Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s it going, Matthew? I’m tired. I’m jet-lagged to fuck. Oh, shit, yeah, I forgot that you’d been to GDC. Indeed, yes, which was a lot of fun. But I’ve come back with the blues of remembering that international travel’s really, really good when you’ve been sat at your desk for three years. It blows the cobwebs off. And you know that thing where you go on a trip, a work trip, and you get to know people you didn’t previously know, and you build those weird press trip style relationships that are quite pleasant. I had that experience, and I was like, oh, I remember what this was like, the old world. It used to happen all the time. So many weird little temporary friends I’ve made over the years. Yeah, who live on in my Twitter follow list and on Facebook, you know what I mean? Even though we haven’t spoken for eight years in some cases, you know, it’s a beautiful thing. Oh, that’s very nice. But now you’re just back to miserable old bath. It’s particularly gray in bath at the moment as well, just to sort of kick me while I’m down. But the airplane food has gone particularly bad post pandemic, I would say. Like that almost deleted all the good memories of San Francisco as I was eating like basically like baked turd with potato with like green beans, just fucking vile. I mean, they tend to give you an option. That’s not new for picking the baked turd or fish. Well, it’s lightly flambéed turd as well. No, it was, there were only two options. I remember they used to do like three. They’d be like, oh yeah, it’s beef bourguignon. It’s like just a, you know, like a bowl of ass. And then like, there’s some kind of chicken curry thing which tastes like worse than a supermarket chicken curry. And then the token vegetarian option, which I don’t know, just a brick of like, you know, tofu by itself with no flavor. But now it’s two options. Basically, yeah. Absolutely disgraceful. The flights are so expensive and the food is so shit just to punish you for not being in first class or whatever. Fucking terrible. I do sound very privileged there though because I did get to fly away. So, you know, just the listeners know. I keep that in mind, you know. Yeah, I can’t remember the last time I went on a plane. Do you not, of course you didn’t go to GDC or anything, did you, because you’re doing Netflix stuff. I, yeah, I don’t know. Will you get to go to anything this year because you’re a bit more game focused? I just don’t know, you know, maybe. I’d love to travel again with work because it’s slightly different, you know, it’s everything’s taken care of, it’s nice. Yeah, Gamescom seems like your sort of speed. It’s like, you know, it’s sort of beige meaty food with chips. Yeah, the problem with Gamescom though is everyone gets really excited for like pig bits, the gristly pig bits, which manages to combine my two least favorite things, which is pork and gristle. So, you know, everyone’s like, yeah, let’s go and eat. Like the bits, which I would say are like punishment, like it’s feet. Like why would you want to eat a fucking pig’s foot? Oh yeah, where it’s like a pork knuckle or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, it’s like sort of like fatty morass. And you’re like, should I be eating this? Oh, I just, no, thank you. Well, there you go. Taking a big swipe at a German cuisine there, Matthew Castle. What about the tiny beers? Do you enjoy those? I like sauerkraut. Yeah, sauerkraut’s good. Your big tiny beer man, they do that, don’t they? People are like, oh, they go nuts for the tiny beers. As not a heavy drinker, you know, you can drink a tiny little beer and it’s not as obvious that you’re nursing a drink. You can drink one of those small things and then other people don’t sort of question how masculine you are. But what? It’s me, the man with no pork knuckle and no tiny beers. But is it like, what is that thing with British people where they go to Germany and they’re like, oh my god, a tiny beer. Like, it’s like the beer I normally drink, but it’s small, I can’t believe this. Like, what is it that goes off in British people’s brains when that happens? A colch, I have a colch, it’s like two euros. It’s like, I can’t believe how small it is. Why is that so novel to people? It’s just like lager or whatever, isn’t it? But yeah, anyway. Well, that’s our little bit on colch. Yep, there you go. And now we move on to whatever this episode is, what we’ve been playing. Before we get into it, Matthew, should we talk about what we’re doing in April? Because April is basically happening, I think, around the time this episode goes live. And we don’t quite have a plan for the month yet. We do know what we’re doing for the XL on Patreon, don’t we? Which is best Mario moments. We’ve kind of discussed that. Yeah. So if anyone who listened to our best Zelda moments episode on Patreon, a very similar deal. And the XXL, Matthew, we haven’t talked about this, but I was going to suggest that we do our favorite Guilty Pleasure movies, because I think that might be fun. Oh, yeah, that’s a good show. That’s good. Yeah, get cram a bit of Zack Snyder in there, as I want to do. Should be fun. I like that we’ve managed to combine episode and episode planning into one. Yeah, we’re doing a meeting in the middle of the episode. This is the audacity of this. We’re definitely going to do best games of 2015 in April as well, probably towards the end of the month. There will be other things too. But the key thing for free feed listeners to know is that we will be taking the first week of April off. Me and Matthew have been slightly rammed lately and have decided we need just a tiny pause to slow things down. So what we’re likely to do is on the free feed next Friday, the episode going live will be PC Gaming Classics Episode 1, which is our mini-series that we commissioned on Patreon from Jeremy Peel, sometime contributor to the show and obviously excellent freelancer and handsome man, Phila Wanyuk. So he has other qualities, but certainly the handsomeness is notable. So yes, for free feed listeners, you’ll have something to listen to basically, and then for Patreon folks, still have the regular Patreon episode. So it’ll be one for your episode in the month, but I think that’s fair enough while we recuperate slightly Matthew and form a good plan for the rest of the year for the Patreon. That’s a good idea. Yeah. So that’s what we’re doing, tiny little pause there just while we recover. But this episode is what we’ve been playing, been a little while since we’ve done one of these, very simple. We go back and forth on stuff we’ve been playing in the old regular podcast format, update people on what we’ve been playing. Most of the time I’ve spent recently has been playing Resident Evil 4, I think it has for Matthew too. Yeah. So that’s a factor here, but we’ve got a bunch of stuff we’ve played like little bits and pieces of that we can talk about. So yeah, it should be fun to get into. What’s your sort of gaming life been like lately, Matthew? Mainly Resident Evil 4 because I’ve been doing it for work stuff too and just having sort of mine it and make sure it’s really on top of it also for the podcast. Otherwise, I’ve been playing little bits and bobs. I’ve been replaying some stuff for my top secret project. So hopefully I can talk about that soon. And man, are you going to be underwhelmed when you hear it? Oh, I don’t think they will be, but the… No, no, I actually like I instantly take that back. It’s something that’s really, really important to me. And I’m super, super pleased with how it’s going so far. And I’ve got some really cool stuff to talk about on the pod. I’ve just seen some people kind of like speculating as to what it is. And I think some people think it’s much, much bigger that I’m, you know, like, I’m not going to be running Ubisoft or something. It’s not that. I already ruled out that Matthew wasn’t like writing the next, you know, fable or something, just because that way I don’t have to be hyper jealous of him. So, yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s it’s it’s I would never do anything that would imbalance this podcast and cause a jealousy black hole to absorb it. You would turn down opportunities. As long as you also pledge to this. Yeah, absolutely. You would turn down opportunities just for the sake of maintaining that careful balance. It is cool, though, but it was very funny to see. Was it on Realmuk that people were speculating about it? That was quite fun. It is good. People will like it when they hear about it, for sure. I feel like Geoff Keighley, once he has bigged up the Games Awards and then just before he is like, set your expectations, there is going to be five trailers, so just bring it down a notch. Yeah, exactly. I look forward to talking about that at a certain point. I think I am about to enter another big games-playing phase now that things are calming down slightly. Am I lying there? I think I am lying, actually. Things are quite busy still. But certainly what I have been doing lately, Matthew, is because I went to GDC, I did get a bunch of time on my Nintendo Switch because my flight there was cancelled, so I had to go a day later, which was fucking hell on earth, I will be honest with you. And then I got put in one of those low-security prisons that Heathrow, that they call a hotel, and so I just sat there playing like my Switch basically all day. So that is largely shaped what I have been playing here. But yeah, Matthew, do you want to jump into your first game here? Yeah, I have just added one. Oh, shit, okay. This truly is like the least well-prepared podcast we have ever made. It is a meeting in the middle of the podcast, rambled about fucking airplane food, which is really a hacky bit, isn’t it? But yeah, I am excited. Hit me up. So last weekend, I have been playing the Diablo 4 beta. Wow, that doesn’t seem very you. Diablo or Diablo? Diablo? Yeah, I think one is correct. I mean, imagine one is correct. Diabolical, you would say, right? Diabolical. I say diabolical. Diabolical plan! Diabolical. Diablo 4. That makes a lot more sense. That’s what we’re sticking with. We’re linguists here, are this bogus? Yeah. Why did I play this? Because it was free. I saw lots of people talking about it. I had played a reasonable chunk of Diablo 3. Not obsessively, I’m not someone who’s playing every season of it. But I like action RPGs, I like the basic loop of numbers go up, your powers and tricks get ever more violent. And this is a really good opportunity to play something without necessarily buying it eventually. It’s quite a big chunk of the game. It felt like one quarter of the world map was sort of open to you with all its respective quests. They also had this silly promotion going on where if you reached level 20 in the beta, you get a… it unlocks like a kind of backpack with a wolf cub inside it in the final game. You hate dogs though? Yeah, though I always think wolves are kind of like where dogs meet cats. Okay, that’s preposterous. It always takes me beat to be like wolves, dogs, not cats. That makes no sense. There’s something a bit more like… There’s a hint of like majesty to them. I mean, they’re literally from the same species. I know that they’re dogs. Yes, I’m aware of that. But there is a quality to the wolf that I cannot put my finger on, that in the Venn diagram of why I like cats and why I like wolves, there is a fraction more crossover than there is with dogs. Fine, I will allow it. Whatever. Anyway, there’s a wolf cub you can get. And I don’t know if I’m even going to play the full game, but once I’d got a certain number of levels, I thought I should probably make it to these 20 levels to get this cub. So yeah, I ploughed on with a sorcerer, a sorcerer with lightning magic. I rather embarrassingly looked up good sorcerer build and let the internet SEO vultures do their thing. Eurogamer’s guide advised me to invest in chained lightning. And I did that. And then I was off to the races. Good guides on Eurogamer. Yeah, very thorough and just sort of like cleanly written. I like them. I dig them. Yeah, like, I think that’s… I will say with all its… I know there are some people who are just like, fuck Diablo, fuck all Activision stuff, and that’s absolutely fine. I was playing it out of professional curiosity, which is my merely mouthed excuse. But the one thing I do associate with their games is that they put all this time into them. And they have a kind of ludicrous level of polish. You know, they really do kind of double down on everything. It feels like everything is exactly in its place. They’ve really thought of everything. And I was probably more intrigued, or most intrigued, of kind of like, what does that polish look like now in this game? You know, I wanted to see, like, is there an instant wow factor? Can I see kind of six years of development or whatever in this next-gen version of Diablo? And, like, mixed feelings, I’ll be honest. I don’t know how much you’ve been following this game, if at all. Was there, like, a version of it that was scrapped at some point and then they sort of started again? Did that happen? Maybe, because they’ve been doing the mobile version, so I don’t know if I sometimes confuse stories about one with the other. I haven’t been following them, but basically they’re kind of like, after 3, which was a little bit more kind of colourful, they’re kind of going down the sort of ultra sort of grimdark route, and it’s a very sort of sombre, wintry opening act, like the air it’s set in is set in, you know, in the kind of snow-capped peaks of the mountains. And because of that, like, it’s not a particularly flamboyant place to be, and it’s not like an obviously good hang. It’s not a place you go to see the explosion of mad powers and magics. It’s almost kind of… not embarrassed about that stuff, but it’s playing all so low-key. I wonder if it’s kind of undermining one of the core pleasures of this series, which is like the wild and silly escalation. You know, this is a game where, like, as everything goes up, the action gets wilder and wilder, but here’s this game where, you know, everything’s kind of shrouded in murky mist and, you know, it seems to always be night, and those two things don’t really go together. You know, I can’t really see what chaos I’m unleashing, which seems like a problem. But, you know, if you kind of get past that, there is that, like, absurd level of detail to it, like, you know, the little physics on all the bodies, because a lot of it’s in the snow, like, everything leaves trails in the snow, and when you’re dealing with, like, you know, heaps of enemies swarming at you, and they’re all leaving little trails in the snow, whatever, like, that feels quite next-gen in terms of, like, eye-for-detail. That’s the kind of stuff I want to see, like, lots of, and I’m hoping that as you go around the map, there’ll be areas which are, like, brighter or have, like, slightly sillier gimmicks which play into that stuff. It’s a lot more like open world. It’s like a big world rather than lots of kind of self-contained regions. So big that you can kind of, like, need a horse to ride around on it in. Things like that. It definitely feels like they’re going quite kind of, you know, grand open world as everything seems to these days, but kind of mixed with their sort of, you know, action RPG ideas. It’s, um, yeah. I don’t know if it’s just a little, a little baggy and a little downbeat for what I necessarily want. But then I’ve seen some people go, brilliant, this is, you know, it’s back to its more serious roots after the sillier third game. So maybe, maybe this is what the fans want, but for my money, um, I’m unsure. Yeah, it’s, it’s sort of like, it falls into that blizzard bracket of things that I’ve never really tuned into, because either the universe doesn’t quite fit my sensibilities, or the gameplay loop is not my sort of thing. So I wasn’t like a wow, a wow player. Um, I have sort of like never quite got the appeal of the Diablo loop with the whole like getting better and better loot. The only game I’ve ever really played like that, I suppose you could argue the From games has a little bit of that, but, you know, Destiny is the obvious one of getting better and better guns. And that was never the part of Destiny that really appealed to me anyway. So, I don’t know, but I was actually quite taken with the visual style of this one. I thought it did look, I don’t know. Just like the perspective combined with that visual style is a little bit unusual. You tend to see that in a trad third person game, right? That kind of visual style. So, it was an interesting approach and it looked like a really high fidelity version of that approach to art style. Yeah, that’s true. There’s definitely pleasure in how much interactive scenery there is to shatter and all the little splinters of wood go everywhere and they’re all physics enabled. But the little elements that trick you into thinking this world is alive are really impressive and I particularly love that top-down world, almost diorama kind of style and seeing that such high fidelity, particularly in the dungeons where you’re walking around rooms but they’re above great big chasms and you can see kind of forgotten civilizations down in the pit of the gloom and all that kind of stuff. It’s certainly pretty, I just worry if it’s taking itself a little bit seriously given that the rest of the game is about where are you going to stick these skills to have a hundred different spells, which mad wizard are you going to make? I think those two things can play better together. That is fair enough. I think a big part of this is if that Activision deal goes through, I’ll probably play this on Game Pass. If it doesn’t, I wonder if I’ll end up picking it up. I guess it depends on what the reviews are like. I feel like it’s one of those games where people who like Diablo will tell me it’s good because they like Diablo. I guess I don’t really know where I’ll fall on that side of things. It is also cool that it is a multi-format game, whereas Diablo 3 was started PC only. It had all of the auction house, the way down the launch where people were selling in-game items for real money, which was not well received. They eventually rebooted it and now you can play on pretty much everything. It’s quite cool that they’re launching it multi-format day one. That makes me more inclined to play it than if it was just locked to PC. I don’t know. But interestingly, you checked it out. Now I feel deprived if I start my game and I don’t have a wolf cub and a backpack. I’ll sell it to you for a hundred quid. There’s going to be a big wolf cub black market, I’m imagining. Lots of shadowy mages meeting up in a tavern and swapping wolf cubs under the table. You’d have to sell me your entire Xbox account for like, you know, 900 quid or something. So I will keep that in mind. Well done though for going out of your comfort zone though, Matthew. This is not your sort of thing. Yeah, well I thought, you know, give us something to talk about. Catherine was at GDC, so I just sat in my pants killing skeletons so I could get a virtual wolf cub. That’s what happens when you’re a wife guy. You just, your life goes off the rails when your wife has gone away for a week, you know. It’s just like, yeah, just playing Diablo, your wolf cub, describing a wolf as being like a cat and a dog combined. Or just, yeah, tough, tough, tough stuff. One of my worst podcast takes. It’s a very Tuesday evening, we’re both knackered take, but I did enjoy it. There was fish and chips aren’t good, which I still back on think, what the fuck was I talking about? Of course they’re solid. Yeah, I think that’s good. Look at a little update there on on a classic. It’s more, I felt, anyway, it’s not good. I think that I would agree with you on the basis that there’s more mediocre fish and chips out there than there is good fish and chips. That is fair. People take advantage of it being our national food by selling absolutely horseshit versions of it. I’m with you on that. Anyway, so my first game Matthew, you ready for it? I have one more question on Diablo. Do you think this will make you buy it? This will make you check it out. I don’t know. It did that thing of getting its hooks into you because you get so far in the skill tree and your mind is definitely firing in different directions on like what you could do next if you had another skill point, which is basically what this game kind of hinges on. And I only had time to do one character and there are like five or six different classes. And I think I picked one of the more conservative ones. So, you know, the idea of seeing how everyone else handles. Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve got a bad feeling I probably will play quite a lot of this. Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. Well, I’ll keep up to date on that then. Is it out in like May or something? May, June, maybe. You know, people don’t come to this podcast for actual information. I hope they don’t. They come to it for wild takes, stabs in the dark. Okay, my first game is called, I think it’s called Tchia. I think that’s how you meant to say it. Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah, I’ve been calling it Tchia on this podcast because that’s how it’s written down. And I didn’t bother researching that because again, that’s what we do on this podcast. We don’t research. We just hope for the best. So yes, this game is kind of like an open world game based on, it’s sort of inspired by this island, this, I think it counts as part of France. It’s called New Caledonia. It’s this sort of like archipelago. I fucking can’t say that. Archipelago. Archipelago, basically. It’s my version of Diablo. And so it’s kind of inspired by, Archipelago 4. It’s inspired by the location and the culture of that place. But they do explain at the start of the game that it’s not like, it’s not directly lifting anything, I think because they wanted to be still sensitive about how they portray the place. But what it kind of amounts to is a sort of sunny backdrop open world game that might superficially remind you of something like Wind Waker. And it has quite heavy Zelda influence more generally, it feels like. So I’ve only played an hour of this, but it’s only like six hours long. So in theory, I’ve played a big chunk of it already. You play this girl whose dad is kidnapped by this, I think like a Warlord kind of like character. And she basically has like a whole bunch of these different abilities, which seem kind of spiritual in nature. Basically, though, she can like, she behaves a lot like Link does in Breath of the World. You can glide in this game, you can climb almost any surface, and then you get the little stamina meter comes up, big Breath of the World influence there, which is obviously very welcome. I don’t mind seeing that in a game. It’s big on traversal more generally, so you can paddle this raft around. You can climb to the top of a tree and sort of ping off the tree, and then use the glider to kind of keep moving. Really good sort of like momentum-based sort of like travel and stuff like that. And then it has sort of like kind of combat system too. You have like a sort of slingshot, and then there is this soul jumping mechanic, which I haven’t actually got to yet because I’ve just been like titting around the city basically, just sort of seeing what’s up and exploring a little bit. But yeah, it seems like it’s like a sort of like a big mix of different elements, but the open world thing seems like the most appealing bit of it to me because it also weaves in like these musical sequences and other Zelda influences. You have like an ukulele in the game and you can like do these sort of ocarina style, you know, play a few notes and then you can make it midnight basically, control time, you know, when the time is and stuff like that. But I was quite surprised because it starts on this like fairly remote island and then the sort of intro of the game you actually do sail to this like the main like I suppose like pair of islands or larger sort of island location in the game, which is like I suppose not quite a city but certainly a town. Like it has big buildings, cranes and you know, it feels very contemporary, that sort of thing. And so yeah, it’s quite interesting like the soul jumping thing in this game. It’s like basically it sounds like seems almost like a kind of prey style sort of possession of like objects or beings kind of thing. So you can like become a coconut essentially, but you can also become animals or things like that. It’s not quite as sort of like I guess, sci-fi sort of like body horror as like as it is in Prey. It’s not quite the same thing as that. It’s meant to be a lot more wholesome, but certainly Prey feels like the most appropriate comparison point on that. But to be honest, I feel like this is a game that people will probably play for the sort of sunny vibes of it. It’s an open world game where it doesn’t feel… It’s got darkness at its heart, the story, but it doesn’t feel super high stakes. It feels like you’re meant to enjoy the act of exploring and using these different movement options to get around the world. I was very taken with the art style. I think it’s one of these games that is probably more expensive than people think it is to make, just because it seems to have quite a lot of real estate to explore. The mechanics feel very well developed. It’s not particularly buggy or anything like that, even though you can climb across the entire world in that Breath of the World kind of way. What are you playing it on? Right. I’ve got a fairly old PC, but it runs okay. There’s a little bit of stuttering in cutscenes and stuff. There’s times where it becomes sort of borderline quaint, but I also can’t hold it against it, because it’s a very specific subject matter they’ve picked to explore here, and if they feel that that evokes the cultural atmosphere of what they’re trying to capture from New Caledonia, then that’s fair enough. I don’t know much about it, and so I don’t claim to, hence me being baffled by seeing the French flag when I clicked on the Wikipedia page just now. Right. So yeah, I do like it. I don’t actually know how meaningful the rafting element is, because the bit where I’ve reached now does seem to be the largest part of the maps. I don’t know how much of that rafting you’re doing, and therefore how strong the Wind Waker influence is, but I’ve certainly swam underwater to find a couple of bits and pieces. It’s just impressive how the breadth of it, really. And again, I do like the vibes. I like the idea of an open world game where you can do the climbing towers thing to basically scout out new things to go and find, but it’s presented in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to mimic those games exactly. It feels like quite in keeping with the world and just the idea of exploration being the thing as opposed to ticking things off. Right. Yeah, it’s good. How do you feel when you see Breath of the Wild’s mechanics lifted into other games? You good with that? Yeah, absolutely. I think the thrust of this, particularly with the possess anything, and what’s exciting about that to me is the, you know, the open world as like systemic playground, which Breath of the Wild definitely did a lot of. And obviously this week we saw the preview of Tears of the Kingdom, where they’re really doubling down on like the, as you put it, titting about. We should phrase that better. I’m very tired. And yeah, so, you know, I’m much more interested in people exploring interesting ways to maneuver around the world, interesting things to play with in a world rather than activities to tick off in a world. So yeah, by all means, like Lift from Zelda, you know, I’m expecting many more things too. And it’s interesting. Like there’s been some games which have and kind of got it wrong, like that Immortals Phoenix, the Ubisoft one. It has like the shape of Breath of the Wild in like you can climb up stuff and you can glide. But it’s also married it so much Ubisoft map ticking that actually you never learn to just like luxuriate in the movement. You’re always thinking about where you’re going to, you know, you’re always thinking about the destination and then the the silly little game you do at the destination. Where by stripping that stuff out, I think it just instantly kind of opens the mind to to being in a place a bit more. So I’m hoping more people like take from that. And yeah, I watched someone playing some of this on PlayStation. It looked really nice. And I think to your point about how polished it is, I think it’s one of the PlayStation. It’s not PlayStation Plus. I think it’s in the PlayStation Games Catalog, which is like a library of games you get if you’re part of the plus tiers. And I don’t think PlayStation, you know, they seem to pick, you know, cool things to go in that library on launch. Like if it’s like a vote of their confidence in it as well. Yeah, it’s also stray, I guess was a similar thing. Yeah, for sure. And they’ve also they’ve also teamed with this publisher Kepler on other stuff. So they did Seafood was like a PlayStation exclusive. So it would suggest they have quite strong ties with that publisher. Yeah, maybe that could that’s a factor. They were they were kind of keen to sort of polish it up. But yeah, it’s it is good. It is good on PC. It’s only on the Epic Games Store. So, you know, it’s sort of like thankfully Matthew unlocked on the old Epic Games press account. So God bless, you know, we’re always happy about that on this podcast. So, yeah, it’s it is cool. I will persist with it. It’s only like I say, it’s only meant to be six hours long. So happy to pick through it. There’s also it’s like a slight crackdown ish thing to like, oh, how do I get up there with some of this stuff? So you can see that one of the like highest points you can reach in the game is like a crane. Like this really like high. It was just higher than I think any of the buildings in the game or certainly it’s like one of the highest points. And you can see a point up there where you can do the old Ubisoft tower thing. And this the little girl just sort of shouts and then she sort of go and see stuff. I don’t really know how that works like some kind of like kid sonar. I don’t know. But yeah, but but like you don’t entirely get how you’re going to do it because her stamina is not amazing. I’m assuming that you can kind of level that up. But I also think it’s quite funny because like one of the first things I did was I climbed at the top of like a coconut tree, pinged off of it and then swung like use my glider to get onto this like building site. There’s just like a builder stood there as this kid kind of like glides into this like empty building site. I just wonder like for the perspective of that builder how strange that would be to witness that. But it is cool. It’s not like as gentle as you might think from looking at the visuals. It does like, it does suggest you’re dealing with some quite gnarly people. And yeah, so I’m going to keep digging into it. And it has so many good reviews. Like it just feels like a bit of a winner from the IndieCrop this year so far. So yeah, I’ll persist Matthew. What’s your next game? My next game is, I’ve been playing Psvr 2. Oh yeah, very good. And getting to grips with that. Yeah, I mean, it’s a nice headset. I mean, it’s very comfortable, very easy to use. You know, I’m happy with any VR headset. It doesn’t make me put silly cameras or sensors around my room. You know, like I obviously absolutely loved the precision of the, whatever it was, I played Half-Life Alex with the Index, maybe. But like I just found it’s such a ball, like you just couldn’t permanently have that set up in our house because the cats would just pull it down the whole time. And like, that just isn’t for us. So this is a very nice, yeah, middle ground. I’ve been playing, I got it, we bought one, you see. And that’s the Patreon money, thank you very much. And got it with Horizon Call of the Mountain. So I’ve been playing that, which is like their big first party, I guess kind of, you know, half-life Alex-esque kind of level of production. Like it’s a full campaign. I think it’s meant to be about eight hours long. I’ve played it for a couple of hours so far. Very, very pretty. Like it is a great showcase for, you know, the extra power of PS5 and the fidelity of the headset, like the dense, the visual density of the world is very, very impressive. And Horizon turns out is quite a fun place to set a VR game because it has a lot of things which you’re familiar with from the game. But when you have that first person perspective, it puts things like height and scale in perspective. And there’s some quite nice moments, like when you get the tall mechs walking over you. And, you know, that is like the Brontosaurus in Jurassic Park. It’s a bit of a, oh, shit, that thing’s really tall. And when you see the big dinosaurs, you’re like, oh, actually, that’s quite frightening to see how big that thing is, which works really well. Have you been following this game at all? Are you at all familiar with it? Yeah, so was there like a whole thing about, is Aloy too small or something? Was that a thing that happened? Or was she too tall? You don’t play as Aloy. No, you look at her though, and she’s tiny. There’s a bit where you meet her and, I don’t know, you’re like this dude who’s presumably taller than her. I mean, she’s not, I wouldn’t, I wasn’t like, wow, she’s tiny. She’s not like massive. She’s relatively sort of petite person, I guess. But I wouldn’t say she’s abnormally small. I did actually pay attention to this game though. It did look like a really good killer app for Psvr 2. You see the difference between this and say, any Oculus Quest 2 game, right? Like it’s that massive increase in detail of what they’re showing you on screen. It looks cool. And it does that cool Half-Life Alex trick of, you know, you have the kind of main thrust of the action, which is what it is and it’s all fine. But it also gives you lots of moments where you stop and you’re given like weird little toys to sort of fuck around with. So like, you know, you’ll often get to little kind of empty campfire clearings and, you know, someone will have left a tambourine or whatever. So you pick up the tambourine and you kind of bang that for a bit. You know, you might find some maracas. So you pick up the maracas and you start shaking those. And there’s a bit, I went into a cave and there are a load of like finger paints and then you could paint like a, you know, a mural on the wall. It kind of gets that like people like to fuck about in these worlds. And it also just doubles as like a very good tech demo for like the precision of the handsets and things like that. And that’s all, that’s all very impressive, you know, to my mind about as sharp as any VR thing I’ve played. So all very good. The campaign itself is kind of interesting. It’s like a lot of it’s about climbing, which I guess there are climbing VR games quite famously. There’s those ones where you’re like, you know, climbing up skyscrapers and you have to like leap for things and do grips. And that’s all fine, but it’s like physically very exerting. And I worry that I’m just too unfit to survive in this VR world. There’s a lot of heaving myself up vines and like readjusting myself so I can stretch up to the next thing and you can like pull the controllers towards you to kind of like hurl yourself across gaps and then pull out a pickaxe and dig it into the rock at the last moment to kind of like, you know, save yourself from the drop. And that stuff’s like really cool in short bursts. There is quite a lot of it though. Like I’d say the game’s probably 80% climbing to anything else. And maybe that’s masking like lots of loading screens or it’s keeping you to a very linear path, which is then how it does these amazing visuals. Because whenever you’re climbing, like if you look away or look down, you know, it does look amazing. Like it really looks like you’re hanging above these like massive waterfalls or whatever. It’s just that the physical act of climbing means this isn’t a game like I could maybe play for a couple of hours. Like I could with Half-Life Alyx. I felt like Half-Life Alyx’s central mechanic, which was these gloves that you could sort of telekinetically pull things towards, was like Valve very cleverly looking at how tired people get and going, well, let’s give you this empowering device which lets you bring everything to you so you don’t have to move around as much. Where this one has very much gone the other way and gone, well moving is the thing, so you’re going to do lots of climbing. But yeah, it’s, you know, between that climbing you get to fight all the iconic monsters and they look great. I mean, visually, like, this is just super, super impressive. And the bow and arrows, you know, it’s really, really tactile and there’s lots of fun stuff where you can kind of like equip all the different arrows and you can make different elemental arrows by sort of slotting different things into them. And it’s, it’s, yeah, like, definitely a technical showcase and I can fully appreciate why they bundled this in and made it the pack-in game. If you buy, like, the special, I think you have to, it doesn’t come free, per se. You pay a bit more for that box set. But yeah, like, I just don’t know. I feel like I’m going to be absolutely, like, ripped by the end of this. But I don’t know. From eight hours, eight hours of one VR game. Well, there’s a lot of, I am just too old for some VR games. Like, I’ve also been playing a bit of Pistol Whip, which is like, in that, a little bit like Beat Saber, I guess, except you’re like running down this sort of like corridor. You’re permanently walking forward down this corridor, shooting people, and like the gimmick is if you shoot people on the beat of the music, you get more points, but they also shoot at you. So you have to like dodge out the way of these sort of slow moving bullets, kind of Neo in the Matrix style. But then there are also kind of pillars you have to sidestep and like low ledges you have to duck under. And it’s the ducking that gets me. Like my body just does not hinge in the middle the way it used to. And like whenever I see lots of crouching come up, I feel myself like doubling over. One hand will be resting on my knee like an old man taking a rest, while the other hand’s got a gun. And it’s like you never see John Wick resting on one knee and like shooting loads of dudes. But that’s what it looks like. I have such powerful, like I’m too old for this shit energy in these scenes. And the music’s like pulsing and the whole vibe of the game is like fuck yeah, you’re fucking John Wick, this is amazing, you’re so good at killing. And here I am bent over, just trying to catch my breath going oh, I’m gonna have to bend over again in like 30 seconds, so I may as well stay down here. Big Jonah Hill and 21 Jump Street kind of energy, you know. Right, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, like that’s the side of VR I wasn’t really prepared for. I like the ones where if it says at the start, like, this has got a sitting mode, I’m like, absolutely, strap in. That’s what I want. Anything which standing up, no chance. Do you think John Wick would have worked as well as a film franchise if he sat down a lot, Matthew, during those gunfights? Would that have been as good? I mean, he’s getting that way. He’s pretty old now, isn’t he, Keanu Reeves? He is, but unlike us, he can sort of like, you know, crouch like he can do that, you know what I mean? There’ll come a time where he’s like, everyone’s like, it was weird how they can try for him to be in a lot of chairs in this film. In John Wick 6. Yeah, I can sort of see that. I’ve had Pistol Whip for a long time, actually, and not played it, because it was recommended by pod disciple Liam Richardson. So, yeah, keep me in to play that one. It is rad. Like, the whole shoot on the beat thing means you naturally choreograph yourself to the music, which is probably where the John Wick film choreography vibe comes from, because you just feel so in sync with that world. I’ll tell you what, though. The bullets are really frightening, flying towards your face, and when they hit you, on Psvr 2, anyway, it’s got quite vicious rumble in the headset, like haptic feedback. And when you take one of those bullets to the face, like, I really don’t like it, and they come at you, and often it shakes me enough that I’ll then take another bullet to the face, and that’s the sad reality of, like, me in one of the John Wick films. I mean, let’s not pretend I would ever have done well in a John Wick film, but I would just get shot in the face and then staggered and then just shot in the face over and over again. It would be a very unsatisfying death for me. You’d be like the tutorial for the actual John Wick, you know what I mean? He’d just, like, shoot you up. Kimless 37-year-old guy. I’ve got to say, one thing about this, I’m not actually, like, I don’t… The thing with any VR headset, right, and buying them is, like, what does long-term support look like? I hope it’s, like, long-term, I hope there’s more stuff, I hope they port more of their PS4 stuff to it, just because they built a pretty cool library there of things to put on there. But I will say that, like, I do like that from the off, they’ve got a bunch of the VR standards just ready to go. So there is this, like, quite beefy library of stuff you can just play straight away. And even if some of it might be familiar to you, some of it’s presented in enhanced form. I know they did that Tales from Galaxy’s Edge, the Star Wars one, right? They’ve given that, like, a shot in the arm. That is a very well-liked VR experience on other platforms. So it is cool that if this was your first VR experience, I imagine you’d be quite excited by all of this. Like, it does seem like quite a package of stuff. Was there anything else you wanted to draw attention to from this, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, the only other thing I’ve been playing, I guess, is I’ve been playing a few more games. Let’s come back to Psvr 2 and hear one of your picks. Sounds good, Matthew. So I’ve been playing Resident Evil Remake on Nintendo Switch, actually. So this is obviously the GameCube 2002 version remake of the 1996 original. Very much inspired by playing Resident Evil 4 and thinking, well, one day I need to go back and play all these fucking racy games. That’s a good use of my time on this planet, I’ve decided. You went back to this even though it’s part of the losing Capcom draft selection. Well, that was it. It was a bit of a perverse pleasure of enjoying your defeat. You know what I mean? You’re tea-bagging my collection of games. What a terrible image that is for this podcast. Anyway, yes. Never finished this. Never really played too much of it. I’ve always played more of the 906 one than this and I never had a GameCube, so I always fondly looked at this and thought, how fucking good do those sharks look? I’ve got to play this one day. And here we are 22 years later, or 21 years later rather, and I am doing it. I thought it would be an interesting challenge if on my 10-hour flight to San Francisco, I tried to play as much of this as possible without a guide. Because obviously, the early Resident Evil games have a lot of puzzles, a lot of keys to find and doors to unlock and things to work out. And it kind of made me realize how open the design is of this game. It lets you go in so many doors almost right away, but it gives you no signposting on how to solve anything. It just lets you figure things out by experimentation. And that’s actually really refreshing and exciting if your modern experience with games is more handholdy action-type experiences where you feel like you’re eased in by design. This was from an age where they didn’t do that, where they dropped you in and said, good luck, you know what I mean? Here’s some handgun bullets and here’s a herb or whatever, and then get on with it. I played this, I reckon, like three hours, and I just endlessly circled the mansion looking for keys and ways to progress. I had all of the different cool Resi remake experiences. I had one of the Crimson Head zombies run after me. That ruled. That was great. I got into the whole burning the bodies once and for all so they can’t come back and then strategically picking those throughout the mansion. I got the shotgun before that door breaks behind you because the handle is fucked up or whatever. I did all that stuff. And I died when I picked up that key thing from that floor and that spike trap comes behind you with all those statues. All of that stuff was rad to experience fresh without knowing exactly how to solve it. So I’m going to persist with this and get to the end of it. I think that would be a worthwhile thing to have done this year. It’s really, really good. Even though I played a whole bunch of the 1996 one, it seems slightly different. It doesn’t seem to play out in exactly the same way. I can’t work out if I’ve just messed up some of the intro bits, but I’ve definitely been making progress with the puzzles and getting into different rooms and stuff. But I can’t work out exactly if I’ve missed something very specific that I remember from the original, or if this game is slightly different or it remixes elements of it. I don’t really know, Matthew. I think there is a little bit of remixing. Yeah, because I feel like the whole playing a piano thing at the start, I can’t work out where that room is or where that piano is, which is weird. Maybe I’ve just made a complete blunder there and missed it, but it seems like it’s slightly remixed. I was making progress in the 96 one a bit faster than I am here. But I’m very much enjoying that experience, Matthew. Have you gone back to this at all since you first played it? Not in a long time. I think I had a little look at it when the HD version first turned up on Xbox One, but even that would have been seven, eight years ago now. Does it hold up visually? Does it still look lovely? Yeah, I think so. I think the one thing you wish is that they’d saved, or they’d made high res versions of the original backgrounds and then kept those and put those in. It feels like they are just what they had on fire, as opposed to maybe there was some crisper edition of those backgrounds they boiled down for it, because they’re so nice and ornate, even compared to, I think, Resi 1996, actually a very nice looking game for the time. But the pre-rendered backgrounds in this are just so, so gorgeous. And there’s also that where you see candle lights flickering back and forth and that level of detail. But also I think that even though the voice acting is not necessarily up to our modern standards, it’s so much better than the 1996 voice acting, obviously. And the writing is that it feels much more in line with what I would term recent Resi, I guess, in terms of tone. So I think you can definitely still play this. Go like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and feel like it links together. It doesn’t feel like it’s aged so much that it doesn’t connect to the more recent remakes they’ve done. So yeah, it’s really rad, actually. The one thing I just wish that I could change on Switch, and maybe this would ruin the experience, is just skipping the door animations rather than having to sit through them every time, just because that definitely gets on my nerves. I can’t tell if that is just hardwired into the original game or if it’s just like a Nintendo Switch loading issue. Who knows, maybe it’s a bit of both. But yeah, that’s good, Matthew, Resident Remake. To the surprise of no one, a 21-year-old game that everyone said was great is great. So yes. And yet they still voted against it. The motherfuckers. Oh dear. We never talked about that draft, did we? I think that you did actually have some more interesting picks than me. I was actually slightly unsatisfied with my list in the end. I had too many survival horror games. I won it slightly. I think I won it because I had Resi 4. I think that’s why I won it. Yeah. But I really felt jealous that I didn’t have A Kame and Beautiful Joel. What are those games so much and you got them? And I thought, well done, Matthew. He did well there. Yeah. I know people think I biffed it with the Glass Rose. And I saw some people dunking on Chronicles of Mistara, even though that is a good ass game. Anyone who actually knows what they’re fucking talking about knows that that’s a good game. Darren from RetroGamer said it was a good pick, Matthew. Yeah, there you go. You see, that’s really, that’s all, that counts as a win. We should just let, since they’re closing polls on Twitter, from now on we should just send our list to Darren and he can tell us who picked the best games. That’ll be who wins the draft. Yeah, yeah. But that’s fine, you know, I know how it is. I feel like we were both very heavily invested in our own lists and we were both quite techy with people who were less than enthusiastic about our lists. Yeah, I can’t remember why I got so invested in it really. I think I was bummed out that straight away you had this massive lead on Twitter, the Twitter poll, and then that lead slowly fritted away. Do you have any theories as to why that happened? I think like maybe the people who jump on it fast, like the most sort of like passionate listeners, may be more invested in like the drama of the draft and like upsetting one of us. And then like all the people, all the more rational listeners come in later and balance it out to what the result should be. So like everyone gets a rise out of you early on. And it worked. But then justice was served. So well for you in your eyes maybe. Well, actually, that’s not how I feel though. Like I say, I think that the colour of your list was better than mine. But I just had better big hitters than you. That’s all. And like there was no hiding the fact that I lost in the Western, ill-advised Western spin-off category when you got DMC. That was tough. You had Ace Attorney as well. A little part of me was sad that I had no Phoenix Wright in my list at all. But I just couldn’t, you nobbled me on that. I think you still could have just picked another Phoenix Wright. It would have been unsatisfying. If you’d done that, I would have talked it down. And I probably would have done the same. So yeah, the drafts continue to expose us at our pettiest. I think on some level as well. I think I’m just like a bit less likeable than you. And so maybe that makes it like… That’s just because people don’t know me. I’m a real grade A shit. Well, we both are. That’s why we make a great pair on this podcast. No, but as ever with the draft, I’m always really flattered when people vote in them. So do another one like a couple of months, what do you reckon? Yeah, if we can find a voting mechanism that is in Twitter. Okay, Matthew, we come to your final little crop of games. Some more Psvr 2 stuff. A couple more Psvr 2. Sorry to endlessly bang the VR drum. I’ve been playing Tetris Effect, which I haven’t played in VR before. So it’s Tetris Effect, you know, you’re playing Tetris, except it’s weird sort of audio visual kind of dreamscape that plays out around the board. You’re obviously sort of fully sort of enveloped in that, you know, you’re kind of locked in and it all kind of floats in front of you. I mean, I love this game as this audio visual experience anyway. And, you know, any peripheral which kind of closes out more of the world around you and just puts you in that space is bound to work. It just, yeah, it’s just a really beautiful thing. And I imagine this was also great on Psvr, but like playing on a newer headset with like better resolution and darker blacks on the screen, you know, it just really, really pops. Very, very satisfying. You’re a big Tetris effect guy. Oh, yeah, I fucking love it. It’s probably the Oculus Quest 2 game I’ve played the most. I think it’s just like, I love it as a sort of VR standard, you know, like it’s as fundamental to VR, I think, as like Mario 64 is to N64. Like I think you just, it like illustrates to you the simplicity of the kind of games you can make in it, but what you can do with the effects of VR to enhance the experience. Like it’s, it’s that good, you know. Yeah, so I’ve been bopping my head to that. I always think I must look like a maniac to Catherine when she watches me play these things. Not that I forced her to watch me to play Psvr2 or anything. That would be weird. Thanks, Clarifon. The other game I’ve tried out is Pavlov, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with this one. It’s, it’s an online shooter, but its big sort of selling point is it’s got a lot of very accurately modelled guns and you have to reload them in kind of like almost sort of pornographic detail. And it really simulates them, which this seems to be one which appears on a lot of like best of Psvr2 lists. And like of the launch games anyway, lots of people seem to be really into it. Actually made me feel a little like uncomfortable. And I don’t mean this to sound like some sort of like absolute caricature of a liberal softie. But there is something sour about a wall of accurately modelled guns that you hold and you can really like look at them. You can’t feel the weight of it in your hands, obviously. It’s not that magic VR, but you can really look at them and sort of caress them and pull, you know, like the revolver. You can open a chamber and you load in each bullet like one by one and then you flick your wrist to flick the chamber in. And it’s like a weird crossing of the line from what you think would be kind of cool because you can do it like the movies. And when you actually have the kind of reality of it, I don’t know, it’s kind of something a little too hard edged and real about it for my liking. There’s something about the accuracy of like moving your hand and putting a gun to someone’s head and shooting them in the head that feels definitely visceral, you know, completely successful in what they’re trying to achieve. But yeah, I think, you know, I think I’m just, yeah, just too soft or something like this. You can shoot yourself in the head with these guns. Which is quite, quite a thing to do in a game. Because I was like, it’s so accurate, the modelling, like where the gun is in the world, that I was like, oh, I wonder if that would happen. And it did. And I was actually quite shocked by it. Like I disturbed myself by killing myself in a game. So yeah, but some people seem to really love this game online. I mean, it’s certainly like the most hard edged and like adult VR game on Psvr2. But like, I think I prefer the kind of like light gun silliness, the kind of one step removed. It’s just too accurate. It’s like Call of Duty, except it really is, it really feels like you in the game. It’s quite a strange experience. But I don’t know. I imagine a lot of listeners are rolling their eyes at that. No, you know, it’s like, it’s, I don’t know, this stuff is, you know, it’s like your perception of it is very different when you live in the UK to maybe the US, where, you know, like I just, when I was in San Francisco, there’s some cops came in to have breakfast when I was sat having like my fucking steak and eggs. And they just all had guns, they just walked past me and saw their holsters with guns. And I was like, I just have to like calibrate, recalibrate my brain to how weird this country is. It’s like they are prepared to shoot people at literally any time and how fucking weird that is. I don’t know, it just, it just puts you in those locations. When you’re doing an online death match, you know, you’re creeping down a corridor, you’ve got a wavering gun in your hand and you’re like, well, if someone comes around the corner, I’m going to point this at them and hope for the best, which is probably how it would work out if I was in a real gunfight and someone else comes around and they’re obviously a bit better at the game and they just, you know, put a gun to your head and shoot you and it’s, there’s a violent like shake of the headset and it’s, it’s, yeah, I don’t know, it’s just too scary for me. Yeah, I don’t think, I think there’s some version of this that might be on Quest but not quite the same. I think that it’s quite a high end visually kind of game, isn’t it? Yeah, and like really, I mean, it is like the craftsmanship of it, no doubt. Like these guns, they look amazing. The way it uses like the adaptive triggers on, on, you know, the, the Psvr 2 sort of sense controllers have the same triggers that the, the dual sense controller has. Right, right. So it’s got like resistance and things. So like, you know, when a gun’s empty, the trigger feels very different. Like, you know, when you squeeze like a, you know, semi machine gun, like the rattle of it feels very different to like the bang of a revolver. The one thing that is quite funny is like, because you have to be very careful and accurate with the reloading, panicking in the middle of a gunfight and like I was crouched in a room and I had this stupid revolver and in my head you think you’re revolver or something, right? Because you’re like, oh yeah, I’m going to be like swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, just like Clint Eastwood. And in truth, you’ve got the thing open and I was bringing up bullets but I was so panicked. I wasn’t putting them in the chamber. I was letting go of them and just flinging bullets around the room like over the top of the gun. And then when I had put six in the chamber, I tilted the gun back too much and they all fell out the holes again. Because it’s all physics sort of reactive like that. Which like in a certain game experience, I’d be able to admire how ludicrous that situation is. But then I got like someone fired like a fucking AK-47 into my head for a minute. So, you know, the kind of fun of it went. Yeah, you were kind of like role playing as MGS3 Ocelot before like Snake kicks the shit out of him at the start. That was you basically. Yeah, I’m hoping that people will take it easy on me if I go, ROW! When they come into a room, but instead they just fire a shotgun at both my knees. I’ve got to say, even though it does sound like a bit contentious in terms of content, there’s something very appealing about it. I’d like to try it and just see what it’s like. Right. I’ve been talking about it at the office and saying like, I was actually a little disturbed by it. And then everyone’s reaction is, I might give that a go at lunch. And you’re like, okay, well, I did. Don’t say it in the morning. Yeah, one thing is I’ve never actually tried. I’ve got the cable for it. I’ve never tried plugging my quest into my PC. And so I just, it does sound, there’s something nice about having it all in one plugged into your TV like that. That does sound kind of appealing. So yeah, that’s cool. Interesting. What fun little VR adventures you had. Anything else Matthew? Tetris Effect and Pavlov could not be more different. Yeah, yeah. But you know, like if you’ve never played in VR before, both of them are like something you’ve never experienced before if you’re only used in old VR games. I like Tetris is where you go to like recover from the horror of Pavlov. Meanwhile, I’m just thinking, what if I shot myself in the head? Yeah, very good Matthew. So we do my last game here and then we’ll jump into some questions. So Celeste is my last game, an indie darling game by Maddie Thorson who I think made, what was that game everyone got obsessed with? Yeah, so basically like a sort of a platforming game with a little bit, in fact it is entirely a platforming game. It’s about navigating these environments using like a jump and kind of like a boost move essentially. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that, but the premise of the game is you’re climbing this mountain and there are mysteries involving the main character and also the other characters you meet that you untangle as you go is quite a strong narrative element to this. But it is at its heart, I think, a fundamentally sort of like hardcore platforming game. And I’m playing it because I really want us to do another Nintendo Switch Hall of Fame this year. And this seems like a game that is one of the indie games synonymous with Switch. I think that’s probably fair to say, isn’t it, Matthew? Even though I know you can put it anywhere, but feels fair. Yeah, so it feels very at home on a handheld. So, yeah, very much enjoying it. I thought, I actually kind of assumed some things about the game that weren’t true, which is I assumed it would be too hard for me to play. But the thing it does that’s really smart is that you, basically there are optional items to collect in the game, strawberries, and to collect those you need like absolutely ridiculous dexterity and skill to get those. But if you just play the sort of like most basic version of the level, anyone can do it but it still requires a bit of skill. I think that’s really nicely stacked. I think it’s got also some quite detailed like difficulty sliders you can change if you want your character to jump faster, further or whatever. I didn’t mess with those so when I get through the default experience. But I really like it as a kind of setup and platforming experience. Really didn’t think it’d be my sort of thing but I just sat and played through the first four levels, which is not, it’s not a short period of time to do that. Really impressed by it and kind of curious about where the narrative is going. It’s not the real reason I’m hooked in but I certainly love how it looks, sounds and feels. You play this one Matthew? Yeah, I’ve never fully finished it, I must admit. So, you know, the full extent of it. But yeah, I mean, yeah, great feeling thing. Um, yeah, not very sophisticated. I think it’s got what you would consider like a good jump by your high standards. I think generally the navigation mechanics are just really, really well judged. They are, you know, they don’t, they don’t fuck you about, they’re not too tricky. They, but they give you loads of flexibility in how you get through an environment. Different levels have different twists for you to keep in mind as well. There’s usually some kind of chase or action sequence in them. So it’s not a totally sort of like passive experience. It can get quite tense and quite hard. And then it starts to have like a tiny bit of a kind of trials HD quality about it. Just because it saves when you move off from one screen to another. Sometimes the screen you’re on can last for quite a long time. And so it’s, yeah, it’s really nicely done. It’s good as everyone said it was. And so, yeah, I will complete it. And then in the summer we will do the Nintendo Switch All of Fame Volume 2. And I’ll probably put that in there, Matthew. So spoiler alert for a future episode, basically. Indeed. OK, so that’s Celeste. I’ll be putting in Pavlov. Pavlov on Switch running at 10 frames per second. You have to strap the Switch to your face to create a kind of like bespoke for your headset. Just feeling the rumble of the Joycon as you blow your brains out. Can you imagine? Labo Pavlov, Matthew. Do you think that’s good? Just like a little cardboard gun. That would be so bleak. Being in that environment, in that little cardboard prison, I can’t think of anything worse. Also the idea of a game like Pavlov ever ending up on a Nintendo platform, I suppose in theory it could, right? It’s just that you always can’t picture it. Imagine going onto that little sales tab and you’re like, yeah, fucking Phantom Doctrine is £1 again. And then like, yeah, it’s Resident Evil 4 again. And then here’s Mario Party and here’s Pavlov. That is a kind of collection of stuff. Ridiculous. Matthew, we’ve got a bunch of questions here. You have curated them this month. Thanks for doing that. Let’s take a break and we’ll come back with the questions. Welcome back to the podcast. We’ve got a bunch of listener questions here. Been a while since we’ve been through these, so thank you very much. If you’d like to submit questions to the podcast, backpagegames.gmail.com, you can email us. And also on the Discord, which is linked on Twitter, at BackpagePod on Twitter. You can click on the Discord. There’s a pod questions channel you can drop your questions into, which is where most of these come from. So Matthew, kick us off with the first question. This is from Koig on Discord. Question completely stolen from the MinMax pod. Big fans of MinMax here. You have the choice to risk it, which means make a sequel, mix it, which is remake or remaster or nix it, which means kill forever. Or you can tell this comes from a podcast of class with those cool little rhyming names. Risk it, mix it or nix it. For these following games that never saw a sequel. So which one do you choose? There’s a list of games and you have to pick a game to risk it, mix it or nix it. The games are Days Gone, Diddy Kong Racing, LA. Noire, Eternal Darkness, Enslaved, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, Sunset Overdrive and Alpha Protocol. So you can make a sequel to one, you can remake one and there’s one that you can kill off forever. Ask her, we should do something like this for our pod, like some kind of multiple choice thing where we go through like a whole list of games and then do this kind of like, it’s basically like a marry, kill, avoid or whatever, isn’t it? Yeah, I think that’s what my game’s called. I’m outing myself as a psychopath there. Okay, good. So yeah, okay, first up, the day’s gone. So I guess we’ll both answer this in tandem, right? I think we can nick stay gone forever, personally. Like, you don’t need to remaster it because it runs really nicely. I don’t think the game is quite as bad as people say it is. I think it’s actually like, all right, it’s a sort of stealth action experience and like with some motorbike stuff. And I hear it gets particularly good in its end game. But at the same time, there was just so much kind of weird like discussion around this game from that main developer dude afterwards. I just- Bad vibes. Bad vibes, yeah. They’ve gone on to make something else at developer and a bunch of them are still there. So I wish them well in that project, but I don’t think there needs to be a day’s gone sequel as such. I think, yeah, it seems like it’s that one game has done everything it needs to do. Your thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, no, basic agreement. And you’re right, the PS5 framerate update basically does feel like a remaster, so. Yeah, nice looking game. So, Nixit, Diddy Kong Racing. Never really played this, but I’m not desperate for, like, I don’t- I had a friend who really loved this and said it was better than Mario Kart 64, but I didn’t trust him on anything else. Matthew is the big Nintendo brain, so Nixit is okay. It’s Nixit. Fuck Diddy Kong Racing, especially for WizPig, one of the worst bosses of all time. LA. Definitely risk it. Make a sequel, like, any day. You can set it in the 70s or, like, you know, just like the modern day even, and it would still be absolutely rad. I fucking adore LA. Don’t need to remake it or remaster it. Like, it still looks pretty nice when you play it now. So, yeah. Eternal Darkness. That’s a good one for Mixit, a remake or remaster, in my opinion. Matthew, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t say no to a sequel. Like, I like this approach of, like, lots of different characters across history. But, like, this is quite a perfect sort of encapsulation of that idea. So, yeah, maybe a shinier version, you know, do a pass on all the mad sort of insanity effects and things. Yeah. Yeah, I’d be curious to know what that would look like if you did it now, because a lot of the stuff… You’d have to be very careful. Well, yeah, yeah. A big thing at the time was that, like, they were messing with the sort of CRT era of, like, TV stuff, right? So, yeah. Which obviously Kojima loved, and that’s how they ended up making The Twin Snakes. So, but even Kojima doesn’t really do that kind of stuff as much now. So, you know, yeah, it would… There’s some work to be done there, I think, either on a sequel remaster to make it more up-to-date. Enslaved. I did like Enslaved. I’d probably go with Mixit, though. I don’t really think a sequel needs to be made, but it was a cool sort of, I guess, precursor to The Last of Us, two characters going through an environment, puzzles, combat, except it was kind of like, obviously much more heightened sci-fi setting. Looked nice, looked really nice at the time. I think it would look even nicer with a kind of modern remake, but I didn’t adore it. I thought it was like a good seven, basically. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I could probably mix it. Yeah, it’s fine. I don’t really want to revisit it. I just felt like all the talk about it was the celebrity talent or Alex Garland’s involvement as a writer, which always fills me with dread. That stuff should be like the cladding around something else in my mind. Okay, fair enough. The Bim with Diddy Kong Racing. Monkey can enjoy hanging out with Tiptup or Pipsy or those awful garitors on that game. Yeah, very good. Okay, right. It’s a mix it from me though, dog. Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. I don’t really like this game that much, but I would go with a risk it because I think there’s still much more you could do with like riding and fighting people in the Metal Gear Universe. Yeah, make a sequel. This time have a good end boss. That’s what you need to do. Yeah. Have flashbacks as well. Like the first thing you should do in this game should be you fighting vamp in Metal Gear Solid 4. Oh my god, that’s such a good show. Like what the fuck are we doing? You know what I mean? We’re just sat there on the table. Instead I’ve got to listen to some senator delivering some mean bullshit that I still have to hear about 10 years later, even though it wasn’t that witty or clever anyway. One flashback should be the whole of Metal Gear Solid 2 that you replay in the middle of this game. So yeah, risk it on that one. Sunset Overdrive kind of doesn’t need to mix it because you can play on PC and it still looks pretty great. Probably a good one for a sequel. Risk it. But then you kind of got Spider-Man, like Insomniac are doing superhero-y stuff even if it’s not exactly the same, Matthew, what do you reckon? Yeah, the core arena shooting in this is unlike anything else and the way it kind of builds up and goes really crazy. I’d risk it. Yeah, okay, I agree. Finally, then, Alpha Protocol, it’s a big nixit for me, dog, for the real reason that I think it being this sort of like slightly weird 6 out of 10 game that is slightly inaccessible to people now suits it quite well, I think you should have to go out of your way to get this much like the old MGS4 and PS3 thing. If you can’t access it, you were never supposed to, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. This should only ever come up in slightly boring blog posts from 40-year-old games journalists. Oh, what a swipe there at Matthew’s entire generation of writing services. Okay, next one. This is from Welshboy Mick, different question. There are no more Nixit or Mixits here. The year is 2026. Sadly, Bath is only left with a cursed Wetherspoon, so it will be fucking next year at this rate. You, therefore, decide to open your own pub using the sweet Patreon money. The pod has 70,000 subs at this stage, and you have a large amount of savings. What’s the pub called? What’s your main clientele? What three arcade machines do you have? What video game characters work there? Bath is definitely running low on good pubs. Two of my favorites shut recently, actually, like Chapter 1 shut. I really love that pub. And we’re down to basically the Green King IPA chains or whatever. It’s a tough one, Matthew, do you have answers to this? My pub named after my pistol whip time would be called the Hunched Wick. Very good. That’s good for a bath pub. You see, I don’t know if I’d even have arcade machines in mine. Yeah, that’s the thing. It sets the tone of the place that you’ve got. That’s the thing. I don’t want to track the wrong clientele, which arcade machines might. Maybe pinball machines. The Star Trek Next Generation pinball machine, the Addams Family pinball machine and the Medieval Madness pinball machine. Those are three goodies. But then I’d have to listen to pinball all night, so that’d be annoying. Yeah. You could have a little room where you just go and play the arcade machines, you know. That’s okay. I’m clear and tell. It would be all our lovely patrons, of course. Yep. Yep. Yeah, okay, so I think I’d go with, like, I think I’d call it the Gentle Giants, my pub, and it’d be a picture of me and Matthew on the sign. I’m not suggesting Matthew has to, like, go into business with me, but he can if he wants to. If you’re in Bath… I don’t like the idea of you just using my likeness without me being involved in the business. Well, you have a sign-off. I pay you a licensing fee, you know. Or I’ll just, like, replace you with, like, a different large man who I know. I’ll just do that instead. Yeah. It’s like, the game’s jealous in Bath, so. Yeah, so, yeah, the gentle giants go with that. Main clientele. If you’re in Bath, your main clientele is old men, awful students, or… That’s about it, really, actually. There aren’t many other people. Or irritating young professionals. That’s basically, like, what you got. So I’d love to say that I’m going to reach some clientele that doesn’t exist, but to be honest, I would have, like, a proper, sort of, like, beer nerd pub. I do, like, you know, good beers and stuff, not just, like, 5% pale ales that taste like ass, and they’re like, we serve craft beer here, and it’s like, no, you don’t, it’s just supermarket garbage. Anyway, enough of that. My pub only serves Pepsi Max. Pepsi Max and Pimble. Come on down. Come on down to the Hunched Wick. Yeah, very good. Three arcade machines. Okay, Police 24-7, so you can dodge bullets in that little chambery thing. Crazy Taxi, it’s a classic, and, of course, Ghost Squad. I know we’ve got two gun games there, but Ghost Squad fucking rules, so you’ve got to have Ghost Squad if you’ve got the opportunity. Wait, no, I’m taking Battle Police 24-7, I’m going with Star Wars Trilogy Arcade Machine. So we’re sorted, that’s it now. That’s the run the gamut there. Video game characters, Matthew, I don’t know. I don’t want to suggest anything by choosing women from video games that people might perceive as me being horny content, essentially. So should I just say Mario works there? I’d too be good behind a bar, like a Garrus or a Thane from Mass Effect. Oh, that’s great, like a chinwag. Like, good trivia guide, good low conversation, kind of like, pour me another, Garrus, I could see that working. Yeah, that’s real good, actually. But Thane pre-whatever goes on with his lungs in the last game. He’s not dying over the course of a shift. No, I don’t want that. That would bum me out. No, that’s a good call. I suppose I should, like, throw someone else into the mix there. I might put that, like, Mario and that one armed guy who, like, builds you that fake hand in Sekiro, he’d work there. The dude who turns into, spoiler alert, the Demon of Hatred, he would be there. But he wouldn’t turn into the Demon of Hatred until after his shift was over. That’s really important. Right. But I think he’s like, he’s like a pretty good hangers from Software Characters Go. That’s what happens when you call time at the bar and you ring the bell, he turns into the Demon of Hatred. That would get all the students out. Absolutely. So, yes, good. I think that about covers it, Matthew. I like the idea of a TripAdvisor review where the title of it is, like, nice ambience didn’t like the Demon of Hatred. Yeah, perfect. I should just call the pub the Demon of Hatred, really. But I like the idea of a pub called The Gentle Giant that ends in that form. That would be quite good. Thank you for your question. Matthew, do you want to read out the next one? Next up from Ian Welby, hello chaps. Nice quick one. Is making your own podcast starting to change how you listen to other podcasts? You’ve discussed how games being your job has affected gaming in your free time, but are you finding yourself listening to podcasts with a more analytical ear? I try not to listen to too many gaming podcasts because I worry about their thoughts infiltrating my thoughts and then me passing off their observations as my own, so I try and keep it fairly pure. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the work that other people do with theirs, but I definitely listen. Me and Matthew are both in the same position of being slightly too obsessed with those ringer podcasts, so The Watch and Big Picture, Rewatchables, stuff we talked about before. Certainly, I think they have affected this pod in the sense that they’ve kind of, as the longer they’ve gone on, the more and more relaxed and familiar they’ve become with each other and leaning into their bullshit more and more. I think that’s definitely affected this podcast a bit, which was a bit more when we started, a bit more down the line, here’s what we’re talking about kind of thing. But we try not to make it too off topic or whatever. I also like listening to podcasts and seeing if there’s ideas we can crib, do games for us, versions of different ideas, I suppose. Or sort of like, yeah, listing out for just like types of guests or ways you can sort of like change up the formula. So I suppose the answer is yes, Matthew, what about you? Yeah, I’d say same. Like I maybe don’t listen to as many game podcasts just because I don’t want my life to be games, games, games all the time. A lot of podcasts I listen to, they have such distinct personalities involved and people who it’s very, very hard to like replicate or necessarily like learn from them. They just are who they are and I think the secret to a lot of podcasting is just to plug in the right person and let them do their thing. But yeah, like I’ve been listening a lot to Simon Park in this podcast recently, My Perfect Console, which is really interesting to me, maybe less so like to copy in this podcast, but to hear Simon like interview someone every week, because Simon’s a very prolific interviewer of game developers. It’s not something I’ve had heaps of experience doing. So you know, I maybe listen to that with an analytical ear more for kind of stealing interview technique and ways he gets of like opening up and where he pushes people where he doesn’t. Yeah, I’ve really been enjoying that. So do you feel like we’re the dinosaurs and he’s the meteor when it comes to a games podcast, Matthew? It’s such a different vibe like his is like a tight hour. Very, like very focused. I wonder what that’s like. No, we’re very different things. And I know that Simon’s a fan of our podcast too. So you know, I don’t I don’t see us as sort of competition at all. No, no, it’s not at all. It’s a really, really good pod. He’s he’s taught some really interesting people. And yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing who he has on next. Yeah, absolutely. He’s put so much work into the guests and stuff. And you know, he’s doing two episodes a week through all of April. That’s impressive. He’s generating actual news headlines from his interviews as well. Yeah. Yeah. That Jake Simon episode was great. Jake Simon seems like such a nice guy. I really, really hope whatever he does next is a success. Yeah, absolutely. Like it’s it’s interesting. I played a bit of Marvel’s Midnight Suns and it is like a cool game. But it also is the most I’ve played a game and thought this feels like someone’s not vanity project, but passion project, you know, because it’s such an unusual way to do a license game. Like it’s nothing like any other license game. But it feels like sheer force of will brought it to life. It’s such a strange mixture of, you know, kind of life simmy stuff. And then the, you know, the turn based action. Yeah. Yeah. It’s such an unusual thing. Like it’s one of the weirdest big games, like in the last 10 years for sure. Quite unusual. But I think I think they really knobbled it with that terrible cover up. Oh, really? That’s interesting. Just the characters standing and looking shadowy and dark. It looks the game looks like it’s gonna be super serious where actually it’s probably like the most sort of Saturday morning cartoon superhero game there has been for a long time. Yeah, it kind of looks a bit a lot of the art makes it look quite Halloweeny and horrorish. Which is, I suppose, like a way to set it apart from like Avengers or whatever. But yeah, it’s it’s it’s such a, yeah, such an unusual specific thing. But it’s cool. It’s cool. So yeah, yeah, Simon’s podcast, I’m sure all our listeners are checking it out at this point, Matthew, it seems like it’s doing really well. Good for him. Next question, Matthew. Shall I read this one out? It’s from Cyrano. Big Sammy Productions and Matthew Castle Holdings have really have received a big injection of cash and you both decide to make games inspired by your time as print games journalists. What do these games look like? A point and click adventure, PC gamer tycoon, how would you translate those experiences into game form? Unless you wouldn’t because it’s a shit idea, in which case, sorry. I did actually like, when I was on PC Gamer, I got halfway through making a Twine game called Deadline about the decisions you make at Deadline and the things that can go wrong. But it was a bit too like arch and self-indulgent and it annoyed me, the content of it. So I just ditched it, which is what I do with all my creative projects. But I don’t know, Matthew, do you have an answer to this one? In terms of catching my day-to-day experience as a staff writer, which would probably be the most interesting perspective, because otherwise it becomes a management game and I wouldn’t really like that. I did a lot of writing to music. I could see there being a touch type rhythm game about trying to get stuff but set only to the selection of the Super Smash Brothers Brawl soundtrack that I’d ripped off the internet and on to my work PC. So it would be only music from Sonic and Metal Gear, because that’s what was on my PC for a long time. That’s good. I like the idea of typing of the dead, essentially. Yeah, typing of the dead, but set to that tune from Sonic Heroes. Okay, nice. Wow, what an unusual choice that is. And that’s the period I really got into those. I don’t know if they are good or bad, but the croony lady singing Metal Gear tunes, are they widely held as good? Yeah, I think so. Calling to the Night, from whichever one that was from. Was Snake Eater in there as well? I’m assuming so. Yeah. Calling to the Night. I don’t know about that one, but the best is yet to come. I’m a big fan of. Yeah, that’s real good. I really like those. Yeah, they’re real good. So yes, I guess a piece of game with Tycoon might be quite fun. I like the idea of doing something like game dev story, but with like sort of, you know, print media or something. You got to combine different types of articles and see how the magazine sells. Something like touch like that might be good. I also do something where instead of like the cut, you treat the cover like the Resident Evil inventory. We’ve got a number of slots to put like objects and stories on there to try and like make a cover and sell. That could be fun. Yeah, that’d be good. I suppose like the truth of it is I don’t think my life is interesting enough to like make someone pay to read about it. Like, like play a game that you sort of understand it. Listening to a free podcast. Someone should try telling indie developers that. So like me telling bullshit stories on this podcast is one thing. You don’t have to pay for it. You can pay for it. You don’t have to. But to play a video, a commercially released video game of it, I couldn’t do it, man. My life, my life just isn’t interesting enough. So yeah, I think we answered that one, Matthew. Join me the next one. This is from KH2698. Good day. You have been given the opportunity to voice a character in an animated video game film. What is the game your film is based on and what character do you voice? I really don’t want any more adaptations of games. Even though I know there have been quote unquote good ones now, I’m still not interested. I just don’t care. So I’ve been a grump there, I should just pick one. Okay, I wouldn’t mind voicing, if they did Final Fantasy VII as an animated movie, I guess like they kind of did with Abbot Children, I wouldn’t mind playing Red 13, the little dog guy, I’d do that. What? I’m not going to be Barrett, am I? I thought you’d be like Biggs or Wedge. Oh, that’s a great shout. I’d be both. I’d be both. I’d be good. Or like, I’d be Biggs and Wedge in Final Fantasy VIII because they are, if you adapted that into an animated film, that would be quite fun for me to voice both of them, the one in charge would sound like this and the one who doesn’t know what he’s doing would sound like this and make me do that or something. Unbearable for the audience. Very versatile. Yeah, yeah, just call me if you want me to do voiceover work. What about you, Matthew? I don’t know. Like, there’s no character I’d improve with my voice, that’s for sure. It’s not like a luscious voice to listen to. I am aware of this. Maybe like, like Phoenix Wright. I think I could voice the Winston Payne who you smash in all the tutorial cases. That’s great. That’s a great show. The slightly nerdy, stressed out guy who loses his wig. That would be me. That’s real good. I like that. I think I could probably do an alright job with Gumshoe, actually. I’d be okay at that. Just a bit, a bit. He’s a bit too good looking for me to play him, really, but like, but sort of certainly being like a bit of a dimwit who’s quite endearing, I think I could pull that off, but yeah. If I made a live action film, I’d cast Carl Chandler as Gumshoe. Oh dear, I think he’s got a bit too much gravitas, but you know, I’d like to see it done, certainly. He’s got the right build and face shape, though. Fuck. I mean, maybe it should just turn this podcast into casting that entire Phoenix Wright movie. Who plays Phoenix Wright, Matthew? Oh, that is hard. Obviously Florence Pugh playing Maya Fey. Oh, or Haley, what’s-the-face, I guess, Steinfeld. Simmons would be the judge. Fuck yes, that’s good. Phoenix Wright’s very, very hard. I think you probably need to find a newcomer. Yeah, maybe you’re right. I would have, like, when he was still alive, I would have had Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince as the judge, like definitely, and I would have, like, suggested that it was the same character from The Fresh Prince, but not said it outright. For Miles Edgeworth, who’s that, is it Billy Magnuson? Oh yeah, yeah. He could be that. He’s got that sort of smarmy-ness to him. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, okay, good. We’ve done that. That was niche. Yeah, that was niche. Okay, let’s move on. This one’s from Sam Walker 2312. Long-time listener, first-time writer, love the podcast and everything you do. My question is simple. What is the worst Mario power-up? My money is on the Spring from Galaxy Games, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Matthew is probably the best one to hear ask about this. I mean, Spring from Galaxy is incorrect, that thing. Once you actually get into it, the sense of it coiling up, the tactility of unleashing it, that is a good power-up. One of the better power-ups, I would go as far as to say. I actually don’t like the ice flowering Mario Galaxy much, which is the one which puts the sort of hexagons of ice under you and lets you walk across water. It plays quite an annoying bit of music. Not to be confused with just Mario ice skating on normal ice, that’s amazing, but ice flower from Galaxy I’m not crazy into, most of them are pretty classic. Yeah, let’s stick with that. Okay, good, so this one’s for you to read out Matthew. This is from Koig again. This is an incredibly inside baseball type question prompted by the great episode with Neil Laughne. He mentioned that the best selling O&M in his time was one with Sonic’s face on the cover and how that informed a future cover choice. To what extent did you track sales on a monthly basis and how did that inform future editorial and art choices, or was it just quite hard to discern why one mag sold better than the next month’s? Oh, mag sales are why I stopped working in print media. If I never had that information, I would have been a very happy man, but I did have that information and it made me very unhappy. That’s genuinely why I left PC, Game and Print and went to work online. I just could not look at data anymore that you can’t control. It’s just not good for you to do that. So he’s trying to divine secret code from these numbers. Yeah, and literally no one ever has. What about the Move Over XXXL Blunt Format? That’s a proven winner. That’s true. Yeah, I did use it to make to inform choices, but probably too many times and I wish I hadn’t. I wish I just like made what I thought was best as opposed to what I thought would sell well. Like that’s, I genuinely think that because ultimately the mag being good is what matters, like not, and like pleasing your core audience as opposed to fighting for like some kid who might be in WA. Smith and go, oh, look, there’s a picture of an ATAT on this cover. I’m going to go buy it. You know what I mean? So that’s how I feel about in retrospect. It’s like, just make a good magazine, man. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Agreed. I think actually the time I used numbers more than anything was when I joined OXM because I just had no feel for what an Xbox mag was going to need to be successful and what was successful. And I had a big sheet of paper which had all the OXM covers and maybe their closest rivals and the numbers for the sales that month to see if I could like extract trends from it. That’s probably when I was most into it. You know, on Nintendo mags you had a natural feel for like, you know, obviously put Mario on the cover. And I think it’s those broad decisions that really do it rather than like, I don’t believe a great hit in the bottom right corner is going to change anyone’s minds. No. I needed it as a crutch more than anything because I was like, I don’t know what’s successful on Xbox mags. Like I inherited that mag out of nowhere. So that was the best I could do really. Yeah. This is me ringing it out, Matthew. Yeah. From Blinky. Okay, so this is from Blinky. Other players are the worst and nobody that’s anybody plays multiplayer anymore. But that said, what are some of your favorite instances of multiplayer griefing and shenanigans, either that you witnessed, suffered or perpetrated? Anything particularly creative or memorable come to mind? I remember us playing this game Pavlov once, right? This is fucking idiot with a revolver trying to reload. And then I just watched him get annihilated with an AK-47. It was great. Yeah, I don’t know griefing and shenanigans. I don’t know if I’ve ever been good enough at a game to be able to grief or pull off shenanigans. No, that’s it. I don’t know about shenanigans, but certainly there have been times where I’ve like definitely in Apex Legends where I feel like I’ve stolen victories like killing. There’s like balloons you can use in Apex Legends and to get up them, you have to like skirt up this rope really rapidly. Your character does it automatically. But while the other characters on the ground, they can shoot at you are using those ropes. I did kill someone who was ascending using those ropes. Because he was the last in his squad, he went down straight away. That felt amazing to do that. But I don’t know about griefing man. I don’t really grief. The thing that happened to me that was quite funny is when I was trying to complete a GTA Online mission in a hot air balloon and someone just very slowly pulled up next to me in a flying motorcycle and then just very gradually lobbed remote explosives onto my airship and then just drove away, waited one minute and then detonated them and then the mission was over. And that was like admirably awful bit of griefing, you know. I felt like Kirtle Kurtz talking about that guy who cut off all those arms, like, you know, it was terrible but I’ve got to admire it at the same time. So yeah, hopefully that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. We’re going to read the next one, Matthew. Oh, actually, I had an online griefing thing. Oh, yeah. When I was in secondary school, we used to play this browser, this epic space browser based game. I think it was called Planetary, where basically everyone had a planet and you were part of solar systems and you were like building up resources and like sometimes all the planets would get together and like raid another solar system and fuck people up. And I played it and a couple of my school friends played it. And I was always creating duplicates, like fake accounts to try and talk to my friends as like pretending to be strangers to see if I could get like the inside line of what they were plotting so that they wouldn’t fuck me over. Wow, that is wild. So I’d be like out of nowhere, be like, hey, you look like you’ve got a good planet. Like, do you want to be friends? And like just approaching them as a company, they always zoomed through it. I was not a very successful coniver, but yeah, I was always trying to like fuck my best friends over in Planetarium because they do it to me. But without without cheating, I was such a rat when I was 14. Yeah, that’s good. I like that. That’s actually reminded me as well that like the there was definitely talked about us on the podcast before, but the daisy game we have where we were on the front page of Twitch. And so everyone came on to try and stream snipe us. So we were we were trying to get from one side of the map to the other. It’s like a little goal. We set ourselves for a diary feature. And basically, yeah, everyone, everyone, thousands of people were watching. And then like everyone who could get to us like came after us. And it was like a proper sort of like, yeah, just hunting us down in this map. And then in the midst of it, like we met some random girl who was very polite. And then one of our like one of our party killed her. And it was just like it was like a proper sort of like narrative in motion. It sort of illustrated why people like those survival games in a really sort of like, you know, straightforward kind of like, oh, I get this. We just created a whole narrative here. That was really exciting and funny. We did all like die in the end. It helped that you had like a legit war criminal in your group. Yeah, absolutely. That was certainly part of it. But yeah, some good ones there, Matthew, I think. Just think about you pretending to be different people and planetary. That’s really fucked up. That’s what you do when you’re a teenager, though. Just strange. Yeah, that’s, you know, all that kind of stuff. I was always making fake email accounts and like trolling people. I was a real asshole. This one is from personal Nadir. Good day, gentlemen of extraordinary height. Apologies for the melancholy tinge to this question, but I think it can also be viewed as celebratory. One day, someday soon, I’ll sunset my trusty PS4 Pro and play the final game on it. It’ll probably be the Shadow of the Colossus remake, as of the games I’m yet to play, that might make for a nice denouement. For some of the consoles you’ve owned, what would be the last choice of last game to play on them before packing them away for the final time? So your last console supper. Right, well, the last game I did play on my PS4 was PT, because you can only play on there. So that felt appropriate to play the one game that’s like trapped on that system. Before I let my dad have my PS4 Pro, I played PT like one more time, just to be like, yeah, once more around the corridor. I say once, like fucking 80 times around the corridor. Yeah, that was… Your dad picked it up, is he playing it now? I’m more worried he’s just… Your mom hears him whispering, Jareth, Jareth, in his room. I’m more worried he’s just fucking deleted it to make room for like COD World War II or something. So that’s more of a concern to me, I’ll be honest, Matthew. Yeah, so that’s a good one. But I don’t know about final games, because I just tend to keep consoles forever and keep playing them, really. So it’d be kind of more symbolic than anything. If it was PS2, I guess it’d have to be something like Onimusha 2 or GTA 3 or something like that. Metal Gear Solid 3, you know? What about you? PS3 has to be Metal Gear Solid 4. Yeah, that or like something really random, like 3D.Heroes. I suppose you could also, people might say the original Demon’s Souls on there. I don’t know, but yeah. Resistance 2, Matthew. Oh yeah, just one of the many brown games. Yeah, so what about Nintendo consoles? Anything come to mind? What would be the last game to play on the Wii? What did you last play on your GameCube? Maybe you remember that. It was Resident Evil 4. And it was more likely to be like a final round of Mario Kart Double Dash. Right, right. And then throwing away the pad in a rage because someone took my own balloons from me in the balloon battle was how that tended to play out. It was probably that. Okay, that’s good. It would have been better. Like the last game you actually want to play on GameCube is like the Twilight Princess GameCube version. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that’s a proper full stop on it. And it’s also like a very sort of autumnal game. It’s about the end of something. It’s, you know, that’s right. DS, the last game you should play on your DS is the sequel to Hotel Dust, Glass Window, in which his apartment block is slowly shutting down. That’s about the end of an era as well. That’s a perfect sign off game for a machine. That’s a good shout. Like I suppose like, if I did this for the PSP, I’d probably say that like, it should probably be God of War, Ghost of Sparta or something, because that was again, like a very late generation sort of game. But if I was to pick something that’s more in this vein of what the PSP represented, it would probably be the original version of Crisis Core, Final Fantasy VII or Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, you know, things that really showed what that handheld could do when it was at its best. So those might be good. You should finish PSP by mashing that button to tear yourself away from your daughter at the end of God of War. You should abandon your child as the final act of PSP. Oh yeah, absolutely. And then of course, for Xbox 360, it’s got to be Wolverine Origins Uncaged Edition. It has to be that, frankly. That’s good. That’s a good answer. Feed a man in some rotor blades. That’s a good one. Okay, this one, Betamax Bandit, if you guys were video game bosses, what would your name be? You know, the long-winded Dark Souls ones. So I guess like Samuel something of something, Matthew something of something. Yeah, I don’t know. What was the like Lord of, we’ve talked about it many times. There’s Rickard, Lord of Blasphemy. Yeah, I think it would be like, I’d be like Samuel Galt-ridden Kingslayer, something like that, I think. Just a very slightly obese version of me, who would just like very slowly swing a spear at you, but then would have like some kind of bullshit attack, where you’d like burp poison stuff at you and you’ve got to get out of the way. That’s what they do in Souls games, isn’t it? And people are like fucking genius, 10 out of 10. So yeah. I’d be Matthew, the perspirating one. That’s good. And my special move would be where I lean down, I hunch over and lean on one knee and shoot at you under low hanging scenery. Yeah, you have to fight them in your pub, the hunched wicker, wherever it is. That’s good. Okay, good, I think we’ve answered that one. We’ve got Welsh boy Mick again here. In a wild turn of events, Barth has suddenly developed a deep interest in Blitzball. Oh my God, and you’re in charge of the team. What’s the team’s name? What video game people do you sign up to play for you? What special techniques does Sam and Matthew have? I know fucking nothing about Blitzball, so I’m out of this one. But I included it because I like to hear you ruminate on Blitzball. Yeah, so the team names are quite hard to replicate because there’s the Killikabees, the Bersaid Oryx, the Lukagoas, the Ronso Furys or something, or is it Guado Furys? So they’re your typical sports names. The Barth Blowhards, we’ll go with that. What video game people do you sign up to play for you? I’d like to just fill a while. He seems like he’s in good shape. He can come play Blitzball, I guess. He’s got to throw a ball underwater. It’s fucking hard, man. So I guess him, he can come along. Mario, of course, bring him along. Yes, I would again bring from my bar, the Demon of Hatred man, he’d come along too. I don’t know. It’s tough. It’s very good-looking people who might live in the Caribbean, other who tend to play Blitzball on the human side in that game. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not sure, man. I guess I’d bring Tidus from Final Fantasy X. He seems pretty good. He’s used to playing Blitzball in other universes. The special techniques, that’s a tough one. In the game, you basically just have variants of different shots and things like that. Tidus has got the Ject Shot. The magic of that is when he does a shot, instead of having to go through two defenders, he can boot the ball and punch the ball at two defenders, get them out of the way, then take a direct shot on goal. That’s pretty decent. I think my special move would be, I take a slightly better shot if you let me take a Renny with my acid reflux first. If I do that, then I get a plus one shoot bonus. That would be mine basically. It’d be a Renny shots, that’s what it’d be called. That’s the technique. Does anyone have a Wii in the arena? It doesn’t come up, I’ll be honest. But I wouldn’t rule it out basically. There are like some beasts in there too. So you know. You can’t trust a beast, not a beast. Well that’s it. Would a Ronso take a shit in the arena? I’m not sure. Because they’re like big dog people. So they might do. Again, it doesn’t come up, so yeah, I’m not sure. Just not like you get to the end of the game and then there’s just like a bunch of turds at the bottom of the big sphere. They play Blitzball. It’s like swimming pools where they have that chemical that changes color if someone wheezes. Just like inspired by distinct memories of being a kid going to my local swimming pool, which is called St. Vincent’s and that someone’s blowing a whistle and screaming, get out, a kid’s just had a poo. And that happened more than once and then the pool is shut now because one four-year-old took a dump in the pool. Very strange. At my swimming lessons, I remember they used to have down the side of the pool, there were these fake plastic tropical plants surrounded by pebbles. And if you threw a small brown pebble into the swimming pool through the water distortion, that would look like a poo on the bottom of the pool and you should chuck those in and then tell people it was a poo. This is like that game you were playing, but in a swimming pool, Matthew, what’s it called? Galaxerion or something. I don’t know. That’s it. So you don’t get this chat on Simon Parkinson’s podcast, do you? It’s very specific. This is why we’ll never be guests. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, I hope that answers your question with three hours sleep. That’s the best I can do for Blitzball. I should have given that more time and thought. But I think the Bath Blowhards works quite well. Yeah, we’ll see you in Luka in 2024 for our first game. Me, Fila Waniuk, the Demon of Hatred and Tidus from Final Fantasy X. So that’s good. Okay. Want to read this next one, Matthew? Yeah, this is from Bob Bob. In a different, less cursed Discord than this one, someone who was new to playing games was surprised how easily she was able to avoid plot spoilers. Is the gaming community generally better at not spoiling video game plots? Does this matter in games as much as it does in film? Does it even matter at all? Cheers for what you do, lads. There are so few big twists in games to spoil. It feels like this is, like for example, how would someone spoil Norco for you? Do you know what I mean? Like you just play it and enjoy it, but someone could spoil Kotor for you quite easily. So I feel like the big twists get a lot of chatter, but I don’t think there are enough twists for that to ever really be a massive problem. What do you think? Yeah, I think that’s true. And I guess what counts as a spoiler is maybe like, oh, I didn’t want to see that that character’s in it or that they go to this place or, you know, like in Mario, it’s a spoiler to see what later levels look like a little bit. You know, someone put up the last level of Mario Galaxy before he played Mario Galaxy, I’d be pretty pissed off. There used to be a games journalist, incidentally, who was quite infamous for printing pictures of the last bosses in his review just to prove that he got to them. Yeah. I mean… What a knob! I don’t think they listen to this, but… No, it’s sort of, they’re too busy spoiling like fucking Resident Evil 4 Remake epilogue for someone, you know, so don’t worry about it. Yeah, so I don’t think it matters that much. I’m not… No. I agree with you, like it is more about like levels and stuff like that. I don’t want to see bits of an open world, you know what I mean? Like I consider it a spoiler seeing bits of Elden Ring on Twitter, for example, but I don’t think anyone can even explain to me in terms I understand what’s happening in Elden Ring. So yeah, like Matthew says, more about… The good thing about Twitter being like totally fucked now is that it’s very, very hard for these big surges of like spoilers to happen because it’s just too awkward a service to use. And it’s not like my feed seems to give me all the tweets from the people I follow anyway. So it’s actually like cutting out a lot of bad content for me. Thank you, Elon Musk! Also, like the landscape of what people are up to now is so fractured compared to where it was even like five years ago, where someone could just like spoil Game of Thrones, like, and be like, oh, yeah, this guy dies. And that would happen at like 9am on a Monday and it fucking stank. I hated it when people did that. But now that doesn’t happen as much because I don’t know, I don’t think everyone I know watches Succession, you know, and I don’t think everyone I know watches, you know, maybe you get some like Mandalorian spoilers or something, but there’s not as much of a monoculture now, you know. Only bright people watch Succession and bright people don’t spoil his stuff. Whereas only only dubbies watch The Mandalorian, Matthews, that was a takeaway here. You can read into that what you will. That’s it. We should start calling ourselves the Disgusting Brothers, I think that would really work for us. Are we done? Next one. Angry Kurt. Hi gents. Having just caught up with the MCU Ranking XXL episode, oh god, I wanted to ask… Commiserations. Yeah, sorry about that. Can you believe we charged for that? That’s unbelievable. I wanted to ask roughly where you’d rank the films which have come out since you recorded the episode that you’ve watched since then, the films that we’ve watched since then. After hearing Samuel’s hopes and enthusiasm for Thor, Love and Thunder on that episode, I imagine he does not like what that film became, i.e. another YTT joke fest. I have not watched a single bit of MCU content since we recorded that episode. I got it. I’m out. I’m just done with it. An episode so good, it killed all enthusiasm for it. When I saw that people were saying that Love and Thunder was worse than Ragnarok, I was like, there’s no reason for me to watch this. It’s not essential. And it just sounded rough from what people are saying. And MCU has had a weird time since the pandemic. Obviously, the Spider-Man film was really good, but it’s just like the also-ran content has turned into the entire project, which is something they need to course correct from. And their main villain is now in some real-life, has some real-life crime stuff to deal with at the time of recording. So you know, it’s not looking so rosy at the moment. Matthew, you’ve kept up with it, haven’t you? Yeah. Just to be part of the conversation, really, even though you’re the only person I talk to about this stuff. I’ve really let you down here. Sorry. No, that’s fine. They’ve all been terrible, universally terrible, I’d say since we recorded that episode. I thought, oh yeah, Love and Thunder was just atrocious. That’s one of the worst MCU films by some distance. The stuff with the screaming goat meme in that is just offensively shit. Ant-Man looked terrible. Black Panther Wakanda Forever was really, really messy, but it had some… It’s heart was in the right place in places, but it has a huge, huge leading man-shaped hole in the middle of it that they just can’t do anything about, sadly. No, that’s tough. Yeah, just bad. Just a lot of bad films, really. Yeah, I couldn’t bring myself… I just couldn’t bring myself to watch Black Panther for that reason. I wish them the best, but it’s just, nah, I’m sorry, he was so good, and they don’t have many actors left of that quality now, you know? Like, legitimately, and this isn’t being a contrarian, but like, The Eternals is looking stronger and stronger with every film that I see. It has a sense of identity that these films just don’t, and if we were to re-rank them, I’d probably put it fucking high. Yeah, we got told that someone said it was like our worst take in them. It isn’t our worst, that’s one of the takes I most believe in. Yeah, I agree, like, it tries to do something different, which these films never do, and now look where it’s got them. It’s got them into like, they’re not making money now, they’re losing money, and people are dunking on them, but they’re just, they’re as bad now as they’ve ever been, like, at their worst. They’re just, people have just finally fucking noticed, because there’s been about 40 of them. So yeah, I agree, like, Eternals does not entirely work, but it’s a big swing, and that’s why, you know, we admire that here on this podcast. We love a swing. The wacky 7 out of 10. So yes, that’s… It’s disgusting, brothers and daughters. Okay, next question. I hope that was helpful, Kurt. Matthew, I guess you put them all towards the bottom, right? Like it’s, you know, it’s none of us get near the top. Yeah, it’s like these films can be good, but they have to actually like make good films. That’s not too tall in order. I’m not feeling much optimism for what’s coming up, to be honest. Like I’m not totally convinced that like a Captain Marvel sequel is going to turn it around and I don’t know if they’ve got the roster for like a good Avengers film. No offence to those actors still doing it. They don’t care what I think anyway. Let’s move on. So do you want to read this one Matthew? This is from Melma. He says, now that the dust is settled, whereabouts would you place God of War Ragnarok in your God of War ranking? Do you think that with time it will get re-evaluated and given the critical kicking a la Bioshock Infinite and what the fuck was that squirrel about? Yeah I think, did this not come up previously? I’ve not finished it still honestly, I just didn’t quite, I didn’t really love it enough to keep going. I will go back to it. It’s on my list of games to tick off still. Incidentally I’m cyberpunk, I’m actually like ticking off all of the big side quests I missed and that’s been quite fun actually. I’ve been playing a bit of that on PS5 actually. Oh no, it looks real nice on PS5 doesn’t it? It looks great, it’s very shiny, very nice. I’m finally doing like the Judy side quests, I feel like at that point I feel like I’ve completed the game, do you know what I mean? They’re real good those character side quests. I think that Ragnarok goes below probably, so I think we did it, so I think it was like God of War 2018, God of War 3, oh wait, yeah it was wasn’t it, God of War 3 and then God of War 2 and then God of War 1, I believe is how we did it. So it would go between 1 and 2 for me, what about you? Yeah I think that’s fair. Yeah, it’s like so much to admire about the production values of it, as an undertaking it’s quite incredible, but it’s just like, there’s just something it loses, it’s a bit too mainstreamified for me, I don’t know, just in terms of the storytelling and the tone of it, it’s slightly off, you know, but I will keep playing it, but sounds like you agree Matthew? Yes. Sounds about right. Alright, we’ve got two more questions, do you want to read this next one Matthew? Yes, this is from Sonny via email, hello Samuel and Matthew, one for the mailbag, which do you enjoy killing more, gods within a life or impoverished nondescript young men from a Sao Paulo slum? Genuinely love the pod, long may it continue. Sao Paulo slum, is that Max Payne 3? Yeah, so I don’t really enjoy killing the dudes in Sao Paulo as such, I do enjoy firing guns in slow motion. I don’t take great pleasure in killing people who have been pushed into a life of crime, which I think is kind of what’s suggested by Max Payne 3, it’s obviously more fun to kill gods in a life, Matthew, as evidenced by the God of War series, which we just mentioned. Thoughts? Yeah, 100%. I mean, I would always rather kill a god than an impoverished person, I’d worry to meet the person who preferred it the other way around, to be honest. Yeah, good to have that on the record though, isn’t it? So, final question then, from Jack. Thank you for producing such a great podcast, you guys are the only podcast to have convinced me to pay to subscribe, on which note, as a gamer of a similar age to you, I can remember a time when game piracy was rife, especially the PS1 and DS. Now it seems like the last two generations have fixed the issue for all but the most ardent pirates. How big an issue do you feel piracy at the time were for us in game mags and what are your thoughts on the emulation scene now? Do you have a cutoff, e.g. a term of age, in terms of age or availability after which you will no longer judge someone for playing a ROM with their naughty Android handheld? Keep up the great podcasting. I’m always keen to hear your thoughts on this Matthew because I think we fall slightly differently on this. Not massively but a little bit. Yeah, I mean, on the subject of games magazines, obviously everyone knew what it was like on DS and it was rife. We were a magazine that covered a lot of import games. Did I think during my time on the magazine that everyone is going to be buying these games? You know, are we providing a service for solid importers? I don’t know. You know, I think it was so rife. You had an understanding of kind of what people were doing with these recommendations you were giving them. Thoughts on the emulation scene now? I do believe in preservation, which, you know, is at the heart of these projects. I have personally no problem with any of that stuff. In terms of, like, cut off, I mean, I just think if stuff’s available, you should always try, but that’s personally, like, I’m not a big pirate guy, like, I’ve never have been. I’m just a very earnest square in that sense. I’ve got friends who do, I don’t judge them too harshly. What I always say in the Discord is I don’t like people who, like, rub it in people’s faces as if to say, haha, you know, you’re so dumb for buying stuff when I get it for free. I think that’s really, really obnoxious, you know. I’ll always have time for people who want to kind of invest properly in these things and that’s the perspective I’d rather hear about, as I’ve said before, have a little bit of shame. It’s okay, you know. Yeah, I think that, like, I echo that, people are like, oh, I’m not going to be playing X Switch game on my Switch, I’m going to play it on my Steam Deck with a higher frame rate or whatever. And it’s like, well, I don’t agree with that because I want to support the industry. So, you know, it’s important to do that. So yeah, I don’t agree with that. I would say cut off for me is like, I think I agree with Matthew, if it’s not commercially available, I’m not saying download it, but I’m saying that, like, there’s more of a justification for it. Certainly, without emulation, I don’t know what would even be left of, like, the PS2 generation at this point, because it’s been so poorly maintained by almost everyone. So while it is nice to see GameCube remakes popping up here or there, what if they never decided to remake those stuff and there’s still so many games they haven’t remade? So I don’t know, man, it’s tough, because I don’t know if you’re really taking anything from people when you emulate those games, because if there was enough of a financial interest for them to actually bring it back to you in some form, as Nintendo has with the Switch Online service and the Virtual Console, then they would. If they haven’t, it’s either because of licensing issues or because they don’t want to, because they’ve got new games to release, where there’s more money in it. So I don’t know. And it feels like piracy has sort of been left to kind of run and run without too much interference on that side. It’s different when they’re more modern games, but I don’t think Sony is going out of the way to tell people not to download PS2 games. I don’t think they really care. I think some of this stuff is even on archive.org now, because it technically counts as preservation. So yeah, that’s kind of how I feel about it really. The preservation side of it is perfectly good. In terms of game mags, I don’t know if that really had an effect, but certainly the PSP and the DS in their latter years, games stopped selling as well because they were so easy to pirate. And that definitely hit those manufacturers and probably did have a knock-on effect for the 3DS and PS Vita of being less supported because publishers in that last bit of the generation saw that God of War Ghost of Sparta was getting pirated a lot more than it was getting bought, or GTA Chinatown Wars, same on DS. I think that’s where it had a knock-on effect. It maybe affected the next generation of those handhelds, which didn’t have as many games to play on them. I hope you have any further thoughts there, Matthew. Yeah, no, I think you definitely saw that and you just saw people losing interest as a direct result. Sorry, I don’t really have a much deeper take than that. No, that’s it, really. So yeah, a bit of a bum note to end the pod on there. No, no, I think they’re like, yeah, I don’t judge people. I think like I know so many people now have like naughty Android handhelds and yeah, they’re never like, you’d never catch me like, you know, ever emulating like a PS4 game or whatever. I’m not interested in Switch games. I haven’t even like done the thing with my 3DS to make it sort of piratey or whatever. And I’m not saying I judge people who do, but I’m just like, I don’t know. I feel like it’s just like the older I guess the better I feel about it, you know? Yeah. Okay, the podcast is done, Matthew. Thank you very much for listening to this like rambly what we’ve been playing slash mailbag but I think it was pretty good apart from the bits where I was utterly incoherent due to my lack of sleep. Where can people find you on social media, Matthew? I’m at MrBazzill underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. As mentioned, the free feed, we’re taking a quick break next week but we’re debuting our monthly mini series PC gaming classics which has already been rolling out on the Patreon so you get to enjoy the first episode of that then we’ll roll out the second episode and third episodes in the coming months. So yeah, that should be good. But we’ll be doing best Mario moments this month and best guilty pleasures on patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like to support us. Best games of 2015 this month too. The rest is still up in the air, but we’ll tweet about it when we know exactly what we’re doing. So thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Bye.