Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, you’ve been playing a bit of Ghostwire Tokyo recently, according to your Twitter feed. Anyway, I saw you had a preview go up on Rock Paper Shotgun. How’s that been for you? It has been merely fine, is my searing hot take. The worst of all takes. No one wants to hear that. They want to hear it’s terrible or it’s brilliant. It’s fine. It feels like a team making their first sort of open world first person game, which they are, and kind of getting their heads around it. And it’s maybe a little basic. The Tokyo is absolutely amazing. The game in it, I’m not so sold on, is kind of my top level take. Okay, this wasn’t Evil Within 2 or so, an open world game. Did I imagine that? It had a couple of open world like hub areas. You can see how it’s a step towards this, but this is like, you know, this is more like, I don’t know, Far Cry, but in Tokyo. So it’s, you know, it’s very open, you know, that you can climb up onto the rooftops. You can kind of go anywhere within the city. It’s pretty detailed. It’s like a, like a very big, it’s like Yakuza level detail, but kind of stretched to an entire city, which that’s the exciting bit. You know, if you just like seeing like rad Tokyo shit, this will definitely tick that box. And the combat’s fine, but like the filler in it is very poor, I think. But I’ve got to, yeah, I got to play more and deliver the review next week and see how it goes. But it’s just a little soft by Nakami standards. Hasn’t got much bite to it, which is quite odd. Cause even in his average stuff, it usually has like a bit of a sting, a bit of a crunchy kind of feel. And this sort of lacks that. Okay, interesting. Well, there you go. A little kind of micro preview for Matthew Castle. This podcast is free and you got that opinion for free. So look out for Rock Paper Shotgun, I’m guessing, for the full review at some point. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. We’ll see, we’ll see how it goes. Matthew, we’ve reached episode 69. Nice. And, oh dear, that already sets a poor tone for what’s gonna follow, doesn’t it? In fact, we definitely should have made this the GameScore episode, episode 69. That would have been more in keeping with the trash factor of that. Were you shocked by how many people liked the GameScore and no one said, what is this load of old rubbish? You two have kids. Like I was expecting a bit of that. I think we’re just a lot more worried about these things than other people are. And like, I think we’ve just got quite exacting standards and people liked it. I think it’s more a testament also to the previous GameScore. I thought like the Michael Caine stuff, not to toot our own horns, really landed for me. And I felt like we were in the shadow of Caine the whole time. And so I was worried the the wine pulping wasn’t wasn’t really going to resonate. But hey, listen, people seem to have enjoyed it. But I’m going to do more research for the next one because I had some very lackluster takes. You basically say game, I’d say I haven’t played it and then kill the person, which is just like, it really had no nutritional value. I love that you’re pretending that there’s any kind of more value to be had from the game’s core format than just like putting Glads to death for the fun of it. I mean, you know, yeah, but if I had looked at some of these games and I’d formed like an instant hot take that I could have delivered, I think that might have had a bit more substance. That’s fair, yeah. Good seven out of ten review of our own podcast there. Well, I must say, I thought it was conceptually neat, your whole Kirby Hitman assassin idea. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I thought I was like, you know, that I could see the cogs were in there. Yeah, it didn’t really go anywhere. But, you know, I picked a guy famous for throwing wine because I knew that he could chuck a bottle at some point. But that required quite deep knowledge of Ace Attorney Chronicles. So yeah, deep knowledge that our own listeners suggested in the Discord should have been mentioned. So that was kind of good. But I was going to say as well, but like we’ve actually, for people who want to submit their entries for Gamescore, we now have a specific channel for it on our Discord. So if you go to our Twitter at BackpagePod and then go to click on the Discord link, join up, you can actually submit entries through there. So it might lead to us having episodes of Gamescore a little bit faster than normal because they’re quite hard to get entries for because they kind of need to put out an email call out and stuff. So the fact there’s now one place where they can be deployed is useful. So, yeah, people can go do that. But this episode, Matthew, is about the PS Vita. So we’re doing another draft episode, a competitive draft, where me and Matthew have to pick a list of games each to represent the best of a console’s lineup. Kind of vaguely put under the umbrella of what if we made a mini version of a console, an old console in the style of the SNES Classic mini or whatever the PlayStation one was called. But that makes no sense to the PS Vita, really, because the PS Vita is already quite small. So how would you make a smaller version of it? It wouldn’t really make sense. But, you know, it’s basically just a draft to pick the best game. So, Matthew, let me ask you top level thoughts, PS Vita doing a whole episode about this, Sony handheld, very much second place to 3DS since its generation. How are you feeling about it? Yeah, I’m feeling OK. I feel like I’ve been educating myself a bit. I had a Vita, but I had quite limited experience of it. I feel like you’re better clued into these things. And so it’s been quite eye opening to dig into it. Both Vita and PSP, I’d say, are a bit of a blind spot for me in terms of, you know, I was on NGamer, I was so focused on what was going on in Nintendo land. My perception of these consoles is slightly skewed. This isn’t preamble to me upsetting you again by claiming that I always thought it was trash or something. But I feel like a lot of the Vita story, kind of, or affection, sort of happens a bit post-Vita. I think it’s more highly thought of now than it was then. And at the time, it didn’t feel like a big thing. Like in the future offices and in my Nintendo bubble is sort of my take. So let me like put something on the table for you, right? Actually, no, first of all, I’ll ask, did a burglar also steal your Vita? Like they stole the family Hoover in your PSP. Did that happen or? No, that didn’t happen. We didn’t have to have a lineup of Vitas. Yeah. The old Tiger LCD handheld next to it. I think it’s that one. Yeah. So let me put this on the table. I think the PSP is a slightly underrated console, whereas I think the PS Vita is not overrated, but I think it’s rated fairly by the number of people. It’s got enough people in its corner to feel like it’s been rated fairly for what it did, whereas I think the PSP was actually pretty undervalued in terms of the breadth of its library. I must say, so the PSP is an even bigger hole for me than the Vita, and looking into it to try and work out some of the categories for this, I was surprised and taken back by actually how much quite decent stuff there was on PSP. That just never, ever enters my sphere. Which is mad, because the PSP sold like four times as much as the Vita. Like it was a pretty big deal. Which I genuinely had no idea about. Like, in my head, I was just… Yeah, that was like an eye-opener for me. Yeah. Shall I start with my memories of the PSV to Matthew? Yeah, so basically, I was big into the PSP. It lasted longer than I thought it would. It was getting games through till, I think, like 2010, it was still getting pretty good software. So, it was getting games deep into its lifespan. The PS Vita comes along. Obviously, we’re in a kind of smartphone era. And my memory of it is, it wasn’t on my radar at all. And then I moved on to Play Magazine again in 2012, September 2012. And at that point, I bought a Vita just so I felt like I had a handle on it going into working on this mag. And I thought it was a real solid crop of, like, launch titles. But it felt to me like the PS4 came along so quickly afterwards, that it just… The kind of demands of a more powerful handheld in the PS Vita, which could play almost PS3 quality games, meant that it was implausible that Sony would have the resources to furnish both with high quality software. So the fact that the Vita loses out and the PS4 wins in that scenario makes complete sense to me. But I think that kind of defines the early part of its story, you know? It was like, here are all these games we’ve prepped for launch, but then a lot of our best devs have to move on to PS4 and make that work. So that was kind of how I felt about it. But I did think it was, that screen was beautiful. It was a handheld console launching with an OLED screen. Just seemed like amazing at the time. Absolutely beautiful. And the PSP always had a dazzling screen, but here, because you had those console level visuals, it was just, just extraordinary. So yeah, I was a big PSP guy. PS Vita comes along, doesn’t make as big a splash, but I definitely keep an eye on it because it does, in its first couple of years, get many of its, what I would say are its defining non-indie games. There’s not much, not much of a long tail on the blockbuster stuff. But how about you, Matthew? You do have a PS Vita, don’t you? Yeah, yeah. I bought one quite early on. And this is a period where I’d buy pretty much anything, because in my head I could get it back with freelance. I don’t think I ever did with Vita, actually, maybe I got back just the price of a Vita in freelance. I think I probably ended up doing like six half-page visual novel reviews across four years or something. So gradually clawed back that money. Obviously my PSP had been nicked, so that was the end of the PSP story for me. I literally only remember playing like Peace Walker and Daxter. Yeah, Daxter, yeah. I bought it with Daxter. It was a Daxter bundle, the PSP. That’s very cursed. It was really cursed. Did it have a picture of Daxter on it at all? Oh yeah. I’m not on the PSP. Obviously the big box did, it was this big orange thing. I bought it on a San Francisco press trip. It was so cheap compared to the UK, because this was back where it was like $2 to the pound. Before Brexit. Yeah, yeah. This was back when everything was fine. So I got that and yeah, that wasn’t a great investment. Yeah, I kind of liked, I feel like it had a lot of stuff which kind of spoke to me. Like it’s got a few kind of niche genres, absolutely locked down. And if you’re into those things, your perception of this console is probably that it is like an all timer. But if you came to it for say, the first party stuff, I think that dies out pretty quickly in terms of the big blockbuster stuff like you say. And also in hindsight, I’m not sure its first party spread is massively strong. Like it’s a lot of like halfway house games, which are trying to like offer the sort of the full console experience because the Vita had power on its side, but none of them can quite get there. And so now they just seem very stunted by comparison where, you know, the DS a lot more underpowered at the same time and the 3DS a lot more underpowered, but you could almost make more convincing bespoke things for it. I imagine it was like easier resource wise to sort of produce stuff for those handhelds, which helped. But yeah, definitely not a disaster like around that kind of first party kind of AAA core. Yeah, I feel like you’re unable to, sorry, you’re unlikely to regret buying one is the thing. You’ll find something to play on it. Most people will, I would say. Yeah, so I think that the PS Vita is defined by two eras, which is a short-burn run of blockbuster games that lasts from about 2011 through to 2013. And then a drought from 2013 to 2016, filled by wonderful indies. And I think that… And Danganronpa. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, it’s really interesting how the console’s identity is very much defined by this split. I think to most people, the second half is what defines the Vita for them. Because, like you say, visual novels, if you like that genre, those games never stopped coming to PS Vita, really. And arguably, still a better console for it than the Switch, or the Switch is catching up. I don’t know, what do you think? Yeah, yeah. I know. Like, the Switch has taken over in many ways. Like a lot of the stuff that was big there is big now on Switch. It’s definitely, like, I will always… I think a portable and a reasonably powerful portable is a really nice place to play things like visual novels and puzzle games and things. There’s lots of genres that work better in handheld, that don’t need a big TV and aren’t really about sitting on the sofa for, like, six hours at a time. I think that’s where the Vita… I don’t know if it targeted that stuff directly or if it’s just can-e publishers who see that and then target that particular audience. But there’s definitely a… you know, a lot of these games came out on Vita and PS4 and, you know, I would always go for the Vita version of a lot of them. You know, they’re just a natural fit and that’s kind of carried over to the Switch, too. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think the PS Vita has earned its cult reputation in retrospect, Matthew? Why do you think our peers like it so much? Yeah, I mean, like, my memory of it is because it becomes the sort of home of portable indie gaming, really in a way that no other thing was at the time, you know, and it also happens at a time where there’s almost like a sort of renaissance in indie gaming, or even a renaissance. I guess it’s the boot, it’s the initial big, populous boom, you know, it coincides with the arrival of, like, indie publishers and a sort of step up in everyone’s game, so you start getting, like, your devolver get very big at the same sort of time, and so everything begins to feel a bit more legit. You begin to get the kind of, the sort of AAA of indie coinciding with this machine that can play it. You know, we aren’t yet in the realms of Steam decks and Switch, and, you know, there’s certain attempts at, like, streaming. You can stream various things to phones or tablets or whatever, but it’s not quite the same thing. So for ease of use, that feels like a perfect time, and, like, maybe a lot of people have just, like, married Vita to their happiness, their general, like, happiness and contentment with that scene in the period, but the two things become sort of intertwined. It was just a… It felt like a good, a good pleasing time in games in general, and here was something which kind of really helped enable that. Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. It is also another underrated part of the Vita, or I think, like, rather I should say, I think half of its DNA is a portable, like, window to PlayStation history, basically. It’s like, got quite a lot of re-releases on it, of varying quality, for sure, but it’s also got, you know, I don’t know if it still does, I think it might be closing that function, but, or it’s certainly more complicated, but the PS Vita sort of, like, store let you download PSP and PSone games from the PlayStation store. So not a complete library, but a pretty vast library of stuff. And, like, these are original versions of the game, so, you know, for example, if you want to play Final Fantasy 8 without the new character models they did for it, you can go play the original on a PS Vita still, and it looks really, really nice. You can customize the dimensions of the screen, make it look the way you want it to look, and, you know, that’s kind of like a massive part of this console, as I had for a long time. Final Fantasy is 1 through 10-2 on my PS Vita, just like on, like, a single page on the menu screen. You know, none of those games originally released natively on Vita. In fact, like, Square Enix and Vita is, like, a big loss compared to the PSP, I would say. They’re not really on Vita in the same way, and the PSP benefited massively from them. But, you know, this is the thing. Like, if you treat it as a handheld console, it gave you access to a vast library of stuff, and I think that that is at least half of the Vita’s DNA. It gives you access to stuff that you can’t get now unless you’re prepared to plug a PS3 in. And so, that, I think, is a massive part of its appeal. What do you think of that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, Nintendo had always been kind of champions of backwards compatibility in terms of, you know, Wii release handhelds, which take out older carts still, you know. You can literally plug a GBA game into a DS and so you’ve got physical backwards compatibility. What Nintendo hadn’t really mastered was, you know, their virtual console offering had had much older stuff, but hadn’t kind of covered recent history. You know, the appeal of Vita now is very much that it’s Vita, PSP and PSone, like that seems super attractive. And that was the big eye opener. Putting together my list for today’s episode was actually when you take all that into account, you can get like a really stellar lineup. You can get the best of three platforms, which are maybe a bit fussier or a bit harder to enjoy now than others. But they’re all there. They’re all right there. Well, they’re right there until the store starts closing. There’s already a lot of stuff missing and being removed. Like there are things you can now not get and you will never be able to get again. Even though the Vita store is still open, bits of it are dying sort of quietly on the edges for various reasons. That was the other thing. I kept finding stuff going, oh, that’ll be good. And then when I looked it up, this is for PSP and PSone, you know, they’re just gone or removed from stores for some reason. And you’re like, well, that’s that then. That will like, you know, unless you’ve got a physical copy, that will never exist again. So yeah, it’s quite sad. I actually got quite excited for the theoretical Vita we’d be building. I was like, yeah, this is going to rule. This is going to save so many games. And I was like, oh, it’s not real. It doesn’t actually exist. Yeah, it’s funny because I’ve got a US account on my PS3 where I basically bought all the stuff that you can’t get here, that you can get there. So those kind of slightly weird 3D Mega Man RPGs, I can’t remember what they’re called, but people quite like those. The Parasite Eve games, I think you can get the second one here, but not this first one. There’s stuff like, I think, is one of the Resident Evils is not available here? Resident Evil 2. Yeah, Resident Evil 2. You’re so dumb. Why? One and three are there. And it’s just like, not that one. You don’t want that one. That’s the one you want. And Dino Crisis as well, I got on there. I think I got both Dino Crisis games on there. So, you know, US has had a better offering, but yeah, it’s true that like, there will soon come a time where these are at least so hard to get hold of that you won’t be able to have easy access to them, which sucks because there’s so many classics there. It’s like one of the, I think it’s absolutely one of the reasons that Vita is so revered is it kind of had all this stuff in one place. And for me, as someone who is on a PlayStation mag, you know, some of us make make choices in life like buying Crash Bandicoot on Psone in 2008 on PS3. But then you are in, you know, you’re in store setting up your PS Vita in 2012 and then you go to your download list and there’s that GameBorne PS3 years ago and it just works on your PS Vita. So that was, I remember that being a nice moment because I’d already accumulated all of the Final Fantasy games and then it was like, oh, now they were just on here on this last memory stick. Right. Yeah. There is one thing that is faintly cursed about the Vita interface and that is you can see a list of all the games on your PlayStation account and you have to basically scroll through this stuff which for a second your brain goes, oh wow, that’s on Vita and then you’re like, oh no, that’s a PlayStation 3 exclusive game. Functionally, I do not want to see games that I cannot play on that machine. So every time I look at that list, the one that always gets me is I see beyond the David Cage game. I always think, wait, beyond some Vita? Oh wait, no, you can’t download it. It’s just like there making fun of you. It’s this big old list. The other thing is lots of the games seemingly have, they’ve got like missing images like JPEG not found for their game icon. That can’t be right. That feels like a games console that’s like decaying inside. I’m not sure that they should ever have allowed that to happen. It’s kind of an odd thing where sometimes you’ll download a game and then it will just show you a broken image of something and then you won’t know what it is you’ve downloaded until it’s done and then it’s like, oh yeah, it’s LocoRoco or whatever and you’re like, okay, very strange. That’s odd. Yeah, not to show our hand too much, but we wanted to reflect that in the draft. So we have five bonus categories in this episode that reflect the PSP and PSone lineups on the consoles because we thought that was an important part of us building these hypothetical PS Vita minis, quote unquote, was just to reflect that in some way. So Matthew, as we wrap up before we start going, what do you think the Switch owes to the PS Vita? That so many people refer to the Vita when they talk about the Switch that it has kind of continued on. You know, a lot of people, you know, talked about having like a PC and a Switch and Switch to play this stuff on the go. Maybe it’s a continuation of the relationship that was established by the Vita. So the idea that you can have access to these games on the go is something people now expect. And so the Switch fills that gap. You know, Nintendo and Indies has always been a tricky one. Like, you’ve never really got the sense that they’ve courted them in any sort of substantial way, you know, and that this has maybe been a weird side effect of it being a console that is portable and powerful enough to play these games, rather than necessarily like the thing Nintendo intended. So maybe that’s the biggest debt. I mean, like, one thing I will say that I didn’t like about the Vita, and I still don’t, is just how much cluttered shit there is on there. Like, you go on and there’s always weird apps and you don’t have to use them, but I always felt like it was this very messy kind of reaching for everything. You know, there’s like social apps and music apps and like, are there video apps on there? I don’t really understand this. There’s so many, there’s like an entire screen of icons I’ve never opened, because it just feels like bullshit that was made at a time when phones were becoming more powerful and could obviously do a lot more than just be a phone. And the thing I do like about the Switch is it’s just like games, like nothing else. It’s just paired right back. That seems very dated about the Vita, very messy at least. Yeah, the first screen you see might not have a game on it, or if it does, it’s crammed in the bottom right, but you know, around some other icons. And the little kind of blob interface thing isn’t terrific, is it? It’s like, it’s a bit less elegant than the Switch, for sure. Yeah, but that’s, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s not to knock out, I, you know, like I say, I think, you know, I’d be interested from the developer side if working on Vita created an appetite or opened them up to an audience or just the style of development that then made it very natural to turn this into the Switch. Yeah, I would say as well, like the observation you can make is that because it happened on PS Vita first, this, it happening on Switch seemed more plausible, like it was just, you know, this, there are established indie successes on this, let’s go do this on the console that is most similar to and then like, you know, with the benefit of a much larger audience and so you have these, these indie games become a runaway success and like, you know, if the PS Vita doesn’t happen, would the same thing happen for the Switch? Maybe, but the PS Vita shows you the kind of plausibility of it and I think it just maybe established it just in the kind of mind’s eye of people who are making those kind of games. So, yeah, I think that’s kind of, I think that’s what it owes to the Vita, even though I agree with you that Switch is a stronger console. And like, to pour a bit of shade on the Vita, it is a limited library still. Like whatever way you slice it, no matter, if you talk about indies, visual novels, whatever, it’s still a limited library. Like you don’t have to go down that far to kind of run out to, you know, that far in the kind of Metacritic list to get down to like, you know, 70s and stuff. It’s not, it’s just not a vast library on that console. Did you find that when you were doing the drafting process too? Yeah. I was initially worried because that’s when we were just doing that, I was like, oh, yikes, this is a bit bad. And actually, once we opened up to some extra like PSone, PSP categories, I felt a bit more confident because I suddenly felt like, well, there’s actually like an embarrassment of riches here. And because that is all available now, it all kind of got mixed in. And the end result was, oh, well, there’s, you know, there’s probably 50 amazing games you can play on this thing across three different libraries. And that’s a pretty good hit rate. Yeah, I would say so. So but you’re right. On first part, like the first, not first party, but the purely Vita stuff, it’s pretty rotten. Also for the sake of the draft, because it does rely on indie so much, a lot of these games are readily available elsewhere. Also on Switch now probably, like trying to find actual exclusives, very difficult on this machine. Normally, that comes into play in these drafts quite a lot. The idea of, yeah, but you can play it everywhere else. Do you really need it? And I feel like there’s quite a lot of that with Vita. Yeah, there is. But do you remember when we thought that would be the case with the Weedraft, then it was like people were surprisingly up for Twilight Princess and the like. But yeah, no, it’s a fair point. I thought about it as well. A lot of this stuff is on Switch and arguably is better on Switch because you’ve got that nice big screen. So yeah, you know, completely fair. Last up, then Matthew, before we get into the draft. Do you think Sony should make another handheld? Probably not. I just don’t think they’re in a place to support it. I feel like they’ve got the studio resources to make enough games for their console. I don’t think they can do it again. And arguably, you know, it isn’t the first party games that kind of carried Vita. But first party games can carry a platform. They work their magic for Switch, for sure. And to remove those from the equation and to underestimate how important those are in the grand scheme of things is mad. And I just don’t think Sony had the capability to do it. So I just don’t think they should. Yeah, I kind of wished instead the PS Vita was just perpetually available and that digital store was perpetually available. I wish you could just buy a PS Vita for the next 10 years and like, you know, there’s just a steady supply of them. I know that’s not how electronic supply and demand works. Right. But that would be my preference if it was easy to get one and it was your portal to playing Psone games or PSP games like that, or Persona 4. These are all things that, you know, the Vita excelled at. So I kind of don’t necessarily need another handheld and to be honest, in a wider sense, I don’t think anyone can really afford to make a handheld and a dedicated home console these days. You could argue that Nintendo never balanced it properly, like in terms of the number of games needed to support each platform. I mean, arguably, the DS had the right number, but when you get to the 3DS era, it’s clearly a bit of a strain to go between 3DS and Wii U. Do you agree with that? Yeah, yeah, that’s true. And you know, that’s why they kind of consolidate everything into one and, you know, I mean, that’s the mad thing whenever people talk about how well the Switch does is like true, but you have to remember, they were doing like, you know, better numbers on DS and close to numbers on the Wii simultaneously. Like, there was just a period where they were doing such incredible, incredible business that actually makes the Switch look a bit piddly by comparison. But yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever that that era is just so over. It’s so done. Like, you can tell it’s done because we’ve now fast forwarded into the era of the like the artisan portable, the kind of that thing with the crank or whatever. It’s, it’s like where people kind of, you know, vinyl comes back in a kind of like limited way. It’s, you know, it’s a bit like portables are like dead enough that we’re now reanimating the corpse in weird and wonderful ways. Hey, you know, get me an analog console that can run the PSP, run UMDs, I’ll be there, you know, day one. That sounds good to me. Watching your UMD movies. Watching a series one of Little Britain, Matthew. I was talking to Ben Tyra, formerly of Official PlayStation Magazine, earlier today, in fact, and he was talking about he owned two films. He owned Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Terminator 3. And you’re like, what a weird combination to watch on your PSP. I mean, I like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but the idea of sitting there, like, chuckling away at your PSP is just daft to me. Yeah, I think there was also the entirety of 24 Season 1 was available on UMD. Imagine that was the way you watched it. You’re talking to someone who spent far too many hours trying to rip DVDs onto a PSP memory card. That was sad stuff. Yeah, that’s funny. I only had one UMD, Matthew, it was Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. Like, the most 2005 ass artifact you can possibly think of. So Matthew, on that, let’s have a quick break and we’ll come back and get to the PS Vita Draft, yeah? Let’s do it. Okay, so it’s drafting time, The PS Vita. If you go to Twitter, Back Page Pod, there will be a poll where you can vote on the winner in this draft. The goal is to pick the best selection of games. We’ll take it in turns. It’s a snake draft, so whoever goes first gets one pick. The person who goes second gets two picks, and then it’s two picks until the whole thing is over. We have two different sections here, though. So we have a kind of main section of games, then a separate bonus category section that we’re gonna do afterwards. Matthew, I hope you plotted it that way, too. That’s kind of how we saw it, that the… Oh, so you see that section kicking in after. Yes, yes. Because that’s why I put in the plan, whoever picks first for the main categories has to pick second for the bonus categories. You see, I saw that as like a chaos element where the person who picks second can choose when to introduce the PSP conversation, because they can basically hold the other person off, but your version makes a lot more sense. Well, I figured it bounced out, because like, let’s just get the cards on the table here, okay? There is a big imbalance here with whoever goes first gets the most desirable game on the console. We all know what that game is. We don’t need to say it out loud yet, because it will come up in a second, but there is one game that is the winner of this console. And so when it’s off the board, it arguably becomes more one-sided than previous drafts, which is actually why I’m not like too neurotic about the results of this one, because there’s a certain amount of it that’s out of my hands. But I thought that the bonus category is coming second, and the person who has to pick second for the main categories getting the first pick there, would balance it out a little bit, Matthew. Do you agree with that logic? Okay, that makes sense, actually. Yeah, I thought it was… Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I thought it was gonna be chaos, someone ripping open a portal to PSP land and trying to sow some madness, but I much prefer this version. Yeah, that’s a very stressful version of the draft. You were kind of like… You thought there was gonna… Because there’s like two fronts you’ve got to fight on. Yeah. Like the PSP and the Vita, and I was like, oh man, how am I gonna do this? No, no, I saw it like when we do like the Game Pass Compared to Draft, where we break the bonus section into a second bit. Okay, that, yeah, good. Okay, let’s go through the categories then, Matthew. Is that everything about the rules? Yeah, you vote a back page pod, like I say, and then, yeah, if you wanna chat it out on the Discord about who picked the best stuff, that might be a good thing to do. I assume the banter will be fairly good. So… No, I like the Discord, there’s some good chatter there. And then the section, then the Anything Else channel where they talk about football sometimes, and they just click off. We’re too scared to go in there. Because some sports might happen to us. Okay, the 10 sections here. Okay, category one, shooter. Category two, racing or platformer. Category three, RPG or action adventure. Category four, re-release. Category five, wild card. Category six, indie game. Category seven, puzzle. Category eight, fighting game. Category nine, visual novel or story-centric game. Category 10, free pick. So anything you like from the PS Vita catalog. Has to be, the games have to have been released in either Europe or North America. There’s no Japanese only games we’re procuring here. Had a little look into that side of things and there’s not that much juicy stuff you’re really missing out on there. Not compared to the PSP. So yes, like I say, whoever picks first of the main categories has to pick second for the bonus categories. And those bonus categories are, number one, Psone or PSP RPG. Number two, Psone or PSP Shooter. Number three, Psone or PSP Action Adventure slash Open World. Number four, Psone or PSP Platformer. Number five, Psone or PSP Free Picks. So anything from the Psone or PSP catalogs that are available on either the European or North American digital stores, basically. So there’s an element of real world logic to the picks. Top blind thoughts, Matthew Castle. I’m very scared of a couple of genres. Fighting game, does not make me feel good about myself. Shooter, maybe shooter, no, I mean, you know, we’re obviously dancing around the game, which will be first. I’ve convinced myself that even if I don’t get that game and I don’t have good luck with these tosses, coin tosses at the start, that, sorry, I made it sound like I was referring to the listeners as tosses. I think there’s some like interesting combinations and some like interesting like mini libraries you can kind of build within this console, because there are certain game series that are represented very well across Vita, Psone and PSP. And so there’s an opportunity to actually do quite sort of fun stuff and quite comprehensive stuff. So yeah, I’m kind of, I’ve got quite a few suggestions. I will say, I haven’t played some of these games, so I apologize in advance if I’m a little hazy on some of the details, but I’m going to try and pick things which I honestly feel are either good from experience or I know are good from other people I respect. Yeah, I’ve got like my my upfront 10 picks and like some of my backup picks are all games I’ve played, but there are some backups that I haven’t played at all, so that’s kind of where I’m coming at, coming at it knowledge-wise. And then the PSone and PSP categories is actually much harder in terms of like you’ve just got to kind of narrow down an amazing selection of stuff to just five games. That’s the challenge with that bit, and I’m not convinced I’ve done it perfectly. Obviously, we agree to these categories beforehand. I have veto over them, I feel. But even so, when I get the list through, I do look at it and think, what’s the game here? What’s the angle? What’s he trying to do? What’s he thinking? What’s he thinking with this one? Specifically, PSone, PSP shooter. I’m like, what is going on in there? That’s interesting. So yeah, I’m still a little suspicious of some of them. All right. That’s interesting because that’s one category where I thought, why did I put that in there last night when I was picking for these? And it became a slight headache. But I think I figured out something good for it. So it’s not as calculated as you’d think. I put more effort into the main 10 categories, I would say. Okay. Yeah. And I even made a last minute change because I was a bit worried that one of them was just racing and I thought that’s just too hemmed in, I think. There’s a logic to a lot of these. Yeah, so we’ve got the lovely combo of racing and platforming. Yeah. The other thing is that fighting game is actually a fairly well represented genre on this console. That was part of why I sort of picked it. I just know fuck all about fighting games. It’s where I’m on the shakiest ground and I already know in advance that my pick for fighting game is what’s going to lose me the draft. Oh wow, I’m excited to hear it. But yeah, there’s some good stuff. Each of these genres I just felt like was well represented by the console generally. Then the wild card category for this is arguably an all-timer. That gets you access to a lot of different stuff. There are different ways you can play it. Let’s see if my way pans out, but who knows? It’s all going to come down to this first pick, I think. Let’s do the coin toss, Matthew. Who goes first? Bear in mind, I have won every single coin toss in these drafts to date. Every single one. And whoever gets the coin toss gets to decide who goes first. What would you like, heads or tails? Uh, heads. Tails? Ah, so I’m not the one who gets that game. Unless I think I can do more damage with a second and third pick. Well, maybe you think you can. What do you think, Mr Castle? I’m going to go first. Ha, okay, that makes sense, yeah. I was so expecting to lose that coin toss that I’ve basically built all my thinking around what my second and thirds are. So I’m actually a little sad that that was all for nothing. Yeah, I wonder if my second… Look at me trying to make winning the coin toss make me seem like the underdog still. Classic Matthew Castle strats there. I mean, the other thing is that I wonder if my first two picks will be identical to the ones you picked. Because I think they probably will be. Because I think there’s like a two, there’s two you have to get off the board. But we’ll see, won’t we? Okay. Let’s do it, Matthew. Which category is first? Dun-dun-dun-dun. I’m going to go RPG slash action adventure. I’m going to take Persona 4 Golden. Who could have saw it coming? I mean, wow, what a surprise. What a shocker. This is, of course, the reworked, expanded version of Persona that came to Vita. Arguably puts the icing on an already excellent RPG in the form of Persona 4, but kind of tidies up elements, adds elements. Fattens it out. The interesting thing about Persona 4 is is it’s slightly devalued in a world where Persona 5 exists, to which I would say, no, I replayed this recently on PC, again, which devalues it a little bit, and was struck by how distinct it is from 5 and the fact that it’s set out in the countryside in a small town, it’s got very different energy. I actually think the hook of Persona 4 is better than Persona 5 of the three that I’ve played. It’s the best by far in terms of like, the actual sort of tone that you’ve gone to this small town. There are serial killings happening whenever this mist descends, which also coincides with you getting sucked into this sort of nightmarish labyrinth where you do your Persona RPGing. It’s incredibly stylish, but also steeped in nostalgia. It really makes you want to go and live in the Japanese countryside and have like four very cool friends. Really not get up to much apart from sort of hanging out on little kind of grassy verges and a slightly unimpressive shopping center. It’s just incredibly charming sort of world. I want to get lost in, but also very cool at the same time. Yeah, it just feels like the definitive Vita game. Yep, I completely agree. I think it is the definitive Vita game. I remember when this came out, I think it was published by a fairly small publisher in the UK, like a really kind of small outfit. And then like it just, I think it just sold out over and over again, just became like this enormous ongoing success. And it really like, Persona 3 and like the console released it for had already kind of like made Persona a big deal in North America. But I feel like this is the one that makes it a big deal in Europe as well. It’s like, if you get a Vita, you have to have this. Does look really nice. And like it’s not compromised by being on Vita in the way that Persona 3 Portable was compromised by being on there in terms of presentation. Just looks fantastic. Arguably as well, it’s kind of like, you could put this on Switch and it would look great. But I would say that this is a game that really fits the Vita’s capabilities, screen size. It’s just kind of spot on for it in terms of like how it looks and like, you know, there is a PC version. And I would say, you know, it’s really cool that people can buy on PC and you know, play on the Steam Deck potentially. But God damn, this game is perfect for the console. It’s a perfect match, a match made in heaven, you know? Yeah, even just like, you know, it’s incredibly like sleek and iconic interface. It just really pops on that sharp OLED screen. It’s just a really like dazzling, you’re right, perfectly aimed, perfectly judged game. On PC, it actually like exposes it to be like quite rough around the edges in a way that you simply wouldn’t register when you were playing on Vita. Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, that is the defining pick. Maybe it’ll win you the draft, we’ll see. I don’t know, like I’m very, very attached to my number two pick. Yeah, I’m with you on the small town setting as well. Like I think it’s just like really distinctive compared to like, I think Persona 3 and Persona 5 have similar settings like inner city kind of school settings. I think, you know, the weakness of four, if there is one, is that its dungeons aren’t particularly exciting visually. You know, they’re, am I right in saying they’re randomly generated every time you go in there? But whatever they are, they’re very like tile based, very sparse and they become kind of fully formed, sort of more fully designed levels and places in five. And that is such a huge leap. But mechanically everything else I’d say is here. This game gets on with it a bit faster, a little bit faster than five as well. It’s great, the serial killer stuff is just really good. Like it’s a genuinely compelling whodunit, which obviously earns it brownie points. I love the creepy little that plays whenever like something creepy is happening. And it’s also got that little shopping mall jingle. Yeah, this one is just wormed away in my head. It’s just so fucking rad. Everything’s great at your Juno’s, isn’t it? Yeah. That’s it. Yeah, it’s cute detail. Yeah, good side characters as ever with the Sony. Yeah. I’m just, yeah, fucking rad. Yeah, cool. Yeah, great pick, Matthew. A good start to this draft, I would say. Nice to talk about that game. Yeah, wonderful stuff. So my first pick, gonna do a tiny genre fudge here, Matthew. Gonna take action adventure. I think this is okay. I’m gonna take Tear Away by Media Molecule. I can live with it. I’m sad, because that was my second pick. If there’s another defining Vita game besides PSone, it’s this. This is the defining Sony sort of like exclusive for the platform. So Media Molecule, developers of Little Big Planet, they kind of released this. They released Little Big Planet, and then as a kind of like, I guess, quote unquote side project from their big releases, they do this paper craft style game that I believe was inspired by like little kind of like bits of paper craft that were left around the office by one of the artists. Sort of like platformery, adventure game. And yeah, it’s like delightful. It just uses the Vita in all these different ways. It uses the back touchscreen, the cameras, all this stuff. And the aesthetic is absolutely beautiful. And it has a little bit of the old play, create, share DNA of Little Big Planet by letting you kind of decorate your characters and interact with the world in fun ways. Just really kind of like beautiful. And like, I would say that if you want a kind of, yeah, I’d say like, if you’re getting two games for the Vita, if there were two defining games, Tearaway is the other one. Just a squizzer little game was released, re-released on PS4, I would say, doesn’t quite have the same magic on PS4. You need to have it in front of you and just see how they use the different features of the Vita to get why it’s so perfect to fit for it. The back touchscreen of the Vita, which is like the dumbest function of any machine ever, is really well used in this because you’re sort of almost thumping the world from underneath it to send him like bouncing on drums. And I think your finger can burst through the world. Yeah, that’s my memory is that the finger from behind the screen burst through the world. Yeah, yeah, really nicely done. Yeah, so you got all that married to like a really beautiful looking kind of 3D platform adventure game. Really, really pictures of you as well and uses them in funny ways that you become like the face of the sun and things. Yeah, like me with a triple chin becoming the face of the sun is my memory of this. But yeah, just like again, like felt visually spot on for it. Like it’s a gorgeous looking 3D game. It wouldn’t necessarily be like top of the line technically of like a HD console, but spot on for like what this console can do. I must admit that this for me, like killed Nintendo’s craft based art style games for a long time. Like Paper Mario was suddenly very diminished compared to this. And like the Woolly World and the Plasticine one, they all felt very rough and crude compared to, I thought this was visually so good. Like it’s so convincing. Like even just things that like, there’s a sense that the world, the floor is made of creased paper that kind of crinkles and compresses when you step on it. Like it is such a good eye for detail. It’s my favorite Media Molecule game by an absolute mile. Yeah, I would say that like the sort of level of detail that was put into giving worlds a crafty feel, the idea that materials feel like something is something that LittleBigPlanet did really well and then carries across here. And like because it’s like 3D renders of like 2D kind of like bits of art, I guess, or like bits of paper craft, that just creates a like absolutely gorgeous effect. So yeah, I think it’s phenomenal. And I think that, yeah, you know, I’m gutted about PSone obviously, but like I think this is a kind of second place is still incredibly strong. So no regrets on this side, Matthew, apart from the whole picking the wrong coin toss thing. That’s a regret, I guess. So my second pick, I’m gonna go with category four, re-release, and I’m gonna take Metal Gear Solid HD Collection. Oh, fuck it. Of course you are. Of course you are. Yeah, were those your two picks for the next two categories? Oh, I had, I was planning to do something madder, but I’ll get to that in a bit. Okay, I’ll look forward to that. So there are lots of re-releases on this console of like varying quality, as I mentioned. For example, if you’re going to play like Jak and Daxter, don’t play on the Vita, I would say, it runs quite rough frame rate, it’s not perfect. There’s some God of War games on Vita that I understand aren’t perfect either. So it’s different with this Blue Point developed HD collection of the Metal Gear Solid games 2 and 3. They don’t run out as fast a frame rate as the home console 360 and PS3 versions, but there are no handhelds, modern handhelds where you can play these games otherwise. So I think that makes it a compelling pick for my PS Vita Mini, quote unquote. So yeah, Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3. You got your fucking big shell, slightly boring looking kind of oil rig location and your sort of bizarre bosses and long cut scenes. Then Metal Gear Solid 3, one of the best games of all time with the 3D camera from SubSystems included. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, a churlish part of me thought I could try and hammer this on the fact that it isn’t quite as pretty as the other HD versions of it, but it’s two of the raddest games of all time. Yeah, you’d be mad to argue with it. Yeah, god damn it, god damn it. Yeah, they run really, really nicely, for sure. So I would worry about the whole performance side of it, Matthew. They’re top notch, I assure you. I’ve completed both on there. So what’s your second or third picks? Oh, shit. I tell you what, Tear Away in Action Adventure is really messed me up. That’s really thrown me in Racing Platformer because my backup was weak. Well I think that… Do you think I fudged it too much there by putting in Action Adventure? No, no, not at all. I think it’s fine. I am intrigued by what you could possibly want in that category. Because as far as I am concerned, this machine is a no-go for racing. For me personally. There was nothing I would want. Which either means I have missed something genuinely good, or I am underrating something, you know, some like fucking Sega nonsense or whatever. I am not putting Sonic crappy karting in there, that’s just not my deal. Oh, yikes, what a nightmare, absolutely fucking nightmare, I really resent Persona now. How could the baddies got Persona 4 bitter about his luck? That makes no sense. No, because I want, I actually think 2 and 3 are, oh fuck it. God damn it, right, come on then. There’s so many other categories, Matthew. Yeah I know, but I can’t, like, I feel like I am going to lose my grip on things. Okay, how about this for platformer? Does Gravity Rush count? Yeah, you can have that. Gravity Rush for platformer then, let’s go for it. I’m only picking that now because I fear I’ll run out of other entries. Gravity Rush I own, I’m going to be completely frank, I wasn’t totally in love with it. It never fully clicked. It’s this mad world spinning, kind of perspective shifting, gravity based platformer where you end up sort of walking around sort of inception like worlds where you’re sort of walking on the walls and then upside down on the ceilings. I never quite clicked with it, but it’s very, very distinct. I feel like it does fit the hardware quite well in terms of sort of gyroscopic stuff and whatnot. Do you have much affection for Gravity Rush? I think it’s like a real seven or a six. Like it’s like it looks… Like I think it looks fantastic. Like it looks amazing for the time, but its style of platforming… No, no, I think that like our listeners, a lot of them mentioned Gravity Rush when we were talking about this. Okay. Was it called Gravity Days over here, the original release or I don’t know anyway? So yeah, I think that like it looks fantastic with that cell shader style, beautiful looking city. But like the way she kind of like does those sort of tubular jumps and the kind of navigation of it, just I just couldn’t get on with it really. It just did my head in a little bit. So yeah, that’s me on Gravity Rush, I’m afraid. Well that’s good. So you weren’t ever going to go for it, but fuck it. That’s fine. That’s why I was worried because basically my nightmare was that I was going to end up having like fucking Rayman Legends, the 18th port of Rayman Legends. And I thought I cannot let that be. And I refused to be forced into a corner where I picked one of the bad. Like if there’s a wipeout, I wouldn’t, I do not care for wipeout. I will say in advance. So I have no idea what you’re going to do in there. I’ve actually got two. I’ve got two. I know. So congratulate you because that that Tearaway fucked me up big time. Yeah. To be honest, it’s funny because you’ve got Gravity Rush and Platformer. I’ve got Tearaway and Action Adventure. They should probably be the other way around those two. But I think they balance each other out in terms of fairness. So you know, you jump in Gravity Rush. Yeah, yes. Yeah, it’s true. The whole world is a platform level for you to explore anyway. Anyway, yeah. Oh, Jesus, I’ve made such a pig’s ear of this. And I don’t get a good pick of PSP because I’m fucking second. Well, that is resolutely not true. There’s loads of good stuff you can do in that category. I know, but it feels like king piss. I really do feel like I’ve fucked this. You have to edit some of this doom and gloom out so that people vote for me. But it makes for such good podcasting. Why would you do that to me? You know that this is entertaining, Matthew. God damn it. I just want to wound. I’m trying to pick to wound, but I can’t work out how to do it. For indie game, I’ll take Hotline Miami. Okay, yeah, that’s a wound. The problem with these indie games, they’re available everywhere, but this, I think, is associated with Vita. A lot of people played it there. It’s got the perfect rhythm for kind of pick up and play. I say you want to play in public. The last thing I want someone looking over my shoulder is me like batting in people’s skulls and whatnot. I think they probably get quite sinister sitting next to someone on the tube playing this. I think it’s iconically associated with the Vita to the point that you famously kill someone in The Last of Us 2, who is playing Hotline Miami on their Vita, you hear the quite definitive soundtrack playing, which raises quite an interesting question of when that game was made in the timeline of The Last of Us, because I’m pretty sure by the time Hotline Miami came out in the timeline of The Last of Us, the world had gone to shit, which I like the idea that someone’s like, no, everyone’s turning into mushrooms, but we’ve got to get Hotline Miami out, and that someone would buy PSP Vita in that in that environment. Denaton were just like carrying on under, even though the apocalypse was kicking off, you know. And that’s the idea that like all those years on, like a Vita would still be fine, that it would have like battery life. Trust me, my thing drains like a motherfucker. It is not my console of choice if I was a hoodlum waiting to get shanked. But anyway, let’s not litigate that. Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s short, sharp, nasty, it’s, you know, a game that completely knows what it’s about, incredibly, incredibly satisfying, I mean, it’s it’s kind of doing the John Wick thing, you know, before John Wick was a thing. It’s that kind of incredibly graceful chain of death around the levels. It’s a really sinister, nasty little thing, but also just brilliantly, brilliantly compelling. Yep, this was my defining PS Vita game for sure. I, when I was in 2013, 12 time, my ex girlfriend moved to Worcester and I had to do a three and a half hour train journey there and a four hour train journey back for about two years and it was the most horrible shit in the world. But like Hotline Miami, I played so much of this during that time. It’s not a very long game. It’s always longer in my head than it seems when we play again. But the mixture of music, sound, action, it was just like, you know, if there’s an indie game that appeals to me in that kind of base level, it’s this game. So I think that’s a good pick, Matthew. Really good. That was what I had for this category. So you have managed to wound to be there, which is good. So those are your two picks, right? So you’ve got… Crap, you’re Russian. Hotline Miami. Two very different games. I would say that, like, as a trio, that’s pretty strong so far. I’ve only got two games so far, I remember. Big exclusives. They’re in quite short supply. So I’m trying to get them on there as a bit of a wow factor. Yeah, fair enough. I’m definitely pleased they went with Gravity Rush over Rayman Legends. Right, this is next two for me. Interesting. How to play this. I think I’m going to go Fighting Game. And I’m going to take Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. So this is… It was this or PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, basically. And I admit there’s a novelty factor to that second one of putting it on here. It was a good version of that game, but I think that like this, there’s a few reasons I picked this. It’s not on Switch, this game. So you’ve got to put it on handheld, your Vita is your only choice. Has a massive roster of Marvel and Capcom characters. I think this is considered like the last really, really great entry in this series. Looked absolutely fantastic. And so, yeah, I think I’ve got the only game on PS Vita that features Felix Wright. So good for me. Taking that from Matthew Castle. That feels good, frankly. So you’ve got a really good range of Capcom characters there. You’ve got your beautiful Joe and Dante, Frank West, all these different characters. Chris Redfield, Wesker, Amaterasu, just a massive array of characters with the kind of Marvel line up of the old classics like Captain America, Iron Man stuff, but they added a bunch more like Hawkeye, Ghost Rider, Iron Fist, Doctor Strange. So Rocket Raccoon, slightly before that film came out. So yeah, I think this is like the pick for this category, but it is quite a good genre. There’s some slightly weirder stuff on here. And there’s also that Street Fighter Tekken mashup that’s also on here. So yeah, thoughts Matthew on this one? When I was looking down the list, I recognized a lot of names and, you know, it’s quite rich from, like you say, your quite big mainstream publisher stuff to Blazblue and all that kind of jazz, you know, your anime things. I just don’t have any skin in the fighting game that a lot of it kind of rings false to me, which is why it’s a struggle. But that one feels like a very you pick. Yeah, I think that if you for a fighting game that’s got like the most appeal to like a wider audience, think having all these lovely Marvel and Capcom characters would be the most appealing. I mean, certainly like it was a game I played at the time as a result of the roster. And yeah, so I think that’s a good pick for that category. And you get to put Galactus on trial. Yeah, of course. The old classic. So we got that then for the next category, let’s go Shooter and I’m going to take Uncharted Golden Abyss, a game I slammed three podcasts ago. And we said this would happen, that someone would make the case for why it was actually good. But let’s be honest, this was the flagship launch title for the Vita. It was a brand new Uncharted game, made specifically for this hardware by Sony Benz Studio that were gone to make Days Gone and previously the Seifenfield games. It’s not the strongest of the Uncharted games. It has the motion captured cutscenes, the shooting, all that stuff. But it’s a little bit underpowered after coming from the PS3 ones. But if I was to get a PS Vita Mini, I would want the one Uncharted game on there that I can’t get anywhere else. So, that’s my rationale, Matthew. And yeah, it’s still perfectly solid even with the 10 million mini games you have to rub something on the screen. So, thoughts on this one? Yeah, I… You know how I feel about stenciling. I also hate charcoal rubbing. You know how I feel about stenciling is the most Matthew Castle statement I think I’ve heard of this podcast. That was a callback. It was good. Thank you. I think it’s too compromised for my liking. I always thought this was a game that showed what the Vita could do and also showed what the Vita couldn’t do. It’s a real halfway house. I’m not mad about any of Sony’s attempts to cram their popular licenses onto Vita. I don’t think any of them really land for me, of the ones that I have played. It’s definitely playable, unchartered on the box, I get the appeal. I think we both know though that this is merely fine. I would still rather play it more than Gravity Rush and I bet you would too. No, I love Gravity Rush. The lies are out full force. She flies around on the floor and the ceiling. That is what happens in the game. It’s basically like Sony’s Mario Galaxy. The things that that man will do to win a draft, I mean, wow. It has the same brilliant disregard for Gravity. That’s all I’m saying. Likewise, that’s why Sonic Lost World is one of your favorite platformers, Matthew. Okay, good. Those are my two picks. I’ve got Uncharted, Golden Abyss, Tearaway and Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. So it’s two more Matthew Castle picks now. Very interesting. Very, very interesting. For puzzle game, I’m going to take Lumines Electronic Symphony. Good pick. Yeah, I mean, like, there’s something a bit unsexy about picking a Lumines game. I think, you know, across this library, there are a few ways into this series. But I’ll take this one as, like, the shiniest version. It’s something that really pops on the OLED screen. Again, you know, this is a studio that’s kind of made for gorgeous HD displays. We could argue, you know, endlessly about song lists across the different games, whatever. Fundamentally, this is the same kind of hypnotic block dropping puzzler. The line that always sticks with me is, Chris Donnell has said this several times about this, is that Tetris is a sprint, Lumines is a marathon. I’ve always really liked that idea. It’s something that you lose yourself in for hours and hours, well not hours, potentially hours if you’re good. But it isn’t about the kind of stress of, like, you got to fill these fucking gaps like it is in Tetris. It’s very about, like, vibing with the game, with the music, with the kind of visualizer graphics. Yeah, why not? Lumines, let’s go for it. Also, I just feel like a lot of the other puzzle games are available elsewhere and I don’t necessarily associate them with Vita. There’s one, maybe, but… Yep, that’s fair, yeah. So, yeah, we’ll go with that. I’m pretty sure you’ve said before that you’re not into the whole Mizoguchi thing, but that’s fine, I’ll disregard that remark, Matthew, instead of digging up to smear you. I definitely prefer this to… It’s like res I don’t really click with. These, I think, were on slightly safer ground. I would never use the phrase synesthesia. You wouldn’t be caught dead saying synesthesia. I can barely even pronounce it, Sam, as you just heard. So that’s one of your picks. There’s another one, right? Yeah. For the visual novel story centric game, I’ll go with Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc, which is obviously, it’s basically obnoxious Ace Attorney. It’s like what if Ace Attorney, but even more anime and in a school with just a load of screeching characters, which sounds like a terrible pitch. But what saves it is absolutely ingenious crimes. I’ve said this before. I think the actual crime construction and the complexity of the mysteries in Danganronpa is better than Ace Attorney. I think Ace Attorney’s quite simple mysteries in many ways. These are, these owe more of a debt to the kind of impossible or unlikely crimes of Japanese crime fiction that I’m into. They always sort of go to shit in the last act when they become super anime, but I do like the setup that they’re sort of set in a school populated by characters who all have an ultimate ability and those weird ultimate abilities, so ones like the ultimate detective or the ultimate hacker or whatever, sort of factor into the crimes and how they’re solved. The actual court scenes is like Ace Attorney meets this sort of mad arcade shooter where you’re shooting evidence bullets at the lies. Maybe not for everyone, but this clicked with a lot of people. I think it is best known on Vita, so while available elsewhere, including Switch now. This is just forever associated with Vita for me. For me, it’s between one and three. I think two is a little overrated because it’s got this really horrible sexualized rabbit in it, which I find very off-putting. So yeah, I’ll stick with the original and rabbit free best. Yeah, so this is actually a blind spot for me, the visual novel thing. I was going to use that as a stick to beat you with, that I have four of these games, is it, on my Switch now, and they cost me like 40 quid for all of them. That was pretty good. Yeah, I mean, that is like, you can definitely buy these games for cheaper elsewhere. But yeah, it’s made with Vita in mind, I think. I think it’s a bit like, it was originally a PSP game as well, the first one. I do not know. Yeah, I think it was originally like, maybe Japan only on PSP, but yeah, that’s just from memory. But yeah, so good pick. I think like Hotline Miami, you’re right. This is like closely associated with the Vita. If you want like a vanguard of that whole visual novel genre, this is kind of the one, isn’t it? So that makes sense, Matthew. Yep, I will eventually play this series and have thoughts on it. And when Lucy comes on the podcast, I’m sure she will as well. As long as the thought isn’t, that rabbit’s really hot. Well, even if it is, I wouldn’t say it on this podcast, which as we established, it’s not a horny podcast. Oh yes, you’re not horny on Main. Okay, so can I get away with this for this genre? Got two picks here. So kind of a tough one. Cause I’ve actually got two things I can put in category two, racing or platformer. But it’s which one do I go for? Tell you what, first of all, I’m going to take story, so visual novel or story centric game. And I’m going to take the unfinished one, which is- Yep, it’s a game by Giant Sparrow, the makers of, what have I forgot it? What Remains of Edith Finch. Yeah. It’s their, I think their first game. I think it was released for PS3 originally. They did a version for PS Vita. I think it’s very nicely at home on handheld. A game where you sort of go around learning the story of this king. And then you are kind of essentially painting the environment, like firing different blobs of paint at the environment to kind of interact with the world and make the story kind of continue. The story goes to some interesting places. And then arguably has some strong connections to Edith Finch that you can spot in that game. Kind of like, I picked this because I don’t feel like I’m on side ground with visual novels to just pick one out of nowhere, like your Steinsgates and the like. And I also did want to pick something that was readily available on Switch, like Grim Fandango, for example, is on here. Or the Telltale games, I think, like The Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead are on here. But I thought, again, you probably want to play those elsewhere and import your saves onto the next seasons of those. So the unfinished one felt like a good compromise, a PlayStation exclusive story-centric game by a developer of a true kind of modern storytelling classic that people might have missed, Matthew. Thoughts on that one? Yeah, I mean, a really nice case for this one. And you’re right, I think if you picked, I would have been disappointed if you’d picked one of the Telltale games. Like there’s something disappointing though. I was looking at lists of like 10 best Vita games on like big gaming sites. And like when one of them is The Walking Dead, you’re like, really? Like, this is as good as it got, you know? Come on. That doesn’t feel right to me. Yeah, so yeah, distinctly Vita thing, a good pick. Okay, cool. And next up, I’m going to go for free pick. And I wonder if you’d have guessed I’d pick this. I’m going to take XCOM Enemy Unknown Plus. I didn’t even look at this. Yeah, so I picked this because I think XCOM Enemy Unknown, which this version features content from Enemy Within as well, despite the name. The Firaxis Reboot of the XCOM series that kind of like brought a new control scheme to this series to make it very accessible for newcomers. This game is not available on Switch. It’s available on iOS and stuff, which it is a good iOS port, but I think on a handheld, this would be right at home. I really love the kind of vibe of this game, like the kind of going into small American towns feel of it and then like poking around till the aliens appear, the tension of it, as opposed to the kind of more of an adrenaline rush approach the genre taken with XCOM 2. So I think that it works really, really well. Just a kind of simplicity to Enemy Unknown that I love. Perfect to play for about half an hour then save it and kind of move on. So thoughts, Matthew? Great pick and I love the game. I must admit, I don’t know the Vita version. I don’t know how well it runs or works or whatever, but you know, if it’s great, it’s a game I would fully enjoy having on the move, so yeah. Yeah, it’s slightly a weird one because it kind of released in a sort of like, it released like in 2016, I think, it was out years after the original and it just sort of came out of nowhere. Maybe it may seem like a slightly weird pick, but I didn’t have anything I thought was more compelling for the free pick category. So that was kind of why I got this one off the board. But yeah, I’m very, very fond of Xcom Enemy Unknown. So yes, that’s mine. Your next two picks, Matthew? For Wildcard, I’m going to take Persona 4, Dancing All Night. Wow, OK, yeah, completely the Persona 4. Would have been weird if I’d have picked that, but not had the other one. But yeah. Well, I was fully planning to take it if you did pick Persona 4, which is what made me think about it. And actually, it’s a game that hones in on one of my favourite bits of Persona, which is the music. It’s a dancing game. I wouldn’t say like, you know, it’s not the most sort of complicated or maybe sort of accomplished rhythm game. Like there are maybe better technical rhythm games available, but I think a lot of them are sort of vocaloid type things. And that’s not really my bag. I didn’t really feel like I could talk about that on this podcast without getting severely burned by you. True. Yeah, I’m going with this because what it does have is the incredible Persona production values. It’s got all the characters you love on Persona for. So in my head, you’re going to play the game because obviously it’s on my Vita. Need I remind you. You’re going to fall in love with all these people. And then you’re going to get to spend some more time in a not as good story mode, but a story mode nonetheless. Dancing away, looking at the mad graphics. I mean, ironically, you’re too busy focused on hitting button cues to actually enjoy the quite incredible production values of this game. But so it goes in in music games. Yeah, I just think this is this is going to be a really fun, like one to punch. Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s a good choice. I didn’t even really think about this as a pick, to be honest. Like, yeah, I suppose that like there is, yeah, there is an argument to having both. If you’re a Persona fan, you’re offering that completionist angle, Matthew. Yeah, good, good. Not a series I’ve ever played, really. Is there like, there’s like another spin off of Persona, right? Is there a fighting game series? Yeah, there’s a fighting game. There are also on Vita music games based on 3 and 5, which by all accounts aren’t as good. They’re just not the full package. It’s more like, they’re almost like glorified expansion packs. It’s just like, here’s some music that you dance to. But this one is like the full deal. Good stuff. So what’s your next pick, Matthew? For re-release, I’m going to take Final Fantasy X and X-2 HD Remaster. This is a podcast where I’m not like a huge Final Fantasy guy compared to you. But I have played this one. I’ve played X anyway. I played it through with Catherine. We played it through on PlayStation where it’s available, you know, probably a sharper version. But these are two really good… I’ve played X, I haven’t played X too. X is a really neat story, really great characters. You get to go on a real little trip with them. I actually think the way the story is structured in that it’s quite a little linear path, with little story bytes along the way, makes it actually a reasonably decent choice for portable play. Like it feels not something that you necessarily need to lose, you know, hours and hours and hours in a massive session. I think you can dip into this. I think it is friendly. I think Final Fantasy is so associated with Sony. I wanted some Final Fantasy on my console. Obviously, you have a lot of roots into it on PSP and the Psone games. But this one is quite sexy. Plus, it is two games for the price of one. So, yeah, let’s get it done. Yeah, I did play this when I finally did replay Final Fantasy X and they did the HD version. Are you about to tell me it is fucked on Vita? No, no, it is really good on Vita. It is like better on Vita than like Enemy Unknown Plus is on Vita. Like it is like really quite neatly calibrated for it. The menus and stuff and the performance is really, really good. It is like the full game, it is the full game, looked fantastic. What I will say is you can get this exact same collection on Switch and it looks just as nice. Yeah. Yeah, so that is the one downside, but it was my second pick and Final Fantasy X is one of my favourite games of all time. So yeah, you will get no arguments from me there. My original plan, when I went second, obviously there was Tearaway, but my vindictive move was to take Metal Gear for Action Adventure and this for Rerelease and then see what you did in Rerelease. Yeah, it would have been tough for sure. I mean, there’s two God of War games collection. Yeah, that’s true. I also could have got away with Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 or XCOM, Enemy Unknown Plus and that kind of thing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true, but I was thinking about the vindictive plays. I’ve got to respect that, you know, that’s solid. Yeah, okay, Final Fantasy X and X-2, yeah, I thought these are great on Vita, really, really good. Oh, well that makes me feel even better about my choice. Like I say, we played them on PS4, but I haven’t played X-2. Is it worth playing? Worth good. Is it worth playing? I would absolutely love to know what you think of it, Matthew. Like it would make for such good podcast content for you to play that game for the first time and report back. Like if Catherine could action that, that would be terrific, because I would have a good time as a result. Just because it’s like, I’m sure you know about the tonal changes they made with it. Like it’s a bit more kind of anime targeted at young girls, which is not a stick I would use to beat it with. I think that’s a perfectly fine approach. But it just means it’s so different to 10 that I found it a bit off putting at the time. But now I kind of see the mirror of it a bit more. But I would love to know what you think of the Massage minigame, for example. That sounds grubby as hell. Okay, good. So there, good picks there, Matthew. I think you might actually be doing pretty well here. It’s pretty decent. Yeah, you’ve had so surprised. Yeah, sorry about that. Okay, I’ve got another slight genre fudge here, right? For puzzle, I’m going to take the game Sound Shapes. Do you know this game? Yeah, I think I have played it, in fact. I think I can just about get away with this for puzzle. It’s kind of like, yeah. So it’s a kind of puzzly platformer game where you basically have to hit points in a map to kind of generate music made by the developer, Jessica Mack, and was part published, sorry, part developed by Sony Santa Monica, as they would do at the time, like they did with Journey, I think. So yeah, it’s a game where you hit these no’s to activate music, and you try and navigate these environments where you kind of play a little fried egg man, I would say, like a little fried egg ball thing. And it’s about using your momentum to like get over the next jump and then like switching between like light and dark to stick to different bits of the environment to kind of navigate it. Almost reminds me a bit of Box Boy crossed with Loco Roco, Matthew. Yeah, sort of in that ballpark, but has really fucking rad music. That’s the thing with them, Jessica Maxx games, just the music is fantastic. So yeah, I think it’s a slight fudge for this puzzle. But I think this is like a real treat that makes more sense on Vita than it does on PS4, which is somewhere else you can play it. Thoughts Matthew? Yeah, yeah, that does. That sounds absolutely fine to me. In my head, I group this in with the kind of Loco Roco kind of Patapon kind of branch of sort of weird shape based music platformer things. Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. Yeah, I’m very, very fond of it. And like, I did also have this category had Fez and Thomas Was Alone. Yeah, those were the two I had. Is Thomas Was Alone actually good? Yeah, it is. That is a good game. Also a defining Vita indie game, I think, like, definitely like one I remember breaking out on Vita a little bit. And then, you’re not a fan? I don’t know. I did enjoy it. But sometimes I do think isn’t this just a load of jumping boxes with Danny Wallace on top? Yeah, but like, this is also, you’ve got to put it in the context of the indie movement at the time. Like, this, there wasn’t anything like this around at the time, you know? It was like, and it was a new kind of, it was just a different age, I would say. Yeah. I just think the central thing of it isn’t that interesting. Yeah, but it’s a bit, there are shapes that jump with different, like, behaviours, but yeah. Yeah, again, like, I kind of feel like it’s, Boxboy is a little bit similar to this as well in some ways. Yeah, yeah, and you are right in that it’s, of its era, it’s a big, you know, it’s sort of blockbuster indie, if that makes sense. What I will say is sound shapes, I think, like, stands to test the time really nicely. Like, I played this yesterday to make sure that I, you know, still believe that this is very good. The music is fantastic, and it’s like a level designer function built in as well. You can build and share levels, not sure if you still can, but that was really good. Make your own music and make people play the levels to interact with the music. Just great stuff, really. Really kind of complete. And I think that even if people don’t know it, I think they would really appreciate discovering it on this console. So yeah, that’s that one. And I’ve got one other pick. Let’s just like upset Matthew Castle by picking Wipeout 2048 for racing or platformer category two. I think this is fantastic. So what is different about this Wipeout game, which has never been really released on other formats, kind of a common theme with a lot of the stuff I’ve picked for this Vita, is that it is set in a more contemporary setting, but with the kind of like Wipeout-y kind of vehicles, floating vehicles and combat. So you get these quite real world locations with like, they’re rammed with detail, just look fantastic while you’re kind of doing this high speed Wipeout action. And it has like multiple routes to the levels as well, different kind of paths you can take. Really, really impressive. Another visual showcase for this console. I feel like I wonder if I maybe should have picked something more indie there, but I feel like I feel like this is compelling to a certain generation of PlayStation gamers. There’s a little bit of swinging for the popular vote here, but I do think it’s legit good. And I’m not like massive on all of the Wipeout games, but this and Wipeout HD, I’m a kind of huge fan. And I think that just playing it, it feels like the most contemporary of those games. It doesn’t feel like you’re constantly dinging into the sides and getting messed up, which is how I kind of remember Wipeout in my head a little bit, a little bit gentler, a little bit more up to date. Thoughts, Matthew? I don’t really like Wipeout and this isn’t this isn’t like a particular dig at this. This one, I think the reasoning sound, I just don’t like Wipeout. It’s sort of boring, F-Zero. Like when it first turned up, I think the culture and the style it was tapping into was like five years too old for me, you know, like I was like 14 or whatever when this first came out and it felt like the, you know, the music was trying to tap into whatever was going on in sort of dance music at the time. Like this, I can’t even talk about it eloquently because it’s such a scene which is not in my wheelhouse. This is so aimed not at me. This was aimed at people who were like 18 to 21 when it first came out and students and I just was, I was too young and I’ve just never, my life has never crossed over with Wipeout where it has made sense for me, but a big exclusive, like you say, very shiny Sony people like it, I guess, so they keep making them so. They actually haven’t made one for 10 years now, it’s been a long time. This was the last one, I think. So yeah, but it’s got long loading times, that’s the bad thing about it. But it looks fantastic, like one of, it’s probably technically the best looking game I’ve played on the console, so yeah, it was between this and a slightly pared down version of Need for Speed Most Wanted by Criterion, which was also very technically impressive, but because this is made for the hardware and I think it’s a bit more PlayStation, I ultimately went for it, Matthew, so yeah. Just give me basically 30 F-Zero characters who are basically sitting in varying colours of rectangles, cubes flying around a big blue hand any day of the week, that’s what I say. Are you going to take that Wipeout fans? Vote Samuel Roberts on BackpagePod on Twitter. Oh yeah, listen, if you like Wipeout, please vote for Samuel because we will never be on the same page. Okay, amazing stuff. I am quietly confident we are not a big Wipeout podcast. That’s probably fair. So Matthew, we’ve got two more picks from you, right? Yes, at least my last two. No, you’ve got one more after that, right? Yeah, yeah, god, there’s so many picks. For free pick, I’m going to take Zero Escape, the nonary games, which is the double pack of the first two Zero Escape games, 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward, which are the first two parts of an amazing trilogy. The third part is also on Vita. I haven’t taken that. It’s arguably the weaker of the parts. They are readily available everywhere else. They’re technically DS games, the first two, I’d say. The first one definitely was started on DS, but they’re a really, really compelling mixture of visual novel and puzzle game, where you’re locked in these sort of games of death. It’s all a bit sore. There’s like a strange puppety figure giving you instructions. You’re stuck with quite unlikely anime characters. So a bit like, much less obnoxious though than Danganronpa. And then you solve kind of locked room mysteries, sort of point and click adventure puzzles in between the visual novel segments. Between these two, they’re some of the best thriller writing in any video games. I think that it’s only sort of been downhill from there for the guy who made them. He did that World’s End Club recently and AI The Somnium Files, which I actually liked, but nowhere near as good as these. This is just a Matthew Castle heart choice. I love these weird Japanese puzzle thrillers. I’m going to fill up my Vita with that goodness. This is, again, an angle I can’t really hit with the Vita. It’s arguably the weakness of my list, but I don’t know. I’ve always heard these are very good, Matthew. I always get them mixed up with Danganronpa in my head. I’d honestly be lying if I said these are the natural home of them or that they are associated with them. They are not considered Vita classics. 2 and 3 are maybe more readily associated with them. I played 2 on 3DS. They’re available on PC. You’ll be able to play them on Steam Deck, I guess. I don’t think they are available on Switch. No, I don’t think so. It does make them, I would say, more compelling as a pick. Yeah, a little bit more. They’re just a really great pair of games. And once you’ve played them, you won’t be able to play the third one on my Vita, so you’ll just never know how the story ends, so enjoy that. Tough shit, Matthew Castle. Okay, so have you got another pick? Yes, I have. Let me just… Shhh. Matthew said, I go, what are the visual novels? Can I stuff onto this thing? I mean, I think in the Venn diagram of our listeners and visual novel fans, there would actually be quite a lot of crossover. Oh yeah, for sure. That’s why I think it’s like a strong angle of attack for you. So you know, it’s fine, but don’t worry, I will mess this up. For shooter, I’m going to take, I don’t know if this is pronounced, TXK, T times K. Llamasoft, Jeff Minter’s sort of Tempest-Me-Do thing. This Tempest-Me-Do like, sort of like, Metroidvania as a genre classification. I mean, so close that they sort of legally stopped the other ports of this, and he worked on, I can’t remember what they called it in the end, was it Tempest 4000 or something? I’m pretty sure Vita is the only place you can play the game that is called TXK or Team Times K. This is going to be like a real Marmite choice for some, like you are either big into the Jeff Minter thing or you aren’t, which is sort of like wireframe graphics with incredible arcade hecticness smeared over the top. They’re very, very pure games, they’re mechanically very pure, they’re very tightly tuned, they’ve obviously tap into this great arcade heritage, but they are also quite like nightmarish if you aren’t into that thing because it just throws all this shit at you. It’s like being stuck inside a music visualiser at times and I, you know, I know lots of people who bounce off this isn’t, I’m pretty sure there was the famous, someone gave like space giraffe like one out of ten. The Rings of Bell, The Rings of Bell, yeah. Like I swear one of the big sites took a big old shit on something which lots of people absolutely love and revere and it’s like one of their infamously misjudged scores. Right. It’s a bit like The God Hand, whatever, three or whatever it was. I know people who are much more into the Jeff Minter thing than I am. I can still appreciate this and like this. I won’t lie, I was looking at other shooters, Killzone Mercenary, I simply cannot endorse a Killzone game even though it is quite pretty and it plays nice enough. I just, Killzone, I just cannot be part of that. Actually, I take that back, I may be part of it later. Interesting. Maybe. I want to say I’m not into Killzone, but I reserve the option to maybe be a bit into Killzone, should the need arise. Matthew really did struggle with that PSP shooter category, clearly. It’s an unbelievable fucker. I was also sort of tempted by Super Stardust Delta, the house mark, sort of, well, it’s unfair to call it like, geometry wars because I imagine it, does it predate it or does it come at the same time? I think it comes slightly after, slightly after. Okay, but you’re, you know, you’re just sort of zipping around a big 3D orb, blasting retro things into loads of particles. These are games which really fizz and come alive on PS4, but as a Vita thing, very, very attractive. I quite liked it. But no, I thought, let’s go with this. You can only play it on Vita. Let’s get a bit of Minter on there because, you know, what a name to put on the box. So, I do understand just reading about it in the background, Matthew, that Tempus 4000 is basically this game, but re-released in other formats. But I suppose, like, you can say the only version of this game, like, technically is on this console. So, that is, you know, that’s good. Maybe I oversold the exclusivity is the reason I picked this. I picked it because it is the shooter I have the most affinity with. Did you think about the Velocity games at all? They kind of crossed my mind. Yeah, I’ve played a bit of the second one. Yeah, they are good. The whole switch in between scrolling shooter and platforming things really, really neat as well. Yeah, that would have been a good shout, but, you know, I’m going for this because if anything, it will earn me Rich Stanton’s vote. That is what matters, ultimately. But will he even listen to this because he’s so busy playing Elden Ring? It’s a good question. That’s what I’m gambling on here. Okay, so, yep. Good stuff, Matthew. Should we recap where we’re at so far? Yeah. Cool. I’ll just read mine and you read yours, yeah? Cool. Yeah. Okay, yep. So, so far, I’ve got for shooter, I’ve got Uncharted Golden Abyss. For racing or platformer, I’ve got Wipeout 2048. For RPG or action adventure, I’ve got Tearaway. For re-release, I’ve got MGS HD Collection. For puzzle, I’ve got Sound Shapes. For fighting game, I’ve got Ultimate Marvel versus Capcom 3. And for visual novel or story-centric game, I’ve got The Unfinished Swan. And for free pick, I’ve got XCOM, I mean, I’m Unknown Plus. How about you, Matthew? It’s a strong line-up, isn’t it, when you say it all like that? Sounds alright, doesn’t it? Yeah, it does. Oh, tough, tough break, Uncharted. You’re up against T times K for shooter. For racing platformer, I’ve got Gravity Rush, my favourite. For RPG, action adventure, I’ve got Insert Heavenly Angelic Noises, Persona 4 Golden. For re-release, I’ve got Final Fantasy X, X2, HD Remaster. For wild card, I’ve got Persona 4 Dancing All Night. For indie game, I’ve got Hotline Miami. For puzzle, Luminaire’s Electronic Symphony. For visual novel slash story-centric game, I’ve got Danganronpa, Trigger Happy Havoc and for free pick, Zero Escape, the nonary games. Nice. So, quite fairly close, I would say. Yeah, slightly different vibes. Yeah, I would say so, for sure. Mine is quite nerdy and dweeby. I wonder if both of us have missed the indie element of the console a little bit. But it’s hard to… I just felt… There were a lot of them. I was like, eh, I can play it everywhere else. It just didn’t seem as exciting to me. Yeah, they’re just on Switch, most of them. That’s the thing. The vast majority of them are just on Switch now. So it is tough. But yeah. I’d say there’s still another biggie, which I would say is very Vita-centric. Yeah, sure. So my next two picks, yeah? My final two picks, in fact. So for indie game, I’m going to take Spelunky. Oh, interesting. That wasn’t what I was thinking about, is it? What was it you were thinking? Undertale. Oh, yeah. Again, that’s on Switch though, isn’t it? I suppose Spelunky is too, but like, yeah, I don’t know, Undertale is just so widely available. I can’t think of it as a PC game as well, but anyway. Okay, yeah, I don’t know why. That just crossed the line into Vita Land for me. It is on, like, whenever you look at the best sellers on Vita, it is always very high, but no, I got with Spelunky because I think that, like, in terms of a kind of pick up and play sort of game, like, this is kind of what I loved about the indie games on Vita. It’s a lot of them were like repeatable experiences like Hotline Miami, where I just, it’s kind of an arcade-y vibe, you know, and so obviously, Spelunky is kind of a rogue-like kind of like side-scrolling platformer, kind of dungy navigation sort of game with like a big sort of for a long time had like a daily challenge element. Obviously, you won’t get that on the Vita, but it’s a very deep and rich game and just incredibly addictive and well done and kind of perfect for the format in question. Were you a big Spelunky guy, Matthew? Fair. Yeah. So, like a really influential rogue-like game. I wanted Hotline Miami. I’m still happy with Spelunky. I just remember like when people were talking about indie games on Vita, this is one of like the core, core techs as it were. And yeah, I say, well, yeah, original Spelunky. Let’s go. That’s my indie game. I went on holiday once with Tom Francis when Spelunky was not yet exploded and he played Spelunky on his laptop the whole holiday. And that isn’t a dig or anything, because I spent the whole holiday playing Dragon Quest on DS and annoying the shit out of everyone with Tavern music. It was quite a cursed holiday at Ninesite. My friend Martin ate so… We had an eclair sucking competition in the car, but Cadbury’s eclair sucking competition and one of his teeth rotted away. Wow, I’m so sad I wasn’t there. To this day, he’s still cross about it. Like it wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I’ll always remember that as the Spelunky holiday and the holiday where Martin’s mouth fell apart. Okay, good. Well, there’s a good talking up of my pick. There’s a little bit of anecdotal action for you. Yeah, I appreciate it. Okay, my final pick is Odin Sphere. How do I pronounce this? It’s Leif Thrasir on PS Vita, of course, on PS Vita, they all are. So this is a re-release, a remake of what I think is a PS2 vanilla ware cult classic. The vanilla ware, of course, made 13 Sentinels, kind of big modern sort of culty game. This is a kind of a side scrolling action RPG, like really kind of like beautiful looking kind of like anime graphics. I absolutely adored this on PS2, that they brought it to Vita, looking even nicer, even sharper, and a big vanilla ware sort of like representation generally on this console, but another kind of one of the odd things about it, I suppose. But yeah, I really kind of love this as a kind of like 2D side scrolling kind of beat em up take on an RPG. I think people would really appreciate discovering it on here if they haven’t already. You can play on PS4, but it’s not on Switch or anything. So I personally think that the art style for this really beautiful looking game is spot on for Vita. So if I want to offer people something slightly unusual, but definitely acclaimed, 93 on Metacritic, this one, then here we go. It’s Odin Sphere. Just don’t make me say the last bit of the part of the title. It’s just, let’s just say Odin Sphere, but yeah. So yeah, so any thoughts on that one, Matthew, do you ever play this? No, I haven’t. I did contemplate Muramasa for this, which is also VanillaWare, correct? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, good run for them on this console. They’re very well suited, their art style and their, I guess, technical requirements were very well suited to Vita. So yeah, I’m not surprised to see them popping up somewhere in this draft. Indeed. So we’re on to your final pick, Matthew, which I cannot wait for this pick. Let’s see what happens. It’s a fighting game. And I thought, listen, I’ve got to be true to myself. I thought, is there a single fighting game on this thing that I have played and I like? So I’ve picked, I’m going with, Nidhogg. Oh, okay. Yeah. Interesting. Um, maybe not the natural home of it, but it has got, I believe, a mode where you can play it two players on one Vita. Has it really? Yeah, I believe so. Okay, that’s interesting. I mean, Sam’s awful. Could you play it online originally, did that close down as a feature? Yeah. But let’s, I mean, can you play this machine online? I’m guessing. Okay, great. Well, that’s good. But listen, it’s the little sword fighting game where two, like, jelly babies sort of get each other and then all kinds of stuff sprays out. Now, this pure nostalgia pick, this was quite big in the office for a while, PC gaming used to play it and scream Nidhogg at each other, which is probably why it’s sort of embedded deep in my psyche. Sounds annoying. It sounds annoying, honestly. You wouldn’t have liked it. You were right when you took over PC gaming to shut down fun. Brutal. No, you guys were into more sophisticated things. I just remember, because it’s so simple, people have that sort of mania where they become attached to weird techniques in it and they started giving nicknames to things. I remember there was a tactic where you could crawl along the floor by tapping down a lot and you’d shuffle along. Owen, then web editor on PC Gamer, thought he looked like a wildebeest and he kept shouting it’s the wildebeest every time he performed his weird move. So for those two absolutely baffling anecdotal reasons, that’s now one of the ten Vita games I’ve decided to save. It was a good suggestion. You managed to get yourself out of the corner where you had to pick a game that you had no interest in and I respect that. I may have asked around the office today what’s a good fighting game for this, which someone said isn’t that cheating, and I was like I don’t get into like the weeds of what is and isn’t cheating in the draft, I mean come on, nobody cares. Like yikes. You’re more worried about the rules than I am. And people in the office tried to convince me to pretend that I liked Skullgirls, whatever that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, reclaimed. But I didn’t know if that was actually just setting me up and it’s actually some kind of sort of incredibly raunchy anime fighter. Did you not just Google it and find out? I had a sandwich to eat, didn’t I? Yeah, sort of like Southern Fried Chicken and lettuce and mayo sandwich, if I’m not mistaken. Bingo! If I’d put my hands on that keyboard, they wouldn’t have been touching my Southern Fried Intermezzo again. So Nidhogg, it is. I hope it plays well on Vita because it’s now one tenth of what you can play on Vita. Okay. Well, that’s good, Matthew. We have wrapped up the main draft bit, so let’s just recap. So for category one shooter, I’ve got Uncharted Golden Abyss. I’ve got TxK. For category two racing or platformer, I’ve got Wipeout 2048. I’ve got Gravity Rush. Category three RPG or action adventure, I’ve got Tearaway. I’ve got Persona 4 Golden, Clash of the Titans. Category four re-release, I’ve got Metal Gear Solid HD Collection. I’ve got Final Fantasy XX2 HD Remaster. For category five wild card, I’ve got Odin Sphere Leaf Thrasser. I’ve got Persona 4 Dancing All Night. Category six indie game, I’ve got Spelunky. I’ve got Hotline Miami. Category seven puzzle, I’ve got Sound Shapes. I’ve got Luminesse Electronic Symphony. Category eight fighting game, I’ve got Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. I’ve got Nidhogg, Home of the Wildebeest. Category nine visual novel or story-centric game, I’ve got The Unfinished Swan. I’ve got Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc. Category ten free pick, I’ve got XCOM Enemy Unknown Plus. I’ve got Zero Escape, The Nonary Games. Okay, let’s get to the bonus categories then, Matthew. So we’ve got five here. We’ve got across Psone and PSP. They have to be available on either the European or American digital stores. And yes, I get to pick first from these. So we’ve got Psone or PSP RPG for number one. Number two is Psone or PSP Shooter. Number three is Action Adventure or Open World. Number four is Platformer. Number five is free pick. So, yes. So you start this with one pick? Yeah, that makes sense, I think. Maybe we should just do one pick each in this one? Yeah, let’s just go one one. Yeah, there’s not that many of them, is there? So, yeah. So I’m going to go first. Going to take category three, Action Adventure, Open World. I think it makes sense for this one. I’m going to take the original Metal Gear Solid. So you get the first three games in this series on my Vita. There are so many good games to pick in these five categories from across the digital archives. That’s why I make the point about the Vita being, you know, I think beloved as much for being a retro console as it is for being a phenomenal, kind of like indie machine or whatever. But yes, Metal Gear Solid. I played the original Metal Gear on Vita many times. Looked fantastic. Still looks fantastic. Can’t play on any other modern handhelds. Metal Gear Solid is a classic, Matthew. And I have all three of them on this Vita, which feels great. Congrats. That’s what I was talking about, trying to build a fun little library. Yep. That was the play, I think. So yeah, Metal Gear Solid. What’s your first pick, Matthew? I’m going to go for RPG. I’m going to take Persona 3 Portable. Similar tactic, I see. Yeah. I’m just trying to round out my collection. Now I’ve got to say I haven’t played the PSP version of this. I know that it comes after Persona 3, but it isn’t held in as high regard. It isn’t a golden slash royal style do-over. If anything, it’s slightly crushed down. Instead of the maps to navigate, it’s reduced to static art and clicking on menus. Still has the character, still has the story. It adds a female protagonist, if you’d rather play as her rather than the guy. So you can see a girl shooting yourself in the head a lot, because that’s how they summon their personas in this. That isn’t just me being weird. But at its heart, it still has all the great persona action you like. I’m pretty sure it has some of the mechanical gubbins added for Persona 4 brought into this. So it’s a little bit more canically, it’s probably the fullest version of Persona 3, which may be balances out the absence of the full world experience. But I’m confident in having 3, 4 and a weird-ass dancing game. Yeah, that’s a good pick. I would say that even with the compromises, it’s still well worth playing. You get the full story content in it and stuff. It is mostly navigation, the compromises. Yeah, I have this on my PS Vita as we speak. It’s a terrific little game and it goes for a pretty penny these days, the physical version. So yeah, people want that UMD. So yes, good pick, Matthew. That’s lots and lots of persona and no stealth on your PS Vita. Okay, interesting. So next up, I’m going to take the platformer category, category 4, and I’m going to take Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Oh, interesting. So wanted a bit of variety here. This is another game that is not available on the Switch as we speak. It’s on some other modern formats like PS4. It was originally released on Psone, of course, which is the version you’re getting here. Just a gorgeous looking Psone original. You know what it is, go through a castle, then it turns upside down or something, something like that. I’m not as experienced with Castlevania as Matthew, but I still think it’s a good pick. Thoughts, Matthew? That’s what happens when we record this podcast. We get halfway through, then I turn upside down every week. That’s why the second half was always less coherent. That is what happens though, right? Yeah, you do the castle and then it’s like, surprise, you’ve got the castle to do again. It’s pretty cool, pretty cool twist that. I think this is another one that I always put on my PSP, on my PS Vita just from my PS3 archives. Just having this one, an all-time Castlevania classic on the go, seems like a good fit. What’s your next pick, Matthew? My next pick is, for Action Adventure, I’m gonna take Resident Evil 2. Oh yeah, good pick. I’m only taking this because it is a pain in the ass to kind of get these days. I know because I was trying to play it before the remake came out, sort of refresh myself and in the end, I had to like reset my PSP to the US store because you can’t buy it in the UK store. And just outside of PSP, it’s not readily available unless there’s a really mainstream way of forgotten. Don’t think there is, no. I can’t think of one, no. Not legally anyway. Nah. And that’s what we’re all about. Yeah, I mean, it’s Resident Evil 2, isn’t it? It’s classic, it still holds up. Like I said, I played it before the remake. I think the remake, you know, while stunning changes a lot of stuff that the original still 100% has a lot of quirks, a lot of weird stuff, which isn’t, if anything, it’s an even more valuable companion piece to see what didn’t make the cut and compare and contrast. Yeah, and it’s Resident Evil 2. It’s an absolute classic. I still to this day remember the first time I ever saw Resident Evil 2, which was on some Channel 4 show and they showed a little clip of the zombies coming out of the mortuary body containers, whatever they’re called, the morgue kind of war and thinking that’s like the scariest thing in the world, people coming out of those things. I can’t imagine a game that is that scary. And then I got to play it in the librarian’s office when her son was sick, a story I’m sure I’ve told on this podcast before. Her ill boy, his suffering was our game. Yeah, but now I needn’t rely on the librarian’s boy anymore because I have it on my Vita. Her ill boy, amazing. My sick boy. Yeah, a really good pick. I don’t think the existence of the new remakes have replaced these by any means. If anything, you kind of missed a very specific type of scares these gave you in terms of perspective and stuff. And I will vouch for the pre-rendered backgrounds on Vita look fantastic. They’ve stood the test time really well. I played the original Rezzy recently after we did our Rezzy episode. And just because I was least experienced with the original Rezzy on PSone, and yeah, they are perfect for the Vita. Just that screen size is spot on. Good pick, Matthew. So we can pick games that have been delisted, right? Because you did that for Danganronpa. Yeah. Yeah, okay, cool. Okay, so my next one isn’t actually delisted, but it’s my free pick, category five. I’m gonna take Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker. Completed the whole set on here that you can actually get on PS Vita or PSP minus the Metal Gear Acid games, which are not released digitally for whatever reason. That seems bizarre to me. But Peace Walker is an absolutely jam-packed, kind of like Monster Hunter infused, a little bit. Kind of readily available in co-op local multiplayer PSP game. So yeah, and I think that it’s got such close ties to the Phantom Pain in terms of story that it’s worth having for that. But it’s also just very well regarded. Kind of like take enemies out, send them back to your base. All those mechanics from Phantom Pain start here. You can play this on Xbox One backwards compatible. But again, there isn’t a contemporary handheld that can play it. I’m bringing all the four of these Metal Gear games to my PS Vita Mini. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, it’s got a robot that sings. It’s got like an AI core that goes la. That’s what I remember about this game. Also a bit where you have to find some birds and take pictures of some birds. There’s some quite strange side quests in it, like little quests and things. I’ve never played this co-op, but again, to drop a name, Rich Stanton is a huge advocate of this. Has always told me that it’s quite extraordinary in its own way, in that it’s kind of Kojima doing his sort of weird thing, but with co-op. And if there’s anyone I trust on this topic, well, it’s you, of course, but also Rich. Yeah, that’s fair. So yeah, I’m happy with that as a pick. I think having all those lovely Ashleywood cut scenes as well for how the story’s presented. So, yes. This is the one with Hot Coldman. Yeah, exactly. And if that’s not a reason to get it, then what is? Come on. So what’s your next one, Matthew? Let’s go for, for my free pick, I’m gonna take Final Fantasy Tactics, The War of the Lions. Ah, good choice. I haven’t really got a huge amount of RPG action going on on my console. Actually, what am I talking about? I’ve got fucking loads. Yeah, what is that based on? That’s based on nothing at all. I don’t know, I forgot that I’d only picked RPGs. Platformers, on the other hand. That’s where it’s a bit more dire. Oh my God. It’s being upside down, Sam. Messes with me. It’s a… Okay, it’s a tactics, turn-based tactics game. Huge complexity to it. It’s basically a little bit fire emblem-y in that it has a similar focus on taking units and kind of leveling them up and preparing them and then when they’re dead, they’re dead. What’s different is that it’s got this very deep class-based system where you can create all these sort of mad combinations by teaching them skills from different jobs and different classes in that world and so from that becomes, just blossoms out this just almost sort of unfathomable world of strategic complexity wrapped up with very sort of charming art style and story. I don’t really know where this fits into. Isn’t this also part of that weird sort of spin-off Final Fantasy story universe thing? Ivalice, the saying of 12, yeah. Yeah I’ve never really understood how all these things connect but you don’t have to worry about that. You can just enjoy it. This was the PSP remake, well yeah, sort of remastered remake. They added a few bits and bobs to their Psone original including a freaking hand solo for Final Fantasy XII. What’s his name? Both here. Both here. That’s it. Yeah, just a big, deep, rich game. One of the most beloved PSP games. Certainly one of the highest rated. So yeah, on it goes. Yep, good choice Matthew. I respect your decision there. Very good. Okay, so I did think about that one for RPG but I went with something else in the end. So for category two, PSone, PSP Shooter, I’m going with R-Type Delta. Okay. PSone, sort of classic, really nice looking 2D game made with 3D models and such. Just an old favourite of mine. Came up in the original OG Gamescore, I believe. Back when it hadn’t jumped the show. Yeah, that was pre-Cain. Yeah, not post-Cain in the bleak era we live in now. This did get delisted in 2012 but I get it in on a technicality. Yeah, R-type Delta, like if I was going to play a PSP shooter or a Psone shooter, it would have to be something side-scrolling and not something like first or third person, I think. Just because I feel like it just never, they never quite got to that, the right level on though, in that respect. In the 3D kind of shooter space, so 2D kind of makes sense to me. So yeah, that’s my one, Matthew. What’s your next pick? For Psone slash PSP platformer, very difficult for me because obviously, home to some of the rankest platforming heroes known to man, the unholy trinity of Crash, Spyro and Sly Raccoon. That’s why I picked the category. No love for Sly Raccoon on Vita, I noticed. It’s not good that Sly Raccoon game, I reviewed it. Couldn’t you get the Ratchet and Clank trilogy on Vita and things like that? Yeah, I think Ratchet, Jack and Daxter and Sly all got re-released on Vita, yeah. Well, it’s none of those because I don’t want my machine tainted with them. So, I’m going for the… not a game I’m truly head over heels in love with, but it’s very cute, sort of iconic and feels very Sony, PSP to me. I’m going to go with LocoRoco 2 for platformer. Yep, I had LocoRoco as my backup for this, so, yeah. Which is the sort of tilty giant ball, sort of feels a little… Actually, no, I was about to say it feels a little Nintendo-y. I don’t think it does, it feels distinctly sort of Sony… Is it Japan Studios made this? Yeah, that’s right. And it’s very of that thing, it’s very sort of sleek, sort of cute, but stark with it. It’s, you know, doesn’t have the… A different kind of like warmth and character to Nintendo games. Like, I’ve always thought these, this and Patapon, there was something kind of cute, but kind of still slightly cool and slightly Sony about them, rather than, they would never go like outright goofy nonsense. But that’s fine, it’s not something that necessarily completely speaks to me, but you know, I’ll take this, a load of old balls with a face on. It’s so much better character design than anything else Sony ever came up with in the platforming space. I like that you are suggesting that this game is somehow not goofy, when it’s like, fucking the daftest looking motherfuckers. It is daft, but do you not, do you not… There’s still something kind of, you know, maybe it’s just on that screen, like, you know, it looks quite sharp, but you know, there’s something quite sleek about it still. It was a perfect, LocoRoco was perfect for the PSP, like it was a platformer that could make the most of that lovely screen, use the shoulder buttons rather than the face buttons, and just felt absolutely spot on. Yeah, so I guess it doesn’t feel like, I don’t think it feels like something Nintendo would make, but I think it’s got a lot of personality and… Yeah, I’m not knocking it, yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to knock it, it was more like, I’m trying to put my finger on why Sony of Japan’s cute efforts are different to Nintendo’s and just not articulating it very well. That’s perfectly fine Matthew. Okay, good, so we get to my last pick. How am I going to play this then? Because I’ve got one thing I kind of want, but I do wonder if it’s not as sexy a pick as it could be. Hard choice, hard choice. Well, it’s more of a logical choice over a hard choice, but I’m going to just do it because I think this is legit and worth having. So Final Fantasy IV Complete Edition is my Psone or PSP RPG, my final category. So this was a PSP re-release of Final Fantasy IV. I think like the nicest of all the re-releases of Screnics ever did with like lovely fonts, the whole game completely like redone to work in widescreen. And with the After Years expansion, which here isn’t very good, kind of added on as well, the entire story basically in one place with this beautiful box art, I thought it was a lovely addition of it. And the pixel remasters they’ve done recently look nice too, but I think this like perfectly recaptures the original style, but re-presents it in a modern way that’s quite… I think it was just exactly what fans of that series wanted and I’m really sad they never did 5 and 6 in the same way. Final Fantasy IV, for people who don’t know, really marks the first time they did a proper story in the game. You play as Cecil, this black knight who is basically sent to this village and inadvertently is sent to basically blow up this village by this mad ruler and then essentially rebels and leaves this navy and then goes on his own redemption quest. That was the first time they did a story in Final Fantasy. He lays the groundwork for everything that would follow, really. He goes to the moon at the end as well. That’s a fun thing. So, yeah, I think this was like… Do you fight God in space? I think you maybe technically do, but anyways. This is, again, one of the treats that I have on my PS Vita. I think this is a really nice… I think people will appreciate having this on the Vita. I think it’s the best version of this game still. Slightly easier than the DS one. The DS 3D one never quite did it for me, the visual style. This looks exquisite as a reproduction of the original thing. So that’s my final pick, Matthew. What’s your final pick? Final pick. Final fantasy. So I’ve got to go with PSP Shooter. I mean, I’m not going to lie, I really struggle with this one. I always, why do I not front load these weaker picks so that we end on a high? I’m actually, I’m going to, I said I wouldn’t earlier, but I’ve got to go back on my word. I’m actually going to take Killzone Liberation on PSP, which I actually think is solid. It’s a sort of top-down, it’s not a twin stick shooter, because it’s only on the one, the one, the analog stick, but it is a sort of top-down version of the Killzone universe, the brownest, most uninspiring universe of all time, it must be said. But it’s surprisingly tight, running around, sort of popping up in and out of cover. I’ll tell you what it actually reminds me of the most is the Ascent, which came out recently is basically a very pretty, obviously much more visually complicated version of this, but a very similar thing of like a cover based shooter from a top-down perspective with sort of twin stick controls. It’s perfectly functional, it’s quite pretty, it was rated at the time, PSM3 magazine gave this 88%, so they knew what they were talking about, I’m going to trust them of however many years ago. It was basically this or Space Invaders Xtreme, which I remember being quite good on the DS, but I thought, you know what, in TXK we’ve already got a really, really good arcade sort of reinvention, so let’s mix it up and please all the Killzone fans, sorry, let’s please the Killzone fan. Amazing, what an amazing end. This was good, this was like a sort of rock solid 7 out of 10 kind of like. Yeah, end with a 7, that’s what they say in the drafts. There’s a few games of this ilk on PSP, not exactly like this in terms of control, but if they didn’t do this, they did like twin sticks even though they didn’t have twin sticks, like Resistance Retribution which had preposterous voice acting but was quite a good shooter, or Star Wars Battlefront 2 which is the same as the console ones but with like half the units in the battles, but still pretty good. So, I could see the bind you’re in here. I did make it unnecessarily hard this category. I should have picked something else. Sorry about that. No, it’s fine. So yeah, we’ve done it Matthew. So let’s recap our 15 picks. You can go vote at Back Page Pod for the winner. We’ll announce the winner on a future podcast, but we’ll tweet when the winner has been determined. I’m sure it will all happen very quickly. So category one shooter, I’ve got Uncharted Golden Abyss. I’ve got TxK. Category two racing or platformer, I’ve got Wipeout 2048. I’ve got Gravity Rush. Category three RPG or action adventure, I’ve got Tearaway. I’ve got Persona 4 Golden. Category four re-release, I’ve got MGS HD Collection. I’ve got Final Fantasy XX2 HD Remaster. Category five wild card, I’ve got Odin Sphere on PS Vita. I’ve got Persona 4 Dancing All Night. Category six indie game, I’ve got Spelunky. Hotline Miami. Category seven puzzle, I’ve got Sound Shapes. And it’s Lumina’s Electronic Symphony for me. Categories eight fighting game, I’ve got Ultimate Marvel versus Capcom 3. I’ve got Nidhogg. Category nine visual novel or story centric game, I’ve got the unfinished one. I’ve got Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc. Free pick XCOM Enemy Unknown, sorry, free pick, category 10 free pick, I’ve got XCOM Enemy Unknown Plus. And I’ve got Zero Escape, the nonary games. Bonus categories, category one Psone or PSP RPG, I’ve got Final Fantasy 4 Complete Edition. I’ve got Persona 3 Portable. Category two Psone or PSP Shooter, I’ve got R-Type Delta. Killzone Liberation. Category three, Action Adventure Open World, I’ve got Metal Gear Solid. I’ve got Resident Evil 2. Category four, Platformer, I’ve got Castlevania Symphony of the Night. LocoRoco 2, very different energy. Category five, free pick, I’ve got Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker. And I’ve got Final Fantasy Tactics, The War of the Lions. Vote is what they call this draft. Vote at Back Page Pod. Now you’ve reached the end of this slightly overly long episode, you can go vote on the winner. So that is in your hands. Any closing thoughts, Matthew, before we say goodbye? The Vita is actually pretty good. And if you can, get one, get them games down before the store closes, whenever that is. Yeah, for sure. I will refer people back as well to the episode we did where I recapped some treats to grab before the store closed. I think that was relatively early in 2021, that episode. So go listen to that for some of my picks. But all the stuff we discussed here, yeah, very, very good selection of things there. Don’t listen to Matthew’s opinions on Wipeout 2048. He’s just got unresolved problems about dance music from the 90s. So Back Page Pod to vote on the winner. You can get us on there. So you can get us on Twitter at Back Page Pod, like I say. But you can also email us at backpagegames.gmail.com if you want to send us a letter to read out on a future episode. So, yeah, pinned tweet. That’s where you can vote. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? At MrBazzill underscore pesto. And we are launching a Patreon probably on April 1st. I’ve got a very busy two weeks coming up, so I’m not sure if I’m going to have time to get it all sorted by then, but we’ll see how it goes. Either way, it’s coming very soon. Patreon, so there’ll be a pay tier and you can back us at the tier that you’re happy with and that’ll be a whole fun thing. But we’ll be back next week with a new episode.