Hello, welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, hello. Shall we talk about what’s going on with the podcast in February 2023? Ooh, let’s do it. That’s good. I just realized I said that and forgot to get the information in front of me, so just gonna scroll up to our conversation this morning to confirm. Yes, so February 3rd, which is when you’re listening to this, is a What We’ve Been Playing. We have a Nintendo-themed magazine guest coming next week for the free feed February 10th. Our first Patreon episode of the month, patreon.com/backpagepod, is 50 Things That Make You Go, Ooh Yeah, in Games. That’s coming on February 13th, and I plan on making that noise a lot. And look forward to that, Matthew. Should that be good? Yeah, I don’t know. Do I ever say, ooh yeah, about anything? I don’t think so. I kind of mm stuff a lot. Yeah, you make a lot of satisfied noises, I would say, is more your bag. Maybe it’s like 25 things that make you go, ooh yeah, and 25 things that make me go mm. Yeah, I think that would be slightly long in the old RSS there, but we can make that work, I’m sure. Then the last of us revisited on February 17th. We’re also gonna talk a bit about the TV show, which will not have concluded by then, so maybe that’s messy, but I think it’ll be fine. Why don’t Matthew just talk about the game a little bit? Yeah, I think it’s a good excuse to talk about. We’ll be halfway through the show by then, or at least halfway through, so. Yeah, I kind of already know how I feel about the show as well, so it’s pretty conclusive. And PC Gaming Classics this month, a mini-series from Jeremy and Phil, XCOM Enemy Unknown. I believe that’s what the first XCOM’s called, the 90s one, February 20th, an X-COM, so that’s coming up. I’m glad it’s them doing it, not us. Oh yeah, that would be a fuck show. Evidently I don’t know anything about even the name of the game, so that’s good. The Wii Hall of Fame, February 24th. I believe I’ve been able to rope Ashley Day into that one, Matthew, so that should be good. I’m looking forward to having Ash back on the podcast. XXL for patrons, the best Korean films, February 27th. Should I phrase that better, Matthew? Should that be like Korean cinema highlights or something? I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, it’s going to be a bit like our other film episodes. It’s just going to be some recommendations of some Korean stuff that I like outside of the super obvious ones. I haven’t got anything in mind for how to structure it, but you know, it’ll be fine. Like I’ve said before, I’m still quite nervous because there’s a few people on our Discord who are really into Korean film and know way more about it than I do. So this is where I get exposed for the complete phony that I am. That’s good. Like all the pageant episodes, we talk them down and then sell them to you for money. So that’s good. Matthew’s like, Samuel, have you heard of a film called Oldboy? So I’ve discovered this film called Parasite. So yeah, people have got all that to look forward to. So that’s this month, Matthew. It should be good. And then March is a packed month, too. We’re going to do a Capcom draft in March, but enough about that for now. So this episode, what we’ve been playing, I don’t think we’ve done one of these this year so far. In fact, I know we haven’t. I don’t know why I said that out loud. So Matthew’s been playing a few games. So I’d say like a couple of games each, really. It’s not like a super packed one. I’ve mostly honestly, while I had COVID, all I did was play Vampire Survivors like nonstop on a Steam deck because sort of in my mild state of like, you know, just depression, sadness and illness. So it’s just like all I could do was just push right, left and up and down on a stick and make a little vampire hunting man kill things. That was all I could do. So nice to finally talk about some new games, Matthew. And what is great is that there are two games here that I’m going to discuss that I didn’t even know I would be playing this month, you know, even two weeks ago. So that’s a nice surprise. So first up here, we’ve got Hi-Fi Rush on Xbox Series X, I think it’s on PC as well. This is the game from Tango Gameworks. I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with it at this point. It basically shadow dropped sort of surprise release onto Xbox. It’s kind of like a 3D action game with a rhythm action element. So you basically go along to the beat while you’re battering different robot dudes. And it’s got this very nice cel-shaded art style and sort of comedic, slightly anime-ish tone. Matthew, I’m guessing you’ve played a bit of this one yourself. Yeah, yeah, about an hour and a half, not very far. Yeah, similar vibe really, I’m two levels in. Yeah, but yeah, a huge surprise. A, that Tango Gameworks had another game, you know, full stop. Two, that it was finished and here, it has sparked a big, terrible online discourse about whether people should surprise, release games like this, which has everyone arguing, because of course we can’t ever have anything nice without it causing an argument. Oh yeah, that was a tweet from PC Gamer, wasn’t it? Yeah, yeah, like, whatever. I get it. Basically, small indies shouldn’t do this, big game studios should do this, because it’s fun to have massive AAA or, you know, expensive looking games to play all of a sudden. That’s fun. That’s a fun thing to have happened. Yeah, what’s nice about this is that it is a surprise drop for sure, but I think because it leaked beforehand on various channels, I think they kind of like, lobelled expectations enough that I thought it was, this is not a diss against the game, but I thought it was like the Pentament, you know what I mean, relatively speaking to Ghostwire Tokyo, I thought this would be the small thing, while the big thing is being worked on by much larger teams. But if you compare the relative size of these, I guess it could be called passion projects, sort of secondary projects at our studios. This feels like much closer to a AAA game than Pentament does, right? It feels like a 3D game with amazing art and sound. It looks pretty expensive. It’s a shadow drop and it’s an impressive one, but the scale of game is a lot more than I thought it would be from what was hinted at in those leaks. Did that take you by surprise too, Matthew, that it’s this quite elaborate, almost blockbuster thing? Yeah. Things like the licensed soundtrack, which whenever there’s licensed music in something I assume it’s incredibly expensive. But that’s probably because I read that one news story about how expensive it was to play the Beatles in Mad Men, and I apply that to everything, whether or not it’s the Beatles. Taking money out of the Walking Dead’s budget, just so Matthew Weiner can put the Beatles, have Don Draper shrug at the Beatles. Preposterous use of money. Absolutely. I don’t know. I don’t know how much it is to buy a 9-inch nail song and put it in your game. I would imagine reasonably expensive. I imagine it’s tiered, right? And if you pick a slightly naff one off an album no-one really likes, and assuming such a thing exists, I know nothing about the 9-inch nails, then that would maybe be like 50 grand rather than like a million or something. But with something off, is it Hates Machine? That might set you back a little bit more, I don’t know. God, I have no idea. I will say the music side of this game is lost on me. The music it seems to be pulling from when the credits come up in the bottom corner, because the game has its own soundtrack but every once in a while it’s set to a piece of licensed music and the credits and the label come up in the bottom corner and so far all the ones I’ve seen have been like, never heard of it. So whether or not I’m the target audience for this I don’t know, but I’m enjoying bopping along to it. Yeah, we’re firmly out of our depth here. In fact I got the name of the album wrong, it’s Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails and not Hate Machine, so I imagine a large part of our audience just logged off and I don’t blame them Matthew. Just to get a standard joke out of the way, etc, etc, this game with Randy Newman, etc, etc. Yeah, I wasn’t going to say it, don’t worry. Low-hanging fruit really, wasn’t it? So let’s move on instead. So yeah, I’m two levels into this, which is, I think I’ve played it for about two hours, maybe slightly more, done two bosses. What I think is really interesting about it is that this, you know, the 3D, if we vaguely categorise this as like the 3D action game that like, you know, is in the sort of Devil May Cry lineage, the sort of beat-em-up, whatever you want to call it, beat-em-up or hack and slash game, that kind of, that kind of lineage, then this is a really seemingly crowd pleasing version of that type of game, particularly in this first level where it’s like, you’ve got this power, you’ve got to follow along to the beat and the beat in the first level is particularly easy to follow along to, you know, it’s pretty straightforward. What’s interesting, though, is I thought it would sort of stay in that vein where it gives you like these high scores just for even doing it, for even turning up, the game’s like, well done you and you kind of crack on. But what is interesting is now I’m getting deeper into it, they’re layering on more and more mechanics and something I noticed in the second level was that they crept up the harshness of how long it, how the game judges you for how long you take to clear an arena of enemies, which is one of the criteria it uses to, you know, to determine your sort of score per area, much in like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta fashion. So that’s quite interesting. And like the, yeah, it has the kind of the sort of like ABCS kind of like scoring mechanic from those games too. So that’s a lot in common with them. But I think as you get deeper into it, it’s maybe layering in more and more mechanics that make it feel closer to those games than I initially thought it did. Do you have any thoughts on that, Matthew? Once you’ve kind of got your head around the combat, you’re like, oh, this is what this is going to be about. And you know, it’s going to layer up the difficulty by having more things to dodge and just more enemies to worry about. But then you look and there’s a combo list and you know, there’s all the inputs are done with just X and Y on the Xbox pad. But you know, already that list is quite varied. You know, it’s not like Bayonetta style. But it’s, you know, it’s something to kind of get your head around for sure. And then it adds in like a grappling hook to kind of pull you between enemies to kind of keep combos going. And that seems that’s very familiar to if you played Devil May Cry 5, one of the characters in that had like a grapple hand that could kind of pull him towards enemies. And that’s got very similar energy to that. I’d say it feels quite close to a Devil May Cry to me rather than Bayonetta, which I think is a little bit more kind of out there and kind of harder to get your head around. How are you actually getting on with the rhythm element of this? Because the whole thing is that whatever you press, the guy always attacks in time with the music. So there’s like a disconnect between what you’re pressing, what’s happening if you are out of time with it. So you’re trying to kind of time yourself with his animations. And like this game gives you so many cues to help you find that rhythm. Like the interface pulses, there’s special sound effects, there’s other HUD elements pop up to kind of give you clues. But the whole world itself like dances to the beat, like, it’s absolutely brilliant. Like it’s a really like mesmerizing effects, especially when you’re like outside and like all the trains going by like chucking by at the rate of the rhythm and all the pipes squirting out steam and timing the music. So it feels like it’s kind of fair in like how many kind of indicators it’s giving you. But like, how are you actually finding that rhythm and maintaining it? So I’m really good at that part of this game. The thing I’m struggling with is I find it really easy to just be like duh, duh, duh. And you sort of go between the music and it seems to work. Like to me, superficially, at least from the levels I’ve played, it feels like it works based on that. It’s quite straightforward. Whereas I think that the thing you can maybe fall into is trying to mimic the beat of the music you’re listening to, where it’s like, oh, OK, there’s a guitar sort of clash here, so I’m meant to bang the button three times or whatever. When I think the game really just wants you to be like, buh, buh, heavy attack, buh. And then kind of going from there, god, I sound like an idiot trying to explain how this works. But that part I find easy. I think what’s interesting is the point I’m at now, I’m struggling to clear the enemies fast enough to get good scores in most of the little encounters. And that’s where I’m like, oh, maybe I’ve been too cautious, maybe I’m taking a little bit too long to start a new combo, or maybe I’m bottling it too much in the middle of a combo and I should be hitting the light attack harder more frequently, should I be doing more heavy combos to clear the enemies out faster. So, that’s where I’m kind of like, well, I can do the basics of this very well, but the skill ceiling is something I just haven’t really navigated yet. So that’s where I’m at with it, but how about you? In the end of fight scoring, the one I’m getting dinged on is the keeping the beat. But I am getting good scores for like overall score, you know, like the combo meter that builds up and at the timing, it’s the beat itself that I seem to struggle to hit. Like I can do little clusters, once I’m into a combo, you know, I can feel out the beat of it, but it’s kind of what happens in between. I sort of struggle to sort of find myself again, I keep slipping out of it very easily. And I thought I had quite a good sense of rhythm, you know, like I played plenty of rhythm games, but then maybe I’m getting like distracted by like other visual elements or what’s going on, you know, if an enemy comes out of nowhere and you suddenly need to dodge, like I’m thrown out of the beat that I was doing or the move that I was working towards. I think you need to play this for quite a while for it all to kind of click together. And the levels seem to have elements that suggest you’ll be coming back to them. You should be replaying them with like other abilities. Like there are locked doors and things you can’t seem to get through, which feel like classic, you know, come back with a better character on a second time through. So, you know, maybe the whole thrust of the game is just kind of push on and find yourself getting better and then come back and mince it for higher scores. I guess in the same way that you do with like a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, your first playthrough in Bayonetta is never very elegant, but here, you know, if you slip out of the elegance of the rhythm, you really sort of feel it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think that’s an astute way of looking at it. I think that like what I found interesting is people comparing this to like a PS2 game, whereas I thought this actually doesn’t feel like something that would be on PS2 to me. I think the art style feels like a kind of an evolution of a, you know, a contemporary PS2 art style that has been sort of forgotten in recent years, a sort of cell shaded style. And it is really nice to see that. But I actually do think that the very specific genre mashing it does, and the sort of like very post bayonetary take on the action, like it even feels like it’s got a tiny bit of near automata when you’re getting like a little gun and stuff to manage at the same time. Like I sort of see other influences coming into it. I only like superficially get that PS2 vibe. I think it’s got otherwise it’s mix of influences feels slightly more contemporary to me. Yeah, really interesting game, really interesting game. But I agree with you about the revisit sort of structure. That definitely belongs to this genre kind of thing. Yeah, and clearly it is racking up more and more abilities to meaningfully make that second playthrough different, right? Which is exactly what Bayector does. So yeah, yeah. Very similar with Astral Chain actually on Switch, which throws you because it’s a very unusual control scheme and that you’re kind of controlling two things at once. And it’s only when you’ve kind of played through it once and then you go back through and start mining it for it’s all secrets you realise you’ve mastered the kind of basics of it and it really unlocks a level to it. I would say this isn’t quite as bad as like even a kind of, you know, coming into this without having like mastered it at all. I think you can still make this game look pretty good. Like it’s it’s it’s pretty fun. Like it’s not all combat. There’s sort of exploration. There’s a lot of fun little rhythm like mini games built into the world as well. And just little quirky touches that kind of carry through like, you know, I may not be very good at it, but I don’t feel frustrated by it at all. Which is pretty generous. Yeah, which is a good balance. I actually think talk about like the like, you know, the heritage of this or like where it comes from. This to me almost feels like, you know, it’s not a McCarmy made game. You know, this is made headed up by one of his younger directors. But it’s it’s it feels very similar to kind of McCarmy producing Beautiful Joe, for example. You know, it’s it’s that kind of era of experimental kind of action game which splinters off to go and you know, that that team of Capcom who were doing stuff with this splinter off and go and form Platinum, obviously. And, you know, it feels like it could be a Platinum game. If anything, this is the kind of thing I wish Platinum was sort of doing more of, you know, this is the kind of like surprise reveal I would hope from them rather than they’re quite drawn out sort of awkward path to release that everything seems to have. Yeah, I think as well, like this is a slightly deprived genre these days, which I think we discussed a little bit on that Platinum episode where we’re kind of waiting for the next big Platinum thing. We talked about that a lot, haven’t we? Of the idea of like, what is the next prestige Platinum thing? Because weirdly Bayonetta 3 didn’t quite feel like that. You know, it’s sort of, yeah, for a few reasons. It does in places, but, you know, the sort of like amount of new mechanics in Bayonetta 3 maybe felt like it wasn’t quite the same thing it was. And I’m not saying that this is taking its place, but I do agree that like, if someone said to me this was made by Platinum, I would believe them, you know? I think that is like true. And yeah, I did find it funny that in their trailer, didn’t they say, from the makers of The Evil Within 2 in the trailer, which may be chuckle. Also, is it John Johannes, the creative director? Yeah. Who also has fewer Twitter followers than me. That seems like an injustice to me. I don’t fucking do anything. I just do a little bullshit and go follow that guy instead, because, you know, why you follow me, basically. He’s probably too busy making cool games like this to tweet. Whereas I’m like, oh, look at this fucking sandwich I ate yesterday. That’s my tweet. It’s insulting myself there. So yeah, real good this. And yeah, it does feel like, yeah, you know, just if, yeah, if Platinum made this, it wouldn’t surprise me. But also just a really exciting sort of snapshot of that studio. I know you’re mixed on Ghostwater Tokyo, but the idea that like the same studio, different teams are making this stuff. I mean, I don’t know, maybe under like that Microsoft umbrella, this could be quite a, this could be quite a great partnership because in a way as well, Hi-Fi Rush feels like a game built for Game Pass, you know what I mean? Like it’s, is that the reason it’s so big straight away per that tweet you were referencing earlier is because it dropped on a massive platform, you know, backed with loads of support by Xbox. And so it just feels like it can thrive there. Whereas if you look, think about the scenario where Bethesda wasn’t acquired by Microsoft and it just released this by itself. Like you could see it doing well, but you could almost see it like being slightly more easily eclipsed than, you know, than other ways might be. Just thinking about how stuff like The Evil Within 2 don’t sort of like do mega blockbuster numbers. But here the impact of just being like it’s on Game Pass right now, you play it and you have that instant, oh, I’ve got to tell other people about this. And now it seems like it’s taken over social media in a way that I think is quite rare for a game these days. Do you know what I mean? Or at least like unusual in how much goodwill there is towards it, you know? Like there’s not, it’s not just complaining or whatever, or like, you know, other stuff that’s going on. I feel like everything else this year has had like a bunch of complaints tied to it. There are some exceptions to that, but just maybe like, this is, it’s not a game that people are lukewarm on. It’s a game that people are like, oh, fuck yeah, I’m glad that this exists. Yeah, yeah. Definitely the most positive buzz I’ve seen. Well, I was going to say seen around an Xbox title. I guess Pentament had its own kind of crowd. It is mad that the last two first party games from Xbox were Pentament and this very strange rhythm action game. But like, yeah, it’s fantastic. I mean, for my tastes, 100%, but it’s, you know, at the same time that, you know, 343 seems to be disintegrating and Halo, God knows what’s going on with it and what lies in its future. That Xbox instead giving us all this like weirdo stuff is, I mean, you know, cool. I’m into it. Yeah, for sure. So what’s your first game here, Matthew? I’ve been playing Fire Emblem Engage. Oh, interesting. See, I wondered if you’d skip this one because you two were appalled by the Colgate hair main dude in it. But I know you’re a big Fire Emblem guy. I feel like you are and you aren’t, you know? I’ve played some of the older ones, quite a lot of Fire Emblem Awakenings, probably the newest one I’ve played most of and sort of dabbled with other things here and there. But like, I’m a very on-off Fire Emblem guy. I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed one. I reviewed one on the Wii, actually. I didn’t really feel a huge amount of buzz for this one. Like, the review seemed slightly kind of mixed, but I’m actually having an amazing time with it. Like, if anything, it’s got me like properly Fire Emblem, I should say fired up, rather than Fire Emblem’d up. I’m sitting there and in my head, I’m really enjoying this game, but I’m also thinking, oh, I can go back and play all the ones properly that I didn’t play on like 3DS. You know, like, I’m going to be a big Fire Emblem guy, I’ve decided. I like that for you. That’s a good persona for you in 2023, I think. Yeah, it would have to happen with the Fire Emblem, which got probably like some of the weirdest sort of character designs and sort of character direction. You know, they’ve really lentened this sort of tropey, kind of anime, very sort of hyperactive, horrible, horrible American voiceovers in this game. Like, everyone speaks in that incredibly shrill kind of anime dub way, which I just wish they’d done this with a British or European VO a la Xenoblade, because it just, it just, I don’t know, that world would just feel a lot classier that way. Everyone’s kind of talking like this. And you’re like, oh, fuck off. It’s just not for me. The main character, you’ve interesting you said Colgate hair. Whenever I look at it, I think one of the slush puppy machines with the vat of pink and the vat of blue. Oh, yeah, yeah. But Colgate. Or Tango Blast. Yeah. Either way, it’s dumb as hell. But I’ve kind of put all that aside. I don’t know how much you know about this game, but the big kind of hook is that you’re collecting these rings, which have the spirits of like past Fire Emblem game heroes in them, and by wearing those rings, characters get a couple of superpowers sort of associated with that character. So they’re basically like class modifiers. You’re collecting these rings as you go through the game. So with each fight, more and more of your characters have these kind of crazy superpowers. And I think that’s a very like mechanics and sort of strategy focused idea. The hook in this game is about taking the classes and modifying them with these powers to like supercharge them or kind of seeing the opportunity. Like if this ring lets this character basically like warp across the map and do an assassination spell, why not give that to your like craziest tank character? You can just go, you can ping them across the map and start absorbing all this shit while everyone else kind of makes their way across. Or you’ve got another character who’s this vicious assassin, but they’re really slow. So you give them the ring, which has got a kind of cavalry guy inside and it sort of boosts all their movements. So they can basically charge across the battlefield and start sort of stabbing people up before they even know it. if you really get lost in kind of class craft in RPGs, I think this whole thing is like absolutely exceptional. And that’s completely what I’ve lost myself to. Like in the tinkering between battles, I’m just constantly thinking of weird little hybrids and like, oh, this character is kind of a bit shit here, but if I give them this superpower, then we can make them do this. And it really kind of like opens up outside of the quite traditional classes, which you’d probably be familiar with if you’ve been playing Fire Emblem for the last 25 years. So that’s really, really cool. Almost Scratch is the same kind of itch that the ludicrously overpowered classes in like Gears Tactics did. I love games where you can just pull off incredible feats if you just match the right things together. That’s like very, very satisfying to me. And that’s what this game does. Interestingly, I think where it falters, the overall story is not much to it. And it doesn’t really have like a clear direction where the last game, you know, was set in this school. It gave it a really clear angle. And this game, the angle is this very deep strategic class meddling. So I can understand why people who kind of just wanted to come in and thirst after a load of like boys and girls in, you know, school uniforms, might feel like it’s stepped down. But for me, I just think it’s a much more sophisticated game that I’ve like played, I don’t know, like 25 hours of in the last couple of days. On the battling side, it just feels not fresh, I mean, it’s still Fire Emblem underneath it, but renewed a bit and super, super tight, just very elegant in how all the different pieces click together. It’s interesting because the school stuff did really make that Three Houses mega click for people, didn’t it? Or some people. Yeah. I played it and found like the amount of time you had to spend in those bits a bit too much of a burden. And I just, maybe I just lacked the little element of like, you know, sort of a teacher would walk in with like the lowest cut dress you’ve ever seen. And I was just thinking, I don’t want to be horny for the teacher. So, you know, I guess everyone’s a little bit different, but yeah, like there’s still a huge amount of faffing between battles. Maybe the school kind of gave it coherence in that it was a place where you were like going to learn, but you could also hang out with people and so the school was a really good setting for that. Where here it’s a sort of slightly weird flying castle and you sort of can do everything that you can do in the school, but it doesn’t really have that shape to it. It’s a little bit like you’re in this castle and there’s people are sort of milling around and there’s a couple of rooms which feel essential between battles. I basically go in and like level people up and I go and like mess around with the rings a bit and then I basically leave. I don’t want to be involved with the rest of it and it doesn’t feel like you have to be. Like if you engage with the emblem system, like these rings which give you these kind of ghost heroes, it feels like you don’t have to go in as hard on the social side of things. Like that stuff’s still developing naturally through play, but there’s a bit of a shift back towards battling in this one and maybe that’s why it resonates with me more. Oh, certainly fucking has if you play 25 hours of it. Holy shit. That really came out of nowhere. Yeah, it’s really good. The one thing that’s quite funny about it is that the rings, you know, they’re meant to be like the main event. When you get one of these rings, you’re meant to be really excited about like, oh my god, who’s going to be inside this ring? And it was something that EdgeReview mentioned that really made me laugh. The EdgeReview like mentions by name, It’s Me Blorko, because they said it’s a little bit It’s Me Blorko when these like people pop out of these rings and you have no idea who they are, because they’re from a Fire Emblem game from 20 years ago. How are you feeling about that, about you being invoked in Edge magazine, Matthew? Honoured, but also sort of that might be pretty baffling to the billions of people on earth who didn’t encounter that tweet. So I’m like, I read it and was like, I know exactly what they’re talking about. But I don’t know if it if it necessarily has the kind of cultural saturation for it to mean a whole lot to a whole lot of people. But it’s quite funny where these people turn up and like Marth and Roy, you’re like, well, I know who they are because, you know, they’re they’re pretty iconic. But most of the Fire Emblem heroes are just dudes with swords and blue hair. They all look like Marth. They all look like Roy. So whenever they turn up, I’m like, oh, good, it waits for their text box to come up. So actually know who the fuck it is. That’s a weird thing. And I wonder if that’s going to like baffle people who maybe like came into the series in three houses and then come to this one. And like the main event is like it’s the Avengers assemble of some incredibly unknown RPG heroes. I really obscure stuff. But relatively speaking. Well, I suppose like it’s that’s partly because this there’s such a history of this series in Japan that doesn’t quite apply here. Right. Both in the sense that like the games were released in Japan, you know, like there are some that never came to the West. Is that right, Matthew? But also this series, this series didn’t even really catch on in the West until Awakening. So that’s like another factor, you know. I feel like they filled in some gaps by like remaking things and redoing things. Like off the top of my head, I don’t know if you can play every Fire Emblem in some form in the West now, but it feels like we’re kind of coming close to that if not already there. I think the other weird thing is like when these people come out and their designs are so classic, Fire Emblem, compared to like where the characters are now, it’s just very jarring that all the people from the past look exactly the same, they’re just in armour and very sort of demure and serious. And everyone, all the new ones are like, you know, there’s someone whose like costume looks like it’s made out of fruit. There’s like a mad sort of witch assassin who’s got all these like shiny stars stuck to her hair. It’s like the new and the old colliding. And it makes the old characters seem incredibly like boring by comparison, though I imagine like traditional Fire Emblem fans would be like, thank fuck these, you know, traditional characters are here because I find the modern guys unbearable. I personally think there’s so many characters, you enlist tens and tens of characters in this game. I think I’ve got like 30 to choose from already. That’s partly because in theory they’re meant to die permadeath style, but it’s a little bit easy, so that doesn’t really happen. So I’ve just, I’ve now just got this castle full of people who like, I could probably do with some of them dying a violent death, just to kind of like, just so we can have a little bit more space because I’m, you know, I like, I turn around and there’s just a lot of like shrieking anime clowns everywhere and it’s like, maybe I should take a couple of the ones I don’t use into battle and just, just sort of like quietly send them off to, you know, I know what the Rock Paper Scissors system is, so I can deliberately engineer a violent death and that would be fine. But you know, even amongst that, there are a few that you kind of grow to love. You sort of develop a relationship with shit with them on the battlefield and you start thinking about them less as, oh, this is this character who has written this way and I like it because of what the writers did and more like, I like this character because he is my incredibly dependable knight and we’ve had 30 battles and every time people attack him his defence is so high everything bounces off his shield and it really satisfies me to see that animation. So there’s this big knight called Louis. I couldn’t really tell you what his actual personality is but in my head he’s just this incredibly stoic legend of the battlefield and I’m really invested in him. Likewise the assassin with stars in her hair. If I get her hidden in bushes her evasion is so high no one can touch her so I just kind of guide her from bush to bush to having people to death and having a great old time. If you give it time to let these characters bed in on a mechanical level you can get past the slightly irritating tropiness that has kind of enveloped Fire Emblem. Okay, interesting. That’s my big take. Someone who I know is playing this told me something similar actually. They just found it quite refreshing to not have to let the school staff take up as much headspace and to just focus on the battles. You’re not alone in that. But it’s like you are maybe lonelier than you otherwise might be, you know what I mean? Yeah. But I’m not high hopes for this but it’s genuinely like, I’m like what a great start my gaming year has. I’m loving this. This is already probably going to be in my top ten contender. Nice. Nice to get what I just ticked off in January, isn’t it? It gets stressful otherwise and fucking December, playing Norco in two days. Great two days though. Okay, Fire Emblem Engage. I’ve thought about it Matthew but I guess I’ve got three houses. It’s the ultimate like we’ve already got a Fire Emblem at home because I’ve got three houses, Awakenings and the two 3DS ones they did. I can always lend it to you on a cartridge, you see. Oh yeah, that’s true. That probably would be easier wouldn’t it? But yeah, you do have to give it five hours or so. Actually my one regret with it is I wish I’d started it on a harder difficulty because I’m quite overleveled now and you can’t dial it up, you can only dial the difficulty down. Oh okay, that’s weird. What a weird choice. Yeah, it seems dumb because like, I’ve got Permadeath on but like no one ever dies. I haven’t had to save Scum or anything like, it’s like impossible for them to kill Lumi. He’s so strong. I like that you’ve got to got this sort of like, you know, sort of like soft crush on one of your fighters. He is quite handsome. Like, he never opens his eyes. He’s got one of those anime faces where his eyes are always closed, like he’s always like, ahh. Like Brock. Yeah. He’s a real hunk. Lost to think about there. But, no, that’s good. I was sort of amused by the idea that like, if anyone out there who wonders what it was like being a staff writer for Matthew, just think of him sending people to permadeath in this, because dooming them to permadeath because he doesn’t want to spend time with them anymore. I think that says so much about you, Matthew. Any comment on that? You’re sort of a size of magazine teams, like, it wasn’t like, oh, Max, it wasn’t like, oh no, we’ve got 30 staff. That’s a good point, actually. I’ve got a room full of editors. Yeah, what an inconvenience. Yeah, that is true, actually, in irrelevant comparison. It’s becoming the best games of 2014 again, Matthew. It’s getting too real. Oh, yeah, that’s quick. Let’s get the fuck out of here. Save it for 2015. Okay, next up, one of my games, and I think Matthew’s been playing this too, both now and 25 years ago. GoldenEye has returned on Nintendo Switch and Xbox. I’ve played through half the campaign in the last week on both Xbox and Switch because I went around a friend’s house for the weekend and moved in past the pad on a single player once I’d had enough of being killed by fucking proxy minds by them in their multiplayer. It’s been really fun to play again. What can you say that’s new about GoldenEye? So I think this holds up for a reason that you identified on social media, Matthew, which is the theatricality of it is still there and the satisfying thud of bullets hitting enemies how those enemies react animation wise to how they’re hit. But also like the thing I’d forgotten about GoldenEye is how much it is about crowd control because when you put it on higher difficulty settings, it’s very much a game of like spraying gunfire down a corridor because you’re trying to interrupt everyone’s animations before they start shooting you. And I forgot just how much of this game is about that, about keeping enemies busy basically with their own animations while you just try and clear these different rooms. Fun to play. I really cannot figure out how to calibrate the switch controls to be like sane FPS controls. That has eluded me. There was like a six step guide I saw and I was like, if this takes six steps, that’s too many steps. It’s when the first step is like you have to tell the left analog stick it’s the right analog stick and I’m like what the fuck is going on here? I thought no, that’s it. Yeah. Again, not to like use my overuse catchphrase, but that’s a no from me doll. So yeah, and so I couldn’t be bothered to do that, but the Xbox controls are so well calibrated that playing facility on Secret Agent felt like bullying. You know what I mean? I was just like strafing, no problem, just like headshotting dudes. The only thing that’s a bit fraught is trying to like precision aim with a sniper rifle or something like that. That is chaotic. Oh, it’s wobbly as shit, that thing. It really is. It’s like Snake before he’s taken dies upon, but he’s also off his tits on whiskey or something. Like there’s a bit of that going on. It’s just pure chaos. So yeah, really fun to play through. Again, I had forgotten how kind of weirdly spooky it gets in places with some color of the sky and shit. Very, very strange kind of horror game vibes to some of these levels. Surface. Yeah, surface in particular. Second surface where the sky is red for some reason. It’s like, it’s like, oh, I’m in hell now. That’s very strange. Watching my friend Andrew, aka the protagonist of Final Fantasy VII, play through this level, through surface too, drunk and trying to fucking find its way through it was unbearable. I was like, just stop playing so I can go to bed. This is, oh, this is taking forever. Really fun to like sort of get your teeth into the layered objectives again, but also fun to remind yourselves of how varied the levels are where like one level is like a timed sprint through a level basically and you know, you’ve just got to grab things as quickly as possible while you’re doing it and get in, get out of there. Some levels are just very set-piece-y and fun and give you room to kind of breathe and enjoy yourself. I forgot the runway had a tank in it actually. That was a, I completely forgot that until playing that because I always thought that was the level you bombed through to get DK mode, so yeah, never really replayed it much. That was fun. Yeah, multiplayer as good as ever, really still incredibly enjoyable and I don’t think there was even a wave of people saying, well, this game hasn’t held up because everyone knows it. It kind of has held up on its own terms, what do you think, Matthew? We’ve not tested out the multiplayer, I’m not really ready to be humiliated by Catherine Addict because I know that she’s going to be an absolute demon at it because that’s as true of all games. Playing these levels, just a bit like going back to your childhood home or something, you know, there’s stuff you remember 100%, some of it seems a lot smaller than it did, you know, when you were a kid, some of it I’ve completely forgotten. There’s a whole room of facility, that big room with like the four raised platforms in the corner with the computers, I completely forgot that place existed. It’s one of the rooms with all the scientists in and yeah, I was like, what the fuck? I must have played this level 100, more than 100 times. How can I not remember this? But yeah, just you’re right, I think it’s just the satisfaction of shooting these guys is just, it just holds up. If that works, if the core interaction of your game, which is a bullet coming out the bottom of the screen and hitting something in the middle of the screen, feels good, your FPS will be good, always. And so like, yeah, just torturing these suckers does feel bad to do it with Xbox controls. Like this was a game designed around like responding to a limited hero, not a modern guy who can strafe, like that seems very unfair. But you know, maybe that’s maybe now it is the true James Bond simulator. You are beyond what a regular man can do by the rules of GoldenEye. It is funny getting the like the faces of like the guards and also the different characters of the game blown up in HD at resolutions they were never supposed to be seen at. Yeah. Like that is the tiniest fucking Robbie Coltrane head I’ve ever seen on fucking Ballantine. It’s a tiny, tiny wee head right there. So that’s funny. And then just the faces of the guards, some of those deranged kind of smiling expressions and stuff as you’re sort of shooting them. And it’s yeah, they were meant to only ever be seen on a CRT sort of TV. But no, I think that’s I think that is fun about it, the sort of bullying aspect. I think you need to like, you know, kind of lubricate the experience somewhat in order for it to not feel, you know, if you want the N64 experience, just try and figure out how to play on Switch is my recommendation. It’s like, it’s basically as complicated. But yeah, yeah, it’s nice. The bullet impact is just so good in this game, like it’s sort of vague, the little hit animation and the sound of it. But it’s in that sort of slight vagueness that it becomes kind of more horrific. You can imagine it being like, this is what it feels like to be shot with a silence pistol. Like it’s just very, very believable. Yeah, it is, and like the guns just, the ways the guns sound as well, like you’re in like a Wild West movie from the 60s or something, just really, just really old school kind of like ridiculous gun effects that they don’t even use in the James Bond films. And I now realize, you know, playing the games now that like, they’re actually very particular to GoldenEye. Other first person shooter games don’t have the specific soundscape that GoldenEye does, you know what I mean? Like everything is very, very specific, right down to the music, which is still fantastic, but it does occasionally have like bits where I’m like, it sounds like someone left the engine running in a car and it’s just like a sequencer going or something. Yeah, really, really enjoyable. And yeah, even even if it was upsetting to get picked apart by my friend Andrew during the multiplayer sessions. He also repeated something that I’ve parroted on this podcast before Matthew, which is the he was there thinking, oh, this this campaign is great. I wish Perfect Dark had had a good campaign. I was like, I know Matthew does not agree with that, so I just sort of like mentioned that’s mad. That’s a mad bad take. I’ll pass that on to him. Okay, yeah. So GoldenEye still really good. Love that it’s on Game Pass. I already have Rare Replay Collection, so this is mine now. They can never take it away. And it did somehow feel illicit to be playing this game, not on a on a handheld emulation device running at eight frames per second. This felt very, very illegal for some reason. So very exciting. I wish they’d done a, what would have been really cursed is if they’d done an HD remake of the Activision GoldenEye, the one where they replaced Pierce Brosnan with Daniel Craig. Which is not a good game, but I have a little bit of fondness for the fact that the extreme revisionist history of Daniel Craig being in GoldenEye, I think it’s just so funny to see him jumping off the dam. You’re like, what? Like, don’t take this away from Pierce Brosnan. Yeah. Pierce Brosnan is the gamer’s bond. You cannot go back and try and trick people into thinking it was Daniel Craig. He is resolutely not the gamer’s bond. The gamers have decided that he is not. They have voted with their wallets against the Daniel Craig James Bond games. No, and he had plenty of attempts as well. Like four attempts, I think, including GoldenEye. Or maybe five attempts, actually. He had less than Quantum of Solace, GoldenEye, that one that Bizarre Creations did, and then 007 Legends. So, okay, it was four. That’s still quite a lot. That’s about the same as Brosnan, I think. So, no, Brosnan had a few more, I think. Yeah. Brosnan’s hit rate outside of GoldenEye is pretty bad. Yeah, it’s probably not. It’s definitely not worse. It all goes a little bit tomorrow and never dies on PS1. And, oh yeah, didn’t you say you fiercely pushed back on the revisionism that Die Another Day on N64 was good, don’t you, Matthew? That’s like… Oh, it’s… The world is not enough. Oh, that’s it. Sorry, yeah. Yeah, that’s a ropey-ass game. Anyone who thinks that’s a GoldenEye killer, especially people are like, I loved it in multiplayer. It’s like, you’re mad. That’s mad. What a mad stance to take. You know what we don’t talk about enough on this podcast is James Bond. Oh dear. The James Bond movies re-ranked coming in 2024. What’s your next game, Matthew? My next game is, I think, Recall by, I think it’s a one man studio. It’s credited to someone called Mytan69, which is like, you know, an online username rather than a full name. I would imagine so. Apologies if it is his full name. And it’s a sort of narrative puzzle game that I likened in a tweet to Ghost Trick. So the set up to this game is that at the start, there is an encounter between a spy character and a James Bond supervillain called the Toymaker in this kind of factory. And the idea is the supervillain is asking the spy character how he came to be there. And the spy character is telling him through multiple choice questions, the stuff that he encountered along the way. But by giving those answers to multiple choice questions, you are then shaping a level that you play as a little kind of 2D, like old Metal Gear Solid or Zelda or James Bond on the Game Boy, if you will. Nice. You go up to a machine and he goes, what was in the machine? And you tell him and then that’s what you get out of the machine, if that makes sense. And the idea is you are trying to kind of tell him the version of the story that results in the kind of successful path through the level. Does that make any sense? Kind of, yes. I can’t quite think of like, just looking at the visuals of it, I can’t quite think of what is comparable to this. The art style feels very specifically Game Boy Advance like the palette. It looks like a Game Boy Advance Pokemon game. It’s kind of the energy of the sprite work. It’s very clean. It’s got almost no reviews as well, Matthew, which makes me wonder, is this one of the exponents of your new initiative to just dive into Steam and see what’s out there? It is. Sorry to leave a bit of a cop before the horse there, but I didn’t want that. No, it’s exactly that. I set out this year to try and play stuff that I just hadn’t heard of at all. This was one of them. I’ve played a few things. This is the only one I want to talk about because the others were such dogshit that I felt like kicking a man when he was down to dunk on them. But yeah, so that’s the central mechanic. This sort of spy scene, it turns out, is just sort of a prologue. And then you start playing as this teenage boy who kind of inherits his sort of powers. And it’s kind of about setting up the best possible outcome for yourself in the actions you take in the run up to it. A kind of time loop puzzle game, I guess. I likened it to Ghost Trick because in Ghost Trick, you’re trying to sort of like avert these deaths from happening by kind of tinkering with objects in the environment. Here you have direct control of this character and you’re just trying to set out the right path. And the way it actually kind of seeds the correct information is very neatly done. There’s not a lot of it, so I don’t want to spoil too much of it, but there’s a puzzle early on where you go into a house where you hear someone shooting three bullets. And then you go into this house and there’s one of three rooms he can be in. And you go into each of those rooms and there’s a gun in each room with a different number of bullets. And you put the killer basically in the room where if he did three shots, he would have used the three bullets. So that means he no longer has bullets to shoot you when he leaves the room. Does that make any sense? Bloody hell. Does it make sense? I mean, I like conceptually, but like the actual experience of playing it, like is sort of, yeah, I feel like I understand the sequence of events, but yeah, there’s a lot going on there. Makes sense when you’re playing it. That’s a strength of this game is that it kind of sets itself up really well with this playable prologue and then the kind of puzzles layer up in complexity. And I was really like all in on this game for about three hours where the first five stages all took this format of like, you go into a situation, the situation is fucked, you keep replaying it to unfuck it using your knowledge of the future from, you know, exploring the post-fucked world, right? Right. But the problem is after those first stages, it basically abandons that mechanic and becomes like quite a bad 2D top-down puzzle game where you’re exploring like mazes as other characters. It sort of does this narrative thing where you do like a flashback where you play as someone else and then another flashback where you play as someone else. And for some reason it just abandons the whole thing that made the game interesting and ends with quite a… I’d say like half the game is quite a boring slog that doesn’t reflect the first half of the game at all. And I actually ended up not really liking it by the end, which was a real bummer because those first few levels I thought, oh this actually… this is exactly the kind of puzzle story blend that I loved in Ghost Trick that I’m surprised no one else has tried. And it really really shit the bed, which I didn’t tweet about. I tweeted how much I liked the first half because I was really enjoying it when I tweeted. And then the developer liked it and everything. And I didn’t really have the heart to be like, follow up tweet, it’s shit at the end. You’re still on this podcast instead where they’ll probably never listen to it. Well, exactly. I thought here’s like a safe place where I can basically like walk back that tweet. There you go. The tweet has been retracted in audio form. I hope you enjoyed that. I stand by it. First few levels good. I’ve done such a horrible job of explaining this. I just lack imagination, I think. No, it’s… Yeah, you just have to put people in the place where they can do you the least harm. It’s basically the puzzle over and over again. But I really like that puzzle. I thought it was very cool. It has a weird character art style. The characters are like super over the top, almost sort of phoenix righty in their preposterous caricatures. They’ve got really dumb names, a bit like pseudo character names. This is where I can’t call any of the characters’ names, because I played this two weeks ago and my brain is a fucking sponge. Travis Touchdown. It’s the opposite of a sponge. Okay, yeah. It’s an anti-sponge. Okay, can I ask you, is three good hours not enough to still justify playing it, Matthew, if those three hours are really good? It’s a hard one to recommend, because the end of it is really very bad. If it just wrapped up after those good three hours, I might feel like, oh, there’s a better game to be made here, but it just left such a bitter taste in a way that you think, did they feel the need to pad this game out with more? Was it just too resource intensive to do all that writing for the first few levels? It honestly feels like two different people made two different halves of this game. Well, your journey into the abyss of Steam has not been for nothing, Matthew. You’ve discussed something that, last year, we never would have talked about a game of this profile whatsoever, so on that level, it’s working, I think. Yeah, it’s on Xbox also. It’s an idea Xbox game, so it’s not totally, totally obscuro. The chap who made this made a game called Evans Remains. This very artful looking 2D platformer. I quite like that the games he makes have this sort of like GBA kind of palette and sort of sprite aesthetic. That’s very pleasing. So, you know, maybe I dunked on that too hard. But it is like 20 quid. That’s quite a lot for like half a good game. But well that I’m playing all of it. How much of January have you spent playing games, Matthew? And reading books? Have you read five books this month as well? Six and a half. You’re on, bloody hell, you’re on fire. That’s because he’s on Goodreads. He’s got to fucking keep those numbers up to keep the Goodreads rules. It’s gamification gone mad. Give me like a meter progress bar to fill up and I will like work myself into the gravy. Okay, good. I have one final game to discuss here, Matthew, but I wonder if I should discuss it when I’ve played more of it. So I’m only like about an hour into it. So I’ve been playing Iron Man VR and I will say this game, which has come out on Oculus Quest, it was previously on PlayStation, like is a full on Iron Man experience in the sense that you have his HUD when you’re wearing the VR headset, you have his thrusters and the character moves in response to like where you position the thrusters and stuff. And trying to play this sitting down was almost fucking impossible because I had to like basically put my hands against the couch behind me and sort of like placing my arms like pulled behind my back motion just to make my thrusters go in the right space. And I thought, if you want me to fucking stand up, just say, do you know what I mean? It’s like, yeah, it’s like, yeah, guess what, ladies and gentlemen, I totally started to not fucking sit down when he was in that suit. There’s a little bit of that going on. And I feel like I’m role playing it as Happy Hogan because I can’t fucking do anything. So I’m like the slightly naff, oh, what if Jon Favreau popped the suit on for 10 minutes kind of vibe? I’ve got that going on. But it’s quite going to start playing it because there’s a… I think that Oculus had to reveal in some kind of FTC statement that this developer was making a Batman game in VR. And then they later had to walk it back. I saw that doing their rounds and I was like, that’s a bit awkward announcing a game there. But, you know, another Batman VR game. That sounds pretty cool. I think it is good. Like it’s, you know, the writing is your familiar MCU type stuff. But there is like a mix of storytelling and sort of action that goes into it, which is good, because it is fucking exhausting to be firing things, you know, with your actual arms all the time. So I appreciate the pause. And it is nice to have something like, you know, relatively blockbuster sized in VR to play on Oculus Quest 2, which hasn’t had loads of notes lately in that respect. So I like that, but I will play more of it, Matthew, before I talk about it in more detail. I’ll try and try and finish it next month. But it is nice to put the Quest 2 back on and have a little potter around. So- When you said it had stuff which wasn’t all action all the time and it kind of mixed it up, in my head I had vision of a Octodad style game where you’re just trying to do domestic chores around Tony Stock’s house in that suit with that control scheme. And you’re just like fucking burning everything, you know, the sofa to shit and whatnot. They were more like, they’re more like walking simulator type bits where, you know, you sort of like, in the tutorial, you sort of fly around and do all these like, you know, do this kind of race and blow up these things and punch a fist through some rock or whatever. And then when you land, there’s a load of like him and Pepper Potts interacting. And so you’re, you know, literally walking around his nice fancy house and, you know, looking at posters and stuff, looking at like an item that his dad used to have and, you know, thinking about Howard Stark. And then you, there’s a bit where like- Exactly objective. Think about Howard Stark. Think about your dad and what he did. Because the whole thing in it is he’s just given up being like an arms dealer, basically, at the start of the game. He’s trying to become like a better man. And so yeah, you do get this bit where like him and Pepper are sort of interacting and then you take the, you know, it’s like a sort of like one of those, they’re serving dinner and it’s like one of those like tins that you kind of lift the lid on. I can’t remember what the fuck they’re called, but you know what I mean? Those dinner tray things, dinner, you know what I mean? What are they called? What, TV dinner? No, no, when you lift like, in a film where like, they lift the metal thing up and then you can see the food underneath and it’s like, what’s the fucking metal thing called? I was gonna say, they didn’t feel like, he feels too rich to be eating like a microwave or a lasagna for most expenses. Exactly, here’s the fact, it’s like Monday Night Podcasting 101, me struggling to think of what a fucking piece of metal is called. Oh, I couldn’t think of anything that was the opposite of a sponge, so. Yeah, what’s the opposite of a sponge? An anti-sponge, very good. There you go. That’s powerful Monday Night energy. Well, look, we did it, but you can tell that the best games of 2014 were just recorded on a Sunday morning. It had that energy to it, but this is very much like, I just need to fucking, I need to go to the gym and then I need to collapse because, you know, it’s just, that’s where I’m at mentally. So yes, there’s like these little narrative bits, I think, that give it that kind of variety, and then it’s like the Iron Man stuff starts up again. It seems pretty decent, Matthew, but I’ll keep playing it and have some more fully formed opinions. I feel like we’ve had some good discussion there. We’re an hour in and we’ve talked about four games and some real detail. That’s pretty decent, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s all right. I mean, yeah, you might want to edit out some of my umming and ah-ing and brain farts, but. What’s the bit where, oh yeah, the bit where you were talking about GoldenEye and you were going to make a great joke and you forgot what the joke was, so we just kind of moved on. Yeah, that’ll come out. Don’t include that. No, I won’t, but I’ll probably include this bit referring to that bit. Very good, great content. So Matthew, should we take a quick break and come back with a barrage of Mr. Questions? Welcome back to the podcast. So, we have some listener questions to fire through. Matthew, go and do the first one. Hopefully, this one will make the grade. That’s him, Ryan, not me. You have to pick one game to play with Eugene Acker forever, or here, I’m joking, of course. Hi, guys, long time listener, first time caller. Matthew, by now you’ve read an entire library’s worth of detective murder mysteries. Has this made you a better detective in real life? Are you now incredibly good at figuring out the murderer halfway through a murder mystery book you are reading? Likewise, is there any passion either of you have inside or outside of gaming, which you’ve now become a bit of a Benoit Blanc in? That’s from Danny Mann. Okay, it’s a nice attempt to try and drag me into it at the end there. That’s a nice question clearly aimed at Matthew. Yeah, I don’t know really if there is. I think solving a mystery in a piece of fiction is a very specific skill, and I think that Matthew is tuned to the idea of what a trad mystery or a subversive mystery is and what he likes. And I feel like you probably don’t always get it, Matthew, but you probably get it more than I would. Yeah, I feel like there’s information you do and don’t need to know. And whenever there’s something jarring, that’s always the thing, you know? Like, you’re watching a film and someone says a line, you think, why the hell was that in there? And you’re like, well, that’s because that’s the solution to it, or that’s the reason they got murdered, or it’s very, very hard to hide things in plain sight. Especially in films where they want to go back and show you a montage of clips and go, look how clever we were. I actually have that with the Ryan Johns. I don’t think, as you mentioned, Ben Roblanc, I don’t think the two nice out films are very good at hiding any of their things. I thought they were both dead easy and super, super obvious. I think I’m pretty good at detecting these things now. Yeah, I suppose the question is as well, like how much is Knives Out trying to hide that? How much is that, you know, how much is the like, who done it or how done it? Is that a phrase? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. How much of them are about that really? And like, yeah, and subverting that template or, you know, themes rather than like the actual art of creating a mystery, you know, there’s that hard part to be had, but yeah. I think Rian Johnson has said in loads of interviews, he’s not too bothered about them as super difficult puzzles. You know, he wants to surprise and delight you, but he’s not like writing a, you know, a Japanese style crime mystery, you know, he’s not, you know, the working out of the thing isn’t the reason for it to exist, you know. Yeah, I think that’s probably the case, that makes sense. So, okay, next question. The other day, I ate some Hare’s Deep Dish Pizza Curls, which turned out to have expired in September 2021. What’s the greatest risk you’ve ever taken with food? That’s from Scott V. And there was a funny answer to this in the Discord, which said, this from Ryan Plugs, when I lived at home, I was making paella and my ma’am insisted we had prawns in the freezer. She’s a nightmare for thinking the freezer is a time capsule. So when I saw the date on them, all I could say was, these are pre-911 prawns. They’re about 10 years out of date, Bin. That made me laugh. So the other day I drank a lager that turned out to be six months old and it was swimming with bits. That felt super cursed. My friend, Andrew- Swimming with bits. It was, it was like a fancy lager. It’s in like a black can, the whole nonsense kind of like craft beer design on it. Pure Samuel Roberts bait basically. But then yeah, I just poured it out and it was just like an ocean of little like bits and pieces swimming around the bottom. And my friend Andrew said, this expired in September. And I was like, I drank it, but I didn’t feel good drinking it. I was like worried about what I was doing to myself. The other thing I could have thought of with this was, there was like a point during the Christmas break when it, this is before we knew we all had COVID, but we’re all incredibly ill with like COVID related fevers, where my mom was insisting on clearing out the fridge for Boxing Day and she reheated some KFC that was in the fridge. And I thought, this feels wrong. You’re not meant to fuck about with chicken. And I think just the idea of like being COVID ill between watching episodes of the English or BBC I Play and eating this fucking cursed chicken, that didn’t feel great. There are probably less recent examples, but those come to mind. How about you Matthew? I once ate some very luxury chocolate out of a bin in my house in London, because one of my housemates had thrown away, they’d been given a box of fancy chocolates, had eaten one and then just put them in the bin. So I took them out of the bin and ate all of those and hoped no one would ever find out. Wow, jeez, this is like a police confession. Yeah, well, it was okay. Like nothing in the bin was touching the chocolates. It was like some hotel chocolat chocolates. Well, those are good chocolate. Yeah, so I was like, yoink, I’ll take those. I think it would have been frowned upon if I had been caught. At Catherine’s folks house, because I’m not a heavy drinker, they always have these soft drinks in for us, but it isn’t for me. But obviously we only go there like, you know, a couple of times a year. And so after a while, it was the same soft drinks that had been sitting on top of the cupboard. And I didn’t really think canned drinks could go off too, you know, in too mad a way. But apparently they can. And like, I think it was Appletizer, cans of Appletizer. Oh, no, no, no, no, Pepsi Max cherry cans. It like slightly sort of changed colour and just tasted so evil. But like, they’d already gone to this faff of having to have soft drinks in for me when they’ve got loads of booze there. And so I felt like, you know, I had to sort of drink it endlessly without ever complaining. So I drank always like rancid Pepsi all weekend and be like, maybe like, would you like another glass? Yes, please. Because, you know, my mum raised me to be polite and have good manners and never kick off about stuff like that. So I was just drinking like this sort of chemical slurry that had at one time been Pepsi Max cherry. To have good manners, says the man eating hotel chocolate out of a bin. Allegedly, that’s correct. I like the idea. Are you like perpetually like three years behind on this Pepsi just trying to catch up, Matthew? No, we’re through it now. I’ve convinced them that I like squash more. So squash you can keep for ages. That’s good. Yeah, that’s good. Did they ever, did you ever bring it up, the drinking Pepsi? Okay, good. I just like the idea that one day you’re just like, they’ll just, they’ll be like, oh, your intestines are just black now and it’s, something’s happened to your physiology because you can’t drink this stuff. Yeah, it’s my superhero origin story. Yeah, maybe. So I’ve got another question from Scott V here, which is, large lads, I know you don’t really do any sound effects or drops. What audio clips would be regularly used if you had the time slash inclination? I was tempted to cut in the Hi-Fi rush, hey, hey into the theme tune this week, Matthew but I thought that might date really quickly when, you know, people forget about what Hi-Fi rush is in a year and people listen back to the episode and yeah, yeah, I didn’t want to do that. So yeah, it was a no from me. I’m actually using more Phoenix Wright sounds in Games Court. We did that originally and then I feel like we stopped doing them because I couldn’t be bothered to keep pulling them off of the internet from this Phoenix Wright soundboard, which is not an official Capcom joint, by the way. I thought like every time we say this is not a horny podcast, you should have some kind of like carry-on style comedy whistle, like whoo, kind of thing, like just sort of like NAF 70 sound effects to sort of add a vibe that isn’t really there. That’s what I came up with, Matthew. What about you? Yeah, I think I have separately tried adding Ace Attorney sound effects to Games Court and it just never ever works. Like the mix of the sounds is just too harsh. I’ve tried adding the court humm, and it just never sounds like what it’s meant to sound like. So I’ve abandoned that. I feel like we just do our own sound effects occasionally, you know, the oh no of Michael Kane. That’s very much ours. We could probably have that on a soundboard. Yeah. No, not really. Not many hilarious answers for that. Good. Let’s move on. What’s the next question, Matthew? Any upcoming Indie Games Hall of Fame episodes coming up? I love those, says D. McCann. Later this year, probably. I think that Matthew and me talked about the fact that because there are so many games coming out in this half of the year that are our type of games, like our sort of like flavor of games, you know, from Zelda to Jedi Survivor and, you know, obviously there is more that I’m kind of forgetting there. What’s the other thing that’s coming out in March, Matthew? Resi War 4 remake, of course. So a lot of stuff that’s very friendly to us. We’re doing slightly more in the way of like episodes that respond to that release calendar. But like despite what people might think about this year, that calendar does basically run out in like July. So at that point, I think we’ll probably cycle in slightly more of our classic formats then. We’ll have some as we go. But I think I would like to do another Indie Games Hall of Fame episode, Matthew. What about you? Yeah. Let me tell you, it won’t be featuring Recall. Yeah, again, just sort of like taking back the tweet there, just being like, yeah, just taking back the tweet. Just walking it back. I’m not a fan of Recall. I don’t want that tweet to be used in promotional materials, because then I feel like I will be forced to do a second tweet where I’m like, ignore that first tweet. And it’s on all of their posters and stuff. Well, I’ll have to then put posters up next to their posters saying, ignore that quote on the poster. But that was from me and that opinion didn’t hold up in the long run. Just going around packs with a stapler, just like, yeah, just attaching it to different bits and pieces. And then it’s like, you’re the worst thing that ever happened to indie games. And then I really regret my whole indie game discovery project for 2023. Yeah, and there is no indie game Hall of Fame because Matthew is persona non grata in the indie movement, just like cast out at the IGF Awards. Just like a picture of him on the screen saying, this man is not your friend, et cetera. Okay, this next one is from Blinky. I did edit this down because it’s quite long, I hope you don’t mind. Hello, Samuel and Matthew, what are some instances in which you recall immersive sim-like solutions to ostensibly non immersive sim games? More generally, are there any tricks or exploits on which you look back fondly? Anything particularly cool or imaginative or ridiculous? Matthew, anything come to mind for you here? Yeah, maybe it’s because I’ve been playing GoldenEye recently. The thing that actually popped into my head was in Perfect Dark, you could take a crate from downstairs in the Carrington Institute, which was like the hub area of the game and is like a non-lethal space, you’re not armed with any weapons, but they had these sort of crates on like hover platforms, I think, and you could kind of push them around, and the building had a shooting gallery, and if you took the crate into the shooting gallery, you could block the door open of the shooting gallery, activate the shooting gallery to get the guns, and then climb over the crate to go into the Carrington Institute with a gun. And just kill all the staff of the Carrington Institute, which is a horribly sinister thing to want to do. But like, you know, as a teenager, what was he going to do but murder some innocent NPCs? So you go into the shooting gallery, get a crossbow, sneak out using my crate exploit, and then kill the people running the target gallery. Which, as I was saying, I thought, man, that really pokes me in a horrible light. But it is something I did a lot and made me laugh. So why not? No, that’s okay. I like that one. When I sort of shot Boris dead in GoldenEye, actually yesterday, my friend Andrew was like, you can’t fucking kill Boris. And I was like, the game doesn’t care if I kill Boris. You can still kill Boris and walk off. And the game’s like, yep, fine. And he does die in the film. Yeah, that’s it. He does admittedly play a key point in that film of what actually happens to drive the story forward. But yeah, there’s no consequence for killing him in the game, is there? He just blow him up and you walk off. And like, yep, that’s it, done now, goodbye. So yeah, but my answer to this one is a really simple one. But I may have even mentioned this on the Star Wars Guilty Pleasure episode, but it was letting the Wampa-ized creatures out of their cage in order to kill all the Stormtroopers in Echo Base. Like, they would just stalk around killing the enemies for you. And I like that shit. When enemies kill other enemies, I’m always massively into that. And that’s a classic example, I suppose. They’re very intimidating. And I just lock the door and then listen to them go, rrrrr, rrrrr, and then open. Oh my God, you listen to their death calls. Well, no, because- As they were torn limb from limb by an angry Wampa. Well, it’s N64 graphics, so it’s not that kind of like in-depth, to be honest. They just sort of swipe a few times. Well, at least you can see it through the fog. The worst thing is, though, once they, like, sensed you were in their vicinity again, you’d open the door, they’d both just walk towards you again and like, oh, fuck’s sake. They’re just like, there he is, let’s kill him. So that’s one that came to mind, but it’s not as good as Matthew’s one about killing lots of innocent people for a laugh, which is a classic story, if you ask me. Do you wanna read this next one, Matthew? Good day, large men. Playing Trails from Zero, I was unfortunate enough to come across Kia, a young female character that the developers obviously think everybody will love, but who comes across as an irritating Mary Sue Bratt, a pattern I see quite a lot in games. As men who also selectively ignore the Discord’s parenting channel, which major child characters in games stand out as genuinely enjoyable to spend time around, and which are the very worst child characters that you’re not meant to hate? Keep up the great child chat-free work. That’s from Balladeer. Okay, yeah, so I try not to spend excessive time with children just generally, you know, as a sort of adult man, but especially not those children who enjoy sushi as previously established in this podcast, Matthew. Do the kids in the persona count? Do they count as kids or are they just too old to be kids? Oh, they’re teens. Yeah, I would have said Ryuji, obviously, because he’s like the buddies I had at school kind of. I guess like the Iko kids are like neither good hangs nor bad hangs, like the little dude with the horns or the girl. They’re like, I don’t know if she’s a child, but he’s not like a good hang, but yeah, he’s fine, isn’t he? He’s sort of there. Likewise, the only other one I could come up with was the kid in Rhyme. I didn’t mind, is it Palom and Pollum in Final Fantasy IV? But they’re fine. They’re okay, I suppose. Kids are generally just a tough hang in games, I think more broadly. Because you tend to find kids more in Japanese games and you tend to get a lot in the way of that thing you were talking about earlier, Matthew, the annoying dubbing and stuff. So maybe think of kids like, oh God, the one in Final Fantasy XIII no one likes, Hope, that kid, yeah. Like, you know what I mean? That kind of character is quite prevalent in sort of Japanese RPGs and they’re a tough hang for sure. Did you have an answer to this? Yeah, another bad kid, maybe a controversial one. I think I’ve said it before, I really don’t like Haruka in Yakuza 1. Oh yeah, she’s annoying, yeah. It’s a really adult game and then this kid turns up and everyone has to act all polite because there’s suddenly a kid in the room and it gets all cutesy. Like, it’s quite a hard-edged, violent game. I do not want this schmaltzy, sentimental sort of bit of nonsense in the midst of it. I know Haruka goes on to be an important character, but in that first game it’s particularly sort of like, do I really want to be manning a kid? Is that the fantasy of this game? I don’t think so. In Yakuza, though, that plot line to me feels like a sign of them not really knowing exactly what Yakuza’s strengths were yet, you know what I mean? It was like, we’ll do the very typical man on fire type plot kind of thing. So there’s a bit of that to it, but sorry, Matthew, cut you off. No, that’s fine. Good kids. I actually think the kids in Plague Tale are quite well written and performed. The girl’s maybe like a teenager, but she’s like looking after her little brother and the kind of brother sister interaction feels quite kind of true to me. And he sounds very young and not too overly directed in his performance. Like it feels quite naturalistic in that game and like their voices sound very genuine. They’ve got this slight French twang to them, which I think helps. Like, you know, slightly different voice to one you’re used to hearing in games. More so in the first game and the second game, I think the second game, everything’s kind of ramped up a bit and like the drama is so much more severe that they feel like they’re kind of pawns in this big, mad blockbuster kind of plague thriller. I think the first game is like their journey or this sort of descent into this quite nightmarish world is a lot better kind of plotted and realized, but they’re rare, like, you know, they carry the game. They’re the main protagonists and that works for me. Yeah, that’s fair enough. Sort of like very worst kids. Yeah, I don’t know. I sort of like, I don’t feel like I’ve played many games that have kids in them as prominent characters, to be honest. Like, I can’t think of any recent examples of like kids where I thought, oh yeah, you know. The little kids in Pentamon are quite cute. Because you sort of meet them because it has these big time jumps in the story. You kind of meet a lot of them as like babies and then they kind of grow up. And it’s quite funny that, you know, you meet these weird little burbling kids and there’s this kid who famously steals the main character’s hat or can steal the main character’s hat in one of the early scenes. And then the kind of journey of this hat through the game becomes a bit of a thing. That’s really well done. But like Pentamon, all the characters are kind of quite free of cliche and refreshing, so. Yeah, and we just spoke about South Park, the Stick of Truth on last week’s episode. I suppose like the South Park kids, do they count? I don’t know if they do really. I can’t really describe Baby Mario as a good hang either. That’s like a… Okay. Instead of just laboring this, let’s move on then, Matthew. A question prompted by learning that Harvey Smith was once working on an adaptation of Michael Mann’s 1995 crime epic Heat while working at Midway. Big Sammy Holdings and Matthew Castle Productions have been given carte blanche to adapt a film of their choice into a game. It can be in any genre and for any platform. What game do you make? Got an answer for this, Matthew? Easy. Oh yeah? I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before. Maybe I have, but a Mission Impossible stealth tactics game by Mimimi who made Shadow Tactics, Desperados and they’ve recently announced Shadow Gambit is one of those games where you control like five people at once and you send them across an isometric map. But I think the idea of like a team executing a plan in tandem with a kind of stealth lean to it, spread out across the map or doing different things to pull off these mad Mission Impossible style schemes. I think that would be brilliant. Yeah I think the tactics format can be applied to so many things. So that’s a good one, Matthew. I really like that. What are the art style going to be like? I mean, it’s kind of harder to imagine because you think you’d want some height to it. If it was isometric like Desperados or Shadow Tactics, it would be limited to everything on the same floor, where the fun of that game is like there’s a guy on top of a skyscraper and there’s another guy on a motorbike in a sandstorm and you’d almost want to take their formula and blow it out to a huge canvas of a proper Mission Impossible set piece. I’m just amazed no one’s done a proper Mission Impossible game. A dumber version of it, I guess. In terms of the spectacle, Naughty Dog could probably do a really good Mission Impossible game. Yeah, I like the idea of that. This did come up in a recent pod, I can’t remember why, but we talked about how there hasn’t been a game based on this is kind of strange. Maybe it’s a Tom Cruise element or the fact these films have changed quite a lot over the years. You can’t improve on the perfection of Mission Impossible in the N64. Yep, a real factor there. Yeah, when’s that fucking coming to Switch Online with bad controls, Matthew? That’s what I want to know. Obviously my answer here is the Kramer versus Kramer text adventure. It’s been a long time coming, I think, but the genre lends itself very well to the subject matter. I like the idea of a character select screen and it says, do you want to be Kramer or Kramer? That sounds more like a beat-em-up, doesn’t it? Yeah, it should be a beat-em-up. And it’s like Dustin Hoffman looking cross or Meryl Streep looking sad. It’s that exact Street Fighter animation, but Meryl Streep just beating the shit out of her. Yeah, that’d be really good. So, my boring answer to this is, yes, I would like there to be a John Wick game, especially because you could probably get Keanu to do the voice, so that could lend itself well to good set pieces. What would it be? It would be like a Max Payne style game, I suppose. But again, I fucking love Max Payne and they don’t make many of them, so high-budget Max Payne alike would be absolutely fine with me. The much bolder swing I came up with here was when they did that Matrix experience for the PS5, when whatever that terrible Matrix film was called, I’ve already forgotten. What was it? Resurrection, yeah. When that came out, that game was a tech demo, but it was a fair bit more elaborate than one might expect from a tech demo, I’d say. It had a whole playable section and then you could just go around this open world. I kind of thought about the idea of a Matrix-style game where you are basically on the run from the agents and your goal is to find the one. You basically have this Watch Dogs Legion-style thing where you play as these different characters who are out of the Matrix. Then your goal is to keep taking different people out of the Matrix and building this kind of clue board that leads you to the one. Basically your skill set varies massively depending on the different characters. Once you unlock the one, that’s like the end game. You’ve got all the powers and can fly through the open world kind of thing. So that was like my very complex pick for this. It will probably make a terrible game in practice. But I thought that would be quite good because that’s the thing that’s interesting about The Matrix, the idea you can have these little stories that play out when you’re infiltrating people’s lives. Some of the Animatrix stories touch upon this as well, but the idea of how do you get people out of there. And maybe you can have more narrative bits that take place on one of those ships in the fucking stormy nighttime skies bits, Nebuchadnezzar sort of bits in the game. So that’s my bold swing Matthew, but of course I’m more passionate about the Kramer vs Kramer text adventure slash meet em up combo. I like the idea of walking through a Watch Dogs version of The Matrix and all these little boxes are popping up telling you about people and it’s like this person likes reading and second bullet point is the one. And you’re like, oh, there we go, we found it, here it is, the one. You just gotta read every single box to fucking find them. Yeah, okay, that is dumb when you put it like that. I had one other suggestion, like a Telltale style game of dazed and confused, like hopping between all the different social factions that meet up at the party at the end of the film and if you make loads of bad choices, you end up getting paddled by Husky Ben Affleck. That’s really good. How can I top that? I was about to throw in another sober suggestion, but why bother? We’ve peaked, let’s move on. I feel like between that and the Graeme vs. Graeme attacks adventure, I think you and I read the assignment, do you know what I mean? Yeah. Okay, is it your question, accident? Has there ever been a good hacking mini game or full game that actually made you feel like a cool hacker? That’s from Zach. So I couldn’t think of any. And even if there were games that were more like hacking type stuff, I don’t think I’d be smart enough to even get them because I just have a very sort of like GCSE C grade IT brain. So that’s kind of like where I’m at, sort of like with this sort of thing. How about you, Matthew? Yeah, you could make a pretty awesome PowerPoint presentation. Using a template. And then email it to the organisation to tell them that they’re being hacked. Like you could send them a threatening PowerPoint with animations, clip art and the works. That would be amazing as a kind of like mini game in a sort of like, you know, Spider-Man type game where it’s like, I’m just emailing to let you know you’ve been hacked. I can’t help you with it, but good luck. Is that being hackers too? Well, you know, hackers, they send you those in films, they always send you like a gif of a skull that goes, ah, ah, ah, and then a message comes up and it’s like, I’ve got all your secrets. Oh, that’s casino. That’s Scopal. Yes. But that’s what hackers do in films. They all do that, right? They send you a scary animation to make you feel fearful of your PC. Yeah, of Judi Dench, like as the Joker. Yeah. They all do that. They all, every single one does that on a Union Jack. That’s like Hacker 101. Yeah, I don’t really, yeah, I don’t, I haven’t really, I haven’t really come across anything like this. I mean, obviously, there’s the pipe puzzles in Bioshock and they were fun for a while, but then there were just too many of them. So obviously, they became a sort of like divisive part of that game. And should we move on Matthew, having, yeah, I mean, another shout out for Uplink, star of my PC games draft. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, really sealed it for you that one, didn’t it? Oh, that’s sarcastic. So I won that one, didn’t I? What a piece of shit. In terms of, like, I don’t know about hacking, but there’s that programming game else heartbreak that I know Andy Kelly was big on. That’s sort of like, but that’s a completely different thing, I suppose. I have no help for. That’s like hacking people, isn’t it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, next up. Large lads, are you fans of the awesome, watching the awesome Games Done Quick events or of watching speedruns in general? If you had to pick one game to speed hundreds of hours mastering in hopes of becoming a speedrunner, world record holder, which game would you choose? That’s a Rock Solid 32. I’m not massive into this, but recently someone did, I think for whatever the last Games Done Quick one was, it was Onimusha 2, which is an old favorite of mine, of course. It was genuinely fascinating to watch one dude conquer this entire game in an hour and sort of show the ways in which you burn through a game that I thought was at least six hours even at push. So that was kind of cool. But yeah, I don’t feel like I get into this as some of my peers, Matthew, and it’s not because I hate charity. I love charity, but yeah, it’s not quite my sort of thing. How about you? Yeah, same. I admire it, but I also have no interest in watching it. I think the ones that I’ve seen, they either make me feel really inferior about my own kind of like performance in those games. It makes me feel like I don’t know them at all, and that just makes me feel bad. Like it’s a pure jealousy reaction. Or, there are those runs which are so dependent on mad sequence breaking and glitches, things which are just beyond what I would think is the rules of the game per se. I don’t really have any interest in seeing someone rolling in the corner of a room to fall through the world and end up in the last boss, but it doesn’t really tell me anything about that game apart from this mad broken element of it. I haven’t got enough time to be watching other people play games, you know? I would rather be playing a game, reading a book or watching a film. I’ve just got too much other stuff on my plate to do that. That sounded more defensive than I meant it to be. I found it really funny. There are so many of these scenarios where you’re like, are you interested in X? And you take it as some kind of reflection on your personality, the idea that, I can’t watch yourself feeling fear about how I play games, and it’s the opposite of how it’s meant to make you feel. But don’t you feel like, I don’t know, you’re like, oh here’s someone who’s really good at Mario Galaxy, and it’s like, well, great. I mean, in my head, I’m the best person at Mario Galaxy, because I’ve got no other reference point. Well I suppose so, but then I was never really, my enjoyment of Onimusha 2 was never dependent on me being the fastest to play Onimusha 2, you know what I mean? Oh no, I’m not the fastest, I just, yeah. Okay well, look, the answers are a firm no, RockSonic32, so what’s the next question? I may have it muted on Twitter because I don’t want to hear about it. Oh jeez, Matthew really hates charity, jeez. It’s not a charity, it’s the speedrunning. I’d happily give the money to the charity, I just don’t want to have to watch any speedrunning. I’ll give him 20 quid if I don’t have to hear about it. Cut to next year and Matthew’s doing the recall speedrun for Orson Gaines Dunquit. I think I could do this in under four hours, so stay tuned. Sorry, that was being spirited. All the best to the speedrunners. All the best is what I say in Games Court after we fucking drown them, but… Okay, next question, Matthew. With the success of Arcade Paradise, what do you guys think of doing an arcade draft? Could be some interesting categories, gun, con, vehicle, fighting games, et cetera, as well as the title of the establishment and how crazy you want the carpet to be. That’s from Betamax Bandit. So I like this idea, but I’m worried that I don’t know enough to do the subject matter justice and I imagine it would be the same for you, Matthew. Oh yeah, you know way more about arcades than I do. I don’t think so. I think just because I’ve tweeted about playing Ghost Squad a few times, that’s what makes me seem more worldly than I actually am, but you know, I know people have really deep knowledge of this stuff and of this kind of history. I imagine, like for example, Simon Parkin could do a really good arcade draft, whereas I’d be there thinking, well obviously I’ve got to get a fucking Ghost Squad. That’s like a big cornerstone of my personal brand apparently. But then yeah, I don’t know, I’d be like, Outrun? I don’t know. I just sort of like struggle my way through it. I think Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, I think I just like faff a little bit, but I don’t think I could get through. I think we could have a great conversation about the fucking carpet though, don’t you? We could definitely, that’d be like 25 minutes for us. Anything that’s like not relevant to the subject, we’re all over it. So yeah, okay, so yeah, I guess the answer is maybe, but I think we’ve probably got to get through all the other drafts we want to do first. I don’t know, it’s like, yeah, it’s not on the cards right now. It has a similar level of likelihood as the Dreamcast draft, which is another area where I’d just be hugely exposed. We can’t know everything about everything, you know? Nah, that’s it. We already outsourced the Dreamcast episode to Andy Kelly anyway, so that was a good bit of outsourcing that was. It’s still cut up about people reacting to that going, I’m surprised they know so little about Dreamcast. I was like, for fuck’s sake, we know so much about fucking Kirby, like we know other stuff. That was really funny. I think it’s because everyone sort of projects the things they’re interested in from like 90s magazine culture or noughties magazine culture onto us, and we come up short in some areas because that’s just not our specialty. So I did two hours of fucking Japanese crime fiction, like give me a break. I’m afraid like the Sonic episode was my contribution to the Sega side of things. Otherwise, I’d just be making it up and you know, I could give you my sort of video game insights by playing this stuff, but I think you probably want true lived in experience of someone who truly loves it. I can give you that for PS2. I could fake my way through an arcade draft, but that just wouldn’t be satisfying for anyone. Well, that’s it. We only want to make podcasts that we think will be good. We don’t want to just, you know, just shit the bed because we feel like we have to to please people. That’s, again, a very defensive answer to something quite this. Mine would just be 10 seaside crane games. That’s what I’ve played most in arcades, is crane games. My would be that fucking Sonic the Hedgehog basketball machine. I love that thing. That’s great fun. That machine where you drop the two P’s and then the shelf moves in and out and knocks down more two P’s. Yeah, you’d say, going, yeah, I’ll take that in like novelty machine and, oh, it’s so good when a bit of candy would come out. I’m not sure this podcast is working, Matthew. Next question then. What game would you make with the dad’s army IP? That’s exact. This got a very good response from podcast discord near do well Balladeer, actually, who said, spec OAPs the line. That was good, I thought. Good. That is a solid one thumb up. I don’t know. I got very upset by this question because I just didn’t feel there was anywhere to go with it other than like a shit hidden object, sort of like a CD-ROM game from about 2004. What can you find Pyke’s hat? Yeah, I was going to say can you find Compo, but that’s Last of Summer White, isn’t it? He didn’t go to war. I need to be able to find Compo unless something’s gone horribly wrong. And everyone’s like, dear Gamers Master, I desperately need your help. I can’t complete the Dad’s Army hidden object game because it’s asking me to find Compo and he isn’t part of this universe. Okay, I’m not sure, I mean, what more could you hope for from that? Yeah, I can’t remember any of the characters, I’m afraid. Well, any answers to this, Matthew? Again, a tactics game? So the only episode of Dad’s Army I really remember, and this is because my stepdad had a VHS of four episodes of Dad’s Army. Oh God. They had an episode where they’re trying to man an anti-aircraft gun and it’s just total chaos because, you know, they’re all idiots as they are in Dad’s Army and no one can structure this thing. And I thought you could do a sort of surgeon simulator-ish 3D VR game where you’ve got like a squad of incompetent Dad’s Army characters trying to use quite advanced military tech and just like, can you build this aircraft gun in like 30 minutes or whatever? So it’d be like a comedy physics disaster game would probably be my best attempt at making a Dad’s Army game. That’s pretty good. I like that. It could be a VR game, you know? Yeah. I think that would be good. I like that too. I always assumed that Dad’s Army was a show that they made like 12 episodes and then just showed it for 70 years or whatever. I think it might be one of those. I think there might be, I think there are more episodes than there were of like 40 towers, but we’re definitely, you know, we’re not talking 22 seasons on, you know, NBC. No, no, no. It’s 80 episodes apparently and three are missing. That’s how old that show is. Like new pitch, new San Barlow game. What happened in those three missing dads army episodes? Yeah, I think that is a follow up to Immortality from what you hear on the grapevine. So I think it’s going to be great. You’re like, I can see it now. The tagline is whatever happened to Captain Manoring. I can’t believe how much of your A material you brought for this bullshit question. That’s incredible. And also the the the Compo crossover universe episode, Matthew, with the last summer wine. That obviously will form another great episode. So, yeah, good. Let’s move on then. Is it you next or me? Oh, it’s a long ass one. Right. Hi, fellas. Your fictional games companies are invited to Games Illuminati and you attend a meeting slash meal in a nice underground vault like La Perla. As two new members. Is that bath? I don’t. It doesn’t ring a bell. That feels like a bath reference that’s gone over my head. La Perla. Bath. It does seem to be in Bath. Yeah. So it’s a tapas restaurant, apparently. Oh yeah, that’s the one near Opa. That’s a bit less familiar with that one. Okay. Well, fair play when you managed to stump us with a bath eatery. We know as little about bath eateries as we know about arcades and Dreamcast, clearly. As two new members of the Games Illuminati, you’ve been given a series of binary choices for the next five years of games can and can’t have because of some reason like necessity being the mother of invention. What would you keep and banish out of the following binary pairs? We’ve got a selection of either this or this. Yeah, would this be easier if you ask Mia and then I give the answer and we do it in reverse? Yeah, probably. Or maybe just one set of answers, I don’t know. We’ll see. Let’s see how many lols there are in this. Double jumps or aiming down sights? I’d keep double jumps, something that’s just super nice. There’s a good one in Hi-Fi Rush as well. Yeah, it’s got a good double jump. And aiming down sights is like alright, but I don’t know. I feel like I’m just so lazy that these days I can barely even be bothered to aim down sights when I play a shooter anyway, so I could live without that. You’re too lazy to squeeze your left trigger. Yes, because sometimes that’s like suggesting the game wants me to sit up and look at the screen properly, and I’m not prepared to do that because I’m lying horizontally. Exactly. I agree with you, double jumps, without double, you know, it’s classic. Metroidvanias would be fucked without a double jump. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, good. RPG mechanics in non-RPGs or turn-based mechanics? The example they give here is XP tiered loot, etc. And that’s like, that’s an immediate no from me, dog. I’m not really bothered about that stuff. I think like I have to keep turn-based mechanics because it’s yielded too many great games over time, Matthew, whereas I do like a bit of RPG progression in open world games, say, you know, your Ghosts of Tsushima and Assassin’s Creed and the like, but it’s got to be turn-based for me. How about you? Yeah, no, complete agreement. I’d like to see all these sort of half RPG games kind of tackle their worlds without the crutch of RPG systems. Yeah, absolutely. I imagine they’d be much shorter, which would be a blessing. Escort missions or cutscenes where your character can only walk around slowly? Is there ever been a good escort mission in a game? Have we already talked about this before? I can’t remember. I can’t think of one. It’s never something that happens where you’re like, yes, I’m going to look after this character. The best one, having just done Play GoldenEye where obviously Natalia is made of glass and can dive very easily. I do love the idea that I basically cleared a level and then didn’t let her out of her prison cell until the level was clear because I didn’t trust her to basically not get shot. That was an okay example of that. Character can only walk around slowly. I suppose it depends on how long the cutscenes are. I’d probably keep escort missions, to be honest, because while they’re not my favorite, I do appreciate that sometimes the game designer needs it in their box of tricks to give the game a bit of variety, I guess. What do you reckon, Matthew? Yeah, I think so. Having recently been replaying Alien Isolation for the 2014 episode, that opens where you’re escorted by that Scottish guy for a while. He’s quite a good hang. One man has turned it around for Matthew, that one NPC. He’s balanced out in Italian. Secret Endings or Gliding? That’s really weird. I could probably live without Secret Endings. I don’t really care that much about those. I suppose it is nice when there’s a hidden ending, but let’s face it, Gliding’s a lovely mechanic, isn’t it? I’d trade every Secret Ending just for the Glide Mechanic and Batman Arkham Knight, you know what I mean? That alone is surely evidence that the Gliding has to stay. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah. I want games to have one ending so I don’t have to replay them to see all the different endings. Fair. That’s fair. Open World Design or Mario. Gosh. It feels very harsh to take it out on Mario. I think I’ll probably need to keep Open World Design, I’m afraid, Matthew. I think it’s the one where we’re going to be split, I assume. I think the next five years, because that’s how long this period covers, I’m more interested in seeing one good Mario game than any number of Open World games. Man, next five years. That’s a good point. But then there is like GTA 6 in there, you know what I mean? Like you’re going to miss out on GTA 6? Yeah, I’m still more excited for whatever the next 3D Mario is compared to GTA 6. Okay, interesting. Yeah, okay, well we’re just different on that front. That’s fine. Melodic soundtracks with themes and motifs, or fighting God in Space? Well, look, I’m not sure we can, in the next five years, we can dependably rely on there being a steady stream of fighting God in Space games, because as we’ve established, so many games have let you down Matthew, because they don’t feature this. Yeah. So, yeah. Also, the fight against God in Space, like a key part of that being a fun experience, is it having an amazing soundtrack? So it’s got to be soundtracks with themes and motifs. I guess that’s a nod to the MCU, which has soundtracks with no themes or motifs. Yeah. I mean, what are we left with if we take that music out of computer games? Could be pretty bleak. Oh, yeah. That’d be grim. Combos or blood? He describes this as Mortal Kombat, Sophie’s choice. People really just stop fucking using that as an analogy for things. Jesus, that’s so not respectful of that film’s themes. I do like blood, but then combos are like… Combos are just… Combos are the lifeblood of so many games I enjoy. Like, I played Seafy. I don’t think Seafy has any blood in it, for example, but the combos are exquisite, so it needs to be combos, I think, Matthew. Really? Yeah. So you want to play a version of Resident Evil 4 where you shoot their heads and nothing comes out? Confetti comes out instead. It’s like in Halo 3 where you turn that skull on and they go, RAY! Every time a head explains. It’s probably got to be combos. Okay, fair enough. I think that just says more about the type of games you enjoy, really. But that will ruin all Platinum games, though, for five years, you know? Are you prepared to give that up? Oh no, let’s keep Platinum. They’re going to need all the help they can get, so let’s not take away combos from them. Well, once again, this has turned into the Is Platinum OK? podcast, which is what to do every two weeks. Next up, puzzles or vehicles? Again, if I’m going to be playing GTA 6, I’m going to want some cars in it, so it’s going to have to be vehicles on that basis alone. I want GTA 6 with no cars, but you do play a lot of Sudoku. Yeah, I’m not sure that will get the most out of the Vice City setting, to be honest, but yeah. Welcome to Vice City, home of puzzles. But you’re not going anywhere, because you have some Noughts and Crosses to do. It’s time for you to do a motherfucking word search. Trailers set to a sad cover of a song, or gameplay trailers that don’t show gameplay from the player’s perspective? I don’t really like trailers set to a sad cover of a song, so that’s an easy one to jettison for me. I’d rather see, yeah, like a gameplay trailer which has got, like, you know, they’ve unlocked the camera to get a better perspective on it, as long as I can see what’s in the game, I don’t really mind. So many, like, songs I like from the 80s have been ruined by, like, NAF trailers, not of games, more of films and stuff, like, because as somebody who, like, enjoys Depeche Mode and New Order, they end up in all kinds of bullshit places promoting movies and stuff. So, yeah, I guess this is a reference to that Gary Jules Gears of War thing, but that was so many years ago. Yeah, that’s an easy one for me. There’s the Social Network film trailer set to Creep. Oh, yeah, of course. And that wasn’t a sad, that was quite a sad song to begin with. It wasn’t like they made, they took a party banger and slowed it right down. Yeah, that’s it. It’s like, yeah. Wife Creep was really depressing. A really sad cover version of like that song Party Anthem. And it plays over the top of Alan Wake 2 trailer. That would be like a rough hang for sure. Finally, games that take longer than 20 hours to complete or physics? Give me physics, I reckon. Give me physics. I love a bit of physics. I could like, I’ll take a four hour version of GTA 6 and keep the physics in GTA 6. Thoughts, Matthew? Okay, well there you go. Then we have decided the fate of games for the next five years. At La Perla, the unknown bath taphouse restaurant. That’s true. The other thing is as well, like physics, we’re going to need that for Tears of the Kingdom. You know what I mean? That’s a very important part of the Breath of the Wild. Does that mean now Tears of the Kingdom can’t be longer than 20 hours? Yes, well, the other I’m afraid. That’s tough, isn’t it? But you can still have more than 20 hours of things to do. The main story is now 45 minutes long, it’s tough. Okay, so next up. Hello gents. SteamWorld games are brilliant, aren’t they? At this point, I’ll try out any genre they slap their adorable robots onto. What existing franchise would you like to see take on lots of different genres? That’s from John Cheetham. Sorry, Mario. Matthew, you weren’t ready for the Mario City Builder game? Is it about time for that? Yeah, I mean, Mario City, it’s like the Mushroom Kingdom is not known for its urban infrastructure. Yeah, building like a mushroom monorail or something. It’s like you build one castle and then everyone else gets to live in a fucking mushroom. There’s not a lot to it. No, that is true. You may get to choose where do you want to put that castle. Is it going to be in a kingdom that’s made of cakes or snow or whatever? So I thought for this one, I think this might seem like a kind of weird pull, but I think that Mass Effect would be the one for this. I’d love to see a home world style Mass Effect space kind of RTS game or something like that. I think you could do a more sort of telltale-y, straightforward adventure with choices in it that maybe tells the story of a key part of a timeline. Maybe you could do like a… This is the most boring option of these, I should say, but like a first-person shooter kind of version of this. You could do a tactics game of Mass Effect. I think that would work quite well. Have slightly more of maybe the CRPG side of Bioware games that you never got to see with Mass Effect. That might be something they could do. So I suppose that… I’m not saying they should make a Mass Effect city builder. That’s maybe not where I see this going. Because I think we were asked this before. They said they’re doing a SteamWorld city game, which did look really cool and I saw Catherine write about it. That seemed neat. What do you think, Matthew? Was that a boring answer? I don’t know. No, no, that’s a very reasonable answer. I was going to say Castlevania, which kind of carries on from my 2023 prediction, episode prediction, that Konami could do a lot more with Castlevania. I thought you could do a kind of tower defense style. You are Dracula managing your forces of evil, filling your castle with monsters. You could do a castle building game. I don’t know what that is. But it could be a thing. A dating sim for all those hunky warriors. A bit like Dream Daddy. That’s what I got. That’s good. We will apply this to Fire Emblem so you can date that guy you like in Fire Emblem Engage, Matthew. Well, I probably can date him already. I think if I charm him enough in my social engagements, because I am playing as the lady character. Okay, I get you. Now I see where this is all going. This is just like the sort of like immortality, you know, reading the fadeout, sort of like breast incidence again with Catherine, except in Fire Emblem form. Lots to think about there. I really thought about the kind of optics of that. Did you ever see J. Bayliss mock up of a Metroid turn-based thing, Matthew? You put it on Twitter. It looked really cool. I think I had seen it, yeah. Yeah, it’s like a GBA aesthetic. I really like the idea of that. It was like these almost Into the Breach style, kind of like grids, you know, where you sort of clear out enemies in a certain number of turns or something. I think that’s kind of what he was going for. That’s quite a cool idea. But yeah, I think these answers have run out of steam. Let’s move on to the next question, Matthew. Is it me or you? I can’t remember. Hey, lads, it’s been a bit of a meme, so I suppose The Back Page podcasts need their say. What is the most useless piece of video game knowledge you know? Yeah, it’s from Bob Bob on the Discord. So this one, I actually did tweet this, and I said that it’s the fact that Jean Reno in Onimusha 3 only plays the French lines voiced by his character and not the lines read in English. That’s pretty useless. I think you can go more useless than this. Some useful trivia I learned about GoldenEye, Matthew, is that the optional objectives and the harder difficulty settings are only there because the testers said the game was too hard on agents, so they actually just hacked out the objectives entirely. And so basically let you do the more slimmed down version of the mission. But that explains why all the other bits and pieces of the objectives are still in the agent mode, right? When you find that you’ve got the modem on dam and stuff. Well, that was good trivia. That was someone from Rare who tweeted that, so it must be legit. Just to give the listeners a bit of value there because I don’t have a particularly exciting answer for this one. What about you, Matthew? I didn’t tweet anything because I don’t have anything, which I consider interesting enough. A weird bit of trivia I always remember from writing about Capcom back in the day is everyone knows Capcom is the shortened form of Capsule Computer, right? Capcom. But the Capcom’s record label is called Sewellputer, which is the other half of those two words. Oh, that is good trivia. Capsule Computer, yeah. That’s like too good, that one. That’s like too good for this answer. You failed Bob-Bob. Oh, sorry. That is a useless piece of information. That hasn’t helped me at all. I think that was a footnote in NGamer when I did a history lesson on Capcom. That’s good. I enjoyed it. All right, next question. Hey, Samuel and Matthew, have no idea if and when you’ll get around to this question. So to hedge my bets, what did you think, slash what do you think of the Oscar nominees, slash winners this year, slash last year, delete is applicable? Do you also try and see as many best film nominees as you can before the day of the ceremony? That’s from Nate Slinn, getting more into the XXL territory here, Matthew. So, yeah, so the Oscars have been, like the nominations have been announced for the winners. I don’t think it’s, is it like April or something this year, the ceremony, Matthew? It’s quite late, I think. Yeah, no idea. Yeah, so, yeah, I think it’s safe to say, Matthew, that you and I pay very close attention to this stuff, try and tick off all the best picture nominees. Do you think that’s fair? Yeah, yeah, I’m a bit slow and I haven’t seen a lot of them. Well, they’re always films which don’t come out until like February or March here, annoying me. Yeah, so we’re only just getting Fableman’s, for example, and The Whale isn’t even out yet, and that’s been out for months in the US, I think. So, very annoying. But yeah, I try and see as many of them as possible. I think this year I’ve seen about half of them so far and I’ve got half more to tick off. So, I’ve got all quite in the Western front to watch. That’s on Netflix, isn’t it? Women Talking, everything everywhere all at once, I’ve still not seen that. Triangular Sadness, not seen that. Avatar, haven’t seen that. There’s quite a few, actually. So, yes. And what do you think of them? They’re a fairly safe line-up this year. I think there’s no massive stinkers in there. I’m not convinced that Avatar film is good, personally. It’s a cinema spectacle. Technical awards, yes, but anything else, come on. I don’t think James Cameron got a Best Director nomination, or did he, Matthew? I don’t think he did. No, so, yeah, it kind of feels like this and Top Gun Maverick, a film I really enjoyed, are the ones that are like, oh, can we get people to tune in to the Oscars this year, at the risk of sounding like the podcast I listen to, which talks about this literally every fucking week. But yeah, I’ll try and see as many as possible, and even some of them outside of that. I just saw Babylon, for example, which is not really an Oscar contender at all, kind of flopped, but I really enjoyed that. I would wager that that is a better film than Avatar, The Way of Water, but that’s just me. Any thoughts on this, Matthew? Yeah, I want to see other things. I mean, it feels like a lot of the acting ones are sort of locked in based on who’s been winning everywhere. I think probably isn’t the spiciest race between Brendan Fraser and Colin Farrell for Best Actor, probably. Oh, I actually thought it was slightly more between in the Best Actress race. Is that not the case? I think there’s a maybe because you had Michelle Yeoh win one of the Golden Globes and Cate Blanchett won the other one. So people are like, oh, I don’t know where that will land. It really is a fucking amazing Cate Blanchett performance. So yeah, tough to know where that one’s going. Plus you have Elvis Boy for the Oscar. He won’t win. I liked Elvis, but he won’t win. Well, it’s sort of like Tiff, what he sort of really wants him to win. That guy’s like 29 or something. He’s got loads of fucking opportunities to win. So to be fair, Colin Farrell’s got loads of opportunities too, to be fair. But I’m not sure Brendan Fraser has. So, yeah, I don’t know. I hope, and it’s likely that he will, that Ki-Hee Kwan wins. Best supporting for everything everywhere. A really nice success story that he’s back. And I have a lot of fondness for that dude from Temple of Doom and Goonies. Would I like that film, Matthew? Yeah, I think it’s pretty rad. And I like it because it’s got a big Randy Newman parody in it. Oh yeah, I remember now. Yeah, I think so. I think it’s worth seeing. It’s certainly something. I wouldn’t be upset if Michelle Yeoh won for that. Has Cate Blanchett won before? I don’t know. I think she has won once before, yeah. She feels like, you know, she regularly gets roles where she gets to be absolutely amazing and she is incredibly talented. It’s harder for an actress like Michelle Yeoh doesn’t get as many juicy parts. And you do think, like, when else are you ever going to get something that is so built around your performance as this film? And she’s great in it. She’s really convincing and has to kind of pull off a lot of tricks. I don’t think it would just be great for it to go to someone who does some really awesome fighting in a film, you know? That’s satisfying to me. Yeah, so Cate Blanchett has won for The Aviator. Actually, it’s like kind of just an impression of someone in that performance. It’s not particularly amazing, I would say. And Blue Jasmine, which I hear is very good, but I’ve not seen by a very cancelled filmmaker, of course. But here she is very good in it. It’s a very good film. So yeah, but she’s had so many nominations, it’s true. Most recently for Carol. So yeah. Have you been following the Andrea Rosborough drama? And I kind of feel bad for her because… I assume I suck to be her. Well, yeah, I thought like she’s getting brought up as this like, I don’t know, I feel like nothing that she could have done to get an Oscar nomination is worse than Green Book winning Best Picture. Do you know what I mean? Like in the recent history of bad Oscar shit, surely that is far more egregious. But yeah, a perfectly talented actress is getting absolutely fucking dinged on social media. Bit harsh, isn’t it? Yeah, just because she got Ed Norton’s tweet about her or whatever. And yeah, it’s tough out there, man. Yeah, not much more to really add on the Oscars. But yeah, quite satisfied. I really did think Tar was incredible, though. I thought it was like a five-star film. Matthew, you just saw it, so not sure how you feel if it’s the same for you. Yeah, it’s one of the weird good video game films as well, for reasons we weren’t going to. Yeah, exactly. Okay, last question from Zach again. Steering the pod back into Bond, what would you call your Bond game? It has to sound like a proper Bond film, not Nightfire. Any thoughts on this one, Matthew? When I was in school, I made a James Bond film in inverted commas in PowerPoint by animating clip art. It was called Icebergs Always Melt. Which I thought was it. It sounds like a Bond film. If you think about it, it’s really dumb, but it sounds like, if said at speed, and you don’t have any time to think about it, you might go, yeah, how’s the shape of a Bond film? I think the one I came up with was, this is so stupid. I came up with this one in such a short space of time. This isn’t good. Come on, rip off the plaster. Okay. Old knives die yesterday. That’s two other films crushed together. Old knives die yesterday. That’s like, God. Just picture a really bad picture of Pierce Brosnan on the cover. Maybe Morton Pierce Brosnan dressed as whatever he was, that Dr. Fait in Black Adam or something. Old knives die yesterday. Yeah, okay, good. Hope you’re happy with that, Zach. I suppose Night and Fire was a bit of a cop-out, so was Agent Under Fire. But it was EA and the Noughties. They just had like 90% marketing budget to 10% development budget. What were they supposed to do? Okay, the pod is over, Matthew. I think that was all right, wasn’t it? A bit of a flabby what we’ve been playing, but they always are a little bit. Where can people find you on social media? MrBazzle UnderscorePesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. If you want to support the podcast financially and get two extra podcasts a month, patreon.com/backpagepod. There’s also backpagegames.gmail.com if you’d like to send us a longer response. It turns out Gamescore is still really popular, so if you have any entries for Gamescore, we’ll probably do another one of those towards springtime, something like that. I don’t want to rush too quickly into it. But yes, thank you very much for listening.