Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by, ever by, I’ll let you talk again, fuck’s sake, I’m a bit rusty myself. I can keep that in if you want that, I won’t. Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how goes the dying days of your holiday break? I don’t know if you do this, but you sort of start the holiday with like, oh, I’ve got 10 days off or whatever, and it seems like the most exciting thing, but then your holiday just becomes increasingly dominated by fear that the holiday’s running out. Just becomes this sort of vicious cycle of doom and gloom. So that’s where I’m at. Yeah, very much so. I’m launching a game in February, so that’s on my mind a little bit, the last seven days or so. Then I had Covid across the entire Christmas break, basically, so that’s tough. Excited about my impending return to coffee shops when this is over in about three days, so that’s good. It’s damn decent of you to properly quarantine yourself away. Well, you know, it’s all the best you can do, isn’t it? The most offensive thing I did was go to that van outside Sainsbury’s and collect my groceries while wearing a medical mask. That seems like a fair sort of like, yeah. And also having a McDonald’s delivered by Deliveroo. That’s one for Big Sammy, but what can you do? How do you spend your break? Do you do anything interesting sort of games-wise, or did you just let the time evaporate around you like I did? I was too brain dead to really achieve anything over this break. Yeah, I made a sort of conscious decision to not play loads and loads of games and just to kind of like relax my brain a bit and have a bit of a purge. I was playing The House in Fata Morgana, which is like a pretty grim hang. Like it’s probably the exact opposite of the cliche of the Christmas game. There’s nothing like warm or friendly or relaxing about that game at all. It’s set in a very cold house and very miserable things happen there constantly. But it kind of amused me to see sort of in my eye line at all times, I could see like a relative snoring on a sofa or was eating like loads of quality streets. So that juxtaposition was quite fun. Yeah, aside from that, I’ve been playing a bit of Steam Deck the last couple of days. I was suddenly struck with this desire to play the Rusty Lake series, Escape the Room puzzle games. They were Flash series and then they got turned into something a little bit more. You can buy like, I don’t know, there’s like 12 of them or something, but they all, you know, I bought them as a little bundle on Steam and have been tapping my way through those, which has been quite jolly actually. Quite a nice start to my gaming year. Yep, that sounds gentle. For me, I have mostly been playing Vampire Survivors on my Steam Deck, restarting progress on a different format, which is foolish for a game like that. But it was the only game I really had the capacity to play as I was slowly kind of melting from Covid. And apart from that, I’ve been watching The English with my family. We watched the entire mini-series, as we all got increasingly ill over the break, which actually is quite an immersive way to watch that show. We all just sat under blankets being delirious, you know. That’s quite a nightmarish thing to consume in an ill, I would imagine. Yeah. It’s got quite a fevered manic energy to it anyway. Yeah, you sort of bookend it with the odd like, you know, elf or another Christmas movie and it kind of takes the edge off a little bit, but yeah. I like the idea of having to have an elf chaser to follow up the English. Yeah. Also finished Ghost Squad in the arcade as well. Spent about seven quid just running through the levels of my little brother. That was quite fun actually. Just played Ghost Squad in co-op. Sounds great. I’ve never actually played the arcade machines, so. Yeah, they had the guns and everything. So, you know, you got like a little grenade launcher button and stuff like that. It was, yeah, very, very good. In an otherwise very cursed talkie arcade that has like a decreasing amount of good stuff in it. At least they have a Star Wars trilogy arcade machine, which is a personal favorite, but that’s gone now. So, what can you do? So, yeah, I was wearing a mask. This was before I realized I had Covid. I thought I just had a cold and I was just, yeah, slowly becoming more and more delirious while playing Ghost Squad in talkie. That was my holiday break, Matthew. I wonder what’s the worst Covid game, Ghost Squad or Bayonetta? We both sank into illness playing quite hectic, unreal, arcadey experiences. Oh, yeah, your Bayonetta experience was super immersive. It’s like, are these monsters in the game or am I imagining the giant baby face on the end of this dragon head or whatever? Yeah, very good. So, yes, I’m steadily recovering. Nice to be podcasting again. It was definitely a fairly intense end of the year, wasn’t it, as you and I sort of burned through a bunch of stuff to try and forge good top 10 lists, which I feel like we did. The response seems to have been good. I don’t think we’ve massively shit the bed. So yeah, success. Yeah, it was the first year I didn’t shit the bed, so I was quite happy with that. I was happy with my top 10 rather than like getting to January 2nd and being like, oh, I finished Metroid Dread now and it’s not on my fucking list. That podcast is a write-off. That hasn’t happened yet, which is good. So this month, yes, we’re doing this, doing a mailbag this episode. So answering over 20 questions from our listeners, which have built up. It’s been a little while since we’ve done anything like this. And then we’ve got 20, 23 gaming predictions. And then our first Excel Patreon episode of the month is Rockstar Open World Games ranked. So that’ll probably be a, yeah, that’ll be a good time, I think, for people who are interested in such things. There’ll also be best games of 2014 this month. And there’s a GameScore episode planned this month too. So fairly packed, but also like for us actually, that’s a reasonably light touch month, isn’t it, Matthew? We needed to have a bit of time to build up to doing a big series, Retrospective, etc. again. Are you kind of in that headspace as well? It’s quite nice not having loads and loads of homework, just to sort of set a better pace for 2023. I think it would be good. There you go. Very tired man, Matthew Castle. Okay, so, yeah, a whole bunch of questions here from our listeners. Matthew, this first one’s kind of more feedback than the question, I guess. There is a question in there, so I’ll just read this one out and then we’ll take it in turns, yeah? Sounds good? Yeah, sounds good. Brothers! Sorry, I read that in the Liquid Snake voice. Oh, I read it as in the Scottish head from God of War. Oh yeah, that’s probably a more grander God of War reference. Yeah, brothers, that kind of thing, yeah. Yeah, okay, but I still like Liquid Snake because he does shout, brothers, a lot. As 2022 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting back on the last couple of years and how lucky I am to have found The Back Page. I can’t remember exactly how I found it. Was I just following Matthew around the internet after the weak spot folded? But I’m so glad I did. The amount of effort you all put into planning the show schedule, ensuring audio and recording quality is high, and most importantly, providing well thought out and fun content is impressive. It has to be a ton of work. There’s no way you can put together such a cohesive, in-depth, multi-hour show weekly without spending many more hours behind the scenes preparing. You both deserve the show to continue to grow. Without a doubt, it’s my favourite pod in my line-up and I look forward to every Friday and sometimes Monday for new content. God, that’s a really good ad for the pod and I feel very self-indulgent reading that out, but it’s nice to get their feedback. When we get to some of the later questions, I was going to skip the praise bits, but let’s have one praise dump up front and then we’ll move on. Just from this one, we’ll probably get 60% of the listeners to switch off anyway, so that will rule them out and then we’ll just continue from there. Okay, there’s also real shared experience you both tap into in many episodes. I imagine many listeners are around your ages. I’m 36 and have fond memories of gaming days past insert with wistful stare. I wouldn’t trade the life I have now to go back it’s an interesting thing to throw in there. Something that the listeners obviously thought about, but it’s a joy to reflect back on those memories and hear you all share yours. Thank you for your honesty and candidness about time is both good and bad. It shines through in the pod. I hope you will continue to podcast with a renewed figure in the new year. You’ve caught lightning in a bowl and I’d love for you all to hit those min-max levels of support one day. Greatness often comes with humble beginnings. Please consider some beefier Patreon tiers, perhaps a 10 pound tier or more and more interesting stretch goals like you’re doing currently. I’m looking forward to 2023. Keep up the fantastic work. Your friend in Chattanooga, Tennessee, only 40 minutes on the Jack Daniels Distillery, Andy Burnett, that’s Butterbeans on the Discord, I think. And then there was some nice feedback there on the Metal Gear episode that we did on Patreon and the Star Wars XL, XXL one and the Japanese crime fiction one, which are good paywall content. So I suppose the question here, Matthew, is the 10 pound, the odd over 10 pound tier for Patreon. We’ve not done anything like this because with the time and energy we have, there’s nothing more we can really provide. And so I didn’t want to just like rinse people for money unnecessarily. And the way we’ve got it, I think is quite fair. What do you think of this? I think we dent the quality of the current podcast output if we were to do more podcasts and we haven’t really got the capacity or inclination to look into physical rewards, I don’t think. Nah, they’re just gonna become really, really pricey in this climate as well to send anything physical out. It’s just gonna be a nightmare, you know? Yeah, I feel like when you look at the people who do have more tiers, you know, it’s you’re getting into the realms of like this, the Patreon is the thing which supports them like fully. You know, it’s more like a company. And so they can think it, you know, plan it out more carefully and take a big punt. You know, just consider us very lucky to get what we do get. And, you know, amazed that we get what we do get. I don’t plan to jack in my job and go full Patreon or anything, which is probably what it would take to make the Patreon more complicated, tears-wise. Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it. I also like Matthew, I echo the grass-dew for what we do get. Like it’s already far beyond my expectations and I don’t really expect it to keep growing. The podcast listenership is sort of like steady. It’s sort of like doesn’t massively spike month to month, really. It’s sort of like, but we’ve got about 6,000 listeners until something like that. And then like, yeah, and so about 10% of our audience is subscribed on Patreon. I can’t really ask more than that. So yeah, I think rather than like we’ve got another question about this later on, actually, which I’ll get some more thoughts on this a little bit. But yeah, I don’t know. I just can’t think of anything good. So in the meantime, the idea of what we’re doing, which is stretch goals to unlock new mini series. So the one we’ve kind of currently got coming out, of course, is the PC Gaming Classics one that Jeremy and Phil are making. That’s a good example of what we’d like to do if we had the extra money, I suppose, is commission shows some people who know what they’re talking about and people who maybe share our editorial values a little bit, that sort of thing. But yeah, in terms of just putting 10 pound there for the sake of it, I just can’t quite bring myself to do it. I think four pound fifty for everything, it’s slightly less than a game’s mad costs when you pay the tax and stuff. And it’s like the two pods we make on there is pretty beefy and hopefully worth paying for. And that’s kind of that seems fair enough, you know. A tenner is like two decent sandwiches. Yeah, it depends on where you go, I suppose. But yeah, it’s like, you know, two reasonably good pret sandwiches. Yeah. Would that get you to actually would get you two whole bagels. Those those are great sandwiches. So yeah. And then once you factor in the gift card with the stamps, you know, you’re getting into the realms of like three bagels. But let’s not overcomplicate it. That’s cool. So what you’re saying is let’s not mail order sandwiches at a £10 tier, Matthew. That’s what you’re saying. Good. Sandwich sampler tier. Just said we’ll send you a great bath sandwich and it may or may not arrive in edible condition. Hey, Samuel. What my chop liver. Hey, Samuel. Hope all is good. This is a direct DM to me on Twitter. That’s what it says. Right. That makes sense. Comment below for the mail bag. If there’s time and space, don’t worry if there’s not. I shouldn’t have read that out. It’s a terrible start. I was just listening to the Game of the Year episode on a plane journey and had the urge to write in. The Games of the Year episode got me wondering, is The Back Page now the stingiest review outlet in gaming? Elden Ring with Universal 10s? Nah, just part of a sea of eights this year. Immortality? The PC Gamer? 95%? Rated? And Edge 10? Nah, doesn’t even make an 8 out of 10 list. And aside, does this mean Edge 10s are now Back Page 7s? Yes. In all seriousness, two great lists that reminded me of a few games I missed. I do think there are a few more genuine 9s. Norco, Elden Ring, probably Citizen Sleeper. I completely agree that your lists reflect the fact that this was a year of great indies rather than blockbusters. Keep up the brilliant, Pods. I’d love to see a genuine falling out over a draft this year. I don’t think you would. Gameboy draft? Fingers crossed that’s the one where you and I just go our separate ways. Well that’s the thing. The thing is if we have a genuine fallout, that’s just the end of the podcast. We’re very thin skinned. That’s me. I know we joke about it, but it is true. Like we genuinely are thin skinned. Like it’s not a bit. I think if we turned on each other, that would just be it. I don’t think you could upset me enough to make me not want to make podcasts. We make so much good stuff. I don’t know. I think we could go full banshees. You got something in the tank you’re saving, Matthew, for a particular… No, not at all. No, but I just… I can see it. It’s not impossible. Yeah, I suppose so. But I’m trying to… One of my New Year’s resolutions is to have fewer complicated relationships with my friends and more straightforward ones. Oh, well, that’s good. I mean, if that’s… Yeah, then the chance of friendship being over has lowered considerably. It’s like if you go play the saboteur at your dad’s house, you prick, or something like that, that would bounce off of me. You have to say something really personal, like, I don’t know, find a mistake that was in a copy of PC Gamer seven years ago and say, you were never meant to be a fucking editor, you loser, or something like that. Even then, I don’t think I’d take you seriously. I don’t know, it’s like, it’s tough. I think the closest we ever got was Xbox versus GameCube Draft, and even then, I was just very tense, still starting a new job, so, I don’t know. Maybe I could upset you, but I don’t think you could upset me enough to not want to make it. Well, let’s see, that sounds like you’re laying down the gauntlet. Oh dear, this is an ominous start to 2023. Yeah, oh, there is a question here. I didn’t know if we wanted to tackle the point first about The Back Page being the stingiest review outlet in gaming. Yeah, I should say as well, we said C of 8, so I acknowledge that Elden Ring is a 10 to people who like such things, and I’m not saying it’s really an 8 for me. I guess that’s a hard one, that would be a hard one for me to score, but objectively it’s great, but I suppose I was more broadly talking about the year rather than Elden Ring specifically. And Immortality, again, a game that I really respect what it does. I think I’m not a big enough sort of cinema head, sort of like foreign cinema clever clogs to get that game. I’m a bit more of a dumbass, you know what I mean? I would rather re-watch John Wick 2 than Persona, so that’s just me. Again, Persona the film, not the anime based on the video game. Yeah, Elden Ring, I think we justified it in the episode. The short version is, it’s amazing, but it treated me like shit, so I’m not too worried about treating it like shit, and putting it down lower on the list. It wouldn’t be a heart pick at the top of the list, it just wouldn’t have reflected my genuine tastes. And Immortality I think is a really singular game, and isn’t for everyone. If anything, I’m kind of amazed, and this isn’t a dig at Immortality, I’m amazed it reviewed as well as it did, that it found so many people in our very small fraternity of games reviewers who happened to gel with that kind of filmmaking. The reason Immortality doesn’t massively speak to me is my taste in films and art in general. I like things which are a bit more nuts and bolts, black and white literal stories. I’m not big into my ambiguities, that’s why I like mystery fiction. I like fiction which has a fixed ending, there is a solution to things. And Immortality is the opposite of that, it’s this dream-like thing. I’m not a big David Lynch head, and lots of my peers are. Obviously a game which is quite amorphous and strange is going to speak to them more than it spoke to me. But I’d say that’s the strength of a game, that it has a very singular, specific thing it’s trying to achieve. But that isn’t the criticism of it, that’s Immortality doing what I think Immortality set out to do. It’s good when something can speak to one audience and not everyone. That’s a sign of a healthy medium, really. There’s a bit of consensus culture in games, where people get upset if not all reviewers respect something the same way, angry internet boys jumping on reviewers for giving a game a 7 rather than a 9 or whatever. We should be in a landscape where people can more openly feel like they can openly give scores that reflect their tastes and aren’t trying to speak to some wider audience. Immortality is a game that is so specific in it’s reference points and inspirations that it’s inevitable that there will be some kind of divide. Well done, immortality. Now the actual question. Matthew’s comment about the effective rate he was paid for his Xenoblade 3 review stuck with me. It was something that always frustrated me when I was a freelancer. Writers are expected to work for, in many cases, less than minimum wage for doing a job that is both very difficult and intense. I wondered if either of you, as editors who had commissioned reviewers, had any thoughts about whether there was a way to change this status quo or even any desire to do so. I don’t actually have who that’s from. Oh, it’s someone from Sam Horty, who is an actual journalist and listener. Yeah, he’s a cool dude. So yes, this is interesting. So for me, I did sort of figure out the solution to some PC Gamer, which was we had like a web budget and a print budget, i.e. you know, there was like there was there was both. So if a game was particularly intensive, you could maybe dip from one into another in order to like get the right level of playtime, justifying it, that happened a few times. But generally speaking, I would try and target the big sort of like important games that were very lengthy to members of the team, you know, like that’s why Andy Kelly was absolutely indispensable, because he would review, you know, both Pillars of Eternity games, for example. Or, you know, that you try and fit things to people on team who have the right taste for it. But it, you know, I won’t deny it’s one of these things that’s never, there’s never quite been an easy solution to it, as your Xenoblade situation sort of reflects. It’s not like there is, I don’t know, it’s not like you suddenly have more money to commission reviews when a Japanese RPG comes out. You have the same pot and it’s about how you spend the pot, basically. So it’s tough. On a personal level, accepting the work, the way I’ve always justified it to myself has been, well, you know, I would be playing it anyway. Which is kind of the excuse that I think a lot of reviewers give themselves. It’s like, well, I’d be playing this anyway, so it’s not really work. It is work, it’s your working time. But that’s really the only way I’ve been able to justify it to myself over the years. As an editor, I didn’t have an online budget like you so I couldn’t do that. I tried to keep things fair by like not taking the piss. So if a game’s gonna have, you know, if it’s gonna be a long game, try and give it a decent page count so the rate was higher. You know, you obviously don’t give a 100 hour game like a half page review because the pay is decided by the word count, not the playtime. So try and match it that way. I try and balance the books. If I’d know I’d given someone a bit of a motherfucker one month, I’d try and throw them some, quote unquote, easy work another month. So like, if you took on a rough review for me, I’ll try and balance it out with some like easy preview work or stuff which doesn’t require any playtime whatsoever. I think the solution for people who are like freelancers, this affects freelancers a bit more, is to play games and to be into games where you can pitch stuff afterwards so that playtime begins to even out a bit. So, you know, like the mad thing with Xenoblade for me is, because I don’t do a lot of freelance writing these days, I pretty much only do reviews. I played it, did one review and then that’s the end of my relationship with Xenoblade. But if I’d been pitching opinion pieces which I could have written off the back of it, you know, obviously then that playtime’s beginning to get split across those as well and, you know, I don’t do that, but I know other people do, you know, it’s why some people, you know, they try and, you know, you almost treat a game as like your beat and then go around all the sites trying to squeeze every drop from it possible. So it’s not just an editor thing. I think it’s a writer task as well. I think that’s true. Like an example of sort of good hustle is Jeremy, who is obviously making the PC gaming classic pods for us now, is like writing pieces on Blade Runner or System Shock alongside to kind of like, you know, basically balance out the amount of time I guess he put into reviewing that for us. At the same time, like I think we, you know, we obviously feel like we paid Jeremy and Phil fairly for their time. That was like part of why we did the Patreon stretch goal thing. But I, you know, obviously I endorse trying to get as much out of that endeavor as possible. So yeah, I think that’s that’s kind of one way you can do it to sort of play it smart. But yeah, it’s one of those kind of unanswerable questions. I don’t think Phil Savage ever forgave me for having to review the MMO Firefall on PC Gamer. Like I think he put 60 hours into it, 60 hours he didn’t really enjoy. And like I was like, I don’t just don’t think he ever quite got over it. I think that was kind of like forging him in the fire so he was one day ready to be editor in chief. He just had to go through like this basically sort of like a fine mesh film, just push him through it until he was sort of like fine. So yeah. The worst bit of freelance I ever did was I agreed to review every Xbox Live indie game. You know, those little, you know, they had that, I think it was called that X-Blig. Yeah. Oh, fucking hell. Every mag would do a spread of them and it was a fucking nightmare to make. What a terrible bit of like editorial that was. But I literally, like about a year and a half into X-Blig being a thing, I agreed to Xbox World to review all of them and I literally had to play like, I don’t know, 300, 400 X-Blig games for that. It completely broke me as well because it just filled my head. Like they are, I would say 95% of X-Blig games are like one star pieces of shit. Yeah. And it filled my game with my head with so many just bad games that my frame of reference was completely fucked. So I’d be playing stuff and be like, oh, this is a bit like Chips Warrior. And people would be like, what the fuck are you talking about? I’m like, oh, it’s an X-Blig thing. Don’t worry. Oh no, I’ve forgotten Banjo-Tooie because I’ve played 300 fucking X-Blig games. Oh, that’s funny. That’s like, I didn’t know you’d gone through that, man. Have you been to therapy for that? That sounds like a big deal. I thought it would be funny and it was funny for about the first 20 and then after a while I was like, oh, these are really bad. What was the best one you played out of the bunch? There was this one where you were like this little telekinetic person going around murdering people and it was like a sort of point and click adventure, but also a little bit like not hitman-y, but you were like picking up different items and you could use, I can’t even remember what it was called. There was a couple of rhythm games that were okay. Oh, they were just fucking meme game. There was like about 50 of them were just pong, except the pong paddles and the ball had been reskinned with some like tenuous object, so it would be like the paddles would be two spoons and the ball would be a Brussels sprout and it would be called like sprout pong. There was a lot of that shit. Was Mount Your Friends an X-Split game? That was really fun, but I can’t remember if it was X-Split or not actually. I think that was and I think that was after I did this feature. Right, yeah, because that was obviously a good party game, but like there was one that Chet and John used to always talk about in their podcast. I had a name like Bleed, but it wasn’t Bleed. It was like a shooter thing, so I can’t remember what that’s called. Anyway, yes, X-Split. I have really pushed that deep into the recesses of my mind. I mean, to be fair as well, like, X-Box has pushed it, like, there’s nothing like this on X-Box now. Like, where would you even go to find games like this? That entire market no longer really exists, does it? So, yeah, it’s just been, it’s just no longer part of the equation on consoles. Happy New Year. Thanks again for all the hard work you put into the pod. Apologies if this has been asked before, but my search turned up nothing. Is there a 7 out of 10 film? A true 7 out of 10. That’s one personal idea, so for people who haven’t listened to it, we did best 7 out of 10 games, and Matthew has created this entire weird criteria where to be a true 7 out of 10. It needs to do something very specific, I think like a mix of being of big ideas and then like true jank as well. Like this, something like that Matthew, is your criteria for a true 7 out of 10? You can’t really compare film and game scores like, because it’s something about the technical execution of it as well, which actually, if a film had jank, I would actually find it quite unacceptable. I just don’t really think of films in this way. Well, don’t worry personally, I’ve got your back. I put Die Hard with a Vengeance. I think that’s got a big 7 out of 10. It’s like a 7 out of 10. It’s not as good as Die Hard, but it is really fun and like more throw away. It’s not like a true classic, it’s just quite fun. And it’s got a slightly duffer version of the same villain from the original Die Hard. I think this fulfills 7 out of 10. 7 out of 10 isn’t Chris, as many as 7 out of 10 is good, isn’t it? Yeah. Would you say this is better than a 7 to you? I think Die Hard with a Vengeance is a 4 star film. Okay, fair enough. I mean, it’s somewhere between, hence the 7. But again, this is why 5 star ratings are just how we talk about films really, so it’s quite hard to… I think that’s probably it, I just think of it in terms of those. Right, you’re stressing Matthew out, personal dear, we’ve got to move on. Matthew, what’s your next question? What are the most famous or in-your-wheelhouse games that you’ve never played? What’s stopping you? Or did you play those games later and were you pleasantly surprised, disappointed with them? I kind of struggle with this one, because to be honest, just in the course of the career, anything I wanted to play, I have played. You’re very prolific. You’re much better at ticking things off than I am, because I get the sense you have no moments of downtime, Matthew, where you just sort of stare at the ceiling. You’re like, Catherine, we’re watching a TV show, and if we’re not watching a TV show, I’m off to play Kirby. I imagine that’s like your evening, you know what I mean? Yeah. What have you got for this? Oh, quite a few answers to this. Maybe you’ll say something and it will jolt me into action. Well, the God of War games were like this for me, where they’d been sat there on a shelf. I’d played the first one and a bit of 2018 and a bit of three, a bit of two and all of Chains of Olympus, but none of Ghosts of Sparta. And so playing all those last year felt like me doing that really, where it’s like, okay, big violent action games, cinematic, you know, PS2, Xbox 360 era games, like these are absolutely in my wheelhouse and I should play them. So that’s an example of me ticking them off, you know, and making some solid podcast content out of it. But there’s a few different examples of this. It’s weird that I’ve never played Death Stranding, for example, you know, it’s a Hideo Kojima game. Why haven’t I played it? I don’t really know, to be honest. I’m not sure. I will at some point, but not played that. I’ve never played Knights of the Old Republic 2 for more than a couple of hours. I’m a big Star Wars guy. So that’s a bit strange because everyone says that’s like the, you know, the best portrayal of the force in Star Wars fiction in terms of its ambiguity. So that’s one I should probably play. Thief seems like it’d be my sort of thing. I’ve never played a thief game for more than like an hour of a demo, 1998 one. So yeah, that’s that’s a strange one for me to have not played. And then of course, it was Jet Force Gemini, which I coveted on N64, always wanted to play this rare game, got good review scores from the Nintendo mags, played on the Rare Replay Collection last year and had a really fucking bad time as discussed on the N64 draft. So yeah, those are the ones that come to mind. Total War seems like it should be my sort of thing and I’ve never really played those. I always wanted to play them after watching Time Commander or whatever it was in the noughties, but never did. So yeah, a few examples there Matthew of things I should like, you know. Yeah, that’s good. The only one that’s just popped into my head is I’ve not played Dino Crisis 2, which is a Shootakumi-directed game. So the idea of there being a Shootakumi game I haven’t played seems mad. I just don’t have that easy access to it more than anything. So yeah, I should get on that. What about Japanese games haven’t been translated that you’ve maybe coveted Matthews, anything like that? You played that second Miles Edgeworth spin-off, didn’t you, in the end? Yeah, I mean, I guess there’s some visual novels, the Ushikoshi stuff like Mr. Zero Escape. You know, I think there are fan translations of some of his earlier games. Like, if you were really diligent, you could play a lot more of his oeuvre than I have. So maybe I’ll do that, but they’re just on my, like, potentially to play pile. It’s not like I’m going to say like, oh, I haven’t played Mario Sunshine, you know, because Nintendo stuff, you know, they make them so many years apart. It’s relatively easy to stay on top of most of the big series. You are firmly a guy who knows what he likes kind of character as well, I think. Yeah. OK, so what about this next part of the question? So the second question, do you have any gaming specific New Year’s resolutions, mine are to finish Death Stranding and to try things outside of my game comfort zone? That’s from ContraRa. Yeah, so I’ve kicked one of mine off for this, Matthew. I’m playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time. I’ve always wanted to give that a go at some point, I never found the time because I kept looking at how long to beat and getting scared by the hour count on there, but I’ve started that now. I think I’ve decided against replaying all of the Dragon Age games in 2023 because they’re too long, but I am going to play Inquisition properly this year so we can do a podcast when that Dread Wolf game gets announced or comes out or whatever. That would be fun to do. Likewise Final Fantasy IX is another of my White Whales. I started that over the break and I would like to finish that this year so we can again do a Final Fantasy pod this year where I’ve actually finally played one of the ones that people like the most. So I suppose for me, my resolutions are more about ticking off things that I just have missed in previous years, which I’m always trying to do a little bit. I would also like to keep on top of indie games a bit more this year so I’m not rushing to finish Norco in two days at the end of the year like I did last year. So yeah, I’ll try and try and keep on top of that a bit more, but yeah, that’s kind of it. What about you Matthew? My main one is I want to take more punts on Total Unknowns. So rather than waiting for people to recommend stuff to me, be a bit more proactive in like going into Steam or Itch or whatever, and just to try some stuff which I’ve literally never heard of, because I think we do get trapped slightly in this sort of like vicious cycle of a few good games get picked up by a couple of outlets, then everyone circles them. You know, I was trying to trace back, you know, why, you know, why Norco, you know, what made people jump on Norco to begin with, or what made people jump on Vampire Survivors. And, you know, we must be overlooking games as good as these that just don’t break into the cycle. Like it partly inspired also by what I saw happen with a few years ago when I did like the IGF judging. And the way IGF judging works is they have this huge long list of games, like anyone, you know, any Indies can enter their games. So there’s maybe like 500 or whatever games in there. And then every judge gets given like a random selection, which you have to play and score to help them create the shortlist. But then what happens after that is you can then select which ones you want to try. And people just inevitably end up selecting the things they’ve already heard of, or things which have been a little bit break out. So like, you know, Babba Is You had had a very creative trailer that gone like viral on Twitter. So everyone does their five, kind of begrudgingly does the five they’ve not heard of, and then requests Babba Is You. And as a result, Babba Is You ends up getting, you know, hundreds more votes than anything else just because people want to test the thing they’ve tried. And so actually, when you go into ITF judging, you can tell what the shortlist is going to be before you even started playing. Because you’re like, well, it’s those five most played games at the top. And we aren’t actually discovering anything new. You know, we’re just going for the things which have already been lauded really, like it’s almost pre-decided what’s going to be an indie breakout success, like Goose Game was another one. That was a meme game though, wasn’t it? Well, that’s the thing. But it is me. It’s like things which have like, yeah, a particular, you know, a very sexy angle or were a big meme or whatever, like they just have such a natural advantage. So I really want to try and go in this year with no like, you know, completely take off the blinkers and just go, we’re just going to try like, you know, I haven’t given myself like a, I’m going to definitely try one thing I’ve never heard of every week, but that’s almost kind of what I’d want to be aiming for. Just to try and discover something else, just to, you know, I’d game in the year lists that, you know, I think ours were quite colourful and, you know, reflected our tastes, but it was still games which had been on everyone else’s lists, you know? Well, yeah, the lists were very similar between outlets. I think this is why I asked the question about Game Pass in the Game of the Year episode is how much is that codifying what the kind of canon indies are? You know what I mean? And like, I think it’s playing a massive part in it when you think about how much Norco popped up and a few other games that were on there, you know? So, but that’s it, you know, not taking the easy route, I guess, is the short version of this of just playing what is accessible to me via Game Pass or other subscription services that I have and to like actually like invest in some games I’ve not heard of, and maybe they’ll all be ours, but I imagine they won’t be, and see if I can find something just to, you know, just to have some genuine surprises and to hopefully explore those throughout the year when we do what we’ve been playing or whatever. Did you hear of a game called Control Alt Ego last year? I saw it, I think maybe John Walker covered it on his blog, and I thought, oh, I should probably try that. Yeah, it’s like a British sort of sci-fi immersive sim, basically, where you take control of robots and stuff, and the only people I saw talking about it, I saw John Walker talk about it, and Tony Ellis, formerly a PC Gamer, someone I respect more than anyone else in editorial, he really, really went to bat for it when I met him a few months ago. And then I think Liam Richardson, who edits our Excel pods and works for RPS, also went to bat for it. But that’s an example of a game where it feels like if that had hit the right people, it would have really, really popped. But it needed maybe a PC Gamer review or something like that to get it at further attention. And so you get to the end of the year, and then it’s got nine out of 10 out of 200 reviews on Steam, but it may be missed out on the bumper crop of people it perhaps deserved. And maybe it was one game past inclusion away from being in those lists too. You know what I mean? So I think there is a tendency of some stuff to just become the canon big indies and then a lot of other things to fall out of the sides. And I think that maybe the amount of crossover between the game and the year list this year suggests that that did happen. So I wish you well, Matthew. I think you’re just going to say you’re going to play a different Rusty Lake game every year, every week this year, because I think there are enough of them. Yeah, I mean, I was also going to say I do want to play more JRPGs because it’s a genre I like, but I’ve not played a lot of the canon. The number of Final Fantasies I’ve actually played is tiny. But I also think, well, am I really going to play loads of 50 to 100 hour games? Probably not. That just feels like I’m setting myself up for failure. Yeah, I think this year we’re going to do maybe four or something series retrospectives across the entire year. And so as to not to make them like back breaking labor, basically. Anyway, so this next question actually does tie into it, Matthew. So happy new year, game of the year episode was a treat. I found myself pleasantly surprised at the wide diversity in your picks, which is underscored just how great this year was for indies of all shapes and sizes. Who could have guessed a game like Vampire Survivors would be making so many game of the year lists? With gems like this undoubtedly lurking beneath the embassy of hentai and horror games on the dusty back pages of Steam and itch.io. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I’m going to be trying this year. Basically, I’m going to be playing a lot more hentai games. Match three hentai card games. I can’t imagine what’s to sit in there as a humble browser game waiting to be discovered. I read that out really badly, but I’ve got Covid, please forgive me. A couple of questions here. Do you anticipate more eyes on these types of games from big games media moving forward? How do these mags websites go about tackling this Herculean task of sorting the hits from the chaff? Now, it is like a big thing to ask of an outlet to do that because they all have limited team sizes and you pick your battles. That was certainly how I approached PC Gamer. It was trying to reflect the biggest crop of things you can, but also there are hard limits. There’s only so many reviews you can commission each month, that sort of thing. So doing the discovery is really tough, but this is kind of what you’re talking about, isn’t it Matthew? This is what you’re going to do this year. So people check in with you every month and just see how you’re getting on with it or something. That might be good. This will be a month one, I just replayed Ace Attorney. Sorry. Yeah, month two, I played hentai Tetris this month. Now I’m in prison. Me and Eugenaka, baby. Poor Eugenaka. Again, I think if a crime is funny, should we not forgive it? I feel like that’s a good rule of thumb. I think if a crime is funny or the criminal, regardless of the crime, the criminal is funny themselves. And Eugenaka is a funny enough character because he’s so sour, but I’d let him off with worse crimes, to be honest. I think it’s maybe living in the UK where it’s like what Tory politicians do all the time with bad PPE and shit like that, where I’m like, oh yeah, in the UK, that’s just what the government does. So the idea that he’s just made a bit of money off of some mobile game or something. I don’t really give a shit. His big mistake was… Grating us on at the Hedgehog? Being born in a nation that believes in shame. Yeah, that’s tough. If he was British, he’d be in the House of Lords right now. He’d be our new king. He’d be coronated this year. Yeah, very funny. But yeah, okay. So yeah, I think we kind of answered your question there. Matthew’s going to do it. Matthew’s going to find all the games this year and I wish him well. Okay, cool. Dear Samuel and Matthew, that’s good. Happy New Year. Thanks for delivering the best podcast of 2022. Why, thank you. Shortly after delivering the best podcast of 2021. Yes. I’m noticing a pattern. My New Year’s question is, since I’m now apparently paying £10 to get regular callout at Samuel’s Enemy, which Patreon bonus for, say, £10 would you each genuinely like to implement if you had infinite time and people? And which £10 tier bonus do people on the Discord actually deserve? That’s from Balladeer. I’m confused by this one. Oh, you say overpaying on Patreon. No, no, he’s not. It was a joke about how you made a joke last episode about how we’ll do a new £10 Patreon tier. I’m not up to date on the Back Page meta. That’s right. You sure you still want to make the podcast this year, man? You sound a little bit tired, a little bit worn out by it. You sure you want to be here? It’s a good energy to start with, the only way is up. Okay, so yeah, it’s the £10 question again. I have a slightly different answer to this because the question is about infinite time in people basically. So I think that it would be kind of interesting to do some kind of weekly news show, I guess, in a scenario where we were doing this full time or we had infinite time, then that might be something I’d add to the mix. We’re not massive on discussing current events, but I think being wry about it might be fun. Otherwise, it kind of goes back to what we said before, where I don’t want people to think I’m trying to rinse them. And I do like the idea of everything still being in the £4.50 tier, because then it’s like really, really fair, I think, because whenever you increase that, it’s going to stay that and then people can just pay it or not. And, you know, and they’ll get all the stuff that we make. So yeah, I don’t know. It turns out what the Discord actually deserve. I do like the idea of like, insulting someone for a week just because they gave us £10. But, you know, I do like our listeners really, I don’t want to be that antagonistic. Any questions? Any answers to this one, Matthew? I’ve sometimes thought about, like, you know, if you had more money or time or the ability to organise it, whether there was any kind of ironic, silly merch, spin-off of like, in jokes and things, some like collectible trinket element to it. I really like, on Twitter, Ben Cameron does the Pin Badge Club. This is like his business. He had an Etsy store and then he does this like monthly club where he designs these cool little badges. And I thought, oh, if I had loads of, you know, if we had loads of money or the money to afford it, it’d be great to commission someone like him to make a range of back page meme badges, you know, like a Matthew Castle Productions logo or a big Sammy Holdings logo or whatever and then send those out. But again, like, the organisation of like setting up a big mailing thing would be just so much work. Very early on, when we were discussing the Patreon, I did raise the idea of like, when you signed up to the Patreon, you’d sort of sign up to be a board member of one of our two fictional companies. But we couldn’t, there wasn’t really anything that would happen after that. It was just like, it was just a different name for the same thing. You know, you wouldn’t get anything. Somewhere in the back of my head, there’s still something in that. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned on one of these episodes before, like the idea of being able to do a podcast series where we talk to famous creatives who enjoy gaming as a hobby about gaming. The one I mentioned before was like Sam Mendes, who apparently quite likes video games. I’d like to just have a 40 minute chat with Sam Mendes about video games. I think that would be fun. Or Stu Turton, that author you like. Yeah, yeah. Just people, yeah, like people kind of who like games but aren’t in games talking about games for a change, rather than the thing that they always have to talk about in interviews, which is their work. I thought that would be cool. Maybe it’s that former Xbox editor who’s a mate of yours who writes books. We could probably get him on at some point. Tim Weaver? Yeah, he’d probably come on, wouldn’t he? Oh, I’d hope so. Tim’s on my list of like, would like to have him as a guest anyway to talk about the N64 and GC days. Mmm, yeah. We should try and do that this year. That’d be fun. Yeah, well, I’d quite like to get… I think, yeah, Stu’s writing his third book as well, and it’d be good to get on because he is really into games. Yeah. That would be cool. But, yeah, if, again, if we had infinite, all this money coming in and no worries about something having to actually be successful, I would love to do a side podcast about crime fiction. It’s not that I’m too lazy to do it, but, you know, it would take the motivation of money to get off my ass and do it. I couldn’t do another pod on top of this just in my own time, I don’t think, so. Yeah. I suppose, actually, yeah, I should maybe think a little bit more sort of inventively about this, if there’s infinite time and infinite money, then, you know, I’d love to have a whole network of different pods that were by people who’d been on the show and stuff like that. Like the PC gaming classics thing was kind of like step one in that plan for me of like, oh, what if we had like a spin-off Nintendo pod or something and like a whole network of them and they were kind of by, you know, former journos or people adjacent to former journos, that sort of thing, because I think that that’s a particularly good background to have when you’re podcasting in terms of like knowledge set, people who share your editorial values, that sort of thing. I thought about commissioning Barry, does our theme change to do a whole range of themes for the episodes, like a Gamescourt theme and like a Best Games of Different Years theme and stuff like that. But I think, again, that would require, he’s very busy, I think, I think he’s working on two video games at the moment, working on the game Century, and he’s obviously a very talented musician. So if we did something like that, it would probably be a, we’d need probably more money than we have, honestly. We should commission him to write some lyrics and get them properly sung to our theme tune, just to get rid of their mental image of our versions of it. Because whenever I hear our theme now, all I can hear is my terrible lyrics to it, and I just need someone to come in and wipe that out with something that’s actually good. Yeah, sang by Diana Burnwood, Matthew. Yeah, that’s the thing. I have genuinely considered, should we just try and get a Gamescourt theme? That would probably be quite fun, wouldn’t it? But anyway, that’s something I’ve thought about. The pin badges thing Matthew raised before, and I really like that idea. The problem is, our memes move on quite quickly, I think. Even the big Sammy Holdings and Matthew Castle productions feels like it happened a while ago, you know what I mean? Yeah, but that’s why it’d be fun, because you’d look back across your badges and be like, oh yeah, I remember all this bullshit that they used to do. I think Brexit has also made it, though. If you want to post something outside the UK, it costs like £400 now or something, because they’re like, fuck the EU, we want to do this, because we’re British, we hate Brexit, it’s so bad, it’s even knobbling our theoretical ideas. Yeah, that’s it, the limit’s very much the sky with how I think about this stuff now. I thought about some kind of digital zine as well, but again, that’s a lot of work. In a wider sense, we did think about, this is not really related to Patreon stuff, we thought about doing a top 100 this year. Did we talk about that, Matthew? What was your idea for that? I quite like that. Well, no, it was because of all the buzz around the site and sound, I thought, oh, someone who is outside of a particular outlet should get every or all the journos in the world to do a really serious top 100 site and sound most influential games, because no outlet could do it, because they wouldn’t want to share the spotlight with any other outlet. You know, IGN isn’t going to get journalists from all the other sites to compile a list, so I think someone has to be slightly outside the system to do it. Closest thing to this is the Game Awards, which gets journalists from all over the world to vote for it, but that’s too coloured by whatever mad bullshit is going on with whatever they want to promote on the Game Awards, so it wouldn’t be that. Just to create a massive, quite serious list that we could then talk about on the pod, it wouldn’t be too much effort. I don’t know. It’s an idea in the back of my head to potentially pursue. Okay, well, that’s interesting. We’ll keep noodling that and see if we can come up with something, because I do like a big top 100 list. Okay, next up. Hi Samuel and Matthew. Thanks for the podcast. They’ve been a delight to listen to. Just a simple question from me this time. What is some of your favourite video game box art? So for me, Akami came straight to mind. Just love the original PS2 art for that. Obviously mimics the art style. Very easy answer. It’s a gorgeous looking game. And so the artwork, I always kind of liked picking up that PS2 box and looking at it. Metal Gear Solid 4, the UK box art for that with the Shinkawa art and the lit up red solid eye on it. That looks absolutely amazing still. It is the nicest looking thing associated with the PlayStation 3. Metal Gear in general has amazing box art, I think. The limited edition of Doom Eternal has an amazing bit of artwork where it’s like a painting of Doomguy facing loads of monsters in hell. It just looks incredible. Or on Mars, I guess. Whichever one it is. I’m unfamiliar with the Doom lore. I love the simplicity of the heavy rain origami cover. That’s cool. I don’t like the one with the floating heads above it, but the one that’s just the origami art they did in the UK, which is really cool. And finally, the GTA IV box art is just beautiful. It’s that kind of compilation of imagery logo style. But if you get the box in real life, you get the lovely embossed effect on the cover and it’s just absolutely gorgeous to this day. So all pretty obvious answers from me. What about you, Matthew? On my version of this document, this says, what is some of your favourite game box set? And I wrote bullshit underneath it because I didn’t know what that meant. Yeah, it did say box set, Kurt, but I think you meant box art, which is what I was going to say. Oh, shit. Off the top of my head, I quite like the Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis box art, because it’s done like the film posters. Oh, is it Drew Streisand, that one? I don’t know if it is. If it isn’t, it’s someone doing a very good impression. And it just looks really legit. Like, if you looked at it, you’d be like, oh, that’s the fourth Indiana Jones film or whatever. That’s really cool. What else is good? I wish I’d prepared. I do like box art. I wish you’d ask me about this question now. I’d have clarified. I just looked at it and assumed it was like, I don’t know what a box art is. What is a gaming box art? I thought it meant like collector’s editions, which I don’t really care about. I did think about reaching out to you, but I don’t know how much you’d want to be bothered by pod admin at this point of the year. So I thought, oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Well, yeah, maybe I’ll shout some others out later as they come to me. Like, I’ll see you in Married Galaxy, but actually the Married Galaxy box art isn’t that great. It’s just Mario flying through space, which is a bit obvious. Not a big you are Mr. Gay guy, Matthew. Oh dear, terrible. Yeah, and I should say, I mean, I mean the version of the economy box art that doesn’t have the IGN logo on it. Oh no, I meant the one that does. We can come back to that because we got loads of questions to get through. So, sorry if this is a stupid question, but why do all monthly mags have 13 issues a year? Is it demand from the publisher? Not that I’m complaining, but I do feel for the people in the mag in the November, December time trying to get two issues out before the end of the year. I think it probably is to make more money, but I don’t really remember what the reason is. I don’t think I’ve ever got told about this, but I think it is just like it increases the bottom line to have another issue out each year. Is that kind of what it is, do you think? Well, yeah, so I texted my old editor, Charlotte, saying, I don’t actually know this. Like, is there a reason beyond money? And she said, no, it’s because of money. And then she asked other editors and they said, yeah, it’s just because of money. It’s not like some weird arcane magazine craft thing. I think it’s that they, you know, mags are roughly on a four week cycle and someone looked at the year and went, we can get 13 issues out of it. So let’s do that. Yeah, that really is that simple. Yeah, it’s not like one of those fun stories. You know, you get those sorts of like, oh, this thing’s called this on a ship because this really unusual thing happened and there’s some very like idiosyncratic anecdote behind it. It’s not that, it’s just some greedy person when we can squeeze more work out of these people. Okay, good stuff. That’s, please do have a… This is going very cheerful start of the year, this. So, this next one, do you want to read this next one out, Matthew? Yeah. What are your favorite games that you never finished? Why didn’t you finish them? Do you plan to? What kinds of things might end up putting you off from seeing a game through to the end, despite enjoying it? I’m interested to see your answers for this, because I kind of struggled with this one, because if I like something, I’ll finish it as a general rule. Yeah, you’re much better at this than me. I leave stuff all the time, which is poor form. I can enjoy things and leave them. For me, the killer is rarely boredom. It’s always the difficulty of maintaining momentum, especially with longer games. Actually, I think for weird, weirdly Final Fantasy is my biggest blind spot here. I’ve played so much of Final Fantasy 12, 4, 6 and 9 and I’ve never finished any of them, which is strange. I’ve finished 7, 8 and 10 multiple times. But yeah, it’s just weird how I just can’t seem to get to the end of some of these. Maybe it’s partly an adult years thing, but yeah, that happens a little bit. Typically, I’d start one of these and something big and shiny would come along and supplant it. Or in the case of Final Fantasy 12, the PS3 that had my save on it died, so I just had to start it again. But then when they finally did the remaster a few years ago, I got to the same point and stopped again. Maybe it wasn’t just due to the PS3 dying, it was due to the fact that there was something about the… Maybe I’d walked through too many boring desert sand cities as Vaan. Maybe I was just switched off by it at a certain point. I don’t know. The weirdest one recently is Persona 5. I was playing with someone else and then we’ve abandoned the 100-hour save file due to reasons beyond our control. That’s tough. I’ve never seen the end of Persona 5, despite getting to I think the last dungeon, the one on the boat. Was it on the last one on the boat? Maybe it wasn’t. But anyway, it was at some point around there, so I’ve not seen the end of that, which is tough. But maybe it’s a good excuse to check out the Royal Edition, I guess. Momentum is for me normally, but it’s a surprising number of games that I like. I’ve not finished actually. I’m quite bad for this. Do you have any answers to this, Matthew? I’ve never finished Fallout 4, which I was quite enjoying. New Vegas is another one for me, actually. I’ve not done that. Yeah, well, more generally, I think Fallout 3 is the only one I have finished of Bethesda games. Most of them I go in and then I get my fill of the world. And I find that I think that I think Bethesda are quite bad at central storylines. That’s never the thing which pulls you through. And so in a lot of those games, I just do so many side missions that I get my fill of it. I feel like I’ve seen what that world has to offer. Also, I think there comes a point in Bethesda games where, like, you inevitably begin to see the building blocks of the world a little too easily. You know, whether that’s, like, assets, quest types, certain rewards. And it’s like looking through the matrix. The magic of that place suddenly goes, because you’re like, oh, right, I think I have seen everything this game has to offer. And that’s just never coincided with me actually finishing one of those things. There’s loads of fire emblems I’ve dumped along the way, where you kind of go in and go, yep, more great fire emblem, but I don’t necessarily have 60 hours to play it. In terms of games I’ve really loved, I absolutely adored The Witness, but I finished The Witness on a surface level, but I’m aware of its depths and I’ve drilled into some of its cleverness, but that is a game where I was just so aware of being surrounded by stuff, which was just a tiny bit beyond me, or maybe a tiny bit beyond the time I had. I guess I’m actually quite similar to you in that, I’m just so busy in terms of playing other stuff, and in this job and in the career I’ve had, I’ve just not ever been in a position where I can pump figuring out hours into something really. I legit struggle with games that are longer than 20 hours these days. That’s hard for me. I can do maybe two of those a year now, and that’s it. And hey, Elden Ring is probably another good example of this, you know? Yeah. Likewise, Bloodborne and Dark Souls. This happens a lot with from games, so Sekiro is the only one I’ve finished. I tell you what, I sat on the ending of Twilight Princess for ages when I was on NGamer. I played loads of it the Christmas it came out and then stalled quite close to the end. And it took me a good few years to actually go back and do it again. OK, there you go. Did you feel like completing a part of yourself when you did it, Matthew, since Elden is a big part of your whole thing? No, not really. I was just like, you know, I think if I’d spent… because that was the one I played when I was staying in my colleague’s flat. I was like flat sitting. And I think if I just had another day of flat sitting, I probably would have got through it. You just couldn’t imagine playing the game without rats shitting out of their cages in the background. If a rat isn’t projectile shitting at me when I’m playing a game, I can’t do it. That’s why new Zelda kink. Okay, good. Very cursed imagery to start with for 2023. I like that. So far this episode, we’ve started 2023 on a low note, a cursed note, a sad note. I’ve got Covid. It’s tough, isn’t it? It’s like, yeah, we’re not coming out swinging, but okay. This one is, I don’t understand what this is, so I’ll just read it out because it’s a Matthew thing. Hi, large gentlemen. This is prompted by a chance we listen to Matthew’s RPS era Weekspot. What was the deal with a Spielberg bit that went on for far too long and then died off anti-climatically? Was born of pandemic era cabin fever, desperation for content, or a meta-joke on everyone else? Happy holidays, Mr. Mean Mustard. Sorry, Mean Mr. Mustard. I want to make sure I get that right. You don’t want to disrespect Mean Mr. Mustard. So yeah, what is this, Matthew? The Weekspot was like a podcast slash stream we used to do on RPS with Cullum, and you had this stupid joke that we were going to interview Steven Spielberg, and it was just thrown in there. We just sort of said, oh, this is what’s coming up on the show, and then at the end it would say we’re going to interview Steven Spielberg. And then there was always some dumb reason why Spielberg couldn’t turn up for the end of the episode. As I say out loud, I realize how weak a bit it was. I thought it would be funny. The thing I’ve learned doing this podcast is that you can’t force a running joke. You know, people take to certain things, and then you run with them. That was an attempt to force something on people. I was going to say that they weren’t ready for… I don’t think there was much they had to prepare for. Well, I like this. I like this as the end of Back to the Future, but your kids are going to love it. Your kids are going to love a Spielberg thing. Yeah, I always thought it would be a funny idea just to say it and then come up with some bullshit reason and then just try and stretch it really far. The problem is the only end to that joke is you actually get Spielberg to do an interview, and that’s the punchline that makes it worthwhile doing, which is obviously something I could never organise. But somewhere in the depths of my head, I thought, if I did this for a year, I could then like Spielberg’s people and go, listen, I’ve kind of pretty painted myself into a corner with this terrible joke. Would Mr Spielberg give me one minute of his time just to get me out of it? And maybe that would be the way I met Steven Spielberg. Right, right, okay. Yeah, it’s got a bit of the energy of that. You know that Dead Eyes podcast about Tom Hanks, the actor who’s got dead eyes, and then he finally interviews Tom Hanks in the last episode? Talk enough about Tom Hanks, and Tom Hanks will eventually appear. Yeah, you’ve got to manifest Steven Spielberg into being, basically. Power of belief and podcasting. But we bottled it after like 10 episodes, so… 10’s quite a lot, though. That’s like, you know, we’re going to force this proper trial run for this joke. Because it was during pandemic time. There was a lot of like us ringing him up and then him not picking up on Zoom. Right. And then we rang him up and got his personal assistant once. That was about as far as we got in terms of the fiction. That’s it. On this podcast, we come up with the joke and then we kind of move on, you know. It’s been a while since I said, always be pegglin, for example. But people remember, always be pegglin. We should say it. We should say it more. 2023 should be the year that we peggle again. Yeah, in 2023, we always be pegglin. Okay. Okay, good. This next one made me laugh. Do you want to read out, Matthew? Hello, Festive Large Lads. I’ve been listening to the Elden Ring episode again and there were quite a lot of talk about castles. So my questions are, Matthew, what is your favorite video game castle? Samuel, who is your favorite person in a video game named Roberts? Or Robert. Have a great Christmas, guys. That’s from Ryan Pugs. Oh, this is so hard for Robert. So the best I could find was a guy called Robert Garcia in one of those fucking SNK fighting games. Good looking dude, can beat people up fine. Otherwise, the closest I got was Jake the Snake Roberts from the WWE 2K games. That’s strong. Or ROB. Rob from Smash Bros. slash a real Nintendo thing that happened to promote the NES. Yeah, that was the best I could do, really. So I guess out of those, I think Rob would probably be my favorite out of those. He’s a pretty solid little robot lad. What about you, Matthew? What’s your favorite castle? I love Dracula’s Castle in Castlevania, Dawn of Sorrow. That’s a good castle. I really like the Castle Sieges in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which is when all the Vikings get to go and tear up a place that your parents probably dragged you on holiday once. Big kind of let’s wreck English heritage tourist sites. I really like the Syrian Castle in Uncharted 3, which is where you go to a castle, which has also become a bit of a tourist attraction. I like the kind of like middle ground between there’s a castle with a historical secret and it’s also a modern kind of tourist space. That’s quite fun. And Hyrule Castle and Breath of the Wild, obviously, as like the centerpiece of that map that you’re slowly working towards, I think that’s quite cool. Yep, some good ones there. That sure was four castles. It definitely was. Much like Symphony of the Night, after I did 200 podcasts with Matthew, he all turned upside down and I have to do 200 episodes in reverse. I hope you’d enjoy that joke. Oh, they probably wouldn’t be much less comfortable than having to record in my stupid pillow box. You’ve got to fix that this year. That’s probably part of what’s making the podcast tougher for you, because you’ve just got to sit in there. I’m just sat at my desk, do you know what I mean? I really lean in. I’m leaning in on every one of these episodes. I hope people can hear that lean energy. Well, your audio is always better than mine, because you can kind of hear my PC wearing in the background when I’m doing it. But you should just have slightly worse audio, but be more comfortable in 2023, I reckon. But hey, you do you, buddy. Okay, cool. So next question. Good day, lads. I’ve recently been playing Tactics Ogre Reborn and loving it. I ended up being amazed at the fact that it gives you a choice at the end of chapter one that completely changes the story and route of the game, depending on your decision and that this happens multiple times throughout to lesser degrees. So the question is, what modern games would this be a cool mechanic to have included in them since it doesn’t really happen a lot anymore, given the cost of making games has gone up. That’s from KH2698. So I think one area where if this happened in a game, it would really wow people, is if one of these Sony open world games did it. Let’s say like in Ghost of Tsushima, like what would happen if you chose to ally with or betray a particular warlord in your attempts to take this island back, maybe one route is more of a villain route and one route is more of a hero route. That’s the sort of game where I think it could really have an impact because so many people play these things and they don’t need to be as log as they are. So you could probably hack 10 hours out of that campaign, but have a diverging path in there somewhere. That might be fun. But truthfully, alongside the cost bit, I think this kind of choice is also viewed as having too much narrative friction for some developers. They don’t want you to morph your character. They want to give you a character who you are attached to and they’re in control of. Another really obvious one I’ve got here is Star Wars Jedi Survivor. Again, I think Lucasfilm wants to tell Star Wars stories that all count as canon, but let’s face it, the best part of the Jedi Knight games was choosing whether to go light or dark, and I think that should always still be part of the equation with Star Wars games. I think when you play as a Jedi, because I think it’s just such a fun idea. So yeah, those are mine. I don’t think that would be any less a compelling idea in 2023, even though it’s out of fashion. I feel like I know one of your answers to this, Matthew, but what do you think? Love to see a GTA campaign that was a little bit shorter, but maybe branched early on to give you the kind of, you know, almost two campaigns to play. You know, maybe you give someone like a departed style undercover twist where you can be a criminal in the police or a policeman in the criminal organization. So their stories would interact. And the idea of seeing like two life paths from different perspectives could be cool. I mean, obviously the Fable game that’s coming up is a really, really obvious contender for this. Like those games have dabbled with good or bad, but you know, the story’s always kind of been sort of semi set in stone. You know, you can just reach the end as a goodie or a baddie and it doesn’t make a huge difference. I’d like to see them be really bold. Like they’ve kind of threatened boldness in Fable before. In Fable 2, they were like, you know, big decisions you could make that would have like large world ramifications later on. But they weren’t, you know, it was kind of like this building will be slightly busted up in the future or this district will be slightly dirty in the future. You know, I’d like to see someone really commit to something substantial. You know, maybe the secret to that is doing it in a slightly smaller world. One of the things I loved about Pentament this year was that it was, you know, just a single village, maybe eight houses and a monastery. And because of that, it could be, you know, it could make quite big changes to kind of who survived and who lived and died between different time periods because it didn’t have to then rip all those changes out into a whole continent or whatever. It was just a very focused study of the town. So I’d like to see people take some of that thinking. And it’s probably just advocating for smaller, smaller, shorter games either way. You know, a shorter GTA, a shorter fable that actually is replayable, that you’d want to see differently. Interesting what you said about, like, people not wanting to create narrative friction. I think that is right. Like, the game that did this so well is The Witcher 2, which obviously splits into, has completely separate middle acts based on a decision you make at the end of the first act. But rather than compromise the character of Geralt, it just allows their writers to, like, investigate a war from both sides and the moral decisions that come in that. And it all folds in on itself. You know, whichever one you do first gives you a much better perspective on the other. You know, it’s a really elegantly done bit of storytelling. I think you can explore a very knotty subject by letting people branch out and tackle that knotty subject from different angles. But, you know, I struggle to see them do it with, you know, when you’ve got, like, a character who’s quite boring and set in stone, like a lawyer or Drake, for example, you know, I’m not interested in… I couldn’t see a version of their stories where there’s anything valuable in sending them down different paths, for example. Yeah, and some of these characters are built with a kind of, like, branded mind, where it’s like, well, we’ve got to make three games of this, so we can’t have them become, like, a serial killer in the first one or whatever. Like, there’s maybe a bit of that that goes into it. But yeah, I don’t think there’s a massive appetite from developers to do this sort of thing anymore on the whole, on Bloodbuster games anyway. I think Triangle Strategy had a bit of this this year, but I’ve not played that, so… Yeah, that’s a huge blind spot for me as well. But I think that’s kind of like, you know, that’s almost taking the baton from Tactics Ogre, isn’t it? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And, yeah, contemporizing that. So, cool, yeah. But there’s hopefully some good answers for you there. I think a big open world game would be a cool place, and Star Wars is still the obvious way. I think the thing with an open world game is you’ve got to build that world anyway. This isn’t me being like, so it would be really easy to make two campaigns, but the world itself doesn’t have to be radically different. It could be the same space. You’re just taking two different paths through it. Rather than, I think where some games may become a cropper is when they’re like, there’s going to be, you know, splitting the route you take, it’s going to have all this bespoke location. You don’t need bespoke locations in the open world. It’s already there. You’re just taking us to different bits of the map. Yeah. Didn’t the last Assassin’s Creed before Ragnarok do this, not Ragnarok, sorry, what’s it called, Valhalla, didn’t Odyssey do this a little bit where it’s like it would have choices in miniature, kind of. It did have choices, but you couldn’t truly affect the overall outcome of the story, but you could affect the outcome of different big side quests that occur on different islands and that sort of thing. It was sort of like a few decisions made along the way kind of like altered the fates of some characters, but it was largely like contained to cutscenes that those changes played out. I don’t think I’m misrepresenting it by saying that. No, I think that is true. So yeah, okay, cool. So next question then. Evening chaps, hope you both well. Like so many people, I end up buying various game-related stuff because of your podcast, and this year I decided to repurchase the greatest 7 out of 10 console of all time, the Xbox 360. That’s fucking outrageous. Fucking outrageous. The Xbox 360 had a lot of 7 out of 10s on it, but it isn’t a 7 out of 10 console itself. It’s a 10 out of 10 console because it has so many 7 out of 10 games. It’s up there with the PS2, the 360. I’m taking it as meaning it has a lot of 7 out of 10 games, but maybe that’s wrong. No, I think you’re right. That’s 50 cent on that sound, yeah. But in doing so, I remembered the ridiculous amount of XBLA games I have on my old account. This then got me reminiscing about the glory days of the downloadable game, the days where Summer of Arcade was some big yearly event. So the question is simple. What would you say was the greatest XBLA game of this era? Geometry Wars 2? Castle Crashers? Explosion Man? Or is it that free Doritos game that they released for some reason? Take care, and I hope you had, or had, depending when you read this, a lovely Christmas from Adam. Yeah, I think Trials HD is the ultimate XBLA game because it was a kind of game that you weren’t getting from box games. Really nicely presented. It made the most out of having online leaderboards, which were a huge part of what the 360’s USP was, how well the console functioned online, especially compared to the PS3. Instant restarts, really addictive. Everyone I knew played it. That was really, really good. But like Adam, I have a lot of fondness for the Summer of Arcade thing, which added a little bit of curation basically to digital games. So how it worked is for people who don’t remember or weren’t there, is that basically they would have four games that would roll out over the course of a summer. They would come out the same day each week, and then yeah, there would be a new game, and then Microsoft would throw a bunch of promotional weight behind them. It was really good, I think. What Game Pass does now is kind of like this, I suppose, where they have the different months of stuff, and they’re like, oh, here’s what’s coming this month. But obviously it’s a very different proposition, because you actually had to buy these games. But yeah, I think Trials HD, but when Perfect Dark came out in HD, that was a huge moment, I think, because in the absence of GoldenEye, there was such a pent-up kind of enthusiasm for that kind of multiplayer arena shooter to come back. I was really pleased to play Perfect Dark again. I was quite fond of the Battlefield 1943 one they did, the small-scale World War II one. That was pretty good. And I don’t think it was part of the Summer of XBLA or whatever, but I enjoyed Costume Quest a great deal, the Halloween-themed JRPG game from Double Fine. So this has come to mind. I like Explosion Man as well and a bit of Geometry Wars. What about you, Matthew? Yeah, Geometry Wars Retro Evolve 2 was like a big game in our flat. I used to play that with Rich Stanton a lot. We loved the pacifism mode, the one where you can’t shoot and you just have to drive through exploding gates. That was just, you know, that’s a key text of the Castle Stanton flat sharing days. I really liked Shadow Complex. I thought it was a really rock solid Metroidvania. It had some cool gadgets. It had like the one which let you do the expanding foam to make new platforms and you could run across the water like the little boy from The Incredibles. That was good. Peggle as well, a real time waster. I liked Trials HD. I was quite bad at it and I used to get really annoyed by the ghosts and the leaderboard dominance by colleagues who were much better at it. That’s a game I associate with always being annoyed by how good Jason Killingsworth was at it. So a little too frustrating to be truly top tier for me. Yeah, I agree with Shadow Complex. Again, who was making 2D style Metroid games with those kind of production values at the time? Basically no one was. So this was before, obviously, there was an avalanche of indie Metroidvanias, which we are now going to live with forever, which is obviously very good. At the time, there was nothing like this. It was really good. It had voice acting and everything. I think the story was written by a man who has been thoroughly cast out and with good reason. Orson Scott Card, of course. But yeah, that aside, still pretty good. I think it’s on the Epic Game Store these days. So yeah, I was very fond of this. It was a good time. I don’t remember the Doritos game though, admittedly. Doritos Crash Course. It was like a famous, easy achievement mine. You could get all the achievements in like 10 minutes. So those people got it for that reason. Yeah, I don’t want to sully my Xbox account with that. People can go online and look at that thing. So yeah, I’d rather not. I didn’t play it and I like Doritos. I’m a big Doritos guy. Yeah, post Doritosgate, I feel like we had to distance ourselves from such things. I think this was pre Doritosgate. Yeah, it was. I was just sad that I wasn’t anointed Doritos Pope. Maybe one day when they release the tangy cheese smoke at the gym. I’m just recycling one of our classic Pope bits. Yeah, that’s true, but the Doritos twist is new. That’s great comedy. Okay, next up. Hey lads, I recently played and enjoyed Monster Train, partially due to Samuel’s recommendation. However, I then got a bit sick, and now the idea of playing again makes me feel ill. I hope I’m not about to be sued for this somehow. My question, do any games make you feel a particular way that’s got absolutely nothing to do with the content of the game? Maybe they’re tied to a particular life experience. Hopefully there’s the opportunity for positive answers here. Love the show, keep it up. That’s from Bob Bob on Discord. Super Mario Galaxy, as well as being just an amazing game in its own right, whenever I play it, I think back to just spending half a week at Nintendo HQ playing it and being in this room and just the excitement of being on that press… not really a press trip, but that review trip. It’s tied to some of my happiest days working on games magazines. So, you know, as well as being a great game, it kind of triggers this magazine nostalgia for me, which is cool. Likewise, Twilight Princess, a great game in its own right, but the fact that I did play it in that weird flat with the rat that kept pooping outside of its cage somehow. It is quite a wintry, autumnal game in terms of its palette, but I played it in a really kind of high-ceilinged bath apartment. It was one of those apartments that had the big wooden boards that you close across the windows, like in the old Regency houses, and it felt like playing this autumnal thing in this big rickety gothic place. So that helped build on that element of the game. One of the reasons I always come back to Hotel Dusk and Last Window, more so Last Window than Hotel Dusk, is playing that for review over the August bank holiday weekend down in Devon. My parents had this big party and I could constantly hear the noise of people somewhere else in the house having a really good time, and I was being quite antisocial, but then that’s what the game is about, this sort of slightly lonely character in his apartment who occasionally comes out and meets all these odd characters, and it kind of ties in quite nicely with how I experience that game and what that game is about. So I don’t know if that really answers the question, but those are three experiences that have fallen into it. I’m going to start with one negative one, right? Right. I think those are all good examples. They’re all quite positive. It’s good ways of looking at it. By the way, did you see actually that Andy Kelly was playing Hotel Dask over the break, Matthew? I was sort of there thinking, oh, how can we get some podcast content out of him for this? But we already did it, didn’t we? So, yeah. Yeah, it’s tough. That’s tough. He’s going to become the UK’s predominant Hotel Dask liker and get me knocked off my number one spot. That is a genuine thought that went through my head this Christmas. Oh, God. We all need to sort our lives out in 2020 really clearly. We need better priorities. Void Bastards. I played with a headache right at the end of my time running PC Gamer. And I think this is a game that’s kind of an immersive sim, but more of a first person shooter, I think, where basically the NPCs all have like liver puddley accents. But like they’ve been auto tuned or something. Or like, you know, pitched up. And they go, hey! And like shout at you all this stuff. Oi, twat face! And all this stuff. And that like makes me ill to think about that game and that time. Because it was like right at the end of where I left PC Gamer, which was quite a furious frantic time. And then followed up by some not great times. And like that kind of burned in my memory of summer of 2019. Oh God, please stop shouting at me. You liver puddley and alien monsters. There was a bit of that going on. So does this mean you can’t go to Liverpool without being horribly… Well, no, because actual liver puddley accents are fine. This is like the most dialed up. And like I say, pitched up with like, you know, must be technically. It’s like, it’s not what people actually sound like. It’s like a really exaggerated version. So, no, of course not. I have no ill will, Matthew. Don’t go to a party in Liverpool where everyone’s huffing helium. Damn, because that’s what I was planning on doing this summer. That was high on my list. So, more positive, actually, I played a bit of The Crisis Corps Remaster over the break, so I got bored of it for Christmas. And so I did realise how much playing that game was synonymous with playing my PSP and my shitty Bournemouth seaside flat. And it took me back to that. It took me back to the really fucking weird landlord who lived, believed me, and would knock on my door about all kinds of random stuff. And he was really strange, that guy. It wasn’t a great hang. Weirdly playing Crisis Corps reminded me of that. And that particular time period of 2008 kind of time, and being a staff writer on play and stuff. It’s like a much bleaker version of when the critic eats the ratatouille at the end of Ratatouille. Which is not what you want, really. You play a game and you’ll magically walk back to a strange landlord asking you unpleasant questions. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, are you walking around more at night at the moment? There’s not these kinds of questions. I was like, just fuck off, man. I pay like 500, I’ve got no money, and I just live in this shitty flat with you beneath me. I’m already in hell. Why don’t you just leave me alone? Anyway, Chrono Trigger reminds me of my favorite time working on magazines, which was on X360 in 2009 when I worked with Simon Miller and David Lynch, not the film director. Those are good buddies of mine. So I played the DS version of that recently, and that reminded me of that entire year I worked with those guys. I would wheel my chair around and bore them all with discussion of the little frog man that you could recruit in Chrono Trigger as a party member. I was very fond of him. And also going on about how, listen, this character’s theme music sounds exactly like Rick Astley, that kind of boring Chrono Trigger band. They were like, who is this damn trigger head we got to deal with? Trigger head? So yes, those actually are some quite boring memories come to think of it, but I hope you enjoy the insight nonetheless. Okay, next question, Matthew. Would you be finding less and less time for gaming? Would you consider doing a top 10 list of games to be completed in a single setting? Cheers. Maybe, maybe. I feel like I’d be repeating myself, because I’ve discussed quite a lot of them already. It’d be a lot of walking simulators and Sonic games basically. What about you, Matthew? Maybe later in the year. I think in my search for new, exciting things, I’m also hoping for new, exciting, short things. So hopefully that will potentially feed into such an episode. Yep, and only seven of them will be hentai games. Okay, so next question. This might be too close to some of the ideas covered on the Bond XXL episode. If not, quick question to let you put your accumulated Bond knowledge to use. What do you think would be the most interesting Frankenbond or 00 Chimera you can assemble from parts or ideas of the various films? Examples of the constituent parts could be the Bond, the villain, the henchman, the lair or location, the set piece and the quip by any character. Perhaps more interestingly, how has mainlining the Bond movies changed your hopes and concerns for IO Interactive’s project? What do you think games have missed from the Bond movies? What do you hope they don’t include from the films? That’s some personal idea. The obvious, well what I thought was the obvious mashup is seeing Daniel Craig Bond fighting Red Grant from Russia With Love. I think the two of those could really do some damage to each other. I think that would be a messy, violent fight. And it’s like two thugs going at each other. But why not do it in Christopher Lee’s mad house from Golden Gun? Which is far too silly for either of those characters to ever appear in. So them having a brutal drawn out fist fight on that beach while Nick Nack looks on, that would be cool. Nick Nack and Daniel Craig in the same film is quite the thing. The bit I didn’t really get is the quip. Because the quips are so context sensitive. If Daniel Craig kills Red Grant on the beach and then says, I thought Christmas only came once a year. You’d be like, hmm? Yeah, I kind of struggle with this too. The quip bits. That was a very granular question. So yeah, I think like I can see that the Daniel Craig from Rush Real Love thing is a good fit. I guess this fight, what’s this fight with Dave Batista and Spectre on a train? Was it on a train? Yeah, but it’s like Dave Batista’s like a slightly different presence to Robert Shaw. Yeah, just a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, okay. That’s a good one. I sort of like, I think I said on the episode that I put Dalton in on a Majesty Secret Service and see how it goes. And I’d love to have the bit where he’s put on the campy accent of the But the thing is Dalton could put on, he’s probably capable of doing a very different accent. But you can’t make that bit of the film not shit. It’s not possible. It’s like a whole weird, it’s got weird. I’ve been smoking too much opium energy, that whole thing. Like it’s just baffling. So I’d like that to be the audition piece for Bond. Every Bond they try out for the next Bond, they’re like, you have to do the scene from On a Magic Secret Service, where you’re pretending to be another man and putting on a ridiculous accent to one lady. The really dumb mashup I came up with was, so I don’t know what the film would be, right? But like, Connery is fighting Sean Bean and the Moonraker base. And Odd Job is there and the hat just floats off in zero G. That was a dumb joke I came up with. And then the Moonraker base collapses onto Sean Bean at the end, like the cradle does in GoldenEye. I got that basically. But I don’t really need them. You never hear Yorkshire accents in space? Sunshine, Danny Boyle’s film, is there one in that? I feel like there must be a Northerner in that, but I don’t know. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it. So there you go, yeah. And I don’t need another quip because Sean Bean says, lovely girl, tastes like strawberries, which is one of the great shit-eating Bond villain quotes. He says an apropos of nothing in a space station. Yeah, while he watches Sean Connery getting decapitated by a floating odd job hat or whatever. I like the idea of an odd job hat, it’s just floating around decapitating loads of people through the film, isn’t it? In the background, they’re like, will someone please do something about my hat? Stop that thing! Another recent fascination of mine, and this is prompted by people sharing images of Sean Connery in the film Zardoz, where he’s just wearing some kind of weird underpants thing, is how hairy is Sean Connery’s back? I’m curious about this as a man who’s not reaching middle age, but in his 30s, how hairy is that dude’s back? Do they have to do any work to get the hair off of his back when they film Bond, or when they film Zardoz? Does he ever turn around? These are all things I’ve been thinking about lately, not related to the question, I’m just curious how a man in that hair suit was able to live with so much body hair. I just really bleak images of you with your Covid fever, thinking about how hairy Sean Connery’s pack is. It’s not been the best holiday break, I’ll be honest. For the other part of the question, I feel like we discussed the our hopes and dreams, the IO Bond thing a lot already. I don’t know why people keep wanting us to return to the subject of our least popular episode. Yeah, the best thing that came out of that was Matthew coming up with Jaws mode, where Jaws follows you Mr. X-style across every single level and you have to deal with Jaws. That’s a fun idea. I think a lot of the IO 007 will rest on the casting of Bond. You don’t want the Avengers game thing of people not liking the version of Captain America you came up with. You kind of want that to really land, so that’s going to be especially hard to get right with James Bond and also the other cast. They should maybe cast someone who has once been in kind of the race for real Bond, like a what-if. Like, this is what Clive Owen would have been like as Bond. Yeah, that could work. Or like Henry Cavill, I guess, that’d be, yeah. Yeah, or lots of different Bonds. That was the thing we talked about, was having like modes or difficulty settings that reflected the characteristics of different Bonds. Yeah, you could just get Brosnan. He’s still alive, you know, he still sounds like Brosnan. Like, I think… He’s quite old looking now. He is like the video game 007, but you could just make him look like he did in 1996. And I don’t know, it’ll be a different actor, I’m sure. Someone who can do loads of motion capture and shit. I’m sure that’s what they’ll cast. I want to see all the Bond archetypes, basically. I want to see a volcano base, I want to see a sort of skiing, a sort of like ski slope or something like that. It wouldn’t be a true Bond game unless there were three separate skiing levels. They each lasted for 45 minutes and were increasingly worse each time they came up. Anything else to say on this front, Matthew? Just that they respect that most Bond isn’t action, it is actually stealth and social stealth, which they can do both of because that’s what Hitman is. Hitman already is a really good Bond game. That’s what I learned watching all the Bond games, watching the Bond films. Yeah, that’s it. It’s the undercover thing. That’s what the Bond games have never respected. I’m with you on that. I want to see a level where you pretend to be Japanese. Oh, gosh. Let’s move on. I hope they don’t include poorly written female characters that are presented as well-written female characters. That’s a diss of Madeleine Swan in those recent Craig films. That’s like an attempt at a character with inner life. I love to say that, Matthew. One that just comes up as a very frustrating, unrealistic creation. Anyway, next question. Question for my favourite podcast host, is there a game or franchise of game that is fairly well liked, that if somebody says they love it, you just instantly discount their opinion? For example, In Bruges is a beloved film and very popular, but I really didn’t vibe with it. So when people say they love In Bruges, I just make a mental note that maybe their film recommendations aren’t for me. That’s from Sam or SGCH on Discord. What’s your thoughts on this, Matthew? I should say outright, I wouldn’t discount anyone’s opinion based on one opinion, but I’m more likely to be suspicious of someone for hating a great game rather than liking something which is good. You know? The boring contrarians who loudly declare that they don’t think Mario Galaxy is good. For example, I’ve never heard a convincing argument why it’s bad. And that instantly makes me think, oh, this is just some asshole who just thinks this is an interesting opinion to go against the grain, like they’re actually lacking in critical faculties. You’ve got to have the chops to back it up. You can’t really judge anyone for liking something, but I think you can judge someone for not understanding something or just not knowing why you think it’s bad. I just don’t think that’s… that to me just sets off so many alarm bells that this person doesn’t really hold this opinion and so they’re a nonsense person. The Breath of the Wild hating ones are the ones I’m like… With Breath of the Wild, I’ve heard some people say what resonates with me and Zelda is like the crazy dungeon design, and Breath of the Wild doesn’t really have those so it doesn’t really do it for me, and I’m like fine. Even the weapon breaking stuff, that’s fine. But like, Mario Galaxy, I’ve legit not heard a good case against it. And I have heard people say like, oh everyone knows it’s a bit of a six, and you’re like, oh well you’re an idiot then, who just doesn’t know what video games are about, and you cannot be trusted. You know, we have peers who hold that opinion, and it’s embarrassing really. I think like I get this a little bit with Pokemon. Like, I would never write anyone’s opinion off, you know, the only time I do that is if they like, say something right wing or go on about Woke, then I’m like, I literally have no reason there to listen to you because you’re a fucking idiot, like, that’s, I think that’s a fair perspective to have, isn’t it? But Pokemon a little bit, maybe. I think it’s just because like, I think even now like people are, I don’t think people have ever been more critical of Pokemon actually, than they have been in the last year or so. But I think that like, when people just love them all unconditionally, I’m a little bit suspicious of that, because even the things I love, I’m pretty balanced about, you know what I mean? I’ll happily slam the things I like when I don’t think they’re like up to scratch or whatever. There are some opinions where I’m kind of like, oh, is this person a little bit boring? I guess, like if someone just plays Call of Duty in FIFA, I’m maybe not interested in that whole deal, you know what I mean? Like, but even then, it’s, you know, that’s fine. But maybe they’re connecting with Call of Duty in the way that like, Jeremy connects with Call of Duty, which is interesting. Yeah, and I’m not disputing it’s not a good game or anything. It’s just, yeah, I guess I don’t, I guess I don’t outright reject people based on that stuff. But yeah, I could become wary based on those things, you know? There was a lot of raised eyebrows from me when Breath of the Wild came out so close to Horizon. People who think Horizon is better than Breath of the Wild, that’s incredibly suspect to me about where that person’s coming from and whether I have the same values as that person. That is one. But never, I can’t think of one opinion where if I was to hear it, it would be like, this person is dead to me, critically. I do love questions that cause you to sub-tweet people on the podcast. Well, you know what I mean, like, contrarianism is just deeply tedious. No value to it. The thing is, it happens in films. I’ve seen people take down classic films in really interesting ways, but it just doesn’t happen in games as much. Like, I’ve just not heard very convincing cases against games you would probably describe as like, canon classics. Yeah, that reminds me of a tweet I saw a few months ago where I think someone had gone viral about a 70s or 80s film being sexist or something and how it should change. And then someone quote tweeted it saying, every now and then a film bro will accidentally try and invoke the Hays Code and bring back the Hays Code basically to get rid of like bad taste films and stuff. And that was funny because it just reminds me of how social media does obviously encourage kind of like firebrand opinions to sort of catch on or put quote tweet this with your hottest take on something or other. And you know, when you live in a sort of storm of that, I think like sincere opinions have more value than ever, which is why I don’t think this podcast is very big on hot takes. We’re very much like, oh, we love to talk about… We say hot takes a lot, but actually we don’t have them. No, it’s also such an outdated phrase as well. Like it’s just very 2014 kind of media time. Yeah, that’s fine. I was happy in 2014. Yeah, I think I was probably happier because, you know, the pandemic hadn’t happened. Anyway, moving on. By jumping into Cyberpunk, away from the hullabaloo of launch, you made the point that the context where a game is played is a real part of the experience. What games have you loved because of that meta experience, e.g. a popular angle in Cyberpunk discourse was that playing broken Cyberpunk 2077 was Cyberpunk itself. Rolls eyes, that’s from me. And Animal Crossing and New Horizons landed in a world where, in real life, isolated people needed comfort from escapism and routine. Follow up, as journos, did PR effects feed into that in a big way? That’s from Roboku. I guess this is kind of similar to the association of a game with a feeling, right? But I actually did come up with different answers for this for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because the situation overrides the game a little bit more. So, for example, there was that weird Christmas Eve where I missed 8 trains because I finished the Force Unleashed 2 twice. That was weird. Yeah, that’s weird. There was a Christmas Day 2003 where I really upset my mum because I wouldn’t let her dye my hair for a laugh and I got sent to my room where I played through this snowy area in Disc 2 of Final Fantasy VII. Wait, why does she want to dye your hair for a laugh? There were some weird things she was doing that year where I wasn’t allowed to have my gifts until I’d done a series of challenges with her and my dad. My mum was really down on Christmas for years, not these days, but she wanted us to, I don’t know, I think there was some eating things challenge, some kind of like, there was a challenge where my hair had to be dyed before I was allowed to go and hunt for my presents. And I actually looked under the stairs and just found an Xbox there and my mum was so fucking mad with me that she sent me to my room. It’s really confusing. Wow. That sounds like it should have been a great Christmas. Well, the gifts were, it was great. I got, yeah, I got Buffy season six and an Xbox. It was decent. But yeah, but I have a particular affection for that part of the game, I guess. And consider it a little festive because I played it on Christmas Day in like 2003. I just like the idea of your parents being like, we’ve got you those gifts and in exchange, we can like sort of torture you for a bit. Yeah, it was a bit, it was like that. It was like, sure, you’ve got, we got you nice things, but you’re not going to get them for free. It’s like, there will be a price basically. You have to pay the humiliation price. What parent gets, oh, let’s not interrogate that. Yeah, there’s a bit of like Faustian Pact stuff going on there, it’s a bit strange. The other one I thought of is, I’ve discussed this before, but I took an Xbox home on Christmas 2009 to play Mass Effect 2 and review that. So that was, you know, I had like two weeks to basically play this game before anyone else played it. And obviously that was one of the best games ever made. So that was a hell of a thing to experience firsthand before anyone just relaxing at home over a Christmas break. And that was like perfect match of context and game, I suppose. I don’t think PR really feeds into it, to be honest, because you can’t force these things into being. You go to the odd like review event, but those always made the situation worse. I didn’t enjoy any review event. So kind of like luxury prisons really. And now they don’t really exist because of the pandemic. And that’s probably a good thing. Thoughts Matthew? The review events are designed to try and make the space you’re in as sort of unintrusive as possible. But you’re just at your most relaxed so that the game can be enjoyed at its smoothest. So it’s not like you’re in a particular interesting space that ties into the game. One that does stick, I remember like the experience of playing it maybe as fondly as the game itself was when I was reviewing Fatal Frame on the Wii, the Japanese import, in that the design of our flat, this is when I was living with Rich Stanton, one half of the flat was quite open plan. It had like the lounge and the kitchen and it was like a big, almost like a sort of semi circle shape. And the TV was in the point of the semi circle, like if you can picture that, so like right at one end. And it meant that if you were playing a game on it and you had, if you, you know, I had a big armchair that I’d move in front of the TV for like long review sessions. It meant I was really in the corner of this massive room and there was a lot of the room open behind me, which actually when you’re playing a horror game, it’s quite a weird space to be in. Like it was quite a bad flat for horror games because the room was so big, you’d be very aware of, like very vulnerable because there’s just a lot of open space behind you with lots of things that could make noises like a whirring fridge or maybe rich coming into the room to get a bean burger. So like that review experience and how spooked out I got in this, this weird little corner of the room, I remember feeling very unsafe playing it, which is probably why I rate it more than most, just because it was a very effective horror playing time for me. Also, this is the one where you had the great anecdote about how you convinced that the the desk was making the wee-wattle on purpose, like you were convinced it was quite an experience. My absolutely based on nothing theory was that, that yeah, that the way they’d compose the files on the disk meant that it forced the wee to do lots of very noisy loading at like bad times because the wee would really come to life when the game was like at its most quiet and it would scare the shit out of me. That’s definitely bullshit. That isn’t something they did. I think it’s just like a badly optimized game. But that’s the headspace playing Fatal Frame got me into, where I was absolutely convinced that this was happening, which I think is a pretty effective time. This game is about to be remastered, isn’t it, as well? Yeah, and they’ll never all play it and go, well, it’s a bit 7 out of 10, isn’t it? Well, it’s just a wee game for 15 years ago, right? But I think it technically has a Nintendo SBD developer credit, this one. So this will be a game that has in some way been part developed by Nintendo, appearing on other platforms next year, which is quite wild. Yeah, part developed by Grasshopper, very weird game. Yeah, that’s a really strange game. I’m intrigued to try it out and see how it goes, but okay, good stuff. So is there anything in games that, while commonplace now, still impresses or excites you when you see it? Example, I still like being able to shoot out glass windows in an FPS from Gilder here on Discord. What’s your answer to this one, Matthew? Dead simple, water reflections, always, that will always impress me. Even basic, like basic pitch, you know, where they’ve just flipped it onto the water. I’m still like, wow, that water’s got real presence, it’s reflecting the world. Ray tracing reflections when they’re like hyper realistic and accurate, like, obviously that’s amazing, but I will be impressed by like the crudest possible version of reflections. That is still magic to me. Yeah, Matthew’s still absolutely dazzled by the reflections in the lakes in Pokemon Legends Arceus. Just like, wow, that PS2 arse reflection, man, that’s blowing me away. I’ll tell you, reflection, it’s like, I don’t know, that seems to me like, I wouldn’t even know where to start making that happen. Yeah. I didn’t know you were a big ray tracing guy, interestingly. No, I’m a reflection guy. Okay, fair enough. No, I like that too. I’ve got a few here. So, big monsters, man, I love seeing big monsters in games, the bigger the better. That’s what I loved about Elden Ring was charging through a landscape and seeing a giant dragon or some kind of weird fucking thing in the distance. That’s like a Shadow of the Colossus thing, I guess, but I just, you know, I will always love seeing a sort of kaiju-sized monster in something. That’s always appealing to me. No matter how badly they’re animated, I’m always game for that. I always love a good reload animation of a gun, like when that’s done really, like, crisply or I can be real tasty, that can, when they put detail into that, which sounds a bit twisted from someone who, you know, would otherwise be very anti-guns, but hey. So, yeah, Destiny has loads and loads of nice ones, as you’d expect. Other ones are, like, beautifully animated finishes will always make me go core. So, Avengers actually had a few of those. The Avengers game was quite good for that, where Captain America would do some sort of random bullshit with his shield, which would be cool, or Thor would have some good ones. Sifu has some really nice ones where he’ll just plow someone’s head into, like, a wall and then give them a boot or something, you’re like, oh, that looks, like, really painful but felt really good, especially in a game that’s about revenge, like that is. And I’ll never stop being impressed by, like, seeing skyscrapers in an open-world game that you can drive towards, and Cyberpunk viscerally brought that back to me where I was like, oh, wow, just being in a city is still always really appealing to me. So, yeah, there you go, there’s those, there’s the basic bitch things that I get excited about. Hope you enjoyed that. I’ve got one more. Very fine textured fabrics in games, you know, when you can see, like, crazy detail in, like, Yakuza suits, or even in, like, fantasy games when, like, the armour’s got very ornate decorations on it, or the witch has got some very fine, like, fabrics that Geralt can wear. I’m always like, oh, that looks really good. What was the first Smash Bros where Mario had denim, Matthew? I was there thinking, oh, that’s some nice denim that is. Oh, yeah, that has to be GameCube. Yeah, it might be, yeah. And then you can zoom in real quick, look real close and see the stitching on his dungarees. Oh, yeah, I love a fabric. I’ll tell you what, a bit of fabric reflected in some water, holy shit. Now we’re talking. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, large lads, I often find when playing games, I’m always searching for those I’m unable to put down, e.g. Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, Tunic, but I’ve never thought deeply on what makes these games so incredibly compelling. Have you guys often experienced the thirst for that addict hit and have you ever managed to put that into words? That’s some pip. The best I did with this was in the Game of the Year episode where I said, um, Tesla tanks zapping the pleasure centers of my brain. I think that was pretty good. That’s a big part of it, what makes a game compulsive to me. But I suppose that’s not, there’s a bit of compulsive nature to Stardew Valley, for example, but I don’t know if Tunic really is comparable to that, but those games are like raw feedback loop basically, and that’s why they’re addicted, like vampire survivors. That’s how I’d describe that sort of thing. Just anything that uses a bit of my brain that hasn’t been used recently by something else is good, which means it’s quite hard to imagine where the next thing is going to come from. You know, sometimes it’s just the raw feedback loop of a vampire survivors, but then it’s the deductive pleasure of an Obra Dinn or Golden Idol, or it’s the audiovisual bombardment of a Mario game, just hearing and seeing what they’ve cooked up. I don’t know, isn’t every reviewer right individually in an attempt to try and capture what makes that one thing do the thing it does? I don’t know if there’s one thing that I’m particularly reacting to. Whatever that is, it’s maybe harder to get with age, or I don’t think it dulls, but maybe the more you play, you’ve just seen more variations on things and it’s harder to get that original hit again. I remember being a kid or a teenager and playing stuff that got into my brain in a way that things don’t anymore. When I first played GoldenEye, even after a couple of hours, the first evening, that was burnt into my eye. When I closed my eyes, I could see it. It was just so vivid and exciting to me. But I haven’t had that level of obsession, like instant obsession, for maybe 15 years or something. That’s partly a time thing and also you’ve never seen anything like GoldenEye at the time. Yeah. I hope that there will be something in my lifetime that I have never seen the likes of that will be so impressive that it will have that wow factor. Maybe I had a bit of that with like very good VR where you’re like, oh shit, this is something else. Yeah. That sensation of like, this is beyond anything I’ve experienced before, but hard to imagine where it will come from. Yeah, for sure. Interesting. Dear men of normal size, one of my biggest memories of the GBA in my teens was playing Mario Kart Super Circuit while playing Queens of the Stone Ages songs for the deaf. More recently, I’d mute Destiny 2’s soundtrack and usually put on the No Man’s Sky soundtrack through Spotify, the only thing that made it bearable. My question is to Samuel, are there any video games you associate with music other than the game soundtrack? That’s from Samuel. I don’t know if it is from Samuel actually, I might have just written down Samuel because it said Samuel in the question. Right, so you like writing here. That’s just like, Covid narcissism, that’s all that is. God, I have a really funny answer to this. I can’t remember if I’ve talked about this before, but one of the weirdest things I did was obviously the original Xbox, the first console to have a hard drive and therefore you could do custom soundtracks on it. So I ripped the greatest hits of REM to my friend Donald’s Xbox and then played True Crime Streets of LA with REM in the background. So it was like driving around LA and shooting guys, imitation of life, I think I stopped short of putting Everybody Hurts on there, which would be really fucking weird. But because of the lazy way they incorporated custom soundtracks into that, all it would do is play the same linear list of tracks, it would reset every single time there was a cutscene or something, so it would just start the same fucking REM album again from the start. It’s like, oh, we’re listening to Bad Day Again, I can’t fucking stan this. And it was that backfired, but that was quite funny, I suppose. Maybe the character in-game was just a guy who liked listening to albums in their entirety. Also, this is directed at me because I assume that maybe you thought that it wasn’t for you, but I like the idea of you playing true crime and then fucking, you’ve got a friend and me. I’m sorry, it’s the only Randy Newman song I know, Matthew. But like, have you done anything like that? Custom soundtracks? Well, I talked about on here about listening to Best of Danny Elfman while playing Call of Duty 2. Oh yeah, that’s a good one. That’s a big one. I used to play Soldier of Fortune 2 online with Ben Fold’s songs for Silverman burnt onto the PC, which is just him doing his Ben Fold’s quite gentle thing while I was getting shot in the head by a lot of American teenagers, so that’s fun. That’s another album I now associate with Death and Fear. I did have something ripped at my Xbox 360, which I used to listen to a lot when I was playing Modern Warfare 1 and 2 online. I got a really embarrassing one off the back of that, actually. I ripped the Dark Knight Riser soundtrack to my Xbox 360 while I did Challenge Rooms in Arkham City. I thought it was the best. It’s got a fucking Bane theme playing while I’m beating dudes up. So embarrassing that is. That’s very you. Yeah, how I was not single at that point is beyond me. We used to play Mario Kart Double Dash in my friend Dave’s room at university because he had a TV. He was the only one who had a TV. That meant having to listen to his music, which I would say was like, it’s not my cup of tea. Godspeed, you black emperor and all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah, I don’t know much about that. No, but not Mario Kart music. Yeah, I don’t know if that really matches the tone of Baby Park, you know what I mean? The other weird one is that when I first got an iPad, imagine one year gave us iPads and it was quite nice. We didn’t get bonuses, so that was as good as we got. But basically I use this to catch up on a bunch of iOS games and I have really distinct memories of playing Infinity Blade and Game Dev Story while that first XX or the X’s album. I don’t know how you pronounce that band’s name, but you know what I mean, sort of like sad, plinky-plonky electronic music. They’re pretty good. My ex would play that all the time before bed about 11 years ago and so I was just noodling away at Game Dev Story, coming up with golf simulator games that sold 20 million copies while that was playing. So yeah, that’s another strange one I guess. So yeah, it happens sometimes. I was also too scared the first time I played Resident Evil 4 and through the Village bit I had The Greatest Hits of Nirvana on because we used to have a stereo system connected to our TV. So that’s another one. Just what McCarmy wanted. Just to be very clear, I have since played it without The Greatest Hits of Nirvana and had a good time. I can handle it now. Do you want to read this next one Matthew? What are some of the biggest slash famous media that have had video games based on them but never a truly great game? has Star Trek or Lord of the Rings or Discworld ever had a truly great classic game that’s from Dithy? Yeah, it’s a weird one because wouldn’t people say Discworld Noir is an example of that Matthew? Yeah, I would say the three Discworld point and click games, they’re reasonably well liked. Discworld Noir I think is probably of the three of them, yeah, the one which is… I don’t know if it’s like a classic, classic adventure game, but they’re not hated. Star Trek had the Elite Force, which were like a raven shooter, that’s pretty good. You got to do a bit of sneaking around shooting the ball with a phaser, that was cool. Yeah, there is probably still something to be like an RPG or something to be made with Star Trek or something like that. I don’t know if any of the… are any of the Star Trek kind of like space battle games good? I don’t know, I suppose there was that Bridge Commander VR game, people seemed really keen on that one. Oh, yeah. That seems like it’s quite hard to play because you need like four or five people with VR headsets. But I gave that a go and it was fun. But I suppose like, yeah, I don’t know otherwise. I don’t think any of them did score that well. So yeah, there’s potential there. If you were going to pump, if you had an infinite budget to make an incredible AAA whatever, which Star Trek series do you think you’d adapt? Oh, I think I like the idea of doing like Strange New Worlds as a kind of Mass Effect style game. You know what I mean? You basically just cycle between different stories, but then maybe one larger story emerges. I mean, that’s the thing is Mass Effect kind of does that, right? It lets you go to these different worlds and, you know, you don’t make first contact as such, but you are learning more about the universe as you go and many narratives play out as you go. What about you? They could do like a Citizen Sleeper set on Deep Space Nine. They could kind of take that and reskin it. If they ever wanted to do a licensed spinoff, which I imagine they probably wouldn’t knowing the team being quite independently spirited, it would probably do Gangbusters. Have you seen Lower Decks, the animated series? That’d be quite a fun point and click style premise. I haven’t. I always look at the thumbnails and think, this looks like a family guy sketch, not for me. It’s slightly better than that, but I feel like I haven’t got to the bits that, you know, maybe people have really loved about it. It’s like slightly harder work than I thought it would be. But don’t hate me listeners, because I know some of my listeners really like that show. So I actually thought of a few answers to this. I thought, is it weird that has a bit of good Mission Impossible game when that franchise has been around for so long? Oh, really? Okay. Do you think it’s the Tom Cruise factor that’s kind of ruled it out? But Mission Impossible wasn’t very like cool for quite a long time. So recently, then it’s become like mega business again. Yeah. And it sort of defined itself by being like, this is an experience you can only really have in the cinema. So maybe they just don’t want to make games because of that. I am really surprised no one’s taken a second swing at Mission Impossible. It must have been pitched. Because the first one was kind of pure, like, you know, we need to tie it out kind of thing, wasn’t it? I would love… I think Naughty Dog could make a great Mission Impossible game. Yeah. Because I don’t think it needs to be complicated, systems driven. I think it just needs to be pure spectacle. And I always thought the mission where you go to the auction in Uncharted 4, that feels like a Mission Impossible set piece to me. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Or even climbing that giant tower that collapses or something like that. Yeah. They should do that. Yeah. That was a good one. I think there’s surely a good Evangelion RPG to be made. I don’t give a fuck all about Evangelion. When anyone says that, I’m having to reverse engineer what Evangelion is based on what other people say is like Evangelion. When people are like, it’s like the mech or like Metal Gear is really Evangelion. You’re like, oh, I want it to be this. So what this show is, is very odd in my head. Is Evangelion about meat? Not really. I mean, it’s basically a series of boss battles, but the boy who’s got to fucking participate in the boss battles has a load of trauma going on. That’s basically what the show is. Is it got things which are like half machine, half meat? Yeah, basically, it’s like the things they fight are kind of like organic sort of mech things. There’s a bit of that going on. But you saying meat makes it sound like, you know, it’s not about salted beef. You know what I mean? It’s not about like… No, but I often see it. People talk about they’re comparing to like meaty horrors or like where meat, where man meets machine. And I always seem, oh, it must be like some horrible cyborg nightmare. Well, I didn’t play enough of it to really verify this, but it felt like 13 Sentinels was very Evangelion. Like it’s, you know, teenagers and mechs having emotional problems and they were still at school and stuff like that. There was maybe a bit of that going on and I’ve got to play more of that really. But it’s very influential. You can see it. I don’t know about Metal Gear as such, but I suppose maybe a little bit, but definitely in Final Fantasy 7, like the weapons you fight in that and stuff are very, very Evangelion at the same time. So it feels like that’s kind of relevant. The other one I came up with is like, I think mostly like superheroes haven’t been given good games like, you know, X-Men, for example. Like, I feel like this Wolverine game is maybe a chance to like do one and then maybe if it’s successful, you could bring in more of the X-Men in the sequel or something. I don’t know. Something like that. Otherwise, I do feel like Lord of the Rings is the big one. Like whatever way you look at it, there’s still a lot of seven out of ten games based on a series that can surely support a good nine or ten out of ten kind of game. Any others, Matthew? Or should we move on? Mad that there’s never been a good Superman game. Yeah, really weird. But, you know, the design challenge of making a challenge that someone that strong can be held back by, I think, is still the big problem with that. I’ll tell you what it was suited is Avalanche, because you’re basically like a Superman mod in just cause. It probably worked quite well, but you need that sort of scale of sandbox, I think, to make it work, you know, so you can actually feel yourself flying from one part to another. But yeah. But it’s a stakes, isn’t it? He like rescues people a lot. Rescuing is a hard thing to do in games without it being really boring. Yeah. Yeah. So no one solved that one. I think it was a rumour that Rocksteady were making it, but I’m not so sure. I don’t know. All right, then. Next up. What are the best game lies you’ve heard slash were told? The 4K Nintendo Switch, Matthew. I’m thinking my uncle who works at Nintendo told me type of stuff. In school I once tried to convince my friends that I’d seen some of the Pokemon that would be in Gen 3 before it was out. When pressed, I said there was going to be a Mr. Mime evolution called Mrs. Mime, and that Gen 2’s weird rock tree, Pseudo-Woodo, would evolve into a Pseudo-Woodo-nt. And that I’d read this in the game section of one of those A5 sized kids’ mags or some Kraft Cheese. What’s your answer to this one, Matthew? The classic one is late afternoon spent trying to activate some variation of the Tomb Raider nude cheat that we’d heard about in the playground and it was always so many like bizarre routines you had to do in the Lara Croft mansion. Like run around the pommel horse, you know, five times and then do eight backflips and then all her clothes would fall off. Which obviously now in hindsight when you look at her, you’re like, what a nightmare, polygon nightmare that would be. And again, I make the point of why would you want to put Lara Croft naked in front of her butler? Yeah, how fucking strange is that? Traumatize that dude. I remember fibbing to friends about having a red alert expansion pack that didn’t exist. What was in it? I just made up a load. I just imagined some units I thought would be good and told everyone about it. And it’s really easy to get found out because it’s like, well, this thing isn’t available. So it’s quite a bold lie. Yeah. I did always like it when this would happen and it would turn out to be true. Like, the weirdest one being the missing no Pokemon one. We could like infinitely level up and stuff like that. You’d just be fighting this really fucked up barcode that would mess with your game. That was pretty cool because a guy literally explained that to me in like the clearing of a park. And he seemed really convincing and I thought and it was just really weird. A guy you knew or a stranger. It was kind of like this. There was this super nerdy mega brain guy who I wasn’t friends with, but I kind of like he knew a friend of a friend and he just told me about it. It’s like you have to go to Cinnabar Island. You have to surf up and down the side of this island and then it will and I was like, okay, this sounds made up, but it was true. That was very cool. I’ve talked about that before in the podcast. The other one I mentioned before is a friend, an old friend lied about being at a games convention falling through a curtain and coming across a wise old man who told him how to save Aerith from death in Final Fantasy VII and about a fake materia called gold materia. But when pressed, this guy who was a notorious fibber would just reiterate the lie and never cave to the fact that it wasn’t true, which made it extra funny. Me and my friend Andrew, we discuss this constantly. It’s still funny to us after 20 odd years. I really hope gold materia gets discovered by speed runners next year. I think people did find text evidence that there was some Aerith dialogue after she dies in the game, but I don’t think it was ever… It was, if only you had the gold materia. Yeah, all she says is, I wish I was still alive. That’s what she says. That’s bleak. So yeah, non-games, the one I never got over, how clearly shit it was. Christopher Nolan is in talks to direct the Justice League movie, and it was obviously never going to happen, because why would he give a shit about fucking… Imagine Christopher Nolan putting Green Lantern in the film, it wasn’t going to happen, but like, that dude just, you’d see his rumours over and over again, and I was like, that clearly was made up, like, there was never a good source for this. And like you say, people have a short memory for this stuff. Remember when it wasn’t uncommon to see some tuck shop fare get a video game tie-in or brand placement? We had Zool, Cool Spot and of course the seminal KP Skips Action Biker with Clumsy Colin. Wasn’t there also something called Death Stranding? Anyway, if this practice were to return, how would you like to see your favourite tuck shop treat featured in a hypothetical game as from personal idea for the third time? Yeah, so I actually like fictional food in games really. Like I like the packaging in Prey, all the fake like dried food they have in space, that rules, I love that. I like the fake cereal that Adam Jensen has in Deus Ex, Mankind Divided. That’s really good, that dude really fucking likes cereal which is funny. Metal Gear has some fun ones, like Calorie Mate and that sort of thing. Tuck Shop Tree, I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind seeing a character in a game mimic my obsession with foam bananas because I’ve got Covid and I had to go and get some groceries. I did indeed add two foam bananas to my basket and when I got there, they substituted them for another Far Inferior candy and I was livid. Don’t you say a real banana, you’re like fuck you, I want my synthetic bananas, fuck you. I suppose foam bananas is my answer to that one, Matthew, what about you? All I wrote down was Cook, Serve, Delicious, Tony from Intermezzo DLC. Just the idea of Cook, Serve, Delicious is almost a time management game where you’re cooking lots of dishes to keep everyone happy and I was always amazed by Tony at lunchtime, his ability to juggle like five different sandwiches and hold all these different orders in your head. I actually think there’s a good video game in that kind of sandwich shop lunch hour rush. Well, there’s that mini game in the fucking Kirby game. I hated that mini game. Did you play that one where I put, why is Kirby working a fucking burger restaurant where he’s saved with his little waddle dees? Do you know what I mean? That was something that crossed my mind. But in that you have to basically do- One after the other orders, and that can be quite tricky. But yeah. But that’s just like left, right, you just have to give them, you’ve got like one of two foods, and you have to give them their right order. You know, I’m talking about like, oh, remember that you’ve just put in a load of bacon in the fryer, and remember that you need to put in some baguettes to heat up for the next lauten. I think there’s a game in that. There’s not maybe a great game, but a game nonetheless. I asked for no chives, no chives in my bagel, that kind of thing. Yeah, and like, you know, hammering a space bar to do some like banter with the customers. Yeah, different choices of dialogue of slightly inappropriate things to say. Yeah, that’s good. That’s okay, because he’s old. Yeah, I think we’ve answered that one very strangely, as usual. That’s what happens when you answer this many questions in a row. Last one then, Matthew. Hi Matthew and Samuel. This one’s for you, I think. I just wanted to send a quick note to say thanks for the great content you’ve created over the last few years. I used to listen to a few podcasts which featured Matthew regularly, PSM3 and Talk Radar UK. Were you on that? I don’t know. I think I was on a couple of episodes each. Very memorable. I’m sure some of the hosts from back then would love to come on. The episode with Dan was fantastic. Also, I just wanted to say thanks to Matthew for the Japanese crime fiction episode. You started a new obsession. Any chance for part two? It’s been really refreshing to hear a UK based show, which is entertaining, but also really well informed. Thanks again. The pod has given me another reason to look forward to Fridays from Rob Hughes. So, a part two of the Patreon exclusive Japanese crime fiction episode, Matthew, do you think that’s on the cards for this year? We haven’t hammered out what year two of Patreon might look like, so I don’t know. I’ve certainly got enough. I don’t know if I’d want to like subject Sam to another two hours of me bollocking on about books he hasn’t read, but. Oh, the tables are about to be like turned when I talk about fucking graphic novels this month though, or the XXL, so. I think I’m more interested in graphic novels than you are Japanese crime fiction. I don’t know, he gave me that book with a really confusing ending to read, and I read it, and we talked about it, it was good. Yeah, if we did another episode, we’d have to do another book club reading exchange. Yeah. Yeah, potentially. We’ll see, like, yeah, the idea of it, we’ve just got to do some brainstorming, really. There’s probably like a British crime fiction or something like that to be done, right? Yeah. Like it’s, you know, you read a lot of that stuff too, so. Yeah, yeah, maybe do a wider crime fiction. But yeah, we got me and Matthew out to debate whether we’re going to take a break this year or not yet, so we’ll do that and then we’ll talk about the Patreon stuff as well, I’m sure. So yes, I would be up for that, though, Matthew. I would be happy to sit through that and read another book. That’d be absolutely fine. I think that was a really good episode. So, yes. Okay, the podcast is done. Slightly longer than I thought it would be. It always fucking is. So the podcast, if you want to follow us on Twitter, it’s BackpagePod on Twitter. Support us on patreon.com/backpagepod for two additional episodes a month at the Excel tier. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Matthew, where can people find you? MrBuzzle underscore pesto. We’ll return next week with lots of shaky predictions for 2023. Thank you and goodbye. Goodbye.