Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, you just saw Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One. My first question to you is, were you excited that the dad from Caprica is the villain in that film? Because I was. Esi Morales, I think he’s called. That made me very excited. Yeah, he’s good at it. He’s quite a more James Bond-y villain than you’re maybe used to from Mission Impossible, which is good. The mad thing with him, I mentioned this on the Discord, that character was originally gonna be Nicholas Holt. Yeah, yeah, completely different. And I cannot work out how they switched that because his age is like a very key part of the story in it, and I’m like, back, back. Yeah, so slightly distracted by the whole Holt of it all and kind of like imagining what Holt would be like in this film. But I actually liked that he was an older guy. I like that the cast in this film is generally a little older. Like everyone’s kind of like 40 and above. And it’s kind of like, here are the grownups to make a proper blockbuster. Yeah, fair enough. But it has been established that the only box office drawers now are like over the age of 50 in Hollywood. So that’s good. Yeah, I was just quite, I was also taken aback by that because I thought Nicholas Holt did seem like an exciting sort of villain on paper. But then when they replaced him with him, I was like, OK, I really like Isai Morales, whenever I’ve seen him in things, I’m like, he’s decent, I know he’s in Ozark, and I think he was in, you know, he’s been in a bunch of sort of TV stuff. He was like Deathstroke in The Titans show and stuff like that. Right. That’s quite a break to get at his age, really, to get, you know, to become the villain on that sort of scale. Yeah. What if they just like wanted someone who could be tolerant of all of Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie’s like pandemic era bullshit of making impossible set pieces under ridiculous circumstances and just burning through cash, basically. It’s like we need someone who will politely come along for the ride. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll talk about this when we do our Mission Impossible XXL Patreon episode. But there’s something very interesting about like the actors you can put opposite Cruise. Like I think there has to be a bit of a fame gap. Otherwise, people who are quote unquote superstars might seem diminished next to him. So you almost have to put people where there’s like low threat of him interfering with their like, their kind of fame in a way. I’m not quite worked out that theory yet, but I think there’s something in it. No, I think you’re right. I think like someone like John Hamm complements Tom Cruise, as opposed to like fights the energy of Tom Cruise. But I don’t think you could put like someone who can sit like, well, Henry Cavill then. That’s, I mean, that maybe anyway, we’ll get into all this in the episode. There’s certain people who can and can’t go opposite him. And this guy definitely made the cuts. Actually, on Nicholas Holt, and again, maybe this is better for the XSL episode. When we were watching, re-watching Mission Impossible 1 the other day, I said to Catherine, in certain shots, he looks like Nicholas Holt, or Nicholas Holt looks like a younger Tom Cruise, to the point where I wonder if there was ever a sort of father-son storyline in the offing. Oh, right. Or like, I think I said, like a clone storyline. No, no, but like, it’s, you know, there is a, there is a kind of connection to Ethan Hunt’s past with the villain. And I wondered if that’s, they changed that connection, but if that maybe was what they were gonna do with it, because he does look a bit like him. Right, okay. We’ll get to that then in the XXL episode. Sorry, that seemed like a shameless advert. We really didn’t set this up to be an advert for the Patreon. I was just shooting the shit, really, because I normally ask Matthew about something he’s been doing lately, and that was the thing that he’s been doing lately. Why don’t you ask me how I’m doing? Yeah, how are you doing? Yeah, I’m all right. What did I do at the weekend? I went to, no, I did nothing at the weekend, actually. I have to go further back. I went to London about a week or so ago. I went to two very nice restaurants. I went to Rita’s in Soho and the French House in Soho also, which was recommended by that extremely popular podcast about a menu that people do, that some comedians do. I don’t even listen to the first episode, and they’re a bit like, whoa, it’s a wacky menu podcast. And I kind of tuned out, but it seems to be phenomenally popular. Off Menu is that what it’s called? Now, Skoda, are you a fan of that podcast? I’ve liked some episodes. I’ve just liked other episodes. I’m not a regular listener. I’ll listen in if there’s someone who I think might be interesting on it. I’m not a big Ed Gamble guy. Okay, but the other guy you like, right? James Acosta. Yeah. You’re a fan of that guy. I remember you talking up his standup at one point. You got me fascinated to hear the standup routine about his ex-girlfriend dating Mr. Bean. That I really wanted to check out. But that podcast recommended The French House, and I went there, and it’s very, very nice. So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I wish there was a funny anecdote attached to it. I went to Gosh Comics, actually, in Soho while I was there. That is a fucking amazing comic book shop. In the basement there, you can buy stickers for The Crow official sticker album. Or maybe they’re trading cards, actually. Official trading cards of The Crow from the 90s. They just have like original packs there. You can buy for like three quid or something. That rules. I love that shit. You should have bought a batch and turned yourself into a YouTuber whose whole shtick is you open unseen packs of The Crow trading cards on YouTube. Blind openings. Isn’t that a thing? Yeah, I think that’s where my career is going after Games of PR. So I’m just going to pivot into that, basically. Pivot into opening old trading card packets. I got a shiny card of hoodlum number five. Well, I did buy the DC Comics Vertigo trading cards. And it was a bit like, instead of a shiny Charizard, I got Shade the Changing Man by Peter Milligan. And it’s like very different vibes, you know? I used to collect Thunderbirds collectors cards when I was a kid. I’d get a packet of those when I lost a tooth from the tooth fairy. And you’d just end up with like, oh, I’ve got my 16th Virgil when what you really want is the hood. Did your mum just buy you another pack of those since you just lost another tooth, Matthew? This time yanked out of your skull by a dentist. No, I’m afraid not. We’re a bit beyond that. Okay, that’s a shame. I’ll hit up the hood on eBay and then send you a… Thanks. Yeah, I think that might make you feel better. So yeah, I guess there is a vague advert for the Excel tier in there on Patreon. patreon.com/backpagepod. Now there definitely is. Oh, well, yeah, there is. If you’d like to listen to us rank the Mission Impossible movies and also this month, we’ve done 20 games that deserve a remake for the Excel episode. So we continue to try and make those Payward content good for people, make a little treasure tray with more than 30 exclusive episodes behind there now, etc. That’s done. This episode. What we’ve been playing has actually been a little while since we did one of those. It was May, I think, was the last time we did this. We have a lot of listener questions backed up. Some are good. Some are questionable. Oh, I’m already getting to that. I’m only joking. They’re all good, etc. etc. But first, we’re going to talk… Doubtful noise in brackets in the old Amazon Prime video subtitles there. Yeah, so we’ve got a bunch of games to discuss in the first part, what we’ve been up to lately. Honestly, the main thing I’ve been playing is one game, which we’ll discuss in detail. And aside from that, Metal Gear Solid 3, which obviously you heard on a previous podcast. So we’ve done that recently. So I’ve not been playing loads of stuff. I’ve been playing quite a lot of one title. So I think we’ll have some good stuff to discuss here. Matthew, should we jump straight into it and get on with it? Okay, that game is Final Fantasy 16. Matthew discussed it a bit on our top five Final Fantasy episodes. This is a long-awaited new numbered entry in the series, the first once it’s 2016. It is the first single-player entry to be done by whichever Square Enix production studio handles Final Fantasy 14. Creative Business Unit 3. That’s a dude who’s had to think about this stuff a lot in the last few weeks, clearly. And so they are, I think, seen as like a fairly safe pair of hands in terms of how they understand Final Fantasy and, you know, there’s… Also for people who, I guess, have not played Final Fantasy 14, it’s interesting to be exposed to a bit of their, I guess, like their sensibilities. But again, I don’t really know much about how Square Enix structures their stuff. It’s just, is it Naoki Yoshida, the… He’s the executive producer here. Yeah, that’s right. What’s the P for? Yeah, I have no idea. I was about to make a joke, but I have no idea, so I’m not even going to try. Powerful, the P is for powerful. Is there a bit of iconography from Final Fantasy that begins with P? Oh, there probably is, and I’m failing massively by not knowing it. That’s on me, man. That’s classic Tuesday evening brain at work there. But yeah, so, you know, he’s become a very, very respected figure in the Final Fantasy community, really. The person credited with salvaging Final Fantasy 14 from disaster and certainly seemed to be a really smart lateral thinker. When you see the story of how they did say Final Fantasy 14 on the Noclip video documentary about that, it does just strike you as someone who’s just like a level head, you know? It’s sort of like, I don’t know, I get the impression that there’s just like a kind of like coolness to the decision making that is maybe, I don’t know, from the outside looking in, refreshing when you’re used to, let’s say, the chaos of Final Fantasy versus XIII, being in like development hell for like eight years and then getting given to a different studio. And all this, all like Final Fantasy 7 remakes, switching developers midway through development, like that kind of stuff. This game seems very devoid of that kind of drama, really. It just seems to be they’ve been making it for years. It feels like a game that has had years and years of work put into it. Every creative decision, it feels very considered to me, except maybe the side quests. We’ll talk about that. But I think, Matthew, it’s made an extremely strong first impression on me. So why don’t you talk with how, talk about how you feel about Final Fantasy 16 so far? Yeah, so I haven’t quite finished it, but I’m very near the end just to give people an indicator of where I’m at with it. Throughout the game, you’re playing as this guy called Clive, and he has the ability to kind of absorb powers from these icons, which are like your traditional kind of summons. They’re called icons in this iteration. And as he absorbs these powers, his moveset develops. So to give you some indication, I have one icon slot left. So I’ve got X number so far. So I feel like I’m like a couple of big boss fights away from the ending. Well, basically, my opinion hasn’t changed massively from when I talked about it before. I think what’s interesting about this game is that it has a much more kind of like in the moment sort of third person action combat system. People have likened it to sort of a Devil May Cry. And that’s quite convenient shorthand because Devil May Cry 5’s combat designer was the kind of combat director on this. So, you know, I think they’ve deliberately courted that comparison. Is it as complicated and sophisticated as a Devil May Cry? Probably not, I think. I don’t know. Maybe you disagree. We can talk about that. But yeah, you know, it’s basically abandoned the, you know, any kind of semblance of sort of strategy or turn taking. There’s no AI party for you to control. They control themselves. So you really are just focusing on like Clive in the moment. And the point I made before that I’m going to come back to you now is whether it makes is whether it’s a combat system that’s big enough to sustain a 50, 60 hour game that Final Fantasy is. I think it’s very well matched to the central storyline, which has more traditional action game progression. Like, you know, you’re going to these very linear levels, quite spectacular things are happening. There are like regular introduction of new enemy types, mini bosses, big bosses, giant bosses. There’s a lot of like platinum style kind of galaxy sized gods in space in this game. Very satisfying on that level. But when it steps out of that mode, which it does for probably half, two thirds of the game, it’s not in that mode, which is like your open world side quest stuff. I find that you’re suddenly left with this very elaborate combat system and very basic enemies to use it on. And I don’t know if that’s entirely satisfying. Now, what I haven’t tested is the advanced difficulty that unlocks once you complete it first time round, which I think then like remixes all those fights. And if that gives a bit more teeth to those world encounters, maybe I’ll feel differently about it. But right now, it’s a game that when it’s firing on all cylinders, I fucking love it. I think it’s great. I think the bosses and the production values and the scale and the polish, Unreal, really, really satisfying. But it also manages to be incredibly boring for at least half the time, which is like quite a tough thing to navigate. Right. So I’ve got some thoughts on that stuff. I think that to start with, like a bit more on the premise, I guess, because it actually took me a while to get my head around what this game’s story is really about. So you play this guy, Clive, who’s sort of like a black sheep in one of the royal families of a house in this in this kingdom. And basically something bad happens to that house in Flashback. And then it picks up years later where you are basically Clive is basically under under under duress serving for this royal army. And then he kind of breaks out of that and reunites with a childhood friend and goes off to discover what happened in the past. Now in the midst of this, there are at least two empires warring over this world. And at the head of like these these sort of these empires, these royal families are basically the Final Fantasy summons in the form of these gods controlled by people. And that’s a very key part of the story, because like you say, Clive goes around absorbing the powers of these, which is a great premise, I think, for for slowly building up a combat system. At the same time, this world is afflicted by something called the Blight, which basically erases all life and is pushing pushing what what what does live in this world into other places are very clear. And, you know, analogy for global warming, and you can’t use magic in these places either when you get there. So a lot of your more exciting abilities are stripped out of the game. And the suggestion is, as you elude to on that Final Fantasy episode, Matthew, is that this world is quite fucked. But the people who are in this world are more obsessed with fighting over the bits that are left than actually saving it, which is, I think, actually really lands as a notion quite well in this game. Without really overdoing it. Like, it doesn’t overcook that message. It’s actually kind of there for you to discover a little bit and figure out yourself by reading the bits of lore and stuff like that. It’s quite explicit at times about, like, if the kind of heroes succeed in what they’re trying to do, it’s probably going to make the world, like, a bit harder to live in. You know, it’s kind of like, we’re going to take a step back. You know, you can’t have this ease of life and the world will also survive. You know, like, surviving in the future is going to come at a cost, which, you know, lots of people would say about the situation we’re currently in. It’s kind of, can, you know, who’s going to be the first to go, well, we don’t have, we don’t have this ease of modern living anymore. You know, in exchange for, like, this world won’t be burnt for fucking Crisp in 50 days. Well, never mind that, Matthew. We’ve got to argue about fucking orange confetti at George Osborne’s wedding. So on the analogy front, do you think the Dominants, who are the people who control these godlike figures at the head of each army, do you think they’re meant to be like nukes? I think they’re meant to be. I actually think what you said about it in that Final Fantasy episode nailed it, which is that they are a mixed bag of people, some of which have inherited this power, who don’t really deserve it and are irresponsible with that power. And I think that is probably also an analogy to our current moment where, you know, certain political leaders are from wealthy backgrounds or, you know, we are in the kind of NEPO baby age, you know, just like… Do you think this is a big barrage against NEPO babies? No, definitely not. But I think there is like a family element to who gets to be like the dominance of these summons, right? So it is a suggestion that you shouldn’t just have this power because you were part of this lineage, which is fair enough, I think. But yeah, I think it basically just posits that these people are more obsessed with power than they are about saving this world. So it works well without beating you over the head with it. But to be honest, though, I think I’m just getting to the bit in the story where those characters are becoming more of a factor and the attention is turned towards, aren’t they going to destroy the crystals so magic vanishes from the world? Is that the goal, Matthew? That’s the game’s premise then. Just wanted to lay that out for people who are not familiar with it. So top line for me, right? This is finally a Final Fantasy game I could recommend to most people without really blushing. I could be like, this is a lot of what the series does very well in a form you can enjoy without me giving you a load of caveats about weird laughing scenes between Tidus and Yuna, or the second half of this game. It clearly doesn’t exist in the case of Final Fantasy XV. Or stuff that’s always been with Final Fantasy, the strangeness of it or the oddness of it, things that just seem super hard to get over. This is a really strong modern form of what this series should look like to me. The combat, like you say, is a slight departure, though Final Fantasy XV was already a fully real-time combat system. You did have controlling party members in there as well, which you don’t in there, so you can’t tell your dog what to do. In a way, isn’t that also the same? It’s not really. You have companions traveling with you who have abilities, so it doesn’t feel like a lonely journey. It does feel like a journey you take with other people, in the spirit of Final Fantasy at least. But the story is so confidently told and so coherent, like you’ve also mentioned before. You can always find out what’s going on, even if you don’t necessarily know what’s going on at all times. Because the game gives you information in the background, very simple paragraphs that just explain, here’s what this empire is, here’s what this event is, here’s what this place is. If you want to pause a cutscene at any time and check that stuff, you can, which is good. But the characterisation is really clear. The dialogue is excellent because the localisation is fucking incredible in this game, like an absolute all-timer localisation job to me. Very immersive for me, getting to the West Country bit of this game and hearing lots of no luck catching them swans then kind of accents going on. I was like, yep, well done. That’s very good. Someone said, I think Sid says cunning stunts at some point. So you’re like, yep, this was not localised by one tired man in America like the SNES RPGs were back in the day. It’s a very different proposition. So it’s like a really solid form to hand someone and be like, okay, this is the essence of what Final Fantasy is in a modern blockbuster in a way you can really enjoy. Right down to the fact that the combat, the real time combat is, like you say, not as complex as Death May Cry, but way more complex than it needed to be necessarily. So it’s like you do have to, you’re probably not going to get many game overs if you’re even remotely familiar with like, you know, recent third person action games, right? It’s not that hard if you play on the more combat focused mode. But a lot of the principles that have like, have governed, you know, the Souls games and Devil May Cry, things like, you know, the sort of attack patterns of enemies, area of effect, that sort of thing. When you move, when you duck, when you, when you quickly zoom after an enemy, timings, you know, like when to play defensively, when to play offensively, all those principles have helped guide the combat system. So I think that makes it incredibly strong at its core, which is, which is great, because I’m constantly excited by the action in this game, even if it doesn’t have like the hardcore credential of Devil May Cry necessarily. It’s like it’s always stimulating my brain in some way. You can’t just press one button and get to the end of it. And that was my concern with where some games were going in the noughties and the early 2010s. So it has avoided that. It requires you, your brain to be switched on. And like you say, some of the boss encounters are incredible. Your point about the downtime in this game, right? You are not as used to Final Fantasy as I am. And I posit to you, my friend, that random battles in Final Fantasy have always been a bit like this. There’s always been that downtime. There’s always been that lack of momentum to, well, now I just grind through a bunch of these guys. Now, you could argue that like that’s, you know, maybe there was a better form of them approaching this. I think you do still get some like tougher enemies in the wild who require you to use the, you know, like the dodging and the parrying and the systems you’ve learned to deal with bosses. You are still required to use those because they can be tricky. But I do agree that like sometimes it’s just a case of, well, I’ll just clear these guys out and then move on. And that, I think, may be tied to the lack of imagination behind the side quests in this game versus the main quest, which has so much momentum and is so exciting so much of the time. Is maybe a fair criticism that the pacing is not for everyone, Matthew? Yeah, yeah, I’d be interested to like come back around to this when you’re closer to the end, because I feel like with where the plot goes and where the scale goes, it feels it feels more and more jarring basically to go from like, you know, even bigger boss encounter to like back to, can you go and get me, you know, five bloody hides? And you’re like, Oh, man, really? Like, I’ve literally been in fucking, you know, the outer atmosphere of this planet. You know, this is beneath me now, like, literally. And that’s I just I just can’t get over that. And like, I’m very much at a point now where I’m like, I just really want this to finish. But at the same time, I just can’t leave the side stuff alone. Like, it’s the compulsive map clearing icon ticking part of my brain. You know, games have just done such a fucking number on me. But I find it very, very hard to resist that stuff. And there’s there’s like little enough of it that you feel the need to do it. But enough of it that it’s just just adding like an extra half an hour where there doesn’t need to be an extra half an hour. Yeah. And also, I just find that like, you know, the quality of the localisation throughout is great. But, you know, dramatically, it’s it’s a lot flatter, you know, when you’re away from like the proper cutscene choreography. Like there’s there’s definitely like two tiers of cutscene in this game on the main quest and then the kind of quite static. I’ve said it before, a bit like Yakuza, where you just have two character models kind of standing opposite each other, kind of having text boxes back and forth. And that’s fine. You know, like it’s OK. But at least with Yakuza, like what happens is often like barmy enough that you don’t really notice. Here it’s there are a few like there are a few good quests. I will say actually, as it’s gone on, there’s been some quests which have kind of coloured in some parts of the world in quite a nice way, which even though what you did in the quests were boring, their actual like narrative purpose made sense. And also it puts quite a lot of side character stuff in the later quests as it goes on. Like the section I’m in now, it feels like it’s actually using the side quests to pad out a lot of the named characters. So you feel even more compelled to do them because you want to know what the deal is with these AI companions who are a bit unknowable otherwise. So it’s still a problem for me. But I do take your point about the random encounters. And maybe that is just part of the tradition is like, here’s just a load of stodgy pointless combat. But when you know how good and alive it can be, and it’s so nimble and kind of reactive under your thumbs, it’s kind of even harder to be torn away from that, I’d argue. Yeah, I think I do get that. And I think that it’s an odd reality check in some ways to go from those massive peaks to these languid moments. And I think to also just bring in more Square Enix business units into this conversation, this has the exact side quest problem that FF7 Remake had, where, as previously joked about Matthew, it’s a lot of squeezing through gaps to retrieve urchins in FF7 Remake, which is completely accurate and sort of the case here. I also wish here, I beg them, can you just cut two seconds of animation when an NPC turns towards you before they start talking? It’s just that moment of them adjusting, getting into their conversation stance. So I’m just like, no, every single time, just cut this out. There’s a lot of like fade outs. There’s just a lot of weird little presentation or like second here or there, which really add up. It just doesn’t feel very nimble on its feet in those moments, but you know, that’s okay. I don’t want to just focus on that negative stuff, because when the game goes hard and goes big, it’s absolutely amazing looking. It’s kind of a, you know, what happens if Platinum had, you know, like three times the budget they usually had to work with kind of style boss. You know, there’s like the, you’ve fought Garuda. You must have fought her already, the big thing. And you know, like the character design is just so nuanced. And like all these feather, you know, it’s really like stunning. And the amount of like animation that goes into like the QuickTime events, which are just, you know, if you dig QuickTime events, this game has some spectacularly over the top ones. It does. Like the QuickTime events as well are interesting because in some ways, I can see why maybe RPG purists don’t love the idea that, you know, like your health bar that you see for a boss might secretly not be the health bar. It might actually be like three quarters of that health bar than the last one is a QTE. Right. Jammer button. So, but I would say that the compared to the like QTEs I’ve seen in, I guess, like I try to think where I’ve seen QTEs most recently. The Avengers, did that maybe have a couple of them? I don’t really remember them that well, to be honest, but certainly they felt out of date or strange or not very exciting. When you see them, you’re just a bit like, ah, this feels like old game design. This one that this in this game, though, they are used to just heighten these big story moments where it’s like, we want to just not have you, you know, finish a boss fight, a flurry of swipes. It’s just like, we want to do a moment where you like jam a sword into a big eye or something like that and really, really go to town with it. And so in those moments to kind of like punctuate the end of a very exciting set piece or a very exciting boss battles, they work incredibly well, so they really earn them, I think. QTEs is like an idea. Yeah, so those highs are just so high. And when I’m playing it and when that’s happening, I’m just like, Final Fantasy really feels like it’s on top here. It’s like this is kind of everything I want from Final Fantasy. Also the way that the summons are woven in as iconography in this game, I do love the idea that they are representative of nations, basically. They are just like, yeah, they are these sort of like unwieldy gods basically controlled by people. That is, you know, I always like it when the summons are woven into the story of these games. And I like the way that Fifteen did that with like Bahamut basically is like this, you know, this sort of god figure you make like a pact with and then years later you, you know, the pact is paid off and that sort of thing. I just, I think that always kind of like… Is that the story of that game? Fuck! Yeah, it’s like a time jump. I think like Noctis makes a deal with Bahamut and then that’s why there’s a bit where like they, I think like Bahamut nods at Noctis before he like stabs Ifrit or something. We don’t need to get into that now, but anyway. That’s a confusing game compared to this one. Well, that’s the thing though, right? It’s like I couldn’t say to people, oh Fifteen’s got a great story. I could say to them Fifteen is an amazing sort of like, you know, like a dream vision of what it’s like to go on the best road trip with your friends that you’ll never go on. Because your friends in real life are too annoying and someone will need to take a shit at a roadside or something. Or your car will break down. Well, you know, like, it’s sort of like, you know, just it’s basically just like a fantasy fulfilled, right? It’s like, you know, oh, you’re spending time with your friends on this great journey and it’s really cool. And that was the thing the game did well. But there was all this other stuff you had to fight to get around it. And also Fifteen didn’t have great combat. Fifteen had very showy combat that could be very exciting in moments. And like this game had the scale that could get you really excited. But this game has like good mechanics to go along with it. So I can’t underline enough like what a tick in its favorite is. So that combined with a coherent story just makes it such an easy game to recommend. And in some ways, I sympathize with them. I think they were like tweeting right near release saying something like, you don’t need to have played the previous Fifteen to enjoy this one, which makes me wonder, have they got some figures or something like that, some kind of statistics to say, oh, younger people don’t realize that this is actually a standalone game, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve not played the previous games in the series, and they would just like play this. Because I agree. I think that anyone who buys like, you know, like 10 million, 10, 20 million people who buy God of War Ragnarok should all be buying this, because it’s that quality level to me. It’s that same level. And arguably I prefer this game in a bunch of ways, to be honest. And, you know, it doesn’t have any ox patty, does it, Matthew? I’ve not got to that yet. Uh, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It’s got some sections where I’m like, this is taking me away from the fun bits for too long, which is my criticism of God of War, but like, in a different way. There’s no at, no, there’s no long at ox ride in this. No, there’s like a moogle, I guess, is an equivalent to the comedy squirrel or whatever the fuck he was in Ragnarok. Yeah, but he’s not voiced by a YouTuber. No, that’s very true. So yeah, it’s, I honestly, I’m just absolutely loving it so far. And the way that it basically lays in more Devil May Cry combat styles when you, you know, you take these summon powers is really, really cool. Because the Garuda one you get, like you say, is basically the Nero claw from Devil May Cry 4 and then 5, right? It’s like the pull small enemies towards you. It should pull you towards larger enemies as well, but doesn’t do that, which I find slightly irritating. But it’s still a cool power. So so it’s layering in these different fighting styles. Like it’s giving you that sort of progression arc that you want from Final Fantasy, but doing it with real time action. But, you know, like you say, Matthew, I think I’m 20 hours in, so I’ve got a long way to go. And, you know, I might maybe I’ll change my mind because those side quests are not very good. And that is that’s a shame because it’s something that even like Cyberpunk did well, right? Cyberpunk had like these big narrative driven side quests that I think land better than just any form you can think of, of go here and kill this thing and bring it back to this dude for a very innocuous reason. So Cyberpunk had it had it right, even if those quests were like gameplay wise, not didn’t have a massive amount of variety to them, you know. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So yeah, good game. I’m glad. I’m happy that you’re having a good time with it. And as a Final Fantasy Liker, this is kind of, you know, ticking, ticking that box. It’s a nice thing to be able to like, just be excited about and get behind. Very like, just very confident, polished, you know, it released in a really good state. It’s a great advert for like what you want a AAA game release to be. Yeah, complete feeling. That’s the thing. It feels complete. It feels like, yeah, just, you know, it feels like it’s just had months and months of polish, you know, maybe even years just to get everything right. So, yeah, although I have to I have gone against the Matthew Castle creed by putting performance mode on Matthew, which I like it. Well, I’m not getting into this. And the frame rate is not our not our whole thing. So that’s Final Fantasy 16. I’ll keep playing it. And when I finish it, we can maybe talk about it again. Let’s sort of round up our thoughts. And I have no doubt it will feature in at least one of our Game of the Year lists. Yeah, I want to know how you get on with like the sexier bits. Yeah, I mean, I’ve not gone to that yet. The masturbating in different rooms thing. That’s a reference to the recent Patreon episode. Again, Craven, sort of like paywalled content advert there. But Matthew, why don’t you talk about your second game in this list? Yeah, this is Master Detective Archives Rain Code, aka what Mr. Danganronpa did next. This is from a lot of the Danganronpa team. Mr. Kadaka is the writer’s name. What he did next after Danganronpa was basically make Danganronpa again, it turns out. This is very similar to Danganronpa in ways that I didn’t really expect. Obviously Danganronpa was sort of a visual novel set inside this school where a load of people were locked in and had to murder each other to try and escape and each level kind of culminated with a trial where you were trying to work out who the perpetrator was. This is set in a city where you are part of this detective agency. You are all kind of like master detectives is the kind of the terminology of the game where they all have like some mad superpower. So it doesn’t have that kind of like instant like thriller hook of Danganronpa. It’s a little bit more. I don’t want to say it’s like LA Noir. That would be really overselling what this game is. But you have a 3D world that you can sort of like explore a little bit and there are sort of side quests in it. So it’s trying to kind of pad out that experience and feel like a probably a more ambitious next step after Danganronpa by kind of breaking you out of this quite limited corridors. On that level, I’d say isn’t hugely successful. Like I don’t think the open world particularly adds much to it apart from a load of technical woes on Switch. This was clearly a game which is like a little bit beyond Switch despite being a Switch exclusive. If this doesn’t eventually come out on everything else, I’d be incredibly surprised. Like I think it was announced as a multi-format game and then they kind of went, No, it’s Switch only because Nintendo put promotion behind it. So, you know, I can see how there’s probably quite a good looking game in here, but it ain’t working on Switch for me. Also, like the open world stuff, the side missions are very, very poor. It’s just a load of fetch quests basically. It doesn’t bring in any of the cool detective mechanics or thinking into those side quests. So they feel pretty redundant. So what you actually end up with is a game which is probably best when it behaves more linearly, like Danganronpa. You are solving these cases. There’s often a murder. You walk around them. You sort of investigate the crime scenes. You talk to people. You collect lots of bits of evidence. And then in a kind of persona like twist, you’ve made this pact with this sort of death gods called Shinagami. And she pulls you into this. It’s called the Mystery Labyrinth, which is basically the Mind Palace from Persona 5. And in this surreal landscape, it becomes like a physical embodiment of what the mystery is. And you kind of like run through it, doing kind of like quick time events, crime scene reconstructions, and these sort of death matches where you fight in these arenas and you have to use contradicting pieces of evidence to like slash away at lies, which is basically what Danganronpa did, except with guns. In Danganronpa, you shot down the lies with truth bullets. Here you chop up the lies with the sword of proof or whatever. But where the trials in Danganronpa were limited to this room, they’ve tried to make this more exciting kind of roller coaster ride. It’s a lot more kind of hyperkinetic. It feels like it’s meant to be the kind of blockbuster, sort of 3D, more ambitious, bigger budget version of what Danganronpa is. Even though functionally it’s basically the same game. That’s all fine. Like, I quite like The Palace as a kind of physical representation of like the route you take to a solution. Like the idea of like picking at different threads and the way it visualizes that is actually quite fun. I’m into that a lot. The mysteries, as in Danganronpa, excellent. Kodaka works with a crime writer whose name I’ve forgotten, not a person I’ve read in translation or anything. So the mysteries are all very sound, very of the like locked room, impossible mystery variety. They’re often very kind of out there and they got quite loopy solutions. Not very Ace Attorney, a lot more kind of like hardcore Japanese mystery fiction. Obviously a big tick. The problem I have with this game is your sidekick, Shinagami, and I don’t mean to be too hand wringing about this, but she’s absolutely foul, like a really depressing, gross, sexualized character. And it just really bummed me out whenever she opened her mouth. She’s incredibly hostile towards the other female characters in the game and it just comes across as like grossly misogynistic. Like normally I can shrug off kind of like anime titillation in games. Like it’s not for me, but I’m like, whatever. But this was actually a case where I thought, I kind of hate this character. And every time she talks, which is throughout the game, because she’s a sidekick, it kind of makes me like it less. And it kind of makes it a bit of a miss for me. I found just a huge fucking buzzkill, which is a shame, because there’s a lot of thought goes into these mysteries. That’s the thing I don’t really understand about this game, is it has this bookishness to it, like the intellectual kind of excellence of constructing these very satisfying mysteries, combined with this just stupid schoolboy humor, which I just don’t see how… Those two things just don’t speak to the same group of people. Or they definitely don’t both speak to me. Yeah, it’s a big disappointment. Yeah, so does that same tonal clash really occur in Danganronpa, Matthew? Is it like a persistent problem between the two sets of games? It is like his vibe. I guess the thing I’d liken it to, in Danganronpa there’s this bare mascot called Monokuma, who’s kind of perverted and has this quite pervy relationship with this other mascot, this little rabbit in the second game. Some of that stuff’s a little close to the knuckle and you’re like, but again, there I’m like, I don’t really like this, but he kind of fucks off enough, but this is like she’s a permanent voice in your ear and you’re the only person you can see her and so she’s basically there, just being a huge asshole for like 30 hours of a game. And it’s funny actually reading the other reviews. Some people are like, this character’s so funny and you’re like, well you’ve got a fucking rank sense of humour. I hated this character. Like it’s very rare I take against the character this sort of vehemently. But yeah, it’s in Danganronpa. And I’ve said before like my recommendation Danganronpa always comes with a caveat of you are going to have to put up with some like some slightly risque, some slightly queasy shit in there. Like that’s just his vibe. He goes like hyper in on everything. Everything is like hyper violent, hyper suggestive, hyper aggressive. Like that is clearly his style. I just, this just didn’t land for me. Yeah. Do you think the game is interesting to look at the visuals of this game and be like, OK, first of all, the Switch trailer for this is definitely running at under 30 frames per second in some bits you can tell. Does it really benefit from the wider canvas? Like is there, was that a waste of time doing that? Or ultimately is the mystery, I suppose in the case of at least going inside the mystery, you get that physical, that palpable kind of element to it, and the imagination behind it. But I guess does the entire game benefit from that increase in presentation scale? There’s a bit of excitement of like, I’m going to go into this building, what am I going to discover there? And where are the mysteries going to play out? And how is this world going to be put to use? Because one of the limitations of Danganronpa is that everyone’s trapped in this environment, so all the murders have to take place in the facilities provided. Just having a city means you have an infinite variety of locations. If you want to set a mystery on a big train, then you can have a train mystery. If you want to have a mystery which, you have multiple locked rooms spread across the city, you can do that as well. But that could have been done in a visual novel. You could have just had the story set in a city. Not a lot happens in the streets to have made it worthwhile. I feel like it was a decision that they made because they wanted to be able to show 3D characters walking around more graphically enhanced 3D worlds. So it just looks like other games you might like. I think there’s a chip on its shoulder about, you know, have you maximized your visual novel audience? How do you maybe trick people who would balk at that into playing this? Let’s have it look like something else. Let’s have it look a bit like a cyberpunky city or something. Let’s do that. I think if it was executed in a more technically sound way, I think this game could have quite good vibes. It’s got an amazing soundtrack. It’s the guy who did the soundtrack to No More Heroes. So it’s got very vibey, repetitive beats, kind of drones. So that’s sort of like, you know, that whatever it is, lo-fi beats to relax to. It’s kind of got that energy to it. And the fact that it’s constantly raining in the city, I could see it conjuring quite an interesting sense of place. But instead, your eyes are just drawn to like, oh man, the framerate is horrible. Or like, one thing this game really struggles with is reflections, which in a waterlogged world covered in like neon signs is like a big problem. Like, the reflections that’s constantly popping in and out. Like, it’s a Switch. It can’t do this stuff, you know. It’s like a… It feels like this could be a… You know, it’s trying to make the most of like the Unreal engine. And that just never looks very good on Switch. It’s always… Yeah. Do you think you’d feel a bit differently about it if you’re playing on Steam Deck? Do you think that would make it an easier recommendation? Yeah, I mean, really, the tech side of it, like, that isn’t the big deal, Breakie. It really is the characterisation side. And, like, I don’t know. I always worry when you bring these things up, like, you just sound like you’re being prudish or a bit of a stick in the mud. And that’s why I don’t tend to bring these things up. You know, like, what other people are into is their own business. You know, it’s not… I don’t want to be too puritanical ever, like, in how I talk or think about games. Like, that isn’t for me. That isn’t really how I think about stuff in general. But every once in a while, something just, like, rubs you up the wrong way or gets in your face. And, yeah, I just… I don’t know. I think it was going for humour. I just think there’s a streak of ugliness in this game, which just makes it a very bad hang. Yeah, yeah. So you saying that just reminded me… You saying I’m not too prudish reminded me of that, you know, like, ridiculous video of that Australian politician going, people are entitled to their sexual proclivities and he starts talking about crocodiles and all that. Remember that guy? I vaguely recall that for some reason. But, yeah, some people are, you know, some people don’t, you know, and that’s fine. But I just… Yeah, I don’t know why this one… This one annoyed me. I think it’s because the mysteries are good. You’re like, why didn’t you… You landed the hard bit, which is being like a cool detective game. Why did you add all this bullshit to it, you know? I think it’s… Personally, I think it’s because I’m like you. I actually don’t really… It doesn’t really bother me that these games exist that really lean into that stuff. But it becomes a thing of like… If I want to recommend it to someone else as like a serious piece of media, and I’m like, yes, but also there are like DLC skins in this game for like the schoolgirl characters to wear bikinis. It becomes one of these things where I’m like, well, I can’t be the guy who’s talking about, oh, yeah, you know, like I’ve just watched season one of Atlanta, but also, you know, play this anime bullshit game. I want to be that guy. I want to be able to recommend both. But I do think it just, especially as you get a bit older, I guess you just become a bit more aware of it as like a factor that can potentially drag things down when it’s too cheesecakey or too nonsensical, too egregious in the case of this game. So I’m with you, I’m not prudish, but I’m just like, ah, it’s like, if you just eased it off a little bit, it would be a bit easier to recommend to other adults, you know, a bit of that to it. So, yeah, interesting. Yeah, tough break. But the mysteries are really good. I’d say if you could put up with Danganronpa, you can probably put up with this, but like, you know, I just want you to know that when you get to bits where you’re like, yikes, I also thought yikes, don’t worry, I don’t think it’s cool. I just want to make that very clear. Me and this game are not like friends. I don’t know, I think all of like Higashino’s work could benefit from some anime schoolgirls, Matthew. I think you’ve, you just lack imagination, my friend. Oh, just trying to speak your language there. Thank you. That’s great, like, that you know Higashino’s name, like, that means a lot to me. Oh, I keep, I’m really tempted to start a runner where I’m going, I want to ask, oh, how’s the new Higashino every single episode? Just because, because like you mentioned the new Higashino recently and like, you also mentioned it with the air of, oh, people know what this is now on this podcast and it just, just cracked me up, so. Well, they should, I talk about it a lot. Well, no, but I respect that, I respect your interests. And yeah, it’s fine, I’m not making fun anyway, that’s, it’s all good. Okay, shall we move on to the next game, Matthew? Yes, yes, from the, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Yeah, so I’ve been playing Trepang 2, or Trepang Squared, I don’t know how you say this, but I think it’s Trepang 2. It’s basically a fear-alike published by Team17. And by fear-alike, I mean, it’s basically like a first-person shooter with powers, single-player, but there are quite sort of like in-your-face oppressive horror vibes to it as well. So you’re shooting up a lot of identical-looking dudes while they make horrible sounds. Sometimes you’re shooting those dudes when you’re invisible or in slow motion, and it’s extremely bloody, and it’s, I would say like almost like a soldier of fortune level of violence to some of them. But also there is like a comic kind of like if you walk into a body, it just ragdolls like hell and moves around. So you’re like, okay, this is quite silly as well. So I think you definitely see the indie seems to it, but I think this is a very good cover version of that type of game. And I think as like the nostalgia in the first-person shooter movement has been more around that kind of like Doom era of first-person shooter, right? Like maybe it’s pushing out of that a little bit more. Maybe that’s a bit outdated as a reference, but certainly like, you know, lights of dusk and medieval are riffing on, you know, sort of like mid-90s stuff. So it’s interesting to get to a shooter that’s more riffing on like mid-naughty stuff. So it’s got the, you can sort of slide through enemies and do like a big kick and knock them over, that sort of stuff. It’s a very physical feeling first-person shooter. I’m about, I don’t know, like an hour and a half into it. It’s very enjoyable. There is like a story in it that is a bit messy. It’s like, it’s trying to sort of lace in through bits of lore and objects you pick up, like something that feels like a mishmash of horror and John Wick and like Resident Evil, sort of evil corporations. And it doesn’t amount to much, but I think if you just ignore it and focus on the shooting, which is good and sounds very good and feels very good, it’s like, it’s extremely enjoyable. So it’s made a very good first impression. I will persist with it. It’s out now on PC and it is coming to consoles as well. Does it have like the jump scares of Fear? It is not quite as good at the set PC scares factor of it, which I think Fear was excellent at, which I really recognized that when we did that Backwards Compatible episode and we went back and we played it. And I was like, oh, I actually forgot how handcrafted the set pieces in this felt. This has like a bit of that DNA, but it definitely has like bits of story you come across, but it’s not quite as presentationally up there, I would say. It doesn’t feel like it’s quite on that level, but it’s close enough for what it is, I would say, Matthew. So yeah, it’s not bad at all. And like I say, it’s just like hearing the awful sounds of dudes dying while you sort of like zip around in the slow motion with very meaty feeling shotguns and machine guns. Feels super nice. And yeah, I’m sort of also not ruling out the idea that it could get scarier, but I think because the plot is slightly incoherent, I’m just sort of like, I’m more just focused on the action and things like that. It’s more, eh? Then, ah! That would make my shot line. That’s better written down, that one. But hey, it’s a good effort, I appreciate it. So yeah, like I say, I want people to make more shooters that feel like early naughty shooters. And, you know, just because I think that is a rich vein in itself of like, you know, aesthetic and feel and things like that. Yeah, I feel like I’ve maybe played enough 90s clones now. You know, it’s like, we’ll catch up. I wonder if we’ll ever get to the era where people are like mimicking Half-Life on an indie level. Yeah, it’s funny because we’ve kind of gone through the sort of arc that we had with Doom-a-likes where there are so many, there are almost too many to play and not all of them are of the same level, which is quite interesting. That is sort of what happened and then the game changed, obviously, with like Quake and Half-Life. And yeah, so it became a different ball game in a lot of ways. But yeah, so I’m sort of with you. I think there is, it is time to sort of do that. I think we’ll probably see more of that come along. There’s the, what’s the sort of like slightly thief-y one with guns that I think got a really good response from people. I can’t remember what that one was called, was it Ultra Kill as well? No. Gloomward, is that right? Is that it? They’ve all got names like that. Gloomward, yeah, Stealth Horror FPS, that’s right. So, you know, it’s like progressively moving along, it would seem. And so, yeah, which is exciting. But yeah, this was, I wasn’t expecting, I think this is just so precise as a kind of like an homage. It just, that’s why I think it works. That’s why I think it doesn’t fall into the ranks of just like other indie first-person shooters. It’s like, it’s riffing on something that if you were there in the early 360 era, then this will, this is tapping into something that will scratch a part of your brain in a way that you quite like, I think. So yeah, it’s a tentative recommendation from Meat Dog. So yes, we get to your final game, Matthew, this episode. Yeah, this is just a little mention of Baldur’s Gate 3. I went to a press event, my first one in quite a long time over in Ghent in Belgium to play like the final version of Baldur’s Gate 3, I guess. I was actually playing it on PS5, which is coming out like a month after the PC version. So it wasn’t the final, final, it was a little bit of work to be done on it. But I was just there to sort of check out how that was looking and controlling and everything. But it’s very interesting to see their presentation about, they showed us some stuff from the third act of the game and kind of took us through it and talked about all the kind of changes beyond early access. Obviously, a game I’ve got huge affection for. I’ve been following this right from the start. I was there when they did the first reveal of it at Sven from Larian’s, his actual house. Do you have a tip about that? I think you did maybe on this podcast. We’ve been going for so long. The announcement event for this was like five journalists invited to his house at a side. Again, it’s a very nice house. It looks like something I’ve hit, man. It’s very elaborate architecture. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten large chunks of this anecdote. It had some kind of animal statue right inside the front door. The first thing you see when you open up is a big plastic lion or a panther or something, which sort of sets the tone. They showed us the game, and then we had a barbecue with him and his family. It was a really delightful time. That sounds like a big, we’ll send Fraser from PC Gamer Energy to that event. That was the first time I met Fraser, actually. He was there. You were like, oh yeah, this is great. This is good. I’m into this. I’ve been fully bought by this experience. It was very, very wholesome. I got to eat some nice barbecue. I got to drink some incredibly alcoholic Belgian beers. I love the idea that commenters always assume that corruption is down to us being sent money bags when really it’s a polite barbecue at someone’s house that completely winds you over to their whole deal. That’s how you corrupt Matthew Castle. We cook to meats, basically. I’ve been following this game all the way through and going to preview events and covering it for RPS. One of the things I was weirdly most sad about when I got kicked out of RPS was I’m not going to get to see this through. I was actually having some success with Baldur’s Gate 3 on the channel and I felt like we were covering it quite comprehensively and I was like, it would be great to see just the game through from start to finish. But anyway, to be able to sort of slot in now, come in at the end and write about it again, albeit in a new job, that’s cool. There’s too much of the game to kind of go into really. There’s one thing I wanted to draw out that they introduced, which is super interesting in that it obviously has a lot of character customisation. You can build your own character from scratch, or you can take one of the companion characters as your player character and you kind of play their sort of their side story or what would be a side story if you met them normally as your like first hand experience. So you actually get to see elements of it. You wouldn’t get to see if you just encountered them as a companion, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think it kind of does. Yeah, it’s the same system in Divinity Original Sin 2. It just adds a bit of cut. You know, it’s like, do you want it to be your own story or do you want to kind of role play as this person who enters the world with their own deal, basically. But the novel thing with this is that they’ve one of the, it’s not quite a companion. It’s more like a kind of archetype they’ve created that you can select to play as called the Dark Urge. And it’s basically, if you play this, you still build your character. They’re completely customized. But they enter the world as an amnesiac and it’s heavily implied that they either are or have been a serial killer and have this like very violent urge that you have to fight. And so instead of the game being about making good or bad decisions at every turn, you know, your classic kind of Mass Effect, kind of Paragon Renegade thing, it’s actually about managing whatever this unknown urge is in you, which sometimes bubbles up without your control. Like, playing as this character, you might just randomly kill people that you meet. It’s scripted that you’d kill them. It’s not properly random, but it’s scripted that you might murder certain people. And it basically like keeps dumping you in these situations where you’ve done these terrible things. And then you basically have to like clean up the mess, which I think is really compelling. Like it’s a really interesting way of like making you deal with like the dark, evil side of this game. If you’re someone who would never opt into those moral choices normally, which I don’t. Like I’m a total goody two shoes. I’m incredibly boring. I’ve only ever played Mass Effect as Paragon. If I replay it, I find myself making the same decisions again and again, just out of like, it’s just what I do in games. So actually having someone who makes a few bad decisions on your behalf and then leaves you to kind of tie clean up the mess. Like sometimes literally you’ll have murdered someone. It’s like, are you going to try and hide this body? Are you going to like try and lie to your friends? Are you going to like just ignore it? Like, what are you going to do? And it’s like being in a series of thrillers where you’ve woken up in a nightmare scenario and have to kind of like quickly panic your way out of it. I thought it was great. I’m like, this is a this is a really cool like approach to this kind of like moral system. I’m like genuinely think I might play that as my initial playthrough. I’m just really interested to see how far they take it. Yeah, that is quite interesting. I feel like all of the headlines for this for Baldur’s Gate 3 have focused on the fact they brought the release date forward or how much cinematics is in the game. And I wonder if that bothers them that people are focusing on that and not something else. The message of this event was like, yes, there’s a huge number of cinematics, but that’s because there are so many permutations that you need them to support. What’s probably going to be more like a 70, 80 hour campaign? Still very long, but that’s about what Divinity Original Sin 2 was as well. And it’s more like whatever you choose to play, whatever decisions you choose to make, kind of we’ve got you covered, I feel is actually the follow up to that big cinematic number. It’s like, your safety net is whatever you do, you’re going to have a proper story experience, everything’s accounted for. I feel like they were trying to steer the message more towards that during this event. I still have to get out of my head that this is something where I need to have played Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 to play. That’s not the experience they’ve made, is it? No, not at all. I need to snap into the mindset of in a month I can play an RPG that will probably tick all of my boxes. It’s probably the kind of RPG that I want to play. Something biowarey that has maybe more depth and more flavour to it. It’s there waiting for me if I want it. That’s really the line I think they should be pushing to get it out to people. If you’re playing with a pad, particularly, it kind of pulls the camera down into more of an over-shoulder view. It’s still quite zoomed out, but it looks a little bit more like a Dragon Age, you know? From that perspective. It’s got this very complex turn-based combat, so it won’t move as fast as Dragon Age can move or Mass Effect can move. But no one’s doing this level of RPG with this level of production values. That is the bioware’s territory, and bioware have vacated that territory themselves. So it’s kind of a larynx for taking. I honestly think this is going to be one of the best reviewed games of the year. I think this is going to be brilliant. I’m so looking forward to playing it. I cannot wait. I almost wish I’d taken more holiday to play it, but I don’t want to keep using my holiday to play fucking games, because that’s just like bad, bad vibes. First of all, this is quite a year for blockbusters, and this is a blockbuster. Larian don’t seem like a blockbuster developer, but they have officers in a bunch of different countries, and you cannot make something on this scale with these kind of cinematics without a blockbuster operation, basically. Quietly, I think the sphere they’re actually working in, but it maybe doesn’t seem like that from the outside looking in. Do you think that’s sort of fair, Matthew? Yeah, I think this is the big step up. They’ve harnessed the interest in Baldur’s Gate to fund this big early access. And it’s sold big numbers on early access, I think. You see numbers getting thrown around by the people who sniff into like Steam numbers and things, but I think it’s already sold millions of copies. It’s probably maybe paid for itself. Also, remember, it had a big Google Stadia push behind it. It was announced alongside Stadia. So you think there’s probably a big Google Paycheck, which doesn’t need to be given back now. Yeah, let’s assume that check didn’t bounce. And yeah, they’ve used it to finance and turn their studio into a studio which does Bioware level development. They’ve had to build this whole cinematics department, motion capture, and there’s hundreds, I think, there’s like 500 of them now or something. Like, you know, yeah, what I’m actually interested in is like, what happens next? What’s the project that you’ve now got this huge operation, like you have to keep operating at this level. You can’t downsize that kind of operation. It would be bleak if you did. Yeah, that’s it. So do they just roll straight to the next one? Yeah, I mean, is it like, you know, yeah, is it, you know, sort of like a sequel to another CRPG classic, like Planescape Torment or something? I mean, we really kind of had one of those, I guess, a little bit in there. Yeah, you know, or do you do the original Baldur’s Gate thing of like, you know, Baldur’s Gate 3 ends at level 12. Do we now build an RPG that takes you to level 20, which was basically Baldur’s Gate 2? You know, do we, you know, is there another campaign? We won’t know until we play this game, see how open it is. But, you know, I’d love it if they did the proper, you know, the proper Bioware thing of like, let’s take a save into the next game. I always like it when a studio does that. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, okay, exciting, Matthew. I mean, I’m not actually quite thrown off by just how many big games there are to play this year because I’m already behind. Like, I mean, I need to go back to Tears of the Kingdom. That’s the thing. I don’t think you do. You know what that game is and what you think about it. Well, I guess I’ve been playing for 28 hours. I still never went underground in that game, Matthew. I mean, maybe you should do that. There’s more to find, for sure. So, yeah, it’s just there’s that. There’s Diablo 4, of course, which has, like, seasons or something. And I’m like, I can’t keep up with those seasons, I’m afraid. I hope you bank the content for those seasons because I’ll be joining season 14 at this rate. FF, I will definitely finish. That’s, like, remaining on my list for the time being. And then we get to the end of the year and there’s, like, Spider-Man 2 and, you know, A New Assassin’s Creed. I probably won’t play some other stuff. I don’t know. But is there an Xbox game out as well? Starfield. Oh, yeah, that’s it. Starfield, exactly. So we are just, we’re looking down the barrel of just so many hours of game. Like, something shorter is very welcome at this point. I think Baldur’s Gate 3 is, like, the anti-Starfield. It’s, like, it’s a huge advert for an incredibly authored experience where everything is written. Like, it’s a writers’ game. They always put the writers on stage with it. You know, the challenge of it has been kind of keeping up with all the mad stuff, the kind of variations or whatever the writers have built into it. And that’s where the kind of cinematic count comes from. It’s, you know, compared to, like, procedurally generated empty planets, it couldn’t be more different to that, I think. So, you know, it’s going to be a real, yeah, really interesting to see how those two games, like, land alongside each other. Oh, I have a really important question about this trip. What happened, your journey there, what happened? Oh, I had a kind of a rough time. It was an influencer trip, and I didn’t know any of the influencers at the train station, so I was like, you know what, I’ll just get on the Eurostar and it’ll be fine. Like, I’m sure I’ll meet up with the group, but I could tell because we were all in this Discord that they were all mates and traveling together. So it was a little bit kind of out of sorts because of that. And then when we got to Brussels, I got on the wrong train from Brussels to Ghent because I was in a huff. I was like, well, they’re not going to look after me on this trip. I’m just going to fucking find my own way to Ghent, which I then didn’t. So I arrived quite late and already quite harangued. I was messaging someone back in the office saying, oh, you won’t believe this. I got on the wrong train and they were like, oh, haha. And I was like, it’s not a very good story. I’m sure something funny, you know, I hope something funnier than this happens on this trip or, you know, this isn’t going to like land very well. And then I got to the hotel and when I was checking in, I managed to shatter a very delicate hotel of water. They had this like glass tear drop on the check-in stand. It was a very snazzy hotel, very deserving of the award that I broke. And yeah, I just knocked it over with my bag. Not a killer story. I knocked it over, it fell over, it snapped in half. And the lady on the till had a… It was like an interesting reaction because she looked… She was clearly like really cross or disappointed, probably more disappointed. But also it’s the kind of expensive hotel where you have to be really nice and polite to other guests. So it was this mix of like, it’s fine when it clearly wasn’t fine. And it just made me feel bad about the rest… Not the rest of the trip, the rest of the hotel, every time I walked past a desk, I was just… my eye was drawn to like the space with a giant glass tier that I was really proud of once that. You should have gone, look, I’m really sorry about this, but I just had a tooth removed, and then showed the gap in your mouth, that would have like really run over to your course, Matthew. Well, you know, if anything, you could just be like, oh, hey, I’m on a Larian trip, this is one of life’s wacky permutations. Yeah, it’s like I failed like… I failed a very basic kind of competency dice roll, fuck that. The worst thing is when it broke, I turned around, and there was like one of the influencers standing behind me waiting to check in. And if it was another journalist, we would have laughed about it and been like, this is funny that this happened, this is a funny little story that we’ll be able to tell later at dinner. Because I didn’t know the influencer, they kind of looked at me like, you dumb piece of shit. Right, yeah, yeah. It was like, that was very uncool what you just did. Where if it was Jeremy Peele, he would have just, I know that he would have been like, silently laughing at me, you know? Yeah, exactly. I needed a friend there to like break my balls over it, to kind of make, to like release the kind of like, guilt of the event, that it didn’t happen. I remember when I went on my first trip where it was more influencers than journalists. It was like an EA trip in 2015. And they, I felt so old, even though at the time I was only 27. So I was not, I was not old, but I felt it in that company. Because it was all these guys who were probably like two or three years younger than me, talking about, maybe a bit younger than that actually, talking about their personas in the, not in the Atlas sense, but in my on-screen presence sense in their channels. And I thought that is like another language to me. And I knew who none of them were. Whereas like, you know, a bloke with a beard and a rucksack, I’d be like, oh, it’s this guy from Rock Paper Shotgun or whatever. Which is ridiculous. But yeah, and so I can’t imagine that you in your late 30s, how old you must have felt in the presence of like mostly… The name thing is always wild because you’re like, do I call this person Ice Wolf or do I call them David? Yeah, Mr. Cheese or Bob, you know, that sort of thing. Though I did, I met the YouTuber Christopher Odd. He’s like a big let’s play YouTuber. He was great. He was really nice. He was a little bit older as well. So I felt like I finally was like, oh, good. You know, there’s some kind of common ground here. So it was nice chatting to him. And I did see some journalists. We had a medieval feast, which I was really worried about because, you know, obviously I had this big open socket situation going on in my mouth from my tooth removal. And like the last thing I wanted to get was some like medieval meats stuck in there. Because like medieval meats to me brings to mind like an age of like bacteria where people would die from things like an infected tooth socket. And so, you know, there was some like, I’m quite picky about like meats. I like very boring, safe meats. So they had like lots of like grisly looking things. So I was just like absolutely no chance. It was like chicken and aspic and you know, things which like fucking Henry VIII would go nuts for. But I’m like, have you got any princess tan? Yeah, that’s funny. I mean, out of interest, are they going to do anything about the socket? Are they going to put something there or is it just like empty now forever? Heel over and it will forever be a gap. Well, it’s not just, they’re not going to put like a fake tooth in there or something. You have to pay extra for that. I’ve opted out of that. But surely the Patreon will cover that, won’t it? That’s like surely a good use of Patreon money to get a new tooth put in. I don’t know if I want to have a fake tooth. Like, there’s something about having a fake tooth seems even like growdier than having no teeth. How much is it? It’s quite sort of piratical. Having no tooth is like better somehow. I mean, come on, like, it’s not a peg leg, do you know what I mean? But it’s a tooth that’s very much out of sight. Like, it’s quite far back. You can’t see it when I talk naturally. Right, yeah, but like, what if you go to bite down on it forever and it’s just like a gum? Well, once it’s healed up, if I start eating with that side of the mouth, then every bite I take is like agony. If I’m constantly like jamming stuff into my gum, then obviously I’ll think about having something put in there. But, you know, my dentist said it was fine. It’s just a bit like you’re at a medieval feast and everyone’s like ripping into like big bits of meat. They’re like holding the meat and tearing it out like Tudors. And the whole time I thought, well, I can’t do this. So I’m very timidly like nibbling it like a big fucking piece of rabbit or whatever. Like, and then after every bite having to like, surreptitiously wash out my mouth with water to make sure I haven’t got any rabbit and plums in my fucking hole. I mean, there’s so much to laugh at there. So like I first of all was chuckling at you’re at a medieval feast. There’s an anecdote that most people could understand like, oh, yeah, I find myself with those often. Like that is preposterous on one level. That makes me laugh. The other thing is that I just somehow imagine you turning to an influencer and just going, can you hand me that knife so I can cut up this pile of meat into something I could eat? And then the same influencer from earlier just look at you like, you fucking piece of shit kind of thing. Lots to enjoy there Matthew. And then rabbit and plum as a thing that you’re eating. Of all the meats, that was the one I thought was the most acceptable. I’ll tell you where it went really wrong. I thought I was looking there and there was a big pile of mashed potatoes and I was like, bingo, perfect, this is exactly what I need. I cannot hurt myself. I was feeling quite greedy. Other people were taking quite small spoonfuls of the mashed potato and I was like, fuck it. Layling onto my plate, got back to the table and realised it was it was mushed up apple. You got a kilo of it. I had to eat a huge pile of fucking apple sauce. That’s so funny. You could see people looking at you going like, man, that guy’s got a lot of apple sauce. I mean, I feel like I would be able to observe the physical differences between apple sauce and potato. I’d love to see it. The lighting could have been bad. That’s amazing. I was eating a lot of rabbit and apple. That’s a thing I ate a lot of that evening. Yeah, it’s oddly comforting knowing that you’re still out there doing this stuff. That brings me great joy to know that you’re still generating anecdotes, Matthew. That’s what I want to hear. You know what I mean? That’s happening. That’s how we know we’re out of the pandemic, if you’re out there generating anecdotes. I mean, the terrible thing is, because I’m so self-aware, is with this stuff, there’s always this moment of like, oh, I’ve really fucked this, but there’s a tiny bit in my brain that’s like, yeah, good story, I get to tell something. There is a little bit of that. But like, I promise, I swear, I’m not actively pursuing these things. Like, I’m quite a shy presence in public. I do not want to draw attention to myself. I do not want to smash glass awards. I do not want to eat several ladles of applesauce. Like, yeah. Is Christopher Odd telling a story on his Baldur’s Gate video about a dude who ate loads of applesauce? He skipped a dinner, he wasn’t there. Yeah, so hilarious, the table I was sitting at was people from GameSpot and Giant Bomb. So, yeah, I don’t know if they were like, that guy was weird, who like, tried talking to us about magazines and then ate all the applesauce. Whereas to our list, as part of the course. Yeah, that sounds legit. That’s good. Like, did you not see Jeremy Peel on the trip? Was he on the trip too? He was treating about Belgium. He left a day early, because there was a journalist day and an influencer day. Ah, that’s tough. So he was out with the journalists. Yeah, they would have understood you Matthew. They would have understood you and your applesauce. They would have laughed about the applesauce. But I got to catch up with Adam Smith, formerly of Rock Paper Shotgun, is now lead writer on Baldur’s Gate 3. Always nice to catch up with him. He’s a great presence. There is a guy who is living his, not just his ideal life, but he’s found his ideal place is at that studio writing on this game. I’ve never seen someone so just perfectly slotted in. I wish it for everyone, but everyone may one day find their perfect place. Yeah, I hate it when I get offered narrative design jobs when I work in games media. Happened all the time. Always turning those down Matthew. But yeah, I know what you mean. I can see why that job is so precisely perfect for him. Yeah, good for him. Very, very nice man. Yeah, and they’re doing really good work as well. So yes, no jealousy, only good vibes. No jealousy on air, only good vibes. It’s nice to talk to these former guys and they’re like, how are you doing? And I’m like, yeah, everything’s going great. As I shovel in my 10th tablespoon of fucking applesauce. I have a podcast about my former glories that’s moderately successful. How are you doing? I’m leading right on Baldur’s Gate 3. Well, fuck, see you later. Yeah, that’s funny. You’ve met some fairly notable Giant Bomb and GameSpot people though, right? You sound like some fairly interesting people. Maybe our listeners might be. Yeah, I was sitting next to a guy from a Belgian games mag, which is always nice to meet people who print still exists in other countries. And you’re like, hey, good for them. But yeah, Dan Reikart was there from Giant Bomb, and formerly Game Informer, who I’ve never met on a trip. I’m obviously aware of his work. Yeah, it’s always interesting to talk to these people a little bit. You sort of switch in to like, you know, can I befriend this person and get them on the podcast in the course of this dinner? But the applesauce kind of like, I was like, this isn’t, this isn’t going to happen here. When you’re on Spoon 10, you were like, nah, this is done, this is cooked. It’s like, I’m still eating this applesauce. It’s like, he’s not coming on this podcast. Yeah, that’s cool. That’s good. I think that this that will end up being the highlight of this podcast, that whole bit, Matthew. Oh, good. I forgot about the applesauce bit. I was a bit worried that the breaking the glass tier was a little underpowered, because it just fell over. It didn’t spiral in any interesting way, which was disappointing from an anecdote perspective. Yeah. Are you at Gamescom this year? Yes. Yeah. Oh, cool. So am I. I mean, I’m working there, obviously, industry side. So yeah, just wondering about, again, like ability to create anecdotes abroad, potentially both in the same place. I have to make sure I see you out there at some point. That might be fun. So we can go eat some beige meats together and drink a tiny average beer called a Kölsch and celebrate how tiny they are, because that’s what you do at Gamescom. So very good. So Matthew, should we take a quick break and come back with some listening questions? I’m glad that, yeah, I genuinely forgot the applesauce until I was like, oh yeah, that was good, that was funny, that happened. Yeah, I’m pleased to be reversed into that. Because it was the sense of like, ha ha, suckers, I’m having all the mash. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Oh, that’s great. Yeah, that was the tip. Once the award story was over, I was like, okay, well, you know, I’ll just keep probing and see what else I can find out about this trip. So, yeah. There we go. Okay. Back into it, then. Welcome back to the podcast. So, we have been threatened with some listener questions and now we’re gonna go through them. So, yes, Matthew, shall I start with this first one? Yeah, let’s do it. Cool. Hello, Sam and Matthew. First off, thanks for all your dedicated podding. They’re often a highlight of my week and I always enjoy your insights and humor. Oh, I can’t believe I was slagging off the listeners when they’re this nice. This lesson’s been great so far. Yeah, there’s that Butterbean’s guy as well on Patreon who gave us that quite life-affirming message about the Indiana Jones episode and I was like, fuck yeah, this is good, I feel good now. After hearing your excitement for IO Interactive tackling the Bond license, I was wondering if you had any dream pairings of a game studio and a particular license. What creative team seemed perfectly suited to a given IP? For myself, I’d love to see Supergiant make an X-Men game. They’re great at handing a large cast of offbeat characters with a lot of heart and I think their art team would have some fresh and stylish takes on modern, sorry, on iconic X-Men characters. Side note, why has it taken so long since we’ve had an X-Men game? Thanks and keep up the good work. That’s some Dankle tear. Yeah, I think we may have been asked this one before, Matthew, in like some different form, but it’s probably been a while since we discussed it. Does anything obvious come to mind for you? Yeah, I have a feeling last time this came up, I said exactly what I’m about to say now, which is I would like to have a Mission Impossible game from MiMiMi Games. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Does that ring a bell? It does. It’s a great shout. But, you know, kind of stealth leaning, but also cooperation between a team where you can, because it’s a real time sort of strategy game, you can sort of send out a real time strategy tactics game, whatever they call it. You can send out different team members and coordinate their moves. I just want a Mission Impossible game. I would also take a Mission Impossible game from IO, who definitely can do, like, the level environmental, like, art design that you want from that kind of the film universe that Mission Impossible exists in. But that’s basically the same as a Bond film, right? So, yeah, yeah, I suppose it’s kind of similar. But, yeah, no, I like that. That’s cool. For this one, I did like, I wonder what if I’ve said this one before as well, but I got for like Evangelion RPG by the Persona devs. Oh, this doesn’t ring a bell. I might have mentioned Evangelion as like something I’d like to see more games of before. And I asked you if the robots were made of meat or something. Some bullshit like that, yeah. Like, this podcast is in an endless tragic cycle, much like the Evangelion saga itself, according to one fan theory anyway. So, yeah, so the reason I think this fits is because you do have like big mechs to do sort of cool fights basically. There is that aspect to it. But a big part of the appeal of the original anime is the interplay between the three different characters. I think if you did an RPG, you have to cast the net a bit wider, because there is a finite number of like angels that the Evangelion, sorry, the big avi units are fighting in that series. So once they are gone, the game is basically over. You can have them as your bosses and then they could be, I don’t know, some kind of like more casual, sort of like disposable opponents to them to fight also. But because each of the mechs are just so visually distinctive, they have slightly different power sets, that sort of thing. And so much was made of like the characters’ interactions in school outside of that. I think that could work pretty well. And it’s just such a, it’s like one of also the anime, the one anime that’s like successful enough. You could just for like a big investment in it and make it visually spectacular, I think. So yeah, and there is like quite a check at history of games based on this property. And the success of the sort of rebuild movies they did, suggest that there’s a lot of life left in exploring this universe. So that’s my take, that’s my take, Matthew. I think that would be quite good. I echo the X-Men thing. I think that my friend Dave is convinced that that Insomniac game will lead to a universe of different X-Men games. I’m not so convinced. I think the Wolverine thing is a very specific kind of pitch of like wild westy sort of like lone warrior sort of villain, sorry, guy, anti-hero, who maybe haven’t meet a few X-Men along the way. But I don’t think it’s then going to turn into like you’re at a school in the next game with a bunch of other dudes. I think that’s something quite different. They’re pitching more in the Logan moulds. But yeah, I don’t know. I think that with X-Men, you’ll probably see them try more when they finally do like some kind of MCU film. That’s assuming the entire MCU enterprise hasn’t burnt down by the time they get to X-Men, which I’m not ruling out, to be honest, after watching Secret Invasion. So let’s see how that goes. Super giant X-Men, though. That speaks to me. I’d like that. Yeah, because I could imagine them doing like the 90s animated series character designs. That would really pop, wouldn’t it? So yeah, I think the potential is there. I suppose a really obvious one is they keep mentioning the idea of a John Wick game. I suppose Remedy would be good for that, but you know, I don’t need that necessarily. I think the Max Pay 1, 2 remakes they’re going to do will probably scratch that itch for me, so yes. Okay, you want to read out the next question, Matthew? Hello Big Sammy and Matthew Castle. I liked the discussion of spoilers in the latest Mailbag pod, and the desire not to have plot twists etc blown in advance is obviously reasonable and correct. But has this instinct ever conflicted with your need to review a game? I sometimes find reviews that are too wary of spoiling the reader, too cryptic to be really helpful or interesting, and I sometimes wish Outlets had come back a month later for a full warts and all critical set too with a game that was too sensitive to spoil upon release. However you navigated this tension in your game’s journalism careers, Matthew’s desire to go in Tears of the Kingdom knowing nothing would obviously have been a difficult one in his O&M days. Do you protect the reader with the same level of care you’d want for yourself, or pull apart every trailer and screenshot for Mag Selling Insights? Yeah, I never quite knew how to tackle this. I think that probably the way to go about it is like to discuss the impact of something and allude to what it is that actually giving the game away. The one of the cardinal sins I committed was with the original Modern Warfare, is that I did big spoiler tags and I did discuss the nuclear thing and nuclear bomb going off in my review because I think we were out like several weeks after the game was. But I think there was like it at the time, I remember I got like slammed on old ancient industry blog Ram Raider. And I’m convinced that the person who submitted me and that review for that has come on this podcast before. That’s one of my theories. Really? Yeah, that’s one of my theories. Oh my god, it’s like a murder industry. It wasn’t new. But I remember I was a couple of times I was called out on Ram Raider when I was a staff writer. I was like 19 or 20 and I thought that’s a bit unfair to call me out on an industry blog when I’m just fucking new to this shit. But whatever, it was a different age. But in retrospect, I don’t know actually. Knowing that might make you buy it if you weren’t otherwise going to be interested in it. If you’re like, oh yeah, Nuke goes off after this game and then one of the main characters dies and it all happens in first person. That might make me more interested than I otherwise would be. So arguably there’s some kind of reader function to that. And we have become so spoiler-averse. Like I didn’t even really know what Final Fantasy 16 was about until I played that demo. But if it was like, the mystery of this is basically for the first part of the game is who killed your brother. That’s the mystery, right? So it’s sowing that seed. But I think that’s a more interesting thing to say to a GameSpy public than, oh, we don’t want to lose. There’s a bunch of summons and there’s a big epic story. And you know what I mean? Like you talk around it, but if somebody pitches that to you, you’re like, oh, that’s actually a little bit unusual. I don’t think I’ve seen that in a Final Fantasy before. So it is a fine line. I think maybe we can be so spoiler averse, we talk ourselves out of just saying what’s exciting about a thing. I don’t know. What do you think, Matthew? I mean, to go back to the magazine days, like fundamentally people were buying, they were opting in to nothing about something. So like they’re open to hearing something about the game. So, you know, they brought up my desire not to go into Tears of the Kingdom. That’s because I was in the very rare position to be like not covering it in any way, shape or form. So yeah, I was like, I’ll commit to this and go in not knowing anything. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily like the idea, you know, on the mags, I, you know, I didn’t mind finding out what I found out beforehand. Um, yeah, the art of these is, you know, boringly still trying to convey, convey your take without without undermining surprises that struck you. And if something, if I was reviewing something and thought, oh, I wouldn’t have wanted that spoiled for myself, then I wouldn’t spoil it for someone else. But at the same time, I am writing for someone who’s fundamentally wants to hear about things. So, you know, you can’t go overboard. Um, you know, it’s, there’s a, there’s just a, there is a middle line in there, which I don’t know, you just instinctually learn to tread. Um, it makes me laugh seeing people, when you mentioned Nukes there, it made me think of like people saying, oh, I don’t want Oppenheimer spoiled for me. Wouldn’t it be like, what? Like, what do you think this film has to tell you? Like it’s, it’s autobiographical. Like I mean, maybe in like the approach, but you know, are there people who are like going into that film, they’re genuinely like, oh man, I hope he doesn’t become Death Destroyer of Worlds. Yeah. Whereas like with Barbie, who knows where it could go, Matthew. It could go anywhere. That reference alone will date this podcast massively, actually. If people discover this in a year, then they hear the fucking Barbenheimer bullshit. They’ll be like, oh my God. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drag us into that territory. No, no, no, no. But it’s interesting because the film podcast we listen to, they do a spoiler section in their reviews after they’ve talked around the general shape of the film. And I think that over time, criticism has evolved to that point where the review is just one part of it. And then like the spoiler discussion comes later. And I think that probably is the most elegant way to handle it, you know. So yeah. Unlike the cliché of, you know, your relationship with the game doesn’t end with the review. You know, we’d still cover these things. We’d go back. You do like your long plays or whatever different mags call them. You know, you’re constantly discussing them. I’d say that that’s that’s the space for slightly more nuanced stuff to kind of unfold over the coming months. Yeah, for sure. So Matthew, I had no answer to this next one. Did you have one? Okay, next question. Hello, large folk. After the discussion of spoilers, it got me thinking, what are the wildest fake spoilers you’ve heard in your time? I’m reminded of a guy at school whose dad ostensibly worked for Sony and was helping with Metal Gear Solid. He had half of my mates convinced he could put sugar in the fuel of Vulcan Raven’s tank and skip that fight always altogether. Always be podding, mad brood. I don’t have an answer to this one. I think I did discuss before the kid at my school who bullshitted about being able to save Aerith in Final Fantasy and also gold materia and he learned it from a wise old man at a games convention. It was a classic bit of kid bullshit basically, just kids lying about nonsense. Did you have one for this, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, the classic naked Lara Croft was a big one that everyone had a different take on like which gymnastics routine would make her take off all their clothes. You know, even you’re a horny 13 year old, that’s the kind of stuff you’re into. I once told an absolutely terrible fib where I made up a load of Command and Conquer Red Alert units from an expansion based on some sprites that I saw in an advert for another expansion. I just took them and imagined what they’d do and then told loads of my mates about it. And then I think when I got the expansion I was like well none of that stuff was in it. That’s a really weird one that but there’s just sorts of lies you tell when you’re a kid, just weird stuff. Yeah you just want something to say at lunchtime and you’re like oh have you heard about like the fucking Tesla tank or whatever and they’re like well that’s it. Well there is a Tesla. A tank that shoots bees at you, a tank that fires Joseph Starlin at you. I love the idea of making up Red Alert units. That’s quite fun to me now. A shoot that just drops engineers out of the back of a tank. I will say Kojima missed the trick by not letting you pour sugar into the fuel of Vulcan Raven’s tank. I just like the idea at Metal Gear Solid, you pick up a bag of sugar and you’re like what the fuck is this for? You’re like well no one ever worked it out if you pour it into that tank. Well I like, that’s kind of like the immersive, if it was an immersive sim approach isn’t it? It’s like well you see if you find Vulcan Raven’s gun early in the game and put sugar in there, by the time you come to fight him it explodes and kills him. Like it’s the old Deus Ex kind of like kill switch thing isn’t it? If you hold on to that bag of sugar for the whole game you can just punt it into Liquid Snake’s face at the end. Well it’s not that random when you think about some of the weird shit you carry around in that game I suppose, so yeah it kind of works. Okay, do you want to read this next one Matthew? Good day larger than life lads, I can’t remember if this has been asked previously, but here goes anyway. What would you consider to be your finest piece of work in games media? It doesn’t have to be the most popular, but a piece that you personally felt was your absolute best, that’s from Just Kai. The idea of something I wanted to write more of, and I never had time for on PC Gamer in the second half of my games media career basically, was I wrote a piece where I interviewed a bunch of devs about the idea of do games respect your time enough? And one of the devs I interviewed has become very contentious since then, so it’s not a piece I relink very often. But I also interviewed one of the devs of the XCOMs to stop wasting my time mod, and there was one other dev in there, and it’s just like asking experts about a thing. Because I was thinking about everything from pointless animations to the way that games, that time has become the currency of open world games, how it’s about your time investment and keeping you engaged, and how much the idea of do devs think about do they respect your time enough, and the decisions they make basically. So, that I think came out really well, and I was like, it was even linked in, I think, in the Rock Paper Shotgun Sunday Papers thing, which is, you know, it’s always a good sign that you’ve got peer respect when Graham Smith drops you into one of those. So, that comes to mind. I think one of my, probably my most read piece ever, that isn’t like an SEO best Netflix shows list, was Sekiro, who’s ruined all other action games for me, for PC Gamer. So, the headline is a bit over the top, but it was a point about, it was a piece about how the combat in that game, the third person combat, was so sophisticated that I just couldn’t get that rush from anything else. And, in retrospect, I wonder why I didn’t think more about Jedi Fallen Order. It’s probably because I didn’t think that was actually anywhere near as good as Sekiro. That’s, you know, I think the second one is a lot better. So, I probably would say that’s slightly more comparable to it. And, you know, with Final Fantasy 16, we have yet another game with extremely strong, intricate third person combat in it. So, you know, I’m quite well catered for these days, but that piece was read by hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even millions, I’m not sure. So, those two pieces jump out to me as like me at my best, I guess. Matthew, what about you? Uh, yeah, a lot of stuff that I loved, even I’ve talked about loving on this podcast, I’ve gone back to it and been like, ugh, seems a bit off. Even though people disagree with it, I’m quite proud of the Skyward Sword Review and Edge. Do people disagree with that one? They don’t bring it up very often. I was really pleased with the Breath of the Wild review that I did for GamesRadar. I was like, I really thought I nailed that one. I was just super pleased with that as a piece of writing. So like, not traditional writing, but some of the writing I did for videos for RPS, you know, when stuff really landed and people loved it. Like I was, like my first video, which really went big on the channel was, did my Forza Horizon 4 review. I was really, really proud of that. My flight, my biggest video I ever did on the channel was flight simulator video, which I think is about to cross a million views on YouTube. Which that, it wasn’t just the writing, but like I also edited it. You know, I did a lot of my own editing on that. So that has a complete thing I was really proud of. More recently, oh, this is a bit of an ego trip now. I was like, I don’t like any of it and then you list off a thousand fucking things. I actually thought the non-video writing I did for RPS, I just thought was, I just hit my stride on that site. I just felt like I had the right tone of it. I was really pleased with my Gears 5 review on there. Weirdly, that’s one that stands out. It’s something I was like, yeah, that was a good review. And some of my recent Edge reviews, which I obviously won’t reveal all of them because the anonymity and all that. But I think stuff that I’ve done for Edge since I left RPS, particularly some of the earlier bits, well, I was feeling quite down and quite lacking in confidence after the whole redundancy thing. And yeah, I just reviewed a couple of biggest things for them that I just felt like, I don’t know, I kind of got back into my groove and felt like, oh, I can still do this, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, redundancy should never be taken personally, of course. Yeah, but it was, I don’t know, I did. The events industry melted down. It just burned down overnight and then that was it. But you do feel a little bit, also, I felt like I grew quite baggy doing video writing. Because it’s written to be said out loud. It’s not quite read in the same way. It’s not intended to be read as a piece of writing normally is. So I’d worried that I’d lost some of that spark. But yeah, that was satisfying. I did the Edge Cyberpunk review and I was really pleased with that. I thought I really nailed that game. So yeah, that’s good. The more pertinent point maybe is that the amount of self-loathing that you have as a writer in the games media about stuff that you wrote, that you maybe thought was good at the time and you go back, you’re like, I fucking hate this. It’s like 99 percent of my work. So I wouldn’t read a single article I wrote at Imagine at all, and I wouldn’t go back to them at all. Because I thought whenever I’ve gone back to even my games team work, I was like, why are my sentences so fucking long? Just all that kind of stuff. Honestly, most of it is self-loathing. So it’s good to balance out by just pointing that out, I think. Just be like, look, most of it you feel like is rubbish inside. So when something does seem good, it is kind of miraculous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s okay. I already feel bad about saying those things that I like. It seemed very indulgent. No, not at all. People get it, man. It’s all good. So is this next one? Yes, me, isn’t it? Good morning, fully-sized fellows of Bath. Hearing of the upcoming Star Trek Resurgence game. That game is now out. That’s how long it’s been since it did a mailbag. Getting excited then disappointed is basically a telltale game. That’s fine, just not really what I was hoping for. It makes me wonder why there are so few really noticeably good Star Trek games. I’m aware of Bridge Commander and a few niche offerings. Firstly, why so few? And secondly, what would be the best game that should be made of Star Trek? My vote is for a big RPG. That’s from FortisLeo. Matthew, my answer to this one was very simple. I feel like Trek has never had that next level of popularity needed to justify a monster investment in a blockbuster game. I mean, it was quite pricey, the 2013 one they made that people didn’t like, developed by Digital Extremes, based on the movies. That was a pricey game, but it wasn’t very good. So, yeah, I think with Star Wars, it’s easy to make the case for building something as epic as that Outlaws game that they’re making at Ubisoft. Star Trek, I just don’t think is that as popular. Do you think that’s fair? Yeah, I do think that’s fair. I do have an answer for this, though. Yeah, go ahead. I would actually… I love Star Trek First Contact, the film where the Borg take over the ship. I think doing that scenario, so it’s set just on board the ship and it’s kind of a take back the ship style game, I think you could do quite a fun, like, immersive sim, you know, basically pray in that ship, single location, because it always has that, like, we’re locking down this bit of the ship and we’re locking down… There’s different functions to bits of the ship. I’d love to go in and fuck around with all the holodecks. I think it doesn’t have to be the scale of, like, you’re going around space and doing space battles. That’s the side of Star Trek I like, is the kind of boots on the ground but on the ship. Yeah, that’s quite good, the idea of dialing in on one thing. I mean, I think the… There’s, like, a Paradox Publish grand strategy game in the works that are based on Star Trek. I think that is actually quite close to what probably people… Probably Trek fans want from a game like that, I suppose. Don’t you lose the human level, which is, like… You know, so much of it is about a group of people in these situations rather than just the situation. Well, I guess it depends on how they handle, like, your dynamics with the crew. Maybe it’s a more involved, kind of like, multiple-choice crew conversations. Because the other thing I was going to say was, of course, that arguably Mass Effect is the closest thing to a Trek game, right? It has the go to a new world and stories happen element of the series. So, with a crew that you like, you know? Maybe then what I want is, like, really silly Mass Effect, which has a space where you do all that, you go down to the planet and you discover the kind of the little sci-fi story it’s playing out there. But I also want the game to be able to do the everyone ate a weird berry and then they all changed and now we’re all in each other’s bodies, you know? Right. Like, I want to do, like, have you seen this week’s Strange New Worlds? No, I’ve not seen Season 2 yet. Is it good? Yeah, it’s fucked, but, like, I don’t know if it’s the episode that’s just out. I just saw a tweet about it, like, there’s an episode coming up which is like, Spock wakes up and he’s human. And you’re like, yeah, okay, I’m in, you know? I want to play their mission in the game, which is that. Yeah, yeah. Or like the interminable sort of, like, acting out a kid’s story. Yeah. That was the only bad episode of Strange New Worlds Season 1. But like, yeah, I like the idea of the role, the total role of the dice. It might be really serious. It might be really dark. Oh, this is the mission where it’s like actually a really scary horror mission. And this next one’s just like a funny personality land piece. That’d be cool. Yeah. In theory, the Resurgence game, I mean, it kind of came and went a little bit, but I was sort of, in theory, I was quite up for it. I thought it was quite nice. I think I might go back to play that. This question has reminded me, like, that was meant to be okay. Yeah. If it’s like, if I can get it on sale, I’ll pick that up. That sounds like something I would enjoy. So, yeah. You want to read this next one, Matthew? Hi, Sammy and Matthew. Just a short question from me. What’s the worst example of cinema etiquette you’ve ever experienced? Cheers. That’s from Angry Kurt. Angry Kurt. Yeah. So, the one that sticks in my memory after, like, 11 years is two old blokes who just had a constant conversation during Lawless starring Tom Hardy. And it was just so obnoxious. And, like, they just did not care about anyone else. And they just talked over the whole film. And I did nothing about it. I just sat there impotently raging with my ex-girlfriend while she just, like, was slightly embarrassed how angry I was. And, yeah, that sort of stands out. I think, like, I remember, I think some teenagers got thrown out of, like, Wall-E because they were talking over it. It was like, this is not the film to talk over you twats. So those come to mind. But, you know, Matthew, what about you? Yeah, I mean, I’ve mostly lived in posh places where people are really well behaved in cinemas. My friend Martin was absolutely convinced that there was a dude cranking it in the cinema with us when we went to see Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Yeah, a film, a notoriously crank-worthy film. A film in which William Defoe gets his bits smashed in with a log. That is incredibly cursed. So, yeah. Were you there for that screening, Matthew? Yeah, I was. I can’t say I noticed it. Yeah. But, yeah. That’s because I was so immersed in Lars Von Trier’s vision. It’s not ideal to crank it to any Lars Von Trier film. I would say any film will stop. Yeah. Well, you know, not in a public place. Oh, jeez. This is not a horny bug gust. No, no, no. Let’s move on. That was a bad cul-de-sac for that question. Is there anything in gaming you wouldn’t be able to do now? Mine was being able to get five stars on this DJ Hero track on Expert back in the day. There was an image with this post that I cannot replicate for you on the podcast. It’s just a screenshot from DJ Hero. You fucking get it. I have no chance now. That’s from richspurs24. Matthew, my really quick answer to this is, I don’t think I’m that old and I can hold my own in first-person shooters still. But doing Elite B agents on hard mode, my fingers are probably too fucked to hold that stylus and do that again. That is beyond me now. What about you? I’ve always been average at games. Because games have got slightly easier and more accessible over time, I’ve gotten better at games because average is now, you need to be less than average to finish most things. I’m doing absolutely fine. Thank you. Excellent. Want to read this next one, Matthew? I have no answer to this one, actually. Howdy, large lads. Shamefully nicked this question from another pod, but in all your time playing games, is there anything which you have learned in a game and then taken that into your everyday life? That’s from GrowlO17. No, I didn’t have an answer to this, really. Sometimes, I think games embed things in your head while you’re walking around and then you see the world in a slightly different way. But actually learning things, I don’t know if there’s much to take away from all the bullshit I’ve played over the years. It’s not like I did the Zelda trading quest and I was like, if I take these bananas, I can trade them for whatever. No answer to this one, Matthew. What about you? No, I’ve maybe like repeated some facts or anecdotes that I’ve heard in like wordier or nerdier visual novels. Like the Zero Escape games have got like a lot of like little science lessons in. I’m not going to say that I learned about… Oh, I’ve completely forgotten the name of it. What’s the thing where you’ve got an AI in a room and it tries to trick you into it being a human? The Turing Test. Right, yeah, yeah, okay, very good, yeah. Little things, you know, you kind of take little things like that and maybe repeat them because you heard them in a game, but not really. I often say, in our house, we both often, and this is not the answer to this question, but we often say thank you in the style of Beedle from the Zelda games. You know, in The Wind Waker in his little boat where he goes, thank you. That’s no surprise with your household of fucking monster weebs. But yeah, that’s good. I suppose there’s a little bit of virtual tourism that creeps over into the real world. So the rough layout of New York, I kind of remember from GTA 4 basically. I’m like, well, OK, so I know Central Park’s got me here, so I know that Times Square is a little bit just below that or whatever or above that. I can’t even remember now, but when you’re there, spatially, I can kind of remember where all the different bits of New York are. Or tedious bullshit like going to Rome and pointing out to my ex-girlfriend, they’re like, oh, yeah, I remember this. I played Assassin’s Creed. You jump through that hole in the top of this fucking building and then you land on a dude and like her just being completely unimpressed by that. So yeah, OK, next. Some of my historical grasp of things is based on like history as it was in games. So like Metal Gear Solid 5 is definitely responsible for like, you know, Soviets in the Middle East a lot. Yeah. Or it’s like when you look up, like, like Lu Bu was like a real dude or whatever and you’re like, no, you were just a meme, my friend. That’s like your legacy or whatever. So yeah. OK, this next one, Matthew, whose turn is it? Yours or mine? All right. Greetings, giant gents. With Alan Wake 2 being a high profile digital only release, I wondered if you fear the death of physical games. Are you mostly digital these days? Or do you have a shelf of cases you can watch grow over the course of a console’s life? What would you miss the most if publishers do away with discs? I’m of the opinion that society peaked when Game Station had their 4 for 20 quid range. That’s from gjames86. Yeah, so I do like physical games. I particularly on Switch. I think that they’re very, very collectible physical games on Switch. You have the whole game on the cart still. Whereas on PS5 and Xbox, it feels more and more like it’s a ceremonial token to download 19 different updates. So I don’t admittedly have the same connection to my physical collections of PlayStation and Xbox games I used to, which is a shame, but inevitable, I think. So yeah, I prefer games to get a physical release. I’ve got multiple options to buy them, but I suppose it’s not a total deal breaker for me, Matthew. Yeah, like my collection is so fucked and all over the place in terms of formats and styles that like, you know, I just, I don’t really care, to be honest, you know, some things you kind of cover it because you’re like, oh, the case looks nice or the art looks nice or whatever, or I know that this is going to be an all-timer. Like I’ve got physical versions of like some first party games, but if you sort of state my Switch collection, because I’ve had like Switch review codes, some of them are digital, some of them are like on a special review account. Like they’re not even all on the same account. My Switch collection is like a state. It’s all over the place. So, yeah. Probably the like the weirdest shit I do is like get paranoid about the Switch eShop being turned off and then think about, oh, should I buy physical versions of Animal Crossing and Xenoblade Chronicles to finish edition just so I have them in case like there’s some kind of apocalypse or whatever. That’s probably the maddest like shit I do in relation to this question. A lot of the physical games I do have, I must admit, I threw away the boxes and just kept the discs. Yeah, I kind of get that. It’s just like they sort of mount up, don’t they? Yeah, I’m at that point in my life where it’s like I need the shelf space for my Japanese mysteries. Okay. On that note, then we move on to the next question. Dear larger than life lads, I’m in the apparent minority of people who prefer PS4 and PS5 style controllers to Xbox. I’m a simple man, I prefer the thumbsticks at the front because that’s where my thumbs are. They’re all on the front. It’s a very good point, actually. What was he talking about there? So you mean like… No, I don’t know what he means, actually. In the front, in the middle? But it’s not that much, is it? Yeah, they’re slightly further down, I suppose, yeah. So yeah, where was I? What is your favorite historical and current gamepad? That’s from John. Personally, Matthew, I feel like the 360 controller perfected it. That’s a pretty widely held view. It had everything in the right place. The D-pad was rubbish, but everything else was great. It just fit nicely around it. On that note, to be honest with you, with the modern age, I don’t really have much of a preference between PS5 and Xbox. They’re both very good controllers. I guess I’m not sure where I stand with that big, vague PS5 button that’s in the middle, the big white one. Yeah, I just need a button for that. I don’t need that to be a vague kind of concept button. I’m good without that. I really hate the options button on the PlayStation one, the tiny little one that’s to the right of the touchpad. If you have to press that button a lot for maps or menus in a game or whatever, I’m probably going to be grumpy about it. Yeah, that doesn’t bother me really. I think they’ve all got good triggers, they’ve all got good bumpers, they’re all kind of doing what they need to do. My ha ha ha sicko’s whatever that meme is, is that I quite like the Switch Pro controller. Oh, okay, interesting. It’s like super generic, but I just got used to that thing. Yeah, my slightly sicko’s thing is the plugging the Joy-Cons into that little controller-y thing they give you. I quite like that, because I’ve never used it before, but obviously for Tears of the Kingdom, I was like, well, I’ve got to play it. That’s too far for you. They’re too close. It’s too small. Your hands are… Oh, no. I don’t mind, but to be honest, I like the Duke on the Xbox. I’m a right fucking sicko for this shit. Let’s move on anyway. You want to read this next one, Matthew? Yes. This is a short one. What games do the best at tutorializing? I have one very simple answer to this. The Titanfall 2, like a tutorial that then gives you a sort of like power run at the end to get the best time. And like it’s downloading. You’re playing it while the rest of the game is downloading. That is fucking tip top. That stands out as a tutorial to me. What about you? Yeah. I mean, the introduction to Portal, where obviously the whole game is framed as like test subjects. You know, that’s a fun way of like narratively tying your tutorial in. Maybe people disagree with this, but like the idea of the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild being like the whole game in miniature. I’ve always thought that was that was super cool, even though you have to like find the tutorials in it, I guess, is maybe a pain in the ass. But solid answers there, I think. What’s the best thing you’ve seen under embargo slash NDA? How did you keep it under wraps until you could talk about it at some Beat-em-up expanded? What about you, Matthew? I mean, does this count for just like review games that we played? Yeah, I suppose so, you know. Yeah, I mean, like, I guess play like reviewing Breath of the Wild on the Switch. But, you know, before the Switch and Breath of the World were out, like the idea of being in an office and thinking, I’ve got a Switch at home. That’s exciting. And no one knows or gets to know that I’ve got this thing. Yeah, that was it. I mean, whenever you’re like the first in the world to play or review something, for that brief window of time, you’re the only person who really knows what it’s like to play that game. And you’re like desperate to tell people. But I guess that’s probably it. Yeah, I briefly had a moment there where I was like, I had a pre-release PS4 that I took home to my flat in Bournemouth. And I was a bit like, oh, this feels very high stakes. What if I get mugged while I’m walking while I’m walking past the Chinese takeaway on the way home or something like this? There’s that. But probably the easiest answer to this is definitely something I’ve discussed before, but probably not for a while, was what became The Last Guardian and was previously known as Project Trico. I’d not seen it, but my my old boss had seen it and described it to me. And then a PR from Sony also described it to me. And this was at least a year before they revealed it. The idea of the the follow up game to Shadow of the Colossus as a thing you couldn’t see, but someone could describe to you, was something I thought about all the time. I was like, it’s like this dog thing and then there’s like, but is it a cat? And then it’s got this little kid with him and it kind of looks like Shadow of the Colossus. I remember it being described that way. I was just being like, I have to fucking see this game. So when it did finally emerge, it was like, oh, it’s no longer this secret I can keep to myself. But I didn’t keep it to myself. I told my friend Andrew at the time because I was a scumbag staff writer. But that’s fine. It didn’t leak. I wouldn’t tell anyone secret things now. So yeah, there you go, Matthew. I think that covers it, doesn’t it? So next question. Hi, Samuel and Matthew. After the recent news of Naughty Dog’s Last of Us Factions multiplayer not passing Bungie’s quality test, I think that was a Bloomberg article. It got me thinking. Do you think there is a feature for online multiplayer games that aren’t live service games, or are all online multiplayer games going to have this live service element? Other than indie games, I was struggling to think of the last multiplayer game of note, not to also be live service. That’s from Kurt Orso. Any thoughts on this, Matthew? You’re not a multiplayer guy, really, are you? Not really, but like everyone in our office still plays local multiplayer games. Maybe they are indie in nature, but like the appetite’s there. In a world where Mario Kart 8 is one of the best selling games of all time, that would suggest there’s still an appetite. Yeah, I think that’s true. Nintendo will keep us out of the games of service era. Some people, anyway. Well, arguably having a season pass of new tracks is kind of live service-y, but not really. You can just turn up and they’re a nice little treat that they’ve added to your game. So, yeah, I think that’s a good point, Matthew. I think there’ll always be room for it, but it’s just going to be hard. It’s just hard for them to break out. The live servicing exists for a reason, because I guess they make money, so they can invest more money back into it, et cetera. It might not be for you, and fair enough if it’s not, but yeah, I think it’ll always exist in some form, and it’s a very good point that Nintendo are kind of the arbiters of that to some degree. So, Matthew, should we leave it there and roll over the rest of these questions to our next open play? Because I can smell a pie. Yep, and I’m going to make some mozzarella little pasta balls, so that’s going to be good. I’ve got to get pie in my hole, my tooth hole. Oh dear, I promise we won’t keep talking about the tooth hole, and I’ll keep pushing Matthew to get it replaced. Then it’ll be old news. Yeah, I still think you should just get another tooth there. How much is it to get a replacement tooth? I don’t know, I don’t even want to, I can’t even imagine. You didn’t even ask, you were just like, okay, I’m stuck with my little tooth hole now, is that it? Yeah, it won’t be a hole forever, it will fill. All right, fair enough. A new gum will grow. A new gum? Is that like new coke? It will be new gum! Is that like new coke, new gum? No, just fresh gums. Fresh gums. Okay, that’s this episode done. Thank you for listening to The Back Page of A Video Games Podcast. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBazzle underscore pesto on Twitter and threads. I’m Samuel W Roberts, I’m also on threads. All I’ve done is post three pictures of one dog. I’ll wait to see if it takes off before I make a podcast account. I’m not so sure it will after a week. It’s quite crap, isn’t it? Okay, you can support the podcast at patreon.com/backpagepod. Coming up on the podcast, the PlayStation 3 draft. That’s next week’s episode. After that, we have another What We’ve Been Playing. We’re going to cover a bunch of stuff that’s come out recently. Diablo 4 and Street Fighter are on the list, so look forward to that. August is shaping up to be quite a good month, I think, Matthew. I’ve got to drop Jeremy a line and ask him if he fancies coming on the Baldur’s Gate slash PC RPG episode. Maybe you can just listen to this and that can count as his invite. Jeremy, get in touch. We’ll have you on the pod. Thank you very much for listening. We’ll be back next week. Goodbye.