See Bye Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how’s it going? Have you been enjoying The Last Jewel on Disney Plus? I just wanted to talk about this film with you, so that’s how I’ve kicked off the podcast. I enjoyed it at the cinema and thought, wow, many of my peers would probably enjoy this too, if they saw this film, and now they have the opportunity to, because like you say, it’s on Disney Plus. Yeah, indeed, yeah. So, been watching that, read the Scott film, made 29 million at the box office, cost 100 million to make, so not great economically, but what a great film, seriously. That was, I was blown away by it. It was like probably the best film of his I’ve seen in about, I don’t know, since Gladiator? I mean, I’ve been told this Kingdom of Heaven, director’s cut is good, Matthew, but where does it rank in the recent Scott films to you? Yeah, I’d say it ranks pretty high. I’ve not seen his Gucci one yet, which is meant to be quite good fun, but yeah, I thought, you know, it’s action-like, but I thought it was kind of of a piece, sort of with Gladiator, weirdly. Like it kind of fits in with it in terms of historical epic, some quite nice character work around it. I mean, this is a lot more character work than it is action, but I think when the action comes, it’s pretty meaty at the end. Oh yeah, it sure is. What were your thoughts on Ben Affleck in that film? Cause I thought he was terrific and the blonde wig. I thought he was having a lot of fun. I was like, this is a man who is clearly like relieved to be involved in something a bit meaty, something to chew on, you know, he’s not wearing a bat cowl and he’s just working with a director who by all accounts lets actors just sort of do their thing. So yeah, I thought it was great. I thought they were all good. Dodgy haircuts aside. Yeah, I read a really funny thing about House of Gucci. Someone tweeted that like this film, the only thing that could improve this film is if it was 30 minutes shorter and lots of Mario woo-hoo’s were inserted into every scene. And I thought that sounds pretty spot on for the tone they’ve gone for. Yeah, the accents in that seem pretty wild. So yes, Matthew, last week on the podcast, we promised a draft. Didn’t quite come together, did it? So we’re doing something else. So yeah, like we were gonna do like a holiday themed draft and Matthew sent me like five pictures, I think maybe four. And they were like all sort of like in a larval state. And it was getting on a bit in time. I just thought, should we just do a podcast where we talk about the games we played this year that were from other years? That way we don’t have to like audit them in the podcast about the game of the year. We can just focus on stuff that came out this year. So that’s what we’re doing in this episode. These are all games from previous years. But partly because of this podcast, but also just generally like we’re always filling gaps in our backlog trying to learn more about, you know, our passion, one of our passions in life. So, yeah, that’s part of what we’re going to discuss. The fact that’s going to be most of what we discuss this episode. Me and Matthew have played, we’ve got about like eight, seven or eight games to discuss each. So you’ll get some good meaty games chat. The chances are by the games that are here, you’ll hear about something you’ll be interested in. Would you say that’s fair, Matthew? Yeah, hopefully. And I’m trying not to, I don’t think I’ve talked about many of these before, maybe little bits and bobs here and there. This is the, we’ve mentioned this on a previous episode, but I am beginning to struggle keeping on top of what I’ve talked about on this podcast. Yeah, yeah. In fact, just to kind of tee us up, I have discovered something about myself that contradicts a previous opinion I had on this podcast. And that is, I started playing Arkham Knight again, and I thought I was pro Batmobile, but I’m not pro Batmobile. And like, I realized this within about 10 minutes of the first Batmobile sequence. And I was like, oh no, I kind of went to bat for it, so to speak, and on at least two occasions. And now I kind of have to take that back. It’s still a phenomenally beautiful looking game. And like, all the Batman stuff in it is phenomenal, but fighting tanks, man, it’s tough out there. I’m still pro Batmobile, and I have played it this year as well. Oh, there you go. That’s just a taste of the kind of spicy takes about old shit you’ll hear on this episode. So that’s fun. First of all, Matthew, I suppose now the poll is closed on the old Xbox versus GameCube draft, we should talk about the winner. You won, I think, something like 59% to 41%, so you must be feeling pretty good about that. I saw you saying you said justice on Twitter. Yeah, I think the fear was, well, I don’t know if the fear for you or the fear for me, there was an idea that it may be just an absolute GameCube trancing. I think there was some nervous energy around the episode based on that, that it might be like a 80-20 split or something, and coming out of it, I thought, wow, you actually made a really good case for Xbox. I don’t think that’s reflected. I thought it might be a bit tighter than that even, but I think we do have a lot of Nintendo heads listening, and they just wouldn’t even humor the idea of Xbox as I wouldn’t at the beginning of that episode. Yeah, I wasn’t actually, I’m not actually that bummed out by the result. It’s not like the N64 draft where everyone heard me having my big child’s tantrum, and basically, spill my coke all over my bouncy castle and start screaming. That was very much me at the start of that podcast talking about those results, and then proceeding to take shots at our own loyal listeners. I will say actually, I think that the fact that people have given such passionate responses to this one shows that people just really enjoy the thought experiment side of this as much as we do, because they’re tapping into like, people will feel really passionately about some of my choices they thought were too multi-format to represent the Xbox. I think that was fair. There was an element of me swinging a bit for like, a bit of wider appeal by putting some GTAs in there, which are considered more PS2 games. I don’t regret the Matrix path in the end though, and I never will. But otherwise, I thought it was good. In a very petty act, Matthew, I’ve made both a revised Xbox list for this episode, and a version of the GameCube list as well, just because I thought listeners might be curious to hear what I’d pick for them. Pick if there was no public vote for the Xbox bits, and it was all heart picks, I suppose, and then like the GameCube thing, I don’t know. I thought you did a good job with the GameCube. And I actually realized, just looking at GameCube, this was a really hard console to pick for, to be honest. Because there is about 25 good games, really. Yeah. And it’s easy to push out multi-format games. So I think you made some good choices there, and Hitman 2. Thanks. Oh, Hitman 2 was loved at one point. Yeah, for sure. So it’s actually two all on the drafts, right? So I won PS2 Mini and Game Developer Draft, and you’ve won this one in N64. So it’s two all, right? And then, yeah, I think like, should we do the Wii next? Should we do the Wii in January or something like that? Yeah, I’d be up for that. Yeah, yeah. Just 10 games each that time. We realized 20 games is fucking loads. So we were both knackered at the end of that podcast. I like the stress of the genre kind of restrictions add a lot of spice as well. The free picks gave us an awful lot of freedom. Yeah, yeah, but I definitely enjoyed it was good. I actually like I really enjoyed it when people were saying to saying that, oh, I thought this would be a route, but the Xbox list actually surprised me. That was my goal. So yeah. So Matthew, I asked if you wanted to do a revised Gamecube list with more heart picks. Did you have any take on that? No pressure if you did. Yeah, I did. If this was purely heart picks as in stuff I’d be interested in, should I just go through my 20 picks? Yeah, do it. Okay, I think I can tell you what I would have dumped along the way as well. In Adventure RPG, I would have dumped Beyond Good and Evil. And this is purely because I forgot about it when we were doing the proper thing. I actually would have taken Skies of Arcadia Legends. Because I did have it on GameCube. I did really like it. In the episode, it feels like more of a Sega thing, so maybe wouldn’t have flown. But I think that’s the best sort of JRPG on the GameCube. Shooter, I would have got rid of TimeSplitters, would have put Metroid Prime in that, just to shift around some spaces. Fighting Sports, I wouldn’t have picked Soul Calibur, I would have put Smash Brothers in there, straight away. Platformer, I keep Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Launch Game, I would have dumped Super Monkey Ball for Rogue Squadron 2, and for my License Game, I would have probably put LEGO Stores 2, original trilogy. Oh, that’s interesting. Monkey Ball, I just think it’s so available elsewhere, you know, but I also know people have nostalgia for it, so I thought I’d play to those suckers. Stealth Survival Horror, even though I talked it down a bit in the episode, I would have put Metal Gear Solid, Twin Snakes in there. I thought it feels like it belongs to PS2, but it’s different enough to be an interesting curio. Multiplayer, I just stuck with WarioWare, Racing, Mario Kart Double Dash, Wild Cards, Killer 7. So then, in my Wild Cards, there’s some real hard choices in here. I probably would have actually put Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. That’s the one I played. That’s the first big Tony Hawk I got into, and I just have really fond memories of it, but I don’t think it is considered the best of them, but it’s the one I played. Resident Evil 4 still. I actually would have put Resident Evil Remake in, just because it feels like a definitive GameCube thing. I put it in Chibi-Robo so that I can still be friends with Ash Day. Futureful Joe, Paper Mario, F-Zero GX. Actually, the rest of them wouldn’t have changed. F-Zero GX, Wind Waker, Eternal Darkness, and I would have kept Super Mario Sunshine. Yeah. Some very good choices there. I actually think that probably would have come out about the same with that list. I think Skies of Arcadia and Twin Snakes were just good picks because they’re so elusive. I do normally think about that, but I didn’t for this. Yeah, so in my heart of hearts, that reflects the console I’d play more than the one I actually built. Yeah, that’s fine. So should I go through mine, Matthew? Yeah, so there’s definitely a mix of things I like, but also things I’ve always wanted to play that are kind of unavailable. So for the GameCube, I’ve done Skies of Arcadia Legends for Adventure RPG. My shooter is Ikaruga. My fighting or sports game is Super Smash Bros. Melee. My platformer is Super Mario Sunshine that has to be on the system no matter what. People can’t deny it, I don’t think, even if they think it makes the console cursed. My licensed game is Rogue Leader. My launch game is Luigi’s Mansion. Now, I know that’s on 3DS, but I think that Luigi’s Mansion looks tons better on GameCube. I think that’s a big visual downgrade for that 3DS version, even though it’s still very good. Stealth or survival horror? Metal Gear Solid the Twin Snakes. Really expensive to pick that one up, and even though I don’t think it’s that good, actually, it’s not as good as you think it is in your mind’s eye, I would say, that game. If you had it in your hands, you’d realize that the PS1 one is the one you actually want to be playing, I would say. Mario Kart Double Dash for multiplayer, F-Zero GX for racing, and I did pick Batm Kytos for wild card, because I thought you would have picked that just because it’s modelith, right? And they’re like, you’re a big modelith guy. I just don’t have much relationship with it, and I know Catherine’s a big fan, so I should have maybe picked it as a nod to her. Oh, you know, so my free picks are Killer 7 for number one, Paper Mario 1000 Year Door for number two. I’ve also gone for The Twilight Princess, because I think that’s a good shout for GameCube, the way it was meant to be played without the entire world being flipped. I put Fire Emblem Path of Radiance in there, because I think that would be a big curiosity. People want to play that, and they can’t. Did you say it’s not very good off air to me? It’s absolutely fine, but they really knocked it out of the park on 3DS. I feel like it’s a big step down from that. Okay, fair enough. Then it goes, Beautiful Joe, Eternal Darkness, Resi 4, Wind Waker, Chibi Robo, Metro Prime. So, you know, pretty similar. But yeah, that was a fun thought exercise, Matthew. I thought people might just be curious. It makes me think maybe I will just go with like all heart picks in future lists, and less like trying to appeal to people. It’s interesting because the film podcasts that we maybe were inspired by, shall we say, for the drafts, when they do their film drafts, there’s three of them who do it. And sometimes someone will go heavy heart picks. And I always think it’s a big mistake because if someone’s going mainstream, heart can just seem very undercooked next to it. If two people are doing heart picks, it’s fine. But if you’re the only one, it can just look a little weak on paper. It’s fine in the episode when you just see the names there in the harsh light of day. It’s like, maybe not. Yeah, absolutely mean, for sure. So I’ve got this Xbox list, Matthew, that I’ve revised here. Adventure RPG, I’ve got Shenmue 2. I played that on Xbox and I absolutely love that game. And I’d throw it back in there just because I didn’t realize actually that Shenmue 2 never released on Dreamcast in North America just on Xbox. So that would be actually significant to people. I only learned that in this past week. Shooter, Panzer Dragoon Auto still because I love that game. Fighting or Sports, I thought I’d throw Dead or Alive 3 in there because I was a bit unsure what our listeners would make of that. But I think that is like a pure… It was like an Xbox launch game, very significant. Psychonauts, I had for Platformer instead of Prince of Persia. A bit more kind of like Xbox associated, I would say. Licensed game, I moved The Matrix Path of Neo up and booted out The Simpsons Hit and Run. Which I felt like was actually like went in my favour a little bit in the draft. People wanted to play that, I think. Launch game is still Halo Combat Evolved, of course. Stealth or Horror is Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. Side note, there is a version of Silent Hill 2 on Xbox I almost had for this, but that’s clearly a PS2 game, isn’t it? Multiplayer, I had Halo 2, of course. Racing, I kept Burnout 3 Takedown because Burnout was very good. Wild Card is still Steel Battalion, of course. That was probably the best thing I had in my draft, so it has to stay. Free Pick 1 stays the same, Ninja Gaiden Black. I’ve moved Jet Set Radio Future down to number 2. Riddick, Escape from Butcher Bay is number 3. Morrowind is still in there. Free Pick number 5, I’ve put Jade Empire in there. I wanted to lean more into the RPG stuff and Bioware was a major asset on Xbox. Then it goes Kotor, Kotor 2. I’ve thrown in Namco’s First Person Oddity Breakdown, which you can play on Xbox One. It’s definitely worth while picking it up with its 4-quid kind of game. And by popular demand, I have put Outrun 2 in there. That was the one people complained I didn’t really get racing games, which is true, I’m not really a racing game guy. But I actually haven’t played Outrun 2, but I played fucking tons of Outrun 2006 Coast to Coast on my PSP. That game ruled. So, happy to have Outrun 2 in there and just silent some of my critics. And then finally, Crimson Skies, of course. So, some mild edits there, Matthew, but I think that’s maybe a bit more Xbox, I don’t know. I think so, yeah. I actually just bought a Xbox copy of Kotor 2 to play backwards compatible, because I haven’t played it. Oh, nice, so you got to board it digitally on Nextbox. No, I bought it pre-owned from CEX. Oh, that was a fun, pointless thought exercise, Matthew. But like, the drafts remain a lot of fun, so I look forward to doing the Wii draft in January. They’re good. I think it was the right call not to do a slightly half-arsed Christmas draft. We don’t want to undermine the draft brand. I imagine as well, people might get exhausted if we do too many of them. In my head, it’s like one every two months is probably the right way to do it. So it’s something you look forward to, a bit like the best games of X year episodes. Yeah, I also don’t want the risk of it, if it were to have turned sour, I wouldn’t want it to have tainted Christmas, which is a precious time to me. So I’m glad we’ve avoided any risk of that. It’s funny because I think our listeners were like, oh, that did get a bit tense, didn’t it? But then also when I said that we might dial it down on Twitter today, people were like, no, don’t dial it down. This is like the best bit of the draft. Honestly, they should have seen the stuff that got cut. Oh yeah, yeah, boy, that’s like the cancel Samuel Roberts cut of the Backpage draft. So much of it was just you getting cross and me cackling at you, making you more cross. That was very much the vibe. Like I said on that last episode, I was incredibly tense because I was about to start a new job, and that manifested in me being a big baby while picking some Xbox games because I’m a preposterous man child, so that’s good. So onward with this episode, Matthew. Congratulations on your victory. Very happy for you. So yes, in this episode, we’re just going to fire through a bunch of games we’ve been playing this year that are from other years. It’s a real grab bag of stuff here. Matthew, I wonder if you should start with one of yours. I feel like I’ve been talking a lot, and I’d like to hear from you, you, my buddy. So why don’t you kick off with your first one? So I’m going to kick off with 428, or 428, I don’t know how you’re actually meant to pronounce it, Shibuya Scramble, which is a visual novel originally made for the Wii. I don’t think it was a launch game, but it was a Japan-only title. It made a minor ripple when it first came out, because it got 40 infimitsu. Looking at import stuff, and we didn’t do an import review of this because it was just all text-based and basically impossible to play, and we were like, what is so special about this thing that it got 40 infimitsu, and then completely forgot about it. Fast forward to 2018, I think it got bought out in the West on PS4 and PC, so I finally got to play it this year on the recommendation of lots of good people on Twitter have recommended this. Oscar, editor of Play Magazine, had talked it up to me at one point, and lots of other people. So, do you know anything about this game? Yes, I do. It’s like a live-action footage, and then it’s interactive, the order of it changes. I think I heard about this because Bob Mackie and RetroNauts recommended it. He said it was pretty cool and a bit under the radar. It’s not really live-action. It’s like photography of live actors, but it’s not video footage. Imagine a visual novel with anime stills, except instead of anime, it’s photos. That’s a huge part of its appeal. It’s really got the energy of… You know, you get those photo diaries in tabloid… The sexy ones. The sexy ones, where it’s like, my husband’s having an affair, and it’s some actor really overacting, and then they’ve just stuck on some speech bubbles. It’s kind of got that energy. Right, but less sexy, I’m assuming. Less sexy. Yeah, it isn’t too sexy. Oh no, this is turning into a horny podcast. The one thing we said wouldn’t happen. It kind of plays with it in places, where it feels like it may get a bit tropey, and then it kind of dials it back, and it’s got this sort of interesting gimmick in that you’re reading screen after screen of like prose text, basically, and some of the words are highlighted, and then you can click on them, and it kind of gives you an explanation of, you know, like a key fact, or like the definition of that word, or if there’s a concept it feels it needs to explain. But sometimes it uses that device to kind of almost sort of say, like, oh, I bet you thought this was going to be saucy. It’s not, you know, it’s not that kind of game and all this kind of stuff. So there’s like this weird kind of meta commentary delivered by this dictionary function, which I like. It’s built around five people who are all involved or have some relationship to a kidnapping case that is unfolding across one day in central Tokyo, and in each, you sort of jump between the five characters at will. But the idea is that the actions or decisions you make in one branch of the story will impact the other branches of the story. And your aim, as far as these things have an aim, is to just progress through the day by making sure everyone is, can get through their storyline. So it’s not really a case of make decisions to get completely different endings. You’re trying to find the right decisions so that everyone is still alive or everyone is still continuing through. And so, you know, if someone gets, like, beaten to death by some punks in their timeline, if another character meets those punks earlier in their timeline, you might go back and make a choice where you delay them somehow so they never meet the other character. Things like that. It’s like a tenet, Matthew. It’s probably overselling it, to call it, like, a puzzle, because, you know, you can just flip through the timeline at will, and it’s like option A or option B. If it wasn’t option A, just try option B. But the thing, though, there’s lots of stuff I love about this, but one of them is that the bad endings are genuinely outstanding, because it’s not just like, oh, you got hit by a car and you couldn’t carry on. Like, often the characters kind of give up entirely, and then it will cut, like, six years later and see what they’re doing. And it’s like a policeman, it’s like, he gave up being a policeman and became this farmer. And then there’s all these pictures of him, like, sort of, gurning at these giant carrots and stuff. It’s just, it’s really funny. Like, that’s what’s great about this game. Just every opportunity for silliness it takes. It’s sort of, like, I was going to say the best example, but also one of the only examples I can think of, a video game farce in that the story is quite low risk, even though it involves a kidnapping. And it’s just these preposterous characters who are, like, ping-ponging, criss-crossing, causing all these, like, misunderstandings and upsets. And it’s just really funny how they do, like, meet up and how these things, which are completely unrelated, somehow kind of smash together. There’s one of the characters, which is probably my favourite, favourite of the sort of storylines, is a freelance journalist, and the company he works for, the guy, basically the guy has run this magazine into, like, huge debt and had to let go of his entire workforce, and he’s got an issue that he’s got to get sent to the printers by 8pm, and so he hires this freelance writer to basically make the entire mag, so he’s got one afternoon to find, like, 12 stories, and that’s his storyline. So he’s running about, just trying to desperately, like, generate headlines from, like, everything else that happens in the story, and it’s just so well-observed in terms of, like, headline craft, the way he sees all this shit, and then he starts, like, reeling off, oh, it could be this, or it could be this, or… He’s got, uh… One of the things he’s to deal with is, I think they’ve, like, already sent the cover of the mag, and one of the cover lines is just something like, um… like, hot Shibuya gossip or something, and he just has to find a story that’s, like, relevant to that headline, and I just really like the idea of this sort of demented magazine craft being part of the story. It just really made me laugh. That’s good, yeah. A bit too close to home, maybe, but, uh, yeah. It’s funny, I like the idea, like, I’ll lay off the entire staff and then we’ll write the entire magazine on the last day when it goes to print. That’s, like, I had a couple of issues of play like that when I was, um, at Imagine, so, uh, you know, big mood, as they say. I’m gonna buy this, Matthew, and this will be of comfort to the listeners. It’s, like, on sale until late December, like December 23rd, so, you know, if you’re listening to this on the week the episode goes live and you fancy giving it a go, it’s, like, five quid, I think. Oh, God, it’s so good. It’s so good. It’s absolutely brilliant. Like, this will, um, you know, when we get to the 2018 list of games, this is definitely in it now. Like, it’s just superb. Nice pushing-outs, games like Assassin’s Creed. Actually, you can’t remember what came out that year. It was 2018. It’s like a complete blur to me now. Um, yeah, can’t even continue down that path of conversation. So, good recommendation, Matthew. I’ll pick that up. Um, I suppose, like, so, it’s fast. Does the kind of, like, the crime element kind of come to any great head, or is that just kind of, like, a thing to kind of riff all the kind of comedy thought lines off? You don’t want to go into, like, spoilers for it. Like, it really escalates. It’s more that, you know, it starts off by showing you, you know, one of the characters is a hoodlum, and another one is a policeman involved in this sort of kidnapping operation. And you think, oh, okay, this is going to be quite a straight crime thriller. Um, but then the next character introduces is a lady who’s, she’s become trapped in, like, a mascot costume. So she’s stuck in this giant cat head, and she’s been, like, pulled in to try and sell this, like, dodgy diet supplement called Burning Hammer. And it’s, but everything she does, she also has to contend with having this huge cat head. And it, it’s just, that’s what it looks, so, like, it’s preposterous, but there is, like, serious stuff going on, but it’s also, like, these five idiots crisscrossing. There are elements to it of some of the storytelling, where it’s almost like a little bit Kirby enthusiasm. Right, right. Where it introduces, like, quirks or things, you know, it introduces a fact, like, so-and-so doesn’t like this, or, like, I have to be at this place. And then when it all comes together, you’re like, oh, of course, it’s got the, it’s got the sort of snap of a great Kirby storyline, of kind of like, oh, man, who, you know, what’s the one thing you don’t want in this, this situation is like this woman with a giant cat head turning up and then lo and behold. And the actors are just, it’s very endearing because they’re all photographs. Like, A, the gurning of the actors is funny, but also just seeing, like, the locations, because they’ve just taken it around, like, famous Tokyo, you know, tourist spots or whatever. And it just feels like, it shares some DNA with, like, a persona in that way, because it just feels, like, super authentic or a Yakuza game. You know, it’s like, oh, I can see the bar, I can read all the whiskey bottles because they’ve just taken this picture in a bar. And it has that slightly sort of Japanophile sort of tourist element as well. Yeah, I imagine that’s a catnip to you and Catherine. So, yeah, perfect stuff. I could hear the delight in your voice. Oh, it’s so good. Must have been really fucking hard to translate as well, like, to make the kind of jokes work and stuff, you know. Yeah, it’s a really great translation, considering that there’s no voice work in it. You’re just reading it, like, the voices are really clear and the jokes really land. Yeah, like, great job, whoever did it. Good choice, Matthew. I’m about to pick the opposite of that. It’s all downhill from here for me. No, you’ve got some good stuff on your list. I’ve admittedly won one game I’ve never even heard of, but that’s good. We’ll get to that. So my first game is Deus Ex, Matthew. So very much prompted by our episode with the great Jeremy Peel on this podcast where we talked about immersive sims. I thought I should finally sit down and play Deus Ex. It’s like I would say rare that I’d play a game that’s this old, that I haven’t played before in 2021. I don’t normally go back this far, I would say. I normally go back slightly sooner than this, but I thought I should really just play this. I’ve played all the other Deus Ex games. I want my immersive SimCreds, and so I decided to finally play through this. Have you played through Deus Ex before, Matthew? I have, yeah. A long time ago. I’ve played the first half of it more recently, so I’m better on that, but yeah. I must admit, from some of your tweets, I was like, I don’t remember that. Yeah, I tweeted about it a lot. It was kind of like, why don’t you just fucking Twitch stream it if you’re going to just do all these tweets kind of thing. It’s that instant rush of nostalgia everyone has, where they’re just like, oh yeah, you see a screen and it takes you back to better times. It’s actually quite a nice series of interactions I had around this game, for sure. People were just like, oh, have you done this bit yet? And it was kind of like, that was really cool. So yeah, it was quite the thing. I think that what I understand now about games’ nostalgia is if you weren’t there when the hardware was like this, primitive, relatively speaking, if you don’t have experience of games like this, like games that are similar to the type of game you want to play, then you probably won’t be able to get into it because it will feel just too old to you and too kind of like sort of arcane and strange. And like I say this as someone who has struggled with games from like the really early 90s, some stuff where I’m like, I wasn’t playing games at this time. So my brain just doesn’t get around it. Like the original XCOM UFO Unknown, I was like, that was a game I tried playing on GOG and I just could not, I could not do it. And like Deus Ex is fine though, because I played a load of first person shooters from around that time. So this is really good. But like, yes, I was dazzled by it. I think it’s the sheer amount of stuff packed into it, like Jeremy was saying. Like they kind of just, they pick a few elements for the later Deus Ex games and run with those. But this has kind of like wild conspiracy stuff in it. And like, you know, bits of like different types of conspiracy thrown in. And like, just, it’s a real kind of, it’s real kind of like rich in that respect. But I was really just like, it was the kind of moment to moment character interaction stuff I really liked. Even basic things like, you know, you’re asked to go and like kill a drug dealer and take something from them and bring it back as proof that you killed them to some guy. And like, if you knock the guy out, a JC. Denton will have dialogue saying, well, I actually already took him out, but he’s not dead. And like, the guy might go, what? I told you to kill him. It’s like, well, you got your thing back, so what do you care kind of thing? And like, it is amazing seeing a game be that reactive that’s this old. And you realize that that is why Deus Ex is held in such high esteem all these years later, is that no game, including its own series, tried to do sort of decision making on this scale. And no game now ever will. And so it’s so kind of all encompassing in that respect. The sequence that Jeremy alluded to when he came on the podcast, this is spoilers for Deus Ex, but there is a bit where you go into a hotel with Paul, your brother in the game, and he tells you to leave and there’s a window. You can go out and leave and then all these police kind of come in and basically shoot Paul and kill Paul and then Paul’s out the story. I assume that Jeremy like did that, went off and then Paul was out of the story. But what you can do is you can stay in the apartment with Paul, help guard him against the guards coming through and he’ll be injured but he’ll remain in the story throughout. So that’s an example of the type of stuff, the ways in which the game can kind of reflect your choices. But there are loads of different things like this. There are things like bosses you can kill with like kill switches that you type in. I missed out on those but I’m really gutted that I did because in retrospect it was really easy to find one of them and I wish I’d had both because that would have been a cool way to end them. They’re not just written on a post-it note. Yeah, exactly. Let’s not be so casual with the kill switches, guys. It’s kind of a big deal. There’s some really good level types in this. There’s a level where you have to go and rescue a hostage from a gas station on this really little map. That’s really cool. I love that there’s a big army base you go into where essentially there are walking tanks around and you have to unleash your own AI walking tanks and watch them fight each other in order to complete the level. It’s just really cool. Anything where you unleash an AI to help you, you’ve got an AI program to help you, it’s just really cool. But it’s the scale of a game that’s this old and the atmosphere of it is so consistent and impressive all these years later. I had a phenomenal time playing it. How did you find the actual nuts and bolts playing, the shooting, etc.? It’s honestly okay. I shaped my build around the limitations of the game, I would say. And the limitations of myself as a player. I really leveled up the basically bulletproof armoring power you can give yourself. You take very little damage in combat. I’d slap that baby on and I’d run in with the dragon sword thing you get partway into the game, just slash a load of dudes up. That was basically my strategy for the entire game, which is not particularly stealthy or whatever. That was my way of dealing with the fact that the shooting, of course, requires you to stand still and wait for the reticule to zoom in. You can ease that by getting different aiming mods for your guns. I had a pistol that basically had the range of a sniper rifle by the end of the game because it put so many mods on it. That was really cool. It’s not the best in that respect, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. Like I say, I compensated it for enough with the choices I made with my character to get around that. I’d say it’s kind of interesting that the later games are kind of obsessed with or a bit more interested in you being cool and kind of looking cool. Because on paper, a lot of the stuff you can get in Deus Ex is cool. You’re like, oh wow, all these kind of ways I can improve myself. This is really interesting. But it feels like you’re almost working towards workable, rather than being a superman. And that would never happen now. Every game’s character feels great out the box. It feels like that’s now a necessity. Whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t know. It’s sort of sad that that’s the case. But yeah, that’s what I wondered about when you were saying you were going back to it. I was interested if coming from the age of lovely, playable games, it would be a bit jarring. I think the thing that really helps is that it makes the upgrades meaningful. You really feel it when you upgrade a particular augment, so you can basically heal while draining very little of your energy to do it. You can become this self-perpetuating healing. At first, you feel like a total fucking dud in that game, like, so shit. That’s the interesting thing about that Liberty Island sequence. In fact, I would say the first two or three hours of the game where you don’t really have any powers levelled up, you just feel like you’re really fucking just about getting by by the skin of your teeth, and then you slowly begin your ascent to being a kind of Superman. And it means that later in the game, when there’s a boss fight with Gunther, one of the other agents who comes after you, and that was such a piece of piss when I did it. Just because I slapped on my health recharge and just headshot him with my super rad pistol three or four times he was dead, and you really feel the difference. And I think, yeah, you’re right. It’s very rare to start a game now where you feel like you are lacking in power, and this game definitely does that and puts you on that exciting journey. It also rewards going down a particular path as well. If you spread out all of your powers and all of your points, you don’t feel that well equipped to do any one thing that well in Deus Ex, but if you really commit to getting to the final upgrade point for all your different powers and all of your relevant skills, it really pays off. So it’s really good, Matthew. I mean, it’s not a fucking radical take to say Deus Ex is really good, but it’s nice to play a game that’s 21 years old and still be amazed by it. But that’s where I’m at. It was good, buddy. I enjoyed it. I need to replay this, because the one thing I know for sure is that when I originally played it, I don’t think I was not old enough or sophisticated enough, one of the two, to appreciate some of the writing in it. I sort of played it more as a game and ignored some of the world-building elements which are obviously so rich and celebrated, but I would probably, playing it again now, take my time a bit more, savour it. Yeah, there was a conversation with an AI that… Andy Kelly had told me, hey, when you get to this bit in Paris, make sure you look for this secret conversation. He didn’t say what it was. And you go behind a door and it’s there. Yeah, it’s a conversation with this AI, and it’s really fucking great writing. And I can’t say I read every piece of material in the game, but yeah, just fantastic. And I actually really love the different cities as well. Their version of Hong Kong is really quite probably the bit that people remember and enjoy the most. And certainly there were parts that I really enjoyed. I thought the bits of Paris you go to are great too. That’s an area that seems completely insurmountable until you work out how you can do it and clear it out quite easily. And you get to break into a lot of shops, which I enjoy as well. So yeah, shops and houses, breaking into those are always good. So yes, that was my adventure with Deus Ex, Matthew. Maybe I’ll play another kind of like noughties or nineties PC classic next year and talk about that in the pod. Maybe a bit of Thief 2. Yeah, perhaps that. Or like maybe it’s time to do a bit of research for a future CRPG episode or something. I’m really excited to hear about your next one, Matthew. It’s like a game that I’ve only heard you talk about briefly in person. So let’s go. Yeah. So this is 13 Sentinels, Aegis Rim. I’ve got to put my hand up and say, I actually haven’t finished this yet because I’ve slightly stalled on it. And anyone who’s played this will know that stalling on it is sort of death because it is so complicated. This is… I’ve completely forgotten the developers. VanillaWare. VanillaWare. That’s what I was going to say. VanillaSoft. But then I was sick of Soft Vanilla Ice Cream. Classic Matthew Castle there. It’s been a long weekend. This is kind of a combination of… I don’t know if you could call it a visual novel, if it’s more of a sort of adventure game. And sort of a tower defence game, where in the future there is a war going on between humanity and invading forces. And there are these sort of giant robots protecting the city. And you sort of do these tower defence sections, which in truth aren’t very good. They’re very simple. They’re not difficult, so they’re inoffensive. But they are also a little bit sort of grudgingly done, I think. But the meat of the game, and what’s great about the game, is the story of all the pilots who are on the battlefield. And you sort of jump through history and meet them at different points. And this is why I’ve stalled on it, because there’s so much criss-crossing of timelines and cleverness set up that I have just completely forgotten who everyone is and what was going on. Because there’s like 13 playable characters and you’re jumping between them in each chapter. That’s a lot to keep on top of, especially when some of the characters know each other and you can’t really remember who is doing what. I think why this game resonated a lot with people is that it feels like it’s drawing from just mountains of pop culture. It feels like a lifetime’s worth of being nerdy has just been forced into a script. Different storylines represent all kinds of different films. There are echoes or ideas. I’m not saying it’s deliberately playing on any particular film, but there’s at least at the point where I’m at. It just feels like it’s drawing on heaps of stuff that if you are into games and nerd culture, you will probably also be into these things. So I just think it really resonates because of that. It just has this warmth of this has come from someone who’s on my frequency. If you read some of the reviews for this, it felt like lots of people loved it and were wrestling with it. Likewise, I feel it’s kind of a difficult one to talk about. I think it’s a difficult one to write about as well. I’m not knocking the reviews, but there was a lot of sort of, you know, a lot of people who are just basically saying, I think you should just play it because, you know, if you play it, you’ll kind of know what I’m talking about, which is horribly vague, but that is kind of the vibe. Yeah, so it’s, I’m sure it is a tough one to talk about because I played a little bit of it. And like, it did seem to be, first of all, I think like the lead female character, her clothes are off while she’s in the robot. And I was like, ah. Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s sort of a vanilla, a vanilla wear thing, right? They’re quite, yeah, the games are a little bit traditionally, you know, kind of, this is kind of, they’re well known for this kind of character design and like, you know, certain tendencies in the games. Yeah, there is a lot of that. There’s a lot of like bouncy bits on the characters. It’s, it’s a little, and like they’re all kind of teenagers. So it is a little bit sort of salacious, but there’s also, I don’t know, it’s got like a lot of heart and the characters are quite nuanced. They’ve all got like a lot of sort of shit in their lives. And because of the structure of the story, you learn about them in quite, you know, quite an interesting pace. Like a lot of the characters, they can kind of flip them on their heads a bit by telling you something. If you learn a particular piece of information, it’s got this sort of strange sort of encyclopedia unlock system where as you go through the game, you’re amassing this sort of currency, which you use to sort of buy more backstory or like, almost like what I was saying in the Shibuya Scramble, the kind of dictionary definitions. There’s almost this like layer of information on top. And as you’re unlocking that, that’s also putting some stuff into context or kind of flipping some bits of the story. It’s super dense. The thing it reminds me the most of, and this is slightly obscure, is there’s the manga 21st Century Boys, which is about a load of people on the kind of eve of the millennium who sort of, there’s a rise of this cult, and they realise that the cult is kind of based on a sort of an imaginary sort of childhood gang they kind of made when they were kids. And they’re just trying to work out what the relationship is between their poorly remembered childhood and what’s going on in the present day. And it’s almost like if you could just remember who did what in the past, you could probably solve all the problems of today. There’s almost a sort of element of that to this in terms of it’s got all these time frames and it’s all about people repeating mistakes and certain patterns playing out in different ways. It’s very dense, very intricately plotted, gorgeously made, just slightly lumbered with these defence sections. I don’t know, they’re so out of keeping with the pace of the rest of the thing that you’re a little bit like, oh god, I better do this then. It’s like a visual novel that has a mechanic bolted onto it basically. Yeah, that’s right. You walk around the environments, it’s got this really gorgeous 2D style, the environments are quite fully realised, you can talk to people. So that’s why it’s not quite like a visual novel, it’s a bit more engaging, it’s quite hard to liken it to anything in particular really. It’s almost got the shape of a point and click adventure in that you’re picking up things and you learn information and then you can use that information to spark off conversations. So instead of an inventory, you’ve kind of almost got like a conversation inventory. Yeah, I was sort of like landing on it in the bit I played and it wasn’t much. A tiny bit persona, a little bit, obviously like quite a lot Evangelion, a little bit, even like a little bit, what’s it called? Into the Breach, just in terms of there being like this like story, people’s different stories kind of playing out and then kind of crisscrossing. Yeah, it does seem like a hard one to pin down for sure. Yeah, but I think that it’s very deliberately trying to create this sort of soup of ideas and inspirations and it’s more about sort of being part of that, you know, enjoying that soup. Yeah, it’s quite devastating, I hear the story, it can be quite brutal. Yeah, I mean, like I say, I’ve, you know, I don’t know how much more of it I’ve got to go, I imagine quite a bit. But yeah, you know, there’s definitely some pretty big stuff in there so far. I think it’s like interesting to see a, you know, there’s a lot of games which I think people like emotionally resonate with and they’re trying to get you on an emotional level, like, oh, you feel this kind of loss or you feel this kind of, you know, jealousy, envy, whatever, you’ve experienced these things. And I feel like the frame of reference here is like almost less emotional, more cultural. It’s like really, it’s super weird how it’s trying to sort of go like, you know, of this warmth of nostalgia because it’s a bit like ET. And it’s, so you sort of feel that. That’s what, it’s just drawing from a slightly different pool of ideas than most sort of stories do. Okay, interesting. It’s like, I can tell it’s a hard one to like really boil down. But I would recommend that people go and look at some screenshots of it, because the visual style, I mean, a lot of people listening to this podcast will know what it is anyway, I think, just because it was like so widely heralded last year, when it was, was it last year it was released? Yeah. Yeah. And so there was like a, I think it was a Polygon piece about how is the best game you didn’t play this year or something like that. And so people have gone to bat for this before, but like, a friend of the show, Jay Bayliss, absolutely swears by this game and says it’s like the best thing he played last year. So I trust his point of view on this stuff. He’s never steered me wrong. Pokemon aside, I’m just joking. Yeah, so yeah, I’ve got this on PS4 as well, Matthew. Like, not sure when I’ll get to it, but like… Coming to Switch next year. Yep, they just announced that very recently, didn’t they? So that’s surely perfect for that format as well. Yeah, yeah. I think there was some performance issues on PS4 with the tower defense stuff. So I worry that it may be kind of heinous on Switch, but I guess we’ll wait and see. Hopefully not, because it feels like a better fit for it. Like, I’m almost tempted to carry on playing it on Switch, because it just feels like it’s not a game I can sit in front of my TV and play for hours. I think that’s my one, like, criticism of it. And general visual novel stuff is I don’t tend to play them on a big TV if I can avoid it. I wish 428 was on Switch. It’s mad that it’s not. It’s not very long, though, right, 428? Isn’t it relatively short? It’s like 20 hours or something. All you do is get me to, like, buy fucking long-ass visual novels, and then I just stack them up in a big pile, and then, like, save them for retirement. I don’t know. Yeah, well, that’s the thing. This is the one I would say, like, definitely play it. I would play 428 over, like, Great Ace Attorney, for example. Wow, okay. That is a massive recommendation from you. So, yeah, big boy shoes. Don’t know what I mean by that. Yeah. So, let’s move on. So, yeah, my next one, Matthew, is straight from the pits of Naughty’s Hell, Dante’s Inferno. So, this is an EA game made by Visceral. It came after Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge right when EA was doing some interesting original stuff in the late Naughty’s. This was 2010, I think this came out. And it’s basically their version of God of War based on this epic poem and set in these different levels of hell, essentially. And it reminds me of just how firmly an identity those God of War games had. They were so like… It was like a specific type of game. It played a certain way. The puzzles and the combat were in conversation in a very specific way. And like the boss battles were of a very specific type. The QTEs, even like the level of gore and like the unnecessary boobs. Like all of that stuff was like so… The God of War games on PS2 like were so their own thing. They were so distinctive, you know, relative. They weren’t like anything else, really. And so when a game kind of rips it off, you can really see just how much they borrow to bring that to life. And this is an example of that. It’s like a slightly over-designed alternative to God of War. But it has its merits, for sure. It feels like they spent a boatload of cash bringing these different bits of hell to life. And so there’s a lot of different kind of environmental art, enemy types and such. You have some cool powers to do all this stuff. It has some real weird quirks in it. Like a very much product of its time quirks. So it’s got this system where you can absolve or punish people from mythological figures, essentially. And the idea is that you’re meant to read their story and then be like, oh, this is a king who sold his people out or whatever, and then you decide whether to punish them, which means basically putting your big sigh through their chest while they scream. Or absolving them and sending them out of hell or something. So some people are there who didn’t really deserve it and stuff. And whichever one you pick levels up a different progression bar, and one’s for your ranged attack and one’s for your melee attack, that’s a really strange system. And the odd thing about it, aside from that, is that it is quite horny in some strange ways. It’s gratuitous. It’s sort of like, oh, the year is 2010 and we can finally put boobs in computer games. And there’s a lot of gratuitous nudity. There’s a bit where you watch your wife being killed and she’s less topless for no reason. And it’s just like… Just like in the original Divine Gauntlet. Yeah, I don’t remember that bit. What’s Italian for norks? That’s the most like… That’s like an Endgamer caption just on this podcast. Oh dear. So I’ve played five hours of this, Matthew. I think I must be getting near the end, because I’m on like, I don’t know, layer like four or five out of seven. So they presumably are only like seven levels. So yeah, real oddball mix, some really fucking annoying puzzles in it. But like a genuine curio, one I really wanted to play at the time, but never got around to. Why am I playing it now? This is the problem when you’ve got Game Pass, right? You just dip in, install something. Is it all Game Pass? Yeah, if you’ve got the ultimate Game Pass. Yeah, because you get the EA Play stuff as well. So the EA Play catalog is well worth a look if you like the areas that we talk about in this podcast. And I gave the game Black a go, actually, on the same note. I didn’t think that was very good, but people seem to enjoy it. Did you ever play this one, Matthew? I think I played a demo of it. I think they released a demo of it. I’d be kind of intrigued to. I’ve not studied Divine Comedy, but I know a little bit about it and was always curious to see how much it actually took, because it’s a super dense and very, very weird and of its time story. And I didn’t know if… Because lots of the sinners in Divine Comedy are kind of political figures from the day, who I don’t think would resonate if you’re like, hey everyone, it’s like that evil mare from down the road or whatever, and you’re like, who? I don’t know if they filled it with just history’s greatest bastards to try and make it a bit spicier. It’s not like, you know, here’s Hitler, absolve or punish. Isn’t there a big lady boss with cherub babies? I haven’t got to that yet, but I’m willing to believe that’s the case. I’ve heard there’s quite an infamous, speaking of the nudity, quite an infamous boss fight with some kind of horrible demon babies crawling all over her torso, which sounded nightmarish at the time. They put some real fucking effort into those boss battles, I will tell you that. They are like elaborate. They’ve looked to God of War and been like, right, we have to fucking dial it up even further. Quite a good Cerberus boss fight in this. He kind of cut one head off at a time, and that’s quite poor RIP Cerberus. Cerberus is basically asking for it with those many heads. He’s like, that guy was born to be taken apart slowly in a three-phase boss fight. Even in Kingdom Hearts, you have to batter his three different heads till they go down. Poor Cerberus. Cerberus never learns to use all three heads at once. It’s true. They cannot take it in turns, and it’s no good, really. The kind of long rambling point I was making about the two progression systems, by the way, is that if you absolve someone of their sins, it begins a Guitar Hero style mini-game where you have to catch sins by pressing the different face buttons, and it’s like, oh, coming down the track now, Y, X, A, and it’s like, 10 sins caught, and then it’s like you get some bonus XP. I’m like, this definitely wasn’t in the source material. Like, I’m like… No. I mean, I’m not like… Definitely not. I’m not that well read, but even I know they’re kind of pushing it there. So this has been, like, I would say a complete waste of time, but one I’m kind of enjoying. It’s a good game to have on while I’m using my exercise bike. It’s not that stimulating, but it’s… I don’t know. Like, sometimes when there’s so much effort and money thrown at a thing, like, you can really get some interesting results out of it. And this kind of testament to that. Good combat system, lots of different enemy types, and they thought pretty long and hard about the structure of it, and the different areas look very distinctive from each other. And, you know, there’s no other setting like this in games, really, even though it kind of definitely has some crossover. Tell you what, we’d totally have a fucking new metal soundtrack if it came out, like, eight years earlier. Like, that is unbelievably what they would do. It’s that kind of game. So Dante’s Inferno, go buy it at CEX or play it on Game Pass. And very good for peddling away while you dispassionately watch your half-naked wife get killed. There you go, that’s my 2021 boiled down by Matthew Castle. So why don’t we go to your third pick, Matthew? So Paper Mario, The Origami King. I’ve talked a little bit about this before. Basically, as part of my campaign of casting shade on Thousand Year Door, I realized I’ve become a bit of an Origami King sort of cheerleader on Twitter in quite an annoying way. Wherever I see people talking about Paper Mario, wade in. Well, actually, I think this one is as good. It started off, I thought Origami King was second best, which is what I think, and has slowly morphed into it’s second best, if not as good. Which, I don’t think it is, but I’m just, I’m sick of the Thousand Year Door propaganda. It’s driving me up the wall. What did you put on your GameCube video again, Matthew? Thousand Year Door, because I know that there’s always zealots that I can trick into buying my console. And it worked, you got the popular vote. Because they cannot resist Thousand Year Door, because they’re so blind to anything that follows it. But it is still the best. Yeah, it probably is. It depends whether or not you treat it as a serious RPG. If there is any of them which still holds up… Well, if there are two of them that holds up, it’s Paper Mario, the original, and Thousand Year Door, in that they have the shape and the rhythm of an RPG. But it’s not a particularly deep, complicated or exciting RPG. I think what people like about them is the comedy, is the exploring this paper universe, it’s the psychology of the Goomba, it’s all these classic things. And most of the ones that follow have it. The big beef people have with the later Paper Marios is that they kind of get to a point where they say, well, the battling is not important, you don’t actually level up as a character, so really you could skip all the battles and just focus on the other stuff. Which I think is them saying the other stuff is what defines these games, and maybe just getting in a huff that it doesn’t force you to grind away on endless fights. You know, maybe that’s a good thing? Maybe? I certainly think it is in this. Like, I’m not… I don’t think it overdoes it, you know, I’m not like, oh jeez, there’s too much fighting in this. I think the balance of it is very nice. Have you looked into this game at all? I own it, Matthew. I was surprised to learn this recently. I was looking through my book of Switch games and thought, oh, there it is. So I kind of like know that I was aware of the kind of flare up of people saying, yeah, it’s not as good as Thousand Year Door, but it’s still good kind of stuff going on like last summer. So, yeah. Yeah, like, I think where it is as good is basically each chapter is like a little miniature story and you’ve got some really wild adventures and they’re very clearly defined, like what happens in each one. It isn’t just you’re following a path to the next boss battle, like, you know, one of them is like a little Indiana Jones adventure where you’re zipping around the desert to sort of unlock the riddle of these towers to make a secret temple appear and that’s all like its own thing, you know, and then there’s, you know, a level set at sea where you’re driving around a boat and fighting mysterious things on ocean liners and that’s its own thing. And there’s a level set in this, like, weird samurai theme park and it has its own, like, mysteries and puzzles and gimmicks to come and pick. And each bit of the game is a little Mario story, which is the same in Thousand Year Door. Thousand Year Door famously has, like, the stretch where it’s a little bit like Murder of the New Orient Express and then there’s the bit with the wrestling match and it’s very easy to say these bits. But this does it just as well. It’s got these amazing, like, signature, like, the big boss fights you have are against these sort of anthropomorphic bits of stationery. Like a big box of colouring pencils and a hole punch. And they’re just really characterful. When they come out they do, like, weird little song and dance numbers about, you know, whatever, how much they love being a big pile of elastic bands. It’s really, really weird, but super charming. And the comedy and the humour translates, you know, it’s just very, very accessible, beautifully made, absolutely banging soundtrack. Really, like, just some of the battle themes are so good, but even if a random battle pops up at an inopportune moment, it’s like, oh, well, I get to listen to 30 seconds of this banging tune. So, you know, what’s not to love? Yeah, I mean, you know, just for those at home, the Psychology of a Goomba, the collected writing of Matthew Castle, will be available in hardcover, $29.99 next Christmas from Bitmap Brothers. In this one, it’s, there’s like quite a long arc about this Bob-omb that’s lost its fuse. And what’s the meaning of a Bob-omb that can’t explode or a Bob-omb coming to terms with the fact that, like, his life basically ends in this sort of suicide. Wow, heavy shit. Yeah, and he never does say it in so many words, but it’s genuinely, like, quite moving, this little story of this sort of Bob-omb coming to terms with, like, his great purpose. So I thought it was, yeah, really well done. I’ve got to say, that sounds pretty good, though, Matthew, but the thing that you have said that’s made me want to play Thousand Year Door more than anything else is the Murder on the Orient Express bit. That sounds, like, rad. I want to see what that’s like. So I’m worried that you sold me more on this GameCube game that you’re wrestling with. It’s really hard to find and play, so… Yeah, that’s true. That’s why this one actually exists. It’s here, it’s now. You know, just get on it. I was really surprised people didn’t go absolutely nuts for this. This is, like, an easy nine for me, and I thought there was some slightly sniffy and begrudging eights. This is good. Ah, good, top stuff. Maybe I’ll give that a go for Christmas. I have just bought that Danganronpa collection, Matthew. Oh, that’s amazing as well. I’m looking forward to that. They’re so cheap as well, those games. Yeah, it’s quite a good way to structure it, isn’t it? Money-wise, it’s like… They’re basically like a tenner each, something like that. Yeah, and they’re like 30-hour games. I mean, they’re huge. Geez, I’ve just bought 90 hours of more games. You’ve just bought 90 hours of incredibly anime murder mysteries. Elden Ring’s out in January as well. Oh, forget that. No, I’ve got to play Elden Ring. That’s going to be… Danganronpa. Next year is the year of Danganronpa. Well, I’ve been given my assignment. That’s good. What I found interesting about Origami King, actually, is… My understanding is that the last Fire Emblem game wasn’t developed solely by intelligent systems. It was, like, made by Tecmo Koei, and they oversaw that Fire Emblem game, but the intelligent systems actually made this. Is that right? Have I got that right there? I actually don’t know. Okay, let’s just cut that out of the podcast and move on to our lives. I think I know what you mean about the Tecmo Koei involvement in the Fire Emblem, but not… I didn’t know if that was the deal or the Paper Mario thing. No, that’s fine. That’s fine. We’ll just move on. So next up, Matthew, a quick one here, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 HD. I finally started playing this this year. And oh, boy, what a lovely collection this is. I really wish I bought it on Switch, first of all. This would have been a great Switch game. Just proper, like, dive in for two minutes, kind of carry on thing. I’ve been listening to a lot of the podcasts, 60 songs that define the 90s. I think it’s called that. That’s a really good podcast from the ring. I’ve been listening to that non-stop, basically, whilst playing this. No diss to the new metal or punk metal or whatever genre of music is in this soundtrack. It’s basically just endless tracks of people going, Oi, oi, oi, oi! Yeah, it’s like blokes with spiky hair in 2002, kind of recording an album in their bedroom vibe. If Papa Roach aren’t on there, I assume they are. Bands like Papa Roach are on there. But this is really nice. I have a bit of nostalgia for Pro Skater 1, but this is a type of game I sort of missed out on at the time. I did rent Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, I think like three times, and I played all of that eventually. That was still a bit cheaper than buying it. I never had a PS1, so I missed out on 1 and 2. I did buy that HD Collection I did in 2012, I think got a bit of a cool response. So playing this where it was like proper deluxe in terms of animations and how it looked and how it sounded, just fantastic. Being treated with real reverence, and I hope they do do 3 and 4, I’ve no idea if they will, but it was a real treat to just jump into this. Playing on PC feels a bit weird, I’ll admit. They seem like the most console games in the world, so I’m sat here at my desk playing Tony Hawk, it somehow doesn’t seem right. Mouse wheel to manual. You’re like, this feels unholy. Usually my flight stick to balance while I’m grinding. Plug in the Steel Battalion controller, Matthew. So that is slightly bizarre. I’m glad that PC players can play this, but I feel like I should have bought this on a console. That would have made more sense. But yeah, did you play this, Matthew? Did you get any… No, I didn’t. I imagine it’s brilliant. I think didn’t they bring in some of the moves and mechanics from like 3 and 4 into this? So this actually does play like those. Yeah, so what is the thing that you can do to chain moves that they add in 3, I think it is? They add that to the 1 and 2. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s like a… That isn’t manualing, is it? Maybe? But yeah, something like that. And then like, yeah, you can chain moves together like you did in those games. You basically do endless combos, essentially. So yeah, it feels more contemporary in that respect. But of course, this isn’t really a genre that moves forward that fast. So it’s not like, you know, much has changed with it since… I must admit, I kind of prefer the Tony Hawk approach to the skate approach. Ian Dixon listens to this podcast. That’s the end of your friendship with him, Matthew. I hope you’re happy. I know you’re not really allowed to voice that opinion, but I felt like that was the undercurrent of like a lot of the glowing reviews for this HD package. I felt there were a lot of people who were secretly coming out as secret Tony Hawk fans saying, oh, this is good. Maybe this was better. I sort of think the problem I had with skate was, you know, obviously, you know, a very well made game, but I was as good at it as I am at real skating, which is to say I’m unable to do it. So, yeah. Yeah, it’s like less cinematic. It’s more like, well, being able to jump up one step is very hard on a skateboard. So that’s good in this game, but you’re like, yeah, but in Tony Hawk, you can sort of skate over a fricking, you know, Brontosaurus’ neck or something. It’s just a very different thing. Yeah, this is real good, though. If you can get this under 20 quid on Switch or PS5 or whatever, yeah, please do. It’s really, really good. And you won’t realize just what a box it takes because it’s in your hands and you can get so much achieved in like two minutes and then feel good about yourself and move on with your day. Top stuff. So what’s your next one, Matthew? Oh, so it’s the one everyone’s been expecting me to talk about, I’m sure. It’s Daedalus, The Awakening of Golden Jazz. Never heard of it, mate. Like, is this a game you made up? No, I hadn’t heard about it until earlier this year. I discovered this incredible blog written by a guy who translates Japanese crime fiction. He’s like one of the big translators for this particular publishing house. Sometimes, mate, you are just a parody of yourself. Reading these blogs, I mean, come on. So he’s got a blog dedicated to Japanese crime fiction and Japanese crime fiction games. He speaks Japanese, so a lot of the site covers stuff which doesn’t come out of it here. But I read a lot of his stuff about Jake Hunter, which is a detective series that I’d always written off based on the one that got ported to DS, which was really, really ropey. It’s like a hard-boiled detective series. It’s been around for, like, 30 years. It goes all the way back. They’re on, like, the 25th game or something. And I read on his blog about this one, which is, like, a prequel. It’s the newest one. It’s, like, the prequel to, like, the whole series about how Jake Hunter became Jake Hunter the detective. That’s his English name. He’s got a cooler-sounding Japanese name. It’s not great, I’ll admit. This is quite a strange, again, kind of visual-novel-y kind of point-and-click adventure game. It’s quite similar to The Mystery Club, the Nintendo games that came out this year. I’ve already forgotten their names, because they left such a little impact on me. Famicom Detective? Famicom Detective Club. That’s it. They’re a little like that in terms of, sort of, a detective novel, but with, like, an 80s, you know, still with, like, the 80s sort of verb sheet to kind of, like, go to this location, talk to this suspect. But this one has this strange gimmick that, instead of static environment art, it uses real-world locations and has shot them with one of those 360-degree cameras. So you’re kind of standing in the middle of every location, and then you can kind of spin around. So it’s a bit like a point-and-click game set in a Google map. Like a Google Street View. Except there will be a cartoon character imposed on it who will be telling you that they didn’t murder a bin man or something. And it is kind of… That is basically it. That is what I have explained. So you’re in these slightly blurry locations, which has a novelty factor in that they are real-world locations, and you’re like, oh, interesting. Like, they’ve had to set-dress this whole room so that they can do this 360-degree turn, but their solution is basically to set a lot of the cases in quite nondescript places. There’s a very long kind of tutorial case set at a summer camp where you’re basically just standing in a load of empty fields. It’s very, very unimpressive. And the story is kind of rotten. It’s not a very engaging localisation. It’s quite a flat, slow-moving game. But I just saw this screenshot of it, of this anime character standing like a real New York alley and thought, oh, this looks kind of interesting. I paid, like, fucking loads for this on Switch. I have no idea. Like, it’s like a full-price game. I think I paid, like, 50 quid for it. A real, like… Because I thought… Basically, I’d be reading this blog, and I was like, this guy’s so hardcore and cool, he knows all this stuff about Japanese crime. And it kind of… I felt something in me saying, like, I have to, like, not compete, I have to, like, show that I’m a true fan as well. And so I spent 50 quid so I’m seen on a really bad visual novel. What I will say is, I’m looking at the screenshots now, it really does look like someone’s house, and then there’s, like, three anime children there. It’s very strange. But can you sort of understand the mental process where I saw that picture and thought, oh, that looks different. Yeah, I can. Maybe I’ll give it a go. I can. 50 quid, though. I mean, like, oh, this is why I have to launch the Patreon, Matthew, to offset somebody’s costs for you, I think. Just to put them on the listeners instead of you. So you can make whims with a safety net. Yeah, like, I think that I can see why you did that. I love that it’s called Alternate Jake Hunter, Daedalus, The Awakening of Golden Jazz. Like, that’s like… Alternate Jake Hunter, that’s your opening gambit. Yeah, interesting. I can see why you’d have intrigue about this, but… Yeah. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, buddy. I just thought, yeah, if it had been good, I could have been smugly telling people, have you played Awakening of Golden Jazz? And they’d be like, oh, interesting. But it isn’t to be. Sometimes you’ve got to take one for the team, right? Do you think there’s any other podcast this year where Jake Hunter has come up in three different episodes like it has with R1? Do you think there’s any other podcast on the internet where that’s even possible? If there is, I should be listening to it. Or hopes to get. Yeah, that’s amazing. What about the other Jake Hunter games on the DS? They’re quite slow and chill. They are actually better. The DS one you’ve got to watch out, because they made one, the one I reviewed. It wasn’t very good. Then they basically re-released it a year later, when they re-localised it and added a load more stuff, because the original was so flat. That is better, and there’s a 3DS one, which is solid. They’re like, you know, again, they’re quite yakuza-y in that they’re set in the same kind of districts, and you spend a lot of time going to small jazz bars, and it plays DS version of jazz music in the background. It’s got a bit of that Hotel Dust kind of woozy vibe to it. Nowhere near as good. The mysteries, they’re a little bit like meat and potatoes. They feel old to me. They feel like mysteries from the 80s. It’s very like, there’s a missing person. There’s nothing too sort of sexy or out there about them. The one gimmick they have, which always makes me laugh, is that the hint system, if you want to have a hint, you basically have to smoke a cigarette, and he just thinks about it and goes, oh, I should do this. That very much speaks to the time in which they were made, I guess. Yeah, and I like the idea that, like, that’s, you know, if you get stuck, which you often do, because these games are basically like weird sequence games where you just have to make sure you go to this location, then this location, talk to this guy, go back to this location. And so a lot of the time you’re lost. So it’s just about, like, this detective who’s constantly lost and is smoking, like, a thousand cigarettes a day just to work out where he’s meant to be going. Like, he’d definitely be dead at the end of one case. Um, and, like, I thought maybe they should have a system where, like, the more cigarettes you smoke, like, you get, like, more of a cough as the game goes on or something. Something just to acknowledge the fact that you’re cheating. That’s bleak. Just tearing up your lungs while solving a mystery. That’s bleak stuff. That explains why you have to have an alternate jake hunter to the regular one. Yeah, you don’t smoke in that one. One final note on that, and this is how sad I am. Um, I’ve become obsessed with, when I see places in films and TV shows, of trying to find them on Google Street View to see how much they set-dress them. Right, OK. This is like a new thing that’s happened in the last year. And this game’s really good for it, because it’s got loads of, like, New York restaurants and stuff. And it’s just, I like to go to the actual Google Street View and see how different it looks from their Street View, or if they’ve had to, like, change any of it. Right. Uh, you know. You know, whatever past the time, I suppose. OK, I’ve got two questions here. One, what is the kind of, like, weirdest? What’s the thing you’ve looked up where, I guess give me a funny example of something you’ve looked up from a film in the past year, in real life, to see what it’s like. I mean, I don’t know if there are funny examples. That’s what’s tragic about it. It’s not even interesting. It’s just, like… I like to look at pictures of places where films were made sometimes. Well, I like to see, like, when there’s clearly a fake shop, I want to see how different it is from the real shop that’s there. Yeah, I guess I can kind of see the psychology there. Let’s just move on very quickly. Do you think that this is a genre where, like, the cream really has risen to the top and we already have access to a lot of the best stuff? Or do you think there’s still a lot of hidden gems kind of buried away with visual novels? To what extent do you think we’re getting, like, the full measure of the greatest stuff in the West? I mean, it’s hard to speak to the quality. Like, there’s so much stuff which doesn’t come over. I’m definitely not claiming to be any kind of expert on this, but, you know, based, say, on this blog, you know, maybe 5% of what he talks about are actually localized things. The rest of it is just things which sound amazing. Some of them are smartphone games. Some of them are, you know, console things. Mostly smart game things, I think. Smartphone games. Yeah, I get the impression a lot of it isn’t coming over, but I think there is a lot that does, but I wonder if it’s more the… Whenever I look for visual novels on Switch or Steam or whatever, there seems to be a lot of kind of romance-y ones and not a lot of these detective-y ones. So maybe it’s just a proven audience. Maybe the failure of the awakening of Golden Jazz hasn’t made a strong case for bringing over more. Well, you know, what a shame to hinge it all on that. But hey, you threw your 50 quid at it, so what more can you do? I was definitely the only person who bought it on that day, I imagine. I like to think they’re like, they’ve got like a ping on their computer and they’re like, someone has bought it in the UK. Someone wants out Ultimate Jake Hunter. Well, if any artists out there want to make a game that’s a bit like this, this is Matthew Castle’s dream game to make a kind of a visual novel someday. So get in touch with the podcast, backpagegames.gmail.com. So just to stop Matthew from looking at photos of places where films were made on Google Street View. So next up for me, Matthew, I think you played this one too, because I was comparing Xbox achievements. That’s my sad habit. The Quake Remaster by Nightdive Studios that was released this year, available on Game Pass, like a lot of Nightdive’s releases. They’ve kind of basically got into this classic PC game and added, made it work really well on modern formats, optimized the controls, optimized the visuals, and presented it in all the different resolutions you’d want. You’re able to change the different visual effects and stuff like that. Really, really good stuff. I very much enjoyed this, Matthew, because it reminded me of what first-person shooters used to be like, which is you could get lost and not finish a level because you don’t know where you are. That’s just not part of the DNA of these games anymore, really. In that sense, I really enjoyed just what a pure hit of level design they were. I probably played about 10 levels of this, maybe a bit more, and just how fast some of them are. Some of them you zip through in like two minutes, some take about 10 minutes, you get lost, some the way you like are swimming under water, loop through here, go back up through here, and then it’s kind of like mazy levels. You can see how this would be a real good crash course for learning game design, I guess, or learning level design, just to build a good Quake map. I can see why that would be a good education for someone. But generally speaking, I just love how full-blooded it is, and the very weird medieval fantasy leaning of Quake. It’s just a very specific thing. So yeah, I thought this was great to just see this on Game Pass, a perfect Game Pass edition in that I didn’t really intend to play through the full thing, but really appreciate just having it on tap to give it a go as a curiosity play. Any thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I think I didn’t even play as much as you did, but likewise, just going into it to see if it stirred up any memories from playing. I never played through the whole thing, I don’t think, in my youth, but I’ve played a little bit and it was like, yep, that’s this. Yeah, like, I don’t know, it’s probably shedding listeners by their hundreds by saying, like, you know, I kind of, maybe I’m spoiled a bit by, like, you know, the new Doom games or whatever, or the pace of them, the slickness of them. You know, I find this stuff, like, still enjoyable, but a bit quaint in a way. Yeah, you can see, though, how, like, to someone who’s only, like, played, you know, the Doom games, for example, like, that kind of style of shooter or Duke Nukem, how what a step up this would have been at the time. Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But that’s the thing, it feels more like a history lesson, I guess, than maybe something sort of, like, stunning in its own right. Though I haven’t played the, there’s the new stuff made by Machine Games, which by all accounts is quite interesting. Yeah, yeah, that’s quite a cool addition to it. Like, honestly, I’ve just been really impressed by, like, the movement in shooting, it’s just lovely. And also, it’s actually really hard to get, like, a PC shooter like this to work well on a controller. And they did a great job with it, like, the sensitivity of it and stuff. Like, I’ve played a couple of, like, older shooters on modern formats where it feels like the aiming reticule doesn’t quite line up properly with, like, analogue sticks and stuff. And this is, like, never a problem with Night Dives games, because they’re just, like, specialists at this, and they, like, really, they really nail it. So, yeah, a cool thing that happened this year. And, like, you know, it’s nice to see them doing things that aren’t, like, Turok and Shadow Man as well, just because this is, like… Oh, I played Shadow Man this year. Yeah, top stuff. Didn’t bring that up in the N64 draft, Matthew, for shame. Oh, yeah, sexy, creepy Zelda. Oh, OK, so what’s another one of yours, Matthew? Just a little nod to Luigi’s Mansion 3, which I stalled on last year and I finished. So I think that counts as a game from last year that I played this year, which I liked. I thought it dragged on a little bit towards the end. I don’t know if you’ve played this one at all, Samuel. No, I’m familiar with the first two, but I assume this is a very similar kind of thing. Sort of structurally, it’s got a great hook in that. It’s this big hotel, and you’re trying to unlock the floors to get to the top, because that’s where the big boss is waiting for you. Each floor is almost like a level, has a self-contained gimmick. They start off with things you might expect, like here’s the floor of hotel rooms, or this floor is the gym, or this floor has the restaurant and the. Kitchen, but as they go higher you get into weird suites, which are based on the pirate suite, or the Egyptian suite, so the floors justify being little self-contained adventures where there’s a weird nautical theme, or there’s a floor which is a nightclub, and there’s always mad puzzles involving disco lights, and light panels, and things. So it definitely finds an interesting way to structure it, but the actual quality from floor to floor is quite different. There’s some really strong stuff early on. There’s a floor which is basically a film studio, and there’s always quite odd stuff about special effects, and ghosts coming out of TVs, and stuff like that. Yeah, but like Luigi’s style, so it’s kind of cute. I just feel like its best levels were stacked early on, and by the end of it, you go into a floor, you get the button, you go up a floor, you go in there, you get the button. It’s got some horrible backtracking where there’s this like, you occasionally get the button, and then this ghost cat jumps out, steals the button, and runs through the hotel, and you have to basically go back through loads of floors chasing this cat, and it just feels like padding. I think it took me about 15 hours, all told, but it could have been quite a tight 10 and better for it. Really handsomely made, but it is also like, I just don’t feel like there’s enough to that character. You know, in terms of like, vacuum Luigi, there’s only so many things that guy can do with his equipment, and you know, that’s the other problem with the second half, is you feel like you’ve seen like every interaction going, and it’s, I don’t know, I’d hold off before doing Luigi’s Mansion 4 if I was Nintendo, because I just don’t know if there’s like, much more like mileage in it. That’s interesting, because like, you know, I know this is acclaimed, and like, do you know it’s sold 9.59 million copies? That’s crazy. That’s just the switch. People will buy, they won’t buy anything, it is good, don’t get me wrong. I always thought it was amazing they managed to like, so when I played the second one, I was amazed they managed to get more out of the formula, like, at all, but they did, you know, add some novel stuff, and it really helped that it was like, it looks lovely on the 3DS as well. That was a big technical showcase. But I think that is its, like, reason to exist. It’s like the most flashy, sort of AAA feeling thing they have, weirdly. Like, it’s very showy, it’s very, sort of, lots of weird, bespoke animation. It feels lush and expensive, and it’s not, like, as gameplay driven as Nintendo’s other stuff. It’s very western, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it’s sort of like a point-and-click game, kind of. Maybe, like, kind of a lighter version. I don’t know. Like, when I played the original Luigi’s Mansion, I did think this definitely feels like there’s a… I’d seen everything in that game, and I didn’t have, like, a massive appetite to play another. Just because that five- or six-hour game just kind of contains everything you want from that particular set of mechanics. So, that’s not to say that the second one didn’t build on it in some interesting ways. So, yeah, three games, yeah. I think the second one’s still my favourite of the three. Just in terms of… I really like the 3D effect. I thought that really added to it. I thought pacing-wise, it didn’t make the missteps of this one. This one’s got some quite bad boss fights as well. Like, he’s quite a slow, cumbersome character. Like, he’s not great. If you throw too much at him, it can become, like, surprisingly difficult. Which, you know, maybe it’s a git gud. Come on, Luigi’s Mansion can’t be that hard. But I definitely thought there were some sort of clumsy beats in it. I thought, man, if, you know, a kid might stumble over some of this, I definitely was. Okay, interesting. Well, I think my girlfriend bought me this last year. So at some point, I have played the other two. So maybe I should just give this a go, see what it looks like. Yeah, it’s pretty spanky, for sure. I do like the idea of a themed rooms thing. That’s pretty cool. That is like a good way to sort of build it out. But like you say, if it’s sort of front-loaded in that respect, then that’s tough. Yeah. But yeah. And just some of them are like, does anyone really want to go to a hotel and buy a suite where like it’s covered in sand? That is just, that is not my idea of a good time. And it’s like high up. So that would suggest it’s like an elite suite. The idea of like paying, if on your honeymoon, you’re knackered from all the traveling and you turn up and there’s just a lot of fucking sand in your bed. I’d be livid. So you’re questioning the logic of a game where Luigi hunts for ghosts. Well, I’m questioning like, that’s the concept that invades the hotel. The hotel exists pre-Luigi’s Mansion. They’re suggesting that someone in the Mushroom Kingdom, well, actually, thinking about it, this is aimed at people in the Mushroom Kingdom, you know, based on what we know about the other levels of Mario games where people live, you know, you’re probably used to it. Deserts, ice, slippy, slidey ice worlds, the works. So a hotel with a sand floor is kind of plausible, I guess. Yeah, and Mario would be like, oh, fine, this is like dry, dry desert, whatever. That’s okay, I can deal with this. Oh, amazing, what when he takes Peach there for the weekend just for a bit of a romantic getaway. Yeah, if he went in there and it was just like, you know, like a nice hour world hotel, like a human world hotel with just like a really comfy bed and nice towels, that might not seem exciting when like, you know, your back garden is an apple that floats in space. It’s just a really weird episode of our podcast, Matthew. Like, it’s a bit like Sunday night, the kind of like things are getting a bit strange. Like, it’s some vibes that are just a bit odd with this episode. I can’t explain why. I’m just getting this slight fear. It’s the awakening of Golden Jazz. I’m looking at those screenshots. They’re not quite the same afterwards, admittedly. So my next one is what I haven’t discussed on this podcast before, but I did fire through in a weekend this year, Resident Evil 3 Remake, Matthew. So I finally gave this a go. I know it’s kind of like considered quite like, you know, definitely the shadow of Resident Evil 2’s remake. I agree. But I think the fact that you can basically buy this for 16 quid on all formats now, it’s like a really, it’s a perfectly good like five hour game to just fire through. I think all the points you made when we discussed this previously about Nemesis, I think we discussed that on the 2020 episode actually, were like fair, like they don’t do anything interesting with Nemesis relative to like Mr. X, which is such a distinctive part of that first game. Generally speaking, it feels like it’s kind of like, it feels like, I don’t want to say like DLC, because it doesn’t really, it definitely has like its own sections, but it’s just such a like, you race through the game, and then it’s kind of over sort of thing. But like, I must admit, I thought the hospital section, this was pretty good. I thought that was like quite, quite tense, especially you get those big monsters chasing after you, the big green things. And I did also, I thought the opening was great when it’s first person, and you’re in Jill’s apartment like that. I thought that the game was going to be completely different based on that. I thought it was going to be like really like immersive and quite spooky and like you’d be kind of like edging out into the city to see what the deal is, but then it immediately turns into like shooting loads of zombies and stuff. That’s quite a nice opening area in like a raccoon city street you didn’t see in Resi 2, with like a toy shop and stuff. That was pretty cool. Just generally speaking though, like it never gets anywhere near the highs of that Resi 2 remake. It’s just not quite as good a product. Because the source material is not as sexy, but also it’s not like they… I don’t think they did every single part of the source material in this version. Like I think there’s like a few bits missing. And yeah, yeah. That’s odd, I think, given how short it is. Like it’s very short and they cut stuff. Yeah, I think all the criticism is fair. But it’s actually like a proper like if you’ve got five hours in a weekend to kill, like just kind of play it and enjoy it. It’s not it’s not that strenuous. And no, no, it’s not bad. It ends quite spectacularly as well. Oh, it’s crazy. It’s like a gigantic like monster. It’s not like a great boss battle, but it looks looks real good. Yeah, the bit of the rail gun is just very, very satisfying. Yeah, for sure. And like they are, you know, like Resi 2, it looks fantastic for sure. Just like, you know, your mileage on Carlos, Saliviera may vary. But yeah, quite interesting to hear Mikami sort of like dunking on this one and say it wasn’t quite worthwhile of being called Resi 3 compared to Code Veronica in that Archipel documentary. I think I’m inclined to agree. But yeah, I did think the hospital section was really well structured in this. Just like it sort of it slowly gets worse and worse. And like you start to dread going back through different parts of it to get to the end of it. So I thought that was one area where it was like, I don’t know, it had its own kind of thing going on separate from Resident Evil 2. It’s just odd that it, like, there’s some weird differences between 2 and this. You know, like the things like the zombie body damage is a lot less sophisticated in 3 than it is in 2. They feel like not just the work of different teams, but almost like different engines at times. There’s something very odd with this game. It feels like it was made in the same style, but then, like, concurrently. So there’s just some oddities there. They just took it in a different direction at times. I wish it had been a bit more interplay, I guess, because there’s stuff that is so good in 2 that just feels like such a… It’s been done to death, but yeah, the Nemesis Mr. X stuff, it just feels like such a missed opportunity. But yeah, hey ho. If you can get it for 16 quid, fire through it. It’s worth it. It’s just perfectly fine for that if your expectations are in check. I think it’s good that I waited quite a while from the rest of the 2 Remake to give it a go. So yeah, a good, would have been a classic rental game back in the day, where that thing you could still do. That’s like 3 copies of this for 16 quid, or 1 copy of The Awakening of Golden Jazz for 50. Or like 2 copies of 428 Shibuya Scramble, so you have to weigh it up at home. The economics of video games. So what’s your next one, Matthew? A very small shout out for Binary Domain, which has been added to the, it’s got the FPS boost on 360. On Xbox Series X even. They recently announced a load of new back and pack games, but they also did the FPS boost, which is where they take the old games, sprinkle some magic on them. Come on, this isn’t Digital Foundry, what do you expect? And double the frame rate, or quadruple the frame rate in some places. This one is, yeah, a 30 frames up to 60 frames. And if you don’t have, if you don’t own the game on PC, or you don’t have access to it or whatever, this is just a really great way to play it. I was playing some of this over the weekend, and A, reminding myself how good binary domain is. It’s just a really fun third person shooter with enemies that are very satisfying to shoot. And it’s one where actually the frame rate, I think, does help, because if you’ve not played this game, you’re fighting robots, and they shatter very impressively. They’ve got like all those sort of ceramic body parts that break as you shoot them, and it reveals like the exoskeleton underneath. And so you’re trying to like, you know, as you shoot them, all bits are coming off them, and they keep coming, and you’re sort of breaking them down. And obviously, the smoother that looks, the kind of prettier the effect is. But yeah, I just thought I’d highlight this as a, you know, there’s, I’ve suddenly got a pile of stuff, other stuff I want to revisit on Xbox, because they’ve pumped it up in some way or made it available in some way. Like some of the Xbox stuff you’re talking about, like I’m actually sort of jonesing to play a bit of Max Payne 2, if I can find a copy. Yeah, I was quite gutted that that like got announced, like in the time since we recorded that podcast and the draft going live. I thought, well, that’s less tasty now, because people can just go fucking play on their Xbox series. Yeah, it was great to see that. I think the entire Max Payne series is made available on there. That was cool, including Max Payne 3, which I know you’re less keen on. But like, should I play binary domain, Matthew? I’ve never played it. Yeah, you’d like it. Yeah, I feel like I probably would. And I don’t know why it passed me by at the time. Maybe it was my longstanding feud with Nogoshi, I don’t know. But like… Yeah, I think it got not majorly dunked on, but definitely sniffed out in reviews. Like, lots of people gave it sevens, you know, or sort of sixes saying, well, it’s not a gears. And you’re like, no, it isn’t. But it’s also got, you know, maybe this was pre sort of UKESA and that team being like majorly popular and kind of culty in the same way they are now. And maybe I’m just applying some of that love retroactively to it. But I think it, you know, the enemies are genuinely really satisfying. It’s got a great tone. It’s got some really funny side characters. The main character is like the most generic action man of all time, like a real like, I can’t remember what he’s called. I think he’s called Daniel. That’s what I can tell you. But you do get to partner up with a French robot called Kane and it’s just a man doing a comedy French accent and saying like, Zoo-A-Laws whenever robots come in and stuff. And that’s just great. I mean, how can you not enjoy that? Did the original version have some like talking, ordering people in your headset kind of mechanic to it? Yeah, you can shout orders at them. There were button controls for it as well. You just hold a button. You know, it’s like sort of giving commands in a Rainbow Six or something. It’s like, go over there or like defend me or I need help. But yeah, you could do it over a headset. If you had one, you could shout like, Kane, give me help or whatever. But I don’t know how well it works. So you have to shout it in French because he’s a French. You have to shout it in French. Jumapel. Oh no, that’s my name is. I was going to say Jumapel Hurt. Fermet le Caille. That means, I think close your book. Close the book. That’s all I remember from French. Fermet le Bouche. Shut your mouth. This is why, yeah, like basically no English people know second languages. Well, also, Cain speaks such good English, you don’t need to. Yeah, well, that’s the problem with like all English people though, isn’t it? Going to other countries. It’s like, they’ll speak English, so it’s fine. Yeah, but yeah, by no demand, I think I own this on PC. Well, you probably don’t, you wouldn’t see the benefits on Xbox. And it’s still quite like low res and rough around the edges, but I appreciate it. I’ve made a little stack of games I own on disc that I want to like revisit or see how they look. So I’ve got the original Nier lined up. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because that’s got frame rate boost and that’s still like, you know, I played a bit of the redo of that this year and thought this kind of isn’t madly different from how it was. So I should maybe just play that again. I’m actually really up for replaying Deus Ex, the second one, the Mankind Divided, because that’s got the frame boost as well. So that should look lovely on Xbox. Oh, yeah, I played that on PC originally and it looked tasty as hell. Yeah, so I’m kind of keen to give that another go. Go enjoy the Pawnee district of Prague and double the frame rate. Yeah, double the frame rate. Double the thirst. Okay, let’s move on. So my next one, Matthew, inspired by the episode we did with Rich, is Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty. Oh, it’s just because you do your homework and I don’t. Well, no, I did this one after we did the podcast, actually. Which actually, like, I was confronted with, again, like the Arkham Knight thing, I was confronted with some takes of mine that I’d kind of forgotten and long buried. And that is that, sorry, Rich, I don’t like bomb disposal. And, like, there is a lot of it in the first half of this game. And, like, the Peter Stillman character is such a fucking dud. He’s such a boring guy. Oh, you’re waiting till Rich isn’t here to say this. You know, when he comes on again, does Metal Gear Solid 1, which is something I plan to pitch next year to him, we can go through that. But the Fat Man boss fight is good, actually. That’s, like, a good use of bomb disposal. But I think maybe it’s because I just know the locations of all the bombs. I still remember where they all are all these years later. Like, where you go in the toilets and all this stuff. And, yeah, but, like, honestly, the big show is just so dull. It’s so, so boring, man, compared to The Tanker. It’s just really, really boring. And, like… I’m glad we didn’t record… I’m glad you didn’t replay it properly before the podcast. Well, no, it’s that thing where, like, I go into, like… I got into one of the struts in the first part of the game. I thought, well, what’s this room? What defines this room? It’s just a fucking room with boxes in it. It’s the box room. And, like, you can sit on a conveyor belt and go around in the box, and, like, that’s, like, kind of novel, I guess. But it’s a really boring space to be in, and they’re all a bit like that. This is the space. It’s got a leaky pipe in it. And this is the one where it’s, like, just some lockers and, like, one room’s got some mines in it. And it’s just… It’s so… Such a boring sequence of places. It gets a bit spicier when you’re going into the central bits of the struts and, like, some of the boss fights have real spectacle to them. But it is quite hard work, the, like, the Raiden stuff. Like, just… It’s not just, like, Raiden as a character. It’s all the stuff around him. All the best bits are, like, when you encounter Snake and you’re like, oh, there’s Snake and that sort of thing. But, like, I will say, still a really good, like, pure stealth game. What I said on there about, like, my quite bold thing about this being a better stealth game than MGS3, I think I do stand by that just in terms of its simplicity. Because there’s still quite a lot of nuance to this in terms of, like, shooting out there. Obviously, they’re, like, sort of walkie-talkies. They can’t call for help. And, like, how you can, like, dart certain enemies, how you can, like, toss their body off the side of the big shed if you want to, and how there are, like, ciphers that fly around, and they’re enemies that can go, like, up or down so they can, like, just sort of pop out of nowhere sometimes. And, like, you have to think about the escalation of where enemies are, like, in terms of the elevation where enemies are. And it’s a really, really, like, it’s a great stealth game, I think. But, yeah, just quite, quite boring. It’s a bit like going to, like, yeah, I don’t know, just, like, like a real oil rig and being like, oh, I’m so bored right now. I wish I was somewhere else. And, like, that’s why, like, you know, going to a jungle. I imagine a real oil rig is really exciting. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, maybe I’m being a bit down on oil rigs. I mean, we all know this is not a real location anyway. It’s just a front for Arsenal Gear, which is preparing to crash into Manhattan for whatever reason, containing an AI that can rewrite fucking all of the news and the entire universe or whatever fucking bullshit it is. I got to say, like, I’ve got a lot of love for the overall game, but there’s definitely a sense I’ve played this one too many times. That said, what a lovely version that Metal Gear Solid 2, sorry, Metal Gear Solid HD Edition is on Xbox, Matthew. Just, like, a great way to future-proof that. They were right to, like, put that backwards compatibility was a gift, goddammit. So, while pleasingly the Metal Gear Solid 3, sorry, 4 mains locked away on the PS3, you can still play 2 and 3 on Xbox. So, yeah, slightly bummed out by it, but, you know, hey. It was, the fact that I played through four or five hours of a game that’s 20 years old and didn’t get to, like, sort of wasn’t disappointed by it, that’s probably a sign that it’s standing the test of time quite well. So, what’s your last one, Matthew? I was going to say, this is just why I don’t replay a lot of stuff, because the constant fear that I’ll have to reverse a take. Yeah, especially on this podcast, where, like, we’ve built so much of our cred on, like, takes on old stuff that we’ve tried not to think about for, like, seven or eight years. Imagine if I, like, you know, I replay the original Ace Attorney trilogy and I’m like, oh, yikes, this is a bit six out of ten. That’d be awful. That’d be like my whole brand comes crumbling down. No, they’re definitely good, you’re fine. Yeah, they’re definitely good. I have replayed those recently, so that’s fine. But there’s definitely some things where I’m, like, a little nervous of replaying them for that very reason. You’re like, no, Risen, I thought you were so good in 2009. You’re a big Risen head, if I recall. Your last one here, Matthew, talk me through it. So I’ve been playing a bit of GTA San Andreas as part of the Definitive Edition, and while that is new, I think this counts as a game from yesteryear. It’s definitely not in contention for, like, my Games of the Year pod contribution, which I actually thought it might be. When they announced this, I actually had really high hopes, because I thought, oh, this could be a very accessible version of these games, which I’ve never finished San Andreas, because I got stuck on it, as we’ve talked about many times. And so I thought, oh, well, if they’ve made some quality of life improvements, that’s the stuff I was excited about. And I think, to give it some credit, it’s quite nice to play and control, driving the cars and everything. I feel as in control of that game as I ever have been. It’s just that I don’t think they’ve shown it quite the love or quality of life stuff that I’d hoped. It feels kind of weirdly budget. A lot of people have talked about the visual problems, but even just from the off, like the interface of it and the maps and just the feel of it, like the feel of the front end and the menus of it, like the fonts, you know, that seems super nerdy, but sometimes there’s just a font, you look at it and go, oh, it’s a bit of a budget decision that, and it just doesn’t feel cherished as you thought it might. You know, I thought this is like GTAs, they’re crown jewels. Surely you’ve got to treat it with some respect, but yeah, this is pretty yikes on that level. But as an actual like A to B playing it, you know, I’m not actually that far into it. I’m still pootling around with the original gang and going to Big Smoke’s house a lot. Is that his name? That’s right, Big Smoke, yeah. Yeah, so I’m still doing a lot of the kind of tutorial missions. I think when I played this originally, I remember thinking, wow, this is so comprehensive. This world is so alive. You go to the gyms to work out and get stronger, and you go to the restaurants to eat and all that kind of stuff. But actually, now, that stuff seems quite linear and standard. It doesn’t feel as hugely ambitious and alive, mainly because they have trumped that and they’ve gotten so good at that world building, and it’s very unfair to compare that, a game made 15 years ago to this, what they’re doing now. But it feels a lot more like icons on a map than a kind of living place that I’m kind of engaging with in an interesting way. It feels a bit more, you know, Saints Row-y, or like a slightly lower tier of open world game. It’s not this sort of truly organic living, breathing city trademark that I remember it as, which has been an interesting… So that’s a bit of an eye-opening experience. But I still like pootling around it. I love that you can just ride little bikes around. That’s great. Yeah, the bikes feel really nice. In fact, I would say that generally speaking, the part where the collection’s really improved is just the controls generally. Cars feel really nice to drive, I would say. You can turn a corner and it feels like it should, I guess. It’s kind of slightly arcade-y driving. Not as stiff as I remember it being on PS2, you know. I forgot how vague the kind of wanted system is in these games. You know, the rules of how to escape or what you’re trying to escape or how to get rid of the police seems a little undefined to me. Like, there’s still quite a reliance on the pay and spray. That’s just something… That’s like my big memory of these games was just being quite frustrated whenever the police came into play, which still happens to me now. But, you know, they’re not going to rewrite the rules of the game. I get that, but… Yeah, it’s like… It’s tough because these days, when you play something like GTA Online, they’ve made the police such a small part of that game that all you have to do is basically, like, you can call someone on your phone, pay, like, $300, and get rid of your wanted rating. Like, the police aren’t a factor. And here, you’re right, like, there, that your number one threat… When you got two stars, you’re basically fucked. Unless you can find a pay and spray, or you can drive through one of those, like, bonuses that get rid of one star, and then with your one star, just go hide somewhere. Like, it’s just like a system that hasn’t dated that well, because as a player, you don’t feel like you’ve got much agency to get rid of the cops, whereas I would say that GTA V has got quite a sophisticated, like, you know, system for, like, how the police track you down and stuff. And they will sometimes seem psychic and come out of nowhere and get you, but you can see their line of sight very clearly. You can drive off-road and avoid them. Like, it’s quite a smart system. Yeah, I just feel like I’m constantly bumping into them by accident and then causing a huge amount of grief for myself. Like, most of my failures are just due to dumb accidents escalating rather than the actual set pieces they want me to be enjoying. So, I guess, like, my next pick ties into this, Matthew, so should I discuss it? Yeah, let’s, yeah, I’m interested here because it’s obviously part of the same thing. Yeah, so Grand Theft Auto 3, I’ve been playing that in the remastered edition. I’ll be honest, I had a really good time with it. Like, I can’t speak for the collection as a whole, really, because I still haven’t played Vice City or San Andreas, but, like, even though the skies, the exact, like, color palette isn’t the same as I remember it. I actually found, like, the character models and the city look really nice, I thought. I thought, like, GTA 3 came out really well from it. I think that I like the mix of, like, real realistic environments, but they picked a certain style for the characters, which I think worked really well. Like, the character Tony Cipriani looks a bit like a jack-o-potato, but, you know, that’s, like, probably the only one where I thought he looks a bit weird. And, like, here’s what I was shocked by, right, is just how much you cut out of these games where you have checkpoints. Like, the checkpointing system in this is so generous. Like, it doesn’t checkpoint mid-mission, but you realize why it doesn’t do that. It’s because the missions are so short in GTA. You forget about this. Like, if there’s one thing it kind of gave me an appreciation of is that, like, there’s a real craft to how Rockstar does missions now, where there’s, like, these big cinematic elements, and they’re kind of in multi-stages sometimes, and then, like, they’ll escalate and have quite a cinematic crescendo. Whereas here, it’s very much like, go do this thing. And that’s kind of it. And, like, as we discussed in that GTA 3 episode, that means they are quite open-worldy sometimes, because they really are just, like, do this the way you want to do it. And, like, that definitely has its own appeal, but then you realize that, like, sometimes when you’re doing those missions back-to-back, you realize you miss the kind of extra touches that Rockstar bring to the modern games, where it is, like, handcrafted and exciting. And maybe I’m being fickle here, but sometimes you just want a little bit of that guided hand to just kind of give you that thrill factor that maybe you don’t necessarily get, when it’s just like, go destroy these four things on the map. And it’s just very, like, rote, and you kind of do it, and you go back, because there’s no reason to have a particularly inventive approach, because you’ve got a time limit and whatever. And so I was shocked by that, because I knocked through this game in, like, six days, and I didn’t even play that much. And, like, it took me a year to finish this game on PS5. There’s two things to that. One, I am a lot better at games now. But two, they’ve added this aiming system that makes, like, the game a lot easier, which I have no problem with whatsoever, because a casual kind of, like, breeze through these games is exactly what I was looking for, really. Like, I didn’t want to be, like… I didn’t want to struggle my way through them like I did previously. And you realize that so much of the time in GTA is, like, reloading a save where you’ve got guns or, like, you know, having to go back to Amunation and buy a load of stuff. And, like, you realize that that was a massive part of… That was a massive time sink. And having checkpoints completely cuts that out. And, like, what an improvement it makes. But it also makes the games, like I say, incredibly short. I absolutely fired through this. And, like, I… Unlike with the PS2 one where I used cheats all the time, I didn’t use a single cheat once in this. I didn’t have to. Even, like, the last mission, which is quite tough in GTA, we got to shoot down Catalina’s helicopter at this dam. Even that, I managed to get… I finished on, like, the third attempt. And it’s, like, fairly straightforward. So, yeah, I just… I had a really good time firing through this. And, like, I’m sort of, like… I suppose I’m sort of, like, dodging around the sort of, like, the wider discussion of this game. Like, but all I’m really speaking to here is that I played GTA III. It was basically like I remembered it, but with some improvements, and it was really cool. So I’ll keep an eye on what happens to the collection as they kind of keep patching it. But, yeah, I was… It gave me the exact nostalgia hit I wanted, Matthew. So… A big thumbs up for GTA III Jacket Potato Cipriani Edition. I posted a picture of him. He was my big 2021 mood. Just like… Just a very strange kind of like… sort of take on that character model. But that’s not how I pictured him. I was picturing him as looking a bit like Michael Madsen because he’s voiced by Michael Madsen, so he’s like gravel-voiced and stuff. And nope, Jacket Potato. So, yeah, also, Matthew, the thing you pointed out on that podcast about how a man would come out of a doorway, shout at you and then like leave again as the start to every mission. I laughed so many times as that happened over and over again in this, because I was like, that so is what GTA is. It’s just like, it’s summed up by Joey Pants as Luigi in the first few missions. Go pick up Misty from across town and like, don’t touch her on the way back and all this stuff. And you’re like, this is what Matthew said it is. It’s just a man shouts at you and you wordlessly absorb information and then like go off and do a thing. By San Andreas, all that’s changed is that the man who comes out shouts at you then sits in the car while you drive and continues to shout at you. And that’s the difference. That’s the evolution. That would sum up like kind of where Rockstar Games would go after that where it’s like, you know, drive to this town and we’ll have like an eight minute conversation along the way kind of thing. Yeah, so yeah, good stuff. I will definitely do the other two. I’m thinking about doing Vice City next. I’m not sure how long to wait. I don’t know what kind of changes I’ll make. That’s the only one you can’t get for like free, isn’t it? Yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, because it’s not on PS Now or like, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, so the GTA games, please stay here. And I guess I’ll keep an eye on what happens with these new versions, Matthew. They’ve added some fog effects to San Andreas. Yeah, they have. I think the smoother playing of them is like a better addition, you know, outweighs the negative sort of like some of the visual kind of like goofiness that you see. Like generally, you know, I was having quite a smooth time playing through it. So, yeah, you know, as always, online is just really centred in on the thing, which is sexy, which is like, here’s a man with like giant elbows or whatever. Yeah, and that stuff’s funny, you know, it’s not very sexy to go, oh, I can drive around corners a bit more easily. But it is true, you can. Yeah, you can aim like really easily. Phil’s nice to fire like GTA 3 guns with like a PS5 controller, you know what I mean? It has got one of the maddest inventory systems. That thing you said about like losing your guns and having to go stop back up again, that is so true and it is so frustrating. Yeah, and they kept that through to San Andreas, you know. Oh, it’s just, it’s so mad. Like, they were so on top of the world, they could put whatever bullshit they wanted in their games, and we all just had to like dance to the beat of their drum. Because they were like making the best worlds, that’s the thing. Yeah, so like, yeah, I agree with you about the kind of, I think the thing that kind of like hits home is the scale of the places that, they are tiny places, you realize. Like, I don’t know about Los Santos in San Andreas, but certainly Liberty City, it’s very, very small. You realize you can drive from one side to the other in about a minute, really. And it’s, but you know, like the atmosphere, I would say still kind of impressive all these years later. I do miss the very specific color palette of GTA III. Just don’t think they can make that. Maybe it was like a product of limitation or something, but I don’t know. I’m pleased that I can still play them, and I look forward to see what state they’re in in maybe six months. They might be, people might be a bit happy with them online by then, but we’ll see. So Matthew, that completes our games that we’ve been playing this year episode that didn’t, for games that didn’t actually come out this year. I’ll think of a snappier title for the actual name of the podcast. Oh no, that should be it. And then on the end, colon, Jackie Potato edition. Yeah, and the front of the podcast will say, alternate Jake Hunter episode 55. Okay, yeah, so this is a very kind of a loose episode, but I enjoyed it Matthew, I thought it was good. Yeah, if you’d like to follow the podcast, it’s Back Page Pod on Twitter. I don’t remember what our next podcast is Matthew. I can’t remember if it’s like The Lord of the Rings one, or it’s not Game of the Year time yet, is it? That’s still a few weeks away. No, I’ve still got some stuff I want to cram in for it, so. Yeah, I’ve got to play Inscription, The Forgotten City and Metroid Dread, so yeah. I’ll play Halo Infinite. Oh yeah, of course, that’s out very, very soon. So yes, by the time people are listening to this, it will be out. So yes, thank you very much for listening. We’re Back Page Pod on Twitter, like I say. If you want to send us a question, we’d love to do a new mailbag episode in the new year. I’ve said that in the last two episodes, but I do mean it. We’re slowly racking up questions. So if you’d like to throw yours into the ring, it’s BackPageGames at gmail.com. Email us about anything you like, and we’ll answer that in a future episode. You can send us your games of the year. Maybe you can read some out. Yeah, absolutely. Please do. Like if there’s a game you’ve played this year that you’d like us to talk about, by all means, we’d love to hear from you. Like I say, you can tweet us as well. I can be found at Samuel W. Robertson Twitter. Matthew, where can people find you? MrBazzle underscore pesto. So we’ll be back next week with a new episode. We don’t know what it’s about yet. Maybe it’ll be Lord of the Rings, maybe it’ll be our 2021 Predictions Revisited. Someone will figure something out. Google Doc will be sent around and everything will be fine. So thank you very much for listening. Bye for now.