I’m Sandra Roberts, I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we are live on patreon.com. For the listeners at home, if they’ve ever wanted to support us financially, they can go to patreon.com/backpagepod, sign up to the Excel tier, and immediately unlock another podcast, The Best Boss Battles. So yes, that’s exciting. How do you feel about the fact that we are now on Patreon and people can financially support us to get more from their two favorite giant hosts? Great. It’s going to unlock a world of even bigger, more indulgent sandwiches for me at lunch, as long as it’s successful. If we don’t even get to making one baguettes worth, I’ll be very, very sad. Yeah, no, it’s good. I know it’s been a long time coming and we’ve been talking this up for some time. And so it’s good to finally get it done there and see how it goes. Yeah, for sure. So I think people will really like what we’ve got coming up. So if you’re like a diehard fan of the podcast, you can basically get 12 more podcasts a year from us. But if we hit our stretch goal of 600 pounds overall a month, then we will unlock another 12 podcasts. So there’s up to 24 extra podcasts, potentially on the table, depending on how it goes. That’s a lot of podcasts. It is, but in the short term, we’ve committed to a whole year of ideas. So people will know what they’re paying for, which I think is ideally how we like to do things. So it’s not kind of nebulous and people feel like they’re getting something for their money. So let’s tell people what we’ve got planned for the XL tier on Patreon, Matthew, for the year. So April, 2022, we’ve got Best Boss Battles. That’s live, like I say, at the time of recording. Each of these XL, Back Page XL episodes will go live probably on the second Monday of each month, just to kind of spread out the kind of like uploads a little bit. But this first one’s just out today when people can download this. But what have we got planned for May 2022, Matthew? We are doing 20 Xbox Back compatible games worth revisiting. Good stuff. And for June 2022, we’ve got the best and worst E3 moments ever. Then in July, we’re doing our top 20 Metal Gear Solid moments. Then in August, we’re doing the Best Hitman Assassinations. Found an excuse to talk about Hitman again, which is good. Yeah. In September, we are doing the best 7 out of 10 games, which I think people know what we’re talking about with that. This is a very 7 out of 10 games podcast. And then October, we’ve got Best Zelda Dungeons. Looking forward to Matthew carrying me through that one. Should be good. In November, we are doing PS5 versus Xbox Series X 2022 edition. So basically picking up a conversation for one of our very earliest episodes. Our first episode? Yep, our first episode, like two years later. So that’s exciting, I think. Just a little bit of a update on how that’s going, the old console war. So yeah, good stuff. In December, we’ve got Game of the Year, Positions 11 to 15, Volume 1, to explain what that is. We’re gonna go back through our Game of the Year episodes and pull out our honorable mentions, put those into more of an order, and then discuss those in more detail. Cause we think that’ll be fun, just for some further reflections on those years. Cause they’re always such chunky episodes. There’s always more to say. How about January next year, Matthew? In January, we’ve got Rockstar Open World Games ranked. In February, we’ve got Guilty Gaming Pleasures. That’s different to seven out of 10 games. Don’t start pointing out the conceptual flaws, Matthew, that we’ve only just launched. And March 2023, in a year’s time, we will have Best Gaming Books slash tie-ins slash extended fiction. Yep, so if you back us at the £4.50 tier, the XL tier, you’ll get a link to drop into your podcatcher of choice. And through there, you’ll get every episode that we make from here on in. We decided to just start it as the Patreon’s gone live. So this episode, 2012, and then the Best Boss Battles are unlocked. And the Patreon Fund can begin. We’ll see how it goes, Matthew. And if we quietly close it in a month, I may go back and delete this from this episode, so let’s see how it goes. But we won’t do a hard sell every episode, but we did want to just say to people, if you want to support us, if you ever enjoyed what we do, and you want to say thank you, there’s like a one pound tier for that. And then if you want to get more from us, there’s a tier for that too. So we didn’t want to make it too expensive. We didn’t want to make it too prohibitive. We’re not looking to get rich from it. We just kind of like, it’s just kind of a nice incentive to keep the podcast a bit more sustainable, as we’ve discussed before. If we were to accidentally get rich. If we hit like, I don’t know, like two grand or something, I will give some of my money to Centerpoint. It may just be 12 pounds a month, but still it will be some of that money. So with the pitch out of the way, Matthew, we’ve come back to one of our best games of the different year episodes. These are always so much fun to do. They’re always incredibly long. So I’ve had a big fat egg sandwich to prep for this. I’ve had two hot crust buns. This one’s been a long time coming as well. We haven’t done one of these this year. Normally, we do them every 10 weeks, but for whatever reason, there was some more timely stuff to do this year, to bump this down the road. But now we’ll go back to our regular cadence of them, try and do them every two or so months. So Matthew, 2012 games. How are you feeling about the whole revisiting this episode format thing? Yeah, great. I mean, it’s kind of a wild year for me professionally. Probably the most hectic year of my magazine career. Lots of upheavals, lots of change. Kind of a weird year for games as well at the same time, but I was slightly distracted from that by all the aforementioned professional upheaval. So going back to it, I’d misremembered a lot of this year, I think. It was better in some ways, worse in other ways. So I’m looking forward to digging into it, particularly hearing your choices from, I feel this year I was particularly shaky on what was happening outside of Nintendo. Right, yeah. Well, the good news is I don’t have a single Nintendo game in my list. Oh, that’s criminal. We should have a completely different selection of games here, which is good. But yeah, I’ve got quite a firm idea by comparison. Yeah, I suppose just to get into it, do people know that we’ve previously done 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010? We do these long episodes where we each do an alternating top 10 in the old Chet and John’s reassuringly finite gaming playlist style. And then we talk about what we were doing professionally at the time for a bit of background. We talk about the lay of the land in terms of major events and E3 and stuff. So we’re doing that again here. And for me personally, this is a weird year too. This was the year that I was on Sci-Fi Now, the TV and film magazine. Then at some point, I think in September, I got bumped over to Play Magazine again, which is the magazine where I started my career in games media. So I was deputy editor, but basically editor. I was called deputy editor even though I was running the mag. That was kind of annoying, to be honest. That’s understandable. Yeah, it’s like, you know, we can pay you less. So we’ll just do that for a while. Yeah, you can edit a magazine and then later we’ll call you the editor. That was the kind of vibe really. But it was like, it was not my favorite spell working on a magazine. When I later worked on Games TM, that was much, much better. I came back to Play Magazine and it was a bit like, I think something as easy to do in any kind of media, but in games media too, is to talk yourself into thinking that the core thing that you do, i.e. reviewing games, previewing games, doing features on games, is like out of date and you need to kind of refresh it in some way or chase some other horizon, the kind of pivot to video sort of thing. It’s really easy to do that in the search for something new. I think that play had become that a little bit in that it had like a cosplay page and it had like all this like vague gaming culture stuff that didn’t really have much to do with PlayStation. So I was a bit bummed out by it and it felt like no one was paying attention to it. It was like, this is like the old play magazine, like not the new one of course. And so at a certain point a staff writer quit and I was running it solo. That was like ridiculous and a very, very stressful month. I think I wrote something like 45 pages in a month, something like that. It was just bonkers, not good. And yeah, and so play just felt like it was the end of the PS3 era, which itself was kind of like a bit of a bummer of a time, combined with the fact this mag had become less PlayStation-y than before. And so it was like a bit, I was a bit of a low ebb. There was also a games industry event I went to this year where a couple of journalists were a bit sniffy with me. But then the next year, miraculously, one of them was when I was editing PC Gamer. It seemed a lot nicer and I was a bit bummed out by that. Most people in games media are very courteous, but I had a couple of bad experiences that year where I was like, this kind of sucks actually being spoken to, I don’t matter. Oh, sorry to hear that. Oh, that’s fine, it was ten years ago, you know. I think at this point our paths were still yet to properly cross. Yeah, somehow we were both five years into our career but hadn’t crossed. But this was also the year, Matthew, where I went for the O&M Deputy Editor job and lost out to a strapping young handsome man named Matthew Castle. These are my favourite kind of anecdotes. So why don’t you pick up from there and talk about how your year was professionally? Yeah, so 2012 was a bit of a weird year. If you remember from our 2011 episode, 2011 was the year where quite a lot of end-gamer got laid off and the three unofficial mags of the future kind of got crushed together into this hub system where it was basically a mega team making three mags and I was working with Andy Kelly and Tim Weaver in like the writing hub. So we were basically just like writers for hire, kind of floating pool of writers. And that on paper, a bit miserable, but was having like an amazing time because Tim and Andy are like two of the most fun people you could work with and the laughs we had and the jokes and just only just spent all day cackling while everyone else was having like a really, really hard time getting used to this new mega team structure. But yeah, at the end of 2011, we redesigned Endgamer into Nintendo Gamer, which launched its first issue in 2012. So this was a big year for us. Endgamer was evolving into its new form. It was about time. We were on the cusp of Wii U. We were about a year into 3DS. It felt like, you know, we had Super Play, we’d had N64, NGC, Endgamer. You know, I was like, this is so exciting. I’m going to be in from like day one. I’m on the ground floor of this new iteration of the mag. So I was kind of pulled into Endgamer a bit more while still being in this hub system, but that was fine. And we made this mag. I can’t remember if we actually talked about like redesigning the mag on a previous episode or if we’ve talked about mag redesigns in general. Not really. No, I don’t think so. So yeah, that’s like quite a big part of the… It’s a bit of a milestone in your career to work on one of those, isn’t it? Yeah, because what tends to happen is, you know, when you’re working on a mag, you’re relatively self-contained. It’s just the mag team and your publisher and there’s not really a lot of outside voices. But when you redesign, obviously, you know, it’s a big future property, you know, or a big-ish future property. Not their biggest, for sure, but big enough that lots of other people become involved, a lot more like senior creative people. So on Nintendo Gamer, it was Charlotte Martin, who was the editor, it was me. Tim Clark was involved. I think at that point, he was like a general, like maybe editor-in-chief of games, I think was his role. Right. And like a senior art guy called Graham, a publisher, and you go through quite a bruising process where obviously me and Charlotte were like, we’re no end gamer, we’ve been doing this, you know, I’ve been doing it for my entire career as a writer, only on this one mag, I was very protective of it. And like they basically came in and like tore it to shreds in terms of, and, you know, I took like huge offense to this at start, I was like, oh man, this is so rough. Like these guys hate endgamer, they hate this mag, like this is not the team who should be redesigning it. And actually it was just like having some outside eyes on it and some outside perspective. And we’d maybe gone a bit mad and had a bit like tunnel vision from working on it for so long. And so it was quite a kind of combative experience, I found, where we were trying to protect the essence of endgamer and they were trying to like evolve it into something new. And so it was this constant kind of tug of war. And I mean, it’s basically ends up feeling like an issue you work on for like four or five months. Like the process was long, you know, we were designing the broad structure of the mag, like what sections we wanted, you know, what its philosophy was going to be. You start with these kind of top ideas and then that gradually filters down into the weirdest stuff where Endgamer was always, you know, anyone who read that mag will know it was very bitty. It was made of lots of like lots, like a thousand silly little ideas. And it maybe wasn’t held together with one big binding grand philosophy. And, you know, I think probably me and Charlotte just wanted to jump to the fun bit, which we were good at, which was all the nonsense. So once we got through that initial period of trying to kind of hammer out what the mag was going to be, and once we got into that, I began to feel a bit more comfortable with it. I’m incredibly proud of Nintendo Game of the Mag that we ended up making. It didn’t really last long enough for people to kind of get a feel for it, I don’t think. And I don’t really know what the consensus is on it. Like, you know, when it relaunched, some of the readers were like, this is great. Some really loved it. Some thought it was a bit boring. It was definitely like a more sophisticated magazine, like it like art wise. It was a lot cleaner. It had this big format. It was like it’s kind of extra wide mag. It’s got quite a strange dynamic to it. But it also had all that kind of weird stuff in there. It was just maybe a bit more kind of politely presented. So I thought it felt like it was enough of a continuation, but also something quite bold and new. But, you know, maybe some listeners this podcast will disagree. I don’t know. I don’t know how many people actually read it, really. It’s very few, which is why they closed it. So, yeah, we went through all that big launch. I was really like renewed and excited by it. Then Charlotte went on maternity leave. And the big thing was they made me the editor of Nintendo Gamer, which was obviously something I’d always dreamed of. I couldn’t believe it. And it was a nice environment to be doing it in because Nintendo Gamer was still part of this hub system. I kind of left the writing team, joined the more editorial team of the hub and was editing it kind of under the guiding eye of Dan Dawkins, who really doesn’t want listeners to know we’ve had on this podcast before. And he was kind of like a senior editor-in-chief of it, I guess. And that was like a really nice place, like a really nice safety net to have because like Nintendo Gamer didn’t have any permanent staff other than me. So you’re like learning to be an editor without a team, without a permanent team. And so, you know, that all worked really well. But then this is just what a wild year it was. You know, I did the first issue, which was the 12, the 10 games to save Nintendo, which I’ve definitely talked about on this podcast before. There was this slightly like aggressive Nintendo line the company was trying to push that I didn’t really like. And we were constantly kind of fighting over that. Like I didn’t think Nintendo needed saving. That also gave us the cover line, were you in crisis? That was before I was editing it. I always really hated that. And then the issue afterwards, we did the Rhythm Heaven cover, which again, I’ve definitely talked about, which was like just a huge celebration of like one of the most obscure Nintendo games ever. The fact that we were allowed to do that cover should have probably set off alarm bells that Nintendo gamer wasn’t long for this world, because it is one of the most niche games you could ever put on the cover. And I was like, I can’t believe they’re letting us get away with this. And the reason they were letting us get away with this was, I think about two hours after we sent that mag to Deadline, my publisher rang me up and said he was closing Nintendo Gamer. Which was, I went from a moment of pure ecstasy and professional pride. I really felt like I’d finally achieved something and made a mag that I’d edited it, I’d taken more control of it, and I’d done something I really wanted to do to have it all wrenched away. And it was basically a, yeah, it was kind of like, you know, you can go to London and be associate editor on official Nintendo magazine. Or, I don’t actually know what the other option was. It may have been like, or there won’t be a job for you. Right, yeah. Yeah, because it was a bumpy time for Future as well at the time. Oh, yeah. So that was like really, really sad. That was really sad, and I was super bummed out. But then, like, sorry, I’m talking a lot in this episode. This is like a major moment. People will want to hear about it. I will say, like, on a more kind of personal level, like, running alongside this, like, early in 2012, I met Catherine for the first time at an event in London. And I must admit, like, after that phone call where he was like, you know, it’s basically bust, you know, London or bust, you know, I kind of sort of stayed in contact with Catherine. We’d sort of seen each other a couple of times, and I actually thought, well, you know, that was kind of a factor in some of my thinking. You’re like, there’s actually a chance here for something, to have something like maybe beyond a job, you know, because I’ve been, you know, a bit of a, bit of a sort of lonely workaholic all through Endgamer. And it’s like, well, here’s a chance to have a fresh start in a new place, you know, you know, potentially this stuff. Catherine as well. And that fact, that could be something like that probably wasn’t going to happen if I stayed in Bath. So, yeah, I just kind of, yeah, I made the decision to kind of move away from Bath. It was really hard, like all my friends were here, you know, and this was back when Bath was still stuffed with the people I was working, I had worked with for five years. It’s very different now, like a lot of people have moved on or emigrated or all kinds of things. But back then, it was tough. Also, like, not to be weird about it, but part of me thought it felt like a sort of cyber trail to go and work on official Nintendo. Like, my whole career, I’d been an unofficial Nintendo guy. I didn’t think the official Nintendo magazine was anywhere near as good as Endgamer. And I thought it was sort of… I was worried that I’d be seen as a bit of a sellout for doing it. Obviously, I did do it. I went, you know, I went to London and that coincided with like, were you coming out? And yeah, it was such a manatee. I went to E3 this year. That’s where I met Chandra properly for the first time. He was editing Official Nintendo. So that was another weird quirk of that job, was that Chandra, for people who don’t know, had worked on the unofficial Nintendo mags over in Bournemouth, kind of coming up. He’d worked on Cube magazine and had eventually ended up on Official Nintendo magazine and left. I don’t actually know what he did in the middle of the years, but he’d left Future. But he came back in. So it was this bit of this weird thing where it was like, we’re like restarthing L&M with like Chandra, who’s got his unofficial background, we had to hire a new staff writer. Basically their whole team had left for various reasons. So yeah, it was just such a manic fucking time. Like it’s like no wonder I didn’t have time to form opinion on Far Cry 3. Yeah, that’s a lot. By contrast in Bournemouth, like a lot of my friends were kind of leaving. Right. Like they had just either burned out on it or had better opportunities elsewhere or had personal stuff going on. I had one quite close friend on the Imagines Photography Mags who left Future. When she left, it felt like a bit of an end of an era thing. And I felt like I was suddenly like a veteran there. And so there weren’t many people left to be put into these more senior roles on Games Mags. And indeed there were a few of them around. So it felt like actually a bit of a time where Games Mag sales took a kicking as the generation really winds down, I think the last couple of years from Sony and Microsoft, this generation is quite poor in a way that you just did not see with the PS4 era, which ended with like Final Fantasy VII Remake, Ghost Tsushima, Death Stranding, all this rad stuff. And this instead felt like, well, we’ll put out our kind of like fourth sequel that no one is really clamoring for. We’re doing more stuff with our peripheral nonsense that won’t matter in about a year and a half anyway. And like, it was like that coincided, I think, with just quite a big dip in mag sales is my memory. It was just like it was just the excitement was gone from the generation. It gone on a bit too long for the amount of stuff they had. And it was kind of like the air was leaving the tires a bit. But you also had to coincide with that. I feel like like everyone like everyone online especially was getting a bit dirtier, a bit more desperate. Like everyone was getting like shoutier with the headlines. Like this is definitely a period where you see a spike in like the conversation around click bait. Everything started getting a bit more aggressive because it was filtering into mags. You know, that’s where the stuff like the Wii U and Crysis came from. It’s like this may sound sexy as a headline, which is going to be gone tomorrow on CVG. But, you know, this is we have 12, you know, we have 12 chances to talk to people a year, 13 issues, I guess, in magazines. And the idea of giving over one of our covers to this sort of shouty kind of hysterical kind of, you know, portent of doom, it really sat at odds with me. But this was the conversation everyone was having. Everyone was getting very aggressive about like cells on covers and very, very kind of like, you know, you’re always trying to make punchy cover lines. But this was something else. This was this felt like people in panic mode and it just didn’t sit easy with with me who just wanted to like, you know, do all this daft bullshit. Yeah, it’s funny because I don’t think that stuff I’ve I’ve never no one has ever who I’ve met had a formula for what works in a magazine is all received wisdom. Yeah. And it’s like it’s just it’s a headache of like conflicting opinions. And like the best person I worked with for this was was Tim when I was on PC Gamer because he kind of he trusted me to make the cover decisions, often helpful pointers, but wasn’t like you have to change this, this and this or it’s not shouty enough. And like imagine it was a bit more like that. I think that like when you look at Edge’s covers now, I think those are like actually what my platonic ideal of a great magazine cover is. It’s like we will pick a game that we think is super rad and then like and then the mag will kind of like exist in its own kind of like domain. And it’s like the cover will look beautiful. And like the product itself is what matters. Like it doesn’t feel like it. It tries to like muscle in on like headlines with stuff. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s yeah. And that’s what I kind of like. If I could go back and do anything differently with mags, I would be I would celebrate the fact that we were a mag more, be more singular and try and try and argue less of the internet because the internet doesn’t care anyway. So yeah. Yeah, but like coming into that and like becoming an editor and taking control in that atmosphere, like you’re on unsteady ground, like there’s there’s so many things you have to learn and there’s so many different battles. You really have to pick them carefully. And I just I feel like, you know, I could shepherd Nintendo game a lot better in its final months. You know, I could have now I would have the confidence to stand up and say, actually, no, I don’t I don’t want us to be negative about Nintendo. That is just not what people want from us. Yeah. But at the time, we just couldn’t. I mean, it’s the same, you know, like even Charlotte herself. And I’m sure she’d she’d she’d say this herself, you know, was, you know, a relatively newish editor on it. You know, come come up through quite an unusual route, you know, in that she was a production editor on the mag, went from production editor to editor. And yeah, so it’s you know, it was it was always a quite a strange kind of makeup and trying to kind of protect your values while also like absorbing the wisdom of people who aren’t as into Nintendo. Yeah, it was super, super interesting. Importantly, I didn’t make any enemies in that period where I think like, you know, without going to some specifics, things could sometimes get a little heated in the hub because you basically have three editorial teams together and not everyone saw Otoi. And that created odd, odd Barneys. I mean, yeah, there was a famous row about FIFA once that lasted like an entire day. It just kept flaring up. And I think there were like three different points where people went into a private meeting room to like to sort of fight it out and then would come out and be like, pieces restored. And then like two hours later it would all flare up again. It was just, yeah, a really weird time. This is also the year I went for a features editor job on a major website and didn’t even get a response. And I was like, oh, have I just done this entire like games media career for nothing? There was that kind of moment I had in my head. I can’t even get heard out when I’m like making a games magazine. That sucked. So more of the game side, Matthew. I suppose then this is the Wii U year for you. So like aside from the personal drama stuff, what was this year? What was 2012 like with on the game side for you? Yeah, so like I think 3DS had enough kind of cool stuff that it was ticking over. Like every once in a while, you know, every month there was something big and interesting on 3DS. I felt like we could get our teeth into maybe not magazine sellers, but you know, plenty of big hitters and kind of like some of the things that had been announced first that had maybe been given a bit more time. So like Resident Evil Revelations, say, kind of was felt quite kind of prestige compared to like some of the launch games, things like that. Yeah, I mean, in terms of Wii U, I must submit like, I’m sure gets this it when we talk about E3, like E3 was a bit of a disaster for Wii U and it kind of felt like it doomed the machine. Like I’ve never really seen like the concept of something die on its ass so quickly. And then we were just gripped by a, well, you know, we’re now the official Nintendo magazine and we have to kind of, not sugarcoat this, but you know, we had to put on the official Nintendo sort of veneer. Again, people didn’t want to hear that the thing they were buying was terrible and we didn’t want to work on a magazine that was just slagging it off. So we, we definitely found the positives and it helped that we, you know, hired Joe Scribs who was like an incredibly positive presence and you know, could, I don’t want to say he could find like positive spin on stuff, but he just took, he took great joy in a lot of things. And you know, I just going to like say, you know, reading some old issues for this period, you know, going back in there and it’s like man alive like that Duke, he is, he’s so fucking good. Like from the off, it’s like, I, I, you know, compared to like my first stuff on Endgamer, it took me several years to really get in the groove that he just like absolutely hit the ground running. And I know if he listens to this, he’ll be super embarrassed to hear that. But, you know, it has to be said like truly, truly brilliant staff writer from day one, which helped because then you’re like, well, I want to be positive too, because you don’t want to be, you know, I had had that. I had had people on Endgamer who were super down on Wii and kind of ground me down a bit. And I didn’t want that. I wanted like, yeah, I’m going to feed off his positivity. I’m going to feed on, you know, help feed his positivity. So that really helped. And we just existed also in the bubble that the mag sold quite well compared to Nintendo Gamer. So I would just like enjoyed being read, which helped get over the lumpiness of Wii U, I think. That may sound really self-serving, but it’s true. You were like, oh, great. Like each of these issues sells like five times as much as an issue of Endgamer. I mean, that’s nice. Like it feels like people may actually hear it. No, I know what you mean, yeah. It’s interesting because the year is like full of like, I think that Xbox is a bit depressing this year. PlayStation 3 is a bit depressing this year. I would say that it’s quite a good year. This is a year I really noticed that PC gaming was starting to like properly be a thing. Like in terms, a thing again, I suppose, like in terms of the rise of sort of indie games taking off and stuff. This is a year that like Dear Esther comes out and like FTL comes out and there’s like the return of some quite very PC style games like PC genres that we’ll get into, I’m sure, when we get to our top tens. So there’s that going on. This is the year that Hotline Miami comes out. It feels like this is a proper like this is the moment where all that breaking through is happening. And I’m sort of like aware suddenly that maybe not all of the best stuff is happening on console anymore, which is quite an interesting sea change. Yeah, in terms of major events this year, Matthew. So we had like the PS Vita launch in February, the Wii U launch in November. This is also the year that Diablo 3 came out. That was a famously flawed launch with that preposterous auction house thing where people could sell weapons for like real money. I stopped listening to a podcast, a games podcast at the time because some dude boasted about how he sold once like one size like $60 or something and made his money back on the game. And I was like, the fact you’re celebrating this is terrible. That is such a you move. I love that you just part your relationship over one anecdote. That will be people listening to me and my opinions on various, on Assassin’s Creed or whatever. But yeah, yeah, so that was that going on. But yeah, it was like, it was a bit of a depressing time for games and a bit of a depressing time for mags. Like it feels like those two things happened at the same time, do you know what I mean? Even though there are definitely good games here. I suppose like on a lighter note Matthew, what were you watching pop culture whilst back in 2012? Were you able to kind of track that in your head? Not really. I just think you’re moving to, because this is the year that like Netflix becomes a thing, right? Yeah, yeah, I think it launches in the UK this year, yeah. Yeah, so wouldn’t this have been sort of like House of Cards kind of period? That was 2013 I believe. Okay, all right, let’s pre that. Yeah, to be honest, it’s all such a blur. Like all I really remember from this year is like moving to London and shattering the roof of the floor below me, with all my heavy luggage. So, yeah, weird year. Yeah, okay, fair. I just remember this as like a fairly big movie year because it was the year like Avengers came out and the Dark Knight Rises and… Oh, Social Network, was that this year? That was 2010 I think. Did your research, I can see, that’s good. No, the only reason I say that is one of my favourite news spreads we did in Nintendo Gamer was about, I think Nintendo were going to get rid of friend codes, or there was some big barney about what Nintendo’s next online system was going to be. And the news spread was a mock-up of the poster and it was something like, you don’t get to invent friend codes without making a few enemies. Which was like the, you don’t get a billion friends without making a few enemies. And it was the same font over a picture of Watto instead of Zuckerberg. Very strange in retrospect like that. Yeah, but if that film was like two years before, then yeah, like that was not a timely reference. No wonder they shot that fucking disaster of a mock-up. I love that you thought, well the film must have come out in 2010 because we did our parody in 2012, because we did our parody that year, but like no, you were just late. So good. That’s so good. That is inventive though. It is funny because I do remember, I think I’ve got one issue of Nintendo Game in my flat and it does look more official looking than Endgamer did. And that’s kind of weird in a way. You couldn’t ever quite see it be in the mag where that bad picture of Mario Santa would be on the cover. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it wasn’t a matter. At this point, the art editor on Nintendo Game was MILF, who previously was art editor on PSM3. He’s one of future art geniuses. Not that our art team wasn’t on Endgamer, but MILF did some amazing fucking stuff with Nintendo Game. That’s definitely the period I became way more invested in how things looked. On Endgamer, I didn’t really care as much. It was part of the big old car boot sale of content, which was the mag. And all of a sudden, I was like, oh, actually, I really do like a very artsy-fartsy layout. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I was sort of very much the same. It’s funny because on Play, we were so boxed in by the games we were allowed to put on the cover. It was just a bit depressing. It was like a revolving door of Tomb Raider 2013, which was being mega-hyped at the time. It had loads of lovely artwork. Very happy to put that on the cover. A very exciting game. And then, like I say, God of War Ascension, where there wasn’t good artwork for it and there wasn’t much excitement in the game. And then, like, Revengeance, which I think I had shot down at one point. And then, like, they wouldn’t let us put DMC on the cover, if I recall, because I just thought it looked a bit also-ran compared to the other Devil May Cry games, when in retrospect that game’s got a great reputation, justifiably. And so I felt like I was just like, well, what are the two games they actually want me to put on this cover? And it felt… It made the mag feel even more hemmed in. It’s like our options are so slim. And like, whatever I pick, there’s only so much creativity you can really kind of apply to it anyway. And I found that really just depressing. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, when they let you do what you want, it is because, like, you’re on the chopping block. Well, I don’t necessarily think that. I just think that, like, it’s like a culture thing. Back on pop culture, I completely forgot this was the year of The Avengers. I think that’s the first film I went to see with Catherine on a quote-unquote date. I think I said, I think that was the first MCU film where I complained about the theme tune on Twitter. Oh, and I definitely did that, and I probably would have done that to Catherine after seeing it. So it obviously didn’t, like, poison the world back then. Our second date, because if people are wondering, was to see the grisly opera musical Sweeney Todd. The kind of, like, full cultural range of your sort of, you know, your diet there is kind of, like, you know, broken down quite nicely. That’s like the two Matthew and Catherine’s there. It’s like, opera one day, Morbius the other. Because I… I did, uh, the other thing is, the Back Page of Nintendo Gaming was where I did the spoof of what are asks interviews, which people really got into. They were like the one thing I ever did in mags that got some, like, pick up online, like Kotaku wrote news stories about them going like, these are really funny from this British mag. I was like, oh my god, I’ve done it. I’ve finally broken out. And they were all riffing on, like, pop culture of the day, because one of them was the Iwata Asks Hawkeye from The Avengers. And it was just loads of really cheap shots about why you need an archer in The Avengers, the most tired fucking Avengers joke of all time. But, you know, delivered by my kind of faux Iwata talk, it seemed all right. OK, good, yeah. I wish there was an archive of those. Maybe that out of print archive dude on Twitter can just find a load of those and tweet them out. Yeah, I used to, instantly, because they were like, they caused me so much stress. Like, at the start of every issue, I had it hanging over me. Like, I have to deliver another of these. And like, they made, like, the first one really made Tim Weaver laugh, which, you know, is kind of quite, you know, we laughed a lot in the office, but making someone laugh in, you know, in words, I think is slightly harder sometimes. And so I remember having that as a real badge of honour. I was like, yes, I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally written something actually like properly funny in the mag. And because of that, I became obsessed with them and would, you know, really diva-ish where it’d be like, oh, you’ve got a spare half hour. Could you just bang out the back page? It’s like, no, it’s not ready yet. I haven’t, you know, I’m still working on it. I’m still working on it. I used to literally go for walks, talking to myself as a water in the character, trying to get the jokes. Like genuinely, I used to take my phone with me and write down one-liners that I was coming up with. I’ve never worked so hard on something which is so forgotten. I’ve actually put that effort into writing one sitcom script to send to the BBC or something. I get it. I do like the idea that this kind of Don Draper-esque thing of do I still have it? And it’s like two days before deadline. And Tim Weaver’s like, not sure you’ve got it in you anymore, Matthew. Not sure this one’s really landing. Then you get the gag. You’re like, I’ve got it. You have that eureka moment and then it’s like gold and you’ve saved yourself for another month. And then amazing. Do you also wonder if maybe your focus on that was kind of a psychological kind of reaction to like the bullshit going on around you a little bit? Like, was there a bit of like, well, you kind of like maybe knowing that things are like on the chopping block a bit. And so you’re kind of like, well, I’ll focus on this one thing because it brings me great joy. Is it that kind of element to it or is it not that? I think because it was also one, especially end-gamer-ish part of Nintendo Gamer. Maybe I held onto it. There were like five bits of, there were five regulars in Nintendo Gamer, which were like classic end-gamer bits. There was like the Iwata Asks. There was a Professor Layton Agony Uncle column, which Charlotte used to write, which I really liked. I think there’s Kirby’s Rumour Buffet with the catchphrase, because he’ll swallow anything. That was actually Tim Clark who wrote that. He’ll swallow anything. That was his gag. And we used to do like, I think it was called Me News Network, and it was like a news story, like a current affairs story from the day. So this was like pre-Brexit, I guess. There was a lot of Newt Gingrich jokes in it, and it was using the AR function of the 3DS to recreate, like in six panels, like quite dry news stories. But it just meant my 3DS was just full of like me’s of popular political figures of the day. I had like a Nick Clegg me and an Ed Miliband me. That’s the most 2012 ass. Like, is there anything more 2012 than a Nick Clegg me on a 3DS? Because I was doing Nick Clegg me-based satire. Amazing. Yeah, good stuff. Okay, cool. So Matthew, briefly, what press trips did you do this year? So I went to the Halo 4 Studio 343 for that one. I think I was still on sci-fi now at the time for this one, but we went sometime up to summer. But you went to that weird ass town. No, that was when I went to 343 the second time and they’d moved offices to another weird kind of like prefabricated Microsoft town in Washington. This was the first time I went to one of those fake towns. This one was a bit nicer actually, a bit less Silent Hill-ish. And it was quite a sunny time and I saw some newfoundland dogs swimming in a lake. It was very sweet. And then they had this beautiful balcony that had a view of the town and stuff. And I met Frank O’Connor and all those 343 devs. They were so accommodating with people. About four or five hours of hands-on, really good trip. How about you? Your E3 thing here, what was that all like? Yeah, so E3 was, like I said, the weird thing about that was it was the big unveiling of the Wii U. So it’s that kind of deep breath, are they going to biff it? Aren’t they? Yes. And also, kind of working with Chandra for the first time, like that’s where we kind of met in person. I think maybe we’d done like a, I want to say we’d done a video call. We must have met before that, because I sort of semi-interviewed for the job. I’m being very careful to say they didn’t just give me the job as you applied for it. Don’t want you to feel bad. You know, I did the interview and go through it. They didn’t just hand it to me on a plate. If I hadn’t gone for that interview, I wouldn’t have got the PC Gamer job the next year, because Tim interviewed me. So, you know. It’s all good in the end, my friend. Good, good. Yeah, so I met Chandra there. And so it was that weird thing of like, we were like working out what was going on with Wii U. I think we had like the MAG was like a week from deadline. Neither of us had worked on it at that point. So we inherited the MAG mid-issue. Neither of us had met the team at that point, I don’t think. I was also trying to work out how I was going to live in London, because I had to move to London, like around E3. And we were sort of feeling each other out in terms of like, what’s this person like? Because we’ve never worked together. So there was just a lot of business going on with all that. This was basically at E3. If you were a Nintendo journalist, you just went to a Nintendo stand and nothing else. And you just tried to get as much time with the demos as possible. So there was a lot of Nintendo land. But there was also like, there was a really good Pikmin 3 demo. There was the wonderful 101 demo, which was mysteriously buried, like not mentioned in the, you know, that they had this new cameo game. And, you know, it basically took a week of the whole three days of E3 or whatever of constantly replaying this demo to kind of get your head around it and go, oh, I think this is going to be a bit special, actually. I’m really surprised they didn’t talk more about this. So, yeah, like kind of I associate that E3 with just so much personal drama as well as the just trying to get my head around. Like, just what the fuck were you was going to be? Yeah. Yeah, OK, fair enough. Yeah. So and then I guess you were just so fixated on that Nintendo booth. You didn’t have much perspective of what was going on elsewhere, right? The only other thing I remember going to do was like Square Enix to do a theatrical rhythm interview, which was their Final Fantasy rhythm game. Nice game, man. Yeah, it was really nice. But again, just a big phony with anything Final Fantasy because they’ve got someone who’s like really up for talking about it. And he was a really good interviewer. I just had really duff amateur hour questions, which was bad. Yeah. Think of all the tens of people who read that interview who were offended by your lack of knowledge about Final Fantasy, Matthew. So yeah, and also just writing stuff for the site. Because that was always part of the deal of being E3. I wasn’t used to ever writing for online. So just having to see stuff and then churn stuff out to send it home, that was all quite unusual for me. Do you eat any kind of preposterous American food when you’re out there? I don’t think so. I think this is the year I… No, no, sorry. No interesting answers. Amazing. I will cut that pause down for people listening. But I will keep it in for comedic effect. I’ll just make it slightly shorter. Okay, good stuff. You’ve also written our plan here. Mad Borderlands 2 weekend, Matthew. What’s all that about? So I don’t know how this came about. But when I was working on O&M in London, Gamesmaster were like, do you want to do Borderlands 2 review for us freelance? But you have to go to their offices over a weekend and play it. Which I agreed to because I wanted some money because London was really expensive as I was learning. And yeah, so I went to the 2K’s offices in Windsor and it was just me and the PR. And it felt like I’d broken into the office or something because it was all shut down and all the lights were off. And it was just the PR sitting outside the room, me sitting in the room. And he just gave me so many sweets and so much cola. I was just, my mind was just like exploding with sugar. I have no idea if I got Borderlands 2 right or wrong. Because I think my head was just in such a messy place of like sugar high. And you know, he was basically like, you can stay in the office as long as you want and I’ll go home when you go to your hotel. So, you know, I only had like three days with it or something to try and play as much Borderlands 2 as possible. I was absolutely frazzled. So, yeah, that was just a strange, a very strange thing that happened. Like, if someone had come in at the office at the weekend to like get their stuff, they would have found this like weird smelly boy kind of going hyperactive with Borderlands 2. Yeah. I think I know the PR you mean and he used to say a lot of fun for a call. So he might have just thought, I’ll just ply him with sugar and then he’ll be happy because he kind of knew your whole deal. He was right. Okay, good. And that’s how Borderlands 2 got 99% in Games Master. That’s how I invented a number, a new kind of number, an entire new scoring system. It’s just two symbols of alien origin. Matthew, let’s take a quick break and then we’ll fire through what was going on at E3 so we can get to the games. Because the games chat is ultimately what matters more, isn’t it? So let’s take a quick break and come back. Welcome back to the podcast. So, this could be a super brief section. I’m sure people want to get to the games at this point, and we do too. We’re just gonna talk about what was going on at E3 at the time. I mentioned the major launches that happened this year, PS Vita in February, Wii U in November. So those are the big things that were going on. The generations were very much winding down for Sony and Microsoft. Some great games, but not really from them, I would say, in this year. There’s like a bunch of games that were making my list, probably about 15 in total jostling for a place. But none of them were Sony or Microsoft games. Well, one was a Microsoft game, but that’s it. So yeah, the common theme, like I say, was four sequels that weren’t hotly desired, God of War Ascension and Judgment. Perfectly fine games, like eight out of 10 games, but just maybe the Sheen had gone off those series a little bit, they weren’t as exciting as they were. They were kind of symptomatic of the generation going on a bit too long to me. It’s like, well, we’ll do the same thing again a little bit because we kind of have to, you know, we have to kind of make it go a bit further or what have you. So yeah, Xbox- It feels like that stuff kind of has to happen though for then everyone to reboot and do really good work with PS4. That is true to an extent, but I would say that like this generation, they just navigated it a lot better by having more kind of cross-gen games and like stuff that felt like it was, I don’t know. It just felt like this last generation just didn’t really run out of steam. Obviously you don’t have like loads of Microsoft exclusives in the second half of the generation, but you have stuff like Gears 5 and you know, like Forza Horizons are always dependably good, of course. And there’s like always, there’s always stuff, Halo Infinite’s across-gen game. Like it feels like it just didn’t, there wasn’t that full stop and then a start again. It’s kind of like the generation’s carried on, but with shinier looking things, which I’m perfectly fine with. This generation, it feels like it just sort of absolutely peters out. And I think that the A3 conferences for Xbox and Sony reflect this, I watched both of them in kind of like fast forward for this episode, and they were like really boring. And like the art of these gets like, they get better at them very quickly, I would say. The next generation, because the next E3 is so significant in terms of like what happens in this generation. It feels like everyone, the showmanship factor goes up a notch, I would say. So yeah. Did you have any kind of overall thoughts about Xbox and Sony this year, Matthew? No, I mean like going through your list, it is, like you say, it’s all a little bit like gear’s judgment, which as you say, is just, yeah, totally the shine off it. And things that were once absolutely the most exciting thing that could happen, you were just so bored of them by now. Yeah. But you do get some other stuff, I guess sort of surfaces around then. I don’t know if it happens at E3, but like Far Cry 3 feels like quite an important game in terms of, it sort of feels like the new template for Ubisoft games, which is now just dominated like massively over the last few years. Like particularly Far Cry 3 may not be a better game than Far Cry 2, but it feels like the more important game in so many ways. Yeah, I think that’s actually true in terms of like, I didn’t really think about the impact of it. Cause I always thought of like, Oh, well Assassin’s Creed must be the game that kind of motivates everything. But it’s true that when you think about how games use maps and open world design, maybe it is more Far Cry than Assassin’s Creed. Yeah, yeah, either way, like, yeah, very influential game. So I’ll just fire through what Xbox is doing, Matthew. So Halo 4 kicks off the show. Very nice looking, of course. 343’s first Halo game, now that Bungie’s gone off to make Destiny. Then Don Matcha comes on stage, talks about Xbox being the perfect place for social movies, talks about Kinect. It’s just like a lot of the seeds of what would go wrong next year are planted here a bit. It’s like eye off the ball, we’re not talking about games, we’re talking about Kinect first. But to be fair to Microsoft, there are some full fat games throughout this. You’ve got Splinter Cell Blacklist, which I know is considered a bit of a lesser Splinter Cell game by you, which is, and who else’s opinion do I care about, frankly. There’s some boring football stuff. There’s both a FIFA and a Madden section of this thing. And there’s a middle-aged sportsman during the Madden one, who I assume is some kind of American football dude. It’s not John Madden himself, I checked. Which that’s like one of the most boring things I’ve ever seen, just tedious. There’s Fable The Journey, which makes a really good showing here. I never played this, I always heard it was a bit flawed, but I was always interested in this. It was like, I always thought it was the only true Kinect sort of blockbuster that was made. A lot of the other games had a slightly different profile. Did you ever play this one, Matthew? Like a little bit. I don’t even know how I played this, because I didn’t own it. I mean, did someone else have it in the flat, or I borrowed a copy from work or something? Yeah, it wasn’t really for me, and I’m like a big, big fable guy, so I think maybe I was just a bit too sort of militant. Like, not my fable in that kind of tiresome way. But maybe I should go back and become a big fable, the journey guy. That’s like, of all the things that won’t happen this year, that’s like number one, I would say. You getting a Kinect out and bothering to play it, it’s not gonna happen, my friend. If we ever did a big fable deep dive episode, that would be the hot take, wouldn’t it? It’s like, I went back, I got out the Kinect, I got the journey, and I’m actually here to say, I think Fable Journey is the one. Nothing, oh God, that makes me want to not do that fable episode, just knowing one of us has to do that. And then the subsequent Games Court where I get drowned for buying a Kinect on eBay, it’s not worth it, frankly. So from there, there’s like a very boring ad with a bloke from Supernatural putting Monday Night Football on with Kinect, just like the Nike Plus Kinect training, yay, just like all this stuff that’s lifestyle-y but doesn’t have much value. Xbox Smart Glass, I can’t say I ever remember what that is. I think it’s something to do with turning your devices in. All your devices can become Xbox control mechanisms. Who knows? Tomb Raider 2013 gameplay, now we’re cooking with gas. That’s what I put in my notes here, very shiny looking. Lots of death, I thought this game was rad. It was like one of the best sort of reboots of a game series I’ve seen in terms of like just having its own tone, its own angle on what they wanted to do and then executing on it. Arguably went a bit too trad after that, but then we can litigate that in a future episode. Ascend New Gods, a Kinect game I never remember or heard of. Resident Evil 6 is on stage, they seem so optimistic about a game that people would hate. But I liked it, so fair play Capcom. Did you like it enough to put it in your top 10? That’s the question. Well, we’ll have to get to that, won’t we? Parker and Stone, the creators of South Park, come on stage and introduce South Park, The Stick of Truth, a game I fucking love. I look forward to talking about that in a future episode. That’s like one of the best times of all time. Then Usher, it’s on stage. Usher, the worst part of that film with Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers. That was the worst part when Usher turned up, and it was the worst part of this conference when he turned up here to promote Dance Central 3. You should really see the correlation that just turning up isn’t really with Strong Suit. He’s like, well listen, I turned up at E3 and I turned up in Hustlers, and neither were that well received by Samuel Roberts on The Back Page podcast. Well Hustlers is a great film. I wouldn’t say I was like, oh it lost me when Usher was there. Well it didn’t lose me. It’s just that like, I don’t know. I think like Hustlers and Widow is a similar types of films and they’re both great versions of like, you know, the kind of like female led heist film. Like they’re really, like really good. But one doesn’t have Usher in it and I’m afraid it’s got the edge with me as a result. I just like the idea of you watching Hustlers at the cinema and Usher comes on screen and in your head you’re thinking, the X-Cox Conference 2013. Yeah. But to be fair to Usher, he was on stage like dancing and stuff. He had to do a performance in front of people, probably the least accommodating audience for him in the world that could possibly exist. Well, I imagine like Don Mattrick standing to the side clapping out of time. Yeah. So I’ve written down here, wild oscillation between total horseshit and good games of the time. We end with COD Black Ops 2 by this point. I didn’t really care about COD anymore. I played five minutes of this game where Sam Worthington was on horseback and I was like, nope, that’s enough for me. I was done after Modern Warfare. So that’s Xbox. They were just trying to service all masters at once here and it was just a bit overstretched. And they maybe lack the kind of like, just like, can you compare this era of Xbox to the era that had like, you know, crackdown, Mass Effect and Bioshock and all these things that were like legit exclusive and cool in the earlier part of the generation. It just doesn’t even compare. And that’s like, it’s hard to divorce that from Matric himself, because Matric, you know, comes in just after that basically and then the culture seems to change and everyone’s eyes off the ball a little bit with big exclusives, you know, but inadvertently he is kind of responsible for like Xbox acquiring all the game developers in the universe from all of this stuff. This is kind of the seed of all that happening here. So, yeah, Sony E3 kicks off with everyone, a games journalist’s favorite creator, David Cage, Beyond Two Souls, Elliot Page being in the game was a big deal. They announced that here. PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Matthew’s favorite Smash Bros. beta was revealed here. Did look very awesome, ran very kind of muddy looking colors. I was watching footage of this, I was like, that’s rough. It was a solid game though, when it came out, it was very like enjoyable, kind of brawling, nothing wrong with the fundamentals of it, just Sony didn’t quite have the oomph at the time for that one. They still have the mascots. No, very much not. So yeah, Matthew Castle not won over by one of the Hellgan from Killzone and Sly Cooper at last. I can’t wait to see Kirby Hellgan. So yeah, there was some cross play was talked about here between PS3 and Vita. I sort of dozed off a bit of that bit. PS Plus getting a good response here. It’s easy to forget what a good deal that was. This month they gave away 12 games at once. That’s like kind of amazing, I think. Yeah, that was like really, really good. Assassin’s Creed 3 was there, but they focused on showing off the ship combat, which everyone knows is the best part of that game. That won’t come up in honourable mentions for me, Matthew. Will it come up for you? Not at all. I played that on Wii U, so it was like Assassin’s Creed 3 plus quite bad framerate. Awful. Oh, man. That game has like a large section of that game is walking around dark tunnels under the cities. One of the worst hours of any game is trying to create the secret underground railroad under Boston in that game. It’s fucking abysmal. Is there any good level that takes you into some tunnels, like, I mean, like generally? Like, I always think about Dragon Age and the deep roads in this where it’s like, we’re going to put you in a corridor with just stones surrounding you for three hours, have fun. And like, they’re never good, are they? No, they’re never good. Like, you know, Elden Ring obviously does underworld. It’s not a tunnel. It’s there is there’s like a realm beneath, which is pretty spectacular. Metro, I guess, is like a good tunnel. That is a very good point. Those are some legit tunnels right there. But that is someone who is like, our game is only set in tunnels. So we’re going to have to work really hard within the constraints of this tunnel. Yeah, I think you have to do you have to acknowledge the tunnel is the worst place to set a game. But everyone does. I think Assassin’s Creed 3 is the true nadir of the series in terms of like the simplicity of it. It dialed back the combat and platforming. So everything was like a one button press. Just like, yeah, really unengaging. I do like the initial kind of twist thing where you play as that other bloke and then he turns out to be like the baddie. I think that’s quite fun. Yeah. He’s your father and stuff. Yeah. And you’re kind of setting up the Templars rather than the assassins. Sorry, spoiler alert. I think some people really hate the ending of this game where the British are kind of driven out and then the game’s like, yeah, but America’s still got a fuckload of problems. Like you basically see slaves being sold and stuff and people criticise it as being a bit on the nose. I would argue quite bold. It was like one of the only bits of the story that really landed for me. It was like, yeah, the British are gone. The British fucking sucked. They’re gone. But also this country, oh my god, has a fucking long way to go. I just thought that kind of stayed with me. I don’t remember the execution in my head that much, but I just remember Connor hobbling through Boston. I just thought that was quite… Maybe it takes a Canadian developer to take that kind of swing. I couldn’t ever see an American developer doing that. Maybe I’m wrong, but American blockbuster developer. Couldn’t see them going that anti-American with it. But yeah, I like that about this. Otherwise, it wasn’t really big on Assassin’s Creed 3. Do you have any more thoughts on that one, Matthew? No. Just fuck the tunnels. Fuck the tunnels, Matthew Castle. Yeah, Far Cry 3 was here. That was obviously a very significant game. Some less sexy PlayStation Move stuff. There’s some kind of Harry Potter book of spells thing. But there was briefly a book peripheral on PS3. People may not remember that. It’s quite funny, actually, seeing how different the vibe is back then, where I was reading some news coverage of this, and they’re like, oh, this is terrible Harry Potter book. But luckily, JK. Rowling turns up to save the day. And you’re like, man, the vibe around her is very different back then. Yeah, so it seems a bit like NAF. There’s some good God of War Ascension footage, but it’s a bit like again, like I say, it feels like a God of War 3 again a little bit. Has anyone played God of War Ascension? John Denton has. I remember he reviewed it for me when I was on play. I commissioned it to him. He quite enjoyed it, I find it cool. But I don’t know, if we do a, we’re gonna do a God of War episode this year. We’ll have to play it. Yeah, that’s the one we’ll have to play. I’ve just, I couldn’t even tell you one thing about it. It’s a prequel, I think. Like, I think it’s a prequel to all three of the games. So I think you can like- Is it co-op? It’s, I think it had competitive multiplayer. Right, yeah. It’s meant to be pretty good, competitive multiplayer. So yeah, you can, everyone can look forward to that incredibly well-researched God of War episode. I think it’s co-op, and I think there was a guy called Kratos in it. So this conference, though, ends with footage of The Last of Us, the first gameplay footage. And it did look really, really good. You know, this game had already been sort of like revealed, and people were hyped about a new Naughty Dog sort of game. But here, it kind of like looks the part. It’s kind of like, there’s nothing bullshottie about it. Like, it’s real gameplay of a game that people would love. We can talk about that game in more detail next year, but that was good. But Matthew, Nintendo E3, this is your domain, so why don’t you kick us off? Yeah, like, start with… You think, oh, this is going to be okay, because it starts with like a little sketch where they go and get Miyamoto from his waiting room, and the idea is like there’s Pikmin everywhere. So they start with like a real core game, Pikmin, and Pikmin 3, to be fair to it, is amazing, and is like by far the best Pikmin game. And that is not a series I cared for. I did not like Pikmin 1 and 2 very much. I found them very stressful. Like their attempts to like Nintendo-ify the strategy game just didn’t work for me. I still found it very cumbersome. But 3, like everything about it just absolutely sang like that game came alive for me. So they started really strong. I’ve noted down Miyamoto looks absolutely amazing in this sketch. Yeah, I did see that. In the comedy intro, Miyamoto looks fucking amazing, super handsome. That’s what you put on there. But he’s like, like not like massively, you know, he’s not particularly old now. He’s always, he’s always, he’s older now, obviously. But yeah, he just looks like his skin looks great. He’s wearing this like white t-shirt. He just looks very, yeah, just super, super healthy. Really, really very like pleasant, pleasant man to look at. The last time I saw someone look this good on camera was the Metal Gear Solid Legacy documentary where Matthew Castle appeared. Yeah, that’s, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so that’s a good start. But it’s just this, I’d say after Pitman 3, I think this shows just a total disaster because Reggie comes out and in that kind of style of him, he’s very bullish about what a proposition the Wii U is and it’s entirely unconvincing. Everything he says just doesn’t feel like he believes it, doesn’t feel like anyone believes it. I think you can almost feel it on stage that Nintendo already knows that Wii U is doomed at this point. And the fact that what gets big stage time is tired ports of weird sequels, not weird sequels, but sequels to series that have never been on Nintendo, that sort of set off alarm bells. The fact that they have this Batman Arkham City, and obviously you can jump in there, but the idea of that being a huge sell to Nintendo people, that you get to play one of these, it’s quite an old game. I don’t know if Arkham Knight had been announced at that time, but everyone has moved on, and here’s Nintendo going, get excited about this. And then they show off very unconvincing gamepad features for a lot of these games, where it really just feels like we’ve taken things which worked perfectly well on an analog stick and made some faff on the touchscreen. And this is, I’d say, is the defining feature of this conference, is they just do not make a convincing case for Wii U. It feels like they don’t have a convincing case for Wii U. Even Nintendo Land, which I like quite a lot, in its eventual form, I’d say only half of it is a decent advert for like, oh, there is potential here, there is something else going on. Oh, this is getting all my sort of like neurons firing. I can see what Wii U could be. It’s like even Nintendo is struggling to do anything interesting with this contraption. I think that’s what made it feel slightly doomed to me. It was like, oh, this is bad. Like the innovation here is very worrying. Like what was interesting about Pikmin was like, the Wii U is a bit more powerful. So it’s like the HD graphics rather than the controller scheme. So that’s all very worrying. This is too much Reggie in this. And I found him, you know, we used to joke about him a lot in the mag, but towards the end I found him quite a kind of like a kind of like charmless presence in a lot of these things. Like I’ve really called on him over the years. He’s a big PR man, you know, basically, yeah. Yeah, he’s just a suit, you know, and maybe that has been colored by seeing some spicy takes from some ex Nintendo staff on Twitter, which I won’t go into, but you occasionally people see people saying, yeah, like he’s just a suit. Like you have to say anything to get you to play this stuff. It’s not like a, you know, he isn’t a Nintendo guy. He isn’t a Miyamoto, obviously. But I think we elevated him with like memes. Plus he was, plus he would participate in those kinds of memes himself and become, he became a figure of fun because he would appear in those skits as well, right? So, yeah. I think the worst bit of this conference is him talking to Harley Quinn from Batman Arkham City. Cause it’s not even like a model. It’s just a static image of Harley Quinn. It’s like a JPEG on this giant screen. And they’ve got the voice actress to do a bit of banter where she announces the president of Warner Brothers to come on and talk about Batman. And it just feels so budget. This game is from several years ago. This feels really cheap. Everything about this makes me feel bad. The fact is they had more interesting games like The Wonderful 101 that they didn’t even mention at their stage presentation. This was so muddled. And I think over the years, they do claw some of this back. Weirdly in Wii U, they get a bit more hardcore in places and that’s maybe more successful, but it’s telling. This is their last stage conference. From this point on, it’s just their more Nintendo Direct style thing, which actually is a huge improvement and a very successful model, I’d say, because it just cuts out all the bullshit and it’s quite fun and frothy. The Nintendo Land finale to this was just such a wash as well. It just felt like you played all those demos last year and now we’ve kind of prettied them up a bit and put more of a Nintendo skin on them, but it felt like you were finishing with old news. However good those games ended up being, this just didn’t get me excited. My heart really, really sank during this conference. I remember I was sitting with Chandra and we were both at the end of it, we were like, fucking yikes, this is gonna be a hard sell. So yeah, sorry Nintendo fans, this was an app. I think this is a contender for the Nintendo’s worst ever E3. Yeah, completely fair. Did the good 3DS games, included Balance Out at all, Matthew, Your Castlevanias and the like, whether that helped to alleviate it? There was definitely more happening there. The fact that they sent on this slightly sheepish exec to say like, I’m gonna have a 3DS direct tomorrow, it made it sound like he was the only one. The joke was that Reggie was above or beyond 3DS at this point. He’s like, I’m gonna give you a minute to talk about your bullshit, basically. And then the guy comes out and he’s like, oh, I have one tuning tomorrow and I’m gonna talk about our actually good games on 3DS. Their 3DS site was way better, even though the key part of it was New Super Mario Brothers 2, which was shit. So, that aside, they still had Luigi’s Mansion coming. They had Castlevania, Paper Mario Sticker Star, which we didn’t know was gonna be a bit ropey at that point. So, yeah, that definitely seemed better, but they almost seemed embarrassed by it because they didn’t want to muddy the 3DS, the Wii U authors. But wrong messaging, I think. 3DS would be a way more loyal companion for the next two years than the Wii U. Yeah, I’ve got to say, the Wii U, from the outside looking in, it did just seem dead from the start. I didn’t understand why they tripled down on these existing console games that ran worse on the Wii U, and they were like, oh yeah, but it’s got some gamepad features included. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get why Mass Effect 3 was on there. I didn’t get why they made a big deal about Tekken being on there, Tekken Tag Tournament. I mean, some of it feels, like Tekken feels like, you know, Nintendo has good relationships with other Japanese publishers and they go on to work very closely with Nankobandai on Smash Brothers and cut, you know, that feels more like there’s stuff going on there between the companies. Oh yeah, Pokemon Snap as well, that’s another Nankoke. Yeah, but like, yeah, you’re right about like the Western, like here’s a load of ports of like old third-pipe, that just feels like Nintendo’s got a chip on its shoulder that we that we wasn’t capable of playing that stuff. Yeah. But you’re like, well, the excitement’s over now. Like those games are done, they’re played out, like people, the people who are interested in shiny games like that are interested in the next shiny game, not the one they’ve already played. That was that was just such a huge, huge problem. And like I say, the Wii U implementation was just, you know, a lot of them put, they definitely put some effort, like there were Wii U modes, but none of them were like compelling in any way, like if you watch that Batman presentation where he’s kind of like, you know, you get this gadget which you get to control by like steering the gamepad or whatever and you’re like, well, fine. But I did that perfectly fine with an analog stick when I played this originally on 360. Like nothing is fundamentally changing here. You are just adding faff. Yeah. Just super madored, super sad. I mean, this was also the E3. They had that weird pre E3 thing where Iwato explained the Miiverse for what felt like 15 hours, which was quite a… I remember sitting in an internet cafe across from our hotel with Tim Clark. That’s the only place we could get it. We couldn’t get the hotel Wi-Fi to work. So we had to go to this really dingy internet cafe to watch Iwato explain what felt like they were going to try and take on Twitter, basically, with Miiverse. Because the pitch wasn’t just that it was going to be on concert. It was going to be on like phone, mobile, Android, all this stuff as well. And the Miiverse does end up being one of the most charming bits of that machine. But it’s also like, you know, it’s purely loved by Nintendo weirdos. The idea that they thought they were inventing the fucking metaverse or something is just very odd, very confusing times. They did like five E3 conferences over three days. I don’t know what Nintendo are up to. They should have just done one good one rather than five confusing shit ones. Yeah, I did watch the footage of Scribblenauts Unlimited in this. I was like, this is what you’re going with as your big like, oh, and it’s funny because even you alluded to it, but even a year later, The Lay of the Land was so much better with Nintendo. Like there were Wii games I wanted to play in 2013. There were like 3DS games I wanted to play in 2013. And like, I felt like they were getting the airtime they needed. But here, it just felt like clawing at something. And like the ticking clock in the background was knowing that the PS4 and the Xbox One were going to be along at some point very soon. And like having parity with current gen wasn’t going to have any value whatsoever. And like, they didn’t seem to get that, which is just where I think a lot of the hardcore sniffiness towards Nintendo comes from around this era. But they would obviously, you could take a more positive outlook on this conference Matthew and suggest that like, what will one day be some incredibly profitable Nintendo Switch games were revealed here. Like, Pikmin 3 and New Super Mario Bros. U and stuff like that. All that stuff would go on to be very profitable on Switch, just not for another eight years, you know. Yeah, I just think like, you know, if you’d been, if you, if they had done a stage presentation, like, the year they showed off, you know, New Super Mario 3D World and Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze and like Bayonetta and like Announce New Zelda, like that room would have exploded. That would have been like one of the all time great Nintendo conferences. But instead, like, they just kind of put, you know, take it out back and put a bullet in it because of this one. Poor old Eguchi, man, the producer of Nintendo Land, who basically has to like host the last 10 minutes of this, because it must feel like you’re the like the final nail in the coffin. Right. Literally you were the last thing that ever happened on stage at a Nintendo conference. Well, we’ll take a break there then Matthew, and we’ll come back with our top 10s, yeah? Welcome back to the podcast. So let’s get into the top 10. Matthew can go first. I’ve always liked to hear about what he’s been playing at this time, and I think our lists are gonna be very different this time. So kick us off, Matthew. What’s number 10? I’m gonna start off with a total heart pick, a total trash pick. I’m gonna start off with Resident Evil 6. Yes! Oh, I love to see it. I didn’t go for it in the end, I must confess. But yeah, go ahead, Matthew. Explain why the most bloated, action-heavy Resident Evil has made your list of the top 10 games of this year. You see, you say bloated, I say wildly, wildly overambitious. This is like the biggest of swings, and so little of it lands that it really shouldn’t be on a list like this. But I just, I kind of admire Capcom going for it. I mean, the basic gist of Resident Evil 6 is that they made four single-player campaigns at once. And I wouldn’t even say they’re like four, particularly like curtailed or budget campaigns. Each one is pretty substantial and really, really goes for it. There is some crossover in the stories to kind of, location-wise, to give them some reuse, but it’s, you know, it feels like a pretty, like rammed 20 or so hours of campaign to me. And I kind of, I almost love the kind of audacity and scale of it, of them throwing. What I think is the biggest team Capcom has ever thrown at a game, I think was like the big story at the time, was like 600 people or something made this game. It reminded me of the Assassin’s Creed 2 press releases that were like, we’ve got 500 people worldwide working on this, kind of like selling you on the scale of the production to get you excited, you know? Yeah, and now people are like, that’s cursed. You know, now that sounds like production line, like a factory farm or something, and no one wants that. But back then, yeah, this was big and like big, sexy numbers. I think Resident Evil 6 is kind of what happens if you feed every Resident Evil into a kind of, sort of a very advanced computer, and it tries to like generate a script. You know, you get that meme online where the guy says, oh, I wrote every Seinfeld script, and then the computer wrote it, and then he’s written like quite an unfunny parody of Seinfeld. It’s like that, but for Resident Evil, and not trying to be funny, which is why it’s successful. Like each of the strands sort of feels like another Resident Evil. There’s one with two people trying to escape, a giant meat monster called the Oosternak, which is also mentioned in our Boss Excel episode for our Patreon listeners. And that’s kind of like a pure Nemesis rift. And then there’s like Leon’s campaign feels a bit more Resi 2, Resi 4, in that you are in slightly more Gothic locations. There is even a siege in a gun shop at one point. Like it feels like there’s a lot of deliberate nods. Chris’s campaign I’d say is slightly harder to play. So I’d say that’s the more out and out action campaign. That’s like Resi 5 a little bit, kind of like, you know, the spirit of that more, you know? Yeah, well the whole thing is like the next step on from Resi 5. Like if the game is getting more action heavy with each iteration, like whatever the individual flavours of the campaigns in this, I’d say they’re all united in being kind of straight up action. Like, none of them I would say are survival campaigns per se. Like things like inventory management and all that goes out the window. Like, you’re never really worrying about bullets here. Like, it loses any of the sophisticated kind of risk reward stuff that the Kami was so good at. But if you are into the wild excess of Resident Evil, if you’re into like the melodrama, if you’re into like absurd boss fights, if you’re into monsters that die like 20 times and keep coming back for ever wilder fights, if you’re in for really stupid quick time events. Like, this game has all of that. It’s absolutely rammed with it. Like, a lot of people think it’s just got like no taste to it because it’s just all this stuff that’s crammed in. I think that the wild excess of it really wins you over. It really won me over anyway. You know, I love their art design. I think it’s a beautiful game. I think there are enough weird and wonderful, like, design and art touches that this game is packed with stuff I like to see and, yeah, particularly at the boss fights I think there’s some really, like, a beautiful grand enemy design in this game and there’s just so much of it because there’s all of that campaign. It’s quite funny, I was reading Simon Parkinson’s Eurogamer review and he was slightly sniffy about, like, if you’re into just, like, the excess and more, you know, like, I’m sure you’ll think this is better, but, you know, if you’ve kind of got taste, like me, you will not. And I was like, yeah, it’s kind of me, I guess. I like that, I like that wildness of it. I just, you know, me, I love a game that really, really goes hard. There were quite a few this year. I think there’s a few other games that kind of compete for the slot of, like, mad excess. So this is also the Year of Asura’s Wrath, I think. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Which didn’t make my list, but again, it’s, you know, I love it when just Japan Studios just throw, like, AAA budgets at just truly mind-melting scale and weirdness. I think it’s a really lovely trait. I don’t think they should be embarrassed to do this. I mean, they kind of are, and obviously, like, Resident Evil gets, like, a proper reboot after this, becomes 7, which is the exact opposite of this game, I would say. And worse, it’s a worse game than this, I think, 7. That’s my take. It’s like, that’s- Oh, whoa, that is a hot take. I don’t like Resi 7. I think, like, it had, like, two enemy types, at most, and you were just, after that house, and the kind of initial tension of it, it just turns into Resi action, like, stealthily, and you don’t even think about it, and no one really pointed it out. At the end, you’re running for a helicopter while shooting loads of goo monsters. How is that better than what Resi 6 does? Yeah, and you are right. Like, when that game becomes an action game, it isn’t as good an action game as Resident Evil 6. Like, is a much flashier, a lot more fun, grand scale. Yeah. I think there is a version of Resident Evil 6, which is a masterpiece, if it was just, the fact that it’s got all the characters, I think if they’d actually done, like, lent more into, like, what made those characters’ games a bit more specific, if they’d actually, if the lore hadn’t kind of just completely gone off the rails and got very kind of confusing. Like, I still like all the umbrella stuff. Like, this idea of this, like, grand culmination of all the melodramatic bullshit in Resident Evil, like, I think would be an absolutely amazing game. This isn’t quite that, but it’s kind of moving towards that. And yeah, I dig it. Yeah, so I think that this game is really underrated as an action experience. I think I said this on our Rezzy podcast that we did where we ranked them. And I think that this game’s big problem is that it didn’t ever explain to you how most of its action mechanics work. So I remember a post on NeoGAF that former 1UP person, Mark McDonald shared saying that, oh yeah, this is like the actual list of all the different action moves you can do in Rezzy, and Rezzy 6, and explained that thing where you do the quick shot, where it instantly turns around and fires at someone who’s nearby. If you hit tap two triggers at once, how you can dive backwards, dive forwards, and then roll around on the floor, and all that stuff to dodge enemies, which gave you a massive range in terms of movement, of how to use things. How that stamina bar worked in relation to your melee attacks. It’s a really deep game in that respect, underrated for how deep it is with that stuff. I think this game is too long. It is too flabby. I think if those campaigns were all five hours on the dot, and you cut back some of the chaff, the Chris campaign in particular, it’s a bit too repetitive in that Eastern European city, fighting those big monsters, it’s a bit too boring. If it just had more of an editor’s approach to it, I think you could wrangle maybe an eight out of ten out of it, a nine out of ten, something like that. But as it stands, the excess, I think, is just a bit too bloated. But yeah, I think was just roundly dismissed, and I don’t totally buy into the narrative that Rezzy has gone back to basics, and it’s better for it. I don’t totally buy into that, because I think this is quite a good little era of Rezzy, personally, but yeah, good pick, Matthew. It was in a four-way tie for my number 10, but do you have anything more to add on it? Do you like the ADA campaign as well? The kind of post-I’m-not-campaign? It’s got a weird, stealthy puzzle element to it. It’s certainly very different, and the fact, narratively, it ties a lot of stuff together and comes in at the end to tie a bow on it. Yeah, and it is, if you play the version they released on the next-gen, Xbox One, PS4, where you can play at 60 frames, this was one of the best-looking games of the previous generation, and it still looks amazing. If you can play it with the smoother frame rate, I really, really recommend it, because there’s just so much art in the game. So many art assets, because you go to so many different places and they really go all out on it. You can just drink it all in. It’s a very, if you’re into that kind of craft, it’s a real treat. Yeah, the Mercenaries’ No Mercy mode is also really fun. That’s like a next-gen port-only mode. It’s in the PC version too, where it’s like, they basically just take the processing power of the new consoles and PC and put like double the enemies on screen or something like that. And so you have a lot more exploding enemies going around and it becomes a lot more arcade-y of like, keep moving, try and take out five enemies by blowing this thing up. And really intense and really fun, as opposed to like the regular Mercenaries mode in this, which is a little bit mild, I would say, a little bit not as good as Resi 5’s Mercenaries mode. The Mercenaries Liker has logged on. Oh, big fan. I can’t wait until Resi 4 VR gets Mercenaries this year. There’s a free download. That’s gonna be fun, I’m sure. I’ve spent many hours on that. So we will never leave VR. You’ll become a withered husk. Matthew, my number 10. This is really hard. Four-way tie, right, between Resi 6, The Darkness 2, Max Payne 3, and what I’ve actually gone with, which is Sleeping Dogs. Ah, interesting. Yeah, is that on your list, Sleeping Dogs? It isn’t, it’s on my long list, for sure. Yeah, so it was tough this, because there’s a lot of games vying for, there are a lot of eight out of 10 games this year, and a lot of them were vying for this second half of my list. Sleeping Dogs is better than all those games, I think, but well, yeah, I think it probably is, yeah, maybe not. I don’t know, it’s tough. But in terms of like, I picked the one game here out of those I didn’t finish, so I did play about 10 hours of it, but I have since actually revisited it on my Xbox Series X, because one of the games that gets the frame rate boost, so it’s always on sale for like three quid, so you can pick it up and play it. Open World Game, set in Hong Kong, was previously a true crime, sort of like a new true crime game, but Activision, for whatever reason, ditched it, so they could publish more cooler duty in rock band, sorry, guitar hero games, I guess. And so this went to Square Enix. They changed the name to Sleeping Dogs. I don’t know why they picked that name, really, but basically adds up to an open world game where you play as like an undercover cop, and the combat is very much like a take on the Arkham Asylum slash City, sort of like contextual melee stuff, counter-attacking, lots of nice slamming dudes’ heads into things, that sort of combat style. Has some of the best rendered food I’ve ever seen in a game. Makes you very hungry playing this, I would say, going to the markets and stuff. A really nice kind of like GTA style open world game at a time where people kind of stopped making those, or even like, even Saints Row, but its next iteration would go like more super hero-y and less kind of like familiarly real world-ish. And I think it kind of always undersold a little bit, but has got a bit of a cult reputation now. And it’s like, I thought it was Rock Solid. And I think they got a chance to make another one. It could have been really up there as an open world game. Rock Solid could use the competition. People should make more of these types of open world games, I think. So yeah, that’s, yeah, Sleeping Dogs. Just like a real kind of solid, like pretty decent storytelling for what it was, but I was more into just like the way the setting was brought to life really. Like I have no idea how close it is to the real thing, but superficially, it looks like Hong Kong to me. And like just, and felt pretty detailed. And driving was quite nice. Just pretty solid open world game, Matthew. Any thoughts? Yeah, I think you’re right about the open world thing. It’s almost like people stop making them, I guess, because of the price of making them. Just as everyone gets good at like all the basics of them. Like, you know, this is a game where everything feels much nicer. Like it’s an open world game like GTA, but like the combat has the kind of like smooth feel of a close up combat game like Batman, you know? It’s, you know, often with open world games, it feels like what you get scale, but you maybe sacrifice the specifics, particularly like mechanically, you know, like GTA was never a particularly good shooter for a long time. And this is the generation when everyone gets better at all the individual parts. Like the driving models get better, or the combat gets better, or the mission design gets better. And, but then it coincides with the period where it now costs, you know, you basically have to be one of the biggest games on the planet to pull one of these things off, or you’re basically dead in the water. So this feels, yeah, it’s kind of sad that we, we don’t get these kind of like second tier under rock star open world games anymore. Yeah. I mean, like the only other one really is Watchdog. Yeah. All I want is a straight up like action, driving around, nicking cars, like enjoying the city environment stuff. Like I don’t care about hacking some traffic lights when I’m going past. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s- Yeah. Yeah. This is like, yeah, just up there really. This developer no longer exists, United Front Games. And what a bummer. Like I feel like they made this and Mod Nation Race is a perfectly like decent sort of carting game with like shareable content. We could make tracks really easily and stuff. Really rock solid. And they just kind of went away. I felt like they were maybe three or four years away from being acquired by Microsoft if they still existed. But yeah, now they’re kind of no more, but what a shame because it did seem like they had the stuff, you know, to make these games. So yeah, yeah. I think I agree with you about the specifics thing. Like even at this point, Rockstar, you know, we were pre GTA V, GTA IV was not a great shooter. It was a good shooter. And so, yeah, the fact that like this game was kind of doing it all was really impressive and an open world setting that Rockstar would never have done itself. So yeah, what can you do? But hey, yeah, they’re really good sort of like standalone game and yeah, like I say, next gen, go Hoover up that version, get a nice new Xbox and it looks super shiny. So Sleeping Dogs Matthew just about wrestles its way onto the list. It may have been higher if I’d have finished it, but because I didn’t, I feel like this was, this was as high as it can go, you know. Should we talk briefly about Max Payne 3? Yeah, okay, sure. Thoughts? Well, I kind of hate Max Payne 3. Right. Like it’s not for me at all. I think it took something I really loved and absolutely ruined it. Like I think it’s completely charmed us. It has none of the character. It’s completely overwrought. I think it sucks. I didn’t like it as a shooter either. It didn’t come near my list, but I was interested as it was competing for your list, what your Max Payne 3 take was. Right. So I would say that what the one big benefit that Max Payne 3 gets is like a linear game in the age of Rockstar just making open world games is that it is the most lavish fucking game in terms of like environmental design and stuff. Like hotel bars you go through where all the glasses are individually rendered of like the different sort of drinks and stuff and like a football stadium that looks the part and like favelas, which is a big part of the kind of Brazilian setting they went for. Just like it just looked so, the production values were just so, so high. And like, while it wasn’t as into the tone of the Tony Scott-esque kind of like stuff that they do here, I really loved the music by Health, the soundtrack by Health was like really different to how this kind of stuff was done. I thought the shooting was frustrating, but I didn’t mind it too much. I quite like that they combined cover shooting and bullet time. The kind of story stuff didn’t land for me as well as the previous Max Payne’s did. I think the series needed to evolve anyway. I don’t think he could have kept doing film noir pastiches and the second one did a lot of the kind of took a lot of it to its conclusion thematically in terms of like, how like Mona Saks dies at the end of the second game and stuff like, I don’t think there was loads more to say on that. It does have a brief kind of New York flashback bit that’s quite nicely done. But I kind of get it. I think some bits of this game really stick out. The organ farm that you come across in this game, really bleak. That’s quite a bold swing at doing something different with Max Payne. I quite liked it. So yeah. I just found it too, it was almost trying to be too classy for what the idea is. Like this idea can be pulpy and fun. Yeah. Like they built those environments, but I didn’t really feel that the combat ever got to like a ludicrous place where like everything was exploding. Like often I’d have a gut, like the gunfights felt like you had to play relatively conservatively. Like it didn’t, you know, unless you played on very easy difficulty, it was pretty tough and not really designed for like mad shit to kind of kick off. I know it’s funny. It’s not a very well loved game, I would say. Generally. And I think like tonally, it is a bit too stiff and not very fun. Whereas like Max Payne too, it’s easy to forget had a whole level set inside like a fictional theme park based on one of the TV shows inside the game universe. And that’s a very remedy thing to do. But this game is like almost lives in a different universe. It’s almost like Max Payne is like a fictional character in his own universe in those first two games. But here, Max Payne is a real guy. Oh, I like that. Who has to like hold down a security job. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It’s like, yeah. Max Payne one and two might be a TV show in Max Payne three. Yeah. And it was also strange how little the game kind of referenced Max Payne too. Like Mona very briefly is mentioned, but like that, the suggestion of the ending of Max Payne two is that that event is kind of the thing that has broken him permanently. And like there’s no hope for him. That’s kind of like the thing you take away from that. But instead it’s kind of, it acts more like, oh, my wife and kids were killed in Max Payne one. And that’s the whole thing. It doesn’t do any of the kind of like big dream sequencing stuff that Remedy did in those games. It is very straightforward. Like man in a Hawaiian shirt shooting a load of like 20 somethings in a Brazilian favela. Maybe the optics of that have dated a little bit. But yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s something in like, what if Rockstar threw all the money and makes, you know, it spends on open world games at one linear environment and you really feel how lavish it is. So that’s, is that a half hearted defense, Matthew? I don’t know. No, I think so. I definitely get that. And I would happily take another, like, like you say, linear high production thing from them. I just, I don’t know, maybe because I had more of a personal connection with Max Payne 1 and 2 in terms of quite sort of games came along at a sort of formative time and was feeling quite protective about it. It’s the idea that Rockstar almost, I got the feeling they thought they were classier than the license, in which case, make something else, you know? Yeah, I could see that. Yeah. Like it’s sort of like, because you get this, you kind of post Al-Inoir as well, which has got like real actors in it and stuff. And GTA IV had quite a serious, thematically serious story. This is kind of like the era where I noticed, I noted like journalists may be calling on Rockstar Games a little bit, because all of those games in a row are quite serious with Red Dead Redemption as well. Like they are bigger into the serious storytelling at this point. And then GTA V kind of dials it back a little bit. But yeah, I think that’s probably fair. But yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at with it Matthew. I don’t think it’s like a masterpiece. I also think that it’s fair to say at this point in this console generation, a third person shooter with no other element to speak of was always going to be a tougher sell. We’d seen so many of them. Yeah. Okay, that’s enough about that then. So what’s your number nine? My number nine is Nintendo Land. Yep. It’s the only Wii U game on my list. Wii U has the worst launch lineup of any Nintendo console, I think. Not by quite some distance. 3DS’s launch lineup isn’t particularly strong either, I would say. But Nintendo Land, you know, I think is the one game which in hindsight is a standout could only happen on Wii U kind of game. Often what happens with weird Nintendo design quirks, like the Wii Remote or the GamePad, is actually, I think it takes like the whole console’s lifespan to really understand where that tech can go or might go. And so, you know, at the start, you review things based on like, it’s like the promise of the machine. And this may sound like I’m about to segue into a defense of red steel. Like we didn’t know what a good or bad first person shooter on Wii could feel like at launch, is a line of defense I’ve taken with that. And by the end of it, you’re like, well, actually red steel was like a pretty good shake at what the Wii was capable of. I think the same with Nintendo Land. Like it wasn’t there came a generation of things which used the Wii U in all these amazing ways. So people who are kind of a bit underwhelmed by Nintendo Land, I think actually I would say, well, this is kind of what the Wii U would ever be. It’s kind of here. Like it or hate it. That’s what we’re dealing with. Hopefully that made sense. No, I think so. Yeah, like it shows that like as a kind of gimmick to sell the console, it’s not nearly as like, it doesn’t have the mileage that the Wii mode did. I think some people marked it down because they expected something more was coming and actually it never did. So actually in hindsight, this was a pretty good indicator of what the Wii was about. I’m really putting it in for the competitive games. There are 12 games in there. I think only three of them are competitive. That’s Mario Chase, Luigi’s Ghost Mansion. Never understood why they added ghosts to that because Luigi’s Mansion is a ghost mansion. And Animal Crossing Sweet Chase. These were the three games which basically pit players with Wii remotes playing on a TV against a player on the game pad who had like an extra layer of information the other people didn’t have. You know, the famous one in Mario Chase is the person who is trying to escape the other players as Mario can see where they all are and can use that command of a labyrinth to kind of pull off some pretty audacious shenanigans to get by them. In Luigi’s Mansion, the people on TV can’t see the ghost that you’re playing as on the game pad. You’re trying to sneak up on them and spook them and get them. And in the suite chase, it’s people trying to collect suites while you control two kind of cops in Animal Crossing. You’re trying to get the suites. That’s a bit of a weird setup. I think Animal Crossing needs like a huge police presence, but whatever. Kind of all variations on a theme, but it really sold. This is one of the few things a second screen can do, is give people another perspective and create some quite exciting drama on the TV. The best Wii U games did do this. They found interesting interplay between the two screens. This was one of the earliest ones that did it best in many ways. It’s as a pack-in game. You have to factor in as that as well. A lot of people bought the Wii U with a slightly bigger hard drive and came with this. It’s a much more substantial, well-rounded package than Wii Sports. There’s just a lot more shape to it. I think it’s more appealing as an all-round thing. I don’t think the remaining nine games are absolutely stellar. I don’t think any of them are honking. They’re more about selling the Wii U as its various inputs. So it’s like gyroscopes or touch screen and that’s fine. But we felt like we’d seen that in previous forms. It’s the games with the second screen that really stand out in this one. I have only played this once. It was at Matt Elliott’s house about three or four years ago. Matt Elliott, who used to work at Future. And I thought, what a tragedy that there are so many people who own a Switch who will never, ever see how good this ghost game is and how good this Mario Chase game is. I remember those two more than the sweet one, really, Matthew? The sweet one is the weaker of the three for sure. But I just thought the notion of that information control as a premise for a party game was just so well done. Just really, really nice. It’s something that only really works for something so specific like the Wii U. It’s kind of a tragedy in a sense. But I thought, I believe that when you’re playing with a Wii mode with the other ones, does the controller vibrate when the ghost is near or something like that? When there’s a ghost near. There’s also extra effects like there’ll be lightning outside the house and it will light up the corridors and reveal a ghost if you’re standing there. So they have balanced it quite carefully. There’s lots of like weird little quirks to help either side. Yeah, it’s like it weirdly reminds me of like the dynamic of some modern board games, like that particular minigame where like in terms of like the 1v3 or 4 players element of it. Yeah, just really, really good. So yeah, I can see why this made your list. I’m glad you went low with it though. I don’t think it needs to be any higher than this just because like you say, if the other games aren’t memorable, they probably shouldn’t be any higher than this, you know? Yeah, and there were some like, duff ones. There was one which was like based on that Ninja Takamaru, quite obscure Famicom game with flicking ninja stars at the screen, which was pretty underwhelming. There was quite a fun one where you’re tilting the gamepad to sort of steer Donkey Kong on a little cart through this kind of deadly labyrinth. But a lot of them could be kind of done and sort of sorted in half an hour and then you didn’t really have to worry about them again. But yeah, we played these multiplayer ones in the office loads. It’s very easy to pick up and play as well. Like if you can move around a maze, you can play this game. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, good stuff, Matthew. So any more thoughts? Should we move on to my number nine? Yeah, let’s do it. All right, sure. My number nine is the game Catherine by Atlas. Oh, right. So this game released in 2011 in the US but only reached Europe in 2012. Bold putting this on the list, isn’t it? Because I have to talk about it now without sounding like a pervert. It’s the pervert game. All right. Pervert, is it? Remember, this is not a horny podcast. Why are you dragging it into a horny podcast territory? If you can talk about this very horny game in a non-horny way, I’ll be impressed. This game’s kind of about shame, I think. Well, you’ve done it. Round of applause. The podcast is over. This is like a puzzle game combined with a visual novel or like the more sort of like life simi elements of Persona, but in a bit of a looser way. It’s part game where you’re hanging around in this bar called The Stray Sheep with your male friends. You play this guy Vincent, who’s this quite anxious dude who’s nervous about being in a full-time relationship with Catherine, his longtime girlfriend, and the commitment that’s coming up as a man who’s like, I think, nearing 30 or is 30, something like that. And he wakes up one day having slept with another woman called Catherine, who is younger and doesn’t remember what happened. And from there you’re kind of like basically in different ways making choices on whether you stick with commitment or go further down the route of cheating. That’s kind of like what this game is about. It manifests though in the form of like decisions you make between this puzzle, this entire puzzle element where you’re ascending these stairs that are collapsing behind you and being chased by various horrors that are manifestations of Vincent’s fear of commitment. Preposterous really. And like the puzzle element doesn’t sit perfectly alongside the more kind of the relationship elements and indeed if those bits weren’t in the game, as a puzzle game this would only be okay I think. But the way that it kind of like blends all of it together, I was just so ready for something like this at the time. Just something that asks some different questions about game storytelling. Would any game now have like, are games too chase now to have a protagonist who cheats on their partner? I think they are a little bit. The idea of a boxed game from a major publisher exploring this kind of subject matter probably wouldn’t happen. But like cheating is a thing that people do and thinking about cheating is a thing that people do and this game tapped into that at a time where like I don’t know I suppose I found some parallels of myself and Vincent in terms of like I didn’t cheat or anything but I was like I was always thinking about it I was in like a steady relationship and I thought do I want to be in this forever the answer was no I didn’t but it was like I don’t know it was it was it asked enough interesting questions that I was thinking about in my head and explored them in ways that I found genuinely compelling sorry Matthew go on. I think there’s a specificity to it which you probably you would expect now more in like the indie space and you see a lot of games that celebrate like people specific experiences and like indie developers who put more of their lived in experiences and the stuff that tends to get celebrated and rightly so is kind of like more diverse voices you know whether that’s sort of like you know race question sexuality questions or just like nationality of like you know what it’s like to grow up in this place or that place and and and that stuff sort of very very sort of celebrated but I guess the little pitch of this is it’s not like miles away from that in that it’s another quite in-depth investigation of the topic it’s just like what it’s an investigation of the perspective is you know a cheating white dude which is maybe why it’s less celebrated I can sort of understand that but I don’t think I think in terms of its actual like sort of toolkit and how it does it I don’t think it is miles away from a lot of indie fare which is celebrated for kind of going a bit deeper into like real life ideas yeah I think that’s fair I think like the big caveat I put on this is like it like you say you’re playing this kind of trash white guy and like it is very male gazey male perspective like um but that yeah that is I’m not defending it, but that is a perspective. That’s a perfectly valid perspective to investigate. And it’s not that this game is celebrating, it realises that it’s kind of tragic, and it’s problematic. And I think that’s what makes it interesting and a worthwhile topic. Yeah, the game doesn’t reward you for cheating. It eventually punishes you, if that’s the path you go down, whereas it kind of rewards you for being faithful. But the fact that they even give you the choice and degrees of consequence from that choice, I don’t know, there’s like, I guess I was really ready to see that in a game. And like, the fact is, in other media, you will watch TV shows and watch films where the protagonists cheat. And like, people don’t take exception to the content based on that usually. Whereas I think if you play, I think maybe people do a bit more in games, for whatever reason, where the actual tone of it is like, maybe people react more sensitively to it than they maybe would with other media, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because it’s interactive or something like that. But I think that means that maybe a game like Catherine just perhaps like, I don’t know. It does have a cult audience. It got a new version a few years ago on Switch and stuff. People do like it. I suppose what I’m saying is, you don’t want to conflate the idea that this character is cheating with the fact that the developers think it’s okay to cheat and it’s promoting cheating by letting you play as a character who can cheat when the intent is maybe a bit more sophisticated than that. Yeah, so it’s a tough one to talk about for sure. And I’ve set myself up for failure by even going for it. No, I think you made a very valid case for it and a case for like, you want a suite of games. It’s a grown up perspective. It may look a bit kind of trashy or silly from the outside, but it’s dealing with grown up stuff and has some grown up ideas. It’s in the same way that like, I think people, when you sort of talk about like, erotic thrillers in films or like how you miss the genre and people are a bit like, huh, huh, huh, you know, dirty, dirty. And you’re like, well, no, it’s part of like a mixed cinematic diet, you know? You want films about adults doing adult stuff occasionally. Like I kind of refuse to feel embarrassed about it. Like if you think it’s salacious, then you know, that’s on you. Yeah, a game that reflects that, why it happens and how, you know, the kind of the thought process that leads to it. Just interrogating that in any way just was really interesting to me and remains enduringly interesting, even with like the more dated elements, there’s sort of dated elements around a trans character that does not stand up the test of time, I would say, and completely valid criticism of that. And like I say, it is kind of, it is male gazey and your mileage on that may vary, but I don’t know, man, Catherine, I will never forget playing this game. It’s super memorable. I like all the kind of kind. Yeah, for sure. Plus you can play Shin Megami Tensei soundtracks on the jukebox in the bar. So yeah, that’s another point in this flavor. So, whew, navigated that one, Matthew. Don’t think I got canceled there. Let’s see what happens in the aftermath. But what’s your number eight? This definitely won’t get, well, it might get me canceled for just bad taste or weird taste or being deliberately Nintendo focused. It’s an Arkham City Armored Edition, Matthew. It is, no it’s not. It’s the sequel to my Wii Mini favorite, Hydroventure. Wow, yes, you love to see it. Fluidity Spin Cycle. Hydroventure was the kind of metroid-y platformer where you played as a big puddle of water. This is the 3DS sequel, which kind of gets rid of the metroid elements, makes it a lot more self-contained levels, but I think focuses the whole idea. It’s a puzzle game built around the different physical states of water. You control a big puddle of water that you pour around levels by tilting the 3DS. You can turn into a cloud that floats around and has specific abilities tied to that state, and you can harden into a block of ice, which can slide down ramps and smash through barriers and things. What I like about this is it’s a really clean evolution of an idea that was pretty great on Wii, great enough to make it onto my Wii Mini anyway, much to everyone else’s amusement. And I just think it fully explores its ideas better. I think it’s technically stronger. The art’s cleaner. It feels like the scale of the adventure is a much better fit for 3DS. It has some absolutely gorgeous water physics, which really sells you on the satisfaction of dealing with these materials. And that for me is the main thing with this game. As well as just being a good puzzle game in its own right, where the different states have playful puzzle solutions, they’re just very nice in their own right. Controlling water has a very satisfying feel of watching it sneak through cracks and things, where turning into a big thumpy ice block and smashing through things, it’s got real weight and heft to it. It’s a very Nintendo-feeling game. It isn’t a first-party game. It’s made by Curve, a London-based studio, but it was made with Nintendo. Nintendo published it. And I think there’s just a lot of, not Nintendo hand-holding, that’s a bit condescending to Curve, but there is clearly some Nintendo through line in terms of how the puzzles evolve, how you introduce people to mechanics. It’s got a very, very nice power curve to it. It feels great, feels very tactile, as well as just being a really smart puzzler. The only thing which is slightly weird about this one is it doesn’t have any 3DS visuals for one, because you’re tilting, it’s all gyroscopically controlled. And it also has levels which are like 360 degree, so you have to like tilt the 3DS all the way upside down, which some people are a little down on, because like as you’re moving the DS, you might close the lid or press buttons or something. I didn’t have that problem. I did note in my review that to be careful if you played with headphones, because you might go rot yourself, I stand by that. Great take, great take that. Thank you. I described the ice block smashing through walls. I reread my review and I described it as an incredible Hulk flavoured ice lolly, which I was pleased with then and made me smile now. Yeah, just a really lovely bite sized weird puzzler. Definitely something to get before 3DS eShop closes. Kind of came out of nowhere. Small, perfectly formed delight. Yeah, I mean, fluidity always deserved better than being battered by Metroid Prime Trilogy and one of our draft culture wars. Like it always deserved better than that, Matthew. I mean, Clash of the Titans. It was never made to be compared to such a thing. Like it was just an unfortunate byproduct of the draft. It was an acclaimed game. I turned it into a punchline. Yeah, that’s on you, my friend. I shouldn’t have sent it out. I shouldn’t have sent it out to fight. I should have sent, yeah, I know, that was 100% on me. And I feel bad about that. Yeah, because like, you know, Curve made a cool little puzzle game that, you know, was decent on a platform that probably needed more games like this to sort of thrive as a digital game service. But yeah, nice to see it on your list, Matthew. I’ve never played it. Maybe I will go grab it before the store closes. But yeah, yeah, cool. Good individual take. This is the sort of thing people like to hear from you, I think, on these episodes. Nice 3DS, kind of Wii type things. The puddle is called Eddie. Okay, very good. It’s quite good. Yeah, it’s just why you hate Thomas Was Alone because it’s like you felt like it was ripping on the same schtick where it’s like… Oh, this was a far more sophisticated game than Thomas Was Alone. Just because it didn’t have Danny Wallace going, Oh, it’s a puddle. Ha ha ha. Or whatever. Okay, good. I’m afraid I’ve got nothing more to add on this one because I’ve just never played it. All right, that’s fine. Let’s move on to your number eight. Okay, my second Japanese game in a row that’s got a young blonde woman on it on the front cover. Lollipop Chainsaw is my number eight, Matthew. Big heart pick here. This is probably the most okay of the different Grasshopper manufacturer 3D action games. But in terms of tone, I fucking love this game. So the real kind of magic at the heart of this is it’s a collaboration between Grasshopper, Suda51’s outfit and James Gunn, the filmmaker who had gone to make Guardians of the Galaxy. But this was pre that. He has like a trauma background, kind of trashy horror stuff. He’s a bit much on Twitter these days. I think we can all agree. But I would say that- You would have learned, right? Yeah. But so this game is like essentially, you play a cheerleader whose boyfriend is bitten by zombies in a kind of zombie attack on this high school, Romero High School. And she, with a chainsaw, chops off his head but keeps him alive in order to stop him from becoming zombie infected and carries him around on a little belt on her side. He’s still alive. He’s wisecracking. He is constantly emasculated while she is going around killing zombies with a chainsaw. And periodically, different James Gunn associated kind of actors like Michael Rooker will turn up playing different bosses and characters in the game. And it’s just really, really fun and funny. Some of my favorite writing ever in a game, Matthew, this one. I really, really love Michael Rosenbaum’s performance. He’s Lex Luthor from Smallville, as Nick, the boyfriend. I think the relationship in a game is very sweetly done because he is constantly emasculated, but he is like quite a spaced out high school dude. It’s got some really nice touches. Like there are sequences where she will place his head on like a kind of like a sort of dummy body and he’ll do this sort of zombie walk while she is sort of cheerleading for him on the side. And it’s this thing where it’s like, she really wants him to do well and prop him up, but he’s like, I’m just a head now. I’m like not a person. And that’s just really fun. And then the kind of way it weaves in music is very similar to how Guardians of the Galaxy uses music as well. You’ve even got some tracks from that, that kind of pop up here. There’s a whole sequence where you’re mowing down zombies in a combine harvester to Dead or Alive spin me around. And the one-liners are just so, so good. I played it with my partner a few years ago, actually, because I was curious to know what she would make of it. She was like, okay, this game has way too many gratuitous shots of this blonde teenage girl, like in a cheerleader outfit, but also is very funny and sweet at the same time. So yeah, maybe a game that like people would argue should be honorable mentions rather than top 10, but these are heartless, damn it. And so I was a big fan of this game. Thoughts, Matthew? This feels very you. This feels like an intersection of interests. Michael Rosenbaum. Do you like James Gunn’s stuff? I think you like James Gunn’s stuff. Yeah, kind of. I’m up and down on it, really. I just think that merging that with the world of like a pseudo game kind of fits it quite nicely. You know what I mean? Yeah. Do you think, and you don’t think this, in the grander pseudo canon, where does this sort of sit? Above Killer is Dead, but below No More Heroes. That’s where I think it sits. Do you think that’s probably fair? How does it sit with Shadows of the Damned? So I’ve only played a very small part of it. I’ve never played it all the way through, for shame. Above Shadows of the Damned, because the kind of, the tonal elements of these games are like, I would say about 50% of their appeal, as well as the games themselves. Would you agree with that? For with series games? Yeah, that’s true. And I thought, I think at the time, I kind of grouped it in with Shadows of the Damned, just because it was like a character with a head sidekick, where it was like a sort of talking skull in Shadows of the Damned. I thought, oh, it’s that again. Yeah. And didn’t really go for it in a big way, but I obviously didn’t give it the time it needed. Yeah, I think like that’s probably fair. It’s probably about as good relative to its genre as Shadows of the Damned is. Maybe Shadows of the Damned is a slightly better shooter, actually. But, and I definitely think small money was spent on Shadows of the Damned. But it’s like the kind of puerile humor of that one really turned me off. Whereas the humor here is about a very dumb situation, but it’s quite sophisticated in its own way. The characters definitely feel like they’ve got their own sort of inner lives. And yeah, I just, it just feels like quite improv-y and just really goes for it. And I think that, I think that, so I would put it above Shadows of the Damned as well in my personal take on the Suda canon. I definitely, definitely have to play this properly. Cause like I said, I have limited experience of it. Well, it feels right for a re-release to me. I don’t know why I didn’t get updated for the backwards compatibility stuff on Xbox. Like that would have been a great way to play it. Otherwise this is just kind of trapped on old consoles, which is a shame. Like I say, it’s just an okay sort of action game. Like it reminds me of No More Heroes in the way that it kind of uses like, it has visually flashy like, you know, sort of like power attacks and ultimate attacks and stuff like that. All that’s in there. Very kind of like the UI is very kind of like, a sort of like a teenage girl’s diary sort of like visual style to it. It’s rife with kind of references to, you know, different genres. Like I say, Romero High School, really obvious one, but like it’s, it definitely feels like it’s standing on the shoulders of like, sort of like tropey horror stuff in a way that’s quite loving. But yeah, it’s mostly like the jokes and the humor and the very specific dynamic that I just really love about this game. Married to some quite fun chopping zombies up with a chainsaw action, Matthew. So delightful. Yeah, there you go. No more horny entries now. What’s your number seven? Yeah, Catherine and that, yikes. Yeah, not good, not good. This is absolutely not horny. Number seven, I’ve got Fez. Oh yeah, that is not horny. Is this on your list? It’s not on my list, no. I like Fez a lot. It feels like every year around this period, there was like one super clever puzzle game, which was a bit out there and had like a secret layer of like madness to it. Felt like it was like Braid, then Fez, then The Witness, I guess. I’m probably only thinking of those three games to be fair, but I’d say they’re all cut from a similar cloth in that they’re kind of slightly far out. So the mechanic in Fez is that it’s a 2D perspective of a 3D world and you sort of spin it by 90 degree increments to discover like a new perspective on the land. And so you’re sort of swiveling sort of cuboid world, I guess, to kind of create new platforming routes. And that in itself is like, it’s not a particularly complicated platformer, but it’s got this very nice retro style, it’s absolutely incredible soundtrack by Disaster Piece, I wanna say. What’s interesting about Fez though, and I’d say sort of similar to Braid, more so The Witness, is that there is this like other layer to it. There’s this idea of like a world beyond the world you’re seeing, not just in that you’re swiveling to get a new perspective, but there is sort of secrets buried deep in this world. It breaks the fourth wall by using things like QR codes, are involved with some puzzles. There’s one where the solution is famously embedded in one of the achievement descriptions for this game. There is a secret language, there are several secret languages in fact, that you have to like learn how to pass and how that happens is kind of extraordinarily clever. Like you have to sort of find the Rosetta Stone of the Fezverse and it’s done in this quite, not chin scratchy, but it’s super smart way. It’s a very, you know, I think some people would call it mega pretentious. Other people like obviously so up my street, if you’re into sort of, yeah, code cracking and layers upon layers, there’s just a huge amount going on in here, which is quite hard to talk about without spoiling it massively. And to this day, like I think that is the kind of reason to play it is to sort of break into that second layer. I will say, I didn’t get massively far into that layer myself because it is really, really difficult, but the few sort of nibbles I had of it made me feel very smart and good about myself, which is why it’s, you know, relatively high up my list compared to some of the other things. Yeah, it just felt like a sort of definitive kind of indie text from this year. There was a huge amount of talk about it because of Phil Fish, the developer, was quite a loud character, I guess. I think people who are like very online have like mega beef with him and I can’t really chart some of it back as a standalone piece of work. I really like this. Yeah, like if you just completely like detach the baggage of the real life artist or however people feel about him from the game itself, like it’s a shame there aren’t more games from him, you know? He’s obviously featured in that indie games documentary that they made as well. And comes across as quite intense in that. But I don’t know. I just think, honestly though Matthew, this is like a pile of shame game for me. I never really got, I never really played Fez. I own it, but yeah, missed it. Weirdly, I get the impression that he’s more interested in that kind of deeper level of stuff that’s going on. Like that, you know, this was always sold as, oh, it’s the kind of 2D game where you rotate it and it reveals other perspectives on it. And I don’t think that’s ever used in like amazingly interesting ways. You know, the actual world design and the actual platforming that comes from it. I think you could build like more of a mechanical challenge using that mechanic and he doesn’t, you know, he’s actually relatively sort of self-controlled with it. But where it is wild is this code and hidden messages and weirdness in this game. Like once you sort of get on the game’s wavelength, you discover that everything is the way it is for a very particular reason. Like there’s like an incredible artful precision in so much of this game that doesn’t reveal itself unless you kind of dig into what makes it special, which, you know, is exactly the same as The Witness. You know, The Witness is a little bit like, so what, until you sort of discover the bigger picture stuff. I’d say this has a sort of similar effect to that. I was looking up online some of the wildest stuff in this game and it is so obscure. Like some of it people cracked just by like brute forcing it by just putting in like endless combinations of things. Like some of the solutions people still to this day don’t really know what the question was. They have the answer but they never really worked out how they were meant to get there. Like it’s that complicated. I think this game still has secrets people don’t understand. Like there’s stuff where there’s tiny graphical elements and from that they’re like communicating to you in like morse code or they’re giving you binary codes you then have to turn into something on your PC to put back in the game. There’s a lot going on here and I won’t pretend I grasped like even 5% of it but I grasped enough to feel cool and like I was part of the cool thing Fez was doing. Oh that’s cool. Yeah I’ve got this wish listed on Switch so when it drops at some point Matthew I’ll hoover it up and give it a go because I always meant to play this. Yeah and like you say as well definitely like speaks to how the indie game movement is happening around this time. You just have so many games like this. This is like you know a vanguard game of that movement. An exciting time for sure. What did you play this on at the time by the way? Xbox Live Arcade I think. Right, right, right. Because I think was it a Summer of Arcade game? I think it was originally yeah just on Xbox yeah. Yeah it feels like that kind of era because there was the big documentary this year. There was that indie game the film or indie game the movie. Yeah. Which was like following Phil Fish and I think it followed the Super Meat Boy team as well. Yeah that’s right yeah. So you know they were quite prolific. They became the kind of poster children I guess for indie all indie games. Yeah which obviously now seems preposterous because it’s such it’s an entire industry onto itself but back then maybe made a bit more sense. Yeah for sure it was like they were just there were a few of them a few of them are around to like make a real impact when they like when they took off and like I say I think like usage of steam creeping up massively around this time just means these games could become overnight hits in a way that just wasn’t possible on consoles at the time. So having said that this was on Xbox that’s a lie isn’t it? That’s not that’s not real analysis but yeah good stuff. Well I said yeah so. So my number seven yeah. Yeah do it. My number seven is Spec Ops The Line on your list. Not on my list. Yeah so just like had to be on my list. I don’t think it’s like the best third person shooter ever. That’s fairly well as well a well kind of like held belief that this is not like a top of the line shooter. But this is a thought provoking game basically about American interventionism and PTSD. And it’s also a great riff on Heart of Darkness slash Apocalypse Now. You play this group of Delta Force like dudes who goes into Dubai, which has been ravaged by sandstorms and has been basically taken over by this Colonel Kirk style figure called Conrad, very on the nose reference there, but you know, it works very nicely. And you hear a lot of like his sort of like screed for these speakers read by Bruce Boxleitner from Babylon 5 and Tron. But he’s really, really good in it. And you play your main characters played by Nolan North. And so you’re basically going into this city to quote unquote liberate it. But along the way, find yourself being drawn to more and more atrocities in order to basically just like stay alive, keep an edge and then without spoiling it, because I think people should be able to play it unspoiled, it’s well worth playing. It does one of the all time perspective flips of what’s actually going on. And then at the end, you have to decide how to reckon with that. And I think it’s incredibly effective. The use of Dubai as a setting was, I think, like just really, really smart and unusual because it’s kind of like the modern version of what like, I don’t know, like a sort of over overinflated kind of like, you know, sort of like a just preposterous wealthy place looks like. So I quite like it’s a take on that. I read some like on Wikipedia, it says that the UAE banned the game, but I couldn’t find a primary new source. And I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think this was considered particularly controversial. I think that might be a bit imaginary. But in terms of how it explored those themes, it generated way too many op-eds, a suffocating amount of them, to the point where it became just a bit, I don’t know, it was a bit like a bit divorced from the game itself, the sort of the kind of like cottage industry of people discussing it. But I would say the game itself is successful in how it explores its themes. Casting Nolan North allows them to subvert the kind of like action hero trope, very kind of much a reference to his role as Nathan Drake, who’s always going around killing loads of dudes and the consequences of that are never examined, of course, because we all like to have fun when we play video games and not be miserable, which is completely fair if you ask me. But as a kind of like a one-off game that explores that idea, really, really effective. Even if I think like one of its weaknesses is you don’t have there are instances in the game where you are essentially pressured into making choices that you know are bad. And then the game’s like, well, look at that bad choice you made later on. And I think that’s the weakness of the game. Like, yes, I know that using white phosphorus is just a bad idea. And the game’s like, well, you got to use this now to clear the area. And it’s like, I know that we should be doing this, but I have no control over this. So that’s the one weakness of the game, I think, where it’s like, you know, look at this terrible thing you did. But I knew it was terrible at the time, and I just felt like I had no other choice. That’s a fault. You can’t use that as a gotcha, you know? It’s not like I was like, woohoo, white phosphorus is rad. Yeah. But it almost thinks that that’s what you are thinking. I mean, it thinks very little of you. I don’t know if it thinks little of you. I know that there’s a line it needs to toe between getting the point of the story across and also having you interact with it as a player. It’s tough to draw that line. But as a bold game from a massive publisher, it’s a take two published game. This has got a pretty strong anti-war message to it. You don’t have to read between the lines much to realize that it’s quite anti-America as well. So at least the American approach to interventionism and the consequences of that, which is something we are perpetually living with. Thoughts Matthew? Did you play this well at the time? Yeah, I did. I must admit I’ve often struggled to balance the brains it obviously has and the fact that it’s like a fine cover shooter. I almost feel like its message gets more effective the more compelling it is as an action game. That’s almost the twist in a way. The more it can get you on board with it, the more effective it would be. Mechanically, it’s fine. It’s absolutely fine. I think there’s an even more effective version of this game, I guess is what I’m getting at. And it’s sort of hobbled in certain ways. I’m also not sure if 2K really… They obviously understood what the game was about, but in previews and the way they talked about this game, felt like they were just trying to make you buy this if you like Call of Duty. I don’t think that was just a PR person cleverly setting you up for a rug pull. I think 2K were trying to sell it as a war game. Jager, yeah. Jager were obviously doing something more with it, but you almost get the feeling people didn’t really know. It wasn’t sold as a clever game, which is almost like the surprise. It’s like, surprise, this has got big brains going on in it. I guess they talked about Heart of Darkness a bit in the early phases of it. Maybe I felt a bit hard to detach from that conversation, hard to detach from how it was marketed and sold as well. It did have a multiplayer mode that was very poorly received as well. That speaks to what you’re saying, I think, about art. Yeah, there’s obviously smart stuff going on in there, but at times it almost seems accidental, which makes it kind of a tricky one to like out and out celebrate. I don’t know if I agree with that. I think those choices are very deliberate. Which password do you think are accidental? The fact that it has this stance, but then it also has a multiplayer mode. That’s what I mean. There’s certain things that seem to contradict each other, where you’re like, well, a team that is switched on, including enough to take the story down this route wouldn’t also make that decision. Accidental is wrong. I’d say there’s definitely a tension there between maybe developer and publisher, I would think. Yeah, it spent a long time in development as well. I think it was revealed in 2009 and then came out in 2012. I remember it writing about it on X360 magazine and then years later it comes out. So, yeah. But yeah, a really interesting, kind of a must play wherever you land on it. It feels like a thing that everyone should experience and probably have a take on, even though I never want to hear those takes. You’ve heard mine now and you must be appalled. Well, your takes are always good. I don’t know. Whenever a mainstream game kind of sells itself on big ideas, it feels like people really give it a hard time and you have to hold up to so much scrutiny because all the clever journalists come out with a, you know, like Bioshock or whatever. There’s lots of snooty stuff written about it where actually I think you should celebrate a game which kind of tries to engage with any ideas that are outside of the gamer’s traditional wheelhouse where this is almost the flip side of it where it doesn’t advertise as a smart game and so people kind of celebrated it more. It’s like people like to celebrate kind of hidden intelligence and drag down explicit intelligence. It’s a bad trait in a lot of games journalists and critical writing in general. It’s almost like I’m going to show you how clever I am compared to the, you know, the self-proportedly clever game. And you’re like, well, you know, fuck that. I’m just not interested in that. I think like a lot of the takes we have on this podcast are, well, at least they tried. Do you know what I mean? And like that’s… And I think that’s perfectly valid, but… Yeah, no, I agree with you. But we can deal with all that when we get to the inevitable Bioshock Infinite conversation in the future episode. For sure. So what’s your number six, Matthew? My number six is The Walking Dead Season 1. Higher on my list, but it’s my number five. So do you want to talk about it now? No, we can talk about it after your six. Alright, that is the format, I suppose. My number six is FTL, Faster Than Light, on PC. Not on my list. Yeah, I didn’t think it would be. So yeah, I think I’ve discussed this on previous episodes. Kickstarted game, spaceship simulation, rogue-like, where you’re managing a ship throughout these battles and essentially travelling across this galaxy while being pursued by these different forces, basically. And your goal is to survive these ship battles, to thrive, to upgrade your ship with new parts, new weapons, that sort of stuff, recruit new little dudes to help manage your ship systems. When you get attacked, your ship is on fire sometimes. You need to find ways to put the fires out. Basically spaceship management stuff. And I think the thing that really brings it to life, actually, is just that I love the little bits of narrative that you uncover in this game. When you go to a planet, it’s like, oh, there’s one survivor left from this previous ship that crashed here. Do you let them on board, or do you basically leave them on the planet themselves? And if you choose to bring them on board, there’s a dice roll in the background where it’s like, they either join your crew as a new member, and it’s really good, or they are a bit too far gone and then blow up a part of your ship. That kind of risk-reward element in narrative form really accompanies the ship battles well, Matthew. But I would imagine people are very familiar with this, and I don’t have loads more to say about it, so last, do you have any more thoughts, any thoughts on this one? Do you ever play it? I’ve only ever played this in a party setting. At Tom Francis’ house where we collectively killed loads of people again and again. It’s weird how so many of my memories of Tom Francis are tied up with scary roguelikes where spaceships are failing, because I also played the Battlestar Galactica board game with him, which we talked about maybe in the Excel episode again. I think it is the Patreon episode, yeah. Oh, I’m so sorry listeners, I won’t keep doing that. That’s super obnoxious. But if you want to hear my Battlestar Galactica thoughts, that’s in there. Prod, prod. Yeah, I think the stuff about the narrative is super interesting. It feels like it becomes a bit of a model as well, or certainly the thing I like most about rogue-like slash rogue-lite games is when they weave in random narrative happenings. And that seems to happen in many of them. Maybe it predates FTL in some other big way, but this feels like quite a key influential game in that regard. And it’s a trait that I’m interested in, in how narrative interacts with genres, which can be quite mechanically cold in terms of their building blocks. It kind of brings them to life and gives you more of an emotional reason to keep playing, I guess. Yeah, for sure. I think that does add to it a lot. I think when they do the Advanced Edition in 2015, which is perhaps the best game ever released on iPad, if you ask me. I just think this game is perfect for playing on an iPad. They added a bunch more of that story stuff with contributions from now a complicated figure to discuss. Serial wronging. Yeah, Chris Avalon. So yeah, a bit complicated to discuss that bit. But the game itself, it’s like two guys who made this, Justin Maher and Matthew Davis, like a proper good success story, I think. A game I played loads in my early days on PC Gamer. Maybe this is my way of trying to understand how management works. I don’t know. But good stuff, Matthew. So what’s your number five? My number five is Binary Domain. Yes! This is not on my list. I’ve never played it, but I was hoping you would discuss it. Seems like a proper cult classic, so hit me up. Yeah, this is, I mean, like the short version is it’s the Yakuza Studio does Gears of War. It’s a cover based shooter about a team of international agents who are trying to break into I think it’s Tokyo, like a Neo Tokyo in the future to find out who is building robots that look like people because in the future robots are so, robotics are so advanced that you can build life like people. They’re called hollow children is against the law but they start turning up in America causing trouble. So everyone’s like, well, we better, we better go and deal with this. So it’s quite a simple trip through the city from its sort of sewers and under city all the way up to its gleaming sort of technological spies. So it feels like while it obviously has like this huge blockbuster sort of scale to it and it’s a linear trip through the city, it still has the Yakuza team’s very fine eye for like location and place and atmosphere. Even though it’s completely detached from any recognizable reality, it feels like a pretty comprehensively thought out place. It feels like a very believable slice of the future that they present. But what I really love about this is, considering that these kind of games and cover based shooters and third person shooters are sort of felt to be more the domain of the West in terms of like that’s where a lot of the big breakout hits come from. This one nails so many parts of the experience that the really key one it nails is the enemies are spectacular fun to fight because you’re fighting robot armies and it catches the sense of a unfeeling mechanical death machine coming towards you and you shoot bits of their limbs off and they basically recalibrate based on where you shoot them. So if you shoot off their arms and they can’t use a machine gun, they’ll pull a pistol with their other hands, start using that. If you shoot off their legs, they’ll claw along the ground towards you. If you shoot off their heads, they kind of go mad and start shooting wildly at their other robot friends and the sense of these disintegrating robot bodies is so brilliantly captured. They really come apart in a beautiful way. It’s almost like their skin is ceramic, the way they shatter and break. So it’s got this really amazing sense of feedback, which I think is like most of the battle in these kind of games. This does for mechanical bodies what Gears of War arguably did for flesh bodies. The satisfaction of pattering flesh with bullets and seeing it get chewed up in Gears of War. This has the kind of shattering mechanical version. What’s really telling is that when Gears of War introduces a robot faction in Gears 4, it is no way near as fun to fight as the robots in binary domain. It is a huge fucking slog when it happens in Gears 4. And I think that’s partly because I think back to these guys. They really nailed the one important thing, which is what happens when you shoot an enemy. Is it really good? If so, it doesn’t really matter what the game is about as long as you can just do that good thing again and again. I’d say that is why binary domain is like, you know, maybe not on a nuts and bolts level the best cover shooter. It’s not a smooth in and out of cover. It’s a little bit janky. But the thrust of the action is like really, really up there in the genre as far as I’m concerned. This is like in the sort of sub genre of games marked Chris Schilling will tweet about it sometimes. And that’s kind of when it like Chris. Yeah, I mean, Chris is a huge, yeah, a huge advocate and cheerleader for this game. And that is why he’s one of the good eggs anyway. This is this is definitely a factor in that. Yeah. So I have been wanting to play this for a long time. I understand it’s backwards compatible on Xbox Series X. So frame boost as well. Yeah. Just waiting for a price drop on the digital version. And it will be mine, Matthew. I will play this. I was meant to. It’s also got really good sidekicks. You’ve got like like a French robot called Kane. And while like it’s fun to play the game with the original Japanese voices, if you play with the international cast, you get the guy doing a very comedy French robot, you know, where he’s like, he doesn’t say Jean-Mappel Kane, but he is kind of like, oh, hello, zut alorss, you know, we’re getting shot at and all this kind of stuff. And he really sells that character. Not very, very endearing. Not sure the real version can live up to your impression, to be honest, Matthew. You know, I can’t honestly can. It’s great. It’s just a French. I like he doesn’t wear. I don’t think he wears a beret in my mind. He does. He’s that French. OK, I like that you’re only about 80 percent sure then. I don’t think he wears a beret. I can imagine it. When I think of that robot, I think of a robot with a beret and like one of those striped mime shirts. But he definitely doesn’t wear that. But that is like 100 percent his energy. Yeah, yeah. That’s really good. No, I’ll definitely check that out at some point. Did you ever do much of the voice like command stuff in this? That’s the thing you can do, right? You can do that with on screen inputs as well. At the time, I think people got a bit distracted by the fact that you can like shout orders and like reply to them and your relationship with your AI characters, there’s like a loyalty system bubbling away under which sort of changes how some of the stuff happens at the end. I must admit, I didn’t really get too into that side of things. In the heat of battle, I wasn’t worried about am I saying something nice or not to this dumb French robot. You know, I was just enjoying, I just enjoyed the ride. You know, I haven’t sort of endlessly replayed this test out variations or whatever. The mic stuff, I just, I don’t really have a read on it. Two things that stopped me from playing at the time. I thought it had the most boring game title of all time. Binary Domain. And my ongoing feud with What’s-his-face. The guy I met. Nogoshi. Yeah, Nogoshi, yeah. As detailed in The Best Games of 2008. So I held a grudge for a long time on that one. I really don’t understand why people were slightly sniffy about this game. You know, I think just the feel of it is so immediately, obviously good. Like, I sort of don’t know what people were playing who gave this, like, a six. Yeah. You know, where you were like, it just doesn’t compute. Like, that just feels like, oh, well, it’s not Gears, it’s not Snobby. Like, there’s no way the Yakuza guys could make this shooter. That’s how those reviews read to me. Like, I just, I don’t believe this could possibly be good. And you’re like, well, it just is. It just is good in the hands. Like, it obviously is. Oh, I definitely think they’ll play this at some point then. I think this, like, the lack of success for this led to quite a big restructure of Sega as well. It was like quite a, I think they had a lot riding on it, and then it just didn’t quite pan out. So, it’s like, you’re just going to make two Yakuza games a year for the rest of your life. Until you leave and join, who else, I can’t remember, they left and joined, was it NetEase or something? Oh, yeah, and hopefully he makes two Yakuza games there for the rest of his life. Yeah, and then while mainline Yakuza and Judgement just carry on, and there’s four Yakuza games a year, that could be good. Oh, my God, the dream. Good stuff. So, my number five Matthew, as mentioned, is Telltale’s The Walking Dead, season one. We discussed this a bit on the horror games episode with Louise, very good episode. Let’s try and get Louise on again soon. Yeah, sure. She’s really good. Yeah, so this was, I had low expectations for this because the TV show was on at the time. It was the hot shit to that TV show, even though it became crap extremely quickly and then remained crap for 10 years. And I can’t believe it’s still on TV. That’s ridiculous. Endless character deaths, just depressing, boring bullshit just because it’s got nice zombie effects and everyone lost their minds. This game came along at a time where I was really big on the TV show and was based more on the comic universe. That raised a bit of an alarm bell. I looked at the art style of it, this kind of cartoony thing and it just didn’t quite look real enough. I was a bit like, ehh, played it and was completely blown away by the sophistication of the choices, the characterisation, this kind of relationship at the heart of the game between Lee and Clementine. That was this kind of like, this kind of former convict and then yeah, this kind of like adopted sort of daughter figure. The choices you make and the consequences that will play out in the episodes afterwards. Then when the episodes did roll out through the months, it felt like a genuine event when they dropped. It was like, I can’t wait to see what happens next. Your take Matthew on this one? Yeah, I played it all after the end. Like I heard this like rumbling on getting big and it wasn’t until it was like appearing in people’s like Game of the Year lists that I was like, oh, I better give this a go. And yeah, I’m kind of blown away for all the same reasons. Like I can count the number of games on one hand that have genuinely like emotionally kind of like got under my skin. I’m not going to say I wept today. I don’t think I did, but it’s pretty hard. Like I find it very, very kind of hard to get to that place with games. But the kind of relationship that builds through this season and kind of what happens in the finale was, yeah, about the most effective version. Like for my money, these characters like meant a lot more to me. Like The Last of Us, Joel and Ellie, who are arguably very similar kind of, you know, energy to it in terms of like you’re the protector and there’s a younger character. Great supporting cast as well. I feel like everyone kind of gets their moment to shine. I think that’s where Telltale like gets flakier as their games go on, is that they never, they never quite nail the ensemble in the way that they did here where it feels like everyone had their place, everyone had their moment. Like it doesn’t feel like anyone gets hugely short changed. I don’t, not in my memory anyway. Just very, very beautifully balanced throughout and yeah, great stuff. Yeah, for sure. I think like the fact that it’s like one, there’s one, what seems like a small decision that comes around back around in the final episode is just like a really nice bit of like believable post-apocalyptic storytelling where the zombies are not the point of it. The zombies are just like a background factor and it’s about the humanity and who are left, which is always meant to be the kind of excitement at the heart of the Walking Dead comic. It’s like, it’s this soap opera thing, but this felt like a more sophisticated take on it to me. And yeah, I agree with you. I think like the thing that I think I like about it compared to the Joel-Elli relationship is that you give in such an on-the-nose reason as to like Joel’s perspective of that relationship in The Last of Us, which I know is a very powerful sequence, but it’s almost a shortcut for you to understand what they’re going for overall with the arc of that character. Whereas with The Walking Dead, it’s more circumstantial and maybe feels more real as a result. You know what I mean? Yeah, so I agree with you on that. Yeah, top stuff, Matthew. I never played the other ones, so I have no opinion on them at all. Yeah, they’re definitely interesting in that you have a connection to those characters and you like to see how everyone’s getting on, but they’re not like the overarching stories for each season are nowhere near as good. I mean, I don’t think Telltale ever got close to this again in terms of quality. Maybe Tales from the Borderlands, but for totally different reasons. It’s just that’s so different, but you know, that’s probably their second best game, I’d say. Fair enough. So what’s your number four, Matthew? My number four is Dishonored. Higher on my list. Okay. What’s your number four? Mass Effect 3. Not on my list. Wow. Interesting. But Fluidity was. Hey, you knew you. It’s a moment like this, I think. Oh dear. This is not a draft though, Matthew. You’re not going to be like… No, it’s not a draft. We need a break from those, I think, just to like mentally recover. We never talked about that actually. You beat me in the PSV to draft by about one and a half percent. That was very close. Okay, yeah. So Mass Effect 3. Definitely not as good as Mass Effect 2, of course. Very controversial ending to this trilogy of games where you could carry your save across between the different entries. In this game, the basically the Reapers are here and it’s like the end times and it’s like do or die, essentially. The stakes feel massive, they arrive right at the start of the game and then you’re basically scrambling to deal with this ultimate apocalyptic threat that’s basically here to reset life in this part of the galaxy. And yeah, things are looking bleak. And so this manifest is a game that has a party that is not quite as good as Mass Effect 2’s party, which I’d say is an all-timer in terms of like great characters. Zayid and Jacob are also there. We obviously talked about Mass Effect a lot on that episode we did last year, Matthew, which I was really proud of. A lot of scrambled together Mass Effect memories there. I think this trilogy coming out though has really like reestablished it as like a, you know, there was less controversy, like there’s no more arguments about the ending. People don’t care as much and they were able to just celebrate it as a whole more than they were, which is good. And yeah, I think the finality of it really landed with me. I know it comes down to pressing one of two buttons, but there is a piece of music in this. Kill Jacob or don’t kill Jacob. Cut off, break. Clint Mansell piece of music called An End Once and For All, which I think is like a beautiful piece of music that really just like sold the sense of an end of a journey to me. And I felt it felt very significant to me because the first game in this series came out when I first got into games media. The last one came out at this point where I felt like I’d been around for a long time. So it was always kind of their Mass Effect. It was always a thing we discussed in the office. And then here was this final entry to cap it all off for these characters I was very attached to. A slightly better shooter than Mass Effect 2. But yeah, I would say that like in terms of like the RPG experience feels felt just slightly pared down from Mass Effect 2. Fewer characters to interact with. You didn’t have the loyalty missions. You did have like a form of them, I feel like. But the specific loyalty missions of Mass Effect 2. It didn’t have that same episodic format. But yeah, still a game I love. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I just much prefer two. I don’t have any particular beef with three, but it feels like it switches into like let’s end in this mode. And as a standalone thing, I’m just, you know, I think it is successful and I think it sees a lot of stuff through and how reactive it is to your Mass Effect 2 save in many ways. Maybe not right at the end, but in many other ways is still hugely impressive. Yeah, it’s just down to like, you know, not as much into the characters. I feel like they didn’t really do anything with Fane that I enjoyed in this and I was a big Fane guy. So that was that was a bit sad. Yeah, I think in my life I was just so busy that when I, you know, I did play this when it came out, but I just didn’t have like, it just didn’t really lodge with me in any particular way. I had so many other bigger concerns with what was going on with the mags that I just couldn’t, I couldn’t really worry about Mass Effect 3. So it’s kind of slipped through the nostalgia cracks a little bit for me, which is why it doesn’t appear on my list, but I have no real issue with it. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s fair. It was like really significant to me. I was really ready for it when it came around. And so, yeah, it was a massive moment. Then it was all gone suddenly. It was, yeah. And the think pieces as well. Yeah, the debate around the ending definitely overshadowed this game. Sucks seeing developers get harassed, sucks seeing pricks get what they want on the internet. Just sucked, the whole thing. And I didn’t have that much bigger problem with the ending. And then when they added the extra ending bit, I didn’t really, didn’t go back and look at it. I wasn’t interested. Felt like I’d said I’d had my time with those characters and it was fine. I think people just wanted something impossible from this series. It had already given them so much. I think this is like an all time great trilogy of games. And yeah, I wasn’t having it, frankly. So what’s your number three, Matthew? My number three is beat the beat Rhythm Paradise. A classic Matthew Castle entry, not on my list. Again, this is just a huge 2012 game for me because it was the one magazine cover that I edited where I really got to do the game I wanted. So my happy memories are tied up with it. It’s an entry in the Rhythm Heaven series, which is Nintendo’s weird WarioWare-ish. It’s kind of an offshoot of the WarioWare team involved with it. Rhythm game where all the games are built around very simple button inputs on here. It’s just the A on the Wii Remote or pressing, pinching A and B together. And it’s just following the rhythm. As long as you follow the rhythm, you won’t go wrong. And then what the mini game tries to do is basically throw you off with all kinds of weird audio tricks and visual tricks. So a lot of this game is just as long as you keep the rhythm up, you will win. And it’s as simple as that. So beautifully easy to pick up. Absolutely banging tunes. I think what I like about the Wii one is that I was just doing one made for TV. Normally these are handheld games. And up until this point, I would have said, oh, that makes sense. Like they feel more like handheld games because you’re locked into these quite bitty, like some of them are only 30 seconds long. The idea of sitting at a TV to play them doesn’t make any sense. But I really love the scale that the Wii brings to some of these games. A lot of them have elements where you start very close up to the action to kind of set the rhythm. So you’ve got the visual cues as well helping you. So like say you’re like marching a little bird on the screen. And then as the game progresses, like the camera will view out and like more birds will appear until eventually there’s like a thousand birds and you’re really far from the action. And it’s kind of like the blockbuster equivalent of a rhythm heaven game. And like another famous example of this, there’s one where you’ve basically got a ticking hand on a watch going around and you’re on the end of it, you’re high-fiving monkeys who pop out of like the holes around the side of the watch. So you’re just like high-fiving each one on the beat as you go around. But eventually like it zooms all the way out so you can no longer see the individual monkeys and you’re just hitting, you can just hear the slap of the high five. And it does lots of tricks with that. Like it does everything I’d want a TV version of Rhythm Heaven to do, I guess. Yeah, also like I was never particularly into the DS version of this because it had touch screen controls, it was all stylus based. And the precision of a button press is just so much nicer than flicking a screen or tapping a screen. But for my money, the A button on the Wii Remote is like the ultimate Rhythm Heaven control scheme. So that’s why this one really, really works for me. Okay, so if I wanted to play, because look this up Matthew, I believe this is available on Wii U to buy digitally. Yeah, you can buy it on Wii U. I mean, probably the one I would say to get now is Megamix on 3DS. Right, I was about to ask that. Because that’s got like most of the best games from the entire series in one game. That’s the most Rhythm Heaven you’ll get. None of these games are so big that you think you feel entirely comfortable paying like 40 quid for them or whatever. They’re very niche. But if you are into them and you click with their particular thing and their visual sense of humour and their charm, it’s like a series I 100% get behind. It’s similar to WarioWare in that way. You don’t play these games to play for 100 hours, but because you are a believer in Nintendo’s silly department where these games come from. The most chef kiss pair of games I have in one of my 3DS horror books is the row that has both WarioWare Gold and Rhythm Heaven Paradise Megamix next to each other. That’s like chef kiss. Makes me very satisfied seeing those next to each other. It’s like the height of indulgence. God bless it. Yeah, 55 quid. This will set you back on eBay to buy the original version. Proposterous. Not many Wii games go for that high. Good stuff, Matthew. Pleased to hear that on your list ahead of Dishonored. Just what I’d expect from you. In a good way. My number three is Hotline Miami. As mentioned on the PS Vita draft, we just discussed this very recently. Top-down action game. Riffs on 80s nostalgia. Kind of pumping, sort of like, I don’t know, what’s the term? Electro something or other soundtrack. There’s some term for it. For the type of music this taps into. It was a very early 2010s genre to take off. Synthwave, that kind of thing. That’s the word I’m thinking of. And basically comes down to a score attack of taking down loads of dudes in a row, shooting them, punching them, hitting them while they’re on the ground, and then throwing knives, baseball bats, anything you can think of to create these kind of like John Wick style set pieces, I guess. John Wick feels a bit reductive to kind of describe it that way. Just very brutal encounters. I suppose Old Boy is probably more what it was going for. Just really nicely done. Such a confident sense of style. Just looked unlike anything else at the time. A proper games are changing moment, I suppose, where it’s like this is like kind of the quintessential indie game in some ways of like a certain type of indie game where it’s like a riff on a past genre contemporized in all these different ways in terms of the way it controls, the way it sounds, the way it looks. Really, really exciting. Arguably a game that was probably best at home on Vita more than anything else, but it started on PC and became enormous, justifiably so. I controversially still slightly prefer the sequel because it’s longer. But any thoughts on this one, Matthew? Yeah, I didn’t pick this one just because I associate it more with Vita. That’s 2013, right? I believe so, yeah. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve even played it on PC. So purely for that rather semantic view, I’ve not gone with it. But yeah, I mean, it’s like you say, just an absolutely essential key part of the indie landscape, a bit of a game changer. I mean, all that aside, just hugely entertaining in a really grisly way. Absolutely zero shame in really, really enjoying this horrible game. Yeah, for sure. I had a dream recently that Denaton announced a new game, and then I woke up and it wasn’t real and I was very sad. Nice little pocket anecdote for you there. Do they still exist, Denaton? Yeah, I believe so. I think they are working on something. They’ve said a few things publicly about what it is. We’ll see. They’ll be back, I think. What’s your number two, Matthew? My number two is Zero Escape, Virtue’s last reward. Here he comes. Mr. Zero Escape, the series that battered me in the PS Vita draft. My understanding is that the first two games are legit, Matthew, but the third one is not. This is the second one, so what’s the deal? This is the second one. I think the third one is legit, but we’ll get to that down the line when we eventually… whatever year that was. Yeah, this is the second one. I think you can enjoy it as a standalone game. It has some quite big story connections to the first, but I think it’s relatively well explained within it. A visual novel mixed with escape room kind of point and click puzzles. That’s what I think elevates this above a lot of other visual novels, is that if you get a little bit kind of sleepy from just reading endless text, every once in a while there’s a really like engaging puzzle section to play, and that kind of rhythm of like text and then puzzle text and puzzle is what livens this up. I actually wonder if that puzzle element means it’s technically not a visual novel. I don’t really know what the rules are for that, but whatever. Really great set up, load of strangers locked in a game of death where they basically have to sort of vote, whether to sort of trust or betray one another. It’s a bit like the Jasper Carrot game Golden Balls. In that if you both vote to trust, you both win. If one person votes to trust and the other person votes to betray, you get absolutely fucked and the betrayer gets loads of points. So it’s all about the tension that exists between people. I mean, none of it’s sort of procedural or whatever. It’s all highly scripted and you have to play every variation of the story to get to the true ending of the game. But there’s a good charge to those scenes where you’re doing the kind of trust or betray. It’s quite funny. I wrote Jasper Carratt’s Golden Balls in my notes for this and then went back to my read my review just before recording. And my opening paragraph was all about Jasper Carratt’s Golden Balls. Like my brain is so locked into that idea that even like 10 years on, I basically like I went to exactly the same place. Right. I don’t know. That’s probably I don’t know. That’s a good sign. My brain’s not fading too quickly. Yeah, this is just as a piece of genre science fiction thriller, amazing twist turns, a really just complete epic story. It doesn’t go where you’re thinking. The puzzles are really good. Characters are really good. It’s packed with philosophical ideas and miniature science lectures that kind of create this soup of ideas that you spend the whole game in. So you just constantly thinking, how does this relate? And it kind of casts everything in an interesting light. It’s just a game of ideas, but not too high for looting or pretentious. Just very accessible, really fun and entertaining, but also pretty damn smart. I think this is so, so good. I always meant to play these games, Matthew. So would you recommend? What’s the recommended way of playing it these days? Well, one and two have been done as like a port to PC. They’ve just been added to Game Pass, actually, so you can play them on Xbox One as well. Oh, yeah. Can you play them on your phone? Yeah, yeah, you can stream them. So yeah, you can do that. So yeah, definitely play 999 first if you can and then play this one. They’re together as a duology on Xbox Game Pass. And then we’ll see if they release the third one. I don’t know. But yeah, very easy to play these these days. I assume that if, because this is like the first time they’ve ever been released on Xbox, that maybe like a Switch version seems quite likely. Because it’s a Spike Chunsoft game, right? Yeah, you’d think it would be an obvious choice. Yeah, like Danganronpa. It feels like it will maybe just be a Switch version later on at some point. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, not graphically complicated. So it was a 3DS and a Vita game as well. But you know, it does the job on whatever format. I played it on 3DS, started replaying it on Xbox just to see what it was like. And yeah, it held up great. Great stuff. Yeah, I will always meant to play these. I’m sure they’ll come up when we have Lucy on for our visual novels episode in the summer. That should be good. Okay, cool. So my number two, Matthew, is XCOM Enemy Unknown. Oh, shit. That’s not on my list. All right. Did you like it, that game? Yeah, I did like it. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. It sounded a bit regretful there, but I don’t know. No, I kind of, yeah, I just keep feeling bad about that fluidity. Fluidity has had enough, like, a flack from your actions, Matthew. Like, I don’t think we need to keep digging with it. Those poor people at Curve, come on. Yeah. Okay. So XCOM Enemy Unknown. Firaxis-led reboot of an old MicroProse, I think it was, series, created by Julian Gollop in the 90s, also known as UFO, Enemy Unknown in the UK, I think it was. I don’t know why that happened, confusing, but I’m sure someone, some branding person thought that was a good idea. So this game reformatted the turn-based tactical experience of fighting these alien invaders into a gamepad-friendly format, released it on PC and consoles, an experience where there was parity between those different versions. Incredibly impressive for the time. I think it helps that this game is quietly quite simple, I would say. It’s like, you know, it’s got a high skill ceiling to really succeed as a tactics-based experience. You’ve got to like make all the right moves and the higher difficulties and not fuck anything up. This is a game big on dramatic percentages, where a 90% shot might miss, and then you’ll be reeling from that. You build up a big sort of investment in your characters by naming them and changing their appearance in a very limited way, I would say. Changing their nationality. So you have Samuel Roberts from Nigeria on the battlefield, that’s kind of confusing. But you know, don’t think about it too hard, I would say. And then you’re basically going into these like urban environments, so a variety of different environments and like looking for the aliens, hunting them out and then trying to repel them, capturing them to study, to learn more about them, then more deadly types turn up and ultimately you take on this, that you go to like a big spaceship and then try and like destroy the whole thing and stop the invasion. Really nicely done and like the isometric perspective with like a 3D camera you can move around just meant that like and the really chunky UI felt like a breakthrough innovation in making this type of game work well on consoles. Really really good and like yeah dramatic, fun, exciting, great on iPad as well. I mentioned the Vita version in the previous episode, but yeah and only improved by the addition of like mech stuff and alien things in the follow-up expansion Enemy Within in 2013. Thoughts on this one Matthew? Yeah I’m kind of in complete agreement with all that. Just the fact that it sort of invents what this genre is now like, sort of almost single handedly kind of creates the rules for this, allows this kind of game to work in you know I love many variations on this that have come afterwards you know I love the Gears Tactics, there was that western one which is like a bit supernaturally that was quite good, Hard West maybe it was called? Yeah but I feel like they laid a lot of important groundwork that other people can like riff on I mean you know Rare is the game that moves a sort of genre ahead completely, particularly something which feels so PC centric into the console space, yeah a really, a really yeah special game. Yeah for sure yeah I think as well like it’s telling that when Julian Gollop made Phoenix Point with his studio snapshot you know he wasn’t afraid to borrow back from the game that iterated on the formula he created that’s very flattering I think for Firaxis and yeah I think that’s it’s great to see that kind of thrive as a sub-genre. So yeah great stuff yeah I really love this and the simplicity of this I think like still holds up quite nicely in x2x.com too which is a bit more intense and packed as an experience masterpiece for sure but I just really loved this first one the vibe of it was spot on. So what’s your number one Matthew? My number one is Kid Icarus Uprising. Of course of course. Probably for me the definitive 3DS game in terms of the way it uses the 3DS so basically huge reboot for Kid Icarus an old NES game which had a kind of certain charm to it it’s quite a simple 2D platformer. This takes the action and splits it into two arcade-y phases. One is an aerial space harrier-esque game where you’re shooting into the screen. Quite like Sin and Punishment as well where you’re in the foreground, you’re shooting into the background but the camera’s constantly pivoting and spinning to frame the action in the most exciting way possible as you fly through canyons and over battlefields but then at some point in the level you’ve got a limited amount of time that you can fly that’s like a narrative contrivance rather than a mechanic. You run out of flight and you land and then you do an on foot section where you sort of explore in third person a kind of a smaller enemy base or whatever and then end up fighting a huge boss. For a game which is my favourite game of the year, still feels like a huge love it or hate it because it’s got a very unusual control scheme. You basically control the camera with the stylus, you control Pip with the circle pad and then he attacks with L and that’s, if you can kind of picture such a thing, if you have not played this game, that’s quite an unfriendly grip. Enough that they had to sell the game with a plastic stand to put the 3DS on. There was never a version of this game where you could use the second little analogue stick or the analogue nub to control the aiming, if it would work as more of a twin stick thing. In theory it would, but I will say aiming the camera and aiming your reticule with the stylus gives it a speed and a kind of reactivity that maybe an analogue stick couldn’t keep up with. It’s kind of like the 3DS equivalent of mouse and keyboard, I can’t really picture it working as well on two analogue sticks. If you can get over that hurdle, you’re basically in for a really singular action experience which is quite un-Nintendo like in many ways. It was made by Masahiro Sakurai, aka Kirby’s dad, Mr Smash Brothers, and he makes what I think is probably the most cinematic Nintendo campaign ever. Visually gorgeous. There’s a huge amount of writing and voiceover in this game. Basically the whole time you’re playing, you’re bantering with the goddess Palutena who’s kind of your sidekick, or with the bosses of the level, so there’s all this chat. There’s a lot of twists and turns, it’s very anime-ish. Story is quite important to this in the way that it just isn’t in a lot of Nintendo action games. The pure visual spectacle of it feels like a lot more… I don’t want to say Western, but I do think of all the Nintendo developers, if you ever read interviews with Sakurai, he is the most willing to talk about that he has a game-playing love outside of working for Nintendo. He’ll talk about playing Western FPS games and action games where Nintendo are almost a little bit above it. But Miyamoto never really talks about other people’s games, where I think Sakurai feels a lot more open to other ideas, and this to me feels like a game which is trying to be I’m not going to say it’s their Uncharted, but it’s definitely their spectacular blockbuster action game, maybe more in the mould of a Platinum game, where there’s a lot of visual storytelling, there’s a lot of epic scale, mad bosses. It just doesn’t feel like anything else Nintendo have made, it feels like something only Sakurai could have made. I think it’s so unusual, I think it’s so full of charm, I think the writing is genuinely very funny. The game had a big pass on it by… Mike Drucker. an American comedian, I think he writes for some late night chat shows and things. Nintendo games often have a huge charm to it, I’d say this is a lot more American in its feel, but it is going for that kind of Saturday morning cartoon thing, which a lot of games go for, I’d say this is the only one that really lands it. Like, if you compare this to, say, the abysmal writing in the Ratchet and Clank series, this nails that child friendly, but really surreal, really zany, it’s actually got good jokes. The problem is the action is so focused on playing the damn thing, you miss a lot of it. So some of the replayability is actually just going through it and drinking in some of the weirdness that’s going on around it. So it’s definitely a bit much, this game. I kind of loved it for that. It has one of the all-time great Nintendo soundtracks. This is that period where they got big into live musicians playing things and there’s just a… sometimes you can just hear the energy of a room of people playing music in a soundtrack and this has got it, it’s got a really jazzy, rocky swing element to it in places. I just think it’s one of the classiest 3DS games, I’ve been replaying it this last week and I’m like, holy shit, this is legitimately probably in my top 20 of all time. I think this is just absolute magic. Yeah, I did play this at the time but didn’t get mega deep into it. I think I played about 3 or 4 hours of it or something so I never really encountered the tone side of it in a way that felt meaningful to me. My memory of it is just how kind of smash brosy it felt in terms of the menu presentation and stuff and the whole gambling element of it, Matthew, with the difficulty slider. It’s the first time he did that and then he took it into Smash Bros which is where you sort of up the difficulty and gamble your currency on how well you think you’re going to do and that ties in also to the quality of loot you get out of a level. There’s a big loot game in this, not obnoxiously so, it’s still very manageable but it does escalate. It wants you to play a bit harder, get better weapons, push into even harder territory. It’s designed to be replayed like that. So like levels in their entirety are maybe like 10 to 15 minutes. Like the idea that you can just keep doing them and doing them ever more powerful. There’s so many weird subsystems that I can’t really go into with just dragging this podcast out to like four hours. You know Sakurai, he has a take on everything. Like there is no element of this game where something weird or interesting isn’t being done. It doesn’t feel very like elegant as a result, but you feel like someone has really like put a stamp on all of this which I really love. It’s also much bigger than you think it’s going to be. The campaign has a certain shape to it, but the twist is it’s kind of like the first act of a three act campaign. Where it goes is really wild. I actually feel bad about not talking on this, about this on our boss episode now, because there’s some bosses in this. The end fight of this is God in Space, exactly 100% what you want. You know, it ends on its biggest possible note, as all games should. Yeah, I’m kind of mad that I didn’t talk about that, but there we go. I’m making up for it here. Yeah, great stuff, Matthew. Oh, I should really go and play this properly. I will say that, like, of all the items I’ve discarded in House Moves, the easiest one to part with was that stand for the 3DS. It’s like, okay, good fillers on DVD, I can go to a charity shop. This stand just has to go in the bin. There’s no way I can keep moving this between houses. The idea that you know your control scheme is so fucked, that you have to make something to try and ease the pain, like, that is not very Nintendo-y. It’s very early 3DS Nintendo, though, like, the Monster Hunter, like, stick thing, all that stuff. It’s very, like, we’re not entirely, we haven’t entirely cracked this yet, you know what I mean? Like, yeah. I would love to see, like, a proper remake of this on Switch, because I think it has the scale and ambition that would hold up visually. I would love to see, like, a punch up of what is already a gorgeous game in 3D. I think this would look so, so good on that screen. And like, control-wise, I think you probably could do it with the second analogue stick, but I don’t know. That’s for Sakurai to work out on me. Yeah, fair enough. Okay, good stuff, Matthew. I love hearing you talk about that game. That’s great. Okay, so my number one is Dishonored. Probably fairly predictable for people who have listened to our immersive sim episode. This was, I remember this kind of came out of like, it didn’t feel like out of nowhere, but I wasn’t really aware of Arkane’s background that much. And so this game comes out, I know it’s got the Deus Ex lead designer, Harvey Smith, involved. And it’s from Bethesda, which has been, you know, kind of like steadily investing in like becoming a publisher more than a developer in the years since Oblivion came out to some mixed results, like Rogue Warrior with Mickey Rourke, and like that game Wet that came out. Those were like kind of like mixed fortunes there, but they were just starting to really hit their stride here. Arkane make this game the way it’s like set in this sort of steampunky, London-y sort of like grim world that’s kind of plague infested, there are rats everywhere. And then essentially you are cast out because you have been framed for the murder of this queen, who is actually your lover, and the daughter is, who turns out to be your daughter is kidnapped by the assailants. And you are essentially an outsider who has to go around killing these targets who I think are responsible for the conspiracy. I can’t remember the exact plot elements of it too much, but it essentially boils down to a series of missions where, well, for the first half at least, or the first two thirds, you have to go and kill a specific target in a particular way. And that amounts to the immersive sim thing of, like, do you take an action approach, do you take a stealthy approach where you’re never seen, the ghost kind of like approach to playing the game, or do you kind of like unravel some kind of sophisticated narrative way to finish the mission in a way that can be quite darkly humorous. And so obviously the peak of this game is often cited as Lady Boyle’s last party, but this game is like rife with very beautifully designed levels, like massive levels, right, you know, right with possibilities of how to tackle them. A brilliantly replayable game. And just yeah, where the controls felt so responsive, that felt like the real kind of like step forward for the immersive sim here was how responsive the movement felt, the kind of like zipping between different bits of the environment. Just fantastic. And yeah, I wish it had been more influential. There should be more games like this, but Arcane are the masters of them. Thoughts Matthew? Yeah, I’d agree with all that. I’d say the only reason it was slightly lower down my list is that I much, much prefer Dishonored 2. I think there’s only really like five levels in this I really like in the middle. And then the last three I don’t particularly like and then it’s kind of over. Like, I wish this was just ten levels of like one target per level, but the story kind of derails that a little bit for the last for the third act. Also like the non-lethal options aren’t quite as interesting in this. Like it feels like to play it stealthily you’re having to get to toy with a lot of fun stuff where the sequel definitely gives you more non-lethal toys to play with. But yeah, I remember reading like, I think like the Game Informer like announcement of this or whatever and there’s all the shit about you can freeze time and then walk someone in front of their own bullet and you know, take control of a fish and swim it through the sewers to get in and you’re like, holy shit, what is this game? And it is that game. Like all that stuff’s definitely in there. I also worry that I just, and this came up a little bit in the immersive sim, that I don’t necessarily have the imagination to make the most of these games. Like, I may be too conservative, like all the wacky stuff you can do isn’t like the optimal way to do it, and my brain is so broken, you know, by trying to optimize my performance in like every other game, that I can’t really like enjoy myself properly, as I’m meant to, but that’s on me, not Dishonored. I think I agree with that a little bit. I think this is where I quite like the opportunity system in Hitman, where it’s like, you know, you can follow this path and do all the actions, but then there is like a narrative arc that plays out. Whereas, hey, there are bits like that in Dishonored, but like, maybe it’s like, it’s a bit more open to things going wrong and like a shootout breaking out and that, and it being quite a scruffy way you get to the finish, I feel like I definitely had a few missions like that in the first one. Married to the fact that I maybe didn’t have the time to throw at it that I would like, you know, just because there was so much, so many other games to play. Yeah, so I definitely feel you on that one. But, yeah, that’s, I would say that even if your experience of the game is just to appreciate the worlds they’ve built and the scenarios they give you, that’s fine. I do agree with you that it drops off when you’re kind of going through sury bits, killing dudes, it’s a bit less, it loses momentum. Whereas the second game takes Lady Boyle’s last party, it’s like a template and it’s like, let’s do basically a whole game of these and they’ll all rule. So we’re talking about like basically a 9 out of 10 game versus one of the best games ever made. Well that’s it, that’s it, so yeah, that’s it, and it lives in the shadow of that second game a bit, but it’s definitely not diminished, you know, it’s its own location as well. Yeah, like their art stuff, I know they made games before this, but it feels like it just arrives as this fully formed thing, such a clear vision of what they wanted to do. Yeah, it is rad, I should have maybe put it higher, oh well. No, it’s fine, you put it at number four, right? Yeah. That’s cool. Matthew, let’s quickly recap what our top ten was, because then I’ll tweet out the list eventually, and it’s a bit easier to salvage, so what’s your number ten? Resident Evil 6. I had Sleeping Dogs at number ten, your number nine, Matthew? Nintendo Land. I had Catherine, your number eight, Matthew? Fluidity Spin Cycle. Lollipop Chainsaw, your number seven? Fez. Spec Ops The Line, your number six? Walking Dead Season One. FTL Faster Than Light, your number five? Binary Domain. That was where I put The Walking Dead, your number four? Dishonored. Mass Effect 3, your number three? Beat The Beat Rhythm Paradise. Hotline Miami for me, your number two? Zero Escape Virtues Nice Rewards. XCOM Enemy Unknown for me, your number one? Kid Icarus Uprising. Dishonored for me. So good. Yeah, that’s a lot faster than talking out over three hours, isn’t it? So, um, God, we’ve gone very long here, Matthew. Let’s do some very brief honorable mentions. First one of mine, The Darkness 2, I mentioned it. Took the first game’s approach to like monsters, kind of like on your sort of shoulders, but based on a NAF comic book from the 90s, but turned it to a full, full blooded action game, less sophisticated game, but a really fun one with quite an interesting sort of narrative choice element of whether you believe it’s a hallucination or not. What’s your first honorable mention? The last story, obviously the reason I met Catherine to begin with, hugely important personal game, a really delightful Wii RPG, very interesting game from old Sakaguchi. Yes, that’s right, yeah. That’s right. But you know, still like an 8 out of 10. It may have been the basis of my marriage, but it’s no Resident Evil 6. Reduces his wife to the honorable mentions, you hate to see it. I’ve got like, I’m going to like try and get through these quickly. So I mentioned Max Payne 3, I’d have to talk about that. Halo 4, I put here, a lesser Halo game, but a really nice looking one. I thought the multiplayer was still really good. Just didn’t quite have the campaign magic of the bungee ones for me, but I encourage them to keep trying. Eventually 343, I’m sure we’ll get there. Next one of yours, Matthew? Crimson Shroud. Oh yeah. The 3DS RPG from Mr. Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics. Just an RPG with lots of weird quirks. Every mechanic has something slightly weird with it, set in a world which is like a tabletop RPG, so all the characters are diecast models. Very charming for a little eShop download. Well worth the 10 quid or whatever it is. Yeah, cool. I’m going to bundle the rest of mine into one big chunk actually, because I think that’s just easier. Lego Lord of the Rings, we mentioned that in the Lord of the Rings episode, I don’t know why that episode happened in retrospect. It was a fun one though, I enjoyed it, it was good. Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, kind of short spin-off of the Alan Wake game, so it’s more action-focused, a bit more of a competent action game. It doesn’t make my list because it’s a bit too slight and features Kasabian, which I can’t endorse. And Dear Esther is in here as well. It’s an important game in the Strand genre, the walking simulator game, but I think later games do it better, including from the developers there. Lone Survivor, that’s in there, a side-scrolling narrative survival-horrory thing that had a bit of vibes of Silent Hill. Not quite good enough to make the list, but a cool game nonetheless. And I feel like a big Joe Scribble’s game, Dragon’s Dogma, has not made my list. I didn’t quite get into it massively. I know people love this game, and Matthew so wanted to mention it. Yeah, that’s Joe Scribble’s back. This has been a big Scribble’s heavy episode. Yeah, a man of exquisite taste. So what are you remaining on with mentions? The only other one I was umming and ahhing about, and it didn’t come close to my list, but I have it, I think it’s okay, is Hitman Absolution. Oh of course, yeah, we should have talked about that one in more detail. Yeah, like, it’s like bobbins in so many ways, and it absolutely destroys the kind of structure of what makes those games good, but there are pockets of wow, holy shit, this is what like next-gen kind of Hitman feels and looks like, and you know, like the busy Chinatown is the one that comes to mind, and some of the predatory stealth elements, like it’s pretty kind of vicious and kind of cool, like you’re very very powerful in this game, but it’s quite un-Hitman-y in a lot of ways. Kind of a proto version of the kind of unlocks and sort of submission structure which makes new Hitman so good is in this too. Look very nice as well, very cool. But it’s just, it’s kind of fucked in so many ways though. Never really played this one. I should play it and talk about it. I wish I loved it more. There’s stuff in it where I’m always like, oh actually this is quite good, and then I’ll get to like a rotten, like there’s a lot of horrible cinematic stealth in it, which is just guff. I don’t know. But amazing that they would go on to make like, you know, Hitman 2016, like just a complete redo that really nails it. Some of that’s in here, but like the broken versions of it. And then you’re like, oh yeah, if you’ve just done that, it does work, you know. For sure. Yeah. So that’s a funny excuse to talk about that one again at some point. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, we did it, Matthew. Our longest episode ever, I think, there, wrapped up. Really long, but really good. I love doing these. Yeah. It’s really good fun. I hope I didn’t get too Morkish with my 2012 nostalgia. No, it’s fine. We’ve been paid for it now. So it’s the time is well worth it. How obnoxious. So yes, if you would like to support the podcast after that ringing endorsement, patreon.com/backpagepod, you can go and immediately unlock best boss battles if three hours of us in a week isn’t enough for you. With all those delights are read out the start to come. If we hit 600 pounds, 12 more podcasts over the next year will unlock themed around pop culture subjects. If you want to hear Matthew talk about Japanese crime fiction, and then us ranking the MCU films, it’s a bit unusual for us. But you can you can get those as well if we hit 600 pounds at the four pound 50 tier. So thank you very much for listening. We’re Backpage Pod on Twitter. This way you can find our Discord details as well. Join our little community. Matthew, where are you on social media? At MrBasil underscore pesto. Geez, it’s also BackpageGames at gmail.com if you’d like to send us a letter to read out on a future podcast. God, so many things we’ve got going on now. That’s enough, isn’t it, for now. Just a special shout out to John Strike, who has helped us with our Patreon page and designed our logo. We always really appreciate his help, and of course Barry Epoch Topping, who has made our wonderful theme tune, which we’re always grateful to have in the podcast now. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll be back next week. Good-bye.