Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, it’s draft time again. So, going straight into it, this is the Xbox versus GameCube draft. It is the most conceptually flawed draft that we’ve done so far, because the actual kind of criteria will kind of come down to people voting for their favorite console, I think, more so than our choices, because the choices are somewhat determined by the hardware. But how are you feeling about this episode, Matthew? Yeah, pretty good. I’ve got a lot of love for GameCube. I will be representing GameCube, I should probably add, in the draft. And always that GameCube is representing me. I don’t know which way around it is, really, because fundamentally my success in the eventual poll hinges on the love of GameCube, which I think is going to be pretty strong. Yeah, I think so on this podcast. I think that maybe, as someone who owned an Xbox, I didn’t own a GameCube at the time. I have a GameCube now. I’ve got a great affection for both of these consoles, which is why I wanted to talk about them both in this episode. I think that our listeners will, you know, as we know, that kind of like listenership is at least half made up of people like you from Nintendo things. And like, that made me lose the N64 draft even when I was right about the best games. Oh, there’s a lot of retconning going on there. I think I think Rich did some real damage in that last episode of two episodes ago where he came in and said that it was like some weird sympathy vote. The greatest lie the devil ever told is that Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine is better than Rogue Squadron. That was truly that was the red faction of that draft. That should have sunk you, but it didn’t. That’s a great travesty in my eyes. Yeah. So going into this, I was a little bit like, well, Matthew, I kind of know what games you’ll pick, broadly speaking, because the GameCube basically has about 20 great games. Like the Xbox is in a similar position. There’s like around 20 sort of great games, and that includes some multi-format games on both sides. But broadly speaking, there are like a canon selection of big format exclusives. So we’ll come back to the draft in a little bit, Matthew. Like with the N64 and PS2 draft, I wanted to give a little bit of context for what we’re discussing this episode. So we’re pitting these two classic consoles against each other. The original Xbox released them. It was both the Xbox and the GameCube released in the UK in 2002, but it’s been 20 years since they launched in the US. That’s why we’re discussing them on this episode. The GameCube released on November 18th, 2001 in North America, and the Xbox released on November 14th, 2001. So extremely close together. The idea of two console launchers close together, I mean, it still happens, but it was very exciting in the moment. In this draft, we’ll pick 20 games each and compete to win. The big difference between this draft and the previous ones is we picked 10 games each in the last two drafts. The idea being that combined, they made up what the PS2 Mini or the N64 Mini was, but that got lost a little bit in the whole discussion because it was conceptually confusing, so that doesn’t matter. But Matthew, as a starting point, did you see these consoles as rivals in your head at the time? Not really. I must admit, at this particular moment in time, I was such a big Nintendo guy. I didn’t really think about anything outside of Nintendo. I wasn’t really interested. I read multi-format mags, so I knew what was going on, and my brother Alex had a PS2. But yeah, it was never something that bothered me too much. I mean, I would say, not just to this generation, but I’d probably say, across the last 30 years, Xbox is the console I have the least interest for. A lot of its first-party franchises didn’t really speak to me. As a machine, I don’t know anyone who had one, and I had to play a lot of catch-up when I eventually edited an Xbox mag. That’s like propaganda. That’s just simply not reality. For the past 30 years, the Xbox is the one you’re the least interested in. Oh, that? No, Saturn. I was going to say, there’s like 90s consoles, and that’s as complete. Sorry, but that is complete nonsense. No, it’s down there. The GameCube, I think its reputation over time has picked up, but I didn’t really see them as rivals at the time, just because they were pitched so differently. When you look at the broad sweep of games here, there’s not much crossover in terms of subject matter or series. It’s very much like a Western console versus a Japanese console, I think. And yes, that’s quite interesting. So I was curious about what you think the GameCube represents, looking back, Matthew. And did it matter that they were both fighting for third place in the shadow of the PS2? I think it pretty speaks to where I was at and what interests me and my diet of games media, which was pretty much just NGC magazine. I feel like back then the whole idea of numbers and sales and basically all the horseshit that’s come to dominate modern game discussion, I didn’t really feel like that was a big discussion. I don’t think anyone ever brought this stuff up in the playground or whatever we called the area we hung out at college. Playground sounds a bit infantile, doesn’t it? Yeah, in my head, I genuinely wouldn’t have been able to tell you how, you know, in my head, GameCube was just where it was at at the time. Like, I loved it, all my friends loved it. It didn’t feel like it was in the shadow of PS2 either. I’m not going to make an audacious claim and say PS2 wasn’t on my radar in the same way Xbox wasn’t. That would be absurd. It gave me awesome first-party games. I have a very tight bond with GameCube because it’s the first console I bought with my own money, which is a very important thing, I think. And it was a game that I could buy more games for because I was working in Homebase at the weekend, so I could finally, you know, was free of the sort of tyranny of birthday and Christmas presents. I say tyranny. God, that sounds so privileged. The tyranny of getting something awesome for Christmas. Poor me. Yeah, I just was having a great time, and I don’t think I had a greater awareness of wider industry things until much later. What about the fact that it didn’t have GTA games on it? That was the big thing going on that generation, and the GameCube definitely missed out. That’s like a massive hole. It missed out on that. I had access to those games through a PS2, so that was fine. I think the thing it had, though, was just a couple of such exciting first-party exclusives and such time-dominating multiplayer games that really felt like a complete experience to me. The thing I was always counting down to was a big Nintendo game. You know, Wind Waker and Sunshine in that early year, Smash Brothers, all these things, F-Zero eventually. There was always something amazing first-party coming, so it didn’t necessarily matter that the third-party game on GameCube was not strong. I mean, the weird thing about GameCube is it goes from a collection of 20 quite amazing games to just an absolute mire of six and sevens, like multi-format six and sevens. But that 20 was almost enough. I think that the Xbox, by contrast, had been pitched very differently. It was kind of like Microsoft were taking the PC might that they had and then infusing it into the console market and also teaming up with publishers and developers to patch it on the Japanese side a little bit and have some kind of oomph on that side of things. I think combined, they managed to build a lineup that was viable and certainly helped. It had one of the probably the most important launch game of all time with Halo. So, you know, it was like that kind of powered it through, I think. And then it sort of picked up momentum over time. And then that sort of ethos would eventually set them up for success on the 360. So a lot of that gets a lot of that gets planted here. Why did you pick Xbox? So I got Xbox in 2003. I got like, let’s think, I had a PS2 in 2001. So I think like it had a price cut and then I got like a bundle. And it was like, I suppose it was relatively late on in the lifespan. But I was like massive into Halo. Halo was just a huge part of my teenage life. Once GoldenEye had kind of been sort of fading to the background. Halo became the thing that people I knew played. It was the first and only LAN party I ever went to. Like a friend’s house was Halo. And that was like an amazing day as we all played Blood Gulch and stuff. And that was like the sort of the dawn of real good FPS games on these consoles. That’s why I say it’s an enormously important console in that respect. I know quite a few people who had Xboxes. And I like the fact that it had a hard drive, more powerful console than the PS2. When you play some of the some multi-format games, they just run better. You could do things like custom soundtracks in some games. That was kind of cool. That was kind of new. And then, yeah, so I think that the kind of it had enough kind of exclusives that I was sort of interested in. And yeah, but honestly, Halo was the big thing that sort of brought me in. But then like in later in the generation, I would just buy all my multi-format games on Xbox. For sure, I know that you would be mad not to really. Obviously, the Dreamcast had this in its DNA, but the Xbox properly brings the online age to life. And that was a massive part of people’s relationship with the console. It’s like playing Halo 2 in the sort of like back half of this generation. You know, that was basically would set the sort of the agenda for the PS3 and the 360. And Sony was kind of playing catch up on that. And Microsoft was way ahead of the curve on getting that stuff in order. So that kind of defined the identity of the Xbox 2. And yeah, yes, I think it’s a cool console. If anything, like I think the problem with both of these consoles, we’re looking back, is that their lifespans are really, really short. Like they’re kind of just they kind of come, they come and gone well within that five year period. Like they both sort of Peter out fairly quickly, I would say. Or at least after like 2004, I guess a bit dicey for both of them, really. Like there’s not like loads and loads after that point. Getting Resident Evil in, I want to say 2005? Super early 2005, right? That’s a booster. What a shot in the arm. Yeah, yeah. But by that point, it already kind of like floundered a bit, particularly in Europe, I think, as well. Like, and then obviously they just put it out on PS2 like nine months later. So it was a very quick turnaround. I remember having a friend who played Resident Evil 4 and he was like, oh, this is amazing game. And then I was like that October playing on my PS2 with slightly worse fire effects. Right, right. Yeah. So yeah, I just, yeah. We’re both sort of passive aggressively trying to undermine each other’s console. Well, yeah, I think we are. But like, I think, I think, but like, just to be like… The draft has already begun. Just to be honest about it though, Matthew, you started it by saying that like, by saying that it was a completely like point, the last 30 years, it was the most pointless console. And you’re a man who worked at a Wii U magazine and it’s like, I mean… Rich left me rattled after that podcast. I wanted to win one just outright. Well, there you go. So, you know, that’s why I’m sort of like going to bat for it so hard because you started the mudslinging, my friend. It does feel like an American console to me. But that’s just really like subjective, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s it. It has such an amplified presence because it’s such a joyous thing. It was purple. But like, I won’t dispute that the GameCube’s reputation has definitely grown over time. I mean, it’s in that unpacking game this week and loads of people are talking about that. So, you know, that’s not going to work in my favor in this draft. I saw that. Did you see the thing about people don’t know that it’s a console? Yeah. People are like putting it in the kitchen because they think it’s some kind of toaster or something. To be fair, my GameCube is currently on my washing machine because I had a flat inspection. So, you know, like it’s not… You haven’t put bread in it. Not yet, Matthew. Not yet. Oh my god. This is our most toxic draft yet. It is. I think we need to reset the dial on this and just like take a step back. Like, let the game… Not politely, we’re gentlemen fundamentally. Well, that’s the thing. It’s like I’m forced to sling mud at a console I think is pretty good because you started it. That’s what happened. Oh, no, no. So I like the GameCube. I’ve had a GameCube for the last few years. I actually just bought Beautiful Joe on eBay because I don’t have a PS2 anymore where I used to own that. But yes, so I’ve got a lot of affection for the GameCube as well. Okay, so Matthew, in the N64 and PS2 drafts, we talked about the consoles in great detail. I would like to have done that here, but because we’re drafting 20 games, I feel like we should just focus on that part of this podcast because who knows how long that could drag on for. So why don’t we take a quick break and we’ll come back with the Xbox vs. Welcome back to the podcast. So, another draft begins. What happens in this is we’re each gonna pick 20 games. Matthew’s gonna pick 20 for the GameCube, I’m gonna pick 20 for the Xbox. And basically, the voting criteria, you can go vote for this at Back Page Pod on Twitter. I’ll pin the poll up. It’ll probably be up till, I don’t know, let’s think, probably early December, based on the timings of when this goes live. So, you’ve got like a week to vote for it, basically. So, what’s gonna happen is that we’re gonna each pick 20 games, you then have to vote on who picked the best console, a sort of mini console, as it were, relative to the library of games. And which of these consoles has the most games you want to play? People will ignore that and just pick the console that’s got one game they like on it. They’ve already been tweeting to that effect, which is really annoying, because I think people should vote for the list, not just for one game, but what can you say? So, that’s basically the criteria. Who picked the best 20 games? You have won the majority of these. Yeah, that’s true, but I also should have won one that I lost. So, you’re cross it, you haven’t won all of them? Yeah, well, only the ones I feel like it’s justified that I win. And I feel like by having, I think people voting against GoldenEye and Perfect Dark were just lying to themselves, like, don’t pretend you wouldn’t play GoldenEye, it’s on an N64 mini, you just would. It’s just, you simply would. I mean, like, yeah, I mean, sure, go play Space Station Silicon Valley if you want to. It’s a proto-GTA 3, everyone knows that. No, you’re thinking of Body Harvest. Well, they’re all on the road to success. Basically, yeah, you’re basically, we’re picking 20 games each, vote for the list that you like and we’ll talk about it. In theory, it’s a friendly draft and it’s meant to be a bit of fun. It is. But Matthew set the tone, like, he set the bar so low, so early on, but I suppose then, Matthew, let’s dig into the drafting process a little bit. So what did you focus on for your selection of games here? We’ve split it into some sort of genre and free picks. I feel like you could build a library of just exclusives, which is where this draft is a little odder in that, in theory, like, I could completely stay out of your Xbox backyard. You know, the competition between us or where there is potential drama is if we want, either of us want, multi-format games. And then it’s a question of, like, do I value any multi-format games above my exclusives? Maybe I do, in the name of building a more balanced console. So that’s kind of what I’ve been, like, wrestling with and trying to, like, balance, kind of, what I can have to, like, what I should have. After the N64 draft, it got me thinking a little bit more about, are there just much better versions of this thing down the line? As people said with the Smash Brothers, like, is it point, you know, do I really want lesser Pikmin, say? There are some, like, questions like that I’ve had to answer. How about you? I’m kind of in the same boat where I’ve got, like, basically a list of 20 I can pick that if you, you know, try and take games off the board or whatever, I feel like I’ve got a good list of 20 no matter what. The big difference between these consoles is, well, there are loads of differences between these consoles, but, like, the types of genres represented on each are just completely different. In that respect, very, very different machines. And yeah, I sort of focused in on, like, stuff that I thought spoke to the Xbox’s strength. Like, there’s not much Japanese stuff on my list, you know? And like, you know, I love games that are made in Japan. There’s a few, but it’s, you know, very different to the PS2 draft in that respect. And like I say, because, you know, you’re coming to this with sort of big Nintendo sort of backing, because I lost the N64 draft, you know, despite having a great list. It makes me think I’ll probably lose this one anyway, because you, Nintendo, it’s just a good combination. I think I’ve gone in too hard against Xbox and lost some sympathy. So yeah, I picked 20 games that represent partly my experience with it, but also just like the best of the console. There’s some interesting stuff that I just have left off the board, because I don’t think it will get the voters excited. And like, that’s, you know, that’s just sometimes like a tough break you got to have for this stuff. So for example, the first person like fighting game breakdown from by Namco, quite an interesting sort of culty game, you can actually play on Xbox one. That’s one I left off the list, because I just don’t think people know it, I wouldn’t get excited about it being here. So like, tough break for a breakdown. That’s the other thing that came up actually from talking to Rich. He was saying you’re a much better judge of like the mainstream and the mainstream taste, which I think is true in these drafts. And so maybe that’s tempered me a little bit. And I thought, or maybe I’ll go for a bit of a crowd pleaser this time, where my natural inclination is basically full of bullshit, no one’s played. But I realized that actually that doesn’t tend to resonate as well in these drafts. It’s tough, because we have an audience that likes listening to you talk about oddball DS games from 2008. Yeah, vote for it though, that’s the thing. Well, that is the thing, they kind of broadly vote for games that they remember liking. And so that’s like, you know, it doesn’t matter how good the list is, really, it’s just got to be a list of things that they remember that are also good. Like it’s taking shots at our own listeners now. The other funny thing, Matthew, is when we do these lists and people say, oh, Matthew’s list is more of a heart list, and I’m like, oh, in what world is Red Faction a heart pick? It’s like, you know, it’s sort of like, I just, yeah, I shriveled up like black hearts. I would say they’re heart lists, but I make like a terrible mistake in each one. And if you ignore that mistake, the true console’s quality comes out. But today, I promise you, no mistakes. And like, I’ll be completely upfront. I created like a malice list, which was a version where I just tried to take as much out of Xbox as possible. But then I was like, this would be a horrible GameCube to play. Like the games here, they’re such bad ports of excellent Xbox games. I just don’t think I could do it. But I guess we’ll see. I mean, yeah, sure. I mean, the thing is, again, like, it maybe makes me wonder if you don’t know that much about the original Xbox, because I’ve got like a bench of about 25 games, so I can like… When you said that, we were talking about this on Discord, and you were like, oh yeah, I’m feeling pretty good with my exclusives. Like, I’m really not kidding when in my head I’m like, Halo and then Project Gotham Racing. That isn’t just being snarky. Like I am hazy on Xbox. Yeah, you know, that’s perfectly fine. But like the thing is that the games, there are like quite a few exclusive games on there. They are mostly like Western made games. There’s a few cool Japanese games as well that I’ve got down that you can’t pick. And there’s also a few multi-format games that come to Xbox, but don’t come to GameCube because obviously the GameCube sort of like drops off fairly quickly. So some games end up skipping the GameCube late in the generation, but do come to Xbox. So I was able to grab a few of those. Yeah, but I do think that all sort of joking aside, I think that you’ve just got the inbuilt advantage of like, people just really fucking like Wind Waker and Resi 4, and I think people will just vote for those. To me, that’s almost like a boring mini console. Like that’s the problem I have with the actual mini consoles that come out, is that it’s just the 20 obvious picks and you’re like, yeah, I mean, I played them back in the day. It’d be nice for the convenience sake, but for me, you know, I’d rather, I’m personally much more interested in something which has like the mainstream flavor and the absolute classics, and then maybe elevate some like really good stuff you missed. And I don’t know if what I’m going for today is necessarily going to be that. Okay, interesting. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. So I think we should probably just kick off with it, Matthew. Should we go through the categories first? Because how we’ve done this is quite interesting. We’ve got like two phases of picks this time, because obviously it’s 20 picks. It’s a lot of games, so we want to make it as easy for you to follow at home as possible. So we’ll do it in two different sections. Phase one is adventure slash RPG, that’s pick number one. Shooter, that’s pick number two. Fighting or sports, that’s pick number three. Platformer, that’s pick number four. License game, pick number five. Launch game, pick number six. And stealth or survival horror, that’s pick number seven. Multiplayer, that’s pick number eight. Racing, pick number nine, and wild card, pick number 10. Now, there isn’t that much of a competitive element to this, but the multi-format games are drawn from a shared pool, so that’s where there is some competition, if we want to do it. You can pick a game and then the other person can’t pick it because you’ve grabbed it. So, say any multi-format game that released on Xbox or GameCube. If one of us picks it, the other one can’t, but otherwise, you’re free to pick exclusives as you wish. So that’s phase one. But phase two is just 10 free picks. So that’s where it gets a bit like wild and impressionistic of like, what do I think is the thing that represents this console? And the lists of games are going to be so, so different off the back of this. Like, my next, you know, my second 10 is like, just, it gets into stuff that’s just nothing to do with the GameCube whatsoever. And, but that I think is pretty cool and valuable. So, yeah, any thoughts on the categories? I think, didn’t we also agree that we could have one, we could bring one peripheral into the mix? Yes, that’s right, yeah. That can be attached to a game? Yes, yeah. I feel it good. I think because we’re going genres first and there’s more restrictions there, that’s, and also because it’s at the top of the draft, that’s where I think if any like, multi-format skullduggery is going to take place, it’ll probably be there. I’ve got a very small handful of things I’m really umming and ah-ing about, but I feel like if I don’t take them early, they’ll be off the table. But then I don’t know if you’re even interested in them. That’s what I hate when I pick something that you weren’t even interested in. That’s where the mind games come in. Yeah, you know, possibly for sure. And like, that’s definitely part of the fun of the draft, you know. Okay, yeah, so Matthew, I’m going to go over the categories just one more time. So phase one, adventure RPG. The second pick is shooter. Third pick is fighting or sports. Fourth pick is platformer. Fifth pick is licensed game. Sixth pick is launch game. Seventh pick is stealth or survival horror. Eighth pick is multiplayer. Ninth pick is racing. And tenth pick is wild card. So that’s like one phase. And then we’ll do a second phase, which is all free picks, 10 free picks. And then collectively we’ll have 20 games each. And then at the end, you go vote for the winner on Back Page Pod. And we’ll talk about it on a future episode. So Matthew, should we kick off? Yeah, are we just alternating as tradition or are we snaking? I think, so snaking sounds good, I think. So people have complained in the past. It’s not fair that I got to go first like multiple times and maybe we should have thought it through. So the podcast we stole this from is the Big Picture Podcast. And they do something that allows you, if you go first, the next person gets two picks. Is that right? Yeah, it’s snakes back round. So the second person, yeah, it goes back, yeah. So it’s one and then the next person does the two and then it’ll come back round. They’ll do two, like the bends in a snake’s body. Yeah, very elegantly put. So yes, I think that sounds good, Matthew. So do you want to, do you want to do a coin flip and we’ll see who goes first? I’ll do a coin flip. What do you want? Heads. Heads it is. Oh, well, okay. Here we go then. Do you want to go first or second? I think I’m gonna go first. Okay. So first up, I’m going to take Burnout 3 for racing. This proved to be a popular pick in the PS2 draft and it is one of the highest rated racing games on the console. I thought about this long and hard. There is another racing game I had that you can’t pick that I thought about. I may still pick in free picks. But Burnout 3, it’s just, it’s everything I want from a racing game. I don’t think you need a Forza or a Project Gotham necessarily. I think a lot of modern racing games tick that box. But the very specific Burnout box, there is no game that ticks that in the modern age quite so well. So I think Burnout 3, people just really want to fucking play that. If they get their console home, plug it in. HDMI looks real good. You can’t play this backwards compatible on Xbox One. Just like, yeah, Burnout 3, let’s do it. Fast-paced street racing, hit the nitrous button, after touch, like a stunt stuff. Just real, real good. Yeah. Great pick. Sad that I couldn’t pick this one either. Burnout 3 wasn’t on GameCube. Was it not really? Yeah. I didn’t know that. That’s amazing. What a great start. That’s okay. I was contemplating Burnout 2, but then I thought, well, all that does is let him pick Burnout 3, which is better. So that has saved. I don’t even know. Yeah. Burnout 2 is great on GameCube, but… I mean, listen, it feels multi-format, doesn’t it? Yeah, it does, but I fucked it, so that’s good. Nonetheless, it remains a good pick by itself, but like… Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Burnout 2 would have been a weird one. It was really good, though, Burnout 2. Yeah, I just couldn’t… You could have easily trumped it, so that’s definitely off the cards now. Yeah, cool. Well, that’s only one of a couple of multi-format picks I was hoping to get, so that’s fine. What’s your first pick, Matthew? I am going to throw a couple of multi-format things in here, so remember, listeners, there are free picks later, so there may be better things in these genres coming up later. Don’t judge me off the bat. For shooter, I’m going to take TimeSplitters 2, because without it we don’t have a multiplayer shooter of note on GameCube. I would say one of the flaws of GameCube is that that is a big hole after The Heritage of N64 and GoldenEye, it’s such an integral game. I’m not the biggest fan of it myself, but it’s a classic split-screen multiplayer on a console which is just so multiplayer-friendly. The reason I didn’t pick that one is because I have two Halo games on my console, and I just thought I don’t think I need three first-person shooters, so… No, I’m just getting in there just in case. But I mean, let’s just remind the listeners that you don’t like time splitters, Matthew. So you have picked a game that you don’t like for your mini-console. But other people do like it, and I’m trying to create a nice balanced diet. Well, Rich Sandon really has rattled you, hasn’t he? You’re picking games that you hate to try and beat me? That’s madness. Next up, I’m going to take FIFA 2003. He’s made a monster of me. Matthew is like shooting himself in the foot just to win a poll on Twitter. Oh my God. Listen, I don’t think time splitters 2 is shooting myself in the foot. I think that’s fine. I think people will be excited about that. Oh yeah, I think it’s a great game. But I believe that. That’s the difference between us, Matthew. Yeah. For adventure RPG, I’m going to take Beyond Good and Evil. Which is obviously the very quirky character for, I don’t know, I’ve always thought of it as sort of Zelda-ish. I don’t know if that’s just because of the kind of control system in it. Adventure from Ubisoft, cult classic, much loved, maybe flawed in that there are HD versions you can play. Maybe I shouldn’t have picked it for that reason, but I associate this as one of the good interesting third party games of that generation. People who love it will be happy that it’s there. People who don’t love it, it’s a good game for them to discover. So yeah, that’s what I’m going to do. Yep, that’s fair enough. That was one of my sort of backup picks, like I was going to have that in free pick, actually, because I thought you might not like that for some reason. I’m not counting down the days to be on Good and Evil 2, but I like it. I’m not filling my console with games that are bad. Yeah, that makes sense, yeah. So yeah, that’s a perfectly good pick. That’s a good choice. Okay, so I’ve got two picks now, right? Yeah. First up, I’m going to take Prince of Persia The Sounds of Time for Platformer. God damn it. Yep, I thought that would be a good pick, because the Xbox is actually kind of bereft of really good performances. Oh, that’s what I thought. That was on my malice list. I was like, oh, I could stop him on Platformer by taking the good one. You know what, though? I had Psychonauts as a backup there. That’s why I didn’t do it, because I thought, no, he’ll go for Psychonauts over that. Surely. Well, I thought, why not have both, you know? Like again, this is a game that’s being remade, but the remake is not here yet and won’t be for a while, it sounds like. So Prince of Persia The Sounds of Time. You don’t want to play it in HD on my nice console? Come do it. Yeah, that is, and also like, I don’t know, this is, this platform is going to be interesting category for Matthew Castle because, you know, this, the GameCube is the console that has the worst Mario on it. So that’s going to see how that goes down. But listen, the worst Mario is better than anyone else’s best game. Sure. Okay. And that includes Mario Party, damn it. Yeah. So that’s funny. All right. So then, next up, this is going to be my, I think, my final pick for multi format. I’m going to take Splinter Cell Chaos Theory in Stealth or Survival Horror. This is the third Splinter Cell game that released on consoles. So I always consider Splinter Cell to be an Xbox series because it started on Xbox. The first one was, you know, a timed exclusive. And you know, I guess he’s got like green goggles, Sam Fisher, I don’t know. What can you say? So I thought there’s a few different things I could have picked for this category. I had like two really good backups, actually, that might slot into free picks a bit later on. But yeah, so, you know, Splinter Cell, there’s a kind of purest nature to the the original sort of Splinter Cell games that like, you know, the new ones are just a bit different. And this is arguably the best one they’ve made to date. And Matthew, you’ve you just mentioned it off air to me there. But like multiplayer was very acclaimed as well. You know, I don’t really think about the multiplayer too much, but I think the people will will dig playing this again. I had contemplated taking the not very good GameCube port of Splinter Cell because in my head, Splinter Cell is like a sacred Xbox text. For years, I thought it was a first party game. Like that’s how connected to it it felt like in my head, or at least in the run up to it. Like what it was doing graphically, that series belonged on like the more powerful machine. The other consoles didn’t do it convincingly. But then I thought, you know what, you’ve got other better Splinter Cells to choose from. So like nobbling myself with a not very good port of a Splinter Cell would be bad, so a good pick. So I’m very happy with those as a multi-format pick. So I’ve got Burnout 3, Prince of Persia, Sands of Time, Splinter Cell, Chaos Theory. That’s a great fucking trio that is. Yeah. So yeah, I guess you’re next up, Matthew. It always seems pointless to go with any more multi-format games. But I think there are a couple of others which are decent. And maybe give this console a bit of range. So for stealth survival horror, I’m going to take Hitman 2 Silent Assassin, the only Hitman game on this platform. Hitman 2 was a big step up. I think it’s probably not until Blood Money that people become really obsessed with the series and it becomes properly magic. But Hitman 2, god, we played that for absolutely ages. My lasting memory of this is the review in NGC where Martin Kitts, who was reviewing it, killed loads of people and arranged all their bodies into a big sign saying NGC. I remember seeing that and thinking, god, I have to get this game, that looks awesome. In terms of an adult, slightly more free and open game, it’s quite different to anything Nintendo would have made. There aren’t many other seriously good third-person action games on GameCube, so I’m going to take that one. Probably the worst of the Hitman games that were released during this generation. It’s not a bad game though, it’s loved. Yeah, it is, but if you play it, it’s the bones of what Hitman is, as opposed to like, there are some levels that are very much like Hitman as it is now, and then there are some levels that are just like, kill a dude in a square and run off. It’s quite a different proposition, I think, to the other ones, but you know. An interesting thing for people to discover and decide for themselves. You’ll never hear me slag off Hitman on this podcast, so yeah. I’m actually going to take, again, sort of in the name of variety, I’m going to take Soul Calibur 2 for Fighting Sports, a famous multi-format game in this one in that it had exclusive characters on each platform. Famously, Link was added to the GameCube one. Very exciting, quite iconic. This was the generation when Nintendo started opening up a bit more and you started seeing their characters appear in other people’s games. Infamously, I think, like, Mario appearing in some NBA basketball game, things like that. They maybe get a little too lax. I’m not a huge, huge fighting game guy, but I remember this game being blisteringly fast and beautiful. Really, it’s a super shiny arcade game. The Link thing was really fun. I think it’s good across all platforms. It isn’t one which is massively hobbled on GameCube, or at least not in my memory. I’m just trying to create a more complete picture of GameCube, so let’s put that in there. Yeah, I think that’s a good pick. I think that’s a game that, like, I think the Link thing just gives you an advantage on that as a pick. Who was the Xbox fighter? Yeah, I think Spawn was. At last! Well, I actually think that’s dated quite well. People have come back around to Spawn’s, like, the Image Comics stuff is going through a bit of a renaissance at the moment. Yeah, I think it’s like it was about it was like a bit considered a bit passe about 10 years ago, but now is like, people are just quite big and they’re making another movie, I think, with their Blumhouse. So that could be, could be good, guess we’ll see. But yes, yeah, I think that’s a good pick. I think I kind of associate this as a GameCube game because I noticed the people I did know who had a GameCube. This was cropping up in their collections more commonly than it would on like, you know, PS2 or Xbox. So I think that’s a fine pick. So my next two picks, Matthew, are you ready for a bit of chaos, my friend? So for License Game, I’m going to pick The Simpsons Hit and Run. You said no more multi formats. Yeah, I lied. So there’s no way you would have picked this though, but- It was on my list. Oh, wow. Well, you know what? But as a spike pick- You have to think laterally and this game, you can’t play it on modern formats. You can’t. It’s a licensed game from the past. It’s trapped in probably some kind of licensed hell. And who knows if it will ever reemerge. There have been efforts over the years, I think, to try and get it to have some kind of remaster, or at least it’s talked about on websites, but it’s never happened. So The Simpsons Hit and Run was a mega selling game and it ran better on Xbox than it did on other platforms, not that it matters massively. Basically The Simpsons applied to a GTA template, but with a dialogue and story written by one of the writers of the show and then featured in-universe itchy and scratchy cartoons and had all the voice actors and generally speaking is considered the best Simpsons game. And I think that that makes this a good pick because I think that people probably do have nostalgia for this game but don’t have any way to play it in the modern age and that’s what a mini console should do, it should solve that problem for you. So The Simpsons Hit and Run, Matthew, any thoughts? Yeah, I mean, it’s a very interesting combination of like extremely mainstream but like you say totally obscure because of just the way things are now in terms of what you have access to. I know there’s a lot of love for it. I’m not crazy about it. It wouldn’t have been a heart pick but I thought, oh, it’s pretty juicy. It is a juicy one and it has that kind of sort of cache of exclusivity now. Like I remember it being only fine but then I think there are a lot of games from this period which were only fine and people, you know, you only had to be like three or four years younger for it to be like quite an important game to you. Yeah. You see it a lot on like YouTube lists and people talking about it and I’m like, huh? But it’s always people slightly younger than me. So if you were like 16 at the time and playing GTA, maybe it’s less likely you were playing GTA when you were like, I don’t know, 10 or whatever. Unless you had more dads to go get it for you. That is a good pick. It literally on my list says Hit and Run, next to in brackets, stop Sam. So I don’t. That’s how, that’s, I mean, how did things get so bitter? I mean, we used to be just good friends talking about computer games. But listen, it’s a rather serious business. It is, yeah. Yeah, I honestly thought that you would like shit on this pick and I’m quite surprised to hear you accept. No, no, it’s, I, it’s, it’s a really good one. Yeah, okay, interesting. You could be looming into false sense of security there, but who knows? It’s all mind games, mate. So my next pick, now this is an exclusive. This is my ace in the hole, I would say. My wild card is Steel Battalion and the peripheral I’m going to pick is the controller that came with Steel Battalion. So you’re really pitching a mini console with that controller? Yes, it comes with the controller. You know, if you look at them on the shelves, and let’s just say we take a massive hit on the RRP to give you this controller, you’ve got an Xbox with this gigantic mech interface and some pedals and a mini Xbox next to a tiny little GameCube on the shelf. Like what are you going to pick? So, Steel Battalion, a quite obscure Capcom game that indeed was like a kind of mech simulator game that had this very immense deck kind of style controller with a joystick and stuff, and famously became quite hard to get hold of. It will set you back a pretty penny on eBay and stuff. I’ve picked this because I think this represents the depth of the Xbox’s weird library. It has some strange games on it and some strange games on the Japanese side as well. This feels like a coveted cool thing to have on this console. I can’t see any way this will ever be re-released in any other form. You might as well have it on my console. It comes with the controller, damn it. So you can enjoy that experience, something you probably never got to enjoy at the time on the Xbox. So that’s my pick, Matthew. Any thoughts? That is powerful. The creator of this went on to create one of my favorites, Infinite Space. Obviously, on DS, it didn’t replicate an entire spaceship controller for DS, sadly. It just had to do with the touch screen. I’ve never played Steel Battalion. I would definitely buy a mini console in order to play it. Yeah, a really great pick. Oh, well, thank you very much. Again, I thought you would question the logic a bit more, but like… No, I think that’s a fantastic gimmick. Like, I think these mini consoles, they sometimes need something slightly shouty, like, you know, we’re releasing the never before released Star Fox 2 on the SNES mini, and you’re like, oh, there’s a bit of a story in that. And there’s not really a better story than if you buy this, you also get the Steel Battalion controller. That will definitely make Front Page a Kotaku. It’s got 44 input points, like buttons, two joysticks, a throttle handle, a radio channel dial, five switches, an eject button and three foot pedals. So that’s what you get when you buy this mini console. Still probably more pleasant to use than the actual Xbox controller. No love for the Duke, Matthew? No, no. But you’re a man who’s got giant hands. I thought you would have been all over that shit. I like the Duke, but it’s fine. We don’t need to litigate that. So what’s your next pick? Well, listen, if you’re on the shelf and you’ve got that controller in the box, there’s only one thing that I could possibly crack out that could draw the eye away from it. It’s of course, the GameCube Bongo Drums. Right, right, right, yeah, of course. For platformer, I’m taking Donkey Kong Jungle Beat with the Bongo Drums. This is the fantastic 2D platformer that you control by rhythmically banging those drums and then you bang them both at once to do jumps. It’s a fantastic game. This is like weirdly a kind of, and you’re going to say I’m really overselling it here. This is kind of like a proto Mario Galaxy, this game. I’ve seen you say this on Twitter before, before this draft, so I can at least let that go. This is the game the team makes before Mario Galaxy. It almost feels like, like engine wise, you can see them experiment with certain things. There’s some texture stuff in here and there’s literally some level mechanics which are then wholesale lifted into the 2D sections of Mario Galaxy. Like when you’re swimming through floating water and things like that. There’s a lot of like jellies and liquids and interesting substances in Jungle Beat. It’s quite a short game, which is why it maybe doesn’t have like the mega scores that you would expect from the team that’s about to make Mario Galaxy. But it’s also one of those like incredibly pure replayable arcade things. Just a hit of like purest platforming joy, incredibly fast, frantic, innovative, perfectly tailored to this ridiculous control scheme. I think this is just a fantastic game that everyone should try. Can I say it’s as sexy as a Steel Battalion controller? Probably not. But I think getting some bongos with this would be a fun little treat. And you may think I’ve sacrificed other important peripherals for that, but I’m gonna stick with it. So, I mean, you know, the RIP the Resident Evil 4 chainsaw controller, Matthew, that’s… shame not to see that make the cut here. But I think that… so this is a 2D platformer, right? Why does it need some fucking drums? They’ve made the drums for Donkey Konga, the rhythm game. So you get the idea there, like, we’ve got all these drums out there, let’s try and have another game for it. So they just strip the platformer back to… it’s almost an auto runner. And that’s how you… so that you need minimal controls to play it with. But also, it’s got lots of moments where, you know, when you knock a boss onto its back and you jump on its belly, and it’s just like, thump those drums to really, like, crunch them. It’s got that really tactile thing Nintendo do. It is a ridiculous controller, but this is the best showcase for it. It’s Nintendo doing what they do best, trying to kind of play with very unique hardware. It holds up as a platformer, like, they re-released it on Wii without the bongo drums, and it’s greatly diminished in terms of the controls, because you’re just thrashing the remote and the nunchuck instead of hitting the drums, but it’s still held up as an actual platformer itself. I’m confident in the quality of the core game, but it’s the drums that make this pretty spectacular. There we go. There goes Matthew trying to rule out the Wii port as a viable alternative there, to heighten the interest. Side note, you can’t play Steel Battalion on the Wii. You have to buy my console to enjoy it, but yeah, I think that’s a good pick though, Matthew. It’s a game that wasn’t even really on my radar until you started tweeting about it a few months ago, and then I started looking it up and I was like, oh, okay, I didn’t know the Mario team made this, that’s quite interesting. So yes, good pick. It’s your next pick, right? For launch game, I’m going to go Super Monkey Ball. Interesting. Maybe this is because this was the first game I got at launch. Super Monkey Ball has gone on to be a very popular thing. It sort of begins here, arguably, like some people may feel Super Monkey Ball 2 has like more going for it in terms of modes and things. But I’d say everything this series is ever going to do right is here. I would also say it’s a series that’s like quite diminished as it goes on. I don’t know whether it’s because like you’ve only really got one Monkey Ball game in you, which is maybe how I feel, which is why I’m not mad about the others. A game built just around tilting that analog stick, steering these giant arcade levels to steer a monkey and a ball through some bananas. A very classic kind of Sega arcade-y idea, super stripped down. It’s kind of hilarious that this has got sort of headed up by the goshi at the time, just before dipping into Yakuza. Maybe a nostalgic pick because it was what I played on the first time I ever played a GameCube. I don’t think you can argue with Super Monkey Ball. Yeah, I think that’s a good choice. It’s a quintessentially GameCube game. I do have the option to pick Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, which comes with both the levels for one and two and all the minigames. Just to undermine this pick. That would be wicked. It would, yes. But certainly, I’d say relations are fairly warming up again between Matthew Castle Productions and Big Sammy Holdings at this point. So yeah, I think that’s a good choice. I do just think of this as a GameCube game though. I think it’s one of the only launch games that was launched in all territories. I think the Japanese launch had quite a small lineup, but this was one of them. And yeah, it has always been there from day one. And yeah, I think I agree with you that the first one you play is probably the one that you’ll love. And these opening ones were really good. It just looks like it belongs on GameCube as well. That silly little purple box plays this quite abstract sort of checkerboard world with these big bright colors. It’s like it’s the right game to kind of come out of that machine. This is a great and exciting Sega time as well in terms of them starting to do multi format stuff. There was like, you know, some really interesting experiments in there. And yeah, I think this is this is a good choice. Yeah, definitely GameCube 2 is cool. What’s your favorite minigame, Matthew? I mean, you’ve got to say old Target, haven’t you? Target is real good, but yeah. I never got obsessed, obsessed, obsessed with any of them, like in the way that some people do, because, you know, it’s such an obsession that like a lot of the subsequent games are reviewed. Like, it doesn’t really matter what they do. It’s basically, did I like Target in it or did it even have Target in it? And if they fuck that, then it puts the reviewer in such a bad mood that the rest of the game is sort of cursed because of it. It’s funny because the real game has nothing to do with Target at all. It’s completely different. But yeah, yeah, it’s funny now how much of a long shadow it casts, you know. I have the same thing with the Mario Balloon Battle. If a game has a really honking balloon battle, you’re like, oh, I used to really love this. And you definitely dock it some points. Like the Wii balloon battle is so rank that it loses points after the GameCube one. OK, yeah, good pick. My next pick is going to be for Shooter. I’m going to take Panzer Dragoon Autor. So that’s a Sega made sequel to the Saturn series. Really, really gorgeous. Like one of the best games in the system, really, really fun. This is definitely like a big heart pick. I played this a whole bunch on the original Xbox. It was, I think, a grab at like 12.99 from play.com and I just played a whole bunch of it. Just really, really nice, fun to replay, arcade style shooter. Just kind of like, you know, ride a dragon, shoot some things down. Not loads more to say about it, but like in terms of the best Japanese games in the system, this is certainly up there. It’s really, really good. You can actually play on Xbox One. So that’s like the one slight downer, but I think that means it shouldn’t be on this console, because I think to a lot of people this represents the kind of like, again, the depth of the console, surprising depth to the original Xbox. And then my next pick is going to be for Fighting of Sports. I’m going to take Jet Set Radio Future. So I think this is a great pick because you can’t play this on modern formats. The best way to play it is still on the original Xbox because you can play it on the 360, but the backwards compatibility is quite iffy, doesn’t run very well. And I believe it hasn’t been re-released. It’s speculated to have not re-released because of music licensing rights. So it’s kind of like a sort of like skating, kind of like graffiti game with beautiful cell-shaded graphics. The original Jet Set Radio is very widely available, you can play it on pretty much anything. But I remember my friend down the street bought an Xbox at launch in Europe and this is one of the games he had. He had this on a disc with Sega GT, I think it was, and it just looked fucking amazing and would look really, really good, blown up to HD. And yeah, Jet Set Radio Future, everyone always wants the series to come back, I think it’s an indie developer making a sort of spiritual successor right now. Yeah, just phenomenal. I think it’s something that people would really dig seeing on the original Xbox. Do you want to play that one, Matthew? No, I’ve not played that one. I’ve played the original when they re-released it on Xbox Arcade. Incredibly stylish game. Yeah, this is a weird generation for Sega. It’s like everyone else harvesting all their good IP that they don’t really have a home for themselves. Yeah, they kind of scatter to the wind a little bit, like Sonic ends up on GameCube and then some of the more, I don’t know, like Jet Set Radio Future and Crazy Taxi end up on Xbox and PS2. Isn’t there Shenmue on Xbox? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I did play Shenmue 2 on Xbox, actually, but I didn’t feel like that was… It’s kind of a weird pick by itself without the first one, and obviously there’s an HD version of that. But like, honestly, Jet Set Radio Future, just go look at some gameplay for this. It looks so, so fucking good, like right from the middle of that, like people doing interesting games a bit like Tony Hawk kind of thing, but like definitely one of the best ones. So yeah, I really vouch for it. What’s yours? It’s your pick next, right Matthew? So, licensed game. Let’s go Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2 Rogue Leader. Absolutely stunning, mind-blowingly good looking game. You know, this was one of the ones where I saw early footage of it, you know, given away and must have been like a video, I guess, on the front of NGC and just thinking like, holy shit. I guess that’s why in my head, like, I can’t really comprehend this thing of like, you know, GameCube was a bit underpowered. You’re like, that is one of the best looking games of the generation. The Death Star stuff at the start is… it just looks like it in the dozen of films. It is amazing. The lighting effects, how smooth it all is. I mean, just as like a visual powerhouse. The stuff that team squeezed out of the GameCube, unbelievable. I definitely take this one over the third one because that introduced the weird on-foot sections where the guy basically had the handling of a spaceship and they absolutely blew. This is a show your friends make them jealous. Oh my god, it looks so good. Yeah, it was real, real good. I was… and it still looks really nice, that’s the thing. Like if they just re-released this but it ran at 1080p, people would be like, that still looks like a modern game basically. So yeah, I really rate it. Actually, one thing I only learned about this game recently is that I think Factor V built all of the tech stuff, but it was LucasArts that did all of the art for it. So that’s quite interesting. They were just… Factor V were just like a tech powerhouse basically, and that was what they did. But yeah, they sure got a lot out of the GameCube. A good pick as well because it’s notoriously hard to emulate this game. You can’t just like play it outright without a whole load of faff. And yeah, I think it’s a good pick, Matthew. So for racing, let’s go for an absolute crowd pleaser, Mario Kart Double Dash. Now I struggle to know where this really sits in terms of people’s appetite for Mario Kart, but I think the dual racer mechanic where you have a bloke in the back and a person in the front means this still has a bit of identity to its own, still has a sort of feel of its own. The specifics of its balloon battle mode, I absolutely loved the maps. This was easily our most played game at university. This was our multiplayer game, playing in balloon battle mode. Just an absolute treat. I think this is the one which Edge famously gave it a fall. This was a classic era of very strict slash joyless Edge, I thought. For me, I thought this was just such a treat and I thought Mario Kart Wii was bland in comparison. A classic multiplayer game has to be on there. I’m assuming you’ve got no argument against that. No, it’s a weird one though, in the sense that I played Mario 64 on my N64 mini-drafter. I think that these mini-consoles, people expect to see Mario Kart on there. I think if given the choice, it wouldn’t be anyone’s first pick from a Mario Kart game to play now. It certainly doesn’t feel like the most loved to me. No, it’s not as good as the Switch one, which is just absolutely so super amazing. But it’s got its own art style, it’s got its own vibe, which is a very vague term when you don’t really want to justify your thoughts. It’s that vibe that I’m kind of channeling with this pick. Yeah, I tried to justify a film I hated the other day by saying it had good vibes and then questioned myself afterwards, what do I actually mean by that? I didn’t really know, Matthew. Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe I’m just gambling on other people having that nostalgia. Come on, it’s Mario Kart. No one’s going to be like, oh yuck, Mario Kart. Yeah, but they could be playing Burnout 3 on my console. That is sexy, but I just cannot offer that to people. Okay, yeah, good stuff. So my next two picks then, going to get two really obvious ones out of the way, they just need to be off the table. So, launch game, I’m going to pick Halo Combat Evolved, multiplayer, I’m going to pick Halo 2. So, yes, you can play both of these in the Master Chief Collection, but it’s a mini Xbox, damn it, a mini original Xbox, and this thing needs to offer the Halo game. So when you look at every list of the best games in the system, these two are normally one and two. Absolutely genre-changing first-person shooter games, just showed everyone how to do it, and arguably TimeSplitters did before them, but, you know, certainly… Nah, come on. Well, you know, the other thing is that obviously, like, the multiplayer of Halo 2 was just so, so massive in the moment, so important, and, you know, just kind of, like, kicked off the next age of online games, essentially. And so, yeah, I think making them viable was really important. Obviously, I think the original Halo’s got a better campaign than Halo 2. We’ve got a best Halo games episode coming up where I can talk about these games a bit more. But, like, the Halo was the game that got me to buy the console at the time. It was the game that just, it made me so excited. There was just nothing like it on PlayStation or GameCube. It was, like, speaking to the console’s strengths. They built, almost felt like, you know, the game matched the hardware in such a kind of perfect way. And even all these years later, obviously, Microsoft’s still trying to make, you know, Halo as big as possible and as synonymous with Xbox as possible. It’s never really properly dimmed. So yeah, these Halo games have to be on there. I will have more detailed thoughts on both, though, when we do that Halo games episode Matthew. It took me quite a while to click with Halo. Halo 3 was the first Halo game I owned and played. And even then it took me playing with people who kind of were like into the game and into some of its quirks. I think it’s got a couple of quirks compared to other shooters that you have to kind of get your head around for it all to kind of come together. And I think I remember playing this on a demo station in a shop and being like, I don’t really get it. But it isn’t me trying to smear it at all. Like, even I, bad Xbox opinion man, would not claim that Halo 1 and 2 are like absolute essentials. I mean, they are the, they are the, they are Xbox’s Mario. You just have to have them. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I imagine you’ll have the same bind when, or if you even pick the Super Mario Sunshine, I assume you will. But like, yes, you just have to have them on the system. And yeah, they still hold up very, very well. So play those with the Duke controllers. You get four of them with the console. You can hook those up, have a good time and some good 2001 vibes in your living room. So Matthew, what’s your next picks? So for multiplayer, I’m going to go WarioWare, Inc. Mega Party Games, my second most played multiplayer game at university after Mario Kart. And I think the most successful version of WarioWare for my money in terms of patching it into something more like I love WarioWare, the single player stuff you fire through those games, you know, and they pack it with enough like weird stuff around the edges that they justify themselves. But for me, like the way this brought together that core idea of just playing a lot of very short mini games with the sort of framing of multiplayer party games was really well done. Specifically, there’s one called Wobbly Bobbly, where you complete the mini games to like earn turtles, which are stacking. And in between rounds, you’re sort of standing on these turtle stacks, which wobble about, so you have to sort of balance on them. There’s a thing where I think if someone falls off, they become a turtle on the ground and they can like headbutt the bottom of your pile to try to fuck you up. Very like pick up and play, which is like essential for that for those kind of multiplayer games. But also just had sort of the whole thing infused with the like the manic energy of the main mini games. I don’t think there’s been a better WarioWare game since then. This is still it for me. Yeah, this is definitely like a good one to pick. I tried to play this with my girlfriend during lockdown. And I think just like how much setup was required, and how old it looked and what the content of the mini games were, just like seemed cursed to her in a way that she couldn’t quite get over the boundary and just enjoy playing it. This is the one with the balloon mini game, right? Yeah. That’s really, really good. I think it was really cool that they did WarioWare so quickly and then migrated it over to this GameCube release. I think it was definitely… I have no idea what the latest WarioWare is really like. Did you play that one? It’s on my to-do list before the Game of the Year episode, though, so I will hopefully get to play it somehow. The episode where Matthew will have played every single game released in 2021 in order to have the most comprehensive list. But yeah, a good pick, yeah. For multiplayer games, yeah, I mean, you’ve already got a Mario Kart on there, so I feel like you’ve taken care of it to some extent. But GameCube, you have to make up for the kind of the online thing. I think between Mario Kart, TimeSplitters and WarioWare and another pick I’m going to make in a bit, I’ve got people covered for split screen. Yeah, I can imagine what that other pick will be, so yeah, good stuff. But yeah, good choice, Matthew. For wild cards, I’m going to go with Killer 7. Yeah, good choice. I know you can play it on PS2 as well. Yeah, and there’s a modern PC version as well. But this was my, as I imagine it was for a lot of people, introduction to Suda. Quite a strange, hard to play game, sort of on the rails in the way that you’re walking through these very stylish environments and then you switch into first person to shoot these monsters that shuffle towards you. Maybe doesn’t quite all click together as a sublime action experience, but in terms of Suda’s sort of very choreographed cinematic world view, literally sticking a third person action game on the rails is kind of the perfect way to deliver it. It looked absolutely amazing. I couldn’t really explain what any of it’s about. There’s split personalities you’re playing as, the multiple people inside the head of the central killer, the killer seven you are. Just a wild, cool thing to have. Yep, definitely. I remember coveting this when I had a PS2 at the time, I think it released a bit later on PS2. And I certainly thought this looked stylish. I still don’t really know the deal with it, but I hear that the PC version, because it’s got mouse controls, makes it extremely easy. The enemies have a very tiny point you need to hit them on, which is where the stress comes because they’re walking towards you. It’s almost like a light gun game in that sense, but yeah, I don’t know, just classic weirdo nonsense. Can I ask, what were the other wild cards you considered for this category? Uh, Chibi-Robo. Oh yeah, that would have been a great one. Yeah. That was actually the only one. I didn’t have many other wild cards for this. Not a big Pokemon XD guy, Matthew? No, no. There’s no, I will tell you in advance, there’s no Pokemon on this console. Um, I just don’t remember GameCube having quite the same, like, weirdo import scene as the N64, for example. Like, NGC definitely had, like, fewer totally weirdo things in there. I contemplated Ikaruga. Yeah, that would have been good, yeah. But, uh, I also, I don’t know, I just suck at the game so much that it would just make me cross to have it on there. I thought that would be, that would be just not true to myself. Maybe I’ll change my mind as I go along. There’s still space, there’s still space for maneuvering here. No, that’s alright, yeah, absolutely. I keep changing my list in the background, just because I’m panicking that I’ve got the right ten for the free picks, but yeah. Um, yeah, so, yeah, good choice. Um, I, the other thing, there’s like other GameCube stuff, like, um, Bat and Kytos, I thought about, like, with Matthew Pick there. Catherine was, um, petitioning me to put that in, because she really likes Bat and Kytos. Yeah. Um, but I didn’t think I could wing it. I don’t know it well enough to, to, to be, you know, I know that it’s called Bat and Kytos. Involves cards? Mate, I picked Steel Battalion. Like, do you think I’ve played that? Um, it’s aspirational. I would like to play that. Yeah. I don’t, yeah, I can quite easily play Bat and Kytos, like it’s sitting on a shelf next to me, so I can, you know, it’s not as aspirational and out of reach. Fair enough. Yeah. So I’ve got one more pick for this section, and we’re done, right? Then that’s, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So my final pick is for, um, uh, adventure slash RPG. I’ve made the very difficult choice not to put Fable in my list because I just think, I mean, I know it’s synonymously Xbox, right? I just don’t think people would want to play it on a mini Xbox. I just don’t think it would be like their first instinct to think I’ll play this when obviously there’s Fable Anniversary, which is compatible, you know, it just is the same thing but like, uh, rezzed up, it’s backwards compatible. There are also better Fable games in the series you can play, Fable 2 and 3, uh, I didn’t, and in the end I just thought, I don’t think you need to have it necessarily, like it, I don’t think it would get people really excited about the console. So for this category, I’ve, um, picked Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. So obviously, um, this, uh, the Xbox is a big RPG console, got a whole bunch of those coming in my free picks. This is the first, um, Bioware game released on the system, set thousands of years before the movies, and, um, would prove to be enormously popular as a bit of Star Wars storytelling at a time when Star Wars was quite contentious on the big screen, obviously, um, features a bunch of memorable characters. I would say that, like, takes Bioware one step closer to that Mass Effect thing of, like, bringing RPGs properly into the mainstream and, um, finding ways to present them cinematically, um, because it’s obviously unshackled from the, um, from the, uh, main continuity of Star Wars. It’s, uh, you can, uh, they do some quite big things with the story. A lot of people know the twist in this, but it is obviously an extremely good twist, very memorable twist. Um, it’s being remade. Um, you can buy this on modern formats, but, you know, have it on my Xbox. It represents, like, one of the, um, what the console could do as an RPG powerhouse. It wasn’t released on any other console. I think it’s got to be here. So, any thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I, I, I love this game. I played it on PC. Yeah, this is what I, I definitely did read about this in Mags and, and had, had big pangs of jealousy. I guess this was a time when, like, there were still quite a lot of good Star Wars games sort of happening. So, you know, when one comes along and people are like, this is really good. That means something. I think now, if you were like, wow, they’ve, you know, there’s a great Star Wars game, you’re a little like, eh, you know, I think it’s a little diminished as a video game kind of license, um, in this day and age, slightly. Compared to this period, I would say. Do you really? Oh, maybe compared to this period. Because this period, you’ve also got like Jedi Knight is still doing the business. The Star Wars flight games, the Rogue League, the Rogue Squadron. There’s a lot of good Star Wars games around the turn of the millennium. Yeah, for sure. And it’s a bit later before it starts to drop off a bit. But, yeah. Yeah. I, you know, big meaty, brilliant game, great writing, great characters, brilliantly, you know, evil robot, which is like, you know, now a tired trope, but there kind of felt like it invented a lot of like, you know, the villainous sort of shitbag character that everyone secretly loves. Yeah, really good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So it feels like a strong pick, even if you can play it on a lot of things. My opening Xbox gambit seems even more foolhardy. But you’re reminding me of stuff I’d forgotten about. Like I genuinely had forgotten about Nightseal Republic, but I remember at the time being like, ah, I want it, I want it, you know, enough that I bought it on PC. Yeah, that’s funny, that is. I wondered if you would have expected the Steel Battalion pick. That was why I asked about the peripheral thing, because I thought that would be pretty cool. No, I must admit, no, that had passed me by. I didn’t really think of that. Yeah, in hindsight, it should have, because it’s a little bit like, what else are you going to use it for? A light gun, you know? The other famous Xbox peripherals such as… Oh, of course, it’s the giant replica of a mech control suit. Yeah, in some ways, it was like a cheeky pick, I suppose. No, it’s great. I mean, the bongos seem very weak. We should definitely keep this in the podcast now, it’s too good not to keep it. Plus, we’ve calmed down now, we’ve stopped taking swipes at each other, so that’s good. Oh, God. So, that’s phase one done, Matthew. Shall we take a short break and come back with ten free picks for phase two? Matthew, let’s continue with the draft. Phase two is 10 free picks. Any opening thoughts before we get to this part? I had to pick some weird stuff up front, and maybe the Nintendo diehards were thinking, what’s he doing? Is he really throwing away the advantage of having the GameCube? But I like to think that the good times are coming. Okay, yeah, so Matthew’s picked a game that he openly dislikes, that’s good, but you know. I mean, that’s one way of framing it. I’m thinking of the gamers. For the gamers. In this section, Matthew, I don’t know if we necessarily need to keep the snaking thing here, because there’s no crossover at all here. So why don’t we just go one by one, you go first with your free pick, and then we’ll go from there. Really, the order of this is sort of irrelevant, but I want to end on a high, because I have a nasty habit of entering the drafts on a sour note, and then everyone just remembers that. So I’m going to start with my weakest pick, which is Super Mario Sunshine. I think it has to be on there, because it’s the 3D Mario, and there’s a lot that’s brilliant about Super Mario Sunshine. Like technically it’s gorgeous, it has a lot of really weird effects, like the paint textures, still to this day really impresses me, the kind of cleaning it up and spraying it away is super tactile and fun. I was playing it again on the Switch recently, the giant solar panels which reflect the world, that’s such a cool effect, like it still now really really impresses me. There were so many like wow moments about this, which kind of counter-biases the fact that it’s like a very weird uneven platformer, because this jetpack comes in and like messes up you know, basically Mario’s rhythm, because he’s got his core moves, and then he’s got his core moves, plus what happens if I spray water at any given time, and it makes him – it’s the precision that I think he refines in Galaxy and I really loved. And here that’s vague, but I will genuinely still take a kind of imprecise Mario over most other platforming heroes. I love the actual Arl Delfino is so gorgeous, the kind of tropical holiday vibes. It’s got some really great level concepts. I know some people felt quite sad after this that Nintendo gave up on the kind of the worlds which you go into and sort of explore for shines. Galaxy is definitely a lot more linear after this. They kind of go back obviously in Odyssey and completely kind of fix that and strike the balance perfectly. This is still a good game. It’s an uneven Mario. Yes you can play it on Switch, but it just fits the GameCube controller brilliantly. So let’s get some of that on the go. Yeah I think it had to be here. It’s a slightly tougher one to swallow. I mean if anything you could argue that a slightly weaker Mario is one of the things holding the GameCube back a little bit this generation. It was still like a must buy game though. Yeah. Does it arrive slightly later than maybe people wanted it to as well this one? I’m trying to remember. I remember waiting for it and waiting for it and like NGC gave it as good a write up as they gave any Mario, you know. Yeah for sure. Before video, just seeing the screens of it looked great and it’s a very beautiful game. Yeah absolutely a good pick. Yeah. I think it has to be here for sure even if it’s not the finest hour. Yeah. Okay. So my first free pick is Ninja Gaiden Black. It’s one of the best 3D action games ever made, action combat games. It’s like a revised and expanded version of Ninja Gaiden which released earlier in the Xbox’s lifespan, a Tecmo game, and it added more difficulties, more missions, remixed the game just generally speaking. I think that this still looks really phenomenal for the time. This is a great looking game. I don’t know much about the collection they did this year with them in, but I think that this original Xbox original was still considered the best way to play it. So, yes, I very much recommend it. Plays really well still and really fast-paced action, really hard. You know, definitely like a challenging compared to your Death May Cry and the like doesn’t really play itself, but definitely like one of the quintessential Xbox Japanese games that came out around this time, Tecmo, quite big on the Xbox. I couldn’t quite bring myself to pick Dead or Alive 3, but I did think this was fine. Although I did enjoy Dead or Alive 3, I thought that was when the series had like a little bit more cred, I suppose, in the eyes of people. So yes, Ninja Gaiden Black, Matthew, any thoughts? I’m terrible at it. I foolishly wrote it into a list feature when I was on Xbox on, and then had to take capture of it, and it took me about the length it took me to do the rest of the capture for the entire list feature just to get the stuff that I wanted from this to make it look not shit and unconvincing, because it is so hard, but also a thing of beauty. Yeah, for sure. So I thought I had to come out of the gate, it’s quite strong here. So yeah, that was my first pick. What’s your second free pick, Matthew? Let’s go with a big old fan favourite. Let’s go Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door. Yeah, had to happen. Yeah, it does. I mean, maybe it’s the contrarian in me. It bugs me a little, like how much this has held up over subsequent ones. Like, people treat the subsequent Paper Marios like they’re dishwater. And maybe this is because I’ve been this year playing through The Origami King and absolutely loving it. I think it is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant game. And in my head, like every bit as good as like as enjoyable as Thousand Year Door. But at the time, I did love this. I felt like it’s a big step up over Paper Mario on the N64. Like they really worked out the tone of it. The kind of variety of the adventures you have, each chapter is like a real story. That’s what I love about Paper Mario. Every part of the game doesn’t just feel like going to a location and fighting a boss. It feels like you meet all these weird characters and there are lots of mini arcs. It’s like definitely like Nintendo’s most like narratively sophisticated series. You know, for a company that doesn’t really do that that often, it’s quite interesting how they kind of dig into like the mythology of the characters and the psychology of fucking Goomba. I’m sure I’ve said always before, but you know, Thousand-Year Door definitely cherished. It doesn’t really exist outside of GameCube, so why not? Yep, a good pick. You know, definitely one that I think people were tweeting about before we even did this draft. So, yeah, clearly some fans of it out there, and yeah, like definitely cast such a long shadow that people still talk about it all these years later when any new game in America comes out. Much to your disappointment, I’m sure. There was a voice in the back of my head that was like, I shouldn’t include this, just to spite the Paper Mario fanboys. But I thought, you know what, I need the votes. Yeah, you can’t sell sabotage, that’s the thing. Not in this draft. Yeah, so I’m going to go completely the other way for my second free pick, Matthew. This is like quite a wild pick, but you can’t play it anywhere right now. And guess what, my friend, there’s a new Matrix film coming out this year. Oh my word. The Matrix Path of Neo. That’s my free pick number two. We’re going to untangle that for all of its licensing issues. You can play it on my Xbox mini. You’re going to have a great time. Fight lots of Agent Smiths, more like six or seven and then like a sea of them in a weird pre-canned animation in the background. Go through all three films as the one and yeah, have a good time with some very nice looking fighting animations in a game that will never be re-released, I’m sure. But yes, you can have a curiosity on my console. And I think there’s a big part of these consoles that have to scratch that itch of like, what can I not get anywhere else? What makes it super compelling? And I think like between this and like The Simpsons Hit and Run, I’ve hit two weirdo kind of like, license picks that I think people had fond memories of. Whether justified or not, that’s not for me to decide. However, the Christmas market, I think, will be very excited about this one, Matthew. Any thoughts? This is a period where, like, it’s sort of where the movie license game dies, but also some people just chuck so much money at them that they are the AAA games of their time and it’s easy to forget that. Like they look amazing. They have all this kind of crazy stuff. They’re maybe not the deepest games. You know, I think of this period. I think of things like this. I think of EA’s Lord of the Rings games as well. Very shiny, very polished things. They look highly desirable in footage. I think this is a great pick. I was not expecting that. I’d be more into playing this than Simpsons Hit and Run as a game. I’ve got a real fondness for the sort of seven, eight out of ten movie licensed title that now everyone is like above. Like, no one would ever make these games anymore. But back then, they used to happen. I was kind of into them. Yeah, the thing is, this came after like Enter the Matrix, which was such a disappointing matrix. Oh, I owned that one. That was shit. Do you have that across two discs on GameCube? Is that how they did it? It’s like all the characters you’re not interested in in a matrix. It’s like, what happened to them in the film? And you’re like, no one cares. And then they’re like, what about what happens to everything that happens to Neo? And you’re like, yeah, of course I want to play that. It’s when they announced the Matrix Resurrections cast, and they were like, Jada Pinkett Smith. And I was like, no, not Niobe again. I mean, Niobe was better than Ghost, at least. Ghost was like a complete non-entity of a character. They had those terrible bits where you were like escaping the squids. They’re like, I know what everyone wants to do, the real world stuff where it’s just dark and there’s a giant robot octopus up in your grill 24-7. And it ends with going under by Evanescence playing over the closing credits, the most 2002-ass piece of music possible. But the path of Neo comes along and it’s like, you can finally play as Neo. You can do all the things that Neo does, his mega punch, his bullet dodging. You can play all of the different set pieces in the films. The one bad thing about this is, well, it’s a 7 and 8 out of 10. It’s going to have dated in a lot of ways. But the main thing is it doesn’t have the movie’s music. The music was so, so good in The Matrix, but it doesn’t have the same music. That’s one part it lets down. But if you want to play a game that’s as close to the definitive Matrix experience as possible, this is that game and it’s a real curiosity pick. So, yeah, why don’t you hit me with your third free pick, Matthew? I bought it up in our best horror games. I’m going to go for Eternal Darkness, which is GameCube’s Lovecraftian sanity sapping horror, which jumps through thousands of years playing multiple characters as they all fight some cosmic horror, lose their minds and trigger quite goofy but endearing insanity effects where your head floats off or the game pretends to crash. Again, it just doesn’t go anywhere. This game doesn’t exist in any other form. You know, there was a failed Kickstarter for a spiritual successor, but it’s really fully formed off the bat. Very, very strong. A kind of interesting what if Nintendo was involved in a horror game, which hasn’t really ever been host before or since. I think people will have a lot of fun with this one. Yep, has to be on the list and would make me buy a mini console, frankly. Like, I think there should be a way you can play this on modern consoles. It’s a real shame that you can’t. So hopefully someone will send us the source file somewhere. But yeah, maybe Dyex got it on like a USB drive or something. OK, so yeah, good choice, Matthew. I’ve got this on my GameCube. I should really sit down and play through it properly at some point. Although when it does the TV turning off effects in like 480i, I’ll be pretty sure that my 4K TV isn’t going haywire. But that’s fine. So my third free pick is The Chronicles of Riddick, Escape from Butcher Bay. It’s true. Yeah, this was one of the best Xbox exclusives. Don’t know why it didn’t come out on other consoles. Maybe the other consoles couldn’t handle it. I would say this kind of plays the Xbox’s strength of feeling like a PC style game on the format. First-person, kind of like a melee stealth game where, set in the universe of the Riddick films that I have no real love for, but it’s really kind of a game about escaping from a prison and being in prison and then getting caught and being put in a worse prison, which is what happens in the course of this game. It’s just like a series of prison escapes with quite meaty melee combat. Once remade later, I thought that the color palette looked better in the original, personally. I don’t think the remake added loads to it. I mean, it’s a way you can play on, I think you can play on PC, the modern one. But still, I think this has to be on the console because it really represented the kind of like, it’s a cool, weird thing. It was like a great first-person game made by this developer Starbreeze who are kind of well-known, but this made them more well-known. This would lead them to make The Darkness, obviously, later on. I would say I was very big on it at the time, but I think this game holds up. I played it a few years ago for a retro gamer piece. Any thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I love Starbreeze’s whole first-person, sort of cinematic, sort of storytelling, but you’re very in-world, you’re very kind of centred in it, and the physicality of the body is really important because it’s all about melee combat. That’s really well done. This was a highly desirable thing, like reading about it in Games Master at the time. I played it, yeah, when they redid it and re-released it with that expansion on 360, the Athena thing. I’m not misremembering. It does the thing where it occasionally spits the third person so you can see Vin Diesel. Yes, I think, when he’s climbing and interacting with things, yeah. I’m kind of a sucker for that. I like games that do the old little bit of a third person. I loved it in Deus Ex, Human Revolution as well. It’s cool, knowing how to show your character doing the best stuff at any given time and switching perspectives to do that. I’m easily impressed by that. Yeah, this is great. Yeah, switching perspectives thing is what makes The Quantum of Solace tie in Matthew’s favorite game of all time. Love seeing a bit of Daniel Craig then go back to first person. Cowering behind a pillar. Yeah, so yeah, I feel good about this pick. This represents like a big cool thing that came out on Xbox and I remember thinking, what a treat this is. Just like, yeah, just a completely offbeat thing. You would never expect a game based on those films to be good, but it was better than the films, arguably. So what’s your fourth free pick, Matthew? Let’s go with GameCube’s own first person gem, Metroid Prime. You can play it in the Metroid Prime trilogy on the Wii. I don’t know if you’re going to go to all that hassle. So having it on here feels like a good fit. I forever associate it with that particular controller as well. So that will make sense. I mean, this was just at the time mind-blowingly good. Felt really exciting that it kind of belonged to GameCube in a way. Like, you know, I didn’t associate, you know, Nintendo First Party with first-person games to see them like enter that sort of space and just do it all so perfectly. And not just perfectly, but like they did stuff that other games have always struggled with. Like, you know, there’s lots of platforming in this game and it’s really good. It’s really well judged. It’s one of the few first-person games where you aren’t like, oh God, I got to do some platforming. You know, that in itself is kind of miraculous. The way it translated the ideas of Metroid into a first-person shooter into that 3D world, just how gorgeous it was. It was really difficult, made you kind of like fight for every victory and progress was hard won, but not so difficult that I couldn’t do it. But, you know, which is actually sort of how I feel about Metroid Dread as well, actually. Like it’s like one of the leftover Nintendo games series, which is still willing to kind of like have a bit of bite to it, and it works really well for this particular character. I didn’t get on as well with the other two. Two was just so hard and so bleak with all the Darkslam and stuff. And the third one was, you know, a very neat translation with the Wii controls and everything, but for my money, original and best. Yeah, I think this was one of the ones I kind of feared when I looked over like the Metacritic best GameCube games. I was like, oh yeah, there’s nothing like this on Xbox. And it was such a surprise that this was as good as it was, it seemed to have such a kind of like fraught road to completion. And then, you know, comes out and just really sort of hits all the right marks felt didn’t exactly feel like a first person shooter. You know, just to the lock on system. Yeah, exactly. And like the animations and stuff, like all the enemies have like canned animations, they sort of flop over when you kill them in the same way and like, but that didn’t matter because like you say, it’s kind of like more adventure game than anything. It’s about like, you know, looking around in first person and saying, Oh, well, what’s that thing up there? Well, I need to come back later with this power and get there. And then, you know, what’s such a hard thing to translate into 3D from 2D? And you know, it hasn’t really been done much in in 3D, otherwise outside of this series. So just just shows how kind of deftly they nailed it at the time. Also looked really, really good. Like I think this in HD now would just look fantastic still. Just beautiful, beautiful Samus character model in this game. Yeah, real good, real good, Matthew and nice kind of like sort of how to put it, like traveling between the different parts of the world in this is really like fun. It’s just so many different types of area kind of contained in the same place. It’s just a really cool place to kind of uncover as you go. Good. Yeah. So backtracking is actually kind of fun in this game. But yeah, good pick. I am a big fan. Cool. So my fourth pick is Max Payne 2, The Fall of Max Payne. So you could play the Max Payne games on PS2, but they only really ran well on Xbox and PC at the time. I played both of these on Xbox. The Convenience Store I used to work in had a bunch of Xbox games and some kind of little promo stand thing. I took both of them home and played them. Instead of selling them, taking them off the shelves, which was probably not ethical. I don’t think they ever sold anyway, to be honest. Like trying to sell Max Payne 1 and 2 in the village of Alvestoke, Hampshire, it just seems like a hard sell where it’s mostly people coming in to buy the Daily Mail and a pint of milk, you know, but they gave it a go, damn it. So I was torn actually because I really love the first Max Payne. The second one’s not quite as long as the first one, but it is a better game, better shooter. Better storytelling. This is where Max kind of goes on the run with Mona Sacks, turns on the police department, and it’s like a big kind of like noir love story essentially, and takes you through this fictional, the steam park based on this fictional TV show in the universe of the game, which is a really kind of like neat idea for a level. And generally speaking, I think perfects that kind of like a bullet time shooter, which was pervasive at this time, but never done as well as it was by Remedy in these games. Any thoughts, Matthew? I do associate this more with PC than console. Maybe it’s just because that’s where I played it. And because I always thought the Max Payne PS2 wasn’t quite all there. Yeah, it is a great game and people have fun. I imagine there are lots of console people who probably didn’t buy this and didn’t own this. And if they didn’t also play it on PC, then a good inclusion. Really, really stylish. I love this. I love this world. I wasn’t wild about what Max Payne 3 sort of direction it kind of took it in. I think it lost a lot of the fun and kind of soul of it. But this was spot on. Yeah, I think there’s definitely an argument that you can’t play this on PC. You do need to do a bit of faffing with Windows compatibility modes to get this running on PC. I think that just the convenience of having on a console would be nice for people. Just like a really good third person shooter felt like a nice addition here to my list. So yeah, noted Matthew. So what’s your fifth? Between that and Neo, you’ve got some good bullet time. Yeah, all the bullet time. And what can sum up the early noughties better than that? Well, slow mo in Burnout 3, you’ve got a very slow mo heavy console. Yeah, who knows? Maybe I’m not done yet. We’ll see. But what’s your fifth repick, Matthew? Let’s go for Beautiful Joe. One of the Capcom 5, which is the sort of games, exclusive games coming to GameCube, many of which, well, a few of which then appeared elsewhere, but basically guaranteed GameCube a run of some absolute stonkers. Beautiful Joe, Hideki Kamiya’s next game after Devil May Cry. Just totally frantic, balmy, 2D brawler with some speed bullet time elements to it. I was quite bad at this game. I remember buying it because I saw footage of it and thought that looked so good, and it looked so good in the hands of someone who was really, really good at it. And I definitely struggled through it, and I feel like I never saw the full potential of it. I think they, as a team, got much better. Definitely they took the leap with Bayonetta of adding modes in where, like, anyone could make that game look pretty awesome, which Beautiful Joe didn’t quite have. You’re in this sort of film, and the kind of film framing of it, with the fast forward and the slow down and the rewind, very, very well done. I just think some people will connect with this and then have a really wild time. I will probably still struggle through it, but I feel like it’s such an oddball entry and the look of the thing and the tone of the thing is so distinctive. I’m quite happy putting it in the mix. Yeah, so I really love this game. I don’t actually think it’s, like, as good an action game as people maybe remember it is. I never finished it, actually. I got to the last level in this, which I think is, like, this Death Star style level and then I found it, like, abysmally hard and I think that, like, it’s maybe slightly incoherent, the action on screen, just because of the sheer amount of things flying around and then you go in fast motion, slow motion, there’s loads of stuff going on. It’s quite hard to pass compared to something like Bayonetta, I would say. There’s, like, pockets where it goes right for you and you’re like, amazing! And then you’re like, oh yeah, no, I don’t get it at all. Yeah, for sure. But I would say that, yeah, this is definitely a game I associate with GameCube. Just looked fantastic and hasn’t been retrieved and put on anything else. Was Joe one of the Capcom, Mother vs. Capcom, three characters, did they add him to the roster for that? I can’t remember. Oh, I honestly don’t remember. Yeah, I can’t remember either. But that was… Yeah, I always wondered why they didn’t bring this back. I think it’s because it was always a modest seller and then just never really came back in any form. But they did make a whole bunch of them, weirdly. Yeah. I think there were three on GameCube in the end, but yeah. This is the best. Yeah, I think I agree. I don’t think… Kamiya only produced the second one. It’s got that weird dinosaur that goes, Davidson is in the house. Vaguely, yeah. I mean, it just… It shouts it through the whole level. You constantly hear it and it’s like a total mealworm. Oh, it just came back. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do remember now, actually. Yeah. It’s like a Triceratops, I think. I think so, yeah. I think the Paris level is the one I remember from this, or whatever it is. It’s the city. It’s so, so beautiful. Maybe it’s because I think that is the first level, but it just looked the most stylish and I don’t know. I always felt like the art style was meant to evoke that kind of like… I think they even said it was meant to be French comic book style and Mobius, I believe they said was the point of inspiration, even though it looks quite different to that. But yeah, good stuff. Yeah, good pick, Matthew. I love that game and I would like to play it again at some point, which is why I bought it on GameCube in real life, so good. What’s your policy on two packs of games, Matthew, if you can’t actually buy the games individually? I’m confident there exists no two pack that I would be nervous about. OK, fair enough. OK, so my fifth free pick here will be GTA double pack. Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto Vice City, the originals as they were, except now you can play with the Xbox’s hard drive, you can play custom music as you play the games. I know that these are first of all PS2 games, but they were big on Xbox too and like I say, they’re enhanced by having your own kind of music playing in the background. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I forgot about this, so that’s annoying, but anyway, of course everyone’s jealous of these games. I mean, in my head they are PlayStation games, but you’ve made a good case for them being better and more enjoyable here, so yeah, why the hell not? Okay, cool. So what’s your sixth repick, Matthew? Do you remember the double pack of… Feeds you a line of bullshit. Wind Waker and… Well, I thought you might have gone for the Zelda Master Collection thing, but, you know, that’s like… Let’s go Super Smash Brothers Melee. Still to this day, like, the, well, I was going to say the hardcore Smash Brothers choice, as if that matters to me. It doesn’t at all. I played so much of this game with my brother. I played so much of Smash Brothers on the N64. Then we picked this up. More characters, more levels, obviously much better looking, a really great fit for that controller with just the sort of the button layout it had. Oh, God, I love Melee so much. Definitely my most played Smash Brothers. I can’t speak to it as a technical fight, I’m just not interested in it in that sense. But I thought this package, it had so much going for it. So many cool modes. It was really important that the target Smash mode had an individual level for each different character, which they got rid of in the Wii in Brawl, which I always thought was quite lazy of them. They just had one generic level that all the characters fought through. Stuck in my craw back in the day. But Melee was just absolutely sweet. It isn’t quite like they just the encyclopedia of Nintendo that these games are from like Brawl forwards, you know, in terms of like, it doesn’t have like the infinite music tracks, it has a great selection, but it isn’t quite the isn’t the same sort of museum piece that the later Smash Brothers become. But as just a really hyper colourful, hyper playable game, multiplayer classic, I mean, come on, it’s got to go in there. Yeah, I think so. This was the game I covered to the most as someone who didn’t have a GameCube at the time. I remember seeing footage for this like towards launch and thinking, holy shit, that looks amazing. I think it’s like three years between this and the original, and they look about 10 years apart. Yeah, just like sheer magic how this game looked compared to that. And the pace of it was obviously a lot faster. The levels look loads better. Yeah, spot on, really, I remember buying the, do you remember the, I think it was the first issue of NGC that had the orange VHS tape on it. And I remember watching that VHS tape over and over again. I was fascinated by some of the games on there, a couple of which didn’t come to come to pass. But yeah, I think this is one of those trailers. I remember just watching over and over again, thinking, fuck, that looks so, so good. I really wish I had that. But yeah, good choice, Matthew. And definitely one I would play on the console before remembering I can go play a Switch version that’s got fucking 20 times more characters in it. But you know, still very good and very coveted. Still very coveted by that audience. Unbelievable, dude. Yeah, no, there’s no denying that people love Melee. People still talk about it in that community nonstop. So a good pick for sure. Okay, so my sixth free pick, tough here, I’m really just like two things have been pushed out that I really wanted in the list. But I think I’ve got to go with The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind. This is in terms of RPGs in the system to a lot of hardcore fans of this fantasy RPG series, this is like the best, this is the best to them. I don’t know if I necessarily agree, like in terms of usability, the later Elder Scrolls games I think just have like the benefits of the modern age. But there’s no denying this is like a cool kind of like really weird looking fungi strewn world and interesting naughty RPG for the time and really kind of like really just showed where RPGs were going on consoles by making it work on the on the hardware. I think Oblivion is like a more of a breakthrough moment, but I think this needs to be on here because this didn’t release under any other console. My mate Donald had it, we played about 20 hours, I remember us just getting killed by mushroom looking things over and over again. But yeah, just felt like I was seeing like the open world RPG, sort of like template crystallise and the setting is very memorable. So I think I’m happy to have it on the list on that basis. Thoughts Matthew? Yeah, played a little bit on PC. It’s always a game of bounce stuff off just because it’s, you know, it is so open from the start. I feel like you’re free to make a lot of bad decisions and then struggle in that world. They definitely get better at like introducing you and smoothing your sort of entry into their worlds from like Oblivion forwards. This one is a little bit harder edged in that sense, which is why it didn’t quite click with me. But I know there’s definitely a lot of people moaning under the RPS top 100 why it’s not on there. So it clearly resonates. Yes, another Fallout New Vegas in that respect. So yeah, there it is. What’s your seventh repick, Matthew? Let’s go with F-Zero GX. The stunningly pretty and sadly final F-Zero game that we got made with Sega just unbelievably fast, unbelievably good looking. There were a couple of games, I’d say like Weirdly This and probably Woke Squadron 2, like where I felt like something else was going on in that machine that no one else knew about. Maybe Resi 4 as well. Couldn’t believe how good it looks. It saddens me that it’s like it’s quite brutally difficult and I was quite bad at it. I definitely haven’t come close to sort of 100% seeing what is in this game just because it was so so frantic and fast. A it’s good, B there just isn’t another one for anyone to look forward to and I don’t sort of struggle to sort of see a version where we sort of see how we ever do get another one after after this long really. Yeah, we’re approaching 20 years since the last entry in this series, right? So it’s tough. It’s like even surprising they didn’t even get like a there wasn’t even like a 3DS version or anything like that. It seems like it would have happened. But yeah, I get really really fast. Quite hard. I don’t know if it was maybe a bit too tricky for me this one when I played it a few years ago. Was it hard to you, Matthew, or do you find it fairly easy? Yeah, like I say, there’s definitely I can’t remember how the campaign or story mode structure I think it’s got a mission mode on the side and some of that is just like impossible. I just don’t see how it can be done and, you know, I remember there being lots of jokes in NGC that it became like certain things became shorthand for just being impossible game about as hard as it came on GameCube, well, Icaruga aside. But yeah, I think it has to be on here. I always loved that you could in Japan plug your memory card into the arcade machine and play that there. Like, surely the number of people who did that was tiny. I should have picked the arcade machine as my peripheral. I still think you missed a trick with the old Rezzi chainsaw controller, but you know. Oh, bitch, it’s just a gimmick, it looks silly. Okay, right then, this one gets really tough. So I’ve made a difficult decision here with my seventh repick. I thought about BioWare’s Jade Empire, but I think I’m instead going to take Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2. I think that you need both of these on the Xbox. This is the Obsidian one, this is where the game was famously praised for adding some shades of grey to the way that the Force was portrayed, which I think has held up very well as a creative decision. I think having both of them on the console will make sense to people. Once people finish that first one, they’ll just want to play the second one. They were both Xbox exclusives. There it is on the system, Matthew. Tough on this format. There are so many good Star Wars games on Xbox that they were vying for places, but I think I lean into the strengths of this console specifically by taking both of the Kotor games. So that’s my thinking. Any thoughts? Yeah, I’d be up for it. I haven’t actually played Kotor 2, so I feel like this would be a good, easy way to access it. It’s quite a lot of two doses of Star Wars RPG and one… Yeah, that’s fine. Well, you know, we’ve got 20 games, so I think that’s fine.

1. You’ve got 21. I have got 21, yeah. Have I fucked you there? Are you upset? No, I haven’t. It’s fine. It’s absolutely fine. Okay, what’s your eighth pick? I am deniered about this one, but I think I am going to include it. Twilight Princess. Okay, interesting. Which I’m going to include just as a sort of novelty piece, because it came out right at the end. Basically, everyone got this as a relaunch game, and this was quite hard to find. And, you know, I think I only ever saw it in a shop once, and it was, like, megally expensive. I don’t know if Nintendo didn’t put out a huge amount of it, but you definitely couldn’t review it on GameCube. Like, they only had it to review on Wii at the time. Slightly less of a curio now that they did the HD version on Wii U, but come on. I think more people are going to own the GameCube mini than own a Wii U. It’s what I’m betting on here. They famously flipped the whole world for the Wii version to make Link right-handed so that his sword hand would be the Wii remote. Link is traditionally left-handed and they literally did it by mirroring the world. So it’s the exact opposite of the Wii game, the GameCube version, which is also true of the HD version. They kind of flipped it back again for that. For the Nintendo hardcore, I think there is something interesting about playing games on their original form factor, their original hardware. The Wii motion stuff arguably didn’t add a huge amount to Twilight Princess. Like it plays brilliantly on buttons, so would play brilliantly on a GameCube controller. I feel like people were waiting for this game on GameCube for so long that the Wii kind of swept in and stole its thunder. This was always meant to be a GameCube game. That’s the kind of technical level it’s at. Kind of restoring that kind of bond, letting people experience it as it was originally intended. I think there’s some value in that. Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. I think that, you know, there is obviously a remastered version of this, but you have to play it on Wii U, which is, you know, arguably as hard to… Well, no, that’s not true. It’s easier to do that than it is to play on GameCube. But still, you know, there is a better version of it out there. But I agree that a part of these consoles is the curio factor, hence why Star Fox 2 was a good fit for the SNES classic that they did. But yeah, yeah, good choice, Matthew. Yeah, I think people would be curious enough to pick that up. By the way, during that, I heard you rustling some Renny, just like people playing the Back Page drinking game at home. So, you know, that’s good. So on to my eighth pick, yeah? Yeah, go for it. Okay, so there’s a bunch of good multi-format stuff that’s like, kind of like, in danger of being swept out of here. But there’s some stuff where I’m like, it would just be cool to have it on the console. So that’s why here, I’m going to go with The Warriors from Rockstar. Oh, yeah. So a game that you can’t play on GameCube, didn’t come out on GameCube, Rockstar wasn’t massive on the GameCube for whatever reason. But you know, we came up with a PS2 draft adaptation of the film, Walter Hill film, kind of about basically like a gang that is framed for killing this guy who’s like trying to bring all the different gangs in this dystopian New York together in a kind of peace, sort of ceasefire. And he is assassinated, it’s pinned on this group and they have to basically like run across Manhattan to get back to Coney Island, which is where their base is. This game expands on that significantly by essentially showing a kind of origin story for the warriors. And like you join the gang, you take place on these different missions, basically go to these like mini riots across New York City with this kind of like very grungy 70s sort of vibe with this great music. They got the original voice cast back. It was fantastic. It’s one of the best licensed games ever made. Still very fond of it years later. I think this holds up because it’s not that complicated a game. It’s not like the old Rockstar games that required third-person naming. This is all like, you know, melee brawling and stuff. So still very playable, very enjoyable. Good to play in them two-player split-screen co-op as well as playing out my buddy Andrew a few weeks ago. He runs a bit iffy on PS5, actually, the most recent version of this, but yeah, has loads of these kind of like colors that are like flip-reversed and it goes a bit weird and doesn’t quite fit together. So I’ll have this on a mini-console. Maybe not like the most quintessentially Xbox game, but then, you know, it’s not really… I kind of just saw this as a multi-format game and I’m claiming it. So that’s where I’m at with it, Matthew. Any thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I included it on my PS2 mini for pretty much the same reasons. Yeah, nice grown up, licensed game, has a really nice relationship with the source material, treats it with a lot of respect, expands it. Yeah, this is great. Good stuff. So what’s your ninth pick? Let’s go for a biggie. Let’s go for Resident Evil 4, which I know you can play on just about every console under the sun. But again, just a sort of definitive GameCube game for me. There was nothing I was more excited about. I remember getting this for a pound because Game had a trade in X Games, get a game for a pound, and I traded in a load of old crap. I think I traded in Medal of Honor or whatever the Call of Duty or Medal of Honor was about, like Pearl Harbor. Whichever that one was. Oh yeah, that was the Pacific one, yeah. Yeah. Rising Sun? Yes, that’s right. Yeah. That and some other crap I had lying around the house, traded in. Had the best ever fucking time with this game. Blew me away how good it looked. Like again, just felt like a, almost like a sort of generational leap, like, within a console. I just couldn’t believe it looked as good as it did. The controller’s really well made for it. Hitting that A for like some mad quick time events. That giant fat A button on the GameCube controller. Come on. That’s heaven right there. I wouldn’t say there’s like many better versions of this in terms of like HD ports and stuff. It’s never, you know, it’s never been particularly well treated after the fact. I don’t think, you know, it’s pretty much perfect here. Maybe you like the Wii Remote aiming of the Wii version. I would still take this version over that. So on to my console it goes. Any curiosity about playing the VR when they release, Matthew? It’s the idea of like lengthy VR games. They really do do my head in a bit. I’m just not really made for it. Though I played Alex, I guess, so obviously I can stick that. It’s just the faff of VR. When do you ever want to stick your head in that machine, you know? The thing is, I agree this has to be on the system. It’s just defining a Resident Evil game. Did you decide to just pick this and not the Resi Remake, Matthew? You weren’t interested in that one. Yeah, I think the Resi Remake, that’s also playable in a lot of other things. I think the HD versions of that are quite nice and quite handsome. I’m not saying they were better than they were on GameCube, but for whatever reason, this is the one. Resident Evil 1 almost makes it on, but not quite. Yeah, this is like… Again, there was a time where this was highly coveted as a GameCube exclusive. I do just remember how hot it was. It was so many years it was in development for the time, like seeing different versions of this. The ghosts and all that shit. Yeah, I think there were four versions in total that saw the light of day in some form, which is sort of bizarre. Side note, that Archipel documentary series, really interesting, the beautiful Jo one, for giving you a snapshot of what was going on in Shinji Mikami’s Division 4 at Capcom at the time, and just how that team was structured. I didn’t realize their biggest project for a long time was that Dead Phoenix game on GameCube. They got completely scrapped, and I was like, interesting. I think that the reason beautiful Jo exists is because they basically wanted Kameer to be trained as a game director and to make a game with a small team. Anyway, that’s interesting stuff. Resident Evil 4, obviously a quintessential GameCube game, has to be on here, even if everyone’s already played it to death. Yes, good choice. So my ninth pick, gonna do a bit of counter-attacking here. You picked Hitman 2 earlier. Gonna pick Hitman Blood Money, which came out on the original Xbox. I think like… I actually forgot that. I thought that was a 360 game. It’s on 360 as well, but it’s on the original Xbox too. Oh, fuck, I wouldn’t have picked Hitman 2 if I’d known that. I don’t… I actually like… It didn’t cross my mind to pick this at first, so I thought you, like me, would have thought, well, if you’re gonna play a Hitman game these days, you’ll just go pick the HD ones. But hey, you know, these are different Hitman levels. It was better than Hitman 2 and Contracts. It got steadily better, the series. It calcifies here the kind of storytelling element of Hitman that it gets really good at. Yep, some very memorable levels here, of course, some of which have been picked up again in later entries. The kind of A New Life, whatever it was called, the undercover one. Yeah, so very, very good. You know, memorable kind of American-style levels. So yes, Hitman Blood Money, you know, you can buy the GameCube and play Hitman 2. You can buy the Xbox and play this, a better game. So that’s a bit of fire there. I was curious on this kind of like type of game, Matthew. You didn’t consider picking Metal Gear Solid the Twin Snakes? No, I just think still in my head Metal Gear like belongs to PlayStation. It is a curio and they did do a nice job. They brought a lot of stuff into it. You know, they updated. Well, it’s basically with the Metal Gear Solid 2 mechanics and Psycho Mantis, you know, reads your memory cards and does all your, you know, you like putting monkeys in balls or whatever. Maybe that would have been a good curio. It was on the long list, but you know, I just had to go and pick up a fucking Hitman 2, didn’t I? Oh, never mind. Yeah. That’s very annoying. I also thought about, I did think about the other IO game, Freedom Fighters. Yeah, I thought about that too. I also thought about Second Sight. I just didn’t love either of them enough, but they were rare adult action games on GameCube also. Which was, you know, worth some novelty points, but maybe not as exciting in the context of the mini console. Fair enough, yeah. So that’s it, Hitman Blood Money, that’s my ninth free pick. So what’s your final free pick, Matthew? I think I can guess what it is. Going as mainstream as you like, I’m going Legend of Zelda Wind Waker. The Zelda that belongs on a purple box in the same way that Super Monkey Ball looks like a game that should come out of that console, so is Zelda Cell Shaded. Zelda, as people sort of called it at the time. In the run-up, again, I couldn’t comprehend something looking as just beautiful as this, you know, just that art style and the colours and the lighting and the execution of that, and then just how brilliantly realised it was in the final thing. Again, it only really existed as screenshots, a tiny little bit of footage on that video, but yeah, I got it. I was just so happy with it. We talked about it a lot on the Zelda podcast that we did, which you should definitely listen to if you’re coming to this podcast late because that’s got heaps of Zelda chat. But for me, the ocean and exploring the ocean just taps into the spirit of adventure in the way that I think Zelda should. Every dot on the horizon becoming a weird little island, even if it was just there for like a stupid joke from Tingle or, you know, one treasure chest or something. Just the sensation of going to somewhere and it potentially being something was really exciting. You know, maybe not the greatest Zelda in terms of like dungeons. Don’t worry, I got you covered with Twilight Princess for that. That has got as many more dungeons than you know what to do with. The pair of these games cover like very different Zelda territory, but both demonstrate Nintendo brilliantly. It just feels like probably like the definitive GameCube game in my head. And so I think it has to be on there. I think it does. It’s a slight bummer that there’s like a superior version of this that exists on Wii U. It’s not like it makes this version still handsome, you know? Yeah, they’re not stylistically the same. Like visually quite different. I was more thinking though the sailing just being a bit less unwieldy or a bit faster, a bit more flexible on the new ones. Yeah, and that’s the benefit of the Wii U ports of both of the games I’ve picked. They just add some accessibility, usability features in. But the core games are unchanged, I think. Yeah, you could level the same criticism at the GTA Devil Pack as well. Cool, yes, good pick, Matthew. I echo that Zelda episode, it’s one of my very favourites. That’s absolutely packed. I mined Matthew for great content that day. It was a good time for all. So those are all your GameCube picks, Matthew. I’m ending on Wind Waker. I’m feeling that is a much better conclusion than Red Faction. Yeah, but rest assured, had I picked Time Spits 2, Matthew would have picked Red Faction, I’m sure, on GameCube. I think the second one came out on GameCube anyway. Yes, so my final pick then is something that’s very Xbox specific. Crimson Skies, High Road to Revenge. Now, I played this recently on for the first time and it’s fucking great. So, kind of like Steampunk-y, Sky Captain, The World of Tomorrow, kind of like playing combat game, basically. Really, really good. There aren’t, like, modern versions of this, really. It’s a very, like, of-its-time kind of thing. Existed in that kind of, like, post sort of, like, flight simulator game era, like post-X-Wing era, where people were making these more, like, and they’re probably most comparable to something like Rogue Leader, to be honest, but I think has a little bit more meat on the bones, gameplay-wise, and has, like, a load of different planes you can pick for each level and then upgrades you can apply to make them even better. Great tone. Actually looks really nice still as well. There’s, like, the city of Chicago you go to later on. It’s actually a genuinely beautiful cityscape even in 2021, considering how old this is. A sequel to a PC-only game, but a very well-remembered Xbox game that didn’t sell amazingly at the time, but also, I believe, had, like, quite an acclaimed multiplayer mode, which I haven’t tried, but I don’t know, in theory. Maybe you could play that on this mini-console. I don’t really know what the situation is there, but let’s say you could. That would be a cool thing, like, kind of ambiently sharing, like, these open-world, kind of like hub worlds with different players. That could be fun. So thoughts on that one, Matthew? Yeah, I love it. Great sense of adventure. Very, like, uncharted-y. What happened to this era where, like, loads of people were making dogfighting games? Like, they’re just really fun. Like, they’re really, like, arcade pleasures. Between this and, like, Star Wars, Rogue Squadron, Starfighter as well, like, this was just a really good time for flying around the skies and shooting stuff down. That stuff is always cool. I don’t know why more people don’t do it. And quite, completely of its own thing, you know, it’s quite hard to kind of put alongside, like, any core Xbox, like, identity. You know, it doesn’t really sort of gel with anything else. It’s like a completely random punt they’ve taken on something. But, yeah, I likewise came to this really late. I only played it on backwards compatibility on Xbox One, but was completely taken with, like, how charming and playable it is. This is a really, really good pick. Yeah, I had a great time blasting through this. I think it belongs on there. Some of the other stuff I considered on there was, like, I thought about Phantom Dust, I think it is, like, a card game on Xbox. But, like, again, I don’t think people really know what that is, and I can’t guarantee that people… The HD version of that was… that game’s piss. Oh, really, really? I had not played it. Yeah, I played it on HM, it was like, yikes. Like, we didn’t even cover it on the Xbox channel, I don’t think. Well, okay, I have not picked that then, so that’s fine. Like I said, Breakdown, I thought about that. I was so close to picking Star Wars Battlefront II, but I thought, I don’t know, like, it’s… I’ve already got a bit of Star Wars on my list, and I’ve got Halo as well. And they’re fun 7 out of 10s, the Star Wars Battlefront games, but I don’t know, it was tough. I did very nearly pick it, but in the end, I thought destroying Matthew’s Hitman 2 pick was more important. Any love for Oddworld? I’m not a big Oddworld guy. Strangest Wrath is the one on Xbox, right? That was the one which I got minor pangs of jealousy from, just because it reviewed so well and came out of nowhere in Games Master. I was like, oh, wow, what’s this game? I played on PS3 a few years ago, and it wasn’t quite my sort of thing. Kind of like a bit different to the other ones, right? It was like first-person kind of game, then metal third-person, I don’t remember. I think it did the old Riddick switcheroo. Yeah, but I remember being quite intricate and interesting, but just not really for me. Tome-wise, I just don’t think I’m an Oddworld kind of guy. So, Matthew, let’s recap our picks. So, shall we go one by one through the categories, starting in phase one? Yes, do it. Okay, so for adventure or RPG, I have Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. I’ve got Beyond Good and Evil, but others are coming. For shooter, I’ve got Panzer Dragoon Autor. I’ve got Time Splitters 2. A game that he hates. For fighting or sports, I’ve got Jetset Radio Future. I’ve got Soul Calibur 2. For platformer, I’ve got Prince of Persia, The Sounds of Time. I should have stolen that. Instead, I’ve got Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. For license game, I’ve got The Simpsons Hit and Run. I’ve got Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2, Rogue Leader. For launch game, I’ve got Halo Combat Evolved. I easily dwarf that with Super Monkey Ball. For stealth or survival horror, I have Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. I’ve got Hitman 2, Silent Assault. For multiplayer, I’ve got Halo 2. I’ve got WarioWare Inc. Mega Party Games. For racing, I’ve got Burnout 3. I’ve got Mario Kart Double Dash. For wild card, I’ve got Steel Battalion with the controller that comes with the system. Oh, I forgot to mention I’ve got the bongos with Jungle Beat. Yeah, very important to point that out. I’ve also got, for my wild card, Killer 7. So, let me go to Phase 2, which is the 10 free picks. My first free pick is Ninja Gaiden Black. I went Super Mario Sunshine first. For my second free pick, I did The Matrix Path of Neo. I went with Paper Mario, The Thousand Year Door. Very comparable games there. For the third free pick, I went with The Chronicles of Riddick, Escape from Butcher Bay. Then I went with Metroid Prime, I think. For my fourth free pick, I went with Max Payne 2, The Fall of Max Payne. Nice. Then I went with Eternal Darkness. I think so, maybe. For free pick 5, I screwed over Matthew and picked GTA Double Pack. So, that’s GTA 3 and Vice City. Then I think I went Super Smash Bros. For my sixth free pick, I went with The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind. Then I think I had Beautiful Joe. For my seventh free pick, I had Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2. I had F-Zero GX. And for the eighth free pick, I had The Warriors. Then I went Twilight Princess, aka Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. For the ninth free pick, I had Hitman Blood Money. Then I went for Resident Evil 4. For free pick 10, I had Crimson Skies High Road to Revenge. And I finished off with The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker. Okay, so you can vote over Backpage Pod on Twitter. Like I say, I think Mario will win. I genuinely don’t know. I think you’ve made a super compelling case. But I don’t know if that’s just me as a non-Xbox guy thinking, well, I’d get a lot out of that Xbox console. Yeah, I think that there’s just a few here that I’m just like, those are really, really strong picks. That’s why I kind of like, I had Steel Battalion in my back pocket. And I thought, you know, Jets are really a future as well. That’s not something that people have access to. That would be a really fun one. I think I’ve maximized games where they’re harder to get hold of now. You know, so The Simpsons Hit and Run, The Matrix, Path of Neo. Hey, I’m up for that. I’m genuinely down for that. Yeah, I think a lot of people would be. So I think, I don’t know, I’m not sure. I think I could like log on to Twitter the day after and see like 20% Samuel, 80% Matthew, but we’ll see. Back page pod on Twitter. You can vote on the poll for the next seven days and when this episode goes live. So good stuff, Matthew. There’s one other game I wanted to ask you about. Luigi’s Mansion. You weren’t big on that one. I liked it enough at the time. I think A, there’s a better version of it on 3DS and I think there are just better sequels that I would suggest playing Luigi’s Mansion 3 instead. Doesn’t quite hold up as well. It’s very short and throw away more of a tech demo. It’s fine. I also felt a little bad for not throwing in Pikmin, but Pikmin 3 is so much better than Pikmin 1 and 2. So… Yeah, Pikmin, Animal Crossing as well. I thought that was very quintessentially GameCube, you know. Again, there’s just so much better versions, which is so close to it. That’s the problem with a lot of the Nintendo stuff, is that actually finding games where there’s, like, a huge gulf in the series, or that’s still sort of justified playing now, some of the series evolve less, and so it’s harder to make a case for them. Okay, yeah, fair enough. Those Billy Hatch and the Giant Egg, Matthew? Oh, fuck that. I bought that, and it absolutely fucking blew. I hate that game. Lots of people try and tell you, it’s like, oh, it’s a quirky hidden gem. That game sucks. Doshin the Giant? I mean, it’s cute, but it’s weird. I kind of feel bad about Hitman 2. It feels like that could have been a chibi-robo. I also feel like it could have maybe squeezed into Harvest Moon. Yeah. I don’t know if anyone would actually give a fuck. That’s a tough thing, isn’t it? It’s like it’s a mix between what will people like, when will people look at the fucking screenshot I put on Twitter, what will they actually vote for? Yeah, but that’s good. I think we’ve got two good lists there. I think sometimes as well, you’ve got to go against the very obvious ones, because they might not do any favors for you. That was why I didn’t pick Fable, because I just didn’t think Fable would get people excited. Yeah. Yeah, I just worry that I maybe blew a couple of like chances to do that on some like mind games that just didn’t go anywhere. Yeah, I mean actually the two I just really wanted more than anything else were Prince of Persia and Burnout 3. I didn’t realize Burnout 3 was not GameCube. You see, Prince of Persia was on my like, because I was just thinking, should I deny him it? But I thought, oh no, he’ll just have Psychonauts. And I think that’s more interesting in a way. But, you know, so it goes. That’s the draft. Yeah, I don’t know why I didn’t pick Psychonauts in the end. I just, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the other ones on Game Pass are so easily available. I don’t know. That’s not a good argument though. Prince of Persia is a better platformer as well. Yeah, absolutely. So Matthew, that’s the draft done. Like I say, Back Page part of People Want to Vote. This draft was a bit of an education or a reminder of the strengths of Xbox. So I can like, you know, I’ll dull back on some of my initial venom. Oh God, that’s going to be so embarrassing to listen back to that when we’re like two basically big children falling out. Mostly me because I’m the real child here. But yeah, good stuff. I think it’s fun anyway. It’s fun to just audit the libraries of those consoles. What a fun thing to dip into. I do love doing the draft. So yeah, we’ll talk about that in a future episode. So I’ve got one question here. It’s from Jacob Bisley. If you’d like to send us a question, Backpagegames at gmail.com. I will say, I’m going to put that call out here. We’d love to do another mail bag in the new year. So if you’d like to send us questions to like pile up for that, anything you like, we’ll go through those then. So, hi guys, sent you a question before, but I’m a mug. Listened to an episode the other day where you covered it. Here’s a new one. Do you have a favorite cancelled game? One that seemed super intriguing, but never made the light of day. I was thinking about Sadness for the Wii. It sounded super bleak and quite horrific, and would have been a unique and more adult title for the Wii. Very few and far between. Would love to hear your thoughts. I’ve got a favorite cancelled game, Matthew. Things that you were looking forward to that didn’t quite happen? The very last demo that I saw for Scalebound, I thought it was coming together. It was a game which was very muddled, but then the last demo they showed us, where there was just a bit more interplay between the character and the giant monsters, which seems to be the mechanic-lifted wholesale for Bayonetta 3, interestingly enough, that I was like, oh, actually, finally, this game is speaking to me, and then they cancelled it. So probably that. Yeah, it might have gone down well in those slightly quieter years for the Xbox. So for me, I was actually quite curious about Star Wars 1313 after reading about it in Jason Schreier’s book. It sounded like it was actually coming along quite fast and was getting closer to the finish line. And then obviously the Disney thing happened. That was one. Something very, very side note. I was reading some old NGCs to remind myself about the GameCube and for their review of the Bounty Hunter game on GameCube and multi-format. Was it called Star Wars Bounty Hunter? Yeah, the Jango Fett one. Yeah, the tagline was, you know when you’ve been Jangoed. Which really made me laugh. Oh dear, that’s like pure UK Games magazine gag. Sorry, you were saying. No, that’s fine. That was that visceral Star Wars game Amy Hennig was making. I was curious about that. I would like to have seen the Amy Hennig version of Star Wars. That would have been cool. I just want another Amy Hennig game, really. Yeah, are you going to get one? Which is nice. Yeah. So that aside, not loads. Were you ever interested in Raven Blade on GameCube, Matthew? Do you ever pay attention to that one? Remind me. It was like a retro studio. It was like fantasy action game. And I think it got canned so they could just focus on Metroid Prime. But it was on that VHS, actually, that came with the first issue of NGC. That one has completely passed from my mind. Yeah, that’s fair enough. What was the one about the vampire? Oh, Blood Rain. That’s what I’m thinking of. No, that came out, that one. So yes, I can’t think of many more, but 1313 is the one that comes to mind. Sadness, incidentally. I don’t know if that was ever really a game. That only ever existed as a couple of basically photo-real, as in I think they were photographs of real people. Yeah. That’s the team that went on to do Layers of Fear. I think that’s the origins of Blooper Team. That is interesting. Yeah, there you go. I think so, anyway. Well, that’s the podcast done, Matthew. Like I say, if people want to vote on the poll, Back Page pod on Twitter. And we’ll be back next week with a new episode. Where can people find you on social media, Matthew? MrBazzill underscore pesto. You’ll also find me hovering under the poll writing obnoxious comments about anyone who disses me. I think you’re describing me there, not yourself. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Thank you very much for listening. If you’d like to leave us a review on iTunes, we’d appreciate it or Apple Podcasts. And we’ll be back next week with a new episode. Goodbye. Bye for now.