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 does it feel to be recording a podcast in a temperature that can be described as reasonable to the human body of a larger male? Wonderful, wonderful. I actually, I could hear sweating when I was editing the Ace Attorney podcast. It was so gross. Didn’t you say that we were like, we were kind of had the cadence of people who are on the stand in Ace Attorney about to sort of like flip and lose our shit? Yeah, every sentence ended with a dot, dot, dot as we waited for the… The wig to fly off, whatever it might be. Yeah, okay, wonderful. Well, yeah, so we recorded three podcasts in Britain’s heatwave and we’re pleased to be doing it on a more reasonable day essentially. So this episode, as some people listening will know, we’ve done a few sort of quite big deep dive episodes lately. Matthew had to carry both Phoenix Wright and Zelda, which was a lot to ask of him. And 2009 was a big one too. So this episode, much more straightforward. We don’t do much talking about the stuff we’ve been playing this year. So this podcast is all about that basically. They don’t have to be games from this year, but it’s just the stuff we’ve been playing. Matthew, did you enjoy being able to audit what you’ve been playing this year? I’d say a lot of the stuff I’ve played has bubbled up on the podcast. And in fact, the podcast has shaped a lot of what I have played, weirdly. But yeah, it’s a weird, weird year. So I’m kind of intrigued to see, you know, how that’s sort of reflected in both of our habits. Yeah, let’s start with that, because this year so far is what it was always going to be, which is inevitably a lesser year for big games. We always knew the pandemic would catch up this year and not last year, because, you know, when it comes to blockbuster game development, the things get pushed back by the pandemic and stuff like motion capture and things like that. So developers have to find solutions to that stuff. Also, you know, some developers are bound to be as productive sort of during that time, but other developers, maybe not so much, because, you know, it takes a massive mental health toll to work at home during a pandemic. So, you know, there’s a lot of reasons why games might be delayed, all of which I think are completely reasonable. But what do you think of 2021 so far? Do you think it’s likely to be remembered as a great year for games? Not massively, I think because of the hit in the kind of triple A space or the delays that are mostly occurring there, those games have maybe stepped aside a bit to allow a kind of tier of indie or lesser known kind of games to sort of maybe rise to the surface a bit, maybe get a few more eyes on them than they would usually get, which is a good thing. Whatever the quality of those is like noticeably any better than usual. I’m not getting that vibe so far. That’s kind of sort of roughly it for me. It’s a different year, not necessarily a better year. Yeah, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously there are lots of different sort of indie games around still and there are still some big releases. Your Hitman 3, your Resident Evil Village, your Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, Returnal. There’s been like some blockbusters. But when you look through, not that this is like a barometer of anything really, but the top 20 of Metacritic definitely feels more muted than it would normally in a normal year. So the number one game of the year so far on Metacritic is The House in Fata Morgana Dreams of the Revenants Edition at 98% on Nintendo Switch. Is that because it’s only just crossed the threshold to be on Metacritic and it just hasn’t been reviewed by other people? Yeah, it’s had eight reviews, but yeah, 98, so yeah. But this happens sometimes. I think there’s like one year where Half-Life 2 loses out to like a baseball management sim or something. And it’s like, that’s just how Metacritic works, I guess. And then that isn’t me saying that had more people reviewed Fata Morgana, it would be a lower score. It’s meant to be a very good visual novel, but you can easily see it being championed by a few visual novel addicts. Yeah, for sure. And so there’s that. Then it’s number two is Disco Elysium, The Final Cut, which is a game from another year. Microsoft Fight Simulator is number three on Xbox Series X. That’s a game from another year. Number four is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2. Again, a game from another year, about, well, from last year, but also a game from like 20 years ago. Then you get to Chickory, A Colorful Tale. And, you know, no argument from me about that being on there. I know a lot of people love it. I’ve not played it yet. And then Mass Effect Legendary Edition, three games from other years. Then you get to It Takes Two, which is, you know, a legit choice to have up there. And a lot of people like that. That might end up being a proper game of the year contender on people’s lists this year. But then, yeah, then you get to FF7 Remake Integrate, a game from last year that is a game from 1997. Then it’s Super Mario 3D World and Bowser’s Fury, a game from 2013. And then, yeah, you got Tony Hawks on Xbox at number 10. And you have to get to number 12 before you get to another original game from this year, which is Wildermyth, which I know some of the PC game a lot are quite enjoying. So I’ve not played it yet. But yeah, so and then, yeah, after that is Ratchet and Clank at number 15 with 88. And then Great Ace Attorney Chronicles at number 16. So yes, good old Shootakumi delivering the goods. Again, but again, two games from like five years ago. So yeah, but no, I think there’s plenty of good stuff in there, but yeah, it’s feeling very unlikely at this point, it’s gonna be a banner year just based on the fact that, you know, we know largely what’s coming out this year. I mean, we’ve got Forza Horizon 5, which is a great godsend really. It’s not a very good fit for like the tastes of this particular podcast. I’m not talking about the individual games, like individually, there’s been lots of stuff, you know, that I know we’ve both enjoyed, but I would say a theme of this podcast is kind of like some of the weird stuff that happens just under like the super mainstream, you know, it’s the kind of the magic of the seven and the eight out of 10. And they don’t seem to really exist this year. Like it feels like at the end of this year, everyone’s going to have played the same games. Like it’s going to be, it’s going to have been quite easy to have played, you know, all the new, new, highly rated games. It’s not like a lot of stuff’s going to slip through the cracks and you’ll be like, well, let me help you discover this hidden gem. There’s a space to be on top of stuff, which feels quite rare. So I don’t know about you Matthew, but I’ve used this as a year to catch up, like a very, to be honest, a very welcome year to catch up. I could have done this last year, but there were actually loads of new games last year still, and I kind of wasted 2020 by just playing Apex Legends and nothing else. But this year, I’ve really enjoyed just knocking off a bunch of big single player games. So those are the ones I’ll focus on this year. How have your habits changed in this quiet year? Like due to the nature of the work, you know, because I’m outside of this podcast, this isn’t my only, my only job. You know, I freelance and so as has been the case for many years, a lot of my game playing is kind of dictated by like what I’m doing for a review and stuff. And even though it has been a slower year, like there’s been like, you know, regular work and stuff coming in and yeah, a lot of that stuff has been dictated by that. I’ve spent a huge amount of time replaying the Ace Attorney games, partly out of just hype for great Ace Attorney, partly because it was time, partly because we had this podcast, you know, that we did last week coming up and I wanted to kind of get ahead of it. And you know, once I played one, I was kind of on that. So yeah, like I don’t think I’ve used it to plug any gaps. I’ve replayed a few things, which, you know, when we talk about the games we’ve been playing, I can sort of bring up, but the few gaps I have plugged have been quite weird niche things. I think I’m slightly more on top of new releases than you, just because I, you know, I still do games sort of full-time as a job. Yeah, I think that’s fair. Like there’s a, there’s still, so I’ll go through a bunch of the stuff I’ve been playing after this, well, me and Matthew will alternate on games we’ve been playing this year. But I’ve still got three like big AAA things from the last generation I want to knock off before things get busy this generation, which is God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and what was the other one? What is the other one? Oh, Red Dead Redemption 2, which I’ve still never played. So, you know, yeah, I’ve played the first chapter of it, but obviously those are like three quite chunky games. So, but they’ll take, I’m sure they’ll take up the rest of the year. No problem. And it’s not like they’re going to be, there’s going to be a lot of competition. There’s some stuff coming out this year. I definitely want to play like Halo Infinite. Maybe I should play the original Psychonauts. I can play Psychonauts 2. That’ll be, that’ll be rad, I’m sure. No More Heroes 3 is coming out this year, of course. And Death Leap, of course, which is our most highly anticipated game on this podcast by miles and miles. Can’t wait to play that. So, it’s looking like a whole year of catching up for me. And then next year, I think I’ll be, I’ll be pretty, at that point, I think I would have played pretty much every major game from last generation that I wanted to play. So, I valued having the chance to catch up. Like you say, it’s partly a career thing. I work in, I cover entertainment, so I don’t play games for reviews. So, I didn’t have time to play 65 hours of great Ace Attorney Chronicles, but you made the time, which I respect. Yeah, okay. So Matthew, let’s talk a little bit about the second half of this year then. So, is there anything I missed there in terms of the games coming up that we’re actually excited about in terms of this podcast and our taste? There’s a couple of like niche things around the edges. There’s that 12 minutes I’m quite excited for, the kind of the time loop murder mystery story. That feels like it should be an Anna Perna interactive game. It is. Did you watch their very good live stream the other day? I didn’t, no. Yeah, it’s sort of, it’s much more tolerable than their lowercase Twitter account. It was full of good stuff. Sorry, they did a tweet about Busted that I saw people saying this is hilarious, Anna Perna knocking out the park. It was all like, I saw that kind of lowercase, like, you know how you just see it on Twitter? It’s kind of like a very affected lowercase Twitter. Oh, it’s a night mix. It’s harder to write in lowercase because my phone will correct it. I have to go out of my way if I want to do that. Yeah, that’s like such an affectation. I’m not interested, frankly, but the live stream was excellent. There was loads of good stuff in there. And yes, 12 Minutes is one of those. And they got a bunch of collaborations coming up with the likes of No Code and- Yeah, that’s exciting. Did they say like the nature of that? Like what is they’re kind of working on? It’s too early, I think, to talk about, but it sounded like it’s going to be ambitious for them. The last two games have kind of escalated an ambition. So, you know, maybe this one will just be like a full blown sort of experience or whatever. But it was also the Outer Wilds DLC, Matthew. Kind of hard to imagine what it would be based on that game being so kind of self-contained and tightly knit, you know, the logic and of the kind of time loop, you know, you can’t just be like, here’s another planet. I don’t think that would work. So yeah, I’m really intrigued to see if what they do with it. I mean, have you played Outer Wilds? Yeah, I played about four or five hours of it twice. And then I forget what the hell’s going on with ancient civilization. And then like my own tragic time loop, I have to start the game again. Except you’re forced to carry on with that. You can’t just give it up and go and play something else. There’s a few stretches of that game, which are like a bit more linear. Like they’re almost a couple of like, it’s probably overstating it to describe them as like Zelda dungeons. But there are a couple of bits in that game where you are stuck in a more linear succession of kind of sort of physics puzzles or weird room puzzles or sort of gadget puzzles. It’s a side of the game, I think, sort of underappreciated. The grand scale of it is so amazing. I think people forget that there’s some like minute to minute really like ingenious use of of like the rules of that world. And I wondered from their little teaser if it’s going to be like more of that kind of stuff because it all seemed to be sort of interior shots of like a temple type thing. I just wonder if they’re going to be like leaning into that puzzle building bit. I mean, it’s out in like a month, so we don’t have that long to wait to find out. But yeah, I’m pumped. I’m pumped for that. I’m really excited for The Artful Escape. Oh, yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I played that E3 in 2017 and it didn’t look that different in 2017. But it was amazing. Like I played it on the show floor. I remember just coming away from the demo thinking I couldn’t really hear it because the E3 is so shitty for that. Even in those conditions, this audio heavy game, you were like, that’s going to be amazing playing that at home with like a good pair of headphones, like just the genre of music it’s tapping into and the visual style and the combination of sort of music, game and platform. I thought it was so good. And yeah, like four years is quite a long time to wait for it. Apparently the dude took so long because in the middle of it, he just wrote like a folk album. Oh yeah, that happens to me all the time in the middle of a piece of freelance. Imagine saying that like, you know, I talk to Edge and I’m like, oh, sorry, Edge, I don’t have that review because I had to write a folk album instead, but you can have a free copy. The guy who makes it is called Johnny Galvatron. I mean, is that his Christian name or like? You know, if that’s what he wants to call himself, like I got a lot of time for it. He’s quite a character, I think. I think he was actually like a pop star, an Australian pop star. Okay. Well, you know, that’s not the expertise of this podcast. So yeah, there was a shot in it that looked exactly like the fight with Sin on the air ship in Final Fantasy X. And I was there thinking, oh, I wonder if he was like inspired by this at all. But the imagery generally just looked amazing. I’m quite looking forward to the sequel to Judgment as well. The Yakuza detective spinoff that comes out in September as well, Lost Judgment. I think it’s like the detective going undercover in a school for some kind of school murder. Like that Steve Buscemi 30 Rock meme. The guy is clearly in his late 30s, if not 40s. It’s absolutely preposterous. Maybe something’s got lost in translation and he’s not going undercover as a student. Maybe he’s a teacher or something, a substitute teacher. But yeah, it’s got big how do you do fellow kids energy. There’s been some quite weird stuff about that game not being on PC. Did you hear anything about this? Yeah, it seemed like it was some quite sensitive brand people who don’t understand what gaming is. So they’re going to end the series as a result, apparently? Is that right? Yeah, like his talent agency don’t want it on PC. Because again, this is slightly morphed from their mouths to my ear, that like, they consider PC like a bit more of a dangerous space, because you can like manipulate it a bit more easily. And I guess they didn’t want people doing like naked mods of their star or something, was what I read. But Sega have got this, you know, we want everything on PC policy. And so those two things don’t match and something has to give and Sega would rather just not do any more judgment games, or there would not be any more judgment games, rather than work with those conditions. Yeah, I mean, you know, Sega has done some absolutely fucking boss stuff on PC with the Japanese games for recent years. So you know, fair play, you know. Yeah, it’s a shame, because we’ll get to a bit later, I’ve been replaying it on PS5 and how well those games run does impact like the impressiveness of some elements of it. So it’s a shame that judgment currently isn’t on PC. I’m quite actually excited for Death Stranded Director’s Cut. Yeah, I sort of, I was reading that all I have to do is put my PS4 disc in and my PS5 pay like nine quid or something, then I just get the director’s cut. That seems pretty good. I think some of the messaging, generally this generation about this like upgrade and what’s paid and what isn’t paid is a bit of a nightmare. Generally it’s sort of a huge pain in the arse, but if there’s anyone I would trust to kind of revisit their game in an interesting way, it is Kojima. Like he has pretty good, what I say, pretty good form. You know, there have been like, what was the, you know, what was the Metal Gear Solid 3, which one which got quite a do over? Yeah, so Subsistence is the one that added the both an online multiplayer and a 3D, proper 3D camera and even Substance, for Metal Gear Solid 2 added like a whole bunch of VR levels and stuff to extend the sort of lifespan of the game. So yeah, I agree he’s got good form with this stuff. Yeah, so like that’s, you know, I’m into that. He also said like, didn’t he come out on Twitter saying, you know, I didn’t call it Director’s Cut because it makes it sound like it was, it was slightly kind of compromised in some way, the original Death Stranding. But I mean, no offense to Hideo Kojima, but I believe he had the power to change that if he wanted to. Like it’s, there’s no way that name would have existed without him signing off. Sorry, mate. I don’t believe you. You could have changed that to whatever dumb bull, you called it Death Stranding. You could have changed that to whatever dumb bullshit you wanted to, and it would have been fine. Death Stranding, big baby edition. I was curious, actually, there’s such a long game and you’ve played it before. Like, will you play it again in this version? Waiting to see more about like what has and hasn’t been added. But like on paper, yeah, if it’s like sort of like systemic stuff and you know, he’s been talking about like growing out the like the social kind of shared world stuff, which would have quite a big impact on how you play the whole thing. Like if you’ve got more gadgets you can place in the world and like more weird ways of like messing with the landscape, like that would quite radically change your whole journey through it. Yeah. Well, that will probably mark the first time I play that game. I just think coming to it a bit later, once all the nonsense had subsided just about what that game was going to be, you could just sort of enjoy it and appreciate it a bit better. Like if you go back and maybe I said this on the podcast at the time, I can’t remember, but if you go back and read like the original Death Stranding reviews for PS4, they’re kind of like embarrassingly shit because it’s lots of people like, oh, we’re wrestling with this thing. No one can comprehend this thing. And actually it’s not that complicated and it’s just quite an enjoyable game. Like I feel like it got massively missolved by the critics because everyone was kind of so wrapped up in the weirdness of the campaign beforehand and you know, the kind of promotional hype. A little bit of distance really helped that game. And I’m interested if even further distance with this Directors Cup may see it like appraised again on console. Yeah, I’ll look out for that too. There was a couple more games from the Annapurna theme that I wanted to highlight, Matthew. So there’s obviously Solar Ash coming out from the Hyper Light Drifter developers, like a 3D action game that’s coming out on 26th October. That’s on PlayStation and Epic Games Store. And I don’t know about you, but I thought that the card based shooter game Neon White looked a lot better in its showing this time. That’s out later this year too and that’s coming out on Xbox Game Pass. But yeah, so Annapurna actually has like, you know, a bunch of cool stuff coming out in the second half of this year. It’s mad that that’s the Donut County guy, right? Yeah. That’s quite a shift, isn’t it? Yeah, I kind of respect that, you know, it’s like, yeah, it’s I will just make a single player speedrunning FPS where it’s like parkour and it looks draws from similar influences to Paradise Killer, or at least, you know, superficially, it looks kind of similar. But yeah, so yeah, yeah, good stuff from them. I’m excited about that. But any others from you Matthew, stuff you’re looking forward to? I can’t remember if you’ve already said Forza Horizon 5. I can’t really imagine it being bad. That team is just very good at building on the strengths of the last one, bombing around Mexico, throwing incredibly expensive cars off the top of volcanoes and things. That should be a laugh. We’ve been watching at lunchtimes the anime Demon Slayer. Oh, right. Yeah, the massively popular anime that is definitely made for teenagers. But there’s a video game adaptation of that, which normally wouldn’t have been on my radar at all. But as you’re watching this show, it’s basically just a boss rush. There’s very little going on in that show other than in each episode he meets a new interesting monster and has to fight it in a kind of cool fight. And you think, oh, actually, I would happily play that show, which there is an opportunity to do so when that game comes out later in the year. I was also this morning trying to work out whether I cared about Tales of Arise, but I didn’t really reach a conclusion. Maybe we should have the listener’s vote on that one, Matthew. Does Matthew care? Yes, slash no. Yeah, there’s a few more that I’m curious about. I don’t know if I’ll buy them this year, but I will want to play them, which is we’ve got Aliens Fireteam Elite, which is one of the two Left 4 Dead style games coming out this year. The other one is Back 4 Blood from some of the original Left 4 Dead developers who’ve gone around the house a bit with making Evolve and stuff. So, yeah, I’m curious about those. My regular Monday online games group might be into playing those, hopefully we’ll see. But yeah, those I’m interested in, especially because Back 4 Blood is on Game Pass, so that is a very easy sell. I’ve not read anything about that Aliens one. Is it like… It’s pretty good. Maybe surprisingly good. Surprisingly good? See, that’s what I like, I love a surprisingly good game. I think it’s been in development for quite a long time and it’s just kind of sneaking up but… It’s not a Sega thing. No, no, no, this is another developer. I think it’s like a developer of like… A new developer made up of veterans, something like that. But this was rumoured about… I remember being on PC Gamer when this was rumoured, so this has been in the works for a little while. It sounds like, not an obvious pitch as in lazy, but it feels pre-built as an idea for this kind of game. A lot of heavy lifting is done just by the IP. Yeah, the license and the premise, basically, combined. No, I agree with you. Is it going to be like the race no one wants to have to play as the little girl? I don’t think it’s like you pick Michael Bean, Bill Paxton, Sigourney Weaver. That would be a nightmare because everyone would want to be Paxton, right? Well, I think you’re going to say Bean, everyone would want to be Bean. That’s Apex Mountain for Michael Bean, after all, Matthew, as you know. Yeah, I’d say Paxton’s got more charm to him. I just got an image of lobbies full of Paxtons all saying game over, man, game over. And everyone’s like, oh, Jesus. I’m not exactly sure when Back 4 Blood is out, I didn’t write down when that is. Obviously, Matthew, I’m very excited about Sonic Colors Ultimate coming to PC and other formats. That’s going to be a highlight of the year, I’m sure. There’s also Aragami 2, I thought looked pretty good in one of those E3 showcases, kind of stealth, sort of like a Sekiro-y game, but a bit more of an indie vibe to it. First one meant to be pretty good, the second one I thought looked really decent in the footage. And then, yeah, other than that, I don’t know really, Far Cry 6 is coming out? I’m not much of a Far Cry guy, they’re always beautiful to look at, but I had the same impression with 3, 4 and 5, which is something kind of chaotic happened. I felt like I wasn’t really in control and I sort of walked away from it, but those are enormously popular games, so people must really dig what they do. I’ve played the first 6 hours of Far Cry 3, 4, 5 and I get my fill and I’m like, yep, that’s definitely a Far Cry game. It just doesn’t ever take off for me. That’ll probably be a get it in Black Friday 2022 when it’s 14 quid purchase of Sammy Roberts. The listeners can look forward to hearing about that then. So any more from you Matthew before we move on? Dying Light 2, is that on your radar? It’s had a couple of really impressive showings at Gamescom. I think we’ve talked about the demos before. They’re a little bit almost too good to be true, almost a little bit cyber-punky in that kind of level of scale and depth. I think what they’ve been showing off recently clearly is a thing that exists. Yeah, I’d be interested. Dying Light 1 is surprisingly good. A 7 out of 10, to begin with, that could creep up to a 9 out of 10 if it gets its claws into you. It’s a weird game. I don’t think it starts well at all, but it’s got a lot going on in it. It’s a very generous game. If you’re into it, it really keeps you well fed. It’s a proper looks like they’ve bit off more than they can chew kind of game, but I’m curious to see how it turns out. I’m sure we’ll discuss more of these newer games in the coming months, Matthew, but let’s take a short break and then we’ll come back and talk about what we’ve already been playing this year. So, let’s talk about the games we’ve been playing this year. As I mentioned before, they don’t have to be games that actually release this year. It’s just things me and Matthew have been playing, but I think that our regular listeners will enjoy hearing about this stuff. It’s some stuff we’ve not talked about in depth before, and a few games that people have been asking us to kind of check out that we’ve actually made time to check out this year. So, I think people will dig it. Obviously, me and Matthew have already talked about Hitman 3 and Resident Evil Village on this podcast. We both finished it, and we discussed that in the relevant episode. So, if you’d like to know what we thought of those, both of which I’m sure will be in our top five games of the year when it comes down to it, then yeah, you can go back and find those. So Matthew, let’s start with a game that we’ve both been playing. You’ve got Hades on your list. So what were your thoughts on that one? The thing that struck me with this, and every element of this game has been written about, so apologies if any of this sounds like broken records, like how compelling like the world and characters were, and the just awesome delivery method for its story, I thought was just absolutely superb. This idea that it’s this rogue light, I think it is rather than like, like, light. So you’re constantly doing this same gauntlet again and again, and the idea that knowing that you can place this breadcrumb trail of story and law that people can discover at their own pace. So as your mastery of the game grows, so your mastery of the fictional universe sort of grows and deepens and your appreciation for what it is you’re trying to achieve deepens. I thought this was just genius. Yeah, same. So I’m not the world’s biggest Diablo guy. I’ve been playing stuff. I’ve played stuff like, you know, that’s adjacent to this sort of thing over the years. But I think this is a great format, even if you’re not big into that genre, because it’s kind of like really easy to grasp. But obviously the looping nature of it seems intimidating, but it’s clearly baked into how the experience is meant to play out. It’s not like each run doesn’t feel like failure. It feels like you’re meant to fail a certain amount of times before you can actually beat the game. So maybe that changes later on. I’ve not finished a complete run of this still. I’ve got to the, I think, the fourth of the different sort of like biomes as you kind of plot your escape, which I think is the last one. So I’ve gotten pretty far in it. I do love the storytelling. Our guest on the Sonic episode, J. Bayliss, his theory on why this game is so good is that they took their epic GameStorm money and basically spent it on all the voice acting in the world. And I really like that as a theory. And it kind of holds like that. Can you think of any other indie games that have this much voice acting and this much contextual voice acting? It’s really, really impressive. I think it’s the Script Lock podcast, which is about games writing. There’s a really good episode with Greg Castleman about this and about like, because he’s the lead writer on it or the main writer on it. And like the pressure of writing for all these voice acting deadlines, because they’re constantly like layer, you know, they were in early access and they kept like adding new characters or expanding the game. So there was like new dialogue options and just having to be super efficient so that you weren’t getting like the voice actors back in to say like one line, which you may need, because that’s the kind of curse of this is once you’ve committed to an actor and you’ve committed to like slowly building the world out, you know, logistically it becomes a total nightmare. Yeah, the characters are so good though. They’re so like like refreshing takes on like what could be like super cliched things. Yeah, I agree with that. So the horny character designs obviously help with that. Do you have a favorite horny character design, Matthew? I’m not particularly horny for anyone in this game. I don’t know. I don’t really feel that way about pixels. I mean, let’s face it. This is not a horny podcast. Like we are very upfront about that. I was just joking. But I certainly do like the character designs. I really love the way that the different Greek gods come across as like sort of arrogant and like as pricks in all these different ways. They’re like, oh, we can’t see you, but you know, cool. You’re breaking out of the underworld. They’ve sort of like got that attitude like, oh, we know we’re better than you, but good luck anyway, have this power. It’s got like the big energy of like when someone popular has invited you to some place and you’re like ringing them to try and find out and you know, they did it to be polite. They’re like, yeah, of course. Like at E3, say someone’s like, come to our thing in the evening and you’re like fantastic. And you’re trying to ring them to say like, oh, where’s the venue again? But they’re at the party and having fun. The last thing they want to do is take your call. So there’s this kind of like tension there of like, oh, this guy, all right, yeah, we’re just here. Just come, just come, just come. I don’t know, the casual disdain of the popular, you know? Yeah, yeah. That’s nicely summed up. So I’m probably projecting there. No, I think it sums it up quite nicely and I like that it makes you, it gives you affection for the different figures you meet in the Underworld and his relationship with them, especially the bosses he’s fought before where it’s like, oh, can you please, and you go into the bar and they’re like, can you please just leave me alone? And you fought them about five minutes ago and it kind of fights to death kind of thing. Yeah, the palace where you respawn, it almost feels it’s kind of like backstage and then it’s like seeing the actors before they go on and everyone’s just taking a bit of a breather and it’s like, all right, we’re going to do this again. It’s such a fun like take on that. I love that the bosses themselves, like there are different versions of them and there’s like narrative with that as well. So like, you know, the first boss you fight is at Magera. Sometimes it’s her sisters instead and you develop these other relationships with different characters and the fact that there are surprises like that when you’re doing the loop is just is such a cool touch. Also, I think that this game understands more than any other how to write, like, codex text. Like, it’s like here is a tiny bit more text for you to read. We know you don’t want to read any more of this and you want to crack on with the game, but we’ve written a type, we’ve written like one little passage here. It’s well written, it’s entertaining, and then it will take you 10 seconds and you can just go on your way. That is what every video game codex entry should be. And this game totally nails it. It just does a lot with a little in terms of like brevity of lines and things like that. Just one of the best written games I’ve ever played for sure. Yeah, I should really finish it. The variety of different weapons as well, the way they change the combat, it’s such a like a valuable package. It feels like it’s got a lot stuffed into it. And I can see why it’s regarded as like the perfect Switch game. It really is in terms of like you can play it for as much or little as you want. Oh, so good on the Switch, such a such a nice port as well. Oh, yeah, I couldn’t imagine sitting at my computer and playing it. It just, yeah, it got me out of some really bad habits as well, because I’m quite bad in games of getting like tunnel vision. Like when something’s working for me, I’ll stick with it again and again. I find here particularly like everything they can give you or everything you can stumble upon has some worth or some value. So it’s much better of like teasing you into different corners. It loosened me up in a way that most games struggle to. It offers you a bonus for picking a certain weapon on a run, doesn’t it? And so… And everything feels good. So even if it doesn’t like particularly help you or you don’t get particularly far, nothing feels right. Everything is nice to try and nice to test out. Yeah, great stuff. We’d definitely have made like my top 10 last year if I was to revise that top 10. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, I’ll do one of mine then Matthew, which you have also played, which is Ghost Tsushima. I’ve mentioned it on this podcast in Bits and Pieces. That ended up taking way longer than I thought it would. I have no appetite to play this director’s cut, A, because I think it’s going to cost like 25 quid to get the PS5 version, which is like, no, thank you. That’s too much money. And secondly, I’ve more than had my fill of this game and I still haven’t done everything in it. And like the new island looks quite nice in terms of, you know, this whole game looks beautiful. It’s just this sort of like Japanese island setting. But it’s, yeah, it kind of typifies what I think of as being like the draw and like problem with open world games, which is the sort of flatlining nature of it in terms of you’re never like that excited or that bored. It keeps you in a permanent state of like, kind of engaged. And that’s how I thought about Ghost of Shima, I think it does this better than quite a lot of the other ones. I think it’s got better combat Assassin’s Creed, for example. But it’s not so hard or so intricate or anything like that, that it requires that next level of like, sort of adrenaline from you. It’s very sort of gentle, you know, counter attack, like pull off cool moves combat system. And yeah, like I say, it just keeps you in that permanent lull of like, you know, it just gives you enough endorphins to kind of keep going through like 60 hours of it. And so yeah, I definitely kind of enjoyed my journey with it. It’s been a long time since I played a game like this too. And I think that that’s the key with open world games. If you play like four of them in a row, you will absolutely burn out on the kind of like, you know, the box ticking nature of them and like, exploring these maps and all this stuff. Like I think that you can easily easily give up on them if you play too many of them. But it had been about a year and a half since I played one of these. And this was a particularly good one. So I liked it. You never finished this one, did you, Matthew? No, no, I got about, I think, like halfway through the second island. And it had just gone too long without showing me something new. And I thought, nah, like I’d had my fill. Like I’d played it for like, I don’t know, 20 hours or something. I saw some cool stuff. I feel like I’ve seen like one example of everything this game does. I think I’d followed about 8000 foxes at that point. Yeah, like the only thing I think you may be missed out on is when you have the duels with the Ronin in like these quite spectacular cinematic locations. They’re all very straightforward, but they’re like, you’ll just go out into this misty marsh and just see a single dude standing there. And it’s like, yeah, you might have even done those. Oh yeah, I did a couple of those. I thought the best bits in the game were like the side quests for like the legendary weapons, because they kind of took you to sort of slightly more bespoke areas and played with the idea of like navigating the map by like landmarks and stuff. They were kind of sort of like geographical riddles. If I remember correctly, it was like go to where the cliffs part and there is a, you know, a giant blue tree or something. And then you’d go there and there’d be some like weird old ghost warrior who you’d smack around for a hat. You’ve basically got to measure it. Yeah. I think even riddles are slightly generous. It’s just like, you know, do you see a different coloured plant in an area where the plants are otherwise the same colour? Yes. Then there’s probably, there’s probably a ghost there in a hat ready to be twatted on the head. How stupid was everyone in that world that no one else had solved these riddles until you game along? Everyone’s like, no, I don’t, I don’t get it at all. And it’s like, it’s blue, the blue flowers in the field of white flowers. No, no, I’m sorry, I’m afraid not. This legendary weapon is like, it’s in this cove and, you know, I don’t know if it’s true or not. And it takes you five minutes to walk there. And then you go in and it is there. And it’s like, there’s no way that makes any sense. But yeah, I guess that’s just, you know, you have to buy into the illusion of it. I wish sometimes games, if they’re going to go down that route, and they’re going to have something which is an ancient treasure, they had the guts to actually like really hide it. And so when you found it, you felt absolutely awesome rather than, oh, I’m just the three millionth player who found this because it’s so for obvious, it just doesn’t feel particularly special. Yeah, no offense to the developers, but nothing in this game feels like a challenge. It just feels like you’re trying to sort of like, well, there’s a lot of puzzles in this game that are just like climbed to the top of this mountain. It’s like, well, the platforming is so automated feeling that I don’t feel like I’m really solving anything. I just feel like I’m just nudging my character in a certain direction to get to the end. And like, you don’t feel like you’re achieving anything, like you say. So yeah, but that’s not to take away from the combat, which is, you know, I don’t think I died many times in this game, but like, it definitely, the death combat definitely felt good. And it looked nice. It’s very nicely animated. What’s that thing where you kind of strike the pose and then you can kind of kill them instantly at the start? That’s pretty cool. Yeah, there’s like, there’s an ability you get later on where you can do it. I think you get the screen goes red, and then you can do like three kills in a row like that. And it’s, that’s pretty rad, come of what that’s called now. But yeah, it’s, yeah, all of that is, all that is pretty decent. But yeah, if there’s one thing that’s kind of highlighted to me as a player, though, is that I do, I do need that extra layer of like, tension or stress or something just to kind of get my heartbeat racing, which determines some of the other choices I made this year. But we’ll get to that in a bit. So what else have you been playing this year, Matthew? I’ve been replaying the original Judgment game, which I mentioned earlier is the Yakuza Detective spinoff. I liked this originally. I reviewed this, gave it three stars. And like, whenever it pops up on my Twitter feed, it’s always people saying like, this is the best Yakuza game. I know Andy Kelly rates it very highly and talked about it when we had him on the Detective episode, for example. And they obviously re-released it on PS5. On PS4, it was kind of pushing at the limits of it. You know, it was beginning to strain and get a little rough around the edges. And I just wanted something to play on my PS5 that wasn’t 70 quid. So yeah, I got that and I’ve been replaying it. And the Yakuza games in general are just real comfort food. Just being in that location again, and you know it so well. And particularly with this one, it’s a bit more wholesome than the other Yakuza games because you’re not like a gangster. You’re just this private eye and you’re helping lots of people in the community and you know, a big part of the game is about making friends with all the shop owners and restaurant owners and to get like discounts. Well actually, sorry, you’re not helping them to get discounts. You get discounts as a result of helping them. It’s not so self-serving. It’s not about a very greedy detective who sees like a scam to get cheap steak, which is 100% what I would do. Oh, imagine if you could like make friends with JC of JC’s Kitchen and get cheap bubble and squeak. I don’t think I could be friends with JC of JC’s Kitchen because the other day he cancelled my delivery order, Matthew, after half an hour and when the delivery guy was already there ready to take it and he just mysteriously cancelled as it started raining. I love that he’s now doing deliveries. Now he’s on delivery and we were like, fantastic. This has solved the big problem of JC’s Kitchen, which is you never know if it’s going to be open or not and it turns out that it is still governed by whatever arcane rules govern the tent. The one part we’ve maybe not revealed about JC’s Kitchen is don’t we both suspect that JC stands for Jesus Christ and this kind of thing? I think it does. Yeah. I mean, that adds an extra layer of… that will probably blow the minds of our listeners who have been following this saga, which seems to be quite a lot of them at this point. But yeah. Jesus Christ’s Kitchen. I thought he was JC. But he’s not calling himself Jesus Christ, is he? No, but I thought he was JC for a long time. Yeah, so did I, like, John Christopher or something like that, you know what I mean? No, I think… I think there’s a quote on the logo, which I think is biblical. Well, there you go. Is there anything in the Bible about closing when it rains? I don’t know. Yeah, that’s one of the Ten Commandments. Thou shall not sell meat when it rains. Imagine, like, imagine he heard all of this. Like, imagine, like, someone told him about this podcast and the fact that we talk about his meat tent over and over again. Well, listen, it comes… like, if he is listening, I don’t think he is, but if he is, it does come from a place of love, like, it’s because he makes amazing food and I just want to have it on tap. It’s such a shame that the rain can, like, govern his business, like that. Yeah, my heart was broken when that order was cancelled. I was, like, devastated. So… I mean, that is hard. I mean, that’s… So, you and I, we rock up to JC’s Kitchen, there are some ruffians there, we beat the shit out of them as we do, and then we get a permanent discount at JC’s Kitchen. Is that what you’re positing, Matthew? Yeah, the words come up on screen, Bath Uni students, and I pick up a giant novelty plastic ice cream that’s outside the ice cream shop near Bog Island, and I start spinning it around, knock them all out, you throw them down the stairs to Bog Island. I pick up that barrel from Outside Independent Spirit and then just throw it like Donkey Kong. Just absolutely… It’s so niche. If you listen to this podcast and you visit Bath, you’ll be like, oh wow, it really is like that. There really is a giant plastic ice cream cone and a giant barrel right next to Jason’s kitchen. If you want to know about one very specific area of Bath, this podcast has you covered. Okay, good. So, yeah, judgement then. Good game. Kiryu runs like a dream on PS5 and the main character is a lot more acrobatic than Kiryu. He kind of leaps off walls and leapfrogs people and chucks them around. That motion is just so much more satisfying when it’s going at full pelt, sort of 60 frames. I’m not normally a framerate guy, but there I remember thinking, oh, this is what this combat is kind of meant to look like. It’s got me quite excited for Lost Judgment actually. I’m really up for it now. Do you play with subs or dub? Always subs. Yeah, I was going to say, because I watched the trailer for Lost Judgment and I found it really bewildering seeing those guys open their mouths and then English voices come out of them. That didn’t seem right at all. The localisation on those games is amazing. Probably is like Ace Attorney levels of excellence in terms of translating quite like regional gags and things into English. But you can appreciate all that with the subtitle files, you don’t need to hear it. And the fact that they’ve hired this Japanese actor to play the character and voice it, I don’t know, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Like I wouldn’t watch a dubbed film. I don’t watch anything dubbed. I love that his representatives don’t mind an English dude’s voice coming out of his mouth, but they won’t put the game on PC. I mean that really is like, um, bewildering. He does some like really weird shit in that game as well. Like you can dress him up as like a vampire and sort of walk around looming at people in the background, which is daft. But there’s a big side quest storyline about these like legendary perverts that you’re hunting. They’re the Twisted Trio they’re called. And all of those set pieces are like pretty wild. I mean he’s not doing anything perverted himself, but he is sharing the screen with like this sort of eight foot tall naked dude with like a giant fig leaf over his crotch. Ah, it must be every Yakuza side quest. Oh yeah, sorry. Yeah, that. Oh, our client doesn’t want to look silly. Like it’s a silly game. You were signed up to be in a very silly game, but I guess they just don’t people like, you know, modding it so he’s not wearing any trousers or anything. Heaven forbid. Well now the problem is if they ever do release on PC now, that will definitely happen because that’s what that’s what the PC gaming community is like. They will like they’ll do the thing to piss the people off. If it came out on PC, all that would happen is that people would swap his character model with the eight foot guy with the fig leaf over his crotch and you’d play the whole game as him. That’s what would happen. Yeah, well, Matthew, that leads in nicely to the games I was going to talk about next, which is Yakuza Zero and Yakuza Kiwami. So for years, I’ve been putting off the Yakuza games, then doing the Yakuza podcast is kind of a catalyst for me finally playing these and I’ve finished both of them now. And yeah, I very much enjoyed the experience. I was curious, Matthew, why did you decide to play Judgment again, rather than just playing continue with the Yakuza series? Because you got up to the same point I did, right? There’s a bit of practicality to it because I’m trying to like review the sequel when it comes out as well. So I figured it would help with that if I just kind of refresh myself. It really was. I just wanted to play something shiny on my PS5 because I spent all that money on it. And I haven’t, I’ve basically only played Resident Evil Village on it, which seems bad. I got a cheap copy of this. So it’s quite a boring, practical decision. But you’re right, like I’ve got a pile of like five other Yakuza games I also need to play. Well, I’ve got Returnal, Demon’s Souls and Miles Morales if you ever need to borrow a PS5 game, so just let me know. But yeah, so Yakuza 0 and 1, I mean, they are like, these are old feeling games at this point, both I think released these remakes, well, the remake of the first one and the end zero, the prequel released on PS3 as well. So they are old looking games by today’s standards, but I nonetheless enjoyed them very, very long. What I found weird Matthew is how, how even though Kiwami is a remake of the first game, it manages to feel like an expansion pack for Yakuza Zero. And I think it’s because relative to the length of Yakuza Zero, it’s quite a short game. And also the fact that it just has like, it has far less stuff in it, far less stuff to do. Very, very few interesting side quests, not, I think the side quest quality was quite poor overall actually. Yeah, just, just generally doesn’t feel like it’s got, it’s got as much going on, which is probably just a sign of how the series managed to evolve over the years and become more interesting and grow all these different strands. So Zero ends up feeling like a more confident game by comparison. But yeah, I very much enjoyed the sort of, the experience of going through that, that story. I think that it’s, I’m kind of like locked into it now, but I think someone pointed out online that if you play too many of these in a row, it’s a bit like Ace Attorney where you kind of need a little break between them really, or you might burn out on them. And there are just so many of them. So yeah, I don’t know. They do sort of blur into one another, though at the same time, I do like the fact that when someone tells me to go somewhere on the map, I know where it is. Like I don’t have to look at the map constantly. I’m like, oh yeah, I can get, I can basically get from anywhere to anywhere in that world. Like if I was to take that test they make taxi drivers take in London, I think I could do it for Camera Rok Show. Yeah, yeah, that’s good. I mean, it is only like four streets or something like that. I know. I mean, those taxi drivers have quite a, and also you can’t, seemingly there’s no taxi cars in the edge of it. Like they all park around the outside of the map, so you just have to drive around the ring road constantly. Yeah, it’s sort of like, I don’t know if it’s a high paying gig, but it seems like it’s a pretty simple one. But yeah, I enjoyed that. Like there was that very bizarre sort of like women wrestling mini game in Kiwami. I couldn’t get into that. I never got into the boxcar stuff in Zero, and so when it came up again in Kiwami, it didn’t really mean much to me. Yeah, there’s always like a thing in these games, which I’m like, I just don’t want to connect. You know, I really hope this isn’t going to be essential for anything. In judgment, it’s like drone racing. Like I’m just not interested in flying a drone around. And of course, they all have the perennial favorite, Shogi. Yeah, the also the big weakness of Kiwami, I think you mentioned in previous, the previous episode is that you have to escort that little girl around and she’s not very interesting. That detective dude isn’t very interesting either. He’s kind of he’s a bit of a drag that guy. And then obviously as well, like it’s quite hard to stomach what happens between Kiyo and Nishiki in that game after playing Zero, because you’re like, oh, man, we just but dude, we kick so much ass in the 80s, do you know what I mean? You just wish there was a button prompt to say that. You feel like so much stuff could be fixed just by reminding them of that. Yeah, just remember the 80s. Like remember the 80s. He said, oh, yeah, it was good. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the end of the game. So you’re right. Let’s go and play that weird sexy Beatle game. So yeah, I enjoyed those. I will crack on with Kiwami 2. I’m just trying to I’m just debating whether I’m going to play on PC with a nicer frame rate or on my PS4 where I’ve already got the version for it. So I don’t know. I will think about that. But yeah, I’m pleased like these crack the games this year. That was something I was I’d always wanted to do. So yeah. So what have you got next to me, Matthew? So I’ve got an interesting one, Raging Loop, which is a visual novel I played on Switch. I think it actually came out last year, if not the year before. Have you heard of this at all? No, I haven’t. It sounds like a proper, to be honest, like, the name doesn’t really sound very distinctive. And but I know nothing about it at all. So the concept is, you know, this sort of dude driving through the night on a motorbike and you have a crash and you kind of arrive in this sort of strange village, which is on the cusp of having a kind of a ritual and everyone’s a little kind of freaked out. There’s this outsider in the village and it soon sort of transpires. Very mild spoiler a little bit is the setup of the game. They’re kind of plagued by werewolves. The village kind of gets locked down by this sort of mysterious mist so you can’t escape and it gets sort of thrust into this sort of like life or death game against these werewolves where the villagers are trying to hunt the werewolves and if they can kill the werewolves before they kill them, they win or vice versa. Much like the board game werewolves, if you’ve ever played that werewolf, the party game where you’re trying to identify who in the group is a werewolf. It’s basically the rules of that, but kind of applied as this sort of mythology to this village. This is like proper visual novel, strictly linear. You maybe make like 20 choices over the course of like 30, 40 hours, you know, it’s mostly sitting there and just listening to reams and reams of dialogue because it is based on that kind of party game. It kind of mimics the discussions you have playing those kind of games where everyone’s in a room and you’re all trying to logic, well, like if he was a werewolf, then he would say this because he wants us to think it’s this person. Even though you don’t have any kind of like role in it particularly, like there’s, you know, you’re not really doing any logic yourself, you’re going to get really wrapped up in the drama and the discussions. It gets like surprising mileage at the situation as well. It’s quite hard to talk about without spoiling. Yeah, I thought this was kind of rad. If you like weird mysteries, it will happily eat up tens and tens of hours. It definitely looks very lo-fi, even for a visual novel. But it kind of, I don’t know, like the voice acting, just the quality of the writing and the quality of like the set up. It sort of works. I mean, I’ve not played enough visual novels that I feel like we’ll kind of talk about them in any kind of sophisticated way about. I imagine there are a lot of subtle techniques which define which of these games do and don’t work well. And those techniques are a bit of a mystery to me. It’s something I am trying to get into, like I’m trying to play more of them and when there is like so little going on, you know, very minor things can make a big impact. So like font choices or the flow of text or the speed of text, like quite technical stuff like that. I’m kind of kind of interested in the art of why these things work and some of us don’t. Yeah, there are a few authorities out there in the media who know this stuff very well. I’d say you’re like, you must be like relative to other critics, pretty up there Matthew by now. On the mags I was on, I felt like if we had one of these things, I’d be, you know, I’d be on top of it. But like there are sites dedicated to this stuff or like Oscar over on Play Magazine. When I talked to him about visual novels, he knows unbelievable amounts. I mean, he must have played like hundreds of these things. I only play the ones which like break into the mainstream. So I feel like a bit of a phony. Yeah, I think Melinda Hedfeld is an expert as well. Yeah. There are definitely people who really know this stuff. So yeah, maybe that’s a subject we’ll revisit down the line. I think we talked about it. Yeah, I think there could be a good episode in that. I feel like there’s some really awesome stuff just out of reach, which, you know, I’d like to know about for sure. Yeah, that’s something we will, we will ponder some more. So, yes, good stuff, Matthew. That’s an interesting recommendation. Is that one of those visual novels that cost a fucking fortune on Switch, or is this one actually recently published? I think it was like 25 quid or something. I think I probably played it for about 40 hours. It was pretty chunky, so. Yeah, you know, not bad, is it? It’s like buying a DVD box set in 2008. If you compare it to something like that, you’re like, well, yeah, sure, and it was good. I’m pleased that I played it. Okay, good stuff. Well then, Matthew, we come to probably like the biggest one for me in terms of like, you know, like stuff to say about the game in question. The Last of Us Part 2. So I think a few people have been tweeting me hoping that we talk about it on this podcast. And so here we are, like, it’s definitely one we missed out a bit on the best games 2020 episode because you chose not to put in your top 10 and I hadn’t played it. I found the conversation around it a bit suffocating last year. So yeah, I muted every possible term I could every character name I could and then just carried on with my life in the pandemic and, you know, and then came back to it a year later. So I had a week off last week and I just played through the whole thing in a week basically. And yeah, so I have a question for you, Matthew. Do you think a game can be perfectly paced in terms of level design and like combat sandboxes and escalating challenges and all that sort of thing, while also having some pacing problems in its story? Because that’s kind of how I feel about The Last of Us Part 2. I think it’s like, I think the escalation of challenge in this game, the combat sandboxes that Naughty Dog builds, the way that the challenge escalates, the sort of variety and level design, all that stuff is kind of perfect and comes to a really nice crescendo with the change of location at the end of this game. But in terms of story, it feels quite flabby and I feel like they could have cut maybe three to four hours out of it. Is that how you feel about The Last of Us? And I feel like with The Last of Us, the story conversation always drowns out like the rest of the game, which is like, like you say, probably the better made bit. I think it’s the best game, game that Naughty Dog’s made. So early on in the game, there’s a safe puzzle where the solution is 0451. So anyone who’s played an immersive sim game will know what that’s a reference to. It’s like Deus Ex and it’s got a long, long lineage. So this game has obviously elements of the immersive sim, but it can’t really be played that way. I don’t think it doesn’t have that level of like variety. Obviously you can’t do a non-lethal playthrough in this game. It’s an incredibly violent game. But as a kind of stealth action game, it’s very, very satisfying. I think you have to get into the notion that you’re not always going to be able to stealth your way out of a situation. And sometimes it’s just easier to start a fight and more fun to start a fight than it is to try and like be sneaky or whatever. That’s not always the case. But also, it can’t count itself as one of those games because one of its enemy types, the Bloater, can’t even be killed in stealth. So there’s a certain amount more combat to this than there would be in other stealth games. And it kind of like walks the line between the two in a way where I don’t think it’s like a really great stealth game. But in terms of like a hybrid stealth action game, I think it’s really, really good. And I think they thought really carefully about the different sort of like, I don’t know, topography of the levels, the sort of the different heights of the levels and like how the enemies would be distributed. And there’s one level that’s like a kind of firing range where there’s like enemies on a broken tall building in front of you and you’re going to get into a sniper battle no matter what. That’s just part of what that level is. And then there’s other times where you’re just in, you know, like grotty apartment blocks, very sneakily, kind of like trying to stab enemies before they see you. And the variety of those, they built so much game for this, Matthew, it’s kind of, it’s amazing. I think it’s like on that level, amazing. Is that how you felt about it? Yeah, very much so. As much as I love a really precise stealth game, this one works because it is quite like hazy and sort of unpredictable. Like there’s attention to it that even the best stealth play can kind of go wrong because of some slightly kind of chaotic elements, or some sort of ambiguities in it. It’s sort of designed to go sort of wrong on purpose in quite a fun way. And when it does, the combat is like a scrappy sort of fight for survival, unintentional and wrong and a bit desperate. Like it’s very rare that you’re just openly a kind of competent aggressor in this. If that’s one of my criticisms of the game, like the way it has these two halves to it kind of focusing on different characters. For my money, the actual action in both parts feels a little too similar. I do wonder if it would have been more interesting if you’d felt like a very different action presence in the second half of the game. But maybe those characters do feel a bit more distinct to you as you played it more recently. Well, I do actually disagree a little bit because obviously… Okay, that’s alright. Like I say, you’ve played it recently so… Well, I think that it doesn’t feel like you’re starting the game again when you take over the role of the second character. It feels like the game is continuing in terms of like, you know, obviously there’s the story through line of this game, but then there’s also the through line of how the action escalates that is, you know, more closely linked to like the level and combat design. And that, I feel like, that kind of continues to kind of grow in challenge as it goes. Like it becomes… And because that second playable character has a slightly different armoury, like a flame thrower and a crossbow, whereas Ellie’s obviously got like a bow and, yeah, slightly different kind of set up. Obviously, the second character is a bit more physical as well. She’s a bit more sort of like brutal physically, she can like beat up enemies in a way that Ellie can’t, who kind of scrambles around environments and stuff. I think that… I don’t think it like changes the game. It doesn’t make it a different game. There’s definitely more they could have done to make it more varied for sure. I suppose that’s maybe something you become more aware of because of the game’s like massive length so you have more and more time to think about this stuff. Oh, you just forget. By the end of it, it’s quite easy to have forgotten a lot of the stuff of the first half. You know, so maybe you like… it blurs into this massive like, wow, that was like 25 hours of like the same thing. Yeah, yeah. But I got to say, compared to the first… so here’s how I felt about the first game in the series, The Last of Us, in 2013. So I thought… I found the combat very frustrating and like half realized. And I thought there were times where it was easier just to fire your gun, throw down a bomb and then try and blow up five enemies as they scramble towards you. And I think this is better in giving you different enemy types, in making the stealth more coherent, and giving you such a vast armory that you feel like you’ve got a good variety of ways to deal with different enemies. So I think it’s like tons stronger in that regard, I found that really confident. And yeah, I just I thought that, yeah, I think building on Uncharted 4, which had the best combat in that series, this is even better and bodes well for whatever they make next. And unlike Uncharted 4, which did have sections cut from the game, because, you know, they had to get it done in quite a short timeframe, there is, I was reading about this in Jason Shrier’s book, but there was originally a collapsing crane sequence in the Scotland section of Uncharted 4 that they had to cut out the game because they just didn’t have time to finish it. And that definitely feels like the weakest part of that game. Not that it’s bad, I obviously love Uncharted 4. But this, this feels like they’ve made no compromises. I don’t think I’ve ever played a Naughty Dog game like it where it feels like there are like no compromises in how they’ve done it. It’s just, they had time to make an absolute fuckton of game for it. And I think that that then spills over though, into the story being a bit too flabby and self-indulgent. So, you know, in the first game, it was set over different seasons, you had snapshots of the story, whereas in this one, you see the entire journey. And it means that it means the whole sections feel quite languid by comparison. Is that why you weren’t as big on it, Matthew? I feel like I kind of know a lot of Naughty Dog’s tricks as well. There’s stuff, particularly on the story side, that when they do it, I feel like I’m just ticking off like, oh, okay, it’s that again, or they’re doing this. And I can’t get into it, you know, I can’t get like immersed in what’s actually happening. The rules of their storytelling, I guess, are a little bit too obvious to me. And, you know, it comes down to the kind of the sort of the interactive cut scene, which is a thing they’re really big on, which is the kind of a big character development beat, where two people sort of chat and have fun social interactions by pressing triangle next to bits of the level. It’s like stuff which gets all the memes and it’s the stuff which a lot of people gravitate towards because it’s like the few moments of lightness in often quite unhappy games. I find them very boring and out of step with action elsewhere. A couple of them, like by all means, like have them as rare things, but this game leans on them so much. There’s so many like flashbacks and the magic of that has totally worn off. Ever since Uncharted 2 Oxpatting, you know, which we’ve talked about before. It’s the Oxpatting moment. It’s all the problems I had with the epilogue to Uncharted 4, Rit Large. But some people love that. Like that for a lot of people, I get the impression they think, man, I wish I could fuck off all this stealth play. I just want to have spend time with these characters doing like dumb jokes in like museums and fucking around with hats and stuff. And you’re like, okay, but like you said, it is Naughty Dog completely uncompromised, but it’s also like Naughty Dog completely unedited. Yeah, that seems to be the kind of like the sort of the price of it, I suppose. I will say, I like that stuff more than you, but I do agree this game had too much of it. Someone in Naughty Dog really fucking loves aquariums, right? I mean, you spend ages in that aquarium in this game. There’s a bit where you flush back to like the zoo. No, it’s not the zoo. It’s the history. Is it the history museum? That’s right. Yeah, like a science history thing. There’s some really nice stuff in there and actually, if that had just been the only one, I probably wouldn’t have had a problem with it. There’s also this weird tension that is that scene going to turn into an action scene at some point? Which is quite nicely done, sort of hangs over it. You’re like, oh, okay, you could do something different with it. And whether or not they do, I won’t spoil. But in the second half, there seemed to be like 8,000 flashbacks to like Sea World. Maybe that’s overstating it, but like you spend a lot of time walking around that aquarium. And that just wasn’t interesting to me. I think it’s the style of the scene rather than the characters themselves. I think I agree with you on that. I think it’s partly, I think the game is working hard to make you like this set of characters that is, you know, not the set of characters you’re familiar with. We’re avoiding story spoilers here because I managed to avoid all story spoilers for this game. Don’t know how. There’s like, you know, a couple of like howling great spoilers for this game that I have just completely avoided in the year since, so I did some good muting there. But yeah, so I think people deserve to discover what those secrets are because they’re, you know, they definitely have an emotional impact. And yeah, so by having the second playable character, they’re trying to make you invested in their world and their sort of like little ensemble. And I would say that the game is only semi successful in that it does it for a very clear reason the amount of time it puts into that. But I think that it does mean that it’s weighed down slightly where you do get to the end of an action sequences are back to the fucking aquarium. It’s like, yeah, I get it. Oh, and you’ve got your boat and you live in a fucking like, you know, a whale cave or whatever. Like, I mean, well done, mate, you’ve done it, you’ve congratulations. And that I sort of I, again, I understand exactly why they did it all. But there’s the second half of the game feels flabby in the first half. You’re like, I just wish this is just slightly leaner than it is a super unhappy time the second half as well. Yeah, it is. It doesn’t help. So here’s the other thing I really loved about it, Matthew. So if I had another criticism of the first game, it felt like the road but PG 13 to me, with the exception of the kind of like finale where Joel kills the fireflies and makes a decision to take Ellie out of the hospital. All that stuff is very dark. The rest of it felt like, oh, I feel like I’m playing the Hollywood version of something like a grisly post apocalyptic drama. This game is one of the most violent pieces of mainstream entertainment ever made. Like it is so brutal from the death animations to the tone of it. Some of the mad shit you see in the second half of this game. It’s like, it really is completely uncompromised. I was curious how you felt about that tone difference between the first and second games. To me, I really admired how uncompromising it is and I feel like it earned how violent it is. I would agree with that. I mean, to be honest, it may sound like a frivolous remark, the whole time I just kept thinking of like the poor bastards who had to kind of make that stuff. I kept thinking of like the sound guy and how every day you come in and see your like to-do list and it’s kind of, oh today we need like what it sounds like when someone kills a dog with a hammer, you know, and you’re like, oh god, like it’s not like a Nintendo sound engineer. It’s like, what’s it like when you jump on a giant apple, you know, it’s just a very different like job and that would probably get to you over four years. Yeah, that’s true. Side note, the dogs in this game fucking suck, they’re psychic, which is really annoying. Like, I killed one dog with a bow and arrow, then another one just immediately dashed through a window like next to me. I was like, what the fuck are these dogs like psychically linked? But anyway, yeah, the violence, yeah. There are odd moments where I feel like it feels like violence is a shorthand for like adult or important. And it needn’t be that way. But that might just be fatigue, like by the end of the game, I was sort of sick of it. Even though it’s kind of like the very end of it, which obviously won’t sort of spoil. On paper, like I’m completely down with it. I like the setting, I like the idea of it, you know, and if it had come at the end of a slightly shorter game, I would have probably just been fine. But by that point, I just kind of got it into my head, I just wanted it over and done with because of that. That was the only point there were bits where the violence felt a bit self-indulgent or I felt like they’d made their point like a hundred times over by that point. You know, it has a bit of a like Lord of the Rings syndrome in it, it has like five endings and each one is like more progressively unpleasant than the last. It’s like Lord of the Rings if he then like just kept killing all his other hobbit mates with a hammer, it would weigh you down a bit. My overall arching feeling is that you kind of know exactly what the game stances on everything, not too far into the second half and then it just becomes like really just hammering it home again and again about you know cycles of violence and you’re like yeah, okay. I don’t know, I don’t know, but the game, I think the game is good at asking you what your point of view is on it and while it works very hard to say, to ask the question are you sure you’re on the right side of this, it’s like, it’s still, it’s still really taking some quite bold swings and showing you lots of mad shit and like and making it ambiguous enough that you as the player kind of like are allowed to make up your own mind about what’s happening even if the story always plays out in the same way. But maybe we did, yeah, I don’t know, maybe I just need to replay it and you know it’s such a long game but I actually remember kind of very little of it weirdly like there’s a couple of like key set pieces and key stretches of it. Maybe that paints a slightly incorrect picture of what that game is. Oh yeah, all the all of my favorite bits in this game as well were bits where there were two sides fighting each other and you were kind of like manipulating the battle around them. I love that shit in computer games. This does it very well. I really like it when they do a tiny chunk of open world like that’s that’s a naughty dog trick I’m still not bored of just because it’s nice to have the illusion of some freedom freedom but also like the incredible polish and storytelling of like their linear levels kind of combined you know particularly like how characters talk to each other how they kind of trigger certain things in that world like how they deal with you doing things out of order I’m not saying they’ve solved these problems but they’ve they’ve had to address them quite carefully and I think people you know if you watch some of their GDC talks how they kind of like came upon that storytelling kind of style there’s a really good GDC talk I think it’s Josh Schaer the the writer talking about the big open world section of Lost Legacy and about how it made them rewrite how they thought about like companion dialogues and how companions act around you and you can see all those lessons in The Last of Us but it has a lot of the cadence of an open world game I think in terms of how it’s paced and I’m curious to see how certain areas feel, even if it’s only really explicitly open world in that one Seattle session towards the start, where you can go into that bank, which is cool. I always like a good bank level in a game. Oh, yeah. I’ll tell you one bug that I do have with this game with regards to its level design is that I sometimes feel it too clearly delineates between this area is in a combat arena and this area is an exploring arena. I feel like I wasted a lot of time exploring combat arenas worried that I was missing like story elements when there aren’t any. Did you ever get that vibe? Sort of. I understood it more when in my brain I started to click, oh, this is a section they just want me to run past. They don’t want me to like look around here. They want me to just move on. But other places are kind of a hybrid. Like there’s lots of loot stashed and it’s also a combat arena. So sometimes it was hard to tell should I be lingering around here or should I just move on? Yeah, I feel like I spent a lot of time trying to clean up spaces. Because the game teaches you to scavenge for survival. And then you end up cleaning up spaces, which actually don’t have a lot to offer in that regards because they were designed as a combat space. This took my partner another 10 hours to finish, which suggested to me that she said she was being really comprehensive and stuff. Yeah, it’s tough to know where to draw the line. So I think that’s a minor criticism I accept. I think it’s themes generally have landed a bit better with me than you just based on what you’re saying about it. But I am fresh off of playing it. I’m glad I played it in that time frame actually. I would have struggled to fit this into my regular life, this game. Did you play it with the swanky PS5? I sure did. I sure did. Looked lovely. Looked fantastic. It makes such a difference as well because I did play the first few hours to get to Seattle in that choppier 30 frames PS4 original. So the fact that they patched it and it looks so smooth, it’s just fantastic. Won’t radically change some things, but… I think it makes the combat feel a bit better. You can really see that hammer going into dog head. Yeah, dogs get a tough break in this one. Probably the reason the aquarium was in the game, Matthew, was a bit of therapy for the people who have to animate throats being slit 40 times a day or whatever. Yeah, they’re like, can I work on the aquarium today? Something a bit sad. And they’re like, yeah, go on. Can I just do some fish towing around? And they’re like, oh no, I’m afraid you’re on dog hammering duty today. And I’m afraid you’ve got to motion capture it for real. What’s next up for you then from this, Matthew? I actually had a couple of more recent things that I haven’t played in great depth, but I kind of wanted to group together. They’re massively unconnected. One is at Neo, The World Ends With You, and the other is Last Stop, the narrative game from Variable State, who made Virginia. I’m assuming you’re aware of both of these. Yeah, I downloaded Last Stop with great intentions of playing it because obviously it’s an Xbox game pass. And then I didn’t play it yet, but I will. And I just, I fantasized about being on the tube again, Matthew, that’s why I downloaded it. Yeah, well, the reason I actually grouped them together is like, they’re obviously wildly different. One’s a mad like JRPG action battler set in Tokyo and the other’s sort of interactive storytelling, I guess in the vein of like a David Cage kind of game set in London. I haven’t played enough, either enough to really get into them as like how I feel about them as like whole things, but they’re both absolutely amazing at capturing like an energy and a vibe of a place, but in quite an abstract way. You know, if you played the original World Ends With You, you’ll know this is sort of set in like the young, sort of trendy sort of areas of Tokyo. It’s about these sort of disaffected teens, I guess, but they’re, you know, they sort of lay about regular teens, the things they’re kind of interested in and like the music they’re interested in is quite like represented by the soundtrack. And you know, the game is not like a Yakuza style kind of realistic simulation of those areas. It’s very like sort of drawn in quite a weird, and particularly this new one, Neo, I’ve been playing on Switch. It’s like the city’s like 3D modeled, but there’s this like strange like fish eye lens effect. It’s sort of looming, you know, the buildings are literally like looming on you at a street level, which is quite fun. But the way it captures like the culture, you know, the music and the style and like, you know, the fact that all your attacks are like pin badges like in the original, but there’s this sense of collecting weird bits of tap that you do as a teenager to kind of express yourself. It feels authentic to me in a way that I really, really like. I’ve only been to Tokyo a couple of times, but it kind of captures this sense of bustling sort of metropolis of where the crowd feels like a giant entity. You get the impression that these characters are just sort of like fighting to kind of stand out or to have any kind of sense of individuality. And in the same way, what I’ve really loved about The Last Stop is it’s like an anthology of stories set in London, but it’s kind of like the most authentic depiction of London I think I’ve ever seen in a game, which is pretty astonishing. Because again, it’s a small team. They’ve opted for this quite broad art style, but they’ve got like enough particular details, like the kind of fabric texture on the seat of an underground train or like the name of a shop or the logo of like a fried chicken place. It feels completely lived in and completely authentic. Yeah, like an interesting shout. Are you saying this is a more authentic portrayal of London, Matthew, than Uncharted 3’s pub full of Mitchell brothers with a little sign saying pie and chips, three pounds? It captures the energy of being like the last person out of an office as well. And then having to go home and take public transport and that sense of, oh God, you know, it really like from my O&M days in London, the sense of when you leave the office and then you’re out the door and you’re into kind of like London itself, which unfair to say it’s like bleak and oppressive, but it’s not like a relaxing environment necessarily. It’s not a warm environment. And the fact is that for a lot of people, like your pocket of warmth is your home. There’s this sense of like getting in through the front door and like what a front door like means to you when you live in a big city. Not to be too wanky about it, but I think I think that stuff does matter. And it really gets that. It’s really doing something like very kind of clever with that. You know, it really feels that they’ve tapped into something, which I think is super hard to get into. Like if you compare it to the Day of the Cage games, for example, which are, you know, just everything in that world is just a cliche torn from a shit film. That’s a bit harsh on all the other stuff. Those games do well, though, in terms of art direction and audio and stuff. Like those worlds look and sound amazing. I think the thing they’re simulating is artificial. It’s like they’re trying to recreate like genre beats where this isn’t. This is like real life bleeding into genre fiction. And it’s just way more effective because of that. Great stuff. Yeah. I mean, I actually think you put it very eloquently there about the relationship between, you know, what your home means to you when you’re living in a city like that. Yeah, it’s, you know, even if the game goes off the deep end and like fucks it in the last act, the supernatural stuff, I kind of went like it’s kind of for me, it’s already kind of achieved enough. Yeah. It’s done its job by capturing the sense of place. Yeah. That’s cool. Yeah. I will definitely pay that for the end of the year. It’s on Game Pass. So people, if you’ve got that, give it a go. It’s great. Yeah. And 12 Minutes is also coming to Game Pass for people keeping an eye on the Annapurna stuff. So yeah, good stuff. And Neo, The World Ends With You, Matthew. So one quick question about that. How do they do the combat when you don’t have the… I assume you can’t do any second playable character stuff because obviously that original game was made for DS and it made so much more sense on the DS than other formats. It’s a completely different combat system, but it is built for playing on this hardware, which is why the DS game was great and why all the subsequent ports of the original were less good because they always were compromised. But this is something completely new. Basically you have a party of characters and each character has one of the badges, which is kind of their attack. The character that’s kind of in play is the attack you’re currently using. It’s quite hard to explain without it sounding convoluted. But it’s quite straightforward when you’re playing it. Yeah, if you just got to imagine, like you’re controlling one character, but that character like becomes the other characters when you use their attacks. And the whole combat system is built around like chaining together different moves. So like softening them up with one move, then hitting them with another move. So it’s almost about like the speed of attacks is what you’re trying to balance across the four of them. So that you’ve got a character who can kind of set the combo going, then another character who can do like quick damage to get in there and then quicker damage after that. So you’re trying to kind of pile it up as much damage as fast as possible. It’s pretty cool. And it does the thing which I loved in the original, which is it’s got hundreds of collectible badges. Each one is a bespoke attack and it kind of feels sort of exciting. It’s like collecting football stickers or something. It has that kind of collectible element, but you also want every collectible because it is an entirely new attack and you just want to see what it’s going to do and what that could mean for your tactics and things. It seems pretty great from the few hours I’ve played. So yeah, I should say thank you to Square Enix for sorting us out with a copy of that. Much appreciated. They didn’t send me one, so I offer them no thanks whatsoever. I’m amazed this game got made, I mean, Square Enix must really fucking love Tetsuya Nomura I guess, but it’s cool. I’m really glad to see that such a great DS classic got a second go. Yeah, good music, I’m digging the story. It’s actually making me want to replay the original because I don’t remember a lot about it and I feel like I probably should refresh myself, but so far it’s pretty stonking. Oh yeah, it’s an immortal DS game that. It’s fantastic. So yes, good stuff Matthew. I’m going to bundle two together myself for my next entry. So I imagine that quite a lot of our listeners don’t care about live service games and probably are very turned off by the thought of them. So that’s why I’m throwing these two together. So Apex Legends, I’ve been playing that again this year. We had about six months off while I kind of like put my life back together and played some open world games and then came back to it. And in that time, actually, I played a bunch of GTA Online as well. So those are two I want to discuss a little bit. So I’ll start with GTA. So basically, we’ve done every every good thing you can do in GTA now. We’ve basically done so the if you don’t know the history of the game, basically, in 2015, they added four, five heists, actually heists that were kind of like like single player GTA missions, but you play them in co-op. If you played the heists in GTA five, they’re kind of like those, but everyone has a different part. And we played through all of those again. And to be honest, found them a bit too elementary on a replay. They weren’t that entertaining. They were like, they’re the ultimate play them once and they’ll blow you away that you can do. You don’t see any of the kind of like big twists coming. And then as a group, you get to have this big collective kind of exciting moment where you get to the end and you will escape and you’ll jump out of a helicopter and you know, you’ve made a load of money and all that stuff. That’s the experience that it was enjoyable to do them again. But I think there are limits on how exciting that can be to redo. So we actually ticked off two of the ones we hadn’t done before, which is the Diamond Casino heist and the Doomsday heist. And the Doomsday heist is definitely the best one of the two. So basically, it involves you procuring a load of different sort of tools to use in the different bits of the heist, like a flying DeLorean, for example, in one of the best missions of the game where you basically steal one of these flying DeLoreans and then you go along a runway, hit a button and it starts taking off. And then you go into the sky and shoot down a massive airplane to get some kind of cargo and escape. And that’s one of the best multiplayer missions Rockstar has ever designed. It’s so much fun. Every GTA player should experience that once. It’s really, really good. And it builds up to this big, big conclusion where you escape this underground base and take off in a jet pack across Los Santos towards your goal. And that felt really, really good. The whole headquarters for that is like you have this underground bunker basically where this very odious Elon Musk-style character is talking to you and this is AI that betrays you halfway through the heist and then the final battle is basically up against the AI and this Elon Musk-esque figure. So story-wise, it’s not up to much, but it’s all about the set-piece stuff and the idea of a finale where you escape by jet pack is really, really fun. And some of the other missions as well are quite exciting. There’s one where there are these invisible dudes with chainsaws who turn up and you turn up to this warehouse, clear out all these enemies. These invisible dudes turn up behind you with chainsaws and you have to take them out. And that’s a really intense mission. The first time we played the Doomsday heist, we could not figure out how to beat these dudes. This time we were mega-leveled up with all these amazing weapons, so we absolutely fucking rinsed them, which was fun. And tick that off. That’s like an end game heist, that one. That’s the thing I did want to ask about. You do have to be leveled up to do these things, because I’ve tried playing some of the heists with randoms as quite a low level character, and it just… we get destroyed and everyone gets cross at me for even attempting to play them. Yeah, it’s tough. You can basically play them from level 5 in the game, but if you’re not with other players it’s just such a fucking hassle. When we originally did it, I think that Phil was level 20 or something and the rest of us were low level, but we did all turn up to the first mission with a pistol and no armour. When you come back to it as a high level player, you have six pieces of armour you can equip and battle. I’ve got some of the guns I’ve got in this game now. I’ve got a chain gun laser, I’ve got a gravity pistol thing that knocks enemies flying like a kind of physics-y fun gun, I’ve got the firework launcher, I’ve got an automatic shotgun, I’ve got a near-complete army, a grenade launcher, and that absolutely makes it a lot more fun to go into one of these missions, because you’ve got all this stuff and you can just lean on your own stuff to complete them. It’s true that if you’re playing it as a low level player, it’s just not as entertaining. So yeah, you definitely need to commit a little bit, and this end game heist, I think it’s recommended that you’re level 100 or 110 to play the Doomsday heist, and I think I’m about that now, about level 100. So, we managed to finish that. Then they added another one, which was a diamond casino heist. It sounds good, going into a casino and robbing it, you think of Ocean’s Eleven. It’s actually one of the worst things I’ve ever played in a GTA game. You smuggle it. I think there’s a way to do it undercover, but we couldn’t figure out what it was. I mean, you get this gun, it’s like a concrete based gun, so a metal detector doesn’t pick it up. And then the idea is you’re meant to sneak down and then steal it. But we couldn’t figure out how to do that. And the alarm went off every single time, and we were getting into a constantly repeating this firefight where all we had was this shitty concrete pistol. We did that over and over again. And then eventually got to the end of it, having lost loads of the money that we were meant to be taking because we didn’t have some items or whatever. It’s a really convoluted thing. Getting to this really boring escape sequence where you have to run across this giant car park to an escape vehicle while being shot at. We failed that a couple of times and then you have to get rid of the cops who are chasing you. We thought we had a really clever solution for this because we ran across this long car park. We all got in this car and we knew there was an underground tunnel where the AI would struggle to get underneath there. We thought, okay, we’ll just hang out there. Then we’ll lose the cops and then we’ve done the mission. But the game doesn’t want you to do that. This is where the collision of GTA being an open world game but not really an open world game and how the missions are designed becomes a problem. So we waited in this tunnel. The cops ticked down. They were all gone. We were like, yeah, fuck yeah. We beat the system. We only had to run away from these cops for about 30 seconds, then we did it. As soon as we left the tunnel, we were back on six stars. It transpired the game just needs you to drive to the other side of the map on these motorbikes and that’s just what it’s going to do. It was such a slog. That was the last thing we really did in GTA Online because it just wasn’t very fun. And yeah, it’s always testing your patience this game. It’s like the most flawed successful online game there is. It just, yeah. But I often think this about Rockstar Games in general. Given how amazing and popular and successful they are, in terms of user experience, particularly GTA Online, it’s quite janky to get your head around it. It’s kind of really rubbing this quite obnoxiously janky experience in your face and making billions doing it. The open world experience of this game is just like, will I be trolled by this other player? There is a dude on a flying motorcycle above me while I’m trying to make a delivery of some cocaine or whatever. Will he blow me up? My experience is in the hands of this absolute bellend who’s called Jock 69 or something. That dude can just determine whether I have a good or bad experience. It’s so true, Matthew. And yet you keep coming back for more. Well, it’s only because we did want to see everything that Heist had to offer because we knew that that was the best stuff Rockstar was making, but we didn’t realize how bad that Diamond Casino Heist would be. It really is terrible. Just an awful experience. We’ve had some good times in it though. We definitely have enough money and stuff now that we can feel a bit more dominant in the open world. You can’t stop players from hacking the PC version of the game and nuking you from Orbea or whatever. We do all have flying motorbikes. We have graduated to that point. That’s enough about GTA Online. It remains a fraught experience. I’m just thinking, again, I just wish someone would come along and make a clone of this game that’s like 10 times better. Like you say, it feels like it’s super hacked together. Particularly a lot of the heavy lifting in this game is done with the interactions menu, which is like you hold down a button and there’s a fucking massive long list of stuff that’s like summon your submarine, call in an airplane or whatever. It’s all this stuff that feels like very sort of steam early access to me and not nearly as fluid as the main game. So yeah, it’s flawed, but I mean, it remains evergreen. It’s a bummer that it’s probably the only new GTA you’re going to have to enjoy for another three or four years, but we’ll see. The other one then Matthew, Apex Legends. I’ve gone back to this, every season they change one of the maps, there are now three maps in the game, and they add a new character. There’s a new season creeping up as we talk. This remains my favorite multiplayer game by far. I mean, I’m actually surprised that a lot of people by generation who loved Call of Duty 4, I’m surprised they didn’t play this, because it’s reasonably paced and fair in a way that I think you’re not instantly being headshot all the time. I think it’s like a really good person in their 30s multiplayer game, but yeah. So the thing I love that they’ve added this season, there’s a map called Olympus that they previously added. It’s like this giant floating space station thing, like kind of a mass effecting environment with all these kind of flat pack sci-fi housing facilities on it. They added these, off the bits they added, they added these growing vines around it. There’s like these two spaceships you can go and loot that are kind of like docked with this floating sort of space station thing. That’s pretty cool. You go find a key, you open a door and you get a load of loot in these rooms and get better armor and attachments and things for your guns. But the other cool thing they added is a boxing ring. So when you’re in the boxing ring, you can’t be shot at. There are these protective layers, but there are like these loot boxes inside the boxing ring and you can’t use your guns in there. It’s just lots of players punching each other, trying to get the stuff and then run away with the best loot. That is like a really fun addition. That’s the kind of dumb bullshit I like in these games. So yeah, I’m enjoying both of those, but like Apex is just fantastic. A game this good is free just always kind of bewilders me. So I’m all in on the next one there, revising a kind of map that I really like, which is World’s Edge. They’re going to knock down one of the more boring parts of the map and change it. It’s funny, though, because World’s Edge is the place that I am. It’s like a volcano-y kind of environment. There’s a big glacier as well. It’s a very like fire and icy kind of kind of place is like a city. There are mountains. It’s like a vast open world, basically. And I am so I was so attached to the version of this that I played during lockdown last year, that when they change it now, it’s like someone changing. It’s like someone like a pub I love being like renovated and turned into flats or something. Like, I get very attached to certain bits of it and upset when they change it. And it’s weird to have that attachment to a game space. But when you’ve dropped down in this place, like 400 times or whatever, like you just become very sort of aware of this whole deal. So there’s my ramble. So going back home to your childhood town. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s my ramble about live service games, Matthew, and feel free to slice that down in the edit. There’s a lot of talk there. No, it’s good. I don’t play any of these things. So it’s nice to have like a window on what’s going on from you. Apex is the one I think you would legit enjoy if you just like if we played it in pairs or something, I think you’d have a good time. But, you know, it’s just having the energy to like for it basically. But this is Apex is giving me the kind of like adrenaline rush that I’m not getting from games like Ghost of Tsushima. So yeah, that’s why this game is part of my gaming life, I suppose. So Matthew, you got a few more, haven’t you? I thought to stay with a little Nintendo roundup of Bowser’s Fury, which is the expansion that comes with Super Mario 3D World, which I don’t think we’ve spoken too much before. We did the Big Mario episode, but I hadn’t actually played it at the time. This I really liked, probably my favourite bit of 3D World. You know, the concept of it’s almost like a little open world, which then houses levels which could be standalone levels in 3D World, if that makes sense. So it’s imagine like if you took 12 levels from 3D World and just went, these all have to exist in the same space so that you can fall off one and then surf along some water to get to the next. So it kind of takes things which are quite abstract and turns them into a quite strange sort of 3D arena, which I really, really liked. There was a sort of sense of exploration to some of these. The individual world chunks are kind of typical 3D World fare. They’re taking little bits of level furniture, they’ve each got a concept, you know, panels that flip over or ice skating down a ramp or there’s fire you have to dodge or whatever. But just the novelty of having them kind of coexist, you know, and then the kind of secrets that kind of hide in the gaps between them, I thought was really, really neat. I wouldn’t go overboard and say this is what I want 3D Mario to be, which I saw some people say after their reviews where they were like, I’d actually be happy if the next 3D Mario was more like Bowser’s Furious. I’d rather they carried on with like the Super Mario Odyssey, very large worlds packed with stuff. I still feel like these worlds are kind of easier to sort of exhaust. I definitely dug it. It’s a great little, you know, three, four extra hours of fun. I also wanted to say Paper Mario, The Origami King, which came out last year, I’d kind of avoided it because Paper Mario has gotten a bit rotten, or maybe rotten is a bit unfair, but they definitely had been quite uneven for a while. There’s something about halfway through it that’s absolutely superb. The art style, the kind of Mario universe built out of paper and origami, you know, it’s been done before, but this seems like visually very, very satisfying. I love the variety of the levels. They do this great thing where each world is quite a self-contained story and has little kind of characters and arcs that kind of play out over them, the kind of puzzles and the way you kind of explore and unravel more of the environment is really satisfyingly done. It just feels massive. Like, you know, I feel like I’ve already seen like a game’s worth of stuff and I’m only halfway through it. Really strange combat system, which is about like swiveling these sort of rings with the enemies on them to try and line the enemies up into formations that you can then attack all at once, which should be quite gimmicky. But as a kind of puzzle combat game, which Paper Mario always was, it works really well. Absolutely banging soundtrack as well. Yeah, good stuff. I was surprised to learn that I own this game the other day. I think I bought it at Christmas last year and just forgot about it. Like it was maybe 30 quid or something. So I thought, oh yeah, I’ll just have that. What is the whole deal with Thousand Year Door, Matthew? Why are people obsessed with talking about that every time a new one comes out? It’s probably because they played it at like a formative time, you know, when they were a kind of kid or whatever, or it was their first encounter with these games. Like it is probably still the best one. I mean, maybe Origami King is better. I haven’t finished it yet, so I don’t know. I think the problem with Paper Mario is like, you know, they sort of nail it in one with Thousand Year Door. Like, it’s kind of everything a Paper Mario needs to be or ever need, you know, could ever need to be. As a concept, it’s not like deep enough to sort of sustain as many entries as it’s had, which is why they have to keep radically reinventing it. You know, everyone moans that they keep changing the combat system and coming up with these big gimmicks, but I think without them, it would just feel like, oh, another Thousand Year Door and, you know, wouldn’t be as exciting as you think. I mean, these games do have to kind of sort of evolve or die, or that’s like Nintendo’s policy anyway. Thousand Year Door is great, but have people replayed it recently? I don’t know. It’s on a bit of a pedestal. Locked Away is this nostalgic favourite. It’s very easy to sort of put these things you haven’t played for 20 years up on a pedestal. Yeah, for my money, this is every bit as charming and exciting and polished. Yeah, I dunno. I should probably mute Thousand Year Door on Twitter. People who complain about it are never particularly interesting about it. Okay, get a nice slam there. It’s like the breakable weapon crowning Zelda. It’s like, yeah, whatever, sure. Yeah, they’re going on. Oh, it’s this again. They’re going on Matthew Castle’s shit list, along with the Bath UD students outside JC’s kitchen, giving him an answer, allegedly. I’m not going to fight all the people who like Thousand Year Old, you know. There’ll be a lot of them, yeah. But I think you’ll be able to physically overcome most of them. But anyway, so… Yeah, a couple of good recommendations there, Matthew. Actually, when I was playing Odyssey, I had a bit of the feeling of what you describe with Bowser’s Fury there, where it does feel like a bunch of 3D Mario levels coexisting. I’m thinking more specifically about that desert early on, where it’s like, there’s just kind of like a bunch of levels sort of hovering together here, and like I can just go poke around in them. Yeah, I guess there is a bit of that. I think there are other better levels. I’m not a massive fan of that desert level, I must admit, because it’s mostly just boring sand. Yeah, I wasn’t a big fan, actually. So like, that’s why, that’s the risk of it. It’s kind of what you stick between the levels, just tends to, in Bowser’s Fury, it’s just water, so you just ride that little dinosaur guy around, which is fine. But it’s not like, thrilling in and of itself. Okay, yeah, fair enough. Well then, I’ll end on two old games that I’ve been playing via Game Pass and Matthew. So Mirror’s Edge is a game that I finished again this year, I’ve not played it for about ten years. I thought it was one of those games that I’ve gone to bat for, I think I had it pretty high up in my list of the best games of 2008, so I thought I’d kind of revisit it and see how I still feel about it. Honestly, I think it’s still beautiful looking, it was very bold for the time, this first person parkour game, but it is super frustrating to revisit when you don’t have the kind of like muscle memory that you used to have for it. So, when I played this game, I played through it once on normal, then I played through it again on easy so I could do it without using guns, and then I played it again on hard just to kind of finish it on hard. And that journey of like mastery felt really, really good and I think that is the magic of the game. It is not about doing one playthrough necessarily, it is about getting used to how the platforming handholding and all that stuff kind of works and getting really good and sort of like doing these sort of speed runs through levels. So to revisit it once, ten years, without that kind of skill set readily available, I must admit I found the constant death a little bit frustrating. So I think this is just the price of revisiting old games, Matthew. And sometimes when we’re doing those list episodes, obviously we don’t have time to revisit all these games. It’s nice to just, it is nice to put games on a pedestal, like you say, and then just like remember them as they were, because you know, you can’t expect games to do the heavy lifting of like staying as good, as good like ten plus years later. So I think that’s fine that that’s my relationship with that. A pleasant surprise, I was meant to play Last Stop, because I saw you had on your list for this episode, didn’t, ended up playing Crimson Skies on Xbox. Yeah. So this was, you know, I’ve seen people talk about this on Twitter, I remember that when they announced their backwards compatibility with the original Xbox on the Xbox One, at E3, I think they used footage from this game to be like, oh, look, look, it’s this old classic from yesteryear, but they just added it to Game Pass, really, really enjoying it. It’s like I’ve played about like five levels of it, I got back on Friday night, I was absolutely wiped, and I thought, I’ll just put this on, see what it’s like, it’s just, you know, this kind of like Rogue Squadron-esque fly around and just shoot down, you know, have these dogfights and, and in this in this kind of steampunky sort of environment and these steampunky planes. Did you ever play this one, Matthew? Yeah, yeah, I did. After the fact, I think when they bought the Xbox games to, yeah, Xbox One, we played it. Yeah, yeah, I thought this was really good fun. You’re right, totally like Rogue Squadron or what was the PS2 one Starfighter? Yeah, yeah, Geno Starfighter. Yeah, like that kind of arcade-y, quite simple, quite easy to kind of get into the tricks of it. But you know, there is just something very fun about shooting down a rival plane and seeing like smoke come out of their engine. It’s got like a fun sort of Uncharted Daring Do kind of vibe to it as well. Yeah, that sort of like a matinee sort of sky captain and the world of tomorrow kind of thing. Yeah. It’s a lot of fun. It always surprised me actually, whenever they talk about like Xbox series, people want to see come back or like, you know, you know, when are you going to do Battletoads or Perfect Dark or whatever that like, I would actually play like a really kickass Crimson Skies. I think that would rule. I think Phil Spencer really digs this game, I think. And this, yeah, this studio FASA that made it that was kind of like mishandled by Microsoft. He’s big into those. Yeah, I think this dates quite well because people don’t make games like this anymore. So, you know, it’s not like there were loads of like contemporaries to really sort of like put against this. So yeah, I love a good, you know, sort of like third person sort of like dogfighting game. This does it really well because the AI is quite good. I think that it’s actually a better combat game than Rogue Leader is, for example. Rogue Leader is all about like, TIE fighters doing these like big arcs and squadrons around you. So it’s like there’s always like three TIE fighters flying off to the left or the right and you’re kind of always about like you’re always pitching yourself against that. In this like enemies will like fly directly towards you and then like spin around you and then you know they don’t travel in squads so you’ve got you kind of like it’s a bit harder to outmaneuver them necessarily and you have to be a bit more conscious of like you know if you’re being if you’re damaged you have to go sort of like land and repair and stuff. It’s a bit I don’t say open-worldy but it’s certainly hub-level-y I would say. Yeah it’s really good but yeah if you’ve got game pass there’s apparently only eight hours long so I think I will probably finish this which I think is miraculous from a gate for a game from 2003 that I’ve never played before so yeah good stuff. So yeah Matthew we have wrapped up this episode then this very gentle episode of just talking about some computer games on The Back Page so yeah I think we needed a bit of like a low energy just sort of you know what’s going on kind of thing so yeah I’ve enjoyed that especially because next week is probably gonna be a bit more intense isn’t it with the the PS2 mini draft so yeah yeah so just to kind of lay out the premise of that one to get people excited about it me and Matthew are going to hypothetically come up with what a PS2 mini would be basically selecting from the range of genres 20 games to make up this PS2 mini we will select 10 games each and people will vote on who’s got the best games so there’s a competitive element to it like with the game developer draft episode we each take it in turns so it really is a competition to see who can get the best stuff and yeah I’ve enjoyed the planning process for that Matthew have you thought about it much yet? Yeah definitely I’ve been thinking quite philosophically about what’s the best game and what’s specifically the best PS2 game, what is the innate quality of PS2 that I’m trying to tap into. This isn’t my natural territory which makes it a bit spicier but I’m determined to win one of these drafts so hopefully I won’t come up with an absolute dud. Some of the genres are tough. I think we have to do, this is like a way turf for you and home turf for me, so I think we have to do one that’s like the opposite in the future as well. So we’ll pick a console, maybe the Wii will be a good fit for this, I don’t know. I look forward to that. But in the meantime Matthew we’ve only got two listener questions here so we’ll just fire through those. This one’s from Simon Thompson who is a long time listener of the PC Gamer UK podcast as well and General, nice guy on Twitter. So both of you are in charge of rival theme parks inspired by your favourite video games. What would be inside and who’s is best? Do you have an answer for this Matthew? So I was trying to think of like rides that could like mimic the games. I was thinking like a roller coaster based on Forza and Forza Horizon. You have that mechanic where you can rewind time if you like mess up a corner. So I was thinking like a roller coaster like like it’s a pretty normal looking roller coaster, but on certain gnarly bends, it like constantly like goes backwards and forwards and then backwards and forwards to kind of like recreate the sensation of doing that, which might just give everyone whiplash and get me sued. To which I say join the queue behind Randy Newman. So that’s that’s fine. I was just thinking like, you know, you get those test the strength things where you hit the hammer on the thing and it goes up and hits the bell. Maybe that’s a bit more carnival than Euro Disney, but a kind of Ace Attorney version of that, where instead of hitting that thing on the floor, you’re having to bang the defense stand with your two palms. And if you bang it like hard enough, like an actor dressed as a, you know, a witness for one of those games falls into a pool of water or something. Catherine said it should be the gavel, the judges gavel, which is probably a better fit, but I’m sticking to my guns on this one. Catherine really is the sort of the secret saucers podcast that people don’t know about. I test all these things on her and then she’s like, I’d do this instead. My partner has no interest in hearing about anything that we do on this podcast and I respect that. So I don’t know if Catherine has any interest, but she politely puts up with it. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. I thought about this. So I thought the cool thing would be to have like recreate the gold saucer from Final Fantasy VII as a real theme park. Oh, that’s a better answer. It’s not bad as you could have like the arcade bit where like, you know, the snowboarding and stuff. You could go on a very awkward date with Barrett on those little kind of like gondola things. That’d be right. There’d be an inexplicable haunted house there. Yeah. I don’t think it’s got anything really exciting going in terms of rollercoasters and stuff though. So I actually slightly prefer your one. I like the idea. Oh, I don’t know. This always happens is that I go first with some bullshit and then you do something that’s good that everyone actually wants to do. So it’s kind of like, would you rather go to an amazing recreation of one of the most iconic theme parks in all the video games, Golden Saucer, or do you want to sit on a rollercoaster whose main selling point is that it’s going to horribly reverse around corners over and over again until you’re probably hurt? So just a disaster. I mean, yeah, I actually had no idea to what extent you would even engage with this question, so I thought you might just come in and go, Dairy Milk, and that would be it. Dairy Milkgate. Listen, I was so hot when we were trying to come up with answers to those questions. Oh, dude, we were so, I mean, that’s the thing, like, the last two podcasts, to anyone listening, if we sound low energy, we were absolutely fucking fried. Like, my intestines were turning against me because I was, like, horrifically dehydrated from the sun. And I was just there trying to talk about, you know, this fucking made up handheld. Like, that’s the real, like, rigorous behind the scenes of this podcast. If it’s not under 20 degrees, we’re completely fucked. That’s just how it is. The only other thing I thought for my theme park was it’s gonna be a bit more like a resort, like you’re a Disney, and I thought all my hotels would be famous hotels from Hitman series, so you could stay in, like, the Bangkok hotel, or you could stay in the spa from Hokkaido, and maybe there’d be actors around the hotel who, like, recreate, like, famous murders and accidents from the games for your entertainment. You could do the manor from Hitman 3 as well, the murder mystery. Oh, yeah. That’d be good. You could go, at night, you could go to that nightclub, where there’s just like, well, like, you’re on the dance floor, then suddenly a light gets pushed off and, like, electrocutes a dude or something. Yeah, it’d be fun. Yeah, I like that. That’s good. That’s a good suggestion, I think. But yeah, I’m afraid I picked a very specific, very kind of like, basic, basic bitch one there with the gold saucer, but people do like it, so, yeah, maybe it will do. Final Fantasy is always a very predictable answer for me, and yeah. Okay, so the last question in Matthew is, hi Samuel, Matthew, just a quick note with two thoughts. He says it’s a quick note, but it’s actually like four paragraphs, so I would argue not that quick, but nonetheless. Just a quick note with two thoughts, the first is that I love the podcast, it has kept me company on many of the long walks that 2020 and 2021 have involved in lieu of anything more exciting to do, and it has made me want to visit the famous meat tent. Jesus Christ, we’ve quite a mythology with that one, Matthew. Thank you for your kind words there. So the second is to wonder whether there is an episode in an idea that came up at the start of the Zelda episode, when Matthew talks about the differences between Breath of the World and the more linear games that came before it. I tend to be in the side of finding, you can go anywhere, to be a daunting phrase rather than an exciting one. I want to go everywhere, but often I find it overwhelming, but are there games that manage to balance it right? That’s the question. For instance, I think the Batman questions probably get it right. Lots to do, but relatively confined, and also with a strong story structure. Horizon Zero Dawn, which I am currently playing, has me hooked to because I want to find out more about the world. There is a reason to explore it, and it gets doled out in chunks. On the other hand, I got lost somewhere between GTA 3, which I loved, and GTA 4, and the introduction of so many, brackets, largely non-optional side activities, particularly when enforced early on. No, I do not want to play dress up with Nico Bellic. I’ve barely got past the first hour of GTA 5. But how does that balance work? What’s the right mix of hand holding and letting you off the leash? So yes, that’s from Richard B who says, thanks again for the enormous enjoyment I’ve had listening to the podcast. Thank you very much for your question. So the question, Matthew, is about how much, to what extent should open world games be allowed to overwhelm you? I think some of this is subjective, but there are some recurring problems with the genre. What do you think? A, like open worlds aren’t just like a single sort of genre. Like within that, there’s, you know, like GTA, what GTA is trying to do is, is very like different to, you know, what as elders trying to do. It’s tricky because like for me, you know, what I like in open world is a sort of sense of exploration, a sense of discovery. And that isn’t necessarily like part of the fantasy of, of like every character, you know, like Batman isn’t famous for like exploring, you know, he’s famous for character rich interactions. You know, he’s always doing stuff, he’s fighting or he’s investigating a scene or whatever and just kind of getting between it. I wouldn’t say like the fantasy of Batman is necessarily just sort of like roaming around. So in that sense, like the scale of like the Batman world makes perfect sense because it’s kind of like big enough to feel like this kind of turf you’re exploring and this is turf you kind of, you know, that you’re taking care of, but it isn’t so big that it kind of verges into that kind of exploration where with Zelda, that is key, you know, or at least in Breath of the Wild, like the tone of that adventure supports that scale. So I don’t think there is like a middle, like a sweet spot. I think there are sweet spots for like individual characters and games within it. Sorry, that’s a bit of flaky answer. No, I agree with you. If there’s, I don’t like these overly kind of like feature heavy open world games. I’m not big into settlement stuff in open world games. Like I don’t like having to manage something else while I’m exploring. Like I like just being able to explore, I don’t engage that stuff in Fallout 4. I like just being able to go out there and explore. I think that exploration does matter in the Batman games because there are so many Easter eggs buried in those worlds. Maybe Breath of the Wild has just blown out my scale of what the scale of exploration can be. Yeah, to some people, I think as well, people would find Breath of the World’s openness a bit daunting. The fact that there are these four key locations you can go to straight away that are the obvious big story beats in the game. And then obviously, there is this one final story beat you go do on your own. But you can look at the volcanic area and the icy mountains and the desert. You could probably feel overwhelmed by that. And I think that depends on the player, really, whereas some people probably quite like the more handholdy nature to their open world experiences. I would say GTA V is actually fairly straightforward to get your head around. There are three playable characters, but the story is quite straightforward. It very slowly rolls out the difficulty in the weapons and things like that. It doesn’t have loads of twats calling you to hang out like GTA IV does. I guess it still wants you to play it very much on its own terms to begin with, definitely. The first thing you do in that world is you’re not just free to do whatever you want. You have to do something it wants you to do. Yeah, same with Red Dead Redemption 2, where it’s like… Yeah, that’s the Rockstars, the whole deal, really. Yeah, it is open world but on their terms, and it’s always been like this when GTA III released. Obviously, you had that first island to explore but it waited till it keep it in the story to give you the next part of the island to explore. And then San Andreas did the same thing with the three different cities. I wonder if there’s a difference to be made between developers who use that the open world is like a tool in the wider thing they’re trying to do and game developers where the open world like is the reason for being. The earlier open world games, they were just they were a lot more like open world for the they were just the reason for being was like, here’s a huge thing you get to explore this is going to appeal to you. And I actually found it more interesting as people tried to do like authored content in open worlds and how that changed it and it was more like the open world became the background for something that was a bit more kind of guided and I definitely like both. I think there’s room for both. Yeah, I think they could be more interesting ones than there are like there could be more interesting ways to kind of get closer to that Breath of the Wild style. But I agree that like both have a place. We’ll talk about both these games in coming best games of 2009 2011 podcasts. But like, I’m quite curious to talk about the how Mafia 2 and LA. Noire, for example, are fundamentally set in an open world, but they are like film sets basically to more authored content, but that still has a place and still invoke something in you as a player. And they both benefit from the fact that they don’t have maps like covered in open world icons. And so you think of it less like a game and more like it’s just the world around you. And you sort of like detach from the box ticking experience that a lot of modern open world games have. So yeah, I’ll look forward to talking about those in more detail. But I agree with Matthew, they both have a place. So good stuff, Matthew. Well, let’s wrap this episode up then. So where can people find you on Twitter? I am at MrBasil underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W Roberts on Twitter. And you can follow the podcast The Back Page Pod on Twitter. You can also email us questions to read out on this podcast at backpagegames.gmail.com. So yes, like I say, next week we’ll be back with the PS2 mini draft. That should be fun. If you like this podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Every review we get helps us find new listeners. So we really appreciate your support on that front. But thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week.