Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how’s the rush to the finish with Game of the Year going for you? It’s going okay, actually. I played a couple of things over the weekend, which really wowed me, and so I’ve decided to invest more time in them so I can speak more fully on them. So, yeah, okay. I’m actually in a better place than I was when I wrote our rather bleak what we’ve been playing Patreon post last week. Yeah, same. I’ve got a couple of games now that are, you know, like you, I have to investigate them, but I feel almost certain that I’ve found one that’s definitely going quite high. I just sat and played a clear four hours of it nonstop at the weekend. I was like, okay, this is promising. So up to about six or seven, I’m pretty confident we’ll make the list now, which is good. Still a fucking rush to the finish, but what are you gonna do? I will say to listeners, actually, my throat is a bit screwed at the moment. I’m at that point where I’m either gonna get really fucking ill or my body’s gonna fight it off, but I’m not sure which one yet. So that’s where I’m at. Sorry, Matthew, what were you gonna say about Game of the Year? I think the challenge is, I’ve played way more than 10 games, and I could tell you what are probably conventionally the 10 best of those games. But I think what I’ve been failing to articulate is I’ve been looking for 10 heart picks, and I don’t know if I’ve played enough things that have resonated with me in that way. I’ve given loads of games four stars for VGC this year, but are many of them true heart picks? I don’t know. I guess that’s what I’ve, the chances of happening on one of those in the next two weeks is probably unlikely. You got the old Callisto Protocol coming out. Maybe heart’s not the right word for a very gritty sci-fi horror game set out of prison, but you know, it’s the last blockbuster of the year. Is it really gonna resonate with me? Has, what’s his name, Josh Duhamel, got the ability to truly connect with me? Oh, is that who’s in it, is it? Josh Duhamel, okay. He’s the guy, isn’t he? Oh, I guess so. Or is it Timmy the Olyphant? Who can tell the fucking difference? I can, Timmy the Olyphant’s like, you know, he’s a cut above, if you ask me. They’ve got the same face. Yeah, one, Josh Duhamel was in Call of Duty World War II, wasn’t he? He was the main dude in that, so. Yeah, and Deadwood. That’s Timmy the Olyphant. How are you getting these mixed up? They’re very distinctive. That was me playing up for the cameras, as it were. Well, yeah, don’t let me confuse that with the early onset of senility. That’s what I’m saying. We’re only in our 30s, but you never know. So, this episode, we are revisiting our predictions from earlier in the year. We always do this, tend to be the first or second podcast of the year. We’ll just bang out some predictions about what’s to come. Just a bit of fun. Usually, some of them are very, well, in fact, all of them are pretty preposterous, normally, with a couple of genuine ones thrown in there. So, I’ve got my 11 predictions at the start of the year. Matthew’s got his 11, together they equal 22, which is the year 2022. You see what we did there, the magic of podcasting. Matthew, first impressions on looking back at your predictions. How did you feel? Well, actually, in the episode, I felt bad because they weren’t particularly fun or goofy. Like they were trying to tap into sort of trends and things in a kind of boring way that we don’t do on this podcast. But in terms of actually giving us stuff to talk about, that’s quite actually handy. The payoff for boring picks is that this episode may be slightly better. Yeah, actually, I think I have plenty to say on a lot of my points. If the exercise was to not completely dick our future selves over in this episode, I think it was a success. Yeah, I actually just realised one of mine I absolutely fucking banged. I was like spot on with it. But the rest of them, yeah, it’s a bit of a minefield as I get into. The other funny thing is for people who have long term back page pod heads who might remember this episode, it was my worst in terms of audio. I sound fucking terrible because I think I’m going too high. And so that episode is a tough hang. You’ve been listening back to it, right? Yeah, I’m glad you said that because we were listening to it in the car on driving home over the weekend. And I thought something might be wrong with Catherine’s car speakers. I was like, is this coming out of a different speaker? What’s going on with this? Because I don’t remember it being bad. No, no, you definitely said it was bad at the time. You said to me, your audio shit, I don’t know why, I’ve done my best to fix it, but there’s only so much I can do. And then the podcast went live. And that was my memory of it. We listened to the Big Picture podcast in the car and then Back Page. And I was thinking, wow, my audio actually sounds okay. It doesn’t sound worlds apart from professional podcast empire, The Big Picture, which was impressive. But yeah, your audio was just like a fucking nightmare. So but then did the host of The Big Picture wedge themselves into some kind of fucking turned over table thing that’s got like cushions wedged in it like you do, Matthew? No, I don’t think so. Also, The Big Picture aren’t above a terrible guest mic. Like considering that they’re talking to people who have millions of pounds from big film careers and their mic sounds like purest ass, you’re like, come on, you could have spent a tiny bit of your fortune on a good mic set up. Oh yeah, like Bill Hader’s mic is fucking terrible. What’s the deal with that? That guy’s like, you know, yeah, that guy’s incredibly successful. He’s like our version of like Ash or something where it’s like, great guest, bad mic. Ash has actually gone and bought a good mic though because I think he wants to come on more episodes, which we’ll be, you know, very happy to have him again. But yeah, I think he, he took it very seriously, criticism of the microphone. So I kind of wish for episode 100 we’d done which Hollywood personality is each of our guests based on mic quality now. Well, Ash is sort of like tall like Bill Hader as well. There’s other kind of resemblances. There was a point where they both aligned in terms of like haircut and glasses, which is the exact time that Superbad came out. I was working with Ash at the time and I thought he looks exactly like Bill Hader and Superbad. So, yeah, that was a good moment for both of them, I think. We’ve really gone down the fucking into the weeds here on some bullshit. So let’s reverse out and get back to the predictions. This is going to be a shorter episode, I think. We just did a two hour, 40 minute episode of James Bond movies ranked. I imagine our listeners have had enough of us for the time being. As Matthew says, we didn’t tend to do much timely stuff and it’s funny because we just recently had our fingers burned by the disaster Excel episode PS5 versus Xbox Series X we visited. Which I think you and I were like, is this like the worst thing we’ve ever charged money for? And like, was it Matthew? I don’t know. It wasn’t that, but I think we pulled it out of the bag. There were a few good jokes. It wasn’t a lot of amazing commentary, but I’d say if it was the worst thing they charged, we’ve charged money for, it’s about the worst things that Sony and Microsoft have charged money for, so that’s fine. Yeah, I think that’s sort of like, I kind of see a thinking there and I’m prepared to go along with it even if I don’t totally believe it. So, on to the predictions. Thanks, Joe. No problem, Bell. Do you want to go first with one of yours? Yeah, so my first incredibly boring prediction was that it was going to be a big year for VR powered by Metaverse for the Oculus and PSVR2 for Sony. Coming to this, I was thinking, oh, well it’s been a terrible year for VR because all that’s happened is everyone has dunked massively on the Metaverse, and rightfully so. Have you looked at any Metaverse stuff, either first hand or just online? I’ve seen mostly the memes about them getting feet and stuff like that, and then some articles about these really weird abandoned virtual spaces basically where it’s like a promotional kind of like money sink and then nothing much really happened with them. So it seems like kind of like a thing that if it was going to happen, it would have happened during the pandemic. Yeah. And now it hasn’t happened. I don’t really know where it goes from there, you know. It’s sort of strange because it’s a culture, you know, it’s an online space that gets this big push, you know, like Facebook rebranding to get behind it, you know, as a company and all that jazz. And it hasn’t like taken off in a big way. And now it feels like a lot of the dialogue has changed to, well, this is going to be a gradual shift, you know, this is the first step on like a decades long journey to get people living in this virtual world, the metaverse. And so this is kind of where it should be. But I think that’s bullshit and just people trying to save face. Like no one wants the publicity they’ve had this year for the metaverse. It looks terrible. Every video you watch is just a PS2 kind of graphics, like a load of really charmless avatars hanging out in what always looked like sort of like 90s bowling alleys, kind of like lots of neon, just a big purple room. It’s all a bit vague. A lot of them look like people have broken into sort of abandoned leisure centers, you know, like those videos where they kind of we found this Russian cinema and it looks haunted as fuck. It’s got like big fat energy, except there’s just like four dudes standing there going like, oh, where are you from? And someone will be like, oh, Spain. So it’s just, I don’t really know what anyone’s getting out of that experience. So while the dunks have been high, I think that actually hides in terms of pure VR heft quite a success story, certainly for Quest 2, which by all accounts has sold a shit ton. Apparently, they’ve sold 15 million Quest 2s, which actually puts it ahead of like Xbox Series X and S as a console, catching up on PlayStation 5. It’s not completely laughable is what I’m saying. It just happens to be fronted by quite a laughable endeavour. Yeah, I almost think it’s a shame that they’ve tied the idea of the metaverse to the Quest hardware because the Quest hardware is doing everything it needs to do. It’s like, you know, it’s a really nice device to use. It feels really good to like, it feels like the form of VR though, is meant to take off. It’s standalone, it’s well supported by good titles, though I do worry about how quickly they might treat it like phones and then kind of like abandoned support for one headset for another. I’m a bit worried about that with Facebook because they kind of gave up on their PC-connected VR headsets very quickly and I don’t really want, basically these things should be like Steam where it will always work on whatever device you’ve got, but it might just run badly basically. So I think the hardware is great, but yes, we’re to tie it to this ambition to like create a kind of charmless virtual world where it does look actually worse than PlayStation Home did 14 years ago. And PlayStation Home was never good and no one ever thought it was good and that was dunked on as well. And so people aren’t learning lessons from history, they’re just repeating them. And also Facebook laid a load of people off, so that doesn’t look good optics-wise. It seems like it’s failing as a giant money sink. I don’t really get it. I don’t really get the need to create demand for a virtual space and then the need for one company to own all that virtual space. That’s like, that is dystopia to me. There’s no net gain for us as a species. They definitely have sold that as a vision to whoever all these mysterious money men are who then go and invest billions in startup companies who just basically have to announce that they’re getting into the metaverse and then they get evaluated for one and a half billion dollars or something just because they’re adjacent to the hot thing. Whether or not people are going to start backing out from that or if there’s just so much money in it that it’s too big and too proud to fail. But yeah, like you say, probably unfair to tie in. VR doesn’t just equal metaverse. I must admit I haven’t heard a lot of chatter about, you must play this amazing VR game this year given that there are all these headsets. You’d think there’d be a bit more word of breakout hits or what’s happening. My guess is right, that they’re saving a bunch of stuff for a Quest 3 next year. That’s my guess. Right. So this felt like a bit of an in-between year for software compared to last year where you had Ressie 4, which was a massive deal for them, or previous years where they had Asgard’s Wrath or Stormland or Lone Echo, and they had Lone Echo 2 as well, which is a PC VR game. So I think there might be some resources focusing on the next thing rather than what’s happening now. They announced some acquisitions recently. We still haven’t seen a hide nor hair of that GTA San Andreas VR that was announced last year, or maybe it was the year before and it was last year. So that you would think, in theory, that wouldn’t have been years away when they confirmed it. But again, maybe they’re saving that for a Quest 3 launch game, which is a slight bummer because I’ve got a Quest 2 and I wouldn’t mind it. I can’t believe that one year on I still haven’t got up in Big Smoke’s Grill, which is hilariously side note. When I was listening back to the old podcast, as you were talking in the podcast, I was thinking up the same jokes I then made in the episode. I was thinking like, if I was recording that now, I would say X, not because I remembered it. I’m just that predictable a person that I thought, oh yeah, Big Smoke’s Grill, ha ha ha. And lo and behold, I said it in the episode. Yeah. The good thing is, I think our listeners now know that this is part of the content mix with us. The idea of making the same joke three or four times over the course of many months. And you only notice it if you listen to all the episodes back to back, otherwise you’re like, it’s got the energy of a friend repeating an old story, I think. It’s not intentional. It’s just who I am as a person, it’s not a bit. No, it’s fine. I do the same thing sometimes, so it’s all good, my friend. And you were right, this was a big VR year because PSVR 2 got announced. And they are releasing that. They’ve got this very elaborate controller tech they’re doing, Horizon Games. They’ve got a very elaborate price point. So yeah, VR is expensive to do well, it just is. Like, Oculus is like, Facebook are losing money on those headsets. They got mass penetration such as it is, ha ha ha. I don’t know why I tag that on as a rider. That had powerful, it’s six o’clock on a Monday energy. It’s been a tough day, man. Yeah, so, you know, that’s, people are like, VR is like, happening, it’s like a big deal still. And people are like, spending a lot of money to get it to that next level. And 15 million, you’re right, is no small thing to, you know, it’s not a small thing at all. And they keep selling software as well. They’re making software and they’re selling software. I did play a new VR game that I like this year, Little Cities VR. Matthew, that was quite nice, it’s like a city builder game. Good vibes, really good sound design. You kind of like, you can sort of move in a 3D space around your city as you build it and raise it up. That was a cool little game. And then there was a City Skylines VR this year. I think that was, didn’t get necessarily like amazing reviews, but there’s stuff happening, but it could have been a bigger year, but in terms of like the movement of like hardware away from the meta stuff, it was a pretty big year. It was Oculus Pro, Quest Pro, I don’t really know what that does, but I assume it does something. Yep. Okay, good. That’s good. That’s a great way to continue the conversation there. Yep. And then that’s, you know, you know that we’re doing a podcast, right? Like you have to keep talking. I was just, my brain is so slow to load up responses. I was actually thinking about PSVR, whether there was anything they could offer me to spend that much money. And I suddenly thought of, have you played much of Horizon? Do you know who Silens is? Oh God, they all got fucking names, like tape recorders and that. He’s the guy, he’s Lieutenant Daniels from The Wire. Oh yeah, yeah, that guy, yeah. Yeah, I just thought rubbing his bald head with my VR hands, that’s the image that popped into my hand. And I thought, yeah, I’d pay 600 quid for that. So why are you thinking about that? Is that when you went, yep, yeah. Like an old VHS player just loading up, kind of like, sorry, I don’t mean to make fun of it. I was just genuinely curious. I thought, oh no, is he not listening to me? That’s really bad. No, I was slightly away with the fairies working out if I had a PSVR bit in me, but I don’t. That’s fine, we talked about this for 16 minutes now, so let’s move on. So my first one, this is a really brief one because it just didn’t fucking happen, which is, spoiler alert, it’s happened with most of my predictions. So CNC Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun get remastered this year. This is a prediction based on the success of the remastered Command and Conquer collection that EA did in 2020. I thought, what a no brainer to just get the same people to do Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun, but it feels like it was just a one-time deal, sadly. So as a result, I decided to just go and download about eight different programs to run compatibility properly with my modern PC to get Red Alert 2 working. And to be honest, I did tick the box. The biggest bit of C&C news this year was the oral history of Tim Curry saying space. That happened, did it? Yeah, I think it’s on Polygon. It’s worth a read. It’s like incredibly deep dive in how that cut scene was written, came to be recorded that way and its ongoing legacy. I think they talked to, who’s the famous American astronomer? Oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah, they talked to some really legit people about space because he said the word space, that was the link. It was quite good. It’s like the Terence Malick film of interview features. It’s like, we’re going to start with the creation of time and space and work our way up to this one cut scene in Command and Conquer Red Alert 3. Okay, yeah, so that didn’t happen. So yeah, nothing more to say really, other than I hope that one day EO does revisit that. It feels like money on the table, that. Just redo the sprites, redo the background, sell it. I’ll pay 20 quid for it every single fucking time. What’s your second prediction, Matthew? My second prediction was, oh, this is a duffer. Video game TV shows will continue to be good. I was mainly thinking of The Last of Us, which didn’t release. Resident Evil on Netflix and Halo on Paramount. I also thought The Super Mario Movie would be good. I wrote my notes. Now, obviously, Last of Us didn’t happen, it wasn’t out yet. You getting good vibes off the trailers and promotional material for that? Yes. Okay. I think it will be, I’m not personally bothered about watching it, with the reasons I think we discussed before, but I think it will be good by the standards of modern prestige TV, you know? Yeah. I’d be interested to see if they can sort of get more of an ensemble going in it, which is sort of what I like in my favourite TV shows. I don’t like TV shows about one person, I think is my problem with all the Marvel shows too. So that’s why I’m not sure video games are good for it. But anyway, Resident Evil and Netflix, did you watch this? No, I didn’t get good vibes from it. And then it got really like weird mix of reviews, like a strange response. Truly baffling show. It wisely sort of exists outside of the game, so it’s not all Chris Redfield and whatnot. Albert Wesker is in it and there is sort of a flashback to what happens around the time of Resident Evil 1. So it is canonical, it is set in the universe of the games, but it’s kind of like 20 years later. And again, Lance Reddick from Silence from Horizon Zero Dawn has Wesker in it, but a kind of seemingly nice Wesker. And that’s sort of the mystery of the show is like, what’s the deal with this nice Wesker? How can you have unleashed what you unleashed on Raccoon City and still be fine? But it was tonally just all over the place. Really like silly, like goofy humour, these terrible like poppy needle drops everywhere. Just an absolutely baffling show with occasional flashes of like deep, resi lore. Like there’s a bit where they find the daughters of Albert Wesker find a camcorder with kind of found footage of Lisa Trevor from Resident Evil 1. Right. It’s sort of in her basement, sort of like, you know, with the shackles sort of like screaming, you know, so it’s a show which goes as deep as that, but then it also has robots dancing to fucking Billie Eilish or whatever. So it’s like, yeah, both incredibly Resident Evil and not at all Resident Evil and we’ll never get a second season. It’s just dead. And what’s really weird that that followed a film that was reasonably faithful to the games, like that no one really talked about. That was strange. You want to say about the TV show, like, oh, they didn’t play Resident Evil, but then it had so much weird Resident Evil stuff in it. You’re like, well, they must have. And this is just what they thought was the right direction to take it. I think it was written by one of the guys behind Supernatural. Yeah. Yeah, it was a load of old shit. I watched Halo, by the way. Yeah, which I haven’t watched. So what does that, did I predict a TV video game renaissance in the form of Halo? You did not, but I wish you well. So yeah, I watched all of this. I got a Paramount Plus trial. I chewed through this and Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which is really fucking good. I love Star Trek. So Halo was a weird one. It had like, I think four set pieces in like nine hour long episodes. No proper hour long episodes. And a lot of it was about random politicking in the Halo universe. It’s tough because I’m sort of with the mindset that the deeper you get into the Halo universe, the more boring it is. I actually thought this was probably still slightly better than I thought it would be. And when it did do the set pieces, they were a lot of fun. Like there’s a proper like big battle midway through the season that was legit good. Is there Scarab? No, sadly not, maybe they’re saving that for season five. They’re saving that for Matthew. But it was stingy with set pieces considering it obviously cost a fortune to make. I found that strange. But I don’t know, I quite like the attempt to like give Master Chief some layers. I didn’t care that he, you know, had sex in one episode. That seemed to be a big deal to people. I really care about taking his helmet off either. It’s a fucking TV show. You know what I mean? Like that guy’s just like a voice in a suit of armor in the game. So you see if sex with there’s this really bad plot in it where there’s this girl who’s like a survivor on some human colony who becomes like the Covenant sort of like weird Jesus figure and then she sort of infiltrates there. She’s both her and Master Chief can see the halo. They’re being drawn to it as this almost holy like object. That’s like the whole plot of the season really is. Yeah, it was quite naff. But there weren’t so much cash in it, it’s proper peak golden quote unquote age of streaming ridiculousness. So, yeah, that was halo Matthew, but did anything else happen to Cyberpunk happen this year? That was probably that kind of proves your point a little bit that these things are definitely on the rise. Yeah, yeah. Well, this was based off the fact that Castlevania and Netflix had been good. So I thought Netflix had their video game adaptations sort of locked down. And yeah, by all accounts, people liked Cyberpunk, didn’t really do it for me. But I don’t know if Resident Evil is just such a honker that it kind of eclipses any successes. Oh, ended with the giant crocodile getting blown up and there was all kinds of, oh, so much bullshit in that show. I had to do an ending explained video for that. So I’ve thought about the Netflix Resident Evil show more deeply than most. Yeah, that’s like when I had to do loads of research on In Her Eyes, the Netflix show. The one that ends, it’s like a show where a woman’s possessed by the spirit of some dead Scottish man or something. And I was so regretful for even suggesting it as a potential thing to cover afterwards. I was like, I regret every life choice I’ve made up until this point. Ending explained videos, they’re big business. I’m trying to do one for £18.99, but the show is so complicated, I don’t really understand it. That’s the problem with writing an ending explained article, what if you genuinely don’t understand it because the show really does need explaining? Yeah, it’s much easier when it’s like, and then Luke Skywalker turned up and took baby Yoda away and you’re like, hey! That guy you see at the end of Mandalorian, that’s Luke Skywalker. Yeah, I wish. Yeah, okay, so I would say that’s like a half point for that one. Not that we’re taking score. No, it is in the competition. Okay, my second one then. GBA and GBC games come to Nintendo Switch Online. Nope, didn’t happen this year. Did anything happen on this front this year? Just more N64 games, wasn’t it Matthew? Was that this year that that happened, that launched on there? That was before. But I guess Mario Kart Season Pass was like the big edition this year, which is quite big in itself because it’s basically another Mario Kart worth of content, which none of us saw coming. I think that was quite a surprise. Yeah, it’s just Glacier otherwise on the new games front, plus the announced Goldeneye of course, but still no release date for that one. We have to wait months and months for a game that was finished like, what, 25 years ago now. Yeah, everyone got a bit too excited that whenever they show footage of Virtual Console on Switch in the Nintendo Directs, they have like a user icon of like the Metroid, it’s either the Morph Ball or it is like the Metroid Prime symbol in the corner. And everyone thinks it’s like them teasing up some big GameCube splash coming, but I don’t know. I think as long as they can sell you those games for a price, they won’t be on there personally. People with unrealistic expectations for a Nintendo Direct, that’s preposterous, Matthew. I would still like to see Game Boy games on there and I think it probably will happen, but probably not until they’ve run out of N64 games, which they don’t seem to be… Because they’re rolling them out so slowly, I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next year or so. Maybe they’re waiting for us to do our much anticipated GBA draft, just to… Because that way it’s almost like focus testing, because you can see which collection people better react to and then use that to pick the right one. Yeah. Oh, this guy had golf in his. We better fucking make sure golf’s in there. Yeah. Or like… Yeah, that’s possible. It’s like, oh yeah, they’re waiting to hear Golden Sun get picked. Okay, we’ve got to make sure Golden Sun’s in there. And yeah. Oh, Metal Gear and Perfect Dark might be tricky to get the rights, et cetera, et cetera, you know. Well, listen, you know, more and more game inner, I was going to say inner game people, when I mean game developers are like listening to the podcasts and listening to us on Twitter, you know, there comes a point where we begin to have influence on these things. Oh, yeah. I mean, Matthew is joking, by the way. Yeah. We don’t think we have influence. We literally got followed by one developer this week. Oh, someone from Frontier started following the Twitter account, which always makes me panic. I’m like, oh, no, they’re going to like rumble my secret second identity as a podcaster. Your side hustle. OK, yes, that’s not happened, but I’m hoping it will happen at some point. So what’s your third recommendation? Your third prediction, Matthew? My third prediction, also Megabust. Halo Infinite campaign will be expanded with DLC in the same way they did Hivebusters for Gears of War 5. It’s all about that continued game pass engagement. This was based entirely on the fact that I felt like Halo Infinite didn’t really have an ending, and so I just assumed they’d give it to us for free, but it turns out that they’ve just spent the whole year trying to make a feature that was in original Halo work. Didn’t quite do it. Tough break for Halo Infinite. That game had quite a lot of goodwill for about a month, and now it just doesn’t feel like a thing at all, unless it’s like GTA Online, one of those secretly massive games that no one talks about, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case. It’s a weird one because it really is a genuinely great online multiplayer shooter, but by the modern standards of these games, it was slow to roll out new stuff, like new online multiplayer player stuff, and then yeah, nothing single player happened at all. They’ve just put in online co-op, which is cool, but yeah, no split-screen co-op still. I think they did commit to doing offline split-screen from the start and weren’t able to do it. And then I think someone hacked the game and made it do it, and then people were like, why can’t you do it if it’s working? And it just seems like Halo’s had a load of trouble. It just seems like it’s not going well, you know, which is tough, tough. It’s tough because I like Halo doing well, but yeah, if there is… The only thing that gets rumored now about coming Halo stuff is Battle Royale, which I don’t really care about, you know, so… Yeah, but if that’s where the appetite lies, yeah, it’s just a shame. Just the only thing you ever hear about 343 is like another big name has left it, basically, which is a shame because good game underneath it, or good multiplayer game, and no Scarab. Yeah, no Scarab. In fact, that was my fifth prediction. Halo Infinite gets a storybook expansion that finally gives us a Scarab or two. Very wide of the mark there. So yes, blown through one of mine there too, Matthew. So that’s good. You ready for my next one? Yeah. FF7 Remake Part 2 is announced. Tick. And it’ll be an open world game this time. Cross. So they did announce this. It’s called Rebirth, the second one. My point was it’s going to come along slightly quicker than you think it’s going to. And I think that is true. It’s coming at the end of next year. Although by the time it does, it would have been, I think, like for almost four years since the last one. So maybe that’s not actually true. But still, yeah, I think I still believe there’s somewhat, though. We don’t know what kind of game it will be. But I think the fact they are out of Midgar means they need to do a more open format kind of, you know, sort of give you more of a sense of the world than the first game was able to. Now, Matthew, didn’t you just start playing the original FF7 remake? You were consulting me for Crysis Core based advice, which is exactly what I’m here for. No, so I was curious about whether I should play Crysis Core before starting Final Fantasy 7 remake, because I heard that it folded stuff from that game into it. So I haven’t started either. Yeah. Fair enough. So yeah, I have consulted with Matthew on that. And I think he’s just going to play regular FF7 remake. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, that’s the plan. I’m glad that I have basically like, I mean, I was going to say you’re good for two things, which is really unfair. You’re good for so many things. But two things, two things that really stand out are the order you should play Final Fantasy games, specifically Final Fantasy 7 games, and what Batman comics to buy my dad for Christmas. Those are the two things I can always, always trust on you. Oh, thanks pal. I mean, I assume you also got Catherine for Final Fantasy based advice. So you got regular wife and pod wife, which is me. So you got information from all circles, basically. Yeah, that is true. Well, she hasn’t played Crisis Course, so she was literally no good to me in that particular conversation. No, that’s weird. Usually when there’s a game I’ve not played from like that time period, Catherine has played it in conversation. Well, I asked her earlier and she very defensively said, why didn’t you have a PSP? And she was actually quite cross as if I was accusing her of something. To be honest, owning a PSP was a big ask, I think for a lot of people. Well, it’s like how, I know a couple of people are like, oh yeah, I don’t know what the fuck happened in Kingdom Hearts because I didn’t own a PSP. And I’m like, I do sympathize. And now you have to play like a PS4 re-release of that to even get it. Now you’re too old and you’re very perturbed by the whole thing. That’s me in Kingdom Hearts in a nutshell, really. Playing 4K versions of PSP games, that’s rough, man. That’s tough, man. But I mean, we’re all about to do it with this Crysis Core re-release. So we’re all going to do it. I’m not sure about that. Yeah, OK, fair. OK, that’s that one ticked off. Then I look forward to more FF7 based adventures. Yeah, we still haven’t done a Final Fantasy episode. No, I’m putting it off because I don’t know how to do it. Someone pointed out, well, you can’t do a game by game because retrodorts did that. And I was like, well, they didn’t come up with the idea of talking about a single Final Fantasy game. So that annoyed me. Basically, I’m just arguing with our listeners again. There’s no actual good content here. We will tackle it. When 16 comes out, we’ll tackle it. But I do keep putting it off. It’s true. Sorry about that, pal. What’s your next one? My next one is that Sonic Frontiers game will be good. If you ask some people, that is correct. Oh, are you asking the right people? That’s the question. I was sort of excited for this in that I liked the early Cheeser trailers, which is all we’d seen at the time. They’d sort of shown the open world and it was all quite kind of abstract. And I thought, oh, the idea of pinging around this, this big kind of dreamy world would be fun. I did buy this. You spent actual money on Sonic Frontiers? Yeah, I bought it. OK, that’s like shocking to me. I bought it in a Black Friday sale, a pre-Black Friday sale, because I’d seen some people who I respect talk up this game. And I thought, is this actually like secretly good? Is there a real heart pick seven in this? Because I thought, what a funny twist it would be if in the Game of the Year episode, my first pick was Sonic Frontiers. So I was willing this to be good and willing it to win me over. But it’s just Sonic stinking up the joint in a massive field. It’s just no good, this game, it is bad. And maybe some people think it’s ironically good, because they’re into the whole kind of ironic Sonic meme thing, which I know a lot of people a little bit younger than me are. Or maybe they’re just so blinded by nostalgia that they can’t see anything but good in Sonic. But it’s just a horrible, horrible thing to control. In a game which basically every interactive element of the world exists because he is so uncontrollable. It’s a spring that you touch and then it fires him off and you have zero control about it. You know, it has to keep taking control away from you because he just feels so terrible to play as. The homing attack still in this game does all the work because he’s a character you can’t steer. So all his attacks have to home in for you. It’s abysmal. So bad prediction. Yeah, I’ve played a bit of this and I agree with that. It’s quite weird when you’re trying to get in the… Because there’s a duality to this game, right? There’s the more trad sonnaky bits and then there’s the more mournful puzzle-adventury bits when you’re in a big crowd. It’s classic mournful Sonic that you know and love. Yeah, which are a bit weird. I think I said in the little what we’ve been playing post, so remind me of like Sonic’s been modded into a game that’s not his. Like when someone put CJ from GTA San Andreas into Breath of the Wild on a motorbike and you were like, is he meant to be here? So yeah, there’s a bit of that vibe to it. But then you’ll try and steer him towards something specific, but then he doesn’t have the momentum to do it. But then if you hit the homing attack, you’ll suddenly have momentum. And it’s like, I don’t understand how this really works as a control system. Yeah, and there’s just always abstract clusters of like grind rails and platforms. And you’re like, well, where’s the beginning of that? How do I get to that? And it’s always, oh, there’s a spring in a bush and you hit the spring and then he’ll just hit the grind rail and grind round it. And then it drops you off back on earth. And you’re like, well, what was the point of that? Other than you going, well, there’s a novel sort of construct floating above me in the sky. Doesn’t even have the one good thing about Sonic, which is bright colors and like a soundtrack that you can kind of hum and enjoy. I can buy into a bad Sonic game. I like, I don’t mind Sonic Lost World because it has the color, it sounds a bit like Mario Galaxy, it looks a little bit like Mario Galaxy. Without that, this game is just, it’s just so dour. Like this big washed out field, this like mournful music, which feels like they’re doing it because Breath of the Wild had a subtle soundtrack. It’s like someone looked at that game and didn’t really understand why it did anything, but just went, well, we’ll sort of do it like that because that was one of the best games ever made. Like there’s little creatures that are like Koroks, but you don’t collect them or find them in any inventive or exciting way. There’s nothing to reward exploration here. I think this is really, really dire. I actually don’t think it’s as bad as I thought it was going to be. No, I should be more accurate. I think like in the Pantheon of 3D Sonic games and Pantheon is inverted commas there. It’s like not really any more offensive than some of the better ones, like playing Sonic Generations or something. Like it’s maybe a bit more muddled in terms of how it tries to reinvent itself. But it’s not overtly offensive. And if you want to phone it in just to get through those levels, you can do it. Yeah. But yeah, it depends. But you’re holding it to like the standard of this is moving into like Mario Galaxy’s domain. Well, why? What the fuck are you playing at, Sonic? And that’s a different perspective, admit. I think they’ve tried to really change it up, but he’s still got all the kind of problems he’s always had. I just don’t think they fixed anything. And just putting him in a different kind of landscape doesn’t fix anything and only accentuates those problems. The one thing that I do like is like the giant bosses that are sort of embedded in the field. And there is like open world things that you can kind of tackle at any given time. So there’s like the big guy with the arms and then you can run up his arms and like boff him on the head and there’s like a sort of sting ray that leaves a kind of trail. And if you land on its trail, that becomes like a racetrack through the landscape. That’s visually quite distinctive and quite interesting. The idea of a sort of surprise arcade burst that’s naturally embedded in this natural environment. That’s cool. But everything else is just very vague and it just isn’t nice to handle. And that’s, isn’t that everything? Like if you can’t, if that isn’t working, it doesn’t matter what he’s doing really. Okay, yeah. I think that’s fair. So no, not good. Well anyway, yeah, I enjoyed that take and then the journey of you buying it. You buying that and the Mega Drive 2. Oh, I don’t know what happened this year. You had a weird year, you had a tough year emotionally, man. Is that, are you dealing with some stuff? Yeah, I just, in both cases I think I thought it would make for fun podcasting to go against my persona. I wanted to show people that I am open-minded to these things. I do try them. I’m not just saying this blindly. Like, I really went in this. I was willing it to be good. I predicted it, it was going to be good. And I’m just very disappointed that it’s just another shit Sonic game. I’ve, I feel like I’ve sort of set myself up for failure by promising that I’ll get Steel Battalion at some point, Matthew, and podcast about it. That feels like a big error on my part. A bit like that Seinfeld episode where he says, like, when he ran the race against that guy and the years earlier, and he’s, like, nervous about having to re-race him to, like, prove he can still do it. That’s a bit like me with this Steel Battalion thing. I’ve said I’m going to do it, now I’ve got to fucking do it. And it’s like, oh, it’s hanging over me, man. It’s like, what if I just install it, put it down on my lap, the controller, and just have the worst time and can’t even do it, and then have to make a two-hour podcast about it? What a fucking terrible outcome that’ll be. You don’t, do you even put that thing on your lap? That’s too big for a lap. It has to go to desk, really, doesn’t it? You’re gonna have to invest in, like, a coffee table or something. Well, then it becomes a question of, like, will it even work with a CRT TV? Will I have to fucking get some kind of 300-quid adapter just to make it work on a modern TV? I hope so. It’ll make for a better episode if you have, like, a really painful quest to make this thing work. Yeah, it just feels a bit like it’s turning into, like, The Out of Towners or something, where I’m just, like, losing money at every single turn until I’m, like, three grand in the hole just for one podcast episode, which will be funny for the listeners, admittedly. Should we move on to one of mine, Matthew? Yes. Number four, Nightdive remasters the South Park game on N64. Didn’t happen this one, unsurprisingly. I was pleased to learn there is another South Park game being made by Question, though, the studio that made The Magic Circle and the, what’s it called, the club? Is it Blackout Club? Blackout Club, yeah. So Jordan Thomas have bought two famous outfits. So yeah, they’re making a South Park something, which is quite cool. This is kind of a joke about Nightdive. It’s like they’ve been kind of excavating the acclaimed catalogue, and this is one that hadn’t been touched, of course. And I think Parker and Stone are on the record. They didn’t like any of the South Park games before the Stick of Truth. So this was a joke one, a gag one, hilarity. And whether you think it’s funny or not, it sure was a prediction that I put in there. What’s your next one, Matthew? Our next one, Konami will have a big comeback. Well, very good. You actually kind of, I think you get a full point for this one. I get full, yeah. Well, a comeback has begun. I mean, financially, they are, you know, making more money than they’ve ever made before because they’re just sort of, they’ve got some massive Yu-Gi-Oh! thing, free to play card game, which seems to make two billion pounds every year, which is, you know, good for them. Not so good for the people, pocket money of easily fooled youngsters. And yeah, I thought the Silent Hill Direct was good. I thought it was really confident. I thought they announced loads of stuff. I mean, you can’t really speak to the quality of any of those games, but I thought they were all interesting projects. I thought the main one, the Silent Hill 2 Remake from Blooper Team is the one I’m probably least interested in, but you know, they’re working with No Code, interesting choice. They’re working with the writer of the When They Cry visual novels, which you know, from the visual novel episode I’ve gotten into this year. Very, very interesting partnership. Yeah, like, you know, I think I said specifically in that episode, you know, we want all their rumoured games announced. We want to hear what they’re doing with Silent Hill, what they’re doing with Metal Gear, maybe what they’re doing with Castlevania. But I also said one out of three wouldn’t be bad. That’s exactly what we got, but I kind of hope they have the similar thing waiting behind the scenes for their other series. Like, they just haven’t been entirely dormant. You know, that stuff is going on and that’s exciting. Yeah, I think the Metal Gear ones likely to be much more reserved. Like, they’ll probably just be like, I think the rumour from VGC was the older games will become available on modern platforms and Metal Gear Solid 3 will be remade. Like, that’s a good starting point, I think. Anything more wild than that seems unlikely, but I’d love to see it. As for Castlevania, no idea. Is the film still in the works for that one as well? That feels like one of those films that people just talk about endlessly then it never gets made, do you know what I mean? Like, it’s meant to be Oscar Isaac and Jordan Voight Roberts fought Voight Roberts. Yeah, but he’s like, I don’t know if he, cause he’s like mates with Kojima and because it’s a project that sort of starts when Kojima’s still in Metal Gear, and maybe you can’t be mates with Kojima and be involved with Metal Gear now, who knows? I don’t know, he seems to have softened up a bit on Metal Gear related stuff though. I guess he probably, but he probably still sees it as they’re making money from a thing that I make. A lot of directors are asking themselves, do I want to direct a Metal Gear film or do I potentially want to be a hologram in Death Stranding 2? That’s a hard one to decide. I would really struggle with the conundrum of be Kojima’s mate or make something based on Metal Gear side. I’d really fuck that. Would you really? Oh yeah, definitely. The cred accumulated from just being associated with Kojima is worth it, arguably. So, yeah, I would really struggle, as opposed to like, yeah, it’s like, oh yeah, I want to make this Metal Gear indie stealth thing. It’s like, well, if Kojima’s gonna be pissed off at me, I don’t want to risk my friendship with him. I kind of get the bind, you know what I mean? Yeah, I just don’t think that that’s an offer that’s offered to anyone who’s circling a Metal Gear project. It’s not like Kojima is trying to tempt people away to sort of stall the progress of the Metal Gear franchise. He’s like, listen, I will buy you with my friendship, which, as everyone on the Twitter knows, is the coolest friendship going. Yeah. Have you dipped into his podcast? I haven’t brought myself to do it. I listened to that teaser one that they did. Hard work, tough hang. Yeah, it wasn’t really for me. I’ve had lots of people send me, he did an episode on his favorite mystery fiction of the year, which obviously is right up my street. But a lot of it was Japanese stuff that’s not in translation, which obviously just makes me jealous. And his picks for English books were very, very mainstream. You know, like he liked Richard Osmond’s one. And you know, that’s fine. You’re allowed to like that, but it’s not like, it’s not a cool pick. Maybe that to him though, that is like you picking up like a pretty famous, you know what I mean? Like Richard Osmond’s like, yeah, probably maybe seems more exotic and exciting if you’re Japanese. Yeah, Keiko Higashino is probably the Richard Osmond of Japan. Is that the most Matthew Castle thing that’s ever been said on this podcast? No, but it’s just, I just, it just makes me laugh at like, you know, he’s into these books that like my stepmums into also, like Kojima and my stepmom, like these books. I just think that’s, there’s something odd about that. Yeah, that’s fair. What even was this prediction again? Oh, Konami, yeah. Yeah, Konami, yeah, I think, yeah, they’re back a little bit. They’re, you know, they’re certainly in rude financial health and they seem to be putting it to what I deem good use. If I had two billion of Yu-Gi-Oh! money, you can bet your ass I’d like blow that on some Metal Gear Vanity projects, but that’s why I don’t run companies, Matthew. I just, I run this podcast with you. Okay, next up is actually my Halo one, so I’ve already done that one. So should I just move on to my other? Yeah. Yeah, okay, more PS2 era games come to VR. So again, the thinking was Resi 4 VR was such a big deal. We’ll see, we’d hopefully see more of that, but it’s really been slow going. There was a rumor that, on like really unsubstantiated one that was floating around saying that Rockstar has some deal to bring a few games to Oculus systems and that might include Man Hunt, for example, which should be incredibly grizzly in VR. I don’t know how true that is. I haven’t even made the GTA one yet, so I’m not holding my breath. But yeah, this was a bust really. I hope to see more visually simple games from this era make the sort of like crossover. It didn’t really happen, which is to be expected, I guess. Like it’s just, VR just is quite glacial in comparison to other platforms, but the kind of visual simplicity of these games would seem to make them a good fit. Like something like Killer 7 in VR would be rad, for example, that would actually work kind of well. I think I was also talking about light gun games, which again, I feel like a bit of a missed opportunity. Like there’s loads of new light gun games made for VR on there, but no old ones ported to it, which just seems like a waste to me. Any further thoughts there, Matthew? I’d like the Rockstar thing to be true, if only to see Zuckerberg doing a big press conference where he strangles a man to death with a plastic carrier bag in Manhattan and just try and sell that along. Well, actually, dead-eyed avatars is quite a good manhunt fit. It’s not worlds apart. Being in the metaverse is quite an alienating experience. Yeah, so that pretty much covers that one, I think. So what’s your next one, Matthew? My next one is Xenoblade 3 will be announced, which hadn’t been at the start of last year. I think I also thought it would be a kind of a mashup of Xenoblade 1 and 2. I’m probably overstating how prescient that was. There is some crossover. I think I predicted it was going to be a bit more of a like Avengers assemble type deal. But this was announced, it did happen. The rumour of voice acting being recorded by Jenna Coleman, which we thought might have been for the definitive edition of Xenoblade 1 turned out to be for Xenoblade 3, so that was right. Yeah, and it came out and it was great. I really loved it. And it connected to the other two in just the right way for my money. Full point for you and full point for Jenna Coleman for still putting in the hours on them. Oh yeah, which is, we congratulated her on this a year ago. Yeah, but still I think that’s good hustle that is. That’s like, you know, you don’t forget where your paychecks come from, fair enough. That’s like us knocking out a two page preview in like circa 2008, you know what I mean? For a six out of 10 360 game. That’s her version of that. So yeah, good stuff. Yeah, well done. That was like, yeah, good call. I suppose it was about time, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that you were pretty much spot on. And it was funny how it just seemed to appear fully formed and then it was just out. That’s like happening more and more with Switch games these days, minus Pokemon games where you were the Pokemon of vehicles, which don’t seem to be quite ready when they actually release. Okay, moving on then to one of mine. Nier Automata gets a proper sequel from Platinum Games announced and may be released. Eh, eh, who knows what’s happening with Nier? It feels like there should be a sequel to this game. There isn’t, I don’t know why. It came out like five years ago. Surely someone somewhere is making it. Maybe the Platinum is making it. We still haven’t heard about it, but you would think a proper sequel to this game is coming, but alas, it’s not happening. I think if you read between the lines, whenever they need to do anything near related, they really do do a lot with Yoko Taro and Platinum. When they did the Switch port, he did another round of interviews for the Switch. If he feels like he’s still very, very close to them and in play, which you’d think is because he is making a game with them. Well, you’d hope so, right? That’s the read. Because otherwise, if he’s like, oh, it’s not happening, surely you’d be like, fuck it, I’m not doing that. It would just be, he is the executive producer on the Switch port rather than the man himself. He’s still cracking out his big papi and mache head. He’s still doing all that nonsense. I think he’s there. Great personal brand in that. Yeah. It’s also the thing of actually releasing a Switch port of this would suggest that they’re trying to, it’s not just to cash in, because it’s meant to be a good port as well, right? They’re genuinely trying to get more people interested in it. So surely it’d only do that if there was a sequel to be made. So yeah, that one didn’t pan out, but maybe I could just put that on next year and it will actually work next year. So we’ll see. What’s the next one, Matthew? Another buffer. Breath of the Wild 2 will be a Switch Pro launch game, but its fate and whether or not it comes out this year will hinge on Nintendo being able to manufacture said Switch Pros. I feel like the Switch Pro rumour mill has really powered down. Or maybe just people are so fucking bored of all the liars saying that they know about it and then it not happening. Well, you know, they are liars, aren’t they? Basically, all the people who said it was and then it was the OLED. You know, literally in the week before they were like, it’s happening, the 4K Switch next week. So yeah, Breath of the Wild 2 next year. Maybe it’ll be a crossover game for some other Switch. But I don’t know. I don’t even know how I feel about the Switch these days. Oh, and I love the Switch. I don’t know how I feel about the Switch successor. It’s quite hard to sort of, you know, seems to be chugging along. It’s such a, you know, you know, I haven’t had a bad time with the Switch this year. You know, it’s probably been my most played console. So it feels like the next year probably has to be the last year of the Switch before something else happens. Like, surely it won’t go on for longer than that. But we are, yeah, actually, I’m not saying that. Like the last thing I reviewed, Bayonetta, you know, was really beginning to like strain against what that system can do and it’s what it’s happy doing. And you thought, oh, it’d be a shame if we didn’t get to see like Bayonetta 3 running smoothly one day on another Switch because this is just a little bit too herky-jerky for my liking. Yeah, I think it’s also important to remember that like Nintendo typically does leave, during a successful generation, we’ll leave up to six years between formats, right? Yeah. And we are still not at the six year point, we’re approaching it in March, but we’re not there yet. This has been a phenomenally successful run for the Switch. It hasn’t stopped selling importantly as well, which may be affecting some of the decision-making. It’s kind of like approaching the point where it’s sold enough that it’s kind of a successful as an old home console and a handheld combined. Like it’s that, it really is that successful, which is phenomenal. So yeah, I think you’ll be right at some point, but at least we got the Breath of the Wild sequel thing happened Matthew, we know that’s coming, so that’s good. Cool. So here’s finally one where I’ve done quite well. The two Yakuza historical games, Ishin and Kenzan, released this year on modern formats. Now, not correct for the year and like it’s not Kenzan, it’s just Ishin, but that is a good call, I think. Yeah, great shout. Yeah, so here we are, like it’s been, it’s not really just a re-release, it’s like a full-blown kind of remake they’ve done with their nice modern visuals coming next year. Very good, we’re gonna get to see a different side of Yakuza, which is now called Like a Dragon, mirroring what it’s called in Japan. How do you feel about that? I prefer Yakuza. It’s got a sort of PS2 era stickiness to it. I just think that’s a better name. Even if it doesn’t always tally with what the games are, it is always in that world. I don’t know, the thing I was curious about is, I hope they haven’t been threatened by the real Yakuza. To stop using that name, I would hope not. I read some speculation in a very excellent Game Informer interview piece with the new producers. That is because the Yakuza’s own power has diminished in recent years, so it no longer makes sense to call them that. Yakuza are no longer cool enough to have a cool game series name after them. Yeah, that’s it. Whereas Yakuza is a great name. I like the idea that real world Yakuza’s are now like, well, shit, we better get our act together. They’re no longer naming a cool game after us, so we’ve got to be more badass, let’s go and hit people with a Gashapon machine. But they made a Michael Mann series about us, how are we not cool? Yeah, so yeah, that’s funny. I’d just stick with Yakuza personally, but hey. So that one Matthew is actually a big old tick, which is nice. So what’s your next? Oh, go on. So that great Game Informer article, that one, I thoroughly enjoyed that when you link that to that. I really like the detail of the games having big karaoke mini games because there’s a guy on the team who’s like obsessed with karaoke and has a printout, which it suggested he carried around with him of every song he could sing at karaoke. Yeah. Which is, I don’t really know what that list is for. Does he hand it to you and then you’re like, you sing this song off this list or like what’s that for? That’s interesting to me. Yeah. It was quite cool reading them being like, yeah, so loads of the old devs left, but now they’ve left, we can all be promoted, which is nice. I was like, yeah, fair play. I love that they, yeah, it was just a really good behind the scenes look at the thinking and the people behind these games who are not negotiate. That’s real round feature that I’ll link it on the Twitter feed. I’m sure people have seen it by now. So what’s your next one Matthew? My next one is, someone buys Capcom. Fucking rubbish. So vague. Based on absolutely nothing. I mean, I guess I was thinking more about acquisitions generally, and I was like, who do I think still in play? Obviously no one could have predicted the Xbox Activision play that followed soon after this episode. Also, I actually think Square Enix dumping all their Western studios is also pretty massive this year. Yeah, especially because one of them just got shut down and their game is deleted forever, which is not great, I would say. No, not a good ad for that whole process. Sony bought Bungie, I guess. That’s a thing. These are all boring acquisitions though. What I would define as exciting acquisition is Microsoft buying Obsidian or Microsoft buying Bethesda. If someone buys Capcom, they might change Capcom. Why would you change Capcom, you know? Yeah, if like Nintendo bought Platinum, that would be exciting. Matthew Castle Productions buys Shootacome. That’s like, you know, that’s what I’m kind of hoping for. Sometimes these things are legit interesting and people pick interesting studios and those studios are secure so they can keep making the things they’re good at. That’s good, but I don’t know, man. Fewer surprise acquisitions, more surprise Japanese studios giving their precious IP to like indie studios in the West. That’s a good story, that’s what I want. Exactly, I completely agree with you. Very good, Matthew. So it’s one of mine, isn’t it? Mm-hmm. Okay, Jedi Fallen Order sequel is announced. Tick, this year. The Tick. Yeah, yeah. All right. And it lets you play as the Sith. Cross, that was correct, incorrect. So yeah, they did announce the sequel. I think it was at the Star Wars thing, whatever the fuck that’s called, the thing where it’s like a load of shops in like a hall and then you just walk around and then you go home. What was it called again? Celebration, that was it. Celebration. Yeah. You think they’ve come up with a better Star Wars pun for that? Yeah, you’d think so. Like something that riffs on like Life Day, the Wookiees and the Star Wars Holiday Specials, some bullshit like that. But in any case, in any case, yeah, they’re making a sequel. It’s set a bit further along in the timeline. It’s got the same dude in it, so you don’t play as the Sith. And I think the speculation is EA is now doing super short PR cycles for things. So Game Awards is where you’ll see a trailer for it, and then it will just be out in like March basically. So yeah, I’m well up for that. So it’s nice to see that break cover. But I was there thinking, oh, it’s nice they’ve turned that around relatively quickly. And it’s like, nope, that was three years ago that game came out and this one isn’t out yet. So yeah, but- I just hope that Stig Asmussen takes a bit more inspiration from God of War III and gives it more of that momentum, climbing giant titans, maybe a very risque wookie sex mini game. Who knows what could happen? He’s got to climb one big star destroyer and then just get to the top and beat the Emperor to death. That could be- That would be my dream Star Wars game. That would actually be good. That’s kind of what the Force Unleashed should have done. It should have gone more in that direction. But yeah. So yeah, that one is kind of accurate. It’s gonna happen anyway, but yeah. It’s called Jedi, I think it’s called Jedi Survivor or something. Slightly clunky name, but I look forward to it. What’s your next one, Matthew? That we will see a new game from Kazuki Yabuki, which I swear I’m not pronouncing that right, because Catherine was laughing at me saying Kazuki Yabuki a lot in the last episode. Now it makes me laugh when I say it, who is Mr. Marocart and Arms at Nintendo EPD Software Group Number 9. What an amazingly fun sounding name. This was a little bit me looking at Nintendo and thinking, who here hasn’t made a game in a while? And I felt like there was a big gap between Arms and, well, a post Arms for him. Now, he may have been just heavily involved in the Marocart DLC, which was obviously a surprise announcement this year, but he is kind of in charge of Marocart still. He’s like the kind of creative director of that. I just, I just, you know, not sort of sound like a broken record. There was this wing of Nintendo that started making new games, you know, which basically gave us Splatoon and Arms. And then they haven’t really done anything else other than lots of Splatoon and no Arms 2, which I’m assuming isn’t going to happen. So I just, I just want to see like something new from the young blood of Nintendo. That’s all I want. Is that too big an ask? I sort of predicted it might be another sports game because I felt like there was a piece of the puzzle missing from their online subscription service. Again, Marocart turned up and kind of blitzed a lot of that. Also, they released Nintendo Switch Sports this year, which has an online element to it. So, yeah, like this prediction was wrong, but Nintendo did make some stuff in that space. I think that’s like reasonably good. There’s like the speculation now as well that Nintendo basically makes this stuff, it’s done, and then it just sort of sits in a vault for a while. Like that Fire Emblem game, people said it was like basically done for a year before they released it. So he might have made something that already exists and is ready for release, but might not come out for another year or so, Matthew. Yeah, and there’s a chance of that. Or, you know, again, if you buy into new console rumours, you think, are they prepping games for that? Whatever that might be, that would be exciting. Did you see old Sakurai sort of wink-winking at the idea of a Kid Icarus uprising port? Yeah, I did. And I was quite surprised by that because it seems very un-Nintendo to let that sort of thing drop. But I suppose he’s got a lot of control over Kid Icarus, I suppose. That has to be a thing. Like, he can’t possibly get sign-off to do that and just bait all the Nintendo fans because it feels like even though he’s his own man and he’s making his YouTube series, like, Nintendo must have considerable sign-off on that thing, you’d think, given what he’s saying. It feels like a bit of marketing. They’re very nicely edited and put together videos, so yeah, I can sort of see that. But yeah, that would be great, wouldn’t it? Because that’s kind of like a bit of a lost 3DS classic in a lot of ways. Yeah. Yeah, never sold. If they did a big official pass on it as well, because it’s a very spectacular kind of cinematic game. One of their only games which sort of really feels a bit more sort of western in that style, like a western third-person action adventure with a very weird control scheme. So yeah, I’d be up for it. I refuse to play it unless they release it with some fucking bullshit stand that I have to put my switch on in order to play it. If I don’t have arthritis after two minutes of playing this game, I ain’t interested. That’s, yeah, good one. Okay, oh god, my last two are so shit. I’m gonna promise to make these more exciting next year, listen, because I just like, but then I probably said that the year before and then fucked it anyway. By the end of the year, I’ll be at least one expansion into Final Fantasy 14. Nope. Yes, I was recently litigated in the Discord. It’s just a bit too much of a time sink and there’s been too much to play this year. This podcast is kind of like the worst enemy to me getting into an MMO, basically. It’s not efficient for me to just play one game over and over again. That’s kind of why I stopped playing Destiny and Apex, so I can actually make this podcast on the rig. And while I still would like to see the delights of Final Fantasy 14, it feels like it’s getting away from me slightly as I ease further into my thirties. Does Catherine ever give this a go, Matthew? She’s talked about it, but she plays so many games for work. She’s really, really diligent as a website editor. She wants to play everything that everyone else is playing, so she can kind of weigh in on it. It dooms your personal playing habits. I think she’s made a decent dent on Xenoblade 3, but it’s one of her favorite game series, and she hasn’t played that because she’s playing SteamFest demos because she works hard. She sure does. Yeah, well, it’s sort of still on my radar. I just, I don’t know. It’s probably not gonna happen anytime soon, so I’ll refrain from putting this on the list next year in favor of something that might actually happen. Okay, good. So what’s your, are you on your last one now? I’ve got two more. Okay, what’s the next one? There will be a new Famicom Detective Club and it will be amazing. Again, purely based on the fact that they did those ports, which were quite well received, and I thought just too lovingly made for something you’d never return to. And the people who were ported there, I think are mages, who are the visual novel outfit behind Steins Gate and the like, said, oh, we love doing this so much, we’d love to make more of these and we feel like we’ve got our head around it now. I also thought if you made a new one, it could fix all the problems, because it wouldn’t be sort of indebted to this design from 30 years ago, which plays largely like ass, was my opinion. I know other people are more into them. Lucy came onto our visual novel episode, I think is a lot more into these games than I am, for example. Didn’t happen, probably too soon really. Like if they put those games out last year, and there was a positive reaction, it’ll probably take more than a year to get their head around that and get that into production, if it is going to happen. So that was just me showing how little I know about video game development and scheduling in the industry. Tell you what though, a reasonably solid year in the detective game genre, right? Like you had at least two things to see that you’ve enjoyed in Pentament and what’s the other one? The Golden Idol one? Pentament Golden Idol and don’t forget the Centennial files. That’s good. I think you should talk about it for 25 minutes, Matthew. The game I was so boring about, you forgot even existed. You’ve just written that out of your brain. I thought it was fine. You were just, for some reason, that has just killed you. Like that’s like, you are so hung up on that. And I’m never bored by your company, Matthew Castle. I’ve always had a good time, so. I think that that game is my kryptonite. And I love it, but I just can’t make it sound interesting. So, yes. But yeah, good year for Detective Games. Yeah, for sure. A trend I’m very happy with. Yeah, feels like Obra Dinn’s kind of led to this point a little bit, doesn’t it? Like it’s, there’s also that locomotive out next year. I think that one of Jay’s former colleagues is making that. So yeah, might hit him up for codes when that launches. The listeners don’t need to know that really. That’s my kind of pod admin business. And so, my last one. Oh, so boring to end on. Oh, I’ve got another one. That’s good, yeah, that’s good. Hopefully you’ll end us on a big high. Will you end us on a big high? Nope. Rockstar announces a new game that isn’t a GTA. Nope, didn’t happen. What did happen is the actual GTA leaked, which was like a massive, strange surprise. I think we’ve all kind of wiped from our collective memory. Do you know what I mean? The Centennial Files episode. It’s exactly the same, just as traumatic for as many people. Yeah, I feel like out of respect, we all sort of drew a curtain on that and were like, yeah, that sucks that happened for them. Let’s just wait until the actual game’s ready, which I think is a good way of looking at it. Like I had no desire. It’s like they were all scared of being sued personally for a million pounds for just talking about it. It just went too wide for everyone to be sued. That was the thing. And the people thought safety in numbers, if we all write news about it, Rockstar can’t sue all of us. Oh, what an amazing idea for a crime. Like if 200 people decide to rob at like a village post office, you’re not gonna put all 200 people in jail for it. Yeah, that’s really funny. Prisoners are oversubscribed as they are. Yeah, that’s it. What are you gonna do? Like have 200 million in damages paid? Come on. Honestly, like crime in numbers, that’s the key. That’s the secret to getting away with crime. I think. Well, I suppose like the argument they can make is that like it leaked because some prick went on there and like took all the information against their consent and stuff. That which is genuinely a crime. And I think that person has been like prosecuted for it. But all the new sites, I bet they couldn’t believe their luck. Like in GTA 6 leaking. That must have been like the best Sunday ever for those sites. So yeah, that was a very strange moment that happened. But Rockstar didn’t announce the new game this year. I think they just did. I actually have no idea what happened to GTA Online this year. I have no idea if they did any more DLC for it or whatever. But I don’t know. I think that part of me still longs for there to be some kind of smaller Rockstar project that isn’t a GTA or Red Dead. But yeah, that’s that. Oh, should we mention the listener though, Matthew, who wrote in and said, I’m pretty sure at some point someone did shout, get me the bends. Like, should we talk about that? Oh yeah. I think that was, we were allowed to share that. I think they were a former person, right? Or maybe they knew someone. Show us, read out. I won’t name the person who wrote in. So, subject line, get me the bends. Dear gents, the podcasts are great, blah, blah, blah. You know the drill, but really they are. Your Leslie Benzies related chat is always a highlight. I love the idea we talk about it enough that it’s always a highlight. I’m lucky enough to know someone who worked as a game tester at Rockstar in the Red Dead 2, sorry, Red Dead 1 and GTA 4 days. His voice has even made it into GTA 4 as a terrified pedestrian. Apparently the company had only about 100 people in Edinburgh at the time, so occasionally bumped into the senior management at lunchtimes, et cetera. We were at the pub recently, and of course I had to ask about Get Me The Benz. This did feel like a risk. Would the joke be ruined for me with a simple dismissal of the phrase as something obviously made up? Should I really have asked about it? I need not have worried. He answered immediately without even a pause for reflection or consideration. The answer was a resounding yes. While he can’t claim to have heard this phrase verbatim, it was exactly the sort of thing he recalls hearing all the time. This is enough evidence for me to be satisfied to truly believe in Get Me The Bens. And I hope the two of you are convinced to Bens on heading into the future as well. So yeah, I suppose the usual caveats of we have not substantiated this with a second source. Oh yeah, like we’re not submitting this as evidence in Bens’ lawsuit. No, exactly. But I do like the idea of Get Me The Bens being a thing that was yelled. I mean, that being at least partially confirmed in some way is a lot of fun, isn’t it? So let that distract from my very boring, awful prediction. What’s your last one, Matthew? I actually think I actually get it wrong. I always say to Get Me The Bens, I think it’s what the actual quote is, I need the Bens. Okay, right. And I always make the point that if Bens is in the office, why would they need to ever request him? He’s already there. He’s not working on the project. Isn’t it implied that he’s working on something else and they’re like, get fucking Lesley Benz’s on this because he’s the guy who can fix it? Yeah. That was my read. Summon the Bens. Summon the Bens. Invoke the Bens. He presses the button on his phone to his receptionist and says, can you bring the Bens into my office? And then she says, I’ve got the Bens for you. I’ve got the Bens on my one. I love the idea of someone saying, get me the Bens. And then he goes through some sort of 60s genre show style tube that leads straight into Dan House’s office. None of this is in the lawsuit because it’s all made up, just to be very clear about that. Get me the Bens. Oh, it’s so good. I wish I will never have a nickname as good as the Bens. No, it’s tragic, isn’t it, really? But I will never be as important as that, so I don’t need a nickname that good. It doesn’t matter. So, to close out then, what’s your last prediction, Matthew? Well, it was based on the idea that a GoldenEye remake was imminent, or a GoldenEye re-release was imminent, and my prediction was that it would happen and that we will all regret going back to GoldenEye. Actually, this is perfectly timed because this is the experience I had watching a lot of Bond films for our recent XXL episode, where we ranked all the Bond films. A lot of happy memories were shattered by going back to these films and seeing what they were actually like. I hadn’t seen a lot of them for maybe 20 years, had them locked away as cherished filmic memories, and then when you watch them, you realize that they’re just very shonky or have very dubious ideas or dubious performances or incredibly ancient bonds, which didn’t seem clear. You don’t notice that when you’re 10. We obviously go into all this in the episode. It’s well worth a listen. And I think the same about GoldenEye. I love GoldenEye. It’s probably one of my most played games of all time, but I don’t know if going back to it will actually be a good thing. Because I definitely sort of shattered my rose-tinted specs when I went back to Perfect Dark. When that was re-released on my Xbox Live Arcade, I was like, man, I spent like a thousand hours playing this. Like, if this. And I don’t know if we should go back sometimes. Yeah, I think that personally, the fact that they did such a nice port of Perfect Dark means that my brain is calibrated to 90s level expectations. The worst thing about that reveal, the Bond reveal, is the confusion around who’s getting what version and what the different versions look like. That has been super confusing. And it remains as such. It’s online multiplayer in the N64 version, but then the Xbox version will presumably be in HD and look quite nice, because it’s coming to the Rare Replay Collection, which is a really nice freebie to give away, I think, very generous by Microsoft. So yeah, but really, I wanted to hear the term remaster, and the actual remaster they made for this that exists, that you can go and just download. I think it’s on archive.org, the sort of redo of this, because it’s not really, you know, it’s for preservation, basically. It’s not meant to be commercially available. That version just seems to be lost, basically, and they’re just going to do something else. It’s very strange, the whole thing. But yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I think a lot of us will basically play Facility, and then we’ll log off and forget about it. That’s going to be like 80% of players, is my prediction. Yeah, I just don’t know if I’ve got both trips to surface in me anymore. Yeah, I certainly don’t have it in me to do complex on 00. Yeah, Giant Jungle is my least favourite level in that. Yeah, I guess the question is, will that look like someone’s smeared paint on your glasses when you do that level next time? Green paint, that’s the… Yeah, that’s tough. Yeah, interesting to see. At least it’s not like we’re bringing back the Daniel Craig GoldenEye version. That would be hilariously cursed, or like the world is not enough FPS on N64. I swear we had a listener say that they thought that was good as, if not better than GoldenEye, which was like, that was a real like, should we pack up the podcast? I choose to believe that never happened and that our listeners are better than that. That’s upsetting, that is. That’s like when you went on YouTube and you found someone trying to make the case for the Mission Impossible game being like a forgotten GoldenEye, and it was like, just clearly not true, but everyone involved seemed to have a good time. It’s actually a proto hit, man. I do love a terrible take like that. Yeah, okay, good. So, yeah, that will come back at some point, and hopefully next year we’ll finally see some of what this 007 game from IO looks like. You’d hope that we’re getting to that point, but these in-between bond times are the perfect time to release a game that’s got a different bond in it, I would argue. I was thinking that about Indiana Jones also. Yeah, that’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it? I think this year has been four years since Wolfenstein 2 as well. Maybe longer. Do you think it will be a game of the film? No, surely not. Here’s a question. Do you think they’ll get Harrison Ford to voice him? That’s like Bethesda Bugs. You can see it happening, right? It depends if it’s old Harrison Ford. You’d think if it’s a film of the game, a game of the film, then sure. But if it’s like young Indiana Jones, you don’t want like grizzled Harrison Ford coming out of it. No. They should get the guy who did Enferno’s Tomb and Inferno Machine and all those other classics. Because that guy sounded quite… He had quite a good Harrison Ford impression. Yeah, he was pretty decent. Yeah. Also, do you think that game will be third person? Because they’ve only ever made first person games, right? So, what do you reckon? These should be left for the 2023 Predictions episode, shouldn’t they? Yeah. I want it to be first person, but you can constantly see the rim of Indy’s hat like poking at the top of the screen in a really irritating way. It’s like my peripheral vision is slightly fucked by this hat being on. You always have to like crane your neck back because Indy’s hat is blocking like the top third of the screen. And it’s got like a take your hat off button in the middle of a conversation. You know that there’ll be achievement for like that hat keeps getting knocked off. And if you pick it up and carry the same hat through the whole game, you’ll get an achievement for like holding on to Indy’s hat. My favourite thing that we do on this podcast is when a game that we know nothing about yet, you and I just design it from scratch and then come up with incredibly granular interactions that definitely won’t make the finished product, but we have a great time. I’m hoping someone from Machine Games has listened to this podcast and they’re like, you know what, that’s a fucking great idea. Like a button to pull your hat through like slowly closing doors. I’d say that’s like a top 10 Indy moment you have to deliver. To me, it just sounds like a QTE. I’d mark it down for that personally. Big harsh though, I’m only joking. I do think we’re in a position now where the more game developers who listen to this, the more evidence will be accumulated that we’re dunderheads who don’t know what we’re doing. Well, that’s why I worry when people say like, when they follow the Twitter and then I look at their profile and it turns out that they’re from a studio, I’m like, oh, yikes, we’re so stupid. Well, I’m so stupid. You know a bit more than I think you’re letting on because you were a frontier. I think you’re careful not to reveal that. Yeah, but I can remember when I was saying that thing about oh, races and cyber bunk are probably easy to implement. And then I said a little bullshit about pathfinding where I was like, I don’t know what I’m talking about. What am I doing there? I have no business talking about this. I’m glad we’re above the level of like lazy devs didn’t do this. Oh yeah, we didn’t do anything like that. But yeah, I am totally guessing at everything that happens internally basically. Yeah, but I like your suggestion of minor hat based Indiana Jones interactions, Matthew. I think you’re on a good path there. That’s got big creative director energy that other people have to make it for you. I think I could do that job. I could sit in a chair and just be like, there’s a hat and it’s going to keep falling off and we’ve got to have like a whole hat physics system and a hat retention system and a way of like judging the hat so that we can give you an achievement at the end for that. The hat achievement is just too good to not put in there. Yeah, the funny AAA developers out there are looking for a creative director. Just drop us a line, backpagegames.gmail.com. We’ll have Matthew do that job. That would be good. Honestly, if you listen to this podcast, I had a great idea for like Jaws as like a Mr. X in Resident Evil 2 style figure in the Bond episode. Yeah, that’s true. I’m sure you’ve pitched that for like another… I like the idea of like a Mr. X version in all these different games. Who would it be in Indiana Jones? The boulder. Well, it just turns up at a dinner party in like a tuxedo, the boulder. It’s the boulder, he’s having a romance scene. Rolls off the top of the spaceship at the end of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just squashes him. Oh, that is so funny. If they haven’t implemented boulder mode, machine games, you are missing a trick. Oh dear. Now I remember why we do these episodes. They’re good containers for other bullshit, aren’t they? That’s what, the predictions are like really, that’s like 5 out of 10 content, but the bits around it are just like, yeah, fun stuff. This is the reward for people who put up with the slightly average 1 hour 15. Yeah, get to the gold at the end and have a laugh. I think we should end it there, Matthew, because we won’t be the boulder in a tuxedo having a romance scene. That’s tip top. So, yes, a shorter episode, The Back Page is over. This is the first episode of December, actually, we have a good month coming up. We excelled to our episode this month. It’s actually going to be best video game levels volume 1. We have a nice idea for how we’re going to do that. So slight change from the original plan, but only to make you a better pod, you, the listeners. So, yeah, you can check out a full plan on Twitter. At Back Page pod on Twitter, there’s a pinned tweet that says everything that’s coming in December. If you want to check it out. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I’m at MrBazzill underscore Pestay. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.