Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how’s your week been? Have you been getting up to anything exciting this week? I just went to London and ate some spicy tacos and looked at some old artwork that they put inside some rooms and turned them into moving animations in order to make them relevant to a younger audience. That’s what I did on my weekend, so how about you? Sounds very exotic. I went to something very weird, which I can’t really explain. A day of film screenings to assist with a film society, it just meant I watched through three films in a row. A very slow film about peach farmers in Spain. Right. A documentary about Nan Golden, the photographer, who was kind of going after the Sacklers for being Oxycontin pushing fuckers. Yeah. So that was good. And comedy from like an American Ghanian actress slash director, which I didn’t think was very good. See, I’d have called the middle one Doapsic IRL. That’s what I would have gone with. Yeah. Here’s some exciting gossip for you. The Pasta Hut that steals electricity from the living room. Yeah. Is, has been sighted. It’s currently parked in Queens Park. What? Like, it reappeared? These things really are like Zur and Destiny. These like weird little stores. Like, where are they siphoning electricity from now? That’s what I was wondering. I was like, if I was the Francis Hotel, I’d be checking all my plug sockets. That’s incredible. That, I mean, they did good, wait, did I eat the pasta there? No, I didn’t. I just wanted to eat the pasta, yeah. You told me it was good. It was up and gone by the time I had a chance to tell you one anecdote about it. Oh, did we talk about the fact that JC’s Kitchen, it’s no longer in its new, its current spot. It’s moved to a different fucking town. Have we talked about that? Right. Yeah, we hadn’t mentioned that, but I know that that is a thing that’s happened. Yeah, so JC’s Kitchen, I mean, more recent listeners might not even know this as part of our lore, but we joked for a long time that JC’s Kitchen’s like a food stand and bath, make phenomenal, like, you know, marinated meat basically, served in wraps and in bubble and squeak. Really good, became like an object of fascination for our listeners because we just talked about it over and over again. Recently has moved to Trowbridge, I think, which is, you know, like, not bath, where they’ve been based for years and years. And that is apparently acceptable. They have a permanent location, Matthew, so they fulfilled that part of what we wanted, except they did it in a different town. How are you feeling about that? It’s like the old monkey’s poor wish, isn’t it? I just wanted to have a regular shop. I didn’t say bath, God damn it. Congratulations to the people of Trowbridge. What a treat for them, but I’m sad to see them abandon. Well, I don’t know if we were the OG site. Maybe he abandoned somewhere else before and maybe he’s, so other people, have you been burned by Jacy’s Kitchen? Yeah, like some kind of Jacy’s Kitchen helpline. You know what I mean? Call in and we’ll just cancel you about it. That’s tough, that’s tough. Cause the Thai Hut closed too. So that’s like two good food stores that have just fucked off now, which that’s tough. Apocalypse on the good food places. Yeah, the Jack and Potato place still stands. Like where is the justice in that? You know what I mean? And Goulash, I mean, really the big news is I am absolutely obsessed with that new Tears of the Kingdom trailer. Oh yeah, of course, yeah. Sorry, I thought you were going to talk about the sides at Milk Bun again. No, I am obsessed with that, but I’m currently more obsessed with Tears of the Kingdom trailer. I always had faith this was going to be a great thing, but I definitely feel this was the trailer where everyone was like, holy shit, we’re getting a new Zelda in three weeks and kind of woke everyone up and showed everyone loads of stuff which wasn’t in Breath of the Wild. That’s, I’m just incredibly hyped for it. And the music is magnificent. That new sax theme. I listened to that trailer at least a couple of times a day. You’re not really a guy who tweets about game stuff much. So I knew that sax meant a lot to you when you did at least like three tweaks about it. I thought- Oh, it sounds so fucking good. It just sounds so good. Like it’s properly earwormed into my head. Like I’m thinking about it all the time. I’m just praying it’s not a piece of music they’ve only written for the trailer. I really hope mad sax jams is gonna be a big thing in the game too. Did someone speculate that like that, that’s music you can play with an instrument you create using different items in the world. Just build your own saxophone with a crafting system. It’s like one of the five best trailers probably ever. It just has a broad sweep of mechanics in the game. I must say that I found that even like remote, well, I’m not so sure about this game, whole thing like completely tedious because I just thought surely like you, you just, you know, your faith is bought by the fact that you played Breath of the Wild and they made a sequel to it. Like what are we doing here, Element? But yeah, it was nice to see a bit of optimism on the timeline for once instead of people talking about acquisitions or other boring things. So yeah. Optimism sort of mixed with like the most insane jealousy I’ve ever had when you get to review that game. Do we make a Pyrrhic run at trying to get Nintendo to send us copies of this? Is it even worth it? Like it worked for No More Heroes 3, but should we try this? Yeah, like I think it’s well, I mean, this is probably a behind the scenes conversation really. Yeah, we like to have these on there sometimes. It’s tough though. Like they’re very particular about review code these days. Right. There’s quite an elaborate process you have to go through to get code onto a Switch. Yeah. The fact that we topped the video game podcast in the UK chart. Yeah. Like that as a screenshot makes the podcast sound a lot more important than it is if you don’t really know how the charts work. Yeah, it’s like, never mind we had like 85 more downloads. It’s like, yeah, the chart placements, wow, 42 places up, wow. Yeah. Yeah, they are a little bit arbitrary. Maybe I can trick someone into giving us that game with a screenshot of that. I feel like that Curry’s Tears of the Kingdom voucher they’ve put out that knocks 15 quid off has like restarted the UK economy, basically. Like that thing is gonna keep this country out of recession, basically, because everyone just pre-ordered that game at once, I think from there. So, good. I’m not getting paid by Curry’s by the way, but it was just fucking handy because it means you can pay 45 quid as opposed to, you know, 55 quid or whatever. So. Isn’t it a 70 quid game, a 60 quid? 60 quid, I think, yeah. Yeah, I mean, for that sex, worth it. Yeah, can’t wait for that, should be very, very good. We have at least like two Zelda episodes planned next month. One is gonna be just two giant men play Tears of the Kingdom. The other one, Matthew’s trying to get a guest from the N64 era to talk about reviewing Zelda games. It seems to be a bit of a mixed effort, Matthew. Maybe we need to re, sort of like, reselect a target to make it a bit easier on ourselves. But it would be cool to do that next month, wouldn’t it? So fingers crossed. Okay, good. That’s the off air meeting complete on air. Let’s go to, I’ve got one other thing to talk about before we get into this episode, Matthew. So, Patreon. We just went out and said to everyone, here’s what we’re making on Patreon for the rest of the year. I wanted to recap it here very quickly. People will know that we don’t have ads on the podcast. We are ad-free. We are Patreon supported, and we have no plans to change that. But basically, we like to tell people in advance what we’re doing on the Patreon for the year so they know what they’re paying for. We’ve got two tiers. We’ve got the one pound tip jar tier and the four pound 50 XL tier. And the XL tier is where we do two bonus podcasts a month. So I’m just gonna fire through these Matthew. So the XL episode in May is 50 things that make us go, ooh no, in games. So that should be good. And anyone who knows our Patreon will see that we did 50 things that make us go, ooh yeah, in games in the, like a few months ago. So this will be a nice sequel to that. We’ve got the best TV episodes ever on the XXL feed. Looking forward to that one too. Bit of a deeper dive into TV, which we love waffling on about. June, we’ve got XXL episode is The Best Boss Battles Volume 2, colon surprise second health bar. That was a Matthew Castle classic there, very good. XXL that month is the best Indiana Jones things. We’re gonna talk about movies, the video games and also the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which Matthew has seen apparently. So I’m looking forward to discussing that. July, XL, games that deserve a remake. XXL, Mission Impossible movies ranked. Matthew Castle back on his bullshit, can’t wait. August, XL, Best Video Game Levels, Volume 2. XXL, an episode about board games. We don’t know the exact shape of that yet, but Matthew was like, I think I could talk about some board games. And I was like, yeah, let’s do it. Sounds good, man. XL for September, Matthew and Samuel do an escape room and the best gaming prisons. This is a surprising amount of gaming prisons. That should be good fun. XXL, Matthew is back on his Asian crime fiction bullshit. That is the name of the episode, not just a description of the episode. October, XL, the best Resident Evil moments, a chance to go back and discuss the whole series. It’s been more than two years now since we’ve done that. So it seemed like about time for a bit of a rehash, I guess. XXL, the top 10 Martin Scorsese movies. We ascend into full, full-blown white podcaster guy, self-parody, let’s go. It’s gonna be good, Matthew, I can’t wait. November, XL episode, the old Hitman games episode. We’re gonna talk about everything prior to the Hitman 2016, so look forward to that. XXL, David Fincher movies ranked once again, self-parody, white podcaster guys. December, XL, the best and worst console launchers. XXL, the best TV shows of 2023. So that’s what you get basically if you support us. And you help to make the regular podcast go as well. Matthew, any thoughts on that lot? When you hear them back, it is sort of a parody, isn’t it? What podcast people talk about, it’s good. I’m looking forward to it. Fucking hell, that’s a lukewarm sell, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s like whatever podcast guys do, but yeah, good, good. I know, it’s a Sunday night. It’s tough to do an episode. I just watched a two hour film about peach farmers being forced off their land. Amazing. Yeah, they wouldn’t get My Pulse racing, I’ll be honest. Okay, this is- We wouldn’t be doing an XL on that. I don’t know, man, 2025. We might be out of ideas by then. Okay, this episode then, The Best Games of 2015. If you are a long time listener of the podcast, you’ll know this is a continuing series for us. We’re going through every year that we worked in games media and we plan on going a bit further back once we catch up to the modern day. So this episode, all about The Best Games of 2015, a big year for big games, an exciting year to get into. And for those who might not know this, the episode format as well, or just to recap, if you haven’t listened to one for a while, our last one was January with The Best Games of 2015. Basically what we do is, we have a preamble where we set the scene, discuss a few news items from 2015. And what we were up to in games media, Matthew was working on OXM this year, I was working on PC Gamer. We’ll talk about that to offer a bit of context, I guess, from that sort of ground floor, making a games magazine in the UK element. And yeah, in this section two, we’ll get into our top 10 games of that year. So it’s an all encompassing look at what was going on in 2015. So Matthew, to start with, what were you up to in 2015? Still learning the ropes on OXM and settling back to life in Bath. I bought a house in 2015, but it was a fixer upper, was it doer upper? Yeah, fixer upper, I think. So began like a year of sort of tromping over and doing little weird bits and bobs. It was like this absolute kind of like time capsule from the, I don’t know, 60s, 70s. My distinct memory is stripping up wallpaper while listening to the podcast Mystery Show. Do you remember that? Vaguely? What’s the- It was an amazing podcast from someone who was serial adjacent and it only ran for like eight episodes. It was one of the classic, I’ve got eight amazing ideas for a show, but beyond that, nothing. Oh, like this one, except we did it for 123 episodes. Our first eight were like decent, but these were extraordinary. It’s the person who, she did the thing about how tall is Jake Gyllenhaal. So yeah, I spent a lot of time going, man, that’s a good podcast, while also peeling big strips of paper from a wall. That’s my 2015. Yeah, so last time we talked about 2014, that was such a turbulent year, our future where we both worked. They closed one London office and reopened another one much close to Paddington, but it was a lot smaller as well. And a lot of editorial teams were basically told you can move to Bath or your job won’t exist. And then most people didn’t move to Bath. It was just you and Kate Gray, I believe, on OXM. So, yeah, so you were kind of, you came back. This was a year, definitely the year that you and me became pals because I remember, well, there were two things, there was a trip we went on, which I’m sure we’ll discuss shortly. And there was also the time that I was redesigning PC Gamer. On a Saturday, you were in, and we both went to the Coeur d’Alene, a tiny bath pub, for a drink afterwards on a Saturday afternoon. And I feel like from there, you and I sort of built a little friendship from there. Is that how you remember it? Us meeting at that point? I remember the office stuff better than the Coeur d’Alene stuff. I don’t even know where, where the fuck is that? It’s like down one of like that 19 alleyways that are in the town center. Like the, yeah, is it opposite the Butchers? No, it’s slightly further back, I think. It’s just- One of Bath’s many Diagon Alley’s. Yeah, basically. Offshoots. Yes, yes. Yeah, I do, I do remember us becoming Better Pals, which was good because, yeah, OXM was, was like quite a difficult mag to make. This is quite a weird year. This is really quite a weird episode in that I basically have like no, you know, I go from being a Nintendo guy up until 2014 to having like no involvement with Nintendo whatsoever. And I had to sort of submerge myself so quickly into Xbox and get my head around it in order to make their official magazine. Like, you know, I’ll tell you in advance, there’s not a single Nintendo game on my list, which is like a first. Yeah. And, you know, looking across the list, like I don’t, you know, there’s a lot of, there are some good games that I played later, but in the actual year itself, I don’t know if I really played anything. I reviewed the very bad Plasticine Kirby game for Games Master, but it was, yeah, like quite a weird sort of recalibrating, trying to get myself into Xbox. I was also playing a lot of PC for the first time since my teenage years, because the previous Christmas, Catherine built me a gaming PC for my Christmas present. Like best Christmas present ever. That is incredibly thoughtful and sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like a bit, you know, this is back when she was, she was sort of like doing hardware stuff. So she was, you know, kind of really knew what she was doing. And it was like a bit of a beast. And yeah, I was actually playing a lot of stuff on PC and then grumbling about it on Xbox. I became one of those boring bastards. But that was, yeah, PC was like a big, big part of my life this year. Interesting. Yeah. Cause I suppose like we never, we never talk that much about your relationship with PC gaming, but it’s obviously like in the last few years, it’s been basically since 2015, I guess it’s been a core part of like what you’ve been doing in some form. Yeah. So, you know, it’s, it’s interesting. My 2015 was by comparison, this is probably the most settled I ever was on PC Gamer. Right. I basically like had, it’s quite a quiet and sort of like slightly lonely year, I guess. This isn’t like a sort of boo-hoo for me year, but this is definitely like a year where I remember having a day off where I just watched Daredevil season one in its entirety. And that was like, that was like an accepted use of a day off. And not, not that I’m judging people who would do such a thing now. Daredevil acceptable. I’d say any of the other Netflix Marvel series. Oh yeah. It gets a little, a little flakier. Yeah. I’d have been devastated if I had a day off to watch Iron Fist, for example, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. Everyone, everyone saw that one being rubbish coming from a mile off. So that was fine. Yeah. So I sort of like future stuff had kind of calmed down slightly. I think like basically there was a tiny office in London and then like two floors worth of people in a four floor building and bath. And then it was like, the company was sort of started from a larval state again before it became what it is now, which is, you know, this like massive, massive thing that owns loads of different brands. So it was just a year of like relative calm. I had bought a PS4 the previous year, but to be honest, most of my gaming was on PC still. That was like, yeah, I was just trying to be as like immersed as I could in PC gaming because I’ve discussed this before, but like coming to PC Gamer, I was a little bit like sort of unsure of myself slightly. Like I didn’t have as deep a knowledge as some of the other people there because I’d like moved over from multi-format games journalism. And I’ve always been someone who like is a bit of a jack of all trades when it comes to games, which I think is a strength when you’re making a podcast like this. But it means that like, if you ask me, Samuel, what’s your favorite MMO? I’d be like, I’ve never played an MMO. I’m sorry, I just haven’t. I just not my genre. Maybe I’d enjoy FF14, but I haven’t haven’t really bothered with that. So, yeah, this was like the most settled. There wasn’t a load of like status quo shaking stuff going on this year. On PC Gamer, it was really interesting because we founded the PC gaming show this year. So for those who might not know, like the E3, a sort of time frame PC specific show is a thing that was created primarily by Tim and Evan in the US on PC Gamer, but I’ve worked on it too. I played, I think I played a small but important part in its creation and I’m here. It’s still running eight years later and I’m outlived E3. Yeah, absolutely. And so I’m pretty proud of having a part in that because we saw that like PC gaming was not being well served at E3. It didn’t have its own place where you could talk about that stuff, where that audience, you know, who’s those tens of millions of people using Steam every day could find out what’s coming up specifically on that platform. So we built it and we did it in such a tight timeframe and then over the years, it’s just got more and more refined. So that’s part of what I did this year, Matthew, but you’re on OXM then, like, can you remember which games were at your cover this year just to give people an idea of what’s going down? Yeah, I’ve been re-reading some OXMs this evening, actually, and like, it’s actually, it’s not bad. The magazine, like, it’s not one I’ve returned to a lot, you know, I think it’s quite well written. I think it’s quite funny. There’s actually a lot of, like, weird jokes in it, which I don’t remember at all. Like, the back pages are sort of surprisingly still good, which is, you know, very rare for back pages. That’s the back page concept of a magazine, not this podcast. Yeah, that’s alright. But, like, the messaging of the mag is an awful lot of, like, well, Halo 5’s coming and holy shit, it’s the year of Halo 5 and, like, Xbox is winning this year with Halo 5 and, you know, move over every other game, it’s Halo 5. Which knowing kind of what Halo 5 sort of launched as and the kind of reception it launched to and this general lack of impact in the greater gaming landscape seems a bit daft. Now, I’ve got a lot of my E3 cover line, or maybe it was the post E3 issue, was Xbox owns 2015. Halo 5 Guardians leads the greatest lineup in Xbox history. Well, that’s what Phil Spencer said on stage at that E3 conference. So you’re probably just echoing that sentiment. Yeah, but like any indicator of how that holds up, if you actually open the Mac and go to that E3 feature, it starts with Halo 5 Guardians, as promised, but the next entry was Minecraft for HoloLens. Did that even come out? Could you even buy HoloLens? I have no fucking idea. What an absolute bust that was. Then there was a bit about Dean Hall’s Ion. Like also in that issue in which Xbox was owning 2015, there was a one page news story about the wireless adapter for Xbox controllers on PC. Wow big news, massive, E3 month, and that’s what goes in the news section. That’s got big, we did it before E3 actually happened, energy to it, you know. Yeah, definitely some of it, definitely some of it, but yeah, Halo 5 was on the cover at least twice by itself, but in a big way in two others. Fallout 4 we leant on a lot. Then there was a bit of Star Wars Battlefront and a bit of Black Ops 3. I think we actually had a pretty good year. I think every other issue would sort of actually hold its own and do okay sales-wise, so people thought I knew what I was doing, where actually it was just that there was so much fervour for Fallout 4 that it was like impossible to fail. Like I’d put Fallout 4 all over the wallet, regardless of what was on the cover. There were so many wallets, which was just fucking Vault Boy giving his big thumbs up, and it worked. Like people just fell for that again and again. Yeah, yeah. Sort of like that. It was funny as well, because I remember us having a conversation about how you try to get Darth Vader or a Stormtrooper on every cover in some place, because Battlefront, which was properly revealed this year, released this year, was such a massive, massive deal. People were just so hungry for any Star Wars game, and it was the Force Awakens year, so anticipation could not have been higher for a game that was ultimately fine and very quite anemic content-wise. But yeah, like massive, massive hype there, and yeah, I definitely remember you being like, yeah, popped a Darth Vader here, popped another one here, or like different covers, and I admired it, frankly, because I remember this similarly on PC Gamer. This was a year where, like, the first couple of issues, like one issue didn’t sell so well, and I was like, okay, great, this is going to be a great year. And then there just seemed to be an unbroken run from spring to the end of the year where the mag just kept selling. And that was clearly because we finally had some fucking games to talk about. We didn’t have that in 2014 as much, but 2015 was chock-a. Do you mind if I run through the covers we did on PC Gamer this year, Matthew? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, so January 2015, so technically the end of the previous year was Overwatch, so, you know, massive deal that had just been revealed, and we were the first on shells with a cover, which was great. I felt like that’s held up well as an editorial decision. A Total War Attila cover comes next, with the future of Total War in the headline. That was definitely, I remember that being like, I need something, and there’s a new Total War coming out, so let’s go with that. Then you get to Just Cause 3, that was, when it was revealed, we were basically on shells, that was cool. It ended up being a game that people didn’t seem to love compared to the second one, but was, you know, sort of like a, still an extension of what they were doing with the second one in a series that people had a big appetite for returning. Fable Legends, a game that didn’t come out, that was next. I remember, a big thing around this time was GTA V came to PC in 2015, so that was a huge deal, but I remember like just chasing a GTA V cover that didn’t happen over the course of about three or four months, and how stressful that was, and then pulling a cover out of my ass when that didn’t happen. That’s what this Fable Legends cover was, but God bless Xbox, they got me all the access I need, then the game was cancelled, what, like a year later or something? I don’t know. Quite nice art, Fable Legends. Lovely art, yeah. The character art was really striking. And notably, quite a big part of their E3 conference this year, so they must have been pretty certain it was happening for quite a while. Oh yeah, we did a big interview with old, who is the guy who used to wear sunglasses on stage? Oh, Kudo Sinoda, is that his name? A big chunk of that was him talking about, you know, it was kind of like, well, Fable Legends is almost here, what’s next for Lionhead? And it was all kind of like, things are looking so great for this team, you know, firing all cylinders and you’re just like, wah, wah. Yeah, that’s tough. Yeah, it’s sort of like, I think it’s interesting because when you watch the Xbox E3 conference back, it’s next to Sea of Thieves in the running order and you’re kind of there thinking, maybe Microsoft saw both these studios as like, oh, this is their chance to basically thrive on Xbox One and one studio truly did and the other didn’t get the chance to. And it’s just interesting in retrospect. So yeah, it was a really nice thing to cover and it did sell well, so people were obviously interested in reading about it. Possibly stuck a big GTA 5 logo top left. And Darth Vader was coming out of the fabled hero’s mouth. Yeah we made a sword into a lightsaber, just to really underline the point. Rainbow Six Siege was next and a game I wasn’t interested in, but people seemed to think it was a big deal and it was actually a cool game and it had quite an extended life. Star Wars Battlefront was next after that. This might have been the best selling issue of PC Gamer I ever worked on. It had Deus Ex and GTA V in the hot zones of the cover, we did a complete history of Star Wars games, guess who fucking enjoyed putting that in the magazine. Total War Warhammer was revealed next, that was fucking massive for us on PC Gamer, huge deal when that game broke the cover. Hitman 2016 was on the August cover, Matthew, straight after E3. XCOM 2 was on a cover in September 2015, so huge stuff here. Then, we had a Doom cover in October with a big Fallout 4 hit on it too, and then we had a Deus Ex Mankind Divided cover and a Star Citizen cover with Mark Hamill’s face on the cover to close out that year. So pretty big stuff. I forgot there was the Star Citizen Celebrity review. Yeah, actually one of our writers went on the motion capture stage and interviewed a bunch of people. I think that’s the most access anyone’s ever had to that. That’s still not out, right? No, it’s not. It’s like a single-player campaign, but the game, the multiplayer game is out and is like an ongoing thing. So yeah, it was quite a big year for games and so it just felt like it was quite a nice status quo and it was, I feel like every mag in the company was kind of doing alright this year because we were just like riding this huge wave of stuff. It was tough to like not have something. I do remember when Battlefront was announced, everyone was just fighting to have it on their cover and to get on shelves first with it. I think like just pretty much every mag went with Star Wars in the end in some form. Matthew is how I remember it. But yeah, it was a little bit sort of Wild West in terms of I kind of think there was actually any story connected to any of it. I think people were all working from the same information and the same like three bits of art and there was a little bit of like, well, if you can make it happen, you can make it happen. So we definitely started doing covers for games without the blessing of the people who were making them. So it was like, we did that and that carried on. So I remember we were doing like Mass Effect and Dromeda covers based on like fucking nothing. And you’re like, well, how did this happen? But they don’t say no, then. Yeah, it was interesting because I remember, I think we had like, where’s it on PC Gamer went to like a Battlefront event and so we had some original access and interview quotes. And I was like, yes, we can make a cover out of this. That’s good. But it definitely was a kind of like race to get that giant ATAT image on the cover. And that ATAT image was all that existed for ages and ages. Good times. So yeah. Just stick another Darth Vader on top of it. That’s the secret to making that art really, really sing. Yeah, yeah. So that aside, Matthew, this was the year we redesigned PC Gamer, which was quite stressful. We didn’t change it like drastically, but we gave the front end of the mag a bit of a shot in the arm, which it really needed and updated all the old fonts and stuff. And I was very, very proud of the end product. We saved it for our top 100 issue when we do the, you know, basically, we would sort of like argue politely on the team what are the 100 best games to play now. And then we put that out and it would do sort of like a big deal every year, basically. So we redesigned the mag in time for that and was so proud of the end result. And I think I mentioned before there was a missing word in my editorial intro, which kind of sums it all up, really. Just one thing to spoil everything. Was it top or 100? Welcome to the top. Yeah, and then just like a triple space and a full stop. And then, yeah, so and then we won the the GMA this year, the last GMAs they did for Best Print brand or whatever it was, Matthew, Best Magazine. So yeah, I was super proud of that as an achievement. That was like, this was like definitely the peak of me and magazines. I should have just resigned after this really. Terrible. What about you, Ono? So did you feel like you made the mag your own this year or do you have to wait until the redesign the next year? The redesign, like we would, I think there’s a bit more of us in there. Like there’s a few more kind of like sillier sides. And I think we repurposed some of the columns and news into sort of regular jokey bits that weren’t there before. Like I say, the back pages were like surprisingly great. I think that was mostly the doing of Alex Dale. And this is also the year we hired Tom Stone, Kate Gray, our staff writer who came over from O&M left early in the year. And then we hired Tom, who was just like one of one of the best people. I love Tom’s bits. My biggest regret with Tom is that he didn’t get to work on NGamer because he was a big end game ahead and OXM wasn’t NGamer, but his application was like, I think if it had landed on anyone else’s desk, they might not have interviewed him. But it was so I was like, oh, this is someone who was really like me when I was on NGamer. And it just absolutely like just laser targeted got through to me. So, you know, it sometimes does work out, but yeah, just a real, a real like mind. And the mags full of all this weird stuff. Like, like I say, I remember it being a lot drier than it was, but I was just reading through it today. And there’s always this great back page about all these games. The month rare replay came out and it was always rare games that didn’t make it, that didn’t make the cut. And they were all, they all start off sounding like legit rare things, quite twee character pieces, and then all sort of twist into something really sinister or dark. Explaining why that they didn’t make the cut. Hang on, I’m gonna read one. I’m gonna read one to you that made me laugh. This is probably gonna sound terrible now and make me look idiotic. There was one that was… So there’s a Photoshop of a man’s face on a bit of meringue. The game is called Pavlova Panic and it says absolutely everybody adored this classic N64 game about a wisecracking meringue based dessert on a mission to be eaten by a hungry crow, but you’ll never likely see re-release as everything from level 3 on is just John Hurt reading Mein Kampf in its entirety. That really made me laugh seeing Mein Kampf that close to Photoshop of some meringue. You saying this has reminded me actually that this is the first year that on PC Gamer we did the review of The Back Pages from that year and for those who don’t know, we basically we put all our back page jokes up on the website and provide commentary with them and because we did that for the first time this year, I suddenly realized how bad they were looking at them all intact and like in a row. I was like, although these are really shit, actually, there was one really good one where I’m wearing an eyepatch. That was good. The rest were like quite dodgy and that was tough. We did a we did like a really fake like a fake sort of wallpaper style magazine called Triangle with Adam Jensen on the cover and I think it was just like I don’t know what the joke is really. And like there’s a lot of that going on where you’re like I don’t I don’t know what’s going on. One of the funny ones actually is that like is Batman Arkham Knight, which I don’t know if people know this or remember this, but on PC it launched and then they took it off sale because it was running so badly. When they later put it back on sale, it was still running quite badly, I would say. But we basically did like Batman on his little wrist computer getting a refund for Arkham Knight on Steam. That was pretty good. But the rest were really shit. I just scrolled through them while you were talking about John Hurt, Morang. And it was tough, man. But we actually made them better because we saw the comments this year and was like, okay, the next year the jokes actually have to be jokes. And so we did improve them very gradually. Were there any others from this year that sort of jumped out to you? Back pages? Yeah. We did one about, there was this story about they were trying to make Halo, they were talking about Halo 5 multiplayer and how they were going to make it like a nicer place with better community controls. And there was a back page thing about like, it was something like that, like the age of tea bagging is over and here’s like 21 new kind of ritual humiliations that are going to take off with Halo 5. And one of them was just called crisping. And it was to eat them eat a very noisy mouthful of crisps down the mic at the person you just killed. Which I just the word crisping really made me laugh. And there was another one about perks in Fallout 4. And one of the first perks was called look at my amazing hat. That’s good. That’s better than all of mine from this year. At least one page of OXM was like relatively funny. None of mine I should add. No, that’s good. I like that. Interesting, I don’t think I even know that OXM had a back page gag. I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention. When we redesigned it, we got rid of funny back page and just turned it into a like developers picking their five favorite games. It’s funny as well because I think it must be the next year where I remember being in some kind of like future town hall and Declan, who was one of my favorites of the managers we had at that time actually, I quite like Declan, was like, No OXM has been redesigned and they have a whole column about barrels and I was like, wow, amazing. And that was the first time I ever heard about the concept of barrel watch, Matthew, which I suppose we can say for the 2016 channel. I mean, yeah, there’s not much left to the imagination with that. So did you go on any fun trips in 2015, Matthew? Yeah, you mentioned a trip we went on, but I’m actually like, I’m just trying to think what the fuck was that? Just Cause 3 and Baby Man. Oh my god. That was the trip. Oh, it was that course. Yeah. Was it like Hanberg we were in or Hanno? Yeah, it was Hanno. It was Hanberg, I thought it’s not Hanover, it’s Hanberg, because yeah, yeah, have we talked about that on the pod before? We talked about Baby Man before. I sort of like that is the best bit of that trip. Yeah, we talked about Baby Man, we talked about the bit where I was so hungover the next day after the trip that I was sat there thinking, I can’t throw up, I’m the editor of PC Gamer, I can’t throw up on a press trip. That was like, that was kind of my big memory from it. There was also that really cool guy from one of the broadsheet newspapers there, who like, who we were both trying to be his mate. Remember that guy? That was like, that was quite funny. What was he like, completely unfazed by Baby Man? He was, he got into Baby Man. He was like, he was a pretty chill dude. I think we were both like, it would be cool to have a friend like this in our lives. So let’s just gradually try and make friends with him. It didn’t really materialize. But the Baby Man thing was, yeah, it was like a large man with writing on his belly. Was that right? And he would, he basically just played lots of very, very European club bangers, including a remix of the Iron Man theme. Is that right? Am I remembering it right, Matthew? Yes, that is right. But the weird thing about it is when we went to the club, there was a sign on the door that said Baby Man, five euros. And it was like, is this, are we the Baby Men? Like, is that what we’re paying to cut? Is it like adults, children and Baby Man, five euros? It was just, and it was, we paid our money and went in and then, yeah, lo and behold, lo and behold, a sort of avant-garde jazz funk club act materialized. And I had, yeah, one of the better evenings I’ve had on a press trip. It was absolutely amazing. Like, it was a really fun group of people. Like, Keso was there, right, as well. Well, Keso was the one who was like, there’s this like cool music shack sort of under a bridge somewhere that we should go to. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, oh, this is a really bad idea. I distinctly remember you being reticent. We saw Baby Man’s sign and, you know, that didn’t kind of make me feel any better about it. I distinctly remember you being really reticent and like commenting on how out of place you were. And then by the end of the night, me looking over and seeing you dancing your ass off and thought he’s having a great time. This has gone really as well as it could possibly go on a press trip. Yeah. It was really good. Do you remember us were like, we were like in that hotel and there was sort of like some weird underground, like town square that like an entrance opened and you went under the road and that was the venue where we played Just Cause 3. Am I remembering that right? Is that what you remember too? Oh vaguely. I mean, baby man just overshadows so much of that truth. I went to E3 this year too. But what about you? Do you go on any other trips besides that? I went to Crystal Dynamics to see Rise of the Tomb Raider, which was cool because you got to talk to some of the Tomb Raider underworld old hands there about the Tomb Raider that I was actually interested in. They also had a strange office where they didn’t have any blinds and it was all glass and they were quite high up in the skyscraper. So there was all this sunlight coming through the windows was blinding. So they all worked under like huge umbrellas. It was like a sea of parasols. That was quite weird. We also had a very traumatic taxi ride on the way back from Crystal Dynamics, the hotel. Where the taxi turned up and it was covered in like disco lights and in the back it had all these like miniature like screens plugged into games consoles. And it was like unlike the area’s local games taxi, like I’m famous for being the games taxi. So we were like, oh, this would be fun. But for some reason, like he was driving quite erratically and the Xbox PR, who was from the US Xbox team, I can’t remember a name, annoyingly, kind of like challenged him on his erratic driving and he turned like super scary in the car with everyone. And when we got back to the hotel and we got out, the Xbox PR just instantly burst into tears and it was just horrible. It was one of those moments you’re like, what am I meant to do? Like what’s the correct response here? You know, are you meant to like challenge this taxi driver or console? It was it was, yeah, a weird, a weird and bad time. The Parasols made the feature, the taxi didn’t. Oh yeah. I went to Kojima Productions Los Angeles, which is where I joined the ranks of IMDB. Oh yeah, of course. I previewed Phantom Pain and they asked if I would answer some questions for a documentary, which then went out with the game, which probably isn’t like a great look for a journalist also reviewing the game. In hindsight, I should probably have said no, but you know, I was just jet lagged and like, yeah, sure, I’ll sit there. Again, and half remember anecdotes. My contribution to that documentary is not my finest hour. It’s me not really remembering the specifics of Fight in the End. What would, where would our podcast meme economy be without that picture, Matthew, of you in that documentary? It’s crucial. You look pretty good in that video. Like you look, you’re in that recent bigotry. Yeah, I mean, yeah, because it was eight years ago. Yeah, there has been a pandemic since then. There was a, there’s a GamesRadar video of Dan Dawkins interviewing me and Matt Pellett about Phantom Pain because we’d been two of the first in the world to sit down and play it. Dan Dawkins was obviously like Mr. Mel Gisolid and for the GamesRadar, I didn’t even remember them having this. They had a set that was like, or they did a regular show. It was like a little studio set up somewhere, which I have no recollection of going to at all. But it’s like me and Matt sitting on a sofa being interviewed by Dan, and like all the comments are like, look at these fucking nerds, compared to all the other, you know, everyone else had quite glamorous looking video presenters. They were like these fucking dweebs. And then all the other comments are just chiming in going like, these are the only people I trust to tell me about this game based on how they look. To me, this looks like this game is all they’ve got, in nothing else. People are like, this is exactly who you should trust, because these guys have got nothing else in their lives. I also upset Kojima by tweeting about the inclusion of, what song was it? Oh, Man Who Sold the World. I think I mentioned one of the pop songs that you picked up in the game. It was one of those terrible PR activation things where they’re like, for the next half hour you can all tweet, and then Kojima might retweet your tweets. I managed to tweet the one thing which pissed him off, and then had a load of people come over to me going, you’ve got to delete that tweet, you’ve got to delete that tweet. He doesn’t want that out, he doesn’t want anyone to know that that song’s in the game. So I managed to annoy him from afar, that was good. There are tallies with Ben from MinMax’s experience where they said how long Ground Zeroes was, and then they were like, you can’t say that, or ever, and it’s like, maybe you should say what you can’t say before. Right, well that’s it, because they were just like, tweet about what you’ve played. Is this thing? It’s like, I don’t know, they should be a bit more polite to the star of their documentary, I think. But that’s just me, Matthew. Me, Matt Pellett, Guillermo del Toro. People in the comments go, these fucking dweebs. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, so I do remember, actually, the Metal Gear Access thing was funny, because I did hear from a PR quite early that they were bringing it to PC. But weirdly, they locked us out of all of the different preview events. And I remember you coming back from that trip and just telling me like, you were like, oh yeah, this is a fucking like 10, basically. This is just, you know, an all-timer. And being incredibly jealous. But the one other trip I did this year, actually, was I went to DICE to see Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and Star Wars Battlefront. And that was quite a fun trip, actually. I remember being with the PS Access lot and one of their cameras hadn’t come back with them on the plane from like Stockholm or wherever we were. That was like, that must have been the most stressed they’ve ever been. But yeah, that was quite a fun trip because DICE as well is like, basically, their office is like a Mirror’s Edge level. And you go there and you’re like, oh yeah, this kind of tracks actually that they would make this first person game in this quite modern architecture. Did you start climbing over all the brightly coloured bits? No, because I was out of shape from eating too many white chocolate buttons, Matthew. That’s my cross to bear. So yeah, that’s kind of like, anything else to add from this year, Matthew, in terms of like fun times or relevant experiences, a lot less dramatic in 2014, isn’t it? Yeah, I mean, I guess like in hindsight, I did get to do quite a lot, which was fun. Yeah, like the Metal Gear review event, like I played that game for a whole week, which as an editor, going to a week long review event, it seems a bit gross. But, you know, I trusted my skillful team to suck it up. That’s what makes you such a great manager, basically, and always has. Yeah. So Matthew, shall we pivot to what was going on at E3 that year? Because quite a pivotal year for the console manufacturers. So you’re in, basically, the console’s launch in 2013. So at this point, you’re getting into, like, the, you know, what have you actually got for this generation? What is going to define this generation? And it’s interesting because Xbox has been in basically damage control mode since the sort of like Don Mattrick sort of like Xbox One announced disaster. From there, it’s been reconstruction, reconstruction. But here’s the thing, right? I would argue this conference has what I think is, in retrospect, I’m the most excited about, like, now when I think about everything that was at this conference. More than FF7 Remake or The Last Guardian, the thing that I get excited about in retrospect is the fact they did Xbox One backwards compatibility. And they announced it at this conference. And it’s the only thing they have there that really got, like, an absolutely killer reception. People were like, you know, both console manufacturers have taken a hard line of, no, we’re not doing backwards compatibility, it’s done. We’re just doing next console. And it just, it really, like, they got away with it because they both did it, basically. But it had become, Xbox here turned it into a battleground. It was something they could win on, basically, that Sony didn’t have to invest in. And it’s a really, it’s really quite nice to watch in retrospect, because it’s kind of surrounded by, I think, a fairly lukewarm lineup of Xbox games. They make a huge deal about Halo 5, as you’d expect, that kicks off the show. Recore, they kind of positioned it as if it’s, like, Spider-Man level or Horizon level exclusive. Oh, it was, it was absolutely nothing. Like, the big line with that is, like, it’s from the creators of Metroid Prime, because, you know, some of the, kind of, retro team had left to set up whatever that studio is called. Armature? Armature, yeah. Yeah, and, like, they’ve been involved in some, like, good ports of things. But they’ve, the idea that they can, kind of, recapture the Metroid Prime Magic, like, they couldn’t recapture the Metroid Prime Magic when they were on the Metroid team, you know, let alone, kind of, like, away from it. It’s just, yeah, it’s a meaningless boast, that. Yeah, Inafune, he had his name on it as well. It was like, uh… Yeah. I haven’t heard about him for a long time. Nah, it’s like, uh, there’s a, I’m sure there’s a comeback in the, uh, comeback Mega Man alike of some kind, Matthew, Mighty Number 10. I look forward to it. Yeah, so you had that, you had that, then you had Rise of the Tomb Raider, of course. Xbox made, like, a big bid by, I assume, chucking an absolute mountain of cash at Square Enix to get this. The sequel to a mega-selling 2013 Tomb Raider game, exclusive to Xbox One, um, did come to PC later, I think. It really was a console exclusive for a long time, or at least like a year or something. It did come to PS4 eventually. Yeah, it did. I think like a year later or something. I think it maybe only came to PC like six months later or something. But, um, yeah, so that, but it was a huge deal. It was like Lara Croft is front and center in this conference. There’s a really like weird trailer in this E3 conference. It’s got the Man of Steel music playing behind it. Fallout 4 on stage here, huge deal. A big thing about this E3 actually is it had like an absolute all-timer of a Bethesda conference. I know we discussed on the E3 Patreon episode we did, Matthew. They had like Fallout 4 like grand reveal and then like they revealed Dishonored 2, they had Doom there and I can’t remember what else they had. Maybe they had Wolfenstein 2, but it was just an absolute like cavalcade of amazing things. I was at that conference, it was super cool. Then you get like a cursed looking Plants vs. Zombies shooter, 4-6 with a car on stage obviously, classic, no Randy Newman, of course, their big piece of hero art for this year was like the shots of characters’ faces side on. So it would be like Master Chief’s face in profile, then it would be Lara Croft, then it would be Marcus Fenix because of the Gears of War 1 remaster, and then it would be a car from Forza, and the human, human, human car will always be funny to me, just to be like, it’s the car’s face, it’s the bonnet. Yeah, hero character. That’s really funny. They also had Henry Ford III on stage, which has big like to collect the award. Here’s the son of the guy who played Huggie Bear, Simpsons Joe Kennedy, a bit of that to it. So yes, then you get to The Division, which has a dramatic and very naff cover of Ordinary World by Juran Juran. I fucking love The Division though, and I’ll talk about it in Best Games 2016. They’re pretty good. See if the Fable Heroes, Gears of War 4 is one last thing, and it just looks like any other Gears of War game, to be honest. So PlayStation Matthew, we definitely talked about this on that E3 Patreon episode, but kicks off with The Last Guardian. So they show you something that people thought they would never see again. Here it was, an actual game that’s coming out, and they had Ueda in the crowd to prove that he was alive, that this was real. Then they go into Horizon Zero Dawn. I think this is the point where the Sony dominance really solidifies. It happens this year to some extent, but I think here you’re really seeing a strategy of cool exclusives take shape, and people really buying into the idea that, PlayStation is actually where all of the good shit lives, and that has basically secured them first place in the console wars, probably for the next 10 years. They’d have to do a lot to sabotage that goodwill, I think. So, Horizon is just such a big deal because it’s obviously guerrilla games, pivoting from the Killzone games, which were quite boring first-person shooters to most people into an open-world game. So a big deal with robot dinosaurs, quite good showing here. Hitman 2016, Matthew, that’s here. Street Fighter V, No Man’s Sky, of course. Dreams, Destiny The Taken King, Miner Stinklebot, who they took out with the expansion, Wise Decision. Tough break. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Final Fantasy VII Remake, which again, a massive, massive reveal. Then there’s some Shenmue 3 stuff, which I think at the time seemed like a massive deal that this game existed, but it was just a Kickstarter campaign, seems a bit bogus in retrospect, not very convincing. That was NAF, that was 0-60 and then 60-0 again very quickly. In fairness, they actually made it, it came out, and the people who liked Shenmue bought it and no one else did. Short of it coming out and announcing NFTs, I can’t think of more of a… after the grand reveal. Then after that you’ve got PSVR, that’s here, I think that releases in next year, Cod Blobs 3, Battlefront is here, and it ends with Uncharted 4, the bit in the jeep going through the town, Matthew the Chase, that was a fucking excellent set piece. An all-timer E3 demo. Yeah, so a really, really strong showing there from Sony. But Nintendo was not something I actually looked up for this episode, so I’m going to leave it to Matthew to recap what was going on with Nintendo this year. It’s bleak. Well, it’s literally a month before Iwata dies. Right, of course. They’re puppets, which at the time you’re like, this is so cute, and now you can’t help but see it as, you know, this is voice work only for a reason. Right, right. Like, this is obviously a very sick man at this point. So the whole thing is like definitely tainted because of that. I mean, they were also puppets because they morph into the Star Fox puppets and show off sort of Star Fox for the first time. Um, like, I think opinions would definitely vary on this one. Mario Maker, big announcement, very cool on paper. Not entirely like my bag. You know, I’m not a big Mario Maker head. Yoshi’s Woolly World. And again, a kind of strand of their ultra cute kind of arts and craft platformers, which I never really thought the aesthetic of these quite counteracted the sort of simplicity of the actual kind of games underneath. Um, yeah, Star Fox was the other big one. I mean, like an indicator of this one, a bit like my Halo 5 straight into Minecraft HoloLens is it’s like Star Fox looking a little visually underpowered straight into here is some exclusive Nintendo Skylanders. Oh, right. And you’re like, if Skylanders is like the second thing that happens, that’s probably not a good sign of where this 15 minutes is going. Right. Um, one thing I do quite like in this is not the Zelda game they announced, which is Tri Force Heroes, the kind of three player co-op 3DS game built in the link between worlds engine. But they seem to film it in the inside the Nintendo building, like in the in the Zelda team area. Right. So like there’s a shot of a Numa walking up some stairs and there’s like the floor signs have got like big Nes sprite art on them, which is really cool. And there’s like a shot of a like meeting room one and it’s got like the sword from, you know, the sword sprite from the original Zelda on it and stuff. And like there is, you know, that that Nintendo building which everyone has seen the external shots of is such a sort of like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory kind of scenario that even like a two second glimpse of a non-descript open plan office is enough to be like, oh, you know, the gates are opening, we get to glimpse inside for this one time only. I bet it probably isn’t even their fucking offices knowing them. They probably filmed it on a set or something. Stanley Kubrick filmed it, Matthew. Stanley Kubrick filmed it. Yes, that’s the indicator of where Nintendo are at this E3. I was most excited by Meeting Room Door. I have a question for you. Do you think this kind of marks the demise of the 3DS this year? Because when you look at what came out, you had a Majora’s Mask port that was, you know, it was like the natural companion to the Ocarina Time port. So it’s good they did that in 3D. You had Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, Code Name Steam, and then Xenoblade Chronicles only running on the new 3DS. Is it kind of over at this point? Is Focus shifting to the Switch, you think? I don’t know. They announced Fire Emblem Fates, which obviously after awakenings is still exciting. That’s still quite bursty. I wouldn’t say it’s totally game over. I think there’s probably more interesting 3DS games this year than there are Wii U games. Oh, brutal. Well, that’s interesting actually. I want to pivot here because you said there’s no Nintendo games in your top 10. Splatoon, that happened this year. Yeah, my relationship with Splatoon is more substantially on Switch for sure. I played a little bit but I just didn’t have a huge reason to or time to. You know what it’s like in this job. The idea of digging into Splatoon and becoming a Splatoon career player just seemed very, very unlikely. I knew it was going to be great. I absolutely believed in it from what we saw in 2014. But I’d be lying to say Splatoon 1 is especially meaningful to me. Was there any Breath of the Wild stuff at this Nintendo conference, Matthew? No, there wasn’t. Fuck, that’s tough. Okay, an absolute write-off then. Xenoblade had come out earlier in the year as well. There’s a trailer for it which has a date prior to the E3. Which is weird. It’s like a remember this. If you’re having to say remember this in your E3 conference, also not a good sign. Yeah. It’s like, hey, everyone, remember the SNES? Yeah, well, you know. I suppose that aside, I didn’t see loads and loads of news items of note. The Iwata thing is the biggest event of the year, really, I think. Yeah, so obviously like a huge deal and, you know, a very well missed. Yeah, it was just what a shocker. Like, you know, you have no idea kind of how, you know, how he was doing on a sort of day to day basis. But like he still felt like quite a big presence. You know, he’s doing a voice for E3 conference. There were still like a few utter asks interviews being written up and, you know, he looked like, you know, definitely in the last couple of years you could see like, you know, he was changed in some way by a public illness that he had been dealing with. But yeah, I don’t know, just sort of, you know, the combination of that and like leaving the Nintendo Mags and all that. It just does as a Nintendo fan. It did feel like a bit of an end of an era. I didn’t feel like, oh, I’m done with Nintendo, but it’s not really until a Switch comes back that, you know, comes out and Breath of the Wild is the game that it is that I kind of like sort of believe fully in them, you know, again, you know, I imagine, you know, lots of other people were in a similar boat. Yeah, so the other stuff that happens this year, like of note, I guess, is that 2K shuts down a couple of studios, including 2K Australia, who worked on Borderlands, the pre-sequel. But like the other notable thing that happens, of course, is that Hideo Kojima is ousted from Konami. And by December has formed his own independent studio, also called Kojima Productions. So yeah, we’ve told that story in as much detail as I think is probably available in the world with Simon Parkin on this podcast. So that’s the episode you can listen to. And yeah, so that’s kind of it for news, really, Matthew. My last question, then, before we get to our list is, do you think this was a great year for games? Because I have previously called this an absolute ball a year. And investigating the list, I think that is true of the very big games. But I think there might be a case of blockbusters doing heavy lifting in a year that didn’t have tons and tons of amazing games. Is that fair for the profile this year? Yeah, it’s probably the defining multi-format blockbuster year of this generation. It feels like it peaks here. The games at the top of my list are a couple of all-timers in there for me, for sure. There are some other big games I’m not as into. And actually, yeah, I will get into some of the games on the list, I guess. But outside of that, there’s a few nines and tens. But there is a little bit of drop-off after that. Yeah, I think I agree. It’s just truly such a massive deal for blockbusters, like you say. But that ends up being, I think, how you maybe remember this year. And it’s funny because when we were talking before this episode, me and Matthew were like, oh, actually, our list might be quite boring to people because this year is kind of like self-evident what matters from this year. Do you think that’s the case, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, maybe I’ve deliberately picked some contrarian takes or tried to spice up the lower end of my list. Actually, it’s not spiced, I’d say it’s genuine. There are some big games this year that I classically don’t have a big relationship with. And so even though people might think they’re a shoo-in, it was a big old shrug from me. I mean, there’s one particular one which is considered one of the greatest games of all times, but I have no relationship with it. So it’s not going in my list. It’s not even in my honorable mentions. It’s going in my list, even though I didn’t finish it, so I’m sure we’ll get into that. But yeah, I think it’s going to be a good pod. It’s going to be an annoying pod if you like FromSoft. Okay, Matthew, should we take a quick break and then we’ll come back with our top 10 games of 2015? Welcome back to the podcast. So, The Best Games of 2015, let’s do it. How do we do this then? So, we count down our top 10 lists, we take it in turns, going from 10 to 1, and then whoever has a game highest in their list, we’ll discuss it when we get to them. So, say that someone has a game at number 10, and the other person has it at number two, we’ll discuss it when we get to number two in the other person’s list. So, pretty straightforward, borrowed from the old Chet and John’s Reassurely Finite Gaming playlist. I feel compelled to point that out, because that was a key podcast text for me. But Matthew, this is going to be fun, I think. So I’ve got a bunch of honorable mentions, I’ll say, for the end, too. I’m guessing you have a few of those, too. Yeah. Okay, great. So, who should go first, you or me? You kick it off for once. Okay, sure. So, my number ten is a slightly weird one, because this game originally released in 2014, but this was the year it came to PC, and it was the year I discovered it. So, this game is Inkl’s 80 Days, Matthew. Ah, yes. So, is this on your list? It isn’t. And I know, did we talk about this in the last episode? I don’t think we did. I don’t think we did. And I think that’s why I made a point of putting it on this list. I think that’s what happened. So, okay. Yeah, basically, like, basically takes the Around the World in 80 Days as a source text and builds this like steampunk world around that story. And the premise of the game is basically, you have to get around the world in 80 days in order to fulfill some, some bets that Phileas Fogg has made. I think I’m remembering that rightly, Matthew. Yeah, that’s right. Should have made more notes, really. Yeah, basically, it’s loosely based on the original, on the original Jules Verne novel. And yeah, Phileas Fogg. Based on the original cartoon. Based on the Steve Coogan film with Jackie Chan. Yeah, so it’s, it’s 1872 and then Phileas Fogg has placed a wager and it basically has to get around the world in 80 days or less. And you basically play as, oh, God, they’re going to really fucking struggle here. Pass part two, Matthew. Bit out of my depth there. But that’s basically, you are in control of that character as it’s basically like his valet essentially making all the decisions that get you around the world. So deciding where to go next, that sort of thing. And interacting with this beautiful, beautiful world map via this, via basically like a sort of graphic adventure style, picking multiple choice dialogue options and having the kind of cause and effect, that sort of thing. There is an absolutely incredible amount of text buried away in this game, possibilities to find as you make your journey around the world. The first time I played it, I thought it was impossible to actually get around the world in 80 days. That seemed impossible just based on like the weird places I ended up and that seemed like the fastest route. And then suddenly I was stuck in a place for like two days and I was like screaming at my monitor. And then you realize as you play it more and more that there are like stiff different shortcuts you can take. But really the game’s magic is about uncovering all of the little bits of text written by John Ingold and Meg Giant. So basically, yes, the writing really brings this game to life. This is my first encounter with Incool’s Games and apparently it’s 750,000 words of text in this game. And it does feel like wildly ambitious for what it is. It’s maybe the best mobile game I’ve ever played. I absolutely adore it. And I’ve enjoyed Incool’s other stuff, but this one really just clicked with me in a very specific way because I think it promotes the idea that it really is about the journey and not the destination. And so your character ends up kind of ruminating on the journey. Even if the bet is lost, at least we had some truly amazing experiences getting there. And I don’t know if any other game has captured that very specific feeling of travel in that way, of going to new places, going to wondrous places. Just using tiny bits of art to bring those places to life, but just putting so much magic in those words. So Matthew, I’m guessing you really like this one too. Yeah, though it did take me a while to kind of click with it, because I think if you go in thinking on sort of game terms, you know, you’re trying to like maximise your chances of getting around the world and you can overthink things. Like you have a sort of inventory system. There’s a lot of objects which you’re like, well, how is this ever going to help me? And then lo and behold, on one of the infinite paths, you may meet someone who that particular object will unlock a particular event. And actually, the thing I had to kind of get over was the idea of like, you know, just go along for the journey and see where the story takes you and enjoy that way, rather than trying to like, like win it per se. And that way, I just think that’s what the game is. And I think that’s exactly what you were saying, you know, it is about the journey and it’s not necessarily about the race to the destination. It’s about seeing what happens and letting the game surprise you. And you’re not trying to like beat it. It’s not out to get you, you know, it’s going to give you a good ride basically wherever you go. Yeah, it’s really good. Yeah, it’s got a lot of like crossover appeal as well with, I think, like people who don’t necessarily engage with games and aren’t used to seeing this kind of subject matter in games. So weirdly, one sort of like borderline meet cute I had was I was next to someone who was reading Around the World in 80 Days on a Train while I was playing this. And then she started asking me about the game. And then we talked for about 10 minutes and then she was like, I have to get off the train now. She was at a stop and I was like, no, that’s the only time that’s ever happened. I’ve been playing a video game and a girl’s gone, oh, what’s this? That sounds like an event that could happen in 80 days. Yeah, exactly. I should document it in my own interactive adventure, Matthew, but yeah, you just have to get a train from Bath to Paddington and then you meet all the people at the five stations along the way. You have to do it at 80 days because that’s how fucking bad the train line is these days. Fucking good luck with that. Yeah, absolutely. Ding dong. Okay. What’s your number 10, Matthew? My number 10, also a bit of an odd one, but something that really stuck with me, the Magic Circle. Oh, yeah, of course, this game, yeah. Yeah, this is by question, who are a group of people who I think they were ex-irrational. Yeah, they were. Maybe Bioshock 2 team? They were both on Bioshock 1 and then they formed the basis of the studio that became 2K Marin to make Bioshock 2. 2, yes. Which is kind of interesting context this game. You are playing a QA tester exploring an unfinished game and you’re basically trying to help ship it or at least polish it up to the point where the level is kind of finished. It’s sort of broken, full of always like busted sort of elements. And while you’re walking around this kind of broken world trying to kind of heal it, you are also witnessing a drama play out between the kind of higher level creatives on the game. There’s this sort of auteur creator figure called Ishmael Gilda who is kind of heading it up and whose sort of ego and sort of endless, you know, changing of opinion is led to this kind of like absurd feature creep. So as you play this game, you realize that it started as a sci-fi game and has warped into a fantasy game. So there’s this like, almost like sub layer of sci-fi you start discovering kind of within the build, which, you know, I think this person is a proxy for a for like a kind of character in the games industry, rather than say specifically this Bioshock team may be thinking about Ken Levine. But it is that kind of figure. It’s the sort of the genius who people love and join the team because they have such admiration for their work and the kind of conflict that can kind of arise between sort of idolizing someone and actually having to kind of like work with them. So that stuff is all really interesting. It’s got this quirky little like mechanical hook where as a QA tester, you can kind of go in and change the characteristics of items in the world by kind of taking the characteristics from one item and putting it into another. So like if there’s like a friendly whatever mushroom, you can take the friendly characteristic, give it to an enemy and that enemy won’t attack you, be on your side and see if to kind of like rewrite the code or these assets to get them to help you to fix the game while also dealing with this kind of big drama unfolding. Like I don’t think there was like masses of… this isn’t like a critically acclaimed game or anything but I do think the mechanical hook is interesting. I actually think the discussion of game development, which at the time I think some people dismissed as being like a little bit inside baseball, a little bit like up his own arse, actually maybe like lands a bit better now because even in these eight years I think we’ve had a lot more exposure to like how games are made through things like the Double Fine documentary or just like you know more investigative journalism and actually some of the stuff this game’s talking about and dealing with maybe like outsiders are in a better position to maybe appreciate it. So, you know, I’d be interested to see how this landed if it was released now as opposed to 2015. It also just has like one of the all-timer funniest endings of a video game where you get the choice to sort of hijack an E3 demo from like within the game and the anticipation of fucking up this demo and like ruining this asshole’s career if you choose to is so delicious. And it just is one of the hardest times I’ve ever laughed at a game. I didn’t find the rest of the game like hilarious, but this one joke as like this perfect payoff to this little quest you’d been on, I thought was just so good. And yeah, it’s really, really stuck with me. Yeah, I think like what is sort of special about this game is like the amalgamation of like different game references in there or like weird chunks of, you know, ideas that have been thrown together in the midst of this game development. I mean that like, you know, if you’ve played like Dark Forces or the original System Shock, you recognize the sci-fi bit that you mentioned. Yeah. Or like, you know, and then like some of the creatures are just so odd. And then they’re against this kind of unfinished assets and things like that. Yeah. And they’re like, there’s like a big like black and white aesthetic to this game, isn’t there as well? And like, and then random bits of colour. Sort of like poking out from that. That combined with like, I think like you say, like that subject becoming more relevant. And then also it having like the programming thing being like a borderline immersive sim element. You know, them tapping into that part of their expertise. And I think that’s like a really cool combination. Like you say, it’s like basically, I’m sure it’s always in Steam sales this, but I think they did see it as like a niche game because when they were making their next game, The Blackout Club, that was much more positioned as, you know, there’s like more people working on it. It was like, I think Trey Parker’s one of the investors in The Blackout Club, I believe. And like it was like a much bigger project. This seemed like their one for them kind of game. Right. And I really like that you’ve highlighted it here. I never finished it, Matthew, which is otherwise it probably would have made this list. I only ever played a demo up until, like I think like about halfway through it basically. But I bet this works great on Steam Deck because you could just play it with a pad. Yeah, they released a console version as well a bit later. So you can play it on a lot of things. But yeah, it’s really good. They’re an interesting team. I didn’t know that about Trey Parker. It probably explains why they’re making a South Park game. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think they’re close ties. Which I mean, what the hell is that gonna be? Well, you know, they have a collaboration going back to The Stick of Truth because Jordan Thomas worked on that game in like a consulting capacity. I didn’t even realize that was a thing. There we go. So that’s like their kind of like history there. He’s a super interesting guy, Jordan. I’ve spoken to him a few times. The closest I made to like a proper like good, good. First name terms, eh? Well, you know, almost. I don’t know. I’ve sort of like- I admire the work of Mr. Thomas. Let’s just move on, shall we? Okay, my next game. I really, I don’t think this will make your list, but I really, really loved it at the time. And I’ve picked Until Dawn at number nine, Matthew. Oh, I almost picked it. I really loved this game and I was not expecting to love it. And I think it’s funny. When you look at this year, you know, it wasn’t last year with the Order 1886 or whatever. That might have come out this year, actually. I can’t remember. But either way, the PlayStation, the hype for PS4 was always there from the start, but this is the year it starts to crystallize a bit. You have a major game that I’m sure will come up, but also you had this game that was announced years earlier. It was like a PlayStation Move PS3 thing, and then kind of vanished for a while, and then re-emerged as this, you know, it’s basically like a bunch of teenagers go on a trip to a spooky kind of like mountain lodge sort of adventure. But the whole thing plays out in the vein of a sort of branching Quantic Dream game, essentially, where decisions can lead to like fatal consequences. All of the different characters are played by, most of them are played by notable actors. So that guy who’s in the Agents of Shield, Rami Malek is in this game, and Hayden Panettiere is in this game. She obviously has quite a big horror sort of like lineage because she’s been in the screen films and stuff. But I always got the sense of that, all that stuff was motion captured years earlier, but this is finally the year they got it out, Matthew. And I think that, I don’t think so many thought this is going to be a hit, but it really, really was. It really kind of caught fire. And it caught fire, I think, because you got to see that Quantic Dream formula without the kind of like the baggage of like the Quantic Dream games and like the discussion around those. But you got to see it in this really fun, schlocky horror movie context where, you know, like some of the consequences seemed a little bit unfair. Like you’d hit the wrong button at the wrong time and someone slips and dies or whatever. That could definitely happen in this game. But you also weren’t so fiercely invested in the characters that you really minded when this horror game picked one of them off. It kind of felt right. And some of the decisions… Because, you know, it has the horror trope of like, there’s eight people and if you kill five of them, the story will continue because, you know, that’s how horror films work. So it’s a much better genre fit for this kind of game than like anything Quantic Dream’s done, I think. Yeah, and so like that kind of match was perfect and then like these actors were really committed to it, I think, and that really gonna bring it to life. The writing was good. There’s like a spooky narrator. Is it Peter Stormare, the narrator in this, Matthew? I think it is. Oh, I get a little confused because they’ve had this sort of narrator figure in like the Quarry and also the Dark Pictures games. So they begin to blur together a little bit. I believe it’s Peter Stormare in this. Yeah, it is, it is, I’ll just check that. So yeah, it’s really interesting. In that respect, and it means that because they anticipate that some of the characters will die, some of the ways they can die are super fun and super exaggerated to kind of match the setting. And I just really liked it combined with, this is super massive kind of breakout game, I guess. This set the formula for what they would do after this. But it was just so fresh and exciting in the moment. Such a fun game to share with someone. And I just think it’s really stood the test of time. What do you think, Matthew? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m quite down on the sort of branch. I say that, I might have another one in my list. Yeah, yeah, I was really pleasantly surprised by this. I remember playing this over August bank holiday weekend, I think is when it came out. I was playing it, but like my brothers and sisters were sitting on the sofa in the same room and everyone was weighing into it. And actually by the end of the weekend, which is about how long it takes to play, everyone was like really invested in it and going, go down there, do it here. It’s a really great co-op game. I think since this one, they’ve tried to do more like co-op modes where like everyone can control one of the eight characters or whatever. But I think it works with like one person on the pad and everyone just like weighing in and seeing what happens. Interestingly, and I hope it’s not like too inside baseball to say this, but this year I was on the BAFTA panel for Best British Game. Right. And in the room, there was so much love for this because of all the games on the list, it was so accessible. Like it was clearly one that some judges, it was clearly the only game they could technically play because they were like, I hated this game, because it had a mouse and keyboard set up, but they loved this game just because you press, if you can press X, you can play until dawn. And it was quite an eye opener of like, wow, like even people I quite respect in this industry, like really rate this because for this reason. Interesting. Yeah. I can sort of see that. Yeah. Yeah. So I think like it being on PS4 just meant, and it being a PS4 exclusive is probably the reason it got all the attention it did get, to be honest. Like it might have been left otherwise. It sounded like the Quarry was about as good as this, Matthew. You played that, didn’t you? Yeah, I did like it. I think where the Quarry isn’t quite as good, and one of the big strengths of Until Dawn is, I think it shifts genres within horror throughout. It starts off, you think it’s going to be a slasher thing, and it actually goes down quite a lot of avenues, and when it eventually lands on, it doesn’t land on until right at the end, and you probably couldn’t guess that’s where it’s going. Right. There’s some almost like weird J-horror beats in this. There’s like serial killer slasher stuff. There’s some stuff in there, some kind of sort of insane asylum. It’s all, you know, it’s quite schlocky, but fun. The quarry is kind of like, oh, I am this thing from start to finish. Yeah. And so it’s just a little less surprising as a result. I wonder why Sony didn’t partner up with Supermassive on more first party exclusives. Yeah, because it seems like the approach would be to like make one of these that’s over like four years or something, and then it’s as refined as this, and it’s like, you know, it’s got massive actors in it and stuff like that. And it’s, you know, like, I guess like, you know, the dark pictures thing is a thing they own and a thing they make. And it’s like, it’s built on the same bones as this. They’re not as good, the dark pictures. Well, it seems like there’s, but I’m glad they exist because- Oh yeah, but I just wish they were like, if each one of those was as good as Until Dawn, that would be a really like special thing to like, every couple of years, I’m gonna get one of these rad things, but they’re a little bit, they’re a little bit six out of 10 when you want them to be like high seven out of 10, you know? Well, I suppose like the other thing that this one had in its favourites, it was you’d never seen this before. Like it’s, you know, it’s tough to like capture the same lightning in a bottle of like, you know, just, this just seems so unexpected to me because I didn’t play it to the subsequent year, but when I was encouraged to, I just couldn’t believe how good it was. So I was just like, wow, this awesome. And like you say, made by British Studio, pretty cool. Did it win that BAFTA in the end? No. Interesting. Yeah. Another game on our list, one. Okay. Oh yeah. That makes sense actually, yes. So what’s your number nine, Matthew? My number nine is The Room 3. Oh, interesting. Not on my list. I’ve talked about The Room before on the podcast. This is a fireproof games, sort of puzzle box game on iOS. In my head, there was, they hit this sort of canes where there was like one of these a year. I think there was a two year gap between two and three because it got a bit more ambitious. But I had a routine of, they’d sort of come out just before Christmas. And I used to play these at the Christmas holidays on an iPad at my folks place, Dan and Devon. And I used to, yeah, I really looked forward to there being another room game at Christmas. The Room 3, I think is one of the best ones. You know, you’re still interacting with these kind of like ornate structures that you kind of like open little hatches and pull little switches and sort of manipulate in this very tactile way using a touchscreen. But this one sort of embeds them in like larger rooms and then the larger rooms are part of a house and you can move between the rooms. So there’s kind of like a broader kind of like game wide puzzle between the rooms. And then the further you drill into them, like the more and more kind of hidden crannies they have. And it also introduces a mechanic where you can like look into like cracks and key holes and small openings within the structures to sort of like zoom inside them. And then there’s almost whole rooms inside some of the structures. So it’s just like everything I like about the room, but much more of it. Yeah, so I’ve always like had a curiosity about this series seeing it on Switch for sale and stuff like that. That VR one looks really tasty, Matthew. I keep looking that up on Oculus Quest. Yeah, like this seems like this was a series that… Do you think critics ever truly love this as much as… I mean, they were always lauded definitely in sort of like mobile gaming sites and they’d win awards and they’d be like picked for Apple Game of the Year on the Apple Awards that they do on their store and things like that. They were, you know, yeah. And like when they ported them to PC and I think they’ve moved them on to Switch as well. You know, people have recognized them as great things, but yeah, I don’t know if they’ve ever had like the noisy critical acclaim, but they’re about, you know, it is my favorite iOS series. You know, I just think they’re so beautifully done. There hasn’t been one since the VR one, I don’t think, unless I’ve missed one. So I hope they do make more of it because it’s just, you know, lovely to click open weird little cupboards and then they turn into other structures and yeah. Did you see the Hellraiser remake recently? No, the one with Jamie Clayton. Yeah, like that has like a, whatever the thing, whatever the nasty thing is that kind of like summons the Cenobites has big room energy. It’s like this mechanical box that you have to kind of twist to sort of transform it into different shapes. And like the different shape it becomes sort of changes the kind of fucked up prize that you’re gonna get from the baddies or whatever. That’s cool. But if there was ever gonna be a series tie-in or crossover, the room, I guess the room actually has a bit of Clive Barker kind of energy to it anyway. But yeah, they should get on that. Or a glass onion, of course, Matthew. Oh yeah, a much less sinister thing. Oh yeah, that would be great. Yeah, that feels like you could just have Daniel K doing that ridiculous accent, giving you clues. In the background. Yeah, that might work quite well. That is like a really good intro to that film, actually. I was quite impressed by that. And then I think everyone was comparing it to the room when that film dropped. Although I don’t know if the tone of that film’s changed now because it’s got a big Jeremy Renner gag in there and the guy almost died. Like, are we allowed to laugh at Jeremy Renner still? Yeah, but the gag in the film isn’t like, I hope this guy gets shunned up on the scene. Well, no, that’s true. But it is still at his expense firmly, that gag, I would say. Oh, I don’t know. I’d say that gag is like, look, he’s loved, you know, he’s cool enough to get a kind of little nod in this film. I assumed that was a real product based on my perception of who Jeremy Renner is. Like, that’s how I felt about that gag. But anyway, yeah, maybe it’s saying Jeremy Renner is like, of this set of kind of assholes. Well, yeah, exactly. Either way, glad that he seems to be doing okay. Yeah, he does, yes. So yes, The Room. I bet they’ve made an absolute mint from this being on Switch because you do always see it like the sales charts and stuff. Always meant to play these, but the VR one weirdly sounds more appealing to me than the non-VR ones at this point, Matthew. But yeah, I don’t know. Do you have like a ranking for that series in your head? Probably like three, two, one, four. Okay, interesting. All right, good. But I’ve not replayed them in a long time. I remember three being good and thus it’s inclusion on the list. Fair enough. So we’re on my number eight, right? Yeah. My number eight is Mad Max. Is this on your list? It isn’t on my list. I did boot it up though because I saw you tweeting or mentioning it. I thought, oh, maybe I should give this another go and see if I like respond in a noticeable way. And anyway, you tell us about it. So Avalanche made a game based on Mad Max. It adapts the universe of the films, even if it’s not a direct adaptation of the films themselves. So you play as a sort of a generic, a non Mel Gibson or Tom Hardy Mad Max. You are, your car has been, I think, taken or destroyed or something. So you basically have to start from scratch with a new car. There’s this nice man who’s with you and he’s gonna help you build your car. And then you basically go, you’re going across this, across the Mad Max desert landscapes, trying to like oust Scrotus, I think his name is. Basically like this warlord who controls the wastelands. Basically you’re doing all the things you do in an open world game, but they are themed around ousting this warlord. And that involves pulling down these scarecrow things, which I guess are like, you know, propaganda. But the main kind of like thing that you end up doing is going into these fortresses, where like the oil refineries and things like that, and dismantling them. They are essentially settlements that you unpick for scrap, which you can use to upgrade both Max and his car. And that involves getting into all these like melee combat scenarios, which is basically a slightly anemic version of the Batman Arkham combat. Not nearly as good, but the car combat in this game is really good and offers a great power curve. You go from having this rusty naff thing to basically this like war machine over a period of time. You become like a lot faster, a lot deadlier. You start taking on convoys, smashing cars up, and it really kind of like, I guess giving you a superficial feeling of like what it was like to watch Fury Road, which came out this year. I think the reason I put it on my list, I think this is one of the best examples of the generic elements of an open world game being bent perfectly around a license. I think it’s really committed to how it adapts those elements. Like most of the level design in this game does seem to go into like those fortresses and how you take them out and the variety of how they’re designed and these scrappy thrown together things. It’s like there’s a war crier in each of these settlements. That’s basically like a dude strapped with explosives who will scream to get like everyone to come and attack you basically like a security system. And every one of them you can like basically like hit a winch and then they’ll just fall and explode to their deaths. And it’s just so violent and fun and over the top. Even the upgrades are given to you by this kind of like weird sort of like desert swami figure. Just this really strange dude who talks to you about your past and then like you just upgrade a few points to improve Max’s sort of stats and then kind of go off again. I think like just really captures the feeling of being this road warrior, this big empty landscape, but not being boring at the same time. It’s kind of miraculous to have a game. It’s just a desert with some, you know, sort of like interesting horizon lines and then like loads of smoke coming out of these different settlements and then just some cars driving around. That’s all this game is, but it still works incredibly well. I played 12 hours of it this weekend, Matthew. I had a great fucking time. Again, one of the games I’ve not finished on this list, but I think it needs a mention as like, this is way better than it should have been. Thoughts? Yeah, I think there’s been like a reassessment as well. Yeah. Like definitely cooler at the time. I think the thing you say about like, it being such a good fit for this kind of open world design is absolutely spot on. I think that is why this game works. It’s, you know, this is a world and culture of zipping across a huge expanse and going to dots where interesting things are. And that’s where you can survive and that’s where life goes on in this particular world. So the idea of clearing it out and like stripping, stripping the desert of everything it has, like narratively, it’s super coherent. Yeah, I’ve just never got very far with it. You know, like it’s, I think one that you can kind of chip away at and pick up again and dip into your save again a few years on and still have a pretty good time. Yeah, absolutely. And I think like it’s, I think I felt like when I first played it, I was like, oh, I’ve got the measure of this. And I think I kind of did, but then going back to it, I underestimated just how compelling that loop is in this particular setting, and how the bits of desert do actually subtly change, like the types of, you know, sort of like old world objects you find there, or even like the way that they’re lit, or like the color of the sand, that sort of thing. Or they’re like, you know, how hard the enemies are, that sort of stuff. It does have like a meaningful power curve to it. And that power curve accelerates quite quickly. You do go from having this proper piece of shit car to something that’s really zippy and like quite useful. And so there’s like just some really satisfying things you can do with the car, like using your harpoon to like pull down towers that have like sniper dudes in them, them just falling to their desks, that sort of stuff. Or using it to rip, using your harpoon to rip a guy out of a car while he’s driving it and pull off the wheel of a vehicle, that sort of stuff. Like where the hand-to-hand combat lacks that granular excitement factor, it just feels like a kind of copy and paste in a lot of ways, but not as good. The car combat feels completely original and kind of uses the different just causey elements of Avalanche was synonymous with in a very compelling fashion. So yeah, I think you’re right, it’s been reappraised, but I think in capturing the story of 2015, Matthew, even though it’s a game I played a lot later, wanted to put it in here. Plus it’s always 2.99 in Xbox sales, so well worth it. It’s like, I think it’s a rite of passage for a new Xbox Series XS owner to just buy this and have it in their library, personally. But yeah, what’s the number eight, Matthew? My number eight is Dying Light. Oh, not on my list. Which, again, is a game which really grew on me at the time, like dismissed it at the time. There were just much bigger, more exciting things happening. And I think I was a little bit sniffy about this one when it first came out. I found it quite rough around the edges, but it’s actually the kind of roughness to it that I’ve kind of grown to appreciate in a way. This is, I think, probably more so in light of Dying Light 2, which sanded off so many of those rough edges and actually what it left was very, very inert and made me appreciate this all the more. What I like about it is it’s obviously the Techlands follow up to the dreadful Dead Island one set in an open world city, which you move around with parkour, really compelling parkour. Just clambering around is very interesting. Getting from A to B is just, you know, the fact that you actually have to work and plan out a route and guess the jumps you’re going to make. Because if you fail them, there’s a lot of fucking zombies in the streets below. That just instantly makes the moment to moment action of this game very, very compelling to me. I do like the nature of the zombie threat in this. It’s one of the big problems with the sequel is the way that they kind of change zombie behaviour between day and night cycles. Here, the city’s always got zombies. You can never clear it out. You can never really win. It isn’t like, congrats, you took back this region. It’s now safe and life will return. It’s just a constant, whenever you are outside of a couple of safe zones, there will always be a kind of general pressure and even basic zombies in enough numbers can fuck you up. And the most competent character can still fail and for it to kind of like maintain that baseline kind of stress and tension, I think is really impressive. It has a really cool leveling system where you like level through doing. I don’t really know what we call that, but you know, like the sort of sky, I guess the Skyrim thing as well of like, the more jumping you do, the better you get at jumping. And so the character that you naturally behave at is what you begin to excel at. And so that’s always good. I am just a big fan of that and would like all leveling to be that. You can also just choose it as well, despite like jumping up and down loads. Like how fucking maniac. Well, it has this thing where at night, these like really scary zombies called Volatiles come out, who are like hunt you and they’re really, really fast and they’re really, really dangerous. A lot of players outside of a few sort of obligatory story missions, where you have to do them at night, will probably sleep the night away and just play this game constantly in the daylight, which is largely what I did originally. But at night, all your XP gain is much more amplified because of the greater threat. So if you’re being chased by one of those things, they can, you know, you’ll be developing those skills a lot faster at night. So it does kind of tease you into that space as well, which is interesting. And it has a really nice power curve between that leveling by doing, but also it introduces like a grappling hook, which completely changes your relationship with the city. Really empowers you in a way that you weren’t before, but it holds it back until pretty about halfway into the game. Certainly, you know, you have to prove yourself a master of the basic parkour. And I really liked that kind of self control as well. So yeah, it’s just a weird sort of, you know, narratively nothing special, but the basic loop of clambering around a city to escape this constant zombie threat. I think this is like, yeah, just a game I’m like more and more impressed with over time. Yeah, I think that what was impressive about this was that like Dead Island, like you say, was like its big success, but I felt like it was just riding that hype that came from that one trailer. It was awful. Well, some people liked it, some people didn’t, but then I think that this was like, putting the park or front and center of this was just such a good idea. The setting really felt quite vivid and specific. Like you say, the story is not that interesting, but the setting did feel a little bit different as if like a place hadn’t been in the video games as much. It’s sort of, isn’t it, sort of in Turkey? I feel like it, certainly like that part of the world, it feels like it’s got some of the like, you know, like the way it’s lit and like the building types and stuff like that. It’s sort of, just as a kind of urban environment that’s been abandoned, I feel like I hadn’t explored that particular space before. And I think it did make the zombies excited. The day and night cycle thing was a great idea. I never like properly persisted with this enough to see the end of it, but was really impressed by it. They also, didn’t they support this like over years with loads of new stuff as well? Yeah, it’s kind of a model that CD Projekt Red did with The Witcher where there were quite a lot of free updates and then there was paid expansions. The expansion, the following, adds this like big countryside area outside and it’s kind of more traditional open world with like buggies and vehicles and stuff, which considering you play it all in co-op, it’s pretty fun. Like, you know, the through line of this game and its development is like weirdly similar to The Witcher and The Witcher 3 and how they kind of got their audience on board and kind of develop kind of goodwill with them and everything. So it’s, yeah, just like I say, like the story around it, and this pic is probably influenced by the fact that I did a lot of Dying Light 2 coverage and had to go back and like revisit the game and kind of like, that’s really when I sort of fell in love with it, you know, kind of playing it since. So probably, you know, not the version at launch, but the slightly more kind of polished, updated version that it now is, is what really kind of got me. Yeah, I think it like properly grew over time as a phenomenon as well. And then like, suddenly I think they were just like, oh yeah, we sold like 8 million copies of this. And I was like, what? Where did that come from? Yeah. But yeah, they just stuck at it and the audience who wanted it, that wanted something very specific, this game gave it to them. So, yeah. Two was a real bust. That’s sort of just, no magic. They misunderstood, I think, what made this one special. There’s an all time great like conference demo too, wasn’t it? It was like one of those, on paper it’s like, wow, like the idea that the whole world changes based on who you let control it and stuff like that. That’s the end, the conference demo, the thing they showed is the last level of the game. Oh, interesting. That’s tough. Isn’t that weird? What a weird thing that they did. Probably because they showed a vertical slice and then built the game around it. And then like, and then that ended up being like the- You get to it, you’re like, oh cool, it’s this from that demo. And then you’re like, wait, that’s the end? They’ve like doing the same thing again though, right? With adding more and more stuff to it. Is that right? I think they have. Yeah, I haven’t really gone back to it. Like I kind of, you know, I played it a lot for a view and felt like it exhausted what it was. Yeah, they have been adding stuff. I just, I don’t know, like the core idea of it. I’m just not interested in being in that world and the way the zombies behave just, yeah, just doesn’t interest me compared to the first game. So like, it doesn’t matter what stuff they put in that world. I think it’s fundamentally not as good. Okay, that’s fair enough. Sorry, darling, I. Okay, so next up then, my number seven, Matthew, is Bloodborne, not on your list, of course. So, didn’t finish this one, so maybe this is controversial to put here, but I swear I must have played this for like 60 to 80 hours, getting nowhere. Well, you can put it in there. Yeah, well, I got like almost, like I got almost nowhere. I killed the Bloodstaff Beast. I killed Father Gascoigne. I killed that woman who turns into a dog that screams in a human voice. What is she called? Vicar Amelia? Yeah, beat her. And then like, I just found the game obscenely hard from there, just like unreasonably difficult. And I was always struggling with it. And I didn’t mean to like properly go back to it, but still it’s like the amount that I played of it, the weird magic of this particular sort of like, I guess, Victorian London infused world, this spooky weird, it feels like you’re in a very cursed version of like ye olde Britain, right down to like the NPC voices, the strange characters you’d meet, the weird like cackling you’d hear in houses and stuff, the idea of like something going seriously wrong in a civilized place. Just really, really just, I think like no offense to Dark Souls because I know people really love that world, but I think this is like a massive step up in terms of how that world is vividly depicted and how compelling setting is in a From game. Even when I played Dark Souls, it kind of just felt like a load of castles to me. I just wasn’t quite tuning into it, I’m afraid. Bloodborne though, I was just like blown away by the imagination of that setting. Some of the strange enemies you’d fight, that sort of thing. Yeah, like I say, didn’t finish it, but still represents a massive part of what I was doing in 2015. And I think when you look at the course of what happens with PlayStation 4, this is the true start of that killer run that gets, that wins in the generation basically. This also is the game, I would say Matthew, maybe you agree with this, that solidifies from, as the developer, it’s not just Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls. It’s like, oh, every game they make now is gonna be like this. It’s gonna be a huge deal. It feels like that happens here. But yeah, I think when it comes to the recent history of games, consoles, this is the game that starts everything that leads to, I guess, until Dawn, but then through the next year, when you get to Horizon and Spider-Man, God of War, all that begins here, The Last Guardian. So yeah, important. Will I finish it ever? God, I would like to say so, but every time I think about it, a new From game comes along, and I feel like I should play that one instead for like 20 hours and abandon it, Matthew. Did you ever give this a go? Yeah, yeah, I’ve tried several times. I can’t get past Father Gascoigne. I get there. I bounce off it. It only takes bouncing off a boss like three or four times for me to be like, fuck this, I’ve got better things to be doing. I mean, I’ve heard Rich Stanton talk about this game to me at the pub for longer than it would take me to play this game. So like, I feel like I could do a possible impression of someone who is really into Bloodborne, but I respect our listeners too much to do that. Same relationship I have with most FromSoft stuff, it just, you know, I play it until it frustrates me too much. I’m not naturally like wowed or dazzled by their kind of storytelling, which hooks people. Whatever the hook is that can get people over that frustration, I haven’t found it in a lot of their games. I don’t really get it. I guess Elden Ring, I’ve played more than the others. Elden Ring, I’m not stuck on, I’m just lost. I just don’t know where I’m meant to be going. Everything seems nasty in every direction. I’m just basically overwhelmed by volume of stuff to do in Elden Ring. That’s my stance there. I wish I could talk more elegantly about this game. It’s one of the, and this developer more generally, obviously one of the key, if not the key player of the last decade. It’s embarrassing to call these other games journalists and not have a stance on this, but yeah. I just can’t, whatever. Can I once again try out, Matthew, my reasoning of why I think this is inferior to Sekiro, which is to say this game has some kind of counter system or like parry system where you basically have to pick, there’s like a random time in an enemy attack animation where you can fire your gun. And when you do, you will basically like stop the enemy in their tracks and be able to perform a powerful attack. And no human using their brain could ever work out when that is, I don’t think based on like when I did look up when these parry times were and managing to like very, like almost never nail it essentially. People might fiercely disagree with that having played the game for 400 hours or whatever, but that’s how I felt about it. Yeah, I think what they should do is they should look at Batman and you know, when the enemies are gonna attack you, there’s like blue lightning bolts around their heads. Yeah. That’s what they should do in this because that’s just better, that’s just a better combat system, isn’t it? The other thing is that like, because it’s all got the RPG stuff in it, it’s like there was one boss I was really struggling with and I was looking up and it was like, oh yeah, you gotta put your anti-poison clothes on for this one. And I was like, fuck that. Like that’s not, I know that like it’s an RPG is part of the DNA here. But I was just thinking, changing fucking outfits for every single boss. Like, can’t I just beat the boss based on skill alone? Like it’s no, you know, yeah. That’s like looking up how to beat Father Gascoigne. Everyone’s like, oh, there’s a trick to make this really easy. You get this like music box and you give it to someone. You play this music box and you have to go through this great chain of events to get this music box in the first place. And if you play it, all it means is the same fight, but for like two seconds, Father Gascoigne kind of reflects nostalgically on the music. And you’re like, oh, fantastic. I bought myself two seconds. Thank you so much. Like even the cheese, I’m still absolutely fed in this game. The one thing I will say, the only time in this game, I suppose, like I got the true, I felt the true force of that from style of storytelling. It was with Father Gascoigne because, I don’t remember Matthew, there is like a house you go to where you can interact with the door. And there’s like a little boy there who’s like, I think he says something like my dad’s like left and I don’t know when he’s coming back. And then it turns out his dad was Father Gascoigne who you’ve killed. And that was like, I thought that worked quite well as a bit of storytelling in this world, this how cruel and awful this world is. Big ape trying to get a mate and then being hit by a parasite in secure energy to that one, Matthew. Similar deal really. Just some sad shit that happens at a from game and then you have to batter someone in the midst of it. You have to watch a three hour YouTube video to fully understand it. Yeah, should I have put this on my list with all that in mind? I think you should, but like you have wisely put it in, because by not putting it in my list, I am in effect telling people that The Room 3 is better than Bloodborne. Yeah, but you’re not. You’re just saying that’s what resonated with you more in 2015. But, you know, authentically like this was a game that was a meaningful part of my 2015. So it was certainly one of the only things I really played on PlayStation along with Destiny. So yeah, what’s your number seven, Matthew? My number seven, better than Bloodborne, is Hand of Fate. Oh, of course. I know you’re a big fan of this series. Yes, this is by Defiant Development. It’s a, I guess, literally a tabletop RPG where you’re going on a quest and the idea is that the quest plays out as a series of cards that are dealt to you by this dealer that you’re up against. Not dissimilar to Inscription, except the dealer is more of a character. You know, they’re kind of playing the DM and speaking to you, like, let’s see what happens next. And as they turn over the cards, there’s almost like a chooser and adventure element to each card is like, you’re in a forest glen and a fairy heals you and then you turn over the next card and it’s like a bandit jumps out from behind a rock and then it will switch to a sort of third person, sort of brawler system, kind of Batman-ish, God of War-ish, I guess, where you fight bandits off. What I’ve always loved about this is the kind of playfulness of that card format and the idea of this person kind of dealing out an adventure that changes every time. There is an element of deck building to this where you change the cards that are in a deck, so you’re getting dealt certain events that are gonna help or hinder you, or certain equipment cards that are gonna help or hinder you. So you’re trying to stack the deck to create a story in your favor or create a series of events, which you’re gonna see through to the boss of each of these little mini campaigns. You’re accruing cards as you go through and adding events that you can potentially kind of bring into the game when they’re dealt. Like the length of the campaigns, they’re sort of short little kind of like burst adventure. So they’re kind of like short enough that you don’t mind replaying them, but kind of unfair enough that you kind of want to replay them and see like what a good result looks like in certain events. And it’s, yeah, one I’ve struggled to explain before, but I think as a way of taking kind of like real world card games, a slightly different approach to a collectible card game and kind of wrapping it up in something which is kind of truly of its own, you know, it isn’t a deck building, you know, it’s not a Slay the Spire or anything like that. It’s a third person adventure built on this card system, which I really dig. And I think like the writing and like delivery of the dealer character like very elegantly like mimics the kind of goading of someone, you know, like there’s a lot of like specific dialogue that kind of reacts to what you’re doing or things that have happened. And it’s a very good illusion of like, oh, I really want to beat this sort of mysterious sort of fucker in this game. So yeah, the sequel is much better, but this one kind of came out of nowhere and made a fan of me. So I feel like it has to be part of my 2015 story. Yeah, very good, Matthew. I do still think that if this came out like, after Slay the Spire or Monster Train and games like that, I know it’s not exactly the same thing. I feel like interesting games that have a card element to them just spiked massively around like, the end of that decade, you know? Maybe, but then like, Hand of Fate 2 came out. Yeah, era, and it’s like way more ambitious and developed the idea, but yeah. Unfortunately, I think the viral development have closed since Hand of Fate 2 didn’t do amazingly well. That sucks. But yeah. It does suck. I think it was the second one. Did the second one come up in Indie Games Hall of Fame? I think it did. Oh, maybe, yeah. Yeah. I think you talked about it. Yeah, I’ve definitely talked about it at some point. Yeah, interesting. It’s a cool addition to your list. We’ve had no crossover so far, have we? Not a single game. I’m wondering if like, well, there’s gotta be some in here. Yeah, you’d think so. Maybe the next one of mine, let’s see. My number six is Batman Arkham Knight. Is this on your list? It’s higher. Ah, finally we got there. What’s your number six? My number six is the visual novel Steins Gate. Okay, not on my list. You shocked to hear that? No, not at all. PS3 Vita Game came up in our conversation about Best Visual Novels with Lucy. It’s just a really good story. It’s a really good time travel story about a mad scientist who invents a time machine using a microwave that allows him to send mobile phone text messages into the past and thus change the future, change his current reality. And it’s a classic butterfly effect story of characters fucking up the timeline and then desperately trying to fix things. Really takes its time, really establishes these characters. So you do care about their fates and you want to give them a happy ending. Like you don’t really make that many key choices. Like the story branches, I don’t know, 15 places or whatever, and this is a game you’re gonna be playing for tens and tens of hours. So it’s really at the non-interactive end of the visual novel spectrum. This isn’t like an Ace Attorney or a Danganronpa or anything like that. Some people don’t, I remember Lucy was quite down on the characters, like they’re all quite super obnoxious. That wasn’t as much of a problem for me, thus it’s inclusion on the list. And I know that some of the storylines are a little bit dubious. There’s some stuff about a trans character that isn’t like maybe great in this day and age. It is beloved as a time travel story. It’s really, really like densely done. It probably lived better on Vita, if you can find it on Vita to play it. I don’t know if you can still buy it on there, but sitting there playing this static art and text on the TV isn’t maybe the best place for it. But yeah, I really like it. I just like time travel stories. Also, you can get it on Steam and then play it on Steam Deck, I guess, Matthew. Oh yeah, perfect. Yeah, ideal way to play it. I’m sure it will end up on Switch at some point. Yeah, that was good. I can never quite remember which one this was of that batch, to be honest. But yeah, I sort of like, I know you’re still fairly, you’re pretty discerning with this genre. So you’d only pick something you truly thought was decent, you know? Yeah, it’s just a good, yeah, it’s just a good yarn. And it like, a bit like Zero Escape. It folds in, you know, a lot of like real world science or like real world events or sort of philosophy or just like weird stuff that kind of exists in the kind of sort of public sphere in a way that, I’m not saying it grounds it, but it gives it a few sort of footholds that kind of catch the imagination. You know, when it references like some strange events that happen, then you look them up and you see that they did happen online. Like there’s this strange character appeared on forums, claiming to be from the future and sort of convinced people in the early internet days that he was from the future. And it kind of talks about that. And I don’t know, just sort of, yeah, caught my imagination. That sounds decent. Yeah, I like the subject of that. That’s cool. It’s like, it’s pretty, I’ve seen it pretty cheap in a bunch of Steam sales. So yeah, I don’t know. I’ve got it under, below my list, underneath Danganronpa, Matthew. So I just got to play like four of those or whatever. And then I can get to this. Do you watch the anime? Because there’s an anime based on this, right? Yeah, I haven’t, but it’s just that I think you can just watch that and it’s just the story of this probably in a more manageable. Interesting. To, yeah, form, so. Yeah, okay, cool. My number five then Matthew is Her Story. Is that on your list? It isn’t. Interesting. Should we talk about that first? How come it didn’t make your list? I, why isn’t it on my list? I don’t have an unfortunate experience with Her Story in that like the fourth thing I typed in kind of cracked it all open for me. And then I didn’t have the journey a lot of people had, which is the risk you run with this game. And like, there was stuff beyond that, but the whole kind of like, I had notebooks full of notes and all this, that just wasn’t the experience I had with this particular game. Also, you know, I do love crime stories, but I like specific kind of crime stories. This one’s quite like psychological. It’s quite sort of based in the minds of a person, in the mind of a person. And that kind of isn’t my jam as much, you know? Like the stories I’m drawn to are a lot more black and white and have like a fixed ending. You know, the whole magic of her story is that kind of, the journey through it that you take will probably change your perception of the character and what you think happened. And like, I don’t know, I’m just not as interested into like things that are that open to interpretation. But that’s just a purely personal preference. Yeah, this is the man who likes Japanese crime fiction where they explain in minute detail, this happened at this time. And then, yeah. This piece of string had to be 15 centimeters because of this. And I’m like, good, order is restored. Good crime, yeah, thumbs up. Yeah, so I suppose like the reason I put it here is it was incredibly fresh and exciting. In the course of like, I guess this sort of indie boom that happens towards the beginning of the 2010s, arguably at the end of the the noughties, it brings all of these different old genre types back to the four. So this is the year that like Pillars of Eternity comes out. But obviously before this, you had the rise of Metroidvanias again. And basically every genre you can name has had some kind of revival now from the Doom style first person shooters to old school RPGs to like city builders, anything you can name, simulation games. They all came back in this period. This was the FMV Adventures time to come back basically. And it arrived in this very specific form of you are at a police computer sorting through this archive of clips, interviews with what appears to be one woman about the death of her partner, a man called Simon. But then it emerges there are actually two women who are being interviewed in these tapes. And so you are essentially picking through these clips until you have a solution to what happened. And you can stop at any time and feel like you’ve satisfactorily solved what’s going on. Or you can get every single clip until you have absolute clarity on what’s going on. But then like you say, there’s a heavy ambiguity element to it. But I think that like the, if you don’t stumble across a solution straight away, like you did, the act of- That’s overselling how much of it I understood that, yeah. The act of like dipping into these clips and the strangeness of finding something out of context and trying to piece it together in this puzzle like fashion was like super fresh and different in men the game wasn’t like massively dependent on other gameplay mechanics. It was all about the story and it was all about your relationship with the story based on keywords and the different rabbit holes that would take you down. I think you just can’t underestimate how fresh this was in the moment. And like, obviously this is kind of like Sam Barlow’s sub genre now basically, like the immortality is similar deal. I’ve not played Telling Lies, Matthew, but is that the same thing? I assume so? Yeah, probably of his three games, the one I like the most. Okay, interesting. Big Logan, Marshall Greenhead, Matthew Castle. I don’t know, just sort of the three, I don’t know, the actual like thriller framing of it. I’m more into that setting. Certainly like critics went all out for this. I remember a PC Gamer, I think we were one of the first outlets to review this and Andy Kelly got right behind it. Yeah, and was it you told me like there was like that Golden Joysticks that year, the actress in this and Danny Wallace were playing, were bowling or something and people were just like forming a circle around them. Was that you told me about that? No, but I have heard that. Maybe that was Dan Dawkins telling us on that episode, maybe. That might have been that, yeah, yeah. So yeah, like you say, a lot of ambiguity. In fact, I full on didn’t understand what happened in this game until years later when someone explained it to me. But certainly the experience of sitting at that fake computer interface and picking through these clips, just fresh and exciting and something that got me really pumped about video games in 2015, Matthew, just spiked your apathy towards it. Yeah, it’s like no shade on it. I hope I’ve explained, given my particular personal interests, why this particular story doesn’t quite gel with them. I feel like I’m outside a really exciting kind of her story appreciation party the whole time. Well, that was us with immortality last year as well, right? Where we were like, didn’t quite land for us, but yeah. These things happen. Indeed, they do, Matthew. So what’s your number five? Again, like no her story and no Bloodborne, but we do have Tales from the Borderlands. Oh, good. Well, that’s a good pick because I feel like we have perennially left Telltale Games out of this, partly because sometimes the episodes spill over different years. And I know that you are a big fan of this one. You’ve previously called it the only funny Borderlands game, Matthew. Yeah, I mean, that’s the boring line I’m going to trot out again now. The idea of a purely narrative experience set in the Borderlands universe sounds like death on paper. I mean, I can’t really imagine anything worse than that game with just the writing of it. But this I thought was brilliant. You know, the whole Telltale Games thing, navigating a kind of maze of moral quandaries and actually here. It’s about navigating a comic universe and how much of an asshole you’re going to be. Really, you know, the two characters, Fiona and Rhys, one of them’s a con woman, the other one’s a sort of Hyperion stooge. So they’re both sort of slightly compromised from the off. It’s structured around the idea that they’re telling their story of how they kind of came to be in the place they are at the start of the game to this masked stranger. But they have, like, competing accounts. So there’s this like comedy Rashomon thing going on. They’re kind of overwriting each other’s versions of history. I just thought the way this took the pressure off the life and death consequences and made it more about just trying to like enjoy this funny story and be like genuinely curious where it’s going to go and liking these characters and, you know, enjoying their company and wanting them to succeed and reach a happier place rather than simply survive. You know, the stakes are so much higher in like The Walking Dead, so you can just enjoy the writing of this one a lot more. It takes lots of stuff, which left me cold in Borderlands, but works really well here, like the, I think, like the Hyperion Corporation and the kind of the sort of parody of like extreme, sort of extreme capitalism is, is, this is where it lands for me finally. The handsome Jack, who I wasn’t crazy about in the other games, I think he’s a really funny presence in this. It does the classic opening set to a pop tune of the moment, which is just incredibly stylishly done, like really, really good, like music video entries that set these off really great quick time events that have some daft concepts is a big, like, imaginary sort of shoot out a bit like the finger guns in space. But like on a much bigger scale, done as a big quick time event. And it’s just a really great set piece. Yeah, like, I don’t know that I played a lot of Telltale games in 2014, 2015. I think we were also juggling, definitely juggling Game of Thrones. There was the episodic stuff of Life is Strange. There was just a lot of this going about and this was the one where I would always look forward to the next episode. And I thought it just really delivered this kind of sort of heist con story across the five. I’ve not played the new one, but I’ve heard it’s quite bad. And I’ve been told by fellow fans just not to touch it, so I’m not going to. Comedy Rashomon is such a great idea for a game like this. Like, I don’t think Rashomon’s ever really been done elsewhere in video games. And it’s like it’s something you see in TV shows all the time, they have their Rashomon episodes. So the idea of doing it in a game, like a narrative game is actually kind of genius, you know, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s a great idea. Why has no one done that kind of thing? Yeah, really good. Yeah, I never played this one, but I was always kind of quite struck by the goodwill towards it, because certainly, like, the humor in Borderlands is such an acquired taste. And I’ve pretty much everyone I know has taken exception to its tone. So yeah, please just kind of won you over. This seemed like from reading about what the collapse of Telltale, this seemed like the one that had the least resources as well, Matthew. And yet, despite that, it was like a labor of love to bring it to life. So pretty cool that it’s earned its reputation, at least, you know? Yeah, it’s so much funnier than anything else they ever did. Right. Yeah. And they’ve done other like comedy games. You know, they’ve done like Guardians of the Galaxy is probably trying to go for a similar kind of vibe and Minecraft story modes, like allegedly a comedy game. But this one, like, it’s not just funny by their standards. It’s funny by any video game standards. It has jokes, which if they were in films or TV shows, you would just laugh out loud at like the timing and delivery. Yeah, you have a really great joke about he’s got this really like nerdy sidekick. I cannot remember his name. There’s a bit where he takes off his shirt and he’s like weirdly hench for such a small man. And everyone’s just slightly like put off by it. That’s really good. That’s awesome. I think the other thing that happens at this point too is that like the other Telltale games, it stops being seen as special as a format. People start taking it for granted and there is already too much of it. And then they reach saturation point in the next couple of years. And so like the idea of one thing to stand head and shoulders above, like I don’t think anyone’s ever told me what they think of that Game of Thrones game. Or I think a couple of people like the Batman games that I know, but you know, no one’s ever talked about that Guardians of the Galaxy game they did either. You know, like it just it really feels like, yeah, this is the one this and The Walking Dead’s like first series. Those are the ones that have truly lived on, you know. So, yeah, they kind of parrot. That’s like they’re parroting it like in Tales of the Little Borderlands. Like it’s sending up these mechanics, which they then do in like another six games. But if you could send it up now, like they’re already played out, like they’re already done. But this should have been like the full stop on it. But it’s not. There’s like another like six or seven of these games coming out. I mean, it’s mad how many of these things they made. Yeah, absolutely. OK, good. Well, good pick, Matthew. That’s nice to hear that so high in your list. So we’re on my number four, right? Yes. My number four is Fallout 4. Is that on your list? It isn’t. Yeah, I didn’t think it would be. This feels like a game that was not loved from this year. It was a game where everyone agreed it was like a step forward in some ways and a step sideways in others. I loved it as a mag editor. God bless you. Certainly, like, hype for this was out of control. There was a lot of, like, merch that went along with Fallout 3, like, cushions and stuff like that, or with, like, that bloody Vault Boy on it. I was like, wow, he truly has gotten everywhere. That bloody Vault Boy. Yeah. So this came along, and, like, well, actually, let’s just, more context. So Fallout 3 comes along in 2008, and it’s the first game in a long time, a sequel to some beloved PC games, a very specific dark comedic tonality to them. But, like, much loved, and then Bethesda acquires the rights of interplay, makes Fallout 3, translates that world into 3D, like, makes it, makes, I would say, like, a much more sober version of that world. Still funny in some ways, and very gruesome, and recognizably the same fiction, but very much its own thing at the same time, becomes an enormous success. They get some of the original creators who worked at Obsidian to work on New Vegas, a game that took it a bit closer to that more open-ended, darkly funny style of the original PC games. That created a lot of baggage with, like, people who liked Obsidian’s version more than Bethesda’s version. Having someone who worked on PC Gamer and looking at the comments at that time and the Facebook comments, they were fucking tedious people, I’ll be honest. Fallout 4 came along, and it felt kind of like Fallout 3 in replay in some ways. Like, it looked tons nicer, had much, much better gunplay and better mechanics generally. But I think, like, largely felt quite similar. This is despite the fact that the story in this is pretty different. But it’s kind of like an inverse of the Fallout 3 story, and that feels by design in some ways. In the first game, you are this kid who leaves the vault looking for their father. In this, you are a parent leaving the vault looking for their son. And you even get to experience when the nukes go off, basically in this game, you run into a vault, you wake up, your partner has been killed, your son has been taken, and you have to go looking for him. A really, really effective opening. But the truth is, this game doesn’t do loads radically different to Fallout 3. It is a pretty similar deal. Well, the biggest thing they added was, like, the opportunity of, like, to customize settlements. A system that I think was a very acquired taste, and not really a taste I acquired, truthfully. But nonetheless, I still enjoyed a whole bunch of this. They added, like, I think, like, you wearing power armor. That was something they added to this one. Are you maintaining and upgrading a kind of, like, power armor so you become a deadlier military force? But despite the similarities to Fallout 3, I loved their depiction of Boston in this. I thought, like, the downtown Boston area felt really kind of, like, vivid and quite cool. I loved the fact there was, like, a settlement inside a stadium. There were some great sort of side characters, like Nick Valentine and Piper, the journalist, really fond of her as well. Some of them were a required taste, but you got to choose your companion to go with you at all times. That’s one way it changes a little bit from the last game. That companion stuff is much more involved, Matthew, which seemed like a good choice. It felt a bit more like you had an RPG party on the go, I suppose, and had the side quests I love with the, where you basically become the comic book character, the, I have not written down their name, but like the radio show host is a big fan of this old comic book character. You get the costume and you solve crime. Not the Flash, the Shadow? It’s something like The Grey Ghost, but that’s the Batman animated series one. It’s like a similar deal. It’s, yeah, but either way, like that quest really, really worked because you go around in this very preposterous voice, being a vigilante. Fantastic stuff. The rest of the story, pretty similar beats to Fallout 3, honestly, particularly when you get to the end and there’s another big mech that marches through the city. Like, feels like a rerun in Fallout 3 in just a few too many ways. And maybe people at the time wanted something a bit newer and a bit more different, Matthew, but I’m guessing you played this too, right? Yeah, I played loads of it. I did think about putting it on my list, but I just found it too baggy. I think the addition of like never-ending stuff, like missions that auto-generating stuff with the settlements and whatever his name is, Preston Garvey, I fell into the trap of like, oh, well, I’ll exhaust that. That’s kind of how I play these games. I sort of go to a place and I do all the quests and I got pulled into something which turned out, I think was almost sort of randomly generating more and more and more for me to do. And so I just burnt out on this game before I ever really made a dent on any of the really bespoke, interesting stuff. That’s my big problem with it. It was designed for 400 hours and I wandered into some of the 100 hour stuff without kind of getting to the good 30 hour version. Yeah, that is easy to do in this. And it’s a shame because I think that like some of that stuff is very memorable. It’s the Silver Shroud, by the way, Matthew is the- The Combat Quest. But yeah, I think in The Best Games of 2008, I had Fallout 3 at number one. So number four, I suppose, represents my relationship with it. I will say that, like I say, the combat turns better. There was a Tommy gun in this that could fire, that shot exploding bullets and that gun fucking ruled. I just carried that around for like 15 hours at the end. It had a great time. Really good. And technically was a lot more solid than Fallout 3 was. So definitely had some like improvements. But yeah, as big features go, the settlements thing just wasn’t quite for me. Felt like it was tapping into like more of that, I guess like Minecraft age of things. Yeah, I just thought it was gonna be a lot of that in Starfield. Yeah, there might be. But if it’s set on like loads of different planets, I’m not sure how wise it is to try and tie you to one place, you know? So I guess we’ll see. That game is still an unknown quantity in a lot of ways. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. What’s your number three, Matthew? My number four is Batman Arkham Knight. I just, for me, do I prefer? Is it my favorite one? I don’t know. I sort of, I go to and fro on it. I think the actual fantasy of being Batman in a more traditional Gotham city is delivered in this better than Arkham City, purely because Arkham City is that slightly contrived like Arkham Asylum version of the city. Like the idea of this area, which has been penned in by big walls, this feels a little bit more like you’re just Batman, you’re having a general Batman adventure, you’re having a general kind of Batman time. And it feels like things can happen a little bit more organically. I love how they surface some of the side quest content in this, like when that famous moment where you’re just gliding around and then man bat kind of gives you a horrible scare, just felt like, oh, what a clever way of this happening. It felt like that could happen in multiple places. Maybe it can’t, maybe I got that wrong, but yeah. I just, if this feels like more alive, more open as a world, which is really all I wanted, you know, to experience with this particular iteration of Batman. On top of that, I’m just wowed by the polish of it. I just think this is one of the most beautiful games of the generation. This is a studio that is just so fucking good at polish and like their ambition that mad bit where you like throw the Batarang to scan. It follows the Batarang out of your hand all the way into the sky. And then it’s looking down on the city and all this kind of stuff. Like they just, there’s just so much showing off in this game, which I always, I always enjoy. And you know, the black mark against this and the reason some people are more down on it against, you know, compared to the others, the Batmobile. I, you know, I’ve said before, I don’t have a problem with it. I think they elegantly find a way to make it fit into the rhythms of how this Batman game functions outside of the car. I think they find, you know, maybe it feels a bit daft by having this car that can like dart out the way in, you know, big lines of fire so you can dodge around it and everything. But I’ve always thought that was a really elegant solution to giving you a really cool piece of kit and making it work. So, tired of defending the Batmobile. The Ridler tracks are shit. Yeah, I think the Batmobile is flawed, honestly. Like, I don’t think it ruins the game or anything. I think it’s just like, it’s a caveat, it’s an acquired taste. It’s simplistic in a way that the rest of the Batman armory is not simplistic. It asks… But it is part of a combat, like, dance that Batman’s part of. It is, it is, but that dance is just firing a turret, firing a machine gun and then just, like, dodging from side to side. And it doesn’t add up to much more than that. No, but… Whereas, you know, the sophistication of the stealth mechanics or the combat mechanics, by comparison, it’s weaker. Oh yeah, absolutely. But I think there is something there. I think they’ve tried to address it and they’ve thought about it in terms of, you know, how does this sit alongside our other systems in some way that makes sense? And I was always, I was pleasantly surprised when I first played it. And whenever I come back to it, I’m still like, you know what, I think this is okay. We’ve got a Batman episode in us at some point. I’m convinced of it. Like we could totally do that. I think like the tomorrow one was sort of that, but it was, it was maybe a bit curtailed. Like we could do a longer one, I think. But like I, my complicated relationship with this was I was a bit down on the Batmobile stuff, but I also knew that the Batmobile was a fantasy. As a Batman fan, I wanted to see realized in a game properly. And this game does that as well. So even if you discount the combat element of it, the increased scale or the way that the Batmobile could even be woven into the hand-to-hand combat, how it would shock enemies when it bumped into them, how you could use it as a finishing move in hand-to-hand combat, fucking ruled. And the experience of turning up to a place and then like jumping straight out into a glide with momentum, as you did Batman vigilante stuff, that was the fantasy and they did it. Like you say, there’s a culmination of everything they’ve been building up to that Arkham Asylum, corridor-based, confined setting Batman experience. Arkham City, almost an open world, like a big taste of what a proper Batman experience feels like, done incredibly well within increased scope of mechanics, more and more Batman villains. Then this is like the ultimate depiction of Batman’s universe in one game. It’s just tremendous and still looks incredible. I’ve been playing Gotham Knights this week. It looks worse than this, for sure, but it plays so much worse, and it makes you appreciate what those games did incredibly well and how it could have just been like old Assassin’s Creed combat and so much worse. But instead, the free flow combat system was just miraculous as a creation. It maybe wasn’t as sophisticated as playing a fighting game or Sekiro or something, but it felt so good in the hands and was such a good fit for Batman, and it rewarded your experimentation. Yeah, it’s great. This also brought in some elements, Matthew, that I thought really added to it. To be honest, why didn’t they make a Batman and Robin or a Batman and Nightwing game based off of this? Because those sections where you team up and go clear out, clear house basically, works so well and obviously Rocksteady knew how to write these characters as well. So it’s actual good Batman fiction inside a Batman game. Fucking great, man. So yeah, the Batmobile is not the be-all and end-all of this game. There’s loads to love about it. Arkham Knight, were you on board with the Arkham Knight? No, only because it was the same story they did in the Return of the Red Hood in the comics, except with a different character. I’ve definitely talked about this before, you needed the Jason Todd thing to have existed previously for that to land as well as it should. But he looked cool. He looked very Unreal Engine. He looked like he could have been in Gears of War or something. Yeah, it was a cool idea. Still want to know what fucking magic they did to make this game look as good as it does, Matthew. Oh, it looks so good. They should have like- Just like the confidence, the way the camera moves between different modes and different moves and the way it moves into like cinematic sequences and out of them, it’s just there. What a gift. Yeah. It’s like you say, the way that you could zoom the camera out to get a wide perspective of the city and stuff, it just felt like so far ahead technically, like you were just getting, it just felt like there were no shortcuts in making this happen. Best looking reign in games maybe to date still. Good stuff, Matthew. So what are we on now, my number 3? Your number 3? Yeah. So my number 3 is Hotline Miami 2, Wrong Number. Not on my list. Yeah. I doubt it’s on many people’s list from this year. I’ve definitely said my piece on this before. It was discussed in The Best Games of the Generation, where I think I had it quite high too. Apologies, by the way, if some of my games in this list clash rankings wise at that. That was like two and a half years ago. What can I say? I’m a different man now, maybe, allegedly. So yeah, Hotline Miami was this top-down incredibly violent indie game where you essentially was a score attack game, but it was all about how you build combos in these corridor-based combat scenarios where you’re picking up melee weapons, battering a guy, throw your weapon at someone to knock them down, killing them while they’re on the ground, picking up their gun, shooting at the guys who are just busting through a corridor. Oh, they heard your gunshots, now there’s even more guys turning up, and then rapidly restarting and restarting and restarting to get the highest score possible in these different levels. Second one is more of the same with a more experimental out there story, multiple playable characters, jumps around timeline-wise. Some of the levels are gigantic, which proves quite controversial. It means it has lower lows than the original Hotline Miami, but I think higher highs as well. I think as well like the sort of like, I guess, vaporwave aesthetic of Hotline Miami became so huge, and the music really spoke to that, the choice of contemporary vaporwave artists and Electro. I’m really fucking out my depth of music, man. That’s why we’ve not done a Best Video Games. I have not. I’m even more out of my depth. So to me, I’m like, holy shit, Samuel really knows what he’s talking about. I think it is like vaporwave aesthetic is technically accurate, but I just thought, I’m sure. But the soundtrack, I’m so lucky my co-host is so cool. Oh, yeah. You really believe that after all this time, Matthew, that I am that guy. But I love the music in this is just so incredible from like the Green Kingdom’s dreamy, weird opening music with, it’s just incredibly chill and mournful menu music as the cityscape of Miami fades in. So many memorable tracks, like Decade Dance by Jasper Byrne, like In the Face of Evil by Magic Sword. And I think the best level in this game is like a heist, like a heist crew basically bus into this building, and the perspective shifts between multiple characters, they’re like, okay, I’m in, I just killed these guys, it’s your turn. And then you play the different members of the heist as it happens. And the music that plays during that sequence, I think it’s Roller Bobster by Carpenter Brute. Absolutely fucking unbelievable. That might be one of my like 10 favorite moments in games. I’ve played that level over and over again. It’s just so intense, dramatic and exciting, and Hotline Miami at its best. And it’s like set PC in a way that the first game never was. The first game always felt like just a taste of what we could do. And this game was just like, right, here’s the full breadth of everything we can do with this formula. We’re going to add a badass flame thrower. Some of the levels will be too big. You’ll be fighting these giant army bases that drive you a bit mad after a while trying to actually complete the damn thing. But I don’t know, man, for me, this was like the real deal. It was just ambitious over the top. The real deal. Yeah. But I’m guessing you never played it, Matthew. Did you play the original much? Yeah, yeah, I played the original through a couple of times. I’m not an obsessive, but I liked it enough. What a vanilla take for a game that demands more than a vanilla take, but so it goes. My number three is so different from Hotline Miami 2. It’s Ori and the Blind Forest. Of course, of course. Oh, the lovely, I’m really the only Xbox at the time exclusive. That was exciting. Probably the whole time I was on OXM, or is that unfair? We had such a bad run of first party exclusives. It just felt like nothing was going on. I think this year was Halo 5’s not on my list. There was some theme park game that I wasn’t crazy into. This gorgeous 2D Metroidvania looks like an animated film. It’s this incredibly multi-layered layer upon layer upon layer of sort of parallax scrolling and 3D modeling and all kinds of trickery to make this image look as rich as it possibly can. I’m not a big fan of very hand drawn 2D styles. The way forward, the kind of animate, when people really overly animate something often leaves it feeling very dead and static and you can feel the animation movements playing out but this doesn’t do that, it just feels incredibly alive, there’s a sort of rustle of nature and the wind in the trees and it’s got this slightly hippie-ish mother tree. And this natural spirit trying to bring balance to this sort of forest which is kind of hilarious because as an actual kind of Metroidvania action platformer, it’s surprisingly hard as nails, very very demanding platforming with very very versatile character, you know his skills obviously develop through the game as they do in Metroidvania, but beyond your classic kind of like double jump and wall running, he also has this power, he, she, I don’t really know what Ori is, it has this power to launch off enemies and projectiles and this for me is the power that makes this game, I have spoken about it before in our Switch Hall of Fame, but this ability to kind of turn attacks into sort of platforms to I think it’s a great way to launch you into something else. Let’s them build these just wild gauntlets where you just don’t touch the ground for great long stretches. And you’re like, holy shit, is this really gonna work? And it also allows them to build boss fights, which instead of you’re fighting a monster, you’re trying to escape. So it’s like chase sequences. It’s escape as boss fight, which I really loved. Yeah, so like to have a genuinely challenging platformer, a genuinely lovely feeling platformer, great feeling character outside of Nintendo, one of the great platforming feels for my money. And yeah, all wrapped up in this luscious visuals and gorgeous music. Gareth Coker, the composer, like just sounds so good. This was one of the only games ever on OXM where we were playing it. I remember like some of the official PlayStation people coming over and being like, oh, we’re actually envious of that. Like that never ever happened, you know, with like first party games on Xbox. No one gave a shit. But this one like drew a small crowd. I prefer it to the sequel. I think it’s a bit of a purer Metroidvania. The sequel is a bit more sort of Zelda-y, has kind of a branching structure, which has some problems. We’ll go into that another time. But yeah, I just thought this was so good. I just, oh, heavenly. I absolutely love it. Beautiful version on Switch as well. So yeah, really available to lots of people. Yeah, this, what I found, I definitely said this in that previous podcast, but how could something so beautiful be so harsh? It really did demand scale of you. It sometimes reminded me actually, when I was playing Metroid Dread and I was doing those Spark Shine challenges, I was like, this is what Ori feels like all the time. You know what I mean? Is that fair, do you think? Is pulling off these almost miraculous platforming feats. Yeah, they’re still quite positive. Yeah, I guess there’s some similarities there. I think the difference is Ori has this interesting system where you set your own checkpoints using your energy. So you will have less combat energy because you’ve put down this point, and a lot of its difficulty comes from the fact that people don’t get into that rhythm. They forget to put their own checkpoints down. So when they die, they go back really far because you haven’t got into the rhythm. But if you get into the rhythm of like, I’m just going to place these whenever I’m on safe ground, or whenever I get over something nasty, you can make things more manageable. But it’s just not how we think about platforming to create a save point for ourselves like that. I don’t think. So it’s more about adjusting to its rhythm. A safe system, they abandon in the sequel, which is one of the reasons it’s less interesting. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I suppose I never really thought about the impact of putting that in the player’s hands and like how transformational that is and how the player uses it or doesn’t use it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because it costs you to do it. So there is a bit of like a how safe do I want to play this? Can I risk going further than I would normally go? And there’s a lot of like instant death stuff in this game. So a system where that only works if there is challenge. Yeah. You know, and likewise in a Metroidvania, it’s another reason I love this game. Like collecting all the health and all the power-ups and all the hidden things. That’s only meaningful if you actually run the risk of dying a lot. You know, if those things have a big, you know, visible impact on how long you survive in the world, that makes that exploring worthwhile. Like easy Metroidvanias, the collect-a-thon element of it, it’s just a huge bust for me, always. Right. Like certain systems only make sense when there is a bit of bite. That’s one of them. That’s a good take, I think. I like that. Yeah. Maybe I will one day finally conquer this. It’s still so holds up like versus other Metroidvanias. When people talk about the best revivals of this genre, this is always up there in that conversation, isn’t it? I mean, it’s by far like in terms of like production values, it’s just so lush. I mean, it’s… Yeah. I think it’s in my top five Metroidvanias. Yeah. Easy. Oh, yeah. Good stuff. Cool. Well, that’s great number three, Matthew. I know what your one and two are, but I don’t know what order they’re in. So that’s interesting, unless there is like a hard pivot from what I think I know about you. Let’s find out, I guess. So my number two, Matthew, is Rocket League. Oh, I completely forgot this is this year. So this game was, did I like this game? It was certainly compulsive. I played an absolute ton of it this year. I played loads of it on PS4 and PC. I just kept switching between them because I played at work, and then I came home and I played at home on my TV and the matchmaking was incredibly fast. This game asks, what if there was football with cars? That’s basically what it is. You drive a car, you knock a big ball into the net, you do that in a variety of modes, 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, your choice. 4v4 if you want to, 2v2 is always the one, I think. It meant you did all these very dramatic saves because there’s very loose gravity to the ball and the way that the car’s moved. You could drive up the side of the walls of the arena and then do these ridiculous, daring flips off of them, using your rocket boost to do these miraculous journeys through the sky to knock the ball in. I was never really good enough to do that properly other than a few fluke times. I never truly mastered it, but I had just a great time. Scoring a goal in this felt incredible, like the animation of watching the ball go in and explode and then it kind of knocking all of the different cars away. Just really, really, like, chef kiss as a kind of like a bit of feedback to the player. And now you can play this on anything you have. Basically, it’s a free to play game. You can just go enjoy it for nothing, which is incredibly generous and cool. But it really was like instant success. You know, the engine of this was the fact that it was a PS Plus freebie when it launched, which was such a good idea. It meant that it was just like the biggest marketing it could have really when it was off sale. It just keeps selling and selling. I really liked it despite the fact that the music in the in the menus was some of the worst shit I’ve ever heard. Like I despised it, like modern clubby music. I just hated it so, so much. I even bought a Batmobile as DLC in this. Like I said, I never really got good at it. But like the times where you would pull off an amazing save or you would score something truly miraculous and you’d hit that share button on PlayStation to capture it and then just put it on Twitter or something. Just felt really, really good. I think this was just like such a deserved success. It was such a great version of something so simple. And it was something everyone wanted. And it was a low-investment multiplayer game that could make you feel incredibly good. And you didn’t need to be like mega-precise to have a good time, I suppose. Did you ever play this, Matthew? Yeah, I played it. You kind of had to, it was so sort of prevalent. And it was always on Xbox, on the YouTube channel that I ended up running. So I had to play a lot of it then. I’m just not very good at it. I also don’t know if I just got a lot of multiplayer, local or otherwise, in me anymore. Yeah, yeah. I guess a little bit. I guess the pandemic killed a little bit of that, I guess. The person I have to play against is Catherine. She’s just so much better at all video games than I am. She’s fucking amazing at Smash Bros. Just absolutely killer. I can’t believe the time she owned us at Smash Bros. It was just like, yeah, we never played it again after that. So I can see why, Matthew. That almost single-handedly killed my interest in multiplayer gaming. Well, this isn’t marriage counseling. So yeah, but that’s tough. Sorry to hear that. Yeah, yeah, this is best played with like, I don’t know, my friend Andrew watching me play this and like what a monster I turned into and him just being like, what the fuck is wrong with you about this is a really funny memory from this year of just like, I don’t know, him seeing me transform into like the biggest baby you’ve ever seen and me documenting that in a series of PC Gamer articles. I think for like, I became, this is the first game I became slightly synonymous with on PC Gamer because I was secretly bad at it, even though I was pretending I knew what I was doing. Yeah, the best- Is anyone consistently good at it? I guess they must be. I feel like Rich was better at it than me because I’d see him sharing clips where he’d do like crazy free cam like stunts and stuff and I could never do that shit. I was just like- Except all Rich’s videos got taken down because he kept playing it to like ABBA and other bands. Absolutely radiating dad energy that. You’d have all this pop music on in the background so it all got like taken off YouTube. That’s good. That’s so funny. Yeah, that’s like, that’s so funny. That is like peak dad stuff. I just can’t, that’s so funny. Yeah, yeah. So I think he was legitimately good at it. But yeah, it was also a game where I just ended up playing it with people I didn’t really know that well. Like I played it with the TCGS guys at one point like this. Like I never played games with those guys, but like that was the- Did they do voice chat while you were playing? Yeah, I recall a bit of Dave Turner’s Bants. He was- Was it like Merciless? Nice, you know, he’s very nice. It’s very funny. Oh yeah, I like that guys, but I just scared that they’d just eviscerate me with barbs. I think they think that’s why we’ve not done a podcast with them, but that’s not the reason. We’re just fucking making this one podcast takes ages to be honest. Oh, that is the reason I’ve not done it. I can’t stand the heat. I don’t even step into the kitchen. I don’t go to the same building as the kitchen. No, I’m like, there’s heat there. I’m getting the fuck out of here. Okay, that was my number two then, Matthew. What’s your number two? My number two is, oh, what a boring pick. It’s The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt. Ah, let me have the same number one. Ah, all is, the balance is maintained. Yes. Yeah, okay. What’s this game about? You are Geralt, a witcher, and that is key to why I love this game. It’s an open world RPG where you have a very specific role to play. You are one particular character with established relationships with loads of characters in this world, and crucially, an established job. You’re a monster hunter. It gives brilliant context to why you’re doing everything. Everyone wants to kill you. That is literally your job to be there. If you go into a town, everyone comes up to you and asks you to do something. You aren’t an amnesiac stranger. You aren’t some sort of bullshit thing you’ve made in a character creation. It’s just someone who goes in and has a role. And I love role playing within that character and within the constraints of that character. It’s like, I don’t know, I guess it’s a little closer to Zelda in a way. You have Link and you’re like, OK, I’m Link in this game. That for me is a huge part of the appeal. I just really love the register of its fantasy world, I guess, in that it’s full of monsters and magic, but it’s primarily people and recognisable people that you’re working with. There is all this supernatural stuff, but the big problem is war between nations, and so there’s something quite relatable in what drives all those people in that situation, like the monsters are almost like another layer of bullshit on top that they all have to deal with, so you can just buy into a lot of the human dilemmas and the frailties and what drives people to do evil deeds and the murkiness of trying to find the correct answers. It’s a lot more Game of Thrones-y, I guess, in that it feels more people-driven rather than kind of MacGuffin-driven, which I really like about it. There’s no one with a cat’s face, which instantly I’m like, I’m out. It’s like, oh, hello. Would you care to buy from my store? They always sound like how cats talk in cartoons and you’re like, fucking yikes. There’s none of that. It’s just sour-faced guys from Yorkshire and you’re like, I’m in. It has one of the all-timer mini-games to the point where I probably played more Gwent in this than I did The Witcher 3 for the first 50 hours of playing this. I actually fucked off the whole I’m a Witcher and I just walked around playing Gwent for so long. Catherine couldn’t stand the theme tune to Gwent when she would play the music. She’d be like, stop playing that game because I would play for hours at a time. Once I had all the cards in my deck, only then did I get on with the quest at hand. It’s such a simple version of Gwent compared to what it became in the standalone game as well. To go back to it now, it’s hilariously rudimentary. Back at the time, I was like, I cannot get enough of this. It’s the only time I’ve ever felt that. I always feel a little bit of envy when you’re doing your whole blitzball routine or people are talking about… What’s the one in Final Fantasy VIII with the cards? Triple Triad. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. I’ve never had that, but in this, this I went all in on Gwent. Yeah, it’s just a really special game. Great character, great characters, great writing, great quest design. Absolutely gorgeous. This is one I played on PC. I thought it looked pretty ropey on console, I must admit. And it looked so good on PC. And this was an absolute powerhouse. Like, sailing around in the boat and seeing, like, the god rays come through the little rips in the sails. I’ll always remember that of thinking, like, holy shit, this PC can do anything. Um, yeah. Like, just absolutely consumed me. Had a machine that was just showing this game at its best. Like, I know it’s flawed. Like, I am almost surprised the way that it’s as big as it is, given that there’s a lot of bullshit in this game. Like, the combat isn’t great, and it has a lot of quite confusing systems. Like, the whole alchemy, the whole having to kind of drink alcohol to kind of restock certain elements, the sort of meditation, some of the terminology and just, like, weird terms, it kind of couches its world in. Like, it runs counter to, like, what simple audience-friendly game design is, I often think. That, the masses did buy into it. You know, they must just love the world and love the character, or maybe we’re just, you know, maybe we should think more of the general masses and what they’re capable of understanding. But, yeah, I was always like, this game still feels, like, quite janky in a lot of ways, but, you know, everyone loved it, so… Yeah. Obviously didn’t matter. A few things were about that, like, it was, like, its success, I think, it was, there was no Elder Scrolls this generation, and that was a persistently massive series. People did, like, Dragon Age Inquisition the year earlier, but this was like, this had, like, specific quests and characters that took on a life of their own in a very specific way. It was like the defining game of the generation in a lot of ways, wasn’t it? It was just… Just so massive. But it’s the fact that loads of people, apropos of nothing, went, I am super into this third thing, that other series I’ve definitely not played the other two of. And you were like, and it’s going to really hinge on your appreciation. Your appreciation is going to be tenfold if you have played them. It’s just odd to come out… There’s not many other times people have gone, the third one, I’m in, you know? Yeah. Particularly for something this hard edged. But, you know, whatever. That’s for the analysts to work out. I thought this was so good. And the DLCs are like all timers as well. Probably my favorite DLC ever. Yeah. It’s funny as well, digging into like the Cyberpunk quests, a side quest I’ve been doing recently, you realize that like, as beautifully presented as they are, they’re not really RPG side quests. They’re just like a bit, they’re just some kind of cut scenes that happen around some first person shooter levels. And like these, but these I always get the impression they were proper RPG quests, Matthew. Oh, yeah. This is like, yeah, the outcome. Even for like the dumbest thing, you know, even if it’s just like a jokey difference at the end, there will be a difference. And like side quests that you can’t differentiate from the main quests because the quality of them is so good. Like a big part of this game is, it sort of has a Mass Effect 2 element to it in that, like without really realizing it, you are like enlisting people to help you in a big set piece. And you don’t really notice it. And you could maybe catch on in that you’re playing it and you’re like, well, a lot of these quests involve me working with one particular character. And at the end of it, we’re either on like good terms or bad terms. And then in your time of need, they all crop up. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that’s, that’s sort of how the game’s structured. Like God of War Ragnarok, Matthew. Yeah, yeah, well, very much like that. Better than that. And, but like that’s the thing at the time, you’re like side quests, main quests, I don’t really know. You know, everything just sort of like has this, this bar of quality, which is really how you should be treating everything in a game. Like it shouldn’t be like, oh, this is side quests. So it’s a second class citizen in some way. It’s, it’s yeah, really miraculous. Baffling how little of that is in Cyberpunk. Yeah. In hindsight, but you know, I imagine we’ll learn about in 10 years what happened there. Yeah, I look forward to that article on, you know, what is it, like Forbes or something. What’s that? I can’t remember. I’m just, I’m too tired now at this point. Okay. My, my number one is the same as your number one, I suspect, Matthew. Everybody’s gone to the Rapture. I’m joking. I’m joking. I just love walking around the countryside incredibly slowly. They added a jog command or at least I think he got slightly better faster when he ran. Metal Gear Solid 5, The Phantom Pain is my number one. I’m assuming that’s yours too, Matthew. It is. Yep. So, third person stealth sandbox game that takes place earlier in the MGS timeline is technically a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3 and Peace Walker. It features a base building element alongside two very rich sandboxes where you recruit soldiers to your army by popping them on little balloons and getting them the hell out of there and basically brainwashing them to join in your militia. But really this is a game about experimenting with AI in amazingly vivid places, seeing what you can do to finish a level, how to take out the soldiers in a given place, see what random events take place as a result of the sandbox, using very, very rich AI companions to help you solve the different challenges in the game. Wrapped up in a story that is oddly light touch for Metal Gear Solid, which is a wise call. This is the best game game, certainly the best stealth game in the MGS series. It’s arguably the worst MGS game in terms of how it fits into that universe, builds on that universe. It arguably falls a bit flat in that respect, but that’s okay because even if people will bicker till the end of time about this game being unfinished because there are two chapters missing or some bullshit and they wanted to have a mech fight with Kid Liquid Snake. I don’t care about that. Who the fuck can give us a shit? This game rules. It’s a great Steam Deck game. I’ve been playing on Steam Deck recently. Real, real nice. Yeah, it’s fantastic, Matthew. Thoughts? Yeah, I completely agree about the kind of like bad Metal Gear. Probably the best game Kojima has actually made as a game. Like I think what open world brings to it is so valuable. Like the idea of approaching these outposts and bases and prisons and whatever it is you’re attacking in each mission from like any angle just opens up so much potential. It’s unlike his other games, which have always been quite like artificial kind of like boxed in spaces that are almost like puzzling in like how you kind of tackle them. Here you can never get like you’re never in total control. Like there’s always a sort of weakness. There’s always an enemy you’ve missed or the world moves on or someone drives in in a Jeep and discovers something. Like there’s this sort of spark of life, which keeps you from being fully on top of any situation, which is just such a satisfying place to sort of sit in a stealth game where you’re constantly on edge. And like the better you are at the game, you can kind of take out a lot of the variables and make it safer for you. But you can never truly just clear out and like walk this game. There’s always something that can kind of come back around to knobble you in some way. And I think that, you know, for all of its many, many qualities, it’s that kind of core trick that I really love about this. It just truly earns and justifies being an open world game through that system. At the same time, it’s like there’s a continuous power curve element to it, where you are researching new stuff and adding to your armory and revisiting places. And, like you say, because you pick the angle of attack on these locations, that makes it unpredictable. But it also means you have this quite unique open world that’s basically like, you know, 10 to 15 different stealth set pieces that happen to share a space. Right, yeah. Which is really unusual and interesting, but it works incredibly well. And it means that MGS5 has a lot more of the immersive sim DNA than any of the previous games did. And it’s arguably the best modern immersive sim, apart from Dishonored 2 maybe, I guess. Yeah. But like, certainly in terms of like the sophistication, the mechanics how precisely you have to play it. I guess I would probably put Dishonored 2 slightly above it. Do I mean that? I’d have to think on that. But anyway. Whatever this stealth experience is, I prefer to Dishonored 2 personally. Yeah, that’s fair enough. I think also it makes its systems incredibly clear to you as a player. You understand why things are the way they are, why at night you have lower visibility than during the day. And also the way Snake moves is better than he’s ever moved before, how he can slide around. Also just the thing about when you get caught, you have that one moment to dart someone in the head before they call in an alert. That’s a really good response to like, I guess it’s like the more contemporary version how you used to be able to shoot out the walkie talkie when someone would try and call in for help or whatever. So yeah, just great. It is still recognizably MGS, but it’s just such a step forward. It was also really oddly gratifying, I guess, as a Metal Gear fan to see, to feel like, I guess, a slight skepticism from people with maybe more of that PC stealth, like immersive background, people playing thief and stuff like that for this game to come along and so not trounce those games, but be like arguably the best modern form of that sort of game. That was quite satisfying from a series that was so often pegged as the long cutscene series. Yeah, pretty cool to see that happen. And then weirdly ends with him being booted out of a studio. Who fucking knows, man? Confusing. I also add to the thing about it not being a good MGS game in terms of the lore and the cutscenes and those kind of flourishes. On a mechanical level, it still has the wit of all the great Metal Gear Solid games. The discovery, the weird behavior of gadgets or sliding down on bodyboarding on a cardboard box or whatever. Getting your horse to take a shit and then cars spinning out on the horse poo and things like that. It’s every bit as witty in a kind of gameplay sense. It just maybe doesn’t have the hour-long bullshit cutscenes that you secretly want from him. Yeah, I just… Lacks killer boss fights as well. Definitely, yeah. Though I do like the quiet sniper fight, but we have litigated this before. We have indeed, yes. That’s fine, we don’t need to go over that again. We did a really fucking good MGS podcast on the Patreon, actually, with Rich. That’s probably the best Patreon episode we did, Matthew. Really, really good. Definitely up there. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, MGS5, it’s like… Plus you can play Friday I’m In Love by The Cure where you’re running around Afghanistan with your dog. That’s frankly what I needed to do in 2015. That was just like therapy for me. So I had a good time. Yeah, an absolute masterpiece. Nice to end with a 10 out of 10, Matthew. Proper 10 out of 10. An agreement. We can shake on it. The best game of 2015. Absolutely. What a great place to wrap up. Do you want to fire through a few of your honorable mentions, Matthew? Yeah, can do. Where the fuck are they? Shall I start with one of mine? Yes. Okay, my first one is Broforce. This was a Devolver Digital published game by Free Lives who had just developed the game Terra Nil, which I look forward to playing at some point. This was a game where you basically played as different 80s action pastiches and like, you know, your Arnie Stallones and the like, with these really rich environmental physics of explosions reshaping the level on the fly. It’s slightly too annoying. I’ve replayed it recently on Steam Deck. It kills you a few for random reasons a bit too often, I think, to be truly up there as one of the best games. But this was something I played a hell of a lot and was a fun co-op game to boot. What’s your first one, Matthew? My first one is I had a really good time playing Resident Evil Revelations 2 in co-op with Catherine. Fuck yeah, we’ve never talked about that game on this podcast. Yeah, just, I mean… I don’t think it’s sort of like mechanically deep enough or kind of interesting enough to make it into the main ten. But this was an episodic adventure, but yeah, built around the idea of playing in co-op. You could play it as single player as well. But what I liked about it is that the… one pair of the characters was… I think it was Barry Burton and a little girl. Right, that sounds fun. And the little girl is obviously very vulnerable, but she can like see things that Barry can’t see, like invisible enemies and ghosts, and she could just point at them to like highlight them. But it just made us laugh so much to… You know, what, you turn around and the other person who’s playing as the little girl would be pointing right at you to try and like freak you out. Me and Catherine were always trying to kind of like mess each other up with the creepy little girl, because she wears like a little Victorian dress. It’s very, very odd. Barry is just a fucking baller, residual character as well, I love that guy. He’s just like comedic in his presence, you know? Yeah, and like the game does have… It hits a lot of the beats you’d want, you know, it starts off in a prison, but then you get to explore a spooky island. There is a kind of creepy sort of fun house slash mansion element to it as well, so it’s kind of ticking off all the resi tropes and it ends with quite a spectacular boss fight. I think it’s so… I probably prefer it to Revelations 1, just because that extra co-op element, I think they really lent into it. It being episodic kind of worked against it, I think. I think more people would have played it and it would have more of a reputation if they’d just put out this one game in the first place. But interesting experiment. Anyway, cool. I have bet everybody’s gone to the Rapture in here, Matthew, because I did think the music was fantastic, but also I thought it was a great, I’ve definitely discussed this before, but a great bit of world building in terms of capturing what that sort of, I guess, like countryside UK setting is like. No other game really does that, and I think how vividly it achieves that in a place where everyone has disappeared is really up there, even if I didn’t totally understand what was going on in the story. What’s the next one? Let’s have a little shout out for Xenoblade Chronicles X. Not the sequel to Xenoblade that I wanted. Much harder sci-fi, lost the kind of like breezy charm of the original game. The soundtrack, much harder to fall in love with, even though it does have plenty of epic stuff. The world of it is like a technical feat, and it’s often very beautiful, but it’s also quite weird and alien, well, it’s literally alien. Like, just a harder thing to sort of fall in love with, you know, a harder world, harder soundtrack, big focus on like big stomping mechs, lots of technical military jargon. Very different to what they’ve done in the Xenoblade series elsewhere, but I mean, a definitive Wii U game, it’s the only place you can play it. It’s the Metal Gear Solid 4 of Wii U as we’ve christened it before. So, yeah, it has to be worth a shout out. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, nice to have. You’ve got to mention something Nintendo related in this part of the podcast, so, pleased to have it in there. In fact, like my next one, actually Matthew, is Splatoon. So I did play this on Wii U shortly, I think before Splatoon 2 came out and when I was putting away the Wii U for good, I did give this a go and I was like, I actually think the best time you will ever play Splatoon is the first time you play it, where you truly understand how they’ve made this competitive game that doesn’t feel competitive in the way that Call of Duty does. It feels a lot softer, but it is just as satisfying and the feedback is great and it has that, I use this over and over again with Nintendo as a point of praise, but how every little interaction and it feels perfect turning into a squid swing through the ink and then filling a space with your paint is just like, that just feels fantastic. And it’s Nintendo taking on a completely different genre and absolutely nailing it. So yeah, little shout out there. What’s the next one? Keep talking and nobody explodes. Oh, is that a VR game? It can be played in VR. Did we play it? No, yeah, no, we definitely, yeah, you can be played in VR, I’m sure of it. But someone is defusing a bomb, the other people have a real world manual to help them defuse the bomb. So it’s kind of co-op, a sort of asynchronous co-op game. Is that a thing? Asymmetrical? Asymmetrical co-op game, is that a thing? I think they’re both a thing, but yeah, that sounds about right. But yes, like the stress of like one person’s kind of going, oh, this bit of the bomb, it’s got this like register number on it, and then they’re desperately trying to flick to the relevant bit of the manual. And then the way it kind of passes information constantly between the screen and the manual and who can see what, and like that both people have enough of a role in that. It’s not just as simple as like look it up. There’s a lot of kind of like specificity in the language. It’s a really, really cool party game. We played it on stage at EGX with RPS, and it was really good fun. Yeah, really good. Yeah. Yeah, fantastic. I never played that one, but always wanted to. That sounds like it’d be good fun at a house party if anyone still had those. Yeah, it’s not like you and one other person. I think that would be a bit like, you’d feel like two people with a bomb, which is probably not a great vibe. Like those old parties Tom Francis used to do basically. Perfect for those. A room full of people blowing up is fun. Two people is like tragic. It is a little bit, yeah. Bad vibes. That’s my bomb take. No, I think you’re spot on there. It’s too late. It’s too late for this podcast. It is, yeah. D4, Dark Dreams Don’t Die. Touch the owl. Someone asked the question, should we release part of an episodic game exclusively on the Xbox One digitally in its first year? And guess what? The answer is it won’t sell if you do that. That’s a poor idea. Swear E65 is a weird game about a dude investigating what happened to his wife. But a lot of the best bits of this game are just hanging out in the apartment with his very, very greedy pal who just comes over and eats food in a very disgusting fashion. That’s got big us energy, Matthew. I really like the vibes of this, that old one, where you don’t want to talk about it in any specific details. You just say the vibes and then kind of move on. I did enjoy that about this game. I did think it looked and sounded and was presentationally way better than Deadly Premonition was, but never got to finish the story, so it can only be an honorable mention. What’s your next one? Grow Home. Oh, of course. That always looked pretty cool, that game. Yeah, Ubisoft’s… I can’t remember which studio made it. Reflections. Reflections, wasn’t it? The New Castle one? Yes, that’s right. Yeah, kind of like a sort of… like a physics-y sort of puzzle platform, a physics-y platform where you control this very sort of physically reactive robot who’s kind of climbing up. You can control his two little hands and you kind of heave him up, this giant beanstalk. You’re collecting seeds to make it branch off into ever new heights. He’s very cute. He makes all sorts of little cute noises. He says, Mom, and things like that. He’s got like sort of ET or kind of gizmo, the gremlin kind of energy, just funny little sort of chirping kind of catchphrases. Like, you know, quite a minimalist sort of art style, but really captures this towering scale of this beanstalk that you’re climbing. Yeah, just a real oddity. Like, where’s the grow home of today, you know? From Ubisoft, that is. Yeah, seemed like a real kind of one-off, this one. But there were a few different, like, Child of Eden, Child of Light. Yeah, and that war one. Yeah, Valiant something or other. So yeah, they did do a few things like that, but now just don’t seem to make those kind of games. But yeah, this did always seem cool. Everyone talked up how nice it felt, the good vibes. And I know some people compare it to Mario Galaxy, Matthew, I feel like there’s a little bit of that. But I don’t know. I think it’s, if anything, they wouldn’t have said this, like, the climbing is a little bit more Breath of the Wild. Gotcha. It’s a bit more like a, almost like one of those, is it Bennett Foddy does like the kind of, you’re controlling all the limbs kind of games. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah. So procedural animation, physics based limbs kind of plus, you know, weird beanstalk climbing equals good game, apparently. Good stuff. I’m going to bundle my last two into one, Matthew, even though they’re not related. Destiny, The Taken King. Destiny was finally good because they added some more Nathan Fillion, but they also made a much better campaign for year two and added lots of fire hammers, which I enjoyed chucking at LANs on the internet. That was what I did in 2015. And then Cities Skylines I wanted to mention, which was in the wake of SimCity sort of dying on its ass. 3A Paradox came along and released this moddable, very cool version of the City Sim they’ve been basically building on for years and years. And yeah, I’ve kind of dipped in now a bit over the years, but I think it was an immaculate version of that kind of thing. So yeah, those are my last two Matthew. Any more for you? I guess a tiny shout out for Rise of the Tomb Raider, which I found very flashy. I mean, it was absolutely gorgeous and it felt nice to have a game with incredible graphics to crow about on LXM. I thought it was like a bit of an improvement on the first one, kind of mechanically in the variety of the areas and what not. Also, a tiny little shout out more on Katherine’s behalf, the SteamWorld Heist, which she loves. I’ve only played a bit of. I don’t think I’ve ever finished a campaign of it, which is the kind of 2D strategy game, sort of XCOM-y. So 2D side on XCOM, but where you control like the angle of fire to sort of ricochet bullets around the inside of spaceships to kill all these sort of steampunk robots. The steampunk games, I sort of admire from afar without ever having like truly loved up close, but dabble with them and recognize their quality. Absolutely. Okay. Well, good stuff, Matthew. Steam World Games, getting a nice shout out there. So that’s it. The podcast is done. It was so fucking long, but I hope you enjoyed it. That was The Best Games of 2015. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? At MrBazzleUnderscorePesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. BackpagePod on Twitter, if you’d like to follow us. And on Patreon is patreon.com/backpagepod. So if you’d like to financially support us, et cetera. Thank you for listening, goodbye. Goodbye.