Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how is the newly rebranded Intermezzo Sandwich Shop, or Intermesso, as we’ve been saying on Discord. Actually, no, I forgot to put that joke in the message in the end, sorry about that. But in my head. I mean, that would have landed great on Discord, so. Yeah, actually, it would be better written down than said aloud, some might say. Yeah. But one of our favorite sandwich shops in Bath has reopened. What’s the deal? Because you did send me some messages. I know it’s early days, but how’s it all going for you? Very early days, it’s no longer Intermezzo. I couldn’t quite catch the name because it’s not written on the store yet. That’s how early days it is. But I think it’s called Carter and Perry or Peary. So it’s got a bit more of a sophisticated name. The something and something feels like you should be making suits, not sandwiches. As a rule. But that’s okay. And they don’t really have like a menu at the moment. So it’s kind of like you go in and just sort of point to what you want. And that’s not like the pleasure of Intermezzo, as many people will know from listening to this podcast, is that you go in and, you know, Tony, the sandwich artisan, has a lot of recipes that he’s mastered over the years. He knows the right amount of everything for a well balanced sandwich. And I don’t want to be responsible for my own chaotic sandwich. I’m paying for him to take on that responsibility. Yeah, to solve that problem for you. You don’t want to be there thinking, I’m going to try, you know, avocado, boiled egg, and then like, you know, smoke salmon today and see how it goes. Put a bit of barbecue sauce on that. Like, it’s not the kind of the sort of like task you want. Also, you’d think that they’d stick with the winners, right? The classic chicken Caesar, the sort of the Caribbean club, whatever it was called. I think they probably will. They just haven’t got round to printing out menus. I mean, this was literally the first day that they opened. Like, there’s a hole in the wall. That’s how, like, raw it is. Not a hole in the wall they serve sandwiches out of. No, no, like, just a huge, like, someone’s punched a huge chunk out of the wall or something. Maybe it was Tony on his way out, just like, you know. Just headbutted it. Leave my mark on the place, you know. Yeah, so, yeah, early days yet. But I think I’m going to give it a little time to, like, bed in, probably avoid it for the time being, and then see how it’s doing, you know, once it’s properly up and running. You want to get yourself down to the whole bagel and get yourself a classic smoked salmon and cream cheese? I’m addicted to my meal deal at the Cake Cafe with a bit of notoriously stale baguettes. Did we talk about that on the podcast already? Yeah, we’ve mentioned it. Well, what a surprise. Yeah, that’s funny, I forgot about that. Do they still, like, have a problem with you going? Well, okay, there’s no problem, but, you know, wasn’t there an expression that you come in here too often and take advantage of this too often, something like that? No, I was worried there was a slight hint of that. The problem there is there are so many elements of the meal deal that it feels like you’re giving them quite a long list, and I don’t know if they know that you’re going for a meal deal until they kind of put it into the till, but now I’ve been in there enough that they’re like, oh, it’s a meal deal guy. So we’ve kind of over that initial hump. Well, there you go. There’s the Matthew Castle sandwich update. I also have to ask, Matthew, you did tweet last night at the time of recording this that your trousers fell down at a Divine Comedy concert, and I have to ask what happened. We have to have the whole story told on this podcast. That’s what the listeners expect at this point. Your tweets turned into full narratives. So it was at the Bath Forum, which is famous for hosting future corporate meetings where they tell us how badly shares were doing in like 2007. Let me say famous for that, like world renowned. Well, for me it was. I associate the forum with going and hearing the management of future telling me things were dire and also going to see Divine Comedy. So, you know, this was much more preferable apart from the trousers incident. I basically very boring. I slipped down in my seat. And so when I then pulled myself back into the seat, my jeans were maybe a little loose and the jeans got stuck on the chair and I slipped out of them. But my arse slipped out of my jeans. Basically, I was fine on the front, but behind it was a disaster. And luckily there was no back. There was no like hole at the back of the seat. So it wasn’t like anyone could see behind. But it did mean that I was like trapped in the seat. Because if I stood up, it was so obvious, you know, I could just feel where the jeans were sitting, like below the cheek. And every time their lights dipped between songs, I was like, I’m going to jump up and pull my trousers up. But all the transitions were too quick. They were like, god damn, that stage crew was really on top of things. I wish their roadie was a little slower, because then I wouldn’t have been embarrassed. When I last went to a work party, I wore a suit, my suit, pre-pandemic suit. And surprise, surprise, my fat ass is even fatter after the pandemic. But basically, the trousers now, I kind of have to lower myself onto a chair when I’m wearing my suit. Otherwise, the chances of something ripping are very, very high. And also, when I sat down for dinner, I could feel that my trousers were at least halfway down my ass. And luckily, I have a long suit jacket to cover up any kind of embarrassment. But also, I was very conscious that I can’t take my suit jacket off ever or someone’s going to see my underpants here. And I was in front of hundreds of my colleagues and I thought, okay, this is tough. So I’ve been there. Large men, large asses, you know, trousers. It’s fucking tough out there, man. It is hard. It’s hard for the big ass. The big ass of us. Well, there you go. So six minutes of nonsense that I’m sure some listeners rolled their eyes at. Probably sick of this shit by now. But, you know, for people listening at home, we are supported on patreon.com/backpagepod, where you can back us at two different tiers, the £4.50 XL tier or whatever it is in your local currency plus taxes. That unlocks two bonus podcasts from us a month. This month, that is May 2022. We’ve already done one, which is… Why have I forgotten it? 20 Xbox Backwards Combatable Games Worth Revisiting. That was a good episode. Yep. A really bad Beatles impression there by me. It goes brummy. That was good. And then the Marvel MCU movies ranked is our second episode of the month, bonus podcast XXL episode. So if you want to back us on Patreon, that’s the hard self done. That’s that box ticked. We can move on. So this episode is all about Star Wars games. So with the Obi-Wan series landing on Disney+, starting on May 27th, it’s time for one of three Star Wars episodes we have planned this year. By planned, I mean that I’ve inflicted on Matthew. Another one about games, best Star Wars games, will drop towards the end of this year. And an XXL episode for patrons on the films and the shows is coming in September this year. That’s on our schedule. But this episode is all about the guilty pleasure Star Wars games. So the exact meaning of that phrase will discuss shortly, I’m sure. But basically, this isn’t like the worst Star Wars games as such. But I realize when breaking down a list of the best Star Wars games, and I would say that the list of best Star Wars games is pretty obvious, there are so many I have some affection for, or I think are worth discussing, that cannot be called best. And this episode is essentially where they live. So Matthew, how do you feel about this episode idea and the whole kind of Star Wars situation? Yeah, and it’s tricky because I was looking at your list of what you’d included in this episode, and then I had some other games I was thinking about, and then they weren’t on the list. And I genuinely struggled to work out, like, are they not on this list because they’re best, or because they’re not even a guilty pleasure, they’re that bad? I think there’s a very, I think we’re talking about a very thin line between some of these categorizations. I would also say, like, Star Wars is, like, very much your domain. I don’t have the same emotional connection to it that many of my peers seem to have. And, yeah, like, I was impressed by how many things you’ve listed for this episode. I was like, oh, well, you’ve gone, you know, you have pretty broad experience with a lot of stuff where I’ve played a fair few, but I’ve not actively sought out many things beyond what, like, NGC told me was good. Yeah, so it’s funny because I think that the thing with Star Wars is, and I understand this the longer I’ve kind of, like, been alive and seen Star Wars kind of, like, keep going and going and going with films, now comic books, TV shows, and, you know, now very elaborate live action TV shows on Disney+, is that a kind of, like, a strain of mediocrity is kind of, like, what Star Wars has become. Like, everything orbits kind of mediocrity. Mediocrity seems to be the base, and then, like, there are kind of, like, dips and troughs. There are, like, peaks and troughs from that. So stuff can still be great, but I would say the baseline of Star Wars stuff isn’t necessarily terrific. It’s always kind of, like, muddled. It’s always obsessed with old films and trying to build out elements from old films. There’s a current thing where, like, basically bad old prequel stuff has been sort of rehabilitated by Dave Filoni, who’s, like, a creative overseer, works in The Mandalorian and the Clone Wars animated series, which is very well regarded. And so I think in that kind of tangle of mediocrity, you can find some really interesting stuff, and I think that games is kind of where that applies also, where there’s just such a volume of content that the stuff you get out of it is quite interesting, and it’s not always bad. Sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes it’s really bad. But sometimes you just get lots of interesting, odd, six or seven out of ten kind of games, and I suppose that’s what this episode is, is celebrating these, which I have a lot of experience with. So, Matthew, I will ask, what is your personal history with Star Wars games? Like, how much of a big part of your life were they? Because you’re a Nintendo player, and Star Wars has a pretty good history on Nintendo up until a certain point. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is, I wasn’t a big Star Wars kid, and I know we’re not really talking about the films particularly here, but, you know, I saw them when I was a kid and didn’t really like them, I wasn’t really interested in Star Wars at a young age, so I didn’t have the burning desire to play video games based on them, which I think a lot of people had. And so, you know, even though there were probably interesting things happening, like the Super Star Wars games on the SNES, I know very well regarded, you know, I wasn’t actively seeking those things out. Like, I’d say my relationship with Star Wars games is kind of the critically acclaimed ones. I have actively sought out and played, and then maybe around the edges some weird stuff have slipped in. There’s one exception with all this, which is, I was really racking my brain today as to why this happened, but in 2005 when I was at university, I bought the Revenge of the Sith action game on PS2. As in the one that came out just before Revenge of the Sith. And I’m not a Star Wars guy as I’ve established, but I think I had some, like, vague Revenge of the Sith mania. Like, maybe I bought into that some hype or I got really excited that this was going to be some big, you know, amazing thing. And I think, you know, a lot of people did buy into, like, hype. And even though we’d been through this cycle twice with Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, but, you know, there was this thing, and it came out just before the film, but it had, like, a lot of the film footage in it. And, you know, it doesn’t add up. Like, I’m not a big enough Star Wars head to have bought it for that reason, but that must have been the reason, because it hadn’t been reviewed. Like, I bought it on the day it came out, like a full-price Star Wars game. And, yeah, so, like, I have, like, whatever, the mania that must have gripped you many a time to justify some of the purchases of the games which we’re going to talk about definitely has gotten to me once or twice. But otherwise, like, I basically bought, you know, I bought them because they were, like, 90% rated. You know, like, I bought them because, you know, Rogue Leader was highly rated. I bought, you know, Jedi Knight 2 because it was highly rated. Rather, you know, Nightseer Republic. You know, rather, you know, not because they were Star Wars things, just because they were good games. Yeah, so, for me, Star Wars games, I’ve been, like, a fundamental part of my gaming diet forever. One of the first games I ever owned was X-Wing on PC. The family PC, the Windows 3.0, whatever PC, got a CD-ROM drive just to play it. I hadn’t even seen Star Wars, so my dad bought me that game. And it was way too harsh for me, to be honest, playing a flight simulator game when I was, like, 8 or something. Too tricky, but to be honest, that did spark my early Star Wars mania. It hit me at just the right age. It hit me just before the Special Edition films came out in 1997, Star Wars mania, and just when we had a PC that was powerful enough to play a lot of the major Star Wars games from around that time. Pete, I had probably more Star Wars games than other types of games at the time. We had Dark Forces, I think we were X-Wing Dark Forces, Shadows of the Empire, Dark Forces 2, Jedi Knight, Rogue Squadron. I think we had X-Wing Alliance at a certain point, Star Wars Racer, The Phantom Menace, my dad had a pirated disc, they had a lot of these on them actually. Another mark against my dad for the cops listing out there. The man who bought me GTA 3 when I was 13. So yeah, they were like, you know, you don’t have loads of games as a kid, but by the time I was like 12 I had all these Star Wars games and I would just play these over and over again. And so they’re a huge part of my life for sure. So I’ve always had like a fascination with Star Wars games, the different weird kind of phases of them. There are what you would call Golden Ages of Star Wars games, but even in those Golden Ages there’s like some complete dog shit and some stuff that’s just okay. And that’s kind of weird, you know. Would you say Star Wars games are your favourite bit of the Star Wars media universe? I think it’s still the original trilogy. Okay, you are into the films. Oh yeah, like A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. Those are kind of like the two core texts for me of like these are the gold standard of Star Wars in terms of storytelling, universe building, pacing, editing, all that stuff. So much of what I love about Star Wars kind of derives from that. So that’s why actually when… You were wowed by the editing as a child, were you? No, I was wowed by the editing as an adult actually. There’s not a single scene in Empire Strikes Back that doesn’t move the plot forward. It’s really amazing when you watch it back. Like Star Wars is really well edited too, but just the pacing of Empire Strikes Back is breathless and amazingly done. Bummer of an ending. Yeah, it really is. And to be honest, the biggest shock I had rewatching them recently was I just really didn’t like Return of the Jedi at all. I thought it was quite terrible actually. That’s the one of the original trilogy I do like. Really? Because it’s the one which has got the most Jedi stuff in it. Yeah, I mean, I like Luke Skywalker’s rad black costume and his robot hand and his green lightsaber. That’s cool, but the Ewok stuff is complete dogshit. And they don’t know what to do with Han Solo in the second half. I’ve not seen him for a long time. I’m sort of dreading having to re-watch all of them actually for the Star Wars XXL episode. Yeah, gosh. I’ll take that hit for that Patreon scratch. The important thing to kind of tap into there is that Star Wars… I’m a big 90s Star Wars person, right? That shapes a lot of what I’ve put in this list, which is that I lived in the deprived Star Wars times. I lived in the times where after the Timothy Zahn Thrawn trilogy had come out, which kind of sparked interest in Star Wars again, kind of gave it a bit of momentum, like these three books that were basically the sequels to the films. They’re pretty good. There’s a couple of elements in them that are a little bit strange, kind of eyebrow raising in terms of how they do clones and stuff. But Thrawn is a good character and I can see why people got excited about Star Wars after that. And so a lot of the games from the 90s, what I liked about them is that they weren’t infected by all of the prequel trilogy bullshit. They were all just like using the three films as their kind of source text basically. So all the iconography is built from that. A lot of the kind of tropes they take from is built from that. The style of dialogue is kind of like more fun and funny Star Wars. And it’s obviously the spaceships are cooler as well. There’s some cool spaceships in the prequels. There’s some really talented, obviously incredibly talented artists at LucasArts. Sorry, LucasFilm. But 90s Star Wars shapes it for me. It was that the games came in and filled the gaps where there weren’t films and where there weren’t TV shows. If I’d have grown up watching the Clone Wars cartoon, I’m sure I would have absolutely loved it, but I didn’t. I grew up way before that. So I grew up reading novels by Kevin J. Anderson and stuff. And so Star Wars games were there to extend my interest in it at a time where the prequels didn’t even exist. So that’s kind of my relationship with Star Wars. Everything I like is sort of framed through that. So games performed a really important purpose because they were closer to a film than anything else you could get at the time because there was nothing else. So that’s kind of my angle on Star Wars, Matthew. I hope that’s sort of useful. Yeah, no, that’s interesting to know. I know you have affection for them, but I didn’t know how deep it went. Yeah, for sure. It’s really kind of tied intrinsically to PC gaming for me as well, like Star Wars. That’s the other thing, is the reason I’ve got such capacity for Star Wars bullshit, I guess, is that to me, Star Wars games are a subgenre. They’re not like other licenses in that way. I see it as an entire subgenre of games, essentially. There are about as many Star Wars games as there are big-budget RTS games or whatever. There’s just so many of them. And I find all the different takes on it very interesting, and it’s linked to the fact that LucasArts was obviously a developer-publisher. They were like George Lucas’ own company and made video games. There’s no comparison point to that in the games industry elsewhere. They owned the license, they built the stuff based on it, and they had a certain quality control. Yeah, and if you compare it to the mysterious absence of Marvel video games, given that it’s the dominant pop culture force of the 21st century, it’s such a different landscape. Yeah, and it’s weird because Marvel games seem to be a harder sell as well. Like, they’re basing… Star Wars games are just culturally embedded in a way that I don’t think Marvel games are. It’s going to be a bigger uphill battle, I think, to get people interested in those because they’re competing with the films, whereas the games were always designed to live alongside the films. They told side stories or they directly adapted them, but they didn’t recast the actors or things like that, because they were pre-elaborate cut scenes and voice acting and stuff. They’re not from that age. So I think that when a Star Wars game comes along now and tells a side story, like Jedi Fallen Order does with Cal Kestis, for example, who’s not a character from the films or the TV shows, people are open to it because Star Wars games have always been doing that. They’ve always been telling side stories. Whereas if you replace the Guardians of the Galaxy or the Avengers, maybe that’s not as easy to sell to people. It’s tough, no matter how good the game is, and that Guardians game is fantastic. That’s where I’m at with Star Wars games, Matthew. I have an endless fascination with them, but I was really curious how you felt about the oncoming wave of new Star Wars games because in 2013 EA signed this reportedly 10-year exclusivity deal to make Star Wars games. It’s made a few. It’s made a mobile game I’ve never played. It’s made two Battlefront games and Jedi Fallen Order and Squadrons. So four games in 10 years. It’s not loads. But the batting average is reasonably high, I would say, for what they did make. So now the license seems to be going to almost anyone who pitches the right thing. Obviously you’ve got Quantic Dream making Star Wars Eclipse, this game set in the High Republic era. You have a full-blown remake of Knights of the Old Republic from Aspyr coming to PS5 and PC, and then some kind of Ubisoft thing, and loads of rumored other games besides, probably more are missing there. A Jedi Fallen Order sequel, an XCOM-style game. These are all things we know are in development. I was curious what you make of that upcoming wave. Is there anything in there you get excited about or to you is it all a bit terminal when you’d rather see those developers making other stuff? No, I mean, it’s a perfectly fine license to work in. I mean, it’s full of enough, like, iconic stuff that I’m into. You know, I’m happy to see people mess around with lightsabers, and I’m happy to hear, you know, see those worlds and that art style. And the thing I guess that’s kind of interesting, and the thing I don’t know a huge amount about is, like, how they manage Star Wars these days. Because, you know, with the films, there was sort of a reset of sorts, didn’t they? Kind of kick out a lot of, like, expanded universe stuff. And now with the TV shows as well, there’s, like, a bit more kind of, like, it feels like there’s kind of some strict editorial control over, like, what Star Wars is in the way that there is with Marvel. And I’m kind of interested if the character of the games made under that era, you know, have any of that to them too? Like, are they going to be part of that? Are they going to sit to the side? I mean, technically Fallen Order was made in this era of new Star Wars and, you know, seemed to just slot in quite neatly. But I guess that’s sort of, like, vaguely interesting to me. Yeah, it’s a good point because, like you say, there was a reset when Disney bought Star Wars and Lucasfilm. They basically, everything that wasn’t the Clone Wars cartoon or the films, they just chucked out and said, that’s not canon anymore, and started again. And now they have this, I think they called the Story Group at Lucasfilm, and they oversee all this stuff, work with developers to make this stuff fit. So, yeah, the idea is there are keepers of the keys to this stuff, so no one can, like, drop a moon on Chewbacca, which is a thing I think that happened in one of the books and, like, before Disney times, so tough break for Chewbacca. You see, now that is something I would like to see in a Platinum game. That is the end of a Platinum game, is you drop a moon on Chewbacca by mashing X for five minutes. Definitely. Now, sign me up. Yeah, I guess the one that I’m interested in is, like, the Amy Hennig thing, whatever that ends up being. Like, her sensibility in terms of, you know, Uncharted is Indiana Jones. I would be interested to see how she kind of plays with that, sort of, the more kind of adventurous, sort of, daring-do kind of element of Star Wars. But, like, so little is known about it. You know, I’d just like her to be able to make more games, really, because it’s been a long time. Yeah, I’m curious about the Quantic Dream thing, I guess. I mean, it’s kind of, the trailer was kind of interesting. Yeah, I think the truth is, we’ll never be drowning in these games either, because they take so long to make now, on the scale that Star Wars games get made on. You’re looking at three to four years per project. And also, like, I think that, I think a lot of the games that have been revealed are earlier on than maybe we realize they are. Like, I would be surprised if a lot, if anything, other than the Jedi Fallen Order sequel was coming out in the next two years, I would say. Maybe you’ll see one other game from that, but I don’t anticipate seeing, like, five games in the next two years, for example. I don’t think that’s where they’re at yet. So I think it’ll be a steady build-up, which I think is fine. Like, I still think Star Wars games, like, two a year would be fine for me, I think. But I can’t see it exceeding. I can’t see it being more Star Wars games than there are, like, Disney Plus shows. That seems unlikely to me. So it will still be staggered. Yeah, so a good bit of a sort of, like, background Star Wars chatter there, Matthew. But something I’ve put in our plan here is, what differentiates a Star Wars Guilty Pleasure game from an outright good or bad one? And I wanted to fire some examples at you of, like, actual bad ones, because listeners might remember the first Gamescourt episode, I bought Masters of Terris Carsey on PS1, the fighting game. And I finally got around to playing it for the first time, like, about two weeks ago. And it was fucking awful. Like, you had to press it. It was like Han Solo fighting Boba Fett and, like, punching him, and then gets a gun out in the most, like, awful feeling combat. And the cheap-ass kind of presentation, like, around the edges. Just a real kind of, like, cash-in on the success of Tekken fighting game. That is, like, frankly, like, you know, a fighting game in that style is not… Star Wars is not fit for that purpose, really. Is it sort of… Is Tekken the kind of model for it? Because, like, I’ve never played it. Like, I have no feel for, like, what kind of fighting game it even is, really. Yeah, I think it is trying to be Tekken. But it’s… It was like… It’s really, like, ropey to control. And just, like, quite… Just hard work. And then it’s just… Just again, they’re like… You’re like, oh, well, Han Solo doesn’t have his gun out, but by default. And it’s like, no, you have to pull a button, press a button for him to get his gun out in order for him to use his gun in the battle. And I was just there thinking, like, this doesn’t work at all. It feels like a prototype that has a full roster of characters, but they didn’t develop the game properly. And so it’s rightly hated. So that game is bad and, like, is not in my… It’s not in my little list of guilty pleasures. Likewise, the Phantom… Do you think you could make a good Star Wars fighting game? Like, do you think if you gave it to, like, the Netherrealm to sort of do what they did with, like, injustice, say, do you think, you’re, like, really glamorous, like, high production values? Or do you think, like, just the nature of, like, the range of characters in that world? Like, you know, Han Solo versus a guy with a lightsaber is never gonna make sense. I think that style of fighting game will never make sense. But I think, like, the route to go down with this, and we have seen this before, is a great Jedi dueling game. Like, that’s what you do instead of, like, a beat-em-up. You don’t try and, like, retrofit Star Wars into, like, a Tekken or Street Fighter. You, like, make it 3D one-to-one sword combat. That’s what Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast did so well on PC. That’s the best I’ve ever seen lightsaber duels done well. In the middle of, like, a sort of multiplayer map, two players could, like, enter a, like, a secluded dueling space, essentially, and then have a lightsaber battle. And, like, there was a proper, like, feeling of a clash of blades. You get these moments where the blades, like, are sort of, like, sort of meet, and you have to kind of, like, out, sort of, like, you know, use strength to beat your opponent. You’re throwing force powers at them. And, like, that’s what a fighting game looks like through the Star Wars prism, if you get what I mean. So it can happen, but, yeah, Master of the Terrorist Cards is just a real kind of mystery. But still, there is a reference to it in Solo, which is quite fun, I think. That says a lot about the… Is there? Yeah, yeah. Amelia Clarke’s character references Terris Carsey, the martial art. So, yeah. So I thought that was quite a nice touch. That says a lot about the sons of Lawrence Casden, whichever son wrote Solo with him, I think. That’s a big millennial energy to that reference, I would say. Another bad one here I’ve got here, Matthew, is the Phantom Menace game on PS1. Do you ever play that one? No, but I… Yeah, I remember it being around at the time and maybe like having a bit of interest because it was, you know… There was one for PC as well, right? Yeah, it’s the same game, but the PC one looked and sounded a lot nicer. It was like a much crisper looking thing. I played this actually for an OPM feature in 2015. I got commissioned to write about this and I bought a copy of eBay and played it and it’s horrible. This is really, really bad. Like, it’s not just the fact that it’s episode one. It’s the lightsaber combat and the way that the setting is realised in this very cheap, kind of boxy environment. So I just hated it. It’s really bad. That actually reminded me, late justification for why I bought that Revenge of the Sith game. In my head, I thought it was going to be like EA’s Lord of the Rings games. I thought it was going to be like a really high quality, because, you know, I only had the box to go on in the shop and it looked, you know, like quite authentic character models. I thought it was going to have a similar energy, and I think you could make a game with a similar energy. And to be honest, it plays much the same. It’s like a beat-em-up, but it’s just very bad, very flat, and you’re just chopping up endless drones. So I feel like I’ve got to try and get back into people’s good books after that purchase. That’s a proper Gamescorp entry right there. Well, this is a good segue, Matthew, to a larger point I have about Star Wars games. So one of the big problems I had with the Phantom Menace game, is that I had played these games like Jedi Knight, like Dark Forces, like Rogue Squadron, and I could never figure out how could the same publisher, developer make both Jedi Knight and the Phantom Menace? How could you have a company that understands how to make a proper high-end first-person shooter and lightsaber game, then make a really shit lightsaber game for consoles? That is what is really confusing about the Star Wars back catalog that you have, Masters of Terror’s Castle coming out alongside the X-Wing series. There’s like extraordinarily good taste and great game design going on there, and then there’s like total dog shit alongside it, and it’s all from the same company. You can argue that there are loads of different developers who work on this stuff, some of this stuff is made externally, all that sort of thing. But like Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, those both came out like just two or three years before that Revenge of the Sith game you’re talking about. So why didn’t lessons get learned? That’s what I find so strange about Star Wars games. Like why would you have the same company make a great game and a shit game in the same genre? Because you saw this over and over again in Star Wars. It’s really weird, right? I mean, you can maybe wonder, like you say, that there’s so many of these games. It’s such an industry unto itself that maybe, you know, there are just so many different people handling different parts of it. And so the character of the games can be massively, and the quality of the games can differ massively. This doesn’t quite make sense with the Terris Cutsie, but definitely with the film adaptations, like, maybe things get a bit, like, a little bit shaky, or things are a little bit problematic the closer you get to, like, the core texts, in a way. You know, maybe there are more stakeholders, like, making a film adaptation than, say, another entry about a spin-off character who’s never been in a film. You know, maybe there is just, like, there are certain… Yeah, like in any company, there are the crown jewels, and people tend to be more protective, and there tends to be more meddling around them. And it almost lets people kind of do more interesting stuff, like, out of the spotlight. And even though they were massive games, you know, the fact that they aren’t film games maybe protects them from some of that. I mean, that’s total speculation, but, like, that would speak to the character of many companies and how you know they behave. I guess so. But I almost, like, I guess we’re both kind of guessing at this here, but I almost envisioned it being the other way around, where the games that got the attention were those side story games and were those kind of, like, games that existed as franchises upon themselves, where I think that the absurd timeframes of making a film probably led to rushed development. Like, the reason there were so many bad licensed games is because they would have either shaky materials to build the game from, they didn’t have enough time to develop the game. That seems more plausible to me, that it was just like, this is what we could make with the time we had. But yeah, you’re right, like, you know, none of those games. I think some people quite like the Clone Wars game that Pandemic made for Xbox and GameCube. I must confess I’ve not played that one. Weirdly, it’s one of the only games, Star Wars games, original Xbox games that has the framerate boost, so you can go play Attack of the Clones at 60 FPS if you want to. What a treat. But yeah, like, I never played that Revenge of the Sith game, but I got the impression it was a big seller because they came out before the film, and people were like, well, I want to see what happens. So my friend Andrew bought it, and he said it was shit as well, and I was like, oh, it’s weird that this game that was really bad just seemed to get into loads of homes, you know? It just made me laugh that the game I bought before that was Resident Evil 4, so to go from Resident Evil 4 to that as purchases, like, I was at university, what was I doing, spending probably 40 quid on a day one Revenge of the Sith? Like, I just genuinely was gripped by Mania. I remember I had the soundtrack to Revenge of the Sith before it came out, just because I really liked John Williams music, and I think that’s more easily, you know, you can justify that. But yeah, that game, that is a puzzler. It was made by the people who made Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, which was good. Okay, so it was like an outsourced thing. It wasn’t made by the LucasArts. Yeah, yeah, it was called The Collective. It was quite funny. I was looking up the Phantom Menace game for PlayStation to see who made it, because I didn’t know if it was made in-house or not. And it was made by a company called Big Ape Productions. And I thought, I have not heard, you know, these people can’t surely be going. And so I typed in a Google search for them. And the first thing that comes up is a Wikipedia that’s dedicated to scary logos. Like companies with scary logos. And Big Ape’s made the cut because the sound of it plays the sound of an ape roaring. And it’s too loud, according to this Wikipedia. I just like that’s your legacy is that someone was like, your logo is too much. That reminds me that like anytime a game gave me the fear, it was when that old Activision spinning logo used to go and that logo had framerate problems. Like that was like when that animation had framerate problems, which I think True Crime New York City did have, like could not run that logo without it like dropping frames. I thought, oh God, that’s got to be on scary logos. That’s really funny. So what did you learn to think about Big Ape Games from that, Matthew? No, because once I found that scary logos thing, I just went down a rabbit hole of what else they considered scary logos. I gave up my search for Big Ape. You thought I’ve got my pod anecdote, we can move on. Basically, I wrote it in my notes. I was like, talk about the scary wiki logo. So I don’t have as much to offer on Star Wars this year, so I’ve got to take my wins where I can get them in this episode. That’s fine. I mean, you are here to crack wise, my friend, and that’s perfectly fine, and offer occasional insight, like me with the Kirby episode, or the Zelda episode, or the Phoenix Wright episode. So to further firm up my criteria here, Matthew, because I want people to understand what I mean by Guilty Pleasure Games. I’m not saying these games are bad. I’m not saying these games are great either. Most of them are like six or seven out of tens, I would say. There are kind of like commonalities between games in this list. Some of them stretch continuity to breaking point, which I think pushes them into Guilty Pleasure territory. They’re like preposterous Star Wars stories that you could see why Lucasfilm would get rid of them when Disney bought them and stuff. So it’s a bit of implausibility to them. There’s some that like borrow another game’s template, but shit the bed slightly with that template. That’s another thing where it’s like capitalizing on a trend, but not really making it work. And there are some games that I’ve like marked down just because they’re set during the prequel trilogy, and I find that kind of a bummer. But like there’s something I love about all of these games or something I like about all these games. There’s definitely like a sort of fluctuating sort of like enjoyment I get from the different ones, which I will like differentiate the ones I really like when we talk about them. But generally, yeah, it’s weird. Like I’m kind of obsessed with these Star Wars games because I don’t know, they were just such a big part of my life at different points for various reasons. And so because I have that fundamental fascination with Star Wars games, these just mean a lot. And I feel like I’ve got interesting things to say about them. So do you think that works the criteria? Am I too vague there? I think so. I’m interested if at the time, like if these opinions are the opinions you held originally, or like if there was as a younger fan, there was like more of a wow factor to some of these that’s maybe called in time. Yeah, I guess we can get to that as we talk through some of them. Because, yeah, some of these things, I remember like coming out originally and just being thoroughly unimpressed when friends had them or were into them. I thought, oh, the differences, they may be into Star Wars and I’m not. Like maybe that fills in a few like important cracks or gets you over like a vital hurdle with these things. Yeah, maybe. I think the other thing to like that I sort of like to underline is that I don’t feel like I can talk about the best Star Wars games without setting the kind of like framework of these Star Wars games to understand like my sort of criteria. The best Star Wars games episode is like a project to me. That’s like a thing I’ve got to like properly kind of build up to. It’s like Mario. So Matthew ranking the Mario games. It’s just like, yeah, it’s my personal back page Everest. I think that’s like we wait for the next mainline Mario game before we do that kind of thing. So you’ve got another three or four years on your hands, I reckon, pal. So Matthew, that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about the what the guilty pleasure element is. Is there anything else you want to discuss in the Star Wars games front? Or should we take a quick break and come back with the me cataloging my guilty pleasure Star Wars games? Yeah, let’s get to your guilty pleasures when we hear about them. Alright. So in this section, I’m going to catalog my guilty pleasure games. Matthew is going to ask questions like a psychiatrist would. Why did you play this? What were you thinking in 2002, et cetera? That’s absolutely fine. Like I say, the list here is not ordered in any way. It’s just a collection of stuff. Some of this stuff is modern, a lot of this stuff is old. I will provide a justification for why I like each one and why I think each one is also kind of rough or flawed. So yeah, like I say, I will point out when there’s a proper Hall of Famer here. There’s like a couple on this list I really love, so I look forward to discussing those. But Matthew, let’s kick off with 2008 Star Wars The Force Unleashed. Now this game I think did come up briefly on Best Games of 2008. It wouldn’t have made the list, of course. But this was a lavish but clumsy attempt at making a Star Wars God of War in the old God of War format, pre-dad and son God of War, with wacky physics. It was absolutely loaded with tech. You had like havoc physics, euphoria physics, and digital molecular matter for interaction of objects, explosions, or some bullshit. I didn’t really understand it when I was reading about it. But what it adds up to is a game where you play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, a star killer, you go around basically being his agent, going like behind enemy lines and hunting down Jedi for him. At a certain point in the story, your character kind of has like an epiphany, realizes that they’re essentially like in an abusive relationship with Vader. Not in any kind of like real world sort of way, but like basically the start of the game, Vader kills your father in front of you, and then he becomes your surrogate father. And it goes too far by suggesting that this star killer guy helps to co-found the Rebel Alliance. I think it overplays its hand with the story. But it is interesting. Go on, Matthew. I was just going to say, I think that story bit is kind of, I remember that being quite cool at the time. I was like, oh, that’s actually like quite a major bit of Star Wars something that they’ve handed to this game to like tell, I thought. Yeah, but it’s just too much to like create this. The character becomes a bit sort of Mary Sue-ish, I think, where it’s like we’ve created basically Dark Luke Skywalker, who’s like a secret spy guy, who goes around on his cool spaceship taking out Jedi for Darth Vader as his secret apprentice. And then he goes on to found the Rebel Alliance. Like it’s a bit too much of a stretch, I think. Yeah, that’s fair. It’s interesting to hear that as a Star Wars fan. As a non-Star Wars fan, I was like, oh, I’m literally thinking, oh, that was cool. Like I think I gave it like a good, I reviewed it for someone. Maybe Games Master, I think I probably gave, I think they’ve scored something on, I don’t know, story ability or something and probably said, well, yes, it’s a major chapter in Star Wars lore and gave it a pass. One of like, one of 18 different review bars in that magazine, I’m sure. Yeah, so it’s like, but like I am saying that in retrospect because at the time I did think this was like a really good little slice of Star Wars and like playing again this week for the podcast, like I did think actually this was like his motion captured cut scenes, a really like competently presented bit of Star Wars at a time where you didn’t think there were going to be more films. So like, why not fill in the story gaps because no one else is going to. And truthfully, you know, we’ll get to this when we do the XXL episode, but not a massive rogue one guy. And so I’m not totally convinced that like the Disney version of the Star Wars universe has filled in any of these gaps with any more elegance. But like, I do I do very much think that Sam Witwer does a good job bringing this character to life. Obviously Sam Witwer, who also plays the main guy in Days Gone, our little pop reviewers on Reddit, though, so I’m not not massive on him after seeing that. But yeah, it’s kind of like the ending with the kind of lightsaber fight with Vader and the Emperor being there is really nicely done. They got a really good like Vader and sound like for this and Sam Witwer also portrays the Emperor actually quite commonly portrays the Emperor and Darth Maul in various Star Wars projects. He’s a very talented voice actor. And so this is this game’s got real scope to it. And some unlike very 2008 in the sense it’s got a lot of QTE. So that’s what I forgot playing this back. Yeah, it’s like the note that obviously the notorious one is pulling down the Star Destroyer, which is shit. I didn’t understand it. I thought it was actually broken. The instruction it gives you on screen is super hazy. And it was going it was meant to be like the signature set piece of the entire game. And when I got to it, I was like, this is a disaster. I think I got stuck in it for like hours. Couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong. Yeah, I know someone who tried playing said with a mouse and keyboard, this sequence is literally impossible. And I can believe it because it is like very, very slowly bringing down the Star Destroyer. Yeah, you’re like dragging it down, but like, yeah, Platinum would not be happy with this QTE. This wouldn’t have happened on Cameo’s watch. Ryder would have sliced that fucking Star Destroyer in half and then like, yeah, it would have just like broken half perfectly. Yeah, so it’s like the whole thing with this though was they were like, the Force Unleashed, that is the intent of the game right there. It’s like we’re showing the Force like it’s never been shown before in a way that only games can sort of like do and in that respect it does offer that. It adds up to quite messy feeling levels I think where there’s just a few too many objects flying around and it’s a bit like a bit blurry to play now but it is fun and distinctive like it is it does separate it from anything else in the time just like you know obviously everyone remembers Vader killing Wookiees at the start but stuff like you know pulling out pulling down. I thought I’d imagine that. I was going to say is this the one with Vader? Like the tutorial is just like throwing around physics enabled Wookiees? Yep, that is the tutorial. There is like a wobbly bridge where lots of Wookiees cross over and you just fire a force push at that wobbly bridge. It goes bananas, starts flipping up and down and Wookiees are just all over the shop and it’s just and the noises are just ridiculous. So yeah, that is in there and then yeah like yeah yeah for sure. I think it’s a little bit front-loaded like you the physics are fun at first. It is fun at first to pull down a TIE fighter and throw stuff around. Then it becomes a bit repetitive. I think that’s 100% my problem with this is that like all the physics and all the fun of it like after a couple of levels they’re like well if we just let you chew through everything easily it’s not really a game so we’ll start introducing enemies who are like force resistant or environments where there isn’t stuff you manipulate and throw around and all of a sudden like the selling point of this game they never managed to marry to like a difficulty curve so they just sort of abandon the pitch of the game and then it becomes just quite a dry slog in the second half I’d say. I would say so. I also think I have a slight problem I have with Star Wars games as well is games where they say you get to play as the baddie but then they renege and they’re like nah actually you’re a good guy and it’s about a redemption arc and it’s like yeah you know that’s what Star Wars does but also it is quite fun the idea of playing as a bad guy so maybe lean into it more and because this kind of goes on that arc I think it’s they do it well but I don’t know I like Big Evil you know what I mean? I had a have I told the story about meeting the producer of this? No no go maybe you have actually. I’ll do a very quick version where it’s a guy called Hayden Blackman he went on to do the the the hanger 13 the Mafia team I think he recently left it like maybe in the last week or so yeah and one of the big things around The Force Unleashed was that like it was a it was an approved bit of Star Wars lore like George Lucas had had a hand in it and so I asked him like what that process was I was like did George Lucas kind of write this and I think there’d also been some chatter that there was some like this wasn’t necessarily the game they set out to make like they had some other concepts to begin with like maybe even one where you played as a Wookie or something there was and a Darth Maul game I believe as well. Yeah. So yeah and he basically said you know we pitch all these stories to George Lucas and then he tells us whether or not they happened in the Star Wars universe is how he sort of framed it. So they’re like they go to George Lucas and say George did Darth Vader have a secret apprentice who he hired to you know and George Lucas is like yeah he did actually yeah you’re right that is what happened and they’re like brilliant we managed to like you know like guess what George Lucas wanted as if like all this lore is in his head and I just thought it was the most preposterous thing I’d ever heard this idea that you had to sort of somehow tune in to this lore and it’s just like he’s just making it up as he goes along that’s complete nonsense. Now obviously you met Hayden Blackman and you can sort of speak to that but like the book Rogue Leaders, the history of Lucas Arts does more frame it as like basically they had to pitch him a Star Wars game, they went through countless ideas and logos and stuff and that was just the one that in these Operation George meetings I believe they called them internally that was the one idea that clicked with him but you know I do like the idea that like you have to guess what someone thinks they imagined. I think that they were framing it not as like this is crazy but more like this is how official it is it’s like yes it is absolutely approved like but he didn’t come they were basically saying like he came up with it but he didn’t come up with it we came up with it and I know just thinking that was so one of the most baffling statements I’d heard in an interview and it really stuck with me but yeah. A kind of like a memory I have from the time is that like this is the same year that Clone Wars film came out and the Clone Wars cartoon started I went and saw that Clone Wars film with my my little brother and that actually massively put me off it because I thought it was terrible and really kiddy and The Force Unleashed by comparison was like the level of maturity in terms of storytelling I like from Star Wars like I don’t like stuff that panders to children but also I accept that Star Wars can be for children that’s the thing I never quite got about those cartoons is when they’re a little bit more Sesame Street about teamwork and stuff I’m sort of they’re thinking well Star Wars is already for kids so what are we doing here and like right that’s that’s why when I’ve watched some of these languid early Clone Wars cartoons I’ve bounced off them massively because they they’re pandering to even younger kids sometimes and like I know that people say it gets really good and dark later on but the Force Unleashed felt more like the complete package of Star Wars to me when it arrived right um I’m very suspicious of peers who tell me to watch those cartoons I’m well it’s like hmm okay that’s uh that’s 20 patrons lost right there that’s Oh, unless you’re a patron of this podcast, you can like what you like. I haven’t even watched it. What do I know? Yeah, so that’s The Force Unleashed. I think it’s a bit blurry to play now. There’s some sections look fine, some look blurry as fuck, but you can buy this on Xbox Backwards Compatible Store. The DLCs are sold separately. I don’t get that. I’m not paying eight quid to play the alternate universe scenarios where you go into the Hoth base and kill Obi-Wan Kenobi and stuff. I’m not doing that, but still, it’s nice that you can play this quite easily on modern platforms, some PC as well. So next up, Matthew, is The Force Unleashed 2, an even worse and shorter version of the last game we discussed. So why did I put this in here? This is the game I finished three times. I think I told this story best games in 2010. I had a rough end. 2010 was a rough year. It ended with me just sat with a full suitcase, meaning to get on a train at 10:30 AM, go home and see my parents at Christmas, and I ended up getting a 9:30 PM train. I just sat there and played The Force Unleashed 2 all day. What’s a bummer about this is, this is probably a five out of 10. This is like borderline guilty pleasure. But it is slightly better as a combat game than The Force Unleashed. It looks a bit nicer. It doesn’t actually have the blurriness the first one has for whatever reason. Maybe they refine their engine or something. But it’s super short. It doesn’t have many levels. It recycles the levels it does have. It has like two Camino levels. Camino being the clone plant or whatever. That’s the other kind of cardinal sin of this game. You play a cloned version of the main character. Spoiler alert, that main character died at the end of the first game. So you’re playing a clone who’s got like, I don’t know, sort of has like some of the memories of his past self. And it’s just quite rough. But I do think that if you’re buying, if you’re going to play the first one, you might as well play this too, because, I don’t know, you do sort of see, there are some marginal improvements that I think kind of make it worthwhile. It still looks super lavish, has a pointless bit where he meets Yoda. Still like, yeah, the cutscenes still look really nice. I think Sam Witwer is really good. But yes, less defensible than the first one. Any thoughts on this one, Matthew? Yeah, I completely agree. It’s got quite a good, like, big, monster-y fighting arena. It kind of got a war-y kind of boss where you kind of take down different bits of its limbs, if I remember correctly. Yeah, that is the weird part. What’s here is fine, it’s just fuck all here is the problem. Yeah, I was reading that, like, this was made in, like, nine months or something. Yeah, I felt it was super, super quick turnaround. I think it sucks because the first one feels like it maybe had, like, that feels like a game that took years to make because you saw that Indiana Jones physics demo and, like, they were talking about The Force Unleashed, like, way before. I think they, like, properly took their time with that one and then with this one, it was like, well, we’ve only really got time to build two levels and to improve the combat a bit, you know, so, yeah. Too few games use the euphoria physics, which is, like, where they hold on to each other and, like, bodies act, you know, act in a realistic manner. I always like that. You always get a bonus point for having that. Yeah, the weird thing is, is it natural motion who developed them? I think. Yeah. I believe that they now are making a Star Wars game on mobile, so that’s… that’s… things come back around again. I hope it’s the Stormtroopers falling downstairs endlessly. That’s what I want from them. That is the other thing about this game. There’s a lot of, like, people flopping over quite easily in these games, but, yeah, they sure are fun. So, yeah, the second one, not as good as the first, but they kind of go as a pair there, Matthew. Next up, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. Now, you’re Samuel Roberts in 1998. The thing you want more than anything else is a Star Wars RTS. That’s what you wanted more than anything else? Yes, more than anything else. In terms of games, yes. In terms of games, I thought you were like life goals. Well, I wanted an N64, and I thought I was going to be a lawyer one day. But those are the two things. But you’d settle for a Star Wars RTS. Yep, and one would roll along very soon. It was called Star Wars Force Commander. In screenshots in PC Gamer, it looked fucking amazing. When it arrived, it was abysmal, really slow, really boring, somehow just completely shat the bed. I remember playing it and being quite crestfallen. At the same time, I was massively into Age of Empires and Red Alert. I was playing Age of Empires thinking, why isn’t there a Star Wars version of this? Be careful what you wish for, my friend, because they made one. It’s called Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. It had an expansion called The Clone Campaigns that came out around Episode 2 time. It is basically a mod of Age of Empires 2 that replaces everything in that game with Star Wars units. And while that should have been spot on, it’s too transparently a mod for Age of Empires 2. You still have the four forms of currency, so you have these little worker droids going around and farming carbon, quote unquote, from what are basically space trees. And it feels very un-Star Wars, and you’re building these little houses and stuff, and it just doesn’t quite feel right. Like, harvesting these four types of currency, and instead of finding… In Age of Empires, you’d find wild sheep roaming around, and you’d kill them, and then you’d get meat in order to keep building new units. Here, they replace animals with Banthas, but the animals are still in it. They’re just, like, replaced with other things. It’s really, really off. But the other weird thing is that, like, you build, like… Let’s say you build, like, a squad of X-Wings. You’re like, OK, cool, I’ll build some X-Wings, I’ll send them into battle. They move like they’re catapults in Age of Empires. They politely get in a line, and then very slowly move towards, like, the enemy lines. And it’s like, all these units are behaving like they are, like, you know, basically sort of, like, pre-20th century warfare. Age of Empires doesn’t have any aerial combat, right? No, no, no, it doesn’t, so, yeah. But there are loads of aerial units in this. There’s, like, loads of variants of X-Wings and TIE fighters and stuff. That’s the other thing. Some of them look quite Star Wars and are inspired by different bits of the universe. Other ones look like where we had to make a different variant of the Y-Wing to bulk out the unit count. So this one’s got slightly shorter engines or something. It kind of just looks like someone built them wrong. And, like, it’s very… Like, so many of the units look very un-Star Wars. You get these… Yeah, go on. Does it have walkers in it? Yeah, it does. And, like, they look pretty cool. Like, they’re animated pretty well. But it just doesn’t look or feel like Star Wars when it’s moving. Because you’ll send a whole army towards, like, their base. And, like I say, they will all move like they’re in Age of Empires. So they’ll get into, like, a very tight formation. And then they will move at the… They’ll be very, very slowly, as a group, towards the base. And there’s no tension to it, no excitement. But there’s still something about having that… And I made the exact template of Age of Empires with Star Wars in it. And, like, have some fun stuff, like the scenario editor from Age of Empires is in here. So you can basically build your own battles that you want to see. So yesterday I spent quite a long time just, like, dumping on a big grass field. Like, fucking, like, a hundred walkers, like, a hundred TIE fighters, like, fifteen Count Dooku’s. And then, like, on the other end being like, oh, just fucking put, yeah, eight Luke Skywalker’s, four Mara Jade’s, yeah, that’s a good deep cut, fucking, like, you know, wedge Antilles, all this shit. Like, chuck it all in there. And then just basically like ants in a jar that you shake, just watching them fucking fight it out. Except half the answer Christopher Lee. And, yeah, so it’s quite hard to recommend. The campaign’s probably better than, like, this isn’t like Age of Empires where you can, I think you can enjoy the skirmish mode that much. I think you just need to follow the vague plot of the films via the maps they’ve made in the story mode in order to enjoy this, but… Is it like events from the film? Like, are you playing, like, the classic film battles? Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah. And they’ve built maps that correspond to that. Some of them really do just feel like Age of Empires maps, though, that they’re stuck on. Like, it is a bit weird just being on a big field of grass when you’ve got, like, 8080s there. I can’t explain why. Just… Yeah. Yeah. What year of Star Wars? Because it sounds like it covers everything. It covers everything except for Episode III, because it predates that. Right. Yeah. So I wanted a great Star Wars RTS. I got this. I bought it. And even at the time, I wasn’t, like, mega obsessed with it, because I’d already played fucking tons of Age of Empires II. This was the same game. And it wasn’t quite as good as it seemed in my imagination. So, yeah. But a few years later would come along Star Wars Empire at War from Petroglyph, which is a much better game. That could be saved for best Star Wars games, Matthew. A teaser, a taster. What’s to come? So Matthew, to pick up a conversation we had earlier today, you asked me about Episode I Racer. And whether that should be in this episode. So why don’t you tell me about your experience with that game? Because it leads us nicely into my next one. So, yeah, we had it on N64. Yeah, we bought it, hilariously. Before we bought it, we saw it in a shop. Our mum was with us. And she kind of humoured us by sort of saying, we were like, look at that, look at Star Wars Episode Racer, that’s good. And she was like, oh yeah, that looks really nice. Which me and my brother were then like, maybe she wants it for Mother’s Day. We were like, we didn’t get Episode 1 Racer for Mother’s Day, I should add. But it always tickles me that in our heads we were like, yeah, this could happen. This is our route to getting this game, is that we bought it for mum for Mother’s Day. She wants it so much. When she was just politely hubering you. Yeah, she saw it once in the shop and was probably just trying to get us to shut up. So yeah, we bought it. Again, it didn’t review. It wasn’t like stellar reviews. This must have been one of the lowest reviewed games we bought. And this was a time where our games collection was basically dictated by whether or not you got a 90 plus in. N64. We had a generic interest in Star Wars, which is why I think it ended up in the collection. I remember playing a fair amount of this, but thinking it was kind of throwaway. There wasn’t a great deal to it. It didn’t have the character or the pure speed and excitement of F-Zero X. But it didn’t have any combat in it. It was just pure racing. So it was pretty stripped back as an actual racing game goes. So we didn’t properly fall in love with it. To this day, I don’t really know where it sits in people’s affections. That’s why I asked, is it a guilty pleasure? That was one. I thought, did it not even make the guilty pleasure list? Is it actually considered so bad? But it’s not like that fighting game. It’s better than that. Well, no. This might surprise you, but this would make my best. That would make my list of the best Star Wars games. There you go. I wouldn’t object to that. Like I say, we played it and liked it plenty. Yeah, and it just got re-released on modern formats. It got re-released on basically anything that came to PC, I think. That Aspyr developer will eventually put it on Switch and Xbox and PS4, which is cool. I’ve not played the Switch version, but I did pick it up in the sale recently. But I was really fond of that game. Admittedly, though, I never played F-Zero X as a kid. I didn’t have an N64. None of the friends I knew had F-Zero, actually. So that was more pity me. And I played this on PC, where I felt like it was a little bit of a technical powerhouse. It was just really, really fast and looked nice. You are right, it doesn’t have loads to it. It’s fairly easy to zip through the entire game. But I thought the handling was really good. I thought that, like, they correctly identified a type of Star Wars game to build from the very unusual film that they made with Episode 1. And they matched it to a genre very, very well. So, yeah, I did like it, Matthew. Yeah, yeah. So that’s absolutely fine. I almost picked an N64 draft, but only didn’t because I already had Rogue Squadron. I thought, well, I got this in the bag. I’ve picked the right one. But it turns out that Indiana Jones, more of an enticing pick. Of course, N64 famously had the unlockable mode where you could control a single pod racer, I guess, with two controllers, each controller, analog stick, controlling one of the engines. Really? I didn’t know that was a thing. Yeah. Yeah, so it was basically like a simulation of pod racing. You’d pull back on one and push forward with the other to do turns and things like that. Wow. That’s really cool. I like that. You had to unlock it with a cheat, if I remember correctly. That’s the maddest thing. That would be a back of the box feature for me. Yeah, for sure. That requires so much effort to make, you would think they’d shout about it. But it leaves us nicely, Matthew, into the next one on my list, which is Star Wars Racer Revenge on PS2. Now, this is like, in my opinion, a bit worse, just a touch worse in every single way than the first one. Like, it’s fine. But by different developers, by Angel, I think it’s… Is that Angel Studios? No, it’s Rainbow Studios. Angel Studios was Red Dead Redemption eventually. But yes, they basically are MX versus ATV devs. And so I think like the original was in Made in House at LucasArts, and this one was obviously outsourced. Weirdly, it was out around like Attack of the Clones. So you race as adult Anakin Skywalker, the Hayden Christensen version, in Jake Lloyd’s pod racer. So that’s quite weird to start with. But the thing they do slightly differently is that it is more of a kind of combat game. Like not in a sort of like massively overt way, but all of the racers have health bars. And they’re incredibly fragile. It’s a bit more like Wipeout where like you basically ram people and try not to get rammed yourself or crash too often. Because it’s not a hard game, but it’s fairly, you can quickly just get bashed too many times, blow up, and then you’re out of the race. And that’s the other thing is you can take people out of the race by ramming them. And so like the number of competitors will just go down and they won’t respawn. So that’s kind of what’s a bit different about it. And that is like a kind of notable and interesting difference. It looks nice and fast for a PS2 game. Bit rough around the edges in all the ways to expect. I personally think I personally prefer the racing style of Episode 1 because it did have some drama. Like you couldn’t hold down the boost button for too long without overheating and doing damage to your engines and stuff. So you had to kind of maintain that. There was an element of maintenance cooling off and then like hitting the boost again, which I thought I thought was good. It was almost like you’re doing pit stops while you were racing. That’s what I liked about Episode 1 racer. And this one’s a bit more like, oh, if I can bash into them. But oh, shit, I just hit a quarter three times in my left engine score and now I’m dead. And like that’s it’s less. It’s less. It has less kind of pull to me. But I did want to put on this list because I did like this little foray into racing games for Star Wars. I didn’t think it was a total mess and it really could have been. It’s actually kind of amazing that the racing game has some kind of reputation to stick around and still be liked many decades later when it’s based on a film that no one likes. Yeah, but it’s the sequence. It’s the one bit which is genuinely exciting and good in that film. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I’m happy it’s kind of got that reputation. But I would save Racer for best Star Wars games. Racer Revenge, which you can play on PS4 or PS5 or PS3. That’s how I played it. I apparently bought this years ago on PS3. So I played that before this. It’s all right. It’s not too bad. But I think the first one is still the classic, personally. Can you name a single character in this game that isn’t Anakin or Sir Bulba? Oh, God. Gosh, because I never get to them on the character select screen. It’s like, I’ll just play as Anakin, who, by the way, in this game has like the worst Hayden Christensen sound alike imaginable. I just like the idea that the Hayden Christensen who is in this game, or the age of Anakin Skywalker is like when it’s all going off the rails. And I like the idea that at the same time that he’s like becoming incredibly morally compromised, he’s also going back and like picking up his old pod racing career. It is a daft, daft story idea. Yeah, it’s like I’m just going to murder all these sand people for killing my mother and have a little race and just see how that goes. As I’m back home, meet up with the guys. I’m going on a 10-planet tour with my pod racer just between Jedi trading. Yeah, so why don’t you just go and see his mother a couple of years before? She still would have been alive and we wouldn’t have had to fucking put up with the Empire, would we? Well, that would have removed the entire Star Wars film franchise wouldn’t exist. Yeah, but maybe that democracy would have collapsed no matter what, Matthew. That’s what George Lucas is really interested in, yawn. So next up, Matthew, I’ve put Star Wars Jedi Starfighter here. A key thing for me with a lot of the Star Wars games I really liked is that I replayed them over and over again. So a lot of those classics I kind of mentioned earlier, your X-Wings and Jedi Knights and the like, I played them over and over again. And this one should have been a game I would love. But because it came out just months after Rogue Leader on GameCube, the game I coveted more than anything else, this was very much like we’ve got Rogue Leader on PS2 at home vibes. And this game was set during the prequel trilogy, so it has less pull. You play as a variety of characters. It’s a sequel to Star Wars Starfire, which was an early PS2 PC game. And some of those characters repeat. But you’re primarily playing as Adi Gallia, who’s like a Jedi Knight, who she’s testing out the Jedi Starfighter, the pointy fighter you see Obi-Wan flying around in Attack of the Clones. And the big gimmick is the Starfighter can do Jedi powers. It’s got like a shield you can activate with the Force. And the dumbest one, which is basically Force lightning from your spaceship, which never happens in the films. And that’s what relegates it to Guilty Pleasure status here. I don’t think it’s got the replay pull of the Factor V games, which were very built around score attacks and getting the medals up, getting your accuracy up and unlocking cool shit as a result. This just didn’t have that same pull, but it was a fun six, seven out of ten. I think it got like eights at the time. It was liked well enough. I don’t think it’s held up super well, but wanted a note here. Do you ever play these, Matthew? Yeah, I actually have some fondness for Starfighter. I don’t know if I’ve even played Jedi Starfighter. I get the two mixed up in my head. When my brother Alex got a PS2 for Christmas, for some reason the game that came with it was the original Starfighter. And I think just the excitement of having a PS2 in the house kind of probably bumped that game up a little bit in my memory of how good it actually was. Like, didn’t look anywhere near as good as Rogue Leader, but like, you know, definitely the original Starfighter. Like a very competent dogfighting game, you know, quite playable, quite easy to pick up, not at all difficult. I mean, I was always scared off by the more kind of simmy PC Star Wars games. So, you know, I have a big fondness for these arcade dogfighting kind of Crimson Skies type deals. Yeah, but big same for sure. Like I had the same thing where I always found myself a little bit overwhelmed by the X-Wing games. So when I got Rogue Squadron on my PC in like 1998 or 9, I was like, oh, this is like spot on for me. Like, you know, I’m on Star Wars planets. There’s like a story, this dialogue. Like it’s, it was a, you know, it’s a bit, they sugared the pill a little bit for flying a Starfighter. This just happens to be in the bottom half of quite a strong sort of like, yeah. You’re so well catered for. And yeah, it sounds like the kookier Jedi powers thing probably makes this one slightly more memorable. Yeah. A couple of like notable things for this. It’s got one of the worst Samuel L. Jackson impressions that you could ever, you could ever do. Like it sounds nothing like Mace Windu. Just really, really off. Just like watch the start of the game on like YouTube or something. It’s very, very bumpy time there. The cutscenes generally look terrible actually, but it is like way more story led actually than some of these other games. Like the Rogue Squadron games aren’t really story games in the same way. Like they’ve got voice acting and stuff, but they’re a bit more rudimentary. This has like proper kind of like CG cutscenes and stuff, but it’s quite goofy, kind of fun. It was actually written by Hayden Blackman who would write The Force Unleashed. Was it written by Hayden Blackman or was it written by Hayden Blackman successfully guessing what George Lucas was thinking? So yeah, it’s not bad. It’s another one you can play on PS4 as well, on PS5. So it’s like available, but it also has like cutscene outtakes basically. So they made outtakes for the cutscenes, which is quite a fun touch. I mean, they’re not funny, but they tried and I appreciate that. When we got his PS2, he’ll hate me for telling you this, but I’ll tell you anyway. When he got his PS2, my brother wept with joy on Christmas Day, like full N64 kid. And I like that it was also for Starfighter. I like the idea that he wept for Starfighter. Starfighter, which I think got 7 out of 10 in OPM at the time. We’ll weep for 7 out of 10s. Not a T-shirt. But these both go in this list because neither would be anywhere near the worst Star Wars games. Neither would get anywhere near the best. Because, like I say, there’s better competition. Next up, my brother wept with joy. It’s so sad it was pre-smartphone age, so there’s no footage to shame him with. But, you know, you can still do it on this podcast. Okay, next up is Rebel Assault 2, an old FMV game that ties very much into what I was saying earlier about me being a 90s Star Wars kid. So there were two Rebel Assault games. One was earlier in the 90s and Rebel Assault 2 would follow. The big difference was, well, I think there might have been some kind of rotoscoping stuff in Rebel Assault 1 to kind of make the characters look sort of more human. It was pixel-arty. This one was full, like, live action cutscenes and stuff. And then they would even go as far as superimposing live action elements into the game itself. So all the shooting sequences are basically done. It’s kind of like rudimentary sort of cover shooting. You pop out of cover, very light gun style, shoot a bunch of stormtroopers who are also, like, animated in live action. And then the action would play out that way. It is, like, not great. It’s quite short. But the context again is, I was a 90s Star Wars kid. This was original Star Wars content with live action elements in it, in like a deprived mid-90s. So this seemed like a big deal. I played it again this week. The first one is borderline impossible to control. Like, any sequence in these games where you have to control a spaceship, you’re in for a rough time. Like, I couldn’t even get past the fucking Tatooine training level in the first one. And I got the impression, it was like, a bunch of people on GOG’s forum said the same thing. And I thought, OK, like, I’m sure I could do this at the time. But Rebel Assault II goes down a lot smoother. It’s a lot easier. It only has one impossible level where you inexplicably steal the Millennium Falcon from inside an Imperial base. They never explain why you do that. But that happens. And it’s about these kind of like basically these very these kind of like secret project TIE fighters that are completely out-focusing the Rebel Alliance as fighters and what the kind of story is behind that. The story features Darth Vader and stuff. It feels slightly bogus as a Star Wars story, but a guilty pleasure because, like I say, at a time where there was no Star Wars stuff, this was inspired by the original trilogy thing. It tries to mimic the fun dialogue. It tries to be a bit more comedy dialogue first about things and less of a serious boring bullshit of the prequels. So, yeah, it came out on PS1 as well as PC. Do you ever play this one, Matthew? No, I watched a little bit of it at lunch today, and I think it opens with Darth Vader, right? Yeah, that’s right. Quite a bad sound to like. Yeah, but even so, it’s the thing. It’s the helmet. It’s the design of it. And I can imagine like if you were super into Star Wars, you’d be like, holy shit, like this is another Star Wars film happening in my PC. I can imagine that. I can imagine that being quite like feeling super authentic and like the real deal. But yeah, the actual gameplay looked kind of comically naff. The best thing, spaceship shooting is the best thing it does. Like it’s kind of on rails arcade style shooting. The on foot stuff is bad. Like I say, actually controlling a ship is really hard. But just shooting things in a spaceship, they do pretty well. And a lot of these games actually do try and like mimic the beats of a Star Wars film. So this has like the kind of Death Star style sequence where you’re flying in the interior of a spaceship to blow something up. It has like escaping out of a tunnel in a Millennium Falcon, a bit like that big worm thing in Empire Strikes Back. It has the asteroid field sequence even with the John Williams music to kind of mimic that from the Empire Strikes Back. So it tries to tick as many boxes as possible while telling an original quote unquote Star Wars story that features some quite bad live action actors. Do you get to romance a family member? No, that doesn’t get. I mean, not that I remember. I only played through like seven of the 15 or so levels for this episode. You have to give your uncle a very erotically charged back rub at one point. There you go. Nice cursed element to introduce to the episode there. OK, so we come to my favorite of all of these games. Shadows of the Empire on N64 and PC. Now, this is a game I was obsessed with as a young man. It had everything I wanted from Star Wars. It had a duel with Boba Fett in like this quite spooky valley. And then when you beat Boba Fett, he got in his spaceship and you had to fight the spaceship. I fucking love that. It had, like I say, it did the similar thing to Rebel Assault, where it was like we start you on the Battle of Hoth. We know that you want to see that in a game. So here it is. Your main character inexplicably was there during the Battle of Hoth, not seen in the film, but he was there, apparently. And so you get to take down an AT-AT with the old harpoon and toe cable. You get to escape the Echo Base on Hoth, like Han Solo and Princess Leia do. You get to encounter Wampire ice creatures, all that stuff. And then you get to do the asteroid sequence as well. So you basically get all of the opening beats from Empire Strikes Back are the start of this game. And then it kind of goes off in its own tangent a little bit. Now, this came as part of a multimedia project at Lucasfilm. I believe it was pitched as a movie without a movie. So they did a book, a comic with Dark Horse, and then a game. The game was kind of the centerpiece of it. And then they do a load of toys as well. So it was basically a thing that happened because some licensors all had a meeting at Lucasfilm or something. So it was very cynical in that respect. But actual Lucasfilm bots went off and built the story for it. So did you have much experience with this one, Matthew? No. So, you know, I don’t know if we knew anyone who had this at the time. Like, I’ve since… I don’t know if I’ve even played it, to be honest, but I’ve watched enough of this. At the time, you know, early N64, N64 games being incredibly expensive, the idea that you would, you know, waste a birthday or Christmas wish or a huge amount of pocket money on one of the… what was one of the lesser rated games at the time in N64 anyway, seemed preposterous. I always thought this looked dire in screenshots. It was so foggy. I mean, you know, this and Turok were just, like, too really bad for it. It just looked so rancid. And the idea that you would, like, get this over… I mean, really, it just didn’t make any sense. And I didn’t know anyone who was into, like, Star Wars enough to, like, waste a part of your game collection on this. So, to the listeners at home, that is the most sensible thing that’s been said on this podcast so far. Like, you should learn by now that you cannot trust me on this stuff. I’m very much in my own sort of weird cult-y domain with this sort of thing. Matthew is the voice of reason here. He’s completely right. Nothing he has said is wrong. I like that you described fighting Boba Fett in a spooky valley, and he’s like, is what makes it spooky the fact that you can’t see beyond five fucking feet because of all the fog? It is a bit like that, yeah. You’re in this sort of… you’re flying… you get a jet pack in that level, and you’re flying between these spires, basically. And like, I don’t know, there is quite a weird, quiet atmosphere to it, but it could just be because they couldn’t portray much shit on screen. Like, that could be why it happened. This is like a super early 3D game. Like, even the design of the main character, Dash Rendal, was built around the limitations of the N64, I believe. So he’s got that big metal ammo thing that Chewbacca has, sort of, on both shoulders. Like, he’s just a big chunky man, made of about, like, ten polygons. So, tough break for him. Quick drop of moon on him. But yeah, again, I have to, like, make the point that, like, at the time, this was a game that was saying, this story is set between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. There’s a load of stuff that happens in that time period you don’t really know about. Like, you don’t know what happens to Luke, all that stuff. This kind of connects the dots by saying, like, you have to, at one point, go and save Luke from these assassins during this kind of, like, basically a speeder bike chase. And when you get to, it’s on Tatooine, you get to Obi-Wan’s house where Luke is building a new lightsaber. And, like, there’s a cutscene where your main character meets Luke in the game. And I thought that was pretty cool. But then you read the book and it’s like, oh yeah, like, this is where Luke built his lightsaber that you see in Return of the Jedi and where he’s kind of, like, basically training to for the final battle with Darth Vader and stuff. And so on that level, I think it was just very appealing to me. Like, I don’t think it’s super sophisticated as a bit of canon goes. But, like, as a start, again, a Star Wars something that had a bit of money behind it that felt almost like a film, enough, like, where I was willing to fill in the gaps in my imagination. This is like a better version of Rebel Assault, really, where it’s kind of like, it’s like a scattergun mini-game approach to making a Star Wars game. They’re like, we’re going to do the spaceship sequence, we’re going to do the on-foot vehicle sequence, we’re going to do third-person shooting. This tries to do it all. It does none of it well, really, but… It’s got big Final Fantasy Chronicles crystal-bearers in it. Yeah, exactly, and just like that, it’s a 4 out of 10. No, it’s not really. Listen, I do love, I love games which try to be everything all at once. Like, I’m very fond of that quite small genre of just like, let’s do it, let’s do everything, and, you know, hope you land some of it. The one thing I will say from, like, what I remember of, like, reading magazines and stuff was like, the Hoth stuff looked amazing, and, you know, using the tow cables to bring down the big boys and all that stuff is, that looks really cool. Like, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that in this and that in Rogue Squadron, on N64. I mean, like, if the whole game had been that, they kind of missed the trick not doing that. Yeah, it almost feels like they started with this level, and they were like, well, this is what we’ll sell it with. Like, it’s, you know, we’re doing this battle super well. And, like, it does do it better than Rogue Squadron does. It doesn’t do it better than Rogue Leader, because Rogue Leader looks loads better. But I’ll tell you what, it does do the toecable stuff better than any of the Fat Five games do. Like, it’s borderline impossible to do in those games, like, without crashing into something. Oh, it’s really stressful. The second you do it, you’re like, oh, fuck, I’m gonna fuck it up! The whole time, you’re like, shit! Rather than, like, this is amazing, I’m such a badass. You’re like, oh, fuck, I hope I don’t go too far away and the cable disconnects. Yeah, because you only get a finite number of them and shit, and it’s like, yeah. Yeah, like, that is chaos. That made that Corellia level in Rogue Squadron an absolute fucking nightmare because halfway through the level, an ATAP turns up and it’s walking right next to a hill, so you can easily just, like, fucking lose control of it. The 3D camera just basically, like, pulls out, super isometric, and it basically feels like the handlebars have come off, and the slow speed is just, like, fucking floating around. So by comparison, this is, like, arcade-y, but it works really well. You have to pick the right moment to shoot it. When you do, you can guide it in a way that feels really satisfying. So I think you’re right. Like, this is still probably, not visually, my favourite portrayal of The Battle of Hoth, but probably the best one in terms of, like, gameplay. So it does that super well. But the third-person shooting is quite rough, but has some interesting levels. Like, there is quite a cool sewer level that ends with a battle against a giant Dianogo, and you have to go into this green water and fight it. And it’s quite, quite, it seemed quite spooky at the time. I was quite into it. So… Quite spooky. Well, it just seemed to me at, like, 10. Fighting this underwater monster. There’s this horrible, great noise that goes off when the water starts rising, and then you see this thing just floating there in this misty green water. It’s quite nasty. But this is a game I’m obsessed with. I last completed it three years ago. This is, like, one of the only games where I’m like, the critics are fucking wrong. There is something about this game that is pure magic to me. And it must just be because I was a 90s Star Wars fan and this hit me at the right moment. Sorry about that, Matthew. Is that the ultimate 90s Star Wars artifact? Yeah, because it’s got everything, right? Like, the main character is like a knock-off Han Solo. And he feels like a kind of… He’s meant to be a more badass Han Solo. That was kind of like what they were going for with him. And that itself feels quite 90s. It’s like that whole sort of like Venom Spider-Man thing where everything’s a bit more badass and it’s just… But implausible. Yeah, it is because it’s such an early 3D game that almost none of the rules of how 3D games have been worked out yet. It’s worse at almost everything than other games. It was an N64 launch game in North America, I believe. So, yeah, it is, but it doesn’t really… It’s not really like the best avatar for Star Wars games in the 90s. I would say that Jedi Knight is or TIE Fighter is. Those are like the gold standard Star Wars games. This is a gold standard for like… Yeah, like just as a product of its time, this is not a timeless game. That’s fair to say. Jesus, I’ve talked about that for a long time, didn’t I? So I hope the listeners won’t… It’s nice to… We finally discovered your ace attorney. And it is five out of ten Star Wars games from 1990s. Shameful, isn’t it? So we’ve got three more here, Matthew. Next up is Star Wars Battlefront II, the EA one. Now, I put this in here because I wanted to like highlight the campaign as something that was a really like nice looking bit of Star Wars. It gives you some fairly solid single player shooter levels. Does the battle of Jakku, which when you see Rey in The Force Awakens riding a little bike thing from Sable around that desert planet and there’s a downed Star Destroyer. It basically shows you that battle. You participate in the game. It goes in here because it’s a bit too short and it does what The Force Unleashed does. It promises to give you, you play as the bad guys and then kind of almost backs out of it almost immediately and it’s like, well, actually they discovered pretty on they’re committing atrocities and they’re going to join the Rebel Alliance. It’s like, I just, I don’t know, commit to making a Star Wars game about dickheads. Do you know what I mean? At what point when you sign up to the fucking Imperial Army, you’re like, I think these guys might not be okay. Like when they killed all the Jedi. So, yeah. I think the problem with making a game about dickheads in quite a, you know, in a fiction which doesn’t really have a lot of shades of grey, is just it will inevitably end with you just have to die at the end, you get killed at the end, you know, because that’s how the rules of Star Wars work, so good guys win and you play as a bad guy and then you get shot and all chopped up by a lightsaber and it proves to be quite unsatisfying. So, yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. I just don’t know if this universe has got, like, like the moral spectrum to be, to do interesting storytelling like that. Maybe that’s, we should litigate that on the Star Wars XXL, but… Kotor 2 fans would disagree, Matthew. Oh, of course, Kotor. But no, it’s a fair point. And like, I think even in Jedi Knight when you turn evil, you don’t die at the end, you just become like a Darth Vader style figure who basically rules like a reign of terror over the galaxy. Yeah, that’s quite cool, isn’t it? So that’s good. But yeah, that’s like a choice you make as a player, whereas here it’s obviously all scripted. It was written by, I think, like Walt Williams, who did Spec Ops The Line. So, you know, if you go in there expecting Spec Ops The Line with Star Wars, obviously it’s not going to be that. You’re not dropping frickin napalm on wookiees or whatever. But I quite like the main character, Iden Versier. I thought the actress who plays her did a pretty good job. Sort of like the guilty pleasure element of it to me is it finds loads of like quite bogus ways to bring other Star Wars characters into it. So you’ve got like, you’ve got inexplicably, there’s a sequence where Han Solo’s at that bar where LePetit and Yongo’s alien character is in The Force Awakens. And he’s just there for a drink or whatever and then like gets attacked by some TIE fighters. And that’s like a level. There’s a level where Lando Calrissian’s in a walker in some mines or something that was kind of baffling. Like it’s telling a coherent story with its cast of characters. Then it’s like, we need to have Luke Skywalker fight some bugs for 10 minutes. And like it’s flawed. That’s got like that’s got Yakuza’s sub story energy. It’s like, we’ve got a character model of a lion from leftover from a boss. It’s like, oh, great, a lion’s escaped in the middle of this city. And you kick the shits out of it. And they’re like, yeah, that’ll do. It’s tough because there are some things I really like about. I think some of the writing is really good. Like what they do aside from when Luke Skywalker is battering some bugs, which is silly. The dialogue with Luke is really nicely done. A well-judged version of Luke. And like I said, I do like the main character, but I think it should have just focused on one quite nasty campaign about the bad guys as it stands. This is a perfectly good install it on Game Pass, blast through the campaign kind of game. Have a six or seven out of ten time. You’ll be well on your way. It’s all good. So yeah, it’s a guilty pleasure. But the main multiplayer stuff, I don’t think this is a best in class shooter either. Whenever I’ve played it, it’s a bit… I don’t like all of the card stuff. I find it a bit incoherent. Do you ever play this one? No, but I know that Dan Dawkins, previous guest on this podcast, was like obsessed with this game, right? There’s a few tired dads who like this. I think he’s played hundreds of hours of it. Yeah, there’s a few tired dads on Twitter who play this and enjoy this. It’s a good tired dad game. It’s got to have something. I just don’t have a space in my life for just a big ongoing online multiplayer shooter. That’s just not really what I play, so I kind of ignored this. I haven’t actually played the campaign, so I should do that. You don’t need to play the campaign, Matthew. If you like Star Wars more, I would say you should. I guess I went into it wanting a Titanfall 2 quality campaign, and it’s not that. But it’s all right. It’s OK. Battlefront 2 as an overall package is a good guilty pleasure, I think. It’s like the most visually spectacular Star Wars thing there is still, and probably will remain so for quite a few years. So yeah, Battlefront 2, it’s the EA one. That’s… Dice nail yet another perfectly fine campaign. Yeah, just have yourself a lovely little slice of Star Wars and get on with your day, because that’s all you need to do. Okay, next up, Matthew, is Star Wars Battled for Naboo. Now, this was another… This is a very late N64 game, this. Another Factor V game. Basically like another Rogue Squadron game. But it’s not quite as good. It goes into the Guilty Pleasure category, unlike all the other Factor V games. Well, actually, there’s one more on this list, isn’t there? But we’ll get to that. It goes on this list because it’s based on Episode 1, so you have the, like, the come down of, like, the setting is more boring. You don’t have X-Wings and TIE Fighters in it. Too much grass. I’m not massively into, like… I don’t actually… The Naboo Starfighter in Episode 1 is a slightly better ship design than some of the other stuff they did in the prequels, which I think looked a bit shit. Like, the proto X-Wings and TIE Fighters mostly look quite bad, but I thought that, like… Is the Naboo one, like, is that that yellow thing? Yeah, that’s a cool ship design, right? Like, Doug Chiang, I think, designed that, and it looks fantastic. So, yeah, and I think what I liked about this game is it did try and do, like, ground combat stuff with, like, some of the Naboo vehicles. It’s not as good as, like, just playing Rogue Squadron where you’re just in spaceships all the time. It strains a little bit to work around the restrictions of episode one in terms of setting and set pieces and stuff. But if you just want more Rogue Squadron, it is basically that. The other problem I had with it at the time was it came out in, like… On PC, it came out in, like, spring 2001. Now, you are just months away from Rogue Leader coming out on GameCube, so almost immediately this seems like old hat and it’s not based on the films you like. So I feel like this game is not on GOG. I think it was kind of forgotten. Did you ever cross paths with this, Matthew? We didn’t buy it because no interest in the episode one stuff, really. Also, yeah, like too late in the day. Absolutely mad that this came out as close as it did. Even on N64, you know, the time difference of whatever, like 18 months later, like the jump that you got with Rogue Leader was just absurd, I mean. Just the aesthetic of episode one just doesn’t do it for me with all the green and even outside of that one ship design, I think you’re right, sticks in your mind. Like I couldn’t draw any ship from those films. Like I couldn’t even draw an outline of them. I had no idea what was going on. Something they try and do is like you can, you sort of fly into a hangar, then you switch vehicles, so like mid mission. So they tried to do that to kind of keep it interesting. But again, being on the ground in these games just isn’t as fun as being in the skies. The other thing, it does quite well. It has a pretty good rendition of the battle for Naboo at the end. So like the proper like fight with the Death Star-y style thing where Anakin Skywalker blows up the ship. Like that space set piece has quite a nice sense of scale to it. Like the Rogue Leader and Rogue Squadron Games 2, this has unlockable levels. And one of them is you flying, one level we have to kill Darth Maul on Coruscant. That’s pretty cool. And then another level where you play as Darth Maul and basically just have to murder a load of like Naboo people. That’s quite nice. Those are really fucking hard to unlock. On PC I just used a cheat code to get those. Again, so they always do fucking good bonus levels in the Fat Five games. So, yeah, another shout out here. Final game, Matthew. Rogue Leader 2, Rebel Strike. Now, I’m sure you played this at the time because you had Rogue Leader. So why don’t you kick off for telling me how you felt about this? So, if I remember correctly, this sort of like… I think there kind of wasn’t the pitch of this, that it was kind of like all the bits of Star Wars that you didn’t sort of get to do in Rogue Leader 1, you got to do in this. But unfortunately, that meant a lot of like on foot stuff. They added on foot sections. And I don’t really remember the balance of the levels. Like maybe there were only like three on foot sections and like 10 flying levels. But in my head, I hated the on foot stuff so much that, you know, it blots out a lot of memories. I couldn’t really tell you what I did like about this game, even though the dogfighting stuff, I think was fine. The on foot stuff was like, what happens if we try and make a third person, like corridor shooter, but in like an engine that’s designed for aerial dogfighting. And the character didn’t handle like a spaceship, but it definitely didn’t handle like anything approximating a human. It was just the controls on the ground were so fucking weird. Like there’s sections of this game where the camera is like tracking you as you go down a corridor and you’re doing shooting. It’s all like weird lock on shooting, which is like nod one to the fact that this game hasn’t really got an aiming system. They haven’t really worked out what to do with that. But then there are other rooms you’d enter and all of a sudden the camera would stop and it almost became like a Resident Evil locked camera. And your characters then moving completely differently in the 3D space. This game is like crazy messy and beautiful, but mostly fucked. Yeah, this is actually borderline for this list because I think the on foot bits are so bad. They almost like pull it down into the worst Star Wars game tier. But the thing is, it does coexist with what are basically half formed Rogue Leader levels. It’s like bits of what you love about Rogue Leader are in here. But my memory of it Matthew is that it transitions between on foot and vehicles. So it’s doing both within each level. That’s what I remember of it. But I’ve not played this one since 2008, so it’s been a while. Yeah, it has two campaigns. There’s Luke Skywalker and Wedge. And I think the Wedge campaign, which you branch into, is a lot more flying based. And then the Luke stuff is a lot more like the set pieces from the films. There’s a terrible level in this where you train with Yoda in a swamp. That’s definitely in there and it blows. There’s also some like speeder bike stuff, which is really pretty because it’s just like what at the time looked like a photorealistic version of those levels ripping past an amazing speed. But I think we’re also like nigh on unplayable control wise. Very odd. But I don’t know if they just got sick of it and were just like, fuck it, let’s just get it done, get it out there or whatever. But I think Rogue’s Rogue leader one was just so absolutely amazing. You know, I bought this, you know, I just couldn’t not buy this. I liked the first one so much, mainly the graphics. And I still think this is a great looking game. But it’s just it is bizarrely like broken in so many ways. Whatever the fuck Factor 5 were doing on the GameCube to like get those ship engines looking like that, to get them lit like that and the overall lighting of the different planets and ships and like the textures, like whatever the fuck they were doing, it was like dark magic. Like I just that game has aged incredibly well. Rogue leader visually. And so is this one visually. But yeah, it makes you think the GameCube is more powerful than it is. Like, yeah, it’s like legitimately up there with like what Xbox was doing. I think that generation you’re like that is one of the best looking games of the generation. Yeah. Hands down. Top five. Whatever they were tapping into. God knows. Well, the Death Star in that first one was just like, holy shit. Like, how is not everyone bought a game key? This looks so good. Yeah, exactly. And it’s like the way that like the Battle of Endor looked as well. And it’s like, oh, the ships actually feel like they’re moving towards me. And I feel like I’m in this film in a way I never thought I’d see. And again, like, this was just like three years after Rogue Scorching came out. Like, that progression was crazy. So, yeah, yeah, I was completely with you. So, yeah, I mean, I played this. I came to this one later on, Rebel Strike, and it was that thing of, well, yeah, I mean, it’s expanded, and on foot sections sounded good in principle, but they just simply do not work. Like you say, there’s no other third person shooter that’s like this. It really does feel broken, like you say, so. Yeah, very odd. It’s like, if you put, like, just a third person character into, like, Forza Horizon or something, it’s like that mismatched. It’s kind of like, what happens if you’re like, well, this world’s really pretty, so I would just like to see it from a different non-vehicle perspective. You couldn’t just do it. You’d have to, like, you have to, like, you know, finesse it. There’s no finessing here. It’s really odd. It’s a super strange game, but also quite an interesting artefact. Like, I didn’t regret, like, buying it. I don’t, you know, at the time I was like, yikes, a lot of this is a mess, but, you know, I still, you know, like the prettiness of it. And I think it’s still, like, reviewed okay. And I think NGC still got behind it. Well, you know, like, again, it would feel like looking at Gif Horse in the mouth a little bit, wouldn’t it? But like, especially on GameCube when there were so few things around. But yeah, no, I’m with you, that’s why I can’t cross under this list. It’s like, well, guilty pleasure is right, because there are bits of the game that work really well, and then there’s like one bit of the game that works terribly. So like, they cancel each other out to a game that must be on this list, essentially. Did you ever play it in co-op, Matthew? Didn’t it have the whole of the first game in it? Yeah, I think at least the vast majority of the game, yeah, it was like, yeah, but retrofitted so you could have two players in it. It’s crazy. Yeah, yeah. Did we play this co-op? Probably not massive. It doesn’t jump out as a memory, but I remember, yes, it having like a large chunk of the original game as a bonus mode, which is like, there’s at least a good Rogue Leader in Rogue Leader 2. It just isn’t Rogue Leader 2. Yeah, for sure. So that’s the last one on the Wanted Upon the List, Matthew. But like, a kind of weird little collection of artifacts there. But I feel like I needed to talk about these in order to tell the full story of like, my experience with Star Wars games, which would definitely shape what the best Star Wars games are when we do that later this year. So any closing thoughts on all that, Matthew? I think you secretly wanted to put Shadows of the Empire in the best Star Wars list, but… Yeah. You are right. You are like, right. That’s the thing. You are correct, sir. You are actually correct. And when I said at the start… I think you’ve sacrificed one of your very cherished memories there for the sake of reason. Yeah, that’s it. But I know it’s not acceptable. I know you can’t put that game like next to a code tour and be like, these are the same. I just… You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. So yeah, I think this works, though. As Star Wars, like I say, languishes in between getting your hopes up, making you think, oh, maybe Star Wars is good again with the Mandalorian seasons one and two, or The Last Jedi or The Force Awakens. It will just turn around and shit the bed with The Rise of Skywalker or A Book of Boba Fett and you’re back at square one. That is the eternal journey with Star Wars that we’re on, basically. It will never get to the heights you truly want it to, or at least it will feel like it is and then it will come tumbling down again. Star Wars always breaks your heart eventually. That’s my sort of overarching theory with this, Matthew. So we come to the end of the episode, Matthew. Thank you for tolerating me talking about this bullshit. Oh, I’ve loved it. This has been such a fun trip into the psyche of Samuel Roberts. That’s good. And next week we’ll be doing a whole episode on Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles The Crystal Bearers, so you can look forward to that. Shall we reveal our guest for next week, Matthew? Get people excited about that? That might be a cool thing to do. So yeah, do you want to talk about that? Yeah, next week we’re talking to former official PlayStation man and current PC Gamer head haunt show Tim Clark, another big, big future name from the time when we were there. Yeah, we’ve already recorded the episode, we had a really, really good chat with Tim. He’s got some very different stories to us, a couple of absolutely killer anecdotes, a great Kojima story to add to this. I think if you liked the Dan Dawkins episode, covering a very similar period to that, but from the official perspective, and Tim’s super funny, super sharp, really interesting career, really interesting background, yeah, I think you’re really going to enjoy it. That’s cool, yeah. And so for listeners as well who might want to know this, because we often get asked, oh, well, why don’t you do more Sega episodes? And it’s true that me and Matthew are just not massive Sega pods, and we thought, we gave you a Sonic episode, what more do you want from us? But we have a returning guest, I won’t say who, just in case it doesn’t work out, but we have a returning guest coming on in June to talk about the Dreamcast, so we’ll have like maybe a top five or a top ten Dreamcast games, but like definitely some Dreamcast love from a returning guest, so look forward to that next month. At the same time, Matthew, people have been voting on our Patreon. We put up a poll for the next draft episode. Overwhelmingly, people want a 90s PC games draft from us, Matthew. How are you feeling about that? Okay, I mean, like, you know, I’ve got a pretty niche collection from the time, but I feel like I can hold my own. Yep, so you’ve got basically ten Command and Conquerers versus ten Monkey Islands. Who will win? That’s essentially what’s going to happen, I think, but that should be good. So Matthew, where can people find you on social media? Mr. Basil, underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. If you’d like to follow the podcast BackpagePod, you can tweet us there if you’d like to. You can also send us emails at backpagegames.gmail.com for our end of month Mailbag episode, Mailbag slash what we’ve been playing episode. And also there is the Discord, you can see the link to that on Twitter. And as I say, patreon.com/backpagepod. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, if you like what we make, you can go and do that. But there’s no pressure from us. Only do it if you can afford it, please. The billing cycle starts at the first of each month, so I recommend signing up near the start of the month rather than the end, so you’re not billed twice in quick succession. So that hot billing cycle chat to end the episode. Yeah, very exciting, isn’t it? But thank you very much for listening. I’ll be back next week. Goodbye. Bye-bye.