Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how is the Cheers rewatch going? It’s good. We’re into series seven or eight now, I can’t remember. It all kind of blurs into one mass of hilarity when you’ve watched this many. I was pleased to solve the mystery of the Cheers thumbnail on Amazon Prime. Every episode of Cheers has the same thumbnail. It’s a picture of Sam and Carla standing at the bar, and there is what appears to be a Chinese lantern in the top right corner, which doesn’t look like it is of the same world as Sam and Carla. It’s kind of 2D, looks superimposed over the top. And every time we play an episode of Cheers, I say to Catherine, what the hell is going on with that lantern? That isn’t part of the set. I have no idea what that is. Have Paramount superimposed it for some reason. And then we finally watched an episode where that Chinese lantern was hanging in the bar. So there you go. There’s a riveting minute of podding. I think that that is this year’s guy from Borgon looks like Jeff Keighley tweets, you know what I mean? It will come up over and over again. And like in eight months, he’ll be like, why isn’t my Cheers Lantern tweet getting the same traction as the Blokko tweet? You know what I mean? The Borgon one, I don’t really understand because Jeff Keighley is a pop culture figure and it looks so much like Jeff Keighley. I just don’t know why people refuse to engage with it. This, I know that this is niche. This has actually already had pretty good engagement. I supercharged it, I feel. I think you did because people don’t want to have another Borgon tweet, basically. They don’t want that to happen. So they’re trying to nip it in the bud here and it’s obviously not working because listen to the last 90 seconds of this podcast. Yeah, okay. So how are you doing otherwise? Like we’re at the end of January. It’s sort of like, it’s been an interesting month in the games industry, but yeah. How are you feeling generally? Yeah, all right. Mostly been playing like Dragon Infinite Wealth in my spare time. I’ve played a lot of video games this month. Now I’m straight into a Persona 3 reload. Are you reviewing that one? No, I’m not. I just wanted to dip into it last night to see what it was like. I have very vague memories of the first few hours of Persona 3 back in the day. Yeah, I just started playing it and it kind of got its hooks into me. I was like, what am I doing? I just don’t have time to have another 50 plus hour JRPG in my life. Yeah, this is kind of why I’m sort of resolving to come back to Yakuza later in the year when I finish the original Like A Dragon. I’ll dip into Persona 3, but I’m probably just saving my time for Final Fantasy 7 at this point because I know that’ll be the one I definitely want to play. Yeah, well, I still need to play Remake, but I feel better equipped for Final Fantasy 7 now now that I’m a true master of Disc 1. Honestly, as an exercise, that has helped so much with the day job. Right, right. Knowing what the fuck’s going on and what people are talking about really, really helps. Infinite Wealth, though, I hope you do get through the first Like a Dragon, because it is essential really to kind of appreciate Infinite Wealth, but absolutely fantastic game. Finished it yesterday and just really sticks the land in that game. What they’ve done with the Yakuza series is like a successful version or exactly what I want from someone attempting a kind of MCU or a Connective Narrative Universe, whatever the collective term is for that, for those kinds of projects. That is just the perfect amount of like callbacks and cameos and like warm nostalgia, but not stodgy. And it feels finite. It feels like a complete piece of work in itself, but still with these ties to other things, it’s so expertly done, really, really good fun. Yeah, yeah. So it’s funny though, because I spoke to you, I think like two, twice during your sort of journey with the game and your sort of like sentiment was very much, oh, it’s so long though. That was how you felt when you were playing it at the time. Did you become a little bit more accustomed to the pace or did it sort of justify how long it ended up being? What was your sort of journey with that part of the game? It’s really slow at the start, full of lovely character beats, re-establishes the cast of the first game for the first handful of hours. You know, and in your mind, you’ve got all the exciting, like Honolulu and all the new classes and the new features and the new mini games. And they actually drip-feed those very slowly over the first 20 hours. And I guess in the moment I was like, oh, I think that might be my reviewer brain. More like, oh, I’d really like to see these things now so I can start thinking about them. Because I was genuinely worried it was going to be like 100 hours long. It wasn’t, took me like 55 or something. Right. And that was quite a thorough play. I really dug into quite a lot of stuff around it. By the end, maybe I’d sort of settled more into the pace. I think I’d lost the fear of like, am I going to be able to finish this in time for writing this review? Yeah. And once that was gone, great. Now I can just kind of enjoy this. So I try to play games as I would, you know, if I was just a punter. Yeah. But when it’s a game that size, you sometimes can’t, you know, so I was getting up at like early in the morning to play like a couple of hours before the day job every day, just cause I was fearing like, oh shit. And then it became apparent, oh, I’m on the final run of this now, and I’m going to have a bit of time to write the review afterwards. So it was fine and I could enjoy it for what it was. And I mean, if you are a long-term fan, it’s just, yes, superb, the way they kind of bring it all together and lean into it. And like, I haven’t written the review yet, so I don’t know if any of these thoughts will resurface. But when you’ve got a game series with recurring characters, that’s genuinely been going on now for 20 years, you actually kind of get into the realms of almost like, you know that the film Boyhood? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You can almost begin to pull off a project like that where you’re like, well, this world has a, we’ve been through a lot of time with this world and these characters, they are physically older, they aren’t trapped in a bubble, they’ve always been games that dealt with their contemporary settings and try to kind of acknowledge what was actually going on and what concerns the world. And I think this game, even more so than the others, leans into the gods. We’ve been through a lot with these people and, you know, they’ve really changed. And what does 20 years of being a Yakuza protagonist do to a person? I was quite moved by some of that. Hmm, interesting. Well, you, the listener, might be confused into thinking this is a what we’ve been playing episode. It isn’t. It isn’t. What is probably quite interesting sort of background for the listeners is that every now and then, Matthew will take on like a monstrously big game to review. And there was a point where I think we thought, oh, the Patreon’s doing well enough now that, you know, you don’t have to, basically, when you’re a games journalist, as a staff writer, you don’t make enough money. So you make, well, I don’t know if that’s still true, but you, you know, you do freelance to basically top up your salary. That was certainly true in Bournemouth when I was a staff writer, like I just ended up doing about, I don’t know, two to 300 quid worth of freelance a month, just to make sure I had a bit more, a bit more to spend. Matthew has never broken out of that mentality, no matter how high he has risen in the sort of like corporate ladder. And now I think you see games as like, or I think you see it as like a one last job situation, where you’re like, well, you’re like, I’m just going to get, get my crew out of retirement for one last, one last sort of like bank robbery, basically. There is a, there is a bit of that. It just taps into a part of my brain that doesn’t always get used in the day job. I’m also still flattered when people ask, cause not many people do these days. It’s just nice to, it’s nice to do it. Yeah, absolutely. Should I address the consoles I bought over the weekend, Matthew, while we start this episode? Yeah, so I bought it. Deranged. So after the episode with Ash, I just had a sort of like a bit of an odd Friday where I just sort of thought I’m going to buy a modded Dreamcast and a modded Sega Saturn. So I bought both of those. I have neither of them. Oh, and I’ve got the Saturn, but I need like a step down power converter to run it. Cause it’s like a Japanese Saturn basically. So yeah, I’ve done that. And the Dreamcast has HDMI modded into it. So it apparently runs at 10 AP, 60 FPS, and all that is sort of arriving next week. So I’ve done that at, you know, like a reasonably high expense. So that’s maybe something I can save for a future GameScore entry, how much they actually cost. But yeah, that’s something I did. I think honestly, that was just the power of the Shining Force 3 discussion. I was like, and then I looked it up and I thought, okay, well that will crash if I run it, try and run it on Steam Deck or whatever. But yeah, on the original hardware, it will work. So what did you make of that when that kicked off, Matthew? I thought, well, it’s not for me. I also enjoyed that episode, but I was just happy knowing that these good things existed, maybe because I was looking at that infinite wealth in the background. It’s like, I just don’t have time. If I was going to be playing anything, my list of games I need to catch up on and learn to appreciate is very, very long. And those Sega things are not high on it. Yeah, so my list is long too. So this is definitely ill advice, as Philip Schofield might say. Oh dear, I’m going to regret making that analogy. I just know it. So this episode then, 12 minutes in, let’s get to it. The Best Games of 2002. So one of our longest running series here. So we’re just doing top 10 lists from each year. Basically, we’ve done something like 2000. So we did 2001 at the end of last year, which was us going a little bit further back than we’ve been before. And I think that was a very well-received episode, Matthew. Very, very enjoyable to do that, you know, very different vibe and to step away from modern games. But yeah, I think it was, but with a lot of our key texts kind of coming into it. So we did 2001, done 2006 through to 2016. So we’re sort of like racking them up. And obviously we’ve done 2020, 21, 22, and now 23 as well. So we’re sort of like building up this very grand, kind of like, I don’t know, tapestry of all the stuff that we think is important in the modern age of games, I suppose. That makes it sound like a lot more sort of high and mighty than it actually is though. So how do you feel about coming back to this, Matthew? Do you look forward to these episodes or do you dread them because they’re always so long? I do look forward to them. I sometimes worry that I’m just going to repeat myself because, you know, a lot of these games, even though we haven’t covered them in the context of the 2002 episode yet, they have come up, you know, in lots of other episodes. And we’ve been doing the podcast so long now that I’ve forgotten kind of what games I have and haven’t talked about. Yeah. I think my top 10 here, I’m quietly confident all of these games have had time in the spotlight. Yeah. That’s, I think that’s fair. I had the same concern or I thought, am I definitely going to be able to say something new about these games? And, you know, the answer is I probably won’t for all of them because of the thing Matthew mentions where this podcast is approaching four years old. And so, you know, a lot of like the games have come up before. But I do think it’s a really interesting year to audit, partly because, I don’t know if you felt this way Matthew, I thought this is maybe the deepest bench of games we’ve ever picked from for one of these episodes. And there’s a reason for that, which is that the, basically what happened in 2001 is a lot of the key games, including the games coming out for GameCube and Xbox, were basically shifted to next year for Europe. So we go by the European calendar, which is why this episode is going to encompass some games that if you’re an American listener, you will have known was coming out in 2001. So what do you make of it? Quite a grand statement. This podcast goes by the European calendar. Sorry, I don’t know why I’m making it sound so official. This is going to be daft and the whole thing is pointless, but you know, just nonetheless. But what do you make of the range of games to pick from? It is massive. I’ve gone with more of a nostalgia take, trying to reflect what I loved at the time, rather than what I have played in the following 20 years to kind of fill in the gaps. So it’s probably a better depiction of where my head was at back then. So like I’ll say upfront, there’s no Xbox on my list. Oh, shocker. Yeah, because I was, you know, but there’s maybe a little bit more PC than you might be expecting, but it’s PC and GameCube basically. Yeah, that’s fine. Mine’s kind of like a similar vibe actually, where I thought about trying to reflect the sort of like grand sweep of the year, but then I thought actually it would be more interesting to just spotlight the stuff that did represent my sort of like journey with games that year. So yeah, that’s very much what I’ve done. So big mix of PC and PS2 for me. So yeah, I think that I ended up being quite different lists with maybe just one or two games at crossover. That might surprise people, I think. So I can already know a few major games that are not gonna be on your list. I can sort of suss them out in my head based on what you said there. So, okay, so 2002 then. Right, what were you doing that year, Matthew? What was going on in the life of Matthew Castle in 02? I was doing my AAS levels while trying to not fuck them up by also being really interested in the GameCube coming out in May. That’s a thing, and we can probably get to that when we talk about GameCube a bit later. I started to learn to drive this year, which began my absolute nightmare journey with learning to drive. There’s some disagreement in my family how many times I failed my driving test. I think I failed nine times. My mum thinks I failed eight times. I say nine because then I obviously passed my 10th, and I’ve always said only one in 10 driving instructors want me to drive. That’s always been my little driving gag. It doesn’t work as well of like one in nine, you know? That’s pretty solid. I like that, you know, it kind of tells a story. I was fucking terrible at learning to drive. I was absolutely dreading it. I was bad at learning to ride a bike, and a bike and a car are very different things, but I’ve just, I’m not a very coordinated person, and I get very nervous around roads. On bike, I was just constantly convinced I was going to kill myself by like going under a car or a bus or something. And when I was driving, it was just flipped. I was just constantly convinced I was going to kill someone in this huge car that I was driving. So not a natural driver. It’s why I choose to be chauffeured. You sure do. Driving Mr. Castle. It isn’t out of laziness. It is out of compassion and care for everyone else in the world who is outside that car. You’re like, this is for your own good, Catherine. By doing this, you will not die. Well, yeah, I don’t mean to be melodramatic about it, but I mean, there is a, like, you know, joking aside, that’s maybe like 5% of what I’m thinking about. Yeah, I was really bad at this. Did you do the learning to drive thing at 17? Yeah, it was actually like, it was kind of horrible in a different way. So I wasn’t nervous as such, but my driving instructor, I couldn’t tell if I was being scammed by him because he would basically talk nonstop for like the entire journey. Sometimes we’d pull over and he’d just talk and talk. And it was an hour long session, but never lasted an hour. And it was like, it would stretch out to an hour and a half or two hours. But then like a full hour of that would just be him talking at me about things that he finds interesting. At the time, he just gave me a full rundown of fucking Borat, like the entire film. He just like told me the plot of that film. And like, I’ve never seen Borat and I don’t think I ever can now because that guy just completely ruined it for me. So learning to drive with this guy, it was such a waste of time. And you know what, actually, it was the last person in my life who I tolerated, like letting them do whatever they wanted out of politeness because now I would not let anyone get away with it. Like this- Is this your villain origin story? Why? So I actually, I took one test after about something like, something ridiculous, like 50 lessons. Again, it felt like a scam and I failed. But I think the guy who was doing my test was, I could smell booze on his breath. And I thought, yeah, you’re really fucking with it, aren’t you, mate? I’m glad I paid like whatever, you know, 90 quid for this shit or whatever. So I honestly, that disillusioned me from the entire thing. I had never completed. I never got my license. I left the process despising everyone involved. I like the idea of you getting to your driving test and you’re like, and when is the Borat test? You’re like, uh-oh, that wasn’t relevant. Oh shit. You just doing Borat impressions the whole time. But I’ve been practicing my way for everything. So I took you off rails there, but that was my experience learning to drive. I didn’t have the fear, but I had lots of other problems. Yeah, I think once I got to my first driving test and failed, the nerves just got into me and it became a huge thing. And with each test that I’d fail, it’d get worse and worse. This is when I also learned I needed glasses because I couldn’t read the number plate on the number plate reading bit of the test. So that started then. I had a similarly bad experience. My driving instructor was a nice guy called Mark. It wasn’t on him. I kept getting failed by a lady called Tina Castle, who is the only other Castle I’ve met outside my family. Oh, that is weird. Every time I had a test with her, she just kept failing me again and again and again. And I was just like, you know, give a fellow Castle a break. Come on, Mike. This is outrageous behavior. Yeah, so that’s Castles have to stick together. Yeah, so that was bad. It’s kind of a stressful year because it was all like, like I said, AS levels and then applying to university. And, you know, I’m a person who like definitely at the time, well, probably still now, took great stock in like the traditional way of things. You know, I really thought if I don’t do well in these exams and I don’t get into a good university, I’m like fucked for life. Yeah. Where actually, you know, I did all that and going to a good university and then started on a 13 and a half grand salary. So I actually really fucked it. The first bit where I had full control over the situation, I completely fucked myself. I could have been one of those sexy characters in HBO show industry. I could have been at an investment bank making hundreds of thousands of pounds and going on raunchy adventures. I didn’t have many raunchy adventures in 2006 or future. Many. I ate all that chocolate mousse on the Red Steel trip. That’s pretty sexy. I mean, yeah, but that was that’s 2006. But, you know, I don’t want to foreshadow some good stuff. That doesn’t happen for a bit yet. So, yeah, it was it was just it was that, you know, it was, oh God, it feels like if this year goes badly, I could sort of fuck up my entire life because that’s what you were sort of trained to think at that age. Well, yeah, that’s it’s true that that’s how I remember my ace levels, too. So minor in I think I took my five. So a few few years down the line. And yeah, I do remember feeling quite phenomenal pressure doing it. Also, the panic of like taking subjects that you know you hate. So sort of like doing history. But then you end up I think like there’s that thing where, oh, these are the things you could learn about. And then like they have to just depend on the teacher or the exam board, whoever, to not pick the shittest one on the list. So when I did history and I had to learn about the Stuart, I was like, no one gives a fuck. You know what I mean? It was like the most boring kind of like British history. But we’re so hung up on it in this country because obviously it’s like big Brexit vibe here, where everything that happened ages ago has to matter. That’s what living in Britain is now basically. So we’re obsessed with like not learning world history, but then like focusing on our own boring bits of history. And the Stuarts were just like, oh yeah, basically this guy threw away lots of dinners and then got overthrown by his people. Great. Yeah, that’s the drive-by on the Stuarts there. So yeah, but I just remember like feeling like the water rising a bit because I was doing that and I’d sort of gotten pressured into taking like a government and politics class by my… Oh, I did that too. This is so boring as well. And again, I don’t know if I learned anything massively that I couldn’t have just learned reading BBC News for the next 20 years. You know what I mean? There was a bit of like, I’m not sure how useful that actually was. This was definitely a year, even though I’d started college in 2001, I just became aware of other people my age who just seemed so much more like grown up and had stuff together. I just felt like such a baby at college. Not just because I like video games and other nerdy stuff, but you start meeting like, oh, girls you really like. But then you start seeing the kind of people they were going out with. They were like our age, but they seemed like they were like fucking 25 in my eyes. I was just like, what the fuck has this person been doing for 16 years that they’ve, they’ve come out of the same process that we’ve come out of so well put together and mature and they’ve got trendy clothes. I mean, that was a fucking nightmare for me. Going from uniforms to secondary school, we had to make no choices whatsoever, to college where all of a sudden, you know, you had this huge level of self-expression. And, you know, I think I was already doing the old jeans and plaid shirt combo of the games journalists. I think that’s, that’s, that’s been my natural mode. You know, I felt like I’d been so sort of sheltered, you know, and because I was working at Homebase on Friday nights, Friday night seemed to be double XP session for like leveling up socially. Yeah. And I was completely cut out of that because I was selling screws and paints to kind of dads who were trying to get a head start on the weekends to work. I didn’t play it very well like that those, those two years. I was just, yeah, focused on these stupid getting these grades, getting the university, doing this Sunday job. So yeah, a bit of a, bit of a weird one. Yeah. Yeah. I suppose, uh, yeah, I, I kind of like, I sort of, I’m torn between wanting to like make jokes, but also sincerely. By all means. I mean, you know, it’s this way you tell me at a similar age, you’re a total babe magnet. Oh, no, no, I had the exact experience you did really. Mine was like, my college years were basically hampered by, um, I had to pick up my brother from school twice a week on a kind of rotating schedule. So what that meant was every, like two days of every week and those two days moving along the week. So Tuesday, Wednesday would then be Wednesday, Thursday, and so on, meant that I just had a completely fucked social schedule because my parents wouldn’t pay for the childcare. So I had to go and pick my brother up. So that completely fucked me at college basically. And so I’ve got powerful memories of that, but I did also want to make a gag about like, why does Dan get to go out with Alexa Chung and you’ll stand there in your Yoshi t-shirt? But, you know, again, I’m torn between sincerity and making a cheap gag. Okay, I was a very dunkable figure at that age and the dunking should commence. Indeed. I just popped into my head, the day we got our AS level results back, I celebrated by going to see eight-legged freaks. That tells you everything you need to know about me. Is that the one that’s got Scarlett Johansson in it? Yes, I think it had David Arquette in it. Right, right. Yeah, I feel like ScarJo might be in that one as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. That’s the kind of person I was. Like, amazing, I get to go and see this. No, I feel you. I do remember that moment of being like, I just remember that everyone just seemed to sort of change on a dime when college started. People didn’t do the same thing. I’ve definitely mentioned this before, but we used to just go and play football on the field next to our school every lunchtime, and then it got to sick form and then all the kids stopped doing that, just started sitting around and chatting and being on their phones and stuff. And so my only source of exercise is suddenly gone. And then also we just weren’t doing anything better because these were, no disrespect, not interesting people. So they didn’t have interesting things to say, but they were just sort of sat around. No disrespect, they were all boring as shit. Well, I don’t know them anymore. That’s the thing. Well, that was the thing that dawned is that we didn’t have anything in common. And it was kind of like, I kind of just, I think I just liked playing football with some people who are easy to hang out with. But anyway, but yeah, but my O2 was actually quite, quite different. I mean, like I would like to come back to yours, Matthew, because I’m sure you have some like, you must have some hilarious memories from that time too. Or at least, no, okay, maybe not then. But a few things we’ll see. So this is my first year of GCSE. So that’s like, if people want to understand, like the very small age difference between me and Matthew, that’s basically what I was doing. So I entered year 10 at this point. I think GCSEs were basically like my sort of level intellectually. I think when I got to A level, I just realized I wasn’t quite up to scratch. But that’s okay because I’ve made it through life because I’m very good at like two specific things, which is, you know, actually I think I’m only like quite good at writing, but then I know a lot about computer games. That’s basically all I can do. So that was the beginnings of like a very badass line in an action film. I’m good at two very specific things. Yeah. And then it didn’t quite go anywhere. No. Sheepishly sort of meanders off. Yeah. So have I told the, I must have told the story. I’ve definitely told you in real life. Have I told you the story of that when I did drama at GCSE and we did the Ramstein thing with the… No. Have I not told you that before? You have told me I’ve forgotten it. I mean, you must have. Well, I will. It’s the most cringe-worthy thing. But to be honest though, everyone in like drama class in GCSE level or A level created some very cringey things. Like, I’m not sure I saw anything good in that time, really. But basically I had to make some kind of like come up with some kind of narrative. And we had to basically tell the story in both like a literal way and a symbolic way. And again, I think that’s quite a lot to ask of some 15 year olds, to be honest. So all 14 year olds as we were at the time. So basically what we did was we decided to do with like a prison escape from a Nazi camp. That was kind of going to be our plot line, right? And so we did everything. We did like the basically crashing behind enemy lines, being taken hostage, and then the escape we did afterwards. And oh my God, I’m actually like creasing up, like just trying to tell this is actually quite embarrassing. In fact, I would say it’s one of the five most embarrassing things I’ve ever done. Excellent. So the literal version of the sort of like being taken hostage and escape was not very interesting. It was just some boring script writing, basically. Some dudes. It’s like the great escape, but bad, basically. But the symbolic one was fucking wild. So we did this thing where, oh God, I feel so embarrassed saying this. So we had to, basically, to denote like crashing behind enemy lines, I mean captured by the Nazis, we all pretended to be airplanes, fell over, then formed a swastika on the ground with our bodies, which is massively inappropriate. And we’re all different heights, so it would have been a really wonky swastika. But the sort of like the amazing climax was, we basically had this, we basically did this pretty, basically the plot of like our escape, we never quite made it, unfortunately, we all just tried to escape then, you know, again, like the great escapes didn’t quite get there. But we basically run, basically, the finale was, we ran in slow motion, while Fire Fry by Ramstein played over the top, and then we all got gunned down in real time. And like, if you don’t know that song, right, basically, there’s bits in the song where the guy goes, bang, bang, fire fry, and each bang bang, one of us fell over and died. So, it was the most embarrassing thing anyone has ever produced. And like, me and my friend, Andrew, the protagonist of Final Fantasy VII, we talk about this literally every time we see each other, but if you just play Fire Fry by Ramstein, and then imagine like the entire four minutes of that song or whatever, like some dudes jogging in slow motion across one stage, and then like falling over to indicate they’ve been killed by Nazis. That is a thing that we did in Drama Class, so very embarrassing. But you know, Drama Class is a safe space for discovery like that. If you can’t take those risks there, where can you take them? Yeah, so yeah, that’s one of the lamest things I’ve ever done. So I hope the listeners enjoyed that. I just can’t. Obviously in my head, I only know you as you are now, so I’m like imagining you as you are now doing that. It’s amazing, that image, but yeah. Just imagine me sort of like half as wide and then like with no gray hair. I know you’ve basically got the idea. So yeah, if you can imagine such a thing. So yes, that happened. I was trying to get other stuff that happened this year. So pop culture is usually a good window to talk about things, Matthew, because I remember the last episode we did, the 2001 one, we talked about SMTV. So after we did that episode, actually, I went and watched the SMTV reunion special they did a few years ago, and I actually got incredibly melancholy because I watched it and realized it’s basically like, just so you know, you realize as a part of yourself you’ve not thought about in decades, and then you realize that you’re never going to get that part of yourself back. I had that powerful feeling watching Kat Dilly and Atlan Deck basically tear up on stage. It’s like the reverse version of the critic eating their Atatui at the end of Atatui. Yeah, exactly. There’s no way to bring that back, sadly. But that time is nicely because that ended in like, they and the deck left at the end of 2001 basically, then I think Kat Dilly left a few months later. So that was out of my life in 2002. And I can’t remember, I don’t think I replaced it with anything, because I started doing a paper round basically and making money that way. So not very exciting. But pop culture wise, I do remember a few things happening this year. So I remember being hyped for Attack of the Clones because everyone was like, oh, this is going to be better than The Phantom Menace. You know, spoiler alert, it wasn’t. But at the time, we all believed it did. And then that almost immediately being chucked out of the discourse by Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, which then just came along and was just so monstrously big, and was just like the film that everyone my age loved. And then suddenly, I think people maybe think of X-Men as being like the first in this line of superhero movies that turned the entire genre into a phenomenon. But in my mind, Spider-Man was the real kickoff point. X-Men was well received and people kind of liked it. But this was the one where it all kicked into high gear. Is that your memory of that? Yeah, definitely. Weirdly, I convinced myself that I quite liked Attack of the Clones. Oh, we all did, I think. Because I remember saying to people that Attack of the Clones is quite hard work, but the end is such a rush of great set pieces. It really comes into its own with this coliseum and this factory bit. And then you get to see the coolest fight ever with Yoda and Christopher Lee. And you watch it now and you’re like, oh my god, this is awful, what have I done? When we rewatched stuff for the Star Wars episode last year or whenever it was, that was a real like, oh my god, I can’t believe I ever endorsed this in any way. Yeah, it’s a really, it’s really naff, but also that is, it’s really sort of abrupt how that film ends. It’s just sort of like a five minute fight at the end that it’s just sort of over. It’s a really like poorly structured film as well, just like all over the place really. But no, I think everyone had the same thing though, like, oh, okay, after The Phantom Menace, they got rid of Jake Lloyd, so this is going to be good now, right? And so I think we all believed it at the time. And then even by Revenge of the Sith, people were like, oh, this is good. And then I feel like it was some, like, I think some kind of spell broke, right, like a month after Revenge of the Sith, and we were like, oh, no, that was it. That whole thing was a complete waste of time, basically. This was the year I started listening to Randy Newman. This is where that interest started. I got into it through, I had a Tom Waits album I really liked. I remember talking to my dad about Tom Waits, and he was saying, oh, there’s this, I think that the connection is, was just like, singers with slightly unusual voices. And he said, oh, there’s this, you know, maybe you should listen to some Randy Newman at some point. Little did he know that he was, he was dooming me and everyone I know to 20 something years of me banging on about Randy Newman. But I went and bought the best of Randy Newman from HMV and Winchester album called Lonely at the Top. And yeah, I was just like, instantly, this is absolutely amazing. I was instantly obsessed with it and felt so frustrated that like at a time where every, you know, music seemed very exciting and everyone was getting in, you know, whatever the music of the moment was, I don’t really remember because I wasn’t really following it. But the frustration of being into something that like just no one else gave a single fuck about and was like instantly a joke. Like every joke about me liking Randy Newman, I heard them all in that year, you know. Like the Toy Story guy and endless that kind of stuff. Like so many times we’ve had to say, no, it isn’t just you’ve got a friend in me, like here’s this whole other career as well. There was that. But also I went to see, I was, I was big into Divine Comedy at the time. And I went to my first concert that year, which was the Divine Comedy and Ben Folds playing in London. I’d not heard of Ben Folds and I was, you know, I loved the Divine Comedy part of it, but I thought he, he was just, just just unbelievably good. Just absolutely blew me away. It was just him and his piano, I think. And that began that thing. So like, you know, my three big musical interests, Randy Newman, Divine Comedy and Ben Folds, all from 2002. 2002 was a big, big music year for me in terms of getting into those things. But to tie it back into video games, this is also the year I got Soldier of Fortune 2, bought for me by one of my friends, older boyfriends. Thus the whole, you know, the beginning of the people I knew going out with people who seemed much older, which was, which sucked, but was good if you then wanted them to buy you video games, which were 18 rated. This or the Wolfenstein game from 2001 around that time were like the first sort of steps into like online gaming for me on PC. And I played a lot of Soldier of Fortune 2 online, but I always played it with Ben Fold’s Rocking the Suburbs playing like on the PC. I think if I’d like ripped that album to the PC or something. So I cannot now listen a bit like the Danny Elfman with Call of Duty. Like I can’t listen to Rocking the Suburbs without having these very visceral flashbacks to just getting my ass handed to me in Soldier of Fortune 2. So I was absolutely terrible at it. Like that is to me, that is music to sort of squat behind crates to. Like just hiding desperate not to be killed and to be the weak link, which you know, what has been the story of my online gaming, you know, ever more. So yeah, a weird music game mashup there. Yeah, music to squat behind crates to is my favourite Ben Folds album. Yeah, I think I feel bad sort of with the Randy Newman thing, because I do laugh instinctively every time you say it. And I realised that you have, you know, had every single hackie and I have no knowledge of his work. The thing is though, I wouldn’t even, he wouldn’t even be on my radar if Toy Story had never happened. But that just obviously is. That’s obviously where everyone’s relationship to… Where it got really bad was when they sent him up in Family Guy. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was just like permission to Lampoon Castle even more. It’s like, oh, we now know the guy you’re talking about. It’s that funny guy from Family Guy. To just throw in some more albums then, I guess, we’re on this subject. What was happening musically? You probably know. Yeah, so I just remember that By The Way album by Red Hot Chili Peppers being fucking everywhere this year. I mean, it was really good and I really liked it at the time. It took a few more years for me to sour on them a little bit. I think it was actually when they filed their lawsuit against California Cation, the TV show, I thought, that’s rock and roll, isn’t it? Calling your lawyers Jesus. So that’s what I got to thought of then. I remember there was an Oasis album that came out this year. It was like a big comeback album, Heathen Chemistry. It was all right. It was fine. I had a mate who was obsessed with it. I listened to that loads. This is also the year that Avril Lavigne breaks out, unsurprisingly, lots of boys at 14 years old who like goth girls massively into Avril Lavigne, like Kelsa Preece, very shocking for the listeners, I’m sure. Also, there was a second Coldplay album that was a little bit more middle of the road this year, Rush of Blood to the Head. The first Coldplay album Parachute is pretty good. The second one was a little bit poppy. It had a couple of good songs in it. When I was at college, Coldplay were a cool band to be into for sure. I think it only changes when they get to fix you and it’s like, this is actually awful and I just need to switch this off. But even then, they are obviously a massive band. But yeah, they definitely had more of a sort of like indie vibe and they were perceived that way for at least like a couple of albums. So yeah, there’s some good singles on there. But that’s basically all I can remember. I’m not also like not much of a, as previously discussed, trying to describe music on a podcast is really difficult. So I don’t even bother. So yeah, but so you get 30 seconds of that and five minutes of Randy Newman. That’s how the podcast should be really. No, I think that’s the right ratio for us. Also, Matthew, you must love this film. Minority Report came out this year. I remember that being like a big deal. I think I felt like a lot of people I knew went to see that. It was just sort of like the, it was just the sort of film that they don’t make anymore, right? It was just, you know, I know it’s based on a Philip K Dick story, right? But it was very sort of the way it was sort of like the technology was depicted and stuff. And it was like Spielberg just still had a bit of a bit of like his blockbuster sort of prowess, you know what I mean? In making this. So yeah, yeah, that was amazing. I wonder like if some of this stuff passed you by as well, because you were a little bit older than me, but triple X of Vin Diesel was a big deal in my school. I knew a boy who had like a bisexual awakening from Vin Diesel in that film, which I think you are right to laugh because I just don’t, I can’t see how Vin Diesel would be sexy to people. He just has like this, I don’t know, it’s just something about his vibe that doesn’t give off sexiness. I can’t quite explain it, but that… Don’t you mean his bisexual awakening? So yeah, that was a thing that happened. Eight Mile was like the thing that everyone I think thought was really illicit, that they’d seen the M&M film in my school, so it was obviously Eight Mile. That was your bisexual awakening. I was reading quite a story about Mekki Pfeiffer, it was an interview with him about making that film, it was on Vulture a few weeks ago, and like it’s funny because I think that film is really dated in a bunch of ways if you watch it, like I don’t think that like his character is like the black friend, I would say is very underwritten, and then you’ve got really badly depicted Brittany Murphy character in it. It’s the sort of like wrap-off scenes and it are really good though, and you got Anthony Mackie, bit of an early role for him as well, so it’s like there’s reasons to watch it, but I think otherwise it’s sort of like it’s a little bit dated, but definitely at the time that and all those songs that were associated with it as well, like Lose Yourself, that was just fucking everywhere in 2002, I remember. So yeah, those come to mind. But I don’t know, were those kind of films that were just too immature to you, Matthew, would you? Oh, no. At 18 or 17 have gone to sea, eight mile? I didn’t. I did watch it eventually, but only because it was sold to me as a serious piece of dramatic work that had been like Oscar nominated. If you were like Oscar nominated, I’d probably track it down and try and watch it. I was quite invested in Lose as like, I thought that was what was the arbiter of good taste, which obviously I now know is preposterous. Yeah, I didn’t have any beef with it. What about XXX? Did that happen for you this year? I didn’t see that at the cinema. I thought that looked garbage. I’ve never really been in on Vin Diesel. The first pitch blackened Chronicles of Ridiculous Sides. He makes more sense as a video game protagonist than as an actor. Do you know what I mean? I think it just makes sense in first-person games, basically. Voice of the Iron Giant. I dig that. Yeah. Well, I suppose that’s probably enough of our reflections from 2002, isn’t it, Matthew? Shall we start talking about games 50 minutes into the podcast? Yeah. Well, yes. Yes, I guess. Is there anything more you wanted to add? There’s no pressure. I’ve got a story about the GameCube launch, which I can… Yeah. Well, yeah. Let’s start with that. So basically, before we do our top 10 list, we also do it, always do it like a lay of the land. So it’s interesting, actually, Matthew. I was curious, to what extent do you think our 2002 list benefit from many of the 2001 games that launched in the US and Japan being delayed until the next year in Europe? Has that made this list harder to sort of construct? Is this like a rare good year because of those circumstances? Yeah, a rare good year specifically in the UK makes this a confusing episode for our US listeners because it means, again, it’s got games that are old and a couple of games didn’t make it because they came out in 2003 here. Looking at you, Metroid Prime. Yeah, yeah. The worst bit of that whole delay was reading magazines and just being so hyped because they do import reviews and it’s funny how many guests we’ve had on this podcast who’ve talked about buying a foreign console so they could play import games. At the time, it never crossed my mind. The idea of just owning the base version of the console seemed very luxurious. So the idea of being aware that that was a thing that was readily available. I feel like I missed out on being a much cooler games person earlier on by following the rules. I could have been playing all these cool games on an American GameCube. Yeah, it’s sort of like the GameCube is aware as well in that they actually like the barriers to to sort of playing import games were dropped quite a lot compared to the PS2. Like you just had to put in that action replay thing, right? And it would just I think I’ve still got one now actually for the US games I’ve got. But I don’t think there was any other console where is that easy to play import games, right? I didn’t even stretch as far as that. Yeah, cops might come bang you up for playing Animal Crossing two years earlier. But yeah, OK, so key video game events this year then. So the two main ones are the European launch of the Xbox in March and then the GameCube launches in May in 2002. So yeah, those are the key events. A little bit on the Xbox then. So I remember the pitch of this console being Microsoft’s big push into console gaming. I remember feeling like the games were pitched a little bit older than how I perceived myself at the time. I remember thinking the PS2 was kind of like on my level in terms of how it was being pitched. The GameCube was maybe being pitched a little bit younger than me at the time. And then, yeah, the Xbox was like sort of maybe it’s going for my dad’s age or something like that. So I was definitely intrigued by it, especially as someone who’s playing a lot of PC games at the time. But Halo was something that I’d known about for years because it was originally coming to Mac and then PC. So I’d read about it in PC magazines and seen screenshots of it. It wasn’t something I was like in my heart of hearts, like mega passionate about. Oh, I have to play this FPS where you shoot aliens. I think it was just that there was such strong buzz coming out of the US about Halo. Like I remember buying an import issue of EGM this year. I think the first time I’d ever done that. And then reading about Halo in there and just understanding then like what a phenomenon was being created, essentially. So that was sort of like the that was a narrative of the Xbox to me. So I remember Matthew, it was pitched a little bit older and the Halo, even in those sort of like times where you just could only read about the stuff in magazines, Halo just had this wave of hype behind it. I know we’ve had disagreements about this in the past, but how it was pitched just didn’t speak to me at all. It really did pass me by. Like, you know, I read Games Master, so I saw the coverage, but it just wasn’t sold as something I was interested in. I was so all in on the GameCube. I had kind of tunnel vision and it is hard to kind of go back to that and think back to what was the story. You know, if you weren’t really following it and you weren’t invested in it, it is possible for stuff to pass you by. And I know that sounds absolutely ridiculous as someone who was into games in 2002. But honestly, it wasn’t like a big concern for me. I’ve got an interesting stat for you, actually. So in 2002, Halo was the 15th best selling game in the UK. And there were no Nintendo games above it in the charts. So it outsold Final Fantasy X, it outsold TimeSplitters 2, it outsold loads and loads of stuff that it basically did. Yeah, but it just didn’t infiltrate our social group. That’s all. Yeah, that’s fair enough. And to be honest, I didn’t know many people who had it at launch. There was, I remember one kid who bought it straight away and something Xbox did is they launched it and they dropped the price almost immediately. They slashed, I think, like 80 quid or 100 quid or something like that off the price. And then they actually gave all their early adopters two free games, which must have been like a massive expense to them. But that’s, I just knew a kid who got like Max Payne off the back of that, which must have been very happy about because that was a pretty great port of Max Payne, if I recall. So yeah, but yeah, that was the Xbox. And then I think it was like a gradual, because it had to be, right? Because Microsoft didn’t have a footprint in that market. So it was slow building. And I remember it was at the end of this year that my friend Donald got an Xbox and got Halo. And that’s when it like properly entered my life. You know, sort of like for the first time, I remember going around his house on like Boxing Day. I think it was, or maybe it was like shortly after that. Was Donald one of the Human Swat Sticker? No, he wasn’t. He got to avoid that. No, okay, good. I just like to keep track of who was and wasn’t in the Human Swat Sticker. Yeah, you got me and Andrew Matthews, if you want to get us cancelled. Steven Ridley and Graham Wright. These were all the perpetrators. So yeah, just… Years from now, when one by one you’re being murdered, that will be the connective tissue in the Murder Mystery Novel. Like, wait a second, they were all members of the Save Human Swat Sticker. You’re thinking of fucking Inside Man when you’re coming up with that. Tell you what though, in the age of like social media, someone would have gone, oh my god, my classmates just made a Swat Sticker on stage and then posted a very blurry picture on Twitter and we would have been cancelled at like the age of 14. That’s what would have happened basically. And rightly so, to be honest. I think it would have been filmed, uploaded and it would be so clearly naff and comical that it would become a legendary meme. Yeah, like Star Wars Kid basically. Swat Sticker Boys. I think they might have filmed the whole thing. Hopefully that evidence has long been destroyed. If you ever try and get into politics, that’s when it comes out. Yeah, exactly. So yes. Okay, so let’s switch tack to the Gamecube launch then Matthew. What do you remember about this? I mean you remember it had a little price cut in the weeks running up to it and I was really excited because I had enough money for it. You know, I can’t remember what it was and what it became, but it… I think it was $149 and $129. I think that’s what happened. But I was just like, great, I’m actually on the way to actually having a game for it. Like I only had enough money to buy the console, which is obviously slightly tragic that you could then have nothing to play on it. With the money, I rented some games from Blockbuster. I played like a selection of the launch games that way because I couldn’t afford it. In the run up to this, my mum said I couldn’t buy it before my AS levels because she was worried it would be too much of a distraction. Obviously, that was incredibly painful. So I still pre-ordered one for launch day and I bought it. And I was like, how am I going to get this GameCube home without my mum finding out? Because it’s in quite a big box. I had this quite large rucksack. When I was in secondary school, my mum brought me this like special back pain rucksack. You had back pain when you were a kid? No, no. I didn’t have back pain, but she bought it to… She must have been sold it somewhere on the grounds of like, this will prevent your child having back pain later in life. It was from the National Back Pain Association. So I had this rucksack which had this huge logo on it that said NBPA. And for years I endured people being like, National Backpackers Association. And I’d be like, uh, actually, no, it’s National Back Pain Association. So much cooler. Wow. So you had that at the Randy Newman gags. It’s just a walking target, basically. Yeah, it was rough. But anyway, this bag, to help avoid back pain, it had all this padding and it had like a structure inside to stop it from like losing its shape. And I realized that if I cut all that stuff out, I’d be able to hide this GameCube box inside this back pain association rucksack. So I modified it at Homebase. I was working at Homebase that night. I remember being in the staff room at Homebase, chopping my rucksack to shit so I could squeeze in this huge GameCube box, which if you were to see this thing, it was the least subtle disguise ever. Because it’s like, you know, we’re in a cartoon, a snake eats something and then its neck is the perfect shape of that thing. Like a bicycle or whatever. It was like that. It was just obviously a huge rectangular box with very taut rucksack material stretched over it. Yeah, absolutely ruined that backpack. I’m probably now have back pain because I destroyed the structural integrity of my anti-back pain backpack, but it did help get the GameCube home undetected. And then I just had to smuggle it to my dad’s house. I knew that he’d be more of a collaborator in the kind of project. So, yeah, I took that there and then spent that. You know, I knew I couldn’t take it back and play it at home. Like trying to hide a GameCube at home from my mom would have been like a preposterous. That’s like a Cheers sitcom story, you know? Yeah, well, I was just like, the whole thing reminds me a bit of like a Jonathan Creek plot line, which I imagine you were like absorbing all Jonathan Creek content at the time. Yeah, maybe a bit of Creek logic. This might even have been the year that they did the episode where there’s that preposterous solution where they bash open like a door, sort of Shining style with an axe. And then it turns out the guy with the axe has built a gun into like the bottom of the axe and then uses it to shoot the woman who’s inside, who then points at like the window. So you think it’s like a killer who’s escaped out the window, but actually she’s pointing at the reflection of the man with the axe, preposterous. But imagine that’s the sort of thing that embeds itself in your brain. You’re like, I could hide a thing in another thing. I could just see the sort of like the corpse wearing there. Like putting something in a rucksack isn’t like an outrageous idea. But I mean like carving out space inside a rucksack for a hidden compartment definitely has big sort of like there’s a theatrical wear to that I feel. There is. I mean, the other thing, so I was looking at thinking I could just unpack it and destroy the GameCube box, but I just couldn’t do that. Because you were like, this is the first console I bought with my own money. It’s like, I’m not going to destroy this box and have a brand new GameCube rattling around in my rucksack. Like it has to be like this. So, yeah, I mean, but I got that. I took it home, played Monkey Ball, Roadbleeder. Just had an amazing time. So my brilliant ruse absolutely paid off. I don’t know if I ever told my mom I did that. So when she listens to this podcast, which she does do, it’s quite funny. Whenever she listens to these old ones, she always gets quite sort of nostalgic for them. And she’s like, oh, you know, it’s like, oh, it’s like a little window into your psychology at the time that I never really knew. You know, it’s like she’s sort of getting to know me better through this podcast. But actually, I’ve misremembered half this stuff, so I wouldn’t I wouldn’t read too much into it. It wasn’t an act of malice. I just didn’t want you to tell me off. OK, good. Well, that’s that’s good to know. And that’s like that’s that’s your story. The thing is, though, did the GameCube I mean, I suppose by May 2002, it did have enough games to derail your A levels. If you’d had the sort of the A S levels, if you’d had like the Japanese launch line up of like Monkey Ball and Luigi’s Mansion and I think Wave Race, then I think that wouldn’t necessarily have derailed. That would have like derailed a weekend, but I think you’d have got through OK. But Smash Bros and Rogue Leader, that’s where it gets a little bit dicier, you know. So, yeah, yeah. OK, interesting. OK, so so what the other thing we do is we always go over like what was happening with sort of the E3s around around these these years as well, because they’re a nice sort of snapshot of what was going on. You can see how the industry perceives itself, how it sells games to people, that sort of thing. And what’s in a wider sense, like something I found quite interesting about the way this stuff was pitched is Nintendo had a sort of like a video in the middle of their when it revealed Animal Crossing and it coming to North America, they had like a very Frankie Muniz-esque kid talking about Animal Crossing and then he had a bunch of friends around his age who he had his memory card and he was like, I’m going to bring my town over to your house and stuff like that. And it said everything about how Nintendo and the way it was selling itself at the time was just a little bit out of step with where the rest of games culture was at because Xbox’s ad, they had this E3 promotional video where it basically plays like a diary, essentially, so like day one and then it shows this dude who’s on a couch and he’s ignoring calls from his girlfriend or hanging up on his girlfriend, that sort of thing, to keep playing games and then a different game is rolled out each of the days and then by the end of it, he’s just like, hasn’t left his house in years. But he’s like a dude in his late 20s, he’s got a beard. It’s all about how this stuff is sold to people, I think, and how you can see that Microsoft saw it one way, Nintendo saw it another. And I think Wes was talking about when he came on about how this is the frosted tip some 41 times. And so Nintendo was not quite where that was. I don’t think this is the year of Des Lyon and with the purple moustache, Matthew, but I think we’re close to that year. So some stuff happening away from the console manufacturers is worth spotlighting because other things are happening in games at the same time. This is the year that Half-Life 2, the Half-Life 2 trailer leaked, I think. People get their first glimpse of like Alex in first person and like her facial expressions and like physics objects being moved around and just like sort of City 17 more generally, just sort of like a snapshot of some of the enemies. And this was like a major deal for PC players at the time, as you might expect, long awaited sequel. Half-Life 2 had some massive problems with leaks, but this wasn’t massively on my radar because I don’t think I was just I just wasn’t that online at the time. But do you remember there being the first glimpses of this, Matthew? Very clear memory of seeing my first footage of Half-Life 2 at university rather than college. So in probably 2004, when they put out like the big demo, basically announced how they were going to release it and everything. I remember seeing it there and being like, holy shit, I’ve never seen anything like that. So, yeah, I wasn’t really following PC gaming that close. I’m going to say that I was buying PC games, so I must have been getting them from PC gamer. But yeah, I don’t really remember this, to be honest. I don’t either, but it’s just interesting to read about in retrospect. I always just like to find out what was sort of like, what became the big thing that people were talking about that year. And this was one of them. I thought this was the year that the Halo 2 sort of like, infamous E3 demo debut, but that was the following year. So the other big thing that happened is that Doom 3 essentially broke cover this year. And there was, I think there was like a behind closed doors only thing you could go to where they just showed off how the game worked. And obviously with Doom 3 they had like this revolutionary like lighting. So it had a bit more of a survival horror edge. So that became the big thing that people were talking about on the show floor. The way sort of reading about in retrospect is that this kind of stole some of the thunder of the console manufacturers because it was just such a long awaited game. So that happened. Okay, we get to Nintendo then. Nintendo are the only one who have their conference from this year online in full. So I watched out on the train yesterday while going to Yates to fetch a Sega Saturn from a listener. You’ve been to Yates before? I was making bets to myself when I got off. Will it have a nail bar and a betting shop? I saw a nail bar. I didn’t see a betting shop. But that’s safe with any British town, isn’t it, these days? So yeah, I watched this. They’re going big on this games giant initiative. A slightly dull marketing man comes out and talks about how all these games are going to sell in the millions of units. And he was like, oh, we’ve got more big games in a nine month window than we ever have in our history, which is kind of plausible when you think about how slow the N64 release cadence was, right? So they had like, they made a good point, you know, that basically Mario Sunshine, Zelda, what would become Wind Waker, but didn’t have the name at the time, Metroid Prime and Star Fox Adventures were all going to launch quite close together. And in theory, supercharge the success of the GameCube. Obviously, that didn’t quite work. And the GameCube was firmly a third place console, you know, basically just from from when it launched then onwards. Xbox slowly clawed some US market share, but the GameCube never really took off, unfortunately. But I can see why, actually. That’s a pretty strong combo of things in retrospect. If they had a Nintendo Direct now where they had new games in those all those series and then they all release within nine months, we would consider that a massive deal. I mean, you know, the closest comparison would be the Switch release window up until Mario Odyssey coming out, right? It was just, you know, a very, very exciting time. When I look back very fondly on GameCube, I’m probably looking back very fondly on the first two years of GameCube. Yeah. And then I don’t really buy anything. And then Resident Evil 4 is this, like, holy shit at the it sort of closer, you know, a bit further on that kind of renews interest. It felt really exciting, you know, reading the mags back then. There was always a huge Nintendo game for them to have on the cover, like NGC. Just it felt to me the place to be. Yeah, it’s interesting as well, because it just again, I was I was super pumped about all these games where I just didn’t have enough money to get a GameCube as well as a PS2. So I felt like I’d made my choice a little bit. But in retrospect, you know, I think this holds up very well as a lineup. And I forgot the other thing that Nintendo did. Nintendo actually, from their perspective, were trying really hard with the third party publishers because they had like, obviously, the Capcom 5 deal. So a bunch of Resident Evil games and other cool things coming to GameCube via that. But they also had a deal with Namco they talked about here. So they talk about how Soul Calibur 2 is coming to GameCube. Obviously, that came to everything, but they had Link in it. So it did have a big difference there. Some GBA games and Namco were working on a shooter starring Star Fox, which would go on to be Assault, which is not a very well regarded game. But, you know, that’s where that deal came from. And they talked about how they had this like triforce of of like partnerships is like Namco, Sega, Nintendo. They put this like triangle logo on screen and talked about that. And again, I can see why in retrospect that seemed like a good strategy. But you just like, you know, this is a this is a world where GTA was changing the way this stuff worked. And so what third party publisher mattered at the time was obviously Take-Two, right? So they just didn’t have that, which is unfortunate. But they did have some good stuff here, though. So they have this kickoff of Metro Prime, which obviously looks absolutely fucking amazing. Resident Evil Zero, which would not be sort of all that. But again, like, you know, coming hot on the heels of the Resident Evil remake. So Gamecube having a having a good moment there with survival horror and along the same lines. Eternal Darkness was here that releases the following year, I believe. So another interesting sort of like early naughties horror game. And they got a bunch of cool GBA games as well. Big round of applause and a link to the past comes on screen. There’s also some Game and Watch Gallery thing I don’t remember. Got a second Golden Sun game, I believe. Mario Advance 3. Again, that gets like a big round of applause from people. It was the one with the baby Mario, Matthew. Is that the right one? Oh, Yoshi’s Island. Yeah, it’s Yoshi’s Island, this one. And then there’s some Disney thing I don’t remember that looks a bit like the old Castle of Illusion games. Everyone had some online game stuff here that’s not very interesting. We talked about Socom on previous 2001 episodes. So everyone was going all in on that. But it’s interminable to listen to in retrospect, obviously. But they did have Phantasy Star Online, which I know people were big into. It’s not a game I have much experience with. But, you know, it’s one of the final Sonic Team games in their old form. Then basically we kind of like get to Miyamoto on stage to show off Sunshine. Looks pretty great. Honestly, the way when he’s demoing it, it looks looks pretty exciting, looks cool. You can see why the flood gun seems all that. But obviously the end product people weren’t necessarily happy with. It’s not, you know, it’s not necessarily that well regarded amongst the other 3D Mario games, which Matthew’s talked about before. Wind Waker is here. Like I say, doesn’t have a name yet. But the it’s really interesting because you can tell they’re responding to the backlash a bit here. The people in the room are cheering. But the way Miyamoto pitches it is kind of along the lines of, well, actually this cartoony art style allows you to be more expressive and therefore realistic. So the language is a tiny bit defensive of we know people don’t like this. So we have to further explain why it’s so dumb. Yeah, it is because it just the thing gamers got most wrong. Yeah, well, I mean, they’re always getting things wrong, aren’t they? But this is yeah, this is like you’re just watching this on a CRT. And you’re just like, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Basically, that’s just incredible. But yeah, it was just, again, Nintendo being a bit out of step with the moment, unfortunately. But the game is obviously to the test of time. You have Nogoshi pre-tan appearing on stage. Obviously, F-Zero GX is the big game that ends the show. But it’s quite a nice bit where Nogoshi, there’s some guy from Namco, Miyamoto and some other guy. I don’t know where he’s from. All play four player Zelda four swords together with GBAs linked to the GameCube. So, you know, again, an experience that not many people would have just because of the hardware demands of doing so. But I don’t know. It’s sort of like in isolation. If you don’t know that GTA Vice City is going to come out this year, this seems like it’s a pretty amazing array of stuff, really. What do you make of all this, Matthew? Yeah, absolutely. I wish I’d rewatch this actually. I didn’t rewatch this presentation beforehand. Mainly because I find some of those old conferences just so businessy because they were more like talking to retailers than punters. Like I said earlier, living these things through magazines just seemed like an embarrassment at riches. You know, it was a good time. I really felt like GameCube was going to be the place to be. Game of Advance wasn’t really on my radar. You know, I didn’t have one until a bit after the fact, really. I was always a little bit dismissive of that. If I could redo these years again, well, I mean, there’s lots I’d redo. I mean, I’m not going to say the only thing I got wrong in the early noughties was I didn’t have a game by France. That’s obviously preposterous. I mean, I’d stop all kinds of… Well, you know, anyway. War on Terror. Matthew would stop the War on Terror. Well, you could stop the War on Terror. I mean, anyway. That’s probably a better use of time travel. A couple of other things I missed, actually, is the Wavebird controller was here. That was about to launch. They talked a bit about that. There was quite a big Star Fox Adventures push here, which obviously that game would not be anyone’s favorite rare game or favorite Star Fox game. But probably at the time, hype was still pretty high for that one. And then there was the Animal Crossing thing was the other interesting wrinkle. Because like I say, they had this little Frankie Muniz-esque boy sort of setting the game. But there’s one point where a girl walks in and you’re like, Dan, they’re so close to figuring out exactly how to pitch this, but they don’t quite know what they’ve got with Animal Crossing yet. And so that was the thing is like, I think people like maybe don’t remember with that game, is it? It started very much as a sort of like import scene. Oh, you’ve got to play this kind of like compulsive game. Like it was very much a Nintendo person’s game. And then when you get to the DS, it’s sort of like its profile changes and it finds this massive audience. Is that kind of how you remember Animal Crossing? It was a little bit more niche this first go around? Yeah, definitely. I can’t remember which magazine it was. It might have been Cube gave away a demo action replay disc, which let you play Animal Crossing on import if you had the US copy. And it felt like a, oh, this is a weird place where all these strange animals say all this weird shit to you. Like it was the kind of weird localization. It still is a little bit that. They’ve just framed it so much better. Yeah. It’s quite, it’s quite, it is one of the weirder games to be like quite a mainstream hit. Yeah. We all miss this profile of import game as well, I think, where it’s within reach theoretically, but it’s also, you could also pick it up straight away and understand why it’s compulsive. You wouldn’t be like, oh, this is impenetrable weird. You’d be like, I get this. I get why this is so compelling. So, yeah, I kind of miss import games like this where, oh, it’s available in the US and it will work on something you’ve got in your house. And yeah, yeah. I never had a Wavebird. You mentioned the Wavebird there. Yeah. I never had one because my gaming setup was I needed to sit quite close to the TV because that’s also where my mini fridge was plugged in. So if I wanted to be able to lean over and get one of my little cartons of apple juice and a cold Kit Kat, I didn’t need to be whatever 15 feet away from the TV. Mini fridge still going strong in that O2. Oh, mini fridge was like I was on top of the world. Friday night, Homebase shift, topping that bad boy up. Just yeah. Yeah, I used to buy a big, big bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk as well, like a big chunky, whatever the weight was, big, big bar. And put that in there and then munch that over the weekend. Oh, fucking great. I live like a king. I don’t think my weekends now are massively different from that. I’m already plotting which of the various like eggs I’m going to go and get this Sunday. So whether it’s little caramel eggs or the cream eggs or some kind of like white chocolate cream egg, that’s still very much the same. You’re planning your Sunday egg haul. Very much so. Yeah, I’m quite excited about it. So yeah. OK, so that’s Nintendo. It’s like a stronger array of stuff. And like I say, it’s the only conferences on online. Like Matthew says, very businessy. There’s a salesman who’s so boring. The fact the salesman has big, you know, when Jeb Bush failed to run for office versus Donald Trump. And there’s that Please Clap. Do you remember that bit when he did that? It was like it had a bit has a bit of those vibes of that guys on stage. But the games are good. So that’s all that matters. Won’t take as long to get through the next two because Sony and Microsoft, like I say, their conferences are not online, but they do have these big promotional E3 videos that are online. So Sony is not very exciting compared to 2001. So you might remember in The Best Games of 2001, they had FF10. They had Metal Gear Solid 2, Devil May Cry. That was like all like the first three games on one slide at their E3 conference. It’s just like out of control. Good. This year, they don’t have anything quite as exciting. So I think like this is their big push. You realize in retrospect this must have been their strategies. They went heavy on the like, we must have a platforming icon for PS2 because they didn’t they didn’t own Crash Bandicoot, Vivendi did. So the previous year, they’d launched Jak and Dexter. This year, they launched Sly Cooper and Matthew’s favorite game of all time, Ratchet and Clank on PS2. That happened. So those are like two of their big games. And the first game that Phil Harrison in this video talks up is Primal, which is a game I don’t think anyone really remembers. I only ever played the demo, but it’s a Sony Cambridge game. So I probably worked with some of the people who made it, Frontier. I found that a few times where I looked up people I was talking to at Frontier, and I was like, oh, this person worked on Heavenly Sword. I guess that makes sense because they live in Cambridge or wherever. So this is a game where you play as a very Buffy-esque woman, described to think as a strong female character by Phil Harrison, very much vernacular at the time kind of thing. And then you alternate between her and this big gargoyle man, basically, who was like her Giles-style sort of like watcher kind of guy. And then I think the same studio made a very similar game called Ghost Hunter, which I did own, actually. I bought it a bundle at the end of that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s another similar deal where you alternate between a man new hunted ghost and a ghost. And those are like the two characters you played as, but kind of like slightly six out of ten ish third person games from the time. So I think I think the point I’ve always made with the with Sony is that they didn’t actually need their own in-house games in order to make the console a success. In fact, Matthew, I checked. And when we did our draft for the PS2, only two games were picked that were published by Sony. Could you name them? That’d be a good test. Oh, three were, actually. Three were. Three? How much am I saying? I’m trying to think why the fuck we picked. All I can think is Red Faction. And it wasn’t that. I’ll give you a clue for one of yours. It was a horror game. It was made by some quite prestigious horror people. Horror game? Not like a Siren? Yep. That was your survival horror pick was Forbidden Siren. A game involving big monsters. Oh, Shadow of the Clusters. Yep. And the last one was a platforming game. You can work that one out, I’m sure. Jack and Dagster. Yeah. So the rest of them were all like games from third parties. So basically they, you know, that was like what was sort of powering Sony at the time. So there’s a bit of Death May Cry 2 here. There’s a Silent Hill 3 trailer with a banging music in it. Akira Yamaoka. I think it’s like the, I don’t know if you know the You’re Not Here song from Silent Hill 3, Matthew. But that is like a pretty, pretty good 2003 ire song. And then there’s something about the PS2 reaching 30 million sales. So again, massively dominant. I don’t know if Xbox or GameCube even got close to that number ultimately. So MGS2 Substance had a great trailer here. One of my all time favorites. It’s sort of like, it’s loaded the weirdest bits of the game, like the last bits of the game, like about the Patriots being AI and all this stuff. Cut over all these VR training and strange what-if scenarios where you’ve got Snake running around them, Big Shell, and then there’s a skateboarding sequence they added to the Substance version. Just really, really good stuff. So that’s Sony, Matthew. Not much more to say there, I don’t think. So Microsoft has Blink’s The Time Sweeper again, one of Matthew’s favorite games of all time. Sort of their attempt to launch a platforming icon. I think you can still play this backwards compatible on Xbox. I don’t think they did that in the sequel, though. So there is actually a sequel to this game as well. Making that backwards compatible just feels like a very ironic move. They know what they’re doing with that. Yeah, I think they kind of like… I think it did get some goodwill from some strange people. And there was Brute Force, which looked a bit like Halo crossed with Gears, but wasn’t really sort of a breakout on Xbox. There was also… The Buffy the Vampire Slayer game figures quite heavily here, because I forgot that was an Xbox exclusive, the first one of those they made, which is just OK in my opinion. I played it a few years ago for the first time. It’s sort of like… It’s just like a standard third-person game of the time, I would say. Lots of puzzles, lots of slightly ropey hand-to-hand combat. Crimson Skies, High Road to Revenge, which doesn’t launch this year. Why have we never had Xbox Giles in our games control? Yeah, I think… Well, next time, we’ll revisit that. That would be good. Okay, so Crimson Skies, which is a fantastic game. We talked about that before. I’m sure that will come up in a future episode again. Some sports that no one cares about, or at least we don’t. Kakuto Shoujin, Back Alley Brutal, a fighting game no one remembers. Dead to Rights, which was like Dumbass, Namco, Max Payne. Kung Fu Chaos, quite a problematic fave in the first Ninja Theory game. I think that game is not very well remembered, but it’s basically like Smash Bros with loads of Kung Fu movie style levels. It’s pretty fun. It was quite problematic, but it was very fun, I would say. Me and my friend Donald play that loads on the Xbox. I think that’s all right. As long as it’s fun, you can do anything. It would be fun to swastika on the stage boy, wouldn’t it? Okay. Mech Assault, which is obviously for Americans. We don’t really play those in Europe, is my understanding. Kotor, would be a massive deal, obviously. I do remember that getting a bit of hype. Torque, T-O-R-K, Tough Hang Prehistoric Platformer. Honestly, does not look very good. I have never heard of that. I think there was a bit of a like, they started well, and then it got gradually worse as it went. Well, I say that actually. We’ve got Shenmue 2 next and Unreal Championship, which I do remember being really good at Xbox. Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball, which Margot Robertson talked about in the podcast. That was fun hearing her talk about that unusual game. Steel Battalion, a Back Page sort of like fave that neither of us have played still. I don’t own it. Yeah, I do own it and haven’t played it. So I’ve got a good excuse. Yeah, that’s on me. Tao Feng, a very cursed horny fighting game with animalish fighting. So you’ve got like bouncing breasts, but then women who look a bit like cats. It’s just not good. It’s a tough hang. Toe Jam and L3, which is one of those series that people pretend to like, isn’t it? And Turok Evolution and Vex to really close out in sort of like no style whatsoever. So a couple of stinkers there at the end. So, yeah, I would say Nintendo actually quite clearly has the best line up of stuff. Probably Xbox in second place there. And then Sony weirdly, Sony just doesn’t need it because they probably know that Vice City is coming out. So they don’t have to do anything. That’s basically what happened there. So that’s the year, Matthew. That’s the kind of details around the years. Anything else you want to interrogate there? Shall we take a break and come back with our top 10s? Yeah, I think we’ll maybe cover some of those things in our top 10s. So, OK, it was a pleasure hearing about The Backpack. So, yeah, good times. We’ll take a quick break and come back with our top 10s. Welcome back to the podcast. So, time for the top 10s of 2002. We have two top 10 lists here, Alternating, Counting Down, and then when we get to each game’s highest placement in the other person’s list. God, I can never explain this properly. You know what a top 10 is. Let’s get on with it. So, Matthew, what’s your number 10? My number 10 is No One Lives Forever 2, A Spy in Homs Way. Not on my list. This is Monolith’s first person stealth shooter for PC. Big Austin Powers energy. May have come up in one of the game drafts. Yeah, it has, yeah, or maybe, yeah, something like that. I feel like we’ve talked about it and talked about its cursed Austin Powers energy. Yeah, North East PC gaming draft. Yeah, it has that kind of slightly sort of 60s James Bond Austin Powers energy. It has levels that kind of remind me of Ken Adams’ production design in those James Bond films, like, you know, giant bases inside preposterous locations. I think that was true at the first No One Lives Forever, but where they really landed this was, I think they just sort of found the game a bit more. They really leant into the kind of stealth element of being a spy and had much deeper stealth mechanics. You could turn lights off, you could hide bodies, you had better gadgets and things to kind of aid you being sneaky. So it ends up playing like a Austin Powers version of Thief a little bit, but one which could also slip into out and out action if it wanted to do preposterous set pieces. I mean the really famous one in this is you go to a trailer park in Ohio, I want to say, and there is a tornado comes in, starts ripping the park apart and you end up fighting these ninjas in the middle of this tornado and then you go into this trailer and it gets lifted up and bits of it are falling off and you’re fighting a character inside. So it has a real spectacle as well. I remember just reading about that in the magazines. I think Games Master, you know, in their little best bit box out that they’d always do would be like, you get to fight ninjas in a hurricane in this thing. I thought, well, I have to play this. And yeah, ended up really enjoying that, taking it very slowly, methodically clearing a level out of all those people, but also enjoying the bright, colourful levels and maybe some like national stereotypes that don’t hold up as well now. Well, any game in the early noughties that has like a level set in India is often a little bit of a kind of clenched teeth emoji. You know, there’s a French, like all the French wing of this evil organisation Harm, they’re all like mimes and played up with very naff kind of comedy French accents, which is probably equally offensive. But I don’t think it was like a cruel game, particularly I think it was just a bit cheeky, as things were in the early noughties. That’s what we called it, cheekiness. Put us in jail. This was also the year of gold member, wasn’t it, Matthew? The worst of the Austin Powers films? Do you think it was? No, I prefer it to two. I suppose like the Michael Caine factor does sort of elevate it slightly. I think that and the bit with the bit they go to Japan and there’s the, oh my god, it’s a monster that’s legally distinct from Godzilla. I really like that. That is good actually, yeah. I think I mentioned on the podcast, my brother became obsessed with Austin Powers last year after I’ve showed him the first one. Then went and watched him and sent me about 18 messages about what he’d just seen. I was very bizarre. Those films must be so confusing. I saw a tweet the other day that said if Austin Powers had been frozen in the 60s, relatively speaking now, he would have been frozen in 1994. Can you imagine there being a film about wild 1994 culture? Well, that’s what these episodes are. These episodes are defrosting our opinions and ideas from 2002 to shock everyone in 2024. The funny thing is, I played the original No One Lives Forever because it came out on PS2. I think it might have come out even this year. I remember just thinking it felt a lot like other shooters, but just with that sort of like spy sort of British theme on top of it. Whereas it seemed like this more confidently just found its identity, like you say, a little bit of thief in there. Like it just, they just like they just maybe figured out a bit more. I don’t know. Yeah, definitely a little bit of Deus Ex. I wouldn’t want to call this like a proper immersive sin because I think it’s like stealth or stealth or bust a little bit. But yeah, like a cool thing. Kind of hard to think what the equivalent of this would be now. You know, just a strange license of its own. Doesn’t isn’t based on anything. Quite high production values. Obviously, this is monolith that go on to be Lord Shadow Mordor monolith. Yeah. And it’s making a Wonder Woman game that hasn’t been seen. Then it was there. They haven’t made a game since 2017. It’s quite a long time. But yeah, interesting. This isn’t the monolith of Xenoblade. They don’t go from No One Lives Forever 2, A Spying Harm’s Way, to making four Xenoblade games. For shame. They make Fear after this as well, which obviously has again major sort of like they were just an FPS sort of one of the masters from the time, really. And it’s sort of like yeah, that’s just not the identity of that studio anymore. So yeah, shame because it was this is a great a great time for this genre, right? There’s so many of them around. So yeah, I decided not to include Soldier of Fortune 2 because even though I played loads of it, it’s just it’s just so gnarly and kind of like, you know, the only thing you had going for it was Wounds Look Great, which is just a bit of a bleak thing to be into now. Yeah, fair enough. Okay, interesting. That’s a good number. I think we had some fresh observations there. Got to talk about Goldmember briefly. That was fun. Okay, my number 10, bound to be higher on your list, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2 Rogue Leader. Yes, higher on my list. Okay, so what’s your number nine? My number nine is another PC game. It’s Freedom Force by Irrational. Not on my list, but what’s in my honorable mentions? I think this is definitely the tail end of my PC interest, or maybe it’s our PC begins to run out of juice or heft, you know, in the coming years. So I sort of fell out of it a bit. Definitely by the time I get to university, I’m not doing PC gaming. But yeah, this just just seemed great. I mean, you know, like you say, Spider-Man, X-Men, these things are getting quite big at the time. Superheroes are kind of forefront of my mind. Here’s a game that lets you play as, okay, made up superheroes, the freedom force, you know, not based on anything to license. But the fantasy of being superpowered and having superpowers was really attractive. I mean, there’s a reason all the licensed superhero games, even the bad ones from the time do well, because I think deep down you’re like, I’d love to see that done well. I’d love to have, you know, feel that kind of power fantasy. And this game, by doing it as a real time tactics action RPG, so you’re a little bit kind of removed sort of from an isometric perspective. But the range of powers that you have as these outlandish characters, not just their inherent powers themselves, but like, you could pick up cars and lamp posts and use them as weapons and jump up onto rooftops and fight things. It ticked a lot of boxes of experiences I wanted to have in games. I don’t remember a huge amount about the fiction other than it kind of pulls from sort of golden era kind of comics. It’s very kind of pop party, very bright and colourful, but with like a knowing modern edge. I guess if I was to liken it to anything, it’s maybe got a bit of like the tick energy. Right. In terms of like it’s, it’s a very sort of, yes, we all talk like this and it’s sort of very preposterous, but also knowing that it’s, it’s, it’s quite silly. Yeah. Jack, Jack Kirby-esque energy to it. Like definitely the character designs on the, on the cover and stuff very much in that vein. There was a more colourful sequel, which was freedom force versus the third right was sending up more jingoistic kind of heroes, the kind of Captain America thing. And then what would their, their, their equivalents be for like the Nazis? But this is the one I played. I was really into it. Yeah, I played a bunch of this as well. It’s just a cool, slight, the kind of game that you just don’t. Well, I suppose as well like it, the fact this is an irrational game is like is always interesting, you know, just to think that you are five years from this to buy a shock is actually quite just such different types of games, but they were obviously a bit more of a gun for hire and developer at the time. And yeah, you can design your own superheroes in it as well. I just remember being like tactical, but also just really exciting and novel. Like there was no other really, no other game that was really using superheroes in this way at the time. The only other superhero games that were really in town were just movie tie ins. So, you know, obviously, like this is the year that there’s like a Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Raimi tie in. It’s just not very good. So that was bad. I rented that from blockbuster. So much of it is set inside. Why did they do that? This just seemed like a really fresh concept at the time because no one else was making a game that was inspired by, you know, by comic books, not the movies. So yeah, cool thing. When did the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games come onto the scene? Right, because they’re in a similar, slightly similar way. They’re a bit more simplified. I’d say they’re a more console version of this. Yeah, they are. I think they did. They do X-Men first. I think they do X-Men in like maybe 04 or something like that and or 05. So yeah, a few years along from that. But yeah, these games are on GOG. I think they’re a cool little cool little time capsule. And yeah, I like them. Okay, good stuff, Matthew. Well, my number nine is Star Wars Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Outcast. Is that on your list? I didn’t put it on my list. It’s definitely in my honorable mentions. Yeah, so another like boss game from Raven, who are just like really just the kings of the PCFBS, the early noughties, weren’t there? There’s like a window there where they’re just making making classic after classic. So yeah, so this is a sequel to very beloved late 90s Star Wars game, Jedi Knight. I definitely talked about this on the Star Wars, one of the three Star Wars podcasts we’ve done. Don’t know how you let me go away with that really, but she’s doing another one. It’s always good to come back to. Yeah, so they’ve never quite nailed the lightsaber combat in Jedi Knight. It was it was it was pretty good. They had the sort of like the right sound effects. There was like an excitement factor to it for sure, and definitely a novelty to to using a lightsaber in a game for the first time. But there was something about the dynamics of the one on one dueling. They just didn’t quite land. And then this game just takes it that step forward where it actually does feel like the lightsabers are clashing. It does feel like if you like make mistake, you’re fucked. It feels like a proper sort of like one on one duel in the way the movies do. Admittedly, a lot more frantic, a lot more sort of like mashing buttons. And they’re just hoping you don’t get sideswiped while you’re just sort of like sprinting around them in the sort of endlessly strafing. There’s a bit of that going on. So maybe not exactly what it’s like to watch Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson duel with Darth Maul. But you know, it’s, it’s definitely like the sort of it feels like you are fighting one on one. The stakes feel real. There’s a bunch of like moments in the game where you’re enter a room, you’ll see like an opponent just stood there, basically like hooded opponent stood there with a lightsaber. You just, you’re going to get that moment of you sort of like turn the lightsaber on. You know, he turns his on and then it’s just like it just kicks off. And then there’s just like force powers thrown in the mix too. So yeah, pushing each other, you know, electrocuting each other, sort of pulling them towards you. Just like frantic and exciting and just captured the Jedi experience so well. Like interesting thing is though that the sort of the single player campaign takes a while to get going. So the whole plot of the original Jedi Knight, the expansion basically meant that Kyle Katara, the protagonist swore off the force. So he steadily sort of like gets back into it in this game. So you get a few sort of like slightly slower paced shooter shooting levels by today’s standards, I would say. Even at the time, I don’t think they’re all that but then it does. I think like the second half of the game is when it really sort of comes to life. I remember that exact reaction of the thing that I’d read about and was excited to play was just held off for, it’s not for long, but it was a little bit jarring to be like, oh, where’s all the force powers and the lightsaber? That’s what I came for. This maybe should have made the list. It is a really great game. I didn’t have much investment in the bigger Kyle Katara story or the any of the expanded Star Wars stuff. But just mechanically, like I said, the power fantasy of the lightsaber was so good. Back then, that’s actually quite a big thing in a lot of the games I liked. It was games that let me do things that I’d seen in films or in other media that I wanted to try in a video game and hadn’t been tried before. And I don’t know why that seems less exciting to me now or just that maybe we’ve seen so many of these things, but like lightsabers, superhero, bullet time, those things really spoke to me at this period. Yeah, definitely. And I think as well, because this is also like the sort of the advent of, you know, obviously everyone getting broadband and online get play being more prevalent just meant that you could take that experience online and just fight real people with lightsabers. That’s just like, what an amazing progress to go from Jedi Knight’s more larval form of what this kind of game would offer and then just to just take it to that level where it’s so it’s so refined as an online experience. Just really, really exciting going on. I think if I can game ladder to try and get a game on this one, I remember just having a having a great time. All these Star Wars characters you could choose from also just had a really good power curve as well. You feel the Force powers becoming more and more useful. You know, it just sort of like, I think it just captures that film experience of like the Jedi’s journey so well. And obviously you have the Sith powers as well. So yeah, super, super cool. Going online, you step into a room, draw your lightsaber. Another person steps into a room, draws their lightsaber. And then the music of rocking the suburbs begins. Oh, good stuff. Yeah, just obviously that the sort of the trail as well of like the I think it was even in one of the adverts, just like the well, the lightsaber burns into a wall and you see the mark left behind. It’s just like that felt like a properly next gen thing at the time. And yeah, on PC, it was just unparalleled, just that precision mouse and keyboard control. But I love the Jedi Survivor sort of like combat. This is precise and just it’s such a sort of like PC early noughties way. Just reading what it was something just so so special. What’s in a break, Matthew? Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. Not on my list. I think everyone’s got like a pro skater in them, like the one that they play and really get into. They probably think is the good one because it took them through that learning experience and it’s quite a steep learning curve. But when you come out the other end, it’s something I’d recommend like everyone does at least once is probably get into a pro skater game because they’re just beautiful. The way they kind of blossom out and you really feel like at the start what you’re capable of pulling off is just so different to what you’re doing after 10, 20 hours or whatever. I don’t really know where Pro Skater 4 sits in terms of overall rankings of the series. It’s a bit of a weird one in that it’s the like middle ground between the kind of earlier games, which is just very pure like arcade. You have X amount of time to kind of score these points and the slightly more kind of freeform open world Tony Hawk’s, which is definitely the death of that series. Like when it becomes too open, you know, in this one you enter the levels, you have a bit of freedom to skate around, no timer and to go up and accept missions. The missions themselves often are timed, so they kind of then lock you into that, that old arcade mentality. You know, some people say that already has kind of hurt the purity of it, but it isn’t yet at the point where you’re getting off your board and walking around, which for me as well, I’m not not into that. That isn’t for me. I’d agree. This is a good sweet spot in terms of silliness of what goofy things might happen if you are Alcatraz and also the purity of these are just good level layouts for coming up with these awesome combos. I got really into high score chasing in this to try and get into the high score challenges that they used to do in NGC magazine. This is the only game where I ever scored high enough to qualify for one of those things. I remember being obsessed with manualing and how long the manuals could go on and the mad combo change. You could like revert them to kind of constantly sort of flip them on their head. Like the more moves you do the score area at the bottom of the screen, which would like list the moves you were doing. If you were doing lots of like constantly changing while you’re doing manuals and grinds and whatnot, like that list of moves would just be so long. Huge shopping list that then finally landing it and seeing like what the score was worth was just one of the best feelings. In games, every once in a while I hear a song that was on the soundtrack and it isn’t my natural cup of tea. You know, there’s no Randy Newman on there, but I only know these songs as songs in in Tony Hawk’s. I even know half of them are called. Yeah. But when I hear them, they have already referenced it once Ratatouille style. They take me right back. Yeah. Yeah. So you are big. You are secretly a big system of a down shimmy head, Matthew. That’s like your sort of thing or a black ball by the offspring. I think it opens with, is it TNT by ACDC? Yeah, yeah. I think that plays over the intro credits. So you’d hear like the, you know, I’d hear enough of that until I could skip it. Amazing. The thing is, I actually, I slightly missed this one. I played a bunch of loads of three. I think I don’t think I got bored of the formula, but I think I just, there were just other games I had to play this year. So that’s where I end up putting my money. But I do agree that sort of like, you do wonder, did they just abandon the sort of purity of it too fast? Did like GTA just like completely, you know, sort of like muddy the waters and everyone was like, what’s our version of this? Like it’s sort of, it really creeps in. Starting this year, but more into like the next couple of years, there’s like an open world. Everyone’s either got their version of GTA or it just starts filtering over into bits and pieces. So yeah. When the skaters start getting off the board and running around, that has huge Rogue Squadron 3 energy where it’s like, hey, what about on foot sections? And you were like, this is so not what I wanted or what you’re capable of doing. Yeah. And you wonder if they’d have just taken like a couple of years off and I don’t know, or just focused on something else. It’s just that like, it just, it’s such a weird one, the history of the series, because it just burns bright for such a short period of time. And then it just sort of like, already, you only have to go forward like three, four years, so people are a bit more unsure about it. So, yeah, just seems like a shame. Still room for a glorious revival of this. 100%. The more technical, like skate side of things that like isn’t for me at all. Yeah. Maybe it is just the HD remakes of one and two together. Maybe that is the game I wanted. Yeah, especially because I can’t follow the EA Skate account on Twitter, because it is all in lowercase. And I just know that somewhere there is a PowerPoint that says we will do it in lowercase to appeal to Gen Z. And I just can’t. I can’t. So I wish the game well, though. And yeah, I am with you. I think this will always be evergreen. People will always want to just do two minutes around a really fucking good course in these games. It feels like you can just, I don’t know, maybe you can amp up the physics of it. Maybe you can just add more sort of track creation stuff for people. I don’t know. It feels like there’s more to be done there maybe. But either way, just a revival would be cool. I don’t know any of the songs on this soundtrack. That’s embarrassing. But I’m not a cool guy with music, as established by me bringing up A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay. So good stuff. OK, my number eight, Matthew, is Medal of Honor Allied Assault. Is this on your list? Oh, not on my list. I sort of forgot about that. Yeah, so this is actually the tricky thing is, where do I draw the line between all of the great PC first-person shooters and other bits and pieces from this year? And where do I like make room for console games? So this is maybe a bit low, actually, relative to the impact he had on me at the time. I think I definitely saw this as the king of all those first-person shooters at the time. I just thought this was the one that had the best actual shooting, like the best. This had the most amazing level design. The drama of it was just out of control. There were World War II games before this, but it feels like this turns the World War II FPS into more of a battleground for people for it to become a major blockbuster focus for the early noughties. This is the game that really solidifies that, I think. You also have Medusa on the front line this year, which is the watered-down, not-as-good console version of this game. This is a game made by the developers who would go on to become Infinity Ward. It is a big mix of different types of FPS levels, some slightly more stealthy levels, and some that are more bombastic action. You are a step or two ahead of where Call of Duty 4 would be, in terms of those super, super tight scripted set pieces. If you have played Call of Duty 1 and 2, this is definitely more in that vein, where there are some levels that are a tiny bit more open, or the pacing is a little bit less controlled, and then there are some levels, like the D-Day level in this, which is very infamous, which is the pacing of it is very controlled. All the beats in it are very scripted. You can only really do so many things, but the drama of the moment they’re selling you, that’s the thing that would go on to be Call of Duty spread and butter would be on the campaign side. That innovation is happening here. I think this is the year after Band of Brothers, Matthew, but I think when you had Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, you had this. It just felt like it was in the moment. You know what I mean? The idea of World War II action was just a big part of the pop culture DNA at the time. That thing I was talking about, about certain fantasies, if you could do them right, they were just perfect. If you could make a good Matrix game, if you could make a good Saving Private Ryan game, if you could make a good Spider-Man game, these were just the goals for games in my head at the time. Metal Warner on console never did it before this. They had never been amazingly well-reviewed in Games Master anyway. They always looked a bit ropey and maybe the thing they were trying to go for needed PC power behind them to actually make it viable. Yeah, I think as well. I would say the controls on the console weren’t. I understand that the first two Metal Warner games were rudimentary because it was a PS1, and doing a first-person shooter on PS1 was tricky, but I thought this was very average, to be honest. Even compared to if you compare Metal of Honor on the PS1 to GoldenEye, for example, GoldenEye was just miles ahead, so I didn’t quite get what the appeal of it was, but there’s a lot of hype behind it. It obviously had Spielberg’s name on it. This one, though, you just have that PC precision controls. I think that’s just a factor that sets it apart, combined with just because you know you have those controls. The set piece design can be a lot more frantic and fun. The other level that stands out to me from this, I think it’s actually from the spearhead expansion, is you parachute down into a level as well. That was just really fucking cool. I think that might have been the opening to the expansion, but I just remember that being just, again, this is what you can do with a first-person shooter. It’s not just a bunch of levels that people have made. It actually feels like a cutscene you’re participating in, essentially. Maybe there is a finite lifespan to how much that sort of thing can excite you, and ultimately it is about the mechanics and the game itself. But at this time, it was amazing. Yeah, and they did that whole parachuting one, which didn’t really set the world on fire on 360. What was that? Is that Airborne? Yeah, Airborne. I think this exact team that makes this, I think this is the only one they make, and then I think they fall out with EA, and then they just go off to create Call of Duty, basically. So a very interesting fork in the road for this genre, because you just know it’s about to take over games and change the way games are made forever. So yeah, it starts here, but what a rad game. Great multiplayer as well. It’s another one of the first proper multiplayer games I played. Just really, really sharp. Just love this particular era of World War II games made by these particular people. Really, really exciting. So yeah. Again, mournful World War I. Very much undermined by Ben Fold singing The Ascent of Stan. Good stuff. What is your number seven, Matthew? My number seven is Mafia. That’s high on my list. Not too much high though, so we’ll come back to it shortly. My number seven. I’m sure this will be on your list, Matthew. Kingdom Hearts. No. Feels a bit wrong, a bit perverse to put this below Medal of Honor, actually. Above Medal of Honor in retrospect. But I had to put it here because I think, again, we’re trying to represent what was important at the time, right? And so just caught me on the end of like… So a few things happened. So I was 14, so getting to the point where Disney was… I was probably slightly too old for Disney. I was about to age out of it, but not quite. And Kingdom Hearts is very much about sort of like the 90s, either 90s Disney or sort of like Golden Age Disney. And so all of the different worlds in the game were taken from that. So Kingdom Hearts, I’m sure our listeners know what it is. But how it started out was very much… It’s like this boy on this island, he’s separated from his friends when these… Basically these dark sort of shadowy kind of monsters attack this island. They’re separated. Their home appears to be lost or destroyed. They’re basically thrown adrift into this… Well, basically their world is one of many different worlds. Essentially like self-contained universes basically. So their island, where they come from, that’s one world. And then Agrabah from Aladdin is another world. And this town called Travestown they go to is another world. And essentially they’re all being blotted out one by one by this guy in this black cloak called Ansem, who seems to control all these shadowy monsters. Sounds preposterous and is, I guess. So you basically have to go around trying to save these worlds from being blotted out by… Your character has this big key, and you basically have to find the lock in these different worlds and basically secure each world essentially. And so, yep, you go through Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin, what else is in this game? Little Mermaids in here, and Tarzan, which is one of the better levels, Sans Phil Collins music, I see they couldn’t license it. Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of them, and I think that this is still the purest and best form of this game. It’s the worst in terms of combat mechanics, very straightforward third-person action, real-time action, which Square Enix, the developer, SquareSoft at the time, was not used to developing. So you have a little bit of a wonky camera. But I really fucking love this game because I think it just tapped into the Disney movies I loved when I was a kid. This is also the year that I go to Disney World with my family. So that was like a big thing. So this game just seemed to mean slightly more at the time as a result of that. At the same time, this is the year as well I’m getting big into Final Fantasy. So it’s weaving in characters from that as well. Hit me at just the right moment, I think. Like if I was like even two, three years older, I think this would have passed me by. But I have a lot of affection for this specific Kingdom Hearts because of that. Yeah, I think it’s cool. I don’t know, I think it just sort of, it captures the vibe of the different Disney worlds quite well. But I think as well, it’s overarching story. It’s quite nicely done because it’s not that complicated. All the layers of complication, the silly subtitles and things that people chuckle about with Kingdom Hearts. That all happens a bit later. This first game is very straightforward. And I thought it was just quite, I don’t know, quite sincere, quite nice, just a cool little game. And one of these games as well where I thought, oh, they’re never going to bring this out in Europe. This could end up being like a Japan and America only thing because that would happen a lot with Squaresoft games. But when this came to Europe, I was like, I have to save up my paper round money, go out and fucking buy this. And I did. It was an independent game shop in Gosport, 30 quid, which was like six weeks worth of paper round salary I had to save to get this. And I did. Thoughts Matthew? I’m not going to dunk on your love for this thing. My brother was really into this. I think he’s more your age too. This was a huge game for him. So I was definitely around Kingdom Hearts being played. Personally, I’ve always clashed with its combat system and those kind of real time menus. I’ve always found it a bit fiddly, a bit unsatisfying to play. But I replayed a chunk of this on Game Pass a couple of years ago. Like with mine, I thought, oh, maybe there’s a Kingdom Hearts episode. And I didn’t get on with it enough to kind of continue with it. But the first moment where it sort of shows this sort of shadowy council of what are clearly famous Disney villains, is like a really potent hit of that promise of like what this game is and what’s really exciting about this game and what was exciting about this game at the time, which was just seeing all these things come together in such a strange and unusual way. And like you say, I think it loses its way down the path where it becomes more interested in its own bullshit lore than the incredible natural lore of IP that it has. Almost the sort of great tragedy of this is they had such a good idea and then decided to go and take it in such a sort of wanky direction. Because even though I went in being like I’m just going to play a load of this and then dunk on it on the pod, I get how lovingly it recreates these things and then the kind of shock almost of seeing the villain of all the different Disney properties together in like a James, almost like a Blofeld layer, you know? Yeah, it’s true, like Maleficent and like Hades and Jafar and they’re all there, mostly played by the original voice actors as well. That is a feat, you know, bringing all that together. There’s also like, I think it just knows that, I think you tap into something quite spot on there, which is it knows how to use that property just so, so well. So you get to the very, they don’t, there’s no Mickey Mouse appearance throughout until the very end of the game. He turns up literally at the ending basically to be like, let’s like lock this big door basically, which I know sounds preposterous, but it is quite a big moment. They’re like, okay, they save like the, you know, the icon of Disney till very, very last, that they know what they’re doing. And there are moments throughout where they just, I just think that the way they use the license is so good. So you meet Beast from Beauty and the Beast. It’s not in his own world. He’s in like Hollow Bastion, which is one of Kingdom Hearts own sort of like weird sort of created worlds. But you have your, your Keyblade thing taken off of you. And all you have is this wooden sword and your companions go off because you’re no longer the Keyblade Master. So they abandon you. So it’s just you and Beast going around. But what that means is you are basically useless, but you have this giant fucking monster who can kill all the Heartless for you. And I just, I just like the way when they do things like that, it just shows they know, they know what they’re doing with that, that, that license. So, yeah, I’m trying to try to be sincere about how good I thought this was at the time. I really, really liked it. It really landed for me. And yeah, I think it, but I think the age thing is just such a huge, a crucial difference. So, yeah, and now I think people relate to this series in such a different way, because if you discovered this in the last 10, 15 years, which I do think this has a bit of a younger player base than Father Fancy does, which makes sense. I think that people are interested in its own lore, and that’s not, that’s not something I really click with. So, yeah, but this at the time, I promise you, this was so exciting. And also, one of the best looking games on PS2, for sure. You must have even noted that when you were playing it. But like, it has to be, because with something, you know, you can almost see the deal that was made to get something this sort of precious, is it has to look and sound authentic. So almost by default, it has to be one of the best produced games ever. Yeah, for sure. Also, I will say, this is my first encounter with Cloud Strife was in this game as well. It’s before I played FF7 for the first time. Yeah, that’s quite confusing to reverse engineer who Cloud is from this game. Yeah, quite odd where he’s like fighting. I think he’s like fighting Hercules and looking for Aerith. Quite confusing. Okay, so that’s my number seven. So what’s your number six, Matthew? My number six, Super Mario Sunshine. Not on my list. That’s a go. Yeah, I think you said earlier, you know, this is slightly looks down on now, probably in the canon of 3D Mario, but I’d say even wobbly a 3D Mario is better than most people’s best attempts at making a 3D platform. Obviously, I’d say that I’m a big Nintendo head. The beef I’ve always had with Super Mario Sunshine to get that out of the way is, I think it takes one of the most precise platforming heroes ever and just adds always mad in precision to him. Jumps which feel a bit vague because they’re jetpack powered. And it’s very hard to build a platforming game around someone who is as flexible as Super Mario Sunshine Mario is with that backpack on. And so, you know, from a technical level that’s always kind of annoyed me. I don’t think it helps that it has a slightly wonky camera and some of the jumps are quite hard to judge. It’s quite a frustrating game. There’s a lot of levels where if you fall to the bottom, it doesn’t just reset because it’s not like Mario Galaxy where you’re above a huge abyss. It’s because they’re, you know, kind of coherent 3D spaces. You can be climbing all the way up something like in the harbor and then you fall into the water and then you just have to swim back to the start of the level and start it again. Things like that just feel like Nintendo would never let that happen again. Like, it’s just so obviously sort of bad and unpleasant to play. And because of that, there’s several worlds in this game which should just fill me with dread because it’s like, oh, I’ve got to climb all the way back up that thing. If I fall down, I just have to climb back up it again, which isn’t a good hang to me. But easy to say that now with hindsight, at the time, this seemed incredibly exciting. It looks absolutely amazing. The kind of the graphical effects on the kind of water and cleaning up the paint and the kind of liquid physics. Still actually very pleasant playing it again on Switch. I was quite impressed with it. Just showing off like whatever it was that allowed the GameCube to do like a few things which fell out of this world. Yeah. Like the reflections on the solar panels. That still looks good to me, you know. You know, that’s like GameCube ray tracing, you know. And like the effect of it. Okay, it looks a little goofy now. But at the time I was like, I just can’t believe they’ve made a game look this good. It looked absolutely amazing. This was like the full might of Nintendo’s kind of tech brains behind it. And I wanted to love it more at the time. I kind of loved the idea of it. I love the kind of tropical setting. You know, I was still quite fond of the go into a world and kind of pillage it of different stars over different runs. I’ve kind of leaned a bit more towards Mario Galaxy’s kind of 3D obstacle course design now as kind of my favorite sort of mode of Mario. But I wasn’t thinking that at the time. At the time, I was like, I’m kind of bad at this game, but I was obsessed with it. And seeing it approaching and reading about in the mags, I was desperate to play it. And it really did deliver on that kind of wow factor and just how different that setting was. And for that, I kind of will always owe it some measure of affection. So number six. Yeah, number six. I guess for you and a 3D Mario, that is low, isn’t it? So that’s a summary of this. But I think a lot of the way it’s perceived, I think it was like a lot of it was in retrospect. I don’t think it was quite as glowing a reception as Mario 64 had, obviously. But I think that people did point out the difficulty and how the flood mechanics affect the game and stuff like that and its points of criticism. But it did still score extremely highly. I think a lot more of that sentiment has built up in retrospect, you know, maybe in comparison to the Galaxy games, which are just so accomplished and there’s no real caveats to the way those games are designed, you know. So, yeah. It’s weird. I can’t remember who it was, but I remember I was on NGamer talking to a member of staff who’d been on NGC at the time. And they were like, some of us thought it was shit and didn’t like it at launch. And it felt like it got a pass because it was Mario. And that was quite early on in working for NGamer. And that was a bit of a shocking… What? The mag didn’t necessarily say what it meant. It does happen. It does happen. Definitely a weird, uneven Mario. But playing it recently on the Switch actually helped because I found it a little bit easier to play and kind of got through it a bit faster. And yeah, I think it’s all right. This placement seems like a good compromise to me. Yeah. So my number six is Mafia, The City of Lost Heaven, which you had number eight. Yeah. So really love this game. I’ve talked about it. I think this came up on the Northeast PC gaming draft, actually. So again, if I’m repeating myself, I apologize. But you had GTA 3 the year before. It was an open world game that was about the promise of what you can do with an open world, how you treat the sandbox, how you create your own kind of stories, how you just go out and cause mayhem and have a great time and absorb the atmosphere of a place. This game was obviously set in the early part of the 20th century. So you have cars that are quite slow. So the idea of a chase sequence in an open world game like this has very different implications. You have a speed limiter on your car so you don’t get chased by the cops, that sort of thing. It’s a very interesting period piece, a narrative focused version of an open world game. It’s technically an open world game, but the open world is more like a movie set than it is a thing you go out and experiment with. Though I would say extremely atmospheric, very accomplished in its depiction of that setting. Really just felt like stepping into a movie. And convincingly brought to life by really good voice acting for the time, I would say excellent voice acting. It was really up there. Legendary smoke effects, the way the smoke rings would blow out of the cigarettes. That just felt like a really nice touch. Felt like it just made the most out of having that extra PC grunt at the time. This was on the like, this is a game I had to go and play at my friend Donald’s house because our PC was running at like 10 frames or whatever. That’s when I knew we kind of needed an upgrade. But just really great sort of like mafia narrative, just about a cab driver gets roped into this world essentially and then climbs the. And then ultimately, basically the story is him ratting out his partners in crime in retrospect essentially. And even though it’s sort of tapping into loads of tropes from that genre, it was just a really accomplished version of that sort of thing that meant it had a little bit more going on than just being a pastiche. I remember the ending of this game just stayed with me. We’ve again, definitely mentioned that before, but then the way it ties back into Mafia 2 is this one of the all time great bits of game, sort of like just design ideas. I just really fucking love that. I think this game is just fantastic. The shooting was better than GTA as well, I think, even though you play it now, it’s a little bit rough. Infamously tough, sort of like race sequence, which they had to patch because it was such a bastard. Quite funny to think about in retrospect, but I think you can now even, I think you can even skip it in the GOG version of this game. So it’s, yeah, they kind of know it was bullshit, but really, really good, Matthew. And I loved it. Yeah, came at the right time, you know, the teenager recently watching Goodfellas, Godfather, you know, all the films this was kind of riffing on, then getting to see it done so kind of accurately. Definitely took a beat to get my head around, oh, this isn’t a GTA-like, you know, this isn’t just an open world carnage simulator. It’s a single player, like, narrative action game that happens to be set in an open world. But I think once you kind of got over that, you could appreciate the kind of standalone levels and the strength of its action set pieces escaping across the rooftops or during that funeral where it all kicks off. Stronger mission beats than what GTA was doing at the time. Yeah. And fuck that car race, though. I really thought I couldn’t get past it. I thought this is it, like, I’m not going to be able to see how good this game is going to get and what has been promised to me in the reviews. I’m amazed that didn’t get more of a kick in the reviews in retrospect, because it is just like, oh, so, so tricky. And the driving of this game generally is like, it’s tough, like, it’s nice that the anniversary version they did or the remake they did four years ago just ironed those kinks out because, yeah, oof, it was, yeah, tricky. It was kind of bold of them to just go with that handling model that they did, though, do you know what I mean? Like, it was just a fast car, just felt like it was completely out of fucking control in this game. It was just really hard to, like, steer or do anything with it. And then the slow cars, once they, like, crashed or slowed down, it felt like it took about 10 minutes to get it moving again. It was just like, yeah, like you had to get out and push. Basically, it was like that kind of vibe to it. So bold of them to go with that when, like, GTA’s handling was just so much, you know, not arcadey as such, but more arcadey than this for sure. And I do agree, actually, the mission design is more like what GTA would eventually do because you go back and play the old GTAs now. They are basically just like, go to this place, plant this bomb and walk off and that’s it. And then now there are just these very elaborate multi-part narrative missions where a guy talks to you on the phone for about five minutes and there’s a long conversation in the car on the drive somewhere. Matthew is a bit ahead of the curve on that. So yeah, yeah, I agree. Okay, good stuff, Matthew. Okay, so Matthew, what’s your number five? My number five is Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2 Rogue Leader. Yeah. We have talked about this game a lot on this podcast. The wow factor of seeing Star Wars rendered. I would say at the time it felt like photo realistically. Like it looked that good on GameCube. And given all the discussions about like the power of the respective power of the consoles, whatever was inside GameCube was just harnessed brilliantly by factor five. When I think of images or levels or moments in games that kind of sum up that entire generation, the Death Star trench run of this and the reflections of like laser fire, like across the surface of that thing, that is like just a defining image of the console, captured the tone of it and put you in the seat of scenes that you were really excited to actually play. A very accessible version of Star Wars, arcadey dog fighting, none of the kind of nonsense they went on to do in three with the on foot sections. Really what left the lasting impression for me was the look of the thing. I just think graphically, this was so superb. I had, you know, the fantasy of Star Wars space battles isn’t like an important one to me. You know, I’m not, I couldn’t even name like what the different makes of ships are. I know what an X-Wing and a TIE fighter are. One of my favorite PC games. For all the attempts there have been just to put something that looks like Star Wars on the screen, I mean, this is 100% that. Just, just absolutely amazing. I mean, I was actually curious from someone who is more into Star Wars. You know, I’m not saying did the story of this scratch and itch, but, you know, is there more here if you are into Star Wars? Well, I think the thing about Rogue Squadron is that the, the plots of the games are kind of like the in-between times between the movies, right? So it’s sort of like this. That’s the first one certainly is basically like it’s after the Battle of Yavin and it’s before the Battle of Hoth. This one, what I found really exciting at the time was, oh, they’re going to actually do a Battle of, Battle of Yavin and Battle of Hoth. And then it kind of does all the stuff that happens in between Empire and Return of the Jedi and then, then does Return of the Jedi as well. So that was, that was more exciting because it felt like they had the, you know, the, the GameCube’s heft meant that they could actually like portray the movie set pieces in a way that felt convincing in a way that maybe felt like they couldn’t on N64. They had a punt at both those levels in Rogue Squadron as hidden levels, but they’re not nearly as good. Like the, you know, it’s the ultimate sort of like show off to the press demo of a level, the Death Star level and this is like one of the all time great sort of like first levels, I would say, even though it’s so mechanically simple. You blow up a bunch of towers, you blow up a bunch of TIE fighters, you go down a really long tunnel like they do in the film, and then you fire a proton torpedo and then Darth Vader tries to blow you up while you’re going down there. I mean, I’d say the fault there lies with George Lucas’ story. Well, no, I mean, that’s one of the all time great movie set pieces, I think. It’s really dramatic. And this just, you know, using some of the movie audio works so well. You have even like the touch of the Millennium Falcon turning up at the end to sort of save the day. So fucking good. And then it’s interesting actually, I played a bunch of this yesterday because I wanted some fresh thoughts on it, right? And it’s like so much of this game is where the fuck are the TIE fighters against this backdrop of space? Because like it’s like they are like these little sort of like, you know, gray sort of like, I don’t know, they’re like hexagons basically that just sort of like pop up in the distance. So the second level, which I think is called Ice on Corridor Ambush, like the first part of the level, it’s really hard to see where the fucking TIE fighters are. And so there’s a lot of like where are the TIE fighters and then following your radar to find where the TIE fighters are. And the second half of the level, there’s a lot of like levels that are set against the backdrop of like Nebula in this. And I think that’s because they’re like, okay, people need, the players need to actually see where the fucking TIE fighters are. So that’s quite funny. But no, I think it captures the drama of Star Wars so well. It captures the essence of the ship so well. So Y-Wing, heavy duty, powerful thing. A-Wing basically just like a Spitfire piece of metal they just put in the sky, basically just really nippy, but really easy to destroy. X-Wing, balance of all of them. Unlock the Millennium Falcon, it feels like an absolute fucking beast, really hefty thing. Sounds like it does in the movies as well with that turret fire. Just, oh, it’s so good at capturing the essence of Star Wars, those Star Wars space battles. If that’s your thing, this game is the arcade-y flip side to the X-Wing simulation games. It’s just so, so good. I think it holds up for sure because no one really makes this type of game anymore. Probably the closest comparison is probably Star Fox, which we talked about before. It’s a little bit of that to it, but even more focused on the dogfighting element. Yeah, Star Fox has never gone all in on the cinematic presentation. No, I suppose not. It’s the purity of the idea rather than, you know, it’s never been Miyamoto’s deal where this is a little bit of both. Yeah, for sure. And it’s just, yeah, I think it’s, you know, the story thing isn’t really a huge deal. It’s another couple of interesting wrinkles, like you give orders to your wingman. You didn’t do that in the last one. That’s fairly rudimentary, but it’s quite cool. You can be like, go off and get those TIE fighters or whatever. I think the idea, again, the name rogue leader is you are in charge of these other X-Wings, so it’s meant to be part of the fantasy that they’re selling. But really, I think people are just checking in to see, oh, I’ve never seen the Battle of Endor done really well in a video game, and this game is like, you have It’s a Trap, you have all that stuff happening here, you have all the TIE fighters in the universe turning up, and you have flying into the center of the Death Star with them, Wedge Antilles, just really fucking good. So, yeah, I think this holds up, and I do hope they salvage it, but even if they don’t, it is really nice to boot up a GameCube and play this again, just really, really satisfying. So, yeah, great stuff, Matthew. My number five is Ico, or Ico. Not on my list. Yeah, not on your list. So this released in, I think, the US and Japan the year before, came to Europe. This was never a big commercial success at launch. They sold, like, at least here, we had some good box art. In the America, they had a fucking terrible box art, like notoriously so, so didn’t sell very well. But maybe the most influential game of any of the games we’ve discussed in terms of the games that have tried to mimic this, like indie games. So we played Cocoon last year. Cocoon feels like it has almost the exact same structure as this game. It’s, you know, these games always tend to be about five or six hours in length. There are particular emotional beats they want to hit at certain times. And it feels like they take from this game, which is a puzzle adventure game about a boy with horns, who is basically locked into this tomb in this prison. And then there’s this weird tremor and the tomb falls over and breaks open and he escapes. And then he finds this girl, Yorda, who is glowing white, who is trapped in this cage. He frees her and then they attempt to escape this big castle together while being chased by these shadowy monsters. No HUD. So again, again, that’s such a difference to what games were like at the time, where HUDs were just clogged up with various elements. Very minimalist. Just you didn’t have a health bar or anything like that. It was all just designed to just put you into the headspace of the characters and the story and to just be really tuned into that. And the atmosphere was just very sort of like specific. The sensibilities behind like the art direction just meant that this game has such a kind of distinctive identity out of the box. I remember playing the demo and just feeling like I’d never played anything like it before. And yeah, I think that just, it’s still just so, so pure, so good. Such a beautiful use of like the PS2 sort of like visual heft as well. It’s that sort of like painterly art style that has held up so well over the years, I think. And I think as well, just a really, builds up to a really powerful and devastating ending. And just so mysterious what’s actually going on. I mean, you play Shadow Closers and it sheds some light on, on like who your main character is essentially. But this just gives you no real clues. And it just, you just have to pay attention to the way that the, you know, the Ico shouts for Yorda in the game and things like that to get any bearing of like how the characters are feeling. It’s just very carefully done. And such a wonderful, different game to anything on PlayStation. I haven’t got a very interesting take other than like, it’s never done like a huge amount for me. But I can’t quite put my finger on why, you know, outside of Shadow of the Closers, I wasn’t really into The Last Guardian either. I just don’t know if his slightly sort of wafty vibe is for me. I wish I had a more satisfying take on the oasis stuff. I will say that I think like just at the time, obviously limited amounts of money to spend on games. I played this and I was like, one day I’m going to come back and get this when it’s cheap in the secondhand market and play this. Because the demo, I played probably like 10 to 12 times. I was just so, so fond of it. I was so like, oh, I’ve never seen anything like this before. And it, to me, it was dialing up my excitement of the PS2 is this machine where there were just so many different types of experience on it. And I was experiencing things I’d never had before in games, but that just had experiences that just never existed before. And so to have a console that had like GTA 3, Devil May Cry, Jak and Dexter and this, and you know what I mean? It just, it seemed to be doing everything. It was such this, it seemed like such a broad canvas. And so this demo embedding itself in your brain at 14 is kind of the perfect time to discover it because of the type of story it is, who the characters are. And then to come back to it as an adult and finally play it was a really satisfying way to close the leap on that because it never dropped in price in the secondhand market because it went out of print. I think they only sold so many copies in the UK and it was like 60, 70 quid, if I recall, to get the old, to get the launch version. So yeah, it took a while, but yeah, just, I think it’s just a really special game. And like, but if you didn’t have any of the, any experience comparable to that, I could see why it’d be a bit of a strange, it’d be a bit hard to reverse engineer back to the point of, you know, just what else is around like this at the time? The answer was nothing at all, you know? Yeah. Okay. So that’s my number five. What’s your number four, Matthew? Metal Gear Solid 2. Higher on my list. My number four is Onimusha 2, Samurai’s Destiny. Oh, finally, the reason this podcast exists. What, the entire back page operation? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, I almost sent you, actually, I was going to say, I was in the gym last night, I almost sent you the opening video to this as like required watching before this. Because I just think it’s one of the all-time great CG intros. You basically just have these like horsemen attack this village, and like it starts with like this fire arrow just landing on like this thatch roof while this like woman’s holding her baby, and then like all these like innocent people are basically attacked by Nobunaga’s men. And it’s just the shots in it are just so amazing. Like it’s just such a dramatic and well-constructed intro. I’ll put the video up on social media when we post it. But this is this great shot where like Nobunaga just like squashes like a snake against his head. It’s just like this is really sudden sort of like death of this animal. Then it cuts to like a black screen with like, I don’t know, like cinematics by this company or whatever. And it just is so theatrical. So I’ve definitely talked about Onomishu 2 before on the Capcom draft. I think it’s where I’ve talked about in the most detail. So first game, survival horror game, very much in the Resident Evil mold, but with melee combat. And like it’s set in a kind of like period Japanese setting, I can’t remember the exact period of history, but going back several hundred years, essentially. Yeah, this odd thing where this like Nobunaga, this warlord, essentially makes this kind of like packed with these demons to sort of come back to life. And then you’re basically fighting these monsters and then fighting Nobunaga himself. So it’s quite an interesting sort of like historical demonic fantasy mashup. Second game, much more ambitious. You’re playing as a different character called Jube Yagyu, who is modeled after like a dead Japanese actor. I think he was in the film Black Rain, the actor he’s based on, the Ridley Scott film. So it’s essentially the sort of like wrinkle with the ears. It’s a way better game in terms of combat. You have all of these different weapons that have like sort of elemental properties to them. So you have like this, I guess like Darth Maul style double blade weapon that’s got like this sort of like area of effect wind attack, which is pretty cool. There’s like this, you get this ice spear in this game, which basically just like will freeze everything in a line when you use it. Just like put these like massive sort of like bits of ice just sort of pop up across the screen. Really kind of cool power. Like it’s like an electric based weapon as well. And it’s really kind of like cool mix on Resident Evil where you’re empowered a bit more as a player. It’s less about scarcity and more about this is challenging, but you have a lot of you have a lot of ways to clear out these hordes of monsters. Really cool, but still has the kind of like fixed camera aesthetic. Wrinklers, they add in all these different characters who you trade items with that you pick up throughout the game. And then you essentially buy their friendship with these items. And then they’ll be optional cut scenes that pop up in different areas of the game that where that character might turn up and help you in combat, or you will learn a bit about that character that you didn’t before. And that will genuinely ebb and flow based on what you trade with players so you can fall out of favour with a character. You can, you know, you can buy a character’s favour and they’ll just start appearing more. And then it kind of all builds up to this, like there are these optional side quests in the game where you will take control of one of these other characters while Jume is otherwise out of action. And so there’ll be an entire playable section just for that character. The idea being that when you replay the game, you can befriend a different character and see how the story plays out that way. So you’ve got four different characters where that can happen. They all have different play styles as well. So it’s like this fat drunk monk. There’s like a pirate guy who’s got all these guns. He’s a really cool character. He can equip a flamethrower, which is pretty decent. This is like basically sort of like female. She’s like a princess in disguise. She’s like undercover kind of like warrior sort of thing. And then there’s like a stealthy kind of like teenager sort of like a guy leaps from rooftop to rooftop, so much more athletic kind of character. So I just think that that’s a really… There’s no other Capcom game like this. And I don’t think Anamusha ever gets this good again or is ever this prominent again. Like the third one flips to Jean Reno, which is a bit different. I think they try to go for more of a Western audience with it, but it was always better when it was just… I know what I’ll get the Westerners in. Well, that’s it. And the paper actor, Jean Reno. Well, that’s it, which is such an odd touch. But I think it was… I actually think if they had an Anamusha game now, it would be a smash hit. I feel like there are more and more games that are in this vein now than there ever used to be. And I actually really love this as a kind of like dyed in the wool Japanese-ass Capcom game basically. That’s kind of what it felt like to me at the time. Like I could never get… The friends of mine who like Resident Evil, I could never get them interested in Anamusha. But I was like, this is so fucking good. Like the bosses are great and spectacular, and it’s such a beautiful looking game as well. And the voice acting is quite rough in retrospect, but I think that just the story generally is quite well paced. You’re in this like this whole element of the story where gold has just been found in this local town. And so that’s kind of like driving everyone a little bit mad. It’s really fucking good game, man. So those are my Anamusha two thoughts, Matthew. Anything to say in response to that? No, just that I love your passion for Anamusha two. I need to play this game. Yeah, it was you talking about this at the pub where you thought maybe we could do a podcast. So it’s a key back page text. Yeah, I think some of the greatest game music of all time as well by Taro Iwashiro. Actually, that’s why I forgot to ask you about Kingdom Hearts. Did not even the Shimamura element excite you, Matthew? Her music is amazing in that game. I don’t really remember it from what I played because I thought the music was just riffing on the Disney music. Isn’t that right? Not really. There’s some bits of that, but there’s loads and loads of original battle themes and boss themes and stuff. It’s quite distinctive soundscape, but nonetheless. Anyway, on Amish 2, they’ll never re-release it because I don’t think many people bought that first remaster. The first game really is just okay, I think. This game is exceptional. What’s your number three, Matthew? My number three is Resident Evil Remake. Not on my list. Another Back Page favorite. Looking at pictures of this in magazines in the run-up to release, I just couldn’t even really imagine it moving. It looked so photorealistic, and I know that’s within the constraints of the fixed camera, kind of pre-rendered backgrounds and everything, but I remember thinking, well, they’ll net that, along with Rogue Leader. They’ll never be a game as good looking as this. Playing it was my first experience of Resident Evil. I hadn’t played it on PlayStation, the original that is, so it was that double whammy of constantly being a gog, how good it looked, and also just learning the madness of Resident Evil 1 and that mansion and how properly scary it was, knowing the true fear of not being able to go through doors because I was scared what was on the other side. The introduction of the crimson head, enemies, the idea that a zombie you killed could later become a threat and get back up and be even last year just poisoned the whole space for me. Not in a negative way, it just did exactly what it was meant to do. Some of its resonance is definitely tied with being probably the first big survival horror game that I played, and as you play more of this genre, you become a little desensitized to it and it becomes harder to find things that work as effectively. But this one absolutely did, you know, by didn’t being the first, it just got to land exactly as they wanted to land it. Yeah, I thought this was amazing. Oh shit, it took me ages to get through. I definitely had to use guides, but you know, as someone who was so excited to own a GameCube, it just felt like another, you’ve made a great decision here, Matthew, moment of getting that. Yeah, again, like that first, it’s our first two years of GameCube, right? It’s just absolutely popping off. I was, I coveted this massively because it seemed like a game that had the profile of a PS2 game, but it was only happening over on GameCube, which obviously Mikami was so besotted with. And yeah, again, just like Rogue Leader, just what the fuck is in this console that’s making these games look this good? That’s very much how I saw it. Yeah, played it again recently on GameCube. I think I talked a bit about it. Just, it is hard, but that’s kind of what’s beautiful about it. It’s just like, it’s harder in, it’s also, it’s hard in different ways to the original version too, because of the crimson heads and stuff like that. So there’s just a lot of like nice nasty surprises in this and the ways in which it compares to the original. And it’s so just like freeform for you to go and like figure out how the fuck to progress. And just works so, so well. Probably the nicest pre-rendered backgrounds of all time in this game. Just absolutely gorgeous. And then all these 3D models of characters that have somehow held up so, so well because of the very particular art style they went with. Yeah, amazing that this is six years after the original and it just looks about 20 years. Hence somehow a magic trick they pulled off. Yeah, real good. Okay. So my number three is Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty. Matthew, do you want to give your sort of like big speech for this one? Yeah, I don’t have like a grand all-encompassing take on this. I mean, if anything, the thing I love about this game and resonates with me is that, you know, it was a game of a million tiny amazing touches. We didn’t have a PS1. So like, I wouldn’t say Metal Gear Solid 1 had passed us by. I eventually played it on PC, but I think by the time I played it, some of the kind of wow factor had been spoiled just by reading about Metal Gear Solid 1 in magazines. And I got to enjoy too more, as it was probably intended, just seeing the weirdness of Kojima’s sort of vision unfold. The obsession that I had with the demo that came with Zone of the Enders, of the tanker, just seeing how much that level of detail or how that kind of weirdness continued into the oil rig probably helped that I didn’t have like that huge connection with the first game, that I didn’t feel as put out by the change to Raiden in it. But yeah, just discovering like how reactive it was, how the beauty of so much of Kojima’s work is he just thinks of everything. And he understands that if there is an interaction to be done, it should probably do something. And he just seems to be one step ahead of you, whether it’s how individual props respond to fire, you know, the melting the ice cubes or the, you know, blowing up a watermelon or whatever, to the bigger puzzle solutions to some of the bosses that they come up with. It sets you on a bit of a sort of hiding to nothing really, because you want all games after this kind of game to be like this, you know, you want all game makers to be as quirky and ingenious, innovative as possible. You know, that sadly isn’t the case. But yeah, at the time, this was just a constant parade of minor wow moments that I maybe didn’t fully understand until years later. I must admit the ending quite flummoxed me at the time. Oh, it still flummoxes me. It’s definitely a game which a lot of it’s been unlocked by smarter Kojima heads than I, getting into it and talking with Rich about it and people writing really great pieces about it. It’s one of few games for me that has benefited from that, like deep analysis. Yeah, it’s a classic Kojima game in the sense that it has these, you know, has loads to say about online communication and how online communities will build and fester and how basically where we were going as a society. It’s way ahead of the curve on that. It’s also a game that thinks it’s really funny to have its main character be naked in there to be like a straw in front of his willy. Like that’s the sort of like those. That’s the duality of Kojima at work. Do you know what I mean? That’s sad. So it’s like, yeah, it’s it’s amazing in so many ways. I think it was on that level of like how far forward they push the stealth simulation stuff from the original, just keeping taking guards hostage and like shooting individual body parts. And, you know, that sort of stuff is just is just amazing. It’s such a marked step forward. And then it wows on that level of like JFK s conspiracy thriller. Like it’s the first like touch point I really had with that kind of fiction where it’s like, oh, the president’s not who you think he is. And there’s like there’s much more going on behind the scenes and all this illuminati kind of stuff. And that’s like that just that hit you at teenager age is basically the right time for you to encounter that sort of thing before you become an adult. And it seems like slightly preposterous to you. So I really dug that stuff for sure. And then I think all the caveats are in the fact that like it’s quite it’s quite slow paced and boring in the big shell bits for like large periods of it. It’s like, like I say, I’ve joked before, it’s like bomb defusal the game. There’s loads and loads of bits with that bomb disposal guy, Peter Stillman. He’s so boring. I played a bunch of this with my mate Lynch when I went over to Japan. That guy is such a fucking tough hang. And yeah, the cutscenes don’t respect your time in this. They’re very intrusive. But there’s a few interesting wrinkles that keep you going throughout. You’re wondering why Snake is there, but he’s in disguise. And then it really takes until the second half of the game for that momentum to come along and for things to unravel and for it to get really exciting. But it definitely gets there. And I think some of the bosses in this game are just really exciting. There’s some big set pieces in this that you just couldn’t quite do on PS1 in the same way. Really, really good. And yeah, I think it’s just so, so memorable. A big swing in a way that I just don’t think you’d ever see. Games can’t ever really do anything like this again. You can’t be the first game to do this sort of thing again. So you’ll just never get there. I feel like games playing with reality, the reality of what you’re seeing and what you’re playing, is something that Kojima has here sowed the seeds of that. I don’t know if that’s what inspires the likes of Daniel Mullins games or whatever. But the idea that there is a meta reality beyond the reality that you’re playing in the game. Definitely Kojima is behind that stuff. And MGS2 is just so, so powerful in the way that sort of thing lands, despite some of its downsides. So yeah. I’m just tickled by the idea of your teenage brain being like, big into hanging out with Beast from Beauty and the Beast, but also open to the Illuminati. Yeah, but that’s what being a teenager is, isn’t it? It is. It’s dumb. It is fucking dumb being a teenager. It is. It is. Because you are like a kid, but you think you’re an adult at the same time. You know what I mean? So in some ways, that means you can connect with so much different media. In a way, you just can’t when you’re an adult. But at the same time, you’re so ill-informed in how you sort of like perceive things. So yeah, that’s very much me. But I still think both those things are rad. So maybe I’ve just never grown up. So yeah. What’s your number two, Matthew? It’s Eternal Darkness. Ah. People didn’t hear the bit they got cut. Yes, GameCube Survival Horror made by Silicon Knights along with Nintendo. One of the funny offshoots of this before we get into it is that there are patents that exist for the insanity system that exists in this game, which have both. They’re shared between Dennis Dyke and Miyamoto. And I just like the idea that Miyamoto was making or had some hand in this survival horror, quite mad, very un-Nintendo game at the time. The first mature rated game, I think, published by Nintendo, which was a bit of a talking point. It starts off with a woman called Alex Royvess inheriting a house on Rhode Island. She goes to this house and finds The Tome of Eternal Darkness, a kind of cursed sort of Necronomicon type book. Looks like serious bad news. And in reading this book and the different chapters of it, she’s taken back through the history of her ancestors and people who’ve come in contact with them, who chapter by chapter reveal a grand Lovecraft in cosmic horror conspiracy growing through the ages. What I loved about this was, I mean, it was A, sort of so un-Nintendo-like, that they were, you know, basically trying to do a Resident Evil. Like, this is their version of a Resident Evil. But on top of that, it had so many unusual systems and ideas, which I’ve not seen many people kind of toy with. Every chapter had a different protagonist in a different timeframe. It was like a collection of short stories. Imagine a bit like Cloud Atlas or something, the way it kind of dips into these different timeframes and treats each time frame quite specifically. So you’d have like era specific weaponry and who the protagonist is would like greatly change what their role was in the story. Like there was like a monk’s assistant who wasn’t very kind of combat ready. There was a Persian sort of prince, a dancer. So all these different people, you have to constantly kind of adjust to their different skill sets, different powers, different kind of strengths and weaknesses only for like the hour and a half that you played as them. But that was really interesting. The fact that it did keep jumping through time, but you kept returning to the same location. So you got to see how, you know, a medieval monastery looked during war time when it being taken over as like a war hospital, for example. So that was like really interesting kind of environmental storytelling. Then on top of that, it had this sanity system where when you saw enemies, if you didn’t kill them enough, kill them fast enough, they drain your sanity. And as a result, the game would start kind of doing these Kojima-esque tricks, I guess, to kind of fuck with you. That might be weird visual filters, but all the way up to the game has corrupted or your controller has disconnected or the TV would look like it turned off or whatever. So just discovering like all these mad things trying to capture your kind of waning sanity, that felt really fresh. Obviously some games have kind of played with that and you know, the more psychological horror end of the survival horror spectrum kind of does a lot of ideas in this place, but I quite like how clearly kind of gamified it was in terms of you have to get your sanity up. All this stuff will start kind of going on and fucking with you. But then even down to things like it had this magic system where you’d combine runes that you find into, you almost had to kind of create this like vocabulary with the runes to kind of conjure certain spells. And you’d work out what the runes meant, but you could kind of reverse engineer that by putting them together and seeing what they did. So it had this kind of quite like organic magic system. And then it had this very strange melee combatting system where you could target arms, legs, torso or head to kind of chop different bits off different enemies to sort of fight them. It just felt like Nintendo taking a swing at a thousand systems they’d never had to touch for any other game before. And coming up with interesting answers to like all of them. And that to me just combined into something like so one of a kind from them. There was a failed attempt to kind of do a kickstarted sort of semi spiritual successor to this from Dennis Stark a few years ago. And it didn’t really go anywhere. But this exists as this quite perfect little bit of oddness. Also, this was my first encounter with like anything Lovecrafty, which I find Lovecraft stuff quite cringe. And I’m always suspicious of people are into it. It’s just a load of old bollocks and people going like mad when they look at like squids and whatever. I’m like fine, you know, but like I just don’t know what you’re meant to get out of it. It’s just like this quite unpleasant piece of work wrote all this bullshit, which some people are into. At the time, I’m not saying I played this was like, oh, this seems cool. But I’d probably roll my eyes a bit more at this if this came along now. But at the time it was like, oh, that what a unique world vision that they’ve come up with. I didn’t know that it was pulling from all this pre-existing stuff. So it arrived in a less cynical time in my timeline, which is very apt for Eternal Darkness and its structure. If you played as 2024 Matthew, he wouldn’t like Eternal Darkness as much as 2022 Matthew. There’s loads about this game that just like there’s just nothing like it in modern games. So the switching of character and setting, but it’s just nothing like that in games. And the fact that the sort of like the various Kojima touches it, it does, which is what leads to the Twin Snakes collaboration, isn’t it? Probably with Silicon Knights and Kojima for that. So those touches are such a pre-HDTV era thing. You know what I mean as well? Like, because just the logic of how TVs work, it just means that you just couldn’t do anything like this now and have the same effect. You know what I mean? Like it just, it was very much a kind of like slightly pre-internet, analogue age, sort of like, you know, way of experimenting with how you’re playing the game. And it’s just such a great way to sort of use horror. And I agree that like the, there was just no one else using Lovecraft at the time to like, as a point of inspiration. So that is innovation basically, because yeah, like you say, that has become so much more prevalent that now I just sort of shrug it like, I’m just like, oh yeah, madness and tentacles. Great. And so, yeah, I think they’re just, this is such a particular kind of game. And the fact that it was just on GameCube is almost perfect for it in retrospect. You know what I mean? Like, would this have been as special if you could play this on PS2, Xbox and GameCube? I don’t think it would have been. I think it’s perfect for the system it was on as the kind of like GameCube’s own little weird bespoke horror experience that was never to be replicated in any way. Yeah, yeah. What an interesting game. I was highly jealous of people at the time. I just really wanted to play this. It just seems so different. It was just a weird thing. I think I’ve seen like a Roman Centurion and like a blonde woman in a tank top with a shotgun in the same game. I was like, what is that thing? I want to know what that thing is. Yeah, yeah. It has a great jump scare as well involving a bathtub which everyone who’s played it remembers. It’s just a really cool thing. I just like that Miyamoto was involved in it. Well, that’s the narrative anyway. I don’t know how true that is, but just the idea of Miyamoto being a big Lovecraft head is funny to me. Yeah, yeah. Damn. Just weird thinking this ever happened. I think there’s a few making of pieces on how this did happen. Right. But it’s just like it’s so specific. You kind of just think that, I don’t know, maybe like Silicon Knights, if they’d have stuck with Nintendo, they might have fell afoul of the Wii not being a good fit for their kinds of games. But you do wonder. Okay. My number two is Final Fantasy X. One of my favorite games of all time. I put it number two for a reason or comes back to the number one. Game about a boy in a futuristic city, like a young man, who is a star player of a game called Blitzball, which is sort of like underwater football. The city where he lives, Anakin is attacked by this giant mythical monster that looks like a whale, but it’s also stranger than that. It’s absolutely enormous, wipes out his home, and he is zapped a thousand years into the future, where, seemingly, people basically remember his time as this transgressive age where they used technology for convenience and everyone had to pay the price. The big demonic whale in question is essentially punishment for humanity’s sins. That’s basically what the plot of the game is. He’s trying to find out what happened and basically wants to get back to where he comes from, but he soon dawns on him that he can’t. He joins the pilgrimage with this young woman called Yuna, who is essentially trying to destroy the big monster in question. That’s essentially what the game is. It’s a Japanese RPG, turn-based combat, and you are going on this pilgrimage, collecting these different summoned creatures with the goal of getting the ultimate summoned creature, which will destroy this big monster. But then there are other plot twists along the way, where you find out that actually this monster always comes back, even if you destroy it. And destroying it will cost the life of Yuna and also one of the people in her party as well. So there is just no… It’s a cycle of violence, essentially, and part of the plot in the last half of the game becomes about how can you break that? Is it possible to break that? Should you make that sacrifice? Is that justified? Et cetera, et cetera. So quite grand themes, wrapped up in preposterous voice acting. The game is… Final Fantasy X is dated in some various ways. I think it’s a gorgeous looking game. Tropical RPG world. Final Fantasy has never really did anything like it. It’s very aquatic. There’s a lot of small islands and that sort of thing. It’s very beautifully drawn. But undeniably, I think the restraints of how they had to do the voice acting at the time means that it just doesn’t quite work in terms of if you were to play it now for the first time, I think you would very much find limitations in how that voice acting lands compared to how it felt to me in 2002. Yeah, I’d say that’s right. I think it’s actually like why I think that the sort of remade remake is probably quite a good idea because I do think that this core story is actually really good and if you can tell that a bit more coherently with like modern voice acting and all that kind of like gubbins, I think it would actually work a lot better. So there’s potential there. But what you get is a really fucking great RPG combat where you have full customization of how your characters level up. You control every single stat increase on this big board game style thing called the Sphere Grid and it means you can just customize your characters and all these ways you could in some of the other Final Fantasy games, but here it’s just it’s much more vast. So if you want to turn your warrior into a warrior and a mage, then you can do that. You can have the same character who knows how to like, you know, whack an enemy out of the arena can also learn Ultima if you really want to. I think it’s pretty cool to put that power in players hands. The summons have a much deeper part in this game than some of the other ones as well. They’re not just a flashy animation. They are full characters that you control in their own right. You progress them in their own different ways. And they’re powerful and beautifully animated. Just amazing things to behold. I’d say a lot of the kind of blockbuster feel of the game comes from the way they are rendered and brought to life. Some good shit eating villains in this game. Really sort of like nicely done on that side. And Blitzball, the most hated mini game of all time that I love. So, that’s Final Fantasy X, Matthew. Any thoughts? And a man who goes, shoopuff. Matthew’s primary frame of reference to this game. I played it through with Catherine a couple of years ago. So, you know, just so I had some way of communicating better with you. I get what you mean about this. There’s elements of it where it sort of shows its age. This was a bit of an eye-opener for me playing this one because after all the criticism of 13 for being this like corridor when I remember playing this and being like, this is also a corridor. Yeah, it is. I was kind of amazed that the fan base could sort of throw that in one game’s face and not the other, where it’s absolutely fine in both of them. If you’re being led along a linear path between interesting story beats, does it really matter if the story beats are good enough? Yeah. Like, who cares? Yeah, but it is wild. Even having played it and having heard you explain it several times, I’m still not entirely sure that I fully understand it. Put it alongside Metal Gear Solid 2 as slightly baffling endings that escape me. Yeah, good vibes. Good Hawaiian vibes. It feels very complete as a Final Fantasy experience as well. Like, you get to the end of the game and you’ve seen lots of different places, yes, along a big corridor, but you also have, like, Dark Aeons to go and, like, defeat. There’s a mega weapon to go and defeat. There’s, like, hidden secrets on the map you can go and find with your airship. It’s just a very deep game. It has a lot more to give if you want to keep playing it. And I don’t think all the Final Fantasies have felt like that in recent years. So, yeah, I think it is a true sort of, like, Golden Age game, but I think all those criticisms are fair. I think it serves, I think a lot of the, I think, like, 8 and 7 also have the problem of incoherent stories. You know, at least the story is incoherently told on some level, so you feel like you’re missing something as a player. But if you’re sort of died in the wall part of that fan base, you’ve gone out of your way to understand it and engage with it. And this was my first proper touch point with Final Fantasies, so it felt like quite a special thing. I think this also made me slightly obsessed with the notion of, like, flashbacks to childhood as in storytelling to devices. A lot of, like, flashes to white and then, like, sad boy Tidas in the past sequences in this game. So I think that’s sort of, like, that idea. I think I thought of that as, like, a major storytelling device having played this game basically, which does it fucking loads. Yeah, I’m very fond of it. And also, again, PS2, like, this is, like, around the time people stopped doing pre-rendered backgrounds, but here you get some of the most beautiful ones that have ever been put on screen. So, yeah, nicely done. What’s your number one, Matthew? My number one is Super Smash Bros. Melee. Not on my list. Put this one on here. I don’t know if we’ve talked massively about Smash Bros. really in the course of doing this podcast. No, not really. It’s not that I fell out of love with the series as it went on, but I feel like the conversation around Smash Bros. got more and more tiresome and like what people want Smash Bros. to be and how they think about it and talk about it as a proper fighting game or not a proper fighting game or where it sits in the fighting game community. I never really gave a shit about that. I think what I loved about Smash Bros. the first game and then Melee were that these were things which were really championed by the magazines I loved. They said it’s basically all this fun Nintendo stuff kicking the shit out of each other. You’d probably like that if you like Nintendo stuff, which I definitely did. And then my relationship with these games was just playing them with my brother Alex at home. And this was before things could be part of an online discourse. I didn’t know how anyone else perceived this game. I just know how it was perceived by me and my brother, which was a really colourful fighting game in settings pulled from loads of Nintendo games I loved. Just a real celebration of that heritage. I think as the series goes on, it doesn’t become a more serious business, but it loses some of the playful spark. And definitely by the time you get to the newer ones, they seem so paired back in terms of there’s more stuff in them than ever before, but they are a little bit more concerned with being a coherent fighting game, is my read on. Probably like The Post, The Post Wii Smash Brothers. But this one, you know, the stages were a bit more weirdly designed. They had a lot of gimmicks in them. The kind of stuff most people petitioned them to turn off. They just wanted to play like a flat background, you know, just a base stage with two platforms above it in front of a Nintendo picture. That wasn’t Melee, you know. It was Here’s the Temple from Zelda 2. And you can have a little fight up here in these kind of like battlements, or you can take it to this like weird cave underneath, which is really hard to knock people out of because, you know, when you did the smash moves, they’d ricochet between the ceiling, the floor, and often you could like stay in there with incredibly high percentage damage. And that was absolutely thrilling. And stages felt like you were like in these places, not just fighting your enemies, but also dealing with the weird challenges. There was the big Metroid level that rotated or Big Blue, where you’re fighting on the back of like an F-Zero race. Fucking wild. What an exciting thing to have made and conceived of. The idea that you could fall on the track and then get pulled off at a million miles an hour because the whole race is kind of moving on without you. This game like cared more about that and the concept of like, what would it be like to fight in an F-Zero race than it did? What is it like to be a technical Nintendo fighter? And I know that this one is beloved by the fighting game community, that like within its systems there is greater depth or whatever. But I simply do not give a fuck about that side of Smash Brothers. And while they have made Smash Brothers, which are bigger and richer in terms of their heritage, like the music stuff they start doing in Brawl Forwards is just like, that’s the reason to buy those games. It’s just a collection of the greatest Nintendo tunes, remixed and re-orchestrated. Like what? That as a project is crazy. But this game still has loads of nostalgia, loads of fan service. But also I think there’s just a playfulness to it that really resonated with me. It may also just be it was the last one that I played for a considerable amount of time socially, like with my brother. And so it will forever be locked in as just an extremely good time for me. You know, I played a lot of Brawl in the office with Rich Stanton, but it wasn’t the same thing. You know, we were playing at work. You know, Smash Brothers has never been part of my day to day life in the way that it was back here on Gamecube. So I have to put it at number one, if only because, you know, just like an hour basis, this is the game I put the most time into. But I do think some of their priorities changed and they have become a little too hung up on it being something a little bit more coherent while trying to bring together all this mad incoherent stuff. Like fundamentally, this one gets it at each stage, leans into the strengths of its specific world and universe and rules. And that for me is what made it really special. Yeah, I don’t know if I feel like Smash Brothers lost that feeling of like, how do you build an innovative level around the idea of this like property? So you think about like the Picto chat level, for example, in them. Is that in Brawl, that one? Just even like the persona level they added to Ultimate, just with I think it’s in the subway, the depths that you were exploring that game. Just sort of like, I feel like they still get the vibe right in this stuff. But I do think that this is the first time you had seen, because obviously the N64 had hard limitations. So that did feel like you were basically like, with a couple of exceptions, like Star Fox level, for example, it just couldn’t do much set piece-wise. And this was like, okay, we’ve got all the GameCube’s power. What can we do with it? Yep, big blue. Let’s have some fucking, an actual race that you’re jumping on top of the different, you know, sort of like the F-Zero races. Really good. And is there also like a level with some big kind of like weird Pokemon floating Pokemon balloon things? Yeah, they put the Poker Floats level. Yeah, so stuff like that. I agree, like there’s just so much imagination behind those, behind how those were brought to life. They just felt like such a treat. And is there a Game of Watch level in this one too? Yes, yeah. Like this had a great selection of like hidden stuff. Like just the more you play, the more like weirder things you unlock. And that was really thrilling. And like obviously the new characters that they added were really exciting. Yeah, maybe I’m being a bit unfair on like later Smash Brothers. They definitely all have levels which lean well into their properties. You know, I love the Spirit Tracks one on 3DS for example. But I felt like as it went on, I don’t know, I do feel like they’re a little bit more conservative. I mean, but that’s by Smash Brothers standards. Like it’s obviously still like wildly out there. And I don’t know, just the conversation around Smash Brothers is really fucking boring to me. I loved it as this self-contained thing. And I feel like it just got co-opted by this community that I’m like, it’s just not for me. That obviously shouldn’t really have a bearing on the games themselves, but it has coloured them a little bit. I will say, because I played this a few weeks ago with Dave who came on the podcast, NQ64 in London, and it still looks amazing. And it is so fast and so pure, but that’s what you can say from LA. It just feels like it’s purely, I think, like you say, it’s designed without a fighting game community in mind, right? It’s very much like it’s just what is fast, entertaining and amazing to play with like two, three, four players. In front of a TV in 2002, that’s literally how it was conceived. So I think that purity is kind of like what makes it stand out and why it is so special to play now. I think there is still a particular feel to how Melee felt that the other games doesn’t have. So I think that is absolutely accurate. And I see what you mean about the discourse, Matthew. So that’s completely fair. I know people get annoyed sometimes when we get like too hung up on the discourse because that isn’t the game and it isn’t the game’s fault. But Smash Brothers is as much a culture now as it is as it is a game. What I’m nostalgic for is just a time where that just that could, you know, that didn’t happen. Or it was feasible, I think, could exist in isolation like Melee did for me. Matthew is nostalgic for a time where Sora did not shake hands with Mario. That was like a period of great cultural defeat for Matthew Castle. So, OK, my number one is Halo Combat Evolved. So, first person shooter, there were many first person shooters this year, but this one I just was the one I would play obsessively over and over again with my friend Donald down the road and then with my friend Andrew, just going through levels like time after time, seeing the different ways we could play with the different toys in the game, running over each other with the tank, running over each other with the banshees, the flying, the flying plane things, seeing if I could jump from the very top of a level down to the bottom by hitting objects on the way down, because I knew that physics-wise that would stop Master Chief from taking damage and seeing if the level would load in. All kinds of dumb bullshit. I would do everything I could to try and break this game because I absolutely adored it. I thought from the different enemy types, which are all just so perfect, the kind of like the way the AI behaves, so they just felt sort of so tactically responsive in the game, the fact that you did have vehicles that you could just hop in and out of, the fact that the levels felt a bit sandbox-y, the iconography of this sci-fi universe, which I’m not saying I’m obsessed with Halo lore or anything like that, but I just thought it was really, really good. 2002, a traditionally PC company has made a console for the first time, ass iconography. That’s what it is basically. Right. Yeah, I think it just looks so good, the original Halo, even though it’s sort of like the colours are so muted and that sort of thing. It was still quite a bright and colourful sci-fi universe for the time. Quite strange. Love the idea of like the basically a big ring that’s like this ancient superweapon. But if you tap into the power of it, you’ll unleash all these like primordial monsters that will come and fuck you up, which is essentially what happens in the story. And then, yeah, basically like becomes aliens slash aliens in the second half, when it seems maybe a bit more, I don’t know, slightly Starship Troopers-y in the first half. Really, really good. And it ends with a great escape as you get in like a jeep and just get out of a big exploding spaceship. Really fucking good. Halo Matthew, available now on Xbox. Really good. I thought your number one pick was going to be Vice City. No, so Vice City has made neither of our lists. Yeah, interesting. Well, it didn’t happen for me in 2002. Like I, my mum wouldn’t buy it for me. So I only ended up playing it. I think 2007 I bought it. And by then it was already quite old. So just didn’t, I couldn’t form the same relationship to it that other people had. And I know for a lot of people, GTA is Vice City still. So hence why GTA 6 is such a big deal. Do you have any more thoughts on that one? Only that I didn’t include it for similar reasons. It wasn’t a big part of my landscape at the time. I obviously came back to it and played it and loved it. I loved the music of it and what it’s tapping into. I think I struggle with it a little bit as a, because the world and story was a little bit more coherent than threes and there was just a little bit more going on with that regard. It made the sloppy or under undercooked mission design feel a bit more egregious. I still really struggle with it. I remember just getting stuck on that fucking junkyard fight level for months and kind of sort of growing to hate, not hate the game, but feel a lot of spite towards it because of that. So that’s why I didn’t make my list. But yeah, I didn’t play Halo either. I mean, I don’t think any of the Halo games are anywhere near like my favorite game lists. It just happened for some people and it didn’t happen for me. Yeah, you’re just not a big Xbox guy either. That’s the thing with you. It’s just not quite baked into your DNA being an Xbox guy. It’s just not. Yeah, pretending to be interested in Halo 4 when I was editing Halo 5, sorry, when I was editing official Xbox was tough. You’re like, oh my god, Master Chief, so good in fucking Halo 1. Here he is again. I maintain that I’m sort of like, I’m very platform agnostic with how I enjoy games. But I think that just, yeah, Halo did just feel special because it did feel like they’d nailed the controls in a way that you hadn’t seen before. And so that’s the start. That’s kind of like the beginning of the end of like the original array of first person shooters on PC, right? Because as games became more expensive to make and Halo became such a big success, it made sense to target that audience more than just like the PC audience. So, yeah, in some ways, it sort of like brings to a close the types of games that we talked about earlier in our list, you know, like the Allied Assaults and General Outcasts of this world, which were made for PC. So, yeah, you know, you could say that’s like one bad exponent of it. But definitely as a standalone, amazing, revolutionary experience, I completely sold the Xbox to me. I was like, well, I just need to play this. I need to have this in my life because I can play this. It turns out an unlimited number of times and have a great time. So, yes. I guess with Halo, it’s a bit like whenever I see people who, like, just don’t get GoldenEye, like they just didn’t do GoldenEye. They didn’t do the GoldenEye thing. And I’m like, well, that person is insane. GoldenEye was amazing. I imagine that people feel exactly the same. I’m like, it just didn’t, it just didn’t click for me. It just didn’t. I wasn’t a Halo guy. It just happened that way. Well, I think this is so true with so many of the games on these lists from this period where if you weren’t there at the time, you genuinely can’t reverse engineer what they were like because even by the HD era, things had changed so much in terms of how third-person shooters felt or how first-person shooters were designed for controllers that you just can’t, you can’t possibly understand. You know, it’s just, yeah, you just had to be there for all this stuff happening. And in the moment, yeah, 2002 felt like a massive year. There was just so much happening, so much changing, so many things you’d never seen before. And Halo was definitely, definitely one of those. And Smash Bros. Melee was definitely like the kind of step forward in games that you’ll just never see now. Just like a true generational leap. But like, yeah, again, just feels like there’s decades apart between those games, between the N64 Smash and Melee. So, yeah. Okay. We wrap up a monstrously long episode. Very, very quick fire. Honorable mentions from me, Matthew. Jetset Radio Future, Guitaruman, Asian Mythology, Hitman 2, the original Hitman 2, Vice City, Rez, Freedom Force, Tekken 4, all my honorable mentions. I suppose of those, I just pull out Guitaruman as a really special, sort of like, unusual rhythm action game on PS2, where you just, we control the guitar using the analog sticks. Really just nicely done and just wild, some absolutely madcap shit happens in the background. Great time for all involved. How about you? Yeah, I would say Golden Sun, which I’ve been replaying since they put it on Virtual Console, is delightful. Castlevania, Harmony of Dissonance, definitely not the strongest of the three GBA ones, but worth a little nod. I was also looking at The Thing on PS2, which is unusual. I just don’t know if it’s actually very good. It’s like a game with a brilliant idea, but actually playing it was, it was a bit of a bad hang, that one. One of those games that I think people are like, oh, this is such a cool idea in the moment. And then it’s sort of like over time, people have called on it a little bit. I just feel like you could do that now brilliantly with like where AI is at and just where we’re at with systems based games. I don’t think we were quite there then. And it’s, yeah, you have to take it with such a pinch of salt to enjoy it. But yeah, those were the biggies. Okay. Well, the podcast is over. It went very, very long. But I think like this is like, I think we can do one of these like a month when we have the mail bags and what we’ve been playing is to like ease it off a little bit. Do you think that’s right, Matthew? It’s like, is that does that balance out? Do you think? Yeah, I feel I feel like that’s right. Yeah, I think so. Okay. Well, thank you so much for listening. BackpagePod on Twitter, patron.com/backpagepod. If you’d like to support us financially and unlock two additional episodes a month, we just recently did best TV shows of 2023. And I bought Matthew with my travel log from Japan. He was good. I love it episode. People seem to really like that one. Yeah, I was quite quite surprised by how taken people was. But actually, the funniest thing was my friend Lynch and some of the people who I met out there have been messaging me since then to be like, oh, to give to give their perspective on like what was happening at the time. They’re like, oh, yeah, you went that bad company. We should do a second one. We should do like like turn it into a Rashomon style project. Yeah, how appropriate. And Matthew, where can people find you on social media? On Twitter, I’m Mr. Basil underscore pesto. On Blue Sky, I’m Mr. Basil pesto. No underscore. OK, great. And no content. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on both platforms. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll be back next week. Bye-bye.