Hello, and welcome to The Back Page of Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, off air, I just asked you, how’s it going? And you said, I’ve not been doing much, I’ve been reading books. Anything more you’d like to add now that we’re on air recording this? Really, that is the long and short of it. I’ve been signed up to Goodreads, the website, for ages, and I thought, oh, maybe I’ll go in there and as just a useful way of recording exactly what I’ve read in a year, because I keep forgetting, but they also have this inbuilt mechanic where you can set a target for the year and it kind of turns it into a bit of an achievement system. And for some reason, it has, well, not for some reason, it’s designed to tap into the gamer part of your brain and compel you to read loads. And I find myself just reading every spare moment I have just to try and make my stupid little number on Goodreads go up, which isn’t a healthy way to engage with any media, but there you go. Yeah, it’s sort of like you’re going for the Japanese crime fiction platinum, aren’t you? You’re like, going for that. A thousand G on a Japanese crime fiction. I’ve read a couple of graphic novels for our upcoming Patreon episode, and they were very quick compared to a regular book, but you can put graphic novels on there. And I was like, does this count? Is this cheating? Am I like artificially inflating my book count by putting these graphic novels on there? I have put them on there because I wanted to see the number go up. I don’t know if you have a take on that. Well, to be honest, one of the reasons I love reading graphic novels is because you can ingest an entire story in such a short space of time. That’s like part of the appeal, but I find services like Goodreads or Letterboxd really stressful because what I really want to do is I really need those services to document my entire life to date, and I’m not prepared to do the legwork and to go and like backdate every film I’ve seen and every book I’ve read, and so I don’t like the idea of starting anew now and it looking like I haven’t watched or read all these other things. So I just think rather than like pour a lot of time into it that will give very little back, I’ve just like given up on them entirely really. So yeah, yeah. Part of my brain thinks if I can get a decent foothold on Goodreads, whatever that means, or I can use a more active Goodreads presence to try and get early access to review copies of Japanese crime novels, see if I can somehow set myself up as a Japanese crime novel influencer. Cause I feel like I could be a great, I am a great cheerleader for it, but I feel like I could be one in a more official capacity if I had early access to cool books. You need to get on Book Talk, my friend. You need to be on there, but in the end working. That’s the thing, I just can’t do that. I’m no good at taking photos of books. They’d be badly lit and you’d be able to just see the shadow of my phone over the cover and no one would like that. And on Book Talk, I think you have to be a gorgeous teenager to be able to talk and build an audience about these things. Because it seems to be a lot of the person, not a lot of the book, from my very cursory glance. Yeah, I think you said cursed glance then. Oh no. It’s funny because someone the other day said to me, oh yeah, now a lot of books get signed off the back of the fact that they could be big on book talk. Book talk is a big factor now. And I was like, oh, okay. Every creative industry is fucked then, good. And then I just sort of like stopped thinking about it because it’s too depressing. But yeah, four minutes into the podcast, I realized. And now all we’ve been doing is talking about books. But it’s nice to hear you talk about these things. And a good little ad for the graphic novels XXL episode coming to Patreon, Matthew, patreon.com/backpagepod, where we also did the Rockstar Open World Games ranked this month in a two and a half hour pod. That was good. The advert is over. This podcast, best games of 2014. So Matthew, it’s been about half a year since we’ve done one of these kind of game of the year episodes where we look back into the past. They are always immensely popular. The 2013 episode that we did last July, I think it was, was one of our five biggest podcasts of the year and like five most popular. They’re always popular. People like these are kind of like, I guess like a time capsule of what was going on at the time. We have some reflections on what was in the news and then we also have our two top 10 lists of our favorite games from the year. So that’s quite a nice overview. So I suppose as our starting point, Matthew, do you think 2014 was a good year for video games looking back? Not maybe like a year chocker with like absolute masterpieces, maybe not a golden year. But I found it quite hard to make my top 10. Like there was lots of stuff that could have gone in there. A pretty good Nintendo year, there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening there and you begin to see next gen, at the time PS4 and Xbox One warming up a little bit more. I think at the time I had a lot of turmoil in my like personal and work life and just the world in general, in the gaming world in general, was a little bit of a shit show in 2014. So maybe not a year, I looked back on fondly before sitting down to kind of map it all out and going well actually put all the dog shit stuff aside and you know I played some pretty good games. Yeah I think I agree with that. I sort of like, I had about 15 games that were eligible for my top 10 you know. And so it wasn’t massively hard to whittle them down. I think if you went outside that 15 the list got pretty thin pretty quickly. Okay. It’s not like, I don’t think there were like 40 game of the year contenders. I did think there were probably 20 in total like you know there were actual games of note you know. And so and obviously like this is the second year of the, well it’s the first full year of the what was then the next-gen consoles PS4 and Xbox One so you always get that steady start I think with them with the new console generations and this very much represented that but it also invoked like you know a pretty serious new series that would change the sort of like landscape of games that changed the way that developers were trying to make games I would argue for the for the worse we’ll get into that I think but yes that was that was what was interesting here is that the identity of this generation of of games was being forged in sort of real time. I think 2015 by comparison when we get to that year is an absolute fucking banner year compared to this this is still a great year though and lots of interesting things to talk about so um yeah I agree with all of that right down to the fuck show stuff um that was uh yeah I reflect on that obviously like yeah it’s not a great time um but it was also there were like wider industry things happening and then also things closer to home I suppose happening in media that were that I remember you know making this a bumpy year I suppose um so yeah I’m sure we’ll get into that Matthew what do you think is different about games at this point in time compared to now uh looking back at what was released what what stands out to you as like trends that were different or the types of games being released were different what what’s different about this where we are like now and where we were then is actually quite similar in the overarching cycle for much of the 360 ps3 generation the dominating trend had basically been the. Incredible I think we’re on the eve of the next dominating trend, Games as Service. And I would say, if you compare that to now, we’re probably at the tail end for that trend, or at least the honeymoon period of Games as Service is over. And I definitely, last year, looking at games this year, you are still thinking, what is the next big thing going to be? And I guess that’s what links this period and then. They’re both periods of, what next? What happens next? Because this thing is kind of played out. There are some more granular differences. I think if you compare then and now, like PlayStation go into PS5 an awful lot stronger than they went into PS4. Xbox weirdly managed to fuck both periods, I think, which is pretty amazing. And yeah, and then Nintendo was just, I mean, seemed like in a very dark place. I will add, this is a period tied to the demise of O&M and Nintendo print media in the UK. So you know, in my head, it was like, well, this is just, this is the end for this. But those are sort of my broad observations. Yeah, I think I agree with that. Maybe I should use that as a springboard actually, because we have, we, like you say, the tail end of games as a service, right? We are still seeing games that have, that when I suppose they started production or pre-production, they looked at the success of Destiny, the game was sort of like tip-turning around here, and said, we need one of those. And I’m curious, so here’s my question. Was Destiny a net gain for games, Matthew? Because I don’t think it was. Now, that’s not to say I think Destiny itself is bad, but I think that like, if you compare the sort of trend cycle of games as a service kind of games, by lots of cosmetics, by season passes, all this sort of thing, on-going games, is that compared to something like the rise of open world games that happened after GTA, the thing that was obvious in how they were presented was just how obvious it was to the consumer that they were about money, you know? It’s like weird this week actually, this feels like a sign of the times a bit, is that Marvel’s Avengers is closing down. And they had this cosmetic store with a few good skins that they sold for real money, and you had to spend real money to get the skins. Now, you got the entire base game and all of the content, including DLC, as part of the base purchase price, which was good about that game. But the idea of a game that’s got a single player mode shutting down, and there being this store element that didn’t take off, and then the game itself not taking off, and the whole thing feeling like it’s walked away in defeat, that’s just a really weird by-product of Destiny this year, in 2014, arriving on this massive wave of hype. Right down to Suicide Squad reportedly having some battle pass thing, and then people talking about that being a games as service thing. I can’t help but look at the history of these games and think they didn’t yield any classics, and Destiny did that, really. Destiny’s success did that, and we end up with loads of them, and I don’t personally think they were good for games. They were bad for games, ultimately, because they just warped the thinking. Now, that’s not game designers’ fault, but I could see why executives would look at Destiny and be like, we need our own Destiny, and that’s why this happened. But I don’t know, man. I think it’s got a lot to answer for. What do you think? Yeah, no, that’s something, when you put it like that, yeah, that seems super clear. It’s kind of a two-pronged attack in that you have games of service, also Battle Royale, of which on the Venn diagram there’s a lot of crossover in terms of behavior, but definitely the period we’re about to enter after 2014 begins to shift into this almost like a game as a lifestyle, as opposed to you liking lots of games, you play something individually. It’s quite hard to talk about as a games journal, because that’s a job that doesn’t really allow you to truly engage and lose yourself in just one thing, even if you wanted to. That’s what I found anyway. I know it’s slightly morphed now online. You have so many stuff on certain websites that you can have a beat and basically live inside one game, and that is your whole deal. I get that, but for a more jobbing games writer or freelancer, that doesn’t speak to me at all. I imagine the people who have just played Destiny 2 every night for the last five years or whatever, or Division, or a collectible card game or whatever, would probably speak to losing themselves in the drama of the granular changes seemed very exciting to them. Maybe it rewired their brains, so those granular changes could seem exciting. And a lot of them will vouch for the community aspect as well. The friends we have that play Destiny, I associate it with playing with a group of people who love Destiny rather than it’s just Destiny by itself that speaks to them. So it fucks with a lot of people, and it puts the emphasis on different parts of games which people then have to kind of like, you know, a lot of designs sort of suffer to support it. Yeah, definitely. That’s a good way of putting it. But it sort of, it does sort of feel like it’s ending or it feels like people are like, nah, fuck that. I will emphasize what I say as well, which that is not me saying that Destiny itself is bad. Like I think Destiny ultimately is like, has ups and downs, but is a great shooter and, you know, has had a continued life because it is legitimately good. You know, the shooting feels great and some of the content is good, some of it is gruelling, some of the content is excellent. I like the raids, which I have discussed before on the Exile episode on bosses. That was like a real highlight doing those. Yeah, that is not to diss Destiny itself, but I think that like, it is the response to Destiny. It was what happened this year, that I had a real problem with at the time, is people, including peers, were willing Destiny to be good, even when it wasn’t, which it wasn’t in 2014 Destiny. It had like a just an okay campaign, and then, you know, then two expansions came out that I don’t think that set the world on fire. It wasn’t until 2015 when The Taken King came out, which had a great campaign, and a load more kind of like Nathan Fillion, which improved it massively, like a new sort of subclass, and just really, really good repeatable activities. Destiny became good in year two, but I think they kind of, they were like, well Destiny is my game, even before Destiny was good, and that really bothered me at the time. I just thought, it has to earn it. It can’t just arrive on a wave of hype in a Paul McCartney song and be like, here I am, here’s the next big thing. And a fucking dinkle bot saying that wizard came from the moon. But that was all it had to me when it arrived. It’s just flat fiction that I’m not interested in. Beautifully, beautiful art direction, and wonderful character designs and stuff, but not even as compelling as Halo to me as a universe. And with a campaign that’s nowhere near as good as the best campaigns that Bungie had made in the Halo series. The fact that people were willing it into being good just really bothered me. I just thought, if this thing wasn’t on PS4, if this wasn’t so closely tied to PS4, would you care about this as much? But that is partly it, right? There’s a lack of anything else massive to maybe eat up your. And so people, maybe on a professional level, they’re willing it to be big because you just want to hit. It’s like whenever you get a dry patch in AAA games, websites get kind of desperate. And they’re all kind of like, well, when the next Rockstar game comes, we’ll be back in business, boys. So I can sort of understand. It had a huge push. Like I was on O&M, but I still for some reason ended up going to a Destiny launch thing and being given a copy of Destiny at the launch party in London and being like, why am I here? This doesn’t benefit you at all. Didn’t bring Destiny to Wii U, did they? Again, I think it’s just more the response to it than the game itself. Just the fact that people are willing it to be this massive thing and then in the world itself because it was part of the PS4 reveal in 2013. As we’ll get to in a second, it was the first thing they kick off with in the 2014 conference. It was tied inextricably to this console that was already massive, that had already won the generation from the starting line. Destiny wasn’t an exclusive, but it was treated like it was an exclusive. That just powered it to this level of instant success that I don’t entirely think was warranted in its form at that time. I think Destiny took time to reach its full potential, but I found it very strange that people were just like, well, Destiny is my game now. I was like, well, it’s not my game, but I wish it well. It would become my game in a worldwide pandemic. Where was the goodwill for Titanfall, the good multiplayer shooter of 2014? That’s interesting. I was going to save this for spoiler alert and entry in my list, but this felt like the end of the type of multiplayer shooter that Call of Duty kicked off. The amount of COD rivals that came out, obviously this is made by the creators of Call of Duty, so it was a fair few levels higher than a lot of the clones that followed in its wake, but this felt like the rewiring of people from like, you buy a 40-pound box game, it’s got a bunch of maps in it, and then maybe you’ll buy another map pack that’s got a few more maps in it. This feels like it ended here when Destiny became huge and Titanfall did not. Now, if you switch those and Destiny was on Xbox and Titanfall was on PS4, and it got the same level of prominence that Destiny did while tied to PS4, would we be in a reality where Titanfall became huge, Matthew? What do you reckon to that? I don’t think the appetite was completely over for these shooters because lest we forget, this is the year Nintendo announced Splatoon, which bizarrely makes quite impressive inroads when it eventually releases 2015 on Wii U, like especially in Japan, it was like the multiplayer shooter that worked in Japan was the kind of narrative around it. And that’s obviously daft and bears no relevance on Destiny or Titanfall. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. Yeah, thanks. I definitely think people weren’t ready for a purely multiplayer shooter. You know, I remember myself feeling at the time like no single player campaign in Titanfall 1, that feels a bit stingy. Given that Call of Duty still was giving you the single player campaign, maybe that has an impact. I think also just Xbox One not being hugely desirable and a bit of a slow start. I mean, it definitely plays a part. It would be intriguing to see what Titanfall 1, how that fared if it did have a campaign on the same level as that Titanfall 2 campaign, which is obviously considered one of the best first person shooter campaigns of the last. Well, yeah, the last 10 years. So, yeah, like it’s, you know, that is why I asked the question, because I think Titanfall did have momentum behind it, but it did arrive on a console that was struggling at the time. Whereas, yeah, I suppose like Destiny had this whole kind of like soft co-op thing where you did play with other people, but you weren’t forced into playing with other people, and you could play competitively, but it wasn’t just about playing competitively. So maybe that flexibility did it some favors as well. So, okay, just to sort of switch track a little bit, Matthew, I suppose like, it is good to, we do like to reflect a bit on what was going on with us, sort of like, you know, on the print media side, or whatever at this time when we do these episodes. So, what was going on with you personally in 2014? I had a horrible year. Chandra left O&M in December of 2013, so I became outright editor of O&M, which is always what I’d hoped was going to happen. You know, I’d edited a couple of issues of Nintendo Gamer by myself, and then basically went back to being a deputy editor. I was called associate editor on official Nintendo though. Yeah, finally in charge of O&M, I was really excited and I had a really, really bad start. It’s not a story I can tell in full, just because some of the people involved, and also it’s just embarrassing and remains a point of personal shame, but the last issue that we sent with Chandra as editor, broken NDA on something, and so I inherited this shit show, which actually kind of tainted my relationship with Nintendo and future. Like A, it wasn’t my mistake, which I was really annoyed about. I wasn’t in charge of the mag that that issue sent. And B, it was explained to me in like no uncertain terms. This is going to sound super obvious, but our relationship with Nintendo is just much more important than our relationship with you. Which, you know, hearing that from like your publisher or whatever is like pretty rough. And yeah, and it like sort of broke my heart a little bit and kind of killed, like almost sort of killed my love for the whole thing instantly. I thought it was really unfair. It was just really embarrassing. If I had more backbone I would have walked away, but then none of this would have happened afterwards. You know, we wouldn’t be here doing this podcast now. You know, I started looking for other jobs because I was like, well, I can’t stay here doing this. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Over. I’ll tell you what it was over. This is the dumbest motherfucking thing. We said Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze had a time trial mode. That’s what kicked this all off. The dumbest fucking thing. Who gives a fuck about that? No one gives a fuck. What a waste of time and energy. No one noticed. So dumb. But yeah, maybe like when we’ve been doing this podcast, like for 10 years, I can text the full version of it is like pretty rough. So that wasn’t good. You know, and so, you know, I was trying to kind of battle that and still kind of maintain my excitement work wise. I kind of had what I wanted in that I was in charge. You know, we had Joe Scripps on the team who was absolutely brilliant. I love working with Joe. We hired Kate Gray as our staff writer. And like I finally had a team with just everyone was like a great writer, really funny, like the actual like day to day in the office was really fun. This coincided with just some like really great Nintendo games that kind of played into our strengths. And I had like a four month period. I felt like all my business with like future Nintendo aside, this is exactly what I wanted to do. You know, I did my Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright cover. That should have been the warning bells that O&M was fucked, that they let me do that. But I didn’t see that writing on the wall. And then, you know, one day I was basically brought into a meeting with a publisher and they said, you know, O&M is going to be shutting down. And I can’t remember how many issues. It wasn’t like next month’s the last one, but they were like, this, you know, it certainly won’t make it to the end of the year. So then I was like, shit, you know, this is really bad. We just brought Kate on board. That seemed really unfair to kind of make someone relocate and, you know, offer them this great opportunity. So I was in a pretty dark place. But then something miraculous happened. Future basically went into like minor meltdowns, decided to shut the London offices, which was terrible news for everyone except me. Because all of a sudden they had a magazine, they were moving to Bath, official Xbox, that didn’t have an editor. And I went from an editor definitely on the way out because I was in closing, to do you want to go to Bath and edit OXM with a new team? In my mind, it was like a stay of execution in print media, which I wanted, and I got to go back to Bath and get out of fucking horrible London. Amazing. I really couldn’t believe my luck. And I feel quite grimy saying that, because obviously at the time, this move ruined loads of people’s lives. Like the office was distraught, you know, CVG shut. All the OXM team got made redundant because they didn’t want to go to Bath. The rest of the O&M team who didn’t want to go to Bath were made redundant. There were shrinking teams across the board. But here I am thinking, well, I was doomed before this, and now weirdly this terrible thing has kind of saved me. I went back to Bath and Kate came to Bath as well, as our staff writer on OXM. So that was cool because we got to carry on doing the work. We took over this mag with a whole new team. It was quite an unusual thing. I hadn’t really seen it happen before. No one working on OXM had worked on OXM before. We had Alex Dale as our DepEd, Emma Davies as our ProdEd, and Rob Crossland as our art editor. They all came from a science mag that had been shut in this whole future, reshuffle. So yeah, it was just how it ended in December. I just couldn’t have predicted in January. Just a really, really wild time. For me, I was… So the London office thing was quite a huge event because I joined in December 2013. And there was that really weird future conference where an ads guy was talking about how he… There was a skiing trip for all these clients, and then people were booing in the crowd at the ads guy. It was a weird culture. People were just quite honest about how they felt about the company while I was there. And that was my first day that happened, that we were in an auditorium and people were booing this ads guy. And I thought, this is strange. I remember there was my first… In my induction at Future, there was a training guy who told me, he said to the room, I will never leave Future. And he was made redundant three months later. And he’d been there for I think two decades or something. It was a really weird time. Future did it to survive and it worked. They were in massive debt and they had to sort themselves out. But it was really brutal and a really cursed backdrop for starting a new job in another city. And I was panicking so much about losing my job that I went for this job in Barcelona, which I almost took and then just left after four months, PC Gamer. I’m glad I didn’t because that company would lay off loads of its own staff the next year. It seemed like a bit of a dud job to be honest. But I was just there thinking, what if they just fucking… Could you imagine yourself living in Barcelona? Does that seem unlikely to you? Do you not think I could make it? What do you reckon? I’ve never really seen you in land so far. Hey, we went to France together. We went to Paris. Yeah, we went to Paris. And you just laughed at me eating an onion pie. It doesn’t really tell us a huge amount about what happened. And complained in a cold car park. You complained a lot. Yeah, you’ve got like Marcus Brody energy from that. Remember that in Last Crusade? When they’re talking about Marcus and they’re like, oh, he’s unstoppable. Why now? He’s already got the grail. And it cuts to him walking along that platform going, does anyone speak English? But I do also love the idea of you selling yourself for some kind of like… Oh, no, that’s why it’s bullshit. We’re both Marcus Brody. Yeah, I agree with you. I would have found it probably quite lonely and intimidating, truthfully. But then, like, Bath wasn’t great either. Like, this was a year where I had a relationship sort of like break down and then end. And it was like it already got on for about a year and a half too long. And it was just like that was bad to start a new job amid the backdrop of that. And then also future booting loads of people, selling brands. Like, it was it was quite intense. But like, Tim was really good throughout it. He was like, well, they’ve just hired you and they’re going to need an editor of PCGamer in like six months. So just relax. It’ll be fine. The problem is, I never relax. That’s my problem as a human being. So that’s tough. Also, PCGamer was like a bit of a pig to make. Because we took on making the US version of the MAG this year. While the US team focused on making the website, which was growing into a very, very huge thing. And it’s now basically like the primary, you know, engine of PCGamer. That was only really spinning up at this time. It was like it existed and it had staff, but this was where like it was major investment time. They moved him over onto PCGamer to run it and in from the US and sort of brought the UK and US teams together more. But the MAG was like, we had like phenomenal, truly amazing writers. All of them were just really good, like Chris Durst and Andy Kelly, Tom Senior, Phil Savage. Like they were all better writers than me. And I’m not saying that to like, you know, be self-deprecating. They were just fucking amazing. But like what the MAG never had that I kind of really needed was, it needed a reviews editor and it needed a features editor because it never had either of those. I just sort of ended up trying to man them myself. And I really just needed to ask for help and didn’t, which was, and that just killed me over and over again. The reviews had to be coordinated to go on the website at the same time, at the same time an embargo lifted, which is another headache to think about when you’re doing mag reviews. Because when it’s a mag, you can get review code and it’s just got to be in before your deadline. But when it’s like an embargo, it’s got to be done in short space of time, edited, then put on a website. That was way too stressful to do on top of making a magazine, truthfully, in retrospect, it was too much. But I did really, I was really proud of working on PC Gamer. And it was amazing to be around so many good writers. It was great to learn from Tony Ellis, the prod who was really good, and John Strike, who’s just an amazing designer still on PC Gamer, designed our logo. That’s someone I have immense respect for his creativity and what he was capable of and how much passion he had for the mag. All of that stuff was really good, but I was just doing a bit too much. And there was other stuff as well. The worst thing about PC Gamer was there was a free gift card every month that had a code on it. And getting those codes in time for the deadline, which was two weeks before the mag went to press, was just a fucking shit show every single month. And I hated it. And to be honest, that made me fall out of love with making the magazine more than anything else. The deadline’s fine. Like, you know, doing the review section and the feature section by myself. Fine, I can do that. That did change when Phil moved on to the mag, actually. He was very good. But when it was just me, I was like, fuck this gift card. I hate this. I’m stuck with it. It’s like a replacement for the demo disc. There’s no budget for it. I have to beg people for codes every month. This is the fucking worst. It’s making the mag worse because I can’t focus on the mag because I’m chasing this shit every month. I hated it. It was the worst thing about running that mag. It stank. Like, it was awful. It’s gone now. Good for them because it was terrible. It was a terrible burden. And it made me hate the mag so much quicker than I would have done otherwise. So I loved everything else about that magazine. But that fucking gift card, I despised it. So that was it. It was like a lot of escalating things really. And like that was quite just a rough backdrop, you know. It was just so sudden. You know, I think particularly the CVG boys are still to this day, like very, very cross and sort of curse Futures name, which they have absolutely every right to do. It’s just a hectic time. You know, it was super messy. I mean, I would say on the plus side, it’s the beginning of the iconic Castle and Roberts friendship. Yeah, I think that starts like more in 2015 when there’s like a weekend. We go to the pub together. We go to the Cur de L’Ion, that little pub. And I think I’m just redesigning Piece of Gamer. So I’m in on a Saturday and you’re in doing something else. Do you remember that? Yeah, vaguely. I still remember like, because obviously we hadn’t worked in the same office. But when I was back in Bath, you know, our desks were quite close to each other. There was us with, was GamesRadar in between us? They were, yeah. A couple of them would argue all the time. And that was kind of like what I remember of that time, listening to those arguments. But, you know, we’d often be in late and, you know, would share, you know, share our woes. You were a little bit more highly strong because I think for the, definitely for the first stretch of our exam, I was still in this slightly weird kind of like, you know, I can’t believe I’m still in games media place because I really thought I was out. Like I remember applying for jobs, one particular job to be like a copywriter for like hallmark cards or something, like writing like the messages inside. Like that’s where I thought my life was going to go. Isn’t that basically what Joseph Gordon Levitt’s job was in 500 Days of Summer, Matthew? Were you going to go become that guy and fall in love with Zooey Deschanel? Was that like… Oh, well, you know, that was necessarily the dream. Obviously, Gafferan was still stuck in London, was only coming down at weekends. But I had a nice flat. I lived on Portnay Street in like a big proper like Regency building. I really loved my little flat. Very weird memory of like, the move was fast to Bath. I didn’t really have a huge amount of time between stopping at O&M and starting OXM. I remember sitting in a completely empty flat, but it did have my TV and an Xbox One reviewing the DLC for Watch Dogs. Right. Like, before I had any furniture. Like, that was what I did the weekend that I moved to Bath because I needed to hit the ground running. So I think we’d inherited like half an issue from John Hicks and his team. So we had like holes to fill. So sitting in this furniture-less tea. I think the TV was like on the ground and I was sitting cross-legged in front of it, playing a bit of Watch Dogs DLC. I don’t think I even finished Watch Dogs once. I had no fucking idea what was going on. Poltney Street, though, means no double glazing. So it’s a no from me, dog. Yeah, it’s colder shit. Really, really expensive heating because they were like storage heaters. So like heating those rooms were really tough. The other thing about that flat, it had a chandelier, which had about 24 light bulbs in it. And it became a huge burden buying light bulbs for this fucking chandelier. I really resented it by the end. Because it’d be like how many of these light bulbs can go out before this room is just too depressing and I have to buy like, you know, 16 light bulbs to try and like brighten the place up. Yeah. So it just, I wasn’t made for fine living. That’s why I have some sympathy with the Royal Family because you’re like, it’s tough. It’s tough living in opulence. They’re not replacing their own fucking bulbs, are they? They’ll be like head bulb guy who does that. Yeah, but the bulb spend is just vast. Let me tell you, I had one chandelier and it like almost financially destroyed me. Well, again, we’re paying for those bulbs. So, you know, anyway. Yeah, that’s funny. My flat was quite shit, actually. It was up the hill. It was very affordable. It was like a studio. And like, I probably shouldn’t have been living there after a certain point. Like, after I became editor in chief, it looked like a, I would say, a section editor’s flat and not an editor in chief’s flat. It was like… They should advertise them in those terms, in bath, because it would make more sense to, like, most of the people renting. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, that would make more sense. But yeah, it was like, it was brown walls, and then there was this weird transfer of, like, a map of the world on the wall. Very strange. And then, like, then there was, like, when I got there, there was, like, a really, really mouldy, like, bathroom mat in the bathroom that was, like, gave it this incredibly cursed vibe. And then I know a Yorkshire terrier had been living there, like, not by itself, to be clear. That’s how opulent bath is, when people’s dogs have their own apartments. But, like, it stank of this Yorkshire terrier for about two years, I would say. That was rough. That is rough. And, like, the other thing is, the main guy, like, the landlord, it’s like, whenever I asked for maintenance, like, to the estate agent, the owner of the flat just came around and tried to fix stuff himself, which was really bizarre. It’s like, oh, the guy who fixes the lock on my door is also my plumber. That was really strange. So, quite cursed vibe to that. I was really far up this hill, so, yeah, it wasn’t the fanciest, but it was like, it was a way that I could live where I could actually save a tiny bit of money, which was, I never was able to do it, imagine, because I earned such a poor wage, and living by myself was so rough. So, yeah, that was a good thing, actually. Future paid way more than I imagined it for editors, which was a relief, so that was good. So, having some money that I could spend on fucking Lego did make up for the stress of the day-to-day, and it was very stressful. So, I think that’s enough recollection from us, Matthew. Should we move on to what was going on in the news at the time? Fire through this quite quickly, I think, but every time we do these episodes, we do a recap of what was E3. The C3, I would say, after the generation defining E3 from 2013, where Sony really kicked Microsoft while it was down, that first Xbox One reveal was just like death, basically, for the entire generation, really tough position to be in. This year felt like Microsoft went, we just need to do something, just lots of games, and not mess up, basically. And Sony was just kind of like, here’s a bunch, Sony was just kind of like, oh, here’s a bunch of stuff. We have an actual array of cool things. But I would say that, as you were hinting at, Matthew, this year isn’t the year that the PS4, massive success and big exclusives really kick in. The games that come out this year from Sony actually feel like PS3 games to me, they have that kind of profile. So, 33 kicks off with Destiny, as I mentioned earlier. They have the Order 1886, they reveal Bloodborne, which would obviously be very exciting the next year. There was some kind of infamous DLC thing, LittleBigPlanet 3, Dead Island 2, that trailer with the dude jogging, that game is still not out, nine years after this trailer debuted, amazing. But it’s meant to be out very soon though, isn’t it now? That’s finally happening. Then there’s a lot of like, sort of like indie stuff, they make a lot of space for this early in the generation with like Broforce, Hotline Miami, there’s Let It Die from Grasshopper, I don’t know much about that game, never played it, but I know a few people got into it, kind of like, I think it was a free to play thing, wasn’t it? I don’t really know. Yeah, I think so. Abzu, which is a cool underwater game, I can’t remember if that came out this year, but it didn’t make my list in the end anyway. And the big thing was in the middle of it was the No Man’s Sky trailer. I forgot that this is where that debuted, that kind of immense depiction of like, you know, a planet with teaming with life and flying over it in a spaceship, then getting into a space battle going back onto a planet and then Sean Murray came out and made this big pitch. An interesting thing in retrospect, because No Man’s Sky launched in a very, very rough state and over the years has transformed, but I still don’t think it entirely looks like it does in this, what was clearly just a prototype or whatever. Do you remember that moment, Matthew, when that trailer dropped? Was that a big deal to you? No, not really. I wasn’t keeping an amazingly close eye on PlayStation, because of all the aforementioned drama. I was kind of lost a little bit in M-Land. This was a year of having to very quickly get up to speed with what had been going on with Xbox, let alone PlayStation. I do remember the big pitch here, and I don’t think you could see the warning signs. Maybe that’s too extreme a term, but for No Man’s Sky. In hindsight, people say Sean Murray went a little bit more linear with it, but I don’t know when that stuff properly kicked off. Yeah, I think it is fair to say it does kind of kick off here. But how much you hold it against him is up to you, I suppose. He was trying to sell the game he was making, and lots of things can happen in game development where things don’t work out. They probably had to release it a certain time because they had a box copy out, and they had to deal with Sony. That was probably part of why it released when it did. And then, yeah, you can’t argue with them putting six years of work into dropping major updates and stuff, adding the multiplayer it never had that they sort of suggested it would and didn’t have. That was the biggie, I remember, was the multiplayer element of it. Yeah, and that is fair criticism. I think there is a lot of the criticism was fair, but obviously it gets caught in the way of vitriol that you just see on the internet towards game devs generally. So I’m always a bit like, well, yes, there was a bit of mollinue to this, truthfully, but also I’m over it and it doesn’t matter. Let’s move on. It’s fine. So yes, other than that, they had a solid chunk of PS Vita action in this show. I forgot that the Vita were still kind of going at the time, but had assumed this sort of indie profile. There were no longer big games coming to it really. An MGS5 Phantom Pain trailer that featured nuclear by Mike Oldfield. I remember that trailer quite well. It wasn’t as good as the… Is this the one with Skull Face? Yes, I think it is. I think Skull Face did a few of the trailers, to be honest. But the best MGS5 trailer I think was the one that had garbage in it. The Not Your Kind Of People. The one that was… I think it was mostly from that hospital kind of prologue. I think it was a recent year before. But this one did have a lot of the plot stuff in it. You see Liquid Snake in it as a boy and all that stuff. Quite a lot of story made it into it. Again, doesn’t really tell you much about the game. It’s just a load of cutscenes edited together, which is Pete Kojima. When really the cutscenes were the worst thing about the Phantom Pain. It’s a reasonably solid conference. I put no pant shitting here, that’s true. It’s slightly better than all of the PS3 conferences were, which were all kind of boring and a bit weird and corporate. That’s funny because you wrote in your notes, you wrote Metal Gear Solid 5 trailer, then reasonably solid, some boring bits, but no pant shitting. I thought that was about Metal Gear Solid 5. I was thinking, was there pant shitting in the final game? I do not remember that. The horse shits, the horse shits, but not Snake. The horse shits? It’s like God doesn’t have that famous pant shitting mechanic that we all grew to know and love. And then there’s like, then it ends with Arkham Knight gameplay, which still looks so good, that if someone showed a game that looks like this good now, I’d be like, wow, it looks so good. It looks way better than Gotham Knights. Yeah, it’s inexplicable. And then there’s just one more thing at the end of it, which is Uncharted for Nathan Drake on an island. You hear a bit of him and Sully talking. Pretty rad, because that game would rule, but it was still two years away from being released. So, super early. I can’t remember what happened to the… I think the Amy Hennig stuff predates this, maybe. I can’t remember, but that’s like a tale of game development, I think, needs to be told in full at some point, is what happened to that version of the game, and what happened to Amy Hennig, and all that stuff. Because that’s, yep. Still, it’s been documented, but not documented enough, in my opinion. So, Microsoft E3. Guess who isn’t here, Matthew? Don Mattrick. He’s gone at this point. It’s Phil Spencer on stage. They’re going to go big with Forza, and that’s fair enough. Forza has always been good for Microsoft, hasn’t it? It’s always been consistent. Forza 5 and Forza Horizon 2. I don’t know if either of those games are in your list, Matthew. I guess we’ll see. But, yes, Evolve was there, which was another one of these multiplayer things that happened this year. They didn’t quite take off. A 4v1 game. But I know I had a lot of fans. You skipped your very funny note about COD. Oh, yeah. A COD no one remembers apart from Jeremy Peel. I think this was Advanced Warfare. I can’t remember if this is… This is Kevin Spacey COD. Ah, yeah, that’s good. I bet they’re happy they did it this year and not in 2017. I think this was my first cover on XM, actually. That’s fair enough. Did you have to put Kevin Spacey on the cover? What was the sort of artwork for it? This was pre-Kevin Spacey being like a known wronging. Right, yeah. That was like 2016 or something, wasn’t it? Yeah, so this was back when it was like cool that Kevin Spacey was in the game. Yeah, that’s good. I mean, the thing is, if they’d have made it like a couple of years later, they’d have had to replace it with Christopher Plummer, which would have been like awkward and at great expense. Bit of a niche joke, that. But you know what I meant, Matthew, which is what matters. There’s Assassin’s Creed Unity with four players. I think we’ve established in previous pods that that’s actually a pretty good Assassin’s Creed. If you forget about the narrative of like, you know, the rough launch that it had. Then there’s got Sunset Overdrive there. Fable Heroes, it does seem like they got quite a lot of stuff, to be honest, superficially. And then there’s like a really long bit with Project Spark, which is like a game creation tool. Do you know what happened to that? I don’t really know much about that. I think we did like a couple of half pages on it. It was a real bust. It’s sort of their little big planet, isn’t it? But it’s nowhere near as charming. It basically lets you make a lot of very, very ropey games. Yeah, yeah. The Dreams is a better version of this, isn’t it? Yeah, it was just, yeah. Just a whole lot of nothing really, Project Spark. Yeah, and so you got that. And then you got quite a bad trailer for Dragon Age Inquisition, actually. I found the tone of it quite off. That was strange, very meta-dramatic. Ori and the Blind Forest is here, Matthew, which I know is a big favorite of yours. Halo 5, of course, is here. And Inside is here. I didn’t realize that had been in the Xbox conference, so I think it was quite closely tied to the IDX box thing for a while, wasn’t it? And then, yes, Phantom Dust and Killer Instinct, beloved revivals of old games there. Why the fuck would they remake Phantom Dust? That’s so bizarre. That game’s arse. It’s quite a strange bit of a show, this. To be honest, it’s reasonably consistent. And there’s a bit of the Division, which does look proper next-gen. And I think it would look proper next-gen when it came out, actually. It was a nice-looking thing. Scalebound is here, revealed. Obviously another doomed… That’s the thing, Fable Heroes and Scalebound here. You’ve got two doomed big Xbox games that are prominent in this conference, which is a sign of some of the issues that Microsoft would have. There’s like… And then finally it ends with Crackdown 3 and the multiplayer thing that never even came out with all of the cloud-based destruction stuff. I don’t know. It feels here like they’ve stretched a bit. You know, things that aren’t ready are here to like make the future look more exciting than it would be because some of this stuff just wouldn’t really amount to much. Any thoughts on that, Matthew, the Xbox conference? Again, coming to it like slightly late and working out how are we going to make a year of content out of this, it was a little bit like what the hell are we going to put on the cover because a lot of these don’t feel like they’re going to particularly play well with people. There’s plenty of interesting stuff there and some games are really loved, but did they ever truly again work out their first party situation? It’s yet to sort of happen. Maybe there’ll be this incredible burst of a year where they release 10 first party whoppers. The number of studios they now own, you feel like they should have to. So many of the studios they owned back then closed within a year of this conference. So it’s kind of bleak. Every now and then on the gaming leaks and rumors subreddit, which is a sort of hilariously feeble part of the internet in terms of any old stuff ends up on there, gets upvoted, and then the comments are full of people saying, this is fucking bullshit, and then joking about the rumor itself. It’s actually a weird addiction of mine to read that. Every now and then, every six months, someone says Scalebound is being revived. And I just don’t see any world where that happens. Scalebound came out, it was called Bayonetta 3. I think what was good in Scalebound was stripped and put into Bayonetta 3. Yeah, exactly. So yes, what about Nintendo, Matthew? Because I always leave it to you to recap what was going on with Nintendo E3. Yeah, so this was their second year of not doing a big conference. They actually, I think, turned it into quite a successful suite of online-only events. Their main, you know, the main event or whatever they called it, was this was the year that they worked with Robot Chicken. It was full of lots of skits with, like, stop-motion animated Mario voiced by Seth Green, which is, like, powerfully 2014. You know, weird intro to Smash Bros. with, like, Reggie and Iwata fighting in quite an elaborate, like, minute-long fight sequence that looks like The Matrix. I think all of this was distraction to tactics for the fact that they had, like… I think they only really announced, like, ten things in their whole… They had, like, no third-party stuff at all in their showing. It was all first-party. I mean, they opened with the announcement of Mii Fighter in Smash Bros. which is a bit yikes. They explained Amiibo, there was Yoshi-Wall-E World explained in a wool shop. That was the gimmick this year. People kind of sitting in the place related to the game they were telling you about. Captain Toad, Treasure Tracker, which I always thought was a little bit flimsy. It’s like, do you remember that thing that was kind of a cute throwaway bit of 3D World? What happens if we had a whole game of that? Well, it’s a little bit 6 out of 10, isn’t it? Isn’t that on Switch now? Can’t you play that on Switch? Yeah, I mean, what was cool about it was probably the gamepad touch stuff. I don’t know. The best thing about it was just that it was toed with a little backpack on. That was it. That was like the most of the appeal. And the nice diorama levels were pretty cool. Yeah, that’s fine. But like, I don’t know, that trades heavily on like your love of Nintendo Q. And I like to have a bit of substance behind it. I thought that game was kind of like nothing really. There was a Numa sitting in front of a screenshot of Breath of the Wild. Not a screenshot, a static camera of what looked to be like real, just in-engine Hyrule shown for the first time. And it was just like, holy shit, look at that. You know, because he started off showing like the original NES at Zelda going, this is what we’ve drawn inspiration from. And you were like, oh, is this going to be shit? And he’s like, ba-ba-da-da. And you’re like, oh, yeah, that speaks for itself. Like the wafting grass, the mountains in the distance. There was like a weird little hut and links to sitting on a horse. And it’s just clopping around. You’re like, oh, that’s going to be so good. And then it transitions into the trailer where he fights one of those sort of tentacled guardians. And that was really exciting. Though obviously, I think by the time we watched the C3, like, O&M’s days were like firmly numbered to like three issues. So it was kind of like, well, that’s an amazing thing we’ll never get to cover. That’s going to blow. There was Pokemon Ruby Sapphire remakes, you know. Bayonetta 2 looking very flashy and fun. Bayonetta 1 with Nintendo costumes, which, you know, looked kind of goofy. If you’re into sort of Bayonetta cosplay, that’s your thing. I won’t judge you if it is. There was some people sitting inside a traditional Japanese house talking about Hyrule Warriors and about how exciting it would be to finally play as Bidna from Twilight Princess. And you’re like, yeah, I’m on board with that. Kirby Rainbow Curse, which was sort of announced, came out I think 2015. It was like a sequel to Power Paintbrush, but made out of like plasticine. And it was a bit, yeah, nothing. It’s going to be Chronicle X, a big story trailer, which was the first time I worried maybe Chronicles X isn’t going to be as good as we hoped. Because before that, they’d been showing like the mad open world and the characters and the kind of fiction seemed from this trailer to be very hard sci-fi, which it turned out to be. And I was a little bit like, is that really what I want from these people? They showed Mario Maker, obviously very cool, went on to be very popular. And probably most importantly Splatoon, which was the three young developers who we’d never seen in anything before. They were like a new creative team within Nintendo, sitting in an aquarium to fit in with their weird little motif of this E3. Introducing the world to Splatoon and doing a really good job of it, actually. I think the stuff they say in this presentation, I still think is at the heart of what makes Splatoon interesting. Even some of the tactics and the way they talk about the ink. I think they did a really, really good job. And they talk about this in either an Iwatarask interview or maybe the Splatoon 3 interview that they did earlier in the year on the Nintendo site. Where they were talking about how important it was to introduce this game to the world and how much time they put in. I think they, as game directors, personally edited the Splatoon 3 trailer and things like that. And actually, you watch it now, you’re like, oh, this makes it look absolutely fantastic. And, you know, there was this huge, like, instant sort of buzz, excitement, you know, new Nintendo IP. I mean, you know, outside of ARMS, we haven’t really had that again in the last 10 years. You know, it’s something to be sort of cherished. So, yeah, that was cool. Ended with a reveal of Lady Palletina from Kid Icarus and Smash Brothers, which, you know, I love those introduction trailers, but maybe not like the biggest note you could end on. I’d have ended with Breath of the Wild if it was me. Like, that’s, you know, yeah. Well, it then actually had a weird little bit where Miyamoto was like, I’m going to show something on a stream later today that I’ve been working on. And it was like those weird prototype games sort of themed around Star Fox. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uncle Slippy, whatever. Yeah, like… Uncle Slippy’s Double Trouble, something like that. When he showed them off, it felt like a very low-key reveal of Star Fox, because it was then on the Treehouse stream, which was something they introduced this year, which was like three solid days of broadcast from the show floor. Absolutely amazing if you were remote working on this on a magazine, because basically the people who knew the demos best played them like five times over and showed you every little bit of them. It was just a treasure trove of stuff. But there was one year when Miyamoto was like, we’re making Star Fox, and there’s no reaction. And then the hosts do start clapping, and you can hear some people clapping in the background. It’s basically that Star Fox game that went on to be everything about that game you know in that reaction. It’s all there, this sort of like, I guess we should clap. Star Fox, Star Fox colon, I guess we should clap edition. So I was in sitting in bed this morning watching the broadcast of the Treehouse demo of Devil’s 3rd, which was the Itagaki supposed combat game, which was like a mix of like third-person melee sword combat a la Ninja Gaiden and mixed with first-person like Call of Duty multiplayer. And actually in this presentation it looks pretty good. It goes on to be an all-time disaster launch. Like infamously GameStop had 420 copies of the game to sell. That’s how much they bought. That was their lack of faith in it. Right. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I think like someone from who used to work at Nintendo choked with me on Twitter about how I think like they just used to bundle it in with things that people have bought and just be like giving it away and stuff. Like I think that’s it just sold so few copies. They were just using it as packing foam. Oh, dear. Yeah. That one’s not been salvaged for Switch, has it? What a shame. Poor old Devil’s Third. Out of curiosity, what was the theme they did for the themed room they did for Bayonetta? Was Reggie in like head to toe leather or something? No, sadly, they didn’t have a room for that. It was just too cursed, too horny. They drew a line there. Watching it now with a bit distance, I was like, yeah, there’s quite a lot of flashy stuff here. And like we were riding quite high because Mario Kart 8 was already out and exciting. So that was cool. It sounds to me, Matthew, like they had the best exclusive lineup of this E3. I mean, yeah, but they only had that. Yeah, like they only had an exclusive lineup. We went to an event for this after because we didn’t get to go to E3. But they did a they did an event in London where they brought all the E3 demos over. And I remember playing Smash Brothers Wii U there and Splatoon. Splatoon was so instantly like pick up and play good fun. These were in the dark days where you needed like every pick me up you can get. So like going to spend a day playing Splatoon was quite nice. That’s good. Yeah. I was going to ask you, Matthew, now that the recap is done. Do you get to go on any fun trips this year? Anywhere like cool? I went over for the launch of the Master Chief Collection. We were in LA for less than 24 hours. We landed, went to the party, slept and then flew back in the middle of the day the next day. We were incredibly tired, not in the mood for it. I don’t think Master Chief Collection was in people’s hands yet, so people didn’t know how fucked it was. So actually the energy of the party was pretty good. But I remember interviewing Bonnie Ross, then head of 343, at the launch party with incredibly loud music in the background. And trying to transcribe this fucking tape. Interviewing someone at a party. It was like that fucking Berlin basement from Hitman 3. It’s just like booming bass. So I had an interview with her, I had an interview with Frank O’Connor, who’s like the sort of ex-future guy, weirdly. We ended up talking about his favourite bath pubs. What do you pick? I can’t remember, I think they’d all closed by the time. Oh, where are the spoons? No, like he was early 90s, if not earlier future, right? I think like the pubs were a little bit more interesting then as well. And like a lot of the good ones have shut in the last couple of years. The most exciting part of that trip was, I went over, Joe Scripps was on the trip too, it was just us two, weirdly, from the UK. We saw Killian Murphy was on our plane. Obviously, because he was in first class, he got off first to go to border control. And so we were like, oh, there goes Killian Murphy. And then we got off the plane and then Killian Murphy walked back past us because he’d left something on the plane. And it meant he was stuck at the back of the border control queue with all the scum. And we just kept, we were like right next to him for ages. We kept like getting, you know, because it kind of crisscrosses. We kept coming back round and being stunned, you know, thinking like, should we say hello to him? But he looked so pissed off that he’d fucked his place in the queue that we didn’t have the guts to say anything to him. Yeah, that’s fair enough. I was in the same queue as John Boyega coming out of the flight. It was like around Star Wars celebration time, so it makes sense. But like that was a dude whose baseball cap was doing so much heavy lifting of like, don’t fucking talk to me. Like baseball cap super low, like just, you know, looking at kind of like not making eye contact with anyone. Just do not say anything. I was like, fair enough, my friend. You were. Yeah, I wish you well. But yeah, that was it was quite funny. Okay, good. Okay, one last turn to flush before we get into this, Matthew. Having talked about just so much stuff from this year, lots of irrelevant memories from me, which will hopefully be cut down in the edit. Let’s find out. I wanted to talk about Gamergate very briefly, because this happened towards something like the end of the year happened. And it kind of like sparked I mean, certainly like on the internet, it was already hostile to write for the internet. The PC game of comments were already like full of bastards. But after this, it was like a point of no return of like the way people interacted with games journalists. And obviously, I acknowledge that for you know, you know, for non white, you know, men like me, that was like a far worse experience than I had. But even I kind of noticed it. And there was the rise of these very bad faith right wing players who were extremely dubious but being platformed suddenly. And I fucking despised it. A lot of them have kind of gone away as it’s kind of emerged that they’re snake oil salesmen or they inevitably say something that reflects their actual views that gets them canceled. But I was curious like, did this manifest much for you at the time? And what did you make of it happening at the time? Because it felt like it consumed the entire games media and what it talked about was itself for about three months, something like that. And then it was like, obviously the fallout would just go on and on. What are your memories? Yeah, obviously awful. My hot take isn’t going to be. I actually really liked it. Terrible. I felt for people who were like heavily, heavily affected by it. I must admit like I was quite insulated from it in print. You know, it felt like a very online thing. So I was in kind of two minds about it because obviously sort of solidarity and support by those affected. But it seemed that to sort of like voice that solidarity, you had to engage with talking about games media endlessly, which I fucking hated. Like, you know, as a print guy, I hated the discourse. I hated the self-obsession. It felt really like juvenile to me. And it was kind of like why this art form isn’t like respected as much as others because it’s just so sort of it was like a teenage self-obsession. It drove me up the wall. But you were kind of forced into engaging with it, you know, just to sort of defend your friends or whatever. I’ve always been a big advocate of, like, disturbing them of oxygen. Like, I just didn’t really engage, not out of like cowardice or fence sitting. These were not people you could ever convince or talk around to your perspective. You were only lengthening the conversation by engaging with it. It just seemed horrible. You know, the least interesting bit of games is games media specifically, like themselves. And it just made that the headline and created like a rift which has arguably just grown bigger and bigger and infected every level of life. You know, I’m not necessarily a big believer in like Gamergate is the start of like Trump, like some people would say, but it’s like a contributing factor and definitely an indicator of what was happening. It was like a bellwether of online discourse. Like, and like the rise of these shit house right wing voices with these disingenuous bad take, bad faith takes, who would still get who by left wing people talking about them endlessly would still get platformed. And it was just like living in that cycle constantly after that. You know, the realisation that these like online ecosystems were kind of like feeding everyone what they wanted to hear and kind of like entrenching everyone further. And I think that was the takeaway which you can apply to everything that happened since you were like, if one of these arguments kicks off, the internet is is a really terrible place for letting it grow kind of uncontrolled. Yeah, it was just yeah, just not good. I can’t remember if this is the time that like sites started doing from now on we’re going to disclose blah, blah, blah. We’re not going to any parties or if that happened a couple years before. And like, truthfully, I had a problem with that because a couple of the people who were putting those out there being like, oh, we’re all going to be better behave now. Were people who I know enjoyed a drink at a press event, but were maybe had aged out of like going to these events and like were suddenly setting standards for younger generations, which I found really. Yeah, we had all the fun now you can’t. Exactly. They already have to put up with the internet. Do not like put big peer pressure has no value whatsoever. Just keep your mouth shut. That’s kind of how I felt about it. Just a tough year for journalists to be considered lowest of the low. It would have to happen in the year that I was given the award. Journalists, journalists, the GMAs. Yeah, at that point it was a booby prize. It was like boo. Corrupted person’s corruptor of the year. OK, that’s enough depressing stuff because we’ve got two quite fun lists of games to go through Matthew. So should we take a break and come back and do our top 10s? Let’s do it. Welcome back to the podcast. So, after one hour of preamble, we finally get to what the name of the podcast is, The Best Games of 2014. Those of you who are still listening, great, well done. It’s gonna be fun. Two top 10 lists counting down. And if we have the same game in both lists, we’ll talk about it when we get to its highest placement in either list. So, pretty straightforward. Matthew, is there anything you wanna say about your list before we get started? Do you think we’ll have much crossover here? As we get into this period, weirdly, we begin to get into games, which we’ve actually talked about quite a lot in other pods. When I made my list, I was like, man, this is gonna be really boring for people because they already know my takes on all of these games. So, that may have influenced some of my thinking. I may have dropped a couple things a bit lower, just to have the chance to talk about something a bit fresh. I sort of wrestled with this a bit as well because some of these, like maybe two or three of them came up on a very, very old podcast now, The Best Games of the Generation, part one and two. I went back to that list because I was making sure, like in theory, the games from 2014 in that list should appear in the same order if there’s like any consistency or coherence with this podcast, which there probably isn’t. Right. And I think it holds up, but there are also some other games that weren’t in that list. So I don’t know. Hopefully this isn’t super boring and predictable. No, ultimately I made the choices that I felt were best for the listener. I thought like, what didn’t make the cut with things I didn’t think were that interesting to talk about or, one rule I kind of broke a little bit here is I have one DLC in here as an entry. So that’s a little bit different. I think I’ll be able to explain why when we get there and I’ll have interesting things to say about it. But I hope it’s not the Watch Dogs one because that was only funny. Yeah, it was actually like Aidan Pierce’s iconic Cap DLC, Matthew. That’s my number eight. So looking forward to talking about that. Okay, let’s kick off then. Do you want to start Matthew with your number 10? Nez Remix 2. Oh wow, not on my list, surprisingly. I’m putting this in almost as an apology to Nez Remix 1, which came out the tail end of December 2013. I kind of completely forgot about it when we did our best games of 2013, but I really love this pairing of games. They re-released them as a boxed version with both games in later in 2014. So take this as a general Nez Remix entry. Do you know what this game is about, Samuel? Vaguely, is it like a contemporary… Actually, no, no. I’m just going to fucking guess my way through that. Why don’t you just tell me about it? I’ve got an idea of how it sort of contemporizes Nez games, but I want you to… Yeah, I guess the best way of thinking it is WarioWare for Nez games, which is confusing because WarioWare has some Nez games in it already, but it is taking Nez classics and chopping them into little mini games that are often built around a kind of core mechanic of a game. So you’re doing like a rapid five selection of things. You know, it might be like BOP five Goombas or reach the top of the flagpole, but it won’t be a whole level of Super Mario Brothers. It will be just the final 10 seconds. And there’s like a little time trial element to like go, this is the game I’m in. This is the mechanic I’m engaging with. I have to do it as quickly as possible. That’s one half of it. The other half is the eponymous remixing where they took classic games and either added like weird filters or effects to them. So like in one, you might be playing Super Mario Brothers 3, but it’s cloned you as a line of Marios. And only one Mario is the actual Mario you’re controlling, but you’ve got all these other Marios to like look out on the screen to kind of confuse you. Or it may take a character from one Nintendo game and do another. So it’s like quickly collect all the coins in one of the coin bonus rooms in Super Mario Brothers, but playing as Kirby from the Nez Kirby game with his moveset. So it kind of spliced together all these games. It was like you threw the Nez catalog into a blender. The remix stuff is definitely like the flashier element of this game, but I still liked the mini games which were just moments pulled from games, because I think a lot of younger people when they come to Nez games, find them a little bit fusty and old and a little like rough around the edges or just too difficult. And what Nez Remix did was take them sort of deconstruct them and sort of show them to you in their like sort of purest form. Complete this boss from Zelda 2 that you probably would never get to just dabbling with Zelda 2. But like here’s a really cool moment so you can enjoy the sword fighting. I actually think they double as almost tutorials for like how to play these Nez games by pulling out a set moment and making you master it. I just thought this was really, really cool. It’s got me really, really excited, you know, about a catalog which I kind of, you know, I don’t have like a vast amount of love for Nez, you know, I’m a bit of a 3D Nintendo head these days, but I thought this was the perfect way to sort of celebrate it and a much more interesting thing to do with their back catalog than they do elsewhere really. You know, it’s sort of virtual console and this and the idea of kind of taking quite iconic stuff and playing with it, that just really spoke to me. That’s interesting. So this is a Wii U exclusive, is that right? Both of them are. They did do a version of it for 3DS. I think it’s still its own bespoke thing. So eShop game as well, gonna vanish soon from the ecosystem. When we do our episode on last minute things to buy from Wii U and 3DS eShops, this will definitely be on the list. A real oddity. I’m actually just really surprised it hasn’t been moved on to Switch. There’s nothing kind of inherently like Wii U about it. Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, it’s like, it seems like you can buy a box copy of it on 3DS, but it’s like, it’ll set you back a bit. Right. Yeah, so not, also not entirely sure it got, did the box copy get released in the UK? That’s quite hard to ascertain. But either way, you just buy it digitally, like you say. So yeah, oh, interesting. I didn’t actually know that’s exactly what this game was. That’s, yes, I like the idea of like pulling these games apart, classic games apart, put them back together again in quite novel ways and maybe illustrating their magic to them if you just see them as fusty when you boot them up in the Switch store, you know what I mean? And just like, yeah, there it is. There’s some games you kind of reevaluate when you play this. Yeah, yeah. Okay, interesting. Ooh, that’s a cool pick. I was not expecting that, Matthew. You have subverted expectations. Yeah, but you’ll be crossed later when I’ve not included something really important. You’ll be like, you think Nez Remix is better? Blah, and then we’ll do that whole song and dance. Interesting. And I wonder if you’ll get mad when I’ve booted a very key Wii U game out of this year because I consider it more of a Switch game these days. So yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see. The tension can mount. Okay, my number 10 is Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor. One of those sevens. So at the time, I was already a little bit sort of burned out in Assassin’s Creed. I’d sort of fallen out of love with them after the third one, which was, you know, quite sort of oversimplified and that sort of thing. And like, I was, what always bothered me about them, and I’ve talked about this in the pod before, is the fact that the climbing did itself. And then by the time they did Assassin’s Creed III, the combat did itself. And you’re just holding down one button to counter attack a whole bunch of people. And I was like, these games need to be more than this. They’re too successful and they’re just, they’re treating their audience like they’re, you know, like they can’t actually like press a button every like few seconds. And it’s like, come on, like we didn’t have to outlaw the jump button, you know? But this game came along, it kind of was Assassin’s Creed, but with a bunch of other weird stuff layered on top of it. There’s a very strange adaptation of Tolkien’s work where it’s some ranger guy possessed by a dead elven sort of king, is that right, Matthew? I think that’s the plot. Yeah, Celerbrimbor, the elven forge master. Yeah, and then this is like… Even, forge master. That’s a great made up word, that’s good. Got your Google synonyms out there. Ah, yes, I must take my horse to the forge master. Yeah, Matthew Castle presents the Elder Scrolls. I would definitely play that. Yeah, so, this comes along and of course has this… It’s set in this very brown world, where you’re basically going around killing orcs, but there is this orc hierarchy. You have this power where you’re basically brainwashing these orcs into working for you. They become your sort of like, rising stars basically, they duel and then you can eventually reach the point basically where there’s this entire strata of how the orcs sort of like behave, these kind of like persistent figures and they can all be basically in your employ. And that’s kind of like what mastery looks like in the game, I suppose. And there are different ranks of them. So you really do start with like sort of Scrot kind of like complete like nobody orc who then fights his way to the top with your backing basically. Yeah, so it’s that and that system is extremely compelling. I think people have talked about the fact, wouldn’t it be nice to put it in other games and then Warner Brothers trademarked it. So now it can’t be good innovation, very good. Even though they took all their climbing and jumping from Assassin’s Creed and good, well done. That’s good, good use of- What a shitty thing. Good use of lawyers there, very good. So yeah, so that’s not gonna happen. I assume that this upcoming Wonder Woman game from the same developer will build on that a little bit. But basically, yes, it was like this firmly seven out of 10, like, you know, borrows from Assassin’s Creed, like the kind of 360 degree kind of counter attack combat system, quite simple combat system, platforming, in a world that’s not particularly evocative. But these kind of like, yeah, these sort of like, I guess they’re almost like companions, like, you know, these sort of your troops, you become sort of emotionally invested in their journeys throughout the game and that was the true magic of it. It was like an okay game with an amazing system bolted onto it. And that’s why I think I had to include it here because it was something I hadn’t seen before, implemented really, really well. And like that carried me through a game that I otherwise probably would have played for a couple of hours and then ditched, Matthew. But Nemesis System, just like, that was a little slice of games magic there. And so I think it had to be in my list to represent what was going on in 2014. I have more attachment to Shadow of War. I had to play a lot more of that because I was on Xbox One at the time and we were covering it on that in a big way. So I know that game a lot better. Yeah, I agree with you. Like without that system, the actual story missions are like not a lot of fun, but that system is so good that it livens it up. I love the videos on YouTube of like where people have set up entire platoons where like everyone is a double agent and then they kind of activate them and they will stab their leader to death and things. You can, you know, it is systemic enough that you can create some quite wild scenarios. And that’s cool. But the Lord of the Rings lore in this is like quite a bad hang. Oh yeah, really tough. But then I kind of like, I’m sort of more and more of the mindset that the Lord of the Rings lore doesn’t have much value outside of the two stories. It’s sort of built to support, you know what I mean? The Rings of Power has characters who are more Shadow of Mordor characters, like crossover. And when you’re watching it, you’re like, oh yeah, I know what, you know, this is like Selle Brimble before he’s a scary ghost. And he’s just like a nice bloke. Or seemingly nice, but a seemingly nice bloke who’s a bit too into making rings, if you ask me. Oh, that amazing thing you told me on our Lord of the Rings episode about what Shadow of War suggests about how the lore of these games weaves back into the books and the films, Matthew. That was incredible. The ending of that game, amazing. That sums up the sort of tacky 90s comic book, like the riff kind of like approach to adapting Lord of the Rings that they sort of take here. It just has very little value. Yeah, story did almost nothing for me. I thought it was very, very boring. Very boring use of that word. Ugly world as well. Really ugly. It has like two quote unquote biomes, but one’s like overcast green biome and the other one’s like just permanently brown biome. But yeah, that Nemesis stuff. Like I’ve only played a bit of Shadow of War. Do you think that is a better game than this? It takes the Nemesis system kind of to like much more interesting places. It has like a bigger like base of characteristics to kind of sort of procedurally generate all the orcs from. So there’s just more variety. It’s just classic more, more, more sequel making. Everything that’s interesting in the first is like a bit more interesting in the second. What I like about this game though is that like there isn’t much scale to it. You feel like you’re just sort of bothering a couple of settlements of orcs. Like they’re trying to get all this stuff and you’re just like, I’m going to overthrow you by brainwashing you. And like it’s quite twisted, but I quite like that weird sort of like the stakes don’t feel super high here. I’m just sort of like tormenting these creatures. Yeah. Probably the best riff I’ve seen on Batman’s combat too. Yeah, that’s true actually. That’s where it like definitely exceeded Assassin’s Creed, I think, is, yeah, to like build on that a little bit. It’s just Batman, but bloodier. You can chop off heads, which Batman would never do without being like really put out by it. Yeah, exactly. That’s, yeah, and some fan outcry, I think. So what’s your number nine, Matthew? Everyone’s favorite, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney. Oh, amazing. It’s been a little while since you talked about this. Not hugely loved by the Ace Attorney community. I think a lot of people would say it’s the weakest Ace Attorney game, which is just wrong. This was a pairing of two worlds which were very important to me on Nintendo. The Professor Layton games of level five and the Ace Attorney games of Capcom set in a mystical kingdom where magic seems to be a thing and the trials are witch trials. Phoenix Wright is obviously there to help people in the trial sections while Professor Layton in between those trials sort of investigates the town and solves puzzles to kind of move the story along. On the Ace Attorney side, it also saw the return of Shutokumi who had left the series as the kind of writer, hadn’t worked on the Miles Edgeworth game, didn’t work on Dual Destinies. I think you can feel his presence in this game. He is just, he makes better characters. Like what I like about the Ace Attorney side of this is the characters and the caricatures really pop in a way that they just don’t in Dual Destinies or the Miles Edgeworth games. On the Layton side, it’s quite weak as a puzzle collection, but I still like the idea of these two very different kind of mystery characters coming together and their worlds colliding. Your mileage definitely varies on this, depending on if you are into both those worlds. If you are, I think you’d be impressed by how they merged the two things together. Production values wise, the way they kind of make the two character designs kind of meet halfway so that they don’t look completely bizarre standing next to each other. The use of music in this game is fantastic. Professor Layton instruments, sort of accordions and violins. A bit more folky, but kind of married with the kind of classic tunes from Ace Attorney. It’s an absolute banger of production values wise. This was one of my favourite games of 2014. I liked it a little less playing through it a second time. It just has this like initial wow factor and as a piece of fan service, it really spoke to me. And I have fond memories of covering it on the mag and doing a cover for it. It felt like the one issue of O&N that was like truly a Matthew Castle issue. Yeah, it’s tied up with those happy memories. I think what is interesting is that like these series, both of them are in this kind of weird period after this of like Ace Attorney’s never felt like I know what the deal is so that it has a consistent, I have a consistent read on its present condition while it’s been at Capcom. Like obviously there were two 3DS installments, Matthew, we talked about how one of the key personnel of those 3DS installments left Capcom a couple of years ago. And then obviously they brought great Ace Attorney Chronicles across. But like I don’t firmly get the sense that there’s a new Phoenix Wright being made right now, you know? And likewise, I know Professor Layton’s in quite a rough place these days as well. Layton’s pretty much done. Like they wrapped up the two trilogies on 3DS. They then did like a spin off with his niece or some kind of relative. It was absolute garbage. Level 5, they’re in a bit of an odd place. They actually suffer for the lack of a Nintendo handheld, you know, where they did so much good work which maybe haven’t translated as well to like full console games. Yeah, Ace Attorney Tricky. I feel like there’s appetite for it, otherwise they wouldn’t have brought great Ace Attorney Chronicles over. Once they put it on everything in the HD collection, maybe showed them that there is a bit more love for it. So is there another Shootakumi Ace Attorney? I don’t know. Do we want him making something else? The last room I heard with relation to him was there’s copyright trademarks registered for potentially a Ghost Trick re-release. Yeah, oh that’d be nice, wouldn’t it? A big HD version of that. I could see that happening. But I also don’t want Shootakumi just, you know, having to like manage his old games being updated. That doesn’t sound very satisfying for a man of his talents. That’s not really what someone who, like a game designer like him does either. That’s like, that’s sort of the porting thing isn’t really like, I don’t see why he would even be that relevant to that process more than just being a sort of like cheerleader for the stuff, you know? Maybe he’s just a face they wheel out for it. But you know, in terms of a new game from him, I mean, hasn’t been one in five, six years. Yeah, but I think I think to your point, like, a lot of people do seem to be discovering this series through that Switch collection or, God forbid, playing it on their TVs on PS4 or whatever, which is completely wrong to me, they’re completely alien, but yeah, that’s that’s cool. So it’s at least good that this arrived at a moment when both these series were like, you know, still really key parts of the Nintendo handheld identity, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, seen as icons, seen as cornerstones, yeah, and a real like doesn’t exist outside of 3DS. Like it’s a real like we’ll live and die on this console very, very hard to get your hands on now. You’re probably best off buying the digital version from the 3DS store to be honest. Yeah, yes, the MGS4 of the 3DS is very good, it’s 100% the MGS4. Okay, excellent. Okay, my number nine is Bioshock Infinite Bury Let’s See Part 2. Oh, I wondered if this might make your list. Yeah, so it’s tough because I know I talked about this a bit on the 2013 episode because we got into the whole Bioshock Infinite thing, didn’t we, of like, yeah, it’s like, you know, it’s themes and how they’re explored are flawed in all these different ways and I accept that criticism, but also what a thing it was that they made. Yeah, yeah. And like, it’s interesting because there was quite, last year there was a whole thing about, so the start of this game, sorry, the start of this expansion, you are Elizabeth walking through this very idealized version of Paris and like, you know, basically like, I would say that it’s sort of like Paris keyword stuff come to life. It’s meant to be cartoonish and ridiculous, almost like you’re watching a sort of Disney movie version of Paris from like the Disney sort of golden age. It’s that sort of vibe to it. There was a tweet about the boy dancing with a baguette in this that summed up the Bioshock Infinite kind of like discourse to me, which was a take on something that is actually like largely inconsequential and also like, just doesn’t, just kind of goes against what the game is trying to present to you. It’s very obvious that this is not really Paris you’re walking through. It’s meant to be Elizabeth’s vision of what Paris is. And so the dancing baguette boy kind of makes sense in that context, but the idea of being like, oh, they wanted to show you it was Paris, France by having a boy dancing with a baguette. That sums up what social media is like for how people talk about games to me. Do you know what I mean though? It’s like, and that’s always frustrated me about Bioshock Infinite. You know what I mean? It’s like this game is like a treasure trove for dunkers. Bioshock generally is, isn’t it? I was going to say, if you had a baguette, you would dance with joy. I know that about you. Yeah, very much so. But it’s like, you got to beat it halfway at least. That’s like, you at least know it that. Yeah. But anyway, I love that intro. I think it really sets an amazing scene because it then, when it cuts back to Rapture, as it’s like basically on the brink of collapse, like the end of the, you know, sort of 50s, kind of like golden age of Rapture, quote unquote, as like basically like there’s a civil war about to kick off and Splice is about to be everywhere. So the second half to sort of like to a storyline that kicked off the year before, where basically Elizabeth and Booker from Bioshock Infinite find themselves in Rapture, essentially. And so like, you know, figuring out the kind of relationship between what happened at the end of Bioshock Infinite and this sort of like comic booky crossover of the two Bioshocks is like part of the mystery of the game. But basically what happens is Elizabeth sort of like gets caught in the whole plot of how how Atlas basically forces Rapture to collapse and like if you’re a fan of Bioshock, it is terrific fan service on that level, quite a lot of fun, and then it also links back to the very start of Bioshock in a quite cool way. What’s also great about this is it actually leans slightly more into the immersive sim nature of like, you know, the the predecessor, arguably Bioshock Infinite is is a first person shooter with powers rather than immersive sim. I wouldn’t necessarily reject that criticism, but here it’s almost like we’re going back to the likes of Deus Ex and games like that by giving you a crossbow and making it a stealth game, which is kind of what they do here. It’s like you are basically playing, yeah, Bioshock Infinite, Bioshock Infinite’s mechanics have been retrofit for you to play it like a stealth game. And I think that’s quite cool. It makes up for the fact that, you know, Elizabeth is not as powerful as Booker in how how it’s being played. So the fact that they do this twist on the Bioshock Infinite gameplay, but also have this really fun spin on how the two Bioshock universes collide means I absolutely love this Matthew. I think this is like, you got I think you need to when you talk about Bioshock Infinite in its totality, you need to talk about these two DLCs because I think they they do talk quite a complete story together. And it gives it kind of like a proper ending that you don’t really get in Bioshock Infinite, which just sort of has a ghost fight that is over basically. What are your thoughts on this one Matthew? You know, as you were saying that, you know, it’s making me think about what we were talking about earlier with defining direction of this period was and you know, I thought it was multiplayer but it is also probably like DLC as a concept and people doing interesting things and a lot of people just added like a boring level to their game or a map pack. But the few times people did use them to not finish the story but kind of investigate the story from another angle or dip deep into their lore was always really exciting. It’s sort of sold with the game now, right? If you buy like the sort of collections of it, you get everything all together. Yeah, it’s just in there basically, so it’s just always kind of part of it now, which is good, I think. Yeah, yeah, it’s cool. I mean, like, yeah, I think they have previous forms. Is it Minerva’s Den for Bioshock 2 was also really good? Yeah, yeah, the sort of standalone story. That’s obviously a different developer, but you know, it’s equally done well. Yeah, yeah, very cool. Well, the cloud that hangs over this, of course, is that they shut the studio afterwards, which is like a waste of an amazingly talented group of people. And, you know, it’s going to come up a lot in the next couple of years, isn’t it? For obvious reasons. And he didn’t blown all that money on the baguette boy. Yeah, that was like a big loss on that in the Take 2K financial statements, I believe. Anyway, yes, so that’s Bioshock Infinite, Matthew. The Bioshock Infinite Barrel of Sea part two, I do very much recommend if you’ve never played these two as a pair to just go through it. The first part is like pretty good. That gives you more of the sort of like, oh, here is Rapture before the fall. You get to see what it’s like going around the whole shopping center basically and like interacting with the citizens. The very eerie vibe that something is very amiss about this underwater world and it’s about to get a lot worse. You get that experience which you don’t get in Bioshock 1 and 2. So yes, well worth playing. What’s your number eight, Matthew? My number eight is Kirby Triple Deluxe. Nice. This is a three for three of Nintendo things I’ve not played that I know Matthew Castle is a big fan of. We talked a lot about Kirby in the Kirby episode, funnily enough, which I recommend you go back to listen to because I feel it’s like a really good celebration of all these games. But this one’s quite an important one for me. Kirby was always a series I dismissed as being a bit kind of kiddish. You know, I saw it only as a platforming challenge, which I don’t think is actually the right way to sort of enjoy Kirby. And for whatever reason, Kirby Triple Deluxe is the one that unlocked it for me. I think it’s got amazing production value to help, it’s like an incredibly shiny thing. It makes great use of the 3D. It’s a 2D platformer, but it does a lot of like dual layer stuff where, you know, things are sort of thrown into the foreground or you can jump into the background. A trick that was borrowed from the Wario Land Virtual Boy game had a lot of that dual plane stuff or another 3D game. Unlike that, though, this doesn’t break your neck like the Virtual Boy does, which is good. It’s a really polished exploration of the core Kirby idea, which is you absorb enemies take on their powers. But what kind of change does the series went on? Those powers became much more fleshed out and those individual personas almost felt like stand-alone heroes satisfying to control in their own right. That doesn’t start here. I can believe it happens in the Wii game. It has a much more complete move set for these characters. But here, just the introduction of new characters and how those different characters are exploited throughout the game. There’s also a little fighting mini-game like Smash Bros where you can play with all those different Kirby power-ups and you just really appreciate how fully thought out everything is in this game, which initially seems quite throwaway and I think that’s really the magic of Kirby. It seems like a game that’s just a scattershot with a thousand different things, but actually all those things are as fully featured as any kind of core idea would be in a Mario game. Also just a really great visual sense of humour. This game revolves around a power-up where you eat this sort of hyper fruit or hyper seed I think it’s called and you sort of go super nova and you can basically inhale the whole world. As a mechanic it’s pretty basic, you just press a button and a cutscene plays. But just the design of entire levels getting sucked into Kirby’s garb or him slurping down huge sea serpents, like he was sucking down a piece of spaghetti or whatever, there’s a lot of really funny, ichy, weird stuff in this game and as mentioned on the Kirby episode and many other episodes it builds to an unexpectedly massive action climax which I’ve likened to Platinum Games which sounds really daft given the world of Kirby but honestly if you don’t play this game check out The Final Boss, these games go places and always end big. I think there’s enough craft for an older fan to enjoy and some of the stuff hidden around the edges can get trickier but I also think it’s really worth celebrating that a game which is made to be an introductory platformer for a younger gamer is as imaginative and well-made as polished as this, children’s license games, mostly shit. This is just absolutely fantastic, I really love it. There’s better Kirby games but this is the one from 2014. This one’s a key step along the way to Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Matthew. It kind of looks like there’s a little bit of DNA between the powers in it but I don’t know if that’s just Kirby-wide generally. A lot of them are just repeated. Forgotten Land is like another step in itself, like the step into 3D is like it almost feels like a new era of Kirby. I think the really key one is that first Wii game, which is directed by Shinya Kumazaki, who’s like the guy who basically comes in and kind of looks after Kirby now. He kind of gives it a more solid gaming core on which to build stuff and this game definitely builds on it. It then builds on it again in the second 3DS game where you get all the robot stuff. That’s really cool. You get Kirby in a mech. Forgotten World is just like another thing on top of that. It still shares some values, you know, the focus on like unlockables and like arcade challenges and the kind of weirdness around the edge that pats it out into something much more than itself. I’d say that’s like classic kind of Kunisaki stuff. I might need to listen back to the Kirby episode that I was on to like learn more about Kirby’s past now that I’ve played Forgotten Land and find the bits that I like and pick them out. When I started in-game I didn’t really like Kirby and Kirby didn’t get like a huge amount of love from in-game and not specifically from me like no one was really into it and now I just think Kirby’s like a lot more on the map as like a kind of a legit important part of the Nintendo puzzle. Yeah, there’s a lot of Kirby on 3DS as well right like relatively speaking. Yeah, they tend to take like the minigames from the main games and pad them out and sell them as standalone games and there’s a lot of like e-shop downloads. It’s a bit like Fall Guys except your Fall Guy gets fatter and fatter because you’re eating like trifles the whole time. It does sound pretty good. It’s got big ass energy. Yeah, it certainly sums up my year so far, yeah, pretty perfect. Okay, so my number 8 Matthew is Titanfall. Spoiler alert, Destiny did not make my list. So we talked a lot about the idea of what a next-gen kind of console represents in terms of like your expectations of games goes up and the sort of like what does next-gen look like with this generation we’re very much in the kind of I think we’ve all kind of come to the realization that there is no next-gen something that’s coming really it’s just prettier versions of what you’re already playing on PS4 and Xbox one and that’s that’s kind of just that’s sort of the era we’re in when you look back like I suppose that yes there is like the increase in visual fidelity that happens but sometimes that next-gen feeling is a magic trick you know what I mean it’s like so they show you something amazing you’ve never seen before and even if it’s like actually possible and something you already own the fact that you’re seeing it this new thing on something that you know on a piece of hardware you just bought and and it kind of like wows you in that very specific way is still kind of like is still amazing and that can still that that is like that is what the next-gen moment is I think it’s like oh wow I cannot believe I’m looking at this we talked about Arkham Knight earlier seeing gameplay of that that is like a next-gen magic trick another Another one is seeing the titans land in this game and getting in them. And like the beautiful animation of that, like the act of calling in these basically mech walkers and then landing on the battlefield and then climbing inside them. And then suddenly you are in this giant mech shooting people in this first person shooter. That is like ridiculously exciting. That felt like a next gen moment to me at the time. That’s like, that was a great selling point for this game. Now you have mentioned that the drawback of Titanfall 1 is that it lacked this sort of like, yeah, it lacked a single player campaign to kind of really kind of get you into it. But the multiplayer shooter they did build with this heavy emphasis on like athleticism, you know, kind of like doing these kind of cool sort of like wall runs and jumps and having this kind of like symbiotic relationship with this, you know, this Titan that you call in. And then also these kind of like weird presence of like AI troops running around the sort of like the battlefield for you to farm essentially in order for you to have enough, you know, basically points to call in your Titan. It felt like innovation to me. It was really exciting. It was different. It was notably different to Call of Duty. It wasn’t a game about you just sort of getting sniped from nowhere every few seconds. It was a game about like these big dramatic moments and turnarounds and oh my God, there’s like fucking three mechs having a fight down that street kind of thing. And I just really got into that, despite the fact that it was real, at least on PC where I played it, it was really obvious that it just died straight away. It just never became a success. Yeah. Not help because obviously it was tied to Origin. This is when EA just didn’t like Steam for whatever reason. And so you couldn’t play this on Origin. And I think it just died a lot faster than it should have done. Even by the end of 2014 when I was playing it, I felt like there were, I was seeing the same names over and over again because there’s just such a handful of people playing it. But I thought the drama of it was ridiculous, exciting, helping this amazing kind of music and these kind of mechs having these very cool abilities, you feeling that power curve really sort of firmly when they’re part of the battlefield, the really exciting moments when they’re about to blow up, so you evacuate them. All of that was just a really compelling hook to me for a great first person shooter. But it just felt like the wrong game at the wrong time for some reason. Meanwhile, Destiny was just, yeah, everyone was fucking bopping to Paul McCartney’s Destiny song. I’m being disingenuous there and going like, oh wow, isn’t it cool that Peter Dinklage is this robot. The whole thing was like, I was like, but this is the magic over here. This is like, this is an absolute sugar rush of a multiplayer experience. It’s incredible. They should have got Ringo to write a song. Titanfall. That was my Ringo voice there. I watched a lot of Thomas the Tank Engine. So it really bothered me. This felt like, oh yeah, the creators of Call of Duty have found a way to take the first person to shoot to the next level. People weren’t bothered, but they wanted to play the same levels over and over again in Destiny Matthew. And like, yeah, I didn’t get it personally. So it broke my heart a little bit for it to not succeed. But I had like, I probably played it for about 30 hours at the time and I was just so into it. I just really loved how the guns felt. The smart pistol in this game was really fucking rad. Yeah, it was just really exciting. This was evolution to me of that type of shooter. Did you play this much at the time? Did it come and pass you by? I was terrible at it. I get everything you’re saying. I have complete agreement about like the craft of it and how good it is. But for me personally, like the core idea that you’re rewarded, you become this huge mech. Psychologically, when I’m playing first person shooters, I don’t like to have like be the center of attention. I tend to play kind of very support roles where I can in games. And to me, the idea of like you’re now this huge lumbering thing and like everyone’s going to try and take you down. Yes, you’re incredibly powerful, but in a weird way, it’s like almost too much responsibility for me. Like I’m almost happy being just a man in this world and you can be, you know, just a man, just a normal man. And you can be, you know, that’s completely up to you. But like, I feel like I never properly engage with this or I just don’t have the mindset I’m too passive for the kind of awesome, aggressive force that is Titanfall. Well, I sort of get what you mean because it kind of puts you centre stage when those things arrive. And I panic because everyone’s like, fucking get that guy, I’m the easiest mech to kill because I’m just like, oh, I don’t know where I’m looking. And then that’s it, I’m just fucked, you know? Yeah. But I think the thing is that they are, they are almost like, you will get a Titan no matter how badly you perform in the game, basically. And like, they are also designed to make you feel empowered even when you’re struggling. I think that’s one of the things that’s good about it, but… Yeah, it’s just a dumb thing in my brain. But that isn’t a criticism of it at all. It’s just why, and also, like, I just didn’t have time to be playing a multiplayer shooter. No, that’s fine. And it’s low on my list because it doesn’t have a single player, like that’s why Titanfall 2 is such a great package. Obviously, that will come up in, you know, when we do 2016. But yeah, I still really valued it at the time and it bumped me out that it just wasn’t and it just wasn’t being accepted in the same way and, you know, the foundations of this, the athleticism of the first person shooter, that’s what would power Apex Legends ultimately and like finally give Respawn the success they deserved. But yeah, it was, this was super cool. It was just, yeah, just kind of ignored, which was really weird, but such as it is, it’s still a favorite of mine. What’s your number seven, Matthew? My number seven is the Evil Within. Oh, not on my list. Shinji Mikami’s glorious, question mark, return to survival horror, over the shoulder shooting, a la Resident Evil 4. It came at an interesting time. Obviously Resident Evil 5 and 6 had been on 360. We hadn’t sort of seen, you know, Mikami in this space, he’d made Vanquish with Platinum. And it was just really interesting to see what he was going to do. The resultant game, like, it’s definitely a mess, the Evil Within. Like, narratively, it’s horrible because it’s sort of set inside an insane mind, so there’s no rhyme or reason to the order of the levels. It also gives them some freedom to kind of, like, take the game all over the place and it kind of almost does, like, urban Resident Evil 2 horror, it does rural village Resident Evil 4 horror, it does mad Silent Hill nightmare prisons. It really goes all over the shop, which is kind of like a strength but it’s married to the fact that I couldn’t tell you what the story of this game is. It’s really satisfying to play but I feel like it’s a much grimy, dirtier, like, stressful game, the Resident Evil. I think Resident Evil, like, even when it’s trying to panic you, has a certain sort of sheen to it. This is, like, it’s never really about being cool, it’s just about, like, scrabbling for survival. There’s an interesting mechanic where you can set bodies on fire which can then set other enemies on fire to kind of, like, limit your ammo but rather than being just, like, a cool thing you can do, it’s like an absolute necessity. Very stressful time playing this game. But I just feel compared to, like, some of the other interim Resident Evils and other people who’ve done, like, this sort of over-the-shoulder kind of action game, you can sense Mikami’s presence in it. As a kind of, like, constant stressful action gauntlet, I think there’s, like, a definite sense of, like, a master with their foot on the gas pedal in this, kind of, like, applying stress in some places, making other places a bit easier and a bit, sort of, flashier fun, then throwing in a horrible boss. Like, I think it really puts you through the wringer and takes great pleasure doing so, and I didn’t really feel that as much in Evil Within 2. Ghostwire Tokyo, I think, is very, sort of, bloated and un-Mikami-ish, but this one, like, it has some of that kind of rollercoaster shape of Resident Evil 4. It’s just, like, a lot rougher with it, and it takes you to some much darker, like, grimmer places. But I have real affection for it. I don’t know if it’s just, sort of, like, Stockholm Syndrome, or, kind of, like, forged in the fire of this game. I kind of came out the other end really appreciating what it did, but, you know, I liked that it was quite cruel and sadistic, and I felt like I had achieved something when I came out the other end of it. In that, sort of, like, bleakness as well, the few pockets of safety, when it gives you a save room, and they’re always indicated by it, plays, like, Claire de Lune, the tune, and whenever I hear that tune, it’s just, like, in the game that is, you’re like, oh, the sense of relief. I think he just has real fun with knowing, kind of, how desperate you’re gonna be at times in this game, and then the, kind of, sense of release when you finally find safe ground. There’s a lot of magic in this quite grueling, hard-going experience. Yeah, I should really, like, actually properly play through both of these at some point. I got to this when I got to the boss, the girl who chases you around, that… Yeah, there’s a lot of, like, one-hit-kill bosses and, like, horrible monsters that, like, scream in your face the whole time. Like, it’s… It’s pretty bleak. Well, I really like the, sort of, cursed, like, spooky vibes of it, because it goes a lot harder than Rezzie ever does, doesn’t it? And, like, the save points become more and more horrible space to enter each time you go, or, like, throughout the game, right? They become a bit nastier. They’re kind of creepy, definitely, it’s like a sort of, like, mental asylum world that you travel to. Yeah, and I think that that’s actually, like, a really cool idea for a survival horror game, that your safe area, your safe, not safe space, fucking hell, that’s such a loaded term now, but, you know, like, safe zone is, like, becomes under threat or becomes less desirable to go into. That’s a very cool idea. I think that’s got something in common with the idea of, like, ink ribbons you run out of in Resi, the idea that, like, you just, you don’t have safety in the very familiar kind of game mechanic. I also thought that the opening, the opening, like, where things go wrong is just so scary and nasty as well, like, the butchers, kind of like, the butchers area you have to escape from and then, or he, like, saws, the chainsaw into the back of your leg and shit when you’re running away. It’s just so, it’s so nasty and grueling from the start. It’s just, yeah, I’m relented. There’s almost a little bit of, like, outlast in it, in kind of just how full on it is of, like, these big horrible things that are just gonna fuck you up and, like, it can take many many hours before you’re strong enough to face off against certain things and it really draws out. It’s a long game as well. Really good DLC spread as well for this one. One of the iconic monsters is a man with a safe for a head who’s basically Pyramid Head, except it’s a safe. I don’t know what his name is. It might be called the Watcher or the something, the Chaser or something. The Safe Head. Safe Head. We had a little box out in OXM which was what’s inside the safe of the man with the safe for a head. And then it was just a picture of an open safe and it would be like, you know, it’s a copy of Spyro. Classic mag bullshit. But you play, yeah, there’s a DLC where you played as him in first person, basically going around fucking up people with his horrible hammer. That was quite fun. And there was another one where you played as Dexter’s sister from Dexter. I think it’s a Dexter’s sister from Dexter’s lab. No, that would be very different. The DD DLC for Evil Within. Do you remember Evil Within? You played as DD from Dexter’s lab. That was weird. OK, that makes much more sense. Yeah. Jennifer Compton. Yeah. And yeah, again, had its own mechanics, own stuff going on, you know, very worthwhile playing. Like if you were into the horrible, horrible world of the Evil Within, there was loads of Evil Within to enjoy, which I quite liked. Yeah, this is like I think this is just this is quite cool. Like you sort of saw what Bethesda was spending all of its Fallout and Elder Scrolls money on right. And it was like bankrolling games from rad teams basically, like in genres that were that had become maybe less popular or forgotten. And that was kind of what this felt like. It was like basically like a Rezi game. It did compare favorably to Rezi 6. I won’t dispute that, you know, despite my bullshit defense of that game sometimes in this podcast. Like it was closer to what people wanted. And yeah, I kind of respect that I’m relenting nastiness, even if I did find some frustration with the game itself. Do you think it has much of a reputation these days? Do people talk about it that much? I think people prefer Evil Within 2, though I think it sort of sands off a lot of the rough edges and it has like a sort of open world areas which let you step away from it a lot more. Like they hold a lot more control over how stressed you are in Evil Within 1. I think it’s a more interesting game for it. But Evil Within 2 is probably more traditionally entertaining. Let’s just finish this at some point. It was like also not afraid to be quite difficult and make you fight for it. I just like that about it. Like it was, it did have the DNA of what people wanted I think from survival horror. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That’s a cool pick Matthew. Was that your number 7? That was 7, yeah. Okay, my number 7 is Metal Gear Solid 5 Ground Zeroes. Is this on your list? It isn’t. Okay. Interesting. We’ll get into that. A prologue essentially to The Phantom Pain which will come out the next year. A prologue that is basically set in Guantanamo Bay, sort of like what is obviously the kind of like an inhumane sort of like American prison essentially, where you are liberating to prisoners of war from snakes, kind of like, you know, private army essentially. You’re going in there to get them out and this base is as you go, you will learn more and more about what happened to the prisoners there. You know, the camp is run by XOF, but it’s clearly about the rancid bullshit that George W. Bush was up to in the wake of 9-11, all the kind of inhumane bullshit he got away with off the back of that. That’s like, that’s kind of like the real kind of core theme of it. That’s what sets it apart from the Phantom Pain really, which doesn’t really interrogate that that much. The Phantom Pain is, I guess, like slightly more fantastical and not really about war so much. It’s more like that’s a game where it’s kind of more about like go to these sandboxes and take them apart. You don’t really sit and think about the theme so much. This is a game that’s weirdly heavy on themes. This is like some truly nasty stuff has happened to Chico, the boy that you’re rescuing from this and some an extremely grim and nasty fate awaits Paz in this. I won’t go into but got a lot of discussion at the time because I think it asked some questions about how, you know, Hideo Kojima and his team handle tone, whether it’s the right fit for Metal Gear, what happens to Paz in this, I think that’s a fair question to ask. I’m not sure it totally lands on myself. What it essentially comes down to though is exploring one Phantom Pain style stealth immersive sim sandbox and seeing if you can make your way through without getting caught basically while liberating these prisoners. It’s quite hard. I played it again yesterday and like they don’t make it easy for you to hide bodies in this, which I think makes it actually slightly unreasonable as a challenge going through this space. But I do like the challenge of like break into this space and get out again and while you’re there, you got a bunch of optional objectives, things to find like clues about the faction who have your troops prisoner. You can also liberate some of the other prisoners and get kind of like rewards for doing that. It’s sort of like, I suppose, what the tanker demo in MGS2 is to MGS2, except MGS5 version and the bulk of the game waiting for you is a lot better than what this is. But as a kind of like, cool little slice of stealth sandbox gameplay to show you what they’ve been working on, to show how they’d like made these really refined stealth mechanics and contemporary feeling mechanics that the MGS4 did not have, I think it works very successfully. But I do think that it’s also, its reputation is also slightly overblown when the Phantom Pain is a lot better. Thoughts Matthew? Yeah, I mean, that’s the only reason it’s not on my list. I’ve put so much time in Phantom Pain, and that like, that moves things along even more mechanically. You know, the world of Phantom Pain still has some grim stuff in it, but this is, you know, not an easy hang. Given that it is quite playful in like how many different like modes and like hidden versions of it there are and ways you can kind of return to this world, but still at its heart, you know, are some like, incredibly sad, sad, horrible leads, but you know, I can completely understand why it’s on the list, only it was one of my most played games of this year. I’ve just, it’s sort of just been overwritten a bit by Phantom Pain. Yeah, and I think that’s fair. I can still see why in the moment it was quite, it was quite exciting. I think like weirdly, yeah, the dark moments in it, I think they are too much. They do weirdly set it apart though from Phantom Pain, thematically. Like it’s sort of like, unrelenting, it’s just so horrible. Like some of the stuff that’s revealed there, like it’s surprising how horrible it is. And then meanwhile, you have the strange incongruous nature of like, oh, Kiefer Suttle in the snake now. Which I don’t think ever really was a good idea. I don’t think that was, he added anything to it. Do you agree with that? Oh, no, not at all. Like if anything, you know, him being more famous and probably, well, definitely more expensive to work with, meant there was like less snake and like less interesting for it. Yeah. I think that was a real dud decision, especially when they kept the same Otacon. So just fucking get your hand, you know, like get David Hayter back, like, and then you can actually tell a proper story. The tone of this world, like the voice actors were so kind of tuned into it. And he is different. When he is in conversation, you know, with other characters, they just, he just doesn’t quite fit. Bad call, in my opinion. So, yes, that’s, that’s weird about it. But yes, it’s like, I can see why people treat this as this repeatable, oh, I’ll do all the challenges and see what the camp is like during the day. But fuck me, the troops in this, they can see you from miles away. I think it is, I think it, like I say, unreasonable, borderline unreasonable is a stealth experience. Where the fuck are you meant to hide the bodies in this? You can’t dump them in boxes or anything. Like you can chuck them off cliffs, I think. But fucking hell, it’s so hard. And I don’t know if hard necessarily equals good with Metal Gear. Because ultimately I think it ends with me like chucking grenades at people, getting into gun turrets and stuff. And I’m like, well, maybe there should be a slightly more options if you want to play this stealthily than it has. What would the boss say if she heard you moaning like this, about how hard it is to be a secret agent? Oh, it’s so hard. I just can’t believe it. After all she gave for this country, but yeah. So Ground Zeroes, yeah, like I didn’t want to put it too high on my list because, yeah, I think it’s over reputation a bit much these days, but it was still very good. So yeah, number seven is fine. What’s your number six, Matthew? My number six is Bayonetta 2. My number six as well. Yeah, there you go. See, I’ve got it into my head. You don’t like Bayonetta 2. Well, I played it a bit this weekend to prepare for this. And I think that like the way that Bayonetta 3 sort of goes off the rails quite quickly and becomes this quite wild set PC strange game. This seems like it’s actually quite nice to just do a back to basics Bayonetta. I love that a game that opens with you fighting on the back of a fighter jet, then you’re on a train, then you’re flying around a giant building basically as a half woman, half butterfly. And you’re like, yeah, this is more basic and down to earth. Well, relatively speaking to Bayonetta, it’s like, it’s not like which of my 20 Godzilla monsters am I going to become for this level? It’s like, yeah, it just it seems quite, there is something slightly more restrained about it. It’s like, oh, I am still doing all the Bayonetta combos and things I’m used to. The mechanics, the core mechanics are still super hardcore and super understandable. There are too many boss fights in this game. But also, Matthew, I originally paid this on Wii U and like this looks fucking nice on a Switch OLED. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Compared to that Fisher Price screen on the Wii U. This is like, yeah, this is big boy shit. So yes, why don’t you kick off from there, Matthew? I was a little cool on Bayonetta 2 myself at the time. I was, you know, I thought one was the more kind of complex, sophisticated game. I thought they watered it down a little bit much. But actually now I’ve come to kind of appreciate it as I think it’s a really good into the series. I think it has wild excess that sort of defines Bayonetta and that you want from Bayonetta. I also think it’s slightly gentler on the difficulty and lets you do cooler things with Bayonetta like from the off with your abilities. As you master her she gets a bit more complicated but I think the skill ceiling is definitely lowered a bit for this one. For me it’s almost like a better into it before you hit Bayonetta 1, which is a more complex tool. She can do a lot more varied things but it’s quite hard getting there and even on normal difficulty I actually find Bayonetta 1 quite a stiff challenge compared to normal difficulty on Bayonetta 2. The downside to that is that a lot of this game is very set PC or a boss fight or a one on one encounter. There’s not a lot of just pure arena based, there are four different enemy types and you have to work out how to deal with all these things. Which I think Bayonetta 1 fully explores its combat system by having a lot more of those scenarios and when you’re fighting a big thing it’s basically dodge its big attacks and then hit when its big eye opens. And you don’t really need as sophisticated at all as Bayonetta to do those fights. They’re still exciting to watch and to do in the moment and they end in really fun ways. I like the variety of this game compared to one as well. You know, it starts off in the city, then you go to this like weird island, you’re dragged down to hell, there are whole new enemy types, you fight all the kind of legions of hell, who have this very distinctive look, they’re all kind of made from sort of almost purple glass and that’s very striking, put next to the kind of like creepy cherubs of the heavenly forces. I just think it’s a really good time, it never gets boring, it’s a little bit easier, a little bit friendlier probably is a better term, than Bayonetta 1. And once you’ve through it, you know, you’ve still got Bayonetta 1 to like really get into like the more complicated stuff if you want to. So yeah, I just, it’s sort of a game I’ve definitely like warmed to. Yeah, I think that like, I think that my take on this on the Platinum episode was quite probably quite frustrating to people because I wasn’t qualifying much about what I why I found it so inferior to the first one. I think the first one’s like, first of all, I do like some of the colorful touches the first one has like the, like the space harrier mini game and the sort of after burning music playing in the otherwise not particularly amazing bike sequence. But like, I think that it is like what you say, I think that what I loved about Bayonetta originally was that it took the arena 3D combat of Devil May Cry, that mastery of being in spaces with familiar enemy types that you can learn. And then like, you know, just and just let you let you push that so far on a replay when you had this like really packed arsenal and you could really perfect it. I think Bayonetta too, like you say, by being so boss heavy, loses some of that a little bit. But yeah, I think it’s still like, in those moments where you are, you do feel very in control of that combat system. It still feels amazing. It does have those moments still. Yeah, I think like, yeah, it’s just a spectacle of it is still still can still can wow me. Just playing this week, I just had a better time this week than I remembered having with it back in 2015 when I played it, you know, that’s basically my experience plus COVID fever. Yeah, it’s like every five minutes, it’s like, it does that thing where like holy music pose and then it’s like a big monster angel baby face and then it’s just new and it’s like, it’s like this is a new creature I’ve been fighting these for like fucking 10 hours, but yeah, that’s quite funny. Also, it’s funny, I read a few reviews of Bayonetta 2 and I think they struggled to put their finger on what had changed massively since the first one. And I forgot that they do give you that power to unleash those kind of like umbral, like big attacks using like the left bumper. That’s quite cool. That kind of meter builds up and it’s kind of like a special meter you basically use to help kind of clear the arena if you’re struggling a little bit or batter a boss a bit more. I think the really like hardcore platinum heads mark this one down quite a lot for that mechanic because they think the game’s balanced around basically building up to just unleashing that and every fight ends with you just doing one of those attacks. I kind of see that a little bit I suppose. Yeah but like I’m so shit at these games like you’d have to be playing at a much better level for that criticism to kick in. But yeah, but these are people who think that witch time is like too generous and like don’t like that mechanic and if I don’t have that I’ve got fucking nothing. Maybe it’s cheating a bit to like include specifically the Wii U version because like a lot of this game’s beauty is unlocked on Switch. Yeah it definitely is. And on OLED as well like just the color scheme like the deep purples and everything just look absolutely gorgeous. It’s one of the best looking OLED games for sure. Yeah really nice. So yeah like maybe I sound like I’m softening on it a bit but you know I think I had when we did the 2010 episode I had Bayonetta a lot higher than number six. So this does reflect like my affections towards it Matthew. I think it is cool and I’m glad it’s like readily available on Switch. That’s good. What’s your number five Matthew? My number five is Dragon Age Inquisition. That’s also my number five. Whoa! Yeah it’s a controversial pick for me because I never finished it but I was thinking when I reflect on 2014 in games the 40 hours I did spend playing this or 30 maybe it’s 30 hours something like that I saw a lot of the landscapes a lot of the story a lot of the characters and I felt like it was still a massive part of my gaming experience of this year so yeah why don’t you go from there. This is the first Dragon Age I properly played like I played the other ones after this so I didn’t really have any connection to the world was a bit baffled at first but I just wanted to play something like next gen that seemed to be good and this was definitely one of the early next gen games that was like quite rated quite highly I kind of like it in that it sort of sits between an open world game and a more linear action experience you know it’s quite large biomes but they feel very like handcrafted they don’t quite have the sprawl of like a Skyrim or Oblivion they’re very like gamey spaces there’s a lot of like side quests infamously in this game but I actually quite like that side of the game I quite like ticking off the activities and kind of stripping these worlds of their things you know it’s it’s not like a landscape that has to last me forever there’s like a finite end to this adventure but there’s also like a scale which I would kind of want from a fantasy game you know I like stepping into these areas I like that the world is split into very self-contained biomes it’s not like a big land mass because it means that each Each world can be very distinctive and have a weird fantasy hook. I was genuinely excited to see each new location because the art design on them and the environmental design is absolutely amazing. I still think of that coastline with all the basalt rock, and then you’re in the weird desert and going down into all these spooky tombs and there’s oasis shit and all this kind of stuff. Visually, it really sticks with me. I really like the central hook of the Inquisition. It’s probably the main thing in this game. I think it really sells you on this fantasy that you’re a party. You have this role in the world, which is you’re in the Inquisition going out and fixing stuff. I really love the war table where you see all these missions spread across the kingdom and then all your different advisors give you different approaches to how to sort them out and that can lead to different mission types or different outcomes or different relationships with those advisors. I love the fact that you have a big castle and you can sit on a throne and meet out judgment on people. I think that’s really fun. They bring up all these enemies who you capture in the missions and then you get to sort of put them on trial and like execute them or kind of forgive them or whatever. And that feels like a very fun riff on the kind of sort of moral quandaries of you know, Bioware are so known for. You know, I liked the characters enough. I didn’t really have enough of a connection with the returning characters to know whether or not they were done great justice too. But you know, I mixed up my party a lot. There was reason to spend time with everyone. I mean, I’d be interested to hear the take of someone who was like better versed in Dragon Age. To be honest, it was really well done, I thought. It was like, so, you know, there were some cast members from Origins and two, like Leliana was a member of the Inquisition bit of it, right, like the actual like managing the world side of it. Leliana, who I’d never, who I missed entirely on Origins. So I was like, oh, that’s kind of strange. But it was cool seeing, as I’ve mentioned before in the RPG companion’s draft, the Cassandra and Varric in this game, who already had a preexisting relationship. So when you put them in the party together and you heard them talking, there was that tete-a-tete, which was nice. And then does the really ambitious thing of making Hawk from Dragon Age 2 a part of the story. You know, a player created character, a player shaped character, you could sort of change his attitude and that would affect his dialogue choices. So, you know, it could fundamentally be your Hawk who was in Dragon Age 2. And that was really cool. It was like, I’m gonna go meet my old main character on the, you know, the battlements of my base and talk to him about what he’s been up to. That’s Brad, I think. So yeah, I think it really worked as a sort of bit of Dragon Age fan service. I think that now people have a lot of affection for this game because it was the last great Bioware game really, wasn’t it? And so I think people hang on to this. And like you say, it was very next gen. It was like when the Dragon Fights kicked off, it was mega cool. It wasn’t the most, it wasn’t the deepest RPG to play by any means. It was very much like, you know, you’re doing sort of basically like an action RPG. But the experience of journey across a world felt pure RPG to me. And they put so much effort into that companion dialogue that it really brought it to life. And when you come off of Dragon Age 2, which was set in one city over 10 years to cover up the fact they made it in 18 months, the sprawl here felt just really, really incredible. I think it gave people a proper snapshot of the world that was only ever really hinted at in those first two games. So yeah, I think it really works as an extension of Dragon Age. Its affections are well deserved, Matthew. So yeah, I think that even though it’s a slow starter, people always joked about get out of the Hinterlands. Because yeah. I didn’t really feel that. There are a lot of collectibles in this game, but they’re put in interesting places and there’s weird little lawn. Everything feels quite bespoke to me. It doesn’t feel like you’re doing the same Skyrim cave like 30 times over, you know? And that’s the stuff that kind of kills open world fantasy for me a lot. It’s like, oh, not another fucking cave. Like that balance like never impacted me. I can remember doing the Hinterlands and being like, people had a problem with this. Like it’s genuinely fine. I think the way to treat it is that like, once you can go to a different place, you do mix it up and then you kind of return later on maybe when you feel you’re part of it. You’re meant to, I think like, to sort of dip into places and dip out of places and see what’s going on, come back and fight a dragon later when you feel equipped for it. Like it’s meant to be that kind of like, oh, I’ll go to this different open world today kind of thing. And when the story beats come, like they’re pretty good. You know, like you go to this like big party in this like palace and it’s all full of kind of like courtly intrigue. That’s great. You know, that’s a really cool set piece. I just, I don’t know what people are complaining about. And honestly, compared to like Mass Effect Andromeda, this is like a fucking Edge 10. Yeah, I think this is really well liked now. But I think the only people who ever complained about Dragon Age were people who wanted it to be like basically, you know, a sort of never went to night sea kind of like RPG combat experience that the origins was and then it was compromised a bit on consoles. And I think that those people were maybe not as enamored with it, but that was quite a hard thing to ask of a game that was gonna sell most of its copies on console in 2014. So yeah, but this was not a big success for nothing. Its reputation is well-deserved. I’m just gonna play Divinity Original Sin. That’s that game. Yeah, basically that one that was this year, wasn’t it? So yeah, what’s your number four, Matthew? My number four is Kalimba. Oh yeah, Matthew Castle Xbox Classic. That was it the best, was it the highest ranking exclusive from this year on Xbox for you Matthew? We gave it a 10 in that sense, yeah. Wow, nice. I think Kalimba is one of the great overlooked games of like the last 10 years. I genuinely think it’s amazing. Portal platformer, where you play as two totem pole segments sitting on top of each other’s head. You kind of control them in unison. So walking along is one unit, but you can also jump to sort of split them apart. And then they can end up on like a lower and an upper tracks. You’ve got to imagine these two little things walking along the top and the bottom of the screen, but you’re controlling them simultaneously. So, you know, where one goes left, they both go left. And all the puzzles kind of revolve around either kind of positioning them so like, you can do something on the bottom without fucking the guy on the top or vice versa, or you can flip the colors of them. And then there are obstacles. So like, if there’s some pink go up top, you flip the colors. So the pink totem piece is up top. It basically has the effect of playing a co-op game by yourself in that you’re having to look at two platforming runs at once and kind of balancing them up. Like, Taken Slowly, it’s just a good puzzle game, but you do find yourself getting more confident in taking it at speed. It’s a very replayable game. Like at the end of the level, you’re judged on like number of deaths, the little collectible trinkets of light that you collect and speed. So there is like a speed running element to this. And you begin to realize that actually the levels are designed to be taken at quite a clip. Some of them almost have that kind of classic Mario Brothers level magic, where if you hold right, you’ll find that they’ve almost choreographed your movement with the level itself. And you just have to worry about jumping, which is a really delightful thing. I love it when a game sort of doubles as almost like an auto runner. That to me speaks of just very, very precise level design. Beautiful visual style, very simplistic, but incredibly sharp. Little sort of like motes of triangular light, which come out of everything, which gives it this very sort of angular, but also kind of fizzy magical feel, which is very cool. The music is very, very funky. I have no idea how to classify the genre of music. I thought it might be like some kind of like energetic like polka music, but I don’t think that’s right. It’s very mad. All the collectibles are like auto tuned to the music. So whenever you get them, it’s like the, it sounds like you’re getting them at the right time in the level. It’s very choreographed in that way, which I’m really drawn to. Great co-op mode, which takes the already co-op feeling single player and adds more totem pieces for two people to play. It’s only like a stretch of 10 levels or so, the co-op, but me and Kate played this on OXM and had like such a laugh. That’s probably where the 10 out of 10 came from. And it’s all hosted by this really cool bear called Ho Bear the Meta Bear, who sort of talks in like fourth wall breaking comments, which I would normally roll my eyes at, but this is a really good example of it done well. Just him sort of, he’s got this very husky voice, which I haven’t heard this voice actor in any other game. So it’s got this very like distinct vibe to him. And he sort of like aware that you’re not there to see him. You just want to get on with it. And he seems quite put out by his whole role as like the narrator and tutorial guy. It’s just so weird and odd and funny and incredibly tight as a platformer. It makes me sad to this day when you look at like it’s Metacritic and it’s just like, you know, IGN giving it like a seven and being like, yeah, it’s all right, so it doesn’t sound like anything special. And it’s like, this feels great and it sounds fucking amazing. Like you fools, what is wrong with you? Yeah, dumb. Why did they release it in the Christmas holidays? What a fucking stupid time to release a game. So just like, this is just such a weird era for Microsoft. This is such a strange time. Like it’s, this game has the profile of like Xbox Live Summer of Arcades game. But like, but it was just released by itself. It to like avoid basically to be ignored. And that’s tough to be on to be completely unappreciated. Yeah, that’s tough. Like again, I don’t know why this isn’t on Game Pass. They own the rights to it, right? It’s the Microsoft published games. So. Lots of people listen to this podcast and go and get Hotel Dusk and play it. And that’s great. But I’d like, if you’re going to play anything that I recommend, go and play Kalimba. I’m just interested to see if I’m, am I just completely mad and missing the mark on this one? Or I swear it’s more people would love it if they played it, but. Yeah, play, and that and the Centennial Case, that’s. Oh yeah, that’s more of an acquired taste. This is just a good platformer. Who doesn’t love a good sharp platformer? Eight quid as well, that’s not much, is it? But then I haven’t bought it and I really trust your opinion. So maybe I’m part of the problem here. Kalimba, very good. All right, cool. Very good. The worst thing, if you type Kalimba review on YouTube, you won’t get anything for the game. You’ll just get reviews of the Kalimba instruments. Then I realized that Kalimba YouTube is like a whole thing and it’s pretty odd. That’s tough, yeah. They’ve done their best to bury the reputation of this game, Matthew. Kalimba, fuck it out. My number four is South Park The Stick Of Truth. Oh. Not on your list? No. So, I love this game so much. So I’m really up and down on South Park generally, as like a sort of a source of interest. I’ve had like several phases of being into it. And this happened to drop at a time where I was getting big into it again. Maybe it was powered by the game, to be honest, but like I think that’s around the time they started serializing South Park and it led to a few interesting seasons before, I think it got slightly long in the tooth and they ditched the idea, during these kind of season long plot lines essentially. This basically was like what I wanted a Simpsons game to be. But even though it was South Park, I would take it, damn it, because someone needed to do this with an animated show to kind of basically like let you explore the entire town in which it’s set, let you interact with all its different characters in fun ways. And here they kind of presented that South Park world via sort of like the kids playing a high fantasy game. And so you were playing this turn-based RPG off the back of that. And they cast different characters, including kind of Cartman as like key figures in that sort of journey, let you go through all the different houses of the characters. And because obviously South Park’s animation style was very simple, you could basically just recreate one-to-one what the world was. And that was a great magic trick. And they used that to kind of like ram in just so many references to bits of the show’s history. South Park had famously been treated as quite, quite poorly in the video game space. I quite enjoyed that tower defense game they put on Xbox. That was all right. And so yeah, here was the game that was the Matt and Trey endorsed game. Worked on by, made by Obsidian, worked on somewhat as well, I think by, because it was picked up by Ubisoft, because THQ collapsed, so I think that Ubisoft did quite a lot of work to kick it into shape is my understanding. So yeah, I was just hugely fond of this. It reviewed really well. It was like a rare super funny game. And it sort of didn’t do any of the South Park humor things that I find quite annoying. It was like, it really kind of got on the right side of me tonally. And so yeah, I was very fond of it, Matthew. What did you make of this one? I haven’t finished this one, I must admit. I sort of started playing it, liked it, liked the humour, liked the battle system enough. I can’t remember why I stopped playing it. Maybe it’s like fatigue from feeling like I had to mine it for like every joke and constantly do laps of all the places. I became sort of paranoid about missing stuff and missing jokes and missing hidden things. And maybe I just made it a bit too drawn out for me. Maybe I should have just ploughed on with the main storyline, because a lot of this game, when people talk about it, it does go over my head a bit, because there’s just loads of cool stuff I’ve not seen in it. So yeah, it’s kind of on my need to revisit list. You want me to revisit this? That doesn’t sound plausible to me. What you never know, it could happen. Well, it’s probably quite a good fit for the Switch, actually. Because I played it at the time on PC, which is kind of strange. You think of you sat at my desk playing this. That just doesn’t seem right, does it? It seems like a kind of console game. It’s very, very simple as RPGs go as well. But yeah, the way it would weave in things like how Timmy was the fast travel system, that was just quite funny. Yeah, it just had every character at every location you would want in it, really. Really nicely done. And I never quite got into the sequel because it sort of overcomplicated the combat. I feel like I would probably enjoy it if I just sat down and played it properly. But this was basically like the Mario and Luigi Super Star Saga approach to combat, right? Yeah. Yeah. But why not rip that off? It was like, you know, it’s trad turn-based but with a bit of real-time interactivity. Perfect, I think. So yeah, real good, Matthew, this. Yeah, still a massive favorite of mine. Not sure I’d ever revisit it, because you kind of see all the jokes once, you’ve kind of done it, I think. Well, that’s why I can revisit it, because I haven’t seen all the jokes, so. That’s true. But that’s exactly why I should play the, what’s it called, the angered butthole or something. What’s it called? Something like that. Angered butthole is something. That sounds much worse. Angered butthole does sound like a kind of like, Suda 51 boss or something in one of his games. What’s your number three, Matthew? My number three is Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc. Is it higher on yours? No, it’s not. Was that this year it came out? I thought it was an older series than this for some reason. It was, but when it came out on Vita in the UK. Ah, gotcha. I don’t think this has appeared on our previous lists. If it has, apologies. No, I don’t think it has, no. I’ve definitely talked about it though. This is a sort of Ace Attorney-ish game in that it revolves around a trial system. You are a group of teenagers who are enrolled into Hopes Peak Academy, which is a school for incredibly elute students. Every student in there is the ultimate at something. You have the ultimate programmer, fan, fit, creator, fashionista, moral compass, baseball star, pop sensation, clairvoyant and so on. You are the ultimate lucky student in that you were picked from everyone else randomly to go to this school. So you are not an exceptional person. You go to this school and everyone is locked in. They are told that the only way to escape the school is to murder a fellow student and get away with it. Which means killing a fellow student and then surviving a trial system. If you go through the trial and everyone picks the wrong suspect, they are all put to death and you escape. High stakes game of life and death. So Ace Attorney but with this extra wrinkle of if you fail the case you die. People start murdering other people so every level is basically you investigating the case. And then building up to this trial. Which has a slight like manic arcade energy to it. So unlike Ace Attorney where you just present evidence, here you like load evidence as truth bullets into a gun and then you have to shoot the evidence of the lies that they contradict. It’s a bit much this game. I know lots of people have really bounced off it because it’s very anime. I bounce off a lot of it. It’s got some really gross characters, some very like sexualised characters who are just a bit creepy and full on and constantly screeching in the dialogue. But underneath that it has really really good murder cases. I just really like the murder mystery construction. I think the actual kind of like locked room murders or mysterious murders that occur are stronger than those in Ace Attorney and unpicking them and solving them and beating them in these in these very energetic trial sequences. That thing’s really really good fun. It’s a very very different stylistic riff on something I really love. The kind of creator of this Kazutaka Kodaka is a big like crime buff. He’s working on a new game comes out this year called Rain Code, which is another like murder mystery thing. I interviewed him once and we talked about Japanese crime fiction and like authors that inspired him and it was just really cool that he’s kind of pulling from a lot of the stuff that I really love too and so I can completely understand why these games kind of connect with me on this level but I fully sympathize if you pick this up and just cannot stand very hyperactive tone of it. Yeah, that’s fair enough. I’ve bought all of these on Switch a couple of years ago or like a year and a half ago when it came out. The box version still means to play these, they’re just I know they’re long undertakings but I would like to play them Matthew so I can have informed takes on this, a la the Ace Attorney episode we did, you know, at some point that’d be nice to do, wouldn’t it? So yeah, yeah, it’s cool, like I’m interested, like what made you at the time pick these up? Did you have your eye on them for a long time then it was like, oh, they’re finally coming to a format I’ve got, like what was your experience engaging with them at this time? Not at all, like I, you know, if I kept a little eye on PlayStation, I kept no eye on like Vita and PSP and what was happening in that space. I either overheard someone in the office talking about it or I just happened to read a review online and it said, it’s a trial game, it’s a crime game, it’s a mystery game, like Ace Attorney. I was like, how the hell have I not played this, like my favourite genre of thing. I think technically Dank and Lompa 1 and 2 both came out in the UK in 2014 because they were quite late porting them. Story wise, it makes more sense to start at the beginning and also like 2 is even more vile in some of its characters than 1. So if you didn’t like 1, you really won’t like 2. This is like devil’s advocate question, is the vile stuff weirdly part of its appeal? For some people, the second one has this like sadomasochistic relationship between this like cartoon bear and this cartoon rabbit which is like just very sinister and not my deal at all. Dog. I know that people… Do I have to say that out loud? No, no, no, that’s fine. Imagine if I was like, that I’m really into and I now have a tattoo of them on my chest. Some people are really into these characters, I think it’s the characters probably more than the mysteries that have led to this series’ success, there’s an anime and there’s lots of spin-off stuff and merchandise and toys, I think people are just really into the universe. Okay, yeah, that’s fair enough. I always like to hear you talk about this, Matthew, and please don’t ask about the cursed stuff now, I think I’ve got some good content out of doing that. Oh, that’s horrible. No, go on. Yeah, there’s some really off stuff in this game. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I wonder if that transgressive nature, like you say, is probably the reason some people like it or think it’s kind of key to its tone in some way. The performatively horny you would be into it. Okay, oh dear, you know how we feel about those people on our podcast. Okay, my number three. I think this is where I start to probably break the logic of the list I put in the best games of the generation. I think this is where it starts to get a bit fucked up. You have to excuse me, I can’t maintain 100% consistency on all my opinions. My number three is PT, Playable Teaser, the Silent Hills prologue that was released. No one knowing what it was, and then people unpicking its secrets and discovering at the end a teaser starring Norman Reedus for a game called Silent Hills that was to be partly worked on by Guillermo del Toro, Yunji Ito and Hideo Kojima, a long-awaited return to Silent Hills since Downpour, the last proper entry in the series, and that never came out and would die as a dream really, and I don’t ever really believe it entered active production to be honest. I think it was always like a sat there in pre-production is a cool thing to happen, Silent Hills. But this teaser, people are very familiar with it, but it’s been quite a long time now since I’ve talked about it on the podcast, so excuse me while I talk about it again. You wake up in this room and you are walking through this identical hallway, this entrance way to a house that has had a family in it at some point and something terrible has happened, and you are trying to uncover what exactly happened while contending with this ghost figure. Well, actually, uncovering what happened is not entirely true because you do that in the first loop, you kind of figure out what happened based on the very creepy radio broadcasts and then you’re really just trying to get out of this loop because when you go to the end of the corridor, you are back at the start of the corridor again and it loops and loops and loops and how the fuck do you break this cycle while you are being haunted by something. And the vibes are extremely bad. And the exact nature of how you get out of out of that space is so abstract in terms of how the how you figure out the puzzle, it was almost like designed as this community kind of like trial and error thing of Oh, I did this and this worked. And so I was able to like enter a new loop where something slightly different happens in the corridor, that sort of thing until eventually people kind of like brute force their way through it. It didn’t take them long to do that. But it’s a it’s a really rare example of a kind of media event where you can create something super opaque and unexpected and then people are wowed by the end result. This just doesn’t happen that much anymore, where you can go into something not knowing what it is. Because we’re in the age of everything being over reported and that sort of thing. But this game truly is that because some of the ways in which the ghosts that haunts you will play out differently on different playthroughs meant that there was a massively unpredictable element to this to this experience. And as a free demo, I think it was just one of my defining experiences of this generation and certainly this year. It was like I took a PS4 home from the office to play this because I just had to see what the deal was because it was obviously it was never released on anything else. And I just think it was surprising, incredible, and really replayable too. I think I probably played this for about 20 hours all in like I’ve had a great time just so yeah, I’ve had a great time. I’m picking this over the years and it’s spooky nature like the unpredictable nature of it never quite dissipates. Just because you never exactly know what she’s going to do on a on a on another playthrough where she’s going to appear and like, yeah, just genuinely terrifying and unsettling horror experience that I think like, you know, even today to this day has left a massive impact on that genre. When we talked about like horror films in the horror film episode, you were always looking for something that was going to really fuck you up. Yeah, I think this this is probably that I wonder if this is to set too high a standard for horror things in general. Yeah, yeah, that might be true. Barbarian does a little bit of this, I think like that thing of like, you don’t exactly know what you’re going to get just from the first 20 minutes, you know what I mean? But yeah, to to fuck you up on this level is very, very rare, doesn’t really happen that much. Yeah, absolutely terrifying. I didn’t get it into the same level as you did. I got slightly like annoyed by trying to work out how to make the game do certain things and quote unquote, complete it all that like whispering the name down the phone into your mic. Jareth. Jareth. People thought you had to say Jareth, the name of the dude from Labyrinth. Well, no, but that did work. That was the thing. Yeah. It would make the phone ring. It wasn’t. It can’t be that. It can’t be. It must have sound like whatever it’s meant to be. Yeah. Just me sitting on my fucking sofa in my rented house going Jareth, Jareth into a microphone. Yeah. But that is also what I did. And then like I did also, I wondered, don’t I play this too much? Because I remember like being drunk with my mate David in Cardiff and being like playing this and just going Lisa, Lisa into the microphone trying to get the ghost to appear. And then like, and then yeah, just, just go Jareth, Jareth, Jareth over and over again thinking this cannot be what the designers intended my experience of this game to become. But yet here I am shouting Jareth while I’ve had like four IPAs. Do you know what I mean? That seems wrong somehow. When the ghost did finally appear and kind of in my memory, she rushed towards us. We saw something at the end of the corridor and then it sped towards us and both me and Catherine like properly, properly screamed and then I had to go and explain to my housemates that we were playing a scary game. It wasn’t anything like bad that they had to worry about. Yeah. And she really, she really is terrifying as well. She is a horrible, beautifully animated creation, like just truly nasty in a way that is like unlike any other video game enemy. What a shame as well that they took out the MGS5, the Phantom Pain item where you could drop her into the battlefield and she fucked soldiers up. What a shame they didn’t put that in the finished game, you know. Do you ever see the footage of that? Oh yeah. It’s like, I think it was at TGS or something, but they were just, yeah, they were just deploy this. Like, you know how there’s like the, I think you could put like fake soldiers down or fake snake down. It was like that, but it would be Lisa from PT and the soldiers would just run away terrified. Really cool idea. But yeah. Yeah, hard work. This is the video game equivalent of the cursed video from Ring. Very much so. And yeah, just like imitated so many times, but never bettered. Yeah. But I do love that this kind of like, this was, you know, I think Outlast kicked it off, but this was like the vanguard of that new first person horror kind of game that would, you know, RAC7 would take inspiration from this and stuff. Like it was, it was hugely important, lost to time a little bit, but certainly not forgotten and remade many times. You can, you can experience this in different forms these days. It’s the original might be gone kind of, but it’s, it’s still around if you want to find it. What’s number two, Matthew? Here’s another one. The Talos Principle. Wow. I mean, I remember this being a big deal at the time, like for, for that kind of like indie sized game, but I’m surprised to hear it on your list still. I was looking back over the list of games, I’d sort of forgotten about this as an experience, but then when I read its name, I was like, oh my God, I spent so much time playing that and it all kind of rushed back to me. A first person puzzle game made by Crow Team, who are the serious Sam creators. Very strange experience of playing this because it kind of looks like a serious Sam game. It’s a first person perspective, very sort of like overblown, not photorealistic looking kind of historical settings, like an Egyptian columns and, you know, ancient Greek temples and things. It slightly has that sort of air of 3D assets you’ve bought, which Serious Sam had. It always looked like a game that was slightly kind of pieced together to me. So it looks like a Serious Sam game. You half expect like those dudes with bombs for hands suddenly rush out of every doorway, but nothing like that happens. It’s an empty world. You are a android exploring it and walking around these seemingly historical settings, solving portal-ish puzzles without the portals. I’m talking about like pressure switch puzzles and like light refraction puzzles. I guess just physics puzzles in a 3D space, very quietly, systematically ticking them off a list and earning keys that unlock other areas with more puzzles than them and it never has like a particular mechanic like all of its own. The most complicated it gets is it gets levels where you can kind of like record yourself doing an action and then work alongside yourself. So there’s kind of like, I don’t know, is it like Braid or I’ve seen other games do that kind of you working alongside a kind of an echo of yourself anyway. All the while a strange god-like voice gives out these mad sort of religious decrees and instructions and sort of guides you through this world. I guess the kind of GLaDOS stand in for this world. There’s a very deep philosophical edge to this about sort of AI, whether AI can sort of have a soul or kind of free will. That’s delivered by these computer terminals, which I’ll admit, like I never fully understood. This was quite a chewy full on game. I’m a little bit too dumb for like 20% of this game, but the pure puzzleness of it, I really, really connected with. I played this for tens and tens of hours. It has all these self-contained puzzle rooms where you’re kind of moving objects about, but then almost like in The Witness, where you realise there’s like a bigger pitch of stuff, you begin to realise there are maybe like levels to these puzzles beyond them or ways that like one self-contained puzzle room might be able to influence another puzzle room and kind of digging into that level is really fun. I just, I just remember it being like The Witness, very low key, very chill time, you know, there’s no time pressure, there’s no stress in executing things, you know, there’s a lot of physics puzzles, but you’re not wrestling with like weird video game physics. Everything’s very well behaved, everything kind of clicks into place exactly where you need it. And it’s, it’s more just about like, giving you the space and time to just come up with the solution and work out how something’s meant to work. I just really, really lost myself in this world and it does build to like quite a quite an interesting conclusion. I say a forgotten gem, it was sort of forgotten to me for a long time. But yeah, I remember thinking this was just really top notch. Yeah, I remember this being from that kind of like, I guess, new class of mid sized indie that sort of Devolver brought in. This is a Devolver game, isn’t it? I don’t remember who published it. I think it is. But anyway, like, you know, it’s, yeah, like, it sort of looked, it’s, you know, it’s pretty high fidelity. It doesn’t look like a blockbuster as such, but it looks like, you know, it’s sort of, you know, it’s bigger than an indie game that would have looked five years before it, you know what I mean? Like it’s, you know, three or four years before it. It’s more elaborate. I do remember people really liking this, getting aches, I think, across the board from people. I think it’s got quite a big fan base these days. Did they make a sequel as well? Definitely an expansion. Right. Okay. I should play this. I’ve got it on, I think I can play it on Steam Deck. I love puzzle games, but I sometimes find 2D puzzle games of which more puzzle games tend to be almost a little too like low key that I can get a bit sleepy playing them. You can almost imagine this game being 2D and watched from the top down, but just being in that world is just a little bit more engaging. Alright, well I’m going to definitely put this on my playlist Matthew and it’s a surprising entry considering quite a number of Nintendo games in my, are kind of like, maybe still not come up on your list so… Yeah, I’ve only got one space for one. Yeah, okay, interesting. So we come to my number 2, which is Wolfenstein The New Order. I wrote down two words in my notes here Matthew, defiantly single player. That’s kind of how I describe this. That’s what I remember of this game at the time is like, you know, there was just this onrush to create the next big multiplayer thing. This was the game that was, note we’re a first person, single player only, big narrative driven game set in this alternate reality where the Nazis have won and, you know, Europe basically has to be liberated. The second game would be like about America being liberated from the Nazis basically and you being BJ Blazkowicz this, you know, very sort of powerful but empathetic figure who knows right from wrong wants to basically fuck the Nazis up for everything they’ve done which is, you know, an empowering position to be in as a player, really exciting. This spares no, you know, pulls no punches on the Nazis. They have their throats slit, they are, you know, gunned down, they are absolutely brutalized, they get exactly what they deserve. That’s incredibly cathartic to play. But this is a game that’s got a lot of levity to it as well, like a really good sense of humor that you might compare to something like Inglourious Basterds but has slightly has its own sort of like take on it. It’s like just ever so slightly aware of its own heightened reality and is a bit tongue in cheek and, you know, has room for like fun dialogue and that sort of thing. I think like what is great about this game is that there’s quite a lot of variety to the levels. I think everyone kind of remembers the sort of like Nazi museum level, Matthew, the Nazis on the moon thing that people remember that. But you know, there’s a level where you break into a prison. There’s a level where you fight like a giant mech. There’s just a huge amount of variety to it with this really good feeling shooting. And yeah, like genuinely compelling, compelling narrative element to it. So really just really great fun still. And I think this first one feels more complete than the second one does, which feels like hobbled slightly by the inconsistent difficulty of that second one. This one feels spot on. The normal difficulty here just feels spot on to me. Guns feel great. Just a great World War Two shooter with a sci-fi twist to it. And a slightly strange pick which of these buddies you want to be pals with element and the other one will something terrible will happen to him. Kind of like the kind of branching storyline element to it. Just really, really good, really complete. One of the most complete feeling single player shooter experiences of the generation. I think the reason I haven’t included it in my list is just, I think I may have conflated it a little bit with the problems I had with two. Maybe that’s unfair, but like, I love the world, I love the set pieces, I love just the horror of the villains, like they’re so grotesque and they really get mangled up. The Nazi lady in this is particularly vile. Shootings never like, it’s always felt good, but it’s never really taken off for me because I’ve always found difficulty a little bit stiff. But I don’t know if that’s just two and I’m mixing that in with this, but that will sort of my memory of this one too. I think this is about right, truthfully. I’ve played through half of it this week ahead of this episode, on normal mode. It has the same thing that the second one has, that duality of stealth and action and you can try and stealth it and then you try and take out basically the commanders in each area and then or the captains because they come calling for help if you take them out then it suddenly becomes a lot easier to clear out in a more violent way. So I personally really like that system and think that the levels are quite well designed for it but I do remember that being a lot harder in the second one. Yeah, maybe that’s what I’m thinking of and that’s unfair. I definitely think the first one, I much prefer the first one to the second one in terms of like variety of set pieces, where you go. I remember the second one being like quite a drag and its cutscenes were so fucking long. Like it really fell in love with its own like voice and well, which is very specific, I’ll give it that but I thought it was a bit too much of it. I thought the first one was a bit more sort of fleet footed. Well, it’s just right there on game pass. So yeah, I reckon like, I actually I have forgotten enough of it that a replay was genuinely just, you know, just a great, it’s been great fun. I’ve been really enjoying it. And I’m like, oh yeah, this was like a purely enjoyable experience from the time like it’s sort of like, there’s only really one all time favorite on my list. And that is going to be the game I’ll talk about shortly. But this was very close. Like, I think it was like an eight bordering on a nine. That was kind of this. So yeah, really fond of it all these years later. Still well worth a replay. And as the data is very well, because it’s not like people are making loads of these kinds of games these days, linear first person shooters that are single player. So yeah, has stood the test of time incredibly well. What’s your number one, Matthew? My number one is Mario Kart 8. Take that Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze. So Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze couldn’t ever appear because it does too much psychic damage. So yeah, bad news for Donkey Kong. Smash Brothers this year, absolutely fantastic game. But I just I never got into the multiplayer with it. I didn’t have I didn’t really have anyone to play it with. Like it just it just didn’t stick with me, you know, and I feel like I just moved a bit beyond Smash Brothers at that point. I just it just died on Wii U. It just like it was like for no one because no one had one like it was. I never played it. It’s a better Smash Brothers than Brawl for sure. But you know, I was on an Xbox Mac, you know, I didn’t have you know, I wasn’t playing it in the office. You know, the other games I played with my brother at home, I just don’t have a relationship with I don’t have a true relationship with Smash Brothers really. So it would just be false of me to put it in a heartlist. Although I loved Little Mac in it. Very, very difficult to play as but I really liked his little powerful KO punch. I thought that was great. Anyway, well, Ultimate is came along. That’s the thing. Like it just completely re you know, there’s no need to ever go back to this version of this game. That’s the thing. It’s sort of the same thing. I guess. I don’t know. Like the 3DS one was great. Anyway, Mario Kart 8. That’s the number one. That’s the one I’ve anointed. I feel like this is this is basically just what I needed Mario Kart to do. Mario Kart Wii, one of the great disappointments of all time, I think. In the Wii and DS era, we had this sort of like new style came out of Nintendo, a very sort of like stripped back, spare looking sort of first party games. You might call it like the me aesthetic, you know, kind of stripped down functional, very much playing on like Wii Sports and like very family friendly, inoffensive matches some games perfectly. I thought when they kind of applied it to Mario Kart Wii, which felt like a very sort of like unloved game to me, didn’t explode on the screen. It wasn’t visually exciting, like music wise, I thought was quite middling. Like it just it just didn’t come alive. I thought this is a series that needs a bit more love. After that very, very safe, very low energy Mario Kart. This just like rediscovered the big screen fun of that series. Just the really boisterous and physically huge tracks that you were on. They were just so, so overwhelmingly exciting to look at, you know, partly due to the anti-grav, which isn’t really an interesting mechanic in itself, but it just gave them an invitation to make all these impossible spaces. Driving up the waterfall in Shy Guy Falls or like, you know, see Peaches Castle, but it’s upside down in Mario Circuit. And, you know, on top of that, you had like really loving recreations of like older tracks. I think the N64 Rainbow Road, like the fact that they took it and turned it into this like single lap thing, like it’s absolutely iconic track. Really, really pops in this game. I love the tracks, which were just one course that you kind of went down, like Mount Wario, I think is an all-timer. Just has the visual invention and like wit and fun of a Mario Galaxy, you know, which I just don’t think you could say of Mario Kart Wii at all. And obviously in all that, you’ve got the beautiful drifting, like that interplay of classic Mario Kart weapons, all the little like animation touches, which kind of created this great like meme economy, you know, obviously the kind of Luigi hard stare and all that. But there’s thousands of these moments. It’s just a really like lively, loved game. But for me, I just think the track selection is where this like lives and dies. And the majority of these are winners, you know, you know, besides the actual track design itself, just as sort of visual spaces to be in. I just I found this game so alive. It just looks amazing on the TV. We played loads of it in the office. This was a game we played split screen on O&M, you know, during some quite grim times. This this this one stuck stuck the landing. I think it’s the best Mario Kart by distance. I can sort of understand the sort of fear of trying to do another one. Yeah, it’s sort of like felt like a definitive Mario Kart on consoles had been a long time coming on home consoles have been a long time coming like, you know, the DS one I absolutely loved. 3DS what I liked, I know that Double Dash split people down the middle. I know that you know, the Wii one I didn’t like much like you I just thought was kind of a, you know, I get why it existed and why it was the way it was. But you know, it didn’t feel like it was for me. This was this was it. This was the pure, you know, HD Mario Kart looked amazing. Great tracks. Yeah, just like just fantastic. Just just really loved it. The only reason it’s not on my list is I really did play this a lot more on Switch where I felt like just the nature of the Switch lends itself so well to enjoying this as a multiplayer experience that defined it for me, whereas I just never had anyone to play with on Wii U. That’s right. Yeah, this one makes the cut for the reason Smash Brothers didn’t, you know, it just it was the right game, right time, right place, you know, playing with Joe and Kate like that was a you know, we always had three players. It was very, very easy to enlist someone from CVG or whatever. Just really, really good times. Maybe think of it as a Switch game. That’s perfectly fine. I think either way, it remains from release is just one of the best looking Nintendo games of all time. The soundtrack is fucking unreal. Like these big bands, you can just hear everyone fucking jamming out on these tracks. The N64 Rainbow Road, that should just be the theme tune to every game show on TV ever. It’s just so powerfully like 80s. Oh, it’s so good. I love this game. What an absolute like fucking punch of stuff was going on with like just an amazing like array of Nintendo games coming out but getting kind of ignored by the wider populace because the Wii U had just not done well. Like what a shame. This is like probably on paper one of the best Nintendo years ever, right? Like a new Smash Bros, a new Mario Kart, beloved entries in those series, Bayonetta 2 and yeah and Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze. That’s like a really fucking strong. Yeah, your four games just yeah just but ignored in favor of you know, yeah, just yeah. It’s tricky. You wonder about Switch 2 like obviously it won’t have this advantage of you know, a library of amazing but underplayed things to kind of dip back into. Yeah, short of re releasing all these games again, but come on really. But it seems yeah, what seems more likely is the reason that a lot of those teams have been so quiet is because they are preparing for this new console, but we hope so. We will soon see, won’t we? Okay, great, that’s your number one, Matthew, so that’s your list done. My number one is Alien Isolation. Did you expect this to be the top of my list? I definitely expected it to be in the list, and I hope you don’t mind that it’s not in mine. No, no, not at all, and I hope you don’t mind that Mario Kart’s not in mine, so it’s all good. That’s okay. We’ll go our separate ways, and everything will be okay. Yeah, so this was quite high of my games to the generation. I don’t know where I put it, but Creative Assembly’s console team basically adapted Alien, not Aliens, or any of the other entries in the series, into a first-person horror-based experience where an incredibly intelligent alien xenomorph kind of follows you around, tracks you down, and behaves dynamically, so you can’t exactly predict what he’s gonna do next. Incredibly compelling is an idea. What I thought was gonna be a six-hour, kind of like truncated horror experience was actually like more like 20 hours, just massive game where they made use of that AI in every single way that you can imagine. They built this analog kind of sci-fi world based on that first game. There are no pulse rifles in this, and it’s firmly set in the kind of like, in the world that Ridley Scott presents in Alien, and with all those limitations in mind, I think that’s like a key part of its magic. When it gives you weapons, it gives you very sparing amounts of those weapons, and you have to use them in quite canny ways in order to sort of succeed. You are not only contending with an alien, you are occasionally dealing with human enemies, you are dealing with working Joes, he’s very scary, kind of like your androids who come after you. Obviously, androids play a key role in the sort of alien fiction, and whether they’re good or bad, or how they behave, and whether they’ll betray you, that sort of thing. Very scary presences chasing after you in the corridors of this game. And then, yeah, you never forget about the alien. You get periods where the alien is not with you, and you deliberately are away from it. And then when it comes back, it has all that more impact, because you’re like, oh, fuck, here it is again. That’s a key part of the arc of this game. You’ll make daring escapes. You’ll make really kind of like risky maneuvers to try and survive. You will blast a load of fire at the alien, just to like buy yourself a moment where you’re like, oh, thank God, I’m spared from it for just a little while. I think it’s easy to perceive how intelligent this alien is as unfair, which I think is where some of the critical divide came from for this game, from a couple of US reviewers. I think that it asks a lot of you in that respect of just how intelligent it can be, but I think the alien can only ever be portrayed this way as this really just like deadly predator who, yeah, you just never know exactly what it’s gonna do next. So I think that just no other game has come along like this. Like even the first person, the first person resies and stuff, like maybe feel like they have some DNA from this, but this is still very specific as a kind of offering, like a licensed game, approached in this way. It’s like anything but the lowest common denominator that you would get with some of the other alien titans that have come along over the years. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, no, I’m brilliantly put. You know, I did replay a chunk of this for this episode, definitely considering putting it in. I think it is a horror masterpiece, but it’s almost so effective. I do wonder like, do I actually take much pleasure from it? Right. Because I find it such hard work, you know, if I’m too scared of it, you know, even in the opening sections, you know, where there isn’t really an alien, it’s just a very intense like sense of doom. And once the thing turns up, it’s genuinely very frightening. I think the thing that amazes me most about this is that so many like horror games and horror films like trade on the potential of a thing. And like once you’ve introduced that thing, you know, once it starts actually killing you, it almost like begins to naturally deflate as a threat. I think with every death in a survival horror game, the threat becomes a little bit more annoying than it is scary. Right. I think the art here is how they get around that by like evolving the nature of it or knowing when to like take the foot off the gas and like take a little bit of a break from the alien and give you a different kind of threat or a different kind of stealth experience. They use the alien masterfully, I think is the trick of this one. And it’s very, very hard to think of another horror game where the villain sort of retains the potency throughout. That’s like a really singular thing. And, you know, obviously all that’s besides the, just the incredible fan service of the thing. And it’s just, it’s unreal how good this looks. I was playing on Xbox where it’s got the frame rate boost as well. And it just looks really, really nice. Yeah, I only ever played this on PC and it just had that 60 FPS from the start. Right, right. It made a huge difference, I think. Yeah, just like a lot of like, it’s weird. It’s sort of, it’s not sort of technically spectacular, but there’s something about the filtering of like objects and the color palette that’s just really beautiful about this game. Yeah. And then obviously the kind of like VHS-y kind of interface to a lot of the electronics and stuff that enhances your connection with that world. Yeah, just really, really beautifully done. Yeah, what a one-off this is. And it is a one-off, they never made a sequel. So, yep, remains a classic available pretty widely still. DLCs are kind of challenge roomy, but they’re kind of cool too. They kind of get you to experience the alien in different ways. But truthfully, there’s so much game in the base game that you’ll definitely feel like you probably feel like you’ve had your fill by the end of it. You’ve seen so much of that creature and what they can do with it. Yeah, a worthy number one, Matthew. So, let’s fire through some honorable mentions very quickly, Matthew. One of mine here is Transistor, a game from Supergiant. It had a talking sword in it, set in this kind of slightly cyber-punky world. Thought that was pretty cool, but probably not more so than like Hades, which is like the ultimate supergiant game, I guess. What’s one of yours, Matthew? A Shovel Knight. Knight, so yeah, that was like a huge deal at the time, wasn’t it? One of the better examples of going back to that 8-bit style, but it’s like not 8-bit games as they were. It’s as you remember them. It’s very like modern tech behind it. Just a lot of very satisfying interactions. I love what they did with the shovel, like digging stuff up is fun, but also pogoing around on the stick. And also just like one of the best supported games in terms of its tale, like the stuff they added to it and the kind of the riffs on it. You know, I don’t have, I don’t go back to that era of games a lot, but I thought this was a great example of it. Yep, that’s a good one. I think that, yeah, I should play that at some point. I did think it was a very beautiful looking riff on that era. I suppose I will put Destiny here. I think Destiny was objectively a good shooter. It just wasn’t like a great campaign or the multiplayer didn’t really speak to me. When the raid came along, I think I did one of the raids and before Protagon King came out, but otherwise it didn’t. Destiny left me slightly cold while other people were like, this is my life now and I just didn’t quite get it as previously discussed. Chuck another one in here, Matthew. So this is like a recent discovery for me, but I was hugely into Sunset Overdrive. The only reason I put it here is that it was, it maybe didn’t reflect my 2014 playing experience because I’ve been playing it so recently. So I didn’t want it to blot out the other games I did want to discuss, but I do like it. It’s probably is a worthy top 10 pick. What’s another one of yours, Matthew? Sherlock Holmes, Crones and Punishments. Obviously one of Andy Kelly’s picks for top detective games, when we did Detective Games episode. I think it’s the actual like writing and dialogues a little bit blur in this game. But I think the attempts to capture Sherlock Holmes sort of mental processes and the way you can kind of hardwire synapses to get in his brain to create different outcomes is genuinely really compelling. It’s a really good like six out of 10. And if you can get it for like, you know, a 10 or something well worth a go. Okay, cool. Yeah, I’ve only got one, I’ve only got one more to throw in there Matthew. Which is Assassin’s Creed Unity. Yeah, just complete. I played it recently. I think I played it for the Xbox XL episode we did, backwards compatibility where they’ve given it a really nice facelift. This is a game that’s in pretty good state these days of the classic Assassin’s Creed template. There’s so much lavish production design, production values, sorry, in the how that world is brought to life that you just kind of need to see, I think, if you wrote this game off as being a bit too glitchy at the time, which I would understand. But yeah, that Xbox one version is the way to play it IMO. Anymore Matthew? A couple more quick ones. Tomodachi Life, which was the weird sort of Animal Crossing like also from Nintendo for 3DS, where you basically made your me and it moved into a block of other me’s and you could socialise with other characters. The big hook of this was it had like quite funny texts to speech. So all the characters were voiced in this sort of Microsoft Sam kind of thing. You could make them sing weird little songs. As an actual game, there’s not a lot to it. It’s very throw away, but the humour of making your me say like rude things or making a Watame to sing like a rude song about someone in the office or something was like always big lols. All the me’s in it. They sort of spoke like this. They sort of went, hello, I am in Tomodachi life. And that’s just really drilled into my brain. The unique sound of that game. And finally, I think we had the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands this year, which remains like the only actually funny Borderlands product, a telltale game. This is the year they made so many of these fucking things. There was also the Game of Thrones one and the Batman this year or the year later. Anyway, loads of them. Tales from the Borderlands, really, really good heist story told across five episodes. Some genuinely very funny moments. Absolutely brilliant use of licensed music for the credence sequences. I thought I was gonna hate this. Like just the story from Borderlands? Yikes. Turns out fantastic. What a pleasant surprise. Did like a sequel to this come out? Is it like available? Last year, yeah, but it’s meant to be shit apparently. That’s a shame. Yeah, okay. I know Wolf Among Us was this year too, but I never quite cracked that one, unfortunately. But the game, just the last three episodes of it were, if you ask me. Interesting. Well, then we’re done, Matthew. Another fucking epic. I remember now why we only do these episodes every few months. They’re like quite an undertaking, aren’t they? But hopefully informative and interesting. Yeah, I hope our listeners have enjoyed it. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBuzzle underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. As mentioned, if you want to get two additional podcasts from us a month and support us on Patreon, patreon.com/backpagepod. You can also email us at backpagegames at gmail.com. You want to leave us a review on the platform of your choice. That’d be most welcome too. And yeah, next week is, I think, a What We’ve Been Playing, Matthew. So let’s get out of here. Let’s do it.