Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’ve got another three times special guest. It’s like Saturday Night Live with Alec Baldwin, but with, I don’t know, less kind of problematic choices. This week we have the return of Jeremy Peel. Jeremy, how’s it going? Hello, I’m good, thanks, yeah. Studiously avoiding GTA 6 spoilers this week, that’s me. At least until I get asked to write something on it, and then I have to just take the hit, but so far I’ve been allowed to dodge it. It’s worth it for £120 or whatever it might be. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so this is a bit of a strange timing really, because this episode is called GTA Clones on Trial, and we’re recording this just after GTA 6 leaked, and it was unprecedented really, very strange. Some people have joked in our Discord that we are the leakers, and therefore we timed this episode to coincide with that, which is an idea I love. But I think it should be a fun one. So Matthew, first of all, how are you? How are you doing and how are you feeling about this episode as a concept? Yeah, I’m good, thank you. Terrified of wading into the GTA 6 discourse in case Rockstar sue me for a million pounds, because that can happen if you even go near the rumors, it seems. I was going to say, very expensive way to promote your podcast episode, really. Oh yeah, I think this one might have spread too far for everyone to be sued for a million pounds. If everyone does it, it’s not illegal, question mark? I don’t know. Just the person who leaked it, I’m sure they’ll get mega sued, but everyone else, I don’t know. It’s a bit public domain defense, isn’t it? I just saw people retweeting gifs and I was like, brave a man than I. Yeah, it’s kind of a strange one. Jeremy, how are you feeling about the fact this has happened? Obviously, it’s terrible for the devs and it’s a really weird situation. But I think it has prompted quite a lot of sympathy and fairness in Rockstar’s defense against idiots who say, this doesn’t look as good as GTA 4 and those people sadly don’t exist. So Jeremy, how did you feel about all this kicking in? Yeah, I guess probably echoing most of my peers in thinking it doesn’t really help anyone, doesn’t really serve anyone. People who feel like they want to see it now are probably getting sort of a little regret. Nobody really wants to see a game at that stage of development. It’s not fun and it ruins it slightly for you when it’s finished. So yeah, a bit of a shame, a bit of a shame. Yeah, it has also kind of exposed just how little people, well, loads and loads of people just understand how games are actually made and how they superficially come together at the very last minute in a lot of cases. So yeah, that’s kind of disappointing to see too. But yeah, a silver lining of it, I suppose, is it kind of shows us what a big deal GTA still is. Like the games that we’ll be talking about in this episode go back almost to the millennium. The idea that GTA is still the biggest thing around, you know, worth targeting with this kind of ludicrous hack or whatever was involved, kind of shows that that series has been endless in a way that pretty much nothing else has been in games. Yeah, it is true with, you know, we’re like, what, 25, 24 years into its history now. So kind of, yeah, nothing else really quite like it. Matthew, how are you feeling about the whole leak thing? Are you kind of perturbed, amused, scared? What was where you at? You know, you’re always looking for the fakes for these things. Whenever, you know, and there was that brief little window of excitement where you’re like, has someone made this incredibly beautiful fake, like really well thought out? And they’d gone to such lengths to make it look real. And then as it sort of dawns on you that is real, I kind of, I just basically got the fuck out of there. Like it’s weird things because it seems to have like finished dialogue in or at least professional lots of chat, chat in it. And I was like, I don’t want to hear that, you know, like I don’t want to be part of that world. So it’s definitely sparked an interesting round of conversation about people’s expectations and it’s always quite nice when there’s something that brings the sort of, I say it’s quite nice. It’s obviously bad things happen, but when you see developers kind of pull together collectively for their craft and sort of defend something or go to bat for them, it’s quite, quite nice to see. Every GTA game has a legal drama, doesn’t it? It gives Daniel Radcliffe something to play when he does the sequel to that awful BBC adaptation or whatever that was. I just imagine how crosswalks they were on Sunday morning. I cannot imagine what it was like. It’s like unprecedented as a kind of nightmare as well. It’s like usually a leak is in the form of one screenshot or whatever and this was, yeah, just out of control, but you know, malicious and bad. The only funny thing I sort of took out of it was watching news writers who were covering it on Sunday morning pretend that they didn’t know if it was real or not. Like, we don’t know if this is the genuine article and it’s like, my dude, there is like a hilariously large amount of evidence. This is not a fake. I get you have to be tentative because you don’t know what the source is and you’re reporting on it, but it did make me laugh. It’s like, who can really say if this is real or not? It’s like, that is a Slack notification. This thing is real. There’s a second secret team of 2,000 fakers working at international studios to make fake GTA. Yeah. It’s like one big bluff fake and then the real game will reveal itself at great expense but well worth it. Okay, good. Well, then we’ve probably ticked that off enough because I find the leaked a bit depressing as well. I don’t know. In a quiet year of news, just maybe the fascination in it really does show how starved people are for blockbusters. I don’t know. It seemed to break a couple of people. Because there’s some people who normally can be trusted for quite decent takes. I saw some real shockers from people who I respect quite a lot. It’s a bit like when you suddenly put a hot plate under cold water and it shatters. It was just like too much news for the sane mind to take. You went from, nothing’s happening to, I’m looking at GTA 6 and I shouldn’t be. People were just like, there were a lot of deleted tweets that morning from people who just didn’t know what the take was. I had a really hilarious meme start to blow up, but it was getting too many idiots dropping in my mentions. I had to delete it. In many ways, Matthew, I was the real victim of the leak. I was about to say, I was the real Blorko. That’s how vain I am. I assumed you were going to drop a Blorko reference there. It’s a little bit too symbolic even for our listeners, I think, that one. This episode, GTA Clones on Trial. I can’t remember why I came up with this. I thought it might be fun to talk about all the games that followed in GTA’s footsteps. A little brief history then. Gta 3 obviously dropped in 2001, and then that drove developers and publishers to try and mimic its success in a number of different ways. Whether it was attaching open world elements to existing series, just borrowing it wholesale and making their own version with a slightly tackier theme, setting a GTA style game in a real city, because of course GTA, the PS2 games had this cartoony art style. The cities were based on real cities, obviously New York, Liberty City and Vice City was Miami, but they had this cartoony art style, so it was deliberately stylized. So you had all these kind of diverging roots of people trying to mimic its success, and no one really got to the same level, but definitely some interesting games came out of it, and it feels like the sort of territory that suits our listeners’ sort of range of interests. So Matthew, how are you feeling about that as a kind of a concept for an episode? One of the exciting thing going through these, because there are quite a few I haven’t played, and I was watching videos or managed to play them by some means that we won’t go into. That’s implied piracy ticked off on the bingo board. Like, it was even beyond my memory of how many of these things there were, and just sort of like a wild inventive time it was of people trying to leave their mark on this particular genre, and particularly in the PS2 kind of era. You know, as you get into the next generation, you already feel the sting of budgets required to pull these games off kicking in, and that sort of genre becoming slightly more starved or slightly more focused. But I’d sort of definitely forgotten the wild twists that exist within the spread of these games. Well, how about you, Jeremy? Yeah, like looking through the list of the games we’re going to be talking about, you know, there are some bad games here, don’t get me wrong, but there isn’t a lot that’s just completely shameless. There are not many straight rips. Like there’s always, as Matthew says, there’s a twist. There’s always something, some kind of weird pitch going on with pretty much all of these games. So although a lot of them are forgotten, some rightly, it is a weirdly creative period as well. Yeah, it is strange to kind of look upon because the variety of games it pulls together, you know, it crosses the gamut from, like I say, series of morphed genre to ill-fated attempts at creating licensed versions of GTA. Just a real kind of like odd spread comic booky games as well. It truly is an interesting range, which is why we’ll keep this intro fairly brief because we have like actually tons of games to talk about as we try and get through all the GTA clones. So Jeremy, I suppose like the reason I brought you on for this episode is there’s definitely at least a couple of series where I consider you a true authority and I thought you’d enjoy kind of like getting in the mud with us for one of our bullshit trial episodes. So how come you are sort of a good fit for this, I guess? Like what is it about your expertise that crosses over with this a little bit? I was a young teenager during this period where the 3D GTAs were emerging and I was already playing driver and kind of, I guess, had a front row seat to a lot of this stuff. And in recent years as a freelance, I’ve sort of reconnected with some of those series and figured out which of my memories were legit and was there something to some of these series? And, you know, driver for me in particular is one that I kind of claimed as a journalist because I thought nobody else is gonna write about this. And it turns out I still love it. Yeah, and it’s nice to be invited onto this format of The Back Page episode. It feels like a tear closer to the core to be invited onto a nonsense fiction episode. You know, games court-ish. You know, that’s not first guest material. You usually get them in with something a little more sophisticated. I wouldn’t force this bullshit on anyone first time around. Yeah, Jeremy, how is it you described it to me was like highly specific but incredibly loose, something like that. Like how you try to rationalize my design essentially for this episode. Like, did you kind of like look at the plan for this and recoil in horror? I chuckled is what I did. I realized it was one of these and a little pressure was lifted from my shoulders as I realized that I wouldn’t have to be, you know, as coherent, as impressive as I might be in another format. So it’s nice, it’s nice. Yeah, this ain’t academic, this one. Brazenly as well. Like, you know how sort of they made, put Tom Hanks and some clay to make him fat and German in Elvis? That was me looking at Jeremy Peel and thinking about his Driv3r takes and bringing him on this episode. I was like, he’s my ace in the hole, he’s my ticket to the top, do you know what I mean? Like, I’ve got to bring him on and talk about Driv3r. So just to, yeah, be brazen about it. That’s essentially why I’ve roped Jeremy into this nightmare. So yeah, good stuff. So we’ve talked before on this podcast about how GTA could always use the competition. Me and Matthew were always like bristling at the fact there aren’t more GTA clones. And so when one comes along as happened recently and was a little bit disappointing, we were kind of like, damn, because it feels like there should be some mid-budget games by modern standards that can sort of fill this space. Jeremy, how do you feel about the kind of current state of GTA competitors? And I suppose at a glance, how many of the games that we discussed from this episode do you think are worth defending? There were definitely some that are still worth defending. I think they don’t really exist anymore, mainly because other developers have been priced out of it. Saints Row coming out this year still doesn’t quite match 2013’s GTA 5 in terms of production values and the kind of mechanics that are in the mix there. There’s no B tier that exists for this genre anymore. Obviously, the open world genre has become a whole broader thing, but there isn’t much room for direct competition with GTA unless you’re Ubisoft now. I think it’s more likely we’ll see GTA Online Clones and GTA 5 Clones sadly in the years to come. I think that people will see that’s where the money is, as selling cars and decals and stuff like that. I could see a kind of riot-sized company moving into that space and making their version, you know, much as they have with Valorant versus like CSGO. Maybe Tencent will buy APB and that’ll finally make its way back. What a cursed headline. That’s a good outside prediction. Matthew, we should put that in our 2023 episode, that’d be good. Matthew, how about you? At a glance, how many of these games do you think are worth defending? And bearing in mind that we’re not going to be defending all of them, some of them we will be prosecuting. So what was your take at looking at the kind of broad array of games here? Were you impressed or were you like, oh, for fuck’s sake? More of the latter, I think. Yeah, I think there’s only really a handful of these games to me that had a really clear vision of how they could build. Well, I don’t even think they were building on GTA necessarily, but they just had an idea of like, oh, we can do something open world that makes it worthwhile. I think some of these are like direct riffs on GTA and a lot of those are quite unsuccessful. The further you get away from the kind of core GTA experience, the better your chances are of having sort of something to sort of say. But some of them are like, yeah, yeah, some of these are quite hard work. It’s amazing how much attention these games got as well. And I don’t just mean from media, but I mean, like, in how they would be friends at my school, who’d be like, oh, have you heard about this, this game that’s a bit like GTA? But that was, it was so popular a format that people would, the word would spread that someone’s made a GTA alike, essentially. Oh, yeah. It was Linkin Park and these games. That’s what was discussed. Yeah, that’s how, you know, like True Crime Streets of LA kind of came to my attention a little bit. And I just had a bunch of friends who were like, keeping it on and excited about it. That was, you know, that was a huge game for me in 2003, in terms of anticipation. The results of that we’ll talk about shortly, I’m sure. But yeah, these things would just get on your radar because they were so, they were just kind of everywhere. People were just so obsessed with GTA. And then when you kind of used up a GTA in like, you know, six months, you’d be kind of asking, well, what’s next? Then of course, there was a big gap where between Vice City, well, I say a big gap, a big gap by PS2 year standards, but two years between Vice City and San Andreas, where many of these games actually released. So yeah, people kind of ran with it, took it, took their own ideas, dumped them into it. Some worked, some didn’t. We’ll talk it all through in this episode. So yeah, I still think it’s wild the amount of appetite there was for this stuff. When you go back and look at the gap between Gta 3 and Vice City is like the development was less than a year between those games. And most people discovered GTA with Vice City, I would say. So they immediately had two to get through. And then they still had time for true crime. It was just kind of insatiable at the time. Yeah, especially when you consider that Gta 3 and Vice City were both incredibly hard, had no proper checkpointing, you know, were just rock hard to control. And like you would fail over and over again. That was part of the extended tail on these games in a lot of ways was just actually getting through them. I think I told this story on the Gta 3 pod we did last year. But when they added checkpoints, the definitive edition in last year’s last year’s re-release, it makes the games a piece of piss. You can just annihilate a whole one in like a weekend, which feels perverse to complete a GTA, PS2 era GTA that fast. So yeah, these games definitely had an extended life. So I guess it was strange that people had the appetite, but I guess it was an era of fewer games generally. I love that these open worlds we celebrate and we spent all this time in them in our youth and most of that’s time just because we were driven to the side activities by pure hate for the campaign. Emissions so rancid that you were basically just forced to engage with them being open world games, which maybe doesn’t happen in the newer ones as much. I remember spending a full day in Gta 3 just crouching in the back of pickups and shooting the bonnet and then just seeing how long I could stay on the back of the car. That’s not a mini game. That is not a mechanic. It’s not a mission. That’s just a thing that I did to pass the time. Yeah, it’s like the idea that you only brought the systemic parts of these open worlds out because you were so fucking angry at espresso to go in Gta 3 or the fucking Zero missions in GTA San Andreas. You have to shoot down those tiny planes. Back in my day, the campaigns were just so awful. We had to make our own fun talking like a fucking dad who grew up in the 70s. Fun times. Okay, I think it’s going to be a good episode, lads. So let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back with GTA Clones on Trial. See Hello, welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, we’re going to talk about, well, in this section, we’re going to put all the GTA Clones on trial. I’ve tried to be as comprehensive as possible. This is indeed a Judge Matthew Castle episode, joint TM. So there’s people who’ve listened to the Gamescore episodes will know the deal at this point. Matthew becomes this judge figure. There’s some slight changes. There’s some slight changes here. Normally Matthew will like pass judgment on whether a pre-owned game results in a person being put to death or not. We will revisit that format very soon. Don’t worry. But this one’s a little bit more complicated. So how this is going to work, right? Me and Jeremy, we are the legal team in this, right? And what we have to do is decide per game or per series, that’s how we’ve divided these GTA Clones up, whether we’re pulling for a prosecution or acquittal. And then we have to try and land the verdict that we want. And I’ve decided that 10 or more successful verdicts is considered a win for the legal team. So me and Jeremy have to decide this on air, which is possibly chaotic. But I think it will work out. Matthew, meanwhile, is the judge. I wanted to play devil’s advocate a little bit with the legal team. If we’re pushing for one verdict, I wanted to interrogate why we shouldn’t go the other way. And then Matthew will ultimately decide the outcome based on each exhibit and how well we’ve made our case. Did I hear you groan in the background there, Matthew? No, it’s fine. Basically, I’m a forced contrarian in every single case in this. No, I want you to be able to talk in an informed way about the games you’ve researched and played and things like that. I want you to just poke the different angles of like, I’m thinking about this. Yeah, we’re going to sort of interrogate them and this is what justice is about. That’s what Ace Attorney taught us. It’s about two voices dueling in the courtroom trying to get the best outcome for all involved. I don’t know how forced it’s going to be. I’m going to argue that some of these games are good and you’re definitely going to disagree, Matthew. So I don’t think you need to worry too much on that front. Nice. Yeah, so that’s the interesting thing is because me and Jeremy have to decide which way we’re going with it, that means there’s an inherent risk factor to some of these. Some we can pander to the judge and go for things that we know he hates because he thinks they’re dumb, which is fine too, but in a lot of cases I think we’ll try and make the case for things that are a little bit interesting, a little bit 7 out of 10, arguably a little bit 6 out of 10. Some of these get passed just because of their names. I don’t really know anything about them, but their names made me smile. Okay, that’s good. That’s a good way to look at this. So if that’s how you need to make a verdict, that’s fine too, Matthew. So, Matthew, I have once again created a bullshit scenario to kind of like, you know, give our listeners a sense of place. So instead of Matthew Castle Island this time, this trial takes place in a dubious PS2 era open world based on Judge Matthew Castle’s whims. I mean like a proper sort of shonky, reduced to ten quid in Asda kind of like open world game, you know, that sort of like joint. So Matthew, tell me, what’s the name of the open world game housing this digital nightmare world where the the legal case is taking place? There’s a Regency themed vibe to my open world game. So it’s called Pride and Extreme Prejudice. That’s fantastic. That’s really good. The other alternative was Sense and Sensibility and also Grenades. That’s maybe the sequel. OK, yeah, yeah, well, yeah. Hang on, is this set in Bath, like Bridgerton? Yeah. What’s the city like, Matthew? Any notable activities or landmarks? It’s set in Bath circa 2006 and it’s been recreated from a lot of extensive photography in a similar way to The Getaway’s take on London. So imagine kind of lots of very on-brand storefronts. I’ve directly textured 2006 Bath onto quite a blocky city so that you can see all the shops as they were, like the old game station. You can look in the window and you can see posters for probably some of the shitty games we’re putting on trial today. Yeah, I do love that in trying to conjure an image of what Bath looked like in 2006, you went with game station. That’s terrific. That’s one of the big differences between Bath now and Bath then is it had a game station. That’s it in 60 years, nothing else to note. Well, there was an opposite game station, there was another pre-owned game shop. I can’t remember what it’s called, but the doorway really smelt of wee. There’s probably an NPC who’ll say that in that doorway. That’s good, yeah. Are you going for like, sort of like high fidelity, low sort of like scale playing area, just because you can drive from one end of Bath to the other in about five minutes, does that concern you as an open world? Well, that’s, it’s one of the reasons this game, like I think would have reviewed quite poorly, is that as an actual like driving open world, it’s deeply unsatisfying because most of it’s pedestrianized and the rest of it is like quite an intense one way system. Like there’s not really a lot of room for interpretation in Bath driving. So that’s probably why this gets like a three in edge, I would imagine. So that’s kind of the deal with the roads. Jeremy, what’s your take on that as someone who has been to Bath several times, but despite working for multiple companies in Bath have chosen to never live here? Yeah, I like the visitor experience. I’m imagining a cathedral blinking in and out of existence in the backdrop, the skyline. I’m reminded that in the first Driver game you could unlock a secret Newcastle city centre level. It’s on YouTube and doesn’t work very well. So I feel like this would go the same way. Not really built, don’t really have the wide open roads of a US city to work with. Bath’s got a lot of quite ornate buildings which are hard to represent and you drive up to Royal Crescent and it basically looks like a kind of low polygon croissant. And it would be powerfully unimpressive. Matthew, I like to think that when you get to delete your save off your PS2 memory card, it’s like a low poly version of that old man who stands outside the Jane Austen Museum that just spins around sadly as you delete your save data. It’s absolutely unbelievable. You should bring him up. Because of the last question that you’re going to ask me. Okay, let’s get to that then. So how will we die here if we lose? Well, really your fate is that you just get trapped in this game world. So you’re trapped in the game, which like all PS2 era open world games will simply fade into obscurity due to the tangle of music and branding licenses that are just too much work for anyone to address in a re-release. And part of that is that guy who dresses as a Regency Gen outside the Jane Austen Museum, he’s demanding millions for us to use his license in a re-master. We will not pay it so it’s never getting re-released. I want him to be like a Mr. X style figure who stalks you across the city when you’re walking around. That’d be good. Yeah, they did that with the Serious Sam game. They had like a scorpion that if you cracked the game, a scorpion pursued you endlessly through the levels. This is a real thing that happened. That’s great. Like one of those creative piracy things. I would like the Jane Austen guy to follow you through the whole game going Thief! Thief! Thief! We got a thief here! So if you ever try and stream it, everyone’s like, Oh, he didn’t pay for it. By the way, I love the perversity that you’re not using the Michael Caine drowning tank here, which was designed for clones originally. We’re finally talking about clones and it’s not being used. That’s an amazing lore cut. Well done. I’m quite cross with myself that I didn’t see that. I just wanted to talk about the guy dressed up as a regency gent. Could have got the first, Oh, yes. I think the thing is, right, that a Bath GTA is a 3 out of 10 in edge, but I think as we discussed before, Matthew, a Bath Yakuza, that’s like a 7 or an 8, right? We think that’s like, you know, square. There’s sort of like amount of space. You could definitely condense Bath down to like four interesting blocks, which is basically what you use it as. On the on foot experience, I got some other notes. I’d say that it borrows GTA’s tap to sprint system. Only here you just have to keep on tapping just to walk up the hills. And there’s so many fucking hills. So you’re just constantly doing that. That captures the true Matthew Castle huffing and puffing experience of living in Bath. One time I visited the PC Games earn office when I worked there, which was at the top of the hill that is Bath at the time. Train station at the bottom. And I had a suitcase with me. My good friend and then manager, Phil Vanyut, met me at the station. For some reason he needed to buy a new shirt on his lunch break. Because he’s a good looking man. He just, he’s that kind of… That’s what you have to do when you’re attractive, isn’t it? And I distinctly remember dragging a suitcase down the stairs into the basement of Clarks. And just feeling my heart thumping. And just genuinely being afraid that I might die on the way to the office. Imagine dying in Clarks. Sam, if there’s one shop you wouldn’t want to die in in Bath, what would it be? I think like Gregg’s would be embarrassing, you know. Just because it would expose how often I’d go there, KFC likewise. I don’t know, I felt like I wanted to give you a bit of a bet. The FUD shop, you know, that’d be pretty… That’s quite a nice FUD shop though, so I don’t know, like tough. Kingdom of Sweets. That would just ruin it for so many people. You would scar some fuckers in there. Yeah, especially because everyone who goes there is like 14. And then like I’m 34 going in there to get some Arizona green tea. And it’s like, yeah, looks dodgy as fuck. And if I die in there, that’s even more embarrassing. To the 14-year-olds, you look so old that they just think, oh, yeah, it was his time. It’s sad that he had a good run. That is so funny. I also like the idea of sort of like playing as a kind of Matthew type figure is good because in these games, of course, it’ll always give you some arbitrary reason you couldn’t go out of bounds. So I like the idea that if you try and walk up Bass Hill, Matthew will just die when he gets to the spot. So the game’s like, that was the game’s way of saying, oh, you went too far up the hill, you’re not meant to do that. So there’s nothing good up the hill. That’s what I’d be saying. I just keep turning around and looking out at the screen and going, there’s nothing good up the hill. Everything good in Bath is at the bottom. So let’s just stay down here. That is true. The Heron Hounds pub is the only exception, but it’s fucking miles away. My friend Martin used to live up. That was quite nice. I quite like walking up to see him. That’s DLC. I’m going to my friend Martin. That’s like a full price re-release on PS3, with move controls. That’s sense and sensibility, and also grenades. Oh, that’s real good. One other thing, you can go to Future Offices, because they’re obviously there, on the Yakuza thing, because obviously Bath didn’t have an arcade in 2006, as discussed on the Nathan Brown episode. But you can go to the Future Offices and play demos of other open world games in our games cage. Which ones have you decided? Well, whatever’s big in 2006, I don’t know. Just Cause on PS2. Yeah, maybe Citizen’s Hit and Run. Well, that’s 2003, so I don’t know. You know what, yeah, I like the idea. Does it have to be open world games? You’re not tempted to put Pop a bit hurdy-gurdy in there? You can go, yeah, Kingdom Hearts 2, that would be coming out of there. There you go, one for Jeremy there. Nice, nice, and you get side-eyed the whole time by a poorly rendered Andy Kelly who’s pretty sure you don’t work there. Oh dear, are we sure this has not become the podcast, us talking about this fake open world game? It’s at least 20 minutes. I wish this game existed. I hope this is what I’d like Dan Douglas to make after he’s made his amazing satirical work. I want him to make Bath 2006 full of Matthew Castle fanservice. I want it to look like a PS2-era GTA, right down to the animations of like, if you walk into what’s it called, Posh Hot Sausage or whatever it’s called, you do that backing away animation they do where they put their arms up. I want to see that in a game. Okay, good. I think we’ve established this. We’re trapped here forever with the Jane Austen man if we can’t get the right result for 10 of our different GTA clones here. Yeah, basically. I have an opening statement before we kick off. Don’t get too excited because I did put this together in about 25 minutes while I was trying to eat a chicken dinner. To be honest, that bit there that I just said is funnier than the actual speech yourself, so keep that in mind. Ladies and gentlemen, today the backbone of early noughties game design goes on trial, the GTA clones. In the wake of GTA 3’s success in 2001, publishers everywhere looked at the game and said, me too, in the least creative ways possible, paving the way for countless rip-offs where you drive around cities that today look like they were made from painted cardboard by a four-year-old. Judge Castle, who could only dream more of these games would actually end up on Wii back when he was reviewing his 18th party game compilation of the month for NGamer. I ask you to expand your mind and allow some of these games to reach the Elysian fields of game design. At the same time, I ask you to bring fire and brimstones for those that offend us people of good taste, dumping piles of dog shit straight into hell. From incomprehensible Marlon Brando impressions to baffling Cockney stereotypes, today we’re here to litigate the lowest form of early noughties art. Today we’re here to litigate the lowest form of early noughties art, open world games, mostly before they were good. And praise me to Judge Matthew Castle, who I think we can agree is the original low-poly gangster. Thank you. Wonderful. Beautiful. I was just trying to imagine it read in the voice of the kind of celebrity who would have been put in these games back in the day, like a Michael Madsen or something. Yeah, I could try and do that, but it would be today the best. No, it’s not going to work. So Jeremy, how do you feel about the opening speech? You’re in the epicenter of the games core experience now. How’s it going for you? Yeah, it’s surreal. I’m looking at my arms and they are transforming into lower poly by the second. Okay, so we’re about to get into the games. So a quick technicality note. So a few shitty crime shooter games that have been discounted here for not being GTA enough, i.e. they don’t feature an open world or some such, there’s a few games that people mention as GTA Clones but aren’t really GTA Clones. The Sopranos, Road to Respect is one of those. It features the full cast of the TV show but is notoriously crap. But it doesn’t actually feature any open world stuff, so I felt like a weird one to include. It’s just cutscenes and crying bits basically. It’s an incredibly quick time to nudity in that game as well. If you want to see a polygon boob, you know, a minute and then you’re off. There was also a Miami Vice game on PS2. That is just a linear shooter. It probably existed because Vice City got big, but it is based on the ATV show of course. That also doesn’t count. I’ve tried to keep things here that have an open world of sorts. I just don’t think you can say it’s an open world game without having an actual open world in it. That seems legit. I can tell you’s Lloyd before. Okay, good. Alright, let’s get into it. First up, we’ve got Mafia City of Lost Heaven, 2002. Now, I hesitate to call this a GTA clone. I don’t think it is because it came so quickly after Gta 3, just like 2002 kind of game. But it was developed over four years and crossed over with GTA’s lifespan and just features enough of a kind of like similar approach to Gta 3 to at least be worth discussing. I think we’re firmly seeking an acquittal here. Is that right, Jeremy? Yeah. Matthew, original Mafia, where are you going to stand with this one? Like the trappings of it, the fantasy of being a gangster stepping into that world, very exciting, like to my head at the time, I thought amazing, kind of old school godfather GTA. That would be brilliant. I think it’s quite a compelling campaign through line, but I think the world around it is just a backing to that campaign. I don’t think it has any emergent fun. I think that pretty much broadly applies to the whole series, really. It’s kind of like an elaborate movie set, you know? That’s the approach taken. But here, this was gaming’s first great open world period piece, really. Arguably still one of the only good ones. With no Mafia, no Pride and extreme prejudice. Exactly, it’s a very pivotal game along the way. I don’t want to overcomplicate it by throwing the entire series here, because it does change its developers twice. And it’s a bit too complicated to try and defend the entire series, because they vary quite a lot in quality. So just going with the first one here. But I’m seeking acquittal. Jeremy, anything more to add on why this game is good? Yeah, I mean, Matthew’s right that the city here is a backdrop. It’s not a game that seeks to kind of squeeze the maximum value out of that open world. Which I guess, you know, it comes somewhat from the fact that it was made before Gta 3 came out for the most part. But that is a point in its favour as well, I think. The way that you kind of spend a lot of time driving slowly around this place, chatting with, you know, Salman Pauly and the passenger seats. And you develop a kind of an appreciation for the intricacies of that world that you wouldn’t if you were speeding around it, you know, hopping from one side mission to the next. And that campaign is pretty strong as well, you know. Like at a time when I think most action games were afraid to take themselves and their characters seriously, this Czech studio had just took a shot at like, well, we’re going to try and do The Godfather, Goodfellas, we’re just going to do it. And got, you know, reasonably close considering. Like it hits all the right thematic beats, that whole thugs in suits dichotomy of the Mafia and the idea of family and how that always turns out to be bullshit. You know, that doesn’t go both ways. If you commit yourself to that family, they won’t ultimately look out for you. The idea that you can’t retire from the Mafia. All of that stuff. It has that feel of that kind of epic that spans someone’s whole life. So yeah, although it doesn’t really satisfy in the sense of a world to explore at your leisure. Although you can kind of roam around it freely. There’s not a lot to find there. And you get to find it incredibly slowly because of the speed limits. The speed limits and the approach to the driving models. I have a theory that because Illusion Softworks, right? They come from this background of simulation type shooters, hidden and dangerous. And I feel like they applied that to the driving in this game. It’s really, you know, you get any speed up in Mafia, you better be ready to break long before a corner. You could have a hard time. The crashes are so painful in this game. And it’s sort of anti-freedom in that kind of hedonistic GTA way. And I think it’s probably quite a shock for a lot of us when we first played it. Anti-freedom is quite a bold pitch for an acquittal. I mean, aren’t you yourself, Judge Castle, anti-freedom? Is that not your philosophy? That is true. And I see a lot of myself in this game. It’s like difficult, quite slow moving. I also eat a lot of Italian meats. You need to take 30 seconds to slow down while you’re walking so you don’t careen into a road. Final pitch here. I would argue that Rockstar has adopted many of the approaches to storytelling in open worlds that Mafia first used. You know, that kind of cruising around with someone in the passenger seat. Those sort of changes of pace. The stuff that Mafia was laughed at for, you know, the fact that you had to drive around, do some taxi missions to begin with. In the sequel, you had to load some crates at the docks. These things that kind of told the character story and helped you understand why anyone would put themselves into such a risky line of work. You know, this kind of stuff is foundational for how Rockstar tells its stories now. So although Mafia lost in the end, I think there’s a lot of it in Rockstar’s own stuff. Yeah, I think it did win Mafia anyway, not against GTA, but as a series that’s still going. They’ve just announced they’re making another one. So, you know, it has persevered. This first game was definitely revered at the time. I kind of loved how PC it felt compared to Gta 3, which felt very, very console. You know, like that difference was meaningful and quite exciting. And the city had just looked nicer than Liberty City did. It was just, you know, because of the power of PC. So it’s also, you know, it looked great in so many ways. Like there’s smoke rings in this. I think of what people sometimes remember about it. Like characters are smoking all the time in bars. And it just looks really nice when they’re kind of puffing smoke out, kind of adding that level of atmosphere. I think it’s legit. Big fan of the banging soundtrack, getting in the car, banging on your favorites, like my girl’s got a lovely hat or some other bullshit from the time. I think it’s, they use some music by, is it the composer Django Reinhardt, who’s in like the Bioshock soundtracks and stuff. Like I think it’s similar rips from of that in terms of like instrumental tone kind of music as opposed to Rock Around the Clock, which I think is in Jim Mafia 2 actually, to be honest. But Mafia 2 has got a banging soundtrack anyway. So yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s got to be an acquittal Matthew, because to be honest, we’ve arguably peaked earlier because some fucking bullshit to come. So thoughts? Yeah, I mean, maybe I just need to give you this to kind of like boost morale and keep the momentum going. We’re fine. We’re doing okay. I promise. Yeah, I mean, just for the record, the debate, is it a good GTA clone rather than is it just a good game? Or is it just a good game enough? I think it’s like it’s a worthy GTA alternative. Okay. I was feeling like no acquittal for this. Originally, just on the grounds that I think it’s a quite a memorable third person action game embedded in quite a terrible open world city. But I take all your points about the PC-ness of it and Jeremy’s point about how this story structure actually goes on to be quite an influence or definitely sets the tone for these things to come. And I like that a lot. So yeah, why not? Let’s acquit. That’s me banging a hammer. I mean, I’m pleased, but I’m very concerned that that one was borderline because that’s some of the best material we’ve got here. Oh right, yikes. Yeah, we’ve got a long way to go. Right, next up, The Getaway 2002 and The Getaway Black Monday 2004. Primarily gonna focus on the first one here. I did have the second Getaway game. It was in an amazing £3 fire sale that Walworths was doing in 2006. I got Viewful Joe on PS2, 007 Everything or Nothing, which I still traded in because I didn’t think it was very good. And then this, yes. There was something else good, but I can’t remember because I realize now that makes that sale sound like it was full of dog shit. I would have just taken a wheelbarrow to the pick and mix. I would have just been like, pour them in. So let’s focus on The Ghetto 8002. Now, this is like in the wake of successful Guy Ritchie films. Comes along this game, directed by Brendan McNamara, who had gone to make El Inuar and become quite a contentious figure for how the production of El Inuar went down. This game promised to, I think at first they said, we’re going to do 20 square kilometers of London. And then at the release they were like, we’re going to do four square kilometers of London. What I love about that is if you look at the map of The Getaway, the street density is huge around Soho, which is where the developer was based. And it just gets increasingly sparse as you come out from that epicenter. You could barely fit the Queen’s Q in that line. Nice. Topical. That’s going to date this podcast so much, Jesus. People will be listening to this in the post-apocalyptic ashes of the Great Britain thinking, oh yeah, I remember when there was a Q, you know. So I think this game is a beautiful tribute to early noughties British retail. If you want to see Virgin Megastore or a defunct storefront, you will find it on Oxford Street in this game. And I actually think that gives it quite a valuable sort of like time capsule-ness. You’re in this very gloomy looking version of London. It’s always grey skies and it’s always overcast. Because it goes for realism, the art style hasn’t aged particularly well next to a GTA from the time. Nonetheless, I think this is just too naff to seek an acquittal on. I think we have to go for the prosecution. Do you have any thoughts on this Jeremy? Yeah, it’s hard to argue that it’s a good game, that driving in particular is horrible. Why do I say in particular in fact? Because the shooting, the movement on foot, all of it is horrible. There are things to admire about it. It took so many risks. It really went hard on the diegetic thing, which for those familiar with that word means basically the interface is within the fiction of the game. There are no health bars. Why didn’t you say that then, Jeremy? Because I’m a terrible nerd and journalist. There’s a whole system in this for taking damage and healing that is based purely on observing how many holes your protagonist has in his body at any given time and then finding a wall to lean. He’s got big fat man after the stairs energy. Absolutely. You just have to turn up over there until all of his wounds have evaporated. Then there’s the notorious indication system for getting around the city. There’s no arrows, there’s no GPS. You see whether the car indicators are pointing left and right, and you do your best to follow that. Which I suppose follows a kind of logic. Your character knows where he’s going, and you just sort of… Oh, that’s mad. It’s not like a love bug situation where the car is sentient. Not explored. Not explored during the course of the story. It really just tells you about 30% of the information you need to get around the map. It’s kind of bizarre as a system. It’s miserable. It probably should get some points for going all in on performance capture pretty early as well. That kind of storytelling was pretty rare at the time, and although the script is about twice as… Every scene seems to be about twice as long as it ought to be. There is something in it, and you can see the path to LA. Dwarf from there. Oh, for sure. Even in the way that, like Mafia, it’s kind of like a game that doesn’t really make full use of its open world. You’re just driving between missions in the city. But once you get to those missions, those areas tend to be particularly lavish. There’s a fantastic art gallery, I think. Some kind of art exhibit that you go to fairly early in the game. There’s a receptionist NPC who greets you and all this stuff that you get to see as you wander around. It has that kind of intimacy and the detail that you would see in LA. Noire. It just doesn’t have the mechanical purpose for it. There’s not really any reason other than, oh, this is cool, to see those environments get that kind of level of polish and detail. It’s certainly a bad game, but you can see how it led to a good one. Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s irredeemable or anything. It’s more just overall. As well, this is one of the first times that a 3D space authentically recreated something in the real world. In the pantheon of GTA Clones, this game has value in that regard. I think it’s just too rough to play. The way to play it now is actually you can type in a cheat code and just play it in free roam mode. Also, the actors in this are terrible. That’s the other difference with doing this and the Eleanor. You look at their IMDB pages and a lot of them do not extend beyond this game in the past. They’ve even got names which tell you they’re going to be… The credits are coming up at the start and it’s all like starring Gary Spanner and things like that. Although, I did see the lead actor in this game in Eleanor in a later mission. There’s a mission that features a boxer, like a British boxer, and he’s played by the same actor and his surname is the same. So there’s a kind of implication that maybe those two games are in the same universe. He’s the great grandson of the Eleanor boxer. Yeah, there’s a kind of cinematic universe that nobody ever asked for going on there. But that’s where the difference in quality comes, because there’s so much fun to seeing the Mad Men circuit to that season two cast basically bring that whole game to life. That’s novel and quite exciting and obviously a lot of those actors are very, very good. So that helps. But yes, the lead guy, Don Kenbury, that does sound like a made up name, doesn’t it? Yeah, like sort of the opening of it just has like really excruciating dialogue between Cockney Hardman, that kind of stuff. Let’s just say she’s good at spilling a bit of the claret. And then like, I thought I was working with experts, not a bunch of bloody husbands. She’s rubbish as well. But like also the main guy who seems to be having some kind of nap when like his kid and his wife leave the house and he’s shot dead. Like he wakes up and goes, Sus, Susie! Like his acting is like all over the place. And then he just sort of goes, ahhhh! And then the game starts and it’s really just like strange and just like proper straight to DVD kind of like British crime thriller energy to it. There’s so little of that stuff about now. Pop culture seems to have moved on from that sort of early noughties obsession that there’s a little bit of quaintness to this. Like I found some of like the enemy chatter quite endearing where they’re all like, you f*** him up here! And all this kind of stuff. Like enough time has passed that I’m sort of now quietly fond of that again. But it’s just not, it’s not that sort of thing at its best. And I think that’s the thing is like that genre, that sub genre of crime film at its best was like legit good kind of filmmaking. And so it does feel like a knockoff in retrospect. Just a kind of weird, complicated game. Like important, I guess. But but ultimately not good. Weird, weird aspect of this is having played Watch Dogs Legion and then revisiting this. I could sort of use some of my knowledge from that game to get around, which I guess is testament to the fact that both of those deeply foiled games did a pretty good job of recreating the same place to some degree. But Watch Dogs Legion doesn’t have Burger King in it, so it’s not as good. No, no, that’s true. They’ve got all those randomly generated Ubisoft open world names, haven’t they? Like Burger Man and things like that. Yeah, like I say, I think it’s really cool to drive past places that storefronts don’t exist anymore. I don’t know how they did it, whether they bothered trying to draw them all or if they just took photos. They look like photos. Yeah, they do. And you’re like, did they license the logos for all these shops? I can’t believe that they asked the local businesses. But there’s small family run businesses in this game. Yeah, is it like a Google Earth offence where it’s like, well, it’s a photo I own so it can go in the game? I’ve no idea. That’s actually what it looks most like now is a city and flight simulator. It’s like you’ve flown really close. This is basically what London looks like in. No, it’s true because if you fly in New York in the recent Microsoft Flight Simulator, like it has you can see like the adverts for all the Broadway shows because it does use, you know, aerial photos to construct it. So that game is full of like accidental branding, too. It’s got very similar energy. I mean, surely fair use defense ends when somebody can shoot up the shop front of your kebab place, which is the only one of its kind in the world. It’s just your business that you’re watching. Yeah, right. They would just argue all we did was like slap a JPEG to the front of this grey box and say it’s your shop. And yeah. OK, so we’re going for a prosecution then, Matthew. Thoughts? I’d love to be a contrarian and acquit this, but it’s just too ropey. And I remember the sting of disappointment of this being sold as like a big important contender, but like official PlayStation really went to bat for this one. And it was just it was crushingly bland after that hype cycle. I would love to have seen a third one on PS3. Like I think the PS3 would have been the perfect home for like a slightly ropey like next gen quote unquote like open world game. That would have been spot on, I think. That VR crime game PlayStation release, that’s not related to this universe because that’s got a very similar kind of aesthetic and vibe and like characters that is it blood and something, blood and glory or something? I don’t know, but I think Gangs of London on PSP is a spin off of this, which I think is like tied to that Sky series in a very vague way as well. Yeah, I think you might be on to something there, Matthew. I think the Soho Studio now makes some VR stuff for Sony, so there may be a direct link there. Yeah, I do think a lot of or at least some of the core team who worked on the first Getaway left to go work on El Inuar from this point, and then it took that long to get it made. Like I believe that’s what happened. Yeah, because Matt Neymar is not credited in the second one. Okay, next up then. 2003’s The Simpsons Hit and Run, one of the only good Simpsons licensed games, breaks Springfield into a variety of different districts, Sexy Players, The Family and Appu, I believe, which is a really random sort of roster of characters, I suppose, has writing from one of the actual writers on the show at the time, which was bad by 2003, of course, The Simpsons, and was developed by Radical Entertainment. And my memory of it is that it actually wasn’t as good as people said it was. This is a kind of like a revered GTA clone, and it is a proper GTA clone. Simpsons, around this time, all they really did was clone different game types. You had The Simpsons resting on PS1. Before this, you had The Simpsons Road Rage, which is just a rip-off of Crazy Taxi and not a very good one. After this, you had The Simpsons Skateboarding, so ripping off Tony Hawk. It really went through the wringer. I think the thing they could have used was a kind of like South Park, the Stick of Truth style open-world RPG thingy. That would have been quite good for it. Alas, it was passed around. This was as good as it got, but I’m not convinced it was as good as it could have been. Vehicles were just really hard to steer. They would blow up incredibly easily, and you’d fail missions quite quickly. Generally speaking, not that funny, really. It has all this kind of like weird off-brand Simpsons music playing as you drive through it, which is very good. Sounds like Kirby enthusiasm. Just lots of like chintzy, do-do, do-do-do. Ba-da-da, ba-da-da. But I will say the developers of this game clearly love The Simpsons. It’s got quite a few touches that speak to that across the different environments you can explore. The best one is probably the fact that you could drive through the Stonecutter’s tunnel to Homer’s workplace. That’s like a really kind of nice addition. We’d even have the little kind of classical music that plays as you drive through the tunnel. And I think they did like properly care about trying to capture as much of Springfield as they could in probably a short space of time. So, on balance, because the only other good Simpsons game is arguably the arcade game. I think I’m going to go for an acquittal. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on this one, Jeremy. Yeah, I mean, I feel like you could have helped us a little more if we are going for an acquittal. But yeah, I think this is the best Simpsons game. Certainly the best one I’ve played, the best written. Obviously, that’s a small and dodgy field, but it definitely has something about it. It kind of leaned into the more absurd elements of GTA, and it got to be a kind of safe GTA as well. Simpsons is a universe where you can effectively kill someone and they’re back again next week, for the most part. It’s kind of as child-friendly as GTA gets, really. I do like those kind of like road versions of Simpsons environments. The fact that you can, there’s basically a drive-through nuclear plant in this game. You know, that’s quite a strange and I enjoyed that they kind of went to those lengths to make it work for their purposes. My fiance, Leandra, her favorite memory of this game is that when you blow up a car, you can then get back in it and drive it around just on the metal. Yeah, so slowly and it was excruciating. Yeah, but she was annoyed when she played GTA and you couldn’t do that. That was an expectation that she’d brought over from it. That is probably an important thing to say actually, is that this represents the sub-genre of games. GTA like games for people who couldn’t play GTA yet in the noughties, which obviously there were millions of teenagers who couldn’t play GTA. If you had parents that were more responsible than ours, this is where you landed and you were pretty lucky that it was this and not something much worse. Yeah. You know, it had some, am I going to defend the platforming? Probably best not to go there, eh? Matthew, I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on this. There’s definitely the sort of magic of being in that sort of Springfield and like seeing how it sort of stitches together or how they’ve stitched it together. Is there a formal map of how Springfield works? No, they’ve always deliberately left it vague so they can make weird jokes to the geography, you know. Yeah, that’s quite weird. I must admit, from what I’ve played of this, the way they try and kind of cram driving into a license, which isn’t like hugely car focused, you know. Like what’s interesting in The Simpsons is when characters are on foot and around each other. You know, the driving didn’t really do anything for me. And the kind of, yeah, the very loose platforming. You punch a lot of robotic wasps in this. Yeah, that’s true. Which is like not classic Simpsons. There’s also on the humour front, there’s this sort of gimmick in it where every level has like gags you can discover, which is basically like interactive bits of scenery, which tends to be like Easter eggs. But a lot of them were either so, no, even if they were obscure Simpsons references, the execution of them didn’t make me laugh. There’s lots of stuff you sort of press a triangle next to and it just explodes. And you think, well, what was that? Was that a ref? Did that explode in the show? Did his barbeque famously explode? I don’t know. It’s a bit weak. It actually reminded me more than anything was a sort of slightly half baked version of what the Lego games would go on to be, you know? Like arguably, if this is an open world GTA clone, then so are the Lego games with vehicles in them. Well, Lego City Undercover directly is, but yeah, I found the actual kind of gag craft quite weak and the volume of gags quite low. It just depends how much you’re like, oh, look, it’s like the old guy inside the freezer cabinet in the Quickie Mart, like, good. That’s good. Oh, I’m sorry. I think you’ll find that is good. That is good. But I am, I must say, I think you’re pushing for an acquittal on this. Yeah, that’s right. I am convinced by the GTA for people who couldn’t play GTA because I remember the pain of this period, not specifically with GTA, but other games where you were desperate to play them and everything sexy seemed to be 18 rated, not literally sexy, I mean like violent. So yeah, I’m willing to throw it in there. Wasn’t this in someone’s draft pick? Mine for Xbox. Yeah, and here I am defending it today and also criticising it quite heavily. I feel strongly that if we go back to that episode, we’ll discover that you used all of your pros during that one and we started fully on cons when it came to this. Well probably to try and carry the listeners favour. If they release this now, I think this would do mega mega numbers. I think there’s like a desire and a love and a nostalgia for it. So I think I will acquit it. All right. Well, I was not expecting to win that one actually. And I thought going for the acquittal might create a bit of drama, but what can you say? Okay the next one. We get to one of the only games that GTA openly mocked for being a clone of it. So we come to True Crime Streets of LA, 2003. Now do I go for an acquittal or do I go for prosecution? It’s like the unanswerable question with true crime. Do you ever play these Jeremy? No, you’re on your own here mate. I don’t know if lawyers call each other mate. You’re on your own here colleague, esteemed colleague. Nothing undermines a case faster than the two lawyers who are working together and then the other one, one of them says to the other, you’re on your own here mate. Yeah you’re on your own here, the right honourable Samuel Roberts. I would ask judge, I’m making a note of that, one of the lawyers doesn’t seem keen on this. It’s a question for it to be struck from the record for reasons to be decided on. I think I’m going to go for, gosh, it’s tough right, because True Crime Streets of LA is like a flawed GTA alike that does have its own angle on it. True Crime New York is just diabolically bad, like a really really rough game that is firmly out of step with GTA by the time it rolls around. Streets of LA at least has some things where it kind of stands out, gosh, fuck it, I’m going to go for an acquittal. So True Crime Streets of LA, you play Nick Kang, who is like this LA detective guy who can do martial arts. What I liked about this at the time, and I did buy this on day one with my paper round money because it was like 15 rated over here rather than 18 rated so I could buy it. Is that it did bolt bullet time and better martial arts on top of the GTA formula, set in this vast open world that had nothing really of note in there, but it was like a kind of breezy fun time and there were quite strong delineations between the different gameplay styles. They didn’t hang together in the same way, quite the same way that GTA did with its driving and shooting is a bit more like you’ve done the driving section now onto the shooting section kind of thing. I think it was slightly a slightly better shooting experience than GTA was though with its chaotic kind of like lock on aiming and camera. I think it was a little bit better in that regard, but overall it was like quite a rough kind of Hollywood sort of story. They tried to bolster by giving it these big voice actors. The house is absolutely absurd. There’s like three different pathways this game to actually finish it. Three different endings, like a good ending, a bad ending and then like a perfect ending, I think. And I think it’s the bad ending that has like you fighting dragons in it. Like actual monsters. And that’s when it goes properly sort of jump the shark. I quite like the soundtrack. God, I think I might be in trouble here. Thoughts, Matthew? I was playing a bit of this and the way it chops everything up into basically like each phase of the mission is kind of a self contained mission. So you sort of drive and then it sort of scores you on that. And then you go into a building and have a fight and then it kind of scores you on that. I thought it really sort of destroyed the rhythm of the open world. Like it never really felt like a long continuous journey was ever taking place. I think you are right about when you get out of a car, it’s maybe a better action experience than GTA, but this is back when I think GTA’s on foot game was quite poor, like the shooting’s fun. You get to do martial arts in rooms with lots of bits of scenery you can smash up. I think there’s a game much further down our list that is like a truly excellent version of this. Right. And basically takes everything and makes you realise like, oh, there really was something in that idea. I don’t think this game particularly is that, though I did quite like going in to do shooting range tutorials and hearing Christopher Walken saying stuff, which is just the sheer excess of like the money being thrown around in this time. And it certainly doesn’t feel like mega cheap. It’s, you know, I’m not saying it’s polished, but there’s no expense spared here in many ways. ROP Luxo Flux, so it sounds like that’s not going to happen, the acquittal there. It almost smooths the edges off so much stuff that it feels like incredibly arcade-y compared to GTA. I’m not saying GTA was like this amazing like life simulation back then that it is now. But part of the appeal of these games was to feel like the world was real. And, you know, when you’re driving and shooting with all this kind of auto lock on, yes, it’s technically better than playing those similar scenes in like Gta 3. But it also just feels very safe and like a kind of crazy taxi open world game almost, you know? It doesn’t have that grit or sense of life or that things surprises could happen in this world. It feels very limited in that sense. That’s fair enough. I could have could have gone the easier route there if I wanted a bit of a challenge. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as it’s remembered, maybe. Like, it’s not entirely a knockoff in the way you might think it is. Yeah, it has ideas of its own. And I think, as I was saying earlier, what’s interesting in this period is seeing people going like, well, I’m going to do GTA, but I’m also going to apply my action chops, or it’s going to be a bit like Max Payne, or it’s going to be a bit like this. And they definitely have their own character as a result. Okay, all right, next up then. So it’s like three, three in our favor, Jeremy, and one not in our favor. You’re on your own. That was amazing. Good moment for the legal team there. Okay, so next up is Naughty Dog’s Jack 2 Renegade. This is actually one I forgot about until this morning when I was planning the podcast. So Jack and Daxter 2001, kind of like Mario and Zelda combined, go around this semi-open world collecting stuff and solving these different quests to unlock these basically stars in pursuit of finishing this game. Very, very generous calling this Mario and Zelda combined. But anyway. We’re certainly riffing on those. Despite Matthew’s cynicism, a very well-reviewed first game and a very well-regarded first game. Now for a sequel, it had a silent protagonist as the first one. They thought we’ll give them a voice and the game wasn’t badass enough. So we’ll give them some guns. They did that as well. But on top of that, we’ll also put you in an open world city where you can hijack vehicles. The year was 2003. They had no choice. I’m going for a prosecution on this one. I think it’s incredibly fiddly and annoying game. I know we made an exception for The Simpsons Hit and Run as the kind of like the GTA style game that young people can play. But I think it was a bit too cynical a turn for this series that was maybe they kind of worried that platforming by itself was a little bit too old fashioned. They needed to jazz it up a little bit. But I think over time that first game has aged well and the second one has aged like fine milk. I’m not really a fan. They did have progressive scan at the time on PS2. So it looked extra nice if you had a good telly, but people didn’t need to know that. So that’s all going for with that one, Matthew Thoughts. If they really wanted to make this gritty, they should have had the gangsters from The Getaway in it. Using their dialogue. Oh, and I’d love to have heard that. I mean, you’ve really painted me into a corner here because you know that there’s no reality in the entire multiverse where I quit Jack and Daxter game. So, yeah, into the tank it goes. Is there a tank? Maybe. Well, what is happening to it again? Well, if you fail, you get trapped in virtual bath. But if the games fail, I don’t know, the guy outside the Jane Austen Center sticks his Regency cane through it. Yeah, that’s it. Or we cut a kind of like office space style sort of like musical montage of us stomping on the games. And then like there’s a bit where we have to hold Matthew back because he’s about to properly fucking smash up Jack 2 Renegade. There was a lot of at this time, there were a lot of silent platforming characters suddenly cracking wise, weren’t they? It was an unfortunate development. There’s a Rayman 3 that I’ve only played with all of the dialogue turned down to zero because they traded in a kind of sense of whatever sense of mystery and magic Rayman 2 had for just kind of slightly laddish fairies. I don’t know. It was awful. It was truly awful. Yeah, that sounds like something worth repressing. I do like the idea that to your young mind, Rayman had an enigmatic air of mystery. Who is this man? What’s this guy’s deal? Where did his elbows go? Okay, we come to the point of this episode, which is Driver 3, 2004. I played a whole bunch of this because it was just so, so mega hyped. Yes, Driver 3, or Driv3r as it was actually called. As in, if you search this game now, Driv3r is what it is written down as. Jeremy, you’re the driver man. Driver 3, is there a case for it or does it have to be a case against it? It’s the trickiest Driver game to defend in that as everyone who’s played it knows, there’s a whole aspect of this game which is completely balked, which is the shooting. It’s less underbaked and more completely raw. You know, it was something that the developer had never attempted before and the game was rushed out the door. I think Atari had some kind of financial trouble at the time and they got the sales they wanted but the damage to Driver’s reputation as a series has been permanent, I would say. You know, it never really quite returned to that kind of top tier in terms of player expectations because of that. However, the exquisite driving model that powered the first two games is kind of at its peak in this game. I would say it sort of has the depth of an early kind of Gran Turismo or that kind of thing but it’s not chasing a kind of real life simulation, it’s chasing a cinematic ideal. The key inspiration for Driv3r is a 1978 film called The Driver by a director called Walter Hill, who also did The Warriors, which Rockstar would go on to adapt. And that just kind of lays out the blueprint for this stuff. And it’s a form of car chase that doesn’t really resemble real driving, but it’s that kind of incredible sliding, wide slides around corners, the crunch of impact, that kind of heft, the sense that a muscle car is almost like a train off the tracks. Like there’s a real sense of barely controlled machinery to it, which is really gripping. And the act of driving in these games is extreme hazard perception, basically. You don’t really need anything else going on, because it fully occupies your attention. The tendency for driving games that step away from simulation, if they’re at all arcade-y, is to kind of punish you less and less for collisions, to keep you moving forward, to keep you feeling like you’re going fast. Whereas these games really do punish you if you mess up. And that’s kind of caught to their appeal for me, especially these early ones, is that if you like this kind of city driving game, that you get early GTA, 3D GTAs, that sort of thing, then this is the game where you would get that real challenge. There’s a real test of your abilities, and that wasn’t really the case anywhere else. Sometimes they completely screwed that up. In places, these games are horribly difficult. And that’s because Reflections, the developer, just didn’t do any QA testing at the time. It was just purely on their perception of how hard it was, and they made it. So they have no idea how tough a game they’d made. And the other aspect of Driv3r that I really love is the stealth component to it, which is there in that original film, The Driv3r. There’s a whole sequence of two drivers kind of hunting each other around streets. And that idea that, you know, evasion involves kind of changes in pace. It’s not always just screaming down roads away from police. Sometimes you’re kind of you’re staring at your mini map. You’re conscious of where those police cars are, and you’re doing your best to kind of dodge them and find a route through to where you want to be. That’s something I think we’ve mostly lost from this kind of game. You know, GTA 5 has a pretty solid kind of evasion and police system, but that was something that Driv3r really specialised in. The other aspect is setting, so I sent you both the cinematic intro for this game. Oh yeah, this was a bold move. What I was trying to get across, and I’d encourage listeners to watch that intro, which is of its time, but it has a kind of Michael Madness to it. It’s shooting heavily for the concept of cool in that very cold, austere way that you might find in the modern or relatively modern Miami Vice or Collateral or Heat. And there’s a real sort of love of the criminal professional. So Michael Mann originally offered the script of Heat to Walter Hill, the guy who made Driv3r, and there’s that kind of love of that sort of Robert De Niro type character who is so good at crime that he doesn’t have room for anything else in his life. You know, this idea of Tanner, the protagonist of Driv3r, he’s an undercover cop. They wouldn’t let him be a criminal Sony in the beginning because, you know, GTA hadn’t yet made it acceptable and cool to be to be the bad guy, but you know, he’s essentially a getaway driver for various outfits and he originally is a character who basically stares at the four walls of a grotty motel room until he gets a call and then he goes out into the night and he drives people and there’s that kind of underlining this game and all of those driver games is that admiration for this kind of character who is just kind of in love with the craft of criminal driving, I suppose, like that’s all they’re about. They don’t have any they don’t have room or time for anything else. This is a powerful sell for Driver 3. It’s got big Mr. Smith goes to Washington Energy like a worry that Jeremy’s going to like pass out and then like try and commit suicide if we don’t like quit this game. Like there’s a slight pang of worry there. It’s hard to argue that this game is recommendable on a fundamental level despite everything I think is quite powerful about it. There’s just a fundamental level of brokenness, which is tough to get around, but oh man, the highlights of it are really great. So the central city, I think you start in Miami, you go to Nice and then Istanbul. So you got Nice in the middle. There’s a mission in there where you are stealing cars and bikes from around the city and you’re driving them to a moving target. There’s a truck that you have to drive the vehicles on to while it’s in motion and it’s just a beautifully elegant mission setup where depending on which cars you tackle first and what point you are in the mission, it’s timed and this truck’s moving towards its destination and you have to get all of these vehicles in it before it hits that point. You’ll be driving completely different routes because of course the B point in your A to B is always in a different place and I’ve never played a driving mission quite like that in anything else, there’s something quite special about it. It’s a really full body defence, this sounds like you’re going for an acquittal. It’s gotta be, right? I have to argue for acquittal but I know that you may not… Your justice system may fall down if you go with it. I understand that this is a difficult case for the public to get behind, I mean although a tyrant, you know, does the public need to be behind you if you go for this? I don’t know. No they don’t. Do the poorly rendered masters need to be behind you in this open world hellscape, Matthew? That’s the question. No, no. They all live in fear of the Jane Austen man, so he’s like my enforcer. So, Jeremy, that has to be… You are arguing for a quitter, right? That has to be it. Yeah, I’ve got it. It’s just part of my personality at this point in these games, so I can’t do anything else. You’re in too deep. Yeah. Matthew? I just have such bad personal memories of this, because I really fell for the hype, and I read the infamous 9 out of 10 reviews that this got in a couple of places, and we bought it, and I would say probably the game that I’ve bought that I hated the most in terms of like, back then especially, like, you know, 40 quid, this is like a rare opportunity to add a game to the collection, and it was fucking Driv3r 3, like, I think it’s a real toss up between this and Rebel Strike on the Gamecube for which game fundamentally misunderstands how a man is meant to handle it, like, Driv3r 3 is like, what happens when guys who only make cars get to make a human, where Rebel Strike is what happens when people who only make X-Wings get to make a human, and they both are just like, the maddest fucking things. I’ve described in that the driving model in these games, imagine the complete inverse. Seeing the good in the core driving, which is fundamentally what the series is about, I don’t know, even though I didn’t get on with that side of the game, it has spoken to me. I also kind of admire it for sticking to its guns in terms of, Parallel Lines is the one that comes out of this, and that is a true GTA clone. That’s when they sort of give up and go, okay, we’re happy to be in this thing’s shadow. And they copy the combat model for GTA, the lock on, all that, and Driv3r sort of, although it’s got a lovely sort of 70s nostalgia thing going on in that game, Driv3r sort of loses its own personality in that period. I mean, this game is undoubtedly a huge folly and disastrous for the series going forward, but it does, it has something about it. I mean, comparing this to Michael Mann, that’s one of the most freaking hilarious things I’ve heard in this court. No, no, but the thing is, right, if you watch that intro, he is right, there’s a shot that completely rips off, De Niro in the blue light, looking out the window, you know. I don’t know, that’s someone who’s had to write a lot of two thousand word think pieces about this game. This is a man who’s funded an entire month’s living, having to write driver pieces. That’s admirable. I love the boldness of it. Yeah, you know what, I’m going to quit this. It’s lovely to see the lens Matthew will go to prevent me from crying on the podcast. I really appreciate that. You made such a good case for it. It clearly means a lot to you. I’d be interested to hear if anyone’s read your pieces and support this, have subsequently played it and whether they actually liked it. I mean, here’s the other thing, it’s incredibly difficult to play now. Victimless crime. Yeah, nobody actually has to suffer through this. I have interest, Jeremy, because we haven’t put it on trial here, but you did mention it. Would you have tried to acquit parallel lines as well? Do you like it despite being a GTA Clones? I do like it. It’s weird. It’s the only game in the series that’s very easily available now, it is on Steam and it’s certainly the easiest entry point. It’s sort of a parallel reality where every song in the radio in the 70s is the songs you remember from the 70s, like whenever you get in a car, it’s Suffragette City, like every time. It’s a kind of beautiful nostalgia land, but the cars kind of lose that heft I described to them. There’s just quite a lot of compromise inherent in it and the director of all the other driver games, Martin Edmondson, wasn’t around by that point and you kind of feel like, you feel like the stuff that is in this guy’s bones that he would never have compromised on is to some degree lost. The Driver was the first film that Martin Edmondson ever saw in the cinema. So it’s sort of like, it feels like it fused with his personality and he was then born to create this series. Alright, time extended. Yeah, very good. Alright, good. Well that was really good Jeremy. I very much enjoyed that. It was quite the journey we went on. I can’t believe you got an acquittal. Neither can I. I can feel Matthew regretting it already. Yeah, Matthew who paid for a game that he hated has acquitted this game. That’s good lawyering. I think that’s a term that you use. That’s like when you manage to convince a judge, you know, when you’ve murdered the judge’s partner and he’s like, you know what, I think you’re all right. Yeah. That situation would be allowed to happen. Okay next up, going to go for a real quick one here to balance out, you know, the kind of like detail we went into on Driver 3. Tony Hawk Underground. Now 2004. So Tony Hawk was a series that peaked obviously very quickly. Three or four arguably the peaks depending on how you look at it. I think most people agree three is. After that, there is this period of slow feature creep and them trying to figure out what to do with it. And this one comes along. It’s a much more narrative focused skateboarding game. Has like the same kind of mechanics in it, but also adds cars to drive around these vast environments. And I think that is a classic GTA clone feature creep kind of idea. And I think as a result, it needs to be prosecuted because I feel like Tony Hawk is never as good as it again, as it was during the early days of the PS2. And while I don’t think this is far from like the worst point, I do think it speaks to the fundamental we need to get a new one of these out every year quality that leads to the series decline. They fundamentally misunderstood the assignment to use the parlance of today’s youth that the car is the natural enemy of the skateboard and the two should never meet. It’s just wrong. Yeah, so I don’t think this should be allowed to fly. I think the Jane Austen man should smash it up with his cane or whatever the fucking pitch, Matthew. Thoughts? This series goes to much worse depths than this. I think actually you might look back on Tony Hawk Underground now and think, oh, that wasn’t as bad as I remember, that was OK, but you are right that these, you know, it is perverse for the skater in the driver to unite. It turned out the underground was only minus one basement level and we could go much, much further down with that series. It’s a bit of a weird one. I’m going to prosecute it. All right, good. So we got the result we wanted. Very good. That’s six so far. Very nice. Okay, next up, 2005’s Total Overdose, also given the very tasteful name of Chili Con Carnage when released on PSP. Do you think that shows great respect to the Mexican people, Matthew? Thoughts? It’s a bit of fun. Yeah. So I played this this week for the first time, actually, because I wanted to have some first hand experience of it. It reviewed okay at the time, got like seven, so it’s a classic, like everyone gave it a seven kind of game, apart from Edge, of course. It is probably the closest to an out and out GTA clone in terms of how it plays and looks, like even bits of the city, when you’re doing like extreme jumps, almost every other street has like a ramp in it to do kind of one of those jumps where the camera pulls back and shows you kind of moving in slow motion. And then when you successfully do things in the world, it even shows you the kind of the score and the money it gives you. The UI looks just so so GTA. So I think it rips off GTA in a lot of ways, has a very uninspiring open world, though. That’s kind of like South Los Angeles kind of vibes, but boxed up into these different areas. Not particularly inspiring, but mechanically it’s okay. Again has the sort of slow mo thing has again slightly better aiming and shooting than GTA, which was, you know, it was not the series strong suit only slightly better, but I would say noticeably better. Just really kind of daft over the top story that I think was inspired by, is it the Mexican trilogy Robert Rodriguez films, but just really corny and quite just just kind of a bit crap. The whole the whole thing stitched together, but I don’t know, not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I’m going for a prosecution nevertheless thoughts, Matthew. I thought the action in this was quite good. I also played this this week and I thought, you know, this is a it’s not like a Max Payne like, but with all the shoot diving and dodging off, you can like launch off walls and things. I actually thought it was reasonably accomplished in that regard. It’s again, it’s super arcadey, a bit more like the streets of LA with combo meters and the like. But I thought this was pretty solid, better than a prosecution. I think I’m going to quit it. Plus you can like it literally rips off Rodriguez in that you can get the two guitar cases that shoot turning to machine guns and just spray bullets for everyone and that’s pretty good. Yeah, just absolutely had to find the one judge who’s the biggest Robert Rodriguez fan on the planet. Any thoughts on this one, Jeremy? I had no idea this game existed until you mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. This was not discussed between Linkin Park discussions at school. I don’t know where it lived. It’s 2005, so you’re getting on a little bit in the PS2 lives. Maybe it all moved on to, I don’t know, what was big by then, my chemical romance. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, yeah. Okay, good. So yeah, that’s a good unexpected verdict from Matthew Castle there. I was pleased to hear you go to bat for it. Matthew, is that the game you’re referencing as a better example of what True Crime tries to do? Okay, then I do know what the other game you’re talking about is then. Just wondering if it’s this one. It has some similarities, I can see them. Yeah, for sure. Okay, next up. God, what a weird combo this is. So The Godfather 2006 and The Godfather 2 2009. Now I played the former this week for the first time and I actually reviewed the latter for X260 at the time. I think I gave it a 6 out of 10. Gosh, Jeremy, have you played these? I feel like these are prosecution material just for like misuse of the license kind of like grounds. Yeah, I have no attachment to these and I have no desire to go to bat for them. I do like the idea of a series that begins and knows it can’t ever go up to three. Like it’s just not wise for them to go there. But also having a sequel that it doesn’t call part two, it just calls two. Like just amazing scenes, really, yeah, the third one could have been like The Godfather versus Capcom or something. So kind of like an interesting one in the sense they got actual film people involved with the first one to provide cutscenes and make it slot into that universe against the express wish of Francis Ford Coppola, I should say. And apparently Marlon Brando, who tried to record dialogue for this, is obviously, you know, in Health and Decline, was so incomprehensible his dialogue they couldn’t even use it, or they could only use small bits of it. They should have included it as a cheat mode. I gotta say, the person they do use it is pretty bad. If it’s not him, it just sounds very much like… And you’re like, is this what EA paid like a million dollars for? Everyone can do a Brando. It shouldn’t be hard to find a good one. Yeah, I wouldn’t have thought so. Anyone at a pub who’s had two pints can do a Brando. The second one has even less of the Godfather identity to it. The first one feels a bit like Mafia, I suppose. Kind of like a period piece open world game. But more straightforward open-worldy experience than Mafia was. The second one has this… My memory of it is it has this almost like San Andreas gangland taking over bits of the city at a time in order to secure bonuses and upgrade your crew elements to it. But quite an anonymous feeling open-world game at a time where Rockstar was really knocking out the park. Very also ran and showed there wasn’t really a series in it. An interesting wrinkle, but I’m going for a prosecution. Matthew, thoughts on this? My only experience of this was playing about an hour of it on Wii, where this was proper like Wii had exploded and everyone was trying to lean into the motion control. And it had kind of used the Wii remote and nunchuck to kind of grab someone by their lapels and smash them against the door. And it had always very cute illustrations of very similar to the Wii sports demonstration, except it was used to sort of extort money by beating up a butcher and things like this. So like a very different energy to Nintendo’s own Wii output. That aside, very bland like management elements of this. It hasn’t got enough like iconic action, I guess, to like feel like, you know, to kind of crib from the, you know, they’re more cerebral than that, the films. So it’s forced you to do loads of boring little chores. Quite similar actually to like Mafia 3, I think. They both suffer from like manager criminal empire, which I just don’t want to do in this world. You know, I want I want like a nice selection of cool missions, some fun mini games, and then some systems to just tool around with. I don’t want to be constantly shaking down bakers. Yeah. Yeah, just think it was really like a very 2006 ass choice to turn The Godfather into an open world game. Like just such a poor idea. And like I do think that people like this. Like it’s, it’s not the least polished game on this list, the first one. It’s like, you know, it was reviewed reasonably well. In fact, just in retrospect, it’s sort of like, maybe you can see why these games declined a little bit when they were doing stuff like this, you know. And it’s just like the lack of ideas, but also the just sort of shortcut of having a license to try and get it in front of more eyes. Prosecution, I think. Agreed, Matthew? Agreed. Also, I’m throwing in all the lazy games journalists who used it make you an offer you can or can’t refuse, which was, which was pretty much everyone. Yep, 40 games journalists were just trapped in this PS2 open world. I remember joking to Kitsy, who was reviewing it on NGamer, the Wii version, saying like, everyone uses all the cliched lines. So I gave him some other godfather lines to try and squeeze into his review, including, try the veal, it’s the best in the city. And he just, you see, just spread it through the reviewers, cross heads. He just said try the veal, it’s the best in the city. That’s better than anything in this game, I think. Good, I’m glad we’ve agreed on this. Tell you what though, Matthew, it did make me realise I had missed one off this list, which I just bolted on. Scarface, The World Is Yours, also 2006. Now, this is by Radical Entertainment, who appear a few times in this episode. They were just the open world people for a long time. Kind of like, makes sense that this happened more than The Godfather. I would say the tone of Scarface is pretty, like, pretty good fit for a GTA-alike. Just a kind of slightly, slightly boring open world game that, nonetheless, managed to get Al Pacino on board, probably with, like, a truck full of cash. I don’t have loads of experience there, Matthew, but I know that you do, right? You play with us a bunch. Did a cover story on it for NGamer. So I had basically involved playing a lot of the, well, I don’t know, PS2 version, I guess. And then, yeah, having my first telephone interview and not recording the interview, just desperately trying to write what they were saying. So that’s why that feature’s only got very short quotes in it, because I literally couldn’t keep up with them, what they were saying. Immediate prosecution then for this one? Yeah, like, it’s fine. But again, it has like, almost that sort of godfather, like, business element to it, like there’s running the kind of drugs empire, which I don’t think any open world ever really nailed until GTA Chinatown Wars, which made drug dealing incredibly compelling. But here, it’s just just not what I want. If the structure of your game is managing finances in an open world game, I think you’d blame it. Any thoughts on this one, Jeremy? I think it often happens in games that an unlicensed game steals a license’s lunch. You know, Scarface the game was Vice City. The Godfather the game was Mafia. There wasn’t really any room for these to then be adapted. Certainly not if they’re not adapted particularly well. I don’t think it does the medium’s reputation any good, does it, when this stuff happens? When people look over, oh what’s happening in games and the Godfather’s become GTA? It sort of just reaffirms people’s poor perception of video games, really. I think it actually makes a quitting Simpsons hit and run like a good choice by comparison because when I think you do hear a lot of people wanting that game to come back in some form, I don’t feel like you hear the same thing about Scarface and the Godfather. I think people are just like, yeah, they’re gone and it’s fine, you know? That is what NGamer said. There were quotes from NGamer. I don’t think it was quoted on the box, but definitely in the adverts, saying a really undercooked quote from my preview saying it’ll grab you right where it counts, which was the last line of the preview was it was something naff because there’s lots of, here’s a balls meter in the game. It was like, it’s going to grab you by the balls and Greener thought that was too salty and so he toned it down to it’ll grab you where it counts, which is the balls apparently. Yeah, I’m not sure I would have followed the euphemism as a reader to be honest. By the way, the best quote that I came across from a review while looking into some of this stuff was Eurogamer on Mafia 2 which they called a hell of boredom. Oh, they get that forward didn’t they, quite famously. I say famously. To me, it was famously. Four out of ten for Mafia 2, that’s like, I can see why it would be a four to someone, do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? I can really see. Yeah, it tells you a lot about this context that we’re looking at really. I think Mafia 2 would review, well we’ve kind of seen Mafia Definitive Edition reviewed well, we’re just in a completely different context and I think people found Mafia a lot of work after GTA, it just wasn’t immediate enough. A hell of a boredom there is. It will grab you by the boredom. Okay, very good. So next up then, we come to arguably the king of GTA clones, Saints Row 2006 and the whole series we’re throwing in here. There is definitely like a long period where people are GTA deprived, not as long as the period we’re living in now for GTA deprivation, although obviously the game got leaked etc. But there was three and a half years there where there was no new GTA, so it made sense that all these games actually started popping up in around 2006, 2007 time, because San Andreas had come out and they were like, okay, we need to move the series to HD, massive undertaking. Saints Row comes along, first one’s exclusive to the Xbox, it is, I would say it and the second one are quite poor taste, kind of like GTA knockoffs in terms of tone. But then the tone very clearly softens as you get to three and four, becomes a lot more wholesome, quote unquote, as the kids say, and then kind of like sort of like has this has like a get out of hell spin off game becomes this little superhero franchise and then goes on hold for a long, long time, comes back this year with a not very well reviewed new entry that we discussed on a recent podcast. I think as a whole, the series has been like a net positive in the GTA Clones like deal, I guess, like it’s, you know, they’ve they’ve given more than they’ve they’ve taken away. I think that Saints Row, particularly by the third one, I was there thinking, well, this isn’t, you know, as good as like GTA, but in a world that didn’t have GTA 5 in it yet, it definitely had a place. And it was kind of on the wackier end, closer to San Andreas, while GTA was not, you know, not too serious, like the right level of seriousness that I liked, but it was a nice contrast, for sure. So I’m going for an acquittal on Saints Row, Jeremy, I’m guessing you agree with this? Yeah, my experience with this is pretty much entirely focused on Saints Row the Third, which I think is the point in the series’ tonal journey where most people agree it was at its best, and it was the right time for it, you know, Rockstar had voluntarily relinquished the absurdity of GTA by GTA 4, you know, from a storytelling perspective, and it was kind of wide open for someone else to claim that, and that’s what Volition did, and did it pretty well. I do think, like, the quality of the storytelling of this game is slightly overstated. Like, it’s fun, but there’s no real effort to make it hang together. Even though it has, like, it has some lovely character moments, you know, where characters are singing together in the car and what have you, you can’t really argue that there’s, you know, great, it’s not a brilliantly written game, and I don’t think that’s what the series is really known for. We’re going for the quittle on this one, Matthew Castle. Your thoughts? The entire series? I mean, I can’t speak for the whole series. I don’t know. You’re a big, you’re a big fan of Saints Row 1 and it’s going collect the hoes minigame. I mean, it’s not, it’s not entirely gone by the third, either, there’s still like an uncomfortable use of kind of hip hop culture as a crutch in that game, which hasn’t aged well, obviously. Big Fred Durst energy to some of those other games, I would say. But it does capture something of like the early 3D GTA games, they had that nice sort of unreal element in the sense that if you were being pursued by the cops and you knew where all the wanted stars were in the area, that was a really satisfying and rewarding thing to do was like learn how to exploit that stuff and suddenly the cops behind you would just kind of, fair play mate, you knew where all the wanted stars were, didn’t you? So I’m gonna have to let you go. And Saints Row the Third does have that energy. Like my favourite thing to do in it, it’s got a ridiculous like drone strike weapon that it’s basically pulled from modern warfare. And so my favourite pastime was to target the gang hideouts in that game. See if I could hit every enemy in those hideouts with a single drone strike. And then I’d immediately be kind of five starred by all the gangsters in the area. And the best way to escape in that game is to enter one of your properties. You know, there’s a property building aspect which will gloss over because we know Matthew won’t respond to that. But if you own somewhere and you go into it, you’re immediately safe. You know, pursuit ends. And so often I’ve been in chases and I’ll come to a building which I don’t own, but I have enough money to buy. So I’ll immediately just drop the cash for like a clothes shop at the doorstep, run through the doors and just be immediately safe. And there’ll be a bunch of gangsters right outside the front door. I mean, I can’t argue with this, can I? So we’re going to have to call it quits and move on. Is there anything like quietly more tasteless in games than like drone strike as like a cool power? Reflects fully on me that I backed that, doesn’t it really? I didn’t specify any criticism for that. But yes, that’s bad and wrong. He’s not just using his drone strike, but he’s a powerful landlord. What’s more offensive, drone strikes or collecting hoes, you decide? So I think we have to go over in a quick on this because I think it’s the ultimate St. Earth’s GTA clone in a lot of ways, and I think that to dismiss this would be to dismiss the entire concept of a GTA clone. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. We’d have to shut this episode down. Yeah. Hmm, we’d have to shut this episode down. As I was saying earlier with True Crime, this leans towards the kind of Arcadia, Game-ear kind of open-world game where I think a lot of the magic of the genre for me is the, wow, I can’t believe they’ve recreated the world in such amazing detail. But I also know that not everyone can deliver that, and this leans so hard into the fun side of the open-world game. I just don’t think you can possibly prosecute it. I wish it was just Saints Row 3 and 4. I have no love for the original two. But as a whole, I think we’ve got to include it. We’ve got another point, Joe. We only need one more, and now we’ve won. Some might say this episode was conceptually flawed from the start. Incidentally, I feel like Saints Row was done the moment that Rockstar folded the silliness back into GTA with GTA V. There’s an argument for that. I feel like this reboot was kind of buried in that moment long ago. It took away Saints Row’s purpose, and it had a good purpose. But now GTA, online especially, happily encompasses all of that stupidity, as well as the kind of mafia-esque storytelling. So where’d you go? I still think it just needed more of an angle than it had, which is just a bunch of people hustling as we discussed in the episode. It just doesn’t really go, what if some people did some things? Yeah, like this is the big narrative pitch, this is why we’re in this city, it doesn’t really do that, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. That’s not very good, Chris, as it was, let’s just move on. So next up is Just Cause and the whole series. Now I thought that Just Cause was really refreshing when it debuted in 2006, because it was the game that was just like with a game with scale, but what scale? And it was very, very pretty if you just bought an Xbox 360 at the time to just sort of like go look at some nice tropical water while flying a plane around, blowing up some bases going off. Then the second one comes along and it’s like there is like a true generational leap there in terms of like how much they’re able to put on screen. They give you like the sort of like the parachute and they give you the grappling hook and that allows you to pull yourself around the map using the parachute. So you don’t even have to get in a vehicle if you don’t want to. And so that had a very exciting physics-y momentum aspect to it. The thing with all these games is they still never quite shook off the idea that the maps didn’t have much identity. Like the individual places are just a bunch of like prefab buildings. You blow up barrels around essentially and kill troops in. But it did seem to own that at least. You get the third one and it’s like it has this wingsuit, but it kind of feels maybe a bit too similar to the second one even though it lets you do a lot more elaborate stuff with the grappling hook, using it more as a kind of like tool for fun explosions and things. And the fourth one comes along with it as like weather as a USP. And that didn’t seem to go down very well that fourth one, although I didn’t play much of it, I’ll confess. I don’t know, Jeremy, do you think this is an acquittal or do you think we prosecute? I have very fond memories of two and specifically the demo that was put out on 360 at the time. It was a time demo and you always started in the same place at the top of a mountain. It was almost kind of like showing off that look how many different things you can do within 10 minutes. Starting from this point in this map, it really kind of, you know, demonstrated that games best qualities in terms of immediacy that you could just tell yourself off this mountain and you could be blowing up bases or doing a mission, although I wouldn’t advise that because the missions were always the worst part. But you could be doing something ludicrous within seconds. It kind of stripped out all those kind of moments of quiet that came with the 3D GTAs where you flip your car and you just had to kind of hike back to a highway or what have you. It just wasn’t into any of that. It was all colour and noise all the time, which is a great thing. But the storytelling and the missions were always atrocious. I have a distinct memory of the voice acting of revolutionary leader in that demo and her intonation is so strange that it stuck in my head forever. Leader of the revolutionary army known as the Reapers. Why would you pronounce Reapers that way? It’s an extraordinary thing. Prosecute them based on that? I’m stuck. I feel like it did something important. I feel like it cut to the chase in a way that was valuable to people and kind of showed the way forward for some open world games that we see today. If you go back to it now, not going to stand out particularly, but that’s maybe because there are a lot of games in that model now. I want to go to bat for this one. We’re going for an acquittal, George Castle. I think that it’s the ultimate play it for five hours, get everything you want out of it, still an airplane, ride on top of it, have your fun, kind of fly from the snowy bit to the beach’s parachute all over the map, and then kind of move on. That’s a perfectly fine relationship to have with a game. I don’t know if it comes to much in terms of influence on the genre or anything like that. I don’t know if the best exponent of it is probably Avalanche’s own Mad Max. I feel like where Far Cry is today is a lot closer to what Just Cause was then. Right, yeah, I can see that. Thoughts, George Castle. I guess we’ll go for an acquittal. Amazing scale, certainly like the physics possibilities of the moveset and the tools it gives you, but I just think it never finds a particularly interesting game to use those tools in. You’ve said it there, five hours. It’s an amazing demo. We played Just Cause 3 and had a very good press trip to Germany. Basically, the ideal way to play Just Cause is to play two hours of Just Cause 3 and then go watch an avant-garde jazz act called Baby Man. While getting drunk with Ian Dixon, that’s it, basically. Those are really the only conditions in which I enjoy Just Cause, and I don’t think there’s conditions to open to many. So I’m actually, I’m going to prosecute this one. Okay, fair. We’ve not won yet, Jeremy. Okay, justice has struck yet again. I’m regretting our no win no fee sales pitch in this moment. It’s good though, because I think there was a bit of a pause there where you had done Driv3r and you were like, well, my job is done now. But then you kind of really kicked into life the last couple. Yeah, it’s working out. I love to hear this analysis between lawyers during court. It’s always good. It’s good to do a post-mortem of the case during the case. It’s just like better call Saul, isn’t it? Next up, Crackdown 2007, Crackdown 2 2010 and Crackdown 3 2019. Going for a straight acquittal here. Jeremy, I’m assuming you agree. I do know that like there’s a bit of diminishing returns of Crackdown. Although I think Crackdown 2 is a little bit underrated. They did add a bunch of zombies in it, but they were kind of cool. But it also had a gravity gun, which is actually a really cool thing to have in an open world, using a gravity gun to fling cars around. That ruled. I don’t think it was so bad. The third one was kind of like received apathetically. But I think that first one in terms of like, I guess it’s not really subverting the GTA formula, but the idea of like, my friend will get in a car, and then I’ll chuck him in the car off the top of this building, was something that hadn’t been done in these games before. And like really added to the open world template that GTA had debuted. And Xbox 360 players at the time went wild for it. So, yeah, I think a straight acquittal here. Thoughts, gang? Yeah, no argument from me. Although Old Point’s bulletin does come out of this lineage, so we’ll just conveniently ignore that fact. The Dark Apprentice. Maybe should have talked about that. So, yes, thoughts, Matthew? You know I can’t prosecute crackdown. So, one of the greatest power curves of all time, just the gradual accumulation of strength and athleticism, the way you collect orbs and just conquer more and more of the city, not just in terms of combat, but just being able to scale ever greater heights, climbing the tower, one of the most iconic set pieces in any video game, I’d say, incredibly satisfying. I think that core of the game is so good, that even the reaction to Crackdown 3 may be apathetic, but if you start playing Crackdown 3, you will think, oh yeah, the orb stuff is still fucking great. It’s a banger, Crackdown. Completely its own thing as well. You maybe go in expecting it to behave like a GTA game, but it just doesn’t at all. It’s all about that crazy momentum of kind of power game. Yeah, the satisfaction of being able to climb a type of building you couldn’t before, because you can reach the upper ledgers a little better than you could previously. And just how the entire city was built to accommodate that. Real good. Yeah, that third one, I know very little about that third one. Should I play it? What do you reckon? If you strip it all away, it is just Crackdown. Get the orbs, get the satisfaction about it. The thing that they promised that they didn’t quite nail is the idea that as you’re kind of taking out each of the different enemy bosses or factions, they are becoming more aggressive presence in the city. They’ll start putting down loads of gun turrets everywhere. Things are meant to be escalating as your power is increasing, but they didn’t quite land it for me. I like the pitch though. Well, we’ve got our acquittal, so we have actually won now. So we should take some of the drama out of it. So you get to leave Virtual Path. It’s not so bad here, you know, this low-poly game station having a great time. So just four more, Prototype and Prototype 2. So 2009, 2012. I thought these games were kind of awful, actually. I thought they were like off-brand superhero games where you played as the second one less so, but the first one you were just like angry white dude in a hoodie, like Alex Mercer stomping on civilians and absorbing them with his weird kind of alien superpowers. And I just thought he was kind of tacky enough. I’m prepared to hear counter arguments on this though. Jeremy, do you play these? No, although my best friend at school, his little brother’s called Alex Mercer and he was lovely. So this never really landed for me as a sort of… You never threw an old lady off the top of the English… No, no. So it didn’t really work for me as a sort of badass on the edge name there. Was this one radical, the Simpsons hit and run game? Yeah, hell yeah it was radical. Their last, I believe. It was their last games before they… I don’t know, did they get made to make Call of Duty maps? I assume that’s what happens to them. Yeah, this was when that division was just melting down everything that wasn’t Call of Duty. Matthew, I’m kind of hoping that you’ll have a counter argument to this because I’m going for a straight prosecution, my friend. I mean, it’s got the classic Just Cause thing of like a terrible world, terrible mission structure in it. There’s nothing interesting to do. The central character is a really good set of powers, I think. Like, your ability to cause carnage. I’m going to grab this thing with a tendril and throw it. I’m going to chuck this helicopter out the sky. I’m going to get into a tank. You could stitch stuff together in a very satisfying way. I thought it put a huge amount of power in your hands. I was quite fond of the first one. I don’t think it’s like a stellar game. I think I maybe mentioned it in the 7 out of 10s, but I remember thinking it had a style to the action and the way that you could just string stuff together and you were quite unstoppable. It’s probably closest in tone to a Spider-Man open world game, but it just had a little bit more bite to it. Transgressive, you know. What you do with that character is the same old stuff again. It’s like you could sort of absorb people and take their form. Become like an army major to infiltrate a base. I remember that one. The same texture army general infiltrating the same base layout 50 times across the campaign. It was completely lacking in imagination. At a certain point, you think they develop a list of questions to ask the army majors when they come back into base, just looking a little bewildered and off-key. Like, what is your daughter’s name? That sort of thing. Throwing any old ladies off the top of the Empire State Building. There’s also a bit of a kind of like… Everything about this has that layer of C-minus at GCSE to it, which is like, even when you go into the menu and look at the different bits of story, it was called the Alex’s Mind Web. And you’re like, everything in this is quite daft. That is true. That is true. But, you know, we’re here to create podcast gold, Matthew, so if you want to go for it, I won’t stand in your way. I can’t. You’re the judge. No, I think for the same reason I didn’t allow Just Cause, Just Cause is a better game than Prototype. I can’t possibly equate this. Next swap, then. I’m going to lob it off. I’m going to throw Prototype off the top of Bath’s tallest building, which actually isn’t that tall. It’s only like probably three floors. It’s that block of flats I live in, isn’t it? Probably. That’s like about as tall as a gate. But in 2006, that wasn’t there. It’s probably like, I’m going to chuck it off the top of Homebase. And it doesn’t die, it just gets slightly injured. Yeah, it just gets tangled in a rack of trolleys. And that’s where it ends. I’d probably throw it off the roof of Homebase, and then Matthew Castle would find it on the way home from work and probably keep it. Good stuff. So we come to one of the true gems, I think, of this. It has to be a straight acquittal for Sleeping Dogs 2012. Part of me wondered if I should have bolted this onto the True Crime entry, because this started life as a True Crime game made by Activision. They ditched it, presumably so they could make more Call of Duty things and Crash Bandicoot remasters or whatever. And so this got passed along to Square Enix, who gave it this very strange name. But a lot of the mechanics in it and how those mechanics are kind of divided up very much recalls what True Crime did in terms of, like, you know, the sort of melee combat, driving, etc. around this, like, very beautiful rendition of Hong Kong. But I think that this has to be, like, an acquittal because when I talk about wanting, like, GTA Clones now, this is the level of game I want, you know what I mean? Like, I want this level of fidelity and this kind of, like, you know, great voice acting, decent writing, you know, all the mechanics feel pretty good, but it doesn’t feel the same as GTA. This is, like, the ultimate modern GTA clone to me. Jeremy, do you ever play this one? I haven’t played it, actually, but Phil Levanyuk wrote a really good retrospective of it for me recently, and, yeah, I think, you know, developers of these games are always talking about the city as a character, that kind of thing, and I think if you do Hong Kong and you do it well, then that’s more than halfway to being a great GTA clone. Or, like, perpetually available on PC and PlayStation, Xbox, Xbox has the framerate boost, of course. Yeah, really good. Yeah, cos they re-released it for Xbox One and PS4, didn’t they? And they sort of upped it, and it’s a really good-looking game. Yeah, for a ten-year-old game, this looks like, yeah, absolutely amazing. So I think it has to be an acquittal, Matthew, thoughts? This is the thing I was referring to earlier, which is just, yeah, I’d sort of semi-forgotten it was a true crime origins of this, but this is everything that true crime promises you, except it just does it really well. The combat is like a decent Batman Arkham clone, I’d say. It’s not got the same snap or bite to it. It’s a little loose around the edges. But the driving’s really fun. It’s got quite a boisterous shunting mechanic, so there’s a lot of burnout scenes where you’re shunting cars and they’re exploding in slow motion things, which is quite jolly. I think it treads that line between that kind of silly arcadiness and the, wow, this world looks really comprehensively recreated. It sort of ticks both boxes. This is probably my favourite game on this list. And probably the one, if you were going to play one of these and go out and you hadn’t played any of them, this is the one I’d recommend playing. Very, very sharp. WSA for Xbox Series X owners as well. Get that nice frame rate boost. Just looks absolutely fantastic. Yeah, RIP United Front Games. Eight years too early when they were closed down to be acquired by Embracer Group. So tough break. Good radio stations as well because it’s got pop, but it’s also got some local pop. It’s got English pop music that’s been imported, but it’s also got loads of local colour as well. Yeah, it didn’t get any flak for getting it mega wrong. You know what I mean? You get that a lot when Western developers try and capture the life of a city where they have no first-hand experience of living there or whatever. I suppose I am assuming a lot there with the developers, but this game just seemed to get universally praised for its portrayal of Hong Kong, which was really cool. Please have an acquittal there. Second to last one, a real quick one here. Dead Rising 3 2013. Added cars for the first time. I gave this a 7 at the time for Games TM, and I do think it was not that bad. This is like a fringe case, I would say, for a GTA clone, because the cars were just added as a means to an end, but there was a lot of soup up your vehicle, put little bits on it to make it easier to drive over zombies and kill them, but certainly the idea of driving through this kind of like walking dead color palette cityscape to get from one place to another, it felt like it was kind of like a post-apocalyptic riff on a GTA, I suppose. Not sure whether to go for an acquittal or a prosecution on this one, and maybe lawyers go through this all the time. I don’t know, not sure which side I should take. Whoever’s got the most money, I guess. I don’t think when you’re presented a case by a client, they give you the choice of whether to go to prosecute them or acquit them. I’m not sure that’s how it goes. No, and you and I are clearly legal specialists. Yeah. Going to go for an acquittal on this one. I think the Dead Rising games from Capcom Vancouver would ultimately come to nothing. But I thought this was alright for the time. Quite a handsome looking thing that, I don’t know, riffed on open world games quite nicely. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I think it’s okay. Didn’t jump out as like the GTA-ness of it was what was special. It was more like his traditional Dead Rising experience with this kind of vehicle wrinkle. As a thing, I didn’t hate it. Yeah. As a thing, I didn’t hate it. That’s why they let me write for itch. This is me trying to tick as many boxes as possible basically with GTA style open world games. Last one then. Watch Dogs 2014, Watch Dogs 2 2016 and Watch Dogs Legion 2020. Games that feature driving by reflections. Ubisoft reflections. Unleash the pain. That’s right. I bowled down again for a bit there, but I’m back baby. It’s Watch Dogs time. So yeah, there’s a whole origin story for Watch Dogs where it was a driver game developed at the same time pretty much as Driver San Francisco, the weird but brilliant tanners in a coma and drifting between the consciousness of different drivers. That game was happening at the same time, didn’t perform particularly well. Sorry, that was very corporate language, wasn’t it? It didn’t sell very well. So that driver became Watch Dogs basically, this Canadian project, which I think got two things fundamentally very right in that it has all that kind of grounding in car chases that Driv3r has. It’s very committed to making that sort of that journey across the city really gripping to enable you to hack bits of the environment and to just kind of ramming cars off the road is very satisfying. And it does the whole car stealthing properly up to the point where you can even turn off your engine and kind of go and notice as a cop passes by so long as they’re not too close to you. It’s quite a sophisticated system. And on the other side of things, it plugs in the cover stealth from Splinter Cell Conviction, which is one of the best things Ubisoft ever came up with was this kind of, I guess, rooted in in gears and that whole cover shooter movement to make this very immediate action stealth thing. And that’s just as is. It just appears in Watch Dogs. And given GTA’s iffy action reputation even now, that was kind of offering something that wasn’t really available elsewhere in those games. The problem, of course, being the protagonist, the story in Watch Dogs 1 is fairly well told, but Aiden’s just a tough hang, ultimately. He’s just not a very nice man to be around. And although he’s quite popular with the Watch Dogs fan base, he’s never really, you know, he’s just very difficult to root for, unfortunately. So that’s the biggest downside of that first game, really. Despite the city being kind of wet and sad, but also quite beautiful and autumnal. And, you know, I recommend taking a boat out in that city and just, you know, you can kind of drive beneath all those famous Chicago bridges, that, you know, loop district and come out the other side. And it’s still quite stunning in its own way. But it just had a massive problem right in its core, which is just kind of sad. But there’s something about it that reminds me of, you know, very early, Gta 3. And you talked a little about this on the podcast before, that there was room to kind of experiment in your approach to missions back then. And, you know, Rockstar abandoned that pretty quickly when you get to Vice City. It’s all very structured, spectacle and set pieces in the missions. But Watch Dogs 1 does have that thing where, for instance, you have this mission format where there’s a convoy that’s moving through the city. Oh, yeah, I was going to say I like the hijackations. Yeah, really good stuff. And you can, you know, you can kind of punt an ambush spot at a bridge. You can pop some bombs down. You can hack the bridge so that it lifts at precisely the right moment. And then you can kind of go in shooting. Or one of my favorite memories is planning it so that I was on a railway bridge with a motorbike at the time the convoy was passing underneath. Which is no easy feat. But managing to snipe the target and be away on this motorbike across a railway bridge onto another island before anyone could could perceive. That kind of stuff kind of lives in the memory because you’re able to actually come up with how you tackle something and that’s pretty rare in this kind of open world game. But yeah, the easier one to defend is Watch Dogs 2 which does all of that but with characters who aren’t hateful. Despite there was a kind of real worry before it came out that it was going to be incredibly hello fellow kids. And arguably is to a degree but those characters work much better than they should and it feels like that real sort of gang of friends that The Saints were a reboot was clearly going for. They are nice to be around. San Francisco is beautiful and colourful and sunny and it’s one of the most kind of joyful open world games you can play. And it’s actually, it feels like more than the sum of its parts. It has an incredible soundtrack from Hudson Mohawk who does kind of like fragmented sounding hip hop instrumentals is how I would describe it. He’s Scottish. Currently best known for, you know, that Reddit thread where the guy talks about having sex to a particular track and everyone lost their mind when they heard the track. That’s Hudson Mohawk. Wow, what infamy. Yeah, that song. I played that to my mum. It made me laugh so much. I was telling everyone I could find about it. Oh, man, that was funny. But yeah, Watch Dogs 2 soundtrack, which doesn’t kind of play throughout, it just sort of plays in key missions and that sort of thing is really special. So that game occupies a kind of a sort of key place in my open world memories. And then Legion, bit of a sad one that, you know, to have someone like Clint Hocking lead a game like that, who’s, you know, always been one of Ubisoft’s most ambitious creative directors, did Valkyrie 2 and split this whole chaos theory and had come up with this whole idea of, you know, finally delivering on that idea in early Watch Dogs of, you know, when you could just kind of select someone in the street and vicariously see who they are, the idea that that would be real, that they would be actually going about these lives and that you could influence them in some fashion. Really solid pitch, but Finnish game kind of feels like they spent so much effort getting this thing to work that everything else, nothing else really advances from the previous game. It kind of feels like there’s this massive switchboard, this powerful machine that they’ve created and only half of the game is plugged into it. It feels like they never really got to the point where it was taking full advantage of this super clever system they built. You get these moments where it comes together, where you take a corner too fast and you run someone over and the game informs you that you’ve just killed the stalker of somebody who was on the fence about joining DedSec and they’re now on board and that’s incredible. If stuff like that was happening all the time that connected up the chaos of a GTA game with that sort of clever emergent stuff, that would be amazing but that’s not really what the experience of Legion is like a lot of the time. And they completely fucked the driving. I don’t know how to get more than two stars of police presence in that game. It’s impossible to muster a police chase, which for me, as you can imagine, is upsetting. And I think Reflections were still involved in the driving in that one, but it just doesn’t seem to really function. I don’t think London is a good driving city anywhere. I don’t think anyone has ever thought that of London. So yeah, that’s a sad point. As a place as well, oppressed London is not a… It like takes… It strips so much character out of the city. Yeah, and although it has kind of strengths in that world building, it doesn’t ring true. Just the idea… There is never… You don’t see any politicians in Watch Dogs Legion. And if there was an oppressed London, you know, a dystopian UK, politicians would still be at the heart of it. It doesn’t make sense to just kind of see, you know, private military companies that are backed by a government that you don’t really see. It doesn’t really… Where is this coming from? Where is the ideology? What is this? You know, where is the connection to the UK we live in now? It doesn’t really feel right. This just sounds like the rant of someone who wants to run over an MP in a military. That’s a really good overview of the series there, Jeremy. I really like that. Gosh, yeah, I should really play Watch Dogs 2 properly at some point. That’s a pile of shame game for me. I played it for like an hour and I was like, oh, I don’t get to go to GDC anymore, so it’s nice to just be in this city for a while. It does feel like this city. And yeah, the tone of it did seem to be Spawn, especially when they added like non-lethal weapon options to. Real, real good. So I think we have to go for an acquittal there, because ultimately I think it’s kind of a flawed series overall. Like I think they’re hacking mechanics. I’ve never, you know, across the three games, I’ve probably played about 12 hours of these, but I just think it maybe lacked a fundamental excitement factor to those that stopped the series from being like that sort of like mega GTA alternative it could have been. Sure. I think it comes into its own with Watch Dogs 2 when they make cars hackable and to a really granular degree where like cross circle square triangle are front left right backwards and you can press the kind of in succession and become really good at kind of remotely steering a car to run over some guards and do block entrance ways and this kind of thing. And then when you kind of get into those, the base assaults, which is still really good in Legion, they’re just not pushed forward in any way. They’ve got a little of that sort of Deus Ex style, like there’s there are a bunch of ways into this place. You might throw a little robot through event. You might run over a bunch of cars remotely, cars remotely with a car. You might play it like Splinter Cell. And that stuff is, you know, especially when compared to GTAs, you know, the, you know, it’s direct equivalence in that regard. Like GTA 5 appears to have a stealth system. Nobody knows how it works really. Like, you still just do things the way you want. So Rockstar tells you to do, essentially, in that game. So it’s cool to have developers that are trying to give you freedom of approach within a GTA clone. Well, a good case. A quittle, then. Judge Castle? I think so. The idea of an open world game that is maybe a bit more interested in sort of systemic stuff and the kind of emergent fun in that. My memories of these games are the moments where you’re kind of cooking up mad solutions to things. I think that makes it quite unique. They’ll one day make a version of this, which marries all that to like a really compelling central storyline. Even Watch Dogs 2, what I played of it, didn’t quite do it for me in that regard. There is a stellar game in here somewhere and you still have to have the money to actually like make it happen, which so few people do. Well, in which case we have won 14 out of 16, Jeremy. That does suggest that the episode was, oh wait, is that right? 14 out of 17, I think. I mean, like, it’s, yeah. Like the bad games are bad and the good games are good. And we get to choose which way. We basically decide it from when it’s good or bad. I’m gonna stop picking apart a system that’s worked in my favour. That’s fine. Why don’t we accept that the open world GTA Clones Trial game itself has to be trapped inside the Matthew Castle game as punishment for being poorly conceived. That’s good. We had a bunch of edge cases, but to be honest, it will drag the podcast out so much. And I’ll just be fucking name checking a load of stuff that we can talk about another time. Spider-Man 2, et cetera, Destroy Humans, Mercenaries, Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction, which I did play this week and very much enjoyed. The infamous games, Sunset Overdrive. I tried to keep to games where you could steal cars, basically. So you could argue I should have included The Saboteur, but good God, we covered a lot of games. So that’ll do, guys. Jeremy, where can people find you on social media? I’m Jeremy Underscore Peel on Twitter. Thank you so much for joining us. And I guess we should reveal that if we hit a stretch goal, you are the mystery person who will do something, probably. We have yet to agree terms, so maybe we should say that. I mean, I’m not likely to walk out of negotiations, to be honest. But yeah, me and hopefully my good friend and peer, Phil, who I’ve mentioned a couple of times during the course of this, will do some kind of bonus Back Page podcasting. So you can look forward to that. I want that to happen. That’ll be cool. Yeah. Just the bastard paymasters of this Patreon have to agree to the terms. Let’s see if they’ll cave. Yeah, very good, Jeremy. Thank you so much for joining us. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBuzzle, underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. This podcast is supported by patreon.com/backpagepod. Thank you to everyone who backs us, all 500 plus of our backers. We really appreciate it. We’ll be back next week with Something I’ve Forgotten. Goodbye. Bye. You’re all still recording? Yeah. Yeah. I heard a mouse click, and I was like, there better not be someone stopping their recording. It’s not me. It’s your partner you need to check in on. I’ve got a lot of admin to cycle through here, Matthew, while I don’t have to say anything. That’s the thing I edit out the most on the pod these days, is the sound of Sam’s disinterested mouse clicks. No, that’s not it. I’ve always tried to find more information, I’m sorry. No, I know you’re… No, it’s good. See, I do this without access to a computer. It’s just me and the mic. Are you still tucked in your little cubby hole thing? Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, so I thought I’d do something about that. Sensory Deprivation Podcasting. I brought some tiny little, some kind of enclosed sponge thing that the microphone sits in, then I just talk into it. You don’t need to know all this, but… Sorry, Matthew, I’ll try and click less. I didn’t realize how big a problem it was. No, no, it’s fine. I’m glad to know that it’s research and it’s not just you tweeting while I’m monologuing. When you hear me click, it’s because I’m paranoid about recording not happening. I just compulsively have to look at it occasionally to know that it’s happening. That’s fine. I can also mute my mic when I’m doing that, so I should just do that. And then, yeah, when I’m doing the hardcore pornography, well, Matthew’s talking about… But then we want to hear your surprise laughs. That’s true, exactly. If I don’t have it on, then I won’t be taking it back. And then you know I’m not paying attention, and that’s bad. Sometimes you do a joke and you’re like, hmm, I would have thought that would have landed better. Sometimes I can’t tell that you’ve reacted to a joke until I listen to the episode back, and I’m like, oh, he did laugh at me saying 5050. Well, I don’t think we should air all this dirty laundry in front of Jeremy. I think we should put this in the pod at the end. I think that’s good. That’s the content. You can use the laughs from this segment and paste them in where you think they should be. Yeah, exactly. That’s good. I’ll just give you a variety of laughs. I’m going to put those through the episode and then I’m going to include this conversation at the end so people will know what happened. But why make an editing nightmare for yourself like that? It’s fucking hard enough to edit a three-mic episode. You know that. Yeah, I know, but it’s next level, isn’t it? Okay, fair enough.