Hello, and welcome to The Back Page:, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Matthew, welcome back to the podcast though. What does that mean? No one knows. So, I was gonna ask you, you edited the Nintendo Wii draft, which is our previous episode. At the time, people are listening to this episode. The poll has closed. We have no idea yet what the results are, because the poll hasn’t gone live in when we’re recording this. But you edited the episode. I was curious how you felt about how it went listening back, because that would be interesting to people who have been following the poll on Twitter. I think, hey, I was really pleased with the draft. I thought it was a really good episode. I thought it was a really nice comprehensive look at the Wii, even if I do say so myself. I came out thinking that, based on how these previous drafts have gone and the psychology of people who tend to click on these things, I think your Double Zelda Mario Smash is just so, so very hard to beat. It’s tough, because when I listened back, I thought, oh, Skyward Sword is kind of an underpowered pick, because you can get it on the Switch, so there’s like no reason to play that version, really. I went too heavy with that line of logic, though. Like, I should have put like fucking Xenoblade on there or something. Like, I stand by that all the things I picked are things I really like, and, you know, I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have them on there, but it may be lacking in a few big hitters. I think I over thought it a bit and ended up knobbling it a tiny bit. I think we’re going to see a lot of secret Other M fans come out of the woodwork for this one, but we’ll see. But I also think I may have upset some people by dismissing Excite Truck, which is a bit of a feels like it should be a Back Page: podcast type game, because it’s one of those sort of weird 07 out of 10s, but it leaves me so cold, but I worry I’ve alienated some of the Castle loyalists. Yeah, I sort of thought, should I have mentioned Tatsunoko vs. Capcom for Beat’em Up? But then I had no attachment to the anime characters element of that game. And so, like, you know, it’d be completely bogus to pick that. Smash Bros is something I would actually play, you know. I did a developer interview for Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, and I was, like, the least qualified person to do that interview, you know. I am not a fighting game guy at all, and talking to the guy, my questions are really dumb. Though I did get a good answer about why they didn’t put Phoenix Wright in it, which at the time was, he said that the, you know, they could only imagine a version of Phoenix Wright who attacked with his iconic sort of speech bubbles. And they said that the difference in length and the localization process would change the physical properties of those moves so much that they decided not to put it in. Obviously, they then did put Phoenix Wright in the fighting game, so they obviously overcame that fear. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I don’t think people would have minded if they just kept the original characters but then changed the audio, so yeah, take that. But hey, it doesn’t matter because he made it into Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and put Galactus on trial in an iconic moment of video game storytelling. So yes, good stuff, not the first time that’s come up on this podcast, unsurprisingly. Matthew, it’s another mailbag episode. Our peers said, don’t do it, they’re too long. And yet we stood our ground. Here we are. How are you feeling about it? Yeah, good. We’ve got some nice self-indulgent letters. Actually, self-indulgent makes it sound like the readers are self-indulgent. I mean, it’s indulgent for us because a lot of the letters are like, you guys are so great for like 90% and then at the end, they’re like, you know, would you kick Eugene Acker in the nuts or something? And you’re like, that’s the general theme of the letters. Yeah, there’s like nothing in between those really. The other problem is because I hastily put this together, I should have cut some of these down because they’re quite long and didn’t have time. So they might end up being really long on the podcast. We’ll see. I think we’ve got about 27, Matthew. Should we get straight into it and fire through them? Yeah, let’s do it. I’ll go first and you read out the next one and so on. Question one is from Nick. I’ve been thinking about how games have been around long enough that I can find the idea of yet another World War II FPS boring and derivative. However, the same might not be true for younger gamers who have increasing access to platforms and game libraries. I was curious if this is something that comes up in games writing. Have you noticed any generational divides in terms of how older writers approach games versus how fresh young voices view the gaming landscape? Do you want to answer this first, Matthew? Yeah, you go right ahead. Good, you can unwrap a Renny or something. I think I mentioned this in a previous episode, but I think Pokemon and Kingdom Hearts are examples of this. I feel like I’m on the age cusp of this a little bit, because I felt like I saw writers who were younger than me talking about Pokemon and Kingdom Hearts in a more credible way, taking them more seriously, whereas the people who are older than me, just even slightly didn’t take them seriously at all, and I’ve seen that kind of attitude reverberate a bit through the US and UK media, that’s not just a UK thing. So that’s one example of it, it’s just kind of a taste sensibilities thing, and you’ll probably find there’ll be another generational divide with stuff like Roblox and stuff. You’ll get writers in about five to ten years writing about those sorts of games with mega knowledge and interesting angles, but they don’t exist yet, and then the younger audience will probably feel alienated by them, and it will kind of continue like that, I think. I can’t quite bring the World War II thing to fit that in my head, but I think that’s in terms of generational divide, I think that’s it really. It comes down to sensibilities. Were you there at the time? How old were you at the time when this thing arrived? That’s a huge part of the cornerstones of how people write about games, I think. What do you think, Matthew? Yeah, I would agree. I’d say the one thing which is maybe different and won’t be recreated is the fact that the generation who grew up reading games magazines, I think, have a slightly different sensibility to people who’ve grown up in the online or the YouTube era. That won’t just naturally repeat itself. I think there was a bit more veneration of previous writers, and this is going to sound like me being like, why don’t young people respect me more? But I definitely like when I joined, it was just sort of like, holy shit, it’s all these like legends of games writing and I get to work with them, I can’t believe it. But I definitely sort of employed people who, you know, even just in the 10 years, by the time we got to employing people would sort of shrug at like anyone and be like, and I don’t know if that’s that’s a sort of generational shift, I guess. A lot of it’s just tied to like the overall generational shift that happens in like every sphere, you know, it’s not related to games, it’s your pop culture references, it’s how you see the world, you know, generally people today are, this is a broad generalisation, but a bit more kind of sort of politically engaged, I guess. And there’s a lot more of that in online writing. Like I’m still a bit of a dinosaur, I’m a bit old fashioned, I’m a bit of a graphics, gameplay, sound and playability kind of person. But there are young people who have that outlook too, you know, I employed plenty of people who I thought had the spirit of old, even though they were much younger. So yeah, I don’t know, making generalisations about young people is such an old person thing to do. Yeah, yeah, and that’s sort of, that’s why I’ve kind of tried to avoid doing it without my answer there. Yeah, that was good. I think about how there was an editor, I think it was a Marvel editor who said that when people complained about the comics not being as good as they used to be, they made the point that like, well, you’re not the same person that you were that you used to be. And so your sensibilities are different to how they were, your life situation was different. So perhaps your enjoyment of X thing was was tied to how you felt at the time. And maybe now you feel differently in your artistic sensibilities have changed. So you don’t click with the same stuff. And I think that’s like, that’s like true to a large extent, like this, there are things I kind of hold dear, but then my sensibilities move on quite fast as well. I feel like every year my game tastes change quite substantially. And I think that like, that’s why pigeonholing people by age is quite a tricky business because it’s very, it’s plausible to me that someone who’s 21 now could play Deus Ex and enjoy it. That’s perfectly plausible to me, or Half-Life or whatever. So yeah, generalisation is a bit tricky. The other big difference is now that everyone is a lot more exposed as an individual. You sort of represent yourself probably more than you represent an outlet or magazines where 10 years ago you could vanish into a magazine quite happily. There were personalities that people liked, but you existed within quite a hidden ecosystem. I felt like I was only writing for people who were paying five quid for NGamer and you could feel quite safe and nice in there, where now it’s the eyes of the world are watching, you know? Everything you do and that’s so tough because it means it’s kind of harder for things to be sort of frivolous and silly, I think. I think people feel like everything has to feel a bit more important because they don’t want to be seen as frivolous in the eyes of their peers, but again, we’re veering into old man shouts at clouds or whatever the thing is. Alright, let’s leave it there then, Matthew, and move on to question two. Yes. Hello gents. Well, technically hi gents. Sorry, I don’t want to edit that. Hi gents. You had a lovely safe… Oh, I hope you had a lovely safe festive period. I’ve really… Well, I’m going to start this one again. Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Hi gents. Hope you had a lovely safe festive period with your families and all the best for the new year. I recently received a subscription for Edge and treated myself to the massive back catalogue available through the iOS app and noticed a certain Matthew Castle cropping up as a contributor almost always when there was a large Nintendo game due for review. The question I have might be a little strange, but I was wondering what the sharing of reviews between main writers and freelancers was like when you were both on magazines. Was Freelancer brought in to cover a specific game, or would it be a case by case and a freelancer might review something they maybe wouldn’t have normally reviewed? Love the most recent Top 20 2021 lists. Some excellent stuff, some I already own, and some I’ll be wanting to try. So all the best for Back Page: Podcast in 2032. And that’s from Ryan Cobain. Yeah, so I guess this is probably more of one for you, Matthew, but I found it varied. There were some genres where you just needed an expert to talk about it, so you’d go get that expert, but it was also common that someone might review a game for two different outlets where there’s probably very little chance that the readership will cross over. So like a console mag and a PC mag, for example, that can be useful when the game’s super long. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. I would say as a rule, most magazines tend to keep the really juicy, awesome stuff in-house. That’s one of the big perks of the job when you’re in a house on a magazine, is you get to sort of get first dibs. And it would have to be a bit of a deadline nightmare for something big to get handed off. Like on a Nintendo mag, a big first party game, you know, we tend to move heaven and earth to make sure someone on the mag actually reviewed that over a freelancer. And you’re right, smaller stuff tends to cross over with the more niche genres where you maybe want some specialist knowledge. I think the best freelancers can do a bit of everything. I always sort of balked a little bit at people who were like, hey, I don’t really do that. And you’re like, oh, all right. You know, fair enough, adds to, you know, blacklist. Weirdly, a lot of the stuff I reviewed for Edge actually wasn’t Nintendo. I didn’t review a lot of Nintendo stuff for them. I really love the Edge anonymity and I still do. Like, still to this day. I know on this podcast I’ve said a couple of the things I’ve reviewed, but a lot of them I haven’t and a lot of them I wouldn’t because I kind of like that they’re out there. I don’t know if that’s just a mad nostalgia for the magazine, but I always thought that sort of air of mystery was quite precious because it meant you couldn’t read anything into it. You couldn’t dismiss anything because you were like, oh, I fucking hate that guy. People bring so much baggage to this stuff and actually you may love a review by someone who you would normally hate and if their name was on it you might not have the same relationship. That’s how Matthew Castle escaped Scrutiny for his Skyward Sword X. I’ve taken some ownership of that now but I undenied about when we talked about it on the podcast, I was like, should I talk about that? I even thought, should I ask Edge if I should talk about that? These days it seems a bit more relaxed in terms of people saying, hey, get The New Edge, I reviewed Blur and that’s because they’re proud of their smart words and I get that. But I still think there’s something very special about someone who really knows their shit reviewing something though. When someone really gets something and you read their review and you’re like, oh, they really know this stuff inside out and there’s certain people who I am excited when they review certain things and it’s maybe a bit harder to get that, unless you’re really keeping a close eye on it, it’s harder to learn what those things are with people. Yeah, I think like this, specialists were particularly important when I was on PC Gamer because it was like, these were genres that had diehard fans, so you don’t want to get them wrong. When we hired like Fraser Brown, I think it was in 2018, that was a massive relief because he’s like a massive strategy and like RPG guy, like he knows those genres inside and out and adding an authority like that to your team is incredibly valuable. And when you’re kind of like freelancing out to people, you can’t always guarantee you’ll have their time, for example, because obviously they might be in high demand. So yeah, I definitely agree with you. There’s something very special about like, I would look forward to a review from a certain freelancer about X or Y because they were the experts, you know. Cool. All right, Matthew, I think we can leave that one there. So on to question three. This is from Chris Doherty, who does all those Photoshop’s Matthew. The cursed Photoshop’s. There are more of them. I haven’t tweeted out yet, but I’m saving them for a rainy day. Okay. So what do you think needs to be improved in the gaming industry for either the consumers or makers of games? Also, are you interested in buying a picture of a monkey eating a sandwich? I’ll do you a good price. 300k. You buy? Remember, you won’t actually own it, though. Kind regards, Chris. PS. Your latest episode, which I think was the Game of the Year episode at the time, was reminded me to play Hitman again. And lucky for me, Hitman 3 was cheap on PS4, so grab that also. Thanks again for the recommendation. I need to give that Hitman episode special another lesson. That was a good episode. Yes, Matthew, because I like work in the publishing side, maybe you should take this one. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge and super broad question. I was actually struggling to think, you know, maybe because I don’t think on these things too much. And I am one of those people who is a bit too frivolous that I was talking about earlier. I feel like it would be a bit rich for me, still a relative outsider as a games writer, to be like lecturing the games industry on what you should be doing. Which may be seen as a bit of a cowardly answer, but the truth is, it’s an incredibly complicated business. A lot of its workings are a mystery to those of us outside. We only get snapshots of it. Investigative journalism and the idea of like using those snapshots to say this is how it should and shouldn’t be done, feels a little dubious to me. So, I don’t know, I sort of struggle with this one, to be honest. Well it’s like a massive question, isn’t it? So like, I don’t know. For the consumers, I think things are pretty good. I think you’ve got lots of avenues to play an awful lot of games. I think it’s easier now to play games, be it on a financial level or an accessibility level, than it ever has been. In a way, I think consumers have never had it so good. You feel like you’re under constant attack because people are trying to shove all this sort of bullshit into things that people don’t necessarily want. At the moment, consumers maybe feel on the back foot because of all this sort of adoption of NFT stuff and you’re like, well, I don’t really want anything to do with that. That doesn’t speak to me. I think it’s environmentally unwise. There’s always repercussions from it. But maybe because I’ve been doing this for so long as a journalist and my relationship with buying and owning games is massively skewed. But I think this is a good time for consumers. I think. Do you agree? I think the choice thing is very true. This is a really specific example of something, right? Game Pass aside, which is amazing value and how easy it is to buy games online at good prices because you’ve got price comparison sites and things like that. I think that the Epic Games Store, right, had just had those three Tomb Raider games for free. And the idea of anything like that happening when I was a kid was just, it was never going to happen. If you have no money, you’re playing games, but you have an OK PC at home, and you can just grab these Tomb Raider games as well as everything else that Epic’s put on that store for free, then what a great position you’re in. Even just on that level, that seems amazing to me, just in terms of a thing you can enjoy as a consumer. Yeah, I would just say the other half of the question, it’s not me going like, oh, it’s all fine, nothing needs to be changed. I just think that it’s basically pointing to a locked box and saying, oh, well, there’s loads of stuff that happens to change in there. And I feel like even with the level of journalism we have, I’ve got a very superficial grasp of the actual kind of concerns that underpin the industry. And I would worry about seeming infantile in my analysis to be like, everyone deserves more money, and everyone should be kinder, and obviously, but also, it’s way more complicated than that. All right, on to the next question then, Matthew, which is less complicated. I hope it’s a funny one. Please tell me it’s about sandwiches. I need to get more back into my zone. This is your one to read out. Are you good reading this one? It’s kind of weird. Hi, Samuel and Matthew. Thanks a lot for the podcast. I just discovered it recently and managed, perhaps unwisely, to binge listen to all 58 episodes in the space of about two weeks. Good god. Imagine how many times you’ve heard me say, you know or like. Awful. Or psychology of a goomba. Or psychology of a goomba. Having to wait a week for the next episode now seems too long. yeah, well I’m sorry about that. One topic that’s been mentioned a couple of times is that magazine reviewers back in the day would often look down on 2D games compared to the brave new world of 3D games. I was reading Dreamcast magazines at the time and remember being constantly aghast at their terrible opinions of near-perfect arcade conversions of 2D games. Here are some quotes from UK Dreamcast magazine. There’s loads of these, but it’s generally mad stuff like Street Fighter 3 Third Strike. As far as the Street Fighter series goes, you couldn’t do much better than this. Unfortunately that isn’t saying much. On Bangai-O they say the game looks crap. This kind of thing could have been done on the Mega Drive, let alone the Dreamcast. So what exactly was going on? Was there some kind of mass psychosis afflicting reviewers back then? How else can you explain why someone would consider Street Fighter 3 as vastly inferior to Ready to Rumble? Were reviewers afraid to be seen as stuck in the past if they raved about 2D games and felt pressured to overcome the flaws of 3D games? E.g. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 which got 90 and 93%. Even Spawn in the Demon’s Hand which I owned and it sucked got an 84% review. Cheers from Doc Houser. And then, yeah, because there was this big push towards 3D. A lot of what was held against the Saturn at the time was that it couldn’t do 3D very well and so that was why PlayStation seemed more exciting and obviously for Sega there was this quite stressful process of trying to get a Sonic game made for the Saturn, which they weren’t able to do and that was kind of 3D-ish for a while and it just became a massive center point of everything and in the way that a big controversial subject now can take over the headlines for a couple of years and we can end up talking about the same things over and over again, I feel like at this point 3D was a new thing and maybe the landscape was just we want to see this and anything that’s old is old and that people didn’t really have the nuance that we have now of 2D revival movements and indie games and things like that. Would you say that’s fair, Matthew? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’re talking about this huge monumental leap, probably the biggest leap there has ever been in terms of one generation to the next in terms of what they could do and what to expect and the excitement around there. Like, I don’t judge people for getting taken up in that excitement. I read this stuff at the time and didn’t flinch at all. I thought, well, yeah, of course. Of course you want everything to be Mario 64. And in the shadow of Mario 64, anything which isn’t trying to be that ambitious seems weaker by comparison. I mean, luckily, games these days have got a much longer tail on them. We can return to them. There are Virtual Console systems to drag them into the modern day. So you can still kind of experience them and have the renewed appreciation. And like, generally, you’re right, that lust for 3D has calmed. I still think a lot of people do feel this way. I feel like whenever you see a game announcement thing, like the Game Awards or the Future Games Showcase or whatever, you know, someone is like, we’re going to reveal 20 new games. The comments are like, oh, you know, not indie games by which they think 2D games. They want to see like Metal Gear Solid style, you know, production values. You know, we’re talking about the most expensive AAA. People want more AAA and there is less AAA. And I feel like they take that out on the 2D scene a bit. But and it’s mad because with what machines are capable of now, it’s like 2D plus, you know, the huge potential of, you know, all that systemic stuff you can do. And yeah, it’s all good now. Yeah, not much more to add really. I just think it was like very much of that moment sort of thing. Yeah, I was surprised reading those quotes, though. They are like surprisingly venomous for like a Dreamcast mag, where it’s not like, you know, beggars can’t be choosers, right? Yeah, so that Ready to Rumble quote, I’ll just read that out. It says, Street Fighter Alpha 3. This is the sort of game which should stay banished from the glorious realms of the Dreamcast. Street Fighter was a great game on the SNES, but on the Dreamcast, it’s like a minnow swimming with the sharks of Soul Calibur and Ready to Rumble. Anyone foolish enough to spend money on this deserves to suffer for their stupidity. That seems like, definitely seems very harsh. Yeah, so, but hey, who knows? Maybe he loved, you know, he obviously really loved Ready to Rumble, old Afro Thunder, whatever he was called, a legendary character, we all remember him. There’s a bit of energy here of like swimming with the sharks of Soul Calibur, yep, very good, and Ready to Rumble, like I need a second game to make my point, and like Ready to Rumble was the closest available. This did happen at the time, there was a lot of like mania where people’s love for 3D made them say mad things, like I remember there’s this like infamous IGN review of Rayman 2 on the N64, or is it Rayman 3? It’s one of the Rayman games where it’s literally like, you know, Miyamoto’s going to play this game and cry because it reveals him to be, you know, the terrible developer he really is, and like watch out, Spielberg’s going to play this and see what modern day special effects can really look like, and you’re like, watch out, I mean, like it’s got a character, he’s just a pair of symbols with an eye, I mean, give me a break. Everyone went mad, late 90s, let’s move on. Yeah, exactly. We just have to, some things just have to stay in the 90s, really, including the discourse, so let’s go on. So, hi, Sathew Casperts. First off, I’m a huge fan of the podcast and love tuning into new episodes weekly while relisting to some of my favorites. I don’t care what anyone says, mailbag episodes are my kind of bag. Well, glad to hear it, our peers don’t feel the same. My question is as follows. What two bath eateries would you combine, EG via the Dragon Ball Fusion dance, to create something greater than the sum of its parts? You’re welcome to handpick the best bits of each restaurant slash pub slash cafe to make your own beautiful creation. This question goes to each of you. If this question proves too easy to answer, I have provided an optional bath extreme difficulty modifier. Hideo Kojima or Shigeru Miyamoto, you pick, meets you at your establishment and will only agree to a world-exclusive interview if they enjoy their dish. Thanks again and looking forward to the next episode. Cheers. That’s from Basim. Thank you for sending through the pronunciation of your name. I appreciate that. So, yes, Matthew, combine two bath restaurants to make a greater one. Where are you at with that? I mean, so the easy route here is the flavor and the dishes and the tastiness of JC’s kitchen, but married to basically the reliability of any like shop or locked down location. So, you know, for the sake of argument, let’s say Intermezzo. Think about Intermezzo. That guy’s been there for like, you know, 20 years or something. He is like the essence of a reliable nine to five shopkeeper. So I want JC’s food, but like Intermezzo’s kind of, not work ethics, not the right word, but like… Availability. Yeah, reliability and, you know, I basically… The mad thing is we used to have this when JC was consigned to a wooden hut. He used to live in this shed in Green Park Station. And I kind of want him in prison there again. Yeah, I’m with you. I never really got why he gave up that location for a location that wasn’t permanent on old Bog Island. Yeah, I mean, whatever happens on Bog Island, you will always… Stays on Bog Island? Yeah, it’s got the word bog, which like when I think delicious food, do I go to a place called Bog Island? Probably not. No, it’s like it’s now because I work from home again. It’s now like hard, too hard to get there at lunchtime. It’s too much of a faff. So I’ve not only do I not know if he’s there, not only do I not know if he’s there, but like I don’t even go there to check. So I have no idea. He could be there every day of the year for all I know now. And I’ve got no idea, but I very much doubt it. Yeah, I think availability for JC’s Kitchen is good. I will say that for me, I probably haven’t talked about my actual favorite place in Bath, which is the Thai Hut in Green Park Station. Oh, yes. I go there like every week pretty much, because they do like the best pad thai I’ve ever had. And it’s like seven quid or something. It’s a really good price. So restaurant quality food out of this little hut. The only thing I’m like not massive on with it is that it’s not open. It’s not open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays. No, wait, Sunday, Monday, Tuesdays. So again, I’d like that on tap basically. They also run out of stuff. They do. Yeah, they run out of stuff. That’s just because it’s so popular. But that’s the thing. You have to get there early. Like getting there and you see it’s open. You’re like, when it’s open, but then you get closer and you see that they’ve scratched off Pad Thai. Yeah. If you’re not there by one, it’s like it gets dicey for sure. But the Duck Penang Curry is very good. I would marry them to like the production line of McDonald’s. You never go to McDonald’s and they’re like, oh, we’re out Big Macs. Well, you say that, but when I’ve done McDonald’s orders, they’ve been out of things like Apple Pies and McFlurries and milkshakes and stuff. Yeah, I’ve had that before. Apple Pies are maybe a bit more niche on the menu. I think that if you went to McDonald’s and they didn’t have fries, you’d be like, what the fuck? And Apple Pie would be like, I can kind of see it. Yeah, that’s fair enough. I like your logic there, Matthew. Do we need to enter bath extreme difficulty mode? I don’t know where I’d take Kazuma or Miyamoto, and I wouldn’t want to presume what kind of foodstuffs I’d like. Do you know what? I would probably pick somewhere casual, like the oven, which I think is probably Bath’s best pizza place. I did have a slightly wet pizza there recently though, which was disappointing. Me and Matthew have argued extensively behind the scenes about the best pizza place in Bath, and I’ve gone to Bath for the oven, so I felt let down by my wet pizza, I’ll be honest. Yeah, because if you took Kojima there and he had a wet pizza, he’d then take a picture of it, and he’d tweet it with the caption, Wet Pizza, and you’d have to deal with that becoming a meme, that he was basically slamming your pizza choice. Yeah, not to mention endless headlines saying, did Hideo Kojima just announce his next game in the form of a pizza? No, he just ate a very damp margarita. It happens. That was the only time I’ve had a bad pizza there. Me and Moto, I’ve got no idea. I’ll probably just take both to the oven, see how it goes. It’s easy to book a table there. I think I’ve heard in the past from Nintendo people that he likes quite traditional, he likes to eat local food when he goes to different countries. That’s a big treat because you can’t get that stuff done at home. That would also correlate with the Dragon Quest composer who talked a great length about roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. Yeah, I mean, I can’t help feeling like that. It’s just some brand guideline stuff going on there. He probably says that when he goes to France. They think that the UK won’t buy the Switch if he’s like, the fuck bangers are mush. I don’t know if we’re that petty people. Yeah, I don’t know if I would gamble my reputation with Miyamoto on a pub lunch. I’m not sure I could do it. We’re like a nice gastropub. We’re probably talking something quite fancy here. The scallop shell would be good for that. The scallop shell for those at home is a very fancy fish and chip shop and bath. You pay more than 10 quid for fish and chips, but it’s really fucking good. And close to my house, which is also good. I might take into menu Gordon Jones. I think he’d like the playfulness of the menu being kind of cooked up fresh every day. That is true, actually. I am picking places that cost 10 quid for a main course, whereas Matthew’s gone for the place 130 quid. You will push the boat out a bit, because you want to impress him. One dish is like a cube of ox curry, and then the next dish is like a single chip and a single piece of fish. But it tastes like the Fun Fair. Yeah, exactly. Good stuff there. I think we’ve answered that one well, Matthew. We spent about 50 minutes on that one. That was a great question. I really came alive there. I suddenly jolted to life. Oh yeah, food. Let’s fucking do it. I love that. People are like, talk about injustice in the games industry. Talk for 20 minutes about fucking chips. We know what we’re about, I guess. I guess, if you want red hot industry commentary, I feel like we’ve established that this is not that podcast, really. But if you want red hot sandwich analysis, we’re you guys. You won’t get that on Waypoint. Okay, Matthew, are you reading out the next one? I think you are, right? Hi guys. Congrats with the podcast. It’s great. Now that we live in the post-Bloco era, it has reminded me of my only interaction with Matthew. The old issues of O&M used to have the staff Miiverse accounts under the profiles in every issue. The Wii U times truly were bleak, but as a teenager, I thought this was very cool. I once mustered the courage to put a cheeky reply to one of Matthew’s posts on Miiverse, of which there must have been about three Macs. To my surprise, I got a reply, and I think it was about him being a Kirby skin in the new Smash Bros game. But to me, this was my first real brush with fame. I think you’re overstating that a little bit. Thank you. I find myself here enjoying the pod as a result of deciding to see what the people I followed on Miiverse all those years ago were up to. So to say Miiverse was a total failure would be a lie. My actual question that may be interesting and actually provide some precious pod content would be if you could make a spin-off from an existing game series that had to be a different genre, what would you do? This question was inspired by the scrapped retro studios Boo and Sheik games that surfaced a short while back. Hopefully this question isn’t too specific or weird. Thanks, guys, from Grant. Yeah, that’s an interesting one. Do you have an immediate answer to this one, Matthew? Well, I was thinking about this in The Vets this afternoon because we had to take our cats to The Vets for their check-up. I was doing some prepping and for some reason the thing that popped into my head was I would love a… I would love an open world adventure game set in the universe of Monkey Island. I was thinking… For some reason, Monkey Island was a series that popped into my head and I thought I really loved the tone and attitude and character of that world. And I remember playing those games when I was young and thinking they really sparked my imagination. And while I loved the stories, I loved the hints at other islands or that it was this sort of spread across the Caribbean and there was this idea that there were lots of adventures yet to be told. And to have a game which kind of captured that artistic style, that tone of voice in an open world game, like just a big funny open world game, is I think a relatively easy sell I hope people get on board with. I also wrote down my notes to kind of represent that character in comedy and its mechanics and its open world ideas. I don’t really know what that looks like, what a kind of an open world comedy game. I guess it would probably be an expansion of what they were sort of doing in Psychonauts, I guess. That has a bit more sprawl to it. But yeah, that’s what I’d do. I saw something this week that set my imagination off actually, which was I think like there’s a couple of X Days Gone guys who are going around doing interviews at the moment and one of them said that they wanted to do an open-world version of Resistance, the old PS3 exclusive. And like I kind of would have been out for that because I think Resistance has got like not tons of character to it, but it’s got quite nice iconography, fun guns and stuff. And like it’s kind of like basically like America occupied by aliens. And like the aliens look pretty good. And they always had big monsters in them. So I feel like that could have been could have been quite fun in the kind of Sony open-world format that they’ve been sort of messing around in. My instinct with these is always to ask to say things like an RTS version of X. But like there’s not kind of many of those I don’t really sort of have to hand. I think someone tweeted this week that basically every episode of the new succession should be a Hitman level. And I was like, yeah, that’s true. But I think that about a lot of films as well, because Hitman has such a filmic vision that I would happily just play loads of levels set in other people’s fictional worlds. But that doesn’t really answer the question. E3 would be a great Hitman level. So good. Go to the convention center, then go to like a presentation across the street or something. And like, yeah, just especially because real E3 is like not happening this year. That could be really, really fun. Like how I think there’s an EGX level in Hotline Miami that was added. That was quite fun. I suppose on these lines, Matthew, like did you see that Nintendo Kart streamer this week? That it might be Smash Bros kind of style roster, but for Mario Kart, did you have any thought on that? Like, I don’t know. It doesn’t massively excite me. I don’t think the character element of Mario Kart is what, like I couldn’t really care less that it’s got like the cast in it. You know, when they’re like the new DLC is going to add Piranha Plant. I’m like, well, like for me, Mario Kart is the tracks. I don’t really care who’s in the car. It could be no one. Like they could just be like control by remote control and I would still have just as much fun. I guess we wouldn’t have the sinister Luigi drive by meme without that. But that doesn’t feel like a revolutionary idea to me. And other than opening up Nintendo franchises for track ideas, I guess that could be cool. Maybe that’s the cool element that people are excited about. Yeah, that was cool in the DLC for Marikate. So yeah, that will do for that one, Matthew. Should we move on to the next question? Yes. Hey guys. First of all, love the podcast. I find you have some of the most interesting and informed opinions on video games out there. Keep up the good work. I must apologize as my question is not actually video game related. But as I view this podcast as a subgenre of gaming meat and general bath tourist information, I hope that’s acceptable. Living in Bristol, I find the concept of people actually living in Bath a little strange. As I think most people in Bristol view Bath as one big tourist attraction or somewhere to take your parents when they visit. Although, as I visit Bath four or five times a year, it’s good to know where to go to get a decent sandwich or some quality meat. My question is, what is your opinion of Bristol? How do people living in Bath view Bristol? Do you have any favourite meat tents there or general places to go to pick up a great sandwich? I think I’m pretty up on some of the best eateries in Bristol, but wondered if you had any thoughts. PS. I think every episode should have at least 10 minutes of non-video game and lore building chat, thanks to the entertainment you bring me each week. That’s from Sean Mitchinson. Bristol, Matthew. I don’t feel like people in Bath have any particularly strong thoughts on Bristol. It’s not like any kind of rival, really. It’s not like Portsmouth and Southampton or anything like that. Does anything come to mind for you there? No. It’s the bigger, more exciting place by most people’s standards, but I like the quietness and quaintness of Bath. It’s more my speed. Bristol’s like… I was going to say it’s Bath hard mode, but I don’t think it is, because it’s so much bigger. It’s so much more ambitious. I’ll tell you what it is like. You know how in a lot of Far Cry games, the start of the campaign locks you into a small area, and then when you get into the main campaign, the whole map opens up and you’re like, oh, fuck me, there’s so much to do. That’s Bristol. Whereas Bath is like… You know, I think in Fable 2, you could buy that island like DLC. Bath is like that, basically. It’s like three to four hours of content at most. Oh, yeah. That is the problem living here many years, is that like the first visit your parents come, you take them to the baths, you take them to the Crescent assembly rooms. Great. Fills the day quite happily. Second time, you’ve got absolutely nothing. You’re just like, I really hope they don’t mind if I pack them off to the, you know, the Therm-A Spa for like five hours because I’ve basically got nothing else to do. Yeah, I like Bristol. I worked in Bristol for a little bit when I worked at the Oxcast. They’re based in Bristol. So I associate it with like some of the stress of doing the Xbox YouTube channel. I did a lot of stress eating, but there’s some amazing foods. I mean, true to form. Probably the best sandwich I’ve ever had is from Bristol Sandwich Sandwich. A shop which, like, just from the title you can tell, it really knows what it’s about. There’s Saint Nick’s Covered Market, which is basically just like that weird alley from Harry Potter with all the magician shop, except it’s just all selling, like, hot lunch portions of meat. That’s really good. There’s a place there that does, like, chicken kebab wraps, but they use a naan bread instead of, like, a pitta called Matina. I ate so many of those, and it was a nightmare because I was working in Bristol when I was trying to lose weight for my wedding and trying not to eat any carbs. And basically everything I loved was so unholy, and, yeah, that was tough. Yeah, yeah, I’ve got four suggestions here, Matthew. They’re very touristy suggestions, as in, like, you can reach them all from the train station, the Temple Meads quite easily. So the Ox in Bristol I really like. That is, like, in a little basement, and it’s really nicely lit, beautiful restaurant. Reminds me of going on American breast trips, actually, just kind of really fancy sort of place. You could take Kajina there. Yeah, for sure. That is actually, like, a legit amazing place. I love that place. The Pasture, the steak place in Bristol, they do this, like, smoked bread and smoked… Smoked bread and I think the butter is smoked as well, for, like, starter. And that’s one of the nicest, like, bits of bread I’ve ever put in my mouth. That’s a great place. Does an absolute cracking blue cheese sauce for their steak as well. Top stuff. On the St. Nick’s Market tip, Matthew, Eater Pitter there is fucking amazing. Great falafel wraps. Really, really good. Absolutely layered with hummus. I like that. You can’t really get much in the way of that stuff in Bath apart from what’s it called, chaiwala, which we discussed before. Finally, I wanted to nominate Small Bar in Bristol. I think it’s on King Street. And, like, that place, like, at night does, like, basically fried chicken, like, a fist of fried chicken in a bun that’s just fucking with, like, Korean, sort of, sauce, which is just incredible. So, yes, those are my four places. Made myself very hungry there. So, yeah, I think Bristol’s excellent. I would probably have lived there if, like, Future’s Office was there, like, no problem. I wouldn’t have lived in Bath. It just happened to me that Future’s Office was here, so I lived here because I’m lazy, and that’s kind of it. Yeah, it’s a bit loud and busy for me. I mean, yeah, I think Bath is super loud and busy, personally, but, like, it’s just all in a smaller space, I guess. It’s more manageable. Yeah. But, yeah, thank you for the question there. I hope that you’re satisfied with our choices. I need to go to Sandwich Sandwich one day and have some of these… They do Southern Fried Chicken, coleslaw, and, like, a sort of a Cajun sauce, also brownie slabs, which are as big as a house. Didn’t you say you were once being, like, live-streamed on the Yogscast feed, and, like, you bought two sandwiches, and then all these kids were going, red shirt guy bought two sandwiches! Yeah, it was during the Jingle Jam. They have an office cam, and the wrapping paper they use on the brownie is the same wrapping paper they use for the sandwiches. And because I bought a sandwich and a brownie, they saw my two similarly papered packages on my desk and assumed that I had bought two sandwiches for lunch. And, yeah, it was just all these teenagers doing, like, emojis to say I’m a fat bastard. I mean, we laugh now, but you raised £800,000 of charity that day, Matthew. You should be very proud of yourself. Next question, then. Dear The Back Page A Video Games Podcast, many of your episodes, especially the year retrospective episodes, basically count as history lectures. Well, it makes it sound a bit severe, I think, but anyway. You are doing a service to posterity, and posterity will do a service to you by listening to your fun-ducational podcasts in future. A year, ten years, and I’m sure even a hundred years from now, someone curious about antique video game culture will find your dusty tomes in the podcast mines. Well, after Big Sonny Holdings and Matthew Castle Productions have filed for bankruptcy due to disastrous investments into smell engine games. Now you can smell the fear of Randy Newman falling out of a car. I added that. Old abandonware gems such as Montezuma’s Return could still be played with emulators. However, they will never again be, for example, a season three of Apex Legends. Which game experiences that are lost to time or soon will be bum you out the most? Which would you want to pass on to future generations in a format more authentic than degraded JPEGs and grandpa’s ramblings about around the holographic fire? Thanks for the insight from Tuivo. Yeah, so I think that basically the suggestion here about Apex Legends is an astute one. I think about this all the time where a place in a live service game changes, moves on and then it’s kind of gone forever. And this means more with Apex to me because I think the art direction is so nice and the level design is so fantastic that it’s a shame to have made that stuff and never see it again. I’m not rolling out the idea that one day they might do this kind of throwback service or something where people who want to jump on the train can come back. I assume that might happen at some point, but I do empathize. The other thing I think about is licensed games, the availability of those. When you look on like GOG’s wishlist, which is a really interesting resource to see, people wanting to see stuff like the game, the Terry Pratchett game Matthew, the one with the detective. That, for example, is always high on these lists, but has never been re-released. There are ways you can play it. You can track down an expensive PS1 copy, or you might have to find another means to play on PC. But really, you just want to have that to hand, because that’s how you keep these things in circulation. It shouldn’t just be down to people sharing it illegally online to do it. Licensed games is the thing I think about the most. I thought about that a lot during the Lord of the Rings episode we did as well, where just so many of them you can’t get now. How about you, Matthew? Yeah, that’s basically what I wrote down for this. I was thinking about all the… Not necessarily like 10 out of 10 cherished stuff, and in a way because it wasn’t originally cherished or deemed super special. There’s even less reason for people to look after them or remaster them or whatever, but a lot of that falls into this tier of interesting remastered stuff or just stuff that captures the spirit of the time, like the soundtrack in a music game, the licensed soundtrack in a Tony Hawk or a SSX or a Burnout. It’s important. It places it where it belongs and those decisions were made for a reason. The idea that how you look after those in maybe a more mainstream way, because I think a lot of games you can kind of find in one form or another, but like you say, it’s not above board, and that doesn’t feel like legitimate long term conservation. I mean, it kind of means there will be long term conservation, but it’d be nice if there was a more regular way. I actually hadn’t thought about games of service like that. That hadn’t crossed my mind. But yeah, that’s really interesting. Will you one day have a… Do they need to build a fortnight museum that charts the development of their island or something? Or is there something to lock it down? But I think for me it’s more like… I was thinking in terms of a tier of games that get forgotten and so there’s no reason, there’s no conversation around them to keep them coming back. Things like the Trauma Center series, for example. I was thinking about that because of the Wii draft last week. You’re like, well, they exist on Wii and DS and if you’ve got a copy and you can find a pre-owned copy, great. But they’re also not classic enough to need remaking or remastering or whatever. And a lot of those things will fall through the cracks. And it happens with films all the time. The film industry has only really bought a very small percentage of its classics with it. And now you’ve got a lot of people who think that’s a shame and they’re going back and you’ve got Nicholas Winding Refn’s going back and remastering and trying to rediscover things that have been lost, things that he loved from, even in the last 50 years, a lot of stuff has gone missing. And so, yeah, it’s more like the kind of, the misfit, the kind of interesting seven out of tens, the kind of stuff we talk about on this podcast a lot. I’d love for that to continue on in some form. It’s also a bummer when these games have really ambiguous rights and no one knows who’s actually in charge of them. So No One Lives Forever fits that description, for example. But even stuff like where there are shared stakeholders of the different bits and pieces, like GoldenEye, where it’s like a Nintendo-published game, but Rare made it, and Rare is in it by Microsoft, but then there’s a James Bond license. And that feels like through sheer force of popularity, we’ll get some other version of that, seemingly, from the achievement leaks. But otherwise, yeah, it’s hard to see. So many of these are just likely to be forgotten because they don’t have that same sort of framework of popularity. Did you read that really good feature on PC Gamer where, what’s the remaster studio at Nightdive? They kind of ran all those games past them saying, why hasn’t this been remade? Or would you like to do it? Or what would you do with this? And he kind of gave some insight into the kind of conversations that happen and the challenges around certain things. That was rad. It was like, I’ve emailed and I’m just waiting to hear back. And this one isn’t a goer because apparently the license hold doesn’t like it or something like that. I think June, actually, that was the response to that one. Yeah, interesting stuff, Matthew. I think that covers it quite nicely. So, next question. Longtime listener, first time emailer. Love the pod. It brings back warm memories of spending A-level free periods at my friend’s house trying to murder all the plot essential NPCs of Morrowind. A bittersweet memory because I was temporarily banned from said house by said friend’s mum for repeatedly throwing nut shells in their fireplace. Just emailing in about the Lord of the Rings episode. My mum would hate that as well. I have no idea why I can even vaguely remember intellectual property rights details from when I was 9 years old, but from what I recall EA couldn’t make a Fellowship game because another company wouldn’t give up the rights they had to a Fellowship of the Ring game. And, if I recall right, kind of Rush went out to retain them, ostensibly based on the book rather than the film, around the time of EA’s Two Towers game. I had it and can’t remember much about it. It had a really, really shit self-section so could possibly have been an acclaimed horror title if released now. I also had an emulated version of the SNES Lord of the Rings game back when I was very young. It was great. Mary and Pippin got killed by some bats very early on in my clueless infant playthrough, and it was impossible to revive them. Imagine that was how they died in the film. Keep up the gaming and the rich themes of culinary lore, all the best, James. Yeah, so I do, I don’t remember if I mentioned this on the episode, but I think it was whatever Sierra was called then, the company that merged with Activision Blizzard later on, Vivendi. That company, I think, put out the Lord of the Rings book game, and it did get middling reviews. But I seem to remember that game coming out at the same time as the Two Towers game. Maybe I’m wrong there. And then they were meant to make a Two Towers one based on the book, but never did. So yeah, I appreciate the update there and the memories of the SNES Lord of the Rings game. That’s very funny. Apparently that SNES game, because I was reading that this afternoon, had, with the multi-tap, you could play it up to five players controlling five members of the Fellowship at the same time in a kind of top-down Zelda-y thing. Apparently there’s like, in emulated versions, people have unlocked it so that you can play multiplayer the whole Fellowship at the ring. But the weird thing is you obviously have to wait for the characters to turn up in the story. So the other players have like nothing to do. At the start it’s just Frodo and Sam and then the other two join in. And you know, if you’re Aragorn, you’re sitting it out for like a large chunk of the game. But I did really like the idea of a multiplayer game where you played like collectively as the whole Fellowship. That would be awesome. Yeah, that’s a nice idea. I think that was like a game that got three out of ten though from a bunch of people. I don’t think it was, I don’t think at the time it was even considered good. No, not at all. But I think the core idea of like, you know, a game about a party where every member of the party has to be played by someone. That could be really interesting. I do also like the idea of like a permadeath SNES Lord of the Rings game where it’s like basically you’re at the end and it’s Gimli with one HP throwing the ring into Mount Doom. That could be good. Yeah, well that would be so good. The story has to adapt to which characters you’ve got. Gimli is everyone’s romance interest. Yeah, he just beheaded Gollum the second he turned up and then they’re like just soldiered on. Yeah, very good. Okay, great stuff. So, next question Matthew. Also, the audaciousness of throwing something to someone else’s fire. I mean, rightly, angry mum in that situation. He probably thought, well, who cares? It’s on fire anyway, it’ll just burn up. It’s the repeatedly throwing nutshells. I’ve told you so many times not to throw nutshells into our fireplace. But you’re a guy who has cats. Don’t your cats basically do that sort of thing all the time? Like torment you and Catherine? They torment us, but they’re animals. They don’t know any better. We’re talking about a boy here, a living boy who had the choice not to throw those nutshells. It’s a perfect wanker kid thing to do because that’s exactly what kids are like to do. Somebody will just annoy you enough. You can’t scream and lose your temper, but they know it’s bullshit what they’re doing. That’s exactly what kids are perfect at, is finding that middle ground there. Well done there, James. That was great. I think we really enjoyed that one. Next up, Matthew. Hi, thanks for the podcast. I’ve been really enjoying wading through the back catalogue, having come to it rather late. My question is about the career trajectories of games journalists and how that has been affected by the decline of the popularity of printed games magazines. Back in the day, did games journalists mainly aspire to be editors? And if so, where do you go from there? I was wondering if there were many games editors in their 40s or older. It feels like you are seasoned veterans and I believe you’re in your 30s. Was there reticence for a print journalist to write for websites? And what is the trajectory of a games journalist’s career now? Thanks, Ashley. I don’t have loads of thoughts on the decline element of this, but the question at the end about was there reticence to print journalists to write for websites? I think just from my experience on PC Gamer, I really liked having the opportunity because it was a way you could just double your skill set and progress. So I actually really enjoyed that because it was a bridge for me to move onto the website and open up a whole different part of my career. So there are different skill sets involved in printing online, but if you can do print, you can do online. You just have to learn how a CMS works, then you’re fine. You can just get a lot of the same principle supply. Any thoughts on that, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, I definitely had moments where even quite early on, when you look around and you think, I wonder what happens to like old games journalists? Because basically everyone moves up a spot and then everyone on the magazine moves up a spot. Promotion wise is tend to how it works. But you do think, where do they go? And like the sad reality of it is like there aren’t a lot of 40 year old games journalists because they get to editors and then your only choice there is to basically become like a publisher or something a bit more businessy. And so they tend to leave and just go and do more lucrative things or shift into PR. Like there’s very few people who are like proper veterans. And if they are there, you know, there’s just not many like job. There’s not many roles for veterans to move into these days. That definitely happens. And then you spent your 20s going, why are there no old games journalists? And then when in your 30s, you’re like, oh, I get it. And you go and get a different job or you shift to online where, you know, the rules are a bit more flexible. And, you know, we’re still finding out, you know, there are quite a lot of older people in online. But I don’t know, I can’t really speak to that. So I’m like one of the only print people who didn’t make the trip online because I don’t know, I’m a fool. You went online in a different way, Matthew. Yeah, I went video. It’s a lot more complex to go from print media to video, I would say. So yeah, the problem with that is like video is a young person’s medium. And by the time I made the jump into that, I was a little too old. And, you know, I’m not a very convinced. I am very much a how do you do fellow kids on YouTube, unfortunately. Well, Matthew says that. But in our sort of like Patreon exclusive Jack and Daxter playthrough series, Matthew will finally ascend to the video stardom that he was always destined for. So yeah, that’s a joke, by the way. Could be a good stretch goal. £10,000. I wouldn’t play Jack and Daxter for £10,000. Okay, next question. Hello once again from Vancouver. Not sure if you remember, but last year I was on the verge of buying a Series S and asked if it was a bit much having all three platforms under the telly. Well, as a follow up, I managed to hold off for most of the year, then took the plunge when Forza was too much to resist. I’ve been having a great time jumping between them, and yes, even though I’m a spoiled man-child, it does feel good having all the bases covered this gen, as now they’re all doing some great stuff. Anyway, as a question, I was wondering if there were any other generations you’d consider it pretty essential to have had all of the main players. And are there any, if you were running out of things to do in a time machine, you’d go back and tell your younger self, actually it’s okay just to stick with this one box, don’t bother with the others. Thanks for a great year plus a podcast, and helping me, and I imagine many others, get through a bit of a bastard of a time, that’s from Tim. Matthew, I can’t say I’ve ever really regretted buying all three consoles. Even buying the Wii U, I was like, I don’t really regret that in retrospect, because I played Breath of the World on there. I feel the way it was meant to be played, and Bayonetta 2, and I don’t know, it’s still good to have around for playing Wii games in slightly nicer resolutions. So, I don’t know, how about you? Yeah, I had to really go all the way back to third generation, so NES generation, where I think having a NES, but not having a Master System makes perfect sense. The Master System is not a valuable thing in my mind, but that is how far back you have to go before there is a machine which doesn’t have something to say. I wouldn’t get a Sega Saturn either, personally, but I’m just not a Sega guy. But yeah, outside of that, there’s kind of enough essentials on every machine. Yeah, I think I agree with that. I was thinking, for example, the generation where I felt like it was probably the most important to have, all three, was the Xbox GameCube PS2 generation. I think maybe it’s because they’re fresh in my mind from doing the podcast, but even at the time, I was there thinking, well, in an ideal world, I’d be playing Halo and Silent Hill 2 and Wind Waker. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think that’s the generation to have everything. After that, I think having a Wii and one of the others is a good combo. Yeah, for sure. I think Nintendo PC is a good way to cover your bases these days as well. Yeah, for sure. Especially as Microsoft and Sony bring more of their games to PC. Yeah, I think we’ve answered that one, Matthew. Let’s move on to the next question. I love the podcast. Three questions. I consider myself a fan of not just video games, but professional video game journalism. I sometimes enjoy the analysis of what makes a game good or bad, as much as video games themselves, with the decline of video game magazines, the rise of Twitch streamers, YouTube and user reviews. Shouldn’t we worry about the long term health of video game journalism as a sustainable industry slash career field? And what are the best ways that I and other game journalism fans can support your industry, either financially or not? I.e. Patreon, magazine subscriptions, writing podcast reviews, turning off adblocker, etc. Finally, Valheim is my vote for Game of the Year for 2021. I love the sense of adventure, the scale and the survival bits. Struck the right balance of augmenting one’s adventure rather than hindering it or overwhelming the player. I don’t believe that survival games are either of your go-to games, but I also think Valheim may be the best non-survival game as survival game. Your thoughts on Valheim? Thank you. From Patrick in Indiana, USA. I haven’t played Valheim myself. Yeah, I should because loads of people I respect think it’s cool. Yeah, I think I bought it to play with someone at some point, and so I do own it, but no, it’s not come up. I think I then thought I’ll wait till it’s out of early access or more stuff’s been added to it to jump in, I guess. Yeah. But yeah. As for the best ways to support games journalism, I think that if you’re somebody you like, support it. That’s basically what it comes down to. If they have a supporter program, if you can subscribe to them, that’s the best way to support them. I guarantee they would appreciate your support no matter what, and it wouldn’t go amiss. Even if you’re buying something on a recommendation from that outlet, that’s supporting them as well, and you’re trusting their buying advice. All that stuff goes towards. Yeah, no, I agree. Also, telling other people about their stuff, if you think other people would like it, and this may sound very self-serving, telling writers that you like their stuff, either in the comments or on Twitter or whatever, the morale boost can honestly get you through a bad week. Like, I’ve had times where I’ve been in a really foul mood, and just someone saying like, oh, this was really spot on or whatever, or just the feedback we get on this podcast, it can carry you through some bleaker times. In terms of the wider thing about, should we fear about it being a sustainable industry slash career field? I mean, that to me sounds like someone who’s tempted or interested in maybe pursuing it, and is there going to be a long-term version of it? And it’s like, yes, there will be, but it’s just going to be different to what you probably read growing up. This is, in the 15 years I’ve done it, it’s a completely different thing now, like a completely different discipline. There are so many more avenues into it. There are lots of weird sub-parts of games journalism now, particularly online. It’s still there. There’s still loads of it. It’s just slightly different. And yeah, sorry, that’s not a very comprehensive answer. No, I share the feedback about like, tell a writer you like if you like their stuff. Like that is for sure, like, valuable. Just because those writers are probably more used to getting negative feedback than positive feedback from being online because that’s what being online is like. Seeing my comment about being told to stick to flipping burgers by slagging off Loki, that was good times. I have had to eat so much shit because of that Blorko tweet. And it’s just meaningless. People get angry and cross about anything. People need to chill the fuck out and get off my case. I do think that people are on a hair trigger since the pandemic started as well. They’re more likely to get upset about things, which is kind of understandable, but also not very pleasant if you’re in the front lines of covering games media. So, praise much appreciated. The nice feedback we get to this podcast, that’s a massive part of why we do it. So far, we haven’t done it for any kind of profit or anything like that. We don’t do ads or anything like that. So, the feedback is, you know, that’s like currency for us. So, yeah, for sure it has value. So, hopefully that helps. But, yeah, vow high my vow to play at some point. So, next one, Matthew. Hey, Sam and Matt. Firstly, I wanted to say thank you so much for your podcast. You’re both hilarious and have such great recommendations and experiences about computer games to share, including many are likely never have time to play. I really enjoy hanging out with you both, and the wholesome banter and warm friendship you both share have really helped me get through another most pretty bleak year. My top… that was good, yeah, it was not very nice, thank you. All these words are very kind by the way, I’m not really responding to them, but they are very nice to these people who say they love the podcast, thank you so much. I’ve completely desensitised your praise now. I think it’s just because my brain’s stuck in the thinking about steak from that Bristol question. That will happen sometimes. I’m just thinking about trapping JC in a shed. My top game I played in 2021 is definitely Sunless Skies, a steampunk horror adventure RPG by Failbetter Games. The writing and worldbuilding in this game are honestly the best I’ve ever experienced, and the art style is truly beautiful. No other game has impressed me more with its humour, satire and understanding of human failures and vices. The gameplay mechanics, maps and difficulty curve are much improved over the previously released Sunless Sea, and make this game a better entry point into the series. I think the team have also done a great job of balancing the complexity of the game’s decision systems, neither too black and white nor too complex. RIP the countless crewmen I have sacrificed to the void in my quest for a supposedly good cause. I’d be keen to hear any thoughts you both have on the game, and would definitely recommend you both give it a play sometimes. So I did play Sunless Skies at the start of the pandemic. I played Sunless Sea previously, and I did find it a bit gruelling, I’ll be honest. It was a bit to grind you down and then do the same stuff again, but here they kind of found ways to make the roguelike nature of it a bit more palatable. The fact they’re set in space as well is very, very cool. This kind of Victorian sort of space kind of location, that’s really, really nice. I love the art style of them, that they haven’t failed better, and the writing is obviously fantastic. I’d need to play more of it, but really liked what I played, I would say, yeah, for sure. Contemplated, seriously gaming Switch versions. Yeah, Sunless Sky is definitely one I’d like to have more detailed thoughts on at some point. Matthew, any thoughts? Yeah, I’ve played less of these than you have. I’ve got a bit of a fail-better blind spot. But I really like the people. I follow a lot of fail-better people on Twitter and social media and whatnot, and they’re always super smart and entertaining. And I’ve listened to a lot of talks and interviews with them, like GDC things or stuff like that. And they’re always super smart and switched on. Yeah, I just don’t know why I haven’t spent more time playing these things. We should do that, though. Yeah, I think their next game is called Mark of the Rose, I think it is. That’s the sort of visual-novel-y romance thing, right? Yeah, that’s not really cool. I look forward to seeing the result of that. But yeah, really, you know, just a really singular developer in terms of the scale of the very specific type of thing that they do. So yeah, I’m all for supporting them. And yeah, I echo what you say about loads of them seem rad on social media, so that’s good. Okay, Matthew, next question. What gaming trope gets on your tits the most that you would ban developers from including in their game if given the chance? Thanks for the great podcast, really refreshing take on gaming. And congrats on the first year. Here’s to many more. And that patron you keep talking about from Alex. I think level gating still kind of bums me out in games. And I think I wish Assassin’s Creed would not do that anymore. But I actually haven’t played Valhalla, so I’m reflecting on Odyssey there. Does Valhalla have the same thing, Matthew? It’s a bit gentler with it. It feels less like there’s loads of endless maths going on. It feels like you can play it more like an Assassin’s Creed. It doesn’t feel like you’re chipping away at a superhuman health bar, which I think is really the problem with that level gating. It’s just when it becomes really unrealistic and drawn out. Yeah, that was just what I didn’t like about Origins and Odyssey. I think games have found other ways to do this stuff, and I think that it also turns a game about exploration into you not really exploring and just doing things in a linear fashion. That actually meant that I ended up missing big chunks of the map in Origins because I didn’t have a reason to go explore because I might have just been killed by a single dude with an arrow, and so I might have left it. Other than that, I’m not a big loot guy, to be honest. I realized I had my fill with that after my last Destiny spate, so I’m not massively into the idea of playing a shooter that’s got loads of loot in it and stuff. I think that the difference between the Avengers game and the Guardians game showed me that, oh, actually, I know what I like with this kind of thing now. So, yeah, I’m not… Unless it’s a kind of game that’s specifically built around how loot kind of works, your kind of Diablo-type stuff, or Hades did loot very well, I don’t want loot in every game, is what I’m saying, basically. Yeah, yeah. What about you, Matthew? Yeah, auto-platforming, I find very, very boring. Like, the idea that it’s meant to be thrilling, and it’s like the kind of fake peril moments of the hand-held that falls away, and then Drake goes, oh, my God. Just that everyone does it, you know, everyone… It just doesn’t feel like I’m playing. It really does feel like I’m hiding a loading screen when I do that stuff. Obviously, as part of that, I think the aggressive signposting of like interactive elements, you know, the famous thing with the painted white grips in like Tomb Raider and all that, I just… I find that kind of visual language a bit tiresome. I’m not a fan of the anti-ending where games build up and up and up and then they end on like a super quiet reflective moment because they assume that kind of veering away from your traditional exciting climax is the kind of grown up or intellectual thing to do. Often it just leaves me thinking, oh, that was a real downer. And that’s a bit of a Sony thing. Like a lot of their games, their AAA stuff, I love them. Right up until the very final thing where they feel the need to kind of basically do the Naughty Dog did it once and it worked and now everyone’s doing it. But to be fair, Naughty Dog also subverted it really well in The Last of Us Part 2 where you might think the game is over, then it isn’t. Yeah, yeah, that is true. There are a lot of endings to that game. Yeah, that’s true, but the ending ending is excellent, I would say. Yeah, I think the one way it really rubbed me up the wrong way was actually God of War, which I really loved that game and the progress with it in the sense of pace, momentum, and I actually thought it ended on a real shrug. It just didn’t, yeah, it didn’t really do it for me. So I just don’t think people should be embarrassed about ending the game with the almost spectacular boss fight, be it in space or not. Like, it’s okay, it’s okay to end big. If you end big, I will come out and probably think better of the game, even if I have a bad time. Like, whatever I think of Resident Evil 3, the final boss, like the final bossed kill is so good that I come out going, ah, it’s kind of alright. That’s fair. Squeezing through a wall to hide a loading screen thing. I would rather, when I come across that in a game now, I would rather just have a loading screen, to be honest. And obviously, you know, the consoles have SSDs now, so maybe this is less likely, but definitely when I was doing it, I was just doing it in Final Fantasy XV, and just loads of games that did it, I was just like, nah, I just don’t want to anymore, please. It’s like, we’re not fooling anyone. It’s like the forever lift in Mass Effect. We know what’s going on. We’re all grown up, so we can handle a loading screen. Yeah, I’ve got plenty of things to be doing during a loading screen now. It’s not like ten years ago where you didn’t have Twitter on your phone. Like now, I’m quite happy to spend 30 seconds. If anything, when I’m playing a game, I’m like, I wish this game would give me 30 seconds where I could eat some crisps or look at my phone. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I think we’ve answered that one quite nicely there, Matthew. Yeah, I miss loading times too, to shatter my attention span even more. So yes, this is a great, one of my favorite comments we’ve ever had for the podcast here, actually. Hi, both. First and foremost, I dig what you’re doing, especially Samuel’s tendency to offer comment in real time, e.g. the brilliant, is this a really weird episode of our podcast, Matthew? Like all great art, the podcast has the ability to entertain while simultaneously commenting on its own nature. I’ve never listened to a podcast that has arrived at, acknowledged and then surpassed self-parody so soon into its life. Quite extraordinary. Part of me wants to reassure you, tell you’re doing great, don’t doubt yourself, but this would of course be counterproductive. Lean into the quirks and lean hard, please and thank you. That’s fantastic, thank you. So, heard you mentioned CRPGs as a potential subject of a future pod and at the risk of stepping on the toes of the idea you’ve probably already got brewing, I’d like to suggest a format. CRPG Battle, in which classics like Baldur’s Gate and other Infinity Engine games are pit against examples from the recent-ish CRPG revival. Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny and the like, to see if the new wave stands up to the old guard. Maybe you could use a debate format where you each argue for a title and then some independent arbiter decides who gets the win. Or for the higher-fit version, maybe each game’s attributes, story, visuals, characters, etc. are all assigned to scoring. You both have to select a characteristic and present to each other in some form of don’t-call-it-top-trumps type deal. Actually, no, not that one. That’s shit. Anyway, keep up the etc. etc. We all bloody love it. Yours, Andy Humphreys. Thank you for your very nice note there. That’s very good. So, that’s not a bad format. I’m not sure I have the expertise for it. I honestly pictured this episode, Matthew, as being like when Baldur’s Gate 3 leaves early access, Jeremy comes on and talks about some old CRPGs and then you kind of weigh in with a bit of your expertise and I play a bunch of them to try and swat up for the episode. That’s kind of how I saw the shape of that one in my head. But what do you think? Yeah, the only problem with this is, as has proved unpopular with people who are into CRPGs, I really like the Larian model, which is kind of the next step along. But actually, whenever I praise Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’ve written a lot about it for RPS, all the RPS old guard are like, fuck you, it’s not like old Baldur’s Gate, this should be like old Baldur’s Gate, exactly like old Baldur’s Gate. And I don’t have the same affection for them, which is why I think we would need a Jeremy in there. Don’t get me wrong, I love Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, I think they’re fantastic games, but I don’t think they’re fantastic games to the extent that I don’t want to play a shiny, all 3D, much more systemic version that Larian are making. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, I’m completely with you on that one. Yeah, I don’t know, these are sort of tough genres to sort of brace sometimes. They have a lot of fans that have a very specific idea of what they should be. I’ve seen this litigated over and over again with Bioware games and more modern versions of RPGs where people say they’re not what the RPGs used to be and all this stuff. So, yeah, I think we just need that extra layer of expertise and we can do it all at once, if that makes sense. Yeah, I thought that, but I think it’s definitely a good topic. Yeah, for sure. You will see that at some point. It might not be this year, but it will be at some point. And, yeah, that’s something to think about. So, next question, Matthew. Hey, guys. When you were discussing the original Deus Ex and how it handles choices, I was reminded of my own first playthrough of the game. You get to the apartment where Paul is and he tells you to leave him rather than face the people coming to kill him. At this point, I hadn’t really ever played a game with much by the way of storyline choice, so I just unthinkingly did as I was told. As time went on, I played more immersive Sims and RPGs, but never revisited the original Deus Ex, and it was only years later that I discovered when reading an article about the game that you could stay and fight and save Paul. I was devastated and made a point of replaying the game to save Paul, but also to see what else you can do when you disobey a character’s orders and how the game reacts. Have you ever had a similar experience where you’ve discovered something about a game that you’ve played and were surprised to discover or disappointed that you missed? Another for me was learning that there’s a reference to Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels in Witcher 3. Keep up the excellent work on the pod. It’s a key part of my routine for getting through work on a Friday. And that’s from Ian. Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I sort of think that like there’s a few things like this. There was a giant kind of like big dark monster thing in Control that I missed entirely. And I’d seen Gifts of it throughout. I think it’s before I even played Control. And I was like, I have to see what that fucking thing is. I finished the game and I didn’t see it. And I was like, oh, how did that happen? And then I found out it was like optional content and I had to go hunt them down. But yeah, that’s like the first one that kind of comes to mind. But is there anything for you, Matthew, where there’s like a big… Not to blow my own trumpet, but I’m like reasonably thorough. I think just reviewing the games has turned me into a bit of a machine for picking at things. So I sort of find everything I need to find. Though this is sort of similar. When I played Red Dead Redemption 2, I completely forgot the plot of that. I sort of forgot that it was a prequel to Red Dead Redemption 1. Not completely, like obviously John Marston being there, puts it in its place. But I had forgotten what happened in Red Dead Redemption 1 and who had survived. And it completely skewed my read on that game. Because there were loads of people who I was expecting to take down, or I was looking forward to dealing with. And if I just remembered, oh no, that will never happen because they’re alive years later, that probably would have changed my perception of some of it. It’s not quite the same thing, but that’s the closest I could think to it. Oh yeah, there was an example of this that happened to me recently actually. Which this makes me sound daft, but I have to embrace the fact that I am daft sometimes. Her story, I basically completely misconstrued the twist of that game. And like when I was explaining what I thought had happened to my partner, she was like, that’s not what happened. And like, I can’t remember the exact detail. So are there like, this is spoilers for her story, which you should absolutely play. Is it like there’s two women in it, Matthew, two sisters, and like it’s about their role in this story? Is that correct? I think it’s still open to interpretation. Right, because I was saying that like, I thought it was the same girl and two personalities. I think that’s a perfectly valid reading. Right, yeah, because I think my partner said, no, that’s entirely ruled out by X, Y and Z. And like, I wondered, oh, did I just miss the point of this game? Because I didn’t find every single clip. I did just find like 66% or something. Yeah, I think that’s kind of what he’s going for though, isn’t it? That you can never fully know. I don’t think there’s anything in that game which 100% like locks it in place. Okay, that one doesn’t count then. So yeah, I sort of like, when I, last, two years ago when I reached the end of the Red Alert Giant Ant missions, that was like kind of mind-blowing to see the end cutscene for that, because as a kid, I had failed to ever get past the second mission of that. So I came back as an adult, absolutely fucking bossed it, and then watched the cutscene where the ants are being killed at the end. I felt like I completed a piece of myself as a person. So, yes. But I was struggling to think of other examples, Matthew. Unless you have any others, let’s move on. Let’s move on. Hello Chaps, I found myself quite amused at the conclusion of the Halo episode, when Matthew aired concern over the possibility of self-contradiction. I had not been listening to your show since the beginning, but I had heard enough to garner Matthew’s stance on Super Mario 3D World. Yet, when I listened back to some older episodes recently, I was a bit confused to hear not only Matthew talking about how much he liked his birthday present of 3D World on his Switch, defending it against IGN’s unfair review. Absolutely fantastic. I really, really enjoyed it. But also Sam having a big rant about Metal Gear Solid 2, describing it as being not very good and that he had fiercely disagreed with positive reviews. Going on to add, most of it is defusing bombs and coolant spray. Then only the other week doing a special episode celebrating the game. PS. Where does Matthew release his anger now that his podcast with Columns died? He’s only been nice on this one so far. That’s from Andy as well. So yeah, I think I addressed this in a previous episode because I played Metal Gear Solid 2 again and then realized again that I thought it was not quite as good as maybe I… Yes, I don’t know. I think we have to accept that contradictions are going to happen when we’re 61 episodes deep into a podcast. Your opinions do fluctuate on this stuff. With MGS2, I can explain that as I have always had very complicated thoughts about that game. It’s deeply flawed but also amazing at the same time. That’s just like what that game is. So I will go back and forth on it until the day I die, Matthew. Do you have any thoughts on the subject? Yeah, like Mario World, you know, I’m literally comparing it to my favorite game of all time. Like that’s what it’s next to and that’s what it’s competing with and it’s the follow up to my favorite game of all time. It’s an absolute nightmare. I think my final stance on it is that I really, really like Bowser’s Fury. I thought that was absolutely amazing. Also, you know, whenever I get stuff for my birthday, I’m just happy and excited because it’s a birthday present. Like, getting a game for birthday or Christmas elevates it in some mystical way. It just becomes slightly better. Everything just, you know, that’s a happy day. Everything tastes better. Everything feels better on that day. Yeah. The other thing is as well, there are some takes where, if I contradict myself, the podcast has to end. And like, I have to, like, stand down. But that’s, I’m willing to accept that. If I ever say they should bring back Metal Gear Solid 4 on a format other than the PlayStation 3, that’s a contradiction too far. I’ve put too much on the line for this one. I insist it must stay on PS3. I will never change my stance on that. If I ever contradict myself, it’s all over. So yeah, that’s the line I will not cross. I also think I’m sometimes a bit more positive than I maybe actually feel out of politeness because we want to have a civil podcast, especially when we’ve got guests on. You don’t want to be like, nah, that’s shit. I kind of go along with it. I get excited. I think this is a positive leaning podcast. I think we’re looking for positivity where we can find it. Yeah, I think so too. It’s not really a rant podcast. You always want to hear people out. Matthew has to say that anyway, because he’s got a Pokemon episode coming up. That isn’t going to be two hours of me dunking on Jay. Yeah, although I’m sure he would find that funny. That’s going to be a good one. Okay, next question then. Where do you release your anger, Matthew, as mentioned there by Andy? The sad answer is I don’t. It’s all building up inside of me and I’ll probably have a heart attack at age 43. Or he’ll lock JC’s kitchen in a hut. That’ll be the other way he deals with anger. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll develop a Dexter-esque dark passenger. Okay, great. I look forward to that manifesting down the line. Next question, Matthew. Ho, ho, ho. It’s that time of the year again, which can only mean one thing. Eugene Acker needs to lay low from a Christmas heist. Again, this is part of the Eugene Acker is a Robber fictional universe that we have no part in. Fiction, very important to underline there. Freddy Loi is listening. Yeah, this is all done with good humor. And he’s laying low from the Christmas heist and he’s hidden under our duvet. He’s shaking with nerves and no amount of stroking his back will calm him down. The only way to help Eugene Acker feel better is to whisper in his ear what you consider to be the most underrated and what you think is the most overrated console. Only by doing this will he be able to help Eugene Acker come to his senses. Merry Christmas from Tom Doughty. We’ll never know, but that’s fine. That’s one of the ambiguities. If there’s ever an unresolved mysteries section of The Back Page: Wiki, the Tom Doughty pronunciation will be on there. I don’t wish to find out. Don’t correct us. So, underrated and overrated. After we did the Wii draft, I did wonder if the Wii was a little bit underrated, Matthew. But I don’t know about most underrated. But do you think it’s the most underrated versus how it’s perceived by the media at large and how people talk about it? Not really. I actually really struggle with this. I don’t know if there are many that I think are truly underrated or overrated. I think in hindsight, I think the 3DS is a little underrated. Yeah, I’m with you on that. I think it’s got great first party games. I think it absolutely brings back some games. It basically renews some series and sets them up to even greater things on Switch. Plus, it plays all the DS games. Plus, it was a fun and playful machine before they stripped that back for the Switch. Again, we love the Switch, but it lacks a little bit of the Nintendo front end magic. The 3DS is just completely Nintendo, but also very good. I like the 3D screen. I think it’s a bit underrated, but overrated. It’s hard. It’s in the same way there. I feel like every machine in that previous question, I would recommend my younger self or whatever the scenario was playing every machine. Is there an overrated console? I have an answer to this. It’s very controversial. I think the Mega Drive is the most overrated. I think you’re thinking this, Matthew, but felt too afraid to say it. I think when you look at the library of games that you actually want to play now on that machine, I’m sure this is very different. I had one at the time. I had a Mega Drive. But I think a lot of it doesn’t hold up well. I think this is a problem maybe tough with this generation generally, because I think the only thing I really want to go back and play on these old machines is RPGs, to be honest, like now, or 2D platformers. There’s not loads else I want to play, but I guess when you look at the crop of SNES classics, like the top 10 games on SNES, I think they’re a lot better than the top 10 games on Mega Drive, apart from Sonic. Apart from Sonic, I don’t have loads of love for these games. I’m not like a Phantasy Star guy. I gave it a go. I’m not a Comic Zone guy. I think Echo of the Dolphin is kind of an iconic game, but I don’t think it’s a good game, really. This is really fucking hard and quite spooky and weird. But yeah, I don’t know. I think the Mega Drive is quite overrated, personally. Our listeners may hate that, but yeah, sorry. I think that’s fair. The one take I was toying with, but I think it’s unreasonable, was that The Last Generation is a bit of an overrated generation. I don’t think PS4, Xbox One… Xbox One isn’t overrated because no one rates it. PS4, outside of its first party excellent games, I don’t think The Generation was as good as the previous generation, so it’s maybe overrated in how successful it was. So you mean the PS4 wasn’t as good as the PS3 generation? No, because it’s the winner of that generation, I don’t think it’s as good as the generation before. I think the Xbox 360 PS3 generation was better. I think the Xbox 360 is better than the PS4. I think I agree with you on that. I think that’s partly because there’s that few years where maybe people are a bit spooked about console games and are more into mobile gaming. That’s been widely reported as a phenomenon. I remember being told by one developer that there wasn’t loads of publishers looking to make big console games for a while there. Whereas 360 is a very different time. But there’s a generation of journalists who came up in the PS4 era in the way that we came up in the 360 era. Because of that, they’re like, the PS4 is the shit. I’m like, it’s great. It’s the undisputed winner of that generation. But it’s not the shit in the way that the PS2 is the shit or the 360 was the shit. Yeah, I think personally, I feel like the differences between the consoles have become minimized over time. But now, I think this generation will be a lot better than the last generation. Because first of all, you have to consider Switch as part of this generation already. Switch is fantastic, loads of great Nintendo games and stuff. But now, the arms race is original games, it’s exclusive games. And that arms race will make this the best generation. I hope so. Make this a better generation than the PS4 generation, I think. Plus, the addition of Game Pass and the types of games you can put on there means that the types of exclusives we’ll see won’t all be AAA from Microsoft. So you’ll get some meaningful differences between Sony and Microsoft’s generation, I think. So that’s why I think this generation will be better than the PS4 generation, and I think I agree with you that I prefer 360 generation to the PS4 generation. Yeah, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say overrated, but it pinged in my head somewhere that I sort of was leaning towards that. Yeah, so I’m going with Mega Drive for most overrated, I guess. Yeah, and so underrated, I think the 3DS is a good shout. There’s a good library there. It’s not a massive library, but it’s like a really robust loads of good stuff. I think underrated as well, I think the PSP is underrated. I think that like we a lot of chatter about the Vita being very good. The Vita is excellent, I think so. But the PSP has some like legit games. But I feel like early on the DS took such a lead that maybe the PSP didn’t get that much attention. But when you look back on it, had loads of good stuff from the God of War games to the Final Fantasy stuff that was on there and stuff like LocoRoco and just all kinds of like good exclusives on there. So when PSP I think is most underrated. I wouldn’t know because a burglar took mine. So I hope the vacuum cleaner burglar is enjoying that in jail where he rots for life. It’s the most underrated console stolen from Matthew Castle. He had a choice of that or a DS and he took that. Come on. That’s good news for you though. Yeah, I know, but it’s like obviously someone who doesn’t read games magazines. Yet another crime to add to his list. He obviously wanted to play Gangs of London on there, Matthew. Nothing was going to stop him. Okay, next question. That was a great one. Thank you. So, this is from John Glover. This is regarding the GameCube vs Xbox Draft episode. Sorry, some of these have accumulated, so they’re covering old episodes. But I’m sure people remember that one well. Thanks for the great podcast. It’s the only games specific podcast I bother with week to week. And I’m glad you seem to be having fun with it. The newest episode was the best draft. You seem to be enjoying it. You’re on a good time. That’s all that matters. The newest episode was the best draft yet as Matthew has finally started treating it as a competition. And though he has still made a few critically flawed picks, brackets the fifth best hitman vs a version of MGS unavailable anywhere else? The depth of his GameCube fandom still carried him to legitimate victory for the first time. It was heartwarming. So that’s a diss on your N64 draft picks, Matthew. Also a little tip from a ball sports loving American and perhaps some games caught fodder for Samuel. EA’s big label had respectable GameCube versions actually. Mario appearing in them was mind blowing at the time and SSX Tricky and NBA Street Volume 2 were the last great arcade, snowboarding and baseball games respectively. Actually two great games stuck way back there. Thanks again for the fun, stay safe and you two have a nice holiday. There’s no question there but that’s a nice feedback from the draft. Yes, and the one thing I will say is I think Amped 3 on Xbox 360 is a great arcade, snowboarding game. Not the last one necessarily, SSX Tricky, but Amped 3 is a favourite of mine, me, Sammy Roberts. Next question Matthew. After something like 20 odd years, it’s finally back. Yes, Game Master is back and oh boy did they do a bang up job with this reboot. Cringe galore. Have you had a chance to watch it and what are your thoughts on it? I’m guessing you used to watch it back in the day, right? Says Chris Doherty. Game Master was slightly before my time, the original. Yeah, I can appreciate that because there’s a few years difference between us. Yeah, so I saw this new one and thought, you know, that it was like, I guess I didn’t have the thing to compare it to, but I thought it was cool they used Trevor McDonald. He seemed to be having fun. Yeah. Any thoughts on this Matthew? Yeah, I actually thought this was great. I really like this. I have very fond memories of Games Master. You know, I still occasionally look up on YouTube the classic clip of Dave Perry losing his shit when he completely biffs the Mario iShoot level. It’s a classic, like, gaming memory for me. That’s really good. Yeah, I thought it was fun. If anything, I thought it was slightly, like, more balanced than old Games Master. It had, like, review content and, like, mini, like, video essays that Rab Florence did. I really like his video stuff with, like, Video Game in Pennsylvania. It kind of had that energy to it. I mean, it’s games on mainstream TV, which I think should be celebrated. I also, I really like, is it Frankie Ward does the PC gaming show as well? Yep, that’s right. Yeah, I just, I think she’s a real class act and, you know, I like that she was putting on this show and she was heavily pregnant during it. You could, you know, she just was on screen and I thought, oh man, I wouldn’t have the patience for that. But yeah, I thought it was a really classy stuff and I hope it gets recommissioned and they get to do more. So next question then Matthew, this is from Jamie from Devon. Dear Samuel and Matthew, the first gaming magazine I ever subscribed to was Cube Magazine, an unofficial GameCube magazine that ran from November 2001 to 2005, published by Paragon. As a teenager, reading it every month awakened a nascent ambition within me to become a games writer that sadly never came to fruition. Nonetheless, I wanted to know if either of you had any connection to the magazine. I imagine its time was a bit before either of you became professional journalists, but did you ever buy the magazine? Matthew particularly is an ardent GameCube fan. As an aside, I loved the latest episode with the Xbox versus GameCube draft. This is another slightly older question. I voted for Big Sammy Holdings’ Xbox Mini. As much as I cherished my GameCube at the time, I never owned an Xbox back in the day, so Samuel’s console made more sense to me. A head choice instead of a heart one. Keep up the good work, Jamie from Devon. Well, congratulations, Jamie. Big Sammy Holdings hopes that you enjoy your Steel Battalion controller. That’s good news for you. I never read Cube, Matthew. I think it was made by people I used to work with. I think I just didn’t read it, because I read NGC whenever I read a GameCube magazine. That’s just the way it was. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I was a big NGC person. That’s really all I read. I picked up the occasional copy of Cube. I remember one issue of Cube I did get. They gave away a free action replay disc or something that let you play US Animal Crossing on the UK GameCube. This was a year and a half or whatever. There’s a huge gap where you couldn’t get Animal Crossing in Europe. So for letting me play an import copy of Animal Crossing US, thank you very much. That was good. I owe Cube that. NGC, I thought, was a lot more… a lot sillier, a lot more fun. I think Cube took itself a little seriously. It was trying to be a little bit more cool, and I don’t think you can make a cool Nintendo Mag. I just don’t think it’s possible. I think you have to lean in to the fact that it’s a… like, goofy… goofy world of bullshit. Next up, we have a question for your next Mailbag episode. If you had to come up with a new Games magazine to launch this year, what would it look like? Your billionaire backer doesn’t mind what it’s about, just wants it to have a chance of making an impact such as finding an audience in 2022. That’s from Alex via Twitter. Does that mean physically? What does it look like? I assume that it means like, what is the magazine? I think I mentioned ages ago that my dream was to make basically like millennial retro gamer. So it was like basically you would pick it up and it would always have a PS2 game on the cover or like something of that generation. That’s kind of like what I’d like. In fact, if they just like rolled out, reprinted old magazines from the noughties, I’d probably just go buy them as they are now. But I don’t know. I think that something like that is what I’d be interested in. It’s long form articles on PS2 generation stuff. As a passion project, that’s totally something I would do. I bought that magazine Lock-On, which has loads of beautiful illustrations in it. It would be cool to do something like that. That’s kind of a journal where you commission artwork and essays about games that you find interesting. That would be something that would be really cool. The presentation of that thing is incredible. That’s the sort of thing I’d love to do. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on this one, Matthew. I can’t remember what I pitched as my stupid magazine. I normally pitch magazines for that episode. This is where I don’t want to contradict myself. I think yours was called… No, New Game Plus was my one, wasn’t it? Yeah, I can’t remember now. It had some slightly wanky name. It would probably be, again, like this podcast. It would cover a similar period. It would go back to these things. It would be very driven by developer access and oral histories. I love that kind of stuff. More about, I want to find the inside story of… I want to hear about what it was like to make Trauma Center. These things, they only really happen about prestige games. You might get an oral history about Final Fantasy VII, but it doesn’t feel like people do that for the weird 8 out of 10. It would be that sort of stuff. I don’t think it would be a traditional reviews, previews type contemporary magazine. No, just be very indulgent. Lots of stuff about seeing. Lots of columns from Shootakumi. That was definitely part of my original pitch. That’s what it would be. Yeah, so I think that like I care what you say about access to Japanese game developers, about old Japanese games. That stuff’s more valuable to me than anything else because it’s so elusive. I love seeing oral histories on Western made classics as well, American games, European games for sure. But definitely like when I see, I don’t know, when they talk on Archipel, they talk to Final Fantasy illustrators, that stuff to me is like gold. That’s more important to me than anything else just because it’s the stuff I always wanted to read when I was reading games magazines, you know? So, yeah, very valuable stuff. It would sell five copies. It would be the ultimate passion project for sure. It’s why I back Archipel is because they’re making this stuff that I want to see and I don’t want them to stop. My money is an implicit, please keep making this basically. So that’s a good way to see supporting any creators I think who do something you like. Cool. Last question then Matthew for the episode from Phil Reynolds. I wouldn’t hear it for a while as I’m only on the E3 pod with Qezza, but here’s a question to look forward to for when I catch up. Have you ever played a phone game for so long on the loo that your legs have fallen asleep and you struggle to stand up? So Matthew, a nice crude image there of us both sat on the toilet to see out the episode. Any thoughts on this one? I’m more of a toilet reader than game player. Right, okay. And also I don’t play a huge number of phone games. There was a very early period, I guess, in like early phone game excitement where I played a lot of that… Is it Temple Run? The one where you just, like, Indiana Jones running forwards? Yeah, I played that quite obsessively for a few weeks and I probably played that on the toilet at some point. But I’m much more likely to be reading an edge on the bog these days, which is really unpleasant for all my peers. You write that, Mag, because they have to imagine that’s their audience. I like… I hope that in their sort of like their little news roundup that has like good and bad things, they go, bad, Matthew Castle is reading this on the toilet right now and it’s like in the next one, that would be good. Yeah, so, or like one of those big quotes they take, that would be good too. Yeah, I’m reading Edge on the shitter. Yeah, I think like, it’s been a while since I played a mobile game on my phone, to be honest. Like, I don’t do that as much, like, and it feels audacious to take a Nintendo Switch into a toilet with you. Oh, gross, I wouldn’t want that. No way, that’s disgusting, because then it’s like around the house, and no. Yeah, so that, the Switch stays out of the toilet, the Switch is by my bedside table, that’s like exactly where it belongs. No. So, yeah, you’ve got to draw a line somewhere. I’m with Matthew Castle on that. But I would really disapprove. If I could think of a mobile game that, like, I put too much time into and would have played on the toilet at some point, like Game Dev Story, that’s like a game that, when I got my iPad in 2011 or something, yeah, picture a much skinnier me on the toilet playing Game Dev Story, coming up with fictional games, it’s like waiting for my golf RPG to absolutely fucking take off. That’s like a big Sammy Energy in 2011. Thoughts on that, Matthew? Do I have to have thoughts of you taking a shit in like Dev Story? Do you ever play Game Dev Story, like those Kyrasoft sim games? I didn’t play it, I remember it doing the rounds of people talking about it. They give you all of the free to play, it makes all the things in your brain go off, but you don’t have to pay for them in-game microtransactions, so that’s a good thing about those games. There’s definitely a sense that I felt like my brain was rotting after a while and I just had to stop, but yeah, that was good times. On that dour note, Matthew, the image of us sat on the toilet, not together, I should point out, the episode has come to an end, another successful mailbag in the can, so to speak. For those listening at home, if you’d like to send in questions for future episodes, we have a plan now to do more of these kinds of episodes where we have listener questions at the end, because me and Matthew this year, while we won’t have one for January, I don’t think, we’re going to do monthly What We’ve Been Playing episodes, so we’ll append a bunch of these on to the end of the different episodes. So backpagegames.gmail.com, if you’d like to send us a question, you can also tweet us a question at BackpagePod on Twitter, so you can follow us for any updates on the podcast. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? You can find me at MrBazzill underscore Pesto. Okay. And I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. We’re off to eat a massive dinner, and we wish you well. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. Bye for now.