going to propose to you, Matthew, that we do some kind of best PS Vita games episode next year when it turns 10 years old. Yeah, I’d like to do that. I think that would be good. Cool. In which case then, Matthew, let’s take a short break and we’re going to come back with a second section where you and I are going to design a gaming handheld. So, yeah, people could look forward to that. Welcome back to the podcast. So, in this half, we’re going to talk about creating a gaming handheld console. So, let me lay out the scenario. Hopefully, you’ve listened to the game developer draft episode of The Back Page in order to have a bit of context here, because it’s kind of a sequel to that a little bit. But basically, we’ve both been tasked with creating our dream handheld console. Big Sammy Holdings and Matthew Castle Productions are moving into hardware, baby. Somehow, Matthew Castle Productions managed to survive. It’s disastrous E3 conference, and it’s continuing to thrive. So, we have got ongoing legal proceedings with Randy Newman and his now broken body. Oh, yeah. Not to mention the lawsuit from the people in the crowd that day where the car dropped from the ceiling. Oh, so many people were hurt in that stunt. But I enjoyed it from my throne. Yeah, that’s probably the biggest meme that’s emerged from this podcast so far, aside from the concept of J.C.’s Kitchen, which has proven very popular. The idea of a meat tent really captured the listeners’ imaginations. So yeah, we’ve each secured additional funding. I made some dodgy deals behind the scenes that I will later have to testify in some court hearing, and the testimony will be sealed in some envelope because I’ve turned in a bunch of my collaborators and have gained immunity, which is how legal systems work, I believe. So yeah, I got quite far into that one. Classic rap behavior. So yes, basically, what’s going to happen is, we’re going to pitch the idea of a gaming handheld. We’ve each come up with one. We’ve got a title for it, like a launch game, basically a bunch of different stuff. In fact, I’ll just read out the categories now that people can look forward to as we go through this. So first, we had to name the console. Secondly, we had to decide what sound effect it plays when you turn it on. Then we had to decide what the handheld console’s big gimmick is. So, you know, like the two screens with the 3DS, sorry, the DS or the 3DS, for example. That’s like an example. Or the 3D slider on the 3DS, that kind of thing. Like some kind of nonsensical thing, like the back touchscreen on the PS Vita is probably the dumbest thing that’s ever been added to a games console. Apart from in Tearaway, where you can use it quite well, I remember. So, yes. And then we’ve also got using the roster of developers that we established in the Game Developer Draft episode. We can each come up with one imaginary launch game to kick off the console with. So that would be quite fun as well. And then there’s two more categories. You can also emulate the entire library of one console at launch on this handheld to help sell it. So you can pick any sort of handheld or like home console you want. Basically, just, you know, you can pick one format. You get that entire library. It just works on the handheld from the get go. Me and Matthew each have to pick one of those. Try not to think too much about the logistic side of this thing. It’s not actually happening anyway, so it’s fine. And finally, you can produce one special edition version of the console with a fun decal and some kind of promotional gift to get people excited about buying it. And what design do you pick is like the last category. So Matthew, any general thoughts about this before we get into it? Yeah, it’s quite hard to come up with a kind of a meaningful gimmick, I’d say, or something that would actually benefit it. My general thought was, I think my ideal handheld console would actually be a Nintendo console that’s capable of playing every single handheld Nintendo format from the Game Boy to the present, like to the Switch. Like it has like a slot for 3DS games, a slot for GBA cartridges, and then yeah, play Switch games as well. I guess I’m talking about like a chunkier Switch that has those things built into it. And maybe at that point, it starts to look like Homer Simpson’s car in the form of like a games console. But yeah. So let’s just get into it then, Matthew. So Matthew Castle Productions, what are you going to name your handheld? So I’m kind of torn between two names. I was thinking of playing like a classic bit of Nintendo hardware. So I think handhelds, somewhere in my head, I’ll always go to Game Boy first. And I think, what happens if the Game Boy grows up? So it grows eventually into the Game Gent, which is one potential name, the Game Gent. It’s an older man. I was going to go with like Game Coot, but I thought it was like a bit too negative. That’s far too like British, like magazine talk. Game Gent. I was talking with Game Chap, but again, that sounds a bit, I don’t know, Game Gent. Well, the other thing I was thinking about was something that like suggested pockets. And when I think of pockets, I think of pocket lint. And but like lint is quite kind of not good. It’s not a sexy concept. People aren’t like wild about lint. So I tried to make it more sophisticated and add a bit of alliteration with, with Ludo lint. I see. It’s like pocket lint, but you play it. Yeah. Ludo lint. I think you’re asking for a lot from the, the conceiver there. I mean, I think if you’ve seen my show at E3, you’ll be expecting certain things from me and I feel like I’m true to those. Amazing. Well, you know, Barack Obama bloody loves it. You know, he can believe it. Imagine him saying Ludo lint. I literally can’t imagine it. That’s why it sounds good. Probably only coming from him. Yeah, I mean, I appreciate your attempt to do a Barack Obama impression on this podcast. That’s not something I thought of. It’s the Ludo lint. It sounds a bit more like Larry David, I’ll be honest. It’s the Ludo lint. Well, now it sounds Italian, which is even more baffling. Oh, I’ve been watching too much fucking Super R Nights. Yeah, it’s like you can have your special edition could be the Paulie Walnuts edition of the Ludo lint. Okay, so I think that’s pretty funny. I thought when you say, so the Game Boy grows up, it’s the Game Man, and I thought he’s surely not going to call it that. No, Gent is more sophisticated. I don’t know which of these two names I’m into. Ludo lint’s a bit weird, isn’t it? It’s a bit strange. I should probably go with Game Gent. But maybe like the catchphrase is like, it’s the Game Gent. It’s Ludo lint. It depends, oh God, I mean, it’s even more confusing. I mean, are you going to have like 400 words printed on the back of the box explaining the name, I think? Game Gent, people, I think if you called it Game Gent, people would see the Game Boy connection, I would hope, because it would be in a similar font. I mean, they would in the UK, yeah. It’s like playable lint, no, maybe lint is not good. Well, there’s that website Pocket Lint, isn’t there? Like, well, yeah, okay, yeah. So that’s about games. Phones, I think. Phones? Pocket Lint? As opposed to what? It’s just lint. I don’t know. I’m not that familiar with the website. You know what? Yeah. Lint’s off the table. It’s Game Gent. I like the idea that this entire conversation should be printed as like a letter you get with the console to explain why it is what it is. This is the Iwata Rast discussion in here, too. Iwata Rast. So, why Ludo Lint? Well, I thought it’s like Lint that you can play, brackets, laughs. Yeah, brackets, laughs is like the next seven lines, basically. Yeah. Okay, good. Okay, so my one, Matthew, obviously, my company is called Big Sammy Holdings Limited. I’ve always been jealous of that. It’s a much better name than Big Castle Productions. Do you think so? So I’ve kind of accumulated Big Sammy as a brand on Twitter. And I think like people might start to think I’m more overweight than I am. Like it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not gone that bad. You know, it’s just. But Big Sammy sounds more fun. Like the word big suggests like fun to me more than the very dry Matthew Castle Productions. Matthew Castle Productions sounds like, you know, one of the sub studio, you know, like the fifth, the fifth studio on a big film, you know, when you’ve had the financing, it’s right at the end of the credits. Yeah. Matthew Castle Productions. It’s not like a 20th century fox. I can imagine like reading an interview in like retro gamer with the president of Matthew Castle Productions talking about the fact that like he made an ET style game disaster and was like snorting cocaine in like jacuzzis until it all went wrong and has basically like been living in obscurity since then. I’d be calling it like I’d abbreviate it to MCP. So it would sound a bit more like mysterious, less corporate. It’s a bit more like something that like, I don’t know, Articon would say in Metal Gear, isn’t it? It’s the MCP. It’s the MCP game, Gent. Brackets not Ludo Lint. Brackets. It’s like Ludo Lint. But that is, square brackets, but that isn’t its name. Okay, so mine’s much simpler by comparison. It’s just called the Sammy Micro. I just thought that was quite good. Oh, that’s good. Yeah. That’s playing on Big Sammy, Sammy Micro. I love it. Yeah, exactly. You know, we could have gone with a small Sammy, but you know, I just thought… What about Little Sammy? Uh, nah. I think that sounds like a rap artist. Or like, if I had a doomed career on like the Bournemouth rap scene, I would be called Little Sammy, you know. Well, you also want to maintain that just in case your company does branch out into the rap. That’s true. And needs it. Again, not sure how Sega Sammy feels about this. But, you know, again, like I’ll just dip into my Russian gangster funds to like fight any potential lawsuits. So yeah, so then let’s go to category number two there, Matthew. I feel like we extensively litigated your title there. Great stuff. What is it? It says The Game Gent. We’re going with that, right? The Game Gent, yeah. So Sammy Micro and The Game Gent, they’re coming in 2022. Let’s continue. So this was a category you added, Matthew. What sound effect does The Game Gent play when you boot it up? I think it should. It plays the sound of the jingle of a chest opening in Zelda. What about, would Nintendo get upset about that? Or is that not something that… Okay, it’s that, but it’s like all off key. Played on like a Yamaha keyboard, you know? Yeah. Well, I did think… I mean, my original note was just, Randy Newman say his welcome. Why? Because, again, I get to hang out with Randy Newman. He’s got quite a warm voice. Imagine if any of Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo built their entire platform on the idea of hanging out with Randy Newman. Well, but this is like my fantasy. Yeah, I suppose so. It’s not real. So why am I questioning the logic of it? Welcome. Welcome. I also thought about Get Ready from Space Harrier. Get Ready? Because you’re like, ooh. That’s cool. Yeah, I like that idea. Yeah, that is good. That is good. I’ve just gone with a nice sound of dolphins splashing and having a good time. Splashing? Yeah. Honestly, I struggled with a funny one for this category, but there is. There’s a twist to it, right? So one time out of every 100,000 times one of these consoles turns on, you’ll hear a man burping and it’ll become an urban legend about this console that people will be like, I swear I’ve heard the Sammy Micro burp and everyone else will be like, no, that’s bullshit. And it’ll be like one of those sort of game trailers, urban legends, unearthed kind of things. So that’s nice. You’re building an urban legend into your console. Yeah. I don’t know why the dolphin’s splashing. I thought about different Metal Gear sound effects. I really like the noise that plays before Metal Gear Solid on PS1. I think it’s the police thoughts theme that like that little do, do. You know what I mean? That noise. That’d be quite a nice thing to hear, but you might get sick of that. Basically any noise that plays, you’ll eventually get fucking tired of it. I don’t tell people it’s Randy Newman, so it’s just a nice voice saying, welcome, and then the urban legend bit is like, people are like, oh, I think it’s Denzel Washington or whatever, and no one knows, except me, that it’s Randy Newman. Yeah, okay. That could be fun. Yeah, I like that. A lot of speculation about who says welcome. I like that. I think the first of all, though, I think they would all ask, who was there on the day of Matthew Castle Productions E3 conference? And then process of elimination, was it Matthew Castle himself? Was it Barack Obama? Or was it Randy Newman? You know, or Shooter Coopy? But then they looked at it and they’d be like, yeah, but Randy Newman is currently suing Matthew Castle Productions because he hurt himself falling out of that car. So would he really agree to do more work? Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah. I mean, depending on the trial outcome, it’s going to be Randy Newman saying welcome. But if if it’s sour and things never recover between us, which I would find upsetting, it’s just him from Space Harrier saying, get ready. I think you’re going to say that Barack Obama was your backup to Randy Newman, which would have been amazing in itself. Oh, yeah, that would be good. OK, we spent enough time on this one, then. So what’s your handheld console’s big gimmick, Matthew? Well, I don’t know if this is just completely… Mine’s stupid as well. So, I was thinking about a thing which had, like, modular screens, so it came with five different screens that you took in and out, and they were, like, from different eras of like Nintendo handhelds. I’m leaning quite heavily into Nintendo, so it could play, like, authentic versions of different games on it. Yeah, that’s quite good. I was thinking along similar lines, actually. Oh. I don’t have multiple screens, but I thought about different ways you can use the screen to play different types of games. So, yeah, this ties a little bit into my next to the next category, actually, but, yeah, mine is actually quite similar to the Switch in terms of, like, it has detachable controllers, but you can reorient the screen and attach the controllers to the side when it’s, like, turned on its side, basically. So that you could use, say, let’s say, you know, some, like, twin-screen games were to be emulated on this thing, then it could work that way, basically, and it comes with a stylus, so you can use it like a conventional 16.9 games console, or you can kind of use it on its side. It’s maybe a bit more fiddly, not quite as comfortable, and probably a bit too unwieldy for someone like Nintendo to make. But I like the idea of controllers that can, like, clip on differently. You have games in a different aspect ratio, basically. That was kind of my thinking there. Yeah, that’s nice. I’d say the flaw of mine is you end up with lots of, like, screens clattering around the whole time. What if you lose one? What if you lose one as well? Well, that’s it. And then you’re like, oh. Because I was going to go, like, one level up and say, like, which screen you put on, like, changed the game as you were playing it. So like, it would, like, scare, like, everyone would have to make, like, five versions of their game. So, like, you could play it as, like, the modern game with the modern screen. But if you put in, like, a monochrome LCD, like, sort of, you know, Game Boy screen, it would have to, it would, like, either unlock, like, an older version of it, or, like, the graphics would recalibrate for that machine. Yeah, okay, that’s, I mean, no developer will go for that, apart from maybe, like, Hideo Kojima. But he… Well, that’s it. It would make a great Kojima game. But he belongs to me, remember, Matthew? I acquired him in the previous episode, so, yeah. Yeah, but, because I’ve got this, he’s constantly harassing you about it now, being like, I want to make a game for that, and you wouldn’t let him, because you know that we’re rivals. Yeah, and he’ll be like, if you don’t let me do this, I’ll walk, and I’ll be like, ah, fuck. Oh, yes, I’ve made your life harder. Yeah, I mean, you’ve already had me assassinated by Agent 47, if I recall that. Which is something I actually only really realised after I listened back to that episode, is like, oh, Matthew’s actually talking about having me killed in this situation. It’s more like, I want you to live forever in fear. Okay, fair enough. So yes, that’s, those are our respective gimmicks. And Matthew’s console has five screens that developers have to make different versions of their game for. They can’t just do the same game in different resolution then, Matthew? Well, they’ve got different colour palettes and stuff, so it wouldn’t make sense, particularly with like that older, like monochrome screen. Would one be the original Game Boy Advance screen? You just can’t fucking see it under any circumstances. Yeah, and it would be, and this is where I was humming and ahhing about it, because I was thinking, well, actually, can a modern screen play all these older games better? And I was thinking, well, no, this is going to be kind of, it’s about a kind of certain texture to these games that it wants to kind of pay homage to. Okay, yeah. I mean, I quite like that, but yes, just to kind of reiterate mine is that you can clip the controllers off Switch style, but then you can like reorient the console on its side and then clip those on and then, yeah, it’s capable of playing different types of games, has a touch screen. So I did think of suggesting something a bit sillier and funnier, like the back of it gets so hot it can be used to like make toasted cheese sandwiches, but I just, it didn’t seem appropriate. So yeah, that would never get out of R&D, no, not even in a company as chaotic as mine. But yeah, let’s move on to the next category then Matthew. So number four, using your roster of developers as established in the game developer draft episode, you can create one launch game from one studio to kick it off. What do you go with? So obviously, I’ve got Shootakumi on board. I love the Ace Attorney series, it’s like a definitive handheld series. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to let him off the leash. We’re going to do, it’s called Ace Attorney Video Game Justice, and it’s basically Phoenix Wright solving cases from across all the different franchises I own. So he’s like visiting other game worlds that I own. So he’d be going into like Hitman world and he has to like, Agent 47 has been caught, but this time he hasn’t killed the person. So he’s to defend Agent 47, or he goes into Forza Horizon world, and he has to defend like a car against the hit and run charge, that kind of stuff. Just a car by itself, not the driver. Yeah, just a car. Okay, well, that’s a world where the people are, you know, maybe there is a person inside the car, but you can’t really ever see them. That’s part of the joke. Okay, now, it’s a good joke. Was there another example you’re going to go with there, Matthew? No, that’s supposed to be the only examples I’ve got. Okay, good. That’s following the rule of three of comedy there. All right, then. In original sin, there’s been murder. Sorry, I felt like I just completely sandbagged that. Oh dear. Well, I enjoyed it anyway. That is cool, actually. I do like the idea of Phoenix Wright solving cases in different video games. It’s like Smash Brothers of Matthew Castle Productions, but with Ace Attorney involved. I’m afraid mine is less exciting. I’ve gone with… Because obviously I bought Rockstar in that. I’ve decided that we’re going to do a version of GTA Chinatown Wars set in Los Santos, so like a top-down GTA, like a modern, sexy version, set in the GTA V setting with a bit of a change in art style, colour palette, like how they had cell shading in Chinatown Wars. So we’ll do something like that, I think, like a top-down revival GTA. The only kind of caveat to this is that while it’s great for on-the-go play, because some of the devs of GTA Online’s in-game purchasable cars had to help on the project, we literally lost tens of millions of dollars making this because there were fewer new cars being added to GTA Online. We should start getting a dungeon master for these things. Yeah, rather than punishing ourselves for our own terrible decision making. Yeah, we need a bit of mediation from someone who’s just not big. I love the idea of the heads of Rockstar. We used to have this incredibly slick money-making machine. This guy bought us and has ever since distracted us from that mission. He’s completely derailed it. This is also the guy, as I heard, that he made a console that heats up so much that it burns your fingers on the back of the console. This is our leadership that we have to work with. Well, those reports are untrue, and I will sue any outlets into oblivion that report that as such. That was just one man, and he’s got a prosthetic hand now, and he’s living a perfectly normal life. That’s the other thing people really love, these giant games publishers that sue journalists. Yes. It’s very endearing. Yeah, okay, good stuff. So, yeah, okay, so the next category, then, Matthew, is you can emulate the entire library of one other console at launch in this handheld to help sell it. Which do you pick? I feel like you’ve built your console around one idea for this, so what did you go with? Oh, no, I didn’t. I was just going to say, well, I was going to say DS, which doesn’t make any sense because it’s not your screened machine, necessarily. Yeah, but you could clip two screens together, right, and make it work. Oh, yeah, sure, then DS. Very well thought out, that one. Well, I was thinking more of like a dream library. For me, DS ticks the most boxes. It’s quite, it’s sort of agony, really, because there’s great games that only exist on every platform, but I think the hit rate on DS is a little bit higher. You’ve just got a bit more to play with. Yeah, so I thought about PS2, and I think that probably is the right choice in terms of volume of games to choose from. But I think that I’m also picking DS. Oh, I was only thinking handheld consoles. I forgot about… The document does say one of the consoles. Yeah, you’re right. Oh, sorry, I completely… Yeah. No, I’d still say DS, begrudgingly. Yeah, I’d say DS too. This is why I basically made the console so it can reorient. So you can basically play DS games on it as well. Because that was such a big library, but having access to those would be pretty cool. Final category then, Matthew. So you can produce one special edition version of this console, the Game Gent, with a fun decal and some kind of promotional gift to get people excited about buying it this holiday season. So what design did you pick? Uh… I really sort of struggled with this one, because I don’t know if just tying it to one of my game things is like… like good enough, really. I regretted putting this category in, because I couldn’t think of a funny answer for it, and I thought, oh, fuck, why did I put this in if it’s just giving me a massive headache? That’s not good content, is it? Yeah, I mean, all I could… all I wrote was dairy milk. Erm… like… But I didn’t really think it through. Yeah, like purple, like dairy milk. Were you just hungry at the time, or something? Yes. He’s wanted a chocolate bar, so he just wrote down dairy milk. Yeah, I was thinking like that… Like that kind of purple and white colour scheme I quite like. Yeah, it’s not a great answer. No, you should… Let me introduce you to this console called the GameCube, my friend. I think you’ll enjoy it. Oh, maybe that’s what I was thinking of. Yeah, so I’ve got with like a Hideo Kojima signature edition. It’s a picture of Mads Milcherson on the console, signed by Hideo Kojima. So, yeah. Wouldn’t that be confusing? To have one face and a different name signature? Well, that’s the joke, you know. So, I’m afraid that’s all I came up with. Well, it’s better than writing the words Dairy Milk and then not even exploring the idea for a minute. That’s just like a kind of a say what you see approach to this. I thought, you know what, I’ll write it and then I’ll riff. But actually, when I got to the riff, this heat is just too much. It’s hard to be like entertaining on purpose at this heat. Also, to the listeners who are paying attention to the audio quality I mentioned earlier, I’ve closed both windows. So now it’s like Colonel Kurtz’s compound in my flat at the moment. Absolutely sweating it. Plus, I’m a local warlord. So, yeah, we’re done with that then Matthew. That was a fun exercise. We won’t be doing any votes on it because ultimately there are no winners with that competition. But yeah, I think that we will definitely revive the Big Sammy Holdings and Matthew Castle Productions idea for like future episode ideas. So watch this space. I’m sure they’ll come back in some form. Dairy milk. Okay, so to see us out of this episode then Matthew, we’ve got a few listener questions here. So if you’d like to send some to us, you are welcome to. It’s backpagepod on Twitter and backpagegames.gmail.com if you want to email us a question. So thank you very much to those who sent these in. So Matthew, do you want to read out this first one? Yes. Hello. Great as always to hear Matthew’s passion for heartburn and indigestion on the podcast. Have you always been a Renny’s guy or do you ever branch out into Gaviscon? I found supermarket brand antacid tablets to be great, but curious to hear your thoughts as Britain’s leading antacid podcast. Yours, Tom Doughty. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I’m a Renny’s guy through and through. Genuinely, I find the Gaviscon tablets, they get stuck in my teeth. They don’t break up into a fine paste as well as Renny’s. So that’s why I don’t opt for them. And I don’t try own brands. I probably should. It’d be cheaper. I should say for those that are worried that Renny’s stuff is a bit of a bit. It’s not the mean. A little bit. I feel like it’s not like a core pillar of my entire personality. Yeah, I mean, I can vouch for that as someone who’s known Matthew for several years. There’s more to him than Renny, you know? Yeah, though I do like if you were to name anyone in your friendship group who uses Renny’s, I would hope you would think of me first. Yeah, I feel like you’d be genuinely insulted if I didn’t, to be honest. Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s a lot of people, but you know, some people are kind of a bit more kind of secretive about this stuff because it feels medical, doesn’t it? Well, it feels like you’re taking like fat guy tablets when you have Renny, do you know what I mean? Hey, listen, I know some real skinny types who get terrible heartburn as well. Yeah, I’ve had it, I had it as well, yeah. Yeah, the period of my life where I like, I dieted quite heavily just before I got married and like genuinely like I didn’t get heartburn like once in that time, which is probably an indicator of what I’ve got to do. Yeah, if the world wanted me to lose weight, they wouldn’t have added JC’s Kitchen to the delivery. Yeah, if I worked half a day and got the same salary, then I’d be in great shape, trust me. Maybe not, I think I just use it to play through like Alan Wake again or whatever. Yeah, okay, cool. Well, yeah, I used to take something else to my acid reflux and they took off the market because they thought it might like give you some kind of bad side effects and they never put it back on the shelves. So, if I grow a third arm in like two years, you’ll know why that was the reason. Okay, cool. Well, thank you very much for that question. We get a lot of ready correspondence, but it’s good to kind of knock a bunch of it off at once. So, quite a long one here, but basically like it’s a bunch of thoughts in response to the Best Zelda Games episode from last week. So, I’m just going to fire through them as a kind of like train of thought basically. Excellent pod as always, just an email of things to add on the Zelda podcast. The Oracles of Games. The original release of the Oracles Games is that as the games released late in the Game Boy Colours lifecycle, there were shops in the game that only opened if you were playing on the GBA. There was also a cancelled third game, but the project was too grand for Capcom. I knew that last bit, but I don’t think I knew that bit about the shops being open. No, I didn’t know that bit about the shops. Yeah, so thank you very much for that. Link’s Awakening. The first time we see the weird owl in a Zelda game, you’d obviously see a kind of weird owl in the… It’s in Ocarina of Time as well, isn’t it, Matthew? So, David Lynch should stream playing this game and be inspired by it to complete the circle. I feel like David Lynch fundamentally doesn’t understand games. I feel like if I showed him Deadly Premonition, he wouldn’t even be able to compute what it is, even though it’s so clearly inspired by stuff. He might actually hate you as well. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know how he feels about people watching films on an iPod. He might just fucking despise it. Twilight Princess, originally created with the same engine as The Wind Waker, despite the very different look, which is why the enemies still have hit sparks when they are hit. If released on Switch will be the Zelda game that has been released for sale, not as a free disc, etc. on every generation since its creation. Is that true? Because if Wind Waker gets released too, that would be the same. Oh, no, because it was on Wii. Right, okay, yeah, I get what you mean. Twilight Realm feels like Britain in its gloominess. Do you go for that, Matthew? I mean, that doesn’t sound like a fact as much as an opinion. Yeah, that’s not a fact, no. That’s not like a, here’s a deep cut from Wikipedia. That’s like IMDB trivia, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Listen, I appreciate the opinion, though. Yeah, exactly. That’s like if you go on to Interstellar on IMDB and it’s like, did you know Matthew McConaughey is very handsome? It’s like, well, I mean, I didn’t know that. That’s blowing my mind. Okay, so Skyward Sword, this just says the smuckest Zelda game ever. Yeah, not sure what to make of that. Again, that’s an opinion. Majora’s Mask, any game with a hand from a toilet asking for paper is immediately Game of the Generation. Again, an opinion, Matthew. Joke’s on him for saying Skyward Sword is the smuckest Zelda game ever because Skyward Sword also has a hand in the toilet asking for toilet paper. I see. If you’re going to come at Matthew Castle, you better not miss. So that is automatically the Game of the Generation 2. I think we’re being too defensive here, Matthew, and it’s just some nice thoughts from a nice listener. I’ll just continue. Wind Waker. I fucking had it with your opinions, mate. Don’t ever write to us again. No, I’m only joking. Wind Waker. I view people who hated the look of this game purely because they wanted more realistic Ocarina again. It was named Zelda by the haters after the cell shading graphics it shared by Jet Set Radio. Zelda looked great. These days, if it was announced and shown for the first time, it might have been called In Zelda. What? I don’t think so. Zelda is actually quite a nice name for it, I think. I don’t know why that was used as an insult. I’m not sure. I mean, the people who hate the game… I think it’s just someone trying out their lines on us. Exactly. Is this just material? Are you doing stand up in like Barnsley or something? Okay, cool. So, The Triumph Forks for Triforce is excellent writing. Another opinion there. Breath of the Wild, the most Nintendo game ever made. Keep this incredible podcast going. It just needs a space arch section adding. That’s a reference to a previous work of yours. A podcast I used to do which had a space arch section. Should we do that or is that like copyright of you and several… I mean, I feel like that belongs to that podcast. So, you know. We’ve got our own in jokes. Who needs space arch when you’ve got Big Sammy Holdings? That’s from Aaron on there. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Apology. I didn’t mean to be combative. Don’t you ever fucking come back here. Do you want to read out this next one, Matthew? Yes. Hello, gentlemen. Game gent. In the dystopian future, Renneys have been reclassified as an illegal Class 8 drug. Seems unlikely, but sure. Unable to resist the law of these chalky delights, Matthew is caught in possession of an extra large 72 tablet pack. That is the amount they come in, that’s correct. Just another statistic in Bath’s antacid drug war, he goes on trial where the judge, whom is clearly suffering from indigestion or trapped wind, agrees to be lenient. Channeling Phoenix Wright, Matthew manages to negotiate a stunning plea bargain. As part of this deal, he must teach introductory video games reviewing at a local college, this is such a mad scenario. Which two games, one Nintendo, one non-Nintendo, should he use to explain the craft? Thanks, says Benji. PS. Hopefully it gets said enough, but thanks for the time and effort you put into the podcast. It’s a great listen every week. So Benji is also the one who sent us the conundrum where I had to go work for Wario if JC’s kitchen was open. So I think Benji’s specialty, Matthew, is just these fictional scenarios that we have to resolve. That’s fair enough. He’s like some evil puppet master. Yeah, it’s like Danganronpa. Isn’t that what they do in those games? Yeah, sort of. It doesn’t make them review video games at a local college. And I don’t think it has ready in it either. I don’t think they would have been able to spin three games out of it if that was the case. OK then, Matthew. What are you going to do about this scenario? Well, I’ve just got to pick the two games to teach at this college so that I can have Renny’s, apparently. Interesting. Games to review. I mean, like Nintendo games. Like, generally writing about Mario, I think, is sort of as hard as it gets because it’s just all play. It’s just writing about play, it’s writing about interaction and mechanics. There’s no, like, story stuff. I mean, a big bugbear, I think, is where people slip up when they’re getting into games reviewing. To put my serious hat on for a second, is maybe treating it too much like film or TV reviewing and banging on about stories and characters, which, while important, aren’t really to be on end also. Like, yeah, Super Mario Galaxy is quite a pure thing to sort of write about. Writing about good games, I think, is kind of harder than writing about bad games. So that’s a good test to learn about reviewing games. A non-Nintendo game that can… I mean, maybe the thing here is the flip, is to give you something that is very story heavy and you have to write about it as, you know, not slipping into it just being a film or TV review. So like The Walking Dead, for example. The Walking Dead. I went with Heavy Rain. Heavy Rain. Well, yeah, it’s interesting. When we recruit staff writers in the past, we always ask people to supply a review of something. And it’s amazing how many people pick a Telltale game and then just basically submit a film or TV review, doesn’t ever talk about it as a game. And that’s always the undoing at that interview state. You know, they just don’t, you know, get through because of that often. So maybe that’s just because I’ve seen that, that sort of done so many times and sort of done in a sort of unsatisfying way that, yeah, writing about a story heavy game as a game and just writing about a really pure gamey game, that’s a pretty good test of your reviewing ability. Well, there you go. If it ever goes wrong for Matthew Castle Productions, then you can go teach at the local college, Matthew. That’d be all right. It’d probably be quite nice. They’ve got quite a nice campus, haven’t they? You can get both. There’s a university up on the hill. Well, the students who live here certainly get better accommodation than the working professionals do. So they’re having a good time. But yeah, so the next… We’ve got one final question in Matthew to see us out here. Thank you very much for the question from Benji, though. That was… Yeah, it was good. It was a very well-drawn scenario. Like, yeah, what a grim dystopia that I dread where, you know, Renny’s a band and Matt Castle has to go work in a college. I mean, wow. I like the idea that a punishment for crime is you have to teach. Yeah, you get a job, a full-time job. That isn’t really the uplifting message that, like, films have about teaching. You know, Dead Poets Society isn’t about, like, man, it really sucked to be that teacher. Especially that teacher represented himself in the court of law and managed to get a great plea bargain with them. Oh, good stuff. That was, yeah, wild. So, last question then. So, howdy again. My lover and I are looking forward to playing It Takes Two, and I was wondering which games you would recommend to play with significant others. Our favourite is Puzzle Strike. That’s from Robert Augusta Meyer via email, so thank you very much, Robert. So, Matthew, I guess, like, games to share with a partner. I think we talked about this a little bit before, but is there anything that comes to mind? Yeah, I really, really like The Colimba Co-op as a kind of really good working-together game. I’ve never played it with Catherine, but I have played it co-op and had a really good time. It’s a fun, like, sort of… It pushes you to sort of a slightly stressful place, but you both, you know, you both contribute equally in the end. I don’t like co-op games where, like, one person can sort of hold back and the other person kind of takes care of them, which sometimes happens when you’re playing with, you know, partners if they’re not as into games. Catherine is much better at games than I am, so that’s never the case. And giving Super Mario 3D World a second go after we talked about it back on the pods, we developed a bit more appreciation for the co-op in it. The kind of competitive co-op is quite fun. Yeah, I agree with that. That’s like the one that I would probably suggest primarily. People heard me kind of wax about, lyrical about that game back when we did the Mario episode with Catherine. That’s kind of what got us into it. Sorry, I feel like I’ve stolen your good suggestion. No, not at all. I mean, I actually recommend games that… I don’t necessarily think you have to play a co-op game with someone to have a good time. I think Pass the Pad is just as good with another person if it’s the right game. So me and my partner, because Persona 5 is very intensive, we’ve played that together. So we haven’t finished it. We’re on the final dungeon, basically, the very last bit of the game. But my partner’s kind of burned out on it because she didn’t realize, like me, that there’s a hard end point to when the relationship stuff stops. And so we kind of like loads of relationships weren’t quite completed in the game. And we didn’t see all of the stories. So she’s a little bit bitter about that. And I kind of am too, actually, because I think the game could have do a better job of telling you when that’s going to happen. But nonetheless, we still very much enjoyed it. And because that’s such an intensive long game, it’s a good game for passing the pad. And obviously, the characters are very well developed, so you can sort of talk about them as you go, like you’re watching a TV show. So I thought that was a really good Pass the Pad experience. We’re currently doing Pass the Pad on Resi Village, actually. I’ve completed that, obviously. But that’s good because if there’s a bit that’s too hard or too scary or whatever, we can just trade the pad and stuff. So yeah, Pass the Pad stuff I like a lot. We’re going to do Ratchet and Clank after this as well because that’ll be nice and chill. Breather after playing Resi. So yeah, those are kind of my choices. I’m not a massive co-op games guy. I mean, I’ve played loads and loads of Halo, but I’ve never played it with a partner. So yeah. So Matthew, we’re done for the week. So that was a slightly shorter episode. We had a little break there. But next week, we’ve got another very beefy one coming up, right? It’s the best Ace Attorney games. So that’s very much a Matt Castle driven episode like the Zelda one. So, are you excited about it? Sorry, if you’re sick of my voice, apologies. You’re going to hear a bit more. Oh, that’s not true. I mean, in that one, it’ll probably be like the Zelda one. It’ll be the most comprehensive, you know, possible podcast we can make around the Ace Attorney games. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve been replaying the games. I’ve been like reading a lot around it. Just to sort of remind myself some stuff. I’m on a huge Ace Attorney kick at the moment. Also, we use that episode to kind of review the great Ace Attorney as well. And I can talk about that, but I promise I will not spoil any of it. You get lots of thoughts about a new game and then, yeah, lots of thoughts about some old ones too. So it should be a good time. I’ve still got to do a bit of reading around that series before we do that one, Matthew. So, well, I’ll get on that before we record. So thank you very much for listening. We’ll be back next week. If you’d like to follow us on Twitter, we’re BackpagePod on Twitter. If you’d like to email us with questions, backpagegames at gmail.com. And at the same time, Matthew, where can people can find you on Twitter? Yeah, I am MrBazzill underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. If you’d like to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice, that’d be greatly appreciated. A couple more people have been adding those and that really helps us find a bunch more people, lets us grow, lets our little community of people expand, which we really appreciate. But we very much appreciate your support regardless. And thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week.