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, it’s been three long months, but we’re back to doing a video game draft, this time on fucking hard mode. Um, I’m sure you’ll agree with that sentiment. How are you feeling about the fact that we’re back in the drafting process? Excited to be doing this again? Yes, difficult. It is a difficult one, though. And I feel like I’m on very unsteady ground, and I’m gonna, well, I’m not gonna reveal myself as not knowing what I’m talking about. I’ve never claimed to know what I was talking about with certain, you know, with regards to certain things. My counter argument to this whole draft is that if you played loads of PC games in the 90s, you were clearly rich, so yuck. So you’ve made it about class. I have, if you think we don’t know enough about PC games, it’s because you are a higher class than us. I refuse to feel bad about that. Yeah, it’s like, you know, renowned working class hero Matthew Castle. Well, you know. No, it’s fine, I get what you mean. So this is the 90s PC gaming draft. Like we basically put it to our Patreon supporters at patreon.com/backpagepod. Get those two free, they’re not free. They’re two paid extra podcasts a month if you want to support us. But we let all of our patrons basically vote on the kind of draft order this year. And this is far and away the one they picked. And it’s interesting because it’s probably the one I wanted to do the least. Not because I’m not interested in the subject, but because I knew it would be the hardest to like research and be on steady ground with. And I feel like it’s the same for you, Matthew, just because a lot of the stuff in this happened slightly before I’m like mega up on games. No, sadly I was born in the late 80s. So that’s not true. I’m not a Zoomer. I am a crusty old millennial with no house. So yes, that’s me. But I am excited to be doing it because even though this one took quite a lot of research and thought, the game selection is like maybe the most varied of the drafts we’ve done so far in terms of like, the categories we did pick as people, as we’ll get to are like so rich with stuff that it becomes a case of like, I’m less worried about what Matthew will grab first and more like how do I curate a list out of this massive, massive pile of things? Is that kind of how you saw it too? Yeah, there’s a category, definitely a couple of categories in there where they are so not my bag that I’m, you know, like totally faking it. And, you know, I just haven’t, I haven’t played the things that I’m aiming to get. And a few of the genres I was really fond of, like I was playing PC games in this time. And, you know, we did have a family PC, so that stuff was open to me, but I feel like I lived so many of the classic sort of vicariously and, or their sort of, there are so many kind of key texts, you know, like genres are kind of invented and born in this decade that everyone feels like they’ve absorbed certain games by osmosis, regardless of whether they played them and kind of unpicking some of that. And I’m picking like what’s important and what I actually like and what I actually know is, I don’t know, that’s kind of tricky. Yeah, it’s a really interesting set of categories in the sense that like, there’s some that like the firm genre categories and there are some that cross genres by their nature. And that allows you to like pull the list in the direction that you find interesting. And we did that deliberately because me and Matthew have very different areas of expertise specifically in PC gaming. So it made sense to give each other like the kind of like the broadest sort of like array possible of options. So I think we’ve allowed ourselves to do that, which is good. So Matthew, before we get into the draft, we always have a lovely little preamble here where we sort of share some memories and stuff. What are your memories of PC gaming? You say you had a family computer in the nineties. Nineties, PC gaming, what was your whole experience of that? Frustration really, because, you know, it’s maybe like hard to kind of imagine in this age where everyone’s so tech savvy, but these were incredibly complicated to have them in the home. You know, I remember having lessons at school where we had like an IT lesson, where basically the whole lesson was about what an email address is, and they used to have to kind of teach you that kind of stuff, and it seemed so sort of baffling and confusing. To me, it was something which was clearly a gateway to the best games you could play, or definitely the most technologically advanced games you could play, like the gulf between PC and console is just so vast. But at the same time, it was a gateway like I just didn’t understand. And if anything went wrong, I was completely in the hands of either very limited internet time, or friends, or my friend’s dad’s, who maybe knew about PCs. I didn’t grow up, I don’t think I grew up in a very PC savvy household. Like my parents, my stepdad, not a PC guy at all. No joke, I have very clear memories of hearing him sitting at the PC, yelling to my mum, Lesley, where’s the Q? Where’s the Q on the keyboard? And thinking like, oh my god. That’s what we were dealing with. Well, I had friends who had PCs before us, and you’d go around to their houses, and I felt like they were on another level, because basically their dads could make stuff happen for them. So, yeah, it was kind of, yeah, like I say, frustrating. A lot of getting games for Christmas and birthdays, and then not being able to get into work for weeks, or getting them to work, and then there was no sound, because they wouldn’t work with the sound blaster card, or whatever the hell it was. It’s not like now where you can just go on Twitter and go, help. You know, it was kind of, you had to wait until someone else had the same problem as you, and then maybe one person fixed it. It was a fucking nightmare, to be honest. Yeah. So, my dad was more PC savvy. My mum just in technology is so like, that’s like another level of doesn’t understand, which is strange because she got a PC before anyone because she had a student grant for being a working class mother basically in the 90s. She spent that getting a rudimentary PC which could play Mario is Missing, a very basic ass like faux 3D tennis game that was an absolute migraine to look at. Just like basically like you’re just in a puddle of sick, just looking at someone do a serve. That kind of like early. And it cost the price of a small house to have that experience. Yeah. And it like could do some things. Eventually we got like a separate CD-ROM drive, that old thing, because the limits of like floppy disk games in the kind of mid 90s were firmly reached. So you kind of needed to move over. And then that was exciting. That opened up like a world more stuff. But then it definitely got to the point where the PC, Windows 3.1 I think it was, just wasn’t cut out for like modern games. So my dad like knew a lot of like, he was in the fire brigade, he knew a lot of like men with hobbies. And so we got like one of their like cast off PCs. There was like a little cabal of people who played PCs at the time. The first issue of PC Gamer I ever got in the 90s was like, like just left around in the fire station where my dad worked, he was just kind of in a pile of reading material, so he brought it home. And then like, yeah, weirdly, I think through that connection is kind of how I got into PC gaming in the 90s where he got a cast off PC from somebody who just upgraded in like 1998 or something. And so we had a Windows 98 PC that could suddenly play basically everything for a certain period of time up until about 2001, then it became a bit dicey. But like, yeah, so that was kind of an interesting journey. So went from playing these really like basic games like Lion King and Aladdin on these kind of like PC format, kind of like floppy disks, floppy disk demos to starting to accumulate my pile of Star Wars games, which I’ve discussed on the previous episodes. That was a big part of what I was playing in the 90s. But then like a massive part of it for me was having the 90s PC Gamer cover this. You get like the two CD-ROMs each month and they’d be rammed with stuff. And then sometimes they do like CDs that had like a special themed one where you had a bunch of demos from like older games you might have missed when the issue came out so you could suddenly play a bunch of stuff at once. And that was like massive, like the demo stuff. I think the osmosis thing you say there, that kind of like, I think the demo is a part of it where you have some, you have like a banter or two about a game because you play Yoda stories on a PC Gamer demo disc like 25 years ago. Like that’s such a part of PC gaming or just a vague memories of a game, like a shooter where all you did was play as a turret, a static turret while things came towards you. I remember that game or like Roll Cage. I never played the full version of Roll Cage but I love the living shit out of the demo that came with PC Gamer for Roll Cage. Like that kind of stuff. There’s a lot of that going on with PC gaming alongside the, in reality, 10 to 1590s PC games I actually owned, you know? But yeah, a good time. Tell you what though, Matthew. PC gaming did seem unsexy to me at the time as someone who like had a PC that could work with games and I had some friends who were jealous of that, but like the hot shit at the time to me seemed like PlayStation and N64. This is where like Metal Gear Solid was happening and like GoldenEye was happening. These are the games I wanted to play. But in retrospect, I think I was actually pretty lucky. So I was curious if you thought PC gaming seems more or less exciting than console gaming at the time in retrospect. Do you think that’s changed over time? Like how PC gaming is regarded versus console gaming in the 90s? Yeah, I guess depending on what you’re into, because like running alongside all this, you know, when I was playing PC for the first time, you know, I was playing N64 every day. You know, I was obsessed with my N64. And even though we suddenly had access to the, you know, quote unquote, proper PC first person shooters, we still played GoldenEye and then moved on to Perfect Dark. And that was the shooter we played for. You know, we played rare shooters for, like, six years straight or something ridiculous. So even though we had, you know, we definitely had, like, maybe not the full game, but like a demo of, like, Quake. And you could see, like, how much more advanced it was. But we were just, I don’t know, I just think, like, the social situation so defined my tastes of what I was into, like, who I could play with. Like, I never, I don’t think I played, like, an online PC game until, until, like, well into the early 2000s. Like, the idea of, like, managing to get that to work or, like, a LAN party. I mean, my parents wouldn’t let us take the family PC out the house. That’s insane. I remember once, you know, I still don’t really understand how these things worked. But playing Command & Conquer Red Alert and somehow, like, dialing someone else’s house up through the PC and, like, hearing their mum through my PC, like, on their phone, which I still don’t really know what happened. I, like, that’s how, like, dumb I was when it came to PCs and modems and the internet and how things worked. I was like, they must have just got a blast of, like, weird modem shit down the phone. And then in the background, in the backgroud, in the backgroud, a man’s… They wanted to play Red Alert? I don’t know. Like, it’s like our elderly neighbours or something. It’s like the idea that in the background I can just hear, like, this is a man shouting, Leslie! Leslie! Your voice is coming out of the computer! So, yeah, it’s… Was it desirable? I don’t know. It’s weird. I’m trying to work out why I didn’t really think of PC as a primary platform, because I don’t think I did. Like, there was stuff I coveted and wanted, and when I got them, I loved them. Some of my favourite games of all time I played on PC at this time. But I didn’t think of myself as a PC Gamer or a PC owner in the way that I was an N64 owner and Gamer. There’s something a lot more graspable and tangible and achievable, I guess, about N64. I thought, oh, I can sort of simplify, I can make this happen. Well, I never got over that slightly difficult hurdle with PC in these early years. You were too young, that’s why. Because a lot of these games were in an older audience. I was a teenager for late 90s. I think a big part of it is down to social set and what your friends are into. Because I know people my age who actually, their teenage years were defined by multiplayer games. Like a lot of the Gamer Network people who are roughly not too far off, the kind of Rupert Loman and Co, like Gamer Network, the first person shooters of the 90s are hugely important to them. I don’t know if you remember this, all their toilets were named after Quake maps. I was there for three months. It doesn’t all stick to be honest. But I did actually wonder what all those names were. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was because that was what they were playing multiplayer. So, you know, just different situations, maybe like a two-year age difference was enough to kind of push you into that area, but I definitely like, you know, all my friends played N64, but then they all had like a PC and I could go to different houses to play different things. You know, my friend Dan like had Baldur’s Gate and we’d go there and like watch the opening FMV and be like, fuck me, it’s like the most amazing movie you’ve ever seen. And then, you know, someone else would have, you know, been mega into their strategy games and would have their kind of handle on that. But it would just wasn’t, it didn’t really feel very unified. It felt like everyone was like nibbling at the edges, which is what this draft is kind of difficult about it for me as well. It’s like there’s bits where I feel comfortable nibbling and know more about and then there’s lots of places where I’m like, fuck. Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. I think, I honestly think the age thing is significant because I don’t think it’s just a case of like you’re 15 so you could have been into this stuff too. I mean, the online gaming thing was about access more than anything. We didn’t have broadband till 2002, I don’t think. And I had a friend who had it slightly before, but like that means I basically missed Quake 3 as a thing. You know what I mean? Yeah. That didn’t really happen for me. Unreal Tournament happened a little bit. I had Unreal Tournament the original, but I only ever played Bot Fights, just me and a load of phantom AI running around these amazing maps pretending that we’re playing with friends and having a good time. Yeah, but I’ll be honest with you, that was still really fucking fun. Oh yeah. Yeah. I had Unreal Tournament too and I was playing it offline like a not insignificant period of time. It was still really fast paced, fun shooter, like great weapons, looked amazing, really fantastic maps. Like yeah, Unreal Tournament still ruled if you were playing by yourself, like it sounds kind of pathetic. That’s more it, it’s the poor little me. No, but I completely agree with you. I think that stuff had real value and like, yeah, it’s funny how the socioeconomic situation is such a big part of what affects your background with games and PC gaming has always been so prohibitively expensive. That’s why I think like, you know, like the Steam Deck is actually like pretty awesome in terms of the offering, like the actual kind of hardware set up, the fact that you will be able to dock it soon and then like use it as basically a functional gaming PC for about 400 quid with the dock and stuff like that. That rules because it’s just never been that accessible. And so yeah, yeah, I like that. But yeah, in the 90s, yeah, PC gaming seemed so unsexy to me as someone who had it, but the grass seemed so much greener in console land. And then in retrospect, I actually think I was quite lucky to have a lot of my sensibilities like formed by these games. So yeah. Do you think magazines played a part? Like, I think the voices of PC gaming magazines and console mags were quite different. Yeah, it was like skewing older for sure. Yeah, like there was a lot of… I remember buying PC Gamer when I was like, I don’t know, 12 or 13, and there being stuff in there where I was like, I don’t know what that means, you know, like, I don’t get that. You know, this feels like there’s a load of adults talking around me and I don’t really know what’s going on. But in Games Master, it was all kind of like, you know, four Lara Crofts and you’re like, yeah, I can get on board with that. There was such an explosion of like box outs and so many of those console Macs. Like it was just, you know, a sort of attention span shattering kind of like layout basically, pulling your eyes in different directions. Whereas PC Gamer was much more, I must say, I never read PC Zone. Sorry about that. That’s no slight against PC Zone. It’s just that PC Gamer was the first one I read, so that’s the one I kept reading. So you know, I sounds like I would have liked Zone though. Very anarchic writers, like Final Days. I probably would have got a lot out of it. Like I think if I’d actually read Zone, maybe I would have been more into PC gaming because Zone actually put the kind of playful, fun, accessible face on it. I think you’re wrong. I think you’re wrong about that. PC Gamer was like just as sort of silly, just as in-jokey, just as fun. Yeah, it was, like it was, those reviews were like super fun. I just remember lots of Tank Simulator reviews. No, no, you’re misremembering it. PC Gamer was like totally in that ballpark too. Zone took it further, but PC Gamer was fun. It was like the like, let’s dress up Kieran Gillan as a mime for a back page kind of joke kind of mag. Like it was that as well. Like it’s, yeah, it’s, maybe you just, yeah, I don’t know, maybe you don’t. Well listen, I apologize to the memory of PC Gamer. I do not want to, you know, cast any aspersions on it. Well look, any magazine that has like a funny gag and then Ed at the end in brackets, it’s like, you know, that’s a fun 90s game, yeah, that is factually accurate. So yeah, definitely, definitely affected it, Matthew, definitely affect the games I picked on this list. Like a lot of the games that were like revered and PC Gamer in the late 90s, early noughties. A lot of that stuff is, has informed my, you know, the games I want to pick for the draft. So that’s, that’s cool. Matthew, I was curious, what I found really interesting in researching this episode. And I’ll be honest, this took more research than any of them so far. Like even the N64 draft where I had to play Blast Core with its, which was slightly unbearable. And Jet Force Gemini, which was incredibly unbearable. This one took like probably 10 plus hours of research over the last couple of weeks, like some real build up. And the big thing that stands out is how much PC gaming, the landscape of it changes from the early 90s to the late 90s. Now genres just move so fast. You have the advent of like 3D graphics in the mid 90s basically, and then that kind of like kind of coincides with a lot of like revolutionary game design as well. And then like sort of a slicker sort of UI and a slicker user experience generally. Like things just progress so quickly. And so in my head, I’ve almost kind of divided them into two areas. Is that kind of how you saw it from researching this episode? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, rather than like specific areas, I mean, just like you say, an era of incredible change and like innovation and how fast things form, you know, certain genres pop into existence. And then three years later, they’ve almost already evolved into their final form and haven’t really changed. I guess like there’s maybe a change in sensibility in some more like, like heavier storytelling stuff comes in later, like in the last couple of years, you know, basically after Half Life, it feels like things suddenly get a little bit more sophisticated. And that isn’t to do with specific genres, that’s more just like a change in taste. Suddenly everyone becomes a lot more interested in things being a bit more kind of coherent and I don’t know, less, less traditionally gamey in a way. Yeah, but I, yeah, to be honest, I was mainly just playing point and click games. So you know, I could say I could see how different they became. And basically that was the one genre which sort of did die out that decade. It felt like, you know, everything, everyone else, everything else was being born and, and you know, becoming something new. This was something which had hit its stride in the early nineties and then was kind of struggling to kind of fit into the late nineties and, you know, and then people get upset if you say adventure gaming peters out after that, you know, they’ll be like, well actually there’s all these, but mainstream blockbuster adventure gaming is not hot after 2000, I would say. No, it’s because like, what is really interesting about this decade is that so many of like the genres that are big on PC have defined, permanently defined my interest in games. So a real time strategy game will always be exciting to me because that’s, that to me is still one of the main genres, but like to some players, it might not, you know, people who grew up maybe 10 years after me, they probably don’t see it that way at all. You know, they might see like, you know, basically MOBAs as that or, you know, open world games as that. And so my kind of core, I guess my core interests are very much like defined by the genres on PC. I mean, you’re right, like, I think like point and click is unusual in the sense that like, well, point and click and strategy kind of both go through similar sort of challenges, basically, the strategy lasts a lot longer. Point and click just kind of hits the wall where those games don’t work on console. And so they are PC only games at a time where things are starting to become more multi format. So although they actually they do die, they do die before that properly happens. So it may just be genre fatigue or LucasArts stop making them or whatever. But yeah, I’m sure that’s been well documented elsewhere. Yeah, that’s the kind of like PC, the modern PC gaming aspect for me, Matthew. It’s a lot of my tastes were kind of defined here. Something I wanted to ask you about actually, before we get to the draft is the state of preservation with these. It’s noticeably way better than other platforms have it. Did you notice that doing this? Like unlike our other drafts, I’ve not gone with the angle of like, what card you play now because it’s almost a periodic effort. You might as well just pick 10 good games. That’s kind of how I approached it. How about you? Yeah, there are a few things that sort of slip through the cracks, and there are a few things, but even those, there’s things that I played way after the fact, so they are playable in one form or another. Yeah, I think you’re right. I know there are literally games I remember like buying or borrowing from friends that I could never get to work on our PC, because I literally didn’t understand how to make DOS work, because that could happen. Who told you about that stuff? It’s like, oh, there’s this other secret mode that you have to go into, and this game works in that. I was like, what the fuck? And now you have your DOS box or whatever that sort it all out. Everything is so automated in the modern age. So it’s not just that a lot of these things have lived on, it’s that people have found nice ways for them to actually be better and just more enjoyable to play. They’ve improved them, they’ve patched them, they’ve fixed them after the fact. Yeah, and it puts a huge wrinkle in the draft thinking, because you’re like, yeah, fuck it, I should just pick 10 things that I like, that I think represent the time, rather than what I can and can’t play. There’s actually not really a PC mini approach to this, and this draft, that’s where it’s a bit different to the other ones, where we’ve basically packaged it up as, if you saw these two consoles on the shelf, which would you buy? I don’t think there’s much point doing that here, because fighting over the elusive stuff just ends up being a scrap over the 10 to 20 obscure, cool PC games that you just can’t get unless you’re prepared to just go download a dodgy version of my abandoned wear and then run it with compatibility settings and messing with EXE files and all that stuff. It’s almost not worth it, I would say. You might as well just pick the games that matter. Matthew, any more thoughts on PC gaming, 90s PC gaming, before we move on to the draft? There’s a lot of good stuff, and don’t be cross if we don’t pick the thing that you loved. Yeah, that’s it. This is the disappointed dad’s episode of The Back Page:. Oh, it really is. So much of this stuff is so… The only thing with this, I was like, oh, I could like bring in a… You know, I could get like, call in some old childhood friends. You could basically do this way better than me. Because I had friends who, you know, I was… No, I was about to say I was friends with them because they had big PC gaming collections. I was friends with them because I liked their awesome personalities. But they also happened to be people who were a bit savvier. And I’m like, oh, man, like, Dan would absolutely destroy this draft in my stead. But I don’t think that’s really allowed. No, it’s not like you bring on Dan and then I bring on, I don’t know, your dad. You know, my dad’s mate from the fire brigade. Yeah, like, yeah, yeah. So, no, that’s the other thing, right? Whenever we do these drafts, inevitably, as with all these features that have ever been posted on the Internet, people are like, why don’t you pick this? Why don’t you pick this? And it’s like, well, the answer is always, I just didn’t. Sorry about that. But like, but here, there’s a larger potential to disappoint because your experience could vary so much between these genres, because some genres have, like, literally 10, 15 defining games in them. So we’re bound to not pick something that you think is really important. I’m going to pick some right old shit. I’m excited. I’ve given this, like, massive amounts of thought, actually. There’s only two genres I’m a little dicey on. There’s, like, one I had to outright bluff, which is fine. I don’t mind doing that. Like, I could admit that. I’ve gone for more, like, importance there, rather than, you know, my kind of, like, base of knowledge. The rest, I’m OK with that. I think it’ll be a fun draft still. So, Matthew, shall we take a quick break, then come back with the 90s PC Gamer draft? Let’s do it. Welcome back to the podcast. So, in this section, we’re gonna do the 90s PC gaming draft. I’ll go to the category shortly. What you need to know as a listener. So, you can vote on who the winner is in the pinned tweet at Back Page: pod. It is a competitive draft. We’re trying to pick the best 10 PC games across these different categories. It’s a snake draft, which what that means is that whoever goes first picks one game, the next person picks two, and then the first person picks two, and it’s then two until the end. If that’s fair that way, so we avoid the very controversial Samuel Takes Golden Eye and Perfect Dark situation that made for such a good podcast about a year ago. So that’s how we’ve done it. Matthew, how about you read out these categories? Okay. So first up, we have two first person FPS games. Yep, that’s right. So categories one and two are both FPS games, different FPS games. We can talk about the categories afterwards, so I’ll just run through them. Third category is God Game or City Builder. Fourth category is Sim. Fifth category is Strategy. Sixth category, RPG. Seventh category, Point and Click slash Adventure Game. Eighth category, 90% plus from PC Gamer UK. Ninth category, The Wild Card, which is a more esoteric choice from the library. Tenth category is Free Pig. Anything you want. Yeah. So yeah, the thinking here, FPS, such a big part of PC in the 90s. Really hard to sum it all up with one category. This was a bit contentious to the couple of people on Twitter who were like, I wasn’t even playing FPS games in the 90s. It’s like, well, they were mega important though. It’s like, it’s the birthplace of the definitive genre. It’s like the genre and I just don’t think you can deny that. Yeah. I was surprised by the backlash to that. It’s a tiny backlash. Most people are quite excited about the podcast. I just want to clarify something. Any game in a first-person perspective? Yeah. I think that’s fine. I don’t necessarily have a FPS game that isn’t a shooter in mind, but I just want to have the freedom to potentially play in that space. Yeah. I don’t know. So, original Thief will be Matthew’s first pick. That’s no, not at all. Listen, we don’t know what’s going to happen. This is what it’s like in the Discord where we’re trying to sand each other out without giving away what is so obvious what we’re trying to do. It’s like the two least conspicuous men ever going to do to do to do. We act like, we’re over the old days of being very petty rivals, and then it comes right back, doesn’t it? It’s the same old bullshit that makes it so entertaining. Yeah. So the other categories here, Matthews, we’ve got two FPS categories. We’ve got God, Gamer, City Builder, another significant game. So that covers quite a broad array of stuff there, but there’s a definite type of game that we’re kind of like angling towards there, of kind of like management games that don’t involve kind of combat basically. Sim, that’s very broad actually, Sim. That covers like a massive range of stuff. So I’m going to say in advance, I really, really struggle with this. All right. I see. I think I nailed that one. So we’ll see how it goes. That’s the category that scares me. And I’ve, well, we’ll see when we get to it. Okay. So five, strategy. Again, like this is one that could have been two categories. So really strategy was a massive part of the 90s. This Matthew did ask me a clarification question offline. Yes, this includes tactics games. So turn-based games, anything like that. Anything that comes under the umbrella strategy is absolutely fine there. RPG, obviously very important on PC. A lot of like what happens with modern RPGs on all formats starts on PC in the 90s. So that’s important. Matthew, like point and click adventure game, that’s your area of expertise, isn’t it? Yeah, absolutely. An embarrassment of riches there. So many great things you can go for. I mean, this is just LucasArts absolutely nailing it, and a lot of these things, because there’s the strengths in the writing more than anything else, like they’re pretty timeless. So a lot of these things hold up. It’s really difficult boiling it down. I wouldn’t be surprised if several point-and-click games ended up on my list via various means. Yeah, so I’ve got 90% from PC Gamer UK, 90% plus rather from PC Gamer UK. That’s, you know, I used to edit PC Gamer. It gave me all these gray hairs, so I thought I’d honor it by putting it in the draft here. I had to do a bit of digging, actually, to see what a 9% game was. I forgot that we made like one of the most ill-advised things we did on PC Gamer was a poster with every single score we ever had on it. And like, I think it had like five or six mistakes in the end, but it was such a pain in the ass to edit. And then for some reason, we never just put the PDF online where you could look at it in like low resolution and just like, sorry, in high resolution and kind of pick over the scores. So we recovered all that information and then now it’s lost to time again. And it’s like, that’s so annoying. Yeah, I think the things I’ve got potentially lined up for that are all 90, like I looked them up and they seem to be in that kind of space, but I think we’re just going to trust each other on this one. Yeah, the tough thing is, well, game rankings used to be a good source for this, but that no longer exists for some reason. So that was kind of a shame, but still, yes, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Wildcard, yeah, we always have a category a bit like this in the draft, we usually do. This just allows you to pick something a bit left field. I think there’ll be some, maybe some discussion over what counts as wildcard here, Matthew, because I’ve picked something that I think is a wildcard to most people, but probably wouldn’t be to 90s PC gamers at the time, which I think is… There’s other stuff I could pick, but I think I would rather pick something that fits that description. Is that kind of how you approach that one? Yeah, again, like the wildcard is like the layer you dig into once you’ve exhausted all the top layer, but like I’m struggling with the top layer in places. So like the idea of me kind of skipping to the weird, it’s not a very lived in category for me, I would say. Like I think I only really played things that got 90% in PC Gamer. I now pretty account for like every category for me. But I think I’ve got a good one lined up. And then, yeah, so and then finally, free pick. We always like this because it just allows you to put your own little personal touch on it. Yeah. To, you know, it allows you to pull more in the direction of genres that you’re interested in. So maybe Matthew will use this to swing another Monkey Island or something. We will see. I’m just trying to psych him out. Yeah, so I’ll recap those. So we’ve got category one, FPS, category two, a second FPS, category three, God Game or City Builder, category four, Sim, category five, Strategy, can also include tactical games, category six, RPG, category seven, Point and Click slash Adventure Game, category eight, 90% plus on PC Gamer UK, category nine, Wild Card, category 10, Free Pick. Vote at Back Page: Pod Pins Tweet. That will be up for about a week. And then after that, I will take the Tweet down from the pin thing, but you can just check in the episode description if you’re a new listener and you can see who won. But we’ll talk about that in a future episode as well. Oh, should we get into it, Matthew? Let’s do it. All right, do you want to do the old coin flip? Because you can be trusted and I can’t, famously. What would you like? Tales. Tales it is. So I can go for, I can pick whether I go first or second. Whether you go first or not. Okay, yeah, sure. Gonna go first. Okay. Gonna start with the genre I’m on least sort of like, most kind of like shaky ground with and that’s RPG, I’m gonna take Baldur’s Gate. Okay. Now, so this is actually like a pretty packed genre. There’s plenty of stuff here to take. There’s like, you know, this is the birth of the Infinity Engine series of RPGs. There is like a fallow period before this that Bioware at the time, a new studio is basically credited with like wholesale turning the perception of PC RPGs around. So a fallow few years becomes this kind of like D&D sets like very like customization and character building heavy RPG set in this kind of like vast world with great writing and was just like beloved for the way that it would, it would let you kind of shape your experience essentially while kind of portraying this very kind of vivid world and kind of informed everything that would follow. Like modern RPGs don’t really resemble this very much, but there is like, there are series, there are like eras of Bioware games and they kind of like filter down from like one to the other. So, you know, you go from this to like the Neverwinter Nights kind of era, sort of like post infinity engine. Then you kind of go from that to like Mass Effect. Sorry, no, you go from that to like KOTOR and Jade Empire. You go from that to the Mass Effect and Dragon Age era. And so it goes. So, an enormously important step along the kind of genre sort of path. So, I felt like if there was one RPG that summed up the 90s RPG sort of phenomenon, well, this was the one. There’s actually quite a nice support of this on Nintendo Switch, Matthew. I’m not sure you’ve played that. I have, yeah. I’m just surprised you can get like a game like this running okay on a format like that. Did you think that worked quite well on Switch? Yeah, I liked it. Yeah, I thought it was good. Though Catherine didn’t like it because I was playing it in bed and like the repeated battle cries of which you hear a lot. The person who I had as my party lead, was it, is it Janira, is that her name? I can’t remember, but her quote was, yes, oh omnipresent authority figure. And like after a couple of nights, Catherine was just like, you’ve got to play that with headphones. Like, will you hear that authority figure lying one more time? I feel like Catherine’s very tolerant, so it must have been annoying. She’s trying to read some very delicate Japanese literature. And there’s me just being an idiot with Baldur’s Gate. Yeah, I really like this game. I know people, you know, Baldur’s Gate 2 is the better game, not a 90s game, sadly. But I think this has got like loads and loads of charm. You know, it’s like you say, it’s where a lot of this stuff starts. There’s a lot of people’s first taste of it. The world’s really, really fun. I don’t know if there’s a collection of this in the 90s, which also has the expansion, but… No, maybe we should have a rule on this, actually. Should we say that like if the expansion released in the 90s, you get it as well? Yeah, that’s… I’ve not got a problem with that. Yeah, I think then that maybe does get you an expansion for this. Yeah, it gets you Tales from the Sword Coast. Yeah, okay, that’s absolutely fine, then. Which is… You would say that. Oh, that’s absolutely fine. I get this awesome expansion pack. It extends the same liberty to you. I think it’s really fair. None of my things have expansion packs. Why did I… Oh, anyway, that’s fine. It’s a really good expansion pack. It adds just four quite substantial… Probably the best quests in the game, I think, are in the expansion pack. I think another really key thing to say about Baldur’s Gate as well is that, or rather this category generally, is that there’s no point in saying it doesn’t play well now. There’s no point in saying that with any of these, because all of these games get surpassed in some way or another. There’s not much use to being like, well, it has no value now about this stuff, because obviously you would play the enhanced edition of this, rather than the original if given the choice, unless you’re ultra hardcore. I think you can still buy the original on GOJ. That’s the other thing. The genres move ahead so quickly as well that, even when I was reading PC Gamer’s Top 100s for some of these games, they were saying games from two years before were starting to show their age. It’s like, wow, you were too used to games progressing super quickly in that era these days. It just doesn’t move as fast. What’s your first pick and your second pick, Matthew? My first pick… Let’s go for a super obvious one, just because there’s a very good chance I’ll shit in the bed, so I’ll try and get a populist pick in the pack. I’ll go FPS and I’ll take Half-Life 1. Which is ultra obvious, I would say. But, you know, hugely important game. I genuinely think we sort of live in the post-Half-Life world still, in terms of what people expect from narrative and people’s ability to cram storytelling into every nook and cranny. I know that there are other games doing interesting storytelling things, but this is definitely a lot of people’s first major taste of that large narrative opening, the side dialogue, the environmental storytelling, all this stuff which we love to this day, I think, is definitely popularised, not perfected, but introduced in a really exciting way here. I wasn’t reading vast amounts of PC gaming coverage back then, so this sort of came out of nowhere. I didn’t have any expectations for it, but there was suddenly this… It was suddenly out of nowhere, people going, oh, there’s an Ocarina of Time quality kind of game or whatever that you have to play. There’s an essential genre-defining thing, and going to buy it in the shop, seeing that manky-ass rusted orange box and thinking, this? This is the future, is it? Being really scared of it, like, because I’m so wuss, when it all goes to shit and the aliens start turning up. Like, headcrabs, I remember genuinely not playing this game for quite a while because I didn’t like those things jumping at me. I actually think it takes you a little while to get to the really good stuff where you’ve got, like, aliens and armed forces and it’s already kicking off. The initial run of this was a little bit too intense for however old I was back then. But, yeah, I mean, you know, a really great game. Bad music, I think. I hate the music in Half-Life. The original voice acting is a tough hang these days. Yeah. By then I said I wouldn’t do that just in the last entry. But the other thing is, Matthew, when we previously talked about what other games inspired the old Pat the Ox thing with Uncharted, this game is probably first at the starting line, right? You walk into places, there are triggered narrative events. It all kind of happens here. It’s enormously important in the history of cinematic presentation in games. I felt a bit bad though because when we were talking about Max Payne, I was like, oh, Remedy did it. And they didn’t. They may have definitely done a very good version of it in the third person space. I somehow completely forgot that this existed in a really important way. I don’t think you can argue with Half-Life really. Maybe I can argue with the bad ending as well. Bad music, bad ending, I’d say. But that’s okay because I think most people probably remember the first half more anyway. And also, the other thing is that this game is a continuous world essentially. In terms of how it tells its story, it’s less itemized by levels as the FPS had traditionally been designed. So that itself is still really impressive. I would have picked this. I should have picked this first. Fuck, never mind. Golden Gate is still a very good pick. But there’s only one game like Half-Life from the 90s. That is what’s good about this pick, I think. Yes, that’s true. There was lots of stuff I was really excited about including, and they’re all 2001 or 2002. My memory squished a lot of stuff together. I thought a lot of stuff happened earlier than it did. I thought we were into… For some reason in the 90s, I thought we were into Jedi Knight 2 territory, and No One Lives Forever 2, and those are early naughties, but oh well. There’s also a really odd thing that happens. This might come up with later entries, I don’t know, but the immersive sim, as I sort of know it and like it, happens just like months after the 90s. So close. There are immersive sims in the 90s, but in terms of the ones I really like, they are in the next decade, just by a few months in some cases. That’s interesting. What’s your second pick, Matthew? Oh man, there’s so many good things. Yeah, it’s really good. It was really hard to just narrow some of this stuff down. I’m going to get the category that I’m struggling the most without the way, because I literally don’t really have anything for it, which is sin. I’m going to take Star Wars Tie Fighter. Oh fuck, that sucks. No, that was the game I played so much of this week, ready to take it. I feel bad because I’ve never played it. That’s even worse, you motherfucker. Oh, you absolute prick. Fuck you, Matthew Castle. Oh, Jesus Christ. You absolute wanker. I should have picked it first. I thought there’s no way you’d go for that. I thought you would misunderstand that that was even a sim, and I thought you’d pick Microsoft Flight Simulator or something. I had vague memories of playing Flight Unlimited 2 at someone’s house. Oh, go on then, Matthew. Tell me about why TIE Fighter is so good. Oh, man. Well, it’s the classic 1994 space combat sim from Totally Games. A lot of people, you know, they maybe mix in these space fighting games with the simpler arcade-y dog fighting games, but I would argue that there was enough controls on the keys. This was very much a simulator. The level of control you had over your energy distribution, shield placement around your ship. There was a lot going under the hood compared to your rogue leaders or whatnot. Put the back of the box down now, Matthew. I’ve got to be honest. I haven’t played this game because it looks too complicated at the time. Sam, I feel terrible, but I had to have something that wasn’t bad. Yeah, this game is really cool. Tell me about it. Yeah, so I played loads of this this week. It’s a game that I had previously owned, right? But like, let’s think. So basically, the whole thing is that there’s a game called X-Wing before this. It obviously lets you simulate playing as all the different Rebel Alliance spaceships. This comes out, flips the switch to like you play as the bad guy now. Weaves you into, I say storyline. There is a storyline, there are cutscenes and stuff. It’s a very loose storyline framework. But it definitely makes you feel like you’re part of like the bastard organization and makes like the Empire seem like scary and cool. Like there’s a hooded guy who represents like the Emperor who turns up at the end of missions and stuff. And like just from your interactions with people, you just never feel like you’re on the side of the good guys. And then you’re flying these ships that are like progressively, they do become more powerful in terms of like, you know, the later ships have shields and different weapons. But like the TIE fighters themselves have barely any shields. So it’s a sense that you’re like high risk, high reward kind of like combat. And this actually plays really well with an Xbox controller. I played that this week, so I don’t have a joystick. But to people at home, if you buy the GOG version, the special edition of this game will just work out of the box with an Xbox controller. And then I think you use the X button to maybe, I think it’s the X button you use to shoot. And then you can just use the left stick to kind of like move around. And then if you don’t mind like hitting your keyboard separately every now and then, just to kind of like divert power and do slightly easier target select, it works really, really well. And like the difficulty setting is incredibly generous. If you play on easy, the rebel ships basically won’t shoot you. So you can just like treat them as a target gallery. But if you turn it up, then you get a much higher level of challenge. Absolute ton of missions. Really like fun, basic missions, but just really good. Amazing sound design. Has like a dynamic soundtrack, which I think was revolutionary for the time. So it perks up and goes down again, depending on what’s happening in the game. There’s some really nice kind of like pauses and it ramps up again. Really dramatic. Just, yeah, like takes that X-wing formula, then super refines it and gives you kind of like a tonal, like a kind of, there’s like a tone to the game that you just don’t, you just haven’t seen in other Star Wars games. And that’s why I think it remains so special. So, yeah. I mean, it sounds amazing. And I can pick it. Yeah, I should play this sometime. To be honest, though, I was in a similar position with Baldur’s Gate. So I get it. It’s good to get the bluffs out of the way, you know. I was watching some videos of it and, yeah, I liked the thing with those, like the strange hooded man who almost seemed to give you, like, counter objectives to what the main objective was. You’re going to be up to no good for me, the Emperor. And I was like, that’s cool. And it also had… It has, like, the Star Wars scroll, but it’s from the perspective of the Empire. Yeah, that’s right. So it’s all like, yes, we absolutely smashed them on Hoth. And they’re like, oh, that’s quite fun. Like, they really lent into it. Yeah, I feel bad about this, but I also… I just didn’t want to be humiliated in the sim category. So it wasn’t done pendictively. No, that’s okay. It’s honestly fine. Like, this serves me right for not going second, really. What can you do? I’m glad I picked it now because you would have picked it relatively early on, I think. I also know the listeners will enjoy my reaction to you picking it. That’s going to be like, okay, it’s just tough to pick what to take next. Because there are like… The tricky thing with some of these is like, do you take something from a category that you know is a super important game, but like, are you like picking too prematurely and you should like patch over a different category? So picking your RPG before you pick your sim. Some might say that’s a fraught approach. Okay, but I think I know what I’m going to do with my next two now. So I’m going to get my point and click game out of the way, Matthew. I’m going to take Grim Fandango. Okay. So, yep, there are so many games to pick from this. I’ve picked what I think is probably the one that’s the most refined in terms of inspirations and presentation. Like the one I consider the classiest, I would say, in terms of this is a film noir-infused, kind of like a Day of the Dead, Aztec afterlife inspired adventure. Basically, the end of its kind minus Escape from Monkey Island. Escape from Monkey Island was awesome as well. Basically, what happens is these games finally become more up-to-date and kind of 3D, but right at the end of their lifespan, that’s the weird thing about this genre, it just kind of peters out. And honestly, I don’t quite have the same connection to Monkey Island that I’m sure that you do. So I felt like picking this was most appropriate, because I think the very specific kind of oddball set of inspirations, no other game looks like this in terms of you are living in this world. It’s basically about the mechanics of the afterlife, in this almost kind of like future armory, or like Brazil-style kind of dystopia of how the afterlife actually works. That is such a specific and interesting approach to world building, and they extract so much kind of funny stuff out of it. Yeah, the mood of this one really works. I had played this at the time, and then it was a few years ago when they did the re-release, because this was out of circulation for so many years, this one. Just couldn’t get hold of it. It wasn’t on any of the services. Then Disney bought LucasArts, and then all of this stuff ended up on different services, and Double Fine brought it back as a really nice complete edition. You can now get on Switch. It’s actually one of the only games. I think it’s the only one of those games you can get on Switch. So it made it look visually really, really nice. And yeah, still so distinctive. How’s all the hallmarks of this genre in terms of the puzzles will just annoy you a lot of the time, and you won’t really know how to progress. But I think all these games are best played with a walkthrough now, Matthew, so you can just enjoy the scriptwriting and the jokes and the different locations. Is that how you feel about this genre? Yeah, a little bit. Some of them are kind of… I don’t know. It’s hard to say, because I played so many of them, I sort of have a vague memory, or anything that’s truly nasty stays with me. So I’ve kind of got an inbuilt walkthrough for a lot of these games. But yeah, definitely. There’s some super strange stuff in it. I remember being very irritated. There’s a few sort of logic puzzles which aren’t brilliantly fun. There’s one quite near the start where you’re trying to change these sort of pneumatic pumps to knock over this tower. Stuff like that is just fucking blows. What about the actual world and the writing and stuff? I absolutely love this game. I mean, this was… When I played this, I was super into Terry Pratchett as well. And this is a very sort of similar kind of… Maybe you’re making the connection because the Discord books obviously had Death as a character and he was very funny. And I like the idea of kind of like quite surreal twists on things that feel like they should be important and this fit right into that. I think a lot of it went over my head. I replayed it again years later and I could appreciate a lot more of the adult jokes. It’s not like condescending in any way. It’s not embarrassed to have jokes that work for different people. There’s some really silly stuff and then there’s some quite sophisticated genre prestige of noir and pulp fiction things which maybe passed me by when I first played it. Had a cutscene in this game I was obsessed with. I used to turn on my PC just to re-watch the cutscene, which is at the end of the very first act where you’re basically chasing this woman who you’ve given a dud deal to and you sort of feel bad about it. He wants to go and give her the proper ticket to the afterlife that she deserves and he chases her down to this kind of port. He just misses her. She’s leaving on a boat and he’s left in this cafe manny and he’s mopping the floor and he’s really dejected and the camera kind of pans up to the sky and then it says one year later or something and then suddenly you get this amazing tune. It’s kind of like big party time, big drum beat. You’re like, what the hell is going on? And then the camera pans back down and in the year that’s passed, he’s turned the club into this huge casino. The town’s absolutely bustling. It’s like the most happening place. And I just remember thinking like that cinematic transition was just one of my favorite, favorite things for so long. Like it used to give me chills watching it. So yeah, I absolutely adore this game. Like it’s super, super important. Yeah, it’s a great pick. It’s the most kind of like singular mix of things. Like I think like the kind of flourished you’re talking about there, Matthew, is why people have always been like lobbying for this to be a film because they could see it in their mind’s eye as like a stop motion animated thing. I wanted everything to be a film. Everything I liked when I was 15, I wanted to be a film. This Monkey Island, I was always talking to my friends about how I turned Monkey Island into a film. I think I drove them up the fucking wall. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, this is one of those LucasArts games that I’ve like played the most basically, and that’s kind of how it ended up here. Next up, right, I’m going to take Strategy, and I’m going to take Age of Empires 2, Age of Kings. Yeah, I thought you might. Yeah, so this one is… Age of Empires was a massive game for me, the first one. It comes along and like, this was a PC Gamer demo that I played obsessively. I had four missions in the original Age of Empires demo. One of them was slightly longer, and I used to extend it by basically building every single building I could, building the biggest army possible just to kind of raise this tiny little enemy base, just because I was obsessed with the notion of building a huge army and building a huge base. That, to a ten-year-old’s mind, is just kind of spot on, and so I loved all that shit about the RTS genre. But the second one was way grander, just had a much bigger sweep of a campaign. I think it brought in hero characters for the first time, so you’d start the game as Joan of Arc and stuff, and that was the tutorial. It basically just transitions through different bits of history. It gives you a massive increase in number of units you can have on screen over the first game. It looked so much nicer. It just got absolutely chaotic with the amount of siege weaponry you could build, sending those towards each other, building these castles, reaching these castle ages and building these elite units, which are different depending on the side you’re playing as. I absolutely loved this shit. There’s a reason people are still obsessed with this game, and there are two different versions of the game you can play right now, and there’s a massive audience for both of them, and that’s because this is still the best at what it does, to the point where the game Age of Empires IV that came out last year was essentially this again, but looked a lot nicer and had some good quality of life changes. This has been very well preserved, but as a kind of distillation of strategy in the 90s, this is one of the games I wanted to pick for this, Matthew. How did you crack the strategy genre? It’s a question I always want to ask people who are into strategy games from a young age, because I just cannot get into it. And I’ve always said, oh, my brain’s not made for it, but that can’t be true. There must have been a struggle at first, right? There must have been a hump to get over, or did it just instantly speak to you? I think it instantly spoke to me, and I found the right games at the right time. I think the first one I ever played was Red Alert, and that was because a friend of mine over the road had the PS1 version, and so he was playing on his TV. I was asking him all these questions about, so you can build different units, and they come out, and you can choose what units you get to build and stuff like that. He was playing a super early mission. That was just a really good way to understand the potential of it, because it was really exciting to see it all pop off. The sound effects are really good. The music by Frank Klepacki, I think it is, I’m definitely mispronouncing his name there, was just so, so fun. The different factions had these really distinctive identities, and then you’d see in the cutscene this budget actor pretending to be Joseph Stalin in this alternate history and stuff. So it seemed so, so fun to me like that, Matthew. Then I discovered other games from that. My dad already had Civilization on PC, so I would just flick that on. I would watch him play it, and I got him to actually sit down with me and explain how that game works. He’s like, see, build a settler that you can go wherever you want. You can move the city to different places, and then when you build a city, you can name your city. That’s the other weird thing. It’s like the creativity aspect of strategy games is why I like them, Matthew. I like to be able to build my own little base. I like to be able to select what my army looked like. I wasn’t an optimization guy. I didn’t really care about any of that stuff. I just liked the act of building something that’s yours and then going to war with it. For some reason, that was just very compelling to me. So I hope that helps as an explanation of my… It speaks to some very dark energy in you. Yeah. So, yeah. So, Age of Empires 2 is right on the cusp of the end of the decade. I don’t think I get any expansions of this one, unfortunately. Oh, because didn’t they make expansions to this for forever, basically? I think they still are, technically making them. So, yeah, it keeps coming. I think there’s actually, like, literally one out this year. Over 20 years later. So, yeah, Age of Empires 2, Age of Kings. I’ve got Age of Empires 2, Baldur’s Gate and Grim Fandango so far. Not a bad start, if I do say so myself. So, what about your next two picks, Matthew? I’m going to take… I have Thief Gold. You OK with that? Being in the FPS category? Yeah, it’s like first person. It is first person. Ironically, what’s interesting about Thief and why Thief is amazing is that in an era where the first person perspective meant shooting things, here comes a game which is explicitly about not really getting into any combat with anything and hiding in the shadows. Maybe there are examples before it, but in my mind this is where a lot of the core foundations of what stealth is going to be comes to play. The idea of light and dark and a visibility gem. Some of the tactics of removing lights. Not every stealth game has shooting moss arrows, which I still think is a little silly. The idea of spraying this moss everywhere so you can walk quietly and cosh people. But the idea of a game where being unseen and not getting into conflict is going to win. I think I do prefer Thief 2 in terms of some of its levels are grander, a bit more exciting kind of landscape to be in. But a lot of what is great about the idea of Thief is all here. I think it’s also a pretty good horror game as well. The idea that it’s a world where you are safest in the dark, light is explicitly scary to you, but then you are also in quite scary locations. There are supernatural elements in this game as well, which are not like super frightening, it’s not like freaking Slender Man or something, but there’s some quite creepy stuff and it’s asking you to play in quite a way where you will naturally be uncomfortable, which I think is super smart. So I actually think it gets a lot of the tension of the horror genre as well, weirdly. It’s kind of a two for one. Yeah, and also just in my head, when I see a picture of Thief, it just looks like the 90s to me. The weird spindly limbs on the characters have a very distinct visual energy. It has got a real visual identity, this game, which is kind of slightly timeless, I think. Yeah, just really smart. I was quite bad at it, but I did love this game. Yeah, so this is one I thought about. I didn’t come down with it though, because you just have to get to 2000 before you have Deus Ex. And if I was going to pick any game to represent my interest in that genre, it would have to be that one. But this happens with a few of these genres, Matthew, like we say, where the best ones creep slightly into the next decade. So it’s kind of tough. So yeah, I think I understand your logic in picking it basically. I don’t think it’s cut and dry that, you know, what the best thief game is. You will still find people advocating for this one to be the best one. While I don’t personally agree with that, I’m trying to speak to those people and I hope that they vote for my mini PC. Oh dear, we didn’t even say it was a mini PC. Are we doing that now? Well, they vote for whatever this is. The list of games. This amazing CD-ROM with 10 games on it. Yeah, imagine you got this disc in the post in the late 90s. Oh my god. Yeah, you’d shit your pants. Well, my dad literally did have a disc like this in the late 90s that he got off some car boot sale. Did he get it from his friend at the fire station? Yeah, so, yeah, okay, good stuff. So what’s your next pick, Matthew? For RPG, and it only just scrapes in literally 20 days off. I’m going to go for Planescape Torment, which comes out December 12th, 1999. It’s tight. Kind of a huge narrative RPG, quite ahead of its time. I don’t think there’s a lot else like it, in that it is a world where storytelling and you playing a role in that storytelling is kind of what shapes the adventure. There is combat. To the eye, it looks a bit like a Baldur’s Gate style jaunt. But actually, you really can talk your way out of most trouble. You have to engage with the combat, and that is the weak point, but I’m trying to talk around that. But an incredibly dense world with some absolutely amazing scene setting, amazing characters, amazing branching quests, like true crazed imagination. The game that, you know, probably the only game since that I’ve really seen a lot of people liking it too is Disco Elysium in terms of the density of the storytelling and the focus on character and how committed they are to honouring every decision you make in this world and every weird choice that is offered has some kind of grand payoff. It’s a hugely dense game. I must admit it took me a little while to click with this. I didn’t play it when it first came out straight away, but dabbling with it and feeling it was a bit try-hard in a way that I sort of feel similar about Disco Elysium in certain ways. It’s so dense and it’s so clever and it’s kind of forcing it down your throat. I actually think it’s a little bit more accessible than Disco Elysium because it’s a bit more kind of fantasy rather than kind of political, I’d say. It’s an odd game in that so much of its strength is in its writing, so you spend a lot of time staring at just the text, dialogue or box. I think you could make a version of this game which was just like a visual novel with like a soundscape and it would maybe be similarly effective. I don’t think the actual being in the world is necessarily the most vital thing. Or maybe the other thing to compare it to is the level of reactive cleverness and writerly skill that you maybe expect from an ink or game. It’s a game made by writers, I would say, which sort of separates it out. Just a marvelously complicated thing readily available on just about every platform these days. Again, I’ve got this on Switch. I think it’s part of a double bill with… Is it Neverwinter Nights or is it Icewind Dale? One of the two. I think it might be Icewind Dale. Yeah, I think I always got the impression this was like the most galaxy brain of those Infinity Engine RPGs. You kind of go along with it. If you’re into it, you’re really into it. I really got that sense again when it’s spiritual successor, Torment, Tidus Numenera came out. Basically, the writing is the juice. I’m afraid this. I just think that probably more people would click with Baldur’s Gate than this. Absolutely. That was definitely my initial reaction. I thought it was… That’s the kind of twist of this. It sort of happens at the same time. You go like, oh, this is going to be like Baldur’s Gate, which I understand. And then actually it seems to kind of push you away or discourage you. Because the combat isn’t particularly sophisticated or fun. Not that it’s amazing Baldur’s Gate, that’s a discussion for another time. Yeah, you know, you’re like, oh, this is very wordy. Like, this sort of likes the sound of its own voice. And if you kind of click with it, and maybe you have to be a bit older to click with it, maybe like you didn’t speak to my teenage brain, because it was just so dense compared to anything else. But yeah, I think you’re right. Like, Baldur’s Gate is more immediate, but Planescape Torment is recognized. Shame it was written by a wrong-in, but there you go. That happens sometimes in this podcast. It does happen in this era. Joss Whedon discussion on the Marvel episode. Let’s call it a problematic vague. No, I think this has just got some really great stuff. Stuff you would never ever spoil. But if you get into it and you just become so immersed in its narrative, it’s so dense that it’s very easy to lose yourself in it. And then when it does do, you know, I don’t even want to call them twists because that simplifies it a bit, but everything just hits that much harder. Yes, it’s a really super game. Yeah, good pick Matthew. I can see the sort of logic there. So is that your second, is it your fourth pick there? Yes. Okay, cool. So what have you got so far? So far I’ve got Half-Life, Thief Gold, Star Wars Tie Fighter, Planescape Torment, all my faves. Good stuff. Okay, so my next two picks, right. I’m going to take my first FPS off the board. I’m going to take System Shock 2. I kind of wanted something that was sort of in that immersive semi-vein, the one that I thought dated in a way that was still fun to play now. I think this is still fun to play now. It is the predecessor to Bioshock developed by Irrational Games. You wake up on a spaceship where something’s gone wrong, essentially. It’s almost not quite alien-like, but it’s a sci-fi horror setting, essentially. You’re being taunted by this AI. You pick these different paths to augment your body in the way that would be described as plasmids and Bioshock, but in a more PC gaming of the era time in terms of interface, not as many nice-ities, accessible nice-ities. But such an atmospheric game, there’s a reason everyone banged on about this when Bioshock came out. It’s because it is true that a lot of the DNA is shared between the games. Showdown, an absolutely iconic PC gaming villain. And the funny thing about playing it now is when you’ve listened to a load of Irrational’s podcasts, which they did about a decade ago, you definitely recognize the devs’ voice of the different characters, which is quite funny. But yeah, I think this is rock solid. You can play on everything now still, and I think Nightdive have put it on there, and there’s obviously a remake of the first one coming out, which I haven’t picked. But yeah, the second one, just such an influential game, scrapes in right at the end, August 1999 in North America. So yeah, any thoughts on this one, Matthew? Yeah, yeah, very good stuff. It’s slightly more, I’d say, complex and maybe deeper as a game than Bioshock. I think Bioshock, like, you could say it sands off some edges, but it also simplifies because it basically wants you to enjoy how clever the writing is. I think this one isn’t as cinematic, but it’s like maybe got a bit more going on under the hood. Yeah, just very much in that kind of like immersive sim of the time kind of way. Yeah, so I wanted a game like that on this list just for variety sake, and I missed out on Thief, but I wanted this more anyway because… I was really umming and ahhing between Thief and this. I had them both and I was like… Because I thought I was going to lose half of life, you see. I thought you’d go for that early on. So then I was like, well, I’ll get Thief and System Shock and go for that kind of era. Yeah, that makes sense. I see the logic there. So yeah, that’s my first pick of the two here. That’s my fourth pick. I’m making it very confusing for people. My fourth pick. My next one, I’m going to take God Game or City Builder, and I’m going to take Rollercoaster Tycoon. Oh, okay. So this is like the ultimate… For the time, this was the ultimate rollercoaster game. I love the shit out of this. Unlike Theme Park, you could basically craft your own rollercoasters. It gave you the capacity to build your own, which added like an enormous layer of creativity to it. Full disclosure, I work for the developer of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. I feel like it’s probably worth saying. It’s not influenced by thinking here, but I was massively into this at the time. The whole balance of money-making, making sure people are happy, making sure the park is safe, but having these really cool rollercoasters. Just really, really enjoyed that as a management experience. This was the most kid-friendly of those types of games I thought. I wasn’t a huge SimCity guy. I missed that boat a little bit. This is one of those that’s my favorite. I like the theme games like Theme Hospital and Theme Park. Those are really cool, accessible versions of this game too. But Rollercoaster Tycoon just has that level of depth that takes it to the next level, I think. Do you ever play this at the time, Matthew? No, I played Theme Park on… I think I played it on an Amiga. Was it on the Amiga? I definitely played a Theme Park at the time. And yeah, I played it a lot, but it also came to terms with the fact that I was never going to be a big building game kind of guy. Once you got over the initial thrill of laying down the basics of the park, I never really knew where to go next. It’s like you build it and then it’s just about sustaining something forever. In a way, I’m more interested in the genres. I think there are better building campaigns or more interesting campaign structures that people are experimenting with now that I think we’re missing from these games. They’re a little bit like, just go forever and enjoy. I wouldn’t conflate this too much with Theme Park. They’re quite different. I’m speaking purely about Theme Park there. Just in terms of the complexity of what you can build in this, you can just keep going with it. It’s not like you feel like you’re building the same thing over and over again. It’s not necessarily as staid as that. That’s one of the things I just really like about it. It’s like a canvas for you to sort of draw upon. This is definitely the game of that type that I love the most at the time. My next two picks. For 90% plus from PC Gamer, I’m going to go Blade Runner. Okay, interesting. Another way to get a point and click in there. Yeah. I actually haven’t picked point and click yet, but that was the 90 I wanted. Yeah, I see the cogs wearing though. Yeah. I mean, it is point and click. The weird thing about Blade Runner is that when I actually played it first, the thing which is best about this game is that it’s a fucking amazing Blade Runner game, which was probably slightly lost to me because it took me quite a long time to really click with Blade Runner. You know, I think I watched it when I was a teenager and didn’t really like it. I don’t think my brain was sophisticated enough for it because you had this future thing. It was this detective story. So in my head, it’s like, oh, cool, he’s going to be hunting down these evil robots and blasting them. But then actually, you know, it ends up being very soulful. Like, there isn’t a fight at the end. The guy just curls up and dies. And everyone would be thinking, well, that’s a lot of horse shit. Like, where’s the fight, you know? I know he gets beaten up in the apartment a little bit and all that nail in his hand and all that crap. But yeah, like, I don’t think it was until I saw it at the cinema for the director’s cut that I was like, oh shit, this is absolutely amazing. So at the time, like, the blade-runner-ness of it, I think, was lost on me. But it was still like an absolutely, like, incredible looking, beautiful thing. Like, it really, you know, the kind of pre-rendered backgrounds were just so gorgeous. You know, that art style, really, you know, of the film, married to it perfectly. You know, the bits of the iconography of the film, like the photo scanner in larger, all that stuff. You know, I could appreciate, like, oh yeah, that’s really cool. That’s just like being a detective. If anything, you’ve got to be more of a detective and have more gunfights in Blade Runner the game than you did Blade Runner the film. It has this, yeah, big branching structure storyline to it. It’s kind of a real time element to it. Different things will happen at different times. You can potentially get things wrong or miss entire encounters and the end can be quite radically different as a result. Never fully kind of explored the full extent of that, I must admit. But as a crazy mood piece and arguably one of the greatest licensed games of all time, I would say in terms of absolutely nailing the style and tone and being a really good genre fit for the film in question, I think Blade Runner is pretty spectacular. Yeah, I’m very fond of this game. It was my second choice for point and click if I didn’t get Grim Fandango. I played this for the first time a few years ago. There was someone who I won’t say in the PC Gamer office who had this on a memory stick. And I played it from there. But they have released it since on GOG. You can go get it now. Plans to do a redo were scuppered, sadly. It doesn’t sound like it’s happening now from Night Dive, which is a shame because that would have ruled, I think. But yeah, I think we talked about this in the Best Detective Games episode, Matthew. What I love about this is there are so many iconic shots in Blade Runner that if you’ve seen the film as many times as I have, and I’m sure many people listening to this, are burned into your brain. And those angles on that city is what you… That is your perspective on the city. And this kind of shows you what happens if you could turn left or right in that city. It’s so vividly drawn that it’s like, well, what if you looked over here and saw what this location was? And what if you went in there? It just allows you to get deeper into that world as presented in the film. It’s such an unusual game in the sense that like, it was a point and click game by Westwood who were RTS developers. They had made the Dune games, which were licensed games, but they were not point and click developers by trade. And it was based on a film that had a really good reputation, but was never a blockbuster success. And arguably, it takes until 2007 for people to really appreciate why Blade Runner is so important when the final cut comes out. So for this to just sort of drop in the late 90s is quite strange, but I think that makes it a very coveted object, you know? Yeah, I thought this was much later. I was like, oh, this was a 90s game? That’s crazy. Like in my head, this looks a bit like a 2000s, early 2000s game. I think that’s generous. It looks like an FMV game from the time, I think. Do you think? Yeah, I think so. The backgrounds are pretty luxurious. They’re nice, but the resolution definitely reminds you that you’re in the 90s, I think. Yeah, I’m a little hazy with this period anyway. Stop trying to burst the blader in a bubble. I just told you why it was so special. It was really special with its shit resolution. All that after I did the fucking heavy lifting for your Tie Fighter entry, my friend. I did all the work on that one to bury my own grave. I watched like a seven minute video. Okay, fair enough. So what’s your next pick, Matthew? No, for strategy, I’ll take Command & Conquer Red Alert. I am denied about this, I must admit, because I owned this game. I really wanted it because my friends had it. And a bit like I was saying with theme part, like this was a game I played a lot. And then it made me realize, oh, I don’t really click with this genre. You know, like I don’t really have the brain for it. That’s why I asked you about Age of Empires, because I don’t really know why. I feel like if I was going to have any relationship with this genre, it would have started here and then. And there were things I definitely loved about it. Like I really liked the design of it. I loved the excitement of working towards something like really nasty sounding, you know, seeing things you could build later and seeing the little pictures of them and desperately wanting to build all these like horrible kind of electronic, is it Tesla Towers or Tesla Coils and all that kind of stuff. And there was definitely a lot about this game I liked the idea of, but I could never really make it happen on a scale. Like my brain wasn’t really good enough to make it happen. My favorite bit of Red Alert is probably the opening cut scene for that reason, where Einstein goes and kills Hitler, I think. That’s what happens. And he says, time will tell, time will tell. I remember that’s burnt into my brain. And then the absolutely ferociously good theme tune to this. I watched that over and over again, because that has a montage of really amazing bits of action in the game happening. And then I’d be like, shit’s it. I don’t know if I got past the first four missions of this. I was so bad at it. But I was very fond of it. And I appreciate it’s super important place in the genre. I never really knew what happened to this series. Well, look, there’s a lot to unpack here. I mean, first of all, we have to go over the fact that you saying I only played the first four missions of this, doing this game dirty to an extent that I can hardly tolerate, frankly. This game is seminal, my friend. This is like… The campaigns are really good, but the expansion campaigns are even better. And then the skirmish mode is where you chuck it all into a big sandbox to see what kind of sticks. And then you get these epic encounters of many, many Soviet mammoth tanks marching into an allied base to basically run over all the Tanyas and then blow up their power plants before they can respond. Just these really exciting, dramatic moments of war. The campaign has the fun tone and the silly cutscenes and stuff, but there’s just so much depth to this game. You can play it for… I played this for tens of hours, Matthew. I thought it was so, so good. As for the genre depth thing, I think that what happened is that… This takes to the end of the noughties for the RTS to phase out a little bit, and I think it maybe is more linked to PC gaming. You have games for Windows Live and stuff. It’s a bit of a bumpy era for PC gaming generally, and then suddenly the sales expectations on HD games are just out of control. The kind of mixture of PC gaming audience at the time, its size, relative to how much these games were costing to make. It was sort of what happened to adventure games years before, but it took a bit longer because RTS games were always more popular. What do you reckon about that assessment? As someone who only really dipped a toe in the genre, and listen, I apologize for not doing this game justice. No, I did the same for Baldur’s Gate. It’s all good. No, I fucking hate strategy games, and talking about it in an eloquent way escapes me a little bit. I feel so bad now. No, it’s fine. My happiest memory of this is the opening cutscene and that level where you control Tanya, because I was like, oh great, I don’t have to do any shitty building, which I don’t understand. And lots of dogs dying. I think that happened in this game as well. Honestly, my first and last with this. So it kind of… Yeah, I’m just kind of curious about where it is held in the grand scheme of things. And I appreciate it’s probably better than I’ve explained. No, it tells the course of the series. So there is one other Command & Conquer game that happens in the 90s after this. It’s Tiberian Sun, which was famously a little bit incomplete as an experience. But whereas like Red Alert 2, I think is the best one, but that comes out in the 90s, sorry, in the noughties. That’s like 2000. So you couldn’t pick that one anyway. And I think this is the best of the Command & Conquer games. I think it’s like it’s not very balanced. Like the allied units are rubbish compared to the Soviet units. But like it’s as a campaign package, just really, really satisfying to play through. This is like a pandemic bomb for me playing through these games. That lovely remastered collection that EA did. Obviously like EA gets, you know, when people talk about EA now, they mostly talk about FIFA Ultimate Team, like packs and stuff, and that’s completely fair. But that Command & Conquer collection, man, had so much love put into it. It’s like one of the best things of the last few years. I absolutely adored it. So yeah, I’m pleased this game’s been salvaged. It’s an absolute classic. So yeah, if you’re going to pick one, Matthew, I think this is a good one. Well, thank you. And thank you for salvaging my defense slash inclusion of it. I was going to pick Commandos, the real-time tactics game, because I actually like that. Why don’t you pick that? That would have been fine. I feel like it’s too niche. And I know we were talking about not doing that, has it been improved upon? But I think the Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3, I find it’s kind of killed the early examples of the genre, like dead for me. I just can’t really get over that. But at the time, I loved the art style of it, those extremely detailed kind of miniatures that you were kind of looking down on. I remember thinking they were some of the prettiest games of the time. And I don’t think that has aged massively. They still look pretty gorgeous to me. Was there a second one in the 90s? Oh, I don’t know. Because that one was a big step up, it felt like, presentation-wise and all the rest of it. And the scale, it definitely felt like a big step up. Screamingly difficult though. Yeah, really hard. In a genre where in the decade of the RTS, to ignore it would be mad. I wish I’d done more research on Command & Conquer Red Alert. No, I feel bad now for Duncan. No, I feel like I shit the bed at that. We’re working too hard to please our listeners here. We need to just embrace it, my friend, that we don’t know what we’re doing. Okay, so this is my next two picks, yeah? Yeah. Okay, great. So I’m going to take category A, 90% plus from PC Gamer. I’m going to take Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, which got 91% back in the day. So this game, the other day I was like, okay, I’ll play this a bit at the time, I’ll play it a bit now, and then my entire Sunday night of six hours vanished down a campaign of this. This game is fucking amazing. So let’s talk about Civilization, right? Because this game is kind of a reskin of Civilization 2, which I almost picked, right? Civilization 2, so much of what is in the modern Civilization games is basically there. They’ve evolved in various ways, but the core of Civ has always remained basically the same, and Civ 2 had all of that. You build your cities, you expand, you build roads between your cities, you choose what path you want to take. Do you want to go the economic route and try to basically money your way to victory? Do you want to take the military route and conquer a bunch of places while negotiating with these different world leaders? That sort of stuff. Will you eventually drop a nuke on them? All of that sort of thing. This game is quite similar, it looks quite similar, but the premise is that you are basically a rocket that leaves Earth, and then it divides into, I think it’s seven different pods, and they are divided by belief. There’s some incident on the rocket, I think, and then they decide to all go their different ways, land on this planet, colonise this planet, and live by their own beliefs. It’s about you building your colony, picking one of those factions, let’s say one faction is like the religious faction, one is like the Mother Earth faction, one is like a rich wanker from Earth faction. They all kind of exist in this original sci-fi setting. And then you kind of go through this similar thing of like upgrading your different tech trees and unlocking new unit types and things like that, unlocking new building types that you can add to your different towns and stuff. But it all happens in this really rich, beautifully written sci-fi setting. Credited, I think, the writing to Brian Reynolds, who was responsible for the overall design of the game too. And I really love Civ, but I think I want to pick stuff that… This is like… Relatively speaking, I think this is the grim fandango of its genre, in that it’s not the biggest selling one or necessarily the one that everyone remembers, but I think it’s just a bit classier because it has the original sci-fi element to it. It means that, let’s say you’re researching things like banking or nuclear power in Civ. Here it’s like you might be researching how to basically go beyond your physical bodies and all this kind of rad sci-fi stuff, or basically augmenting the brains of the people who live in your colonies and stuff like that. It’s basically what Gabe Neal spends his days thinking about. You said that, not me. It’s all like brain interface stuff, isn’t it? Well, it’s just that basically every single… After a certain point, every single technology you unlock in Alpha Centauri is like… Or Centauri, it’s Centauri, isn’t it? Is something like galaxy brain, kind of like crazy sci-fi concept? Along the way, what is different between this and Civ? It’s like the military stuff is really fun in this. So you build laser soldiers who are basically exploring across the planet and things. But when you research new technology, you don’t necessarily get new units who make the old ones obsolete. You get new components of units. So a tank can become like a hover tank. And a guy with a laser can be like a guy who’s got these missiles and stuff. And you end up customizing your different base types of units. So you’re basically fashioning your own more and more powerful army. And it’s a bit more in-depth in Civ, which is kind of just like, how can I build as many fucking Panzer tanks as possible, then just send them across Europe or whatever? Like, this is just, I think it’s just a more interesting version of Civ. So while I wait up picking both, I’m picking this because it’s a fucking great sci-fi setting. And like, still a seminal 4X game, I guess. I lost so many hours to it, Matthew. And I was like, this is like legitimately, I think, like probably my favorite game of the games I’ve picking on my list here. I’d really recommend it to anyone who’s got like a passing sort of Civ interest and can handle some 90s ass UI and menus. Do you ever play this one? Were you ever aware of it? No. I’ve… Civ, anything 4X, I can’t do it. I just haven’t got the brain for it. That’s the theme of this podcast. It’s me revealing all my extreme limitations. Strategy games, building games, Sim games, 4X games. Basically the pillars of PC gaming in the 90s are all things I know fucking nothing about. And now I just… I’m just scared of them as genres. Like I just can’t get into them. Like I’m just out of it. Like technology has escaped me, which is, you know, a sad feeling. I remember this particularly because like I had friends who played Civ and I would go around the house and watch them play Civ and think like I have no idea what’s going on. But I remember one of my friends had this and I remember thinking like I couldn’t even pronounce the name of the game and he was playing it and it was on… It is, like you say, it’s so galaxy brained. I remember sitting in like his dad’s study with him playing it and me thinking he’s going to achieve more in life than I’m going to. Yeah, just because I didn’t get… I was like, how can he… I thought this is so grown up. Like this is just… How does he get this? How are we both, you know, in whatever? How are we both 14? But he understands this and I don’t. Like, just terrifying. And, you know, he’s… I think he went into maths eventually. He was more of a maths brain than I am. But, yeah, I remember, like, this is just… Yeah. It terrifies me. And I know that there’s this huge chunk of stuff that I’m missing out on. Like, whenever anyone talks about Civ, I just have to do that kind of, ha ha, yeah, yeah, Gandhi. And hope no one asks me about it. Well, it’s like, I have loads of respect for, like, how Civ has sort of maintained its audience by, you know, visually getting the bump and stuff like that and things like that, but it does always still feel like the same game. But what I like about these ones is that, like, people might disagree with me on this, but when I played these games as a kid, I could really, they look so visually simple, they’re such simple-looking games in terms of, like, they barely have animations, you’re just moving little, basically little sprites around a map, like thumbnail-sized images. And I was, because I was a kid, I filled in all the gaps in my imagination in terms, like, what was actually playing out. So when I played Civ II’s fucking epic World War II scenario, where you load a map and then, like, it’s absolute carnage in, like, the British Channel as, like, millions of German ships move out of France towards you and stuff. And, like, it seems so exciting because even though, like, all the units were generic, all the kind of city names and, like, the fact that you weren’t seeing any of it in any super specific detail meant that your imagination was doing the hard work, whereas now Civ looks as modern as any other game. So it feels like I’m just looking at Civ more than I was, like, looking at the story I was building in my imagination. So I think that’s why I think these ones still hold a special place. The other thing about Alpha Centauri that I think it has over picking Civ 2 for this draft is that this hasn’t been bettered in its very specific combination of what it does. Now, I know there are other sci-fi 4X games. I haven’t played Stellaris, but I know that’s more of a, like, galaxy-wide thing. This all happens on one planet, essentially. And it has all its different versions of Civ things, like basically like a fucking laser nuke, essentially, that you can use and then horrify all the other civilizations with and they all declare war on you at once. That’s rad. But they made Civ Meier’s Civilization Beyond Earth a few years ago, which is a sci-fi one, but wasn’t was quite coolly received. So this has never been surpassed, Matthew, as its own specific thing. But that’s enough waffle about that from me. I hope some of my enthusiasm was infectious. Oh, yeah, you made it sound… Well, that’s the thing. I know these games are great. And that’s, you know, it’s… I’ve spent years listening to amazing anecdotes about people playing, you know, this genre rather than that specific game. And just being like, why can’t I make the games do that? Like, why can’t I click with them? Like, God, being sent to preview events before, like, what was that? Is it humankind or humanity? Oh, yeah, humankind, yeah. Yeah, like going to a video preview day for that for RPS. And my footage was just like unusable because it was just like, oh, here’s something clearly has no fucking idea. Everyone else is like, I’ve reached the moon. I’m still like the monkeys banging rocks together. You know, it’s just, I don’t know. If someone can point me to a video or teach me how to understand and enjoy 4X games, I mean, I would pay good money for that. It’s a shame you missed Civ Rev on DS. That was the one, I think. But it didn’t happen for you at the time, Matthew, such as it is. So my next pick is, it is my pick still, isn’t it? Okay, so I’m going to take FPS 2 and I’m going to take Star Wars Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight. So after I picked System Shock 2, I wanted to pick something that kind of straddled the different types of FPS that happened at the time. Something between that kind of like Doom style. The Doom equivalent of Star Wars was Dark Forces is basically a Doom clone, a very, very good one. This is kind of like the Quake era sort of Star Wars game, but like had much more storytelling than Dark Forces did. You play as Kyle Katarn, this guy who in the game starts as a smuggler, basically starts as Han Solo, then ends the game as Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader. That’s the whole thing about this game is you Jedi Knight, as the name suggests, you find you go back to like your other home planet where you grew up and you find your father’s lightsaber and you learn that you have basically this Jedi part of you and then you slowly accumulate your powers as you go. First, you’re kind of like a little bit weak, but then by the end of the game, you choose to either be, you know, like a dark Jedi master, like a Sith Lord or like, you know, a light side Jedi essentially. And there are like really corny live action cut scenes with them that tell that story for you. So there’s like a branching path there between two, two finales, which seems so exciting to me at the time. But the core, the core of the shooting was so, so good. So on that level, it was great. And then the lightsaber stuff is slightly weak, is definitely weaker in this than it is in Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, where it’s really, really refined. But just an absolutely classic 90s shooter, because it did both at the same time, seems so exciting to me. I’ve talked about this in the Guilty Pleasures episode, there was that fallow 90s Star Wars period before the prequels came out. And this was one of the main events for sure. So, yeah, happy to pick it, Matthew. I’m guessing you didn’t play this one either. No, I didn’t. Is it Jedi Knight 2? That’s like later, early noughties, right? Yeah, on GameCube, I think. Yeah, I played them on PC and really, really liked them. Yeah, I remember the box for this. Like, it’s a real nineties artefact. Oh, it’s beautiful. But, yeah, that’s… Oh, God. What terrible commentary. I remember the box. No, that’s fine. I’ve got just slightly more to say on it as well, which is this also gets me The Mysteries of the Sith expansion, where you play the character Mara Jade, who basically, like, has to… The first mission of that expansion is actually, like, one of the best missions of any of these games. It’s like a rebel base being invaded by Imperial officers and stuff. It’s such a good level. But, like, basically the whole thing in it is that Carl Gatine has turned to the dark side, and, like, you get to the end, and it’s about pulling him back from the brink, so you are playing his, like, apprentice slash friend, and, yeah, basically learning that your master has actually crept over to the dark side and tried to pull him back. It doesn’t have quite the same production values as the original Jedi Knight did, but I really like that as a counterpoint kind of expansion at the time, so that gives me that too, Matthew. So what’s your next two picks? Look at you, loading up with all these extra games. Well, I guess I get the Red Alert, Counter-Strike and the other one. Aftermath. Yeah. You’ve got the giant ant missions. Well done. Yes, I love those ants. I love it. Albert Einstein goes back and rides an ant or something. Right, what have they got? God Game or City Builder? I’m going to go with… I think I can get Dungeon Keeper in this category. Yeah, I know nothing about that, so go ahead. Yeah. Mainly because I think there should be a Bullfrog game in the mix. I feel like a super important developer of this era. I sort of put them in with Rare as a very British company. There’s a lot of humour and weirdness in their games. They kind of mess around with genres and do quite a lot of fun twists, which is something I always associate with Rare. Yeah, you build a dungeon and fill it with monsters. It’s kind of an interesting thing in that you’re trying to almost lay the right conditions for the monsters to come. You’re trying to tempt them there. So building certain room types, draw certain monsters there. And then it’s kind of about keeping everything playing nice and working nicely together and then also defending the place. I think what it actually does is it addresses the thing I was saying, the problem I had with Theme Park, in that there seems more of a purpose. It’s kind of like build it and then make sure there is an actively hostile force coming in, rather than just boredom or fatigue or vague business concepts, which is kind of the enemy in most building games. Here it’s kind of like people coming in, things coming into your dungeon. I think it also just has a lot of character. You are playing a cruel monster who runs the dungeon, and because of that, that character creeps through in the way that you can treat certain creatures, you can kind of slap them about. There’s also fun stuff where you can possess the creatures and go in and directly control them, take you in to really see this world you’ve built from the ground. I just think there’s a lot of charm in it. Again, not a genre I’m super, super crazy about, but I just remember this being having a few more strings to its bow than a lot of other things, certainly enough to kind of hold your attention. I did think about Theme Hospital, but again, once you’ve actually done the building and you’ve seen the funny illnesses and all that jazz, it just becomes the kind of chore of running a hospital, where I think this has got a bit more of a shape to it. Okay, well, I had no idea that was kind of what it was. I always thought this was an RPG-ish thing, but I’m probably thinking of Dungeon Siege there. That’s on me. This is just a knowledge gap for me. I very much remember the two characters who were on the artwork. They were very distinctive, 90s-ass figures. There are other things. Like the evil genius is basically this again. Right, right, yeah. Except it’s a Bond layer and you’re the villain. So it’s quite similar. Also, the look of this, it’s got that sort of terrain deformation stuff which Bullfrog had. I think it’s the same engine that they made, weirdly, the Magic Carpet games in. So it’s that kind of slightly undulating kind of organic feel to it. Like it feels like sort of pillars and mounds of dirt. I think I read somewhere that like the kind of block, the kind of aesthetic of this where you kind of chip away at blocks of like dirt to kind of dig out the dungeon was an early inspiration for Notch when he was making Minecraft or the Proto Minecraft. I think it’s a quietly influential game, quite British. I don’t really know what it’s like. A lot of this Bullfrog stuff feels like it’s a sort of frozen there in the 90s and like, did anyone play this outside of the UK? I’m not entirely sure, but yeah, like I’m glad it existed. I think this is a quirkier pick in amongst some of my bigger hitters. Yeah, they were like, yeah, I think like I think Bullfrog had that cache outside the UK. I did think about picking one of their games because what I do like about your games is that they do have a little bit of chill about them compared to like some of the more intensive semi stuff you can pick from this category. So yeah, they are a good hang, Matthew, the Bullfrog games. So yeah, I think that’s a good pick. So what’s your next choice? For point and click slash adventure game, I’m actually going to pick Gabriel Knight 2 The Beast Within. OK, I never played that. I played this way after the fact on Steam. I bought a big Sierra bundle a few years ago, so I’m not going to pretend I have like a huge attachment to it. But of all the Sierra things I played from that bundle, this was the one where I was like, oh, this is this is actually real. Like this feels like a really delightful 90s artifact. The first Gabriel Knight is like a bit more of a traditional kind of monkey iron looking kind of, you know, point and click interface and everything. This one is like an is an FMV adventure, which I think is probably why I didn’t have a huge interest in it. So I was I don’t know. As a genre, I always thought it was a little bit like naff and gimmicky. It didn’t really speak to me. But it’s incredibly charming and it has this like extreme 90s energy. The people in it, you know, all the dialogue scenes are, you know, video sequences played with actors. It should be really hammy, but they’ve I don’t know. They’ve cast it really right. Like there’s no one really recognisable in it. If you look up these people, a lot of them have got quite strange careers. Like the guy who plays Gabriel Knight, who is called Dean Erickson, is now just like some big sort of stock trader, philanthropist type. It’s not an actor at all, but they look like they just they just look like 90s ass people, which which I really like. Like it has kind of a Twin Peaks energy to it, weirdly, where, you know, the costumes and the hairstyles are kind of of that era. The kind of music, the sort of synthy music has a bit of that Twin Peaks energy to it. It’s definitely an influence on this. Gabriel Knight himself is kind of like a sort of he’s an author, but also supernatural kind of investigator type. So he gets pulled into the first game is also Voodoo related. This one is werewolf related. It’s set in Munich, which is really odd. So you’ve got this F&V stuff, but like all the cast are, I assume Americans pretending to be German, but it’s quite ambitious in that it’s trying to like whisk you to this whole other location. Like I can see some people looking at this and just thinking, man, this is just so fucking old looking and like tired and dated. But it’s I just think it’s executed really well. It’s really charmingly written like Gabriel Knight and his sort of like sidekick. He’s called Grace Nakamura. I think just have like really good energy. They’re really like sort of like fully drawn and like the performances are really committed. I like the supernatural story of it. Like I actually think it’s it’s like pretty decent. There’s a little bit of like almost like Dan Browniness to it and how it kind of pulls on like real history and pulls kind of like landmarks and things into it. But in quite a quite a cool way. I just thought I really liked discovering this. I thought, oh, yeah, let’s put this on. This feels like something which is, you know, slipped through the cracks. I don’t see it talked about a lot at the time. It was absolutely, you know, cherished and celebrated. So, yeah, we’ll go for that. So have you not picked a LucasArts point and click game yet? Am I right? Think that? Not yet. No. OK, that’s weird. I guess you do still have some categories for that. A lot of them are played on the Amiga and I know it’s a similar space, but I wanted something that existed because of the CD-ROM. And the FMV-ness of this, it couldn’t have happened otherwise. Yeah, I sort of see your point, but I don’t know. There are so many games that seem so you from that crop of stuff like The Monkey Islands, Indiana Jones, Fate of Atlantis. All that stuff seems very you. Yeah, well, we can still get a bit of it in. Okay, yeah, being a bit premature there. Right then, let’s go with Wildcard, category 9. I’m going to take Free Space 2. Do you know this game? Let’s say no. I do know it, yeah, vague idea, but I couldn’t draw a picture of it. Yeah, so you could argue like this probably wouldn’t be a Wildcard to people, seasoned PC gamers who were there at the time, but I think to most people it would be, because it was quite a poor selling follow up to a, I think it was like a spinoff of the Descent series, which are kind of like tunnel roaming kind of like space kind of shootery games. This is like a proper sort of space combat simulator with these like, at the time, extremely impressive kind of like fleet battles and stuff going on in the background. Just extremely beautiful looking. Volition developed this, Matthew, now obviously associated with Saints Row. They made some quite odd stuff for a while. They made, remember the Summoner series? They made those RPGs. Quite a strange bunch of stuff before they sailed into wacky open world things. So yeah, like I, this was free on GOG a few years ago. I think it was in obscurity for quite a long time before that. The other game I thought about for Wildcard was Outcast, but I think it’s just two shits. Yeah, like open worldy, like open world at the time, but just two different… That’s in contention for my free pick. Not anymore. Well no, it’s perfectly fine to pick. It was just until a few minutes ago actually. Well no, it’s just at the time, I know that like they’ve done that remake of it that runs a lot better. It’s just like, it was a super early open world game. It deserves credit for that, it was really impressive for the time. Yeah, no, I agree. But I think it ran at like 5 FPS for most people on their PCs. Just a bit too demanding and unfinished. So I thought I’d pick this instead. This is like right at the tail end of the 90s again. It’s a 1999 game. But I think it’s kind of spot on. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d like for this. I could have picked it for sim I suppose, but I didn’t think enough people would know it for sim. So I thought I’d just pick it for this category instead. So, available on GOG. And according to Wikipedia, has had mods for it based on Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica. I won’t be playing those, but I wish the creators of them the very best. And yeah, just one of the most beautiful of this sort of genre. Next up. So, for my second to last pick, I’m going to take free pick, and I’m going to take StarCraft. So I just needed… First of all, I wanted a Blizzard game in this list. I thought about Diablo. I’m not a big Diablo guy, really. I’m not a big Loot kind of guy. I thought about it, though. It was like for a bit of variety. But I ultimately thought because you took Red Alert, I wanted another RTS that was like sort of in that vein. So I’ve gone with this instead. So yeah, I didn’t get into this quite as much as Red Alert at the time. Red Alert was a little bit simpler for me to understand, maybe a little bit less sort of demanding. But these are games that had really fucking good sort of like campaigns. And it had these two really distinctive sides at launch in the Protoss and the Zerg. And they were just like really different from each other, really kind of beautiful looking original sort of sci-fi setting they built. And just like, yeah, just sort of so, so kind of like compelling. It was re-released a few years ago. People seemed to really like that re-release, which was nice. I always found it funny that this game had an N64 port. Don’t know how that fared. I can’t imagine it was very good. But yeah, like not a game I’ve played for years and years, Matthew. But I was like, I was definitely kind of a fan of it. So I think as a kind of shooty, shooty sort of RTS, which I did want alongside Age of Empires, which is quite different. This was kind of my pick. Did you ever play StarCraft at the time, or is it another strategy game you just didn’t really get into? Yeah, I’ve never played a minute of it. It’s my second to last pick, Matthew. So we come to your last two picks. Yeah, so for free pick, I’m going to take Curse of Monkey Island, the third Monkey Island game, which was only on PC, I think. It came out in 1997. I thought it was one of the most amazing looking things I’d ever seen. This is where the… The new art style of all the Monkey Island games are radically different. It’s something Ron Gilbert talks a lot about now, doing Five, and it feels like it’s been a… Not a backlash, but… Some people are like, eh, not entirely sure on the concept art and things. And he’s like, well, this is a series which reinvents itself visually every game. This arguably is the biggest leap. It really became… I would have said at the time, Disney quality animation, maybe that’s overdoing it a bit, but it had a much more big, hand-drawn, kind of crafted style. Like, production values, absolutely stunning on this, like the big, lush, orchestral music. Everything I loved about Monkey Island was really amped up by what felt like newer technology and probably a fair amount of money. All the characters were voiced for the first time, I actually thought. I think it’s Dominic Armato, who they cast as Guybrush. And then subsequently, when they did the special editions of 1 and 2, went back and re-voiced Guybrush there. He is the voice of that character for me. I think he’s a really, really good fit for the character. I don’t really know where it fits in fan rankings, this one, but I always loved it. I thought the puzzles were really good. I think it’s pretty much as good as 1 and 2. I don’t think it, just because a lot of the people involved with 1 and 2 weren’t involved with this, maybe the temptation is to say, eh, not as good. I think 4 is bad, and I thought the Telltale ones were bad. But this one, great characters, introduced Murray the Talking Skull, had loads of really good cameos that really understood the characters and did fun things with them. Really good puzzles. I think the chaps who headed this up were quite heavily involved with Full Throttle, which is probably why it has that slightly more cinematic sheen on it, because that’s what Full Throttle’s whole deal was. I just really like it. People may say you should put 1 and 2 in, or like you say, Indiana Jones, Fate of Atlantis. I loved them all, did play them on the Amiga back in the day. This was making more of what power there was on PC. Another thing where I re-watch the opening cutscene again and again, if there’s a thing to this draft, it’s that I loved the opening 5 minutes of lots of games because it played a huge orchestral version of the Cursed Monkey Island theme tune. I remember thinking this should be on a cinema screen. It sounds so good. Yeah, god, I love this game. Yeah, this was out of circulation for years, this, because they did those two special editions of the first two, right? And then this just wasn’t among them. So I think it was only a couple of years ago it came back to GOG. So you say that this is not as regarded as well by the, quote-unquote, fan base, Matthew as the first two. I always thought that was the case. But now that a load of conversation flared up about Monkey Island again because of the new one, I suddenly heard loads of people going like, oh, is this character from, you know, is Murray from, basically people love Murray the Talking Skull. And it was like, oh, actually loads of people like this game. Like I assumed people were sniffy about it, probably because like a couple of quite prominent games critics were sniffy about it on Rock Paper Shotgun. But actually it’s, no, it’s good. It’s great, in fact. I think two is still the best, but I might put this one over one, you know. I loved it, it’s really good. Okay, cool. So I’m glad you got one of those games in there anyway. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had to squeeze it in somewhere. I would have put Grand Fandango on there, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Okay, fair enough. Well, hey, you know, the better man won? We’ll see in about two weeks. No, listen, it’s a game that I actually played this time, so that’s good. That’s got to count for something, right? Yeah, I think so, you know, it’s tough out there. Yeah, okay, good. So we come to my last pick, Matthew. I’ve got my wild card. Oh, sorry. Yeah, of course. You got one last pick. What do I do with this? This is a tricky one because, like… Please pick Minesweeper. I don’t know if I do want to pick Minesweeper. I do love Minesweeper, though. When I made that joke on Twitter, there was a little tinge of truth to it. I was like, you might pick Minesweeper for wild card. Yeah. You might win on novelty alone there. Yeah. What is a true wild card? What is really odd? Heads is a good wild card. Was that the 90s? I’m not picking Heads. I’ll tell you what I’m going to pick. I’m going to pick The Grand Folly that was Jurassic Park Trespasser. Oh, okay. Cool. Which was the first person, came out in 1998, infamous for having basically like a… It’s a first person game where you’ve got like a fully simulated arm. And you have incredible control over this arm and like wrist rotation and wrist bend. And imagine a first person shooter where like you have to like really maneuver your arm around to like shoot things. And we’re talking about quite fast moving things. I say it’s a folly. Like I think the actual idea of that is like inherently fucked because it’s just really, really inelegant having to like move this arm around. But at the time, like I remember reading about this and thinking that sort of sounds like the future. If you were listening to last week’s episode with Andy Kelly when I was talking about the cupboards in Shenmue, I had a very similar reaction to this where it was like, you know, there it was, oh, imagine a world where you could like open every door in a house. I was like, oh shit, I thought that would be amazing. And here it was like a first person game, but you have like full control over your arms and like any action you want to do, you’ve actually got to do it. I remember thinking, oh yeah, that’s definitely the next step forward. That’s what all games should be. It had crazy physics stuff in it. There was lots of like, you know, you could pick up big bits of wood and then swing it about freestyle to like whack velociraptors around the head. On paper, this stuff all sounded great. In reality, it’s a bit of a nightmare, but it’s not like a total car crash. I think it is a bit of a, it’s got like a bit of oddball kind of curiosity energy to it in that people should see like something that was hugely ambitious, was trying to do interesting things with controls, had like very advanced or like over reliance on quite mad physics in it. There was a lot of like pushy boxes around and things collapsing. It’s a little bit like, like proto Far Cry in something like the original Far Cry in that it’s kind of like quite wide, is it wide linear, they call it. It’s not open world, but you have these huge levels with dinosaurs roaming in them and it, you know, on paper, the fantasy of like you are in, not Jurassic Park, it was the one from The Lost World, is it Site B, is where it’s set. And it is actually like, it’s got like, I think it’s got like weird connective tissue between the two games. As you go around the island, they’re not audio logs, but you get all this commentary from Richard Attenborough playing John Hammond talking, like not just clips from the first film, like he’s talking about the grand project and what he was trying to do there. So like, there’s a bit of weird Jurassic Park lore element to it as well. At the time, I only ever had a demo of this, which is kind of all you really needed to see that it was a little bit bought. But this just feels like a real 90s, a real 90s thing, which people should probably experience for themselves. So I admire what a like, sort of burn down the house around me, sort of like pick this is like, I’m out of here, baby. And then just like setting fire to the carpet kind of energy like Edge magazine Matthew two out of 10 CVG one out of 10 quote, trespassers possibly the worst game I’ve ever played. If you go on YouTube now, you’ll find a lot of people who are kind of like, you know what? There’s something interesting about this. Yeah, you know, I think Andy Kelly did a thing on it a few years ago. I can’t remember if you liked it or not. Like, I’m not trying to sell you. It’s a good game. It’s not. It is a wild card. But it is something which like, you know, it came out before Half-Life and like it had big ambitions. Like it is a vision of the future. It’s like one that’s a bit unfinished and like doesn’t really stick the landing, but it’s a huge swing. And I think that’s like, like I’m confident enough that I’ve got some pretty like mainstream stuff on this in this compilation, but I can have something a little bit quirky. Weirdly, this game was headed up by Seamus Blackley, the architect of the original Xbox. Quite a character that guy. Yeah. So it’s weird. He gets really arsey on Twitter if anyone ever talks shit about Trespasser. Which is quite funny. I’ll make sure I don’t ever do that in a polite society, then. Just keep my trespasser takes to myself. Hopefully doesn’t listen to this. When I said it was a proto-Far Cry, that isn’t me trying to upsell and say it’s good. It’s a bit like that in structure, but check it out. Your health meter is a tattoo on your breast that you have to look down at. Yeah. That’s like the original dead space, what’s it called? Diagetic. Yeah, that’s it. Because of the simulated limb, you can bend your arm around and shoot yourself. Just like in real life. And often you just drop your gun because it clips on something or the physics go mad or you walk too near a box. Okay. Well, that will free space too. You the listeners can decide. Do you know what? Actually, this category, I had a few different suggestions for it. I almost picked the, do you know if you’ve ever played it, Matthew, side scrolling shooter called Raptor. I feel like everyone had a shareware copy of this at the time. When I got a gaming PC, it was one of the first things I bought on GOG. Just a really great fun little side scrolling shooter. Thought about that. I assume most people don’t remember it. And then I also thought about Virtual Springfield, the Simpsons thing, which is almost a point and clip game, but not quite, you know. I was thinking about the Simpsons cartoon maker for Sim. Maybe we should have just had a software category on this. Just got really gone for it. I want to say, my other wild card picks I was thinking about was LucasArts The Dig. Oh yeah, that would have been a great one. I’m surprised it got there. I wondered if it was too big and too legit good to be a wild card. But it’s the LucasArts games that people hated at the time because they thought everything should be like Monkey Island and Zany and this was like an incredibly solemn space adventure. It was a lot more like The Abyss or something. It was very super dry. But now we’re all adults, you can play it and go, oh yeah, this is quite sophisticated. Yeah, I was about to say, can you really call it like a wild card when Steven Spielberg was directly involved? Yeah, exactly. That felt like bullshit. I was also toying with Desquadra. Oh yeah, I don’t know if that’s quite a wild card. That would have had to be point and click, I think, or free pick. Do you think so? Yeah, it’s very well regarded, that game. It’s just not easy to get now, you know. Yeah, so there you go. The Trespasser is a true wild card. I buy it. It got 70 from PC Zone, so I do like a pick that’s got the 2s and the 1s and the 7s. That’s big Back Page: energy there. Right, finally, Matthew, bring us to the end of this fucking long draft. I don’t know how it’s gone on for so long, actually, but I hope people have enjoyed it. My last pick is for Category 4, Sim. I’m going to take X-Wing Alliance, so basically, Matthew took TIE Fighter. I did want TIE Fighter. This is like visually a massive step up from TIE Fighter. There’s like a big gulf between these earlier games and this game. Does that make it better? Not necessarily. This has you playing as rebel ships again. This included a really good rendition of the Battle of Endor at the time. Let you fly the Millennium Falcon in the kind of like a sim style way that had been pioneered by Totally Games across the X-Wing series. Really really good. Really it still looks like, I think, it still looks, it doesn’t look like a modern game but it’s definitely the nicest looking of this series. This is the last of the X-Wing series. Get your sort of joystick plugged in. Enjoy kind of like flicking your power from your different, between your engines and your lasers and moving your shields backwards and forwards depending on how the sort of battle is going. All that stuff was extremely cool and like so 90s PC gaming that I had to honor it in some way. I do have some free space too in there but I wanted one of the big obvious space sims from the time too. And this was a huge deal to me at the time. This was like right smack bang in the middle of when I was reading PC Gamer and the cut of the box art for X-Wing Alliance with the Millennium Falcon flying towards second Death Star is one of the most beautiful bits of artwork I’ve ever seen. I just absolutely loved it, was so excited by this as a kid, even though as a kid I was not quite good enough to play these games. Now I am, as an adult, I can enjoy them. But Matthew, I’m guessing you didn’t play this one like you didn’t play Tidehunter. It sounds great. Yeah, for sure. I think it turns this category into almost a draw, or arguably a draw, just by being visually a bit of a step up and having the Millennium Falcon to fly, which is why I wanted it at the time. Where does X-Wing versus Tidehunter fit into things? I think that was multiplayer only, you know. So I never played it. And then X-Wing, I think, is just considered worse than Tidehunter. Bit more opaque, bit more annoying. So yeah. But Matthew, I will cop that you got the right game for that category, I think. It was that or nothing. So yeah. Actually, I do realise, looking at my list now, my list is so late 90s PC and I do wonder if some people rank are like not picking Doom or Ultimate Underworld and stuff like that. But I’ve picked a list of things that were legit important to me at the time and then a couple of things that I needed to pick because Matthew took Red Alert and Tidehunter. I picked loads of stuff that I bounced off but I think you’re going to love if you vote for me. Yeah, okay. So, let’s go through the different picks here Matthew. People can vote at Back Page: Pod. We will now go through our list. So, Category 1, FPS 1, I picked System Shock 2. I picked Half Life. Category 2, FPS 2, I picked Star Wars Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight. I’ve got Thief Gold. Category 3, God Game or City Builder, I picked Roller Coaster Tycoon. And I’ve got Dungeon Keeper. Category 4, Sim, I’ve got X-Wing Alliance. I’ve got Star Wars TIE Fighter, my favourite. Category 5, Age of Empires 2, Age of Kings. I’ve got Command & Conquer Red Alert. Category 6, RPG, I’ve got Baldur’s Gate. Pearls Before Swine. Category 7, Point and Click Slash Adventure Game, I’ve got Grim Fandango. I’ve got Gabriel Knight 2, The Beast. Category 8, 90% Plus from PC Gamer UK, I’ve got Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. I’ve got Blade Runner. Category 9, Wild Card, I’ve got Free Space 2. I’ve got Jurassic Park Trespasser, baby. Two out of ten from Edge. Category 10, I’ve got… That’s got to be the lowest Edge score in a draft ever. Surely. I don’t know what Red Faction got, but I don’t think it was that way. I thought we’d give it a seven. Edge at the time probably gave it a five, but no, no, it’s a good point. Yeah, that’s so funny. Category 10, Free Pick, I’ve got Starcraft. And I’ve got Curse of Monkey Island. And just a reminder that if there’s expansions that released in the 90s for any of those games, we get those too. I will note those in the tweet that I put out just so people understand. Oh, your list is going to be fucking stacked. Maybe, okay, fine. I’ll just say that on the podcast and not let that affect the list. You can put in brackets, plus DLC. Yeah, okay. All right, that’s fine. Those are two good lists, Matthew. I think they’re great lists. Yeah, I wish mine was a little bit more lived in, but I did my best. Yeah, for sure. You are in the position I’ve been before with N64 and stuff, where it’s a little bit of a pun. I don’t know, maybe I knew more about N64 than you know about this, but you know. I definitely knew more about, yeah, yeah, for sure. You absolutely gave it your all, though, and I really appreciate that. I could tell you’re fucking stressing out trying to do this properly. Oh, that’s hard. That’s the level of effort Matthew puts into this podcast. If you’d like to if you’d like to reward him financially for his efforts, patreon.com/backpagepod. Sorry, Matthew. Should we do a 2000 to 2005 PC draft at some point? Do you want to do so you want to divide up the different? So will we do another one that’s like late noughties too? We could do that. Yeah, potentially. I just think late noughties, yeah, I think I think we can discuss it. I think there’s something in that. No, I think so too. And, you know, based on the response to this, because I forget that like a lot of your audience comes from RPS, a lot of my audience comes from PC Gamer. It makes sense that people are interested in hearing us talk about this stuff. I’ve lost any audience I had from RPS in this episode. They’re like, fuck me. Did you hear him trying to describe Red Alert? I only played the first four missions and I signed Killing Alert. Goodbye. And a Tesla coil. To me, Red Alert is about electrocuting dogs and that is it. At one point, I think like I did visualize the like one mission you were describing to like sum up your entire Red Alert experience and had a little juggle to myself. But look, Matthew, you picked well. And Trespasser. Backpage Pod, if you’d like to vote, pin to tweet. We’ll add the winner to the podcast description in the coming weeks and tweet about who the winner was, talk about it on the next what we’ve been playing pod at the start of July. All that fun stuff. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBassel, underscore peste. I’m Samuel Roberts. Thanks so much for listening. You can email us at backpagegames.gmail.com. Backpagepod on Twitter. If you want to tweet at us, there’s a Discord that you can find through the Twitter too. And like I say, patreon.com/backpagepod. If you want two extra podcasts a month this month, that’s Best and Worst E3 Moments and Best TV Shows of the Century, another episode that’s having Matthew pull his hair out, trying to pick things for it. So you can support us at the £4.50 XL tier, support the work we do on this podcast and then get some extra podcasts for your trouble. So thank you to all those who support us so far and we’ll be back next week with a new podcast.