Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts. I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how does it feel to be back on the BBC and The Guardian endorsed The Back Page Podcast? Is that exciting to you? Very exciting. I am so glad that they only listened to one of the grown up episodes, not the usual horse shit. But yeah, great. I mean, I think both of them presented the podcast, not necessarily how I would present it, which could lead to not a nasty surprise, but certainly a surprise if you just booted up the latest episode. But that’s okay. All publicity is good publicity. Yeah, I was very chuffed with it. It was very much something our parents could understand as sort of like credibility. But what you’re saying is, Matthew, you don’t think they listened to Gamescourt before they wrote the kind of like little blurbs there. You don’t think that sort of happened? The old me being hung over and sentencing people to death at the hands of being cut by Raiden, what’s it, I think it was. Yeah, and there’s Johnny Sasaki shitting in a barrel. You don’t get that in The Guardian. No. No, I think they used, the BBC used a clip from the Gen interview episode, which is a marvelous episode, absolutely brilliant. But it is just so much more sort of sophisticated and well behaved than a lot of what we do. But then that’s the challenge of it. The guy on the BBC said a very nice thing that he said that, you know, like whatever the topic, we seem to be quite a agreeable company, which was nice. Yeah, he could listen to us for hours, I think he said. That was very, very nice. So we’re pretty surprised. And yeah, yeah, it was just sort of a nice way to sort of like kick off the end of summer. I don’t know what I mean by that. I think I’ve just stolen the time because we’re back. The end of summer that we always celebrate. I’m celebrating because the heat wave has finally dissipated a bit in the UK. When I say that, it’s like cloudy and muggy as fuck in the park today. I’m so moist. I like my headphones today. It was giving me flashbacks to that E3 when I put on the headphones on the Kid Icarus demo station and like water touched my ears. And I was just like, yeah, someone else’s sweat poured into my ears from those headphones. Yeah, they wouldn’t play this clip on the BBC with us talking about this. Yeah, that’s very much where my headphones are today. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Yeah, sort of similar deal really. Just sort of like genuinely depressed by the British summer and like climate change and like reading about oil profits and Norway killing a walrus has like put my faith in humanity at the lowest point it’s ever been. And then also weirdly like watching prey and thinking how much better would the world be right now if Native Americans were like dominated America over the past few centuries and what a better world that might be. And daydreaming about that basically as I sort of like stare into our impending doom. But enough about that Matthew, we’re doing a draft episode. So people remember we did the 90s PC gaming draft. Me and Matthew thought, oh, maybe we’re a bit out of our depth here because PC gaming not necessarily a primary subject for us, so a little bit more for me than you maybe Matthew because I worked on PC Gamer and all that, but you worked on Rock Paper Shotguns so hey. But I think we came out very well from that. It was a very popular episode. It was a very kind of memed episode. People laughed at me for losing my shit. You getting TIE Fighter. Then I explained why TIE Fighter was good. Then I lost the draft and also you picked Trespasser, Jurassic Park. So you know, it was memorable. So how are you feeling about revisiting PC gaming as an overall thing in this episode? Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I’ve got sort of fond memories or at least better fond memories of this period. I’m still not going to pretend that I’m like Mr PC. I think this period in question, you know, I was buying games with pocket money and whatever, so had quite kind of a quite small collection of very good games. You know, I’m definitely not on as steady ground as I am with basically any of the console drafts. But yeah, I mean, absolute heaps of good games. It’s quite hard to see, like, how you could truly biff this one, I think. You know, I worry it may be a bit more straightforward than some of the drafts, because you’d actually have to go out of your way to pick kind of bad games, I think. Yeah, I think that there’s one tricky element at the heart of this, which is I personally think, I don’t know if you agree with this, this is the 2000 to 2005 PC gaming drafts, so games have to be from that time period. I think there is one game that stands head and shoulders above all other games in this, and I do worry that whoever picks that first might steal it based on that, but I do agree with you that there are, you know, there’s just so much good stuff from this period. You know, last time we did 90s as an overall thing. This time I feel like maybe it’s just my age, but that personally there’s just a, there are just a lot more options to all the different genres than there were when we did the 90s draft. So, yeah, or at least some genres are a lot better represented. So, you know, I agree with you, I have fresh memories from this and I have takes to share, but I do feel like in terms of how I’ve approached it, I don’t know if you agree with this. I’m kind of like, I’m trying less to fight for what I think the audience thinks and I’m just going to pick 10 rad games and that’s it. I just can’t be bothered to like wage the psychological warfare element of this and try and get floating voters to get interested. I just have to pick 10 games I like because that’ll make the best podcast. What do you think? Yeah, I think so. I’m going to try and pick things that I’ve like legitimately played because last time I felt that I had some quite unearned entries on my list in that you basically had to make the case for why they were good, which is kind of a rotten thing to do in an alleged competition. So, yeah, none of that. I’m going to really try. Maybe some of them will go and there’s certain genres where I don’t have a lot of options. I might have to just go a bit crazy. I’m not out to be vindictive. I’m not looking to wound this time. I wasn’t really last time, tie fighter aside. So we’ll see. I don’t think there’s any potential danger spots for major upsets. No, I don’t think so. And personally, there’s like maybe one genre where I feel a little bit on unsure ground and I’m picking something I’m kind of more curious about playing myself than something where I have that lived in experience. But the other nine categories and possibly even the all 10 categories, depending on what happens, I have games I can talk about games I know and games I love. And I think that will ultimately make for the best podcast and me trying to, you know, me picking World of Warcraft just because I think, oh, yeah, people like that. And it’s like, oh, I’m not interested in talking about it. So I’m not going to pick it. You know, that’s remains how I prefer to podcast because I think it makes for better podcasting is less phony. You know, that’s kind of where where I’m at with it, Matthew. Yeah. So, yeah, sorry. Are we going to say something? No, no, I agree with that. I was just thinking, I agree with that up until the point where, like, if I feel like I’m getting really thrashed, maybe I turn into a total shit lord. But we’ll find out. Can I surprise you? I like Total War. Like, actually, I really love Age of Empires, actually, despite all my previous comments about not being able to play RTS games, that sort of stuff. But no, I’m sure it’ll be good. Yeah, it’s cool. It’s like, I lost the last draft. This one, I don’t know, I kind of like, I did pick this thinking, oh, I know Matthew has more sort of like relevant bait and experience. So why don’t you tell me a bit about your memories of early noughties PC gaming, Matthew? Yeah, so this was definitely a period I was more aware of PC gaming. I think up until this point, I’d been a little bit too young to like properly enjoy PC gaming magazines or there was a lot of stuff in them I couldn’t particularly pass. Look, I won’t lie, there was still occasionally like things and weird references that like Kieran Gillan would make in PC gaming and I’d be like, eh? Like this was clearly an adult writing about, you know, a more adult world. This was a period where I was now responsible for buying my games largely, working in jobs, washing up at the pub and working at home base. So I was very, very selective so I never really bought things which were absolutely rammed with critical acclaim. I’m also juggling like a huge, like Nintendo habit obviously at the same time. So for me, every purchase is kind of, do I want a GameCube game, you know, or do I want a PC game? So that has an impact. I think I only really bought what would be considered kind of classic, kind of PC canon basically. So a super mainstream experience of, you know, a period where just PC games were getting so gorgeous, like graphically things have seemed to really be accelerating at this time. They were so much more ambitious in terms of storytelling, just like the crazy sort of physics and the complexity of what these games could do. Like the gulf between PC and console seemed massive in this period. So it was definitely like cutting edge and super exciting. Did your family get like a better PC around this time, Matthew? Because I remember last time you made quite a big deal about the sort of class warfare element of this, where you’re like, if you had a PC in the 90s, you were posh, so fuck you. Which I thought was a great take from you. It was a great take from you. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, but it’s also, it’s a bit false. Like we had a decent PC and I can’t pretend I had a difficult upbringing. I mean, you know, we lived in a house that was named, not numbered. Yeah, I was gonna say your family was really hurt by the dissolution of the unions by Thatcher. That was tough for your bloodline, right, Matthew? So you know, I can’t, but yeah, we did, yeah, we definitely got our second PC in the early noughties and yeah, it could just play like everything on monster settings. But then I would say, you know, from 2003, I was away at university and I didn’t really have access to PC gaming at all, you know, I had a kind of a laptop that was capable of doing like work and nothing else. It was only in second year where we were living out and about and other people in the house maybe had like a PC capable of gaming. So like, yeah, I played a lot of stuff sort of 2000 to 2002 and then it gets a little shaky after three. That mirrors my experience quite nicely too. So we had a PC that could play games basically from about 1998 through to 2002 and by 2002 we got a new PC that could only really barely keep up with the new games at that point. And I’ve just sensed the fact that my dad was just like, either not as interested in it or didn’t have the money to spare on it because we moved house a couple of times or whatever. And so, you know, decided to spend it on like renovating the house instead of like getting a better graphics card so I could play Empire Earth or whatever. Like I totally sort of understood why it was less of a priority, but it was kind of a bummer because I did miss being tuned in to PC games in the same way that I was in the late 90s where I just read PC game every single month, played every single demo on all those discs and just absorbed an absolute fuck ton of information about it. That happens here up until basically the end of 2002. But one thing that does happen for me is that I have a friend down the road, this kid called Donald, who lived in this giant house that looked like a castle, I’ve mentioned him before. And he had like this, he had a dad, I think his dad was quite wealthy and he had like a really beefy gaming PC. So it was a Saturday ritual. We would go do our paper rounds, because we had paper rounds at the same shop. We would go to this like little shop called Gina’s and have a box of microchips. And then we’d go back to his house and we would basically play a first person shooter or something like that all day. And he just seemed to have always have the hot new PC game at that point. And so my access to online games at the time was sort of through him before we ended up getting broadband a bit later. Because he had the sort of like the beefier PC, I felt like I was getting the optimal experience through him, which is very exciting because, you know, at the same time, my parents probably thought, well, Samuel doesn’t need a gaming PC because he’s got PS2, which was true as of 2001. So I was enjoying the contrast to the two Matthew. They were very, very different at this time. So that is what I’d like to ask you about next, actually, is we mentioned there that like there is a big gap between what’s going on in PC and console at this time. They have not converged in the way that they would in the late noughties slash early 2010s, where there’s maybe some more parity between the big games. So what do you think sets the two apart at this point, PC and console, Matthew? It was interesting because I felt like there were a lot of series born in this period which also had a multi-format life which really exposed that big gulf. You started getting Medal of Honor on PC, which obviously when you put against what Medal of Honor had been on PlayStation, it was laughable how much more advanced it was. I do think this period has the beginnings of the convergence. Definitely in terms of what series are big and, in a way, not the end of PC gaming but the slight stalling of PC gaming that I would say does happen a little bit in the late 2000s, isn’t so much that consoles are catching up, it’s more that consoles are such the focus that the ambitions for PC shrink, I would say, a little bit and you begin to see it just in terms of the seeds are planted of series here that are going to go on to be the biggest series in the world and dominate gaming arguably up until now, either series or genres. I think it really depends in terms of the contrast between the console and PC experience on what the series is, what the game is, how high the quality of the port is. I think a massive factor that has to be brought up here is obviously the rise of Xbox, and that drags genres that were more PC centric into the console space the first time, particularly RPGs and first-person shooters. That happens, and then by the time we get to the 360 launch, which does happen in this six-year time period that we’re covering, you have basically like Quake 4 as a launch game. You have like Oblivion and Mass Effect as like games that Microsoft is talking up as a thing happening on their platform. So, you do see the beginnings of Microsoft de-prioritizing PC around this time for sure. That absolutely happens. At the same time, you do see some convergence in a way that I think sort of makes sense across different platforms, like Halo is really good on PC, Halo has online on PC that doesn’t have an Xbox, for example, sort of port by Gearbox, I think. You have things like Grand Theft Auto where, obviously, Grand Theft Auto is a PS2 concern. For the most part during this generation, they have exclusivity, but it comes to PC. It looks a ton nicer. The game is immortalized on PC, mod scene just kind of perpetually keeping that game ticking along. So, the relationship between them, there are some ports that don’t work as well, like C, Mafia, for example, which is a fantastic game on PC from 2002 that had famously bad ports on consoles. So, it couldn’t do everything, console, that PC was doing. And there was a pleasant amount of divergence, types of games that would still just come out on PC and they would even try and put on consoles, for example, the RTS, which makes sense at this time for sure, Sims and that sort of thing. So, there are meaningful differences, but I agree you see the first signs of convergence. I think that’s happening around this time. The shocking one, really, of kind of a sign of times and what’s going on is the fact that Deus Ex Invisible War is so hampered by its console ambitions, in terms of like, it becomes incredibly segmented and basically loses the kind of the wider areas which define the original game. And that is, you know, that is, I mean, okay, Deus Ex One also on console, but it is a, you know, as PC a game as you possibly get, that the sequel to that can be allowed to change so much based on what is required by console. I think it’s just a sort of sign of the times. Also, I know we’re near as big or important a game, but there’s a little bit of it in Thief 3 as well, that kind of sort of segmented stuff going on. So it’s, yeah, it’s like, I don’t want to say it’s doomed. It’s definitely not, you know, like you say, the Golf is absolutely massive. But the tension between them is like super interesting, like throughout this period. I feel like Invisible War is probably the most extreme example of this, because you can still look at the likes of Morrowind from this time or Kotor, and you can see that they’ve got, you know, what is close to parity between the platforms. But it’s just that something of Deus Ex’s scope just can’t be replicated on that, on a console still. And it’s a bit, yeah, it’s tough to see for certain genres, but it doesn’t happen that often, you know. Still 92% in PC Gamer. Yeah, that’s the lesser remembered Deus Ex review from PC Gamer, some might say. I don’t think it’s that bad a game, have somebody played it on Xbox but played it before the original Deus Ex, but if you played it after Deus Ex, it would be astonishingly disappointing for sure, because you would just miss those vast areas, the feeling of possibility. It kind of boils down like Cairo into like basically three rooms, so you’re like, this is such a bummer. When I was looking through some reviews for these games, one for Invisible War jumped out. GamePro, this is a quote from GamePro, Invisible War is not only the proverbial sequel better than its original, but it’s also deep, challenging and intelligent on a level that action games usually don’t reach. Right, okay, yeah. Do you think that’s still a test of time, what do you reckon? That’s a bold take. Sequel better than its original, I mean, man alive. So Matthew, one other thing I wanted to ask you about was, how do you think the PC gaming landscape changed between the 90s and this period? Do you see any kind of obvious genres rising and falling here? The shift from the 90s shooter into the naughty shooter is super, super obvious that something changes. You want to say it’s just like half-life changes everyone’s narrative ambitions, but for an era which is dominated by id games or id-alikes, you suddenly end up with action games with a heavy narrative streak, or the rise of the World War 2 shooter, which comes from the same kind of place as half-life, weirdly, like the early Medal of Honor and the first Call of Duty, in attempting to sort of cinematically put you in these scenes and capture the spirit of the thing. It’s not that different to some of the techniques that you had in Half-Life 1, so that’s a major thing. It is really weird how all of your, you know, where go the sort of hexons and bloods and all that kind of jazz of the 90s? It just sort of vanishes, and you know, maybe it feels like a bit more of a sort of sophisticated, well behaved space in the noughties than the 90s. The 90s feels more like video games to me on PC. It’s a bit like wild there. It’s like bloody. It’s gore. It’s violence. It’s fun. And then the noughties is a little bit more, it’s a little bit more HBO. Ah, yeah, I guess so. It’s, I think that the Half-Life thing is a key difference, like you say, like the up, the sort of like increase in narrative presentation that you see across these games, the sort of overall level of polish and variety to them, they do feel a bit less like, you know, sort of like pure level design and guns like those, a lot of these 90s games do. They got more niceties going on and it becomes more competitive, you know. And that stuff still got, you know, like where that stuff lives on is like multiplayer. I will say, huge caveat with all of this, I basically didn’t know multiplayer gaming on PC. I couldn’t ever really figure it out. You know, it wasn’t something that interests me. I was still playing a lot of split screen perfect dark right up until like this period. So like that is obviously like a huge part of the landscape. And I realised that, you know, what’s going on in there is quite different, you know, like that sort of slightly more sort of rambunctious kind of 90s vibe does live on in your Unreal tournaments and whatnot. And I get that. But that just isn’t my scene. Yeah. So I’ve got some some slightly more developed online experiences than that, just because, like I said, a friend down the road had and we just played this all the time. And I can’t I can’t underline enough just how magic it felt to go online at that time and play those games and just like the the exhilaration of knowing you’re entering a server that had real people in it. Like I just I’ll never forget how that felt playing Medal of Honor, Outlander Assault and just we’re like, you know, going on games ladder or whatever the fuck it was, game spy maybe and then just booting in and then just like, oh shit, I’ve actually been shot at by, you know, characters played by real people. And that seemed amazing. And like when I played Halo Online for the first time and then someone crashed a banshee down and ran me over, which is something you couldn’t do on the Xbox version at the time because it was just more more limited and you can play online. Just all that stuff. Just I felt like I was seeing something I’d never seen before. And so I say in general, like this this period of PC gaming just felt so distinctive to console gaming. But I was in I was enjoying the differences between the two so, so much and I kind of almost wish they were this far apart. I mean, you know, they’re different in the sense that PC is a lot easier to publish for than console still, but generally speaking, like the sort of the blockbuster games here were just completely different between the different platforms. And yeah, sometimes, you know, there were some games on PC that they would even bother trying to port on to consoles, but then they would like, take little bits of it and try and make it work. See Middle of Honor, Alad Assault versus Frontline, Frontline took the D-Day level from Middle of Honor, Alad Assault, which was at that time the best set piece I’d ever seen in a video game. It was absolutely phenomenal and then basically made a really cut down, not as good PS2 version of it. So when people were talking about Frontline, like, you know, without having played Alad Assault, I was thinking, you’ve only seen half of what can really, it could really do. You just need to see it on this sort of platform to get it, not to be all gatekeeper-y about it. But yeah, just those big differences were huge and online gaming was a massive part of that. The other thing Matthew was, of course, in our 90s PCDric gaming draft, we had an adventure game’s point and click category, we’ve completely chucked that out this time, there is, because this genre doesn’t die, but the old version of what this genre was, its glory days are basically over at this point, right? You’re not allowed to say the adventure game ever died, because there’s always a couple of people who are like, well actually, and then they’ll name some super obscure German series you’ve never heard of. It lived in certain weird crannies, but in terms of it being a big substantial, I mean basically LucasArts were not doing it anymore. There was a 3D Monkey Island which just squeezes into this window I think, but there’s no way that’s going on my list, it just isn’t very good. Yeah, that was disappointing for me, it was a genre I really loved. I think I dabbled with the early 3D Broken Swords, but they were all a bit ropey, I don’t think anyone ever really worked it out. it’s not till you get to probably your branching, narrative led kind of telltale games or your life is strange, that kind of scene is more what the genre evolves into. It’s a bit, for my money, depressing for ten years. But again, I know people who then list all this weird ass shit and say otherwise, but none of that’s making the list. So you won’t be picking Fahrenheit, that’s what you’re saying Matthew. Oh well, I like Fahrenheit. Yeah, so is there anything from this period of PC games you wish we still had in modern games Matthew? The only thing I’ve noted down is it still feels like there’s a very clear balance of single player and multi player in a lot of things, you have great single player campaigns and then maybe a whole other team making a great multiplayer game and you could be a classic on both fronts or only one and you know it just feels like over time the franchises that came to dominate a lot of them just went well, we’re just better off doing one or the other which is a bit of a shame because I felt like you could have a great time as a single player on PC in this period or a great time on multiplayer if you like both, I mean you’re amazing, what quits in but that’s a bit of a generalisation but that’s kind of the only thing that jumped out to me. Researching this Matthew reminded me of the time that my dad in a desperate effort to try and keep up with the sort of exciting modern technology this time tried to burn Mafia which was on DVD, a DVD-ROM onto three CDs because we didn’t have a DVD-ROM player and it didn’t work and I think he put most of a Saturday into doing that so that was quite funny. There was a brief time, I don’t remember, where PC Gamer did two versions of the cover disc or they did a DVD-ROM or they did two CDs, I don’t know if you remember that but yeah, that must have been a fucking nightmare to produce, you know what I mean, in terms of the expense of doing it. But yeah, but no, I’ve very much enjoyed PisaGaming, PisaGamer, around this time still. So Matthew, shall we take a quick break then come back and get to the drop? Matthew, any thoughts on the challenges in selecting your games for this Top 10 list? Only that there is a bit more connective tissue with the games of today, in terms of like, there are some series that are introduced now that live on, and I always feel a little concerned picking things when there’s like a much better version of it. So, you know, your military shooters, I don’t really know where they sit really in the grand scheme of things. Are we going to go back to them? I don’t know. You know, also just trying to find stuff which was sort of definitively PC and, you know, didn’t exist in another form, you know, like another decent form on console maybe, you know, I know we don’t factor in these things hugely, but I wanted to try and feel as kind of innately PC as possible. That is tough to do, I would say, because some of the series that start here really do morph quite quickly into other things. Yeah, I must admit, I did just try and go straight down the line, what are like 10 games I played, and then, you know, just try and figure out from there. And I kind of got to about 20 games I played before I tried to whittle it down, because obviously you need backups for this when the other person takes something you want. Matthew, should we reestablish our rule from last time, which is if a DLC pack came out in this time period, you get that DLC pack, but if you don’t, if it didn’t, you don’t get that DLC pack. Do you think that’s fair? I think that’s fair, yeah. I think otherwise it makes one of these games just too weighted as like a great pick and maybe ruins the rest of the draft for people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. So in which case, Matthew, do you want to do the old… Oh, I know, I suppose we should re-edit the categories first. Yeah. Do you want to do that? So our categories are FPS and a second FPS category. So two for FPS. Category three is 4X game, god game or sim, aka the dad game category. Four is online game. Does that mean that could just be a game with a big online mode, right? Number five, strategy. Number six, RPG. Number seven, immersive sim. Number eight, 90 plus from PC gaming UK. Number nine, wild card. Number ten, free pick. Could be anything. The wild card is something a bit more idiosyncratic. Yeah. Yeah. That was where I played Trespasser last time. And hey, it worked. So who knows what the Trespasser of this period is? I’m excited to find out. But yeah, so 10 categories there. Definitely tried to roll as much as I could into category three, four X game, god game or sim, partly because I think it’s sort of a weak spot for both of us. I would say not many super interesting games from this time can be described that way either. So quite a handful for that one. And like definitely like two I really want and I really like. So that’s fine. But beyond that, it was just a bit of a wasteland, to be honest. An online game I thought was good to have as open to interpretation, because yes, you could just pick wow in this category if you wanted to. But maybe you picked something that was more of a meaningful, really cool online experience to you at the time. Even if it’s a game that’s not necessarily known for multiplayer, but meant something to you. So, yeah, not much more to add on that Matthew. Shall we do the old coin flip? Yeah, what would you like heads or tails? Tails. Tails it is. So I get to choose whether I go first or second. Right, I should explain to people, actually, it’s a snake draft. So whoever goes first picks one, the next person picks two, then the first person picks two, and it goes in twos until the whole list is done. So the idea being it bounces out any Perfect Dark or Golden Eye style shenanigans. There’s a deep cut there for the Back Page lore heads. I’m gonna go first, Matthew. And I’m gonna take Half-Life 2. Yeah, of course you are. In FPS 1. So, yeah, I think there’s actually like two games that I think are super, like, essential from this period to just get off the ball straight away. And I did Theorycraft, what would happen if I went second? Yeah, I had a good backup because I thought either of us goes first, we’ll take this, right? I assume you would have taken this first? Uh, yeah, probably. It’s just the most important first person shooter of this period, but none. No, I don’t get the expansions, of course, but that doesn’t matter. This is a seminal first person shooter in terms of storytelling, environmental design, physics, all this amazing stuff. Just so much of what we love about modern games is kind of like, well, you know, a lot of it was started in Half-Life, but here it’s taken to a grander scale in terms of like world building and the sort of sense of momentum in the world. It has some bad vehicle sections, I’ll give you that, Matthew, but still just remains utterly fantastic. Kind of like the one of the oddities about it, about playing it now, is it was so reliant on this physics that it almost feels like it’s sort of a novelty feature in the game in terms of how they work and how you can use them. But of course, you know, with the things like the gravity gun, picking up parts of the environment, the firing at people. This game is just absolutely chock full of ideas and atmosphere. And yeah, it’s, you know, all these years later, people still want to see a third one. They never will, unless you count the VR one, I suppose. So yeah, I think this is just still so, so good on a replay because of that level of variety in the escalation. And yeah, just in the sort of imagination in its world building, it’s like the opposite of a kind of a boring sci-fi universe of which there are like, those are ten a penny, you know. So, thoughts on this one, Matthew? Yeah, yeah, it’s, you know, absolute classic. I remember seeing this for the first time, like, when Valve did like a video demo and watching it on a friend’s PC at his student house and being like, holy shit, like, you’ve just never seen anything like it. You know, the gravity gun and the, you know, just the look of everything, like the texture to it. And, you know, when you shoot an exploding barrel in this game and stuff goes flying, it just, it was just an absolute, like, must have. I didn’t understand, like, the earliest iteration of Steam or whatever it was that you used to download it. I had a fucking nightmare of a time trying to download this game and play it on a PC in my student house through dial-up, I think. Like, yeah, just absolutely amazing. So lean, you know, just feels like, I think Valve are a bit, they’re a bit like Pixar in that you get the feeling they just do infinite passes on something, cutting out anything shit until it’s just, like, absolute gleaming sharp. There’s just this sense of everything here is exactly how, you know, everything here works. Everything here is doing exactly what it’s meant to do. You know, it’s, yeah, a really sensational game. Yeah, I think you have five years between this one and the first one. I think in 2003, I believe the game was stolen by a hacker and that delayed it even further, completely threw them back. So, yeah, it was, you know, yeah, long in the works, incredibly ambitious at the time. My first experience with this, Matthew, was a very compromised feeling Xbox port of this, original Xbox. I don’t know if you remember that, but it was just not quite up to it. And then, of course, I would revisit it when it came to Xbox 360, of course, the Orange Box. And then I’d revisit it again on PC a bit later after that. And it’s actually sat on my Steam Deck right now with, along with Black Mesa. I thought of playing back to back. So, yes, Half Life 2 is still fantastic. If anyone made a game even vaguely like this now, I would absolutely love it. I’m still always all about the story driven first person shooter. It’s a big on invention and sort of variety. So what’s your first pick, Matthew? My first pick is, I’m actually going to go RPG, take Baldur’s Gate 2 Shadows of Arn, which I believe would also get me the Throne of Baal expansion, which is kind of the end of the story. So that feels fair. You know, Baldur’s Gate 2 obviously is like definitely the better loved, is the better of those two games. It kind of takes everything that was great about Baldur’s Gate. And kind of adds a lot of the ideas that would become like, I would say, the more sort of fundamental building blocks of what Bioware are like now. There’s a much bigger focus on companions. The quality of the side quests is so much improved over Baldur’s Gate 1. Famously in this game, Baldur’s Gate 2, the second chapter is set in a city called Athkatla, which you basically have a goal to achieve of to raise a lot of money and a city of side quests with which to do it. So it’s really like a huge freeform, just a compendium of stories. There’s so much going on in this city. Like wherever you go, you get pulled into an amazing adventure. I mean, it’s very, very hard to tell the difference between main questline and side quests in this game. Also, absolutely killer villain. Something I would say Bioware’s kind of struggled with since. I don’t think Dragon Age or Mass Effect have a truly, truly killer villain. In this it’s John O’Renicus, this sort of figure who you basically encounter throughout the game. And the game is almost his story as much as it is yours and played by the now late great David Warner, of course. Passed away recently. Just a vast, vast game. Huge chunks of it you can miss based on choices you make. It’s just so confident in the amount of content it has, to put it crudely. Yeah, so not a series I have that level of experience with. People might remember I picked Baldur’s Gate last time and struggled to shed much light on it, so I didn’t even bother this time with this one, which was wise. But yeah, always meant to play this. It’s interesting to hear it contextualised next to other BioWare games, Matthew. That’s a good perspective. Is there anything else from this era of BioWare RPGs you miss in the modern versions? Maybe the more tactical approach to RPG play, that sort of thing? Not really. I’m not mad about Real Time with Paws, which is the combat system in Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. I would say, one, there’s less going on story-wise, so you’re forced to engage with the combat a little more, which isn’t wild. In this one, there’s just so much cool stuff going on around it. I know some people swear by Real Time with Paws. I think the turn-based battling that they’re bringing into Baldur’s Gate 3, aka Original Sin 3, is just way more interesting to me. It’s just a system I never got on with. But yeah, I haven’t had a lot of experience with the other biggies of the period, sort of your icewind dales in Neverwinter Nights. I just don’t have that kind of foothold in them. I have got them on the Switch versions to play, but whenever you’ve got 100 hours to play a Switch port, when you’ve got all this other stuff you need to play for work and whatnot, so. Well, a good pick. So you say the expansion is the end of the story. Was that significant at the time that this came along and just pushed the story further? Was it controversial in its original form at all? No, not really. It just sees it through. The whole thing with Bordersgate is it’s like an ongoing campaign. So Bordersgate 1 is kind of like the low level of a D&D campaign, and then your character moves across to Bordersgate 2. So that’s another reason it’s more exciting, is you’re dealing with a high level character from the off, so you instantly get into the crazier D&D magics, if you’re into that kind of thing. And then this just sort of rounds out the story fully and just brings a neat bow on it, really. It’s not like the first game where the DLC was just like a quest pack of four very good quests, but it was just a bit of a fun expansion. So this just feels like, you know, it’s the perfect full stop on it. So what’s your second pick? Some things are tricky because I don’t really know where to place them genre-wise because they’re a bit varied. There’s another biggie I feel like I should go for, but I always don’t particularly want to go for it. There’s also a very viable alternative to that biggie, I would say. Yeah. If we’re thinking of the same biggie. Oh, we might not be. For my free pick, because I’ve got other genre stuff to play with, I am going to go for Star Wars Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Outcast. I don’t think… Can you put this into first person? Yeah. Yeah, you can play the whole thing in first person. I mean, you should probably play the lightsaber stuff in first person. Well, that’s the thing. So, I agree into this and why I’ve put it in free pick rather than first person is I’m not crazy about the first person in this particular game. Like, the actual shooting, I think, is fine, but what I remember about this game and like why I wanted it in there for the sake of variety, because I know some of the later stuff I’m going to pick. The Jedi, actually being a Jedi, having a lightsaber, the lightsaber combat is brilliantly realised. I think in my head, it’s still the best video game representation of being one of those characters and having those powers. Like leaping around in third person with that lightsaber in my memory is absolutely thrilling. The duels felt like proper lightsaber duels, with two people bounding around, throwing all the powers they have at each other, the blades clashing, in a really unscripted, pure way. You know, whenever you went into a room and there was someone else with a lightsaber, you knew it was going to kick off and you knew it was going to be fucking amazing. Yeah, that’s really why I decided to pick it. I just thought it’s such a distinct action memory and one which people have had plenty of opportunities to improve upon in Forced Unleashed or whatever that last one was called that Respawn made. Jedi Fallen Order. But for my money I still like… this is a happier memory for me. Yeah, I think that the thing about the links Forced Unleashed and Jedi Fallen Order is that they are… in bringing those experiences to consoles they had to lose something of the mega precision you get in these two Jedi Knight games on PC at this time. And yeah, so I think that like those very specific… trying like… oh, this one guy’s shoulder is exposed. I’ll switch my Jedi stance to like fast and then I’ll just try and like nip him on the shoulder and take him out and then this lovely slow motion animation will play where you slice the guy in half. And like, that stuff was rad and yeah, it is absolutely a dream to see a lightsaber, that lightsaber combat stuff come to life. I played an absolute fuck tonne of this game Matthew, it’s very, very good. Yeah, it had that… and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but it was kind of like… wasn’t it like one hit kill with a lightsaber? Not quite. It’s close though. Like, you could basically… you could take or give a near fatal attack doing that. You could definitely like… you could die from one hit, but you wouldn’t just die from one hit. Well, okay, yeah. Because, you know, maybe it sort of speaks to like where my teenage mind was at, but there were certain fantasies which if games tackled, you know, they just instantly won you over. And like, sword fighting was one of them, you know. I remember being incredibly envious of people who had the… was it Bushido Blade? The kind of sword fighting game. I remember that because it was like if you nick them once they’re dead and the idea of like anything which kind of captured like samurai cool, that felt like a real… the first game that really does this is going to absolutely rule and like the sword fighting in this kind of is that for me? And it’s… so it’s just yeah, locked away as a great memory. I mean, am I being unfair to the first person shooting section of this? Because it definitely made you wait before you could become that. Like the first chunk of this game is spent without lightsabers, it’s more of a traditional style of shooting game, right? Yeah, it’s a slow starter. It’s like, it’s maybe, I don’t know, four or five campaign missions, something like that. And then it’s quite clever, really, because the I mentioned the 90s piece of gaming draft, there’s Mysteries of the Sith, which basically established Kyle Katana’s, this had fallen to the dark side. So he basically had to give up the force. And that’s where you find him at the start of Jedi Outcast. So he can go through this sort of whole arc of like getting his powers back again and stuff, which is elegantly done. But it does mean that the first few levels of this are sort of like Dark Forces levels, basically, just in terms of similarly tiled environments and shooting dudes, you know. But whatever engine this was made in, like just a dream for Star Wars environments, you know, like interior spaceships just looked great. It was really, really sharp. The kind of edges of it, it just it was it was well suited to it. Yeah. If there are like two sort of like, well, I suppose there are like two MVPs of first-person shooter games at this time, it is Monolith and Raven Software. Like if we lived in a world where two developers like this were still making first-person shooters, that would fucking rule. And those those two developers between them are responsible for so much great shit from around this time, Matthew. Yeah, they were absolutely amazing. And so yeah, this was this was phenomenal. I don’t know why this series like would just die in the late noughties, like why, why that happened. But LucasArts just changed hands too many times and then died a slow death. So yeah, but a good pick. So that was your free pick, yeah? Yeah, that was my free pick. Yeah. So, you know, I know there’s still a lot of biggies in there, but I just wanted to get a couple of things in. That’s absolutely fine. So, OK, my first, my sorry, my second pick is going to be for category five strategy. And I’m going to take Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. This is the best of the Command & Conquer: series. The whole thing with Red Alert is that it’s basically like an alternate history timeline thing. Blah, blah, blah, some Stalin bullshit. And then like something to do with Hitler dying. And then like there’s then there’s loads of mad sci-fi shit going on and the Allies and the Soviets are endlessly fighting. So the whole thing with Red Alert was it was always very, very silly. Like it was quite it was quite campy cut scenes, but absolutely rock solid, incredibly thrilling sort of strategy gameplay. This took it further adding some more and more sci-fi ish sort of designs, loads of like great new units, the Prism tanks, which are basically like the Tesla tanks in the first one, except they’d link up and all these beams would sort of link up and then like absolutely just zap a dude or destroy a building super quickly. Or Kirov’s, he’s very slow moving Soviet sort of like basically like balloons, air balloons, what are they called? I don’t know, zeppelins, those things. Very slow moving, they would absolutely bomb the shit out of your base. Dolphins that would be used to attack ships, lots and lots of like mad shit. That the fantastic expansion Yuri’s Revenge would add another faction controlled by Yuri, who is sort of defected and formed his own sort of like faction in that expansion. And just takes, I think, what was great about Red Alert to its natural conclusion and is one of the best sort of strategy campaigns ever, aided by cutscenes that feature Ray Wise, Leland Palmer himself, as the president of the United States. Absolutely adore this game. If EA don’t bring it back in some form, I’m going to be like mad for 10 years. Do you think that they’ll do like, is it feasible they could do a remaster like they did the first lot? It feels like it because you might have more art to like convert into. I think it was LemonSky, the developers who did like the art for the remasters, but you can absolutely do it because it’s still the same sort of deal. I think of like it looks like 3D, but is actually 2D sort of like sprite work. So I think that this and Tiberian Sun would be an absolute all-time appearing. So my hope is that they are doing that. But I don’t know, we’re coming up to two years since the last one. I feel like they would have said something if they were interested in doing another. But I don’t know, but yeah, Red Alert 2, absolutely phenomenal. Just the units, the excitement of it, the spectacle, the fantastic music by Frank Klepacki. Just absolutely phenomenal. Thoughts, Matthew? I didn’t play it because as we learned from the last draft, I got Red Alert and was so shit at it and it basically put me off for short of a life. Not because the game is bad, but because I was like my brain just isn’t capable of doing this. So yeah, I just looked at these things longingly in magazines knowing that no, this, you know, games are too expensive and my money is too precious for me to gamble on liking this thing again. So I’ll take your word for it, but I know that this is loved. Yeah, it’s also a game that just does not work properly on Windows 10 anymore. Like I’ve done all the things that people say you do and it still just crashes every few minutes. So someone needs to save this because it’s absolutely fantastic. So yeah, you could have, you know, if you were going to pick a sort of rival Command & Conquer: from this time, Matthew Generals is like a proper 3D Command & Conquer:. That is very much a kind of liked game as well. But I do prefer the Red Alert setting. I think it still slightly has the edge among fans. So yeah, and I believe like the lead designer would go on to be, I think it’s Dustin Browder, one of the designers, to go on to work on StarCraft at Blizzard. So yeah, an important sort of game in the old history of the RTS, which would admittedly sort of like diminish a bit by the end of this decade. So if only our horrible listeners cared about strategy games. Well, this might be one of the ones they do care about. It’s funny actually, because I’ve got some on the table that I did think about picking, but I thought I bet our listeners will not appreciate me picking Brian Reynolds’ Rise of Nations. It’s too good for you, scum. I don’t want to get into the old fucking… What was it last time? Alpha Centauri. I stated my claim on Brian Reynolds last time with Alpha Centauri, and it didn’t work out, god damn it. So, Red Alert 2 it is, and I hope that someone listening to this has played it at some point. Or watched the funny cutscenes on YouTube, at the very least. Okay, next pick. Third pick, category 7 immersive sim. Let’s get Deus Ex off the board. So, I do very much like the look of Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex on my list. That makes me feel quite happy. I think you could pick Thief 2 here, and have an almost as good immersive sim here. And I expect you to do that Matthew, because you picked Thief last time. I have talked about Deus Ex in this podcast multiple times at this point. There is only one game exactly like it, I would say. Even its own sequels couldn’t match it in terms of scale. So, a game where you play the way you want to play, you put points into what is important to you. Yeah, it’s like an RPG, first person shooter hybrid. If you want to become like a fireproof man who just cannot be blown up with explosives and just has the most deadly pistol of all time that can kill people from about 40 feet away, you can become that guy. If that’s your choice, that was my choice when I played it. Absolutely fantastic. Or you can play it in a completely stealthy way. And the game gives you different ways to kind of… It’s got a great power curve actually, because I think that when it threatens to sort of flatline in terms of your powers, suddenly each bump to a different skill becomes more and more meaningful and you inhibit, inhabit that sort of your chosen sort of cyberpunk superman basically, around the midpoint of the game. And it starts to become more and more empowering and less and less why am I missing with this crossbow every fucking shot I’m taking on Liberty Island, which is what the opening few hours of the game are like, to be honest. So, yeah, playing through it last year, blasted through it. There is some tool you can install that makes it look great on modern platforms, something to do with the weird Unreal Engine lighting from the time. But, yep, absolutely phenomenal, large scale, great sci-fi game, so much memorable script writing, the everything game. I love Deus Ex, it’s a masterpiece. Thoughts, Matthew? Oh yeah, when you put it all perfectly. A game I was obsessed with long before I played it because of that incredible PC Gamer review where Kieran talked about all the different approaches to one mission and the game did not disappoint. Yeah, I’ve got absolutely no qualms with this. It is a classic. Yep. So, very good, Matthew. Now, I’m very curious to hear what your next two picks are. God, I have no fucking idea. How have we reached that point. Well, it’s more like, yeah, for all the big talk about, you’re not in it to win it, I’m just going to pick stuff that I really like. There’s always a little bit at the back of my voice that says, I don’t want you to get something that I sort of want. And I’m not very good at guessing what you want. Oh, right. Did you not think I’d pick Deus Ex and Half-Life 2? Yeah, definitely. I’m curious what you’re going to pick for RPG. I do think Baldur’s Gate 2 is the one in that genre. But we’ll see. I thought how this was going to play out was that if you went first, you were going to pick Deus Ex. And then I was going to pick Half-Life 2 and Baldur’s Gate. For some reason, I thought you were going to go Deus Ex. I thought Deus Ex was more valuable to you than Half-Life. I think I just saw what Half-Life did for you last time at the voting. Right, that’s the thing. Regardless of what you think about it, it’s kind of like the boring masterpiece. Yeah, that’s it. So you just have to accept it and go, alright, here we go. I didn’t think you’d let me get Deus Ex, actually. I thought you’d have blocked that. But again, it’s another boring masterpiece that I’m almost gambling on people being like, oh yeah, it’s one of the greatest games of all time, snore. Well, that is an incredibly shitty take, in a way that I find very endearing and funny. But that’s why I can’t play Red Alert 2, this is the level of my strategy. It’s like mudslinging immediately. It’s not mudslinging, it’s amazing, but I just sort of figured maybe it’s the siren call of the trespasser route. Do you have a trespasser in your sort of pick? I honestly don’t. There’s no other trespasser, I would say, from this time. I looked and I don’t think it exists. You’d be cutting off your nose to spite the face kind of thing, to not pick a 90 for anything else. I will say, I do worry that the slight problem with doing a full updraft is the second one maybe gets too competitive because there’s an element of continuation. Whereas maybe doing stand-alone drafts means you kind of reset, you come back, and you’re like, oh, let’s see how this goes. I’m not in a competitive mood. I felt shitty about the last one. I wanted this to be honest. So do I. For my first FPS pick, I’m going to take Fear. Great pick. Yeah. Which is kind of what if Spooky Monster Closet, well not monster closets, but the sort of spookiness of Doom 3, is how I remember it, meets the bullet time obsession of Max Payne. Again, which is somehow very spooky, but also very empowering. It’s kind of, if you look at screenshots now, the thing with Fear, which is that it’s largely set in very boring environments. It’s very like industrial warehouses and office of things. That’s really not what’s good about this game. What’s amazing is that the actual enemies it puts in are these kind of human forces who are being sort of puppet mind controlled by this other sort of psychic villain. Have some of the most sort of exciting sort of AI of the period and you have some of the juiciest weapons taped down. Like in this game, everything feels pretty good. Even the melee is good because you can sort of do jumping kicks and things into people’s faces. That doesn’t matter like artistically how boring the room is. Fights will always be good because of the combination of those two things. It’s the kind of game where if you die and you have to throw yourself into a firefight, it’s not a chore because you’re like, oh great, it’ll play out differently. This isn’t a shooting gallery. This isn’t a this all these enemies are going to be in the same place. Things just unfold so differently every time. It’s just a really, really like exciting reactive shooter in that way. But with this weird supernatural story, which allows there to be this sort of J-horror sprog called Alma, who appears at various times, it’s really cheap jump scares, but incredibly effective, I think. Yeah, you could shoot people with like a nail gun and sort of staple them to the walls. You could go into slow motion bullet time and basically evaporate people with a shotgun. This is like a real, like teenage Matthew was just all in on this shit. Like a series that I think they absolutely drove into the ground. But this one, I think in terms of like what Fear does well, which is just really, really shit hot encounters. This is the best of the series for me and hopefully a solid FPS pick. Yeah, so I had four FPS games that are rotating across various categories here. And Fear was one of them. I did actually for this podcast, Matthew, go and play a little bit of No One Lives Forever 2. Because I know that that series is very beloved. For my money, Fear is better. So just in terms like the tone is more me, I suppose. But I do also think it’s a better shooter. I think it’s just that the simplicity of it, I think, is a strength. Like the fact that it is officers, it is very like, you know, sort of like lived in boring locations. It gives you a sort of grounding and then the spooky stuff hits harder, I think, as a result, whereas the next games would be a lot more heightened in their setting and then lose their luster as a result. But I do think so much of it comes back down to that gun feel, like you say. I think I did talk about this on a Patreon episode, actually, the Xbox Backwards Compatibility one. This is really fun to revisit. It’s slightly more set PC than I remember, but it does have a phenomenal physicality to it. So I think it’s a great pick. Very good. So that’s one. Yep. Ninety plus from PC Gamer. I’m going to take Max Payne 2. Oh, yep. That was going to be what I picked next. Obviously, we did the Max Payne podcast where we talked about this one. Like, again, you know, a bit like I was saying about sword fights with the lightsabers. You know, this was a good period for a thing which was a fantasy being done in the game. Sword fighting was a thing I really wanted to see. Bullet time. Basically, after The Matrix, any game that had bullet time you would buy because you just wanted to see what bullet time would look like and how cool it was. Max Payne is, I would say, the best bullet time game still. I actually think Max Payne 1 and 2 are quite close, and you can get either in this period. Max Payne 1 is like, I think we said this in the previous podcast, it’s almost like the pure action game in that there’s less narrative weirdness, it’s a bit more bang, bang, bang. But this one is just better looking, much more fleshed out characters, the relationship between Max and Mona is really cool. Some of the remedy taking more form as this experimental narrative company as well, which is really exciting to see. Just really, really great vibes, a really fast moving campaign really mixes it up with little bits where you play as a second character. This was, yeah, I remember Max Payne, I know it’s a Max Payne 1 anecdote, but reading the review of that and PC Gamer and then being like, that is what I’m buying next. I remember being at home base and absolutely hating working at home base, but thinking, you know, whatever, seven more hours of this and I’ll be able to afford Max Payne and waiting for my paycheck so I could buy Max Payne. And then it had that fucking, there was quite a famous era with Max Payne 1 where like a certain driver wouldn’t work with it and it was a bit of a pain in the ass to get fixed. It would like begin, it would like load up and then crash after like the first cut scene and it was just like devastating. But, you know, eventually played it, loved it. And then this one came along and everyone was like, it’s even better. Had to get it again, absolutely loved it. Just, you know, belonged with mouse and keyboard as well. Never really bought the console versions of this. I always thought they were a little, just way, way harder to play in the same way that Max Payne 3 was. So, yeah, Max Payne 2. Yep. So, yeah, I must admit I do have Max Payne 2 or Max Payne written down for this category. So I did think if I lose one, I’ll probably pick the other because there is like, they are like, they play so similarly. I do agree with either the nice tease of the second one. Like, it’s a much better written, better story. The environments are much more varied. Like, the first one feels a lot more like kind of a sort of small developer taking a punt on something really cool and then like massively succeeding, which is, you know, kind of what happens. And the second one is like the first one was a huge success. So let’s invest loads in amping up those story telling aspects and making the combat feel just slightly better and doing a little bit more stylistically with it, paying poets the full for a great original song, all that stuff. I actually, of our recent podcast, I really loved that Max Payne episode. I thought we did a great job in that one. It’s really, really good. So, yeah, a good pick. The one thing I had with this, Matthew, is I couldn’t verify that PC Gamer UK gave this a 90% plus. I know they definitely gave the first one, I think it was like 93 or 94, because I remember reading it at the time. But this one, I could not find evidence online of what this got from PC Gamer UK. I could only find the Metacritic PC Gamer US score, which was 90 plus. But that was the one thing I was a bit spooked by. But I will just take your word for it, because it’s fine. I’m going to say, I didn’t look it up beyond Metacritic. Right, right. Yeah, I must have missed the US bit he said, unconvincingly. I’ll be a real party pooper to take this from you, I think. Well, you know, it’s the kind of drama people like, but also don’t do that. No, I’ll let you have it. So that’s your two bits right there. It’s too hot for backstabbing. Yeah, I mean, we have to make more of these, that’s the thing. We can’t just fall out here once and for all. We are thin skinned enough that one of these would end the podcast eventually. I’d apologize, because I always know that I’m in the wrong when these things happen. Okay, so let’s think. I’m going to take FPS 2 and I’m going to take Call of Duty 2, which for my money is the greatest World War II first-person shooter ever made. I think it’s a fantastic campaign. Modern Call of Duty’s wish they had a campaign anywhere near as good as this, which was like an all-encompassing look at World War II. I think it had a European storming France and reclaiming Europe element to it. Did it have a Russian element to it as well, Matthew? Were you fighting the Nazis from that side? I believe there’s also the Britain in North Africa, like tanks going across the desert and stuff. That sounds about right. I believe it does all of those things at once, whereas Medal of Honor, Allied Assault, which was much more directed, these were by the same developers, of course. Short story there is there was a developer called 2015, I think they were called, who EA upset, so they went off and formed a new company called Infinity Ward and they would make the series Call of Duty for Activision. The first one is really good, the second one is phenomenal, so that’s what I’m picking here. I did play as an Xbox, but I think even after playing, I played this after I played Modern Warfare’s campaign, I think even after that, the fact that this isn’t quite as like activating set pieces down a corridor as that is, it’s a little bit more of the… just a tiny bit more of the sense of a sort of like level that you’re kind of like exploring and looking around than the Modern Warfare games would have, that I think sets us apart a little bit and links it a bit more to why Associated is the first person shooter games from this period, Matthew. I don’t know if you agree with that, but obviously it doesn’t look as nice as Modern Warfare, but I think that’s okay. I think for the amount of World War II shooters from this time, I wanted one that really summed up nicely, and I think this does across both PC and Xbox. So thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, I loved this mini genre of FPS games. I mean, did Call of Duty 1 also have a Normandy Beach landing? Was that just Allied Assault Medal of Honor? Allied Assault definitely does. I don’t remember with the original Call of Duty. Because I remember I loved Allied Assault. That definitely had the D-Day landing. You were like, I’m basically playing save at Private Ryan, which was just, again, one of those fantasies that people really wanted to have at that time. Not for real, obviously, the grin. I definitely died like 10 seconds. That boat would have opened and I’d been like, gone. And Call of Duty 1 had the stuff which was quite like Enemy at the Gates where you do that rush up from the boat where it is the Starling Grad or Leningrad, one of the grads. I’m really enjoying Matthew Castle explains World War 2. Putting himself in D-Day and then comparing the grads. Top grads. I got a very low grad in history, unfortunately. My main experience of this game is playing split-screen multiplayer at university, which I must have told you about, right? Yes, yeah, at least twice in this podcast. Oh, OK, right. I forget, because I know I’ve talked about it on the RPS podcast. I can never remember who I’ve bored with my tales of virtual war. Hiding behind the tiny little piano in the middle of Carintham. Good times. Yeah, but it’s also like even though it didn’t have the same multiplayer niceties that Modern Warfare would have, it’s not quite on that level. It was still a really, really good multiplayer game as well. That definitely speaks to me too. I probably wouldn’t play a World War II FPS now. I played that COD World War II one they did a few years ago. I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as this or Alad Assault, to be honest. I think there was just something about this period. Maybe it’s just something in the DNA of how Infinity Ward did campaigns that just really speaks to me or respawn. Maybe you can only do those set pieces so many times. As shiny as the newer World War games get, you’re like, I’ve been in this setting. I’ve been in an uglier version of this setting, but it was still close enough that I kind of recognised it. And also, I don’t know, there’s a shock. It feels like now, because there have been so many War Games, everyone really doubles down on how shockingly unpleasant it was. And I get that it was, you know, I’m not saying it wasn’t. Where these have a sort of, like, there is a little bit of kind of daring do about them. That sort of, I was going to say it’s like more about the sort of, the heroics of the thing rather than the horror of the thing. It definitely had some of the horror of the thing in it as well, but now it’s just all so sort of, everything’s kind of, you know, watching people sort of burn to death horribly in first person. You’re like, I don’t ever particularly want to see that. I think it’s horror that turns into heroics, the way that Infinity Ward in 2015 would do things. Yeah, that’s a nice way of thinking. In terms of like, you get off that boat and you do see and experience the absolute carnage. And then each time, this is more allied assault in my memory, but I think Call of Duty 2 is very similar. You get to basically the barbed wire, the shingle on the beach, quote unquote. You blow through that and that’s when the tide would start to turn. And it’s like, right, let’s like absolutely fuck these Nazis up. And that’s the kind of thing like it gets you pumped, it gets you pumped. And then you’re kind of like, right, now we’re storming these bunkers and taking these turrets. They just don’t, it used it just to great effect, great cinematic effect and just, but a listed emotional response. Like when I played Allied Assault, the earlier missions didn’t get that response to me at all. I was just like, oh yes, the Nazi shooter. But you played that and you’re like, I’m looking at something else here. I’m looking at the future of FPS set piece design. Like I’m experiencing it because they’ve done such a good job bringing this to life. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. And yeah, and I think that Call of Duty 2 does that, but I think it has like multiple sort of moments like this. I just thought that it used the multiple perspectives so well to dial up the drama of those different scenarios, the sort of struggle of the Red Army and then the storming, the desert element of the North African campaign, which was the weakest campaign that one. But then, yeah, and then obviously, like, yeah, the sort of like going through Europe stuff as well. Just extremely well done. Yeah, so I think that this is the peak of that particular form, Matthew, Call of Duty 2. So yeah, that’s one pick. I really went on about that one, didn’t I? Sorry about that. The Warshooter is important to cover in this period, to be fair. Yeah, for sure. Like, it’s the thing. Yeah, absolutely is. Okay, so do I just get RPG out of the way? It’s funny, I’ve already written in what I think you’re going to pick for it, so… Did you put Kotor? Thought about it, thinking about it. I’m going to take my… Sorry, I’m really thinking on this one. It’s all right. It’s important. It’s not. No, it’s not. Okay, I’m going to take my RPG and get out of the way. So I am going to take Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. I really thought about Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, but I don’t have the same baiting experience with it. And it arguably doesn’t get fixed until much later. So you kind of have to give people the broken version. Oh, really? Is that the rule? Oh, you’re going to pick it for Wildcard, were you? I don’t think it’s a Wildcard if it’s published by Activision, personally. But yeah, I think it just has to be Matthew, because I think that GOG version you can get now, that’s like built on a mod that I think is 2012, something like that. Oh, that’s tough, that’s a tough rule. Yeah, yeah, that’s why I didn’t pick KotL 2 either, because I think it was only 2014 that the mod that properly finishes the game came out. Yeah, okay, well, we can come back to that anyway. But yes, category 6, RPG, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Released on Xbox and PC, I think it belongs to both, it’s a Bioware game. I don’t think they compromised it to make it work. Bioware has an interesting period here. I did think about Neverwinter Knights, Matthew, which is definitely a definitive Dungeons & Dragons RPG from this time. But I think this just spoke to me more at the time, just because the world had never had a great Star Wars RPG up until this point. And this took the bold decision to set it, obviously, like thousands of years in the past, where it was untouched by bad prequel continuity, which is on everyone’s minds at the time, of course. And so, yes, it would cast you as this sort of like a basically mute character who wakes up and doesn’t know what’s happened and then starts kind of like piecing together this party and following in the kind of like the sort of footsteps of this character, Bastila. There is obviously like a massive twist embedded in this. I think people know what the twist is, but I won’t spoil it here in case people have never experienced it. I think like the boldness of doing a twist like this inside an RPG that already had so much great Star Wars writing in it and world building just was really sort of like cherry on top of the cake. This is where you give birth to Chewbacca at the end, right? And I think that combined with the fact that you have the choice to go light or dark side, just absolutely phenomenal. So yeah, you can sort of see, this is almost like the stepping stone, I guess, between the sort of Baldur’s Gate era of RPG and what would become like Mass Effect and stuff. So yeah, I think still really kind of like great to play now. It looks quite paired down, was going to be a remake, don’t know if there will be still. So maybe this is still the first and only best way to play it. So yes, Kotor is my other pick there, I think. So yes, what’s your next choice? You see, your vampire masquerade comments have really thrown me off. Well, I think that has to be fair, right? Yeah, that is true. It has to be a time capsule from the time because then you could start saying, well, what about mods and stuff? And it just gets a little bit messy. Yeah, that is true. See, my grand ploy was I was actually going to play that as an immersive synth. Yeah, you know, I’m just going to give it to you, Matthew. But you can have it. But I do agree with you that it’s like fucked at launch. Yeah, I don’t know when that unofficial patch comes exactly. I just know it’s not within this five year period. I’ve only played this in the last couple of years when I was on RPS. And it was with the, you know, the mod you basically have to install that sort of comes with it. So that’s quite misleading. It is good. But there’s a version of this draft where I would have played that as an immersive sim. And I even ran it past Jeremy Peel to make sure that was legit. And he said it was. Yeah, I almost picked it as an RPG for the same reason, because I thought, you know, it kind of straddles both, doesn’t it? Yeah. In which case, I’m going to ignore that genre for now. For a 4X game, god game or sim, I’m going to take Black and White, which is the first Lionhead game. Huge hype for this at the time, because everyone was very excited to see what the ex Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux crew were going to do next. This is before Peter Molyneux became a slightly more contentious figure. This is just the golden age of like Molyneux the showman and talking up big ideas and making things seem very exciting. This is a god game where you have an island full of tribes. You are god, you are a hand that can interact with the world, perform miracles, wow people, basically tempt people into believing and supporting in you to increase your strength, which you then use to push further and take over the island. That in itself is very interesting. There’s a lot of cool things about how streamlined the interface is. It’s basically entirely mouse-controlled. You have this hand that performs all the actions in a very tactile way in the world. So if you want to help, you can set disciples to be like woodcutters and farmers and whatnot, or you can literally use your god hand to pull trees out of the ground and put them straight into the mills, or your hand can hold a rain cloud and rain on the crops. It’s a very kind of playful, tangible kind of interpretation of how a god would interact with the world, which is really good fun. The other big sort of novelty of this game is that you have an avatar in this world, this giant creature which kind of represents your sort of moral alignment, like how you treat it depends on how it kind of evolves sort of visually, but also it had this, for the time, quite advanced AI, where you could teach it sort of new behaviours, so it could basically sort of aid you, you could basically use it to automate certain processes, so you could teach it to farm, or you could teach it to pick up the trees. At least that’s what it was on paper. In reality, I always really struggled with the creature in the game in that if you basically, if you did it through like positive reinforcement, like if it was doing something you liked, you kind of stroked it and praised it, but at the same time, if you started stroking it and praising it, you got the impression that if inside its mind, it started like a new negative routine, you were basically going, yes, take a massive shit in the food storage all the time. And so that’s what would happen. And your creature would just start doing insane shit. And I found it quite unworkable as a thing, which isn’t a great pitch for it being on this podcast, but it is such a weird, wild creation. And the hype around it was real. This was a big, much anticipated game. The excitement of this amazing AI creature that I think you want to be able to experience it, even if it’s just loading it up, getting frustrated, and then literally beating the shit out of it, which I used to do all the time. I remember my mum once telling me off because I had a cow, I think it was, and I was punching it in the face. And she was genuinely cross. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a bee cross out of video game violence, was me absolutely brutalizing a giant cow because it had disobeyed me. But they get like, I think the creature could get quite unhealthy as well. My creatures always get super pallid and get rashes and get really skinny. I was really bad at this game, but it was quite something. Do you know what? To be just completely balanced about it, I read a Graham Smith piece about this last night on Rock Paper Shotgun, the kind of like, have you ever played series? They did. And it did bring up the same problems with the creature as a concept. And this has appeared on quite a lot of under, sorry, overrated games lists because it was so highly acclaimed at the time. I think overtime reception has cooled. But I think if you want something that’s like raw, early noughties PC gaming, this is as raw as it gets, basically. I think it’s a good pick for that reason, good variety to your list. Yeah, that’s what I think it’s like, it really felt like a big thing at the time. You know, like if you’re into PC, you were definitely aware of it. And so I feel like it kind of earns its place, whether or not it’s any good, I don’t know. I think I only ever got about halfway through it, because there was like a level in it where you took over enough islands, you basically moved on to the next island. And there’s one where you basically lost your god at the start, it took away your god, and then just started bombarding you with shit from other gods, so they were just like, another disembodied hand would just be throwing fireballs at all your people. It was just like, I’ve had enough of this. Look, I’m only scraping by, I can’t deal with the challenge of it. But yeah, so that’s why you should buy my PC Mini. It’s got that on it. Yeah, I suppose like, yeah, the PC Mini manufactured by Matthew Castle Productions, $99, it should be good purchase. Will you not tend to pick the second one based on this, Matthew? No, I only had experience with the first one. I don’t know how much better or advanced the second one is. In fact, I think it partially by entirely. When I saw the category, I was like, I’ll do black and white for that. So I didn’t even contemplate researching it. That is fair. You truly stuck to your guns then. I had a backup, which was… Well, I won’t reveal it just in case it gives you any good ideas. Do you have another pick now or is it me? I think I’ve got another one, yeah. I’ll get an online game out of the way. You’re not going to pick this, but just in case. I’m going to take Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Oh, nice. Nice choice. Yeah, so I said I didn’t play a lot of online games. I played precisely two online games, a moderate amount in this period. One was Soldier of Fortune 2, which I don’t want to put in because it’s just so fucking grubby and… like, it appealed to my teenage brain at the time because it was so violent and gory, but I think it’s quite a dubious game. So I’m going to go with Return to Castle Wolfenstein because everyone agrees that shooting Nazis is hilarious and good. Sticking purely to the multiplayer on this, because the single player is fine. It was gorgeous, but I don’t think it was anything too special. But the multiplayer in this, entirely team-based, as I remember it. So it wasn’t just a complete free-for-all. And the big problem I had in this era with shooters is that I have never had good reaction speed. I’m quite bad at mouse keyboard games. Having grown up playing Gold Mine Perfect Dark, I was just shit at any kind of twitch shooting or reactive shooters. This had a big team emphasis. It had roles you could play in that team. So you could be like a medic or an engineer or whatever. Basically like Battlefield in much smaller levels. No vehicles or anything like that. Very, very small feeling. But the fact that you could play this as not just a shit hot gun person, that you could be someone who is helping the wider cause, trying to push forward towards objectives or whatever. This just clicked with me more than other shooters at the time. I think there is some affection for that. That kind of middle ground between the arena-based shooters of your Unreals or whatever, and your Quakes, and the coming of Battlefield in this period, which is a series I have no experience with up until it, like, well into 360. So I felt a bit bogus pretending to like that. I don’t know where Return to Castle Wolfenstein is held in the grand scheme of things as a multiplayer shooter, but I always remember being very easy to find a game and having quite a lot of fun while being quite bad at it. Yeah, so, you know, I only played the single player of this, but I thought it was really, really good. Just like this was a top notch, very well reviewed FPS, really well liked. And so I think it’s definitely like when ID was on top of the world before they were like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And like, also felt like a very different side of the coin to the Medal of Honor Allied Assault experience. And just in terms of feeling like, you know, deliberately a bit more of a sort of spooky atmospheric, you know, heightened genre take on on the World War Two shooter. So, yeah, I felt like just live really nicely side by side with it. I guess like how some of the feeling of the old the old Wolfenstein game. Yeah, it definitely felt trashier than like Call of Duty and Allied Assault. Like one of the multiplayer maps was like the D-Day landings. But it was just like people running around, torching each other with quite horrible flame throws. It’s just the sound of like burning and screaming. It just felt a bit like a slightly nastier game. But good fun. Yeah. Yeah. Good pick. That’s the thing. I suppose it’s worth caviting as well, Matthew. The online game element is like you get the game. It’s not that you just get the online. You get the entire game. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. I just don’t think I don’t think I ever finished Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It was really well reviewed. And I think I bought it because of the single player campaign being well reviewed. I just found it very, very difficult. Yeah. Because, yeah, like I say, bit of a mouse and keyboard noob. So I just played this online more. Yeah, that’s fair. This part of me, Matthew, wants to dick you over so badly here by picking Thief 2 in free pick because that kind of traps you in immersive sim with just Thief Deadly Shadows, which is a good game, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to let you have Thief 2. I do like Thief 2. I have played it, but I don’t have the same level of experience with it. So I’m going to pick something else. For my free pick, I’m going to take Warhammer 40,000, Dawn of War. So this was the game I always wanted as a kid. And basically everyone I knew as a kid wanted as well, which was a great Warhammer 40,000 RTS. You don’t have to buy and paint the models. You can just enjoy that universe. But from the point of view of a classic RTS made by Relic, this doesn’t get me every expansion from the time, regrettably, including the very, very good Soulstorm expansion, but still gets me Space Marines, Orks, Chaos and Imperial Guard, Eldar, among others, plenty of good stuff. I think this is still the best version of a Warhammer 40,000 strategy experience. It’s absolutely fantastic. I think they should totally just do a HD remake of this and then re-release it. There is a thriving mod scene for this still, where people are updating it with the newer factions for Warhammer 40,000. Over time, they built it to this very complete feeling RTS. It’s a very different RTS to Red Alert 2. It’s more about territory capture, that sort of thing. Over time, it would just become, yeah, just such a fulfilling, exciting vision of this universe. And I think at the time, it was just so refreshing to see a Warhammer game that lived up to that universe’s full potential. And I still dig it all these years later. The second one’s really good too. It’s a bit more of a sort of like small-scale tactical thing. The third one was very contentious for whatever reason. But yes, the first one I loved. I’m guessing you never played this, Matthew? No, no, not at all. The other thing is, yeah. Well, the other thing is, I didn’t want to take Thief 2 either because I’ve got… I didn’t want to take all first-person… I’ve got a lot of first-person games already, and I didn’t want to just have like half my picks be first-person games. So yeah, there’s a bit of that to it as well. For my next pick, I’m going to take… I think Wild Card’s an interesting one because I’ve got quite a few picks for this. I’ve got like three. Three potential ones. And I don’t think you’ll pick probably any of them, but we’ll see. I struggled a bit with Wild Card. Yeah? Because I only played, like I said, like 90 rated games. I don’t know if there are any critically acclaimed oddities that I could think of. Yeah, yeah. Perhaps. Perhaps that is… I can see why that would be the case when you have that experience. All right. I’m going to take my online game and I’m going to take Star Wars Jedi Academy. So if we’re talking an online Jedi experience, this pushed what Jedi Outcast did even further. The story was not as good as the main game because you’re playing this player-created character called Jaden Korr. Quite a morphous addition to the universe. You had all these customization options, that was good. But I would say the story element of Jedi Outcast is a lot better. However, the Jedi element was even better, adding more and more flexibility to the way you could play as a Jedi. If you wanted to do one lightsaber, that’s fine. Want to do two lightsabers, that’s fine. Want to do the Darth Maul double lightsaber, you can do that too, with all these different stances as well. It was so popular online that it sustained this online community for years and years, because it was still the very best of its type. The third person duel in-game, arguably still not surpassed. It gave you loads more flexibility with how you picked your Jedi powers and shaped your character, which I absolutely loved at the time. I think some of the levels in this have a massive sense of scale to them. And then the guns still feel really good as well. So, yeah, I mean, I think this is a better game than Jedi Outcast, Matthew, just in terms of the lightsaber experience. But, you know, I like Kyle Katarn as well. So, yeah. Thoughts on this one? I didn’t play this one. Yeah, I only have experience with the previous ones. So, yeah, I’m going to have to take your word for it. I mean, it sounds very convincing. Annoyingly so. Like, I really thought I’d picked the best Star Wars game from the period. So, that’s annoying. That feels wasted. If I could take that back, I would. Well, it’s that thing of, like, adding the Darth Maul double lightsaber was a fantasy in itself, you know? And it just, yeah, it just took it that bit further. You seemed weirdly cool with my Star Wars pick. I thought he was going to be annoyed about that. And then I thought, oh, well, maybe that’s because he’s going to pick Kotor and he doesn’t really care because he’s going to have something Star Wars-y. But little did I know that there was a different, better Star Wars game. Well, better in some ways. I think it’s a better Jedi experience, but, you know, yeah, you picked a better Dark Forces sequel. So, you know, hey, again, I’ve been playing fair. I didn’t take Thief 2, so, you know, that was decent. OK, so those are my two picks, Matthew. So it’s on to you again. OK, for strategy games. Excited to hear where this is going. Can we have tactics games? Yeah, I think we did this last time. Anything under that umbrella, go for it. Does that not narrow it down? No, I’m going to need a ruling on this. And you’re probably going to say no. And that’s fine, because I think it’s more of an action RPG than it is a tactics game. Where do you stand on Freedom Force? Well, there goes one of my wildcard picks. I’m going to let you have that, because it is real time. I think it is real time with port. That’s the thing. I think to the eye, you think you might group it in with Marvel Ultimate Alliance, or just a big action, everyone sort of swarm. But really… It’s too hard for that. Yeah, it’s way too hard. You had to pause it and give orders to everyone. Yeah. No, I dig this. I dig this. So give me your sort of rundown of why this game is around. So this is Irrational 2002. Tactical-ish superhero RPG. Set in this sort of quite gorgeous golden age of comic book style. Very kind of… What the term is for it? It always reminded me a bit of The Tick. It’s got that sort of very sincere, heroic, bold, slightly dunderheaded energy to it, which I really like. You control a squad of four superheroes. It’s not based on any particular licence, although there’s characters who are sort of like Ant-Man, Captain America, things like that. There’s sort of like-for-likes in it. I think, you know, again, it’s fast become the cliché of this episode. It’s a good fantasy game in terms of I get to control these superheroes and I get to really indulge their powers in a very big, cinematic, satisfying way. You know, you have superheroes who can band over buildings. It’s sort of isometric, I should say, sort of top-down, third-person view of this sort of city and this squad of four. But the characters, you know, some of them can fly and take to the sky. Some of them are super strength, and they can pick up cars and pull lamp posts out of the ground and use those as weapons. There’s characters you can bound over a building with a single jump. People who can jump up to the rooftops and rain laser fire down. It just really allowed you to feel like you were in control of a big superhero squad unleashing all kinds of mad powers. I don’t really know where this game comes from, like, within Irrational. I find it quite hard to place it, like, in their wider story. It sort of came out of nowhere, just had this really great energy to it. Very fun comic book style, really lent in to the comic framing with the kind of panels around the action and cut scenes. Surprisingly meaty campaign where you’re constantly unlocking new heroes. I never played the sequel, which I think is even more tongue in cheek. That’s Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. I think that’s maybe got some, like, spicier comedy in it. But this is the one I played. Yeah, I just, I love the power fantasy of being superhuman and chewing through enemies, even if it was quite hard. Yeah, so I love this game. I think that it and the Tic are both riffing on the same thing, I think, which is like 70s Marvel. I think that’s like a big interest of Ken Levine. It’s like he’s a big Jack Kirby guy, I believe. So I think it was his homage to that a little bit. Why I think this game rules, Matthew, is there was a, you know, if there’s something you can kind of say about games at this time is that a lot of them did look very sort of like dad game-ish in terms of color palette. And this was, this looked like, you know, nothing else on PC basically. Just this vibrant, bright, exciting-looking thing with like the super friend-style narrator talking over, introducing the levels, right? I think that was an element to it. And then I believe you could even import, maybe isn’t this just in the second one, you can import your own superhero designs in it too. So if you want to plug Marvel heroes in there, you can do that. And that sort of thing. But then each character is a little bit, a little bit different in how they control. Yeah, I really like this. It’s like a seminal sort of like early noughties PC game to me. I absolutely loved it. It was the first irrational game I ever played technically. So yeah, lots of affection for it. It just doesn’t like exist in any other form. Won’t come back. Just a real oddity from the time. So what’s your next pick? Yeah, for immersive sim, because you kindly let it alone. I’m going to go with Thief 2, The Metal Age. It’s a much purer game, stealth game, than Thief 1. Like the Thief 1 had a few levels which were a bit more kind of fighting with undead things. This kind of did away with that. So it’s every level is kind of a pure stealth experience. It sets a little bit on where there’s a sort of steampunky like robots. So there’s sort of like hints of modern surveillance, of security cameras and droids patrolling areas, except they’ve got this sort of steampunk energy. One of the delightful things in this game is that a lot of the robots are powered by fire, you know, in their boilers or whatever. And you can shoot water arrows into those fires to sort of put them out and kill them, which is really sweet. Just a much bigger game, like really huge open levels where you had complete freedom to sort of explore and rob from multiple places. A level which really sticks with me is kind of a rooftop approach to a huge tower. The tower in itself is a substantial, you know, as big as a level in the previous game with multiple floors, but the entire rooftop area around it is full of sort of little flats you can break into and other strange sort of mysterious buildings you can sneak into and get a little bit of the story. I think there’s a much clearer through line from like the level design in this to like Dishonored series than with the first game. Like that density of the environments really, really stood out and the purity of the stealth experience this time round. Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of weird. I know it is an immersive sim, but stealth still kind of is the order of the day. It’s really not very satisfying outside of that. So it feels like part of the immersive sim tradition in terms of its world design and freedom to sort of explore and ignore certain things rather than necessarily a hugely branching story or erratically different places. But it is considered part of the genre, so I will happily take it here. Yeah, so yeah, considered the best stealth game of all time by a certain type of player, I think. If you didn’t, you don’t subscribe to the Kojima strand of stealth game, essentially. Yeah, so where the difference between the PC and console experience lies is in the sheer amount of options you have, the sheer precision of how you can play it, all that stuff that’s not very console-y and very PC-ish. You know, Deus Ex is similar in that respect. So yeah, I think this is a great pick, Matthew. This was like absolutely beloved, and I believe the immersive sim sort of like lives and dies entirely inside this period that we’re talking about in this podcast, basically. So it’s a bummer to read about because it’s just what happens to Warren Specter, Iron Storm, and just so sad that these things weren’t salvaged. Well, Arkane, of course, they salvaged it, but you know. OK, time to get my wild card out of the way. So I’m going to take Anachronox, a game which asks the question, what if immersive sim developers made a Japanese RPG? This is such a like, I think this is like kind of an obvious wild card in a lot of ways. But do you know this game, Matthew? I know of it. I have never played it. I don’t think I could point to a screenshot of it. That’s how much of an Anachronox noob I am. It’s quite funny to play it after Deus Ex, actually, which is what I did last year. And it kind of looks like it’s cobbled together out of Deus Ex in some ways. As soon as you start playing it, you’re like, why does this game look so much like Deus Ex? It’s kind of funny. But it’s like a very, very different deal. It’s sort of like you’re on this sort of like, sort of down on his luck kind of PI in this sort of sci-fi universe. Kind of like a bit cyberpunk-y, but actually just kind of like big on sort of like weird kind of like dark, strange humour. And like quite out there sci-fi concept. So for example, Matthew, one of your party members is a planet that decides to shrink down to human height in order to be part of your team, which is a great concept. Why did I create this? Well, it’s the thing is, it’s like it is like a Japanese RPG, but it’s a little it’s a little bit different to play like it’s not not quite the same thing. It’s not like you’d play it with a controller. It still feels very sort of PC ish. And plus, like the the sort of like subject matter and the points of inspiration make it feel almost nothing like a Final Fantasy or a Chrono Trigger or something like that. But if you have like a kind of like an ex, like an alcoholic ex sort of superhero in your party as well. And like this just is quite just a real audible cast of people. This game was kind of like notoriously had like tons of cut content chucked out. But the finished result is pure sort of like it’s an 8 out of 10. But it’s like some people’s favorite 8 out of 10 ever. Is it a 7 out of 10? No, it scored well at the time. It’s better than a 7 out of 10. Yeah, it’s better than a 7. People did really like it at the time. But it was it’s just incredibly original and strange. And so I think it’s perfect for a wildcard pick here. It came out in 2001. So yeah, I did think I did think can I get away with Freedom Force? You’re right. It’s an irrational game. You probably can’t get away with that, to be honest. And I sort of thought about another game too, which I won’t mention in case you pick it. But yes, it was an Acronox truly strange, a Japanese RPG style game from Iron Storm Dallas, just like singular and you can go play on Steam. So yeah, that’s my pick. Right. Next up, I’ve got two picks left. I’m going to take my category three, four X game, God game or sim. And I’m going to take Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. Oh, okay. Take Rollercoaster Tycoon for your last one. Yeah. And I think that the reason I picked them is because I think they hold up so well as sim style experiences. This is still a really well liked game. Full disclosure, my employer made it. But you can play this on Switch now as well as PC. It’s that evergreen. There’s no other sim game from this time that people would still put on a new format. But this has got that level of stickiness and quality to it. Which is, you build a theme park, you run it, you try and make it profitable. You create your own vastly creative, interesting roller coasters. Try not to get out of business. I think the second game was considered a little bit disappointing. So this third one was a big reversal of fortunes. And I think that this particular era of these sims, like the Sim City 4 from this time, is not very well liked, Matthew. And I don’t care about the sims too, not interested in that. I did contemplate sims too. Yeah, I did too, but I’m just not interested. It wouldn’t excite me to see it on the list. And the other one was, I thought about Civilization 4. But I always think that the Civilization game you should play is just the most recent one. So yeah, as good as Civ 4 was, I just think, just play Civ 6, why would you not? Also, and I know we’re not doing this, I just don’t know if that would have landed much with the listeners. At least Roller Coasters are like, anyone can get that, right? Yeah, whereas Anachronox is going to land big time, I’m sure. Listen, that’s the one I’d get your machine for. I’m more interested in playing that than Deus Ex again. I’m not dunking on Deus Ex. Deus Ex is a masterpiece. Okay, yeah, so Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, that’s my pick, Matthew. So we come to your last two picks, is that right? I’m going to go for a 1-2 Monolith Punch in FPS, so I’m going to take No One Lives Forever 2 as my other FPS to go with Fear. I think you are right, that Fear is definitely the better shooter. No One Lives Forever 2. I wondered for a while if there was any way of trying to squeeze it into immersive sim. That’s bullshit. But in terms of it is an action game, but it’s also a stealth game. It has both modes to it, and that’s what I kind of like about it. You could be a spy slinking around, you know, Arctic laboratories and weird Soviet camps. It’s like a sort of prestige of sort of 60s spy films. A little bit Austin Powers, just without all the kind of interminable catchphrases. But it also does insane set pieces, like the famous trailer park where you visit. I think that’s in Ohio. You visit a trailer park, you’re investigating something there when a hurricane hits, and you end up having to fight ninjas inside a caravan that gets lifted by the… you know, it’s being destroyed by the hurricane. And, you know, that’s that kind of narrative set piece that, you know, everyone is doing in FPS shooters at this time. FPS shooters. That everyone’s doing in shooters at the time. But it also has the brains to do the kind of slower rifling through stuff, using gadgets to bring people down. I really love this game. I thought the first one was bad, actually. And this is just so hugely improved. It’s just a much tighter stealth game. The rules of it are much, much clearer. Like Freedom Force, it has this gorgeous look to it. Like, it’s very bright day glow, kind of pop-arty kind of colours. The character designs are slightly kind of caricatured. You’re fighting like evil mimes in one part and ninjas in another. It’s… I think it’s got a lot of charm, a lot of character. I don’t really remember how it holds up as an actual, like, gun-feel shooter. But I don’t, you know, it isn’t known for that. But as a kind of a big, all-encompassing adventure, I think this is pretty cool. Yeah, so you can go and download this off of some sort of, like, abandonware site. And I don’t know if it counts as illegal because no one actually knows who owns this. Like, Activision say they don’t own it. Published by Fox Interactive and they’re either… They’re probably not bothered about games anymore. So does Disney own it? Maybe. But no one cares enough to, like, stop you from downloading it, basically. So if you do want to go play on Windows 10, you can do that. Yeah, I think that this… I did play this set me recently, Matthew, and I… It is good. But I can’t say that the tone of it, like, properly won me over these days. Maybe this is more of an of-the-time kind of thing. I have not played it since I bought it 20 years ago, so I can’t speak to that. I don’t think it’s, like, dubious. No, no, no. It’s not games past the 90s, you know? No, it’s more that just when I was, like, weighing up what I would pick from Monolith around this time, the fear is just to stand out, I think. I’ve got both. I’m pleased having a Monolith double bill. I think that is respecting a studio that was, like, really fucking good in this space at this time. Yeah, instead of, like, making one open world game every five years or whatever, like, it’s, yeah. Yeah, very good, Matthew. So, yeah, I think that’s solid. Is it as solid as COD 2 and Half-Life 2? Only one of us is as good as that. I mean, come on. You’ve picked something quite, that’s quite hard to get hold of as well, so I think maybe that’s got a little bit of a feel. Yeah, like if this was a serious product and I was weighing up what has value, this is kind of interesting, but, you know, it’s, yeah, I mean, who knows? We’ll see. That leaves me with just my wild card. I’m actually going to take Uplink. Oh, OK, yeah, good choice. It’s this introversion, is it their debut game? Definitely an early… I think it is, yeah. Yeah, it’s introversion’s hacking simulator, kind of based on the fantasy of being a hacker, which everyone had in the early noughties because of hackers and, to a lesser extent, swordfish. Do you remember that film? Yeah, of course, yeah. My dad took me to see that, and there’s a very awkward scene where he has to hack something while someone’s messing around with his junk. That’s awkward to see with your dad. Great memory to share. I don’t know anything about hacking at all in real life, but this kind of treats it as this big in-world experience. You only ever see a computer monitor. It’s quite cold and clinical. The story is told purely through the missions and things you are doing. I don’t really have a story as far as I remember, really. And it basically presents you with a desktop and the freedom to figure out. You have a tutorial hack which teaches you the basic of pinging things around the world through lots of different connections. And then it kind of leaves you to find your own way through this game where you have a weird amount of freedom to buy new software and hardware which are going to be involved in different hacks. There’s a lot of trial and error. I remember being quite frustrated with it, but also being prepared for that because reviews said, this wasn’t a 90% game. I think this sat somewhere in the 70s, to be honest. But it felt in its slightly cold edge in the way it wasn’t explained. It felt quite authentically elicit in that way in that you’re figuring out your way around this. There is something very exciting about trying to break into these high security sites as people are chasing you around the internet. Again, I’ve got a little bit of The Matrix in that, I guess. Yeah, as a sort of hacking simulator, I think it explores it in a very realistic way as far as pop culture hacking goes, which was good enough for me. Yeah, so this isn’t the one that involves Snooks, is it? That’s a different game? Is that DEFCON? That’s DEFCON, yeah. There are other games I never really got on with. Actually, I like Prison Architects. This one was like, you know… I think it came in almost like a fully black box with no instruction manual. It felt a bit naughty, you know? Yeah, I think it was a proper breakthrough indie game, this, as well. I remember reading a feature either in Edge or PC Gamer about the idea that indie games are starting as a thing, and they used introversion as the jumping-off point for it. So, yeah, that was… Some of the first times I saw indie games being discussed as a thing was around this game, I believe. So, yeah, I think it’s a good pick, Matthew. I would never have thought you would have picked that, but that’s actually like… You’ve gone different to me. I’ve tried to pick a kind of weirdo game from a big developer, as opposed to something that’s just a little bit… You know, maybe you forgot how cool this is. Yeah, yeah. Which I think is a good strategy, you know? I think you should experience. I don’t know if everyone’s going to love it, but it’s certainly something. Yeah, that’s cool. Side note. I met Introversion once and after introducing myself, the main guy could be Graham by mistake, who was the previous PCGamer editor. That made me laugh. It was a very slight Scottish man, as opposed to extremely chunky English man. So, yes, good times. Is that all your picks? That is all my picks. OK, so I have one left. That’s category 8, 90% plus on PCGamer UK. I’m going to just take Max Payne, Matthew. If you can have a slightly underpowered sequel on your list while I have the other one, then we can do it in reverse as well. This is just an iconic PC game. An iconic early noughties PC game. When I got back into PC gaming, this was just the hot shit. I picked up the issue after PCGamer reviewed this. It was top of the charts and stuff. It was just used as a point of reference everywhere because it’s just such a breakthrough. Everyone had seen The Matrix. Everyone wanted to see that fucking bank lobby scene or whatever it is, that lobby scene, recreated in some kind of game form. This was that merged with this really fun noir pastiche. It worked incredibly well. A slightly longer game than the first one. It feels like a bit more gamey and a bit less sort of narrative-y, I would say. It feels like of the time in terms of the level design, whereas the second one has this much more elaborate art direction applied to the level design. But I’d say the shooting is absolutely on par, very, very close together in terms of how the shooting feels. They are definitely two pieces of the same thing. I don’t think a person would play one without the other, Matthew. Would you agree with that? Yeah, hence why they’re both being remade together. So yeah, Max Payne. That completes my list, Matthew. That was fun. Did you enjoy that? I did, yeah. That was nothing too nasty. No major upsets. Yeah. I wonder what the next draft will be, because I think the next highest voted one was the Game Boy, Game Boy Color one. So maybe we’ll do that in a couple of months. That’s rough. Well, you just do GBA if you want. Maybe we should just do all Game Boy games. That would be quite fun. Original Game Boy. I don’t know. It gets thin fast, I’d say, in terms of legit greats. Yeah, you could maybe do GBA and GBC together instead. That might be the way to go. Because when you look at black and white Game Boy games, actually, I don’t want to upset Ashley Day. Plus, it’s that James Bond game we’re always banging on about. That’s the king pick. Yeah, maybe one category should just be original Game Boy game. That might actually be pretty good. This is taking shape. So it’s coming up with episodes inside an episode now. Let’s do the rundown of our categories, Matthew. So do you want to read the category name, then your pick, and then I’ll read my pick? And I preface this by saying, think of this as a whole collection. Don’t focus just on the direct comparisons. That’s all I ask of you. Very good. Yes, category one. I’ve got fear. I’ve got half-life too. FPS category two. I’ve got no one lives forever too, a spy in harm’s way. I’ve got Call of Duty 2. Category three, 4X game, good game or sim. I’ve got black and white. I’ve got roller coaster tycoon 3. Category four, online game. I’ve got return to Castle Wolfenstein. I’ve got Star Wars, Jedi Knight, Jedi Academy. Number five, strategy. I’ve got freedom force. I’ve got Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, plus Yuri’s Revenge. Category six, RPG. I’ve got Baldur’s Gate 2, Shadows of Arl and Throne of Baal. And I’ve got Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic. Number seven, immersive sim. I have Thief 2, The Metal Age. I have Deus Ex. 90 plus from PC Gamer UK. I’m hoping Max Payne 2 is a 90 plus. And I have Max Payne. Number nine, wild card. I’ve got Uplink. And I’ve got Anachronox. And number ten, free pick. I’ve got Star Wars, Jedi Knight 2, Jedi Outcast. And I have Warhammer 40,000, Dawn of War, with I think two expansions. So quite close there, quite close. Well, Half-Life 2 will win it. Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex is a… we all know. We know our lists too well. I thought it was tilting one way at the start, and then I think it tilted back a little bit, which I think is good. I think after you picked Jedi Outcasts, I did wonder, oh, maybe I’m just going to try and snatch up a bunch of stuff here. But I think the civil way has resulted in two quite balanced lists, you know? Whereas if I’d have had Thief 2 for that free pick, that would have been just harsh for no reason, I think. So yeah, I think that’s good. So people can vote for that, Matthew, at Back Page Pod on our pinned tweet. That will be live on Twitter by the time people are listening to this. The poll will be up for a week. Afterwards, we’ll talk about the winner. I’ll also add to this episode description who won. But Matthew, I always enjoy drafting with you. That was good. Excited to be on, to have less baggage in our next draft after doing like a sequel draft for the first time. Yeah, at least I don’t think the baggage, really is ugly head with this one. I think we’re fine. Was I going for a TIE fighter moment with Jedi Outcast? Perhaps. Oh, did you also, did you almost pick SWAT 4? Because I thought about that. I didn’t, no, I just don’t have any experience with it. Yeah, it has some like cool environmental design elements to it and stuff that like you could, you know, you wouldn’t call Bioshock-y, but you certainly feel like, you know, accomplished first person sort of shooter team made this. So I did think about it, but I couldn’t quite place it. I just like, I didn’t want the whole list to be FPS games and I’ve got arguably four on my list, which I think is plenty. So, yeah, but I know I did think about it, Matthew. That was the one I thought about. Plus, like I mentioned, Rise of Nations, that was the other one I sort of considered too. Any others that you sort of thought about that didn’t make the list? I quite like Desperados, the kind of cowboy version of sort of Commandos came out in this period. I think you’re right about Vampire Bloodlines, just not holding up in its original form, but I think that is a super interesting game. And in its form now, definitely worth a look. Yeah, I think that was mainly it. Heads? No, not heads. Yeah, there was a game called Impossible Creatures, where you design these weird fucking monster things that on PC Gamer, Tom Sr. was always going on about. I thought about that for Wildcard, actually, but I didn’t play, I didn’t have the experience. There was Homeworld 2 as well, which is, if you like, space games and RTS games combined, very, very good. Most of the games, I just didn’t make them on my list, where RTS games, I just didn’t have the space for. Warcraft 3, for example, I know people liked that at the time. I’m not really a big Blizzard guy, personally. Yeah, you get World of Warcraft begins in this period, but I don’t know how it is in this period. Yeah, I think that people have a lot of nostalgia for this period of it, because it was so new, so fresh, so well done, relative to, I guess, what the MMO was at the time. But I don’t have any of that experience and all of my, I don’t know, I have a lot of people who I’ve met over the years who have had their lives impaired by being addicted to that game. So I will also say, I do ask you, by the way, the funniest part of this podcast is the idea of your mom coming in while you’re punching a cow. That’s pretty funny. I really thought about for Wild Card, the movies, the Lionhead game. That was my backup in case you took Black and White for strategy. Yeah, I thought I’d probably get away with Wild Card for that because it sold so badly, didn’t it? It was like a notorious flop. But yeah, that’s such a super interesting game. That should totally be on GOG or something now. It’s kind of annoying that it’s sort of lost to time, that and Black and White. So those are the honorable mentions, Matthew. I might do a follow up tweet at the little thread just saying those so people know that we’ve name checked a few more things. Just to get the PC hardcore off our case. That’s it. I don’t want people tweeting us about World of Warcraft. If you’re thinking about doing that at home, don’t bother. We’ll all have a better life. Nothing gets you muted faster. Yeah, straight into the abyss there. So Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBassel underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W Roberts. As mentioned, I’m going to the pinned tweet back page pod. I will post up the full list of this again, just in case you need to hear it back. In fact, Matthew, maybe we should just do one quick recap here. So I’ll just read out the name of the categories and you just drop yours in. So FPS 1 Half-Life 2. I’ve got Fear. FPS 2 Call of Duty 2 for me. No One Lives Forever 2 is Spying Harm’s Way. Category 3, 4X game, God Game or Sim. I’ve got Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. Black and White. Category 4, Online game, I’ve got Jedi Academy. I’ve returned to Castle Wolfenstein. Category 5, Strategy, I’ve got Red Alert 2. Freedom Force. Category 6, RPG, I’ve got Kotor. Baldur’s Gate 2, Shadows of Arm. Category 7, Immersive Sim, I’ve got Deus Ex. Thief 2, The Metal Age. Category 8, 90% plus from PC Gamer UK, I’ve got Max Payne. I’ve got Max Payne 2. Category 9, Wild Card, I’ve got Anachronox. Uplink. Category 10, Free Pick, Warhammer 40,000, Dawn of War. Star Wars Jedi 2, Jedi Outcast. We’re done, let’s get out of here Matthew, goodbye.