Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. This podcast is supported by Patreon, patreon.com/backpagepod. If you wanna get two additional podcasts in a month, go back us to the Excel tier. That’s enough of a hard sell on that one for the time being. We’ve just done a Japanese crime fiction, a 101. Matthew absolutely powered us through that one. But in today’s episode, we’re going to take it easy with another mailbag. We were going to do a What We’ve Been Playing. I haven’t quite played enough to justify that as an episode idea. And we had about 30 questions from our listeners backed up in our Discord. So we thought we’d fire through those. However, Matthew, I will give people a bit of kind of what we’ve been playing sort of bonus by asking you how Horizon was, Horizon Forbidden West. So I know you’ve just finished that, right? So how’s that been for you? Really good. A much improved sequel, I think. I think they finally kind of… The first Horizon, I don’t really rate. I think it’s quite a good looking world, but there’s just nothing in it and I never really knew what to do with it. And the combat never really took off for me. And it just felt like a step short of everything of what it was meant to be. And in this one, I felt like they really kind of hammered that out and worked out how to make the combat really pop. The monster design was even more incredible than the first game. It looks absolutely amazing. And the actual kind of map filler was pretty good. Obviously, it’s not a genre for everyone. It’s quite baggy stuff. But if you are into spending, you know, 60 plus hours clearing a map of icons, this is a pretty good way of doing it. But the only downside, I can’t remember how… Have you finished Horizon 1? No, I’ve only played about 10 hours of it. I was slowly getting there, but then Elden Ring came out, basically. Yeah. So the one thing that’s amazing about Horizon 1 is the story. It’s like the backstory of the world, which kind of is the story of the game. You’re going around uncovering basically what happened to leave civilization in the state you find it. And that stuff’s really good. That’s the one absolutely solid gold idea in Horizon 1, I think. And this one doesn’t quite have anything as interesting on the story front, unfortunately. You can’t establish a world a second time, I guess. So it’s trying to find kind of details to pile on top of those foundations. And it was fine. And I still liked that stuff. But that is one area where it maybe doesn’t land quite as well. Weirdly, I think there are a few gameplay tweaks away from actually going down more of a bio-ware, mass-effecty route with this series. In that maybe this is a superficial comparison, but there’s a hub area, which is quite like the Normandy. And whenever you return to it, you are collecting allies who hang out at the base and you can check back in on them and they will tell you their thoughts on the story at the given time, which is very like the Normandy. And a lot of them have loyalty missions. They don’t amount to anything. That’s what I mean about it. It’s like it isn’t quite a Mass Effect 2, but it could be in that you go off and then you spend some time with them. I think if they found a way of like having those AI companions like with you in the open world or like, you know, more missions where you could choose to take them with you maybe and maybe have some branching consequences, it wouldn’t actually be a huge leap from that to this. I mean, even like has the structure of like you’re basically collecting people to mount the final assault in this game, which is a bit like the Suicide Mission. So yeah, it’s almost like I’m almost more interested in what happens if it did more with that than just another open world game because it’s definitely set up for a third. Yeah, okay. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I suppose like, what is it about this one that coalesced as an open world game more for you than the first one? What is it it does differently enough to like, I guess in terms of combat and exploration to make it a bit more Matthew Castle friendly? I mean, on the exploration front, there’s just a lot more to find and there’s still no surprises. If it isn’t a map marker, there isn’t anything there in this game, like there’s nothing to dig out like loot-wise, but the actual things you find, you know, and that’s true of lots of games, you know, I’d say that’s also true in like Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, you know, games of that ilk, but the difference is, I think, is when you actually get there, there’s quite a lot of like, bespoke craft in the individual things. There’s not a lot of stuff that just endlessly repeats. So I’ll give you an example, like there’s a feature in this game called cauldrons, which are like these sort of robotic dungeons that you have to explore to kind of download the code that lets you override the kind of robots in the outside world. So if you want to take control of them and have them fight on your side, you first need to kind of tackle these these robot dungeons, but each of those dungeons themselves isn’t just like a templated thing. You know, that in an Assassin’s Creed game, it probably would be, you know, it would just be, oh, we’re going here, we fight the same monsters, we do the same thing and we tick it off. You know, here, you know, there are story elements to them. So like in one of them, you know, it starts off as a cauldron, and then it kind of halfway through becomes more of a tool neck mission, which is how you uncover elements of the map, for example. Like they have some sort of fun with their templated elements, which is quite like unique, I think, in open world games, because the nature of map filler is you just sort of like bang out 10 of the same thing, but they’d rather settle for four interesting things than 10 of the same things, if that makes sense. And I thought that was slightly, you know, there was hints of that in the first game, but I think they really doubled down on this. And naturally, it makes all the kind of box ticking stuff feel quite worthwhile. Ah, that sounds good. Yeah, it is good. It’s like I was weighing up whether I should, you know, I was thinking like, is this like the most improved sequel since Mass Effect 2? Or am I just thinking Mass Effect 2, you know, in terms of, because it has these structural similarities. I don’t know. But like, considering I do not particularly care for the first game, this one I thought was really good. It’s not, it’s not like a masterpiece. It’s probably like an 8, but it’s massive, probably a little bit too massive. And yeah, it has some interesting stuff. That’s cool. How do you feel they interpreted the old Zelda gliding cloth thing, Matthew, like a gliding tool? Is that done as well as Zelda, would you say? It’s fine. Like, really the problem is like the climbing is still very kind of controlled where you can do it. But I will say for the glider, there’s lots of bits in the games where they engineer it so that you end up standing in a very high place and you get to do like an amazing long glide down like a whole mountain while all those graphics happen around you. Like, they know, you know, how the world looks is one of their strengths. And so they deliberately kind of script stuff that and she’ll even say in her thing like, wow, if I glided, it would look amazing or some such bullshit. And it’s often true, like, you know, they’ve got the landscapes quite kind of lumpy and up and down. And that actually makes it quite fun to kind of glide down. But as an actual, like, I don’t know, I kind of forgot it was there most of the time. Like I’d maybe use it to save myself from some like long falls. But it isn’t like, I wouldn’t say it’s the actual, like the act of moving through this world is, is, is, you know, particularly special. Okay, yeah, fair enough. Well, I have lent my partner my copy of it. I will finish the first one, learn what this rad backstory is, and then go and play the second one on my shiny PS5 at some point. So yeah, yeah, it is good. The really mad thing, you know, they showed off like all the kind of beaches and the kind of the San Francisco stuff they’ve really lent into with all the box art or whatever. Yeah, like I genuinely didn’t see any of that stuff until about like 45, 50 hours in. Wow. Like it’s super late. Like it’s still, you know, slight spoiler is sort of the last act of the game. Like they really bury that stuff in. Like there’s a lot of desert before you get to San Francisco. Well, they probably did the old, you know, what are our marketing pillars? America. So let’s take the most recognizable bits of the game and promote that. There’s a really good stretch that involves Las Vegas and but like a future Las Vegas because in their timeline, the world’s kind of gone to shit a bit further down our real world timeline, right? So it’s kind of like Las Vegas, but like a mad hologram powered Las Vegas, which is pretty cool. Like that’s, that’s, you know, visually one of the like the standout areas, I’d say. It’s definitely there’s a lot of fun stuff in this. I was quite impressed. That sounds pretty neat. I mean, you know, it sounds like they’ve wandered into the old Fallout New Vegas thing of we’ve got a cool casino bit and then lots of deserts surrounding it. But they do some interesting stuff like they’re like, well, it’s the desert, but it’s also like our big water level and you’re like, oh, okay, you know, that there’s some like sort of tropey twists that you maybe don’t see coming. I think they’re definitely having a bit of fun with with, you know, your expectations from this game. That sounds good. Yeah, because I feel like it’s as much as you love Breath of the Wild, one of your personal brand pillars in recent years is to be, you know, when people say this game is as good as Breath of the Wild, to go like, definitely not, which is, you know, still true, of course. But like, it feels like you’ve been won round by a slightly more refined sequel. Yeah, Alissa, you know, I’ll be the bigger man and own up and say I liked it. You know, I’m not so childish. Like, the me of ten years ago may not have been as gracious and may have thought Brandcastle was more important than the truth. Yeah, but that guy liked Red Steel, so what’s he doing? Yeah, I mean, that guy was a fucking idiot. I joke, of course. So I’m guessing you got all these hours in, Matthew, because Catherine’s been away at PAX, right? Yeah, I had the week off. I mean, the last few days was very, like, stay inside, fed myself almost exclusively with Deliveroo. I did almost message you, saying, oh, do you fancy going to the pub? But then I think last time I messaged you saying go to the pub, you went, oh, I’m not really a pub guy. And then we didn’t do anything. So I thought… I’ve definitely miscommunicated something there. I do like the pub. Well, I also worry that every time I invite you to the pub now, you think I just want to talk about podcast ideas. So I like that. Maybe there’s a bit of that. But now the Patreon’s launched. We don’t have to endlessly discuss the Patreon. No, that’s true. That is out of our lives. But Matthew, I understand in your sort of delivery bonanza this week, you had didn’t something go wrong with one of the orders and you ended up with basically like a mountain of food. What happened there? Yeah, I ordered a chicken chow mein, basically. And what I got was a large family’s dinner by mistake. And I tweeted a picture of it saying something’s gone wrong. I then had a thousand people tweeting at me, not a thousand. I mean, this wasn’t a Blorko style breakout, don’t get me wrong, but lots of people going, looks like something went really right, if you ask me. But I didn’t really want to get into it because I didn’t want to seem ungracious. But unfortunately, a lot of what the family had ordered were pork dishes and I don’t really like pork. So they sent me a load of food that I couldn’t really eat. All right, I’d have come round and taken those off your hands, but it would have been a bit strange to just turn up at your door to collect some pork dishes. Yeah, I microwaved some chickeny black bean sauce thing the next day and I had a beef in black bean sauce from their meal. It did tickle me the idea that there was me with all this food and there was them with a single chow mein, which is really the opposite of the feast they ordered. One night, me and Phil Savage, I used to work with him on PC Gamer, came on our Yakuza episode. We both ordered a burger from the same restaurant and mine turned up with like an ice cream and I didn’t know where the ice cream had come from. I was delighted that I got this ice cream, assumed it was complimentary because it was the first time I ever used Deliveroo, ate it about a year and a half later in the pub, talked about the time I ordered this burger and got a free ice cream and he went, that night, I ordered an ice cream I never got and I was like, wow, okay, it’s like the end of like a Kirby Enthusiast episode where all the kind of like threads kind of coalesce. Or a Twilight Zone episode twist. Yeah, or like the end of a chapter in Cloud Atlas, you know. Play some mournful PC music as your connection through time is revealed to be an ice cream you once ate. Cut to Phil as a cannibal in the future jabbering about his ice cream. Me on horseback, yeah, but played by Halle Berry. Basically bawled down with that film is very succinctly there. So yeah, good stuff. So yeah, I feel like I should throw something into the what we’ve been playing pot Matthew since you threw in Horizon. So I’ve been playing a bit of Sunset Overdrive actually. I did say on Patreon, we do like a what we’ve been playing, watching, reading kind of post. And I did mention I talk about Sunset Overdrive in the next what we’ve been playing. We’re not really doing that this week, but I thought I’d mentioned it anyway, so I promised to kind of bring it up. Was pleasantly surprised by how kind of like cool it is, this 2015 sort of like Xbox One exclusive. Kind of like the tone of it is sort of like Saints Row with energy drinks. There’s a lot of like, hey, kind of wacky tone going on. But then it also has like grinding across a city mechanics and lots of different movement options. Really nice feeling movement. Feels like kind of a precursor to Spider-Man, Matthew, that Insomniac would later make on PS4, of course. Yeah, I’m really, really fond of it. I wish I had the old Series X framerate, but it’s what can you do? But it does seem to like it has the kind of Insomniac thing of will load you up with a load of cool weapons. They steadily get better and better the weapons. That’s like a kind of, you know, a Ratchet and Clank thing. We know how you feel about that. But like as an open world game that feels like it’s got its own sort of identity, it’s pretty great, I think. I think the difference to Ratchet and Clank is it has a really good combo system that like amplifies everything you’re doing. So the combat really does like ramp up in each fight in a way that it doesn’t really in Ratchet and Clank. In Ratchet and Clank, it sort of ends with how zany the weapons are. Here, that’s like the first step. Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. The scenarios get pretty intense because you’re fighting a lot of zombie-style enemies. Well, there’s actually quite a big variety of enemies in this. There’s some quite smart, larger enemies too. But yeah, I would agree with that. The combo system really helps. The open world is really nice as well. Quite a handcrafted feeling city. Doesn’t feel like vast, but each district feels like it’s got its own identity, I would say, because it’s a little bit more sort of cartoony. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to mimic a real city. It’s trying to be heightened, and the areas are meant to be themed. Yeah, just really, really good, Matthew. I’m told that a lot of the better traversal options unlock deeper into the game. Do you know if that’s true or not? Does that progress as well? Some of them, I think, were tied to DLC. I think the DLC added some quite good stuff, or maybe some stuff that makes water a bit more interesting. I think that’s a limitation of the main game. Yeah, it definitely has a drip feed of stuff throughout, though. So, you know, it does keep changing it up. Maybe some of the humour is maybe a little bit wearying at times, but… Oh, yeah, yeah, it is hard work on that front. It’s like I’m considering skipping the cutscenes and putting a podcast on while I’m playing it. That’s not a great sign for how I feel about the dialogue. But yeah, it got enough going on visually that I just seemed… I really like it. Yeah, and precise feeling of movement as well. It feels like it rewards you for precision. It’s not that hard to do anything, but to keep momentum going when you’re traveling. It’s still a little bit of a challenge in itself. So yeah, really good, Matthew. Nice pleasant surprise. It feels like maybe it didn’t get the attention it deserved because it landed that weird early Xbox one time that was a little bit of a black spot in people’s memory, I guess. So yeah, but good stuff. I hope it can have re-emerged at some point and notice on PC as well. But yeah, that was a nice game past treat. I’ve also been playing Lego Star Wars, The Skywalker Saga. So we’re up to the end of episode two now in that they’re firing through the prequels quite fast, which I appreciate, of course, because the movies are terrible and all this does is remind you of those movies. But the game’s pretty cool. It’s like a kind of, I suppose, like an augmented version of the Lego formula where locations are turned into like vast open worlds. I would say not necessarily vast, but like, I don’t feel the need to spend loads of time in them, exploring them and finding stuff. But I could see how a younger player might appreciate just going around like Coruscant and finding all the secrets and all that sort of stuff. Like it caters to that quite well. And then has slightly better combat than the previous Lego games and lets you fly between planets and stuff like that. Very elaborate depiction of the Star Wars universe. Me and my partner are playing it, a really good like two people can play it while having a conversation kind of game, you know, with some legit funny cutscenes as well. Have you played this one, Matthew? I’ve played only a tiny bit of A New Hope and I got to the map and saw I picked up like a, I don’t know, whatever the doodad is, a Kaiba brick, is it? Yeah. And it was like, you’ve got one of like 1,100 of these. I was like, fuck that. Yeah, that was my Lego Star Wars story. Yeah, good stuff. I hate myself, so I thought we’d start with The Phantom Menace. It gives you the option of which trilogy to start with and the completionist in my brain just went with that. And it’s like, well, you know, that’s punishing myself, frankly. But yeah. I thought, I don’t know if we’ll carry on with them, but you know, I thought I’d get all the trash out of the way and then save The Last Jedi, you know, the good Star Wars film to the end. Yeah, it’d be funny if that was like an eight hour campaign itself, just doing The Last Jedi and the rest were like, and then like, you know, The Rise of Skywalker is 25 minutes. But yeah, very nicely done. Kind of bit of fan service. This has taken them a long time to make and this is a studio that used to make maybe a couple of Lego games a year. And I must admit from the little bit I’ve played, I do think like what kind of happened because it doesn’t seem that radically different or that that much more ambitious than the games they were making back when they were super productive, like, you know, Marvel Avengers had a whole New York to put the round in and that seemed pretty amazing at the time. So yeah, it’s still a bit of a mystery as to like why this took, you know, four years or whatever compared to the other ones. But I do remember it was maybe we’ll never know. I do remember it was playable at E3 2019. Like I remember James Davenport, PC Gamer, he went and played this and was like, oh guys, this game is rad. Actually, it’s got proper third person shooting mechanics and stuff. So yeah, it seemed like it was around for a while. But you know, we did have a pandemic in the middle of that. Yeah. Didn’t they change their engine as well? I think that was part of it. There’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff on this out there, Matthew, that people can go and find. But yeah, I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. But certainly it feels like the open worlds took a bit of effort in themselves, like you do have vast player spaces to walk around in. And they seem to have done it for every single planet. Every single planet has like an open worldy bit to wander around. Kind of like the old hubs, the hubs of old in the Lego games, but like one for every single planet, which all with their own collectibles and some like little micro-puzzles to solve and stuff like that. Like I say, I think if I was like 12, this would be my sort of perfect game, or like 11, something like that. As an adult, it’s a bit like I kind of, my partner wants to stop and smash things, because she’s like, well, you know, this is fun doing this. She hadn’t really played a Lego game before. And I’m like, I just want to get through this. Like I was like, darling, we’ve got nine episodes to get through. But she’s saying, well, if I want to watch Star Wars, I’ll just watch Star Wars. Like this, I’m here for the game bit. And I was like, that’s kind of a good point, actually. It’s like, if you want to watch Star Wars, they’re all just all there on Disney Plus. So I can see how this might not fulfill the kind of storytelling need for you, which is fine. But yeah, I’ll carry on with that. And we’ll see what happens. I’m excited to get out of the prequels. I feel like I’ve done my sort of time in the prequel mines now. So yeah, OK, Matthew, it’s a mail bag. We’ve got loads of questions here. Do you want to read out the first one, then we’ll go from there? Yeah, let’s do it. Instantly, I was reading through some of these questions, and I like the variety of ways people address us will be a theme of this episode. So just keep an ear out for that. Hi, chaps. I hope you’re well. I’ve been looking at a bunch of cringetastic game magazine covers from yesteryear lately, and the one that I remember quite vividly is Edge’s famous The Girls issue, which just featured the bottom half of one of the Dead or Alive girls in a bikini. Did either of you have experience when working on magazines of being forced to try and cater to the horny teen boys demographic? Love the podcast, keep up the good work. That was from Adam of our Discord. Yeah, I mean, as ever, like my listeners want us to dish dirt on print media things, Matthew. Which, hey, we called the podcast The Back Page, so maybe that’s on us. So, I couldn’t really think of anything except for, this wasn’t forced on me specifically, but the classified ads at the back of the old games mags were very, very cursed. We always hated those internally because they made the mag feel trashy and it actually was. Like you’d go to the back cover and there’d be like a badly photoshopped Sarah Michelle Geller Buffy head on like some random naked body and it was like, text this number for like eight quid and we’ll send you one bad JPEG and it’s like that kind of stuff. Let me slay you, my lord. I think you’re giving the copy too much credit there personally. But I hated those. As of memory serves, someone complained about them in 2008 and made quite a big public complaint about them. That’s when they just got rid of them outright. I think Future did and then Imagine did around the same time. I was glad when they were gone. When I joined Future, I remember we used to have these town hall meetings with the management and I remember someone getting up and a big diatribe against these classified ads and how they were against our values. Future definitely got rid of them around the time I started, but there was a tradition of mags coming in and then you’d hear people reading out the absolute shockers that had been printed next to their work and really, really vile stuff, the super-porny, super-porny mobile phone things. But in terms of covers, not really, everything was so, I say, legit and classy by the time I started. It also was on a Nintendo mag, it wasn’t like there was anything particularly spicy on there. The peach swimsuit issue, of course, Matthew, you declined to talk about that. I think that edge cover is very tongue-in-cheek. Yeah, it is. It isn’t like them being like, four, because that is an edge. No, the content inside is quite, because it’s that particular era of edge, it’s a bit more academic, if memory serves, because I was reading edge around that time too. You bought it because of the bikini, and then were like, oh man, this is just telling me off for liking it. Do you know what? I think I only read that issue when I was in Futures offices years later, because there’s that underground, not underground, it’s just on the ground floor, library of magazines, and I’d never read that one. Maybe this is a scan online or something, but I’ve read one of the issues after it, which was the one that had, I think, the mod symbol on the cover, and it was about how the modding scene on PC, they did a whole issue on that, which is pretty cool. And in that, it had an image of the previous, like the back issues, and I saw that cover and I thought, what is that issue right there? But yeah, I read it years later and it just wasn’t that, of course. You know, it was a different time for sure. In a more general sense, I would say that rather be forced to try and cater, these were male-dominated teams, and they were, I would say this applies less to NGamer, which is dated much better than some of the mags I worked on, but they were kind of laddier mags, the more PlayStation and Xboxy ones, and so I wouldn’t say they were kind of horny as such, but they certainly felt like they existed in the same era as like Zoo and Nuts and stuff like that. So yeah, I don’t know, I guess what I’m saying is I wouldn’t just defend outright all the stuff I’ve ever written, I wouldn’t. Even NGamer, which was like super kind of asexual, had, you know, they’d be like slightly, you know, there’s, when I go back to old copies now, there are like off-colour jokes where you’re like, this wouldn’t even have registered as off-colour at the time, but by today’s standards it’s maybe like a little cruel or a little unfair or, that’s just time though. That’s fine. If someone like, if someone like copy and pasted a scanner or something, a porn I wrote 15 years ago, I would simply say, it was a different time, I regret this in retrospect, sorry about that, I hope we can all move on. People will be fine, I think. People are fine. You know, if I did something 10 years ago and it didn’t affect you back then, I think you’re okay. You’re still okay now, you know. Yeah. Apart from all those people you killed, Matthew, but that’s… Yeah, but that’s a different matter. Okay, next up, as with all the Souls games, I turned Elden Ring into a podcast game today while I cracked a bottle of red and farmed runes for a few hours. Other than that, podcast games have been Tony Hawk and Forza. Any go-to podcast games from you guys? That’s Cboy77. Most of these are via the Discord, by the way. So Matthew, have you got any go-to kind of podcast games when you’re listening to The Big Picture? What do you sort of tend to be playing? Washing Up. That’s a big podcast opportunity in our house. Popping the headphones, do some washing up, that’s always good. Anything with like endless loops. So like Dead Cells, when I was playing that, I’d sometimes pop on a podcast in the background because I was just dying every 10 minutes and then going back through it. Mopping up icons from like an Assassin’s Creed map, a Far Cry map, Horizon, maybe not during the campaign itself, but definitely in the aftermath. RPG Grinding seems like a great podcast time. I remember listening to some stuff when I was playing Yakuza Like a Dragon. There’s like a multi-tiered sort of dungeon that you kind of fight your way through to kind of grind up. And sometimes I just bang on a podcast there and thump some people for a couple of hours. Actually Sunset Overdrive that you mentioned is a really good podcast game because a lot of it is story free and there are so many collectibles in that game. Yeah. And like you want to drown out the audio sometimes when people start talking. So, yeah, I get it. That makes sense. Yeah. I have a few of these. So, I think like most recently Halo Infinite has very much been a podcast game just because you can sort of like I tend to have like one ear with the game audio than one with the podcast audio, which sounds like hell, but it kind of works alright with Halo. You just need to kind of know when like people are shooting at you basically. So not a big deal. But like the big one I’ve gotten into Matthew is Tetris 99 actually, I’ve gotten massively into that this year, you know, a benefit of being on the Castle family Nintendo Switch Online account, of course. And like it’s kind of perfect when I’m sort of like working out or something and like want to do two things at once. I’m like, well, okay, I’ll listen to this audio while also playing this. I think Tetris 99 might be bullshit. Like it’s really like nicely done. The matchmaking is really fast. In principle, like Battle Royale Tetris sounds like it wouldn’t work, but it’s, you know, it’s quite slickly done. But what it seems to come down to is a game of like, did I get ganged up on by loads of other players or not? But by matching kind of lines in the old Tetris style, you send attacks towards other players and it drops more lines underneath them and pushes all their Tetris minos up. So, basically, it’s like this kind of rising water feeling to playing Tetris, which means you have to be going faster and faster to clear the lines. And all you can really do is pick, you can pick like a random player to attack, you can pick attacking other players who are attacking you. There’s like a few different options, but sometimes there’ll be like, you’ll get down to like last 20 and suddenly like four players are sending bricks towards you and so the whole thing gets pushed up in a matter of seconds and you’re out of the game. So as a multiplayer experience, they get to leave something to be desired. But yeah. Are you good? Are you good? Are you okay at Tetris? Yeah. So maybe you are like a valid threat. And that is the strategy. I mean, I would feel because I’m very bad at Tetris. I would feel quite cross if everyone was punishing me because you just have to look at my Tetris board or field or whatever they call it to see that I am quite shit at Tetris. Well, it genuinely eats away at me when like I let a line go that I haven’t completed. Like that kind of kills me inside a little bit. So I’m big into the like lining up kind of like four sort of like lines of Tetris at once basically. I struggle with the terminology of this game, I don’t know why, but anyway. The only reason you would attack me is like putting me out of my misery. It’s you’re like, let’s get this guy out of Tetris. This guy is clearly struggling. Let’s just take him out back and put a bullet in him. There is also a sense of this game as well that like once you’ve cleared like once you’re down to like last five players, it’s like going from regionals to nationals and it’s like suddenly everyone in the room can see each other and they’re like they can see that I’m actually like fallible and they can fuck me up no problem and then suddenly I’m pushed out immediately. I’ve only won one game of Tetris 99, so I can’t be that good. You’ve won a game of it. I would think statistically there would always be a better player. I’ve never won a game of it. There would always be a better player than me. Yeah, I suppose to be honest though, Matthew, I think the matchmaking glitch, because there was only about 41 players in this game. So I thinned out the competition somewhat. And yeah, but it’s unlocked like a kind of like another mode basically. It’s like the winners only mode of Tetris 99. You got a ticket to the big leagues. Yeah, I feel like I stole the ticket. But yeah. It’s like the secret room at the back of the casino they take you into where you start gambling with like bits of your body and stuff. Yeah, I don’t remember that in Martin Scorsese’s casino, but it seems plausible. What happened in my casino? You’re going to open up a casino in Bath? Is that next for you? Is that what you do with the patron money? No, because I’ve been watching Ozark in which some people set up a casino and let me tell you they had a bad time. By the way, I am enjoying this like new sub genre of tweets you’ve tapped into, which is literally explaining what happens in Ozark in very like surprised terms. Would you like to explain, give a little overview there, Matthew? Not really. You see, it’s interesting you’ve identified them as a sub genre of Ozark tweets. My new formula is just saying how I wouldn’t like to be involved in what is clearly a very terrible situation. So you say, oh, I wouldn’t want to be involved with these gangsters. Perhaps they seem a bit too much for me or whatever. And people seem to take it so cynical, I shouldn’t be revealing my thinking behind my tweets. That’s really more what I’m trying to get at is like, imagine me in Ozark or the Northman. It’s like, oh, I’m starting to think the birds in Ozark are bad people. And it’s like, yeah, but it’s good. They’re so obviously bad people, right? Well, yeah, I mean, I get the joke. Well, I mean, the number of likes I’m getting would suggest people do not get it. Is the creator of Mare of Eastown in your mentions going another great tweet, Matthew? Is he in there because he follows you, right? He does follow me. Actually, I forgot about that. I forgot that he was following me. Now I feel bad for all my like inane bullshit tweets. Yeah, I’ve actually like when notable people have followed me, sometimes I make or remove them as a follower because I feel too much pressure to tweet in front of people I genuinely admire. So that’s preposterous, isn’t it? But I have done that with comic book writers before. Yeah, so the only other one I was going to mention here, weirdly I’ve been getting into as a go-to game, Pokemon Pinball Ruby and Sapphire. That’s a random one. But I was like a big into Pokemon Pinball and the Game Boy Color, but which was a very compromised version of Pinball in that the Game Boy Color could even depict the whole table at one time because without a transition screen between top and bottom, whereas this one is obviously a GBA game, so it does. It’s just a good little pinball game that combines some classic pinball stuff with collecting different Pokemon as a kind of like overall quest, I suppose. So I don’t know, I’ve just been playing that. I’ve probably played about 10 hours of that now. I don’t really know what happened, but yeah, I don’t know, solid little game there. So those are my podcast games at the time, Matthew, right now Matthew. Do you want to go on with the next question? This refers to the opening area of Elden Ring chat and tutorials in general. I think all the From Software games have wonderful tutorials at opening areas that introduce players to the way the world works. For instance, there’s almost always a boss that kills you before it takes you through to the real game itself, introducing the idea that death is a constant in the game. This idea is similar in Elden Ring, where the Tree Sentinel is far too strong for you to beat, with the game urging you to avoid this mad imposing bastard by simply skirting around him. In Dark Souls, the opening boss you first face while having no weapons or armour at all, and you need to run through the exit at the side. Again, the focus is on you avoiding a straight up fight rather than directly engaging. By making the first enemy you encounter so imposing, it’s telling you to be smart. Direct combat should be avoided until necessary. It’s so unlike other games, where opening areas are always so prescriptive with no player agency, where you pummel all enemies to death quite easily with pop-ups saying press L2 to heavy attack five times. Are there any other games that have great opening areas tutorials and treat the players not like mindless droids? Asked Welsh Boy Mick. Yeah, so I think the ultimate one here, Matthew, I imagine you’ve got this answer to is Breath of the Wild. The original kind of the kind of opening plateau section just gives you a little bit of the entire game. But gate the world away just for a little while until you know what you’re doing. And I think that’s kind of like the perfect opening tutorial section really, because it whets your appetite for what’s to come, breaks down all of its mechanics quite elegantly. And you never really lost when you go out into that world, even though you can complete the game in any order you want. It feels like the developers have given you all the tools to succeed out there. Not mastery, but enough to kind of get by to go and master the game. What do you think? Yeah, definitely. And the difference there is you can go out and potter around and discover it for yourself. But there are also people who are more explicitly there to explain certain things, or to say, try this or that. Which I think is maybe the difference between Breath of the Wild and the FromSoft stuff, is they would never have something so literal buried somewhere in the game, where Zelda is. It’s there if you spend the time. Yeah, that’s a really good one. I think another tutorial I really like for having the kind of game in a kind of microcosm is the training levels of Hitman 2016. Oh yeah, they’re great. Just because they take everything that makes a Hitman game Hitman, but in a very small space, because once you get into the main game, you know, they’re vast and quite overwhelming. And I actually like having those spaces. The challenge in Hitman is teaching people kind of how to play Hitman, as well as the controls. It’s like the pace and the approach of the game. And I think those levels are very, very well judged to kind of like, you know, even, you know, there’s two of them. There’s the boat and then there’s the hanger. And the way, just the scale up between them is a really nice stepping stones to the main game. I also think in Hitman, the escalation contracts are kind of great tutorials in themselves in that they force you out of your comfort zone and maybe teach you kind of how the variety of ways you can manipulate the world. And, you know, in these games, it’s too easy to go, well, I’ll always try and do this because it worked that one time. But here, because they’re always adding wrinkles or limitations saying, well, now you’ve got to do it like this instead. I think that’s a really cool way of teaching you it. Yeah, I would say that like the boat level in that tutorial is borderline like a DLC quality level. Like it’s, I played, when the beta first came out to see, could play Hitman 2016, I played this boat probably about 20 times because I complete, I used it to completely learn how the game works, but also just to like try and do all of the different bits and pieces, taking the disguise of the guy who goes on the boat to try and like go alongside them, seeing if I could headshot someone without getting spotted, like being the bartender and like poisoning someone, pushing the person off of the side and seeing if I could do that without getting caught. There’s loads of stuff just in that one level. So it really is like the most simple possible hit, but you can do it in a bunch of ways, you know. And it gives you the taste for like what the whole game is going to hinge on, which is replaying it and trying other objectives and trying other approaches. And, you know, with that kind of mindset, you then apply it to them. You know, when you’re in Paris, you’re not so overwhelmed. You’re like, well, I maybe, you know, I already know that, you know, I don’t have to use everything in this entire level. You know, this run may just be a couple of rooms or this wing of the fashion museum or whatever. Yeah, I think that’s really elegant. I also wanted a little shout out for a slightly different thing, but I quite like the sort of in-world training in like Modern Warfare 1 and Titanfall 2, where you’re kind of being trained as a soldier in Modern Warfare 1. You’re in the kind of training camp and that’s been in Call of Duty before, but it has like the kind of time trial kind of gauntlet that you can kind of run again and again. And it, you know, famously puts in these like achievements in both games, where if you can beat the time trial in quite a short time, you know, it unlocks an achievement. But I think the idea of seeing something that you can just replay really fast and see yourself cutting time off it and get your head around maybe like advanced tricks or that there is stuff beyond your first attempt for you to kind of aspire to is quite neat. I always like that. Yeah, we talked about this in the Metal Gear Solid 2 episode, but the tanker in that game also does a similar thing where it’s like, explains how the sort of different elevation of enemies works, how the rain effects can work on you. Basically, like every single mechanic you’ll need to play the game properly is in there minus a couple of things that are specific to the plant later on. But, you know, that section is functionally a tutorial that’s like teaching you how the game works. So, you know, it’s considered the highlight of the game in a lot of cases. So even if it doesn’t feel like a tutorial necessarily while you’re playing it, a lot of it is. I mentioned an episode that like the Olga fight is obviously just there to teach you how to aim in first person because it’s a very simple fight. Otherwise, it can show you that like light can get put in your eyes, but you can smash the light when it’s being put in your eyes and you can remove objects to make Olga appear and take her out. So, yeah, that entire section is a tutorial functionally. But, yeah, it’s a very well done one. So, I think we have some good answers there, Matthew. Okay, so next question. Hi, both. I’m interested. If you both have favorite genres or types of television shows, does Matthew have any particular favorite detective or investigator shows? Should we start with you, Matthew? I mean, I watch so much TV. I’ll watch anything if it’s good. Well, anything drama. I don’t watch like reality TV shows or anything like that. But most of the biggies, me and Catherine, are kind of on top of at any given time. So, Sam, you always joke about this when you come over about how we’re just total fiends for television and have watched all TV. So, yeah, like if it’s good, anything. Don’t really care about genre. In terms of detective stuff, I do like my Scandinavian crime dramas. I really liked The Bridge, which was on a few years ago, which is about Danish and Swedish detectives teaming up to solve grizzly murders, which I really liked. Every series of that was great. It had old Kim Bodnia, who is Vesemir in The Witcher, season two on Netflix, as one of the detectives. Very kind of characterful dude. I actually really like, there’s an ITV cop drama called Unforgotten about cold cases with, is it, I think, is it Nicola Murray? Sanjeev Bhaskar, right? And Sanjeev Bhaskar, yeah. That’s really, of the kind of like low key Brit dramas, which are a little bit sort of, you know, Sunday night and safe, but this one, like they’re just really nice policemen. Like they’re just people who would dig up a cold case and then kind of take it on to themselves, try and do some justice for these sort of sad bodies they find in like decomposed in suitcases and things. And they’re just really compassionate. They aren’t like cops on the edge. They’re not like mavericks. They’re just, it’s kind of like sort of, what do they call it? Is it like proficiency porn? Where people are just really good at their jobs and just get on with it quietly. And then, you know, often with a big emotional payout at the end, I really, really like Unforgotten. I think it’s great. I think it’s on Netflix as well for international viewers. I actually, a bit of an odd pick, but just to spice it up a bit, I really liked the HBO, I think it was HBO reboot of Perry Mason a few years ago, with him from The Americans. Matthew Reese. Yes. I really like that. Apparently, season two is coming, but it’s like depression era, LA. So like, I’d say even like pre-LA confidential, LA noir style, it’s just people kind of slumming it, but in a credible production value, it’s a really, really cool cast. And Matthew Reese is like private detective on his way to becoming an attorney, which is the kind of maybe the Perry Mason, you know, from like later shows. Yeah, so I like the first season of that. Do you know that the second season doesn’t have any of the same writers? They’ve got a completely different writer team. Like, why have they done that? Like that bummed me out when I saw that. I was like, well, what’s the point? Because originally it was going to be that the first season was going to be the true detective guy. Oh, yeah, Pizzolato, yeah. And then Downey was going to start. Yeah, Downey was going to start originally. All right. Yeah, that would have been a very different sort of thing. Yeah, I don’t think that would have been as good. Well, he may do a little instead, so good for him. But yeah, I liked the first season. I thought it was good. I must admit, though, when a show has taken more than two years to come back, and I know there’s been a pandemic, like, don’t bother. I feel like it’s just too long. Like, by the time this comes… It’s been two years since season one of this aired. I think they’re only just starting to film season two now. Like, that’s three years. Just don’t bother. Just cancel it. Make something else. Honestly, it’s just too long. I can’t be bothered. But it also speaks to, like, we’ll release it when we’re ready. You know, let’s get it right. Let’s make it. It’s not just, like, the churn. It’s not just the production line. You know? That’s true. And that is good about, like, HBO and some of the streamers, for sure. But, I don’t know. It is a long time. I had to look it up to see if it actually existed still. I was like, did I imagine that? It’s like, Barry is, like, 2019, the last season of that aired. And, like, that’s just now, airing season three. Especially if you’ve got an old person in it, like Henry Wrinkler, you’ve got to be, like, you know, I don’t want to be bleak, but, you know, time’s ticking. Did you call him Henry Wrinkler? Did I? If I did, that was a subliminal thing. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that’s the thing. That show simply doesn’t work, like, with anyone else either. It’s not like that he can die and replace him with John Lithgow, do you know what I mean? Like, he’s like, that is one of the most well-drawn characters I’ve ever seen in a TV show, his character in that, Kusano. So, yeah, I’ve kind of hinted at my interest there a bit, Matthew, but I think I’m less of a genre feed. I’m more of a, like, I follow certain creators or certain, like, I must admit, if there’s a HBO drama, I will always give it a go, because it seems like they’ve kept their quality bar incredibly high, whereas I would ask, argue that… Did you watch The Nevers? I didn’t, no, but, like, did anyone watch The Nevers? I was just seeing how steadfast your rule was. Well, no, I didn’t bother with that, because, you know, they booted Joss Whedon from it halfway through, because of, you know, perfectly… Yeah, exactly. But then, like, at that point, I was kind of like, well, I wasn’t that invested in the premise anyway, some witchy stuff in London in the olden days, but like… Isn’t that, like, half the shows these days? There was that one with Eva Green where she was, like, hanging out with, like, Bram Stoker or something. I didn’t watch it. I think you have… What’s it called? Penny Dreadful. Yeah, and there’s that one with Orlando Bloom where he’s, like, a fairy detective or something. Carnival Row, yeah. There’s more of these than there should be, arguably. But, like, yeah, I thought when it wasn’t even Joss Whedon’s show anymore and they were, like, disowning him from the marketing, I was, like, well, did he create this or not? I have no idea. And, like, they were, like, oh, we’ve got a new show running now, had nothing to do with the previous set of, like, writers. And I was, like, well, why does this exist anymore? Just fucking burn the whole thing down. There’s no point. But anyway, yeah, so I followed creators or, yeah, I’m kind of curious, like, there’s some good stuff on Disney Plus now. Like, they’re kind of like that… What was that show with Michael Keaton? Dope Sick? That’s pretty good. Yeah, it was good. Yeah, bleep stuff. Impressive, but good. Yeah, for sure. Like, what you were saying about, you know, keep the quality bar high, I agree with, but there’s some shows like Yellow Jackets, for example, which, you know, I absolutely loved. Had a kind of, like, losty sort of mystery vibe, but, you know, a better, more refined, modern version of it. Has loads of young actresses in it, and if they take three years to film a new season of that, all those actresses will look three years older. Like, that’s, like, kind of a problem, but whereas in the fiction of the show, they’re only out there for, like, a certain number of months. So, you can only take so long to do that, you know what I mean? So, yeah. They got a bit of that in Ozark with the boy who’s meant to be, like, 14, but he does not look 14 anymore. He’s like, hello, I’m a 14-year-old. And you’re like, uh-huh. It’s like how, like, the last season of, like, Stranger Things, they all looked about 12, and now, like, one of those boys looks about 45, and I’m like, I don’t know what happened in the middle there, but with us, a pandemic, you know, I feel it. I look about eight years older after the pandemic, but still. So, yeah, yeah, I, uh, I don’t know. I’m a bit, I’m a lot pickier than Matthew as well. I won’t just watch anything. I will watch, like, probably, I watched 15 shows a year probably, but I’ll be really selective about what those are. And Matthew watches a lot more British stuff than me, it’s fair to say. So, yeah, I think that’s a pretty comprehensive answer, Matthew. Mailbag Q. When a new game comes out, I have a fear of missing out on the zeitgeist around the game’s release. The fun that comes with taking part in the conversation around the game can often be as enjoyable as, or sometimes more entertaining than, the game itself. As I get older and busier, it does get increasingly difficult to actually complete the game, so I keep buying out of this FOMO. Do you guys feel yourself in a similar boat, find yourself in a similar boat, or are there times where you’ve been able to avoid the pressure and just enjoy games on their own merits? What’s your advice for a gaming zeitgeist addict? That’s from Alex Hater, who I believe works at Torn Banner Studios and seems like a very nice guy on Twitter. So, Matthew, what’s your take on FOMO and trying to keep up with what everyone else is playing? So, I’m kind of lucky in that most of the stuff I’m really interested in, I get to review or I pursue a review of it or playing it early, which is a bit of a smug boy answer, so I feel like when the game’s actually out, I don’t have to engage with the pattern if I don’t want to. I must admit, I’ve got very few gaming experiences that have been improved by the jokes of other people, because I’m a grumpy old sod at the heart of it. Often it’s either a new game, which if it’s a game that I haven’t played before release, it’s a case of, well, here’s just a load of people spoiling it because I don’t have as much time to play them, so it’s fantastic. Everyone’s joking about the end of Elden Ring now, and I’ve not even scratched the surface of it, and you’re like, fine. And if it’s a huge game, that unfortunately means there’s going to be a lot of bad patter in the mix. What I like is maybe when something I’m really into that’s maybe a bit more niche, and the specific people I follow on Twitter have funny Ace Attorney takes or something, but I wouldn’t say that’s chasing the zeitgeist. Yeah, I’m sort of with you on this. I get the occasional… the first wave of Elden Ring memes I was quite into, but I wanted to switch it off after about two days, and then it kept going and going and going, and now it’s still going, of course. If that’s how people enjoy games, that’s fine, but the reason I liked our Elden Ring podcast is I didn’t feel like we were trying to appease the kinds of people who hang out on FromSoft subreddits or have big monster takes on this stuff because I don’t care what those people think. Monster takes would be a good name for a podcast. Or an Elden Ring boss, but yeah. Yeah, so I think that I only really care what the people who listen to this podcast think, so that’s why I thought we could do it the way we did it, which was, you know, we don’t really know this genre that well, but we can just dive in. Otherwise, I quite enjoy playing games outside of the discourse times. I do get FOMO with games when I see something and get loads of like high scores. I’m like, well, maybe I need a copy of Triangle Strategy, even though I’ve got like 18 different JRPGs to play. Like that I get, that’s more familiar. But do you have, are there like, you don’t have to name them, but would you say there are like particular people, like if they are there like this thing, you’re like, oh shit, I better get on that thing. Yeah, so I did buy, so I trust Joe’s takes, for example. Joe DM’d me after we did that horror games episode and said, you got to play inscription. And I was like, okay, well, I’ll go play that right away then. And I did, and I didn’t regret it. So yeah, like there’s a few people like that. Jeremy Peel, if he’s like big into something, I’m like, well, I’ve got to check that out. I’ve got Weird West downloaded at the moment. And that’s, you know, partly down to Jeremy Peel, I would say. So yeah, there’s like, there are groups of people for sure who I do listen to. But yeah, like I enjoyed playing The Last of Us 2 outside of the Discourse Times. That was good. I got to play that in a complete vacuum. I had no idea what people made of it. And weirdly I could come back to it at a time where some of the illusions made in the game to real world situations seem to kind of bubble up again. And like, I’m a big fan of when people are playing something older, but having their online takes now. And it’s almost like what happens if Twitter had existed when Deus Ex came out or the original Max Payne came out. And, you know, I’ll see if, you know, a funny tweet from you about Deus Ex or Andy Kelly will post a funny picture from something he’s replying from 10 years ago or whatever. I quite like hearing the discourse way after the fact, or like games that missed out on the discourse because they were like pre-social media. Yeah, that’s, you know, playing Deus Ex is one of my favourite things I did last year. And so, yeah, the sort of little take factory I built on Twitter was a roaring success. I’m big into that. I had a little bit of that when I was playing Baldur’s Gate on the Switch. Like just being able to screenshot some funny stuff from Baldur’s Gate and put it out there. I mean, listen, it didn’t do good business. I apologise to anyone who listens to this podcast. You get sick of us talking about Twitter for alien success. Mostly you. Mostly me, yeah. But, you know, I always appreciate like, you always tell when someone’s taken a screenshot on the Switch because it’s got that particular font. When you write over the top of it and you annotate it with stuff. And I’m always extremely here for that. Yeah, I guess I’m in other ways too, like people talking about how the latest Destiny expansion has the best campaign of any of them. And I was like, well… That’s what they say every fucking time. Yeah, I mean, I’ve not seen if this is true with this one. It certainly wasn’t true with the last one, whether that was called the icy one. I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s who’s worse, the early Destiny reviewers or the early Marvel reviewers. Wait until you see it. They’ve really knocked it out of the park. It is breathtaking what they do in Doctor Strange and the Mansion of Bullocks. And you’re like, oh, yeah. Yeah, OK, it’s definitely the Marvel reviewers, because if you type in the most mediocre fucking Marvel reviews and like first reactions and find a new story from 2013 about Thor the Dark World, like Thor the Dark World man blew my top off another like high water mark for the MCU. And it’s like same with Ant-Man and the Wasp. People are like, Ant-Man and the Wasp man is going to blow. Oh, Jesus. The work Michelle Pfeiffer does in this film, I was in tears, guys. You were going to be in tears when you see Michelle Pfeiffer dress up as a wasp. A killer comeback for Scott Lang or whatever. And it’s like, what the fuck is this? So that is like a haven of bad takes. Whereas the Destiny players, I don’t know, like Phil was saying it was like a great campaign. I trust Phil to know he can shoot a campaign. Oh, well, Phil knows what he’s talking about. Well, that’s what I mean. So, you know, yeah, Marvel fans, I don’t trust them, but that’s fine. Sometimes there’s stuff happening where I’m like, I feel like I should get FOMO from it, but I can’t be bothered. So there’s like a Godzilla versus Kong thing going on in Call of Duty Warzone at the moment. But because that game is so, I want to see what two monsters fighting in a first person shooter game looks like. That sounds interesting, but not enough to download the 100 gigabyte file onto my PS5 and actually do it. So I will watch a five second GIF of it and that will be my experience because I’m kind of, like you, I’m kind of the opposite, Matthew, so good stuff. Is this your one to read out? Yes. A long time listener, first time caller. I was going to come up with a solid question that would generate an interesting conversation on the pod. But what’s more important is this. Are you aware that it looks like you’re about to kiss on your logo? Is this a mistake or is there something you’re not telling us? That’s from Pizza Hotline. Well, you know, blowing our surprise for episode 100 there, frankly, where we kissed live on air. So was Catherine the first one to point this out, Matthew? I think she was, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so after she said that… This was before it was live, I should add. Yeah, yeah. So John Strike designed our logo. I think he did a great job. When you see it on iTunes and stuff, it’s really distinctive. It really jumps out at you. So it does its job, for sure. But yes, it does look like the two people are going to kiss. Yeah, it doesn’t hint at any kind of wider meaning. It’s not a mistake. I did briefly panic about it when we got the design back and Catherine said that, but then didn’t want to spend money getting it redesigned, so went ahead with it. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, basically that. It may have homoerotic undertones, but it’s just two people talking into a mic. Yeah, it’s 2022, man. If you want to read homoerotic undertones into the podcast, you are welcome to. We are completely comfortable with that. So all good, yes. Okay, good. I think that’s covered that one off. Listen to the Old and Ring Pod right now. And at the Dream Guest question, how do you consider trying to get Gav Krupa or Powers on to speak about the From Software game? So that would be the perfect level of chaotic, in my opinion. That’s Owen Christie. I don’t really know any of them, Matthew. I know Gav supports the podcast on Patreon. He’s been very nice about it, gave me some behind the scenes advice, which I’m very grateful for. Yeah, if we know what’s good for us, we’ll try and have them on, I suppose, because they’re enormously successful on Patreon. I suppose. Well, I just mean from a business point of view, it makes sense to have them on. Yeah, I know. Just made it sound like such a chore. No, I don’t mean that. No, no. I know Gav very well. I used to work with him on O&M. I don’t know. I feel bad even calling them by their surnames, because I don’t feel like I know Daniel and Rory well enough to be so casual as to refer to them as Creeper and Powers. Well, aren’t they called that, though? Even when someone is known as a nickname, I still feel like you have to have a personal invite to use that nickname. Yeah, you have to earn it, really. Like if a rando was to call me Castle, I’d be like, Filly on. Unless it’s Mr. Castle, in which case I’m like, yes. I felt a bit weird saying that out loud, actually. As a rule, we have people on that we kind of know reasonably well in real life, too. I definitely know Gav well, potentially. I would imagine Gav’s a very busy man and probably too successful a man. To spare us his time. But yeah, the funny thing with Gav is, when I was on O&M, we were very sort of combative, both in office and on social media, to the point where I wonder if some people think we’re generally hostile towards each other, you know, to set the record straight and to break… What’s that thing in wrestling where they all have the fictional kind of veneer of wrestling? This is terrible. K-fabe. That’s it, yeah. Yeah. To break that, we do get on in real life. And whenever it gets too spicy on Twitter, there’s always a DM thread happening offsite where we’re like, are you all right? Sometimes it’s the only way men can communicate with their emotions. When we were on O&M, he used to, and I know it was him, he’ll say it wasn’t him, but I know it was him, he used to write mean notes and then scan them on the photocopier, and the photocopier had a function where you could email them to people from the photocopier. So I’d get these anonymous hate messages from the photocopier. But they were written as the photocopier. So it was kind of like, this is the photocopier, and I hate your guts, and everyone here despises you. And I was actually sure it was him, and then he went on holiday, and they continued. And I then accused so many different people in the office of being Gav’s accomplice. To this day, I’m only 95% sure it was Gav. Wow, that’s like sustained psychological torment. It’s one of those things where sometimes on these other podcasts, I think the level of bants is a bit too hot for me and my very thin skin to sort of survive there. I definitely feel that way with a computer game show, where I’m not sure I could withstand the David Turner’s barbs. I think I might crumble listening to that, because I’m just such a thin-skinned, pathetic man. But I own that, frankly, so I’m fine with it. But I wonder if that would be the case with Gav, where I’d walk out 20 minutes in, then come back 10 minutes from the end sort of situation. I think Gav is good at reading a room. He knows who he can kind of play with and who he can’t. Yeah, from both a business and entertainment point of view, yes, we should get one of them on at some point. But when is the bigger question? Because like Matthew says, they’re extremely successful. But yes, very grateful for the advice Gav gave you on the Patreon, Matthew. That was really good. Yeah, it’s great. Cool. So next question. I’ve got a question. What’s the biggest twist in the plot of a game? That’s from Ryan Cobain. Bioshock. That’s my answer. You, Matthew? I thought Metal Gear Solid 2 is pretty good. Yep. Yep. Very good. Also, I think the final case of Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice is like the only Ace Attorney game that properly got me in terms of like, oh shit, I didn’t see that coming. Yeah. Those are good. It’s a bit of a difficult one, isn’t it? You can’t spoil them, but just trust me, they’re good. If you can play through Spirit of Justice, that’s like 20 plus hours of a 3DS game that will soon be gone from a store, then go for it. Yeah. Also, the Zero Escape series, they’re packed full of twists and really good ones. There’s an absolute doozy in the third game, which people are generally down on that game and I don’t know why, because I think it’s rad, but that’s got a really great perspective base twist that I won’t spoil. Okay. Very nice. So, yeah. Hello from up north in the wilds of Yorkshire. Sorry if this has already been asked, but I’ve got a potentially boring question, which is basically, how is the pasta made? Pasta made? Sausage made? Pasta made? Anyway, it’s a little behind the scenes question. I always love getting a glimpse behind the scenes of how my favourite content gets made, i.e. the software and hardware you use for the pod. Each episode sounds great, and is very premium offering that we get for free each week. Such a good sales pitch. Thanks for the hours of fun and laughs. If I ever find myself in Bath, I already have a list of eateries to investigate or avoid, which I guess is pretty handy, he said unconvincingly. That’s from Jimmy S. Bowers, or Jimmy’s Bowers. Was that on Discord? I don’t know, but yes. How do we make the podcast, Samuel? Yeah. Jimmy Bowers, he works for End Dreams, he’s a community manager, very nice chap. We make the podcast. Me and Matthew both have the same microphone, which is a Blue Yeti. They are the podcast microphone. People do seem surprised by how good the audio quality is, Matthew. People think we’re in the same room together recording. We never are, which is surprising to some people. We are always at home. Then we use the free program Audacity to record the audio. Matthew smushes them together. Then there’s a hosting service. We used to use something called Buzzsprout, which is where we could create those fun little samples we put on Twitter of the podcast, try and sell it, which were good. We’ve had to move over to Acast because that’s the only way we could do the Patreon exclusive RSS feed thing. They got us over a barrel with that, unfortunately. Yeah, that’s basically it, really. We just use a Blue Yeti mic and in terms of the actual making of the episodes, we always have an episode plan. I used to do a lot of those, but now Matthew does a bunch of those too. You still do the meat of it. Well, yeah, but I think that’s just because, I don’t know, you’re a very busy man, you’ve got a lot going on. I don’t do freelance or anything like that, so I don’t mind doing it. I think now that we’ve got some Patreon money coming in, splitting it between us, there’s more impetus to make sure the work is fairly shared, I think. Yeah, but Matthew has to. Matthew’s the money man. I’ve assigned him the banker role, so all the Patreon cash gets sent to his account, and I think that’s very stressful, so I’m pleased he gets to do all that. Honestly, if you’ve watched Ozark, that’s truly stressful money business. Ozark has taught me a lot about so many things. Casinos. I’m not laundering money, I should add. Nothing like that. It’s all above board. But anyway, let’s just, yes. Yeah, they call it pod washing. That’s what he’s doing with the cash on Patreon. Yeah, anything to add to that, Matthew? Tell us what makes you it. I’m glad that you like how it sounds. I think we do take pride in trying to make it sound as good as possible. And we edit them quite closely as well to try and make them as smooth as possible, cut out any boring bits. So I’m glad that seems to be working. And we’re always bummed out when a guest has a shit microphone. And that’s always a bit of a bummer for us. And they don’t get invited back on. Oh, fun times. Are we joking or not? People will never know. So next up, Matthew’s telling of his experience of Elden Ring versus other From Software games makes me wonder if there are any other games which have pulled you into a genre you previously couldn’t get on with. That’s from Uber Tarquin. What’s your answer to this one, Matthew? The only thing I could think of that really jumped out was Forza Horizon, which I’m not a racing game guy at all, and it’s very arcadey, admittedly, and I have dabbled with arcade races in the past, but I’ve played those games a lot, and if you’d asked 16-year-old me, will a racing game ever be one of your top played games, I would have probably scoffed in your face, but I think it’s balance of fun and glorious visuals and kind of take it at your own pace. It’s just, it’s a really great example of how to introduce people to a genre. I think it’s just a really accommodating game and the craft of how accommodating it is is what really marks Playground out. If Playground can apply that thinking to Fable, that could be a really interesting open world game. I am pumped. Yeah, if there’s one thing I’ve thought about a lot working in like the publishing side of games, it’s the idea of like, what is the onboarding experience of playing a game for the first time? Like, you know, what do you kind of learn? What do you need to tell people, that sort of stuff? I think about that quite a lot. And so when you see that done, the way it is done in Forza, where it’s like so good at explaining how systems work, so slick, so easy to use, so inviting, that really is like an art form in itself. It’s really hard to do that well. So yeah, I agree with you. It’s a good gateway drug to the rest of the genre. Maybe you’ll play that and go and play some hardcore Forza afterwards, who knows? Or some very boring Gran Turismo. Oh dear. The Elden Ring thing didn’t happen to me, but it happened to me with Sekiro. That did for From Software Games, of course. I’ve talked about that enough on this podcast, Sekiro. Rocket League is one. I don’t really like sports or driving games, but I played that for hundreds of hours. I talked before in the 2009 episode about Fight Night Round Four. I never ever played a boxing game. I didn’t really play fighting games, but that was my most played game that year probably. I still go back to it every now and then. So yeah, that’s really surprising because I don’t care about boxing whatsoever in real life. So yeah, we did the big conversation about Muhammad Ali being OP, which is pretty funny on that episode if I recall. I wasn’t a massive racing guy, but the Motorstorm series, that really opened that up to me at the time. What I loved about that series is it looked phenomenal, of course. It was like a PS3 system seller, but it was about as complex as Mario Kart to play, pretty simple games. Pacific Rift in particular, the second one was fantastic. Had a massive variety of different tracks and stuff to unlock. Motorstorm aka Good Excite Trucks. There you go, there’s a burning hot take. That will definitely lose us in Patreon. I don’t mean it. I don’t mean it. I’m sorry. I can picture a couple of people spitting in my face when I say that. Yeah, I’m sure you’ll get at least like four Discord messages about that, Matthew. Yeah. Then the last one I picked out here was DayZ with Survival Games, actually. I’m not a big Survival Games guy, but I definitely played a whole bunch of DayZ in like 2014 when that game was like mega, mega hot on Early Access. So, you’re never into that, but that sold me on the appeal of it, which was the very spooky feeling of walking around a very realistic feeling environment, but then seeing one person in the distance and not knowing if you were going to both draw a gun and start shooting, if they’re going to wildly swing at you with an axe, whether you just be ships in the night, pass and go in your way, that was the thrill of DayZ. Every encounter was a complete mystery as to how it would go. So, yeah, a real magic to that, I think. So, yeah, there’s some good examples there, I think, Matthew. But, yeah, so is this your one, this one? Yeah, if you could live inside any game world, what would it be and which game would you not like to be trapped in? Gosh, yeah, I think we might have answered this one before on a previous episode, but I thought I’d write a different answer to last time and put Sea of Thieves. I think I quite like living in Sea of Thieves. Like, they’re always adding new stuff to it, so it would get less and less boring as time goes on. That’d be good. You got story mode stuff you can go and do, go uncover some lore of the islands. You can just go get into some fights. You can just hang out on the islands. This is life, though. This isn’t like, just to live in that world. You don’t have to engage with its missions, do you? Well, no, I mean, I guess not. But I suppose what I’m saying is those little islands that have like a little tavern on them and stuff, they seem quite, just seem quite nice. Do you know what I mean? I mean, there’s no sunscreen in that world, so I’d worry about getting skin cancer, admittedly. Not sure there’s anything I can do to mitigate that. That’s a tough break, that. That’s for their next patch. They have a much requested player feature to rub sun cream into yourself. And also, I want to be able to rub sun cream into my crew. Yeah. I’m like, show me your back. Can I swap my cutlass for a large umbrella, please? Yeah, so yeah, I think Sea of Thieves would be quite nice. Yeah, it looks pretty as well. If you try and sail off the edge of the map, you get that really fucked up red sky and then things get really gnarly. That’d be quite cool to experience in IRL. There is a bit high risk of death in Sea of Thieves, though. You come back, though. I mean, are we talking about real world rules here? Well, I would say it’s like real world rules. So like, if just some teenagers decide they’re gonna shoot you with a cannon, that’s it. Well, you just fucking ruined it then, haven’t you? That was a great pitch, that one. And then you’re like, well, actually, you’re just gonna die. That is the, I think that’s, well, he didn’t state, admittedly, F943 in this question. It’s a fair point. I’ve got to go back to drawing board on this one. What’s your answer to this one? I would either like to live forever in the private hospital in Hokkaido in Hitman 1. Oh yeah, that’s a good one. Because it’s just so luxurious and amazing mountain views. Again, if I don’t get assassinated, so like with C of E’s, there’s a caveat. I want to be there, but I don’t want to be a target. I don’t think I would be a target. I’ve not been enough of a wrong in life for anyone who wants to assassinate me. Is that the one where you can get pushed off a waterfall? Is that what Hokkaido? When you’re doing the yoga. Luckily, you would never do yoga, so you’d be safe on that front. Yeah, and the only downside to it is it’s like a health spa where someone is murdered occasionally. And also stuff’s always sort of fucking up because Agent 47’s like turning the power off or like messing with the lights to try and do something. So you would have to sort of live sort of in the kind of aftershocks of what Agent 47 is up to. Yeah, you might find like a boiled man in the sauna one day and that’s like not suboptimal. Yeah, suboptimal, I would say. And that would be traumatic. If you did find a boiled man in a sauna, the one place you’d want to be to recover is a really luxurious clinic. You’re in the right place to have like a major meltdown. Yeah, I think I would like, if I could revise my answer to a Hitman answer, Sapienza is probably a good one. Because there are loads of places to go there where you’d be relatively safe. The beach seems pretty safe there. Like you’re never really killing people on the beach in that game. There’s also the gelato shop. I don’t think anyone’s going in there and headshotting anyone. So I try and like stay to those locations if possible. Try and avoid some of the more like quiet sort of urban areas. And I wouldn’t go anywhere near that mansion, of course. I wouldn’t go in that underground bit either. That’s like- Oh no, horrible. You’ll wait, just wait to be killed there. I wouldn’t want to live in the apartment above or below that woman who is on a loop saying, Marco, Marco, or whatever it is. Yeah, nor would I want to work in that lab below the mansion because there’s constantly a fucking alarm going off. Because Agent 47 doesn’t know what he’s doing with those fucking buttons. There are some stressful places, Sapienza. As you know, putting all that aside, it seems quite chill. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, some good answers there. Cool, I think you and I are clearly both looking forward to that Patreon Hitman episode, Matthew. We’re always dying to talk about Hitman. Yeah, okay, good. Oh, what about the ones you wouldn’t want to be trapped inside, Matthew? Referring on last week’s episode, the world of Max Payne 3 seems very traumatic just because of A, body count, and B, just the cynicism of the world. Why would you even be there? Why are you in Sao Paulo? Well, that’s it. That’s what I wouldn’t want to be, you know. It’s that I do not fit that world, and especially this version of it. Well, that’s why I said it’s a place I don’t want to live. You were at one of those pool parties with that family he’s looking after. It’s like, why am I even here? And then like, yeah. I just wouldn’t want to hear what Max Payne’s inner monologue would say about me, because you know it would be like fricking harsh. I think it’d be like, maybe it’d be like that IT guy who just gets shot, you know what I mean? That kind of vibe, where he’s like, you know. He’s just like, this guy’s just a body waiting to happen. I can hear you, Max. As long as he doesn’t talk about my haircut or weight, that would be quite hurtful. Yeah, I suppose it would be, yeah. Yeah, well, actually, a bit of extra Max Payne trivia for you, Matthew. And I only thought of this because I just pictured this just now, but something that they originally were gonna have in the game was the idea of taking a human body shield. Like, and I thought that would be quite funny, the idea of Max using you to absorb some bullets and throwing you to one side, but yeah. Strategically, I’m a big body, so. Yeah, you know. I would eat up a few bullets before you had to toss me away, I think. He’d be wise. That would be like, there’d be a lot of SEO guides saying, grab that white pasty dude. So for my worlds I wouldn’t want to live in, Max Payne’s a really funny one. Like, I pick the real city, Sao Paolo. I pick Kingdom Hearts here. If I lived in any of the Disney worlds in this game, I’d go completely mad because they are all like three rooms big. It’s like they brought Alice in Wonderland down to like three one-bedroom flat size locations. And if I was trapped in any one of those, I would lose my shit. Particularly if I was stuck there with fucking Donald and Goofy. That would be like a tough hang. So, yeah, but Alice in Wonderland World in particular, actually, because it’s like when you watch that film, it’s a really amazing looking and trippy film. And the Kingdom Hearts version is really nothing like it. It’s just that fucking kitchen over and over again. But the stuff’s bigger than the stuff smaller. Like, yeah, I would like I couldn’t could not deal my friend. I like the idea of Sora turning up to do that level. And there’s all the Disney characters in the into the room and there’s just you wiggin out. And he’s like, why the fuck’s this guy? And he’s just like, I’m losing my shit. This place is like a small flat. How the fuck do I get out of here? And it’s like, oh, we’re going to another three room location based on the Tarzan films, do you want to come? Yeah. These kids are like, this guy’s not from Final Fantasy or Disney. Yes, I don’t remember this, like a slightly overweight white guy in Final Fantasy X. That’s, yeah, maybe he’s one of the Blitzball players. Yeah, okay, very good. So yeah, Kingdom Hearts is really the one I came up with because I do like those games, but when you think about it, none of those locations make any sense. There’s like logical worlds in themselves. So yeah. Hello, when I look at the difference in graphical fidelity and gameplay between Wolfenstein 1992 and Unreal 1998, there’s an enormous gulf. Yeah, I’d argue since Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty 4, the technological gap has slowed considerably. Obviously graphics have improved a little, but the fundamental gameplay stays the same. In some instances, I’d say the gameplay has even regressed. Do you think we will ever see another big jump in technology like we did in the earlier 3D boom days of gaming? That’s from Nathan Brady-Easton. What’s your thoughts on this, Matthew? I feel like there are still technological leaps happening. I mean, they’re maybe not as sexy like when I was playing Horizon 2, the fact that you can fast travel across that world in basically a second and it’s instantly there feels like a minor miracle. I’m sure you’re kind of like, well, this is what it should always have been, but there is kind of still a wow factor there. I’d also say like the rise of actually good VR, particularly like VR motion controls, feels to me like a wow moment or a new golf that has been passed. I don’t know if I particularly agree that like, you know, gameplay has regressed and all the focus is on graphics. Like I still see enough stuff that like wows me. That’s the thing. So something’s happening. Yeah, I saw an image of, I don’t know if you saw this, this Hellblade 2 screenshot of an environment they put up the other day on Twitter. It’s this massive like, it’s like a panoramic kind of shot of like a beach in the game or something. And it looked fucking unbelievable. And a bunch of artists went and made that. And, you know, gameplay wise, it’s likely to feel like some things I’ve played before. But I was completely wowed by this environment and thought, I can’t wait to see what the rest of the game looks like based on this. So I felt like I’m always having these wow moments still, you know? Yeah, I don’t know. I think that, like, if anything, I don’t mind that the graphical fidelity thing is slowed down. I don’t need that to keep going and going. I would rather that games’ development was sustainable in terms of cost and, like, there’s a constant need to bankrupt yourselves, spending 250 million making a game just to, like, blow your socks off. I quite like that this generation of consoles seems like the last generation plus in a lot of ways. And there’s still stuff that wows me all the time like that. And Matrix Awakens demo on PS5, for example. Like, when you see that in action, you think, oh, I’ve not seen a game that looks this good before. Like, in the Open World City bit, it’s more familiar, but in the actual, like, set piece of it, that looks phenomenal. Go on, Matthew. Yeah, and I think there have been genre changes which have, like, altered the industry. You know, the rise of the Battle Royale, for example, you know, has set so many people on a different path than they were previously on. You know, that’s a huge transition. That’s a huge jump. It may not be the gameplay jump or the gameplay transition you’re looking for, which I think is often the case. You know, it’s maybe hard to go, like, well, what’s radically changed in the first person shooter? But I think there has been radical change in areas. It’s just maybe not the areas that speak to you. Maybe it’s what’s happening. Yeah, possibly. You know, like, you know, Apex Legends is the same developers as Call of Duty 4, but they’re quite different from each other, really. But I suppose in my head, I see the continuity of, like, experts at a particular genre applying that expertise to, you know, to something they know incredibly well. And I see the through line because it’s like, the people who made the classiest shooter then are making the classiest shooter now, in my opinion. So, you know, that carries on. But yeah, the form may look quite different. So, yeah, but yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever stop being wowed by games. I think, like you say, the innovation might come more from hardware and stuff like that. Like, putting an Oculus Quest 2 on was quite an amazing experience. It was like, you know, it’s all in one. I’d only ever experienced VR with wires plugged in. And like, when you plug in some headphones and stuff, it really feels like you’re immersed in that. Because it’s so, so crisp and it’s only 300 quid, so, yeah. It’s the hand controllers in VR that get me. Like, the control over like 3D space. I mean, that there, it really feels like you’re interacting with the world kind of in such a tactile way, you know, where they can see where your fingers are gripping stuff or whatever, like that’s, that’s truly like a next gen thing. Oh, yeah. That’s why I was banging on about that VR table tennis game I played. Because it’s like actual table tennis, because you can see the paddle in your hand. And think of how far that’s come from the wheeze, like slightly less responsive, you know, motion control. So, yep, I agree. Hi, are the previous games you’ve been playing episode you mentioned playing the last stop. Following your conversation, I gave it a try and finished it last week. I have mixed thoughts on it as I love the setting, but the decision making was more restrictive than I initially thought it would be. I wondered if either of you had finished the game now and had some more thoughts. Thanks, Love the Pod Pinch. I didn’t play any more of it, unfortunately, Matthew, did you? Yeah, I did push on with it. The short version is I much preferred the earlier parts of the stories before they got too paranormal. The game has an act that brings everyone together that I wasn’t massively into, and then it hurries back into the three stories again for a big decision in each of the characters’ lives. I think I’ll stick with what I said in the original episode. I really loved how it depicted family life and London, and just a sort of realism of the way, within a budget and a particular art style, I think it kind of captured a lot of truth about living in a city like London, which I really liked. But maybe as the story went on, I kind of was less engaged. And I can’t really speak to the choices and consequences. I played it once, I felt like it didn’t feel wildly unfair, but I don’t know if there’s much elasticity to the story. Yeah, fair enough. Enough said. Chaps, the pod has made me suitably cynical, and it has only hit me that those last few pages box out many reviews found in our dearest, mostly departed magazines that I took as gospel. May not be the result of dozens of hours of gameplay. Any unwritten rules on what constitutes a suitable amount of time to put into one of these? And does this depend on the writer’s role? Starfighter, freelancer, et cetera? Cheers, that’s from Pocket Wats. I can’t work out how to pronounce that, but that’s not my problem. So Matthew, I don’t know if these types of reviews exist anymore, I don’t think they do actually. But I imagine that in the 90s, when these things were more popular, these review roundups, they were probably paying a lot better. So you could justify putting more time into them. What’s your take on this? Yeah, on NGamer, a lot of the reviews roundups, definitely once Charlotte Martin joined the magazine, that was sort of her domain. She reviewed all the games on that page. Maybe we’d get a freelancer in to do it. I mean, the truth is, they’re 100 words long and you’d probably play them until you had 100 words of observations. If when playing it, it was amazing and there was something more interesting to be said, it would probably be elevated to a bigger review and then be given more time and money to be reviewed properly. No, we were not playing review roundup games on NGamer to completion, but a lot of them were like match three puzzlers, things like that, things you could kind of get your head around pretty quickly. Like it was more about matching the right games to the right section. You wouldn’t put like a really complicated narrative or JRPG game there. Like if that’s gonna be worth talking about at all, it’s probably gonna be worth talking about at more length, so. Yeah. I’m actually quite slightly depressed by the line, Chaps, the pod has made me suitably cynical. And I was like, oh no, that’s the opposite of what the podcast tries to do, but oh well. I guess we’ve been like honest about mags and stuff. I know they’re not. No, I’d say, you know, hopefully we’ve sold them as positive experiences. I only had positive magazine experiences, so. Yeah, apart from the ones we don’t talk about, but yeah. Yeah. Okay, so this is your one, Matthew. You keep getting the long ones, don’t you? Oh, large gents. That’s the theme here. Congrats on what has fast become my favourite podcast. It really is exactly what I’m looking for in a video games discussion. Spicy takes, churlishness, big X energy and meat. Anyway, onto the question. As a new father to a seven month old baby boy, sleep is a stranger to me. There are nights where I’m lucky if I get three broken hours, truly the worst of times to counter, the best of times that fatherhood brings. Which game do you feel uses sleep most effectively as a mechanic and or what sleep based mechanic would you like to see implemented in a future title? We all know sleep isn’t as simple as choosing how much you want to sleep for and hitting okay, as much as we’d like it to be. So, oh, as much as we’d like it to be so. That’s from Mad Brood. Speaking of sleep, I need some. So, I came up with one answer for this. I have three answers for this, actually. So, I really like the sleep mechanic in Bully, because you’re playing a teenager, and your main character will fall asleep if they’re not home in time, if you don’t put them to bed, basically. And I think I like that because it’s a nice touch. It makes the main character seem innocent, because he’s a bit of a hard ass in the story and stuff. But he’s a teenager, he’s a kid, basically. So I think it’s a good bit of characterisation that he nods off about 1am or something, because he just shouldn’t be awake anymore. And then he just wakes up. Sometimes people steal his clothes, and he wakes up in his underpants. That’s unfortunate. The other one I thought of was, I think Snorlax is a good use of a sleep mechanic, because in Pokemon Red and Blue, he’s a nuisance motherfucker who won’t move, even though he’s blocking a road. And if he falls asleep in the middle of your battle with him when you wake him up, he replenishes his mighty HP bar. And I like the idea that it’s a nice example of how you can communicate a belligerent wanker in the form of game mechanics. It ties together quite nicely. In terms of more dreamy stuff, I thought about how Final Fantasy VIII your characters black out, and then basically time travel into the brains of three guys in a war years ago. And then it’s very anime, but basically they’re there to help supercharge these soldiers to survive. And then there’s a universe reason this exists. This happens later on, but at the time of the game, your three characters black out, you don’t really know what’s going on, and you’re suddenly in a place you don’t recognize playing characters you don’t really know. But your main characters are still there in the heads of the characters, communicating their thoughts. That was another one that sprung to mind. Did you have any for this, Matthew? I like that in Dying Light, at night, everything is much harder and much scarier, but you can sleep, just sleep, go to bed and not worry about it at all. I like that you can sleep away in a difficult mode or stay up and deal with it. I think that’s quite fun. I mean, I find most sleep mechanics quite boring, because you’re not doing anything. Like you say, you’re pressing a button and just rejuvenating in some way. Though in Death Stranding, you can like rest to regain your health. And as you’re like hiking about, you know, it’s a case of like, oh, I want to try and find somewhere kind of safe or pleasant to have a little sleep. And in the kind of connected online world, where people sleep sometimes leaves like a little pile of rocks. I think they’re cairns. Yeah. And if you see those cairns and sleep near them, like you get, I don’t know, your health comes back faster by sleeping there. And I think that effect is amplified the more people who sleep there. So I like the idea in that world that there are certain spots become kind of known sleeping spots just because lots of people are using them, which sort of feels true to how people navigate the world. Like you have safe havens or whatever that develop over time. And that’s one of the neat little things in Death Stranding. I mean, I can’t say I’ve got any great ideas for how I want sleep to be used in games because sleep seems quite a boring thing. Important, but boring. I wouldn’t want to sleep in games. Yeah, fair enough. I empathize with your plight as a dad who has to be awake a lot. I’m very tired just from having a job, so that’s why I’ve opted not to have children. Because I eat big sandwiches. That is also a factor, yes, being overweight. Dear TGM, brackets two giant men, does choosing what game you’re going to play differ if you know you’re also going to be writing about something or discussing it on the podcast? Do you try to differentiate clearly between gaming for job purposes and gaming for leisure purposes, when I assume it’s quite tricky to turn off the analytical part of you? Would you intentionally choose not to play something you’re playing for review deadlines allowing, even if you’re really enjoying it, so you can take a break from work gaming? Keep up the good work, Ian Welby. What’s your thoughts on this one, Matthew? Yeah, and I’ve said a few times on this podcast that my brain is broken from years of work and freelance, so I find it very hard to motivate myself to play stuff if it’s not for work. That isn’t cynical. If you’re not paying me, I’m not playing it. I need the fear of a deadline to power me through games. Otherwise, I’d only play them for half an hour at a time. I’ve left to my own devices. It’s quite rare, but Horizon 2 is probably the first game this year that I finished without it being for anything in particular. Even then, I was like, well, I might talk about it on the podcast. So, yeah, my brain is just fried by this job. And I don’t know it will ever truly recover unless I just stepped away from it and the pod for years, and I don’t plan to do that. So right now I’m dabbling again with Xenoblade on the Switch because I know Xenoblade 3 is coming out, so I’m prepping my brain to write about some Xenoblade. But that’s just… I’m mad, I think. I’ve spent a long time since I worked in games media now, like three years this year, so I feel like I’m trained out of that a little bit. There are definitely games I never went back to because I reviewed them and the appetite had cooled off. So like The Division 2 was one that I thought of where I played 50 hours of it for the PC Game Review, then didn’t really go back. That’s partly because none of my friends were playing it, so that was kind of a shame. It was definitely a game to be shared with other people. Really fun when you do. So yeah, even though I loved it, I didn’t really go back. But I must admit, when we play games to podcast, it feels less like a chore, because it’s not work I’ve been assigned. I’ve chosen to talk about it on the episode, so I’ve picked something that I or you would enjoy replaying or revisiting. Now, of course, we have Patreon, so we have the incentive of being paid for our time, essentially. So that’s nice, too. So you can kind of treat it like a little freelance assignment. But because we’re picking things we actually care about, it doesn’t feel that transactional. You know what I mean? So, yeah, it doesn’t bother me so much. What’s the next one, Matthew? Dear Samuel and Matthew. Oh, no! You’ve been trapped in a Freaky Friday situation and swapped bodies. You have until the following Friday where you learn the lesson and swap back bodies. What’s one nice thing you do for your podcast pal while in their body? And what do you do to sabotage their respective competing video game publisher? For a bonus point, what is the lesson you had to learn to swap back bodies? Love the pod, makes Friday that much better. That’s from Kunky Donker. So, I would delete Delivery off of Matthew’s phone. I just sort of see how he gets on without it. That’s like, I don’t know if that’s a friendly gesture or not, but certainly I just see what happens if I did that. Just see if he’d take the hint about changing his lifestyle slightly. Maybe just start getting into like making really elaborate lasagnas or something. Seems unlikely, but I’m willing to give it a pun. So, do that. But in terms of destroying his reputation, Matthew Castle Productions, I’d close Singh again on his behalf, destroying his reputation and serving his ties to the Hotel Dusk franchise as a brand ambassador. Hotel Dusk HD would be cancelled live on stage at E3. Who does a cancelling on the stage at E3? Yeah, it seems like bad form, doesn’t it? But, you know, if we talk about corporate sabotage in the body of another person, then this is the way to go. For a bonus point, what is the lesson you had to learn to swap back bodies? For this, I put the lesson I had to learn is that sometimes a Subway is a real substitute for food that adults are supposed to eat. Well, you already knew that though. That’s the judgement you brought to my body and then deleted my Deliveroo app. Yeah, that’s true. But are you using Deliveroo for Subway? Are you? You don’t just walk over there? Who knows? It’s not that far from your house, is it? Listen, no one knows what’s going on. We don’t talk about it. No, we don’t need to litigate that. That’s fine. Okay, what about you Matthew? Well, as a nice thing for you, I’d buy an HDMI splitter, some plug splitters, some cable ties and I’d really sort out all your consoles and cables. So I’d plug everything in and so you wouldn’t be upset about having to plug in a Wii U or anything. I’d do that for you. That’s really nice. That’s a genuinely nice gesture. I’m actually slightly moved. To sabotage though, I’d open your window and shout hate speech out of it. Well, I’m in the middle of an estate, so people would definitely hear you. Yeah, I’d also ring the local news first and say, I’ve got something to tell you. I’d say, I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’ve got something to tell you. And then lots of hate speech. Lots and lots of hate speech. Yeah. Like whatever took my fancy in the moment. What’s the lesson you had to learn from swapping back from these? I actually struggled to come up with one of these. Don’t use hate speech. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t. I want listeners to know. I wouldn’t actually go for that. I’m just trying to sabotage him. Yeah, that’s what I’d do. I like the idea of comparing closing sing again to shouting out of hate speech out of your window in the middle of Bath. Those are quite a contrast there. I mean, it’s a lot less elaborate. Based on your scenario, we’re swapping bodies during E3, which means I could shout hate speech at E3. Oh yeah, that’s even worse. That’s true. In the middle of LA Live, you could be shouting. On that huge stage. I’d get someone famous up on stage as well. I’d get Keanu Reeves and Paul McCartney and they’d be really shocked. That’s a good answer. Good stuff. Whereas I’d have Randy Newman in a helicopter, indoors. Let’s see how that goes. My one. I just don’t think we should use the Freaky Friday scenario to kill what the other one loves. That seems bad. What I’m doing is creating an element of danger. I’m not saying I’ll actually kill him with the helicopter. I’m just trying to top your last E3 conference. That could be good for your reputation. I don’t want to jump back into my body and find Randy Newman’s blood on my hands. That would be tough. You are the guy who collapsed him from the roof in the car. All right, good. Maybe it makes more sense if you read this next question, Matthew. I would love to know how Samuel switched from journalist and writer to PR man is going and how he’s finding that side of things, says Sip G. Very short answer to this one. Ask me in a week when I’ve launched a game. It’s good. At first I was like, oh, is it a bit uneasy doing this podcast still? Because it’s kind of like games media, sort of. But I treasure this podcast too much to give it up. And I don’t think it’s like particularly egregious what we say or do on here. So I think it’s fine. But yeah, it’s really refreshing to have a sort of career change. I was in a big need of it. It’s nice to switch to this where I feel like I’ve been learning lots and doing lots of cool things and making a difference and working with some really cool devs. Yeah, it’s good. You know, getting to sort of like see that side of things is really is genuinely interesting. People just want to make great games and get them to the hands of people who want to play them. So it’s good. It’s good. Yeah. Any further thoughts there, Matthew? No, it’s been, you know, good as your pal from afar, seeing you get to grips with this and you definitely seem much happier with it. So I’m pleased for you. Oh, thanks, buddy. I appreciate that. Good stuff. So, dear Matthew and Samuel, love the pod. How do you feel about the boomer shooter slash early 3D FPS trend? Do you two have much affection for the gameplay of Quake, the Unreal, etc.? I’m most interested if you feel the low-poly early 3D style has chops as an intentional visual aesthetic in the way that Pixel Art has. That’s some Kraft cheese. What do you think of this one, Matthew? To be honest, in this period, I was always into Nintendo. My PC gaming was largely point and click games. I’m a real point and click nerd and that’s kind of all I played. I obviously played demos of most of these things. We had Quake, we had Unreal for sure. I can’t say I’ve got huge affection for them. The thing about them as an aesthetic, I think the pixel art style works very well because it’s almost like a complete movement. It’s done, it’s of its time, it’s fixed, where I see the 3D graphics in these games were more of stepping stones to the modern 3D games and where the style has sort of evolved. I would say into something better, I’ve still got a bit of nostalgia and when I see these games, I have a fondness for how they look, but I can’t say I’m desperate to play lots of things in this style, which maybe loses me my hardcore credentials. If not knowing what fucking kayfabe was, this definitely will do it. And also not having an Android handheld. This episode has really ended me with a very certain segment of our audience. Yeah, some people were really listening because they thought you had an Android handheld, Matthew. And like wrestling and Quake. I think we made your feelings on wrestling very clear when we told the story about you at WrestleMania. Okay, good stuff. Trump will be shaved at dawn or whatever. No, John Cena, that was it. Trump will be bald by night’s end. Come on, please. George RR. Martin level stuff there. Yeah, okay, good. I think you’re right there. I think that there’s an element of pixel art. They’re riffing on the end of the SNES and Mega Drive eras where that form was perfected, arguably, and that style was replaced with 3D to a large extent. And so yeah, I think the fact they’re riffing on such a complete visual style with such amazing modern technology that can bring it to life in different ways, look at the way something like Dead Cells is animated, look at the way that Ultrapath Traveller and that triangle strategy use pixel art. There’s loads of cool ways you can use that. So I think in terms of comparing the chops of it, I suppose, like the longevity, I think you’re right that maybe there’s a bit more specificity to riffing on something like Quaker Unreal that means it doesn’t have the same legs necessarily. But that said, I’ve only played a little bit of Dusk, but I really liked what I played of it. I have not played it in Medieval, but I heard that’s got a good reputation too. I get very excited when I see games from this time. So yeah, you’ve seen Night Dive do these remasters. That’s really cool. Yeah, I think that I am taken with this aesthetic. My way into it is maybe a little bit different. So I was big into Unreal Tournament, which might be slightly later than what you’re asking about here. But that style, that visual style really speaks to me. I played a lot of Raven software shooters in the early noughties, and I was big into Jedi Knight and Dark Forces. You see those styles being riffed on quite a lot. So yeah, I like seeing that stuff riffed upon. But does it have the legs of Pixlar? I think Pixlar is just an unstoppable visual style now. It will never fade away. There seems to be endless ways that people can use that. This is maybe a bit more closed off. That was a great answer. I think you managed to get a lot of people back on board. That’s good. I’ll buy Matthew an illegal Android handheld for 20 quid that breaks after two months. But let’s him play Golden Sun for two hours before it crashes or something. Would either of the hosts ever consider doing a top 10 point and click episode after the news of a new Monkey Island being in the works broke? Or is that not a genre you’re big into? That’s from Doomacan on Discord. What about you, Matthew? Short answer, absolutely. I love Monkey Island. I think we’ve definitely got a LucasArts game episode on our to-do list. I know obviously there’s a lot of stuff outside of that as well, but yeah, for sure. Yeah, so me and Matthew are really keen to use another episode format this year called The Hall of Fame, where you boil down the number of, like the complete history of a games company down into several games that you consider the most important, the representative of that archive. We think that could be a fun, challenging exercise. We again nicked it from The Big Picture, the film podcasts we enjoy, because they’re very good at coming up with these formats. So yeah, if you ever hear an idea on there, you can expect to hear it on here at some point in some other form, warped or with discussion of sandwiches and all that other bullshit we like. It’s not a genre I know that well, actually. So it passed me by as a kid a little bit. So I would have to do a bit of research for it. I never really quite got into these games, but yeah. I loved Point and Click games. Monkey Island, India Jones, Fate of Atlantis, the Discord games I loved as well. Not Broken Sword. I’m not a Broken Sword guy. Has come up a couple of times. So yeah, a lot of things. Yeah, I was playing all the other LucasArts games that had Jar Jar Binks in them and such. Do you want to read this next one Matthew? I’m going to click on you’s knife on Jar Jar Binks. Funny they made a Star Wars point and click. That seems like a missed opportunity, doesn’t it? But rather nice as to print money. Anyway, why don’t you give the next one Matthew? Are there any running jokes from a magazine you think were a bit bizarre slash regret that you regret looking back on them? As a child, my entire perception of Hull was formed as O&M before Matthew’s time would constantly compare the city to any terrible neighbourhood in games, mute city, space junk galaxy, etc. Years later, I’ll probably never go to Hull because of this, says Jamie. Yeah, I couldn’t actually think of anything specific. There weren’t running jokes in a lot of the mags I worked on. I do remember the running jokes I remember from PC Gamer were jokes about the staff. That was a big future sort of thing. It’s in jokes about staff. There’s plenty of cringe stuff in 90s games mags to look back on for sure. I do remember Hull getting a lot of beating actually in some of the mags I read. Like Hull being called a boring place or something like that. But the truth is, if it’s not one of about six cities in the UK, it probably is a bit boring. Right, yeah. There were just certain things that sort of sounded like Hull or like Skegness because it’s got a hard sort of sound in it. People would often use, yeah, I mean, the thing with these in jokes, the really important thing is you couldn’t really force them. They had to happen quite organically. On NGamer, it wasn’t some affectation. If a joke was in the mag, it was because it made us laugh. If it was in the mag several times, it was because we were trying to make each other laugh. If then readers took to it or picked up on it, even better, that kind of cemented it. Sometimes you had a feeling when you wrote something, you think, oh, I think that’s actually going to run and run. We did this terrible wee wheel, which in our advert for it, we were under strict instructions from our publisher to tell everyone that it was worth £7, and I always thought the kind of shoutiness of that made it seem very dubious. It was like something sort of desperate, sort of Jack Lemmon in Gling, Gary Glen Ross about it, you know, sort of, it’s worth £7. And we were like, ugh. So we kept making fun of that in the mag, and then that became a thing. I still to this day have people saying worth £7 to me because of that stupid wee wheel. Didn’t people want to call the paid Patreon tier, the XL tier worth £7 tier, Matthew? That would have been good. Yeah, it would have been really abstract, but actually really funny to be like, were £7 £4 £50, that would actually be quite good. Missed opportunity. Oh, god damn it. You see, I’ve just not got the brain I had back then. But I guess, like, linking back to that question about the six ads earlier, NGamer wasn’t too obnoxious, I don’t think. There’s nothing I’m too embarrassed about running joke-wise. It was just silly. Like, a lot of it just didn’t land. You know, you look back at it, and the worst you can say is, like, oh, that was a bit try-hard. You know, there was nothing mean about it. We weren’t cruel or unkind people, and we didn’t make a cruel or unkind mag, I don’t think. Yeah, that’s fair enough. OK, good. I did get rid of all that whole shit from L&M, though, when I joined. That was never for me. That was cast stamping some authority on it. Matthew Loves Hole. What an egotistical maniac it was. Matthew Loves Hole. Matthew declared Harleur City of Culture in 2013. Yeah, that was like the other staff’s joke, you know? Yeah, yeah, of course. That belongs to a different group of people. Yeah, exactly. I sort of felt that way on PC Gamer. It’s like, I’m sure you have your own rapport. I have my own more strained rapport with the staff now, so I will make my own jokes. OK, good. Hello, BPP. Yeah, we have had a lot of variations on how we’re referred to here, Matthew. My question for the pod this week is, have you ever somehow completely missed an important mechanic of a game? For example, in Half-Life 2, I never realised that you could actually control the launcher rockets with your mouse after you fired them. I’d shoot it at an enemy gunship and watch as time and time again my missiles would be shot down as I wasn’t focused on guiding them towards the enemy, meaning several set of times I’d fire it in the general direction of the combine and then run for cover somewhere, only to be hit seconds later by my own missile, which had done a full 180 in the air and exploded at my feet because I was now aiming at the ground directly in front of me. What should have been a fun, quick little skirmishers with an exciting and unpredictable enemy turned into a growling, minutes-long missile marathon that only ended when either I inevitably blew myself up again or law of averages dictates that if I shoot enough missiles into the sky, some of them should hit the enemy. Even with it being the most dangerous weapon in the game, I actively avoided using the rocket launcher because I was so scared of its perceived unpredictableness. Despite this, it continues to be my favorite game ever. Have you guys ever had this? That’s Danny Man, a long-time listener. Any mechanics that you’ve completely missed, Matthew, that you didn’t understand and then you went through the whole game without it? Well, not the whole game, but for a long time playing Fallout 3, I didn’t realize bottle caps were the currency. So whenever I was looting anything and there were bottle caps, I wouldn’t pick them up because I was like, why the fuck would I want that? The funny thing is though, because of the way they’re displayed in your inventory, it does make them look like they’re junk. Yeah, it’s kind of a UI thing, I think. Because the currency is called caps. They don’t call them bottle caps. I never, ever made the connection. Well, I did. No, I tell a lie. I eventually made the connection, but it was like 20 hours in of a real like, oh, I see what I’ve done. I have a really recent example of this actually, which is I’ve just picked Tunic up again this week, right? And I got to a boss, quite a tricky boss, one of the first major ones, I think. And I was fighting it for an hour, getting to the last bit of health and then just failing. It was like a real absolute bastard. You have to use this little kind of knife against it. Tough, tough stuff. And I had completely forgotten there was a healing mechanic in this game. So I had like four healing things that I hadn’t been using for a whole hour because I was trying to hardcore do this without taking any hits, basically. And then as soon as I realized, I did it in like two attempts, and I was like, okay, I’m a fucking idiot because I only played this game one month ago and I’ve already forgotten one of the main mechanics of this game, so that’s an example of me already knowing a mechanic, then somehow forgetting it. But another one I pulled out here, Matthew, is that me and my partner, we played all of Persona 5 without realizing that you could force each relationship with the NPCs to advance if you wanted it to, because they give you these slightly like non-committal responses sometimes, but you have to keep pushing until you get a hangout, and we were kind of always waiting for them to text us and say, do you want a hangout? And so we got to the end of the game and then realized we hadn’t maxed out any of our relationships at all, which was really disappointing, so we never saw the end of those stories, and I felt like that was kind of the game’s fault. It doesn’t really explain how that hangout system works properly. So that was fun. I don’t know if I even know that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you ever get to level 10 with any of your friendships? Yeah, I did. I was playing Royal. I don’t know if they changed it a bit in that. I doubt it, but I don’t know. We didn’t feel it was that intuitive from doing it. We got to like, re-use it to like eight or nine or something, but the rest of them were all like five, six. We had no romances or anything like that, which is kind of a bummer. Just a lonely boy. To be honest, it was a bit controversial arguing with my partner about who we should romance in that game. So I was kind of glad the decision was taken out of my hands. That was good. So that’s my answer. As a follow-up, Matthew, I actually did get Danny Mann here. People might remember that Danny Mann was the guy who pretended he had The Sims 2 to impress a girl in a previous Gamescourt episode. It comes up quite a lot in the Discord. But I actually asked for a follow-up and Danny did actually mail in. So if you listen to that episode a few months ago, here’s the kind of sequel basically. So what happened at the time was Danny pretended he built this awesome house to impress this girl who liked The Sims, didn’t even have The Sims, stole money off of his mum to go and buy The Sims, went home, made it and the girl came over and it all kind of like fritted away basically. It was kind of like the whole thing was quite sordid. Hello Matthew and Samuel. You asked for a bit of a follow up to my sordid confession in the last podcast. Thank you for reading it out by the way. Sorry if it’s a bit ramby and long. Although I can’t believe you cut out, oh there was a joke that I cut out for time. I didn’t have to go over that. The stealing £40 from my mum issue of Despicable wasn’t quite as bad as I’d made out. I’d also taken several games with me to trade in, but I was worried this still wouldn’t cover the cost of The Sims 2 and The Pets expansion, especially if I couldn’t get them secondhand. So the stolen cash was hopefully just to be used as a last resort. I remember sneaking the change back into her purse. I think it was probably only a tenner in the end I actually stole. I’d like to say I eventually paid this back, but let’s be honest, I probably didn’t. It’s kind of like sugarcoating that. I think he stole from his mum. He’s just covering up. PS my actual partner now, who I did not woo with The Sims expansion FYI, one of her favourite shows is You on Netflix. Thanks to Samuel’s comparison of me and the main character, which I said in that podcast, I’ll never be able to watch it guilt free again, which in some ways is even worse than being turned into wine. A reference to the classic Matthew Castle pulping thing. How do you feel about the fact that pulping’s become like a meme, Matthew, in our Discord channel? Are you happy with that? Yeah, that’s like the thing I was saying, the end game of running jokes. They sort of happen organically. People take to them, they take to them, and great. Yeah, the wine glass is now like a classic reaction in the Discord, so you love to see it. But yeah, bit of a follow up there, Matthew. Do you want to read out this next one? Yes. A lot of the interest in retro gaming was driven by a love for the 2D art and game styles that were shoved aside in the rush for 3D. Your chat about the aesthetics and mechanics of Max Payne made me wonder, are there other things that have fallen by the wayside since the peak Back Page era of mid-period 3D consoles that you miss? My longest answer is for this question, actually. Well, hit me up. I’ve got a big list. They’re all kind of specific, actually. First up, I put something I mentioned in the previous episode, which was GTA clones disappearing. I was quite sad when that happened, because I feel like while no one could match Rockstar, the competition was quite good for them, and it was nice to have alternatives. Like you said, their controls and stuff were just getting good when they stopped making them. That’s kind of a shame. So that’s why I’m actually quite excited about this new Saints Row that’s coming out this year. I think that could be pretty good, so I’m excited about that. I miss elaborate handheld RPGs that thrive during the DS and PSP era, but Square Enix has seemed determined to bring those back on the Switch, which I love. This is actually incidentally why Nintendo not chasing superpowered hardware works well for me. I don’t want everyone making JRPGs to have to make monster budget stuff. I like what’s interesting in between things, which is what I liked about the PSP and DS era. I’ve also cited mid-sized Rockstar games here, Matthew. Mid-sized by their standards, anyway. I’m talking about your bullies and the like, although all their games are pretty large in scale, really. I guess I kind of miss a 20-hour Rockstar game as opposed to a 60-hour one that’s got a whole online component. New Rockstar wouldn’t make the Moreys, for example. Yes, exactly. That seems very unlikely, doesn’t it? Prove me wrong, though. I’d love to see it. But I miss Summer of Arcade on XBLA, the idea of a curated season of new releases, kind of indie-ish type games, each week with a nice little sort of push. There’s so much of everything all the time now, and that’s kind of inevitable, because that’s sort of the market we’re in. But I liked it when it was like Shadow Complex one week, or like Midsplosion Man another week, or, you know, Stacking, or so, you know what I mean? Like, that was quite cool, a cool way of formatting those games. And a couple more things here. I miss preposterous licensed games that shouldn’t exist but yield surprisingly good results, like The Wheel Man with Vin Diesel, or the Riddick Games with Vin Diesel, or 50 Cent Blood on the Sand. I miss shit James Bond games, The Darkness, things like that, basically. Buffy Chaos Bleeds. Bit of a spread in terms of years there, but that weird mid-level license games died out. A lot of my favorite weirdo things come from that type of game. I miss non-open world Bioware games. That’s my list, Matthew. Quite a lot there. I love that. What an amazing list. That sounded like a very wistful monologue in a play. Everyone’s like, oh, hush, hush, it’s the I Miss monologue, where that old guy talks about all the stuff he misses from 2006. I thought quite a lot about it there. There’s a lot I love about modern gaming. I’m not one of these guys who’s like, gaming’s worse now than it’s ever been. There’s some things I don’t like about games. NFTs, I do not put those anywhere near my games. I don’t want those at all. There’s stuff I miss, but what about you? Everything now is all or nothing in terms of budget. You either make a $100 million game that becomes the biggest game on the planet, or you basically fuck off. There’s no space for weird stuff. There’s no Wii-tier console. There’s no Little Kings story. There’s no Zack and Wiki anymore. I don’t know who would make those games. I don’t know what the equivalent of those games are now. The other thing is the lack of a portable gaming device from the big platform holders. I know the Switch is portable, but I mean an equivalent of the DS, the PSP, the 3DS, the Vita. I think between mobile gaming and home console gaming, which the Switch still is in my eyes, there is a tier of weird games made for less powerful hardware that will never ever exist again. You said the JRPGs. I would say all genres benefit from the games that happened in that space, and they never will again. Particularly Nintendo, it feels like there’s a lot of thinking and a lot of craft that they won’t really ever have to tap into, because they won’t make something which is portable only and they’ve got hardware that doesn’t need to be limited. So I miss those two things. So we’ve come to the final question of this mailbag, which is what games do you guys think deserve better? Games whose brilliance was not recognised in their time. As a former PC Gamer reader in the 90s, I know that the answer to this is Looking Glass’s Terranova Strike Force Centauri, as articles lamenting its obscurity seem to be too apenny. Oh, not ten apenny. Is that a term? Curious to hear your takes, though. So, personal to dear, what’s your take on this, Matthew? Which games do you think deserve better? Imagine you have a fucking giant list of these, right? No, I’ve only written one. Well, Little King’s Story would surely be one, right? Yeah, well, I think the reason I struggle with this is it’s kind of what this podcast is. If you’ve been listening to this, it would just be me repeating the Singh games, all the games on Wii from big publishers that people weren’t playing because they were playing their shiny AAA games on 360 and things like that. I feel like I do not need to tell people I like Hotel Dusk again. Nah, definitely not. What about Apuna? Do you need to give Apuna another shanty? Apuna. Yeah, Rich Santon’s more of an Apuna guy than I am. He’s more of a big Apuna head. But the only thing I wrote here was Final Fantasy Crystal Bearers, which I know you fucking hate. I hate it, I just thought it was mediocre. Yeah. I guess I wrote that as a prompt for all those kind of games that we have talked about. So, sorry if it’s a lazy answer, but I would say if you listen to our best of the year lists from the start of this podcast up to now, I think we offer a pretty detailed account of the hidden gems. Yeah, I think so. Like a lot of the stuff that I, you know, I’ve done the whole God Hand shtick. I’ve been there, done that, you know what I mean? Like, we’ve been there. But yeah, I sort of like, I put a few here that I would shout out, like Amped 3 I put here, like a snowboarding game on 360 that was a launch game, but had a really funny sort of like tone, sort of like threw in like a bunch of comedy stuff that worked quite well, I thought. Quite wholesome comedy, but was kind of ignored. And you know, the other two Amped games, I think were quite serious snowboarding games. It was a bit of a left turn. Never got made like backwards compatible, this one. So, remains a bit of a forgotten gem. Loved that game. I think that Enslaved was a bit underrated. The, what are they called, Ninja Theory. Game that came out in 2010, featured Andy Serkis, was kind of like a retelling of Journey to the West, but set in this future that probably influenced The Last of Us quite a lot, I would say. Yeah, that’s kind of underappreciated, I think. Here’s a really weird one, actually. Age of Mythology, I think is a bit underrated. Age of Empires is like a massive sort of following, but the idea of adding lots of kind of like weird mythological creatures and stuff to this template worked really well. I was big into it when they did the extended edition in 2014. Really nice to revisit that. I would love to have seen that get like a new entry like Age of Empires 4 did last year. That’d be really cool. That’s a bit underrated. Sort of think people didn’t really appreciate what Mirror’s Edge Catalyst did well. People were really burned out on like, there’s some bad mandatory combat in that, but I thought it was a really good open world translation of what the original Mirror’s Edge did well. Looked phenomenal as well. Don’t know if you have any thoughts on any of those, Matthew. I wasn’t a huge enslaved guy, I must admit. I always sort of, I found it like a little too simple in everything it did. Right. Maybe I need to go back and revisit it. I don’t think I even finished it. Well, we are done with the mailbag, Matthew. As ever, it ran quite long. But I’ll cut it back so people get the best bits. That’s fine. I know everyone’s a fan of the mailbag, so. You only ever hear good things about mailbag. From our peers especially, yeah. So where can people find you on social media, Matthew? I am at MrBazzill underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. You can follow the podcast at BackpagePod where patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like to support the podcast financially and get a podcast in return for backing the XL tier. And thank you very much for all your correspondence for this episode. You can find the pod questions thread on our Discord and throw some more in there. And next time we do a What We’ve Been Playing, we’ll answer a bunch more of your questions.