Hello, and welcome to The Back Page of Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how’s the gout that’s returned with you from Bruges going? Are you kind of dealing with that well? Yeah, I’ve got most of the gout out of my system, but I did eat some extraordinarily rich meats, and felt truly terrible on the last day. I just had constant heartburn. I was so unbalanced. Have you ever been to Belgium? No, I haven’t, sadly. It feels like a place I would like, as well, because a lot of Western European places are sort of like England, but better, in a lot of cases. So I count Germany among that. I feel like Belgium would give me the same experience. Bruges has got big bath vibes. That it’s very small and walkable, and everything’s gathered in the U of a river, basically. So you can get everywhere really fast. There’s chocolate everywhere, which is amazing. Bath obviously isn’t like that. Bath has fudge everywhere. Yeah, but that’s not like… Bath isn’t famous for fudge. No, but that one fudge shop is really good in the Bride of Cathedral. That’s decent, isn’t it? Is it Cathedral? It is, isn’t it? Oh, it is, that’s it. That’s just the fudge kitchen. Yeah, it’s rock solid. Like the salted caramel fudge is top. I can only have it once a year or get diabetes, but… Not a Rollies fudge pantry kind of guy. No, is that the one that’s got the very cursed ice cream boy we talked about before outside? No, Rollies is down near where HMV used to be. It’s actually a small chain from down in Devon and Dorset and Cornwall, I think. I’ve seen them down in Lyme Regis, so they’ve made it all the way up here. Side note, have you noticed that Marshfields have some kind of fucking grip on ice cream in the West Country? Like, if you go for anywhere West from Bath, and including Bath, you’ll just find like Marshfields ice cream everywhere, instead of like good sort of gelato ice cream and stuff. I mean, there are people trying to break that stranglehold, but it’s very disappointing to go to like Brixam in Devon, for example, and be like, oh, the only ice cream they got here is this one brand I can get in Bath. It’s like, it’s a very West Country concern, I’ll be honest with you, but. Wow, this is a niche opening to an episode, which already has to work so much harder to be entertaining than it is. Yeah, so what we’ve been playing episode, hence why we’re being so loose, we think, oh, hey, we can waste three minutes talking about ice cream. Like, as ever, I feel like when we discuss Bath stuff, 25% of our audience is having a great time, the other 75% is like, oh, fuck off, get on with it. Like, I think that’s the- Well, that’s what, probably mixed up with some bruge. You might go to bruge. Do you have any good beer there, Matthew? It’s famous good beer, isn’t it, Belgium? Well, I’m not a big beer drinker. I drink a lot of hot chocolate. Just pints of it. They’re big into hot chocolates where they give you a big thing of milk and then you put in lots of chocolate and it melts into hot chocolate. They’re like the whole set the intensity of your hot chocolate with your own input of small pieces of chocolate is very much the kind of gimmick at the moment. It wasn’t like that when I went a few years ago, but now it’s everywhere. And we went to a place where they basically give you like, it looked like a giant flower petal, you know, the top of a flower, a flower head made out of chocolate. And it sort of sank into the milk and slowly melted into hot chocolate. Fuck, that’s intense. I wouldn’t trust you with that level of control over the chocolate intensity. Well, that’s the problem. Like in the hotel breakfast, I would have hot chocolate and they’re like, they give you a jug of hot chocolate to tip into the milk to set the intensity of flavor. And I just poured the whole jug in, because why wouldn’t we? You know, you want the maximum chocolate. And so it made me made myself some slightly too strong hot chocolate, which probably can be attributed to the gout. I like that if you were the last day, just like heartburn sort of leaning over, but just pouring like thick hot chocolate into your cornflakes for breakfast down at the hotel. It was actually surprisingly like that, because Catherine was like, on the last day, she’s like, I just couldn’t have cooked breakfast. And I was in a much worse state, but I still was like, I’ll have a hot chocolate and eggs Benedict. Crammed that down and suffered for it. Oh, that’s good. I also discovered Flemish beef stew, which is quite like beef bourguignon, I guess, or just a beef casserole, except they serve it with apple sauce, which is very unusual. So it’s like beef gravy and apple sauce. Absolutely delightful. That’s good. I think the sweetness would offset the kind of like, sort of the savoury kind of like darkness of beef bourguignon, which I think it’s like a bit, I don’t know. It’s not like the most flavoursome thing in the world. I think you could use a little something, something. Yeah, it was nice, but I no longer will associate applesauce with pork. I’m gonna be boring people with that story for years to come whenever I see them putting their applesauce on pork. I’ll be like, I only use applesauce on beef stew. Learn so much about you from this five minute opener, Matthew. Just top stuff there. Has it been five minutes? Jesus Christ. This is what the patrons are into. Everyone else is like, oh, fuck this, but the patrons are having a great time. So yeah, so what we’ve been playing episode, I will say it’s maybe like going to be one of the briefer ones in terms of stuff we’ve played, because I think it’s like secretly a mail bag this episode, Matthew, because we’ve got quite a lot of good questions here from our listeners. So if you want to leave us a question, there’s a pod questions sort of like what’s it called? Thread in the Discord. If you join the Discord, we can kind of like sail away with us on our social media arc as Twitter fucking crashes and burns as I hear about constantly at the moment. Hopefully, it’s not like the arc from Russell Crowe’s Noah, where Ray Winston smuggles himself on and starts eating the listeners. I don’t see that film. Is that what happens in that film? He’s like the baddie of the film and he comes on and starts eating the animals. And they’re like no as to fight him to stop him from eating the animals. That’s why certain animal species get basically wiped out because Ray Winston ate them just like in the Bible. What? That’s like, so he’s like munching on a dodo. They had a boss fight at the end of Noah. I imagine a very Dark Souls style boss fight with like slow dodge rolls and things like that, Matthew. Yeah, I’m telling you, that film is wild. Yeah, Ray Winston ingesting a dodo and a woolly mammoth. That would clash with the idea of creationism, wouldn’t it? They don’t like woolly mammoths. They’re like, oh, fuck that. I’ve already boiled it down to the Cliff Notes there, but I think that’s basically the intent of the fight, man. Yeah, I think so. Right then, the games. Let’s start with you, Matthew. So the first game here is one we got sent by a listener, right? Like who works for a PR agency. It’s like, oh, you know, I like The Back Page:. Would you like to have a code for this? And it sounds like Matthew sort of thing. So, yeah, tell me all about it. This is Case Of The Golden Idol by Colour Gray Games. This had appeared on my radar before we got that lovely email in that I saw people talking about something which was Obra Dinn-esque on Twitter and had appeared at, I don’t know if this was a PC gaming show or one of the infinite indie game streams that seems to happen all summer. But word had reached me that something Obra Dinn-y was in the world and was coming our way, which is very exciting. Obra Dinn is one of my all-time favourite games, absolutely masterful take on the detective game. And this is kind of Obra Dinn-y in that it is a game where you enter lots of scenarios where a murder has been committed and the input that you use to solve the mystery is quite like Obra Dinn in that you are basically filling the gaps in an account. In Obra Dinn it’s just like so-and-so died because of this. And here it’s more like… Americans always refer to this as a madlib, which I don’t know if that’s a UK thing, but it’s the story with gaps that you fill in hilarious words. What is the UK equivalent of that? Is there one? Consequences? Oh, I don’t know. No, I’m not actually sure. Well, anyway, it will say blank, fell off a blank, hit his blank and then blanked. And you basically click on things in the world to collect nouns and verbs to fill in that story. So like all the elements you see in the scene, you click on them, you harvest a big bank of words, and then it will be like the name of the guy fell off his bike and hit his head on a rock or whatever because you’ve clicked on horse, rock, bike and this guy’s name. So half the game is kind of passing the scene for clues, which to be honest is quite easy. They’re kind of given to you as hotspots. The other half is then interpreting the scene to make sure you insert the right words in this account. Which to start off with is super obvious because it will be like a bloke has been pushed into the sea and there’s only one other guy there and it’s really obvious that he’s pushed a guy into the sea or whatever. But as they get more and more complicated, like these sort of scenes you step into get more and more complicated. They’re presented in cross sections so you’re like you might have like a whole house where you can click through to the different rooms and click on lots of different things. You can kind of go through people’s possessions and read letters and I guess the Obra Dinniness of it apart from the input is that you have to interpret a load of information at once to try and get to the right answers. I think it’s a little less, not a little less clever than Obra Dinn but a little bit more like linear and prescriptive because there are only so many slots to put words in and there are only so many words in the scene and a lot of them due to the sentence structure you’re like, well I know it’s none of these words, you know. If so and so hit his head, so and so is going to be a name, for example, you know, and so like you can sort of deduce a lot of stuff from just the structure of the account, but what it does to then spice things up and maybe engage your brain a little bit more is there are almost like supplementary puzzles, which you have to like strip information from the scenes to solve. So there’s one where there’s been a murder at a dinner party and one of the supplemental like panels that you’re filling in is where everyone was sitting around this dinner table, and that’s got the kind of classic thing where someone’s like, I refuse to sit next to so and so and someone else is like, I sat at the place where I had a sherry and a carrot, and then you have to look at all the information on the table and work out where everyone sat, so it’s like one of those puzzles and like a logic grid. It adds up to something which I think is a little slighter than Obra Dinn, but there is a lot of fun about like, every, I don’t know, half an hour it maybe takes to solve these chapters, you’re stepping into another murder mystery, presented with just a whole new load of faces, a whole load of weirdness, and you get to have a little kind of fun time picking it apart. I quite like it. Ah, that’s cool. I’m pleased that like, I just know that your standards are quite high with these kinds of games, right? In terms of like, their kind of internal logic and also the satisfaction of actually being able to solve it, so yeah. And this, the thing this does really well, and it’s the same thing that Obra Dinn does, it’s like, it’s when you actually enter a new scene, and it’s like the fresh aftermath of something, so like there’ll be a body on the floor, someone will be inevitably like some dainty lady will be screaming, you know, someone else will be doing, you know, trying to leg it and do a runner and is tripping over something, like there’s probably a dog going like fucking mental somewhere, you know, and that’s quite funny. It has got a good sense of humor from like the demented energy of like a murder, which obviously I’ve never seen in real life, but you know, that’s something I like in Nioh Bredin as well, where you just go into these scenes and you’re like, good grief, murder is like messy and must be like quite frightening to see. Which are obviously quite a trite point, but that’s something both games have in common, which I really like. And this game has like quite an ugly art style, like the face, everyone in it is quite ugly looking, they will kind of look like sort of subtly misshapen kind of potato people, which really sells you on the like disastrous before and these sort of ugly people from history. Well, I mean, misshapen potato people, I’m talking to a fucking Professor Layton fan, do you know what I mean? That’s like your whole deal. Well, yeah, it’s kind of like what if horrible murders in Professor Layton and yeah, it’s fun. It’s really neat and nothing else stays as welcome. You know, you’re constantly presented with new stuff, like you say, and I think the addition of these extra side puzzles, which if you skip, I think you’re skipping like the meat of the game, like they actually tap into some interesting ideas. Because, you know, when someone’s been murdered or someone’s died, like you’re forced down certain avenues. Like there’s only certainly things that can happen. So by having puzzles about like where people sat or which room in the, you know, where do all the servants live in this house and trying to match the servant to the room based on like what’s in the room and what you find in the servant’s pockets. Like it can just do, it’s got a bigger like vocabulary than just murder, which the Obra Dinn arguably doesn’t have. You know, that’s just like a shitload of people dead on this boat. What happened? Um, so yeah, this, this like, you know, while maybe a bit more linear, like kind of has like a wider breadth to it, I guess. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, it sounds decent, Matthew. Did you play it on Steam Deck? I did. A little bit of an eye strain. Right, right. I think it like technically supports it, but I did wonder if it sounded a bit more pointy clicky, you know, sounded like I should be sat at a desk maybe. Yeah, it worked fine. Like interface wise, like there’s nothing, you know, you’re never really up against it. It works, but there’s definitely some small techs. I mean, I side note loaded my Steam Deck with loads of games when I went over to Brouche. So I thought I’m just going to play loads of games on the train or whatever. And lots of stuff have been recommended to me and I got really nobbled by some small fonts in certain things. It is a problem if your game doesn’t have good scaling to it. I really bounced off that Roadwarden, which lots of people have been very complimentary about. It’s kind of like a big kind of interact, a bit like an incal thing, I guess, like a sort of interactive choose your own adventure. But we just, it’s just reading, loads and loads of reading. And I found the font a little bit of an eye strain. So that won’t be making my game in the earlist. Evidently not. But yeah, it sounds like a scratch is enough of the itch of Obra Dendron if you want a piece of it. Yeah, like I do hold the genre in, you know, to quite a high standard. And this definitely like made the cut. Okay, cool. Well, that’s a good way to kick us off, Matthew. Have you got something you are equally infused for? Yeah, like very, very different vibes. But my first game is Stay Out Of The House. This is a horror game by Puppet Combo, who I’ve discussed the podcast before for people who have listened to for Back Page: Podheads, which is what we affectionately call our audience, maybe. I discussed The Glass Staircase on the Best Horror Games episode we did with Louise. And that was a game where you, I think you have these girls, they would disappear one by one over a course of different days, and you’d disappear into this maze, and then eventually encounter this nemesis from Resident Evil 3-like creature. PS1 slash PS2 kind of like art style, with a bit of a Silent Hill sort of like influence to it. So, Puppet Combo is like a, I think like it’s technically like one person, and then it’s like a collective of support devs who help make the games. And if you back the map, oh sorry, patreon.com/puppetcombo, I think you get all of the games like $10. You get like an itch version of all of them or an EXC or something. So, they’re very accessible. And most of them are built around like one core idea. This one is actually a first person game, Glass Staircase is third person. And in this game, it’s basically like The Hills Have Eyes and Alien Isolation inspired, I believe they’ve said. So, what this amounts to is, first up, there’s a prologue that’s actually not related to the rest of the game. But you are working this night shift in this garage, like a petrol station. And cars come and go and people come in and they buy stuff. Again, this kind of low, sort of like PS1, PS2 aesthetic. It even kind of mimics the sort of like vibrating textures of the PS1 era, if you missed that. And then like this white van circles through the forecourt a couple of times, doesn’t stop for petrol. You’ve been given this list of tasks to take care of across the night. The vibes are not good at this petrol station, Matthew. It’s in the middle of a foresty kind of area, surrounded by trees and darkness. Not very nice. And you are in this illuminated space. And of your three jobs, you’ve got to sweep the store, you’ve got to put some items back onto the shelf that customers have left behind, and then you’ve got to clean the bathrooms as well. And basically, you’ve got the whole storefront area to kind of like walk around, and then there’s also this like back office bits with like a refrigerator and stuff. And so basically, you just kind of play out this night shift, and you know something’s going to happen. And this is like, this is locked door that’s stopping you from getting to the bathroom. And so what you do is you wander out the front of the petrol station, wander through the back, and the locked door has been unlocked from the other side. That doesn’t seem good, does it? Like what would have done that? And so you walk through, back into the shop, through that what was the locked door, and you find out what it was, and it’s like a fucking massive jump scare, basically. And it builds up to that. It’s a really good, like, fun little horror thing in miniature. It does a great job of setting the scene, of building you up, of letting you do the kind of mundane petrol station employee bits, and it gives you a fucking fright. And then the proper, the game proper starts after that, where you are this, this girlfriend, this, you are like a couple basically, who go out to the woods, and like your boyfriend disappears, and you have to go off and look for him, in this kind of like American countryside style kind of area, where like there’s a, there’s like a mill that’s been shut down, and you have to walk through tall grass and things like that, and there’s like an abandoned church, and you read these bad vibe notes about how people have basically rejected the church and gone satanic, and started chucking stuff through the church, and all this kind of stuff. And then you eventually come to this house with these, with all this kind of like red lighting coming out of the windows. You walk into the house, explore it, and then you have this little dog companion with you, and then something happens, and then you wake a little while later, and you’re trapped in this cage, and you have to find a way out, or there is a bad ending where if you turn and watch this TV, where there’s this fucked up preacher guy talking on TV, it gives you basically a bad ending, which is quite cool. But once you escape, it turns into this first-person sort of puzzly horror thing, where it’s only a couple of hours long, and I will confess I’ve not finished it yet, because it fucked me up too much to finish it in one night. It got me. It fucked you up, isn’t it? It’s difficult, isn’t it? It’s scary. That is scary. It got me on a bad night. It got me on a Sunday where I was not quite at my bravest, and it just really, really, really unnerved me. Which day of the week are you at your bravest? Friday, I think. I got good vibes on Friday. I’m like, yeah, I could fucking take on this really fucked up family in the American South and then just try and get out of here and save these other kids. It’s just quite cool. I guess it takes similar influences to Resi 7, similar kind of vibes, but it’s way more, because it’s like an indie horror scene game. It’s way more fucked up and gnarlier. What I like about Pop It Combo is they take a variety of influences from different games and different genres. There’s another one called Murder House. It’s much closer to a Resi style experience. You can even get a shotgun and stuff like that. This does have guns in it, but I think it’s meant to mimic a bit more of the Alien Isolation style struggle. I just think it’s cool that there’s someone who makes this stuff pretty regularly. If you want to go find some alternative horrors to the avalanche of remakes, which I am excited about for sure, there is someone out there doing it. They sent me a key for this, which I was very grateful for. It’s pretty cool. Like I say, if you just back them on Patreon, you’ll get all the games, which seems like a pretty good deal to me. There’s something sort of magically cursed about the idea of a system where you use, you know, Patreon, you barter for money for these sort of strange handmade horror things, you know? Like it seems a little bit more like illicit somehow than just buying something on like Steam, you know? Yeah, it does. And some of these games do come out on Steam, but not all of them are. I think they’re all kind of like spread across different formats. I think you can even get a couple of them on Switch now as well. There’s like one called the something. I think it might just be called Nun Massacre. I like your kind of ongoing quest to find something to kind of fuck you up. Like this was a theme of our sort of horror episode when we talked about horror films and the Patreon. I feel like you’re looking for something out there in the world. Truly disturbing. Could you speak to that with regards to this? Yeah, so I definitely like whenever I, with my former partner, whenever I go to the cinema, it would be a case of like your expectations are too high. When we saw, what was it called? A kid getting their head knocked off by the post box film. What’s that again? Oh, not Heritage. Oh, Hereditary. I was going to say Pentament, but it’s not that. No, Pentament is the Games Journalist’s number one game of the year, Matthew. Yeah. I’m looking forward to that. Yeah, so when I saw Hereditary, people had hyped it up so much that when I saw it, I was quite let down by the fact that it didn’t fuck me up for life, which is what I was. That’s kind of what I hoped for going into a horror film. And then I went into Smile, same deal. I went into Barbarian, same deal. Now that is very scary for long stretches of time. But it is true that there is a fundamental scariness to the final act of Don’t Look Now, for example, which I want something like that that’s going to just ruin me basically for at least two weeks and make me just a nervous wreck. Have scary games ruined you more than scary films? At times. I think about how when I was a kid playing Resident Evil 2 had just so much more impact on me than it would do if I played it now. Do you know what I mean? I think just like it just that just really hit me at the right moment. And as an adult, I’m not so sure. But definitely like when I play Silent like the Silent Hill 2, 3 and 4, the good ones, I can get I get some of that. Oh, I’m a bit unsettled by this vibe. Did I tell you about when I played Silent Hill 2 at my parents’ house last Christmas, Matthew? And then my parents like my dad’s oboe room slash clarinet room is like right next to their porch. And my I was playing Silent Hill 2 and my mom suddenly like appeared at the porch next to the window. I would say, oh, all I was doing is playing Silent Hill. She just looked at me like, what’s up with you? I’m just playing a scary game. You just suddenly fucking appeared. And it really scared me. The only thing that can make Silent Hill 2 scarier is if Pyramid Head played a clarinet every time he appeared. And you just hear him coming by the loudness of his clarinet. Yeah, clarinet head as he’s been renamed in there. Maybe in the Silent Hill 2 remake that could be something they do. So yeah, Matthew, I’m not like that much. I’m not that brave. You know, I played this like very like tentatively like, well, if it fucks me up, I’ll turn it off and I’ll start Animal Crossing. I’ll just level myself out tone wise. So yeah, how about you? Do you think games can fuck you up more than? Oh, yeah, definitely. I still get fucked up with my films quite easily. So I don’t really go and sit in the cinema for that reason. But yeah, like, like legitimately moments playing PT when it was me. And that was with Catherine there as well. We were just gripped by like a like a really rare kind of dread, which you sort of think I hate it in the moment, but what a spectacular like feat to make someone feel that emotion, you know? Yeah, that’s it. PT is almost like a game that is like a, you know, like a what’s it cool when something hangs around your neck, you sort of weighed down by it. We’ll cut this out of the book. What’s that like? Albatross. I was going to say Albatross, but I don’t know if I’m confusing my nautical things. Albatross, you should probably keep this in. Yeah. Do people like, imagine backing us on Patreon and people don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. They’re just suddenly like wandering to our Google. So I have to actually like I have to load Google. So the only window I’ve got open is Microsoft Edge and that doesn’t have Google by default. That’s not bad. I’m not technologically literate. Albatross meaning. Yeah, I know about the bird fucking Merriam-Webster. Google’s like, it’s a bird. Something that causes, oh, something that greatly hinders accomplishment. That’s the one Matthew, we did it. Okay, so I get the impression that PT has been a bit of an albatross. Three, four. Big word, eh? The use of that terminology. For the horror genre, because I think that certainly I saw a couple of free indie game horror people be like, oh, I wish people would just stop remaking PT and make something original, which I think is a fair assessment. And I even feel like I do see PT influence films now as well. I felt there was a real PT moment in Smile, which is bad. And then big PT vibes to the feel of the house and Barbarian as well, which is good. Have you seen Barbarian, Matthew? No, no. Too scary for you, I imagine. Yeah, too scary. I wouldn’t sit at the cinema. I only see comedy horror at the cinemas. This is a good mystery box film. I would recommend struggling through it when you can rent it. I think you can rent it now, actually. I would recommend it just to see what it does. It’s not entirely what it seems from the trailer. So, yeah, give it a watch. But yes, I’ve got a bit derailed there. I just really love the idea that someone is basically pushing this little fringe of horror games. There’s actually a really handy infographic they posted that maps all the influences for the different games and where you can play them all, which I might retweet after this episode goes live, because it gives you the complete puppet-combo library of games. They’re usually based around one core narrative idea and then a couple of core gameplay ideas, and that’s it. So, yes, this is it. Heels Have Eyes kind of vibe with a spooky family in a horrible house and a cracking Resident Evil 4 reference, which I won’t spoil in case people want to play it. So, there we go, Matthew. That’s me done. My first one. What’s your second one? I’ve been playing Taiji. I think it’s pronounced like that. It’s by a solo dev called Matthew Vandevanda, and it was suggested to me by one of our listeners, whose name I’ve rudely forgotten. Oh, no, it’s terrible. I put out a call on Twitter for people to suggest good things to me. Oh, I’m so sorry. I will correct that in a later episode. Apologies, person who suggested to me this to me. I even had a lengthy exchange with them over it. That’s how rude I am. Was it, um, Fatshuwa-chewa? Oh, that sounds about right. Add a quick Google there, quick look, and yeah, that would appear to be the one. I wanted you to pronounce your name wrong, but yeah. This was suggested to me by that kind listener. And it’s a… Now, I would say it’s a 2D clone of The Witness in that you’re walking around a 2D top-down world, sort of Zelda-y, solving panel puzzles which pull from all kinds of environmental details and other strangeness in the world. Though looking up the developer of this and reading on his blog, he doesn’t rile against it being called a Witness-alike. I think he recognises that the idea of walking through a very open landscape and picking puzzles at your leisure and working out how to solve them using the same input grid is quite Witness-like. But if you read through his blog, which is absolutely fascinating actually, really, really close step-by-step blog, sort of development of this game over many, many years, kind of reminded me a bit of like Tom Francis’ blogging actually about his games, like someone who’s really open about his process. Someone cleverer than me, I understand. Someone much cleverer than me. And, you know, talking about his puzzle philosophy, and on there he said he actually, they set out to make a Zelda game, an open world Zelda game pre sort of Breath Of The Wild, but an open world 2D Zelda game. And one of the problems he had with Zelda was that, you know, there wasn’t any like universal puzzle design, like the puzzles in each dungeon, because they’re built around tools and items, you know, are quite distinct from one another. So there’s no kind of like escalation across the dungeons to one core idea. So he was trying to build a kind of puzzle system, which would have like the universal input across the whole world, which actually, when you think about it, the kind of is what The Witness is. Then The Witness came out and he was like, yes, this is what I’m talking about. This is the kind of game I’ve been talking about and wanting to play and then carried on with the 2D sort of thrust of the Zelda thing to make this game where, like I say, you walk around this island solving puzzles. I haven’t got hugely far in it, because it is, I think, much harder than The Witness. I feel like The Witness, you know, without giving it away, there’s like layers to The Witness. There’s the kind of surface level of these kind of panels that you interact with, and then there’s like much bigger stuff in the world, which you have to kind of find out. And because of that, I feel like it sort of throws you a bone with the puzzle stuff. Like, it’s much easier to kind of get a foothold. Like, I kind of, I made my way through the kind of the base puzzles of The Witness quite easily, I’d say. This is much harder trying to figure out, like, the rules that kind of define each region. So, like, The Witness, each part of the island has, like, a flavor of puzzle, all with this grid where you light up cubes to solve them. Some of them are, like, tap into the environment. So, there’s one that has… I’m not going to tell you what the gimmicks are, because it will spoil the puzzles, but there’s one where there is a relationship between the panels and some trees that are near those panels, which, again, felt very similar to something in The Witness. There’s another one where there’s a relationship between the panels and the gravestones. I mention those two, as those are the only two regions I’ve been able to make any kind of headway in. This has been a lot of me… I’ve literally been walking around this island looking at stuff going, I have no fucking idea where to begin with this. Not in a bad way. It just doesn’t… It doesn’t throw you any bones, this one. And I feel like you have to kind of go in in a more experimental mood than you maybe do in The Witness in that I feel like you almost have to start like… And maybe people who have played this game and know this game better than me will say this is actually a really crude way of thinking about it. But I found myself banging stuff, almost trying to brute force solutions to then reverse engineer what the rules are. I had no clue from the environment where I was meant to be starting. I couldn’t work out with the relationship. So I just started tinkering. And then maybe the panel would be like, ping, this is the right combination. And then you’d be like, okay, what is it about this combination that relates to this nearby pillar? Or what is it about this… What’s this combination telling me? So it feels more like a kind of a sort of, you know, roll up your sleeves and kind of dig in and try and work things out. Where I think The Witness gave you a bit more guidance through its puzzles. But it is still a, you know, a really super engaging thing in that you know it’s there. Like, you know, it’s not like you’re missing an item or you’re missing a key piece of information. That, you know, you can tackle these regions in any order. You just have to have the logic brain to make those connections. And when they come, it’s like incredible. Like, the few regions I have beaten in this game, you know, I felt like, wow, you know, my brain was really, like, firing on all cylinders to work that out and make that kind of progress. You know, it’s the kind of game that really sticks with you in that you’re constantly thinking about it. And then you’re like, oh, maybe I’ll try that when I get back to my Steam Deck. So this whole day I’ve been sort of dipping into that a lot and going slightly crazy because the paintings on the wall of our hotel room looks like some of the puzzles as well. So it’s like, I couldn’t fucking escape this game, like, no matter how hard I tried. That’s some Howard Hughes shit right there. That’s like, just seeing the puzzles everywhere. Yeah, but it’s, yeah, it’s definitely, it’s pretty hard. It’s pretty unforgiving. But like, you think if I look this up online, this game will just be ruined. You know, like, all it has is what the secret to each puzzle solution is. You know, what the rule is that you’re trying to work out. And in some of the cases, like, you know, I did five panels in a row and got correct answers because I thought I had the correct rules. And then I’d get to the sixth panel, and actually my rule set didn’t work for it. And you’d be like, oh shit, I got the wrong end of a stick. And then you go back and you try and unpick those solutions to try and work out what the rule is. It’s, you know, not, not flashy and not too showy. Certainly not for everyone. But if you played The Witness and really liked it, I would say this feels like a really nice next step. Okay. Interesting. I actually thought like I didn’t quite have the patience for The Witness itself. I did a few of those mazes and then said, oh, let’s just put on like an episode of Buffy or something at the time. Just not in the right. I thought, okay, I’m probably too much of a dunderhead for this. Or, you know, it’s like it just requires more patience than I have. So I guess if you like The Witness, that’s a good way to know if you’ll probably like this, right? Yeah, I think, yeah, like I wouldn’t. I’d say if you’re going to try one of them to see if you liked this style of game, I would still think The Witness is more accessible. Also, just because it’s like a 3D game, like it’s a bit more interesting to be in that world. Like the island is visually a lot more stimulating. This is, you know, it feels like a sort of smaller production, but it still has like a real charm to the world. And, you know, it almost looks a bit like those sort of when people used to do those demakes of like 3D games into 2D style. Like you could almost think this was a demake of The Witness, because it’s so many similarities with, you know, panels opening like gates to the weird areas and you go in there and there’ll be some like strange props you have to interpret. It’s got a very, very similar energy, but I think definitely a stiffer difficulty to it. But of the things which were recommended to me before I went on holiday, this is the one I’ve played the most of, was having a real good time, very Steam Deck friendly as well. Yeah, I should say Stay Out Of The House is not Steam Deck friendly. I played it and when I started the game, your characters are staring at the floor and no matter what you did, they’ll just continue staring at the floor. I think you’re going to say it was so scary you might throw your Steam Deck up in the air and shatter it. Side note though, Matthew, I do love the idea of you like, right, I’ve got to finish this pint of syrup thick hot chocolate and get back to Taiji in my hotel room. And then like putting Taiji down and then seeing Taiji on the walls. That’s a really good, like what a great sort of picture of your holiday. That’s that paint. That’s tickled me. The visual style is quite interesting, actually. I wasn’t quite what I was expecting from what you described. But then when you said the demaking, I was like, yeah, that does kind of track, actually. Yeah, it reminds me a bit of that. Oh, God, what the fuck was it called? What’s that iPhone thing with the little guy with the sword? Oh, little guy with a sword. Oh, I do know what you mean. You know, it was like the art house game. It was made by that sort of art housey collective. You don’t mean Monument Valley, do you? No, not Monument Valley. I was thinking of… I keep thinking sword and sorcery. Yeah. Is that one? That is one. Is that like a 2D side-on game? Anyway. What a useless avenue. It’s like Albatross all over again. This is the kind of brain that’s struggling. This is why I’m struggling with Taiji. Because I’ve got so many half-remembered thoughts. This is a thick layer of hot chocolate pushing down on Matthew’s brain cells. Oh, it honestly is. Everything in this episode is trying to break through this gout zone. What a fun thing to joke about that is. Okay, so my next game, Matthew. Very, very different vibes here. I completed Gradius Advance. I’m going through a slight GBA thing at the moment. Now, I’m not much of a 2D side-on shooter guy. But weirdly when it comes to Game Boy Advance, that’s probably where most of my interest in that genre has solidified. It doesn’t have that many of them on there. But Astro Boy Omega Factor is one of my favorite 2D games full stop. It’s fantastic. A treasure distilled, licensed version of a basically Gunstar Heroes style game where you play as Astro Boy. It packs in loads and loads of references to the lore. I believe Astro Boy was created by a guy who basically worked himself to death having four hours sleep every night, which makes me really sad when I think about it because such a cheery little character. But that’s being a manga artist, I guess. Bleak note there. But yeah, so I got massively into that and then Gunstar Super Heroes on GBA. And then I was, because at the moment I’m just playing through loads and loads of cyberpunk so we can talk about our next week’s pod. I kind of needed a little break from that. So I thought I’ll just complete Gradius Advance in like two sittings, which is what I did. Basically, like as a shooter, these are really, these are so hard to describe. How the hell did anyone ever review these and be coherent about it? Do you know what I mean? Basically, you pick the, you basically choose the weapons that you have and choose the directions the weapons move in. So what that means is you might have like a weapon that can fire backwards or diagonally. And basically you pick the right semblance of shapes that suits your play style, I guess. And then as you collect power-ups, you gain these little kind of like beams of light, these little balls of light that you accumulate. And they will kind of fire multiples of the same weapon. So basically what that means is you can, they follow you around basically like ducklings following their mother, I guess. Like, God, that’s a terrible example. That’s classic. That’s a classic shoot-em-up metaphor. Edge always uses that metaphor. It’s really hard recording a podcast after work. This is why I do them Saturday mornings normally, Matthew. Because I know what an albatross is. Ducklings, that’s way more evocative to me than, you know, whatever terminology people do. You should review these games. Basically, yeah, they just follow you in a little trail and then they will replicate the fire that you are doing basically. So if you’re firing missiles in that direction and your three little balls of light are just below you, they will fire in tandem. You can basically cover half the screen in fire. If you die, the little light things disappear and then you’re back down to like no power ups. Essentially, you have to build it up again. What that means is that if you kind of like line it up so all your little balls of light are pointing horizontally, that means that you can do like four times the firepower essentially by shooting in that direction. Basically, this is all basic shit to Gradius people. This is like completely meaningless, but it’s a really kind of like beautiful early GBA game from a series I’m not that familiar with. And I had a really good time going through it, like even have slightly puzzly bits like basically this. This bit was like a wall of like baked beans like vibrating baked beans in this kind of like weird sci-fi space. And what it means is you basically have to shoot a tunnel through this kind of like wall of baked beans and then speed through quickly before the tunnel kind of replicates itself and basically fills the holes back in. So there’s like a whole sequence you have to go through these walls constantly. And that was really, really tricky. There’s like some good cursed energy to the final levels where you see these like planets that have like faces in them and stuff like fleshy organic faces. And then at the end you destroy a brain and some big eyes. I guess they were playing a lot of Star Fox or maybe Star Fox ripped them off. I have no idea what the lineage is of this genre. But I had a good time playing it, Matthew. Did you ever have this one on GBA? I didn’t know. No, I’m trying to like fill some big shoot them up gaps. Well, which is just a gap is one massive gap. You know, I’ve always had a couple of these games at like every sort of every console, every stage of life. But I’ve never written about them. I can’t speak eloquently about them at all. I’m always forgetting which series is which, like which is the one where all the enemies are fish? You know, it’s things like that. But I love reading about them and hearing about them. Yeah, I should I should play this one. You love hearing about them from people who describe fucking beams of light in the form of ducklings following their mother around. I love that, yeah. No, but you just I don’t know. There are certain people who are really into these. I really like reading Martin Robinson stuff on Eurogamer about this show. He obviously, you know, seems to really know his stuff, but also isn’t like gatekeeper about it at all. He seems to have quite a almost like quite a casual affection for them, which is sort of, I think, you know, something I might have as well. Like I like I like the ones that I that I like. Does he have a Vic Vipers Twitter handle as well? That sets the tone. That’s a nice hardball. But yeah, I’ve played like quite a lot of Drainus this year and really like that. So, yeah, it’s something like and it’s an easier hole to fill than JRPGs, you know, because you can, you know, in the length it takes you to play through one JRPG from 1995, you can probably play like 40 of these games. So, yeah, I hope to make more headway in the coming months. Yeah, it’s also like just a nice way to be exposed to like the here is the most beautiful pixel art that we had at the time. That’s like that definitely like works here. This was actually like it was reviewed reasonably well. I got like high like sevens and eights. It wasn’t like beloved. So I get the impression this is not considered the very top tier of this series. But I very much enjoyed it as a nice way in. And it also led me down a weird sort of wiki rabbit hole Matthew. This was actually developed by a company called Mobile 21, who a Japanese video game developer that was a 50 50 joint venture between Nintendo and Konami. What? Which yeah established in 1999 and was basically built with mostly with an interest in linking the GBA to a mobile phone essentially. So Pokemon Crystal, they have a credit on that. I think that’s I think that maybe in Japan had some kind of online element to it. And if you kind of logged on, but basically they worked on a bunch of GBA. Ash is logged on. Ash knows exactly who this company is, I’m sure. But basically the whole venture was terminated in December 2002. So I guess it’s like the actual online age emerged this and the mobile adapter Gameboy service was was sort of like ended like the company just like disappeared along with it basically. So yeah, they have credits on this. They have credits on Pokemon Crystal, Mario Kart Advance and then like random stuff like Jurassic Park 3 Island Attack. And then that would be done another Wiki Rabbit hole of remembering there were three GBA games based on Jurassic Park 3. Yeah. So this I guess, Matthew, you might like the idea that somewhere in Japan there’s a pixel artist who had to make a sprite of William H. Macy. That’s a nice thought, isn’t it? So yes, I do remember there being a kind of weird number of these games around. But yeah, so the company just doesn’t have a credit past 2001. And so when the service was cancelled in 2002, I assume that they just disappeared with it. But yeah, relatively interesting background there. This probably wouldn’t make one of my selections for the Game Boy draft, Matthew, because I’ve already spoiled the fact that I rate Astro Boy. And that would be my pick for the genre. I see Astro Boy, I think you’ve now established as like a pick that would really upset you if you didn’t get. Right, yeah. So that would make a good podcast content if you want to take it from me. I’ll have to listen back to that fucking Kirby episode and find out which of those you like on GBA so I can take that from you. Joke’s on you, none of them. Oh no, please don’t take Amazing Mirror. So yes, Gradius Advance, very much a good pace breaker between SideQuest and Cyberpunk 2077. What’s your next game, Matthew? My next game is A Plague Tale Requiem. I’ve been playing a bit of this courtesy of Games Pass. Thank you very much, Uncle Microsoft, for this free AAA game. This is the sequel to A Plague Tale Innocence which was, maybe a bit unfair to say, it put a Sobo on the map but felt like a big arrival of sorts for a studio which had done lots of really interesting stuff and made lots of interesting games in the past. They obviously made the new Flight Simulator 2. But this, at a time when not many people are entering the third person, story driven, action game space, here they come with something which I thought was a pretty great first effort at doing a kind of naughty dog-esque stealth survival game set in medieval France in the middle of plague times. You are escaping from the Inquisition who are after you for some mysterious reason and there is a plague of rats and the rats are enemies, the Inquisition are your enemies and ever so occasionally you can turn the rats in the Inquisition against each other with lots of flesh-chomping fun. This is like very much a bigger… I wouldn’t say better sequel yet. I’ve only played like five hours of it or so. But it kind of takes everything from the first game, very beautiful, kind of like The Last Of Us. You sort of go through these gorgeously designed sort of sets really. Then occasionally it opens up into like a puzzly bit or a stealthy bit, all revolving around escaping these guards, escaping the rats, using light and darkness to kind of control where the rats move. Did you play the original Plague Tale? Just a little bit of it. And I did think that for a game that probably had the fraction of the budget of a Naughty Dog game, it did a very, very good job of like approximating what those games do well in terms of cinematic presentation. This is like that, but with a bit more juice behind it. I mean, it’s pretty spectacular looking. This is a not a cross-gen game, but it feels like they’ve really gone like mega pretty over like lower performance modes. I don’t think there’s the option of alternative modes in it. It’s just like, this is what you’re getting. And we’ve gone for just something super, super gorgeous, like amazing lighting. I wouldn’t say it’s like Naughty Dog levels yet, but we are talking about a very different like studio and budget prospect here. A lot more ambitious in terms of like the amount of like real estate you cover in these games. One of the things that always amazes me about Naughty Dog is like the illusion that you’re passing through, like a really massive world. Like you go from A to B and like you’ll come out into a city and you’ll see it cross through a tower and think, oh man, I’ve got to get across this whole city. And somehow they kind of weave it into these amazing set pieces. And it feels like you’ve really taken a longer journey. And this game definitely has a lot more of that. Even in these early chapters, I feel like I’ve seen almost as much as I saw in the first game. Like it feels just absolutely massive. Even though you’re only ever in a very small part of it any given time. I still think the rats are an absolutely incredible technical and mechanical achievement. There’s swarms of thousands of rats. If you walk into them, they instantly eat you up and die. So all the puzzles are based around lighting fires and then the rats will flee the light. It’s a bit more systemic than the first one. The areas are much bigger. It feels like there are alternate solutions. It gives you the toys that you spent a whole game building up in the first game. You get quite early on in this, so you’re able to put flames out to kind of marshal rats to certain places. You’re able to light new flames to scare them away again. Where you can shepherd the rats around to your advantage to take out enemies and stuff is very nicely done. You know, in a similar way that, like, how Last of Us 1 turned into Last of Us 2, there are, like, these much bigger sort of stealth sandbox areas where you have the choice to kind of fight your way through, sneak through, try and use the rats to take enemies down and this time they’ve changed the skill system which kind of how you behave in those sandboxes, like whether you choose to go quietly or play aggressively, levels up your character in those skills to kind of encourage that further use. So the first game maybe felt like, oh, this area is like a combat area, this area is like a rat puzzle area, this area is a stealth area. Those elements are a bit hazier and kind of blurring together a bit more and you have the kind of choice to play with them. Not a stellar stealth game, I will say. Like, I think the rules are quite easy to manipulate. You know, it’s not like Metal Gear in terms of like AI or mechanics and that’s probably a good thing because the character’s quite stiff and I think it probably leans more towards puzzle solving. It feels like there’s a solution to the area rather than you playing it as a stealth thing. But I am fond of it and I really love the rats. The sight of them, all their thousands of eyes glinting in the darkness is genuinely creepy and the way that they’ll swarm into a room and you can be in an empty barn and then all of a sudden the walls will crack and then they’ll just come pouring in. It looks genuinely evil when the rats turn up, which is something I loved about the first game. They keep doing it over and over again, but I’m pretty sure it’s a trick I’ll never get bored of. Just here’s a place and in like three seconds we’re going to fill it up with rats somehow. And every single time you’re like, oh shit, this is bad news. Very shiny thing. It feels like an absolutely no brainer on Game Pass to me. Not sure if it’s got enough new ideas. Certainly not so far, but I’ll see in the long run, you know, for this to be a potential Game of the Year contender, because the original was one of my favourite games from that year. Definitely scratches that itch, especially on it. I mean, it is on PS5 and PC as well, but on Xbox, which has a pretty non-existent first party lineup this year, this feels sort of a bit like a Xbox are trying to plug a gap by putting it on Game Pass, a bit like they did with Rise of the Tomb Raider. It’s like, we’re not making these games or we haven’t finished one of these games. So, you know, this is the closest thing we’ve got to the last of us. Give it a go on us, you know? Yeah, and I think there’s nothing wrong with that. I think you can play it on PS5 anyway, right? It’s on PlayStation. Yeah, I’m not trying to say like it belongs to Xbox at all. Well, they’ve marketed it loads, right? Like when they announced it, it was in their showcase and stuff. So they fully backed it. I imagine that the Microsoft money involved is part of why this looks so lavish, you know? I’m also big into the idea of a sort of like a game that should be a 7 turning out to be an 8. And then that developer going from like AA to AAA between sequels. That’s cool, right? Yeah. Well done to Asobo, is that right? Yeah. You think they’d be top of the pile for like if Microsoft was going to buy another studio. You know, if they’ve got any money left in the coffers after buying every other studio going. This scratches a big third person linear gorgeous story experience, which Xbox don’t currently have. They might have one in Hellblade 2 when that turns up. And Flight Simulator, which is just, you know, such a technical marvel. Just think they’d be like, let’s get these guys. They’ve given us two of our like strongest offerings or two things, which are both great games. Also like three year turnaround fast, you know, for the sequel to come out in this day and age, where people aren’t making these games because they’re too costly and too risky, you know, you have to land big. Like I say, I don’t think this is quite Naughty Dog level of obsessiveness, but it’s like a pretty good impression. And it moves at such a pace that I don’t think you really notice. Like I saw some people ding this one for like, oh, the NPC characters are like really animatronic in their movements. But you know, if you stand there for five minutes watching a person, an NPC do the same thing over and over again, when do you do that? You know, I don’t. If they were doing something more interesting in The Last Of Us or Uncharted 4, I walked past them and didn’t see. So I don’t know, because this is the only thing which is like The Last Of Us. It gets compared quite closely to Naughty Dog. And it’s not quite that. But listen, if it means they get to make a new game in three years, like I’ll take that over waiting fucking five years or whatever for the next, whatever we’re going to get from Naughty Dog. Yeah, that does feel like we’re in the forever cycle with that now. And it’s definitely like the days of getting it uncharted in two years. I just like, yeah, I just, you know, this shows you it doesn’t have to be the way, you know, like these things can happen. You know, these sequels can come out and be really dead solid. And that’s the kind of diet Greedy Matthew wants. Greedy Matthew. That’s good. Good new nickname for you there. Okay, last up for me. It’s a really brief one, Matthew. But I did discuss this in, patrons might not know actually, they’ve probably seen the email notifications, but we do like a monthly newsletter where we talk about what we’ve been playing, watching and reading. It’s a bonus we don’t make a big deal about, because it is just a wall of text, essentially. But I quite enjoy doing it some months, and Matthew, I get the impression you deeply resent doing it. No, it’s because you’ve got these interesting thoughts. I struggle to come up with anything. It’s because I don’t write in my day job anymore, apart from press releases and stuff. So it’s like a bit of the old dipping into writing for games media thing. You know what I mean? So I think that’s why I’ve just got lots of pent up and boring opinions to share with people. So yeah, I actually played the Yuffie DLC for FF7 Remake. This game came out. I made a big deal about the fact this was my pandemic game in April 2020. During a very bleak birthday, I remember playing this and just wandering around Sad Midgar thinking about how I just couldn’t go to the pub. All I could do was order chicken wings from that one restaurant that pretended to be about 20 different restaurants on various delivery apps. Matthew, remember that? So going back to this, it’s kind of weird. It was like you look at the skybox of Midgar. I can’t help but think, oh yeah, this is this. Oh yeah, I spent my pandemic here. This is like weirdly Midgar was kind of my prison. It was like a game. So I did eventually get to the point where I found games to be quite welcome escapism from the pandemic. But it took me a little while to acclimatize when they were like the only thing. You know what I mean? There was a bit of that going on with media consumption during those days. I wasn’t like a big, Oh my God, I just watched 100 episodes of Shits Creek kind of guy. I was a bit like, I fucking hate this. And games are like, I’m barely hanging on. All I can do is play Apex till 2 a.m. every day. And that’s all I got. Apex Legends was your Shits Creek. It was, yeah. And now I just don’t play it because I’ve just got a completely dysfunctional relationship with it. And cannot reprise it in any way, shape or form. So yes, Square Enix released this DLC for FF7, which introduces a character, Yuffie, who is one of the party members you get in the main Final Fantasy VII game. She is an optional party member in the main game. I imagine they won’t do anything like that with the remakes because the idea of an optional character in a modern game is way too fucking expensive. So yeah, she turns up here. She’s got like a little mission going on in Midgar. She’s from Wutai, which is one of the other kind of like countries, as it were. On the Final Fantasy VII world map. She goes around with this dude who’s a bit of like a… He’s got a bit of a Star Trek red shirt energy about him. He’s not a character from the main game. So you’re kind of there thinking, well, I don’t see this guy like going the distance. We’ll see how it goes. David from Final Fantasy VII. What it basically amounts to is going through lots of recycled feeling environments and just doing bits of combat with Yuffie’s new combat system. What is good about it is they’ve added a combat sync element, which basically you press a button and then Yuffie and her male companion will start hitting an enemy at the same time. And what it reminded me of actually was a bit of how you would coordinate attacks in Final Fantasy XIII when you flip to a different stance that would get you to basically stagger the enemy, so you could do maximum damage. It reminded me of that. FFVII’s combat system is very similar to FF13 generally, I would say, but definitely more so in this expansion. I was put in the mindset of that. But what is the most interesting thing about it for people who might have played the PS4 FFVII remake, but not this, is that it’s got a bunch of new cutscenes featuring all the characters. So it actually gives you a little bit more story of FFVII proper than you got from the main game. So you actually see them leaving Midgar and going to Calm and stuff, and they encounter Yuffie. I think it’s like a cutscene, a new cutscene. It’s got Barrett and Tifa in it and stuff. So it’s got little bits of extra story, and it takes you back to the Shinra area as well in the game, the Shinra building. So what is recycling content? It was just about nutritious enough to be worth, I don’t know, 16 quid or something. I paid for it, Matthew. So a little taste of that. And it did remind me, oh yeah, there is a, you know, next year, there is another FF7 Remake game coming out. That’s allegedly happening at the end of next year. So yeah, I don’t assume you, I assume you didn’t play FF7 Remake. I can’t remember what you were watching. It’s quite high up my list of to-do, though. All my to-do lists. That’s good. After you finish that, Rena, you’ll play FF7 Remake, right? Honestly, I’m feeling like gout aftershock. I regret that Flemish Beast stew. Yeah. I bought this DLC for Catherine for her birthday. Maybe last year. She still hasn’t played it. So I love the idea of buying DLC. I love the idea of buying DLC for a birthday gift. It’s like, I got you 400 coins for this MOBA or whatever. That’s like a fun thing. I thought next time you turn on the console, it will be there. It’s like, here it is. But yeah, no, it hasn’t been played, I don’t think. It was the same deal with me, but I had just about enough reason to reinstall it. Because I also didn’t actually… There’s a secret Bahamut fight in the main game, which I didn’t actually do. But it did make me marginally more pumped to play the follow-up, which allows you to leave Mid Girl, which I’m very excited about. Because yeah, I can’t spend any more time there. I just can’t. Yeah, I’ll definitely play Remake and the DLC before that part two comes out, because I want to be part of the conversation. I missed out on it during lockdown. I remember there was so much tweeting going on and exciting buzz and people comparing things and making little meme jokes. So I really felt like I missed out on something quite big there. So not again. It’s definitely like a big shiny thing. It maybe doesn’t have like the scope of what I wanted it to, what I wanted a game with FF7 Remake in the title to do. But it’s a solid foundation for what comes next. So yeah, those are my games, Matthew. It was actually quite like an hour of chat. That’s not too bad, is it? It’s quite a lot. Quite a lot. Six games. Geez, I thought it was going to be a lean one. So take a quick break and we’ll come back with a list of questions. No doubt you heard some music from Matthew’s Rat Game there, or Gradius Advance or something. I don’t know what music we’ll put there yet. I just wanted to call it Matthew’s Rat Game. I thought that was just to amuse me. Matthew, do you want to read out this first question from our listeners? Yes. New to the podcast and listening to old episodes, I’ve sometimes heard reference to games you respect, but don’t like. What games do you like, but not respect? That’s from Roboku. That’s a really interesting one. So I think respect but don’t like is how I would describe my relationship with Gears of War. I do enjoy it and I do think it’s well-made, but I suppose the universe of it I don’t love exactly. But the actual technical act of creating it and how good the shooting feels and how it is the top of its class when it comes to third-person shooting, that I respect. But I don’t necessarily like it in that. In that base, oh, I get excited about gears kind of way. That’s kind of what I would like to add as a game that fits that category. What fits that for you, Matthew? What do you respect but don’t like? Oh, I thought we were doing we like but we don’t respect. Yeah, yeah, we are. But I was wondering if you had an example of the other one first. Oh, right, yeah. To help set the scene. Sorry. Confusing. Yeah, my old gout brain again. I mean, there’s so many genres, which, you know, I will happily read anecdotes about and sort of, you know, reporting from in that game where I can appreciate, oh, wow, which is really clever, like what it’s doing, you know, I mean, we’re talking as broad as like the MMO genre or, you know, management or 4X games. But I, it’s not I don’t like them. I just haven’t got the brain for them all the time. I haven’t got the time for MMOs, but I haven’t got the brain for 4X games. Like I’ve tried playing SIV and I’m just so shit at it. I just don’t have an ounce of strategy in me, as everyone will know from the drafts. So I guess, you know, they’re big examples, but they count as things where I’m like, I know these things are genius. You know, I can listen to these developers do interviews, even though I don’t like their games and appreciate what they’re saying. And, you know, there’s so much amazing writing about them, but can’t say I like trying to play them because they make me feel dumb. Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of putting that. So respect, but don’t like, and that would apply to, yeah, I agree, 4X games. I remember reading Rich McCormick on PC Gamer back in the day. We’re like a diary feature on Crusader Kings 2 with a Game of Thrones mod installed. And that was a great medium to enjoy Crusader Kings without having to like feel daunted by the just the act of looking at the map in that game. Yeah. And just be like, it’s kind of like you can boil it down to, oh, my nephew just got fucking killed and now I’m having war with France or whatever. And like that’s what I need in terms of like boiling down that genre for me. I will one day give that genre a proper try. It’s not happened yet. I think Stellaris will be the one for me, but yeah, that’s a good example. MMOs as well, yeah. Like it is fun to read about all the historical, historically interesting things that happened in WoW, like in the early days of WoW, for example. That is genuinely interesting to read about, but I have no intention of experiencing WoW myself. So yeah. So what about games that you like but don’t respect, Matthew? Do you come up with an example for this? It’s quite hard, because if I like them, it’s because there’s something I respect about them often. I’ve got a soft spot for very bad five out of 10 point and click adventures. Like, when I was growing up, I loved the genre so much that I will happily play them and sort of brute force my way through terrible item combinations. You know, we’re talking about the likes of Secret of Files, Tunguska, some of the older Sherlock Holmes. I mean, I was actually thinking, do the new Sherlock Holmes count as this? In that I don’t particularly respect a lot of them. I think the brain deduction sort of connecting the synapsis system is actually is clever and I do respect that. But before Frogwares did that with Crimes and Punishments, like they made about 10 Sherlock Holmes games. I played some very early ones. Sherlock Holmes in the case of the either Silver Mirror or Silver Earring, I can’t quite remember, but like terrible. But I was such a sold up fan of point and click games that I would force my way through these terrible things. So I don’t respect those, but I kind of like them. Yeah, I like that. That’s a good, very specific example. I was also going to say Sonic Lost World. That’s a really good one. I mean, that is like, I mean, for all the time I dunk on Sonic, I gave Sonic Lost World, like, I think I gave it low eighties and all that. I went properly mad in that review. That is like a legitimately bad platformer. That’s probably a worse platformer than like your Crash or your Spyro’s. Or it’s genuinely bad, but I gave it a pass just because it was a bit like Mario Galaxy. Like, I liked Mario Galaxy so much that you only had to be a bit like it, that I would overlook the game kind of being abysmal. Yeah, but you were on a Wii U mag in 2013. What are you meant to do? Not like Sonic. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, you had to stomp for what you had, you know? I feel like that’s the first, that’s the moment I lost a bit of Joe Scrabble’s respect for the first time. I think up until then, we’d had a pretty good working relationship. I think that was one where he was like, uh, oh dear. We should do a complete history of how you lost Joe Scrabble’s respect. And then document times you’ve either gained or lost his respect. Oh, it’s a long and winding road. Oh, that’s really funny. Yeah, Sonic lost, well, I wish I had an example that good. The best way I could come up with is like horny games. So Dead or Alive 3, for example, right? Like those two original Xbox, sorry, Xbox and 360 Dead or Alive games 3 and 4. Those are really enjoyable games, but I cannot say I respect them. You can’t, I cannot say I respect a game that has like jiggling breast physics in it. I just can’t, but I can fundamentally enjoy the, the jiggling, the dynamics of the combat. It’s just like, it’s like, you know, like any of those 3D sort of them beat them up from that time. They’re just, it’s just very, very enjoyable kind of pick up and play style game that, you know, also just have really sharp graphical fidelity, I guess. You know, but if you take like another, you know, sort of like Team Ninja game from that era, like Ninja Gaiden, that is a game I respect and like. So, you know, it’s nothing, it’s not snobbery at the idea of the developer or anything like that. It’s just that Dead or Alive cannot be respected. It’s as fundamental as that, but it can be, it can be enjoyed on some level. I did struggle with this one. I did struggle with this one otherwise, Matthew. Gosh, maybe like, maybe along the Sonic lines, maybe Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, because that loses all respect, I think, by having obscure characters from the Sonic animated series appear as characters, and you’re meant to know who the fuck they are. And like, Jay Bayliss put it out to me, like there’s loads of like rando characters and that, that are just from obscure forgotten bits of Sonic media. So yeah, can I say I like it for sure, but can I say respect it? Probably not, so. On a side note, I like Jay Bayliss, but I don’t respect him, that he knows that about the Sonic film. Oh, the things he knows, it’s good. Yeah, he’ll appall you for sure. Okay, cool. So next question, Matthew, have you guys considered expanding into video content? And I don’t think that means like gaining weight and therefore spilling into another medium just for weight gain. Thoughts, Matthew? Not really. Like, yeah, we’re doing the podcast thing and it works as a podcast. So I think we have talked about, do we upload this as a video to YouTube? And it’s, I don’t know why we don’t. Too much work now, isn’t it? It’s too much work. You’ve got like 103 of them, you know, it’s too many. Yeah, no, like, I sort of, we talked a little bit about this on the Discord this week for those on there. You can get some bonus Samuel and Matthew content on our Discord. It’s often frustrating. Just me basically taking shots of the listeners and you occasionally responding to something about Japanese crime fiction and that’s basically it. Yeah, but like, I don’t know, to be honest, the bleak answer is like video production and making videos about video games has sort of soured a little bit for me after leaving RPS. Like I really liked making those videos. I thought I was good at it. And then, you know, when I was made redundant, I was a little bit like, Ah, fuck all YouTubers and fuck all videos about video games forever. Which I still have a little bit of no offence to our lovely friends who make videos and do it very well. But I’m just a little bit too bitter to re-enter that pool just yet. Yeah, I think I think we just thrive in this medium because it’s just, you know, we don’t have to feel self conscious about being on camera or anything like that. Like just having to set your room up to be like a gamer room. You know, they’re streaming. Like if you saw the room, I mean, it’s so depressing. You wouldn’t want to watch a video of it. Yeah, it’s sort of like mine looks like someone being interviewed from home because they’re under house arrest. Like when you look at my sort of background, just like piles of stuff. Like when you sort of see like Jordan Peterson’s house and it’s full of shit everywhere. You’re like, this guy is like not doing OK. It’s kind of like kind of like that, but less cancelled. Big Jordan Peterson energy to my room. Just to the room, just to the room. Oh, yeah, just the room. I’ll just turn around to see if there’s anything I could describe to give the impression of like how cursed my room is. There’s Sainsbury’s carrier bag with two gamer keyboards in it. Oh, that’s amazing. There’s a huge pile of Northern Exposure DVDs that I’m trying to throw out or plan to take to a charity shop and haven’t. And a load of dusty books on card magic that I bought at the beginning of the year because I thought I was going to learn magic this year. That’s the best detail. I thought I was going to learn magic this year. That’s an amazing thing for an adult in his mid-30s to say. I really thought this was going to be the year. I watched a load of magic videos at Christmas and then bought a load of books on a whim. This was going to be the year. Ah, kill me that. Just like, ah. I mean. But no. Were any of them written by Paul Daniels, Matthew, or were they all, like, proper? No, some of them are quite famous. Yeah. Like the cart magicians. I did lots of research before buying these books. Oh dear. I’m sorry, I should not mock you trying to get into something new. That’s like a legitimately, like, good thing to be doing, but… Yeah, so like the fact that I, like, I just didn’t, you know, I bought them and now they’re there just looking sad. That’s why I don’t want people to see this room. There’s just too much weird stuff about me in this room. Yeah, I’m a bit concerned of how much of a Patriots painting of you and your house actually, like, Northern Exposure is very on brand, and then, like, card magic books are like environmental storytelling, and like, you know, in an open world game, we just scan it and it’s like, oh, yeah, remnants from when the resident tried to learn card magic. Oh, okay. What’s my answer to this? I’m too fat to be on camera still. Basically, got to lose about two waist sizes to be presentable on camera. It might happen early next year, but not going to happen right now. That’s what I said about the card magic. I do put, yeah, I do, I think I do use, like, being too fat as an excuse too many times. I’m just a bit too chunky. I’ve got a lot of that, too, as well. Yeah, so there is the question of whether we both even fit on one camera. That’s, like, up for debate. Also, I think that I would just feel a bit too self-conscious about my sort of, like, how I was presenting myself, how I looked and how I was gesturing, and I don’t really care about that on audio, so I can be a bit more sincere, I think. Yeah, and it’s like, it is just a lot more work. This is like you record two audio tracks, you smush them together, you edit it, it’s up. And that just feels, that feels, like, efficient, whereas I just, I don’t know what the value would be necessarily, and I feel like fewer people would even find us out there than find our podcast, where there aren’t that many UK games podcasts, so we can theoretically stand out a little bit, whereas if we’re just two more white guys streaming Jack and Daxter onto, like, on the internet, will anyone but our 200 most loyal listeners find us? Probably not, is the brutal answer. So, yeah, I don’t know, I think the only scenario that would happen is if we miraculously became, like, a 10k a month patron and I was like, oh, okay, I’ll, like, just become a full-time video person. That’s never gonna happen, so, yeah. Long answer there for Scott V, but hopefully useful. Do you want to read out the next one, Matthew? Yes. Out of all the console drafts you’ve done, which mini would you actually take home with you? So, I thought about this, and I think that- That’s from Serano, by the way. Yeah. So, I think that I would take probably my Xbox One with me. The original Xbox One. So, just to kind of recap, you’ve got a Shenmue 2, Panzer Dragoon Auto, a Dead or Alive 3, Psychonauts, Matrix Path of Neo, Halo Combat Evolved, Split the Cell Chaos Theory, Halo 2, Burnout 3, Steel Battalion with the MET controller, of course, Ninja Gaiden Black, Jet Set Radio Future, Riddick, Morrowind, Fable, Kotor, Kotor 2, Breakdown, Outrun 2 and Crimson Skies. Now, since then, I’ve played Breakdown and it’s shit, but the rest of it, pretty solid. So, that I take home, that’s a really good selection. You’ve got a few things in there that are legitimately hard to play now in modern formats like Jet Set Radio Future and The Matrix Path in the O. So, I think that for me would be the one, Matthew. How about you? Yeah, probably the Vita. I unhelpfully didn’t write down all the games like you cleverly did, but the reason I’d like the Vita is like the Vita I built is probably like the closest to my actual Vita. Like, it’s got modern feeling games on it. You know, I don’t feel like I’d be winding the clock back too much to be able to like enjoy a lot of those games. Just the form factor of it. I’m just in a portable place right now. So, yeah, the little Vita would fit well into my life. Yeah, I think that’s good, Matthew. I was surprised you wouldn’t take your GameCube one, you had some real special games on there. Yeah. Wouldn’t take the old PS2 with Red Faction on it. Not fancying that? Definitely not. Terrible. So, we had like one follow-up question to that as well, Matthew, which is related. Which drafts have you done where you actually prefer the other person’s mini console if this has happened? Now, for this, I would probably take your PS Vita, because you had Persona 4 on it, and Final Fantasy X, and then like the nonary games, and then you also had Danganronpa, I think, on there as well. So, that was a pretty good line-up. The only one I didn’t care about was Persona dancing all night, which I was like, ah, I could take all of that. I think you’d get into it in time. Maybe. Like, my Vita is basically just designed to turn you into a mega weeb, so by the end of it, it wouldn’t be the first thing you tried, but it’d probably be the thing you played the most after playing the others. Yeah, that or I would take Matthew’s Gamecube home, probably. I thought, like, you know, that there was enough good stuff on there with sort of like, well, you know, F-Zero, GX and things like that, like original Wind Waker, Eternal Darkness, Metro Prime. That was, I will admit that that draft was impossible for me to win, but that was a good selection by Matthew. What about you, you got any suggestions on your side? Your Wii was really good. Had Mario Galaxy One, Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime Trilogy, big mistake on my part. Ghost Squad, absolutely classic. Whenever I look back on our two competing Wiis, all I can see is Red Steel 2 on mine and I really regret that choice. It’s a real bummer having that on there. I just really doubled down on Wii Motion Plus as well, which was weird. Like yours is probably a more traditional classic Wii line up, but it is really strong. I would actually pick your Xbox, if only because I’m a little bit like, I loved my GameCube at the time. I played it, I played so much GameCube. It was that age where you have the time just to play games all the time and I did. But I’m also kind of like, it’s not that I think it’s overrated, but I’m still, I’m a little tired of it. I’m a little tired of the endless GameCube obsession. So I’m ready for, I’m ready for a bit of Riddick, Steel Battalion, Kotor, Crimson Skies. I’ve had my fill of GameCube and I’ve got those happy memories locked away. I don’t need to keep returning to it or returning to it once even. Yeah, I think the thing with the GameCube is, there’s like, you know, those 20 games you picked basically are the 20 games and then there’s no more. Well, that’s it, yeah. And I think it’s just like, if you really dip into that library, you see that like the, it doesn’t have as many sort of like multi-format games as the other consoles did at the time. And it’s just like, it’s quite a shallow lineup when it really comes down to it. It’s not that many years worth of games. So I agree with you that maybe there’s a tiny bit of an overblown aspect to the GameCube stouture these days. People are a little bit overboard for it. So yeah, but yeah, you know, the Xbox, that’s like an actually fucking amazing lineup, I think they built over the years. It’s a little bit, I think that maybe the way the GameCube is slightly overrated, the Xbox is slightly underrated, which is why I like to go out for it. I don’t know, that’s probably fair. Yeah, okay, interesting. How gracious of me. You wouldn’t take my PS2 home, Matthew? It’s too bitter about that. Got Kingdom Hearts on it, so we won’t be interested. Fuck me. Times Spirits 2 as well, he’s not having any of it. Yeah, but I thought your PS3 too was excellent. So yeah. Thank you. Okay, cool. So, hello, you both love movies and other stuff. What are you both pining to see adapted for the big screen? That’s from Personal the Deer. We assumed this meant anything, didn’t we, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, one would assume video games. And if it had to be video games, which there’s not many video games I’m particularly desperate to see TV or films of like, they exist as video games and our best as video games. I think both Ace Attorney and Professor Layton could be turned, not together, but individually, it could be turned into good films, TV shows. I don’t think the film, the Ace Attorney film is very good. I think it’s quite bad. And the Professor Layton anime film was also quite bad. I think you could do them live action weirdly and it could work. I think you could, I’d love to see someone try and do Phoenix Wright, like Speed Racer style, like that real hyper kind of live action anime thing. I think that could be rad as hell. Oh yeah, that would be good, yeah. The closest thing I’ve come, it’s not even fan fiction. Like I remember, I used to think endlessly about writing a Phoenix Wright film to the point where I’ve even written bits of it down. I remember talking a long time ago, this is back in the NGamer days, not as an NGamer comedy bit or anything. Like I genuinely thought I had a really good plot for a Phoenix Wright film figured out. So if I was given millions and billions to make a rad live video game adaptation, it would be Ace Attorney. Did you pitch me some kind of Hitman TV show idea, Matthew? Where it’s like, it’s a different target every episode. Did something like that you maybe pitch? We maybe talked about that at some point. Joke. I did, I can’t remember, it might have been on the RPS podcast which it came up, but I wondered about like, I thought if you were to make a Hitman show, making it about the targets and like Hitman, like Hitman, Age of 47 is a kind of quite ambiguous presence throughout the show and it’s more like, it’d be more like Succession, probably. But a Succession where people are getting assassinated every once in a while, and Age of 47 is more of a, like an engine for drama rather than, I don’t want it to be about him. I do not give a fuck about his backstory or his character. I just want there to be a bald man who occasionally turns up and you can have lots of Easter eggs and like, he can be in the background. You can almost see, like, see him go about his work in the episode, but it’s not about him at all. Almost like a horror style figure where the audience spots him out of focus. They’re like, oh fuck, there he is. That could be kind of cool. Also, you could do it so you don’t actually know who the target is every episode, so that could be a surprise. And then, yeah, it could just be one episode about a waiter who gets fucking punched on the back of the head, like, and wakes up and is like, what the fuck has gone on? And his boss is dead suddenly and he has to put the rest of his life back together. That could be quite fun. The thing I used to fantasize about is I always wanted to see a really high-end Final Fantasy anime, like a really, really good one, like straight adaptations of the game stories, like, you know, eight and seven. It’s like, you know, 13, 26 part series or whatever they do in terms of format. But I always wanted to see that when I was a kid. I just thought that with really high-grade animation would really hit the spot. Some of those stories might work quite well in that kind of form. That aside, in the games front, I don’t really get, I don’t really hanker to see this stuff make the leap. Like, the Last of Us TV show they’re making looks very impressive, but I’m not really bothered about watching it. I would rather have seen the same people who are making that show make an original HBO show or make another Chernobyl or whatever. Like, that’s fundamentally more interesting to me, you know? Yeah. And I feel like we’re gonna go down the bad gamer route of that girl who plays Ellie getting loads of shit from people because she’s not exactly the same as the games one. That’s my big prediction for next year, is that we’re gonna see shitty gamer boys do that. I feel like that’s inevitable. And I feel like I’ve built up a radar for this stuff because I’ve seen it happen so many times now with women in different pop culture things. So I do kind of wonder about that. But yeah, otherwise, I don’t know. I’m just sort of, I don’t really, there’s like a Bioshock film being made. I don’t think that should exist. Like Bioshock is so strictly a games-related thing. I was thinking if you did a film, it should be about something completely different and not the main character of the original Bioshock game who is, in his nature, is like a, you know, very tied to the idea of video games. That makes no sense to me. You could almost do a like Watchmen TV show style add-on to Bioshock, which like takes the themes, but maps the themes to like the television format better, you know, finds the equivalent ideas, but for like TV shows rather than video games. Like it could work, you know, like occasionally you get something, you’re like, oh, that’s going to be so bad. But then like the Watchmen show was just so elegantly done and its relationship to the original comic was so smart, I thought, you know, like almost freeing yourself, but having like enough threads that it did exist in the same universe. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, speaking of like Alan Moore adaptations, like not on the game side, but I would really love to see good TV adaptations of From Hell and V for Vendetta. I think they would work really, really well. Just like the texture of how you could bring those worlds to life in TV, like different, you know, sort of period portrayals of Great Britain. Too chewy for films. Yeah, definitely. From Hell is like a really, I mean, you know, it’s got a famously bad film with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, but like the actual material is just so, so grim and like so real. And like, yeah, I just think that the idea of a kind of borderline mythical Jack the Ripper story done with, you know, with like a mega budget could be really cool. A whole episode dedicated to that guy’s coach ride around the city. Oh, that would be a great episode, though, wouldn’t it? That’s one of the best issues of a comic book I’ve ever read. So yeah, you know, that’s like up there with the Dr. Manhattan on Mars. It’s like a one issue, amazing bit of storytelling. So let’s think about Alan Moore. He’s a fucking grump, but he’s one of the most talented comic writers who ever lived. So what can you do? Any more game suggestions there, Matthew? Or should we move on? No, if I could wheel non-gaming stuff into life. I think Wes Anderson could make an amazing Poirot film. I’d love to see his whole kind of diorama, cross-section, slightly cartoonish characters. I think his visual style would match to like a country man and murder mystery really, really well. Ralph Ralph Reynes as Poirot. Secret Ralph Innocent podcast this. There’s a book by Glenn David Gold, Carter Beats The Devil, which I always thought would make an amazing mini-series and it’s often been rumored that it was going to be turned into a show by HBO about the kind of golden age of stage magic, hilariously. And, well, the invention of something which folds into a story and it’s sort of a bit magic-y, a bit supernaturally, you know, sort of prestige era, I guess. And I’d love to see that. I would have also said The Three Body Problem, but that is being turned into a TV show, which I’m incredibly excited about because that’s got some galaxy brained violence in it, which I think people will, if they put it on the screen, people will be absolutely astonished by. Are they making it though? That was announced two years ago and they’ve done it. Yeah, they showed footage of it at Netflix’s To Dumb this year. Oh, okay, fair enough. Yeah, it’s like it completely passed everyone by that they’ve shown clips of it, like, and it got picked up by no one. So yeah. Yeah. Okay, strange. Yeah. Yeah, good suggestions there, Matthew. Yeah, that’s, I wish I had more gaming examples, but I’m just not that bothered to be honest. I think like this… Go on, sorry. Yeah, I mean, they’re just better as games. I just can’t think of anything where I’m gonna be like, oh, man, I wish this was like more on the less interactive. Yeah, all this stuff like would have appealed to me more, you know, 15, 20 years ago than it would now. It’s like how I just I’m not, you know, like superhero adaptations were incredibly exciting to me, you know, when I was like watching Smallville and like the Flash would turn up and I was like, oh, wow, I can’t believe they’re doing like comic book stuff on the small screen. And now I’m absolutely awash in it. I’ve not even fucking seen She-Hulk or Ms. Marvel, do you know what I mean? It’s just I take it all for granted completely now. So yeah, I don’t think games would make a difference to me. Okay, so next up then Matthew, do you want to read the next question? Are there any games you were sort of ambivalent about when you played them, but now look back on them incredibly fondly? I started playing Divinity 2 in lockdown and thought the writing was diabolical and the combat really fiddly, but now I think, oh, what a great game. I’d love to go back. That’s from Gerard Manley slash Slack Forest, which feels like an in-joke I’ve already forgotten. Yeah, remember how I said my dream games squad entry would be from a guy called Gerard Manley? Oh, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah, so Zach changed his name. Very good. A good deep, deep cut there for the Back Page: lore heads. I thought about Enslaved as a good example of this, the game by Ninja Theory. Yeah, sort of like Andy Serkis starring game set in a post-apocalypse and has two characters. One you control and then another you sort of escort, basically. I think the story, the end of the story is so confusing. I think Alex Garland was involved in its creation, which kind of does add up after you’ve seen Annihilation actually and Devs where it’s like he will sometimes go galaxy brain in the last act and it might work or it might not. That’s like a thing that happens with that writer or director I find. So yeah, I think that that is a game, at the time I was like, huh, at the ending. But now I kind of look back on it and think, well, that was cool. That was a new IP, quote unquote, that was built in this post-apocalyptic world that actually feels like it’s got some tendrils that extend to The Last of Us a little bit in terms of like the style of game and the type of post-apocalypse and how the world looked. So that’s one. Matthew, how about you? I sort of struck up with this because again, I sort of like, you know, I like what I liked. I didn’t actually write anything down. What a rubbish answer. Yeah, I don’t know. This was hard to think about. Like that’s a very specific thing you’re talking about there. Like generally, if I make my mind up in the moment, it stays that way, you know, it doesn’t waver massively. Yeah, I guess, I guess like some of them would be like in that GameScore’s We Got Wrong episode. Right, right. Where like maybe something like Nier, the original Nier, which I played and thought, eh, you know, this is just a bit all over the place and you know, it doesn’t, you know, none of it makes particular sense and I found it quite incoherent and naturally, you know, whether it’s just post-Automata that everyone, you know, everyone’s now, you know, into Yagatara’s sort of thing or it just took time to grow on me. But like when I played the remake of it, I just much, much preferred it. I just thought, oh yeah, I could, you know, whatever I liked in Automata, I can see a lot more of that here as well and I don’t know why I bounced off it so much originally. Yeah, you could also take something like 50 Cent Blood In The Sand for this because that is a game where I played about an hour of it and thought, well, this is the meme game. You know what I mean? Like I found 50 Cent very insufferable anyway. This was, I think like post when I doubt you remember this, Matthew, but there was a time when Kanye West had an album out and 50 Cent had an album out and they were both going up against each other. You know, it’s kind of like alternative rap versus gangsta rap basically and gangsta rap lost and then like 50 Cent lost basically and it was like considered, I was reading about it in retrospect. It was considered quite a significant moment in like recent music history basically. Obviously, Kanye West has gone off firmly these days, but at the time he was not embarrassing and controversial. So, I think in that war, Randy Newman was Switzerland. That is the exact punchline I was fishing for, I’ll be honest. But basically, by 2009, I was like, I don’t really care about 50 Cent and anything like this. But now, I look back on playing that as a kind of like, what an amazing oddity this was, that someone made a high quality shooter starring this guy and that there’s this kind of latent affection for it. I guess its meme game status has not changed, but I suppose I feel differently about the fact that the games industry then was able to give people a game like that. That it made sense to make that at any point in history is, I don’t know, that seems more endearing to me now. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, that’s it. I actually had one other thing just popped into my head, which is that I think I’m slightly fond of Hitman Absolution now, because the stakes aren’t as high, because we have all this amazing Hitman that followed. It kind of took the pressure off. For a few years, Hitman Absolution was like not the Hitman game I wanted. And now that I have basically more Hitman than I know what to do with, I can enjoy Hitman Absolution a bit more. We definitely mentioned this on a recent episode. I can’t remember what we were talking about, but the idea that games feel a bit more high stakes at release and maybe after a couple of years you’re like, I can just enjoy it for what it is. And it doesn’t have to be amazing anymore. It can just comfortably be itself. Yeah, for sure. I was trying to think, do I feel that way about Assassin’s Creed 3? I kind of like always like the idea of the setting of Assassin’s Creed 3. And so when I look at screenshots of it, I’m like, oh, that for a 10 year old game, that still looks really nice. And I’m really engaged by the idea of that, you know, sort of like the Civil War as a kind of backdrop. Not the Civil War, sorry, it was like the Revolutionary War, was it? Yeah. Get my American history mixed up. That was where we were the bad guys. One of the many times. I don’t know, that wouldn’t extend to a defense of the game mechanically, which I did find it too simple and I did think that Assassin’s Creed needed a bit of a revamp at the time, which it would later get with Origins, of course. So yeah, but enough rambling about that, Matthew. Next question. So I’ll read this one out, Matthew. So you can invite three PlayStation characters around for dinner. Who are they and why? That’s from Betamax Bandit. Should I do my three first? Yeah, I hope one of them is like a fucking Peugeot from Gran Turismo or something, but… Not quite. I thought these are things which have been on PlayStation rather than necessarily exclusives, but whatever. I thought Clancy Brown from Detroit Being Human. Just because I want to meet Clancy Brown, he looks and sounds like him. I know that he’d have to be a sad detective, but it’s close enough, so that would do. I could have a pitch with him, and if I showed that to people, they’d be like, oh, cool, you met Clancy Brown. I wouldn’t say, oh, it was the detective from Detroit. What would you say about your DVDs, your Northern Exposure DVDs and your card magic books? Matthew, would you have to explain those? Yeah, I’d probably hide those. Well, that would be a David Cage style minigame where in one panel on the screen you see Clancy Brown walking down our road to our front door to come for dinner, and in the other panel it’s me desperately trying to hide all my magic books. Oh, that’s so good. Oh dear, that keeps giving, that one. Yeah, that’s good. So we’ve got that. Revolver Ocelot from Metal Gear Solid 1. He’d betray you, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he just like fucking kill you and walk off? How can you betray someone at dinner? I suppose so, but he’s not a good guy. He’s good, historically he’s not a good guy. I know, he’s not a good guy, but I imagine he’s got some stories. And also, like, he could probably do some, like, cool gun tricks. Like, you know, shoot a pea out of the air or something. Yeah, OK. So that’d be cool. And last of all, that big yellow sort of ball thing from Loco Roco. What if it turns into, like, 18 smaller ones? You got to pick them up. Oh, no, well, I wouldn’t be up for that. As long as he, like, agrees, or she or they, I don’t know, whatever the deal is with Loco Roco ball. But as long as it, like, agrees not to break down into multiple Loco Roco’s. It’s only getting one chair, basically, is what I’m saying. And how it chooses to use that chair is up to it. I would rather it maintained its single form. I think your cats would, like, fuck it up and it would turn into the little ones again and then they, like, slowly disappear over the course of dinner and there’d be none left. I think that’s a very serious risk of that happening with all of us. Well, listen. I’m closing the cats upstairs during this meal because they don’t like strangers in the house and Clancy Brown and Ravel Rosalot are both quite big, sinister-looking men. So, like, the cats are already away. Can you eat the Loco Roco? I think, like, I think you just have to feed them fruit. I wouldn’t like advising them. I didn’t know if it was, like, a nice fruit jelly, like, if it was a guest slash potential dessert. Invite a guest you can later eat. Yeah, very good. Yeah, like the, you know, the walrus and the thingies in Alice In Wonderland. Yeah, yeah. Okay, that’s good. I like that. You’ve done a good job there. You really thought about that one. You got, like, three solid punch lines in a row there. So I thought about this reasonably sincerely. I thought, I need, like, one good conversation, sort of like, start a guest. And I think that Sully from Uncharted would be spot on for this. Oh, that’s good. I’d be like, you know what, mate, tell me some stories and we’ll just, like, I’ll serve you some bisque or whatever and, like, it’ll be, that’ll be, like, a solid start. Do you want him really smoking that fucking disgusting cigar in your flat? Well, I’d insist he goes outside or at least uses the little, like, non-balcony of a gun. He’d think you’re so uncool if you told him to go outside. He’s like, look, look, I just want to give you lung cancer, you know, that’s, that’s all I, that’s all I ask. Just get into your furniture, cigars stink, man. Yeah. So similar lines to Clancy Brown. I would invite Jet Li from Jet Li’s Rise To Honor on PS2 Round. I’d be good. I’ve always wanted to meet, meet Jet Li. I think, you know, I sort of, like, sort of see what the vibe is, you know, how that goes. What console era is that? PS2. So would he be a poorly rendered? So it’s PS2 era graphics, Jet Li. Dancing around is, like, pretty photorealistic, even on PS4. Yeah, it does look like exactly like him. I could have also invited around PS2 Jack Bauer from 24 The Game. That’s a PlayStation exclusive. So poorly, poorly rendered, Kiefer Sutherland or James Badgedale could have come round for dinner, Matthew. You know, I love James Badgedale. Last one, I’d invite around Dr. Octopus from Spider-Man on PS4. I think I’d just like to see what the deal is with him, what he’s going to get going on, kind of like sort of dissect him a bit, sort of like mentally. He sort of talks a bit about some of the bad shit going on. And then like Sully takes a pause like, whoa, you need that kind of person to like even it out. So it’s not just like, you know, yeah. So let’s see how that goes. A bit of like social rehabilitation for a madman, basically. If it went wrong, though, you’d end up having to boss fight him like at the end of Spider-Man on PlayStation 4, except he’s on top of Homebase. Yeah, but that’s why I bought Jet League, you know what I mean? Jet League can take care of that. PS2, Jet League can. Poorly rendered Jet League would have a good, good, good stab at it. He’s not getting up on the roof of Homebase. It’s tall. Yeah, that’s true. Whereas Sully would be like, oh, you’re your own kid. And then you kind of go off and you’d be like, oh, yeah, yeah, very good. Sully’s dialogue really does right itself. Yeah, it does. I could have nailed that, no problem. Basically, Amy Heddick sat right here. Yeah, so yeah, I suppose Doc Ock would be one. I was sort of racking my brains to like Spider-Man characters. But like, you wouldn’t just have Spider-Man. Which, OK, but it would have to be original Spider-Man. 2018 Spider-Man, not the Warped Tom Holland redo they did, which broke my heart, Matthew. Why must he got patched halfway through the dinner? What, by dessert? He’s like… When he goes into the toilet and he comes out with this new face. I’d be really disappointed. I’d be like, oh fuck, did you get ported to PS5 between fucking dinner and dessert? They all get upgraded. Sully would also get upgraded to his PS5 version, so he’d suddenly just come into slightly better resolution. Well, he starts as like the PS3 era and then kind of evolves. That’s good. But Jet Li remains the same. Yeah, because he never had it. OK, well that was a fucking long answer to that question, so that’s good. I didn’t want to just say like Daxter, because I just don’t think that would make for a good dinner party, do you know what I mean? I’m not letting that fucking rat in my house. The cats are definitely fucking… Oh yeah, and I’d welcome it. Do you want to read out the next one, Matthew? Hello large lads. This is a bit… That’s the first large reference we’ve had today. Hello large lads. This is a bit of a two for one, as I’m not sure if one part has been asked before. Is there a game series that you are really interested in but never really got into? It could tick all your personal boxes for genre or style but for some reason never stuck. Basically if you could banish an exclusive from each platform for three big platforms, what would it be and why? Two very different questions. Yeah, for sure. So the first one, I would say that there were just so many Japanese RPGs that ticked this box. I got so into Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger and a couple of others that there’s no reason I shouldn’t have gotten into Suikoden, for example, you know what I mean? Or Dragon Quest as well. Dragon Quest have always considered to be a bit too vanilla. Is that how it’s pronounced? Not Dragon Quest, Suikoden. Suikoden, I think it is, yeah. Oh, it always is. I’ve been saying Suikoden like some kind of sweetener. Have you got any Suikoden for my tea? I’m so glad I haven’t said that out loud on this. Podcast. Suikoden is what Matthew shouts when he does a card trick. That makes so much more sense. I’ve just never heard it said out loud. I think Suikoden is how it’s said. If I’m wrong about that, then let me know. That’s embarrassing. It’s like how when I was a kid, I got absolutely roasted for calling Fury Swipes and Pokemon Furry Swipes. I got absolutely fucking like murked by Mark Eden in my year for that. He was right. That was embarrassing. Murked by Mark Eden. I haven’t thought about that guy for years, but yeah. So yes, that kind of stands out. Matthew, like JRPG series, I’ve not really properly played the Stalker series and I know that would be my sort of thing because I’ve enjoyed like Metro and other immersive first person things. How about you? Not to be too similar to my 4X answer earlier for like things that I just don’t get. A lot of fighting games, again, I love hearing them talked about and I love reading Rich Stanton or Nathan Brown writing about Street Fighter. But I have just, I’ve just not got the patience to learn the few basics I think you really do need to learn to be able to enjoy those games properly. That’s why I like Smash Brothers. I think it’s a lot more pick up and play than those games. Like I remember Rich spending a whole evening trying to teach me Street Fighter 4. Basically, I think he wanted someone in the flat to play Street Fighter with him. And he, you know, I think some people out there would actually pay good money to have spend an evening with Rich and having him talk to them and teach them about Street Fighter. New Patreon stretch goal, Matthew, maybe. I was so ungracious that I just didn’t absorb any of it. And you know, I think I tried playing Street Fighter 4 genuinely for a bit and just couldn’t make immediate progress. So I was like, fuck this whole genre forever. So yeah, that’s that’s probably it for me. Yeah, that’s yeah, that is another genre as well. So like, yeah, I dip into when there’s a theme I like to a fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom, for example, that’s, you know, or Injustice, it’s like, oh, it’s got superheroes and Capcom characters in it. I’ll totally give that a go. Whereas I don’t care about fucking Ken memes or whatever. That’s just not interesting to me. When we had Nathan on, we asked him about like what it was about Street Fighter and he was just talking about the kind of sort of, you know, just the primal power of like two things fighting on a screen and the satisfaction of landing a hit and the simplicity of the health bar. And you’re like, that stuff all really does speak to me, but, you know, when these things become muscle memory, I think that’s when you unlock like the amazing potential of them. But I’m just too lazy to do muscle memory. That was the worst like random question I’ve unleashed on a guest, wasn’t it? It was explain why Street Fighter is good and then Nathan had to like come up on the spot with an answer. I think he resolved to come back at some time and give a fuller answer. So that was on me, that was. Yeah, that’s a good one. So what about banishing exclusives, Matthew? I found this really easy, OK? So I would banish Mario Party. Oh, that’s a great shout. I don’t know why I think of that. I would banish OG Forza because I don’t care about car simulation things for Xbox. I keep Forza Horizon though, of course. And I’d banish Gran Turismo. That was really easy. I’d get rid of all those. I don’t care about like hardcore racing games. That was quite an easy shout for me. How about you? Oh, Mario Party. I completely forgot about. So I was going to do this whole bit about like there’s no Nintendo game I want to banish. They’re all amazing. Actually, Mario Party. Mario Party is it. Like if I was taking the stance that like you have to pick between favorite children and banish something you like. Like the Nintendo series I have least affinity for is Star Fox. Like I wouldn’t be I wouldn’t be upset if Star Fox was gone of all this. But actually, that’s because I forgot about Mario Party, which is dire. Also Mario Strikers. Oh my god, I’ve forgotten loads of these. You know, this is what happens when I make my plans at lunchtime when I’m just cramming fucking gyoza into my gut. I can’t believe I went to Star Fox over Mario Party, Mario Strikers, actually. I still think that like when Mario Golf and Mario Tennis are good, when they were good on N64, they were really good. So I wouldn’t want to banish those. Strikers has always been dogshit. Sony, Infamous, Easy. I don’t think that counts because they’ve not made a new one for like eight years. I think you need a more contemporaneous one. I think so, yeah. Gran Turismo had one out this year. I was like, yeah, that’s a good one. You could just get rid of Ratchet and Clank. That’d be easy for you. Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s as simple as that. Done. That’s done. Little Big Planet. Poor Sackboy. Poor Sackboy. But, you know, let the let the Tearaway era begin. I really struggle with Xbox because they don’t really have many series at the moment. Like they’ve killed them all. You pick Pentaman before it even comes out. Contemporary. I wouldn’t be sad if they didn’t make more Outer Worlds, to be honest. Oh yeah. That’s quite a good one. I like that. Cool. Well, we might as well answer that in the end. I took it out against driving games for the most part, which dads enjoy. Can’t believe you’re not letting me have Infamous. There was one on PS4. Yeah, but in the early part of PS4, that’s Dormant. That’s a Dormant series, I think. Killzone. Oh yeah, again, pretty Dormant. This was like Bait to get you to slam all these PlayStation series. Yeah, I know. And I can’t say them because PlayStation have developed a bit of taste and they’ve killed off all their bad games, which is like all of them and now they’ve just got like God of War and Naughty Dog. Very good. Okay. Next question. Dream podcast collab with people you are not friends with slash stole formats from. That’s from Jamie. That’s a reference to the fact that many formats in this podcast have been lifted from the Big Picture, our favorite film podcast, Matthew. I wouldn’t want to do a podcast with them because I don’t know them and I think it would be really awkward and I don’t think I’m quite as funny as them. I think the appeal of that is very much like this podcast where the people know each other. So collaborating doesn’t sound appealing. What do you think? I think you’re funnier than the hosts of that show. No, not at all. Shaun Fantasy on that show has an incredible recall for everything film related that I wish I had that kind of recall. And I think they’re all a lot more erudite than I am for sure. Like, I’m heavily edited on this podcast. They sort of like, yeah, I don’t necessarily sort of like, no, I mean, I think we did talk about like, I don’t know, what would the sort of lifting the podcast format of The Rewatchables for like retro games would be, but that would be quite fun. Like, the replayables or whatever, yeah, working title, hard though, you have to put in a lot more legwork. Yeah, that’s it. Like, the way we do this podcast means we can dip in and out of things relatively easily. If it’s like you have to complete a different game every week, that’d be fucking stressful, unless it’s Gradius Advance and just have to do a side-scrolling shooter every two weeks. We only do two hours of shoot-laps. Yeah, that could be good. Echo Junior this week, that game is 37 minutes long. Yeah. So I don’t know, I don’t have a great question, answer to this. What about you? Collab with people I’m not friends with. A bit of a vague thing, but if I could magic a podcast series into being, I’d love to talk to people who are artists or famous for whatever they do, who also happen to be gamers, but they never talk about their gaming because why would they? It’s not their profession. So I remember listening to Sam Mendes talking about 1917, and he was talking about like video games, like him liking video games and what he took from camera specters and video games to do that one shot in a one shot film. And he was talking about Red Dead Redemption 2, and it struck me like, holy shit, Sam Mendes is really into Red Dead Redemption 2. I’d love to hear more about him talking about that because he’s an intelligent guy in a different art form. And so I’d love to do a podcast series with film people, I guess, to talk to them about who are like also massive gamers. So like Sam Mendes, John Carpenter, those are the two I’ve got so far. No, that’s a cool idea. I’d always enjoy the novelty of when someone who’s outside of the game space kind of weighs in on it. Even like that actor, Rahul Kohli, who’s in all those month planning shows, like he talks about games a lot on Twitter. And that’s just quite cool. Or like Charlie Brooker, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah, and it’s like the Henry Cavill thing with Warhammer 40K. You’re suddenly like, oh, actually, I have something hugely in common with this person who is like basically a different species to me. Not in that case, I’m not into Warhammer 40K, but like, oh, we have video games as a common ground. Like we could definitely have a good chat about that and probably have a good time. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that’s a good one. I like that. In terms of like other people I’m sort of like not friends with, I suppose like, I would like to interview more game devs who I don’t know, you know, people who are sort of, I keep thinking, oh, what if I asked Harvey Smith to come on the podcast? Would he do it? You know what I mean? Because I know he’s done a few podcasts and stuff and he seems to be up for chatting and things. I’m like, that would probably be quite a good episode, but you know, would it be awkward because I don’t know him? Would it have the same vibe of the Back Page:? I always think we have to explain this podcast to people. That’s when it falls down. You know what I mean? It’s like, what is your podcast? I’m like, well, The same episode 100. It’s that. Yeah, very accessible entry point there that we made. So yeah, I don’t have a good answer to that, I’m afraid. Any US gaming podcasters? Because I feel like we share more common ground with them, and it was really nice talking to Ben about MinMax. But I’m just having no connections with any US podcasters. I don’t know if it would be overwhelming. I sort of know Lucy James. Lucy James should be pretty cool to have on. I don’t know, these are people who are kind of like, I guess I don’t know super well, but I kind of know. They’d be quite good. Next up. Oh god. If you could make your own tub of Celebrations slash Heroes slash Quality Street slash Roses, what would you pick? Think of it as a Confectionary Draft, if you will. That’s from Betamax Bandit also. So just like a box of chocolates compiled from other boxes of chocolates. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, so my box would be, it would be deceased chocolate bars bought back in miniature form. So it would be a box of favorites from yesteryears. And it would have, here’s a list, Fuse bars, Cadbury’s Astros, Vice Versus, whoever made those. A terrible name for chocolate, that. Vice Versus, they were milk chocolate on the outside and white chocolate on the inside, or white chocolate on the outside and milk chocolate on the inside. They were literally vice versa. Vice Versus is a terrible bit of branding, I’ll be honest with you. Well, listen, they lasted for like 10 years. I was chomping on those things. The old form of Time Out, because the new Time Out wafer fucking sucks. It’s just all wafer and it’s like no fun at all. Cadbury’s Spearer, which is just like a, it’s like a very hard twirl. That’s again, bad branding, I think. Cadbury’s Spearer. Spearer? Spearer sounds like a fucking Dario Argento film. Not something you want to be sticking in your mouth for a treat. No. What about Cadbury Dream, Matthew? They’ve got, these days, they’ve just got white dairy milk, but you know. Yeah, Cadbury Snaps, which were like the Cadbury’s Pringles. They were good. Oh yeah, that’s the second time that’s come up on the podcast. Finally, and this one is very niche, when I was about 14, a man came to our house and we did a Twix taste test for Twix. Like they did a block, they were doing like focus testing on a new Twix range. And we tested a Christmas Twix, which was like cinnamony. And it was really delicious. And I’d love to have that in the box. So that Christmas Twix that never got released. That’s what I want. This has the same energy as your line up of vacuum cleaner story. No, this was true, because the man came and he made me a mystery Twix. He made me a mystery Twix. And then I filled in a questionnaire about it. Like, how did this Twix make you feel? And like, did you love this Twix? Would you want to eat another one of these Twixes? Oh dear. And then I assume that other people said no. Yeah, it was like 10, 10, 10. I’m like, get this Twix on that shop shelf. Yeah, that’s good. Just surrounded by Spearer rappers. It’s like, yeah, this guy knows his stuff. Yeah, I don’t know. I sort of struggle to have much imagination with this. I’m mostly content with roses as they are. I would just swap out the two toffee ones. Like, I don’t need like two lots. You don’t need two lots of toffee. Now, when you’ve got the stick and the little coin, you don’t need both of those. But when you get rid of the fruit ones? No, I quite like the strawberry one. Oh, fucking grim. Yeah, I like the strawberry one. I don’t like the orange one as much, but the strawberry one’s good. I would just swap the toffee coin and the toffee stick for a fucking avalanche of the purple ones at the caramel and the nut in them. That would be like… Well, that’s quality street. Oh, is it? Fuck, I’m getting them mixed up then. Yeah, toffee penny and toffee stick. That’s quality street. I see, okay. Yeah, in which case, I’m just getting them completely mixed up in my opinion. I thought you were ragging on the rose caramel keg. Oh, no, of course not. That’s tip top. Anything that’s got just basically some kind of caramelized fluid in it is definitely going in any box. Actually, I don’t know why I’m defending toffees because my teeth now shatter basically when I eat anything that isn’t soup. A toffee penny would literally pull my teeth out of my gums. It would be horrible, like a horror film. No, I’m still in the same place. I’m like, if I bite down on this, will I just pull it out and there’ll be like eight teeth on there? That’s where my dental health is currently at. No, I’m sorry, I don’t have much imagination for this. I would like, with celebrations, that needs some workshopping, I think. I like the bounty, I would keep the bounty. I think that’s why this question came up, because they’re taking the bounty out of the box and people are like, you know, it’s a classic bit of distraction news in the UK where it’s like, don’t look at the government because they took the bounty out of this chocolate box. So that’s exactly how the fucking country works now. You’re waiting for the government to plant it. Yes, I do, Matthew. This goes all the way to the top. You think this is a big like Putin move to stop us trying to protect Ukraine? Yeah, I think the sort of like a bounty pipeline running across Europe has been shut off. I think it’s secretly about that, Matthew. Yeah, I don’t know. I would like, but I would keep the old truffle that comes in the celebrations. That’s really good. Galaxy truffle classic. Yeah, that’s lovely. I keep all the galaxy based things in there. That’s pretty good. Yeah, the galaxy caramel, very strong. Malteser, reasonably solid. No? So the problem with the Malteser is, like, so the miniature versions of popular things, the Malteser is the only one which is bigger than its base version. Like the core, like a Malteser is kind of perfection in itself. I think there’s the balance of chocolate to Malteser core in a Malteser, in the miniature one is off, completely off. I think it has none of the charm. Why don’t you just wrap a Malteser up and put it in the box? Well that wouldn’t be the same shape as the others, it would be a little bit too, like, out of shape. Yeah, it’s, or just, or like, you get the box, you put all the other celebrations in there and then you just empty a bag of Maltesers to rattle around in the box. So you know, that’s why, I just want there to be like, that’s how Maltesers should be truly represented. None of this like, oh it’s like, it’s not Malteser, it’s too much chocolate. Well, I think that’s fucking deranged to empty a bag of Maltesers into a box of celebrations, frankly. Why is that deranged? Why must be, if you filled it up like packing foam, like to the brim with Maltesers. Well, that’s like, I’ve made my own version of Revols and it’s like, it’s just like a box of celebrations in an ocean of Maltesers. If I go round your house and you like got that out, it’s like a post-it at, just like what the fuck is this? It’s like, I have to touch so many Maltesers to get to any chocolate in here. No one else is going to want to eat those Maltesers because hands have been rooting through them. The communal chocolate experience has been ruined because, yeah, that’s, oh dear, I knew this would be the question that would derail this podcast from being done in under two hours. Oh, I’m sorry. No, it’s fine. Yeah, I’m afraid, I think they’re like having some shit chocolate as part of the mix is just like part of the, it’s just what these things are, right? It’s meant to be, like, it’s not meant to be all of your favourites, it’s meant to be just like so much variety that you can only truly enjoy maybe like 60% of it and then the rest you just sort of put up with and then at the end you have like a big mound of them you just eat on like the 29th of December. Oh, the real desperation last days of Christmas when you just eat 50 orange cream roses. Yeah, that’s it. Just like trying to get through like 19 toffee pennies and just like and at the end there’s just gums left, you know. Just gums and just blood everywhere. Oh dear. Okay, good. I think we answered that one Matthew. Yeah, so, hi fellas, has Matthew kept in touch with the boys across the river brackets not asking for any fanfic purposes? Thanks. That’s from Maylam. Matthew, this is some boys you knew as a kid, right? And they had some games consoles you didn’t have and then you would hang out. It all sounded very nice. I assume these are real kids and not something you dreamed. Yeah, they’re real. This isn’t a Hoover line-up incident. That’s what I think every time you tell an anecdote now is, oh no, he’s fucking imagined it again or his mum told him it happened. No, I didn’t imagine like at least five years of friendship with two boys across the river. Yeah, they no longer live across the river from my dad, but we occasionally see one of the boys, they still come to my dad’s social gatherings. Rod and Todd Flanders, they’re called, it’s, yeah, Ed and Andy, the boys across the river. They had a Snez Weed and Mega Drive. It’s like the end of the Cold War in it, it’s like, you know what, we can still get along even though we’ve got different games consoles. That’s beautiful. Okay, good. I’ll answer that one. That’s good. I don’t talk about any of my childhood friends on this podcast. Apart from Andrew, the star of Final Fantasy 7. Yeah, that’s a good callback. A lot of good callbacks in this episode. I can’t wait to get my Andrew figma. Yeah, your Play Arts Kai Andrew is complete with motorcycle is on the way Matthew. 180 quid but well worth it. I’m excited about my Dorsia figurine myself to be honest. Or like Daniel with his machine gun arm. I say these are such specific references, I apologize. Do you want to read out this last question Matthew? Hello Bath Big Boys. That’s a new one. We are amazingly almost at the 10-year anniversary of the Wii U release. Where has the last decade gone? Tell me about it. Just wondering if Back Page: has any plans to profile this landmark. I always enjoy discussion of the most cursed, tacked on use of the gamepad screen. For me personally it is strangely my favourite console of all time. The Wii U ended up being the first HD gaming experience I ever had. I’d grown up with the SNES N64 games and owned a PS2 and GameCube as I moved to university. Unfortunately Berger struck my uninsured huge student digs and got them both. Funnily enough they were not interested in the Dyson. They left my Resi 4 and Wind Waker slash Ocarina Master Quest boxes on the shelf though, so only got the game in the disk drive. I hope Killer 7 is the sort of game criminals enjoy. I’d be surprised if it was. Following this incident in 2006, life got in the way and I never bought a replacement console. I mainly lived in a small one bed flat with my now wife in this period, so could never justify the large outlet for sporadic gaming on our one TV household. The Wii U’s off-TV play suited me perfectly and fully reignited my love of games. In a move that now seems inexplicable in hindsight, I went to the 24 hour Aster at 1am on Reece Day, fearing the Wii U would be a smash hit and sell out immediately. The staff there were of course baffled and I had to go back the following day, turning up for a midnight launch and they’re like, oh yeah, we’re not even having one. I played the thing to death with 100 plus hours racked up on each of Splatoon, Mario Kart 8, Xenoblade X and Breath of the Wild. As I’d missed the PS3 360 era completely, I even gratefully lapped up middling ports of Deus Ex, Mass Effect 3, Arkham City, etc. The right console at the right time for me. I’m interested in your thoughts on the Wii U’s legacy. That’s from Captain Birdseye. Imagine starting the Mass Effect trilogy from the third one. That as an experience just blows my mind. And still writing hate mail to the Bioware. Fuck you, you ruined this game. I don’t like how this ended or this began because I started with a third installment. I was completely baffled. We have put out a joke, Patreon Goal, which is if we hit 2100 we’ll do a Wii U Hall of Fame. But we will do that. And so what we’ll do is we’ll ball down, I suppose, probably like maybe 20 to 30 essential games and then like pick 10 out of those to represent the line up. I would say, yeah, we’re definitely not done with the Wii U. There’s definitely more to come on that side of things from us. So in terms of its legacy, I think definitely the most obvious thing to say, of course, is the software line up of the Switch. It gave the Switch an incredibly strong base of games to build upon. It arrived basically with these pre-made exclusives they could roll out and they still haven’t rolled all of them out even after all this time. But that is kind of like where you see the sort of like very basic idea of a console that can be plugged into the TV and used portably exist in some form. And then the Switch is obviously the far superior version of that form. But why am I talking when I can ask Matthew, the biggest Nintendo head, I know what he thinks for his comprehensive opinion. Yeah, I really like this. I really like the little narrative and actually that very specific scenario of not having played those games and then coming to this as a little entry point. I could see that being quite mind blowing, you know, quite hard to untangle Wii U from you know, what’s happened on Switch, obviously, so many of its games lived on but like taken if you do take it as an isolated console, say you didn’t get a Switch and you played all those first party games, I think it did actually have an incredible first party library, you know, sort of punched above its weight. I mean, arguably a lot of the best games on Wii U, I think probably, you know, the five best games on Wii U could probably stand up to the five best games on Gamecube, I would say. Yeah, I think that’s about right. You know, it’s not it’s not like miles off. It’s definitely not a disaster. It’s laughed at, but it’s a wonderful little thing. It’s just I think because so many of those games live on on Switch, it feels like a little less important now, a little less precious for it. I think there’d be a lot more affection for it if if this still was the only place to play like Mario Kart 8 or whatever. I also find it quite hard to untangle from like personal experience, you know, covering games consoles, you have like an extra sort of special affinity for them. Like you associate that console with the people on the team and the excitement around launch and particularly this this time of year, like I get very nostalgic for I always get nostalgic this time of year because I started on NGamer in October of 2006 and like when it starts getting dark outside, something triggers in my brain like, oh yeah, it’s like when I started on NGamer and being in like, like office, you know, the harsh fluorescent lighting when it’s dark outside always takes me back to those offices and I have some of that similar nostalgia for like the O&M offices at London which I associate with this staying off to work to play Wii U, Nintendo Land with Joe Scribs. That is an experience everyone had, obviously, but for me it’s quite hard to untangle from. As a console, kind of slightly misguided, wrong price, wrong release time, like the third party games spread was just baffling and kind of hobbled it massively. It just seemed a bit out of touch and out of step, but a thoroughly charming thing. You know, Miiverse, one of the all-time great Nintendo things, just so delightful. That incredible software line up, you know, I think it really does have some amazing games and they live on. Even like playing it this year, playing some Xenoblade X on it, I was thinking, I actually do quite, you know, I’m still quite fond of this. I like holding the gamepad, it’s comfortable to hold. It’s a nice thing. We’ll do a proper Wii U episode and get into all that. Those of us who are there have a lot of love for it and it’s very easy to be snide about it. But it’s rock solid. Yeah, I too, you know, I enjoyed the narrative here. I was there thinking, oh man, imagine missing the PS3 and 360 era, like the stuff you’d miss out on. But I can also see why that would have like this kind of slingshot effect of making the Wii U seem exotic and exciting in a particular moment before next gen consoles came along. I always like the fact that the, I think the way to look at this is most people’s relationship with games consoles is not like ours, Matthew, where we devour everything and have to play everything. Most people will buy like, will have probably 10 to 20 games that they own, like total across the generation. They’re not just like hideous hoarders like me, who just like have a mountain of like 500 things to play. They’ve accumulated and have to have audited in games court. Most people have just that leaner collection of things they really want to play and if you, you know, if you, like you say, if you pick like the sort of cream of the crop, you have, you know, as good a 10 games as you get anywhere else, really. And yeah, certainly like this, you know, the Deus Ex is a great game, Mass Effect 3 are great games. Admittedly, I think that’s a weird way to play them, but nothing wrong with the port. So fair enough. Yeah, I can totally see why that happens. So yeah, I echo it. I kind of like I like how sort of detached that we use whole like ecosystem felt from the rest of gaming in terms of like, it wasn’t you weren’t, you know, pounded with notifications and it didn’t really feel like it was trying to sell you anything. It was like all those kind of like, you know, little sort of like dudes like totter onto the screen. And like, the noises it would make just didn’t sound like anything else. The Switch is a lot colder by comparison, really. The Switch feels like a more contemporary, you know, sort of like Apple and Android inspired sort of like deal still has some of the kind of like Nintendo warmth to it, but not nearly as much as the Wii U had. The Wii U just had loads of it. So yeah, I think it’s so I don’t, you know, I certainly don’t regret owning one. I just like the idea of setting a comedy stretch goal where I’ll get out of my cupboard if people spend 2100 pounds in the podcast. Maybe this is like a sick example of late capitalism, Matthew. I’m not really sure. Yeah, we’ll return to it. We’ll do that episode at some point for sure. So yeah, I think we’re done, Matthew. We’re done so much for 90 minutes. Yeah, that’s what you do. It always fucking happens because we haven’t spoken for a little while. So it’s like, oh, I can ask Matthew about how his Bruce trip was and what a great story it was. So Matthew, people can support us at patreon.com/backpagepod. If you like the podcast, you like to throw a few pounds our way. We spend the money on Patreon contributors, sorry, contributors to the podcast, edits on the Patreon episodes and also ourselves, of course. So if you like what we do, you can support us. twitter.com/backpagepod. If you want to follow us on a declining social media network. Where can people find you on there, Matthew? At MrBazzill underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts and next week is Cyberpunk 2077 Revisited. So see you then.