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 18th UK bank holiday been in May? Have you been filling it with good times, bad times, average times? I forgot that we completely missed the coronation because we were recording the Excel episode for this week. That’s because, you know, my king is our listeners. So, you know, like that’s the only monarch that I recognize. Yeah, I forgot about that too. And then I saw some, is there something on Sunday, like some kind of weird variety show? I saw Tom Cruise in an aircraft or something. And I was like, I suppose that’s happening. But yeah. Yeah, it’s where Prince Charles, sorry, King Charles has to pretend to be interested in modern pop. It’s interesting. Cause he’s like a 74 year old man, right? Yeah. My mom has been like thinking a lot about sort of old age. She keeps saying to me, 75 is what you’re done for basically. So Indiana Jones, you know, Harrison Ford is still kind of kicking and doing it. But it’s like, I can’t imagine the danger of putting Harrison Ford on like a horse. I mean, I don’t think they did. I think they CG didn’t want to a horse in that trailer. But you know. Yeah, I’d say that’s the big difference between say Harrison Ford being Indiana Jones at his age and Joe Biden going for a second presidential, like 84 whatever the fuck he is. Because you can’t CG Joe Biden’s face onto another man’s body and he can still do the job. Yeah, that’s more of a Republican move, isn’t it? Than a Democrat move. But yeah. I think even Americans would see through a CG president. You would hope. I got big Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns vibes there. But yeah, I don’t know how we got onto this topic. That’s where I am at. That’s my like forlorn Monday bank holiday energy of like, I’ve got a carry on with my life now and isn’t that sad because all I did all weekend was sit and play computer games in my underpants. It’s mourning really. I’m mourning that for myself. I’ve only got three days and then it’s Zelda day, baby. Oh, that’s true. Yeah. So you’ve got a week off for Zelda Avenue. Took Friday off and the following week. Wow, yeah. So that’s like, you know. It’s a dream. That’s good. Ten straight days of Tears of the Kingdom. So we’re gonna do two giant men played Tears of the Kingdom. You’re gonna have played it for 85 hours. I’m gonna have played it for six hours. It should be great. It should be a great episode, but yeah, yeah. I wish I’d taken that week off too. I was slightly too busy that week, but no, I will get some proper time in with it at some point. But excited to hear your thoughts, Matthew. This is the big one. Everything’s been building up to this, so yeah. Okay, this is a What We’ve Been Playing episode. People know the deal. We talk about some games we’ve been playing, then we answer some listener questions. So nice and straightforward, always easy to put together for us to give us a little bit of a pause. And fortunately, me and Matthew have both been playing things. There’s one thing we’ve been playing together, so we can talk about that. Matthew, our first game, we have both been playing this first game, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, the sequel by Respawn Entertainment to 2019’s Jedi Fallen Order. It has released to a lot of discussion about technical issues. I’m playing on PS5, where if you put it in performance mode, it’s sometimes it’s okay, but a lot of the time the performance sort of tanks, frame rate going up and down. The game generally doesn’t feel unfinished to me. It feels like it’s like, it’s not buggy or anything like that. It really is just the performance. So it’s a bit of a weird one, but it feels like that narrative has run away a little bit. And I think that it’s slightly unfair in the sense that this is one of the best blockbuster sequels I can remember playing. And it’s strange that the discussion is only ever gonna be about frame rate now. And there are so many things this game does well. I think it’s incredibly impressive from the Uncharted 2 school of sequel making. What do you make of this game? I thought this might happen when we started getting into games that were current gen only, and people actually see the limitations of what the current gen is and how things look. I think comparing this to say PS5 ports of PS4 games, which fundamentally Horizon and God of War Ragnarok are, you’re bound to see some differences. But anyway, that’s a conversation for a more boring podcast. So we’ll leave it with them. I think this is much improved over the first game. I think it’s dialed back on some of the soulsy elements of the game. Like it has the same structure as the first, in terms of when you die, you go back to sort of checkpoints and you lose your XP and you have to go back and find the enemy, which was kind of the sort of soulsy element. But this time, I think the difficulty is like a little gentler. I think the areas kind of loop back around on themselves a bit more. And I think there’s a lot more forward momentum, which is a much better fit for the kind of tone they’re going for, which is a lot more of a romp. One of the odd things about Fallen Order was that the kind of bruising grind that comes with any sort of souls like game runs counter to the kind of go get them attitude of Star Wars. Right. You know, like these are, this isn’t a world where you have to fight hard for every inch forward, you know, it never quite kind of added up or made sense to me. By dialing back on some of some of that difficulty, I think you can just focus on like the crazy set pieces, the quite good characters, you know, a story which did pull me through and the kind of Metroid elements, which are part of the soul genre too. But here there’s just a huge amount of powers that open up across the game and are constantly recontextualizing your relationship with the various maps. The way this game works is it kind of has a central planet called Kobo, which is absolutely massive compared to any area from the previous game. And you do leave it and go to some other quite substantial areas, but you’re constantly returning to this place and it kind of spokes out into new areas as you get new powers. But I actually found the way they layered up that space and the way that they constantly drew back and revealed new ideas and it was really, really nicely done. Like as far as 3D Metroid games go, I think this is kind of one of the better ones I’ve played. Yeah, so how it is, it’s not open world as such. It is, you have around the same number of planets as the first game and the structure is roughly the same where you end up going back to the same few planets over and over again to do different objectives. But they give you new abilities to reach different places, hence the Metroidvania thing. But the spaces are incredibly vast compared to those in the first game. Like you will be exploring for several hours and then it will tell you, oh, you’ve only seen 45 percent of fucking Kobo or whatever. And you’re like, wow, okay. So there really is just so much packed in there. And I think that I agree with you that the Metroidvania structure is so well handled here that I don’t actually, I didn’t get into the mindset of like, oh, I need to see everything the moment I get into this planet. I was doing critical path stuff and then kind of letting my abilities accumulate. And it means that when you’re kind of like good and comfortable, you can go and tick off each planet one by one, which I think is a good way to design it. So I really like that about it. I definitely agree on difficulty too. So the first game was quite tough in places. I certainly remember when you were fighting the, I can’t remember the name of the planet now, but when you fight the Zabrak, the Darth Maul looking dudes, some of the like, the combat- Dathomir, was it? Dathomir, that’s right. Yeah. Could be incredibly just like difficult and frustrating. And I remember feeling that when I was playing it. Here, I’ve sort of like, I reckon I’ve probably died fewer than 10 times so far and I’m about two thirds through the game, maybe slightly further. So, I’m certainly finding it a lot more comfortable. I think that certain things have bothered me about the first game, like the parry window, which I never felt like I could quite nail. That feels spot on here, I feel like I’m always parrying and getting it right. That’s really, really nice. The combat is, I think, vastly improved across the board. They have new stances in there, so new Jedi stances, so you can use like a single lightsaber, you can use two lightsabers, you can use like a Darth Maul, sort of double lightsaber. But you can also, in this one, you have like a blaster stance where Cal Kestis, your main character, carries a lightsaber in one hand and then like a blaster in the other and the blaster’s ammo replenishes based on your performance in combat, essentially. And so it means you’re doing these combos where you’ll swipe with the lightsaber and then he’ll do this like quite cool hand motion as he sort of like over the shoulder shoots them with his pistol. And it feels almost like anti-Star Wars in a certain way because Jedi don’t use guns generally speaking, but I think it just makes for it feels like a combat team that’s really come into its own and found like new and exciting ways to experiment with their combat system and to make you as a player find the style that really suits you. And they’ve also had like a cross guard lightsaber stance, which is like the sort of Kylo Ren. There’s a little, yeah, two little beams. The really heavy one, right? That’s what it feels like. That’s my favourite one. Because I think with that one, like if you get really big into like the parry and evading game like another mechanic actually they’ve added to this is you can still do evasive dodges because there are kind of red attacks that are unparryable. But if you don’t move and press block just as an enemy attacks, you sort of do like a little force sort of shift, a little kind of weave out the way and then you’re still right up in their face. And I actually found that once I kind of got my head around that, the combination of parries and that means you don’t really ever have to move. You can just kind of sort of stand and let everything come at you. Deflect things, parry things, dodge the couple of things you can’t parry. And then when you’ve got the cross guard, you can just give them such a walloping. Like it’s so powerful that when it does get an opening, I just found it was like the way to go for me. Maybe this is the Kylo Ren Association, but it feels kind of angrier and more aggressive than the others. It’s got like real kind of sort of intent behind every hit, which I really like. Yeah, it certainly also that’s where it makes it feel more like a Souls game than ever where, you know, my experience of Souls games is like picking a fucking heavy weapon and then watching my dude very slowly twat like a big monster with it before he inevitably gets like squashed by a deep jump, a AOE attack and I have a tantrum and turn it off. But obviously, it’s a lot kind of this game. The Souls cycle. Yeah, for two giant petulant men, that’s how we play Souls games. But yeah, there’s loads of other ways in which it’s improved as well. I don’t really remember what the platforming was like in the first game, but here they put a lot of effort into giving you different sort of mobility options. So you do a lot of wall running, which I know is in the first game as well. And there’s occasional sliding down sort of like gravelly cliffs. There’s a lot of that in the first game too. But there’s also, they’ve added this, there’s like a grappling hook so you can sort of shoot onto certain surfaces. One thing that I really like is you can do sort of like a mid-air boost and to, which gives you even more flexibility to move around. And then there are even sort of other options they add later into the game to kind of give you new ways to get around the environment. And I think I liked it because I’ve definitely like griped about this before, but I’m not big into games that have platforming where you just hold down one button and never actually do any jumping. I think that’s not really platforming, in my opinion. But this game is not like mega, mega complicated, but it does actually require skill. And that’s true of the whole game, really. It’s not that hard, but it does require you to actually pay attention. It’s not playing itself for you. And so it really hits that blockbuster sweet spot for me, Matthew, of, you know, it is challenging on some level. I’m being stimulated by it. But also it’s not so difficult that you can like hand it to someone’s kid and be like, you can’t play this. I think it really threads that line nicely. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I agree with that. Definitely. I think something else the platforming does, because he just has, by the end of the game, quite enormous range, you know, when you combine his double jump with like this dash and there’s another jumping power that comes into it later, which I quite like. He can cover quite big gaps and it allows them to build out these physically quite huge spaces, which I think really suits Star Wars and really suits the kind of alien environments. Like, there’s some areas where they can do some quite cool, like aerial sections or sections where you’re in these like huge sort of vertiginous structures looking down or you’re kind of jumping between like rocky outcrops at the top of a mountain and it’s a bit of a basic observation to say when you jump further you can have like bigger more impressive looking gaps but that is part of this game’s visual DNA like it just the levels feel big because you move far and I really like that there’s a quite big kind of platforming boss encounter that’s more of a kind of platforming set piece I guess where you’re kind of escaping this big thing you’re covering so much real estate to get away from it which I always love when a game does that like when a game’s kind of like see this whole kind of three miles of virtual level we’re gonna trash that in two minutes I always think that’s kind of someone really kind of bringing out the checkbook and just throwing away some assets on a piece of excellent set pieceery. I love that about it but I think that what’s great is that scale also applies to some of the puzzles as well so you have these really vast feeling puzzles which again not that complicated but complicated enough that you have to think about them a little bit and sometimes, these puzzles will just span these quite wide spaces and they feel like set pieces in their own right which is really impressive. Yeah, I agree with you. I think something I really like about the way they particularly do Metroidvania type level design is that like you say, you’ll look up into sort of the skybox and you’ll see different landmarks and you’re like, I wonder what that is and then inevitably the game will eventually take you there and you’ll kind of see what the deal is and each one will kind of feel like a level in itself essentially like the self-contained sort of like, you know, exciting set PC narrative driven sort of like affair essentially and so I think that the structure is really working because you have that blend of the Metroidvania stuff with more trad Naughty Dog style set piece design. It just it’s just a really nice melding of like, oh, we built this amazing level. It just happens to be inside a much larger kind of like a meta level essentially. And so yeah, I think that’s it’s just really, really working well. And it’s much better than if this was an open world game, I think it’s sort of like, yeah, it’s past to follow and past that will reward you and it is exploration, but it’s not exploration in the box ticking sense. So really finds that line nicely. It’s like the difference between a game that could could have been 70 hours long, probably feeling closer to 40. You can probably charge through the main campaign in 20 sub 20 if you want and just have a quite a different experience. I’d imagine. I think it would feel like more of a cinematic blast from start to finish. But if you are into the backtracking and using powers to uncover secrets and stuff, it’s so densely packed. It doesn’t feel like you’re having to travel for miles just to like pick up one little doodad. What the powers unlock, they make sure there’s a lot of it always in the map. You can sort of move from like revelation to revelation quite quickly. It’s funny, because I don’t really have many complaints about this game, like my only real complaint. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it that as such, the area of the game where I wasn’t as moved by it as the first one is the story, because something this game’s story does, so you know, you may remember from the first game that you are this Jedi on the run, essentially, you get this, you find this sort of like a surrogate master. And the game’s main villain was a failed apprentice at this master, essentially, who was, you know, now part of the dark side. And I thought that conceit was really nicely done, really well explored and executed. And the cow was quite a well, a well rounded sort of like, it was just interesting to peel back the sort of weird survivor skill he had. And, you know, just sort of like what his life was like on the on the run from the Empire after Order 66. And I thought it weaved into the Star Wars storyline, sort of overall arc, really nicely without necessarily meaning that he has to have, he has to like, his presence isn’t distracting versus the rest of the canon, he sort of like fit around it quite nicely. And this one, so they do something which I think is quite close to like a branding exercise, because in the last few years Lucasfilm has been big on this, the High Republic era of Star Wars storytelling, so it’s mostly taken the form of like a bunch of books and comics so far. And it’s been like pretty well received on the whole. And there’s a TV show called The Acolyte coming out, which I’ve definitely talked about before in this podcast, which is also set in the same time period. That was the sort of like more martial artsy looking one, they showed a celebration, looked pretty good. This game, even though it’s set in between the two trilogies still, between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, it does this thing where it kind of has a villain, villain unfrozen from Amber basically, and he was in the High Republic era. And they talk a lot about the High Republic era. And I feel like if your game is not set in the High Republic era, it probably shouldn’t be about it. And so I think that’s like a storytelling weakness of this game is that the overall arc of like, this dark Jedi you’re hunting down, Dagan Gera, is quite weak, compared to the overall arc in the first game. However, I do think that the writing, the dialogue writing, and the characterization generally is extremely strong. This is a game of good hangs, a lot of good hangs. And like, it’s, yeah, it really works in that level. It’s just the overall narrative I couldn’t quite get along with because that High Republic thing was distracting to me. I was like, you know, this fucking Darth Vader is out there, man, like, it’s just, you know, we’re in the times of the Empress hunting down, like, the Jedi. We don’t, I don’t think it needs to be about another era just to promote a bunch of books, basically, which is kind of what I felt like when the High Republic came into this. Maybe you didn’t feel that as someone who’s less engaged in Star Wars. Yeah, no, not really. I kind of feel you on the, there are bigger threats out there and this is a game that can’t really deal with them because where it fits in the timeline, you know, we know that Calcesters isn’t going to, like, find and kill Darth Vader. You know, that isn’t just, that isn’t a thing that can happen. So they almost have to keep them away from all the key players. And it is quite self-contained, which I like. I will say, I know I’m not going to spoil it, but in the third act, I think there’s some really, really good classic Star Wars stuff that kicks off, which is really, really good fun. And I actually kind of clicked into the story a lot more then. Though, though, actually, and we talked about this before in the pod, I wasn’t crazy about Fallen Order’s story. Like, I didn’t really like any of the characters and it didn’t really, none of it really resonated with me. And I don’t really remember a lot of it. Even though I’m told apparently it’s great. But, those same characters do return in this game. And I just, I found them infinitely more likeable. Maybe it’s because the nature of your relationship was established in the first game and here you can just skip to, like, them being good hangs. But it has quite a few stretches where you’re paired up with a second character. There’s this, like, kind of, like, mercenary guy called Bode Kuna who’s really good fun and Merrin from the first game. I loved the stuff with Cal and Merrin in this game. I thought it was really, really nicely drawn. It was quite kind of sweet, the nature of their relationship. I really liked them fighting together. It was just cool because she’s got this, like, weird green magic shit she does and you’ve got your Jedi powers and it really feels like two people tag-teaming to bring down things which are a lot bigger than them. That’s probably where the game’s, like, at its most uncharted-y. You get to spend quite a lot of time with her and have quite a good couple of adventures with her which I really like. I actually thought it did quite a good job of placing it between those two trilogies. Probably better than a lot of other things which are set between the films, which are a lot of spin-off shows and books and comics or whatever are. I sometimes feel like, oh, I can see how this becomes one or I can see how it came from one thing. But in this one, there’s a lot of, like, remnants of the original trilogy in that it brings in, like, the droid enemies from the Clone Wars. Yeah, but it also has the classic Stormtroopers and it really does feel like better placed between those two eras. It feels like a kind of an end of one thing or the kind of degradation of one thing and the kind of rise of another thing. And I thought it’s one of the more successful, like wider Star Wars projects for that reason. Yeah, I think I agree with you on on that level because it allows them as well to delve into this quite wide range of potential enemy types as well, which is, yeah, I would say that every single enemy type in this was really well designed, I thought, really well judged and challenged in different ways. And there is there is like one enemy from the Clone Wars era that wasn’t in the original game that is done here. I think it’s executed here better than it was in any other Star Wars game. And I thought it was a really nice addition. So without spotting what that is, I think it is meant to be a minor reveal of the game. So I’ll let people discover that the battle droids are funny because they’re they are they’re like, you will hear them talking all the time and the characters keep making reference to the fact of like, why do they program them to talk and they’re just like having these conversations. And that’s really good. That’s someone who’s obviously like a lifelong Star Wars fan who wondered what was going on there. Yeah. So I agree. It means that you have like these droids who are basically owned by mercenaries who are just like, you know, rolled out to sort of patrol. And then you have the other stormtroopers who just obviously are part of the Empire doing their thing as well. So, yeah, it just means that you just have this massive range of different enemies and they all, yeah, they all challenge you in different ways. You’ll fight entire clusters of them. They’ll throw these extremely OP grenades that you’ll be able to just like force push back into a bunch of them and they’ll all die at once. And it’s actually not it’s actually not afraid of letting you find shortcuts to take out all of the enemies as well. That’s what I like about it as a combat experience. It’s not like fucking Dark Souls where they’re like, you have to just prove yourself to From Soft that you can do this. It’s much more like, wouldn’t it be fun if you killed seven enemies in like one go because you did something quite, quite smart? Yeah. And that’s cool. You’ve got like a Jedi mind trick kind of confused ability. And that is so overpowered if you pump all your skill points into that. There’s several areas where it will drop two things which would be horrible to fight kind of au naturel. But if you turn one of them to your side and let them do most of the work, like you can get over most of the difficulty spikes in this game quite easily, which I really liked. And it didn’t feel like I was cheating, it just felt like I was engaging with the systems properly. Dark Souls never gives you those workarounds, it’s like deliberately designed to avoid any kind of like easy outs. But just giving you a couple here if you discover them I think is really smart. Yeah, absolutely. And I think as well that even the stances can be quite shitty. So the blaster one is just great because you’ll have these moments like Raiders of the Lost Ark with the guy with the sword who Indiana Jones just sort of shoots and you have those moments all the time in this because you’ll just come out of a lightsaber battle, there’ll be like one stormtrooper left and he’s about to run at you with like a fucking electric stick or whatever and you’re just like, eh, and then you blast him in the head and he’s dead and you’re like, that rules. It’s not really sort of like sporting in the Jedi sense but it’s a Star Wars, a specific Star Wars fantasy I’ve not really seen before where it’s like, you know, we thought it’d be fun to put a bit of Han Solo into this Jedi stance and I just, it really works and yeah, it’s, what a game, man. It’s just really, really good. It’s like, this is great blockbuster game design. I’m just, yeah, incredibly impressed by it. Big grin on my face the whole time I’m playing it, you know, so really good. But it sounds like I’ve got more yet left to find, Matthew, so. Oh, I think you’ve got the best bits to it. Fuck, okay. We’ll see how much of it I can get in before I have to get on a three-hour train to Cambridge today. We’ll see how it goes. Cool. Anything else to add on Jealous Survivor, Matthew, or should we move on? It is dumb that there’s unlockable beards in a box. What can you do? Yeah, one of the first ones you find is like a mullet by a lake, and I was there thinking, this is really, really daft, but they were also smart to get the mullet out of the way really early in the game because it can never be as funny again after that. There’s something about you’re in an Imperial base and you’ve just done a really difficult combat encounter to get access to a crate, and it’s got a goatee beard inside, or like a handlebar mustache, and you’re like, why is this here? That is baffling, the notion of the Empire storing our collective knowledge of facial hair. Were you aware of what the poncho jokes refer to in the game, because there’s quite a few. Yeah, some of them looked really bad as well, some of them looked alright, but there was a big pink one where it was like, I don’t know, it was not necessarily the right look for Calcestus IMO. But here I’m not even engaging with the customisation really, I’m just sort of like, oh, if I mess with BD too much, will he still look like BD? I’m not sure he will, so I’ve just left it on default. Apparently there’s quite a big, well, I was going to say quite a big movement, but that makes it sound more important than it actually is. There’s quite a lot of people online digging the lightsaber customisation, and it’s not just the individual parts, but it’s like the texture and the colour and how worn each individual part is. And you know, you can probably make, this is probably like the best lightsaber construction simulator there’s ever going to be. And given that people spend whatever, 300, 400 quid to go to Star Wars land and build their own lightsaber, I can understand why they’ve really doubled down on that. I just think it like, as a Metroidvania challenge reward, pulling off a really difficult bit of platforming, only to get like a pommel, like it’s just, I mean, come on, your heart just can’t race for a pommel. Yeah, of course, to allude back to an earlier point that Matthew made on our Star Wars episode, just for diversity’s sake, it’s just great to see a gingerhead main character in a video game, Matthew. I mean, you could shave it all off if you want. That’s true. You can also make it super long. Some of those hairstyles really don’t suit him that they put in the menu, but who am I to judge? So, yes. Very, very successful. Another great Star Wars game from Respawn. If they don’t make a third one, that would be a shame, but also whatever they make next will be fucking amazing, I’m sure. I think they’ve got a third one in them. I think they know what they’ll do if they make a third one too. That game could be absolutely incredible. So, yes, this is like maybe, you know, I really enjoyed the first game, probably to the extent that it was like a high eight for me, but it’s definitely a nine. This is exactly the kind of, these are weirdly elusive these days, these kinds of blockbusters, these particular single player blockbusters that are not open world games, but really hit the spot. Okay, good stuff, Matthew, then. So our second game is Arkane Studios Redfall, which has become a lightning rod for a bunch of different Xbox related conversations. Not too interested in getting into those, but you and I have played a whole bunch of this. Well, we played like two hours yesterday, basically, and I think we both came to the same conclusion, which is this is a game that’s sort of for everyone and no one in a lot of ways. It’s like, when you’re playing it by yourself, it’s kind of sort of pretends it’s a stealth game in some ways, or it pretends it’s an immersive sim a little bit. But what it comes down to is basically like quite a weightless Left 4 Dead-alike, where you’re going across this open world map that’s okay, got some like, got a few cool interiors in there, you can always depend on Arkane for that, basically just killing cultists or vampires in this land, this world has been trapped by this like giant sort of like water wall, basically this sort of tidal wave that’s surrounding it. And it was not a particularly inspiring experience. And it’s I think the surprise there comes from the fact that Arkane is responsible for so many of the best modern games, that it’s kind of a shame. So the the technical, the performance stuff didn’t really bother me that much. I think it was more the fact that there are places where the game felt unfinished, you see enemies sort of scooting along on the ground without animation. There’s the games got like kind of a story element, but they’re all told for like these motion graphic cut scenes, which I think is feels like a step down from the way the story has been presented in previous Arkane games. And also the narrative in the world don’t have a lot to be for you to be interested in. I think even going back to Deathloop, Deathloop was really good at making you invested in that world and exploring that world and uncovering all those characters were even though come to think of it, it didn’t have a lot more going on in terms of actual narrative presentation. Like it was pretty, it was pretty much, you know, a lot of it was told via like, you know, voice audio tapes and things like that. But this game doesn’t have what Deathloop had, which is that incredible environmental design that tells you the story of the place or the people you’re sort of tracking down. It feels like if you’d have told me this was, if I had been given this game to just play without knowing who the developer was and someone asked me to guess the developer, I don’t think I would even guess it’s Arkane, which I suppose is probably the most damning thing I can say about it. What did you make of it Matthew from our session? I just kept bumping into things which made me think this was kind of doomed from the beginning, which maybe sounds a bit extreme. But the co-op element of it and the multiplayer element of it just runs so counter to what Arkane’s strengths are. Co-op to me is like the forward charge, it’s friends messing around, it’s players who you have no control over basically and you can’t guide their eye and you can’t rely on them listening and you can’t rely on them taking their time, they’re certainly not taking their time. So when you see classic Arkane tricks in this, loads of readable materials which have got all these lore cuts and they may be beautifully written but I’m not spending a minute to read something when Sam’s talking to me over a headset or a friend’s running off. As a co-op experience, Arkane’s strengths, which is take your time and drink it in, that is just not what co-op is about and that they haven’t identified that as a problem, that at that needs to be addressed super early on in the core concept of the game, I just couldn’t really believe it. I just feel like it was built to fail because of that. The powers aren’t interesting enough. I was playing as Jacob who’s this sniper guy and the first thing he has is a bird that marks enemies on a map, I mean very very boring. You’ve got a little cloak thing but anything that hints at stealth in this game is wasted because the AI just isn’t there to support a stealth game. People can’t notice stuff if stuff’s going wrong. If it all kicks off, it’s one of these games where every enemy in a one mile radius will become activated. There’s no subtlety to it. Fights never take off. We never knew what we were meant to be doing at any time. The story was so lost in the way they were telling it or what you were meant to glean it from, I have no idea because we always knew what we were meant to be doing. We never knew why we were doing it. And we found ourselves in this quite big story beat where we got pulled into this doll’s house. And the both of us were just like, what the fuck are we doing here? This could be cool. The idea of a level where you’re doing something and then there’s a twist where you get pulled into a weird visual realm. That feels like a classic Arkane move. But actually it’s like you have a boring fight in a house. You get pulled into a doll’s house and you have a boring fight there too. It’s just so sad to see people who just feel completely mismatched with the material they’re working on. I just, I don’t get it. I just couldn’t really recommend it to anyone. Not on the grounds of like there’s anything like heinously broken. It’s just so bland. I played a little bit more of it after our session yesterday and it’s not like I don’t like actively dislike it as such. It’s just there’s not one part of it that’s really easy to love. And yeah, the main missions just don’t have that inspiring quality of, oh wow, here we go and do the thing. Also, we had a few objectives that we were given, which were very much in the vein of classic open world tick box objectives where did we end up in this by the same burning helicopter like three times trying to like find various things? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The story mission took us to these two places and then we picked up a side mission and it took us back to those same places. If it was procedurally generated, it’s fucked. If it wasn’t procedurally generated, I have no idea why that mission is there and so close to that first mission. Yeah. Yeah. And sort of there was also other strange things about the open world like this. There’s quite a lot of big empty spaces in between landmarks where like it may be you start to realize why open worlds are as condensed as they are for the most part. Like you it’s because you end up like there’s no vehicles, you’re just doing a lot of walking on like big highways and it’s a bit strange. I mean like the little downtown bit with the storefronts and stuff, that was quite cool as a space. I quite like that. But yeah, it doesn’t have the immediate, the world is the star element that say, you know, Prey from the same developer did back in 2017. It’s that thing of like, look how incredible this world is. And back on the narrative presentation thing as well. Yesterday I was reminded of the incredible opening to Prey, where you’re in the helicopter flying over the city and then obviously turns out to be an illusion and that amazing Mick Gordon music plays and then you like break through the mirror. This game just doesn’t have that, you just sort of like turn up at a fire station and then like talk to a lot of NPCs and then it’s suddenly like, off we go, time to do lots of like box-sticking missions. Just quite strange. Yeah. But also it doesn’t feel like a game that’s going to be like significantly changed by patches to me. It might just be this is just kind of what they’ve got and that’s sort of it really. The review which really nailed it for me and I thought was Jeremy Peel wrote about it and obviously like a huge Arkane head. I really trust him on this and the sort of the sense of disappointment was really powerful in that review. You know, he was liking it to Far Cry but he said compared to Far Cry, you know, it doesn’t work as a stealth experience because it doesn’t have a stealth takedown move, which is just such a flaw. Like whatever you think of Far Cry, actually clearing out an outpost and the skills that you unlock to let you like pounce on someone and then throw a knife at someone and then drag someone into the bushes is really powerful. And we would laugh at that and say that that was a basic stealth experience compared to maybe the stealth experience of A Dishonored. But compared to Far Cry, this is like, it just doesn’t even register as a stealth game. Like it’s like they forgot everything in a genre which they invented like a lot of what’s good about that genre. You know, the people behind this game. It’s just an action game. And so any power which is about like positioning or getting the drop or getting you up high so you can see down, it doesn’t matter because once it kicks off, it will be the same boring firefight over and over and over again. It’s, if you can find one, like the map is so empty. What a mistake. The thing is, each of the four different characters have different Dishonored style abilities. And so you have, you know, my character, the triple threat in student debt or something. She can do this thing where she puts up this like barrier that can absorb damage and then she’ll sort of like reflect the damage back at people, kind of like a Bide attack in Pokemon, it’s an example I can think of. But she’s also got something where she can create like a little kind of elevator thing, which basically just gives you like a little air boost, which there are a couple of missions where it was quite useful to get into a building using that, where that was kind of cool. And there’s also, she can also summon her vampire ex-boyfriend who will come and attack enemies. My problem with it was that I think those powers needed to make more of an immediate, impressive impression than they do, because you have like the weakest possible versions of them, and then there are upgrade trees to make them more powerful. But I think that it just means they all feel a bit underpowered, and I wasn’t using them that much and I was just like, fire, fire, fire, fire, stake the vampire, staking a vampire, that’s pretty cool Matthew, that’s a good interaction they got in there. I think they’ve captured that Buffy style, that’s the Buffy style element. But you’re right though, stealth, you know, to have it play in stealth, you needed something like that, but in stealth mode. When you kill the human enemies, you need to like do a throat slit. If it’s vampire enemies, you need to be able to like stake them from behind or something. So it does lack that, but the game still pretends it’s kind of a stealth game, because you’ll see enemies have little question marks and stuff and it’s like, it’s not really though, it’s not really. And when it sort of says, you know, this line of like, oh, it’s still an Arkane game, because there’s several routes into every building. But one of those routes is like, go through the front door, or climb up the ladder next to the front door and there’s just a hole in the roof. And it doesn’t matter, because once you’re inside, you’re shooting the same three guys anyway. Like, there’s no reward for playing it differently. There’s no like, big narrative reveal or like, clever narrative twist if you do it one way or the other. That design just feels so hollow without that core tension of like, am I going to get caught? Like, that is… I just don’t think their whole deal makes sense outside of a stealth game. Because in an action game, like, you go in all guns blazing either way, so it doesn’t really matter from which direction you come. Not really. We just had so many bits where really bad signposting in levels, or there was like a level… We took on this mission where it was like, you have to go and hunt the king vampire of this area and we were like, oh, okay, this is going to be good. And he’s got like, it’s a named vampire, it’s called like, the fucking the suburbs killer or something. And it’s in this house, you come into this house and you’re like, oh shit, he’s going to be here somewhere. And then we couldn’t find him and everything was pointing us down to the basement. So we went down to the basement and there was just no vampire there. It just felt like it had broken. It actually turned out he was in a tiny little room, which was like in a shadowy corner of the basement. That was so easy to miss that I was in there for like four or five minutes running cycles of this house going, there’s no fucking vampire in here. But we found all its audio logs so we could hear what its whole deal was. You know, we found all these documents being like, you know, the classic, oh, I feel myself changing. I hope I don’t kill my family or whatever. And you’re like, well, who wrote this note? Like I want to kill that guy. And if you have to go looking for like a boss, if you can’t find him, by the time he turned up the whole thing was so deflated and we were like, oh, here he is. And then we just shot him like three times with a shotgun and that was it. That’s the other problem with it. Like the vampires don’t feel like a big event in any way. Some of them are as easy to kill as the common human enemies. What was the deal with that vampire who had like some kind of weird Destiny style blue barrier shit? Yeah, that sucks. So there was this one in the basement. It’s always in the basement of these games where you’ve, yeah, we found one and it just had like, it had a slightly longer health bar and it had these like blue shields that spun around it, but they only covered like 50% of his body anyway. So you can just empty shotgun blasts into his feet or whatever. And I think at the moment we both burst out laughing at just how fucked this game was where there was just a vampire chasing after us in broad daylight. And it was like, oh, I think that is meant to do that though. I think it’s meant to be like they’ve caused an endless night, but it just happens to be daytime sometimes. I don’t, I don’t quite get that part of the premise. Well, either way, it felt like that feels like it’s up there with the James Bond game where someone says, what’s your name? And he goes James Bond in terms of like just did not understand the assignment. Yeah, it’s a weird one because the vampires as well, like they are the enemy I noticed the most like without having like really sophisticated animation, they would just scoot along the ground. They just sort of slide around. And it just meant that it deflated them even more because, you know, they are like slightly harder to kill than the human enemies because you have to use a stake to kill them or some kind of fire weapon to kill them. But it’s just when they would turn up, scoot around and then they’d just be yeah, they’d just be gone. I’d be like, oh, I guess that was that then. I think the other thing is that there’s a few ways in which this feels like someone making their first proper co-op game, which is like when I went back to my game after doing I think like three or four story missions with you, a fair chunk of the story I think it is. I went back and that progress did not count in my game. So I was back on that ship at the very start of the game. And I think the game needs to at least go once you’ve caught up to like where you got up to in sort of co-op when you when you kind of come to those missions, it needs to say, oh, it looks like you’ve played this before. Like do you want to play it again? Because if not, we’ll skip to the next mission. And that feels like something very basic. I expect from a co-op game to like recognize my progress playing in someone else’s game. You got to go back with all my experience, all my guns. That was good. It made it quite easy to go through the first few missions. But it’s that thing of like, I’ve already done this mission and I just have to do all of everything we did yesterday for two hours. I have to do again in my game. And that’s where it’s like, that’s not ideal. The other thing is that apart from like when someone’s down and you revive them, it doesn’t have an overt amount of like, it doesn’t really have any meaningful co-op mechanics. So I was talking to you like, oh, how come when it’s like not like two players, it’s not like some kind of vampire where like one of you has to like hold the vampire down while the other stakes him or something like a more powerful variant or some, some kind of enemy that requires two people. But it doesn’t have anything like that really. It’s just, it’s just the same stuff, but there are two people there, basically. That’s kind of what it feels like. So yeah. Yeah. I tell you what, though, I didn’t spite of all that. I don’t actively dislike it. And I’m even kind of curious enough to like see the end of it. I sort of want to see it through a little bit. It’s like 11 hours long. And I’m like, I think I could do that. I think I could get through that. I didn’t want to play the same missions again. It’s like, there’s no part of it that greatly offends me. It’s just like, it’s just, it just feels like a missed opportunity, you know. I can’t say I’ll be going back to it. I don’t think. You know, but it’s not, it isn’t, it isn’t said with glee. The problem with this, this happens a lot in games these days. The second like anything mainstream slightly shits the bed, it definitely gets amplified by everyone jumping on it. You know, like the mega dunking on Twitter, all the hate preachers on YouTube drawing out the worst possible glitches and saying like, this is 100% of the game. This happens when any game goes wrong. You think it only goes wrong and you’re like, well, actually, like, I’d say 95% of what we played was functioning and didn’t look weird. But like, I’d say even 5% is kind of sort of unacceptable in my head in terms of like, and you know, human enemies sliding on the floor or a boss not spawning or whatever like that stuff’s shit. But it’s not like every single character in this game world is inside out, which would have you believe if you follow the online discourse. And it’s even worse because it’s like an Xbox thing. So then you get all the kind of console war people and not the cool console war people like me, like the bad console war people who love this stuff and decide that because a character slides along the ground, they’re going to tell someone at Arkane they’re going to kill them or whatever. And you’re like, well, cool, you know, as always, it feels like it’s becoming a game. It’s almost hard to say is bad because it lumps you in with some real dark assholes who think it’s really bad. Yeah, and that’s why I think I’m tempering my language because I am an Arkane fan and I do think they are allowed to take an L. But it does feel like it would have been so good for this particular run of pretty amazing games at this point where we’ve had like Resi 4 remake, we’re going to get, you know, we’ve had Jedi Survivor and then like Zelda is coming next week, Final Fantasy 16 is coming next month. It would have been so sweet to just have a great Arkane game in the mix there. That would have been like, it could have, it would have made this like maybe the best sort of six months of games ever, perhaps. But yeah, because it hasn’t happened and I just don’t see a way they can salvage it with with updates. It just it feels like something that where I’m just like, well, I hope all that happens now is they are allowed to learn from it and move on and make something new. That’s all I really want from from this. But yeah, I’m not not I’m not truly heartbroken. It’s just that I don’t know on paper like co-op sort of co-op Dishonored style game against vampires sounded so good and so that the end result was quite flat. It’s just really surprising. All the trailers for it were bad, though. I actually didn’t watch any of the trailers. Do you mean like the ones where it’s like, oh, it’s wacky man and stuff like that? I mean, well, it started off with just a video trailer of like characters being their character for selves. And I was like, well, you can’t learn anything from that. The second they started showing off the game, it’s looked in every step of the way. I don’t feel any disappointment because I honestly didn’t think this was going to be any good. I think it’s kind of exactly what I thought was going to happen. Yeah, I didn’t know what to expect from it, honestly. And now it’s here. I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s tough. Far Cry was maybe what it was going for. You compare the immense mechanical sophistication of the glue gun in Prey to anything in this. None of that inspiration comes through, really, and none of the majesty of the environmental design as well. Talos 1 is such an incredible place to explore, such a beautiful looking location. Hey ho, Matthew, we survive, we move on. My last game to discuss, then, and this will not be a surprise to anyone who’s listened to our Excel episode on the 50 moments that make us go, oh no, this month. But I finished Mad Max, so people might remember the best games of 2015. I played that game as research for that episode. I think I put it at number eight or something like that on my list. And I stand by that after playing the entire game. I had a great time by the end of it, just ramming cars off the road, shooting like rockets from a little harpoon turret thing, and yet like ripping off tires, just like, yeah, just kind of doing a lot of damage, raiding these bases, pulling like down turrets, and yeah, like running over snipers, and all this kind of like cool car combat stuff. I think like everything I’ve said on that podcast is true in the sense of the melee combat is the worst thing about it. You’ll have loads of fights where someone who you’re meant to counter-attack just flies in off the screen where you can’t see them, and then suddenly they hit you and you’re down, and it’s quite frustrating, but the car combat really nails it, and the world really is like beautiful. And it’s just a great variant of the old school open world template, Matthew. So I had a good time with that one, not loads more to add there, probably because I got it all out of my system on the Excel pod, talking about the people who needed water, who accidentally ran over. No regrets here, my man. But yeah, fun times out in the desert. You know, because it’s got so much sort of collectible and map stuff to do. Did you kind of like start ignoring that for the sort of central story towards the end, or did it keep you engaged throughout? Oh, so weirdly, the non-story stuff is the best stuff about this game. And the only reason I deleted it from my hard drive is because Jedi Survivor was coming out, and I needed to move aside so I could just play that basically. So, I didn’t actually completely exhaust the open world. The game is slightly guilty of gating off a lot of the cooler upgrades by you having to do open world stuff, so it can be a little bit stingy in that respect, and not necessarily respect your time by asking you to do a lot of that. But I think it’s okay, just because it’s absolutely at its best when you’re not going down a corridor trying to kill certain enemies or whatever, or fulfil some kind of narrative objective. And it’s just like these free-wheeling, sometimes quite languid battles, and then just slowly ticking off bits of the world. And it gets so challenging as well. You’re getting bombarded with artillery when you’re charging towards the base and stuff, and it’s just trying to take down the defences gets trickier and trickier, and then the challenges within will somehow be a lot harder than things you faced before. And I think it really scales nicely. It weirdly nails it with the things you tick off. There are exceptions, though. Racing in this game is not good. As mentioned in that Excel episode, open world games that are not about racing that suddenly ask you to do racing tend to not be particularly good when it comes to that actual racing experience, and that’s definitely true here. Yeah, and somehow… Don’t give away the Excel content for free. Yeah, that’s £4.50. That’s all I’m saying. The free trial is over. Yeah, really good, and also I managed to make sand exciting by lighting it differently or having it be a slightly different colour or putting some different types of objects around. It’s weirdly good at making what should be incredibly boring environments feel not lively but distinctive. So, yeah, good. If you can get it for £2.99 when it’s on sale on Xbox, it is a hearty recommend for me. So, yeah, that’s my last game, Matthew. What’s yours? I’ve been playing the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 DLC, Future Redeemed, which, I mean, to call it DLC, it’s kind of a standalone campaign. It feels like it’s going to be of a similar size to the one that followed Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which was TORNA, The Lost Country? The Golden Country? I can’t remember what it was called. I think it’s The Golden Country, I think. The Golden Country, which they sold that as a separate, sort of standalone physical thing, like that’s how substantial it was. And this one feels of a similar size, but they’re not selling it. I think that might be because this one really feels like it’s for the hardcore fans, which is kind of why it’s brilliant, but also why it wouldn’t be a place you jump in without getting too kind of like lost in the Xenoblade weeds. This is a sort of series of JRPGs where they’re sort of seemingly unconnected for about 99% of each game. You know, it’s a different cast, a different world, different mechanics, different rules, you know, almost like Final Fantasy. It’s just like, you know, that what connects them is the title. But then at the end of Xenoblade 2, there was like a thing which tied it back to the end of Xenoblade 1 and suggested that, you know, well, they don’t just suggest, you know, they exist in the universe and there is a direct connection between these very disparate worlds. In the course of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, it makes that relationship with both those previous games a lot more explicit. There are some like big callbacks. There are some character links to those games. But even so, when I got to the end of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I thought I’d kind of hoped it was going to have a little bit more of that. You know, I’d hoped it was going to kind of tie a bow on it. And that’s kind of what the DLC is about in a big way to the point where it’s like absolutely amazing. If you’ve played all three Xenoblade Chronicles games and loved them and you’re really into the kind of wider story, you’re going to be in heaven here. Because this is like what feels like the end of this sort of Xenoblade arc and him going, this is how it all connects. But good luck jumping in here. Like, you just won’t understand what’s going on. I’ve played the three games and I don’t understand quite a large chunks of it. I’ve had to do some proper Wikipedia kind of recap stories on YouTube. So I’m like, who the fuck is this guy again? Think the architect at the end of The Matrix, but like a lot more confusing. That’s the kind of vibe we’re going for here. As just a sort of a bit of JRPG making, I’m still fascinated by what Monolith are able to do that no one else seems able to do, which is that they’ve basically made six full JRPGs in the course of 10, 12 years. I’m always amazed at how much they do move on in the course of two years from releasing Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Here’s a game where they’re like correcting some stuff from Xenoblade 3, adding some new ideas. It feels like they’re probably prototyping some stuff for whatever they do next. That’s what they did with the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 DLC as well. It’s just constant steps forward. You just love to see it really. A studio kind of at the peak of its game just knocking it out again and again and again. This story happens less and less as the generations get more and more sort of technologically complicated. Maybe it’s the fact that they are tethered to a slightly simpler hardware in the form of the Switch that kind of allows them to just focus on not trying to kind of push the boat out in a tech sense, but just focusing on mechanics, story, pure content production. Holding the line on having no 4K textures in your game. It’s probably like taking tens of millions off the price of making it. Yeah, that’s cool. The four or so people I know who play Xenoblade are very excited about this DLC this last week. So clearly, it’s meant a lot. Are there any hints from this, Matthew, at where next game could go? Or does this feel quite conclusive? I haven’t quite finished it. And the race is on. It’s like, can I finish this before Tears of the Kingdom? Probably not. The vibe I get is that it’s trying to conclude a lot of stuff that’s come before. Because technically this DLC is a prequel to Xenoblade 3. Whatever happens after Xenoblade 3 is still really up in the air. At the end of that game, there were big question marks about, is this hinting at a huge combined universe of all this stuff, or will we ever see these characters again? It felt like there was some unfinished business at the end of 3 that isn’t going to be addressed by this DLC. But this DLC is addressing the unfinished business of Xenoblade 1 and 2, which is probably more important for the long-term fans. Okay, interesting. A fans-only affair, but then if you’re playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3, you’re probably all in anyway at this point. Yeah, so good, so good. There’s stuff I can’t spoil in it, because I know that there’s at least two Xenoblade heads in the Discord. You’d be really upset. But I imagine this will end up in my top ten at the end of the year, just for the fan service alone. Interesting. Well, yes. How’s that going, by the way, your top ten process? I think I’ve got two games that are definitely going to be in there, but we’re actually almost halfway through the year now, so I feel like I should be slightly further ahead than I am. What about you? I’m going to play all these indie games and undiscovered gems, and actually that hasn’t happened at all, because those of AAA developers started making exactly the kind of shit I love, so… sucks to be you, indies! That’s good. Matthew’s policy has changed from, yay, indie games, to, I hate you, indie games. Seems unreasonable, but what do I know? OK, Matthew, good. That’s the What We’ve Been Playing section. I will say, actually, just for your kind of like, an FYI for you and your admin, I am actually playing the Apex Legends again at the moment. And the party boat, which was famously my pandemic hangout spot, has reappeared on, I think, all of the different maps. It seems to be, there seems to be some version of it on all of them. And the party boat for people who don’t know is basically like this floating barge that has like a little kind of bar area and a disco going on, just sort of like a fancy yacht, essentially, that flies around. And you can press a button to unleash party mode. And then these like big balls drop from the some kind of hatch, and then you just break them open to get some loot out. And that remains a top hang all these years later. But it’s now kind of like a weird pandemic and throwback energy to go in there. Where I’m like, oh yeah, I spent like eight months here in 2020. That was strange, wasn’t it? But yeah, still a good hang, Matthew. So I just wanted to update you on that. Great. Always love to hear about the Party Boat. Yeah, not just complaining about the character box in Apex Legends. Again, a reference to some Excel content there. Got to stop giving that away. That’s 48 things that they’ve got left to not be ruined for them. That’s true. Someone’s going to ask me to paste that list into the Patreon post. It’s going to be such a pain in the arse. But yeah, OK, the formatting is going to be a nightmare. So Matthew, should we take a quick break and come back with some list of questions? Welcome back to the podcast. We’ve got a bunch of listener questions here. If you’re interested in sending us questions to answer on the podcast, there’s backpagegames.gmail.com is our email address. I keep forgetting to mention that in the episode. If you’re on our Discord, there is a pod questions chat where you can drop questions in too. And we normally list them out from there. Every now and then I’ll strip out one that’s like super long or I don’t feel like we’ve got a good answer to. But generally speaking, we try and answer as many as possible. So thank you for your questions. On that though, I will say occasionally, we still get a question that makes it through. Where in my notes, I just write, ugh, because I’ve got nothing to say. Is that this first one? Is that you? No, no, no, there’s one in here, but I won’t say what, because I don’t want to insult the lovely who took the time to write it. That’ll make them all panic now as they try and work out which of them it is. Dear Samuel and Matthew, Armored Core 6 promises to be quite a change in setting and aesthetics and maybe gameplay for FromSoft, a developer whose past games were mostly set in the oldie fantasy realms. What are some notable big leaps from other developers? Any surprisingly ambitious and successful gear shifts spring to mind? That’s from Blinky. Yeah, I think there’s some really obvious answers to this. So The Witcher 3 versus the other Witcher games is sort of like them redrawing the scope of it. But that’s not to say that the earlier Witcher games were bad, but certainly that is a big leap. That was the, you know, that turned that series from being a, not a niche concern, but like quite successful to extremely successful. And, you know, there’s now like the dominant open world RPG, essentially. I think that like people might, people who love Morrowind might disagree with this, but I feel like Oblivion was a triumph in making those, that Bethesda template just more accessible to a much wider audience. People feel like they could play it. That is a huge leap, even if you might prefer the sort of like messed up fun guy looking stuff in Morrowind as a world. So that may be, yeah, your mileage there may vary. But that’s one that comes to mind. I think also like another real notable one is that I would say that I never really played Metal Gear Solid for the stealth experience and as much as like the story and the setting until Metal Gear Solid 5, which obviously is so gameplay first as a kind of evolution of that series that that feels like a major gear shift there. I don’t know if those are all comparable to FromSoft, but those are the ones that come to mind, Matthew. What about you? Yeah, I mean, in terms of just like, holy shit, here’s a studio really arriving who you wouldn’t necessarily have been excited about before. The jump for Rocksteady from Urban Chaos Riot response to Arkham Asylum. There’s nothing about their first game that you think, oh yeah, they’ve got a game of the caliber of Batman. I mean, even when people started saying the Batman game is really good, I was like, really? From like, some relative, nobody, so I don’t believe that, but that puts them on the map in such a way. Maybe this isn’t quite right, but I do feel like the fact that we’re now at a place where Nintendo can publish a first party Dynasty Warriors spin-off based on like, how that series starts, that isn’t like the series itself massively changing. It’s more like the Dynasty Warriors team fitting into a groove and realizing how to match their style of game with like the correct fandoms have kind of made that a much more palatable thing and definitely a much more notable thing. Like there was a time no one would talk about those games. You know, it would be a real duff freelance commission if you got asked to review Dynasty Warriors alike. But now people like anticipate the Zelda ones, the Persona ones. I don’t know, there feels like a leap in legitimacy there. Yeah, for sure. The other thing I point out with this question is that FromSoft did make Armored Core before they made it to Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. That’s the key thing. They’re coming back to something with what they’ve learned from that. So slightly different narrative there. But we pledge not to pretend to be interested in it. Yeah, I’ll put someone, I think like one of the combat designers of Sekiro is making it though. And I think they’ve added like some kind of stagger system. So there’s gonna be like basically like mech fight Sekiro. And I’m all in on that as an idea, but let’s see. Wait and see on that one, I think. I can’t disagree that Fires of Rubicon is a great subtitle though. I think Breath of the Wild, this applies to for sure. Like the, however you feel about Skyward Sword, it just, the redrawing of the canvas there. And you can sort of, this is actually mentioned in that New York Times article that was doing the rounds on Zelda, which is very nicely designed. And in that they mentioned that like, someone says that Zelda was stagnating a bit. And whether you think that’s fair or not, I know Matthew, where you stand on this. Breath of the World is suddenly a game that sold 29 million copies. It was just a completely, a whole other deal. So yeah, these sleeps happen all the time. They can be really exciting. Hi gents, we’ve had several ranking pods, but now we need the ranking to end all rankings. What is the best time and day to record The Back Page pod? This has been referenced throughout the podcast, usually by a jaded host. Yeah, it doesn’t narrow it down. But the listeners need to know. Thank you for all you do and keep up the good work. That’s from Bob Bob on Discord. So it’s definitely not a bank holiday Monday when you’ve got to get a train for three hours. That’s today. It’s funny, Matthew, I think there are some episodes, like Games Court Midweek felt like a mistake to me. Like we just could not get into the funny head space for it. I think Saturday morning is generally the best day to record. What about you? It is, but it’s also, I’ve come to resent recording Saturday mornings because I want to have a like a lie in after a very busy week. But it’s tough because you know it has the results. Yeah, it’s tricky because I sometimes think having a whole day to warm up makes me like a little bit more like loose and limber. Like sometimes I’m a bit groggy in the morning. Definitely my memory is a bit more fucked in the morning. So I don’t know that there is an optimal time. Yeah, I think I do think that like Saturday can yield some good results. But Matthew is right. Sometimes I want to just kind of read some Batman comics in bed or something. And I’m like, time to record in 30 minutes, you know. There is something very particular about the tone of the podcast when you reach like half 10 on a weekday. And it’s this kind of like, oh, we want to get the fuck out of it, especially if it’s got a guest. And you’re like, this is great. And I love that they’ve given us their time, but I wish they’d hurry the fuck up. Yeah, I think I agree with that. It’s also like that 2015 one that we recorded on a Sunday night. And then by the end of it, you can hear me saying, I’m so tired, man, as I’m trying to talk about metal guests on at five for the 18th time. Yeah, so the morning or weekends is good, but I agree. When it runs super long and you see like 10 o’clock turn into one o’clock on your weekends, it can be a bit, you know, it’s sort of like, I totally get you, I totally get what you mean. But yes, there you go, probably a bit too much information on what is good and what is bad. But it’s a short part and it’s midweek, that’s actually fine. And we crammed it in from like six to eight or something, then you still got your whole evening. It’s not too bad, so. Sometimes it’s with the list, it’s when I look at the clock and I’m like, oh, we’re both on entry seven of like a top 10. And it’s like, we’ve both got six to go. And this has taken a long time. I definitely do a lot of mental arithmetic of like, well, each one of these entries is taking roughly 15 minutes. So six more of those. And then I just feel like the energy something. And that’s the annoying thing is by the time you reach the top of the list, which is what the games you’re most enthusiastic about, they’re the ones I want to talk about least because I just want to get the fuck out of there. Yeah, that’s true. The other thing is that sometimes episodes that should be short run so long and I don’t understand why. So why was that Guilty Pleasures movie episode like three hours long? That should have been a clear two hours. A podcast that’s got Austin Powers, the spy who shagged me in it, should be two hours long. And yeah, there we were. So yeah, who knows? Lots of information there for you to think about. Basically, what we’re learning is there’s no good time. They’re all bad times. But we do enjoy making the podcast. At least I do. I hope Matthew still does. But yeah, no comment from Matthew on that one. That’s worrying, isn’t it? Okay, next one, then. Prompted by the Rad Tears of the Kingdom trailer, what are some of your favorite trailers for games over the years? And bonus DLC question with slightly more nutritional value. If you compare your favorite game trailers to favorite film trailers, are there any shared themes or things that work better for advertising one medium over the other? And that’s from Malik, Maylam. A lot of them are from several years ago, really. So I was a huge, just like a really early example of this, but I was a huge fan of the MGS4 Raiden vs. VAMP sort of trailer. Every MGS4 trailer was better than the actual game, I would say. They were all so incredible at dialing up hype. There’s a really good one. I think it’s like an E3 one where Snake is trying to execute Ocelot in this crowd, and then he activates his fucking weird, like control all the soldiers thing, and Snake can’t quite pull the shot off. That’s a really good one. Yeah, MGS4 just was absolutely rife with them. I would say that the first two Red Dead Redemption trailers were just absolutely incredible because they were all gameplay, and there’s one that ends with John Marston like pushing the plunger on some dynamite and as a train goes past, and it’s just such a good way to sort of set the scene. Those trailers were just absolutely majestic. And yeah, I think it’s sort of like even that Final Fantasy XV one where the car takes off at the end and then it like fades to white, I thought was absolutely fucking great. It just made the game, it made me so excited about that game. Even if the flying car element was quite minimal in that game really, it was something you could technically do. Those come to mind. I really loved the, all of the Deus Ex, Mankind Divided and Human Revolution ones are really good because they had that sort of like rad music. They would use some of that kind of Icarus imagery in the Human Revolution trailers and lots of gruff Adam Jensen voiceover. They did such a good job of like sort of like making you understand what that world was, what world you were stepping into and also made Adam Jensen seem pretty cool as well. And I thought those were like great ways to sell an immersive sim, which is fundamentally quite a sort of daddish genre and not super sexy. So yeah, those come to mind, Matthew, how about you? Pure recency bias and Nintendo bias, but when they did the Super Mario Odyssey trailer in 2017, which had the T-Rex and then he turns his head and he’s got the little Mario cap and you’re like, what the fuck is this about? That’s also got the bit where Mario turns into the frog and it has him going down the 2001-esque like tunnel. Really captured the surreal nature of what that game is gonna be. It had the, whatever that song is, Jump Up Superstar or whatever they call it. Something the Nintendo trailers do really well is just showing you those games are so stuffed with mechanical joys. They can just show you lots of little glimpses of them and you instantly get, oh, that’s what I’m gonna be doing and that’s why that’s gonna be fun. You can sort of see the fun happening and you just watch them over and over again and just imagine yourself playing them. I think that’s really the key to the Zelda trailers. Like, Tears of the Kingdom trailer is amazing, but it’s like almost a beat for beat remake of the 2017 Breath of the Wild trailer, which they released at similar kind of like a couple of months before it came out. Starts with like slow shots of just the landscape, animals nibbling at leaves or whatever, and then has a little bit of the story stuff and then just lots of shots of Link hand gliding over like amazing locations while this rad music plays. And it’s not like the most complicated trailer construction, but it’s just, I want to be in that place. I want to do that thing. You know, that looks like kind of a fun interaction to me. And I guess like to lead into the other bit of the question, that’s probably where like the game trailers differ from film trailers or the game trailers I really like are the ones where I can kind of like imagine myself playing them. It’s, you know, it’s the here’s some things you’re gonna do rather than here’s some things you’re gonna see, which I guess is what film trailers kind of hinge on. I haven’t got a really deep philosophical take on why game and film trailers are different, to be honest. Like I think of the trailers I watched over and over again, it’s just the film trailers. It’s just cause they had, which is the second Matrix film, Reloaded. I watched that trailer so much just cause it had like a couple of shots of people like landing in slow motion while things exploded and being like, that’s gonna be so fucking good. Yeah, I think that like, yeah, film trailers are sort of like, because you have that curiosity of what the film is without knowing the finished shape of it. I ended up watching like the Dark Knight Rises trailer a lot, the Man of Steel trailer a lot. Like the, I watched the, I think it was the Spectre trailer a lot as well. A film that turned out to be such a dud, but I was obviously, I was like massively hyped for it off the back of Skyfall. So it being a dud was a surprise. Yeah, so though it tends to be, tends to go further back, I find like a lot of film trailers quite irritating though, especially when they start sticking shots of their third act set piece in there. I feel like these flash trailers are giving loads away by showing like fucking Michael Shannon’s odd punching through Michael Keaton’s bat plane and stuff. And I’m like, why is this in the fucking trailers? It’s obvious like third act stuff. So yeah, that kind of thing bothers me a little bit. Yeah. So yeah, I don’t know with games like you, I like trailers that actually sell me on the experience of what the game actually is. So one that just came to mind, and I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but there was a Mirror’s Edge trailer that I think it just said at the start, like everything you’re seeing is captured in engine. And it’s just a section from the very first bit of the game where like Faith runs over some buildings, like the first or second level, then does like a wall run and basically does all the things you do in first person in Mirror’s Edge. But has that with this like really evocative music playing. And it’s like them just saying, this is the game we’ve made. We’ve made a first person platformer, but you’ve never played a game like this before. And it just sold me on it and I loved it so much. And it definitely made me mega hyped for that game. So yeah, yeah. I think it’s conveying the essence of what the game is, which is a fundamentally a different goal to film, which is about the feel a lot of the time or the emotionality. So yeah. Okay, good. This next one then Matthew, should I read out this one? Yeah. Kind of related. The recent trailer for Tears of the Kingdom got me really hyped for the game to levels I haven’t felt since GTA V. It got me thinking of a question for you both. What is the most hyped you’ve ever been for a game and what was the game? Did you find yourself losing the same levels of hype as you were used to for games as soon as you started working as a journalist? Or do you think as we grow older, we lose that same level of excitement for a new game release as we move further away from the enthusiasm of our youth? Thanks for all the games, great podcasts you put out each week. That’s from Angry Curt. Yeah, kind of related, I suppose. I think that in a general sense, I don’t allow myself to get too hyped about games because I just kind of like, I’m happy to let them land on my doorstep and see how I feel about them. So for example, Final Fantasy XVI, I’ve pre-ordered it, I’m gonna play it, I’m absolutely all in on Final Fantasy XVI, I’ll definitely play it. But I haven’t gone out of my way to learn about it or get myself hyped up about it. I’m just sort of like, well, Square Enix doesn’t fuck about with numbered entries to Final Fantasy games. I feel like I’m in good hands. And when it gets here, I will get excited about it. And that more accurately conveys my relationship with games now. I’m sort of like, they’re on my radar, but I don’t spend weeks and weeks thinking about them in the way that maybe I did when I was a bit younger. There are probably some exceptions to that, but yeah, that’s generally my approach, Matthew. What’s your sort of attitude towards that? I still, I mean, as proven with Tears of the Kingdom, like I have the capacity. I think as a journalist, you’re probably too close to something and you’re too on top of it and you’re too familiar with things for them to be almost like mysterious enough to hold that kind of allure. You know, as much as I’ve moaned about not being able to review Tears of the Kingdom, the fact that I haven’t played it before release has like supercharged release date in a way that I haven’t experienced for like a long time. I felt this excited for Mario Odyssey actually, which again, I didn’t get to review. So there was this sense of like, oh, I knew Nintendo thing and I’ve deliberately avoided it, which you aren’t really able to do when you’re a journalist. It’s kind of like tapping back into just how I felt as a punter, as a teenager. You know, I remember feeling so hyped for Perfect Dark just off the back of GoldenEye. You know, I loved GoldenEye so much and N64 magazine, you know, it covered Perfect Dark so comprehensively and sort of showed us so much of it and just made it sound so exciting. You know, it’s what I like about like really great games writing, games journalism, as I think it can like tap into that excitement and be like your companion in hype, which I really like. You know, some people are a bit sneery about that and think hype is all just, it’s a bit kind of commercial. It’s a bit naff, but I’m not embarrassed about that. NGamer was like big into being excited alongside you and I owe a lot of my like big hype memories to magazines kind of psyching me up. The Gamecube era in general felt incredibly exciting to me because I think I was finally old enough, like I had a job, I was making money to be able to buy my own games. I had control over my own gaming diet and that just made everything seem so like attainable. Waiting for like Sunshine and then waiting for Wind Waker, just unbelievable levels of hype. I worked in Homebase and my shift was on Friday night, which obviously Fridays was when all the big games came out. Having to work at Homebase when I knew I had a copy of Mario Sunshine in my bag or a copy of Wind Waker in my bag, I just had to get through this four hours, walk down to the bus station, put up with all the horrible kids who bully me because I’m dressed in a Homebase uniform and then get half an hour bus ride and then I get to play this thing, which has just been on my mind for so long. I’ve probably read the import reviews because global releases weren’t a thing back then, so there was this sense of someone else having something before you that could only heighten the hype. Yeah, I love it. I’m not embarrassed to be into all that. Yeah, I think when I was trying to isolate this myself as well, I came back to the PS2 era. So certainly when I got a PS2 was at the end of 2001, which is when the PS2 had really taken off. It’s funny now because there’s so much talk about exclusives all the time and I don’t think the PS2 had a really major in-house exclusive until Gran Turismo 3, which was over a year into the console’s lifespan. But obviously it didn’t matter because the PS2 had a built-in DVD player. So that made it a huge seller. And obviously people had so much good will left from the PS1 and they knew good games were coming. But when you got to the end of 2001, that was when you saw like this avalanche of stuff dropping. So you had, in North America at least, you had like Final Fantasy X, Jak and Daxter, you had Grand Theft Auto 3, and then Metal Gear Solid 2 as well, Sons of Liberty. And of those, definitely in that kind of like early, me paying attention to PS2 era, Metal Gear Solid 2 was the game I was the most like hyped about. I was like, I have to see what this is. There was so much chatter about it. I read every single magazine I could that previewed it. The game itself obviously is sort of like an up and down affair. We talked about it a lot on this podcast before. But definitely I was capable of levels of hype that I couldn’t quite summon now. I mean, I haven’t even played Death Stranding, which is quite unusual. So my relationship with Kazumi Games has changed quite a lot over the years. But there are other instances from that period where I would get mega hype for something. So GTA Vice City, a massive thing as well because GTA 3 was such a huge game for me. And then all the details you’d hear about were like, you can go in buildings now, or which you could in some buildings, or fly a helicopter and fly airplanes properly, rather than just a dodo plane with its kind of weird precarious handling. And obviously the 80s setting as well. And that seemed on paper, all these like pink and light blue, sort of Michael Mann ass screenshots of Vice City just looked absolutely incredible. So I just remember, I have a vivid memory of like a double page spread in official PlayStation 2 magazine where I was like, I have to, it was so important that I play this. I cannot wait for this. And that was a huge moment. So it was like 14. So it was the right time for it. Arguably it was, I mean, it was illegal for me to play it. But, you know, in terms of my hype levels, they were certainly up there. Obviously as a huge fan of Final Fantasy X. So the fact they made a sequel was exciting to me. The sequel was not my sort of thing in the end, ultimately. But I certainly remember being hyped because there’s kind of a cliffhanger ending in Final Fantasy X of like what happens to the main character. And Xenoblade 2 does resolve that if you 100% the game, which is completely unreasonable. So that was ultimately quite disappointing. So there’s Xenoblade Chronicles 3 DLC of its day. Very much so. And so, and slightly before that actually, like Pokemon Gold and Silver, they seemed really, they were just so like exotic and strange to someone who had got massively into Red and Blue. And suddenly there were these actual like color games coming out, you know, using the Game Boy Color tech rather than just the original Game Boy tech. And seeing Japanese screenshots of all these strange Pokemon you’d never seen before, it just did this very specific thing to my brain where I’m like, okay, now I get why young Pokemon fans are obsessed with this when they add new monsters and they get obsessed with new monsters. Because in that moment when I was seeing like this weird stuff, like those alphabet Pokemon where they’re all a different letter of the alphabet, they seem really fucked up and strange. And then, you know, just seeing the new starters and being like, whoa, this looks like just so different to everything I’ve experienced. And when the game got here, it was pretty good. But I was actually like, I’d already grown out of Pokemon a little bit by the time it landed. But yeah, big hype levels. Any others, Matthew, should we move on? Let’s move on. All right. Would Samuel care to spill any light on the spy column in PC Gamer? Always enjoyed reading it in the mag and trying to work out who was writing it. I always thought it had big Andy Kelly energy, but was probably completely wrong. Was it a Deadline Last Minute Nightmare? That’s from Jesmond. So I wouldn’t ordinarily talk about this, but I think Phil actually revealed it when he came on the podcast the first time for the Yakuza episode. So Phil tended to write the spy when I was there, because what was really funny is that like it’s, what it is basically is a rumour column written from the perspective of a secret agent. And so there’d be lots of secret agent jokes around the actual like rumours bits. And as time went by, the spy became less important in the internet age, because you’re always obviously like three weeks behind whatever the actual news was. So that would move on very quickly. So it became more of a like, it was something people expected to see in the UK mags. So he kept it rather than having like a specific editorial function. And Tony Ellis, who I worked with, was very frustrated when writers took on the spy but couldn’t actually get what the right tone of the spy was. So I was definitely one of those writers where he was like, you don’t entirely get this. And I was like, fair enough. Andy Kelly was the same. He sort of like, we both threw our hands up a little bit, but Phil did get it. And before that, I think, yeah, there was a couple of other people who really got it historically. But Phil was the one who understood what the spy was. He was the keeper of the spy. I imagine that’s still the case. But yeah, it was a last minute headache. Sometimes there were like no good rumours, which was tough. But you’d also have to pick. It was like picking a theme. Like, I mean, like I’m attached to a submarine in Panama or something like that. And then it’d be lots of jokes about being in Panama and stuff. And it was really hard to make it work. I just as a creative writing challenge, I thoroughly failed at it. So those are my spy insights, Matthew. OK, next question then. So following on from the Mario moments episode, stealth plug for the patrons, some great stuff on there. What would Bath look like as a Mario level or Mario Kart track or some balladeer? Thoughts, Matthew? Easier to see it as a Mario Kart track. But my thinking didn’t go much further then. The circus and the Crescent are really good for powerslides. You could scoot past the genitals that were carved into the lawn outside the Crescent. They fucking got rid of that so quickly. They shaved a big cock into the big field outside these posh houses. And the council were on that shit. But if there’s like a dead bird by the river next to a slightly naff street, they’ll leave it there for weeks. Fuck that shit. That’s like proper classes on that. I mean, there’s a slight difference between a giant cock carved into a lawn and one dead bird. I mean, yeah, but what I’m saying is like they only cared about it because it was a posh area. If it was like the outskirts of town, they wouldn’t give a shit. But it’s like, oh no, we can’t let the affluent neighborhoods have a tough time. Yeah. If it was on the outskirts of town, it would probably just be left there for centuries. And then in like 500 years, everyone’s like, oh, that’s the great cock of Bath. And everyone’s really fond of it. And it’s on tea towels. Weren’t people calling it like a Neolithic monument of like, what’s it, fertility? That’s what people were calling it. And I was like, yeah, very good. But generally, I actually think Bath would be OK as a maricot track because it’s got a bit of a one way system anyway. It’s like a big loop. You go up and then there’s a big, you know, it’s on like a big slope. So you’d have the kind of like the drive up. Then you do all the power sliding at the top with the circus and the crescent. And then you’re just like driving all the way down again. I could see it being quite a quite a fun up down little little loop. How far would it go up? Will you go up to the Heron Hounds or stop before there? You go all the way up. You’re going to the circus. You just you’re just power sliding that whole circus and then straight back down. Like ideally, like you’re setting off your boosts when you hit the man outside the Jane Austen Center. Amazing. Yeah, I think that I was thinking, could it be like a World Tour track, like those DLC tracks where you go through a different supermarket in each lap? So the first one you go drive through Waitrose. Second one’s like Sainsbury’s. Third one’s like M&S or something. So slightly different supermarket each time. Yeah, it’d feel like if that’s the thing, if it was an Arikart track, it would definitely be going through like the Roman baths and there’d be lots of steam and everything. You’d jump over the pools. Yeah, and to make it accurate, let’s say Wario’s driving something quite obnoxious around there, he’d be hit with a clean air energy, sort of like Bill in the post afterwards, so that would be reflected in the content too. He’d get it and go like, ah, sort of thing in the post. I think the hot spring steam would be used for uplift for the hang gliders. Yeah, that’s good. It would be real good for hang gliding actually, yeah. Would the abbey be involved? There’s no roads around there, but it feels like you should be able to skid around the abbey somehow. That should be a thing you can do. Yeah. Something to think about there. Okay, good. Yeah, I think we answered that one pretty well. It actually would make an okay track if not a good open world game as such. What box would you issue if you were units in Command and Conquer? I need one for the initial select, one for movement and one for attack. And that’s from Zach. Okay, yeah, I mean, I struggle with this one a little bit because in like Command and Conquer, they’re super distinctive, over the top, sort of like, yes, sir, for King and Country, that’s the spy character in Red Alert, which is closely obviously based on Sean Connery. So, I don’t know, I just, I think if I was like selected, I’d be like, oh, because that’s my response when I get an email about anything now. I’m just like, oh, so that’d be my first one. One for movement, I’d be like, sure. And then one for attack, for fuck’s sake. That’d be my three, I think, really basic. What incredibly low energy. I don’t want to be like, oh, sorry, I was eating a sandwich when you click on me. Do you know what I mean? I don’t want to be super contrived. It’s like, oh, if I can shake these big man titties, I’ll be there for the movement. You know what I mean? Or attack is like, yeah, I’m more of a slapper than a puncher. There’s like three off the cuff ones, I guess. What about you, Matthew? Mine are from the school of irritatingly overlong barks that you instantly hate. When you select me, I go, why am I even here? I have bone spurs. When I have to do movement, I say, oh, please tell me it is an uphill. I haven’t really got one for attack. Because I was trying to think, would I be a peace nick type? Would it be sort of like a, I don’t know. I couldn’t really think what I’d say in sheer combat. The thing is, I can’t really imagine myself. I’m just such a coward. I would freak out, I think. I think I’d be fundamentally broken as a unit. I think if you ordered me to shoot, I’d just drop the gun and have a bit of a wobble behind a boulder or something. Has anyone ever started a fight with you? You don’t seem like that kind of person. But has anyone ever tried to, you know, you’re a tall guy, I want to take you on kind of thing? Has that happened to you? I had a minor altercation with a man in town once who almost ran me over at the zebra crossing outside the Odeon. I was crossing it and he drove right in front of me. I had to step back. And then you cross over the zebra crossing, then you cross over that second road, which leads into that car park. And the guy who’d gone past me on the zebra crossing had in the time had gone round and was coming into the parking and almost did it again. So I hit the back of his car with my hand and he instantly skidded to a stop and he got out and he just screamed in my face. And that’s the closest I felt like I’ve come to like someone punching me in the face. But if I was stronger, yeah, I often think of what terrible thing I would have done for that person. Those are the Max Payne 3 apartments as well though, right? So he’s probably a fucking drug dealer or something. No, that’s the thing. Well, I was going to say it was a really fancy car which doesn’t really help my case here. The thing I was surprised about was he had his partner girlfriend in the car with him. I often think I should have said, just shouted out, like, this person’s clearly a psychopath. You shouldn’t be with this person. It’s what plays out in my mind. But that probably wouldn’t have helped matters. I thought I was well within my right to hit his car to show my displeasure. That he almost hit me twice. Yeah, that sucks. OK, interesting. But if he’s going to the Max Payne 3 apartments, he’s probably got a fucking armed militia in there, Matthew. So, yeah, who knows? OK, good. So, a very different note here. That really did turn Jolly to quite serious there. Yeah, what I’ve just told you, that’s genuinely a point of continued trauma that I think of a lot. I know what you mean. I got served before someone at a nightclub in Bournemouth, and this guy was going to start a fight with me because I got served first. And obviously, if you’ve ever been to a nightclub, it’s just chaos. One of the reasons I don’t go is because trying to buy a drink there can take 45 minutes, and it sucks. And I had to buy him a pint to stop him from beating me up. And I always think about that as like a Bioware style choice I made. And then he shook my hand, and I was like, I fucking hate traditional notions of masculinity. But instead I just avoided getting punched when I was 18, which is wise probably. I often think if I was to get into another altercation, I think my go-to tactic is to tell the person I’m an off-duty policeman, they really don’t want to fuck with me. That’s a great idea. I mean, if they call you a bluff, it might be tough. But what happens if they’re an off-duty policeman? You go, right, let’s both show each other our badges at the same time. Three, two, one, and then you have badges. But then I’ve literally thought that through and thought, do I buy something that looks like a police badge? I love the idea of you are suddenly arrested for impersonating a police officer, being like, the reason we have to stop making this podcast would be absolutely wild. Really funny thought there. But as a self-defense technique. Yeah, you could say it’s cosplaying, I’m just cosplaying as Judge Dredd or something. Yeah, okay, that’s really funny. I really got into something there. Okay, very different note here. What was the demo you played the most back in the day? That’s from Daryl. What’s your answer to this one, Matthew? Metal Gear Solid 2, the Tanker demo that came with Zone of Enders. We played more than Zone of Enders for sure. That’s a bit of a cliched one. I was trying to recast my mind back to when I used to play a lot of the Amiga with my friend Craig. And we used to play this game called Tanks. And I don’t know if it was a demo, or if it was just a shareware game and we were playing it in its entirety. But that was definitely on a cover disc of some Amiga mag. And it was a bit like a sort of Proto Worms. Except you had a tank at either end of the map. And all you did was move the tank left and right and change trajectory and power. And you were just trying to hit the other tank. So you were just taking it in turns, take pot shots along the length of this kind of hilly terrain. Gradually kind of working out like, oh, if I do this next turn, then it will be enough to hit them. We played that loads and I still don’t know if there was more game to tanks that we never uncovered. Right, right. That’s interesting. Yeah, MGS2 is a good one. I played that hell of a lot. I didn’t play it with Zone of the Enders. I played it when it came back around on official PlayStation 2 magazine. But yeah, absolutely rinsed it. I enjoyed the crap out of that. The other one was Age of Empires. The original one had a four level demo. And three of the levels were quite simple. But the fourth level was you could build a town, you could build loads of units. I remember me and a friend from the time in Year 6 just building boat after boat after boat and just annihilating the enemy over and over again. We had a great time with that. I probably ended up playing that more than the original Age of Empires, to be honest, because by the time I got around to buying one of them, the second one was out, which was obviously a lot better game. That one I played loads and loads. There’s quite a few demos from the PS2 days that I played a whole bunch of. Weirdly, I played loads of Tarzan Freeride back in the day. My only experience of Ico for a long time was the demo of Ico, actually. That was one I played tons. Dynasty Warriors 3 I played a lot because you didn’t need the full game of Dynasty Warriors 3 because you had a full level of it here. That’s basically the entire experience in this demo. I beat 800 guys to death. There’s nothing more the main game can show me, really. I had that with a demo of Blood on the PC because fundamentally why you want this game is so that you can use these weapons to explode monks into gory bits, which you can do in this one level. Thank you very much. Yeah, that’s it. Actually, I’d never played Soldier of Fortune 2 except for the demo of it, but it was a great demo because it had all of the maiming of dudes in it, all of that war crime stuff. We did end up buying the original Soldier of Fortune for like two quid or something off the back of that, one of those sold out boxes. I honestly had played absolutely tons of demo back in the day. I just absorbed everything that was on the PC Gamer and official PlayStation Mag cover discs. So yeah, good stuff. What’s the worst game you’ve been gifted either solely or came with a console you received? When I was 10, I was given a Nintendo N64 and I got Earthworm Jim 3D and Michael Owen World League Soccer. I tried so hard to enjoy Earthworm Jim, but it’s my default go-to pick for bad 3D platformers. That’s from Img3r63. It’s interesting because my parents were always so… They knew that I was so particular about things I liked, they didn’t even try and sort of mess around really. So by default, the worst game I got from them was 007 Nightfire. Wait, no, 007 Agent Under Fire with my PS2, which was one of those just about competent early North Easy 8 tie-ins, and it was OK, it was fine. But it wasn’t massively offensive, I guess, is my point, Matthew. So what about you? Yeah, same here. No one’s ever just bought me a random game. I’ve only ever got stuff I’ve wanted, and it’s mostly been good. The only thing I can really think of, and it isn’t even really mine, was when my brother Alex got his PS2, he got first Starfighter game on PS2, whatever that was called. But that was good. I quite like that. I don’t hate that game. I’ve lived a very blessed life. I’ve never been bought something that’s truly howling. My poor friend Andrew, aka the protagonist of Final Fantasy VII, him and his girlfriend recently bought a Switch, the handheld one, Switch Lite. They bought it with… He was pushing for, we pay £10 more and we get Metroid Dread. He kind of caved and they spent £10 less and got the last Harvest Moon game, which was considered quite duff. I kind of ragged on him for that for quite a long time. I was like, you should have been more assertive because I think she played it once and ditched it. I did try and explain to him, you can just buy Stardew Valley, it’s about 10 quid, and it will tick all those boxes and it only costs you £20 more, but you’ll have two great games instead of one not very good game. So, yeah, that’s one example recently where I’m like, he brings up a lot of the Metroid dread regret that he experienced off the back of that. OK, next one then, Matthew, this one’s for you. I was a big fan of the PC gaming weak spot over on RPS, due in large part because of mystery Steam reviews and Matthew’s antics during them. Given that show is now gone, have you all thought about bringing it back at all? Cheers from Boston, from Stefan. PS, if that’s not allowed, maybe you can start a definitely new game that’s very legally distinct from mystery Steam reviews, perhaps Secret Online Game Store Appraisals. Yeah, Matthew, this is your whole other subworld of podcasts and RPS. Mystery Steam reviews was just us guessing games from mystery Steam reviews. It wasn’t hugely complicated, but I’m pretty sure it was Cullum’s idea. And the format, I don’t know, it feels like it belongs to RPS. Because I actually started doing it, I think, after I’d already been made redundant. The PC gaming week spot was something they invited me back to do, like as a freelance gig. So, yeah, I don’t know, easy to repeat. But we’re also, I don’t know, we don’t feel like we’re a very mini-gamey podcast, really. I sort of like the idea of that, but I also couldn’t lift someone else’s podcast idea, I don’t think, and be like, oh yeah, we’re doing that on this podcast now. Don’t add to the big picture. Okay, the film podcast we listen to aside. But also, the specific formats we’ve borrowed from them, other games podcasts haven’t been doing, really. I feel like if we’re not the first people who have done a games draft, we’ve got to be among the first people who have done that kind of idea. So I don’t know, I feel like that’s probably best left, yeah, like you say, belonging to RPS. I hope that there was going to be more excitement and mileage in my classic. Is it a Xenoblade crafting ingredient or is it a 90s drug slang? That one just didn’t land anywhere in it. So I just haven’t even bothered to come up with similar concepts since then. Oh, I forgot about that. I’d like to do another 90s games magazine quiz. We have to guess the game from the paragraph. I guess that’s more like our equivalent. That’s a bit closer in tone to Mystery Steam reviews. I think people like that one. We could do that again. It took a lot more prep than we thought it would. It was really hard work finding old scans of things. Yeah, that’s it. We had the old podcast regret. Great idea, stressful execution, good times. Okay, good. Well, yeah, I hope that answers the question of someone who obviously misses your old work, Matthew, and not the brilliant work you’re doing here and now. Okay, so, you want to read this next one? Are there any games that you feel you really should have played but for some reason just haven’t? For me, it’s Chrono Trigger. That’s from Doomican. Well, we’re talking about the old pile of shame here, and that sort of never really ends. I mean, I was talking to someone the other day about how I’ve not played Planescape Torment, and if I didn’t play Planescape Torment when I was editor of PC Gamer, and before I turned 35, will I ever play it? There was a bit of that going on there. So, I would say that classic RPGs, those PC RPGs, CRPGs, particularly that 90s Infinity Engine era and slightly beyond, that’s probably my biggest weak spot of knowledge, biggest knowledge gap. So, those are the ones where I’m like, I really should have played them, but I haven’t. What about you, Matthew? Yeah, like that I’ve not played an MMO ever. Seems like a big oversight, given that it’s like such a… It’s not just like knowing the genre inside out. It’s just knowing the influence it has on other games. You know, like that I haven’t, you know, I couldn’t even describe what happens in World of Warcraft. And there’s loads of Final Fantasy games I haven’t played. I think I’ve only ever finished 10 and 15. Yeah. Which is bad, given that they’re quite massive games in a lot of people’s lives. And I have to have so many bits where I just have to be like, hey, yeah, sure. And sort of nod along to other people talking about Final Fantasy if I have any idea what they’re talking about. Do you mean me on this podcast, basically? No, well, there’s this issue. You always give me the context that I need. But like I work with a lot of Final Fantasy heads as well. Right. I’m pretty good at going back and filling in the gaps on things. But Final Fantasy, they’re just too big. They’re just too big to go back and do that. Yeah. So actually, it’s interesting because I did go out of my way to play Deus Ex a few years ago as listeners might remember. And that was a really satisfying experience because while it took a little while, I think I played it a little over the course of a week and a half when I was off between jobs. But that experience was kind of suitable because I think I fit it into like 20 hours in between other stuff. Whereas a Final Fantasy is an undertaking. That’s like 60 hours of your life gone. And that could be two or three months of, you know, games you can play for this podcast just like wiped out. So I totally get what you mean. It’s tricky to weigh it up. OK. Next up then. Dear Podman, What video game creature do you think would taste nice in a sandwich? A head crab and mayo sub? Perhaps a moogle meat deluxe or keep it simple with a gumbo lettuce and tomato baguette. That’s from KH2698. So I remember I made a joke about having toga pea scrambled eggs once and got an absolutely appalled reaction from my then girlfriend, but I thought that was quite a good show. I’ve always been tempted to have a little munch of toad, do you know what I mean? Bite his head a little bit and see what that tastes like. I don’t like mushrooms at the best of times. I’ve got a lone one which has got a face and can talk to me. Has there ever been a bigger conceptual lie than the mushroom burger, by the way? Where it’s like, it says burger and then it is just a big mushroom inside a bun and you’re meant to be impressed by it and I’m like, at least give me some kind of crushed mushroom patty, you know what I mean? That’s like a hot mushroom sandwich, I’d say. Agreed, agreed, my friend. So yeah, I don’t think that much about eating creatures in games because sometimes the way they’re rendered, you can’t really picture what they would taste like because they’re sort of anime-ish. You’re like, I don’t know what a chocobo would taste like if you deep-fat fried that bad boy, you know what I mean? It’s tough. What about you? Probably just go for an animal which is quite close to a real-world animal that I like to eat. So like, you know, the cuckoos from Zelda, you know, they’re just chickens, so let’s just kill them and I’d have some like chicken mayo baguette that would be one of those chickens from Zelda instead. It’s not a very imaginative answer, but it’s the truth. Or like various fish, you know, I don’t eat a lot of baguettes, as many baguettes these days as I used to, but I will occasionally have, if I’m like quite stressed at lunchtime, I might go and eat a tuna baguette from Pret. So I could see it being like a tuna baguette from Pret, but it’s made with like a fucking Hylian bass or whatever from fucking Breath of the World. Incredible, yeah. Yeah, good call there. Yeah, obviously like Breath of the World’s food is all very kind of like enticing, but I think what they’re fishing for here is something a bit more deranged and I don’t quite have that in me. Big bank holiday Monday energy. Too many of these things, they’ve got too much personality or I’m like mates with them. Yeah, like it’d be really messed up if I said I want to like eat an Asari from Mass Effect. I’d be like, oh, maybe the Hanar. I’d give the Hanar a little bit of a taste, you know what I mean? They seem a bit like… Oh, it looks grim. It looks like you get some kind of like cosmic space virus if you ate that, you know what I mean? You know those Mario enemies, I don’t really know what they’re called, but they look like Smarties with feet and they sort of march in like a row of five. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those little guys, yeah. Maybe they’re just insects, so they’d just be full of like bug guts and paste, but you know, I always think of like Smarties when I see them, so maybe they’ve got like a sweet treat vibe to them. It’s probably like absolutely like incredibly bitter insect insides. Well, you cut it open, it’s like when you cut open the Tauntorn and Empire Strikes Back and loads of like weird jelly stuff comes out and you’re like, oh, this is not how I pictured it at all. Okay, I think we kind of fumbled away through that one, Matthew. Even though it was mentioned that Mercenaries in Resident Evil 5 was one of the best from Resi, what would you rank the other Mercenaries as after this one? I loved the original one from 3 and was gutted that there was no return of it in Resident Evil 3 Remake. That’s from Daryl. This is like probably going to sound like, you know, this probably might disappoint you, Daryl, but I’ve actually not played original Resident Evil 3, so the, or at least I’ve not played it for more than like an hour or so. I do have it on my PS Vita, I think, or maybe it’s on my PS3, and I think, I didn’t get far enough to unlock Mercenaries. I think that’s something you get at the end of the game, and that means that my experience with it starts with Resident Evil 4, which I think it does for like a lot of people. In terms of ranking them, I suppose like the ones I’ve played, I didn’t bother with whatever the 7 and Village versions were of that mode, because I didn’t think the combat was quite up to it in the same way, but I think that 5 would probably still be the best, but the 4 remake ones, really good. The different character abilities and the way they are differentiated works very nicely. The levels are pretty decent. Yeah, I’m quite enjoying that one. Have you played that one, Matthew? No, not yet. Yeah, so it’ll probably go like 5, 4 remake, 6, which I think has a really good one, and then probably original 4. I know a lot of people love the original 4 one, but I think it’s just the longevity of it is kind of what the magic is, like the different maps and the way it escalates. There are only 4 maps in the Resi 4 one, I think. So I found that more of a finite experience, much as I enjoyed the water world map, of course. But yeah, 5 just… When you add co-op to the mix, it’s just… It suddenly becomes like super essential. Next question, then. I really enjoyed your short discussion about QTEs in the Resi 4 pod. It felt much more nuanced than normal for the topic, where the conventional wisdom among players is that they’re just bad shit and should never be used. I liked the idea, I think it was Matthew’s, that they can broaden the palette of actions for a game without taking away focus from the core mechanics it uses the majority of the time. From a bit of an overdose in the mid-North East, they’re more or less exiled from the industry today. It feels like fan reaction has caused an overcorrection. Are there other bits of game design you think have fallen unfairly by the wayside, or ways that a strong reaction from players has had an exaggerated impact on the industry? My usual disclaimer, if this is a terrible question, please don’t read it out and make me look like an idiot. That’s from Cyrano. I think it’s a perfectly fine question, Cyrano. Any thoughts on this one, Matthew? I could think of things which haven’t lived on, but it’s not because they were maligned. The big one that often comes up on this podcast is the classic GoldenEye in Perfect Dark difficulty tiers, the sub-objectives. People didn’t do that because fans hated it. In fact, everyone I know who’s played those games loves that about it. I guess it’s just really hard work. I don’t know why that doesn’t live on. A broad version of this where I think maybe fans had a bit of an impact. I feel like after the quite bold departure of Metroid Other M, it was kind of laughed at and didn’t do particularly well. I feel like Nintendo mascots have mostly stayed in their lane since then. I’d love to see a Nintendo that was open up to just trying something a bit different like they did with that Metroid. It’s a bit vague, but that’s sort of a feeling I have. I don’t feel like I’ve seen any mascots do anything truly outrageous in the last 15 years. And another one that comes up often on this podcast is just this. It’s not because something’s maligned, but because something is assumed to be loved by an audience. It’s this sense that everything today has to be sort of elevated or mature or a bit more profound or psychologically real in some way. I think there is a slight embarrassment about the simple pleasures of games used to be a bit dumber and a bit lighter on their feet with it. And I don’t need everything to be dad of war, kind of having a bad time and feeling awful about the stuff he used to do. I used to love the stuff he used to do. But that’s, I don’t know, that again, slightly vague. Yeah, it’s a slightly tricky one this. I think there’s like a few mechanics I see less often in games now where I’m like, that was a cool idea. Why didn’t that come back? I wasn’t a huge fan of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, but I did think the mechanic where you could call an assassin to kill a target for you is like a little powers really cool. And there are some games I’ve played where I’m like, oh, it might be cool to do something like that in Cyberpunk or something. And, you know, even like, like it’s something I really like, something I really like about Jedi Survivor is that the times where you are with an AI companion, they have some quite cool meaningful abilities that can mix up the combat and rebalance it slightly and that sort of thing. But I like the idea of very disposable enemies who just like kill that guy, they turn up and they disappear again. That was just a cool notion, I think. The other thing is that I liked it when one thing I found was like disappointing about the more modern dice, Star Wars Battlefront games is that you had to go to these icons to get into vehicles or pay currency to get in them. Something I liked about the pandemic games that made them a little bit cheap and nasty, but really good fun, I think, was everything you could get in was just on the field. So if you were just playing as a Wookie, you ran up to an AT-ST, you could just get in it and kidnap it and stuff. It meant that all the vehicle handling was kind of all over the place and it wasn’t mega sophisticated. I think as games have gotten more sophisticated, the idea is they don’t give you that level of control. They don’t make it that sandboxy because it just feels too disposable. It’s somehow got to be a lot set pieceier or controlled and things like that. And I think Pandemic’s style of games was quite broad and messy. It wasn’t best in class at anything, but they were kind of great fun. And so I sort of missed that mentality when a blockbuster game could feel quite AA in places but still sell mega well and have quite a big audience. And now I feel like you’ll never play… Actually, weirdly, Fortnite is the closest you get to this, where the shooting mechanics aren’t so sophisticated. It’s got to be like, look at the way we’ve done all these reload animations or the way these guns sound and stuff like that. That’s sort of like… Fortnite doesn’t quite have that same level of Battlefield or Call of Duty granularity. Yeah, I just missed things. Yeah, just a bit broader, bit sillier. I kind of missed that attitude, I guess. Again, a little bit vague, but yeah. Okay, do you want to read the next one, Matthew? Question. Having just seen the Mind’s Eye teaser that would be playable inside everywhere, I’m just wondering your thoughts on what the gaming landscape might look like in ten years’ time. How big a market share will these games inside hub game launchers become? That’s from Melma. Yeah, ten years, that’s tough to call. The current state of games now is that games that were made when live service games were huge, or at least when Destiny was massive, are still kind of coming through and people are being like, well, the world’s moved on from that a little bit, the appetite isn’t necessarily there, and so these games are either getting retooled or they’re just coming out and not getting the, you know, maybe the reception that they would be if they were like a more guided sort of single-player, you know, specific single-player game. Something like Jedi Survivor feels like actually quite a good idea of like something that still feels contemporary, which is, you know, a light sprinkling of Souls elements, but also super cinematic, big budget and stuff like that, whereas these are games that are like, you know, loot numbers, things popping out and eight million different guns you pick up. That maybe feels like it’s on the way out. The everywhere thing. So I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what they’ve like said about what that is. I get the impression that it is. It sounds like it’s like two different games, like one game inside another game. They just recently, the last couple of months, done some sort of talking about it. But I think they’re trying to make like basically roadblocks for adults is my understanding. Yeah. And there’s a potential that takes off because roadblocks has obviously taken off. But I don’t think it would ever replace traditional games and how they’re like made and sold. I mean, I suppose you do. If you do get to the point where these tools are so simple that you can build games and then you can kind of monetize them really simply. That’s something. But I think there’s also maybe the risk that Epic beats them to the punch on this by making Unreal more and more accessible and more and more easy to use. I feel like that was part of what they were announcing at GDC just to kind of bring those barriers down to making money with their platform. Yeah, I don’t know. But all I ever really care about is what the games are. And if the games are good, that’s kind of what matters. And if it gets to the point where something like Everywhere becomes so big and people are like you have to go and play this open world game inside this other game, then I’d be curious for sure. But I think that we haven’t really seen examples yet of that stuff catching fire. Like there hasn’t necessarily been like a dreams game where people are like it’s the best game of the year is inside dreams. I mean, you know, there’s some amazing stuff in there, but it’s still it’s still considered part of dreams. And I think that that’s maybe the barrier they have to overcome, where it’s like, oh, it doesn’t matter what the platform is. You just have to go and play this thing that’s inside this platform. And so that that’s what that’s the barrier they need to overcome. Basically, the idea of just a platform and owning a platform and that being like your base of operations, that feels like a pitch to like investors. That’s where you get all your startup money from. That isn’t like a pitch to me. I couldn’t give a fuck about that stuff. Like, I just do not care. I’m not interested. If it makes a good game, then yeah, for sure. But right now, this this whole pitch is like just the whiff of metaverse. All these things. It’s aimed at money, many like big ideas rather than people who are actually going to play these things. Yeah, it has to the question has to be like, what is exciting about it for the player? That’s what it always comes back to. And like, I think the reason people have brushed up against or like found themselves rejecting games or service type games is because they are they are built with shareholders in mind rather than gamers, you know, or players rather. So, yes, that’s that’s my bleak answer to that one. Games will be fine in 10 years, but I don’t think they’ll just be a bunch of like platform launches. That’s just the metaverse dream is just not one. It’s not really how it doesn’t really have anything to do with video games. That’s what it comes down to. And eventually people are going to realize that, I think. And it will either be boom or bust. In 10 years time, Suicide Squad releases to a 6 out of 10. OK, this next one. With the one year birthday of the Steam Deck just passing, do you think it’s been a wholly positive addition to gaming? It provides a baseline performance standard for developers to aim for. But by doing so, does it run the risk of losing what sets PC games apart from console games? I don’t actually think that, but trying to avoid the chances of Samuel saying yes. Next question. That’s from Ryan Plugs. It’s not that I’ve called on it, but I haven’t played my Steam Deck for quite a long time. I was filling a gap when consoles weren’t interesting me, but this year there’s loads of console games I am interested in, and I’ve just abandoned it. So maybe not the best person to ask. It hasn’t disrupted gaming in the Castle household. It’s there when we go on trips and things, and that’s very handy. But I’ve stopped playing it in the house because I just don’t need it. And I’d much rather be playing games on the big TV. If I had been playing all my weird little indie games, like I promised I would, Steam Deck would probably… I’d prefer to play my Steam Deck over my PC, but I’m just not in the mood for either. Yeah, it’s funny because I haven’t played it as much this year. The last game I really properly played on it was Cult of the Lamb, and that was a game where I was like… There’s a whole crop of indie games, so I’m like, I think I’d rather just play this on Steam Deck so I don’t risk there being performance issues on Switch, which is… That’s kind of where it’s shaking out a little bit, where I’m not sure what the Switch is capable of in some of these more complex-looking games, so that’s where I played Arcade Paradise, for example, as well. So it’s sort of like… And it sort of remains that in some ways. That game, Shadows of Doubt, I bought that a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve got that installed on Steam Deck. I’ve got Dredge installed on Steam Deck. So it has sort of defaulted to an indie machine, but that’s partly because it was really cool to play Days Gone on there, and Days Gone looked absolutely amazing on there, but the battery life just runs low so quickly. It’s almost not worth it. It’s too much of a penalty to stick with that experience, and that is obviously because you are asking it to do something quite drastic that is typically beyond a handheld device. But as a tinkerer’s sort of handheld, I think it’s absolutely retained its value, and that’s where I still kind of use it. An older boy told me it’s really great for emulation. I wouldn’t know anything about that, of course. But that side of things remains evergreen as a prospect, especially when you think about all the other retro handhelds out there, which as good as they are, they don’t have the same power that this has for the price that you pay. So on that level, I think it really maintains its value. I would stick to the original point that I made on the Steam Deck podcast we did, which is if you have a large Steam library already and you have the mentality to enjoy the tinkering side of it, it’s worth buying. But I don’t know if I’d necessarily recommend it if you didn’t have those things. That’s kind of where I stand on the Steam Deck, Matthew. Any further thoughts on Psych Odyssey? Have you both watched it? Has Samuel’s gig given him any new insights into development, marketing, business side of things? That’s from Blinky. Yeah, so I actually only watched about four or five episodes in the end. I meant to keep on with it and I just haven’t gone back because I think I went to GDC in the middle of it and then just haven’t beaten up again. But you watched all of it, didn’t you, Matthew? Yeah, I watched it all in like a weekend. I really mainlined it. It’s super interesting to see just how chaotic it is. I just like the soap opera drama of all the different human personality types. I’m interested at people in the workplace anyway. I always think that’s fascinating. Games or not, it’s intriguing to see power dynamics and how certain people handle different upsets. Particularly when you’ve got someone like Tim Schafer, who’s a bit of a game developer celebrity, it’s kind of interesting to see his managing approach or lack of in places. I think the really interesting thing was it’s very easy to talk about certain issues as being black and white in games development from the outside. This is bad. Everyone hates this. There’s this crunch culture and topics like that. And actually to hear different perspectives from people inside and how people can slip into certain behaviours and how people can justify things themselves and how they justify it to other people. Surprise, surprise. These people are as complicated and messy as any people. It just made me think about the amount of stuff that gets written about games development by journalists outside telling them it should be this way or that way. And actually you just can’t really comprehend or understand how things are unless you’re inside it. And I’m not inside it. This gave us a little window into what it’s like to be inside it. And even with that limited glimpse you came away thinking like, well, there’s certain things I probably shouldn’t be kind of opining on because I just don’t have any fucking idea what it’s like. Yeah, I sort of like, I think that’s kind of true of a lot of things that Twitter has a perspective on but actually doesn’t reflect what being a human in the real world is like. And I think, yeah, that’s one of them for sure. What I watched of it I really enjoyed. It is the first documentary I’ve watched where one of the participants has unfollowed me on Twitter. So that was like a thing. So I like the idea that I bored someone enough. During the making of that documentary I’m surprised I didn’t do an episode on him unfollowing me, Matthew, where it’s like, oh man, this guy is still talking about fucking Star Wars. I’ve had enough of it. I’m noping out of this. Anyway, Psychonauts 2. So yeah, I liked it a bit. The second part of the question, yeah, it has given me new insights, but also I think that like it’s crystallized a lot of things that I think I already sort of knew. But then, you know, it sort of challenges my assumptions a little bit. Yeah, you learn tons and you sort of like have a have a different understanding and a different empathy for sure. And yeah, yeah, super insightful. It’s sort of like the actual like learning about how games are made. Part of it is one of the main reasons I like doing it really. It’s like, you know, understanding who all the different people are, what all the different moving parts are. Dear True Gamers, In your recent pod, you criticized reviews for showing later levels and bosses. Nintendo Power used to feature full guides and the magazine was beloved. I knew everything about Final Fantasy and Super Metroid before playing them, and they’re my favorite games. I’m trying to understand your aversion to spoilers, so could you tell me which games you enjoyed less because you knew too much about them beforehand? That’s from Robert Augusta Meyer. Games have more of a pronounced narrative element now, so when they get spoiled, you’re a bit like… Like earlier, for example, my aversion to spoiler for the third act of Jedi Survivor is there’s some cool Star Wars shit in there that I should probably experience firsthand, so it’s really obvious to me that I wouldn’t want that spoiled. That’s maybe a bit different to, like, here’s how you get this weapon in Super Metroid or whatever. You know, it’s a slightly different situation, but I don’t know. Some people… There probably are spoilers. Some people are like, there’s no such thing as spoilers, don’t be a baby, and then there are people like, I don’t like things spoiled, and we just seem so entrenched that, you know, I can’t really convince someone otherwise. Yeah. I just like to experience something new, a fresh, you know, it’s exciting to me to not know what’s going to happen in Tears of the Kingdom. I mean, maybe that’s a more extreme one. Like, I really, I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t want to know if it has the equivalent of the Shrines from Breath of the Wild. I want to discover that for myself. I have no idea in my head of the shape of that game, and I don’t really want to know it until I discover it for the first time. I think it’s actually really obvious, the spoiler thing. I don’t think it’s like a controversial take. And I don’t get the push back against people being like, you know, I don’t want the episode, the key episode of Succession from this season spoiled for me. Like, that should even take explaining. It’s really obvious. Just don’t ruin the experience of someone else that you got to have. It’s really, really simple. So that’s why. I do consider seeing parts of the world I’ve never seen before in Tears of the Kingdom to be a spoiler. But yeah, I don’t know. I go out of my way to avoid that stuff when I’m confronted with it. It annoys me. And it’s always annoyed me. And yeah, it’s such a culture of someone’s watched this the second it’s gone live and then they’ve just blasted out what’s in it, like in a headline or whatever. And I’m like, well, you know, I did want to experience that firsthand. Sue me. It’s like, you know, it’s the magic of it, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to feel ruined for you if we went into it and games are a similar deal. The kind of puzzlement at us not wanting spoilers. Like, I am equally as puzzled as like, well, you’d be happy knowing what happens in Final Fantasy 7 before you play Final Fantasy 7? Then why fucking play? It’s a story. What a weird relationship to have with the story. That you can just know how it ends and be content with that. I equally put the question to you, I don’t understand your stance, you know? Yeah, fair. On that lightly confrontational note with the listener, the podcast comes to an end, Matthew. Again, ending on a high, that’s what we deal with in this podcast. This episode, this is Big Bank Holiday Monday ending energy. I hope the episode doesn’t come across as too sort of like downbeat. I’m definitely in that headspace a bit where I have other stuff going on. So I do apologize to the listeners if this wasn’t like mega jolly. Hopefully we’ll shore it up enough for Games Court, Matthew, which we’ll guarantee we’ll record on a weekend morning. But we’ll see. Next week, Zelda episode. I’m going to be in the best possible mood I could be. I’m going to be playing a new Zelda game. I cannot wait. I’m so looking forward to talking about that game and playing it and having thoughts. It’s going to be really exciting. Yeah, absolutely. That’s next weekend taken care of. Very exciting. Okay, the podcast is over. If you’d like to support us financially and keep the podcast going, patreon.com/backpagepod, where you also get two additional podcasts a month from us, one on games and one on pop culture. This month, as I mentioned, we did 50 things in games to make us go, oh no. We’re also doing the best TV episodes ever, so it should be a good one. And twitter.com/backpagepod if you want to follow us. Matthew, where can people get you on social media? MrBazzill underscore Pesto. And I’m Sammy Dobby Roberts, and we’ll be back next week with Two Giant Men Played Tears of the Kingdom.