I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Matthew, welcome to September. Shall we talk about what’s coming up this month? Oh, let’s do it. Yep, so if you’d like to back the podcast, support us financially, whether it’s that one pound, and join our little tip jar tier, or four pound fifty to unlock two extra podcasts a month, patreon.com/backpagepod. Here’s what we’re making this month. So this is our first episode of September, what we’ve been playing, that’s September 2nd. For September 9th, we’ve got Splatoon 3, plus Nintendo’s newer series. We have a spotlight on recent Nintendo attempts to make new things, so don’t ignore Mario Link or the like. Our Excel episode for patrons, best seven out of ten games, Matthew, September 12th. You looking forward to that one? Yes, I am. It feels like put money where your mouth is. We talk about this vague concept of seven out of ten all the time, and now we’ve got to actually try and clarify it. Yeah, I think our listeners will like that because it will run the intersection of interesting games that aren’t necessarily stellar. Funny thing is as well, I was shocked at how much of a consensus there is on what a seven out of ten game is because I found an old Alec Muir list on Rock Paper Shotgun from 2016, and that had about eight of the games on there that I would have put on my list. I can’t believe there is a consensus around this, but no, it should be some good stuff in there. That should be good. September 16th, we’ve got GTA clones on trial. So that should be good. Trying to get a guest in for that one if we can make the timing work, but yep, we’re gonna run through from PS2 to present all of the different attempts to muscle in on GTA’s turf of open world nonsense. And then I think Judge Castle is gonna rule on whether they, I don’t know, live or die. We’ll think of something that will happen to them. Get sent to the bargain bin. Can we fit the whole of Neversoft into one of those water tanks? That’s the question. All right, is this a reference to Gun, Matthew? Okay, good. So that should be fun. We may need you to make the case for some of these as well. So that’d be even strange to turn for the court of Judge Matthew Castle. Yeah, so that’s September 16th. That’s September 23rd. LucasArts Adventure Games Hall of Fame. I’m hoping to finally have Ashley Day on for that one. A guest we’ve discussed many times, someone who used to work with me, and Matthew knows quite well. So that is going to basically… Matthew, we’re going to try and slim down the LucasArts Adventure Games Library to five representative games. You can only pick five. Is that the goal of that one? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, that’s the plan. Go through everything and then chop it all down, really tighten it up and come up with five definitive classics. Yeah, and then upset two or three people along the way, no doubt. Well, the person we’re most likely to upset is Ash, so by having him on, we negate that. It’s a good way of scanning our way through that particular dilemma. Yeah, that should be good. The XXL episode, Pop Culture Focused, is Star Wars actually good? That would be a ranking of the Star Wars movies, probably primarily driven by me. That’s September 26, so that’s another patron exclusive episode. If you’d like to back us the XL tier, £4.50, you’ll get that. Finally, Gamescourt Not Again Edition on September 30. Judge Big Sammy will return hungover to decide whether more people live or die. That sounds like a good month to you, Matthew. Sounds like a great month. We’ve got some good Gamecourt stuff. I’ve been keeping an eye on it. Lots of traditional entries, games and prices. If you’re thinking about submitting something, that’s what we want, a game and a price. By all means, give us a bit of an anecdote. Give it a bit of colour. But the game should be at the heart of it, not like your character, I feel. Yeah, we’ve still got as well, so many entries backed up. I feel like we’ve got at least two episodes kind of backed up worth of entries at this point. So yeah, there’s a lot to get through. Some of these, they’re getting into the realms of like, oh, I was thinking about buying Crash Bandicoot 2, and then when I was thinking about it, I hit a guy in my car. It was that wrong. And you’re like, that isn’t what GamesCourt is for, I should say. It’s not gaming adjacent crime. It’s pre-owned games you have bought. Some are like entire autobiographies as well. Like, you know, the year is 1997, like June 7th. I look at a boy being savagely kicked on the playground. Eight paragraphs later, I bought Croc for like eight quid. As a 35-year-old man, and it’s like, what are we doing here, really? But yeah, well, nonetheless, we appreciate the entries. So keep them coming in the old GamesCourt submissions thing in the Discord. So that’s good. So yeah, Matthew, last introduction. So patreon.com/backpagepod, big sale done. Thanks for everyone’s support so far in helping us make the Patreon. People seem to really like what we’re creating. So we’re grateful for the support. So, Matthew, this is what we’ve been playing. Why don’t you kick off with your first game? Well, I’m going to jump in with Saints Row because I think we’ve both played a bit of this, right? Yeah, sadly. That’s basically it, isn’t it? Yeah, I just really hoped it would be better than the review said it was. So yeah, I kind of came into this with probably a bit of like unfair bias in that I wanted it to be good, just to kind of like… there’s been a slight move against this game because its characters are sort of younger, and well, they’re a new cast of characters, it’s not the traditional characters, and there is this sort of narrative around this that it’s a bit hipster and it’s a bit woke, which obviously some unpleasant corners of the internet have jumped on and have been willing this game to be shit so they could make a crow about the decline of these very things, and these are not people who genuinely should win in life, so I sort of really wanted this to be good, just to kind of put those assholes in their place. I don’t think it is good, but I also don’t think it’s the absolute car crash that some reviews have made it out to be, you know, I’ve heard some people sort of talk about this in the terms of like, you know, it’s a total embarrassment, where I think it is just quite a crummy open world game, no more, no less. I think what it lacks is an angle. They’ve rebooted Saints Row, obviously it got more sort of superheroic in its last entry, it has been nine years since an original Saints Row game release, that is a long, long time. Getting rid of the players of president, superhero stuff, wacky stuff, sci-fi, to make it more grounded again, I can see the logic in doing that. But I think what it lacks is a modern angle to either the premise of who you’re playing as or the location you’re in, which is this desert city that’s maybe a cross between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Is that fair to say, Matthew, do you think? Yeah, I think so. I did wonder if there was a little bit of Breaking Bad Albuquerque in the mix as well. It does have a little bit of that vibe about it to the story as well in some bits. Because it’s kind of like hustle, you know, that if it has any angle at all, it’s kind of like young people hustling to kind of get a foot on some kind of criminal ladder. That is pretty fucking fake. Yeah, I don’t have a particular problem with the characters. Like you say, there was this weird backlash from the usual people who waste their time and energy worrying about this stuff. But the characters are like no more offensive than the characters in, you know, say Watch Dogs 2 to me, or, you know, any kind of recent attempts to make young people, young modern people the center of something that I don’t have a problem with. I think it is just, I don’t know what it’s for as a game, whereas I feel like, I feel like Saints Row 3, the tone drove the game to a large extent. And there was this escalation as the game went on from like your classic Saints Row 2, you know, gangster nonsense up to, oh, some sci-fi lads just turned up in some floating sort of like warships or whatever. And meanwhile, there was this, you know, we’ll have these like these characters singing together and all this kind of stuff. And I feel like there was this winning through line, the game just had an identity, but this I don’t quite get what the identity is. It’s just sort of a load of open world stuff. And it’s weird. I’ve only played a couple of hours of it, so I wouldn’t completely write it off, but it’s just it’s kind of by the numbers open world game, which is a bit strange in 2022, just because there are so few of these games actually around these days, open world games in this old GTA style, that you almost expect them to be to have like a high concept attached to them. But this doesn’t. It’s just another Saints Row game, which is kind of weird, you know? Yeah, I, you know, I feel like they’ve obviously wanted to reboot it. But actually, if you look at Saints Row, like, arguably each game is like radically different from the last. Like they’re actually, the actual identity of the series is very, very hard to pin down. Like based on a hazy memory, like I haven’t gone back to a lot of these games, like I’d say it feels pretty closer to Saints Row 2 in terms of like, it has like a little bit more like sort of silliness than one, but it hasn’t gone the kind of full crazy kind of posturing of three. And like by the time you get to four, like that I would say is actually like encroaching on like crackdown territory. You know, it’s such a, such a different game altogether. So you know, it is a bit of a nightmare series to continue on or reset or return to because it, you know, for better or worse has been lots of different things. But I think, I think you’re right. Like there’s just, especially early on, and I’m the same as you, I’ve only played a few hours of this, you know, the story missions seem like, I would say perfectly sort of fine. Like there’s, there’s a, there’s a little bit of character to them. They’re sort of set pieces. They’re a bit sillier. Like, you know, the opening tutorial you end up like stuck on the back of a, of a tarrier jump jet shooting at people and you’re like, oh, okay, this is a little bit of Saints Row. But once you actually get dumped in the city, I feel like you have to go looking a little bit too hard for fun, which is like, that’s just a big sort of like alarm bell for me in an open world game. You know, this, you know, a sandbox should be, you sort of set off a domino rally of chaos. You know, you shoot one person and that should set off the chain of events that’s going to keep you busy for the next 10 minutes. Here, like, whether it’s just those tools don’t exist or they exist deeper in the story, I just, I found it quite hard to make my own fun. And that was, yeah, that’s why I sort of stopped playing after a couple of hours. I was like, you know, I’m not particularly feeling this. I will sort of temper that by saying, like, you know, it doesn’t, like, offend me or anger me, as it seems to have some reviewers. It’s just like, you know, and at the same time, like, you know, because I saw some reviews saying like, it’s just not up to Rockstar standards. And that’s that I don’t think is a particularly fair criticism, because I don’t think like really anyone can match them in terms of like team size and budget. Like that is a preposterous aim, but it doesn’t have, yeah, like the gameplay lacks character, I guess is the thing. The gameplay lacks character, and the city looks nice. I drove around the whole thing and I was like, well, this does actually feel like a real city and in the way it’s lit and how it’s been modeled. It does, you know, the bits that look like Los Angeles really feel like Los Angeles and the bits that are more Vegas-y are, you know, certainly colorful and nice to look at. But it’s true, it doesn’t feel like a massively reactive world, you know what I mean? But I do think that personality or through line or angle on the open world game is what used to define these games to a large extent. Like when you think about, you know, how Vice City was, this is the 80s game, you know, this is like this game is it drives the tone of the game, it drives what the city looks like, how it feels, then you can even look at the clones that followed, as we’ll discuss in a future episode, like, you know, true crime was like, we’re the game that’s got the Max Payne slo-mo laid on top of the sort of open world stuff, which, you know, wasn’t as good as GTA, of course, but they had their own angle on it too. And then you look at the getaway, which is like, we’re the London open world game, it’s really London. That was their angle. And so all of these games are up to Watch Dogs, where it’s like, you know, the hacking is the thing, or like the idea of being part of this secret society that’s trying to bring down some kind of authority, you know, authoritative force, there is always an angle. There was always an angle, there was an always there was always an intent behind the different environments they picked for the Watch Dogs games, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, London felt very different to San Francisco, and felt very different to Chicago, which felt deliberately sort of cold and real. And I just don’t sense that overall intent here, that overall feeling of, well, this is what we’ve made. This is what the game is. And like, instead, it just feels like, you know, little bits of the camaraderie of Saints Row, I remember from before, and in this, like, quite, this pretty but quite flat feeling open world that just doesn’t have, like you say, makes you work a bit too hard to have fun. And so it’s kind of a shame, because I think there absolutely is room for lower budget, like GTA alternatives, but it almost feels like a slight waste that they had their shot at with making one, and then just didn’t have a really strong hook for what a viable alternative looks like, you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Like you almost miss the slightly obnoxious guiding hand of like THQ is like missing in a way. You know, it just feels like a thing that was like left to its own devices and hasn’t really gone anywhere. You missed Danny Dillson. Because I’ve bounced off some of Saints Row, some stuff which people have really liked in the past rubbed me up the wrong way because I found it like it’s it’s so obnoxious and like mate like if it tips into charming, I think you fall deeply in love with these worlds. If it doesn’t, you’re just like, oh man, it’s just like a load of like Yahoo’s, it’s just isn’t for me. And but this just doesn’t even come anywhere near any of that. Like there’s just yeah, it’s not even like particularly annoying. You know, it’s just, yeah, just sort of there. It’s sad. It’s it’s it’s it’s disappointing. Like this team used to be very productive and it’s made some really, really like great eight out of 10s. And it’s like a space which is so like you say, this is such a drought of like this particular like level of game making. And to see it kind of like what should be quite a sort of key game in that kind of middle ground, slightly fluff it is, I don’t know, it just bums me out. But at the same time, like, you know, the people on Twitter who are just showing you gifs of this game becoming extremely broken, like that doesn’t reflect my my technical experience with it. And a little part of me, you know, kind of like riled gets riled by that. It’s like, well, it’s just not true. You know, this game has its problems, but it’s it’s false to present it as this just like gross technical negligence, because I don’t think that is true. Oh, yeah, I refer, you know, refer us both to Nathan Brown coming on the podcast and saying I will never criticise an open world game developer for having a bug in their game, because yes, a big game like that is really fucking hard to test and, you know, sharpen up. So that I don’t hold against it. It’s like, I’m not offended by it. I just wish I was up for it more. That’s how I feel. Like, I’m not, that’s where the disappointment comes from. I don’t think there’s any any one part of it that’s bad. It’s just all of it’s just okay. And so collectively just doesn’t add up to something that I’m excited about playing, which I don’t know, it actually had got me to reinstall to install the Saints Row 3 remake they did a couple of years ago. I thought that might just be more what I fancy. Maybe I’ll just scratch the same itch. And I felt very coherent as an open world experience in terms of like tone and just it was just the right spot between them fun and silliness. I also wish the shooting was a bit better in this Matthew as well. The shooting is a little bit like just ratatat standstill kind of thing, you know? Yeah, it’s all a bit spongy. And but I think that was sort of true of the old games, but you didn’t really care as much just because there was so much like so much distracting you from the slightly spongy core where in here it just doesn’t have that that like extra layer of zaniness or weirdness to distract you. So it’s it’s just all a bit more kind of like out there, you know, under the kind of harsh spotlight. Yeah, it’s also like it’s not that woke either. It’s like if you want to design a character who’s naked and runs around with like bare breasts out, you can do that. That’s they’ll let you do that. This quite immature in that sense. Yeah. So yeah, that’s a real I don’t know why people took that angles. It’s really annoying they did because like you say, it feels bad to like it feels almost rough to criticize the game for other stuff. I’m assuming I don’t really know what the dynamic of the central for. They just seem to be flatmates that sort of do crimes together. And it’s really vague. It’s like really vague in a slightly unsatisfying way. You have a completely separate job. Like it starts off, you’re working for this sort of like private military company, which seems to be like your whole deal. But then you are just one of this quartet of like weirdos. And you’re like, how do these people gel? How do they like work together exactly? But I don’t know, maybe it all will be revealed if you play it. Apparently not massively long. Apparently like, you know, sub 20 hours campaign. Just not sure I’ve got the time for it. I think I might already be done with it, you know. Yeah. Yeah. God bless the Epic Games account. It was useful in this case because I did want to talk about it, but I must admit if I had paid 50 quid for it, I’d be a little bit disappointed. So yeah, that’s my read. Okay, Matthew, should we move on to the next game? Okay, so I’ve been playing Arcade Paradise on Steam. Now, I think this is available on all formats, including Nintendo Switch. It’s about 15 quid. Do you know this game, Matthew? I’ve been reading up about it because it sounds amazing and I’ve seen some people getting really excited for it. So when I saw you were going to talk about it, I thought, oh, this will be good. This will be my chance to decide if I’m going to get it or not. Yeah, so I think for the reasons you might think it’s amazing, it’s just okay. Oh, which is to say, like the fact that, okay, let’s start with the premise of the game. You are this ne’er-do-well 19-year-old called Ashley and your dad, who does he thinks you’re a bit of a waster, wants you to go and run his very run-down laundrette in this city that I think is maybe a riff on Detroit or Chicago. Can’t really tell. And so, in first person, you go to this laundrette each day and you run it like a laundrette. You put the washing in the machines. You take it out, put it in the dryer, all that stuff. And it’s like a scoring system for doing that. But the whole thing is that Ashley has the desire to build, secretly build up an arcade that’s at the back of the laundrette. There’s a few machines in there, but it’s very run-down. But he sees potential of, oh, well, we can turn this community laundrette into something much better and much more exciting. And he’s like a massive games fan, so he wants to make that happen. So what it amounts to is this first-person management simulator kind of game where you’re sort of balancing the time of each day, of how you kind of like, when you put the washing in, when you pick up rubbish and chuck that in the bin. And the whole thing is that as Ashley’s doing that, you as a player see each task he does as a kind of arcade-y game. So like there’s a visual effect on screen when you’re like chucking the rubbish in the bin just to get it accurate and stuff like that. There’s a little power meter that comes up when you’re pulling gum off of a surface that’s almost stuck there, that sort of thing. And you’re slowly making enough money to buy more arcade machines and expand the little arcade thing out the back. And so I believe there’s the kind of like the big novelty thing here. And I’m assuming this is why you’re excited by it, Matthew, is that there are over 30 arcade machines and they are actual games that you play inside the game. And most of them are riffs on old arcade games, everything from Atari. Sorry, Atari. My brain shorted out then. Everything from Pac-Man to like Missile Command and a whole bunch of other stuff. There’s absolutely tons of their air hockey, you know, if you like an old, old arcade game, it’s probably represented here in some form. But I was curious, Matthew, which part of the game sort of captured your imagination? Yeah, so it was the talk of there are all these machines, which are sort of parodies of sort of classic games, but are like fully functional with like cheats and like the weird sort of arcade machine behavior to kind of probe, which I saw people saying that they were very, you know, they really simulated the kind of complexities of arcade machines married to a kind of, yeah, a sim element, which sounded like it fit into the kind of maybe the more like zen sim traditions of like your power wash simulator or your lawn mowing simulator. You know, it’s not like a technical management game. It’s like a chores game. And I just thought, oh, that sounds like a relaxing game married to an interesting selection of arcade games. Like my big doubt was like all those arcade games could just be a little old shit. And then this whole thing would fall apart. But people seem to vouch for them in the reviews. I mean, does that reflect what it is or? They’re not a load of old shit. They’re like, they’re highly variable. And I would say that like most of them you play once and be like, oh, that’s enough of that, you know. But they have like created art for all of these different games and put legit effort into the presentation generally of how the machines look when you’re exploring that 3D space. And each time you get a new machine delivered to the Launtrette, it turns it into a real event because you go to work the next day and this lorry turns up and chucks it outside and then it’s like, oh wow, it’s here. And so you’re slowly kind of building up. And what I like about the early game dynamic, and I understand this changes as you upgrade things is that you kind of you go and have a go on the arcade machine, but then your watch goes off and it’s like time to empty the dryer, time to like, you know, take the washing out, that sort of stuff. And that’s really cool because it’s like, it’s like what it would be like if you were actually working in this place and you had arcade machines. It’s like, you can play this for a couple of minutes, but then you’ve got to go do something. And I really like the way it kind of simulates that quality to it. And so yeah, some of the games are better than others. I say like most of them though, most of them I’ve played so far and I’m only a few hours into the game. I think I like just okay. But like, yeah, it is a really cool combination of things. Like there’s no one standout part to the game. I’d say. But it’s like the delicate combination of the simulation elements and the arcade games. Like they support each other and it works well because there’s not one part of the game that it’s ever like truly dependent on. So it kind of flicks between them. I see. And like, yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. Cause like I definitely, the thing I was racking my brains for, it reminded me of when I heard about all the games was like I really liked the experience of playing like the retro stuff when they did Rare Replay. And I wondered if like, oh, it’s like a, like a narrative experience built around like a similar, yeah, similar experience of like unlocking new games and finding new games and playing these games and maybe discovering some you liked and some you didn’t like, but with this kind of chilled laundrette sort of element to it as well. But I didn’t realize it kind of tore you away from the games like that. You can just ignore your duties if you want to play a game all day. That’s fine. The game only punishes you in the sense that you won’t make as much money that day and you’ll get like a low rating for the quality of your laundry because you took too long to take out the dryer or whatever. And so there’s no consequence. If you do want to just keep playing them, you can do that. And some of them actually have like continuous elements to them, like it’s like one that’s kind of like a micro adventure game that I was playing and that sort of thing. There’s also an element where a more popular arcade machine can be placed next to a less popular arcade machine to generate more money. You can adjust the difficulty of the machines. You can adjust how much it costs to use the machines to kind of make the profitability go up or down. There’s a really nice ritual element to, you go up to like the little kind of coin thing at the bottom and empty it out. And that feels really good when you take the money out of there and deposit it and stuff. So there’s all these like nice little ritual elements to it. Each day in it is just very satisfying. And like, I must admit, there’s, I like the laundry elements, like the laundry elements is quite good as well. But you get in and each morning I’m like, right, I’m gonna clean up, gonna find every garbage that’s been left around here since last night. Got burger boxes, pizza boxes, newspapers, leftover socks, chuck those all out, good. Then the game rewards. It gives you a bit of money for chucking out your garbage. Don’t know how that works exactly, in terms of real life economy. And then you’re like, right, okay, we’ve got our first set of laundry. Let’s pop that in. Yeah, pop that in and go deposit the money in the safe. Look at what I can buy. See if I can buy a new arcade machine. See if I can knock out a back wall and expand the arcade at the back and that sort of thing. There are NPCs who are in the laundry with you, which makes it feel a bit more like a real space. They’re not massively expressive or anything. They’re just sort of standing around, but it makes it feel real. You hear the ding-dong as the door opens at every single hour of the day. Really, really good. And I find that ritual just really satisfying. So even if the arcade games aren’t primarily the draw for this for me, I think that it really works as a combination of stuff. And it’s only like 15 quid or something. I think it’s like a really cool little thing for what it is. And it’s supposed. Yeah. That’s kind of why I hope to hear. Yeah. Can you push it the other way? Can you expand the launderette and sell the arcade machines? No, I don’t think you can. The funny thing is, because you have this ongoing sort of tension with your father in it, who by the way is played by Doug Cockle, I think, the Geralt of Rivia, which the game goes to like massive pains to tell you. He is played by him. And I would kind of roll my eyes at that, but fine. How does he say, like, it’s me, your dad, Doug Cockle. No, he goes like, oh, back in the day, they called me Geralt of Rivia or something. But everything else about the game, I really like. It’s like a really, really good seven out of 10. You know, like it’s, I actually like, of all the games I’ve played for this episode, like I’ve just been like noodling around with this, eight, three hours of my time, like no problem. And I’ve got a free code from a friend of a friend. And a publisher, full disclosure, but I really like it. It’s really cool. It’s a great Steam Deck game as well. And like the vibe of the place is just spot on. Like the laundry feels like a distinct space. And then the arcade bit itself feels like a distinct space. And like, there’s loads of good, it feels like it’s like the 90s or the noughties or something. The technology in there reflects it. Like you’ve got like a PDA with you and that sort of thing. And the computer is like an old gray box Windows PC. So really kind of inventive, cool little game. I love that it’s a first person game that’s like a sim. Like I think that’s much better than managing it all from like a bird’s eye view or something, you know? So it’s cool, Matthew. It’s a cool game. I like this. Very good. Yeah. It has slight echoes of a, I knock, the sim and laundry elements very different, but there was quite a good game on DS called Retro Game Challenge, which was based on that Game Center CX show with that Japanese guy who plays all the Rock Hard NES games. And it was about a kid playing like fake Famicom games with his mate in his bedroom. And they were just there, you know, they’d made these clones of like Gallagher or whatever that you’d play. And then, but you’d get like games magazines, which would have like hints of like secret things you could do in the games, which would help you like win the next time you played, you know, like games mags did. It would say like, if you shoot the red bug and then the blue bug, that like triples your points or whatever. So you had to read these games mags to kind of get better at the games. And I’d kind of hope that there was a sort of an element of that kind of sort of simulating the kind of arcade experience. Maybe there is, but I’ve just not gotten deep enough into it to get that. Cause I’ve only got like, I think eight machines and there’s like more than 30 in the game. So, you know, I’ve only seen a little bit of it, but I’m definitely gonna keep playing it. Like I find it a very comforting play. I do like the idea there’s no pressure to like, do something in one day. If you can’t be bothered to do laundry, you do just want to play games. That’s pretty cool. You’ll still keep ambiently making money. It’s where you leave the arcade and find your dad in a Geralt or Rivia bathtub. Hello son. This is a cursed reference. Yeah, I’m hoping just the one reference is all they’re going to like force upon me as a player. But 15 quid, just the right, exactly the right price for something like this. I do wonder if they paid what you, the game you mentioned, the retro game challenge, you say it was called? Yeah, so I think it was called something like that. Retro game arcade or retro game challenge, yeah. Yeah, so no, this is cool. This is like, yeah, this probably won’t make my game of the year list, but it’ll definitely get into the unrollable mentions. It’s decent, yeah. I think it’s just cool. It’s just exactly what I needed. The right, it’s got good vibes, this game. It’s good vibes. You know, when you don’t want to explain what you mean properly, you say good vibes. All the time. That’s like 90% of what I say on this podcast, is that something has vibes, and let the listeners figure out. Can they go and spend 30 quid on it in CEX, and go, fuck the vibes. And I’m like, well, I only said it had vibes. You know? That’s on you. So many ill-advised, yes, but has made as a result of that mentality. No, good stuff, Matthew. So what’s your second game? I’ve been playing As Dusk Falls, which is on Game Pass, both Xbox and PC. This is made by a studio called Interior Night, headed up by an ex-Quantic Dream person who worked on, I wanna say Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls, and she’s called Caroline Marshall, and now she’s creative director at this studio. And this is like, are you aware of this one at all? Yeah, I was. And it’s got this kind of, it’s like almost motion comic art style or something. Yeah, yeah. It’s a sort of Quantic Dream-esque choices, consequences, interactive narrative, except, yes, rendered with sort of static character art that animates between sort of frames. So somewhere between, if you built a game out of Max Payne’s comic book scenes and animated them a bit more, it might look a bit like this. Or, if you listen to our best TV shows, you’ve ever watched Tom Goes to the Mare, which has got a photo, which has got basically lots of images of Tim and Eric photoshopped and filtered. It’s very similar to that, which made me laugh. I imagine it’s a very cost-effective way of making a game with a lot of branching paths because you have static images of your actors, you aren’t rendering them as complicated 3D models, you’re not having to animate all their actions. That’s really a huge benefit to the story they’re telling because it feels like just economically they can have a lot more variations going on without breaking the bank, which I imagine they couldn’t have when you’re making these things with incredible photorealistic graphics. So it seems smart from a smaller studio tackling this kind of material. I also wonder if in the long run it will seem smart from a more timeless artistic perspective. One of the big problems I have with Quantic Dream games is that they often look phenomenal at the time, but when you go back to them, they look fucking bizarro, because they’ve got all these uncanny Valley characters. Like Heavy Rain, which was once as cutting edge as they could come 3D models-wise. I’d say now looks kind of unnerving and bad, where I think this will probably never look as cutting edge, but will always be fine. So, that’s what I have to say on the interesting art style. Narratively, it’s very, very similar to a Quantic Dream game. Like, this is clearly someone who has come from that studio with its storytelling traditions. Like, it’s a lot smaller in scale, because it’s about basically two families that collide with one another. A family who are driving cross-country, so the husband can take a new job, and a family of petty criminals who’ve stolen something from a local police chief, and they basically all end up in this motel, in a hostage situation. But it’s actually, again, I would say a very smart move, because it’s like this sort of tinderbox, there’s all these personalities clashing in there. It feels sort of intense in quite an organic and believable way. I mean, it’s clearly a preposterous piece of thriller writing, but it isn’t having to jump through like mad hoops to engineer constant situations, you know. A lot can go wrong when there are police outside and a load of aggressive people inside with hostages. And I think it minds that situation a lot more kind of deeply and realistically than a David Cage story would like. I haven’t quite finished it, I’ll say. And the story definitely does go to places, but I don’t want to sort of spoil that, but it doesn’t go to preposterous places. It plays within the rules of reality, of thriller filmmaking. I sort of think this kind of storytelling is a bit of a dead end. I don’t think they particularly tell us much about ourselves. I think they put you in lots of situations where you only have a fraction of the information and you’re trying to kind of make sort of half our sort of guesses based on that and what the right thing is to do. And that has a kind of panicked energy to it, but I personally prefer my moral dilemmas to come in a space where you can kind of like investigate the whole scenario and then work out, you know, have a bit of time to think it through. You know, I think Bioware do a better job of that, say, where they kind of give you like, here are all the things, you know, here’s kind of what we’re playing with. This is a little bit like press A, press B, press C. And you know, the idea that like at the end of the level, it sort of says what kind of person you are, does this like personality test, but I don’t think it really tells you anything. You’re just pressing buttons to see what happens really. So that’s why I think it’s a bit of a narrative dead end. But that said, saying that, it’s still like, it’s pretty diverting. Like, I don’t know, I’ve played that for like four hours so far, I think about two thirds through it. It’s quite fast moving. Like it asks you to decide something probably every 30 seconds or so. There’s no like movement in it. It’s just selecting choices pretty much. So it doesn’t have the sort of slower sections where some telltale games like pretend to be point and click games, but actually kind of come apart. It doesn’t have the kind of like say the wild, bizarre excesses of David Cage and just the silly unlikely bits. It’s just, you know, quite sort of hackneyed cops and robbers stuff, but I’ll actually take it, you know? Yeah, yeah. It’s because it’s a sat on game pass. It does make me think I should just give it a go. And I probably will. But also I think it’s probably about to be eclipsed by immortality on there as well this week. So I feel like my interactive narrative box will probably be ticked by that this year. Not that they’re competing. Yeah, I imagine it might be very different games. Yeah, but in terms of my headspace, I probably only need one for my year, you know what I mean? So I feel like the approach to maybe telling more than showing in terms of how the art style works is maybe where it’s been slightly divisive with some reviewers, because for some people, I think the storytelling really landed, and then for other people, not so much. And I couldn’t tell how much of that was down to the presentation, Matthew, versus the writing or the construction of the story. But yeah, I’m not sure. Yeah, I read a few reviews to see what people’s major beef with it was, and they were saying that whenever it tries to do action, it looks a bit sloppy. It’s an art style that serves facial expressions, because it’s just a photo of an actor that they’ve sort of painted over the top. So it can kind of capture sort of human emotions and human behaviors in quite a subtle way. But when it all kicks off, it falls apart. But I actually felt, considering I read those reviews before playing it, I was surprised at how sort of with it I was in terms of lots of stuff kicks off. And you don’t think, oh, this is cost cutting. You don’t think, oh, well, I didn’t think, oh, I would rather be seeing these 3D models perform all these moves as you would, you know, a bigger budget Quantic Dream game. I was like, yeah, it’s conveying all the information it needs to. Yeah, I thought it was quite an elegant way of doing it. I mean, one of the beefs I have with the whole kind of photorealistic motion capture thing that David Cage does, it’s this whole talk about like, you know, we’re just trying to kind of close the gap between what a physical human actor can do and, you know, what the character in the game can do. Where actually, you know, the art of animation, the classic over a hundred year old art of animation is all about trying to kind of convey motion and human emotions and capture like bigger ideas in a more abstract form. Like it is an art form in itself, which I’ve always felt like he very clumsily doesn’t understand. And in a way, this is much closer to that. This is trying to kind of convey something in a kind of slightly like middle ground, if that makes sense. Yeah. Plus you are like someone who has played visual novel games where they don’t have any more animations than this has, right? That’s like the whole point of them in some ways. But like what you can achieve with a sound cue or an edit or an angle or a sudden, like even a text bleep. I just, I feel like cages, not to make this all about cage, but I feel like cage’s obsession with technology and the cutting edge just basically like ignores so many disciplines that make things come alive in this particular form. You know, like fundamentally, I think games have more in common with animation than they do live action filmmaking in terms of like you are representing something on screen. And, you know, while I love it and I know there’s craft in it, I’m not saying there isn’t, you know, it’s absolutely amazing what Quantic Dream have done, Naughty Dog have done bringing these characters to life. I just don’t, I think it’s like really crude to think if it isn’t like a real life human being powering the performance, it can’t like convey a genuine human idea. I think that’s fucking, I think that’s just the dumbest thing. And this is a game that’s freed from that thinking, so more power to it. Yeah, I think even in Naughty Dog’s case, I don’t know if this is the case for the PS4 ones, but certainly the PS3 ones was on charter. They would use basically the motion capture as a base, but then artists would handcraft the expressions on top of that. So they weren’t completely beholden to what the faces were doing. So, you know, that artistry does still exist in motion capture form sometimes. So yeah, but okay. Well, I may or may not play this, and if it’s short, that’s kind of appealing. The thing I haven’t tried, apparently you can, a bit like the newer, is it Supermassive, who do the horror? Yeah, that’s things like that. Like those games, this also has like eight people who can play on their mobile phones, like making decisions. So I think as a group, you could gather on a sofa and basically put these people through hell if you wanted. And I’d be intrigued to see how that would unfold or whether it’s satisfying. Because I would definitely, the best experience I had with, the fuck is it called, Until Dawn, was when I was playing with my family on the couch behind me, kind of offering their thoughts on what I should do. And it did actually bring that game to life a little bit. So maybe I should try that mechanic here as well. Okay, cool. Maybe I’ll have a run where I just try and make as many shitty decisions as I can in a row and see what happens to the people. So that could be something I do, my sort of like speed run here. Okay, good. Well, that is technically an Xbox exclusive that was published this year, isn’t it? Because I think they funded that. So- There was one. There’ll also be a Pentament, but I think that is it. That’s just what all the frickin Gears of War fan wants, a photo of like a skinny, skinny hillbilly boy looking sad at like vending machines a lot in a graphic adventure. Okay, very good Matthew. So my next one is Symphony of War, The Nephilim Saga. Are you aware of this game? Is this the thing which is something to do with, or maybe Fire Emblem adjacent? Yeah, so this is basically like a Fire Emblem riff for PC. So I suppose like in a similar way to how the game Wargroove was a bit like Advanced War Z. This is kind of like an indie developer’s take on, yeah, on the Fire Emblem formula with these visuals that look somewhere between like SNES and a little bit RPG maker. That’s not a point of criticism, but some bits of the game look better than others. And the whole thing with the Fire Emblem, of course, is it’s a Nintendo exclusive series. There aren’t really many clones or alternatives to it on PC, but this is one that kind of tries to have the relationship building element alongside the turn-based strategy, sorry, turn-based RPG strategy combat, however you want to sort of put that. So this kind of does something similar. It’s a story set with these three warring kingdoms, and then you kind of basically put these different characters, place them onto a map, and then move across the map, completing different objectives, side objectives to unlock more money, that you can, and resources that you can then invest in building your team up. You can buy more units to add to your little various little squads. You have characters who can live or die, you can put permadeath on if you want, and you try and knock through these different missions and these different objectives. I think it’s a really, really good riff on this. But I say that as someone who really should have played more Fire Emblem games than he actually has. It does feel like a low-key betrayal to be playing, like not the clone, but certainly the riff on these games, rather than the games themselves, which I do own and have owned for years. That’s a fundamental failure on my part. Feels like vandalism in some way. But I think this is really good. The writing is pretty decent. The characters are quite well drawn. I think the game looks at its best when you’re watching the combat sequences. I think that overall, the combat map and visuals and stuff looks good. The character portraits don’t look as nice. That’s where you really see the sort of seams on it. Any thirst traps in there? Definitely. That’s the thing of all the characters are vaguely 20s, so everyone can be a bit horny about the characters, I guess. That’s kind of what happened, and that’s kind of what happens. But then also, there’s a few older fitties thrown in there for good measure, to just, you know, if that’s what you’re into, fine. Like, that sort of stuff, like, it’s all… Yep, the horniness is well represented, Matthew. But I just think it’s a really strong alternative. I got onto it because I saw a piece of game is Evan Lartey tweeting about how good this was. He played a little bit on Steam Deck, and it is a great fit for Steam Deck, of course. Like, the pixel art style looks great on there. And at the same time, it’s got massive upswell of like, it’s got more than 3,000 reviews on Steam, which suggests it’s properly broken through, and people have actually found it, which is cool. It’s from Freedom Games, a publisher I’m not really that familiar with, but a lot of the stuff they make is a bit snazzy, a bit kind of like 2D pixel arty. This is really cool. I think if you don’t have a Switch and you want to play a Fire Emblem-like game, it’s like 15 quid this, so I think it’s decent. I’m like about three to four hours in, and I’ve just found it really compelling. So yeah, I guess if you’re waiting for a new Fire Emblem, this might be a good alternative, but I would only really play this on Steam Deck. I wouldn’t play this sat at a desktop, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, but I sort of feel that way about Fire Emblem proper now. It’s become a handheld game, because the majority of the best ones were on handheld, and it just doesn’t fill the TV particularly well. What it’s doing isn’t particularly flashy. It’s a bit more cerebral and plays out in your head a little bit more. So I think it’s better suited to devices which have some handheld element to them, for sure. Yeah, I think it’s got 80 plus on Metacritic, and I can see why. I just, this doesn’t, as you might expect with the Steam Deck 2, it doesn’t drain the battery too fast. So it’s not like you can only play for an hour or whatever. It looks very simple. So it, you know, it’s pretty steady on there. Yeah, just, I can’t believe this is as good as it is for what it is essentially, but yeah. Do you let your people die? Or are you a resetter on death? I turned off Permadeath from the start. But how do you play the game, Matthew? I believe that Permadeath is the way forward. I don’t know, it gives it all a sort of dramatic charge, but it is tough. Yeah, yeah, it’s difficult. Yeah, you know, there’s no wrong or right way, but you know, in the same way that with like immersive Sims, you know, the line’s always like, well, if it goes wrong, you know, the real fun of this game is like trying to deal with it. And I’m just like, quick load every time, you know. Yeah, same. I know that you’ve worked really hard on having these reactive features, which are designed to like scrabble out of danger and come up with like mad, you know, emergent escape sequences, but also that’s not for me. In the old Fire Embers, you didn’t really have a choice. So you just had to sort of engage with permadeath and like live with it. And I don’t know, maybe that’s, I try my best, I guess. My hesitancy here is that I don’t, you know, obviously Nintendo games are Nintendo games. Like they, I kind of like expect a certain level of like, you know, a sort of standard of difficulty, I guess, in terms of how a permadeath game might be calibrated, or intelligent software rather, but here, because I don’t know the developers that well, it does seem to have like, these quite big spikes in difficulty. And so I think that permadeath would feel really unfair. If like you sent one unit charging into another unit, you didn’t realize just how overpowered you were till that unit was dead. And that’s where like, I think I would just, I’d be a bit like, I quite like Jules, the sort of like a dude in my party. He seems like a pretty cool guy with sort of pals now outside of the battlefield. And so when he just gets absolutely ripped apart by archers, I’m just like, well, I didn’t have any idea those archers would be that powerful. And I’m still learning the game. So I just, yeah, I didn’t want to have it on for that level of risk, basically. I’m still fine for a low risk playthrough, but yeah, I would maybe have something I would do on a replay, but I’m a bit of a coward to be honest. That’s, I just can’t bear to be looked to lose and to be told that I’m a loser. So that’s all it is, Matthew. I just can’t be, I just can’t, I can’t bury any more hotties. I just can’t bring myself to do it. Just a graveyard of waifus, yeah. So what’s your next one, Matthew? It is a little bit on Splatoon 3. I want to go massively into this because obviously in our next episode, we’re gonna talk a bit more about Splatoon 3. I think, will we be out after the game or on the day? I think like around the same time. Yeah, well, yeah. I’ll have played more of the game proper, hopefully by then. But I did go to a preview event and play early versions of this. I played some of the single player campaign, which was fine. I don’t know how familiar you are with the single player in this, but in the first two games, it’s kind of like a, I would say like a glorified obstacle course. I’ve seen some people try and upsell Splatoon single player levels as being Mario Galaxy-esque, in that they are abstract land masses floating in space. That sounds like bullshit, Matthew, I’m gonna be honest. I mean, visually it’s sort of true in that you’re there, and the way you fly between the land masses, you have these sort of ink cannon things that fire you out that look very like the sling stars that fire you between the planetoids and galaxy. But really what you’re doing on them doesn’t change that dramatically from planetoid to planetoid, and every level is clearly designed to teach you a particular weapon class or a particular move or a particular piece of level furniture. So the idea that it ever properly takes off into galaxy territory, I think, is sort of horseshit. And I’d hoped this one was going to maybe evolve it a little bit more, but it hasn’t. But it’s fine from what I’ve seen. Like the levels that we played and the levels they showed off in the Nintendo Direct were, you know, had to certainly had some stuff going for them. They won’t be boring. But it just feels like a world that’s on the cusp of doing something more, because it has this sort of surprisingly deep lore to it in terms of like the war between the different kind of the squids and the octopuses and the kind of history of this world. Like there’s like a surprising number of lore dumps hidden in the campaign, but they just exist as a sort of story between the levels rather than, you know, one day we’re going to play a game which is like a narrative adventure set in the Splatoon universe, which I actually think it could sustain and would be interesting. I partly wonder if it’s actually something to do with like logistically, if the level, due to the graphics style of the game, the levels can only be a certain size because the hub, which is like the biggest level, runs at 30 frames compared to the rest of the game, which runs at 60. And I just wonder if they cannot push it much further beyond what the single-player tutorial missions are, but I don’t know. I’m pulling that completely out of my ass, but that’s my theory. So yeah, it’s quite a weird game for Nintendo, and we’ll definitely get into this when we talk more about the game next week, but it’s probably the straightest sequel they do in terms of it doesn’t really have a gimmick. It’s not like Splatoon 3, colon, the kind of crazy ink wars. So it’s not like there’s nothing pushing the mechanics beyond one or two. It’s arguably the same game it always was. It’s got a couple of new weapons, a couple of very small moveset tweaks, which the hardcore will tell you are going to revolutionize certain things. But I think for the average player, you wouldn’t necessarily notice they’d happened. So actually writing and talking about this game and rating this game is a bit of a nightmare, because it’s just more of a thing you love. And is that good enough? I don’t know. I don’t tend to review iterative sports games. I almost wonder if you have to use the same language as those kind of reviews. Is this actually Nintendo’s FIFA? And if so, does it kind of move the needle enough to kind of warrant celebration? It’s a tricky one. Yeah, it’s a weird one in a sense. I own both Splatoon and Splatoon 2 and had a similar relationship with both of them, which is I played it for a few hours, thought this is delightful, just a great accessible sort of like multiplayer experience, where a lot of the horrible bullshit of multiplayer online multiplayer has been stripped out because of Nintendo games, so there’s no horrible voice chat, et cetera. But admittedly, sort of like always the same thing of falling off after about five or six hours, being like, I know there are more weapons to unlock and ways to play this, but I think fundamentally the experience is so straightforward, I can feel like I scratch the itch quite quickly, and competitive games that really get under my skin tend to be ones that I will just play obsessively. And so it’s never quite crossed over for me. And for that reason, Matthew, I’m probably not going to buy the third one unless you manage to convince me otherwise. This is where I give you the incredibly hot take that is Splatoon, Nintendo’s Destiny. Does it have raids? It should have raids. It doesn’t, but I will say the thing that keeps people playing into the hundreds, if not thousands of hours, is that the language of it is very similar to the language I hear around Destiny, in that it’s people basically re-rolling weapons to try and get the ultimate version of a particular weapon. People are basically working towards the dream build in a game which fundamentally never changes, which isn’t that what Destiny is? Yeah, I mean, Destiny does change a lot in terms of how they rebalance weapons. I don’t know if Nintendo does that, but… I think it does do that, not to the same degree and the same regularity, but there’s an element of that. But the idea of people having a dream something in mind that they’re working towards, but the thing you plug that dream character into is it’s just Splatoon. Splatoon is Splatoon, and with the depth it has in that system, it’s almost a shame that character doesn’t have something more interesting to do in the campaign mode. The campaign is separate, none of that kind of customization or the character you build for multiplayer isn’t the character you bring into the single player campaign, for example. You know, it almost lacks the kind of slight coherence that maybe like locks, like, destiny. I’m just preposterous trying to call it destiny, you know, for the sake of an interesting podcast, whatever. I’m just basically, what I’m saying is, I’ve got this review on the horizon, and I have no fucking idea how to write it without it being the most boring thing I’ve ever written. So I’m just basically like, I’m just trying out some angles on you to see if you bite, see if there’s anything in them. Yeah, so trial version of an angle. I’m focused testing my review line on the podcast listeners. So if on VGC you see a review at Lycan’s Splatoon 2 Destiny, that’s why it happened here. Any others? You want to A-B test while we’re here Matthew? Is this game like Call of Duty Warzone, etc. you know, that sort of thing? No, I don’t think so. There’s definitely something about, like, I think I’m probably too old to connect with the whole kind of fashion scene of this game and the kind of… People really dig that side of things, right, as well. People are like super… That’s like a huge part of the game. You know, what keeps you playing is unlocking, like, catalogue and then, like, get, you know, some new trainers. And the idea of working towards getting some trainers for a virtual squid that turns into a boy, it just, I don’t know, it just doesn’t motivate me at 37. What about when you were 30 in the original launch, were you more into it then? Even then, like, back then, I didn’t think, like, I really liked it when it went, because we never actually got to review Splatoon, the official Nintendo closed before Splatoon was out, but we did go and preview it after E3 and, you know, you pick it up and it’s like instantly brilliant. I love it as a game and again, we’ll talk about that next week. But I never foresaw the kind of the world of Splatoon taking off in the way that it has. You know, people really connect with the iconography and the vibe and, you know, it’s definitely a younger Nintendo team like it comes from a, you know, there’s a sense of like, like a young adult life in this game that other Nintendo games simply don’t have. You can see the connection between Splatoon and the real world in a way that I don’t think you really can elsewhere. Maybe in Animal Crossing, there’s a bit of like the adult concern of like buying a house and decorating a house and the pleasure of making a place yours, but this definitely feels like, oh, these are, you know, these are, these are like real world ideas you’re dealing with, you know, fashion and trendiness and clouds. And yeah, so I don’t, it’s, it’s, you know, maybe not aimed that. I don’t think that stuff’s particularly aimed at me, but we’ll see how it goes. All right. Cool. Well, I’ve got more to ask you about this, but I think it’s best safe next week, Matthew. Because I’m sure we can have more Splatoon shaped thoughts then. So right, next up, a really simple one from me. I replayed Rogue Squadron, the N64 PC game. When don’t you? What’s that? When don’t you replay Rogue Squadron? Yeah, so this is just a real kind of like comfort play, basically. I was just like, messing around on the old Steam deck and I thought, you know what, I will just blast through Rogue Squadron. I will just do that. And I came to a realisation that I don’t think I ever finished this game without cheats, because at some points, absolutely fucking rock hard. And I questioned whether I would even finish one of the levels in this, because I was definitely too incompetent as a 12-year-old to actually do this. There’s a nightmare level in this where you have to escort these three little walkers out of this icy valley, while three giant walkers are shooting at them and TIE bombers are dropping bombs on them. And you have to be so quick to actually do this that it took me, I would say, 30 attempts to finish the level. And I was looking up online, there were people who were writing retrospective things on Game FAQ forums, going, why is this so fucking hard? Apparently, they recalibrated the difficulty of Rogue Leader based on the fact that people hated the difficulty in this mission. That’s like how notorious it was. And I thought, there’s no way I finished this legit when I was like 10. I must just skipped past it. So this might have been the first time I truly finished Rogue Squadron Matthew. But yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It looked very nice on the screen and everything. A nice representation of the Star Wars universe. Unlocked the Millennium Falcon, did a bit of that. Had a really good time. Sort of missed these kind of space shooters. Though I did forget how much of these games is just like, do an attack run, turn your ship around for about fucking 10 seconds, then do another attack run. And you think, okay, maybe that’s where like first person shooters won out over these. Because there’s no like, I have to do a build up for in order to shoot things again. Right. Like you have to jog off and then like jog back and then sort of charge, which you basically do in a spaceship in these games. So maybe that lacks a bit of drama these days. So that’s a real quick one, Matthew. So any thoughts to share there? I definitely didn’t finish this game back in the day. Too hard for you? Way too hard. Yeah, for sure. I think we probably used cheats to see a load of the game and then abandoned it. I didn’t have the same love affair with this game that you’ve had. I remember thinking, oh, it’s quite cool. And the bit where you put the toe cable around the legs, it’s cool. If fucking nightmarish to control, because it basically goes into like a third person camera and you have to steer it around and it’s so hard. Which I guess it would be. Like the feet, it’s meant to be a feet that he does it, right? If it was that easy to do, you know, those walkers would have been abandoned years ago. But yeah, maybe I should watch it. I was going to say replay this for the Star Wars episode, but that’s films. That’s definitely not going to happen, you replaying this game. But I think that this is the one thing that Shadows of the Empire did well was that they made the toe cable thing really simple. Like, it was quite hard to fuck up, they made it very arcade-y. And here, yeah, this is like this chaotic third person camera where your ship suddenly feels like light as air and you turn one tiny bit and it just goes off in an angle you can’t possibly control from the camera perspective. And you’re like, what were they on at Factor 5 making this in the 90s? Did you watch the Sonic Frontier trailer from Gamescom? No, no. So, it shows the combat in it, and he’s got all his usual bullshit homing Sonic moves that everyone hated in every other game he’s ever done, but are back for some reason. But he’s also got this move where he can basically run… if he runs a circle around someone it traces it on the ground and it’s implied that if you run repeated circles, how many completed circles you do around an enemy is how much you damage it. And the camera view and the look of his movement is exactly the same as that Toe Gable in Rogue Squadron. It gave me like, you know, like Nam flashbacks. I was like, oh my god, I’m not going to be able to do that. Yeah because you are waiting for day one on Sonic Frontiers, aren’t you? You’re like, I can’t wait to jump in, man. I was secretly hoping for like, it to be brilliant, and so I could do like a wild Castle U-turn on it. But you know, it’s good drama for the ongoing storyline of this podcast. Yeah, that’s true, but that depends on Sonic being good, which is a big art skill to be. Yeah, I won’t pretend it’s good for the sake of the storyline. You know, I’ve got too much respect for the listener. Yeah, so yeah, that’s good. I’m pleased that transitioned into you slamming on all of his bullshit moves. I was off mic there, like blowing my nose and then absolutely cracking up at you laying into all of his bullshit moves that people hated last time and are back again. Very, very funny. What’s your next one, Matthew, your final one for the subject? Last but not actually, yeah, last and maybe least, Escape Academy, which is another game past game, a bit of a game past month for me. It’s basically lots of escape rooms, but in a video game, which sounds like the most obvious thing in the world. Like, you play them from a first person perspective, heavily designed around co-op. So I was playing this with local couch co-op with Catherine, where you are both exploring this room, trying to find clues and keys and codes to unlock other things in a room, much like you would a real life escape room. And it’s just… it technically works, the puzzles are sort of fine, but it really made me realise that what’s good about a real life escape room, which for people who haven’t ever done one, is you go into a room, you get locked in with half an hour and then you have to solve a load of weird crystal maze-ish puzzles to find a key to eventually get out of the room. It’s like being in a video game. Which is probably the problem with this game, is that you are in a video game, and it lacks all the drama and the weirdness of what can happen in an escape room. Which may sound like an unfair ask of a game, but that is what makes an escape room an escape room. I was trying to put my finger on it, of like, it’s just too well behaved as a space. If there is a thing you can interact with, you press A on it, it will light up and then your camera will zoom on it. I find what I’ve loved about escape rooms is the slight chaos that comes from introducing a kind of very fallible human being into a very technical puzzle and seeing these two things butt up against each other. You know, it’s the beauty of going into a room and being like, there’s a switch on the wall, what’s this switch? What’s this switch? And then some bloke has to come into the room and tell you, like, oh, that’s an old light switch that we had to unwire in the room. Like don’t touch that, it’s not part of the puzzle. Where there’s like none of that madness in this. It really lacks that. It’s incredibly sterile, incredibly boring to what it’s actually to be like in one of these rooms. You know, the fact that when you interact with an object in this game, you know, it will always be the correct interaction. You know, it doesn’t give you something which you can potentially try and break or, you know, your mad head goes, let’s slash an egg into it or whatever, you know, like that’s what happens when you’re in an escape room. You go mad and this game doesn’t have any space to go mad. So for me, it’s kind of like a complete failure at what it’s trying to achieve. That’s so damning right there. But I think, like, you know what I mean about escape rooms, though? They’re like, something weird happens to you in that space. Yeah. I think like the whole point of it is that like the venue itself is what you lose yourself in or you don’t. And yeah. Yeah. And so there’s the real life element of it is why it’s appealing. It’s why it’s made for, you know, two quite bad films. But this is, yeah, this is like playing a blueprint for an escape room. You know, you’re like, oh yeah, I can imagine that would be quite good if this was real. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, and like, maybe some people are like, well, that’s just completely unfair thing to say, you know, of course a game couldn’t put you in it. Maybe what I’m saying is don’t make video games about this particular thing. Maybe it would work as a VR experience where you could like interact with stuff and break stuff. I’ll just always remember being on a, I went to an escape room on my brother-in-law’s stag do and we missed our slot because we were in Cologne and there was this famous Cologne escape room we wanted to go into and we missed our slot because everyone was at the pub drinking those tiny beers, 8,000 tiny beers and we were like, oh shit, we missed it. But we went along anyway and they were like properly closing up and we were like, oh please, it’s his stag do and for whatever reason they were like, oh yeah, this looks like a group we should let in. This clearly, they’ve had 8,000 tiny beers, they’re safe to bring in and like a couple of us were a bit more sober and trying to do the escape room but just seeing people like stick their fingers in like weird holes and things, things they clearly weren’t meant to do, like nearly breaking so many bits of the furniture in the room and it just, I don’t know, I want a game that captures that sense of like chaos. Yeah, it’s like you wouldn’t make a game about what a cheeseburger tastes like, do you know what I mean? It’s like, you’ve got to actually just eat a fucking cheeseburger, you know what I mean? Is that a dumb ass analogy Matthew? No, I think that’s true, I think there is something in it. I think there are some experiences, you can’t simulate, there is just something, it doesn’t matter how much you nail the action, there is just an energy to the place. We went on one of my stag do, and it was just like someone’s flat that had been converted into an escape room. Clearly, they had a spare bedroom, didn’t want to pay like bedroom tax on it or something, so it turned into an escape room. But there were things in it where you were like, is this the escape room, or is this a man’s filing cabinet with his accounts in it? There were some things that just really blurred the lines of adventure and reality, and I couldn’t tell what was what, and it was kind of terrible, but also amazing for it. Yeah, the bit that I always remember is when someone comes in and you have to hide, and then the light I think goes out, and then you all hide, and then they come in, and then it turns back on again, and that was quite scary to experience in real life, even though it’s preposterous. One of Catherine’s brothers was very clearly visible underneath a curtain hiding from this figure coming in, and the idea that we were all suddenly somehow hidden in the content, like the logic of the game, was preposterous. But we all bought into it, you know? Yeah, I enjoyed that. I thought it was good, but yeah, there was the thing of, am I supposed to rip this shutter off this window, or does someone actually live here, do you know what I mean? Once you’ve been locked in a room, you’ve got a natural surge of adrenaline from being trapped, and you’re actually capable of doing quite a lot of damage to that room. They often say, in all the escape rooms, in fact, I’ve done, where they’re like, if something doesn’t instantly give, if you apply even a little bit of pressure to it, it’s not part of the game. There’s no test of strength. You know, nothing has to be broken for you to complete this, because clearly people go in there and they’re just like, ah, fuck, and then start ripping the wallpaper off the walls. You know, because you’re like, the puzzle could be anywhere. It could be inside Craig. It could be like, saw, let’s cut him open. And you’re like, oh no. Where’s the game which makes you want to cut Craig open? That’s what I want. Yeah. Escape Academy, not a high score from me. I expect the impossible. Which formats are rated long, Matthew? It’s on everything. It’s on PC and Xbox for sure. It’s on Game Pass on Xbox. Well reviewed this. It’s got like a 9 out of 10 on Steam or a 90% positive on Steam, but I don’t know. It really didn’t land for me. It’s a very trendy sort of concept in an escape room, isn’t it? Maybe that. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a snooty element of like, well, not everyone can go to an escape room. They’re expensive and there may not be one near you, and in which case, yes, you can experience this. But I just think there was a vital spark of magic missing from it. Yeah. I cut open Craig. That’s funny. Yeah. I was going to ask you, Matthew. I’m related to the games we’re discussing. Have you played Power Wash Stimulator? I’ve been dipping into it. Yeah. So I played about 10 minutes of it. I washed that van. Got to the second level. Thought, this is really good at what it does and I want nothing to do with it. And then uninstalled it. That’s my experience with this game. I just, yeah. Going from a van to a whole garden is like a very interesting psychological hurdle because you do the van and you’re like, oh, that was fun. Maybe it takes you 10 minutes. But what you’re asked to clean next is so much bigger than a van. I think you’re either going to walk away or you’re going to play 100 hours of it. It’s kind of like, I dare you. And you’re like, ah, man, I really don’t like, you know. And the thing is, it’s got you the second you spray once in that garden. Because you spray a tiny bit of the patio and then you’re like, well, as I’m here, I may as well do the rest of the patio. And then you’re like, oh, and the dog house is right here. So I’ll just do the roof. And the next thing you know, you spent like an hour and a half cleaning a pretend garden and you’re like, what am I fucking done with my life? That is exactly it. But I had the added element of like, I had a flat inspection, like the week after that I was like playing this game, it was like a couple of days later. And instead of cleaning my actual flat, I was washing someone’s virtual garden with a hose. And I was like, what the fuck is wrong with me as a human being, that this is how I choose to live my life. So yeah, that’s I was like, I respect what this is doing. But absolutely not. Like definitely not. That’s, that’s me with it. But even like it knows that, like, what a psychological tug of war is going on. Because I think when you are like halfway through the garden, it’s like, do you want to clean this, like tiny children’s bicycle or something, it gives you something, a separate mission to clean something really small, where you can leave the garden as it is and come back later. So it like gives you these like breadcrumbs of, well, why don’t you get 100% on this and then you’ll maybe feel better about yourself. It knows just when you’re feeling like at lowest ebb, you know, cleaning a fucking bird house or something. Weird game. I think it might end up on some people’s gaming ear lists. Definitely. It’s like, I think it was like a ringer piece about it and they barely cover video games. So I was like, what? You know, so yeah, it’s crack and it’s a mate. Like it’s definitely like one of the better examples of that kind of crack. Like it’s, it’s classier than like House Flipper and the lawn mowing simulator. Like it’s just more interesting and more like instantly fun and reactive. Yeah. Yeah. Weird one. That we’ll see. Yeah. Very strange. I’m glad it was on Game Pass so I could get it in and out of my life as quickly as possible. So my last one here, Matthew, is Ryse, Son of Rome. Now I bought this for two pounds on Steam three days ago. And I suggest to you that this is a good, a good purchase for two pounds. I’ve been playing it on Steam Deck. And I think what is like a six out of ten in 2013 for 40 quid is a seven out of ten in 2022 for two quid and very low expectations. So this is a game where, made by Crytek, so it looks really kind of photorealistic, where you play some Roman dudes during the time when Nero was around. And you are hacking up loads of barbarians who I think are British or something or other. And it’s got these very elaborate looking kind of cut scenes, photorealistic, just, you know, the works, motion capture, all that stuff, looks very shiny. Essentially amounts to a game where you don’t do loads more than slice loads of dudes up with these rad finishing moves. And it’s only about six hours long. I’m about just over halfway through it, but like four hours the other day. I think this is extremely enjoyable. And because it’s so different to the type of blockbusters people make now, i.e. it is short, cinematic, it’s done in six hours and you move on. It’s kind of refreshing against the grain of things that exist now because no one would make a game with this level of fidelity that only lasts for that length of time these days. It doesn’t happen. And I think it’s just very, and those finishing moves feel real good. It’s repetitive and it’s not super simple though. It’s like challenging enough. You can have like alternating between shield bashing, countering, rolling, you’ll chuck a spear through a dude sometimes. That’s pretty fun. You’ll sometimes get into your little formation of shields to protect yourself against arrows as you charge these very gorgeous looking levels. I think Ryse, Son of Rome, is quite enjoyable, Matthew. Thoughts? Yeah, maybe they should have released it for £2 originally. Maybe that’s where this game went wrong. This was always going to be an incredible sub £10, 7 out of 10. That’s where this game belongs. Yeah, I played it way after the fact and had a similar time with it. You’re like… If you can play it five years after it came out, where the fate of Xbox doesn’t rest on it being a good game, it isn’t a key first party game. You can just enjoy it as, oh yeah, this is… I wish there were 100 games like this a year, which with this level of polish size violence. Not a lot to it. Does it still look alright? Does it hold up? Because I remember thinking it was beginning to show a little bit of age. I don’t personally think it does show age. I assume they never did a framerate patch for this, so I think it probably runs slightly better on PC. I assume it’s doing like 40 FPS on Steam Deck or something, but I personally think it looks real shiny still. Maybe you don’t have all of the types of visual effects you have these days, but I think when you think of it as a contemporary of something like God of War Ascension, it looked a lot better than that did for the time. And yeah, I don’t know, there is that kind of like crytek sort of like coldness, you know what I mean? Things are like, nothing is particularly lavish, there’s nothing fantastical about it. Lavish is the wrong word. There’s nothing particularly stylized about it, you know? It’s all like, we try to make it look like a Hollywood film about the time. That’s kind of what they go with. Just like how Crysis doesn’t look particularly stylish, it’s just, it’s very clean, it’s very, it’s like a car showroom kind of game. It’s a bit of a similar vibe here. And so yeah, I think that’s the thing is, it is weird thinking that this is like the big launch game for Xbox, but it was, wasn’t it? This was, this had been around for ages. I think it was a Kinect game for a while, and then it finally rocked up as a launch game and then just, just left people nonplussed really and was forgotten pretty quickly. And then found its way to PC a few years later. So yeah, I don’t know, for £2 these days, pretty enjoyable. And yeah, like you always wish that game like this existed now, but was pitched as, oh, well, you can play this on Game Pass and it’s a mid-level game. It’s not meant to be like a, you know, Halo Infinite sized blockbuster, but instead it was, it was pitched as that at the time, and it was always going to disappoint on that level, you know? Is the, is the, no, this isn’t a spicy take, is the spiritual successor to Ryse, Son of Rome, Hellblade? I did think of it a bit while I was playing this. Very pretty, but like, not a huge amount going on with its actual action systems. Well, I think I have to come back to my original point in this, Matthew, which was that Heavenly Sword was the predecessor to Hellblade. Like, Heavenly Sword, Hellblade, like, that feels very, there’s continuity there, you know. I’ve made that point before, so apologies to the listeners for repeating myself. No, no, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s a bit more, that’s, that’s a lot more valid, I think. But definitely you can see a through line in terms of, like, the relative complexity of the combat, the photorealism, yeah, like, it definitely, it feels like it lives in the same space, for sure. Yeah, it’s weird, because apparently they were going to make a sequel, then Microsoft said we want the IP rights if you make a sequel, and Crytek were like, no, so nothing happened, but Crytek can make another, a rise too if they want to at some point. Well, they were that attached to it. Like, as an actual IP, it’s just about fucking Roman, like, that’s the story. There was a Roman, he killed some guys. Oh, what a legend. So when I worked with the Frontier, tweeted me saying, oh, my uncle played Nero in that game. I was like, that’s a great bit of trivia. I was quite impressed by that. Imagine being precious about Ryse. I’d be like, another load of work from you. Absolutely. Sounds great. Thank you, Microsoft. We’ll take that paycheck. That’s it. Especially because Crytek has some bumpy times after that. Like, I’d have been like, yeah, you know, if this doesn’t work out, we’ll just make a fucking Greek version of this. You know what I mean? It’ll just be Spartan spelled with a Y, where the second A is, Spartan. Spartan. Martin the Spartan. Son of Greece, yes, which also has two Ys in it. Yeah. Okay, I’ve wasted enough time on that one, Matthew, but I hope you enjoyed me rambling about that. Yeah, it was good. You know, I came to hear what you’ve been playing and I have heard what you’ve been playing. Yeah. Quite a varied selection, really. So, shall we take a quick break, Matthew, then come back with some listed questions? Welcome back to the podcast. Matthew, can you read this really fucking long question from Danny Mann, because I’ve got a cold? That would be a big favour. Cheers, pal. He’s got a straight up question for us. What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever heard or been told by a developer about their game? I’m talking the big Molyneux-esque overambitious promises about what their game will be, when in reality, they’re never like the promise article. The biggest culprit for me, this is Danny Mann speaking, not me, is Todd Howard’s E3 2005 preview on Oblivion, which I think I first saw on a PC gamer mag DVD, in which he talks over an incredibly scripted scene of the player flirting their way into an NPC’s house. You first see the NPC decide to improve her archery skills by badly firing an archery target in her bedroom, or whilst announcing out loud every supposedly genuine thing that comes into her head. She even gets so frustrated with her bad aim, she drinks a potion to improve it, then weirdly, after feeding her noisy German Shepherd, she then casts a spell to paralyze it because it won’t stop barking whilst shouting, I said mummy is reading! which only stops the dog from barking temporarily. So she sets fire to it with a fireball spell, which presumably solves the problem more permanently. Todd plays all of this off like it’s a natural part of the game for every NPC, which obviously it never was. One of my favourite games, but I’ve always thought it was an odd way to advertise it when there is so much to genuinely love about it that actually does exist in the finished game. That is from Danny Man. Yeah, so this specific case, I think that the reason a lot of this stuff happened in the noughties is because it was before the idea of an internet backlash existed. So you could, excuse me, you could basically say, we want our games to do this, or we’re gonna do this, like Fable did this, of course, a bunch of modern new games did, they could over promise. And then if the finished game didn’t line up, there may be, I don’t know, I think it was a slightly more innocent time, I don’t think it was ever done maliciously. I think it was just like, we want to aim for this, and if we don’t hit it, fine. And that was how things were. Now we’re in the age of like, someone will compare the cyberpunk demo of one year to another year and be like, downgrades and all that sort of stuff. And like, you know, it’s an age where you don’t do that anymore. But yeah, I don’t really think of it as a lie. I think it was something that probably Todd wanted to put in the game, but like, and maybe was in the game at some point, but ultimately just, you know, got missed out. What do you think of that one? Yeah, and for his sins, I think he now runs like exemplary demos. You know, like he’s become quite famous for the kind of cut down E3 demo where he jumps between specific features to show you exactly how they function in the game, which I think is a really clear, honest way of doing it. It’s not, and actually he does maintain the showmanship as well, because these games have interesting enough ideas. I was going to say like behind the scenes, because I felt like Danny was like angling for some kind of sort of secret expose. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever heard anything where I’ve been like, wow, and then it just hasn’t been true. But I think the thing you do become tuned to when you are going to a lot of like game events and game previews and hearing developers talk is how they frame a feature that is in the game and maybe upsell it. So the one that jumped out to me is when I did the Rise of the Tomb Raider cover feature, there was a lot of talk about like survival elements in the game where like in this game, she’s a survivor and survivals, you know, you’re going to have to do things like find a fire, find a shelter, kill animals for food. Now, when you say that, your mind pictures survival mechanics, you know, it pictures health bars, heat bars, you know, a sleep meter, all this kind of stuff, where actually what it technically refers to is that there are narrative sequences where she makes one fire, makes a camp and kills an animal to kill at that camp. Technically everything he said happened did happen in the game, but it was like it’s framed to make it sound as exciting as possible, and I don’t see that as a lie. I see that as the sort of showmanship and the game that you play with developers when they’re telling you about something, where it’s to kind of like pass it and work out exactly what it is and represent it. I mean, you don’t want to like just repeat ad nauseam what you were told, because, you know, that there’s this risk in that. But I personally like, I quite like that part of the job. I quite like how they describe something compared to like what it is and trying to work out what it is. But I wouldn’t say it was like cynically done. Yeah, I think that your Rise of Tomb Raider example came up when my example came up, when we were asking similar a long time ago. Right. So I mentioned that probably the closest thing I got to like an out and out fib, I wouldn’t call this a fib, but it’s close, is the producer of Mass Effect Andromeda who told me that we are approaching the completionist aspect very differently. This is when I asked about side quests because we’ve done and learned a lot from Inquisition, but we’ve also observed what other games have been doing like The Witcher and then described meaningful as like the to represent the side content in the game. And I think it’s fair to say that Andromeda didn’t have that and didn’t really learn any lessons from Inquisition. And that felt like just a hard marketing. Well, we’ll just say this. That’s not what that game is. Yeah, I do. I think if it’s malicious, not really. But that was a game with a lot of problems and they were probably papering over the cracks a little bit. So the crazy flip side to this is the one time I was told something extraordinary and then it was extraordinary and didn’t end up in the game was the earliest multiplayer demo that I tried of Crackdown 3 when it was a cloud controlled or cloud calculated city where you could destroy the whole city right down to like a granular level. It was like Red Faction guerrilla style destruction, but even more granular than that. Like if you were in a skyscraper and kept shooting a machine gun into a pillar of rock, you would eventually like burrow through and create a hole which was the hole the size of a bullet hole and then could shoot through it to assassinate someone. And we played the demo where that tech was in it. We played it and saw it, but they could never ever make it work with the cloud, like the retail version of it or what would be available to the public. And the actual multiplayer mode in Crackdown is a very watered down version of that destruction. But for like 15 seconds, for 15 minutes, I saw the future and then it got wound back. What a bummer that that never saw the light of day in that form. That sounded so exciting. There was maybe even like an edge cover or coverage around the time about this. I know that that Dave Jones guy worked on GTA. He was quite closely involved in the making of that. So yeah, I was kind of heartbroken that never happened. Then I saw the finished one and it was kind of like you’re kind of just jumping around these blocks aren’t you? Just shooting them and it’s like yeah. Yeah, the final thing was just I imagine in the plus column it worked, which the other mode didn’t have, except the other mode did work. It worked in our demo. We saw it. We played it, you know? Yeah, that’s it. So at some point it existed. Yeah, at one time they managed to make it work on like a mega PC. Yeah. Sometimes I did like developers giving the big sell. I don’t know, I remember seeing Fable 3 and like Peter Molyneux for a while was obsessed with talking about Coronation Street as a point of comparison. I think he was talking about the fact that once upon a time they released Fable 2 episodically and he liked the idea of games being something that the details would change, but the experience of playing them would stay the same or something. But he always just talked a good talk. I remember him talking about how powerfully he thought the idea of holding hands with the character was in Fable 3 and just what that kind of represents and talking about how they were slimmed down all the progression systems to make it more straightforward for players because they had too many of them in Fable 2. I always found him very convincing. Imagine if you could kill Ken Barlow and they remember it for 20 years to come. Yeah, that’s funny. I’m happy having this spiel. I love a showman. Yeah, that’s it. I never really got upset by it in the way that… People have found that objectionable and we saw where that led, of course. We don’t need to go over that. But I liked him. I liked him. Don’t NFT bullshit. Stay away from all that. And obviously, Goddess didn’t work out. But I’ve got time. If he wants to just make a computer game that’s good, I’ve definitely got time for him still. There you go, Pete. There’s the challenger. The gauntlet has been thrown down. He’s like, make a good game. Not an NFT. Okay, good. So here we go, Matthew. This one’s some bullshit from a listener. A new version of Witamp has just been released. Advance Wars has been delayed due to a worldwide conflict. And a new series of Big Brother is about to start. No, it’s not the early 2000s. It’s 2022. You have both been selected to enter the new Big Brother house. You have also been assigned the role of Big Brother and must pick two video game characters or video game personalities to join your co-host in their respective houses. One that they’ll form a strong bond with and one who will annoy the living piss out of them. Who do you both choose and why? I haven’t worked out the logistics of how you can both be housemates and Big Brother simultaneously. Let’s just say a wizard did it. As a bonus question, you may each take one luxury item into the house with you. What do you take and why? It’s from Ryan Plugs. Now that’s quite incoherent, Matthew, but I think basically you just have to pick one person who’s annoying and one person you’d like to… But for you, right? Yeah, but for me. Yeah, and I’ve done it for you. And so, did you understand that before? Yeah, I think so. Okay, good. So do you want to go with yours first? What did you pick for me? I was thinking, like, in terms of something you’d hate, like, you don’t like people kind of getting up in your shit, or, like, I don’t think you like kind of chaos or, like, too much noise. Yeah, that’s probably true, yeah. So, like, I was thinking either, like, a rabid from the rabid games, because they just screen the whole time. Or, um, did you see the demo of the new Justin Roiland game? Oh, God, yeah. That talking knife. Oh, God, yeah. The things in that, that just seemed like the most annoying shit of all time. Well, there we go. Perfect. I’d send you in with one, a talking knife from the Justin Roiland’s new game. Um, because that would just, I don’t think you’d be able to do anything with it, because you’re not allowed to hurt another housemate, are you? No, if you do, I think they’d just come and take you out of there, so you’d be disqualified. I think the law still works inside of the Brothers House. It’s not like International Waters, we can do what you like. Is that how International Waters work? Yeah, I think so, but it’s not, the law is not waived by like Channel 5 or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, okay, good. That is annoying. For your annoying person, Matthew, I’m putting the woman in Sapienza in Hitman, who says, Rocko, Rocko, at the start of the level. She’ll just say that over and over again for like two weeks while Big Brother’s happening, so I think you’d find that quite annoying. Every time you go near her, she’ll start doing that routine. A routine. So the entire thing starts over and over again, much like playing in Hitman level. I really want a snack. And you’re like, can I hear this again without completely losing my shit? Yeah, so I thought that was a good one because I knew that she annoyed you at the time. Who’s the person you’ve got who I would form a bond with? I was thinking of someone who is quite chilled and adult, and then I was thinking, I know that you like Final Fantasy, so I was trying to think, who do I think in Final Fantasy you’d get on with the most? And Catherine actually suggested Auron from Final Fantasy X. Yeah, that suggests Catherine knows quite a lot about my personality, which is quite flattering, actually. She’s not like Wocka. Well, said Wocka in the game. That would annoy the shit out of me again. But I think he was, you know, he’s just like… Because I was thinking, if you wanted the ultimate quiet character, like Agent 47, but he’s too quiet. You want someone you can like share a story with or whatever. I think you could have a conversation with Auron. I think so, yeah, because I’d be like, oh, you know, back when I was in sort of like I went on this press trip in 2007, I had a piss at the side of the road outside of New York and got beat up by a police car. And he’d be like, I’m dead. I’d be like, you know what I mean? Not in a like, that story has killed me. It was so funny. He’s literally a dead person. So yeah, I think there’s a lot out of that. He’s got like the energy of someone who like, back when I was in my 20s and I’d go to parties, I had friends in my 30s who’d always give me quite bullshit life advice. And I’d sort of like nod sagely like, yeah, this person really knows their shit. And then I get into my 30s and I’m like, well, I don’t know anything. So they probably didn’t either. But I think Auron would offer a bit of guidance and tips and stuff like that. I think he’d be good. Yeah, like he’s truly lived. And I mean that in every sense of the word, lived past tense. Yeah, yeah. It’d be funny if I got to the house though and it’s just like the knife, the Justin Rollin knife and a Tonbury just walking towards me with the knife. That’d be good. Okay, so for you, I’m going to put Garrus in there, Matthew, from Mass Fed, because I think what you need is encouragement to finally write something, like a book or screenplay. And I feel like if I tasked Garrus with talking you through that, you do a bit of target practice. Like, Matthew, have you thought about working on that book finally, just getting something down on paper? I think he’d go through that with you, the back garden doing a bit of target practice. Meanwhile, woman in the background showing, Rocko, Rocko. Yeah, that’s really conducive to writing a great novel and to listen to that. Also, imagine going into Big Brother and thinking the strategy to win Big Brother is to quietly sit and write. Haven’t you seen this? You’ve got to just get really drunk and then almost drown yourself in a paddling pool and shit yourself on TV. That’s how you win Big Brother. You just have to be like an animal. Like writing, writing quietly. If anything, Garrus is a major threat because everyone fucking loves that guy. He would win Big Brother. Yeah, but he wouldn’t do like, he wouldn’t shag someone in a hot tub. Well, the only people in the house is me and the ladies at Rocko a lot. There’s a lot of options. That’s true. There’s no context here about whether there’s other people here. No, it’s just that. It’s 12 weeks with those three people. That would be tough for me. I’d have to ask some really searching questions about my sexuality in that situation, I think. But let’s not go into that. What would your luxury item be, Matthew? I don’t know. You sort of think some kind of weapon from Hitman to get rid of the Rocko lady. Are you going to kill a woman on TV, is that a thing? I throw a coin into wherever that is. The toilet! I throw a coin into the toilet and then garrot her in there. And then just tell Garrus to never ever go into the toilet. You just hear Rocko cut out basically. And it’s like, oh, Matthew Castle just murdered a woman on live TV. Garrus is like, where’s the Rocko lady? I’ll read you some of my book. Can you just go take a shit in the garden from now on, thanks mate. Okay, lots to unpack there. But I think I’ll just take a little retro handheld probably. Just put a load of GBA games on there. That’ll pass the time. But again, it’s not chaotic enough for TV, is it? I’d have to bite a chicken’s head off or beat a guy to death or whatever. And they’d be like, yeah, we’re giving this guy a deal, like some endorsement deal when I get out and I get to be on this morning or something. So the knife would end up getting married to like Peter Andre or something. That’s what happens when you leave the Big Brother house. I thought we talked about that one for about 20 minutes. So should we move on to the next question? Hi gents. Can you think of any developers who have dematured in terms of the tone and aesthetics of the games they make? Basically the opposite of studios like Rockstar and Naughty Dog, those being devs who found success with more adult or self-serious games and subsequently moved away from their more eccentric and lighter history. Or if that’s tricky, any studios you’d like to see change up the tone of their games. This was inspired by wondering about Larian’s next game after Borders Gate 3 because it seems to be a big step up in presentation and reduced silliness from Divinity 2. I have quite a controversial answer to this one, Matthew. Which is, I feel like I could go for a slightly lighter From Software game, I think. Just a slightly lighter touch. Like maybe like more of a kind of young adult adventure quality about it. A bit more about the wonder of exploration than this landscape is fucking decaying. And that guy over there. Like Miyazaki does Life is Strange. No, I was thinking more along the lines of like Miyazaki does like Avatar, like the Nickelodeon series. The big Avatar head, eh? You know, the what’s it? You know, the kind of with the different elements of stuff. I thought you were talking about James Cameron’s Avatar. No, no, no. I was like, what? I just think that’s something like that where you’ve got that sort of, you know, like a sort of like boy’s own adventure, I guess, kind of thing. Oh, okay. Like just sort of like where the, yeah, there’s a journey in that sense. And it’s less about look at this like eldritch horror. You have to at least got like 19 health bars or whatever. It’s like maybe just a slightly lighter touch with that bit might be might be a nice change. But I know people just want to see like, you know, a feted rotting dragon just like breathe fire on them. Like it takes 100 hours to kill. Or a dog with a baby’s arm coming out of its arse or something. Exactly. So, yeah, like, oh, yeah, that’s what I like to see. Yeah, cool. In terms of actual examples, I did struggle with this a little bit. I suppose you could look at something like Quantic Dream, who are now making a Star Wars game. That’s a bit different in terms of the maturity level of stuff they have been making. You’ve seen this go wrong before with, like, mini ninjas, for example. It’s like, we’ll make this instead of Kane and Lynch or Hitman. And it’s like, just make Hitman and it’s fine. But I also thought, like, maybe Insomniac a little bit. They tried to go a bit gritty with the Resistance games and now they just make Ratchet and Clank and Superhero titles. Though they never really stopped making Ratchet and Clank. I couldn’t think of a great answer for this, basically, Matthew. What about you? I have a couple of things where I thought there was a slight thawing, perhaps, of them. I think Suda51 games got trashier with time. I think his earlier games are a bit more abstract and arty and a bit more serious minded. Like, if you compare The Silver Case or Flower, Sun and Rain to, like, Shadows of the Damned where it’s all jokes about you having a big boner. Like, they’re very different products. You know, Killer 7 is, I would say, quite serious minded compared to what he would later make. Yeah, for sure. I wouldn’t say dematured, but I think Valve lightened up over time. Like, arguably Portal and their little weird funny Steam Deck game. That kind of, the Aperture kind of universe is a side of them I like. A very witty, funny, accessible side compared to, I’d say, reasonably harder edged stuff earlier on. I prefer their modern tone of voice to Half-Life 1’s tone of voice, for example. Gearbox used to have more tonal strings to their bow. They made expansions for Half-Life, they made Brothers in Arms, and now they just make shrieking meme fodder. I think they used to have a bit more going on than they have going on now. I’d say they’ve dematured or unmatured. Yeah, that’s partly because of the types of games they have been making. But it’s weird, I suppose they are also like the publisher of Homeworld 3, which looks quite… Oh yeah, that’s not out yet. So, you know, I’m willing to reset my opinion once. No, that’s fine. That’s a hard one to answer, but quite a good question. It is a hard one to answer. But I tried my best. Yeah, but then you could say that Rockstar did like, you know, was more self-serious than GTA 4, and less self-serious than GTA 5, but Red Dead Redemption 2 was very self-serious, so who knows? Yeah, it’s all a little bit like tuberculosis, lol. It’s hard work. Hi guys, what are your thoughts on Limited Run or re-releasing old games on disc for modern formats in general? There seems to be a bit of negativity around Limited Run’s lead times. Games can take half a year or more to actually arrive, and they take your money straight away with a strict no-cancel policy and high pricing for collector’s editions, considering what you actually get. Also, there have been rumours about withholding stock to create artificial buzz. I don’t want to go into that because it sounds like allegations with no evidence behind it. That’s me saying that. I’m all for physical copies of older games being re-released. I’m waiting on my PS4 Limited Run copy of Castlevania Requiem, including Symphony of the Night. But with other issues such as bad ports, I’m looking at the Blade Runner Enhanced Edition from Night Dove Studios. The actual cost of getting a disc press slash artwork printed with it at times can be an unoptimised version of a digital release. Is Limited Run games a bad thing? So, I personally haven’t bought anything from them. And, like, I don’t… I think, like, I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought there’s no more Heroes editions they did on Switch that were really good. And I would pay it for a game I really loved. I sort of missed… I think there was, like, actually a N64 cart pressing of Shadow’s The Empire they did. And I think I would have been well up for something like that. But, yeah, I don’t know. It’s just not… I’m not a big physical goods guy when it comes to games. I do like having, like, a, you know, a Nintendo Switch sort of like the little cards and stuff. But I’m not… I don’t need to have art books and all this other peripheral stuff because all it does is get a bit battered when I move house and I never retake care of it. So that sort of stuff isn’t really a big part of my life these days. And I think that, like, if you buy this stuff, it’s such a big financial commitment, you kind of have to mean it to begin with. So the existence of it doesn’t offend me. As long as those games are, like, widely available digitally or in other means, that’s something. I don’t think they withhold them from anywhere. So, I don’t know. What are your thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, like, the fear of missing out thing, I mean, that’s just a whole industry. That’s not just games. Every hobby has its things, which, you know, are, like, artificially scarce to make them sort of desirable. And it’s, I don’t know, like, I don’t need these things. I don’t feel like, oh, God, there’s nothing I want that only exists in that format. You know, they’re going back to old things and, like, creating these new products. I mean, like, maybe it preys on suckers, but if it does, like, don’t be a sucker. Don’t go for it. I mean, I don’t know. I used to go to Comic-Con and see people who’d spend their whole Comic-Con queuing up to have a chance at winning, like, a limited edition Transformer toy or buying a limited edition My Little Pony that only existed at Comic-Con. And you think, like, I mean, yeah, if that’s how you want to spend your time and do it, by all means, but you can’t do it, you know, to sort of, I don’t know, it seems odd to kind of complain about that process. Like, you can just stop it out of it. You know, you have the ultimate control over the experience, I guess. Like, I don’t see what’s been limited to you by just going, no, I don’t want that. You know, because, like, these things are sold. New games are all sold. You have an opportunity to buy them there, fairly, I would say. Yeah, I just, I don’t really get it. But I know there’s been, like, there’s a few YouTubers who’ve taken sort of great umbrage with limited run because of certain practices or whatever. But a lot of it, it’s just, no one’s forcing you to do it. And I hope that doesn’t sound like a shitty, it doesn’t affect me. I don’t care. But I just, like, there’s, I don’t know. The collectibles industry’s designed to build you of money. Like, just don’t do it. Don’t go in for it. I mean, it’s as easy as that. Let me give you an example of, like, an alternative to this where it is shitty, right? So in comic books, there’s a very, like, an out of print for a long time crossover between the Justice League of America and the Avengers they did, written by Kurt Bysiak and illustrated by legendary artist George Perez, who passed away this year, I think, and they did a limited, a limited reprint of it where it was so limited, it was actually very cheaply priced. Comic book shops could only order, like, one copy each, basically. And they said, oh, yeah, we’re only doing this one print run. We won’t print any more. And it’s raising money for, you know, the charity, a charity that was linked to the artist. And it sold out immediately. And all that happened is a load of copies went on eBay for extortionate amounts, not benefiting the charity. And their reasoning for this was so shitty, and it was so annoying. I was like, I can’t buy this book. I want to give you money to help support this cause. And you are literally stopping me from doing it because you’ve got this pigheaded way of, like, actually putting this out there that is, like, just annoying to your customers. That’s like, if Limited Run were doing that, like, artificially doing it that way, that would be a different conversation, but they’re not. They basically take your money up front because it costs a little money to actually make the stuff. Like, you can’t take no money and then, like, have all this stuff commissioned. You need to, like, take the money and pay for it because you can’t have people canceling their orders because you’ve already paid to make the thing. So that’s a fair request, I think. And as for the lead time, it takes ages to get this stuff made. It just does, especially right now with the supply chain problem. So, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, having seen that comic book version of it be just so annoying. They’re like, I want to buy a book and I can’t because the publisher is saying, no, no, we’re not making any more. So you better buy it off eBay, off of some scalper prick. And it’s like, what are you thinking? So, yeah, that’s my take on it, Matthew. Maybe what this comes down to is the fact they’ve yet to have anything I would want. The games that I like or the games that I’d want to see come back, they would never have access to. They would never be part of that process. It’s quite weird, fringe stuff. And they have got people caught in the, you know, I have 99% of these and now I have to have them all. Those people probably feel like they’re being victimised, but they bought into it. It’s like people who buy fucking Funko Pops and feel they have to buy every Funko Pop. No one was forcing you to buy it to begin with. That’s the catastrophic lack of taste, isn’t it? Maybe it’s just keeping these people from collecting human heads. Maybe it’s a good thing. I just find it very hard to put myself in the shoes of someone who would ever be interested in those things because it’s so far from how I connect with games these days. Sorry, that’s probably a tough answer. Sorry, very unsatisfying from both of us. But yeah, me rounding about comic books and Matthew’s like, nah. Let’s move on then, Matthew. So this is from Fiery Meat. Hello to you men. When you are doing draft slash best of episodes, do you go back and play the games you’re going to discuss? I’m amazed by your ability to remember fine details and intricacies of games that are sometimes a couple of decades old. What do you think, Matthew? This varies quite a lot, but I would say in most cases, I don’t go back and replay things because there’s no time. But occasionally, I will play something if I feel like I need to plug that knowledge gap to make the podcast a bit better, see TIE Fighter in the first PC draft that we did. Which really benefited me. Yeah, but what about you, Matthew? You’ve definitely put some research into more episodes than others, right? Yeah, when we do the big series deep dives, I’ve replayed a lot of stuff for those just to try and get some fresh takes and some fresh observations. Because I feel like it’s a big ask that we’re going to do two hours of Ace Attorney and they’re quite well known games. And you’re like, I’m going in with mine to try and find something new to say about them. And also, to see how they hold up and whether my rankings on them still hold up. Most games, weirdly, the stuff I remember about them, if I then go and find my review and read it, it’s the stuff that I pulled out when I was reviewing it. Like, you just always remember the highlights. And if you wrote the review properly, your highlights would be represented in that review. And it just reinforces, like, oh yeah, I kind of know where I stand on this. There’s been a couple of games from, like, childhood that I’ve, you know, watched footage of just to refresh myself on YouTube of, like, oh yeah, I remember that piece of music or that thing there. But I do try to say in the episode, like, oh yeah, I watched it. I’m not trying to fob anyone off. I’m not, like, my memory’s pretty bad these days, to be honest. You know, there are people who have got, like, way more gaming knowledge locked away. I’m not encyclopedic at all. I mean, close. So, yeah, basically. Yeah, I would say that, like, you know, I sometimes think the half-remembered quality of discussing these games is quite nice because you do sort of, like, you know, as long as you’re not straying into factual inaccuracies, and I don’t think we do, we’re pretty good at avoiding that stuff. We are, it’s like the, sometimes that’s the best way to discuss these games because not all of them hold up when you do, like, a forensic re-examination, and so, particularly when you’re doing it in list form. So I quite like that quality about it. And then at the same time, like Matthew says, I mean, I’m currently playing through the God of War series because I want to be super up on that series when we do our series retrospective. We spaced them out quite a bit, those ones, because they take more work. But yeah, I don’t know. There’s not time to replay everything, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t talk about something unless I feel like I’ve got something to say or some perspective on it. So I think it’s all good. I have definitely edited out bits where I felt I was too vague on something to make myself sound better. Yep, same. So there you go. Good to be a friend about it. Do you want to read the next one, Matthew? We’ve done best gaming board members. We’ve done best holiday guests, huge heroes, let’s up the stakes. If you had to have a video game beastie as a pet, living in your house and depending on you for nutrients, what would it be? That makes it sound like we’re going to feed it from our own bodies. But anyway, I’ll carry on. For the sake of argument, yes, you would have to keep it alive unless it’s a ghost of some sort. No, you can’t have Rio squirting Mario come over and feed it. That’s from Balladeer. Yeah, I thought I’d just have an Eevee from Pokemon. They’re pretty cute, not too belligerent as Pokemon Go. What kind of type is that? What does it do? It’s like a normal type. It’s just a little dog-fox thing. But don’t put a firestone on it or it will turn into Flareon and then set fire to shit. That’s what I’d have to avoid. You know what I mean? I just didn’t want to pick something like a Squirtle because I think that would get out of hand quickly. Like in the anime, he puts on a pair of sunglasses, he’s a right little bellend, and I don’t want that. So Eevee feels pretty inoffensive to me. Okay. Would you keep it in the ball? Ever? Or are you just letting it free roam constantly? Do you have to feed it if it’s in the ball? Do you have to let it out and go, oh yeah, eat your dinner, and then does it then take a shit in the ball? I’ve got no idea how that works, but… No, I’d probably let it out. I never want to go into it, funnily enough. That’s not the deep lore of Pokemon shit management I don’t think has been covered in the games. No. It’s like, well, we have a Pokemon that’s a fucking toaster, but we won’t tell you if they take a dump or not, and it’s like, come on, lads. I bet if you asked some Nintendo, they’d say they just don’t have bums or something, because they’re cute. Yeah, fine. So yeah, I would let out the ball. That’s very big of you. Yeah, cheers. Maybe sometimes if I need to get some work done, I’d be like, yeah, back in the ball, but yeah. Like you when you put your cats away. Is that a thing you do? Put the cats in the kitchen at night, or the cage, sometimes on holiday. Yeah, just to stop them from murdering local wildlife. So yeah. What about you, Matthew? I was thinking of that little chocobo chick from Final Fantasy XIII. That’s quite cute. Oh, the one that lives in that dude’s hair? Yeah. It’s tiny. I find grown chocobos kind of unpleasant. They look like chicken. I don’t find chickens particularly cute. I don’t like grown chocobos, but a little one is kind of cute. It’s very, very small, very cute. I think that would impress people. It seems very comfortable living in someone’s hair. I haven’t got big hair like that guy, but I’ve got enough hair for it to kind of have somewhere to kind of live. I think you’ve got jumpers where it could live in the pockets quite handily as well. Yeah, I think that would be cute. The other one I was thinking about was like a rock Pikmin, just because it doesn’t really move. It would just sort of sit on the mantelpiece with its cute little eyes. I don’t think you have to feed it because it’s a rock. Is this the same one you took on holiday with you in that one time? Yeah, I mean it’s a Pikmin. I can’t remember what types I bought with me on to America. This one I wouldn’t take. This one’s my pet. I’m emotionally attached to it and I don’t want to take it through frickin homeland security, whatever they’re called, and then treat it bad. Matthew, why must our listeners insist on turning us into beleaguered children’s presenters? That’s what a lot of these questions are. Yeah, the truth is I don’t really want my life to be full of weird cartoon mascots. Yeah, I don’t want any quotas. I think you’d end up like Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where he’s just so sick of being surrounded by all that animated shit the whole time, where he just cannot deal with it anymore and it’s made him have a bit of a breakdown. I think we’d be like that. Yeah, very good. Okay, next one, Matthew. Dear Samuel and Matthew, oh no, it’s a sunny day and you step out of your house for a tasty J.C.’s Kitchen lunch but to your horror, you see their tent has been absorbed by a giant Katamari rolling toward your house. You have time to grab one video game related item or memorabilia before your house is absorbed. What is it? Also, what would be the worst thing to be stuck next to if you got absorbed into the Katamari fucker now? Love the show. Keep making Friday be Back Page pod day. That’s from Konky Donka. So for this, Matthew, I thought, I don’t know, I don’t really have much rare stuff, but I suppose I should take my copy of Paper Mario, the Thousand Year Door, since I spent too much money on it. That would be a good item to preserve. But yeah, otherwise, being stuck next to, I don’t know, like a stinky animal. I’m not sure. Just some dog shit right next to your face. If you had to smell dog shit for the rest of your life. A British river that is full of shit, because that’s what the Tories do now, they just pump shit into the river. So a shit river, that would be bad. Thoughts, Matthew? What’s your answer to this one? Yes, I agree, a shit river would be bad. I’ve got a couple of signed games. I’ve got my Dragon Quest V Famicom signed by Yuji Horii. That’s pretty good. Or my Smash Brothers Brawl signed by Sakurai. That’s pretty good. I’d probably actually dump it. I’d probably take my leaving cover from NGamer, just because that’s got big sentimental value to me. That’s a good answer. It’s the only thing that exists, and it’s about my career. Because presumably, if I’m in the ball, the podcast is over. But I have got that there with me to constantly talk about it to other people in the ball. So a bit of the podcast would live on. I’d be able to say, see that line there? That references this hilarious thing that Greener did once. Which in a roundabout way would make me the worst thing to be next to in the Katamari ball. Some bearable man talking about the past. Weird man reliving former glories with a convenient visual aid. Yeah, the podcast presumably would exist on a Google Drive somewhere as well. So that’s good. I’ve got backups. That’d be fine. There’s so many things I wouldn’t want my head to be next. Any food, it would go off. It would just be awful. Or if it was out of reach. Like imagine just beyond the reach of your tongue, there was a delish in JC’s kitchen bubbling as squeak. Yeah, that’d be… Again, though, I don’t think he would have been there that day. So it’s fine. It would have rolled up an empty tent and it’d be fine. Okay, good. Matthew, let’s just do the next two and then we can save the others for a future episode. So should we read out this next one? This one’s aimed at Matthew primarily. Shag, Marry, Kill, Crash, Spyro, Sly Raccoon from Ryan Plunkes. People just really want to hear you dunk. Very easy. I’d kill myself. That’s good. I don’t want you having sex with any of those. No, I’d kill myself and I’d do it in front of Crash Bandicoot to haunt him forever. Okay, good. Well, we end with, I think, a great question, Matthew. Do you want to read this next one? Hello to the kings of portable gaming. I don’t really get that. Portable? Podcast? No, I don’t. David Fincher has decided to revisit his Classic Seven and remake it for digital natives. To appeal to Gen Z, the victims will now be subjected to video games representing each of the seven deadly sins. Which game would you pitch for each of the sins? They are Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth. That’s from Personal Nerdier. Good question. Now, I genuinely think that Animal Crossing covers all of those except for Lust. Like, Animal Crossing is pretty good. What’s that? Even then. Well, you know, we talked about Isabella before. Like, you know, that’s maybe there’s some tension there between your character and… Given enough time. Just, you know, close professional relationship, etc. I have an answer for each of these, Matthew. Do you? I do, also, yeah. Okay, cool. You go through your list first. Let’s go through them in pairs. Let’s do them both. All right, sure. Pride first, yeah? Yeah. Do you want to go first? I did pick Animal Crossing. Right, right. Being house proud. You know, showing off… Basically, I was thinking of games like camera, photo modes. People who show off their stuff online a lot. That’s a kind of terrible pride. So, yeah, an Animal Crossing game, I think, is that. Yeah, for me, I picked Apex Legends. I took so much pride in my kill-death ratio during the pandemic times, which I almost got to one from like 0.8 or whatever. And I was chasing it and chasing it and chasing it and just losing tens of hours doing it. I thought, that’s a good example of pride eating away at you, isn’t it? So, that’s good. As good as, you know, the classic David Fincher film Seven, arguably not, but still. So, Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt bust open the door and they just find a guy playing Animal Crossing or Apex Legends. That’s what happens in this film. It’s like, it’s less good, isn’t it? They’re not dead, right? Yeah, I don’t know. That’s TBC, really. Is Kevin Spacey still in it? I feel like he wouldn’t make the cut these days. Oh, no. Especially not with Gen Z. They’re really, like, clued into this stuff. So, what about Greed, Matthew? Greed. New Super Mario Bros. 2, which is the Mario game with the objective to collect one million coins. It’s the greedy Mario. Golden Mario. He runs around, coins spray out of him. That’s a good answer. I like that. I picked Civilization Revolution, a game where I would break it every single time by building too many banks and overruling the entire world with capitalism by using it to build constant tanks that ascend towards my enemies. That’s the game I think where I was super greedy every time. I refused to play it in any other way and thought, what a piece of shit I am. The problem here is you’ve based all these on your actual sins. I’ve just sort of done theoretical sins. The thing is, Matthew, I’m a bad person. I think you’re a good person. That’s what differentiates us on this podcast, I think, ultimately. I’ve done lots of bad things in computer games. What have you got for Wrath? Wrath? I mean, I was really lazy. I just wrote Asura’s Wrath. That’s a great answer, though. Because I was like, well, it’s got the word in the title. It’s sort of self-explanatory. Yeah, I should have gone with, like, is it Pathfinder, Wrath of the Righteous? That would have been good. I went with Hotline Miami 2. Got a bit too into burning some dudes alive with a flamethrower, which I discussed in a previous episode. I felt a lot of wrath going on there. I thought, wrath against who? I don’t really know, but just, you know, dudes. Yeah. What have you got for envy? Your big envy head? Envy? Oh, I’m in credit. I’m jealous of everyone. I can’t give any real examples because it’s just too tragic to see how envious I actually am of people. So for this one, for the games, I’ve actually gone for Dreams, which is a game about seeing how much more talented everyone else is at Dreams than you. Yeah. That’s good. That’s a good answer. I picked Trespasser Jurassic Park, of course. Just, you know, should have picked it from my draft, didn’t. So now it’s like, you know, envy eats away at me, man. It’s tough. I’ve got a big dose of that coming off this last one. I can tell you that. What have we got for last? Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball. Yeah, very good. Problematically Horny. That’s what you want for last, isn’t it? So that’s, you know, that’s good. Yeah. It’s not performatively horny. It’s outright horny. It’s legit horny. And I’ve got more respect for that. Yeah. Along some of the lines I’ve picked, Catherine. I wrote Catherine or Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball. There you go. Two perfect, problematically horny picks there. We’ve got Gluttony. The recent release of Kirby’s Dream Buffet. Oh, that’s a good one. Which is all about force feeding Kirby cakes on a race to make the fattest, you win if you make the fattest Kirby, which I think isn’t that how they make foie gras, like force feeding geese. It’s a bit like that, but for Kirby, it’s got a sinister edge to it, that game. It’s also basically what happens in Seven, right? He force feeds that guy until he’s like incredibly fat and then like dies of eating. But he doesn’t like weigh him on a comedy scale, which also I think Kirby just like wins more cakes for being the fattest. Plus he can like, he’s got the power to absorb that if he wants to. It’s not like he’s sort of like going to have serious intestinal issues afterwards. He could just like, you just press down and then it’s just gone and it’s fine. Oh yeah, yeah, or he can just exhale it as like a big beautiful star. If I exhale all the stuff I’ve eaten in the day, it’s just a fucking nightmare to watch. So I picked the game, which you would never call a game this now, Fat Princess. Like actually, it’s quite surprising even then, they called it that. And I think that’s a game where you basically just have to feed, you have to feed like cake to a princess to stop her from being carried around by these monsters or something. It’s quite a strange old PS3 thing. But classic cursed PS3 artefact, of which we love discussing on this podcast. So yeah, a bit problematic in retrospect, but yeah, Fat Princess seems good for gluttony. What have they got for sloth? It’s so lazy, I didn’t even name one. I just wrote, Surely any god game where you order other people to do your bidding? Yeah, that is phoned in, but I still respect it. Which is ironic for this particular category. Yeah, I struggle with this one too really, because it’s not really a game where the game is like do nothing. You know what I mean? Like it’s just be lazy. I’d go catch a Snorlax and Pokemon Blue. You’ve put far more thought into that, and clearly respect the listeners more than I do. We should have ended with Lust. Probably a good game of some kind. We should have ended with Lust. We had good answers for Lust. Or ended on Osiris Wrath. That would have been a great punchline. But what can you do? So Matthew, we’ve done it now. That is the episode. We have a few more questions. But as ever, we’ll just push them back to another one. We will always get around to them when we do what we’ve been playing each month. So thank you so much for sending them in. If you want to share questions with us, backpagegames.gmail.com or join the Discord, get a Back Page pod on Twitter. You’ll find a link to the Discord there. You can join our little community of almost 500 people now. So that’s cool. But Matthew, where can people find you on social media? At MrBazzle underscore pesto. I’m Samuel Dobby Roberts. See you very soon for some Splatoon 3 and new Nintendo series chat.