Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, at the time we’re recording this, it’s basically Black Friday time, and the poll for the Xbox versus GameCube draft has kicked off, and you are winning, which I expected, but it’s not as big a disaster for me as I feared. Do you have any thoughts on how it’s going so far? It’s going okay. I feel like it’s another poll where, games aside, just general kind of episode demeanour is carrying some of the vote. I think some people found either of us too sour. Mostly me. I don’t think so. But I think when people would step away from that, which I hope they will, and just focus on the games they see, I think there are two collections that define those consoles nicely. I was way more excited for the Xbox games than I thought I was going to be. I’ve seen some people like, I’m not voting for GameCube because it’s got sunshine on it. And you’re like, well, I mean, that seems mad to me. But, you know, whatever. It’s one of 20 games. I mean, if you want to base your vote on that. So I can maybe sort of understand some of your previous frustrations where people kind of torpedo an option over like one quite mad stance. I mean, it was funny because one listener said that, you know, it was easy to vote for you because my console was filled with like weird movie tie-ins. And I think that like only refers to The Matrix Path of Neo, which like, you know, I totally own as a kind of divisive pick. But the funny thing is, that episode that we put out is the edited version. So like, if we think that’s what was suitable for public consumption, imagine what we cut as we kind of like got into sort of like, basically childhood kind of rivalries and me being a gigantic baby, which is. Yeah. I mean, I like literally cut like half an hour from that episode. Because it was just too spicy. It was just like, is this even a fun podcast anymore? You don’t want people to ask that question. I was like, don’t tell me this is the end of the Back Page podcast. Killed by a draft. It was right before I started a new job that we recorded that. And I was just incredibly tense, I think, generally. I think that just came off a little bit in the audio. It’s good. I think once you get into the draft itself, I think that that episode’s just got like loads of fun games to talk about. And some preposterous stuff. I do feel a bit dirty about TimeSplitters 2, but there we go. You’ve got to live with these things. I’ll have to live with that. Yeah, I wish I’d worked a bit harder to throw things at you that you didn’t pick for the console. We talked about this off air, but the Fire Emblem game that came out on GameCube or Skies of Arcadia, which is hard to get hold of. But it’s fine. It doesn’t make a difference. But what can you say? It’s a console that’s got Wind Waker and the Resi 4 on it. Of course, people are going to buy it. It’s just good times. Good times ahoy, frankly. So yeah, we’ll see how that… Very nautical. Yeah, I guess it is. Yeah, that was completely unintentional. But like, just because I’m bleary eyed. I don’t know the word ahoy popped into my head. So yeah, that draft is closed by the time that people are listening to this. So I’ll keep the pinned tweet up for like another week so people can see what the result was. And also a housekeeping note for people. I’ve gone back into the episode descriptions for the draft episodes and started adding who won them, just because it’s going to be quite hard for people to find the results on Twitter at this point. So just thought that if you want to know who won the draft and you’re like late listening to it, all you have to do is go to the episode description and it will tell you who won. So that will save you a job. Most times you’re safest to go, I imagine, Sam, because that’s tends to be what happens. It’s going to be 3-2 after this one, though. So you know. Well, then I’ll lose my underdog shtick, which will hurt me in future drafts. Yeah, absolutely. So, Matthew, in this episode, speaking of the old Xbox, this episode is all about Halo. So Halo Infinite is, it’s been long awaited. It was delayed by about a year. They released the multiplayer a little bit earlier. So in this episode, we haven’t played the single player yet, but we have been playing a bunch of the multiplayer together, in fact. So in the first section, we’re going to talk a bit about that. And then in section two, I’m going to rank the Halo games. Just going to rank them by campaign rather than multiplayer because it gets a bit murky otherwise, but people can look forward to that. I think I would say in terms of the ranking, it’s quite a predictable ranking, particularly if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you’re kind of like tuned into my taste. But yeah, Halo Matthew, we talked about this on the Xbox draft a little bit, but you said it took a little while for Halo to crack you. Was that your sort of starting point with it? Halo 3 was the first one I played because obviously I didn’t have an Xbox. I think when you come to Halo 3 without any like investment in the world and the story of it, some of it’s a little befuddling. Like I’ve been doing quite a lot of, I’ve now played all the Halo campaigns over the years since then. But before this episode, I was just refreshing myself on some things and reading about rankings and watching some YouTube videos just to get a feel to see what other people rated. And there’s so much like mad over investment in the story of Halo that I think can only come from playing these games when you’re young on Xbox and becoming invested in this world which coming to it now, it’s an element of it I will never understand. So putting that aside, like I would even go as far to say I think the Halo story is kind of total garbage and so let’s push that aside for a second. It’s got such a weird rhythm of its own, I think Halo, it’s still completely its own thing. Getting into that took me quite a long time. Halo 3 was something that didn’t instantly strike me as amazing. It took me quite a few years and replays to really click with it and fully understand it and I feel like now I like Halo more than I ever have but that’s coincided with maybe the at least the campaigns being not very good. So I’ve done it all out of order. My whole relationship with Halo is sort of fucked because of when I came to it, when I’ve worn to it but I’m open to more great Halo and I’m looking forward to chatting about it. Yeah, for sure. I’m not a big Halo head as our listeners might say. I’m resisting saying this. Oh, instantly on a side note, I feel so seen when people do these tweets that quote with eerie accuracy things that I might say on this podcast and it’s made me realise just what a caricature of a human being I am that I could be boiled down to a handful of Simpsons like catchphrases. It’s kind of embarrassing. I think you underestimate the kind of the richness of yourself. I mean, we’ve put out at this point more than 100 hours of audio onto the internet. Like, if you think about it, that is the equivalent of about 300 Simpsons episodes. So, you know, I like after 300 episodes, you could build up a pretty good impression of who like, you know, I don’t want to say Homer Simpson to compare you to Homer Simpson, but, you know, a character like that or Moe, like you kind of you know firmly who they are. So, it’s done out of love, Matthew. Yeah, I think so, but I’m not going to say I’m not a big Halo head, even though it’s kind of true. Yeah, I’ve never been like mega invested in the story of Halo, but I assume it must matter to the people who play the games because they’ve always made it such a big part of the marketing of how they work on these games, so, yeah, but like I am into like the setting though. I do love the way it looks. I love that it’s a colourful sci-fi world. It’s like back when everyone was doing kind of like brown games in the HD era, like Halo looked vibrant and beautiful and that style has aged very well. It’s why Halo Infinite looks fantastic. It’s just because they, you know, it was all there from the original game in 2001 and they just kept that ever since, even as like the trends have changed around it. It never really feels like in a wider sense, it never really feels like Halo is bent around the like different trends of first person shooters. It’s like, kind of like, yeah, it’s like there are like concessions for sure and changes like, you know, this this loads to Halo Infinite, like running and stuff like that, that feels like battle passes are from modern shooters, but the rhythm of it remains very specific, like you say. I think Halo 4 is the one where definitely in multiplayer, they shit the bed a little bit as far as like traditional Halo fans that are concerned, because there’s a lot more like coddiness to it, loadouts and kill streaks and things. I think that feels like a studio reacting to the taste of the day where actually I think the strength of definitely like what we’ve been playing in Infinite is that it’s very much its own thing, kind of saying, if you like Halo, here we’ve got Halo, if you don’t like Halo, maybe this isn’t for you. There’s only so much you can change it before it’s not Halo anymore. And I feel like they’re really sticking to their guns on this one. Yeah, which is, you know, absolutely fine by me. It’s kind of like resulted in a game that feels familiar. Like if there’s one thing I will say about playing Halo Infinite right now, it kind of like I always sort of regretted that I never quite played enough of the Halo 3 multiplayer as I wanted to, relative to how much I enjoyed that game. But now it feels like I am getting that experience and that particular type of multiplayer experience. And it feels really, really good to like see loads of people I know playing it. There is definitely a sea change here with like people who I know have been playing games on PS4 for the last few years. A lot of people playing Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite, like I think showing that Microsoft is like whatever they are doing is kind of working in terms of reaching people and getting people excited about Xbox again. These are games that absolutely do it. And so yeah, it is really nice to be playing something that feels familiar like this. But nonetheless, it has a bunch of different stuff like the grappling hook and other bits and pieces to kind of keep things varied. So we might as well go straight into that, Matthew, because I could talk a bit about the older Halos and my relationship with Halo in the second section. So playing Halo Infinite with you has been a great delight. We played it one evening this week. For the listeners benefit, the funniest thing Matthew does when we play this game, and I assume this is you regressing to your 2007 self, is when he dies, he will go, peace! And the other thing he does is he will sometimes cry like a baby does. The other thing he does is he does these Malcolm Tucker style riffs on the gamer tags of players who killed him. So let’s say there’s someone who’s like called like Riverboat Captain 69. He’ll be like, oh, it’s so fucking Riverboat Captain McFuck or whatever. And like it’s these kind of off the cuff sort of like riffs that were so, so funny when we were playing together. And like I assume that this this is something you’ve always done in multiplayer shooters, Matthew. But would you like to explain all of that? I think it’s just like my stream consciousness coming out like live. This is why I don’t stream because it’s just a constant flow of me being quite cross. And like in the heat of the moment, they probably sound wittier than they are. I mean, really, it’s it’s just word association of like, I see a word in their name, I see another word and then I stick some fucks in there and somehow it sounds legit. But it really isn’t. Yeah, I have just I mean, that is literally what goes through my head. If I’m playing a multiplayer game by myself, it’s just me yelling out. That’s why I’m not on headset mics. I think I would have been banned like a thousand times over. I’m not a good loser and I die a lot, which is why I think it probably feels more prominent. It’s not like once or twice a batch. It’s like every 15 seconds, which is why it probably stuck out a lot. It was so funny because I was like quite calm. I would sort of like cheer when something good happened. But like, you were just off in your own little world and it’s delightful for me because I’ve known you for years and yet I’ve like uncovered new sides of you and like, I just think that’s a great privilege. And it’s like, it’s the way it’s just the way you go, Pissed! That’s just so funny. Like that should be a Matthew Castle soundboard you can go buy in like fucking joke shops or something. It was, it was good stuff. So that aside, Matthew, how have you been feeling about Halo Infinite so far from what you’ve played? Yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been really enjoying it. I’m not amazing at Halo, but this one I seem to be doing okay. And I don’t know if that’s just because we’re in like the early window and like everyone with Game Pass and an Xbox is basically playing it. So there’s lots of people who stumble in and kind of don’t know what they’re doing. And this does happen in multiplayer games. Like I remember you talking about like Apex Legends, like you guys like moving around different platforms based on the quality of the general play. Is that right? Sort of. I mean, what we would do is we’d switch from like ranked to unranked and just see if it would be like, sometimes the matchmaking would just boot us into games with absolute terrors, but then like, we didn’t. But then if we switched to like ranked, we might get a bit more of a consistent game, that sort of thing. But we’ve definitely done a bit of that. Didn’t you do a bit on PS4 and then switch to PC? Yeah, that was that did happen. I did a bit of that last year, and I did win a game on PS4 quite easily. I thought, oh, I’m the dirtbag that I hate when I meet them online, you know. Right. So that’s, that’s, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about in terms of like, I was doing okay, but I seem to be doing okay against a few familiar names in each match who are obviously the people who were just like panicking a bit. The quality of my play aside, I think it just, it feels super nice. I think the word I used on Twitter was like crunchy. There’s a real snap to the guns and especially if you’re getting in close and sort of melee-ing people to death, which I do a lot because, you know, you’ve only got enough bullets in your normal gun to kind of deplete your shield and then you’re up close to personal and then it’s the old whackfest. So the whole thing feels very sort of like armour on armour. They’ve really captured that sense. It feels very tactile and pleasant, which I really, really like. So just the act of playing it is super nice. Compared to other shooters, again, like this is completely obvious if you’ve played any of these things, it takes that little bit longer to die in Halo. So it doesn’t feel like you’re just getting murdered instantly by teenagers. You know, someone gets a couple of shots on you. I mean, you have got a few seconds to kind of like hide and fix yourself or self-right or approach it slightly differently. And that was always the big hurdle with me early on playing Halo, that I didn’t really sort of understand that kind of rhythm of it and would get killed quite easily. But just knowing that, you last a bit longer in these games. So it’s naturally more satisfying to me than other shooters, because I, well, apart from all the times I die and scream piss, of course. But that aside, you know, it’s just, that’s why it feels like classic Halo. Like I’m living a bit longer. And when I do stuff, it feels great. Yeah, this is exactly why I played Apex Legends as well. This is slightly longer, Time to Kill, which is a term I learned from Evan on PCKimo when I worked with him. But like, it’s like you just have that little bit longer to kind of keep going and survive, as opposed to like, definitely with COD 4, I remember just being like, you know, just shot, not even understanding how I died, and then there’s this guy like inexplicably across the map, he just headshot me. But the temptation of that is like, well, I can do the same to someone else. You know, that’s always been the appeal of COD, is that kind of, it’s high risk, but high reward, I guess, where Halo’s got a very different rhythm. Yeah, even Warzone feels a bit like it’s like you last a bit longer. And just maybe it’s maybe that’s a battle royale thing where you just need to have a slightly longer life. But yeah, so I agree with you. I was trying to work out what is the essence of Halo Multiplayer. And like, I was in a firefight, there were like tanks driving around and stuff. I like shot a guy. And then like, a dude fucking clattered from the sky and a banshee ran me over. And I was like, this is Halo. It’s like fucking pure chaos in an arena shooter. And like, there’s a bunch of dials they can turn to make it even more chaotic. Like it’s a much more straightforward experience in the smaller maps, isn’t it? Like a straightforward kind of arena experience. And then the larger maps, it’s like the vehicles get thrown in. It becomes more complicated and like there’s a lot more going on. Do you have a preference between the two styles of play? Traditionally, I’ve always liked the big team battle stuff just because it it feels more like the Halo sort of sandbox with all the vehicles. But I think the arena game is as much better balanced. And I love the really close run, like objective game types. You know, we, you know, just in the time we were playing it, you know, we had a couple of games where of like oddball, where it was proper, you know, first to 100, both teams in the 90s claiming like individual points before losing the ball and those incredibly tense match endings. That feels like definitively Halo and they’re really good at engineering those as well. Like it’s very finely balanced for it to be super tense. Where in big team battle, I think it’s so chaotic that if a small group of people on one team know what they’re doing, it can just, they can just run away with it and completely trounce you. Like if the people on your team are like wasting the vehicles which can really like overpower the other side, you’re basically fucked and you’ll lose like a hundred to twenty or something. But at the same time you don’t really care because if in all that chaos you shoot someone out the sky with a rocket launcher, that feels great and that’s like your win of the match and you’ll take that away. It doesn’t… the overall scale of the thing, who really cares in the grand scheme of things? It just felt like organic emergent Halo fun. Yeah for sure. I really love that map that’s like the capture the flag map with the two points and you’re like in a desert. It’s like a square-shaped map I think and then like off to the left there are these two columns in the kind of like face the middle and like the skewer guns pop up there which are like one hit kill guns and they pop up a limited number of times a game and we won that capture the flag match in Sudden Death I think. I like it because it’s got those like launches that get you down the map quicker but you’re then quite exposed and there’s quite a nice sort of risk-award thing in there. I’m like oh god we kept joking in when we were playing like if either of us are hinted at trying to have some actual knowledge of the map or some like wisdom we joke about being like terrible esports commentators, like absolute pretenders and you’re like no no let’s let’s know our place we don’t know what we’re doing really. There are entire games where like I think there are about three or four instances where you and I teamed up to try and be a more effective unit but then there were like other times where we just sort of like basically did our own thing within a game and like had completely different experiences in the game and like and then at the end we’d lose we were like oh well you know at least I shot down a banshee or whatever and like yeah you get that but then there’s other times where like that oddball match where we were playing against a squad of absolute fucking like monsters who were just amazing at keeping hold of it and moving through the map and holding at a specific point and like being hard for it was hard for we didn’t win that that game but we got really close and it was just just just really really fun and like just a really fun trad multiplayer mode but also the game generally just feels like trad multiplayer but just done incredibly well so yeah really exciting and I just also just feels like a game I can dip into without feeling like I have to be fucking amazing at it you know which like as much as I love Apex I really do love Apex is a game that requires you to be kind of like switched on really just because it’s just it’s It’s got that really high-scale ceiling, and it takes a while to play a game and stuff. And here it’s just like, well, I’ve got 10 minutes, I fancy a game of this. I don’t really care if I lose, but if I win, it’ll feel really good, and I’ll have a good time anyway. I mean, side note, 343 Industries, I noticed this in Halo 5 as well. They’ve gotten really fucking good at how guns feel. When we were playing that, what’s that mode? The Fiesta mode? Yeah, Fiesta, yeah. Yeah, it gives you a random load out of guns. And pretty much every single gun in the game feels really good. Like you say, crunchy is a good way of putting it. It just feels like every gun feels like it’s got some heft to it. Even if it doesn’t necessarily do that much damage, there’s that gun that slaps out big red rockety things, and it does almost no damage, but it feels really good to fire. I think that’s something they’ve gotten really good at since Halo 4, is just understanding the gun feel is really important. And so even the old assault rifle feels really good in this one, you know? It’s quite the thing. So any more thoughts on Halo Infinite, Matthew, or are we done there? Annoyingly, the whole Halo Infinite multiplayer experience seems to be represented online by lots of arguing about battle pass. Maybe you’re super into unlocking cosmetics and stuff, but do understand that that side of the game is not important. Like fundamentally, there is no advantage to anything that happens in that game. Like you just go into the matches, they will play out the same way every single time. No matter how many games you’ve played, you don’t have better equipment. There aren’t loadouts or anything like that. Online will make… You know, the online discourse makes it sound like it’s completely hobbled by this battle pass system. But maybe I’m just of an age where I just don’t care about that stuff. But the actual game you play is great. So don’t worry about that. All right, then. Yeah. Well, I’m very much enjoying it. And I’m excited to see what Microsoft does to build on it. Like, if they have different seasons and they add new maps and stuff, that could be really exciting. I mean, this is free as well. It’s a free game, this. That’s like, yeah, amazing. Well done, Les. Yeah, I’m glad we just got a really complete feeling shooter in our hands. And Halo is back. A world with a good Halo is a better world, if you ask me. I mean, you know, sort of all COVID stuff aside. Like, it’s just, you know, it’s good. I’m excited for the future of Halo, which is a good place to be in. So, Matthew, should we take a quick break and come back and talk about some old Halos? Yeah, let’s do it. Welcome back to the podcast. So, in this section, we’re gonna rank the Halo games. Well, I am, and Matthew’s gonna politely listen and ask questions. Think of it like the Phoenix Wright and Zelda episodes where Matthew did a fuckton of work, but then I just sort of said, oh, but what about the Majora’s Mask and the origins of Epona and just all that kind of stuff? And this time Matthew gets to do that, but I won’t have any answers for him because I don’t know Halo as well as he knows Zelda. So that’s fine. We’ll muddle through it. Yeah, I think so, yeah. So Halo for me is like a massive foundational series. I mentioned this on the Xbox draft last week, but it wasn’t really massively on my radar, but then around 2002 time, I got massively into first-person shooters. There was a lot going on in that space at once suddenly. There was stuff like Medal of Honor Allied Assault on PC, which was by what would become Infinity Ward, making that game for EA. That was obviously a phenomenal first-person shooter. I’d never seen anything like it, just draw-dropping, saving Private Ryan style. Omaha Beach section, of course, and that was really good. But also Battlefield 1942 was around that time as well. So you got large-scale vehicular combat in a first-person shooter. That was really, really good. And there was also stuff like Star Wars Jedi Knight 2, yes, Jedi Outcast. And that had a really good multiplayer mode where you’d go from first-person shooting to having lightsaber duels in maps that looked like the Death Star and stuff like that. And that was really, really good. So there was just suddenly a moment where my brain just became alive to how good first-person shooters were. And loads of this was happening on PC at the time, more than consoles. Yeah, but I played lots of Soldier of Fortune 2, weirdly. Ha! But that was a good game, though, right? Wasn’t that like a… was that a Raven game? Well, I played the multiplayer of it a lot. The single-player, people only played that game because you could, like, cut people accurately on, like, 50 bits of their body. It’s, like, really sinister, early naughty shit. Um, but I played the multiplayer of that a lot. A slightly warped experience because I had a… I always used to play it. I had one CD ripped to my PC, which was a Ben Fold CD. So I used to play that online to a Ben Fold soundtrack. And now whenever I hear any of those songs on that album, I’m just, like, flashback to war. I’m so glad I, like, went down this tangent now because if I hadn’t, I would never have heard that story. I could have just talked about Halo, but I got to hear that. Well, I remember I played, like, more of the first Soldier of Fortune than the second. I think I’ve only played the demo in the second. I thought the second, like, seemed, though, like, it was a legit shooter. Whereas the first one was, like, basically pull these action figures apart and watch, like, blood and guts go everywhere. The first one’s a little bit like war crime simulator. Yeah. Yeah. And then the second one was kind of like them going legit a little bit. Yeah, and you still had that horrible streak to it. But it was definitely like, I think the campaign was semi-respected, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So that was a really good time for PC shooters. It just was. And this is right around the time that people get in broadband, of course, as well. So you could go online with this stuff and have a really good experience. So yeah, I was big into PC gaming at the time. But make down the road called Donald, he lived in this gigantic house that looked like a castle. I mean, that sounds like a thing I dreamed. I promise it happened. Like he got an Xbox. I don’t know why, but he wasn’t as into PS2. I think it’s because his brother had a PS2, so maybe he felt like he got that out of his system. He got an Xbox and I remember he had like Championship Manager 2003, which I think like that was a huge deal for a football fan, for that to come out on console at the time. You put that in the draft, though, did you? Maybe if we redraft next year, Matthew, I’ll do that. And then like True Crime Sheets of LA and Brute Force. The cursed redraft. I quite like that as an idea, but I don’t want to test our listeners’ patience. Do you know what, on a side note, I do want to do a four-person PS2 redraft. Oh, for sure. With Rich and maybe Dan Dawkins or something else. Oh, that would be so good. That could be really good, yeah. Because also, you know, Dan plays football games, he can talk about pairs. I think I never understood, so that’d be good. But yes, that was a bit of a tangent. But he got an Xbox. And I didn’t really, I knew that Microsoft had thrown all this money at it. I remember at the time thinking, oh, is it kind of like your dad’s console? Because PC, you know, PC and console have very different profiles. But then the shooter that had been like written about in PC mags a lot. I think Halo was originally a strategy game. And then like it was obviously a Mac game for a while, then end up coming to PC. But then like it moved from PC to Xbox. I had a long journey, came along and I was just blown away by how good it felt from the off. It was like playing a PC quality shooter on a controller. And like, there was just something perfectly Xbox about Halo. It’s just the very essence of the Xbox, what I kind of see it as and what everyone sees it as. It’s just wrapped up in Halo, this really high quality, kind of like bright first person shooter that feels like something it could have been on PC and like the the noughties, but instead ended up defining like the genre for consoles. And over time, I would say that like, Halo left such an impact on me that I’ve never quite had the same experience with the subsequent games. They’ve gone in different directions, like more story led directions and adding different parts to the lore, having more cut scenes, having the aliens talk, which is always controversial to me, because in the first Halo, all the aliens just went and like would throw a grenade at you and go. And that was like all they did. So in the next game where they were like, I must go and defeat Master Chief or whatever, I was just a bit like, I was like, I thought these guys were just like Wall-E, so you kind of like attached grenades to it and ran over. Exactly. It’s like you and the paper Mario Goombas, Matthew, you’re like, oh, Oh, yeah. What is the psychology of the grunt? Yeah. Psychology of a Goomba is like one of the Matthew Castle like go terms now. I’ve said that at least 10 times. Yeah. Oh, amazing. So when they start adding that stuff and they start adding new enemy types, it’s hard to remix that original Halo formula because that first game arrived so complete, I think. But we’ll get into that when I rank the games. But Matthew, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on what makes a great Halo game and what you think the essence of the series is. I think for me, it’s more down to individual levels. There’s a certain level type which only Halo really does or can do. And my personal rankings of the games is sort of based on how many of those levels you get in the game. And it’s the semi open world mixture of sort of a vehicular and on foot combat, which seems so specific to Halo. The famous example everyone always gives is Silent Cartographer, but then, you know, there’s many of these level types. It’s the sense of being in this huge world with this kind of amazing equipment and it’s you in this equipment versus the massive world. That’s the side of it I’m into. I’m less into the kind of close quarters stuff. Like, it always amazes me, like, for the classic, it’s considered. I don’t really like the first level of Halo 1, for example, the kind of the ship level which these games tend to open with. You know, I am really only into the outdoors when you’ve got lots of fun stuff. The kind of sandbox is what they always refer to it, isn’t it? The combat sandbox. That’s the stuff that sort of speaks to me. Just where you can make cinematic moments happen for yourself, which makes the obsession with the actual, like, in-baked storytelling and cinematic ideas seem a bit false to me, because you can make better stuff happen by yourself. There’s, you know, the, I’ve mentioned this on the 2007 podcast, I think, but my favourite Halo level is the level called The Covenant in Halo 3. That’s the level that basically ends, almost ends, with the two scarabs dropping from the sky into this massive battlefield, and you arrive at, like, a tank. There’s, like, two flying vehicles off to the right that you can get in as well, and then there’s loads of, like, dudes driving around at the below, they can go get in a mongoose and, like, you can hop over a hill onto, on top of one of the scarabs, which are these giant, kind of, like, walking tanks, basically. And, that, like, is a perfect Halo set piece, because I would just reload a checkpoint over and over again to see the different possibilities of how that could play out, doing things like, can I get one scarab to shoot the other one and blow it up? Spoiler alert, you can’t. And then, like, doing things like messing with the physics, where I’m like, okay, we managed to get this thing happening where, if the scarab stood on you, then it could flip you into the sky, the top, very top of the map, and then your vehicle would just, like, slowly collapse from the heavens, back down onto the map, and the game would just kind of go haywire. And then playing that back in the Halo’s, like, video editor sort of software and stuff like that. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, yeah. Like, that kind of stuff, really. That is the essence of Halo to me. Like, that is my perfect idea of what Halo looks like. That’s why I’m so excited about Infinite, because it’s, theoretically, it’s a whole open world kind of, well, or a series of open worlds. I mean, I’m not exactly sure how it’s going to work into this in my hands. I’ve not been reading the previews of it. But like, that sounds like it could be a whole world of open Halo sandboxes where, you know, kind of chaos can happen and there’s loads of vehicles and the first story trailer they did, sorry, the first campaign trailer they did this year, just really, really kind of like made me excited about the sort of the direction it’s going in. So I’m hoping it will kind of like coalesce into my ideal Halo experience, because I agree with you, like the story, you know, I don’t mind, like, Halo being story focused. I think that’s definitely like part of what people expect with the series. But I agree, like, I’m at my least happy in Halo when I’m in a corridor for like a long period of time or a series of tunnels. I’m at my happiest when I’m outside and like this basically a war happening around me. That’s like, yeah, inside there’s always there’s like a lot of repetition. There’s a lot of like architecture repeating because it’s set in these weird sort of alien architecture where there is a lot of repetition in the design sort of intentionally and that stuff I just never really got the appeal of it. Like it just didn’t feel like you had the options you have outside. And I know some people have like an interesting relationship with this game in terms of like difficulty. Like there are some people who are just sort of like legendary or bust and I can’t say like, that’s that’s my relationship with these things. I’d much rather have a cool time in some vehicles than feel like I’m being pushed in this like nightmare combat simulator, you know. It’s funny because the original Halo sums up that sort of like those two different styles of levels so well because you have the library which is the ultimate death corridor basically. It’s like probably a level to bulk out the length of the story because Halo is not a very long game and like has a lot of level repetition as it is which I don’t think like I could hold against it massively. I don’t think it makes a difference but the library just is basically the same thing over and over again. Lots of dark big rooms following a little blue thing around and then getting attacked by endless flood and you just try and fend them off with a shotgun and it’s kind of nightmarish on legendary difficulty. But then by contrast like you say the silent cartographer is like the almost like a vertical slice of Halo, like a proof of concept of what Halo should be, do you know what I mean? It’s like complete the objectives and the order you want, you know, here’s a bunch of vehicles, here’s a battle on a beach that you arrive to and a load of cool little sandboxes to enjoy. So yeah, I think that’s very astute and the first game just really sums up that very well but all of the games have this balance to some extent. I think the success of a Halo game to me depends on how well it balances them. I just think it should just be trying to delight you with set pieces all the time. That’s kind of how I see Halo. So Matthew, before we get into ranking the campaigns then, do you have any thoughts on like Halo Wars or the kind of like any of the other sort of spin-off stuff? Like I was always quite fond of these games. I don’t tend to play strategy games, particularly real-time strategy games. I’m not a very strategic person. As anyone who’s listened to any of our draft episodes will know, strategy is not my strength. I get why they’re sort of semi-important and like what they achieve in terms of making them playable on a console. I played more of Halo Wars 2 because I had success when I was on the Xbox channel when we were doing a lot of Halo Wars footage, so I, you know, the footage couldn’t be terrible and I was having to get my head around it. I sort of get the appeal in terms of you get to see those battles from a slightly further out perspective. It’s almost like having a bird’s eye view on like classic Halo fights. I never felt like what I played of them ever scaled up as fully as I’d want it to, you know, like in your head you want to see just like a huge army clash with another army and it never really kicks off like that. I guess to make it like manageable or workable on a console, which is a shame. Like I feel like it doesn’t take the final sort of cinematic step is what I’d want it to do and really like blow out the scale and just have hundreds of units on screen at the same time, but that’s fine. People seem, are they sort of rated by like strategy players? I don’t really know. It’s hard to say really because they are made by, the first one was made by Ensemble. The second one was made by Creative Assembly. I think that like there was a big trend of RTS games that were just based on licenses that like where you kind of there were big battles happening in the kind of like properties themselves. So you wanted to see that happen on that larger scale and Halo followed in the footsteps of you know battle for Middle Earth and like Star Wars Empire at war and Galactic Battlegrounds and that respect like people wanted to see that large scale Halo conflict that gets hinted at in cut scenes and stuff when you’re playing the game. So yeah, I don’t know. I think they have a fan base basically and like they made the second one I think because it was like their most requested sequel, Microsoft. I think that’s what they said at the time. So yeah, must have been some fans of it. But yeah, I take your point Matthew. I keep forgetting that you’re not an RTS guy. I feel like there’s been so many podcasts now where I’ve asked you, do you like this RTS? And you go, I don’t like RTS games. And then I keep bringing it up. We did a really mad press event for, actually, I think it was an influencer event for Halo Wars 2, where it was for the presenters on the channel. It was like set up, but they were in either a ship on the battlefield or maybe they were in a ship looking down on the battlefield and they were playing like Halo Wars 2 in this sort of like ship, which they designed to look like an actual like, hey, it was like walking into a like Halo level. But like as they got hit in the game, like bits of the set would like collapse and spray smoke at them and stuff. It was pretty cool. But at the same time, I was like, I’m so glad it isn’t me playing. So it was so bad at the game. I don’t know that they would have taken into account me being that bad. I don’t know if the set would have been able to like disintegrate it enough. They had a cool like card based multiplayer mode for Halo Wars 2 as well. I remember I only ever played at a press event, but I remember I met the designer of it and he was so, so smart and it was like a really cool idea for a mode. Like, yeah. Do you remember the thing I mean? Like it was like you summoned units to the battlefield. It was it was like a hold three checkpoints thing. And as you held checkpoints, I think you got the resources to to play more cards. Yeah. And you were basically trying to play like your hero card. If you were the covenant was like a scarab would turn up or something. And it would just be like game over for everyone. Yeah, that that’s the bit of Halo Wars 2 I played the most of for sure. Side note, like I asked the designer of that game about that mode, about 40 questions, because I went to three, four, three industries for a press event for Halo Wars 2 back when I was on PC Gamer. And like I found out he also worked on Alien Isolation. So there’s an entire dinner where I was basically just pelting in with questions about alien isolation and making this Halo Wars mode. And like, yeah, that was I’m sure that wasn’t fun for him, but I had a great time. So that was good. Yeah, I suppose I should talk about that, actually. Yeah, 343 Industries, they have like a Halo Museum in their studio. So I walked around that, like, you know, replicas of the armor, all the different guns and stuff like that. And that was quite good. But the more surreal part of that trip was they were in this town that was like felt like a kind of tech town. Like it was there was like a shopping mall right next to the studio. And it was like empty on a Friday morning. And it was like I couldn’t sleep. And I woke up at like 4am and I went for a walk around this town. And it was incredibly strange, like Twilight Zone style place. It didn’t feel like a natural place. It’s all in the Pacific Northwest, like near Bellevue. This is like Microsoft’s, you know, big kind of territory basically. And it feels like an entire town just built for like the tech people around there. And like maybe maybe subsidized by these tech companies because it didn’t function like a normal town. I walked to the edge of the edge of town, which didn’t take long. It was like it took me 10 minutes to walk from one side to the other basically. And there was just like these barriers stopping the roads and anyone from going down this big road out of town. And I thought, am I in Silent Hill right now? It was very, very surreal. Sounds like WandaVision. Yeah, it was a bit like that. Just very surreal, an entire shopping, outdoor shopping mall. There were like about eight people in a Starbucks and no one else. And like all the shops were open. It was really weird. But anyway, side note there, the Halo Museum was cool though. Yep, that was one hell of a tangent. So now, Matthew, I think we should just get to ranking the Halo campaigns. Do you have any further thoughts on Halo before we kick off? On the 343 thing, I always thought that was a really interesting happening. You know, obviously in Losing Bungee, they basically build a studio to make Halo. I guess in a similar way that they kind of built Turn 10 to make racing games. It felt like that was their solution. If we don’t have it, we can just build it. And it’s interesting seeing them just keep at it and stick through it and all the kind of weird highs and lows they’ve had to deal with. And hopefully Halo Infinite will be a bit of a crowning glory for them finally. I dealt with them quite a lot when I was on OXM because it was Halo 5 kind of time. I also edited a massive Halo bookazine. And as you can guess from this episode, I’m probably not the person to build a 130 page celebration of Halo. I interviewed five of them at the same time, I think, over the phone. I did like an hour and a half interview with 343, which was like, it was the same five that they’d interviewed like just before they made Halo 4. So it was kind of like a before and after interview. And you know, whatever you think of their actual individual games, like they’re super, super passionate. They’re just massive, massive Halo fans. You know, maybe why they took a bit of time to find their feet because they kind of populated it with Halo nerds who kind of were maybe too protective of it. But we can get into all that, I guess. Yeah, their games definitely have their merits for sure. And like you say, you know, Bungie moves off the series after Halo Reach, goes to McDestiny. And then, yeah, like it’s a big weight, I’m sure, on them to like continue that series. So I’m really pleased to see that Halo Infinite seems to be that game that, like you say, crowning glory. It’s a good way of putting it. So in this ranking, I’m not going to talk about the multiplayer modes, but some stray multiplayer thoughts, actually. That was like, even when Halo 5 was having like a bumpy time on Xbox, the multiplayer was really fucking good in that game. Like the Warzone mode just felt like it was doing everything that I kind of want, I always dreamed Halo could do in multiplayer, just in terms of scale. And it was just like, it was cool to see that part of it, even if the campaign was maybe more contentious, that that part of it remained like, sort of incredibly popular with players. And that’s the other thing about 343’s games, they’ve always looked fucking amazing too. So yeah, that’s a side note there. It’s pre-Battle Royale, isn’t it? Yeah, it is, yeah. Weird period for games. It’s like the tail end of the cod, like ruling the roost. And then this new thing comes along and they’re kind of like, I guess the halfway house, you know, like a big open world map, but not Battle Royale. Weird time. Yeah, it was a bit strange, wasn’t it? Yeah, and then like, I feel like there’s also, because Destiny was happening at that time too, there was like these, you know, there were live servicey games that were more like PvE stuff and then Halo was kind of an outlier. And Halo has always remained an outlier in that respect, I think. It’s just even now, like, it’s not like Battlefield, it’s not like Apex, it’s not like Warzone. It’s just, it’s very much its own beast all these years later. So yeah, good stuff. Let’s kick off, then, Matthew. So I’ve ranked the seven games in total. I’ve ranked them all here. It’s a pretty predictable list, but we can fire through them. So we’re starting with the one that I’ve got the spottiest memory of, which is Halo 4. That’s the number seven on my list. So this was the first 343 game. It introduced, like, four runner enemies to the game. That included, like, there’s, like, this angel thing, this dog thing and this poor thing. And, like, those were, like, those were, like, they didn’t quite feel exactly Halo-ish at the time. They felt, like, I think that they had to do something to make it feel different, to, like, not just be the Covenant and the Flood over and over again, which, you know, Halo had definitely got into that pattern. And so, you know, I fully respected the fact that they tried to do something quite different. This also looked phenomenal for an Xbox 360 game. Like, this basically looks like an Xbox One game. And when you play the Master Chief Collection, you can really see that. It’s just phenomenal looking. So the tech they built for it was really good. But yeah, admittedly, I didn’t think it quite had the pace of Halo. The levels felt very long. And I don’t think it quite had those, like, one-minute bursts of, like, absolute, kind of, like, amazing action. It didn’t have anything really like the Two Scarabs set piece I mentioned earlier. It was kind of like lots of protracted battles. And it just, yeah, it didn’t entirely feel like Halo to me. But Matthew, I wondered, do you have any thoughts on this one? Like I say, it’s the spottiest memory for me. I quite like Halo 4. I’d probably put it above Halo 5 for myself. I don’t think the Prometheans are like amazing enemies. Like they’ve weirdly kind of hit the glowing weak spot, a lot of their designs. But I will take them over the flood. I fucking hate the flood. And I think the Prometheans are a better like second threat than them. And yeah, you’re right. It looked absolutely amazing. Like the Promethean architecture is like incredible. So even if the levels are a bit more linear, you are constantly like, wow, this looks awesome. You’re right to put it near the bottom. I would maybe tussle with 5 over this, but… There may be a bit of recency bias here. But yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s the one I’m due a replay of really. Like I’ve been playing through them all again with my buddy Jay who came on the Sonic episode. We’ve been enjoying that. So yeah, Halo 4 I think is next up on our list. So we will get through it. But yeah, this is the one I played the longest ago of these really. But like Halo 4, yeah, just didn’t quite have the stickiness of the other games. Like didn’t make me want to replay them. And that’s like a massive part of what makes a great Halo single player. It’s just the urge to kind of play a level again, see how it pans out. It didn’t quite have that magic, but I agree it was a valiant first effort. I think the Prometheans are a lot like Destiny enemies. They’re like, like you say, glowing weak spots. Maybe make me think of the Vex a little bit. Just like, yeah, hit this bright thing and then try and take it out. You’ve got like a moment to hit it before, you know, it kind of closes up. And those sorts of types of combat challenges, you know. Yeah, it just feels like a lot of the fights in that game are like, stay really far away and snipe out the Prometheans. And then you go in, it doesn’t have quite the same variety. The Prometheans are a bit uncompromising closer up, is my memory of it. So my number six is Halo 5. So, you know, Halo 5 Guardians. This is the one I’ve played the most recently. I played it this year for the first time, the campaign for this. Nice game pass edition there. I enjoyed firing through that. I actually thought this was a lot better than people said it was. And I think in the second half, it loses what I was enjoying about it, which is it almost reminded me of like Doom 2016. It was just really frantic, busy enemy encounters. And actually the enemies were quite tough and like pushed on you really hard. And there would be like waves of them. And it was quite, there was like a few moments like that. I was like, oh, I’m getting a slightly Doom feel from this. And it really helps that the framerate is like 60 frames on Xbox One and like looked amazing. And those weird enemies in the distance that move at half the framerate. Oh, yeah, that is weird. Yeah. Yeah. The funny thing is, though, like I think that what they did here that I don’t think Halo 4 had as much is they really cracked like what the guns should feel like. And the Promethean guns were really good. Like the Promethean shotgun felt really, really nice. And I think that they got that working well. And I think they got the experience of ripping the Prometheans apart, hitting their weak spots and killing them. I think they were way better at that in this one. They’re much more exciting enemies to fight. They’re more agile and interesting, very aggressive. They’re not perfect. But I think the combination of refined gun feel and better enemies is why I like this one. I think they got rid of the ball enemy as well, which I appreciated. Did you have any thoughts on this one, Matthew? In my head, this is the game where Halo vanishes up its own law hole. It really got bogged down in the overarching story and it was part of a multimedia, cross-media project. There was a spin-off, smaller TV show about Locke. There were comic books. They’ve always had the books. There’s always been supporting material. But this one felt like you actually had to engage with all this bullshit to just understand the basic setup of the game, which was like Master Chief versus this other not very good Master Chief played by Luke Cage. I think you’re right. The actual mechanically, fine. I really like the multiplayer in this, but I felt like this was on the story level and how much the story was there. There were literally like the classic Naughty Dog walk around a level talking to people levels in this. There are static, combat free story environments. And I thought this is just a game which is really misunderstood. This is what happens when you build a studio of Halo fans and they’re just like, well, everyone loves this shit, right? And you’re like, no, not really. I think they got a bit high on their own supply. I would say that the talking sections are so brief, Matthew. They last for about two minutes. They are the exact opposite of what you want in a Halo game. They’re like, remember him from ODST? Here he is doing his stick. And you’re like, oh, fucking yeah, OK. If you’re not into the Halo story, this is definitely the most egregious one to play, I think. I think an important question to ask him, Matthew, is are you not interested in Nathan Fillion? That’s like my question to you here. Yeah, I like him enough, but not as… Like, Buck is hardly a classic character. He’s not, but I just feel very comforted by hearing Nathan Fillion. It’s why I liked the later Destiny expansions. I don’t know, just the mere presence of him reassures me to my very core. You get a bonus Fillion point. Yeah, basically, yeah. I think so. It’s 10 out of 10 for Fillion. I’ll tell you what, I really love the opening bit of music to this. There’s a bit of music where they sort of jump out of this, in this cutscene, they sort of jump out of this ship and then slide down this mountain, and it plays this, like, it’s like someone banging on church bells. It’s really, really good. There’s also a set piece in this that made me think. They’ve really rediscovered the kind of, like, magic of Halo, which is you fly into, like, a big structure and blow up its core, then have to fly out again, like, a kind of Death Star-y sort of thing. It’s quite brief. It might be, like, a big moving walker thing. I don’t remember the exact details now, but, like, you just, like, have to fly in on a banshee and then leave again, having blown out. It’s like a mega scarab, almost. Yeah, yeah. That is… I think that is what it is, yeah. And, like, that, just thought, oh, fuck, that was, like, a real magical Halo moment of, like, big set-piece nonsense. And that was really, really good. A few of the vehicle sections are quite good in this. There’s, like, one way you have to kind of, like, fly through the entire map, basically, opening different doors and taking out enemies. And, like, that really worked for me, too. Again, I remember no story details of any of this, so I can’t give you any more context, but, like… Do you remember having to fight the Warden Eternal ten times? Yeah, I do, actually, yeah. It made me think about the idea of, like… I think, like, they were originally going to do one big sister in Bioshock 2, but then realised that, like, fighting the same enemy, a boss, but never killing them, was too frustrating as a player. But in this game, you would do that over and over again. And it was like, yep, he’s fucked off again. Guess we’ll see him later. And then at the end, be like, finally. Yeah, I mean, the clue’s in the name. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, yeah. So I actually did think I thought this was better than Halo 4. I didn’t even think it was much of a competition for me. And again, I think a lot of it just comes down to gun feel. I think the fact that you have the NPCs kind of companions with you makes the fights feel larger scale as well. I think it loses the thread of it a bit towards the end. I liked sort of like kind of roping down that giant Evangelion style sort of robot thing. That was pretty cool. I think you were just kind of like rushing down it and shooting enemies. That was really cool. Yeah, repelling. That’s the word I’m looking for. That was good. I think there were a few moments in there that were like real highlights. I just sort of felt like they were getting closer and closer to what great Halo is. Now, six years later, I’ll get to see what they can do with all that time and the power of some nice new Xbox hardware. Having given that Craig guy a beard so people stop making memes about him, that’s good. So, my number five is Halo 2. Again, another predictable one. So, this is a game that lacks… I thought you were going to put this higher. Well, I mean, if you think about the remaining ones in the list, it kind of makes sense that it’s here, I think. Yeah, I’m completely with you. I thought my controversial take was Halo 2 isn’t quite as good as the others, but obviously not. No, I think that’s a fairly commonly held belief because it feels very brisk. Like, it’s a game that ends when it feels like its third act is about to begin. It’s just very, very short. And I know this is, there was an interesting Halo oral history, I think, on Vice a few years ago, where they talked about just how, what a rush the finish this was and a tough game to make. And I think all of the best parts of this game happen in, like, old and new Mombasa City at the start. The city sequences, I think, are what people remember from this. Partly because when they did the first E3 reveal of this, and they showed off, like, a whole section of vehicle combat, that kind of burned into people’s brains as, like, the kind of platonic ideal of what Halo is. It was just a lot of people still in the YouTube comments that are like, I remember this video and I’ve still always wanted Halo to be this. And it cast a long shadow. And so, when the actual game came out, the most exciting thing for me was just going over that fucking gigantic bridge in a tank shooting down banshees in the tank. Like, that’s, like, the best part of this game for me. You know, controlling a scarab layer, or being on a scarab layer on, maybe, that was fine. But, like, I think it just, it felt like it was going to be this, like, big second act, and it wasn’t as much. And I wasn’t, admittedly, big into, like, the lore stuff of aliens talking, and the arbiter, and like I say, just, like, being we must eliminate the human beings and all this sort of stuff. Like, just, yeah, like, very wrinkly-looking guys and, like, floating, sort of, chairs, all this sort of stuff. But here’s the thing, Matthew, what I will say about Halo 2. So I think it’s a 7, the campaign, but I think Halo 2 anniversary is an 8, because the art pass they did for that anniversary edition in the Master Chief Collection is fucking unbelievable. It is an unreal effort. Like, an amazing facelift where these very grey boxy levels, particularly in the second half, are, like, given so much colour, vibrancy, and, like, a soundscape that made them incredibly atmospheric. And it was, like, levels that I don’t remember at all just being these, kind of, grey, boring pits. They made look like the fires of hell. And it was just amazing. It was, like, a proper example of, like, what amazing artists can do to elevate a game. Did you play the anniversary edition? Yeah, that was part of the Master Chief Collection, right? Yeah, it was, like, the centrepiece of it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It probably didn’t help that I don’t have a huge relationship with the original. But, yeah, it looked nice. It had those absurdly good-looking cutscenes as well. Yeah, for sure. The Xbox One really struggled to show without, like, fucking falling over, basically. But, like, yeah, like, I think it’s good because it really future-proofs this game. Like, the past they did for Halo anniversary was really good, but, like, this was, like, next-level stuff. And that was 343 as well, and it’s, like, fair play. I thought, you know, I just thought it really elevated Halo 2 as an experience. It made it feel fresh and worthwhile. So, yeah, just a big shout-out to the art, the art past, because I just think it made a massive difference. So, yeah, Halo 2, though, Matthew. Any more thoughts? I just didn’t think this, like, reached the highs of the first game at all. That was kind of my disappointment at the time. You know, the first time I played it was in The Master Chief Collection. It was a bit of a shrug from me in terms of, like, oh, okay, you know, fine. Like, I know that most people love it because of the multiplayer, and it’s, like, the game that introduces everyone to Xbox Live, and I get that. The actual campaign, you’re right, like, the bit I remember is going along that bridge on the tank, but that’s quite near the start, and isn’t there a bit in the jungle with lots of snipers as well? I feel like there’s a bit like that in all Halo games. Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah, I couldn’t tell you a huge amount about the rest of it. When me and my mate Donald would replay it, we would only do the city bits, basically. We’d be like, like, let’s get in a tank and go fuck up some Covenant, and that was it, basically. And like I said, it just ends very abruptly, and you kind of want that next level of escalation, which I think other games do a lot better. So yeah, Halo 2, I think it’s kind of a minnow, but justifiably so, and yeah, that’s absolutely fine with me. So my number 4 is Halo 3 ODS 2. So for a lot of people, this game, which is like a standalone spin-off, I think it was like maybe it was meant to be DLC for Halo 3 at some point, and then it got kind of rolled into its own game, budget price game, and it came out in 2009. So this was quite different in the sense that like you were landing in this city, you were basically trying to find out what happened to your squad mates, these kind of shock troopers who just landed from the sky in this city. You find their helmets and then kind of like hear their stories sort of play out basically, and the stories take the form of like more traditional Halo levels. But the overarching kind of like sort of, I guess like the wrapping of the entire game is this sort of like kind of open world driving around this city at night and kind of like taking on smaller squads of Covenant while this kind of like quite jazzy sort of music plays, a bit different stylistically. And I think that a lot of people will say like this is their favorite Halo game or whatever. It’s definitely not the best. Like it just isn’t. The set pieces aren’t up there. But as a kind of like contrast to the formula, it always made me think about what else you could do with Halo as a kind of template. Because what’s interesting about this in terms of your power as a player is you’re a regular guy rather than a Spartan. So you run out of breath and like, you know, when you’re damaged and stuff like that, you feel very fragile compared to Master Chief. I think that was really interesting. It made for a really, really good firefight horde mode in this. This is the first game with firefight. I think they did it really well. Really enjoyed playing that two player. So, yes, Halo 3DST, Matthew, do you have any thoughts on this one? The thing I played most was the firefight also. I always found the weakness of the character a little bit frustrating. I remember this being quite hard or not making particularly good progress in it and finding some of the map a little confusing. It’s quite a story heavy entry again. If they are going to expand their story and expand their universe, I’d rather they did it in games like this than asking you to buy lots of novels and comics and watch not very good Hulu series. A little overrated in how people talk about the atmosphere of the thing. I think you’re right about the music, but it’s quite low-key, almost too low-key for what I wanted from Halo. Considering the stuff I like in Halo is the ridiculous overblown bullshit, this is the exact opposite of that. It does reach that next level when it comes to set pieces towards the end. It takes a little while, but it gets there. And it does give you these snapshots of what happened in this part of the city and stuff like that that give you a short burst of that. Admittedly, the overall exploring the city, like you say, low-key, that is the way to put it. But it looks real nice. This looks not real nice in the Master Chief Collection, too. As the sun’s gradually coming up in the sky in the city, it just looks lovely, this neon-y, slightly Blade Runner-y city, I suppose. The music stuff is good music. It was meant to be kind of noir-y detective music. Like you say, it’s a good template for Halo stories. I really wish… I don’t think there’s any reason for Microsoft to make a game like this now. We’re not in the age of the four-hour campaign shooter, really. But I’d love this as a kind of… If they did a one year later with Halo Infinite, they did something like this, a kind of side story that lasted for X amount of time or whatever. I think this is the sort of thing I dig. I feel like the more almost episodic storytelling that they do with the little missions that you dip into feels like they kind of do that better with Reach in a more kind of complete campaign, but I’m sure we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that right now, Matthew, as we get to my number three, which is Halo Reach. This is the one I’ve come around on the most, actually. At the time, I didn’t really think much of Halo Reach, but I mentioned it on the 2010 podcast. But I’ve replayed this a bunch in recent years, and I think that it’s definitely top tier Halo. There are three games that are top tier Halo to me. This is one of them. And it doesn’t have that two scarabs sandbox-y moment, but it has really, really good set piece design, confident set piece design. At this time, where set piece design was almost like an arms race because COD was doing stuff like that infamous airport sequence and just chasing fucking Lance Henriksen down a river in a boat while you’re being shot up by helicopters and all this stuff. And I think that as those scripted set pieces were dominating, Halo had their own spin on it. And Reach has a whole bunch of good ass moments that are like this, where I’ve said this before, but the tone of this game I love, you know it’s a battle that you’re going to lose, you know that the fall of Reach is a big thing that happens in Halo lore. Even if you’re not massively connected to the story of Halo, that’s something you’re aware of as a fan. And so you have this very bleak sense that like your Spartans, your group of Spartans are going to fail and they’re not going to get off this planet. One of them does actually in the end, spoiler alert, but I don’t know what happened to them in the end. I’m sure it’s in a novel somewhere, but anyway. So there’s a bunch of levels I like in this one. There’s one that starts off with a set piece of like, you see like basically like hundreds of warthogs going into battle and then you kind of like go into battle and have to take out these turrets. That’s a really good level. I quite like the one where you’re underground and you have to like set up these turrets to deal with like oncoming waves of enemies where you’re protecting this Dr. Halsey character. And I’ve mentioned this before, but my favorite level is the one where you’re flying between skyscrapers, going into like nightclubs and other kind of buildings, clearing out Covenant. But in the background, you basically just see this giant Covenant ship like absolutely icing the city and it’s really depressing. And as it goes on, the city is more and more on fire. Meanwhile, you’re shooting down banshees from the sky, doing aerial combat, which I always love in Halo. So yeah, Reach is top tier stuff. And the final set piece is you’re kind of like basically there to see the Pillar of Autumn off and starts the original Halo storyline. That’s really, really good as well because obviously it ends with the the sequence of like your dude just has to survive for as long as possible on the planet before dying. But I never managed to last longer than 20 seconds, which made me feel like such a fucking loser where it’s like this guy died heroically and it’s like, no, I think a grunt just fucking exploded with like four grenades attached to him and like killed him within like 10 seconds of the first firefight. And it’s like, I don’t really feel like this mythical warrior, you know. It didn’t mention this in the novelization. I think this is actually the best combination of like storytelling and set piece design in the Halo series. This is where those things coalesce really nicely because the story is so straightforward. It’s not like forerunner kind of like, you know, alien race stuff. It’s just like our planet is fucked and we have to try and survive. That’s it, you know. You’re right. This is like a sort of a response to Call of Duty and the kind of cinematic shooter. But kind of done honestly, you know, it’s not fake. It’s not on the rails. You know, it still gives you a space to kind of play in and you have to kind of pull it off. And when you have the vehicle sections, their proper vehicle sections, which COD never, you know, ever, ever really did. Yeah, I really like the balance of this one. I thought this was great. Yeah, I love as well that it opens with like this quite tentative, tense level of like you’re kind of you’ve just found out the Covenant are basically already there and you’re kind of it’s a bit like it’s very quiet and a bit eerie and like, yeah, you just you discover the enemies are there and just basically this bad situation gets worse and worse. Really, really effective. So, yeah, I love Halo Reach all these years later. But yes, spaceship as well. Yeah, absolutely. Which that entire sequence, I could have had a whole game of that. Maybe I’m alone in that. But I love fucking flying spaceships around. And yeah, it was real good fun. You get 20 minutes of Star Fox to punctuate the rest of your Halo experience. This is always worth a replay. It’s one of the 360 ones that looks the best on PC and modern Xbox platforms as well. It doesn’t look as good as Halo 4, but it’s still a nice looking game. So my number two, Matthew, Halo 3. So, yep, so this has like the… Here’s the thing. I think this is probably… This has the best moments of the entire series, like bar none. But I don’t think it’s like as consistent as my number one. So Halo 3 like has, you know, the two scarab sequence, like we say, but it’s got like loads of high points where you’re just, you know, you’re in vehicles fighting like in these mini sandboxes fighting the Covenant. There’s an earlier scarab set piece as well in this. It’s really, really good on like the side of like a hill. There’s like a base. And that’s, it’s really good fun to play in two player. It also ends with an amazing kind of like, kind of a throwback to Halo 1, where you basically just have to escape in a warthog from all these collapsing platforms. Just a really kind of rad sort of linear set piece that can go wrong in all kinds of different ways because of the wacky physics of Halo, just like accidentally driving a warthog into the abyss. Great fun in two player that. So I think all the high points are here. It has other bits that are not as good, like there’s a level where you’re basically in an alien butt. Oh, Jesus. Cortana. That is the worst Halo level. By a long way, I think. That’s why I couldn’t make it number one. Oh, fuck that level. You’re like, oh, this is so majestic. I know, let’s have a level in an anus. Just bad, bad idea. Yeah, there’s loads of stuff this game adds that makes Halo more fun. Adding the hammer, is it? Just the really powerful melee attack that does AOE damage. Just great fun using that thing. One of the most fun weapons to twat a mate on the back of the head with in co-op, which I did to my friend Andrew fucking endlessly. He is so used to that happening that he would just quietly resign his fate when I got hold of one and was just fucking running after him with no subtlety whatsoever. That’s really good. But yeah, this is Halo at its best and Cortana just lets it down a little bit. But there’s a couple of levels in this that are just not amazing. The opening is not a thriller either, I don’t think. No, it kind of takes a little while to get going, I think. It takes until you’re in these big sandboxy set pieces for it to feel like it’s this deluxe Halo experience. But yeah, it’s not particularly memorable in the first, I would say first two or three levels. It probably takes to get going. There’s that level you sort of get onto the motorway in the Warthogs, then it suddenly picks up, I think. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s just set pieces. That’s just what they’re good at. It still has all these bits where for no reason there are these bollards in place, so you can’t take your vehicle into the next section of the game and they’re like, oh, this is the on foot bit. I’m like, no, all I want to do is fucking drive a Warthog through this entire level. It’s also, yeah, yeah, but really, really good. It also added a few enemy types I wasn’t massive on, like the little flying motherfuckers in Halo. They do nothing for me. But I always accept that Halo is a hard game to add enemies to because the dynamic of the enemies in the original game is just so, so good. But any more thoughts on Halo 3, Matthew? The scarabs are like all time amazing, amazing. All the scarab fights are just a treat in this. Up until then, those kind of set pieces would just have to be baked in and here they’re happening in real time and that’s pretty astonishing. If anything, the only bummer is that there’s no like… No one else does this in this generation. It doesn’t, or ever really. There’s never a wave of Halo likes where people are like, do you know what I want to do? I want to make a game that’s got basically set pieces like this in every single level. It happens here and there’s still nothing else like it. There’s like loads of COD-a-likes, a couple of Half-Life-a-likes, no Halo likes. I don’t know if it’s just deemed untouchable in a way. Yeah, for sure. This has a motherfuckers in a forest level as well, Matthew. Sierra 117. It’s a big motherfuckers around waterfalls and trees level. So I think Halo loves doing this, I think. The Covenant is the best bit, but even the Covenant ends with you having to run down a tunnel of flood. It does have the flood, Matthew. I like the level. I think it’s the arc where you’re in all the tanks and as you keep blowing up bigger things and the guy in the car keeps saying, it’s the famous, tank beats this, tank beats whatever, and then you fight the scarab. It’s a nice kind of vast feeling level, that. It is mostly linear, but just going around this gigantic environment in a vehicle, that’s pure Halo. Yep, that’s good. Also, the one thing I do like about the flood in this one, because obviously there’s a generational shift, they could show one of those little flood things attaching to an enemy, and then kind of like edit coming to life as a flood, that was really rad to watch. It was gross, but you would just see this little parasite take over the dead body of this covenant, and I thought, oh, it’s cool they were able to do that, because you never get to see it in the original Halo. I sound like a right sick fuck there, don’t I? So, move on to my number one then, Matthew, the very predictable Halo combat evolved. Many people may disagree with this. Like I say, I think the best moments in the Halo series are in Halo 3, but I don’t think it’s as consistent a game as the original Halo. I know people hate the library. I don’t mind the library. It’s kind of like a bit, I see it as a big combat challenge. It’s not my favorite level of the game at all, but I really liked it. I think here this just had like, it was just a complete feeling campaign. It has two levels where the map is basically flipped, assault on the control room and two betrayals. The second time you go through it, it’s like darker and snowier, but they are massive maps and they are like the pure essence of Halo sort of sandbox nonsense, just like they finally let you get in a banshee in two betrayals and fly around. That was really, really cool. You had this kind of like land and air combat at the same time, and then it would be the toughest in terms of enemies as well because you have a mix of flood and covenant in two betrayals. But the first time you go through Assault on the Control Room is really good too because you have multiple points, you get squads of Marines with you, and they are like pure cannon fodder, but it’s really cool to just go onto a battlefield and see a bunch of NPCs shooting at each other. That wasn’t something I felt like… I didn’t feel like that was in games at all at that time, and I felt like I saw it here first. And obviously they have all these really silly voice actors as well that make them seem like kind of a whole range of Bill Paxton in Aliens, where you’re like, I kind of want to see these guys die, and then also just starting a fight with them and seeing if you can survive, and saying, can I kill all four people? If I hop out of this tank and just hit it with a rocket, will it kill all four of my guys at once? And yeah, I just love that you could like, basically if you just killed one of them, they would all just turn on you. I thought, ah, god, this game is so good. I like that the two things you’ve highlighted in this episode as really liking are when the Flood disgustingly take over corpses and killing your friends. Yeah, basically, yeah. But you know what I really like about Halo Combat Evolved? I don’t think the other ones have, is it’s really bleak. It’s got a much bleaker tone. When you get to the end of the game, you are basically the only survivor. You escape in this ship from the Halo Ring, which is, you know, the Pillar of Autumn has been destroyed. You watch Captain Keyes, your guy get fucking turned into like Flood Mush. You see his face like in the side of a Halo, so like a side of a Flood kind of like egg or whatever it is, like just really, really gross. And like the game starts with you crashing on this planet and everyone else in your escape pod fucking dies. And it’s like, it’s just always really bleak. And like later games become a bit more like hurrah sci-fi adventure. And I much prefer the idea of like, you don’t know how dark this is going to be because the Flood stuff is quite dark. You have that whole first person sequence where you find the helmet and then you see the Flood unleashed basically and it’s kind of like found footage, sort of like horror moment. And I just don’t think the other games lean into horror at all really, like this one does. This has got like the level where you discover the Flood. It’s like basically like there are these trees that are clearly infected by the Flood, these like pulsating green yellow trees. And like it’s really, really sinister. So yeah, long winded Matthew, but that’s why I think Halo 1 is the best one. It’s bleak but also has some fucking amazing set pieces. Any thoughts? For my money, I’d probably put Halo 3 above it just because I think it has the couple of best, best, best Halo levels in it. But everything it builds on kind of is here. So you’re definitely right. Maybe because I just don’t have that nostalgic connection with it, it doesn’t feel quite as absolutely essential. But when I played it for the first time in the anniversary edition, I was really impressed at how well it held up and just how it worked. But at that point, I felt like, oh yeah, this is a bit like a simpler Halo 3. Well, I think that’s a lot of people, right? Because in that second, the next generation for the 360, loads more people had Xboxes. So probably a lot of people discovered this in retrospect after playing Halo 3 because Halo 3 was so just mega hyped. I think a lot of people were discovering that retroactively, you’re right. But I think for me it was just because, like I say, because I was there at the start with it, playing it in 2002. And we played this game over and over again. And it’s a game that is meaningfully different as a challenge because of the difficulty settings when you replay it. Legendary mode is one of the only times I’ve ever really finished a game on the hardest difficulty. And I only did it because it was fun to have the challenge of doing it. The thing they do with the legendary difficulty setting is that right at the end when you have to escape from the exploding pillar of autumn in the warthog, you get one minute less than you do in the other modes to escape. And it comes down to microseconds shaving off the time. Basically, if you just fuck up driving once, you have to just restart the checkpoint and go again. And when I did it, I think I did it with three seconds left. It’s just bombing it to the final, to the ship and getting out of there and just loads of enemies amassing on you. Just really thrilling stuff. I think just because I’ve played it over and over again, all of that stuff is embedded in my brain. And I just have that fundamental adoration of it from just playing it over and over again. So I can totally see why this wouldn’t be the number one of someone coming to Halo now or even 15 years ago. So I get it. I think lots of people agree with you that Halo 3 is the best one. Yeah, it’s clear. I think you’re right about your top three being the three, which are just noticeably a step up. I want to make more Halo games. I want them to be loads more. I mean, there’s been six years between Halo 5 and Halo Infinite. It was never meant to be that long, obviously. But I loved the 360 era, where it felt like you were getting a Halo every year for a while. That was very exciting. It’s not a series I mind having yearly iterations of because it’s very different to other first-person shooters in terms of how each one is a little bit different. I think 1 and 3 probably have the most in common. 4 and 5 have a bit in common too, of course. But they are all quite different from each other. Reach is very different from Halo 3 and Halo 1. And Halo 2 is very much its own thing as well. It’s funny, it’s not a series that ever bores me with repetition because I feel like it’s maybe the most open to interpretation of the different first-person shooter franchises. People latch on to different things and like different things, and then the games pull in different directions based on what they think it is that people want to see. So that’s something that 343 has obviously been wrestling with, but now it looks like they’ve come back around to pulling in the direction of Things I Like, which is that sandbox design and, like you say, emergent set pieces. It’s always been the funny thing, because every time I’ve interviewed them, it was largely in the run-up to 5. They were saying the right stuff. Basically, what they liked was the stuff that we said we liked at the start of this episode. You know, they were talking about the silent cartographer in the sense of being on this larger landmass with vehicles and the sandbox nature, and then they never really let into that in 4 or 5. They were just a lot more linear. They were almost too pretty. They were more interested in fidelity than scale. You’re right, you’ve reminded me a couple of times that they did that well in 5, definitely. So they’ve always talked a good game. I’ve never really felt like they’ve made the game they’ve talked up. But this definitely, the flavour of it, the fact that this Infinite is set on a Halo ring, everything is set up for it to be that game and return to that. Even after this last round of previews, I don’t really understand the structure of the game or how open-world it actually is or really what the hell the game is at all. But I’m super intrigued. The fact is just on Game Pass and I can just play it. That’s exciting. And even if it’s not to the same standard as the Halo games that I’ve put very high in this list, there will still be a multiplayer that I know is extremely good and has a potentially long and healthy future. So yeah, I think they’re in a good position to succeed. I hope it’s good. Also, we’re sort of bereft of really good single-player shooter campaigns these days. And I just want to see one done really well with a fuckton of money spent on it. The other thing is, because they’ve gone with the Brutes as an enemy type instead of the Parthians, I much prefer the Brutes. They’re not quite classic Halo enemies, but they give you an excuse to have classic Covenant enemies in there. And then the Brutes have different spins, like the guys with the jetpacks and stuff like that, and the more melee-focused ones, means that you’ve got enemy types that are familiarly Halo-like, but also not exactly the same as how they did the Brutes in Halo 3, and I think that might tread a good middle ground. So I’m optimistic there, because I think if they just showed a load of footage of you fighting Prometheans, I think a lot of people see those enemies as representing the weaker parts of Halo 4 and 5. So yeah, I think that’s a good decision. So Matthew, I’ve done my ranking there. It ended up being fairly brisk, perhaps because I just got bored of the sound of my own voice there talking about Halo games. That doesn’t happen with me in the Zelda and Ace’s Journey episodes. I think that’s just because you’ve got deeper thoughts about them. Whereas here I’m just like, yeah, I don’t like levels when you’re in tunnels, but I do like levels when you’re outside. And that’s kind of like my point for every single one of these. And the more tunnel levels they have, the lower down on the list they are. The more scarabs they have, the higher up on the list they are. That’s just kind of like what I’m interested in, I suppose. But I think it’s because there’s just a kind of fundamental DNA to Halo, of sandbox shooting that I’ve never seen another sandbox shooter do. Like Far Cry is nothing like Halo, but it is an open world shooting game. There’s just something very specific about the rhythm and enemy types and composition of a great Halo level that nothing else can really match. And like, yeah, I don’t know. I feel like I’m always just chasing that fucking two scarabs fight. I just want to see different versions of that. I want to see modern devs just show me, what is your version of this? What is your version of the set piece? I will restart a checkpoint 30 times in a row to see what happens if I drive a vehicle over here, I blow this up, I try and make this happen. Like that kind of massive player experimentation. We haven’t really seen it, but I’m optimistic, Matthew. So, yes. Any further thoughts, Matthew? I had one question for you, because I know you’ve played a lot of Destiny, and obviously that being the theme they made after Halo. How do you think, not how Destiny compares, because I know technically they’re very different, but in terms of your enjoyment, do you still prefer Halo over Destiny? I do, yes. Destiny has a lot of trappings that aren’t necessarily for me, which are like lots of grinding to do particular challenges to unlock a different weapon and stuff like that. And that’s stuff I did a lot in the midst of 2020 pandemic times because there was not a lot else to do and it was a good way to listen to a load of film podcasts. So I basically got every amazing gun I got in Destiny 2 before they locked a bunch of them away. I was quite happy with that. But I definitely don’t think it’s got the same repeatable kind of sandbox-y levels. I don’t get excited about repeating a level of Destiny. What I will say though is that the strikes have their moments. The strikes are just like more elaborate levels. So it’s like three people and then there’s a boss at the end. There’s a few of them that are pretty good. They can escalate quite well, get a bit close to the Halo experience. But the raids are probably where you see the DNA of Halo go after this. Where it’s like, how do we escalate that four player co-op experience to something where your coordination needs to be really precise. There needs to be these moments where you bail each other out. And where you have these massive victories together as a team because you did everything perfectly. And the kind of clockwork-y puzzle nature of some of those raids and the inventiveness of the different set pieces. That is where you see the raw potential of Bungie in these Halo games manifest in Destiny. That’s kind of how I feel about it, Matthew. I want to see good Halo more than I want to see good Destiny, if that makes sense. Just because the barrier of entry to Destiny is just so high, because to even get to the point where you’re doing raids always takes quite a bit of effort. It feels like a lot of people who love the two scarab set pieces in Halo 3 would probably enjoy the raids in Destiny, will probably never see them because they don’t have five friends they can play with. Right, right, yeah. Hopefully that answers your question there, Matthew. To wrap up, Matthew, I’ve got one question here from a listener I’m going to ambush you with. It landed in the inbox 11 days ago, but it’s written specifically to you, really. Hello, my dear fellows. I’m writing to express my gratitude to the Castles for their relentless advocacy of the Ace Attorney series. I’d never played any of the series before as a relative newcomer to Nintendo consoles, but I picked up the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles on the strength of both Matthew and Catherine’s recommendations, and I absolutely devoured it. It’s simply wonderful. I was expecting anime madness and convoluted mysteries with a few tugs on the heartstrings, but I wasn’t prepared for it to be so incredibly funny. The final case in the second game is so rich with payoffs, not just for characters and plotlines, but also for the gags. No spoilers, but for Matthew’s benefit, I’m thinking of the final logic and reasoning spectacular inside Sean’s flat, which had me roaring with laughter. However, the absolute star of the show was the prosecutor Baron Von Zieks and his iron-heeled Wellington boot. I never got tired of the animations for his escalating series of courtroom discourtesies. I think I laughed out loud every single time he casually tossed his bottle of Claret into the public gallery. So to maneuver this email onto a question, if each of you were Ace Attorney prosecutors, what would you choose as your escalating series of animations? What I really like here, this is from Samuel Cardwell, thank you Samuel, is he then says, feel free to skip if a question like this has been asked before. And I like that even that’s even plausible with this podcast. You’ve probably been asked this before, but if you were an Ace Attorney prosecutor, how would your wig fly off? Sorry, it’s that old chestnut. Yeah, I think like, it would probably, I don’t know, for me, maybe it would be me throwing a tantrum and destroying Matthews in N64 Mini. I don’t know, actually, like, what do I do when I’m actually mad in real life? I’d go incredibly red and then just like, I think I would like stress eat. You’d see me, I’d like eat like fucking forking de Buenos and then fucking smash something. And then like, and then go, I would go grayer in the escalating series of animations as I get more stressed. I think that works. Kind of when I was in gray hair. What about you, Matthew? I think it would have to be Renny based. So like, because it’s, you know, getting cross and it’s getting my stomach acid up. So to start off with, I’m just, you know, very casually snapping open like one Renny, like flicking it from the from the foil packaging up into my mouth. But by the end, like, I’d probably be emptying like entire boxes into a pestle and mortar, kind of grinding them up and then pouring like a big stream of Renny dust into my gob. It would probably be Heartburn related. This is the best bit, Matthew. PS, also, if Matthew says the word popping a Renny as part of his answer, I get £100. That is so perfect. Oh my god. Like I said, I’m just a caricature. Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to playing the original trilogy soon, though really I just want five or six more games with Rionosuke, Susata and Shomes. Many thanks as always for the podcast. So that’s a great question. Thank you, Samuel. Yeah, good. A very elegant celebration of Great Ace Attorney’s qualities as well. Yeah, I’m really worried that that game just got lost this year. And like it was, you know, including with myself included, because it was two gigantic visual novels that came out at the same time. And then like, I just don’t I don’t feel like I see people going to bat for it enough, Matthew. And I’m always worried about the future of Ace Attorney, you know. I feel like it made a dent at the time. Like it made a bigger splash than I thought it was going to. And yeah, you’re right. It maybe has passed, like people don’t really discuss it or think about it. I imagine there are a lot of people just sitting on it, waiting to play it like on a holiday or over Christmas holidays or something. It’s too big a thing just to sit there and play, you know, when there’s lots of other work to be done. Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. So we come to the end of the podcast, Matthew. We’re recording this, you know, on the one year anniversary of our first episode, PS5 versus Xbox Series X. And as we wrap up the one year of podcast, Matthew, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the matter? Just that I’ve really, really enjoyed it. Really pleased other people have enjoyed it too. Like, I don’t think we had any expectations when we launched this. You know, I’m struggling to think back to some of those conversations, but it was definitely just a, we want to hang out thing. And that people have, like, taken to it. It’s, like, awesome. Like, it’s, you know, really, really nice. Just to have an outlet where we can kind of, like, share more regular thoughts because, you know, you’ve obviously sort of stepped away from games writing and I appear sporadically as a freelancer, which means it’s quite hard to, like, get, you know, you don’t feel like you have an ongoing relationship with any kind of readership when you’re a freelancer, unfortunately. So having an outlet for that bullshit and, you know, it has been, yeah, super rewarding. Yeah, absolutely. For me, I’ve, like, you know, stepped, kind of, games industry side, games publishing side. And, like, that means I’m kind of, like, trying not to show my ass as much as I used to. But, like, but then, you know, anyone who listened to me taking a shot of the listeners for the N64 mini draft results will know that that’s made no difference. So, you know, still here to embarrass myself. Yeah, it’s really good. What I really like about this podcast is that, like, we celebrate oddball stuff. And, like, and, like, for example, when we talked about, like, the Matrix part of the video in that last podcast, it’s one of my highlights, actually, just, like, talking about the very specifics of massive budget licensed games on, like, PS2. That’s, like, totally my bag. And, like, if anything, this podcast is a good illustration of what can be achieved when you bully Matthew Castle into following you down one of your vanity projects. So, you know, just keep that in mind out there for anyone who wants to, you know, make something good. But, yeah, I’m very grateful for our, you know, two and a half thousand or so listeners, Matthew, that we have each week. It’s awesome. My only worry is, like, consistency. I worry that I’ll go back and things that I’ve said, you know, that my rankings change forever in my head and I’ll go back and, you know, flip something I’ve said in the past. I’m kind of, I live in fear that there’s a lot of, like, opinions on record that I may kind of go back on or just forget about because that happens with me a lot. Oh, man. I mean, you know, this, this stuff in this podcast, I was panicking that every time I talked about an old Halo game in this episode, I was just repeating what I said in those best games of the year episodes. And I thought, yeah, am I just rambling some bullshit here? And like, I panic now when an episode comes to under two hours. I thought, oh, don’t. Oh, God, did I fuck it? Did I not have enough to say? And it’s like, no. It’s good. It’s it’s it’s it’s just because it’s not got me bollocking on for ages in the middle of it. So yeah, it’s been fun. I feel like there’s still loads of fuel in the tank. We’ve got some good ideas for going forwards. And there’s stuff I think we can like, you know, like I definitely want to revisit some draft stuff as well, because I think there’s so much mileage in that. Running a little low on magazine heavy ideas, I must admit. Oh, yeah, same. Like the Back Page episode one is the only one I can think of that there’s left to do, really. Like, I think that that stuff will probably just manifest in the types of guests we have on, where like they tell stories about stuff they did. One thing we haven’t really talked about actually that much, Matthew, and I think we should do this when we get to June next year, is we haven’t talked about E3 massively and what it’s like being at E3, just because I think that would make a good episode. Because you mentioned it a bit on the… Yeah, definitely. I’ve got some horror stories. Yeah, absolutely. And same here. So, yes, that will be good. But for the rest of the year, I think we’re doing kind of like a draft episode next week, but it’s a really low stakes one. So it’s not like people don’t have to worry massively about being big invested in that, but it’ll be fun, I think, and quite festive as we get closer to Christmas. Then we’ve got a 2021 Predictions Revisited coming up, and we’ve also got our Best Games of this year coming up. And I have suggested to Matthew that we do a Lord of the Rings Games episode to mark the 20th anniversary of the film, Fellowship of the Ring, coming out this year. So those are all things that we’ll hopefully do for the end of the year. And yes, as I mentioned on the last episode, if you’d like to send us an email, we’d love to have a bunch of emails we can go through in a new mailbag episode in the new year. Those are easy for us to do. Knock them out and make them too long as we ramble on about some bullshit. And then have our friends complain to us privately how they don’t like those ones. Yeah, they’re too long. Please stop doing them. What the hell? This should have been an hour long, but it’s two and a half hours long. You know, all that stuff. So yes, thank you very much for listening. If you’d like to follow the podcast on Twitter, we’re Back Page Pod. If you’d like to send us an email, it’s backpagegames.gmail.com. Please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I am at MrBazzill underscore pesto on Twitter. I’m Samuel Dobby Roberts. I’m now signing off so I can go and get some noodles from a hut near my house. It’s going to be good. So have a good week. Goodbye. Bye for now.