Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Hello, Matthew. Welcome to the Nintendo Top 50 Part 4, The Epilogue. I think we should wrap this up in… Should be able to wrap this up in three hours. It’s like the Nightmare Sequence where you wake up. Certainly for the people who didn’t like that episode format, but everyone else seemed to enjoy it. So, yes, we’re talking about games that aren’t fucking Mario and Zelda for once, so a little bit of a treat there for people. Matthew’s had a special K to kick him off on this Sunday morning. I’ve had a pepperami because I’m on one of my low calorie days. You’re on a pepperami diet. Yeah, well- You can eat as much pepperami as you want, but only pepperami. Your lifespan is reduced by approximately 15 years, so as long as you’re willing to make that sacrifice, you can get a lot of great results, I find. So, yes, notice the What We’ve Been Playing episode. We’re just going to talk about some games we’ve been playing. In truth, we’ve both been playing Perfect Dark, as people who listen to Monday’s Excel Patreon episode will have heard about across a two-hour episode in real depth. So these are the things around the edges. I suppose, Matthew, this is a primer to our conversation, because I think we’re probably in the same boat here. I imagine some players are in the same boat here. There’s a little bit of like tiny bit of summer blues with games going on for me. I don’t know about you, but it feels like the lack of any kind of massive, a bilateral sized indie standouts means it’s a little bit of a kind of like, pick your own thing and try and find some cool stuff in the margins you like. But what do you think? Yeah, I’d say it feels like a bit of a free for all. You know, as I’ve said many times on this podcast before, my playing habits are largely dictated by what I need to do for work or for this podcast or, you know, keeping up with the big trends and like I feel like there’s not a lot of obvious direction in that at the moment. So I’m kind of left to my own devices and it’s now that I remember how bad I am at filling my own time yesterday. I probably had the worst day of gaming I’ve ever had. Wow, that is saying something. In terms of, hang on, I’m just going to get some Renny’s out of my pocket because I don’t want to be rustling through this. I was in a foul mood yesterday because I woke up and had a load of Uber charges on my bank account which was just really infuriating that some motherfucker was using my debit card. Anyway, that put me in a bad mood and I was sort of agitated throughout the day. I had a free house because Catherine was away at Hendoo so I thought, oh great, normally any other day I would have sat down and mainline something for 10 hours and it would have been bliss. But I think the agitation of the Uber stuff combined with the fact that I don’t have a big project game at the moment meant that I just flitted between the weirdest shit. I replayed an hour of one of the Famicom Detective Club games. That’s a bit weird. That’s quite strange. I played four levels of Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. Oh, did you want to move it down to the ranking after playing those? No, it’s fine. I’m willing to let it go. I have to decouple it from my trauma. But that was fine. That was enjoyable. I did two worlds of Mario Galaxy 1. What else did I do? Top 50s left some weird scars on you, I think. Yeah, it was like that all day. I was just flitting between little snippets of things here and there. I just couldn’t get any purchase in it. I watched an episode of Cobra Kai. All right. That really dipped as it went. I found that show. Yeah, I’m still fond of it. I watched half an hour of one of those terrible Zack Snyder Rebel Moon films. Well, the director’s cut. Yeah. I think it’s got two scenes of breasts that he’s put in there just to sort of make it adult. But yeah. This is terrible stuff. So a friend described that as like an NFT movie, basically. That’s what that film feels like. I quite like that. It’s just so charmer for some reason Anthony Hopkins was this soulful robot, isn’t it? He just makes that dollar, doesn’t he? He’s in those who wish to die or whatever. Oh yeah. We tried that. I think he will turn up for a paycheck, which is fair enough because he’s probably thinking grandkids, yeah, here’s some cash. Your granddad’s been in a shite Transformers movie again. I feel like he’s muscling in on Malcolm McDowell’s turf. Very much so, yeah. A bit of a whiff of credibility British guy in junkie genre stuff. So yeah, yesterday just sort of encapsulated what is going on with me at games at the moment. I just don’t know what to do. Yeah, I’m in a similar boat. I’ll talk about this a little bit. In fact, this could just be the thing I’ll talk about upfront. Actually, that probably makes sense as a transition here. But yeah, I found that a bunch of new games that have come out this year that are this summer period, I should say, are good objectively, like they are well-made and it’s a nice variety of stuff as well. But I found that they just aren’t sticking because for various reasons, I think it might be partly me, just none of them have truly captured my imagination. But I feel like I’m a little bit ungrateful as well because Arranger, which is like puzzle-adventure thing that I even picked one of my most anticipated games on that episode we did back in June. I didn’t quite click with that as much as I would like. You’re going to talk about that game in this episode anyway, so we’ll come back to that. The Dungeons of Hinterburg, which is a very nice looking and well-conceived, sort of like Zelda slash Akamia-like with a few persona elements, quite an interesting mix of stuff. Yeah, cell-shaded graphics set in this sort of like alternate version of like tourist ravaged Austria. I quite like that game. It’s like it really does look nice and it feels like a game that, if it was like an ex-BLA game in 2008 or 2009, everyone would have been like, wow, and then all these years later people will be talking about, oh my God, remember Dungeons of Hinterburg? Someone made like this cool like little Zelda-y thing and it was like they sold it for 2,400 Microsoft points or whatever. Like it’s got the profile of a game like that, but it’s just, I do think that some of these games, another one is like Kinetsu Gami, Path of the Goddess, which is a Capcom, very lavish looking Capcom spin on Tower Defense. All these games are like probably in the 8 out of 10 range, but for some reason they’re just not quite doing it for me. Kinetsu Gami, I think it’s because I have, my memories of playing Tower Defense games on PS3 are too fresh. There were loads of them on PS3. So with that kind of game, I feel like I’m done. You know what I mean? What were the Tower Defense games on PS3? Pixel Junk Monsters and its sequel. Oh, stuff like that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Savage Moon, which was really good. But there were just loads at the time. In that early age of download games on console, I feel like there were loads of Tower Defense games. Do you ever end up playing any of them? Not really. It’s not really my genre. There was that Double Fine one. Yeah. With the tanks. Yeah, I can’t remember what it was called. It was something like Lion Brigade, was that it? That’s right. Yeah. I think that’s right. There was also, I think there was, I can’t remember what they’re all called now, but wasn’t there also a Final Fantasy themed one that was on WeWare, like Crystal Tower or something like that? There was one where you built this big tower. Was that related to My Life as a King? Was that like My Life as a Dark Lord or something? Maybe? I can’t exactly remember. There were so many of them. There were those weird Crystal Chronicles adjacent WeWare games. There was one which was like a town builder. There was one where you definitely built a tower and people climbed up it. Yeah. There are even more there. I just looked it up and remembered obviously Plants Vs. Zombies, that was huge. Yeah. Defense Grid and its sequel and of course, South Park, Let’s Go, the Tower Defense play, which was I think like probably actually like quite well made game, but I wondered if it was one of the games that drove Parker and Stone a bit nuts. They just wanted to make their own very good South Park game, having thought there were loads of things that weren’t quite a good fit. Yeah. There have been loads of them. This has a very different aesthetic. I guess you might describe it as a period Japanese fairy tale aesthetic. A lot of people have compared it to Onimusha, and I don’t think that’s too unfair because it’s got a lot of weird demonic crusty shit in the different levels that you have to clear out. But for some reason, that feels like just something I have played before, despite their best efforts. What do you make of this malaise, Matthew? Am I just being ungrateful for the sheer amount of good stuff here? No, I think that’s okay. I mean, I don’t know if it’s also just down to the ease of access to these things on Game Pass, if it’s just harder to focus you in. Sometimes you need the discipline of like, this is the only thing I can play to get you into something. Otherwise, your mind, it can wonder. Yeah, Arranger is free on my phone. That’s my best guess. Well, Arranger is free on my phone as well through Netflix. So yeah, I mean, that is part of it. But I think it is also because they are all very good, rather than like out and out excellent. That’s also part of it. I’m not quite locking in. So Dungeons of Hinterburg, I like everything about how it looks, and the presentation, and the writing. It’s not too intrusive, the amount of story they do put in there. The dungeons are nicely designed as well, because it is a series of Zelda style dungeons that you’re taking off. If you missed that part of Zelda, then you might enjoy this. I think I’ve done three, four of the dungeons, something like that. But the thing about the game is, it actually mimics exactly what I remember about Akami in the sense that I love the aesthetic and the world it puts you into. But then the combat just leaves me a bit cold. It’s exactly like that, because it is like a very trad Zedlock Zelda style combat system. It’s just weird to be like with some spells that remind me of Akami, like drawing the bombs and stuff like that. And yeah, it’s weird to be like really just like strongly reminded of, here’s the thing I liked about this game that clearly inspired this game, and here’s also the thing I didn’t like also in this game. That’s quite unusual. So that’s my sort of little overview there. Those are all perfectly fine games, but none of them are just quite clicked here. I will stick with, I don’t think I will stick with Arranger, to be honest. But I do think I will probably give Dungeons of Winterberg another couple of Dungeons, and Kinnetsu Gami a few more, maybe like an hour or so extra just to see if it kind of clicks. But yeah, none of them have quite done it for me, unfortunately, despite a lot of people seeming to like those games, Matthew. So why don’t you talk about your first game? Because this is probably the one I’m most excited to talk about in this episode. So this is Nobody Wants to Die, a cyber-punky detective game from Chrisco Hit, I think, or a Polish studio published by PlayOn. I don’t really understand PlayOn’s whole deal. It’s kind of what Deep Silver was? Yeah. Yeah. If they publish it on the Metro, it will be through there, right? Because they’re like a distributor as well, right? They’re like, they’re not anyway, whatever. Let’s not get into the PlayOn it at all. So yeah, this was like quite unexpected. It’s a weird one. So on paper, it feels like something that should have had a bit more buzz around it, because it’s quite a nice looking cyberpunky game, like, you know, graphically very impressive. And they never, they didn’t do any like preview rounds for this. I think they did one bit of access for like IGN, you know, a few months ago, and it did like crazy numbers on the IGN YouTube channel. So there was like an appetite for it, because, you know, people naturally gravitate towards games, which look kind of AAA, and it does look AAA. But it was hard to glean kind of what exactly it was. Sort of a Noir-ish tone to it. It’s basically a private eye, you know, 1930s style, you know, sort of Raymond Chandler-y kind of private eye story, but set in the future, maybe a little bit Blade Runner-y in that regard. You play a detective investigating murders in a society, which is basically built around the idea of people moving their sort of consciousness or soul into new bodies, and, you know, it’s kind of created this sort of immortality for those who can afford it. But at the same time, there’s now all kinds of sort of ethical moral dilemmas around, you know, how people think about their bodies, where these bodies come from, people who can’t afford things, you know, do they sort of sell their bodies, you know, do they sell their healthy bodies and, you know, just survive in this grim time. So there’s all that kind of stuff that you’d sort of, you know, sort of high-concept sci-fi thing. It’s a little bit, I don’t know if you ever watch Altered Carbon on Netflix, which had sort of similar kind of, rich people can live forever by kind of moving between bodies and the idea that you end up in a body that isn’t yours and you have to kind of come to terms with that. Like there’s a lot of that in this. That’s an interesting sort of jumping off point. I do agree it looks very AAA and shiny. I can see why it captured people’s imaginations. You’re quite not a harsh critic with this genre, but this is your kind of turf this genre. So how do you kind of rate the overall detective game element of it? I mean, I would say it’s like barely a detective game. It’s really a very handsome walking simulator. There’s not a lot in terms of what you actually do. The mechanics of it, I’d say, are lifted from Batman’s detective vision or the detective mode. You know when you get the crime scenes in the Arkham games and you’re walking around kind of reconstructing things with holograms? It’s like that, but I’d say even more guided. So a lot of these scenes, you come in, you see them all kind of smashed up and sort of fucked up, but you have this tool which lets you sort of rewind time and kind of create a timeline which you can sort of zip through. And the game’s big visual trick is this fast-forwarding, rewinding thing and seeing these crime scenes which are often sort of disastrous in nature, kind of like reversing, you know, so you get to see lots of things like, you know, explosions in reverse and like a bar which suddenly just explodes in violence, you know, when you rewind it, you see all the kind of splinters of wood kind of reforming into furniture and chairs and stuff. And that stuff’s really cool, just from a sort of visual perspective. But in terms of what you actually do, yeah, you have quite limited tools like a UV lamp, this time rewinding thing, a couple of others, but the game very explicitly, like whenever you interact with something, it just brings up the tool you need. You don’t have to make any decisions in this game. You’re just following a linear path. There’s no kind of questioning system to make sure that you’re passing the scene. Sometimes these games will have like a, you know, you do understand what you’re looking at, but there’s nothing like that here. It’s literally following this linear story path through each crime scene. And, you know, it’s the fantasy, I think it’s trying to sell you on, rather than like the skill and the mechanical kind of involvement of being detective. It’s just like, here’s a six hour thing where you will follow this path and see some cool visual shit. And you know, like, you know, it works on the basis of like you go into these scenes and you’re like, what the fuck happened here? And you’re kind of interested to find out what happened there. But you don’t really find it out yourself. It’s quite like inevitable. But like that, I still found that kind of engaging enough from like, you know, my, you know, switch my brain off, just marvel at it, enjoy the kind of art design, you know, enjoy the animation of these scenes playing out when you rewind them. Like that was fun. But yeah, and you can barely call it a detective game really. I’d say it’s an on rails narrative experience. Yeah, like a walking sim. There’s like an element to it that you sometimes get to, like the only kind of input you really have are like, you’re in conversation with like a kind of your partner or handler. I can’t remember exactly how they set it up, but there’s this sort of observer on the crime scenes, this lady who isn’t there with you. And your relationship with her is kind of defined by the dialogue choices. So almost like a tiny bit of Firewatching, the way that Henry is always talking to that lady in the other tower. And the big choice you have in Firewatch is to define the relationship with… Is it Delilah? Is that her name, I think? In Firewatch, it has a bit of that. But unfortunately, like the big weakness of this game, I think the writing is like absolutely terrible. And the voice acting, just not very well directed. I think some of the dialogue, like anyone would struggle to make sound natural. Like it doesn’t sound like it was written by native English speakers, I’d say, in places. Like some of the use of swear words are just like, you just wouldn’t say that there. But it just doesn’t sound true. And these people are kind of growling their way and chewing their way through his dialogue. But I found that quite distracting, given that all it really does have is the story. You’d probably want that to be delivered as smoothly as possible, but it’s quite cringey, that element of it. I think the thing I would say for it, and the thing which kind of kept me playing, and the thing that I liked about it, and maybe this is a bit of a clinical way of looking at its design, but I did like how I think it really punches above its weight in terms of like real estate. Like it’s not an open world game, you know, it’s a series of crime scenes and like the detective’s apartment that you go back to, and a couple of other locations in between, but it really sort of sells you on the kind of complete city and the scale of the city, whether that’s by like, you know, you look out of these, there’s lots of bits where you look out of windows and you see like the huge cityscape, and it looks absolutely amazing. And it uses his car in quite a clever way in that, you know, as he’s moving between locations, the car kind of shuts you off. So they haven’t had to build loads of the city, you know, you don’t fly around it, but it often uses his car as like, his car is parked around the city, and you’re kind of sitting in the driver’s seat or sitting on the bonnet of it looking around. And it uses like quite a limited handful of sort of static viewpoints to give you like, quite a comprehensive view of the city. You come away feeling you’ve seen like loads of it, and you have a really, really good sense of place. And that to me just, it felt quite elegant for a smaller team, you know, with probably not a mega budget of like, how do you really stretch this? You know, I felt like I had as good a sense of the place as I did Cyberpunk, which was a, you know, an open world city. I was driving around for hours and hours and hours. I thought that, I thought that was quite clever. I thought that, you know, particularly, like the opening of it, it’s got this great sort of almost like bio-shocky reveal where you’re watching a sort of film in your car, like at a drive-through and then you open the door and then you sort of realize the scale of the city that you’re in. And it’s a bit of a, you know, like I give you rapture kind of moment where you’re suddenly looking down at this futuristic sort of time square. Is it? Yeah, I think it is set in like futuristic New York. And that’s really good. That’s like, it has these quite like wow moments, which speak to a kind of bigger ambition or a team that are working really well within their limitations. And like just from an execution standpoint, you know, I quite like that stuff. I wouldn’t say, you know, it’s the reason to play it. But if you are interested in, you know, how smaller teams can do this kind of very shiny, expansive stuff, it’s quite an interesting solution to it. Yeah, kind of not very engaging as a game, but as a little sort of technical showcase, yeah, I quite enjoyed it. I didn’t feel like it was wasted time. Almost feels like it would be elevated to the next level if they did get the writing right though, right? Because that’s the thing about a walking simulator, is that great story and great characterisation can lift it that little bit further. Like we saw that with Still Wakes A Deet this year, not completely a walking simulator, but definitely has a lot of that DNA and like you say, Firewatch, Firewatch is just a game of people talking, basically, while you walk around really nice environments. And if they got the writing right, it would tip over into slightly more essential territory. Yeah, it would definitely, yeah, I don’t know if it would quite be essential. I feel like it would still need more of a detective game at the heart of it. Even just turning off the handholding, if that was possible, and just letting you go, oh, I better use my UV lamp here because they’re talking about fingerprints or whatever, rather than press right trigger to use UV lamp. But yeah, the writing would help, but that is definitely the most jarring thing, and some of the other people I’ve spoken to have played this, really bounced off it for the same reason. Just really sweary in a way which feels like, oh, you don’t really know how swearing is meant to be used. Okay. Interesting. Well, I will probably get this when it’s quite cheap because I was still just curious enough about it from the footage to dive in. So I don’t think it’s that expensive. It’s like 25 quid or something. So they’re not asking loads for it. I don’t actually remind the lack of, I mean, maybe I’ll change my mind when I play it, like the lack of loads of sophistication to the actual detective elements. Yeah. Being shot through a story, it’s not too objectionable if I feel like I’m otherwise having a good time. So you finish it, it’s well worth it. This one foot thing that made me laugh in it, in the future, like it’s got some nice future ideas and future tech and stuff. In his apartment block, you’ve got his apartment, his bedroom, his office, his kitchen. But the bathroom, it kind of connects to… It’s a one-person bathroom, but it feels like it rotates to connect to different apartments. So when you try and use the toilet door, someone else is in there and they’re trying to finish their bathroom session. And then I guess the bathroom like realigns to be connected to his apartment. But I kind of like the idea of this sort of mad… I think it’s like the shower rotates. So when you’re in the shower, someone else is like, get out the shower so it can rotate into my apartment. I like the idea of a shared shower. I thought that was that was quite novel. Good world building, yeah, yeah. Like that’s got big Airbnb energy that has appropriately cursed. Okay, good stuff, Matthew. I will pick that up when it’s about 12 quid or something. Yes, this is very much a 12 quid game. Okay, perfect. Well, my next game then is Anger Foot, published by Devolver Digital, developed by FreeLive, so one of their sort of like frequent collaborators. They made Broforce, you know, probably the game that people of theirs or people will know the most. They also made a game called Gorn on there and Genital Jousting they made for Devolver too. So those games you probably have, they’re quite some quite splashy games they make, I would say, and physics-y games that sort of like their whole area. Anger Foot is a first-person shooter where you have, you can basically have a very powerful kick that will instantly kill enemies with you at all times. And yeah, you just, you kick an enemy, you can knock them into another enemy. And then there are some enemies you need to kick. And basically it’s like kicking becomes a core part of the experience. You go around these levels room by room, clearing out enemies while this thumping, loud kind of club music is playing. And then the music will basically lift when there are enemies around and then drop again when enemies are like cleared out. So there’s this constant kind of like musical beat going on while you’re like basically kicking enemies or shooting them. Or sometimes you can even like kick grenades back at enemies, like you use the Anger Foot in different ways, kicking grenade back at an enemy and watching them explode. Very exciting. But you’ll get some enemies that run at you and self-destruct, so you kick them towards other enemies and they kind of explode. That’s where I think it’s got some DNA with Broforce, very much a game of explosions going on for reasons you’re not entirely clear on, even though you are having a good time. I think this is really good. It reminds me a lot of, it’s definitely going for a kind of Hotline Miami style vibe of, there’s a timer counting down. Levels are not that long in theory, but it can get quite hard. Understanding where the enemy placement is, the optimal way to deal with enemies. In some ways, actually, it very much reminds me of a game I discussed on, I think it was our last, what we’ve been playing, which was Mullet Mad Jack. Another game that had a kick in it and was a first-person shooter and was about speed running these different levels. This is better for a few reasons. It’s got a wider array of enemy types. I’m quite impressed by the number of different enemy types they’ve got in there, and the levels start to mix it up as you get deeper into it. So at first, you’re going in through a labyrinth of different rooms and an apartment block basically. But then where I’ve got to now, I’m on level 16, and I believe there are 62 levels in the game in total. So getting to the point where it’s eased out of teaching you the mechanics and into more of a kind of like hardcore, can you maintain this rhythm of doing all this different stuff without being killed kind of thing, where you’re actually jumping between buildings now. It’s like a platforming element to it. So the kind of canvas of it has expanded a little bit, which I quite like because I did wonder if it was going to risk going stale if it was just kicking enemies, kicking the same few enemies going through these apartment blocks. It actually is mixing up now. I just did a level, for example, where you have to jump between all these different rooftops, while a sniper is aiming at you. If you’re exposed for more than a few seconds, the sniper will automatically kill you. So as well as kicking enemies, shooting enemies, you have to think about remaining in cover, so you don’t get sniped as you go. All that’s really good. I think the bones of the game are really good. What I think adds the longevity that Mullet Magic lacked and that Hotline Miami obviously has, is that much like the masks in Hotline Miami, you can unlock new trainers for your foot. They have different powers. So there’s one where kicking enemy will restore ammo, for example. There’s one set of trainers that gives you a second life. So if you die in the middle of a level, you’ll come back to life. It’s incredibly helpful in some of the trickier levels. There are loads more beyond. You basically unlock them bit by bit, by unlocking three different stars per level based on these different parameters. So finish a level in a certain time, you’ll get a star. Just finishing the level by itself always gets you a star, but there are these optional objectives on top of that. Then you spend that currency on these trainers. They all have different abilities. So some will be a bit more speed oriented, some will be a bit more combat oriented. That’s where I think the layer of replayability comes in. I think it’s really good. I think it’s a slight shame it’s just on PC. This is also one of those games that made me think, score attack game would be perfect for the Switch, but there’s just no way the Switch is going to be able to handle this game. It’s got way too much going on in terms of physics, the enemies you’re fighting, these very cursed looking, sort of like blue, green kind of monster lads, very strange looking beings. You are a strange looking being as well. You have this big green foot that you’re kicking people with. Definitely cursed, like 100%. But very, very enjoyable. Were you aware of this game Matthew? Yeah I was. It’s good to hear that there’s a bit more to it in terms of the trainers and the level variety because it’s one of those games where I sort of smirked at the trailer and went, oh yes, very funny, very devolver, man with an angry foot is kicking lots of stuff. But like, it’s one of the, it’s almost like a sub-genre of games of like looks amazing and is really funny the first time you encounter it in trailer form because it’s got a funny name, a kind of funny concept, you know, you can sort of see what the shape of it is pretty quickly. But at the same time, they don’t tend to kind of push me over the line in terms of actually buying it. Because I just go, oh, it just seems like a joke, you know, because it’s sold as a joke going, oh, this is going to be quite a frivolous thing. And, you know, I think there are a few games like that. My friend Pedro game. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, just sort of things like that. Things which are like, they’re sort of, you know, they’re sort of so simple and easy to get your head around that, you know, the second you see it, you kind of rush to tweet about it or message about it, whatever. But then the relationship ends there for me, really. So it takes people like you to actually play them and go, oh, there is more to this. It isn’t. It doesn’t hinge on you thinking the idea of a really angry man with a big kick, who likes kicking stuff, is like a good enough concept to get you to buy a whole game because it isn’t for me. So, yeah. Yeah. What I would say is it feels like they almost like game jammed this concept and then asked themselves, what is every single layer we can add on top of this to make it feel like full featured and kind of valuable and not a novelty game? And so, I can definitely see why the attitude of it and how that was presented in trailers and stuff comes off as novel. But I think it’s got the goods when it comes to actual FPS design. Yeah, I played two hours of it last night non-stop and in any real pause, I definitely want to see the end of it. I definitely want to get more of those trainers. I know that sounds ridiculous me saying that. It has all the usual kind of like, I would say like Devolver kind of like art gubbins. What I mean by that is a lot of the like small details and levels or like posters or in-game items and things like that have great art. And I’ve asked something I kind of like weirdly think of with Devolver games is the art side of things is just always kind of nailed in these games. And that’s obviously comes down to the developer more than the publisher, I’m sure. But it’s just like, but the map screen in this is like this little scrapbook he goes through and just like all of the symbols and stuff remind me of playing something like, so it’s very specific examples, something like Amped 3, it’s kind of scrapbooky kind of visual style that just really adds something to it. So yeah, I definitely agree, it could have strayed into novelty, but it doesn’t. I think this is definitely my favorite of the kind of like weird batch of midsummer games that have come out that I don’t want to say weird, that doesn’t make sense. But I guess like clutch of indie 6 to 8 out of 10 stuff that’s been sort of like swimming around. This is definitely my pick of them. So yeah, I definitely recommend this. Like it’s 20 quid, obviously sale season’s coming up, so keep an eye out. I’m sure we’re gonna get a little bit less. It’s also playable on Steam Deck. I can imagine it’s perfect on there. It’s got like a couple of like performance issues when a lot of things are happening on screen, something it has in common with Broforce actually. But yeah, nothing to like really destabilize the experience, but I like this game, it’s cool. It’s got the FPS goods, Matthew. Do you have to be a big trainer guy to like this? No, not at all. It definitely taps into that culture a little bit, but I would say as well like the, to just go back to the Mullet Mad Jack thing, I think this just, that game I think just didn’t have enough variety in terms of like ways you could play and enemies that you fought. It was a really nice thing to blast through, but yeah, this game just, this game feels like the complete package in the way that didn’t. So yeah, I would definitely recommend this over that. There you go, Matthew. So what’s your next game? Well, I’ll say it’s an old one, came out in January. I finally got around to properly digging into Another Code Recollection or Recollection, which are the Switch ports of the Another Code SING games on DS and Wii. They’re actually kind of complete remakes, both of them, which is a surprise. I don’t know how familiar you are with Another Code. I played a bit of it for the DS draft, and that’s the only time I’ve actually played these games. Yeah. Yeah. So like the DS game, obviously I fully expected them to have to kind of remake that more substantially on the Switch, because I didn’t really see them just sort of replicating the dual screen setup on the Switch. That didn’t make sense to me, but the Wii game was a console, big TV experience, so I expected the Wii game to kind of come to Switch. And actually one of the interesting things about this is that they’ve remade the DS game completely into sort of a 3D world that you walk around and explore. And then they’ve updated the Wii game to look and behave more like the DS game. So quite a substantial amount of work’s gone into this, given that, you know, another code didn’t seem to be in play. I mean, this wasn’t a thing Nintendo cared enough about back in the day to kind of keep seeing around making more games. And I think it was made, this version was made by Arc System Works, I think, where there are Xing people, like they’ve… Oh, what, the fighting game dev? Yeah, I think that’s right. Maybe I’ve muddled up a couple of facts there, but some members of the original Another Code team did work on it, but at their new place of work. So all together, quite strange, you know, you would think if they were to make, update any of Xing’s games, that they might have looked at Hotel Dusk and Last Window, given that they have a slightly bigger cultural nostalgic footprint, I’d say, than Another Code. But anyway, so there’s that element of it, which I think is interesting. If you’ve never played this game on DS before, it’s about a teenager called Ashley Robbins going to meet her long lost father, but a father who hasn’t been in her life since the death of her mother as a young child. He is on a weird island and not much is known about him. Most of the game, most of what the game has to offer is discovering the quite limited story. It involves science fiction in nature, there’s a piece of machinery at the heart of both games that has something to do with memories. But like I say, you kind of have to kind of play it and discover these things yourself. I always found it like the problem I have with these games on DS and Wii is that I found them quite thin story-wise. Like not a lot happens and then it kind of info-dumps everything at the end and the actual science fiction sort of concepts aren’t particularly interesting or novel. So you’re left with this character piece, but then there aren’t many characters in it. The first game, another code one, is largely you just looking around a house for your dad, solving lots of puzzles to open new rooms of the house. It’s almost like Resident Evil without the zombies, and there’s not much the story is actually delivered during that process. It all kind of comes in the final couple of chapters where there are finally more characters in play. Sounds very lonely. A little bit. I mean, you have this ghost boy with you in the first game, so it’s the pair of you walking around. But if you think about Hotel Dusk and Last Window, they are very much character pieces. It’s about learning who all these people are, who are in this very limited environment. I guess the house in Another Code is probably a similar size to the hotel in Hotel Dusk, and it trades a lot on, well, like, there are only 12 rooms here, so it’s quite momentous when you get into a new room, which is something I always really liked in Hotel Dusk 2, the idea of like, oh, I just want to look around this place and find out what its deal is, because there’s such limited real estate that those feel like quite big steps when they come. And this, you know, which is, I hadn’t really made that kind of connection between the two games and how they use, like, a single location like that. Like, the original game on DS had, you know, it was famous that a lot of its puzzles were built around the touch screen and it had some novel uses, some very sort of seeing touches. So there was like famously a puzzle you had to solve by closing the lid of the DS to kind of imprint something on the top screen to the bottom screen. Obviously, like on a different console on the Switch, they can’t use any of those puzzles, so they’ve had to kind of make them all new. I would say there aren’t any puzzles in this new one which have anything like that, or anything where you’re like a kind of eureka, clever use of the hardware, sadly. It’s a bit more basic. So if anything, the thing that did make another code special, like, isn’t here. So you know, it’s quite a thin experience, made even thinner by the lack of those interesting puzzles. Though I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. You know, I’m playing through the first one and I’ve played like the first hour and a bit of the second game now. And you know, there’s something quite chilled about mooching around in these environments. They’ve done a pretty nice job updating it and it isn’t a looker by any stretch of the imagination. You know, it’s quite rough looking, it’s quite basic. It’s not hugely atmospheric, but you know, it moves along at a decent pace. You know, there’s some light puzzling. It’s definitely like, you know, I had to think more than I did in Nobody Wants to Die. Imagine like no developers who worked on either of those games could imagine someone comparing the two. I just like the idea that the one man in the world who would compare them happens to be on this podcast. I just happen to play them next to each other. So I was like, wow, what a feast of interaction there is in Another Code. But, you know, I kind of like it. You know, one of the things I like about Sing is that they were making, you know, they’re a Japanese studio, but they were very hooked on like Western pop culture and like Western genre stuff. So like thrillers and detective fiction and, you know, science fiction. And they were, they thought they were creating something for quite an international market. And there is something interesting in seeing like an, you know, an American setting kind of as envisioned by, you know, non-American developers. And, you know, the slight oddities that sometimes go in there or how they’ve interpreted something. And, you know, all of their games have their own, have their own vibe. You know, there’s a sort of an inauthenticity to them, which I find quite endearing. And, you know, I was like that in games too. Yeah. Yeah. And she’s quite, you know, Ashley’s, she’s quite a sweet hero. And she’s, you know, she just wants to sort of, you know, find her dad. And, you know, there is making to smash bros though, did she? She didn’t. Well, I don’t know what her abilities would be, because like, like her, really, her primary skill is like finding keys to open doors. Yeah. And I, I really, yeah, I really struggled. Like maybe she could be a character who’s built around, like the ghost boy being like a tag team. Yeah. So you’re sending him out to do like some ghostings, you know, or the idea that I guess she’s got like an inventory, maybe her moveset could be built around like a pop-up inventory where you can pull out items which then become weapons. So like puzzle items in the game, like a, you know, a rake or a plank or a, you know, throw a can of drink at someone’s head. But I don’t know if she’d be that great. It is cool that they have tried to excavate this even if they have like stripped away some of the elements that made it special. I mean, the DS one, I bought the DS one a few years ago. It’s not very expensive. You can just go get that quite easily. The Wii one, I think, is not massively pricey either. But plugging in a Wii, we’ve talked about that many times in this podcast, don’t bother most of the time unless you really have to. It’s nice that they have at least had a go at saving it. It feels like there’s someone looking out for you, Matthew, at Nintendo who’s green lighting new Famicom Detective Club games and salvaging DS games for the modern hardware. They must be doing good enough numbers to justify it. But I do find that, as much as I welcome it, it’s like an odd trend that they’re doing this. Because back in the Wii and DS days, if you read the Iwata Asks about games like Another Code, the SYN games, Professor Layton, they were very much part of the Touch Generations. They saw these as games for mums. They were like, well, mums like reading light detective fiction or light murder mysteries. I guess like the sort of Midsommar Murders crew or whatever, you know, or like Morse. And they saw these games as targeting that demographic. And, you know, they’ve kind of moved on from talking about that audience. And it’s hard to look at, you know, the Switch library obviously includes some of that audience because it’s just so big and so successful that it’s bound to be some crossover. But I can’t say that they, you know, they don’t have like a casual strand to them. There’s nothing that, you know, that I don’t think… Another Code didn’t feel like it was marketed to… This Switch version doesn’t feel like it’s marketed to moms. It feels like it’s a pure nostalgia play for the kind of cool game as he liked it, you know, 15 years ago. Of which there aren’t many. So, yeah, it’s just very odd. Yeah, it seems like it’s one of the positive exponents of the push for casual players that Nintendo did in the DS and Wii games. We had this, like, much wider array of stuff being made, but obviously didn’t amount to loads on the Wii side, but on DS did amount to some really cool stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, it’s cool they salvaged it. I feel like the lack of a Wii version of Hotel Dusk is kind of like maybe the obstacle to them doing that one, Matthew. It feels like they need to do a lot more work to get two DS games up to scratch. Like so much of its character is in the book format and that specific art, and I think the redo would be so substantial it’s probably not worth doing. Yeah. But, I mean, honestly, the amount of work that’s gone into this, their total remakes, I really can’t understate that enough. It’s a really baffling thing for them to have done, but quite diverting. Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy for you at least, and the 10 other people who will buy this in the UK, so that’s good. I think that’s just a testament to how successful the Switch is, because they didn’t do anything like this on Wii U, obviously, but where the hardware has been so successful, and been around so long, they’re just like, well, we’ve got a deep collector culture on this console, let’s just keep putting out kind of slightly weird stuff in the margins, kind of thing. So I love that shit, even if this specific game doesn’t appeal to me that much. One thing they do do, which maybe gives me hope for Hotel Dusk and Last Window, is they’ve kind of tied the universes together a bit more closely in this game. One of the characters in Another Code, or a character in the past, is a crime writer, and I’m pretty sure this wasn’t in the DS original, but they’ve now made it that the books he wrote were the Carl Hite series. Oh, right. So they’ve suggested that those stories are a fictional series that exist in this series. Hmm, okay, interesting. Yeah, a bit of Alan Wake meta-textual thinking going on there. Okay, very good, Matthew. So, yes, sort of like an island of no hangs, where the Hotel of Bad Hangs was written, basically. That’s what we’re saying. We’re not all bad hangs. No, just that. I think I’m just blaming on that one guy on the stairs. I think it really is what I’m basing that on. Okay, anyway, my next game then is Thank Goodness You’re Here, which has been described as a slap-a-thon platformer, I believe, on the Steam page of this game. Or a slap-former? A slap-former. That’s it. Sorry, it is early. Slap-former. Matthew is obviously aware of this game too. It has made a bit of a splash, I would say, with UK media because it is a very, very rare game that has Northern accents in it, and is about basically the North of England, kind of like Yorkshire specifically, is kind of like what it’s going for. It is published by Panic, who did Untitled Goose Game, and it actually does have quite a lot in common with that, in that it’s a game of basically poking things. For jokes to come out, that’s kind of like what the game is. I would say that definitely, this has been talked about a lot already, but it’s set in this Northern English town of Barnsworth, but I would say that the character of it is very much the reason to play it. It has this really nice, kind of like looks like an adult animated series. There’s a little bit of Beano in there, a little bit of Viz in there. It’s quite specifically British in a way that I think will be probably off-putting to Americans, but also who cares? Because so few games are made in this style. It is a joke machine game, basically. It’s not like there’s loads to it, but I think that if you have, I’ll be honest, Matthew, I’m not above finding something comical said in a Northern accent amusing. That will do it for me a lot of the time. Inside number nine, that’s one of the key things in their toolbox, is them just saying something, putting a comedy wig on and saying something in a Northern accent that’s quite amusing. That’s a strand of humor. I won’t deny that I very much enjoy. There’s a lot of cursed British humor in it, but in a way that’s like, you just don’t encounter this in games that often, and it’s nice to have a really concentrated dose of it here. It’s on Switch. It’s not very expensive. It’s like 13 quid at launch. I think everyone I know who’s played it, has basically said the same thing, which is like, yeah, not all of the jokes land, but when they do land, it is very amusing. It’s got some great voice acting in it as well. Matt Berry is in there, John Blythe, former games journalist and now pub landlord, and I’m sure very well known to our audience is also in this game. It’s very nicely done. But as a deeply southern man, Matthew, what do you make of Thank Goodness You’re Here? I think I might be the only person who’s not really into it. I knew it. That’s why I wanted to talk about it, because I knew you’d be so boy from Reading about this. I feel shitty, and it just makes me a more boring person. I’m not into it. This was part of my agitated playing yesterday. I played, I don’t know, half an hour, an hour of it. And you’re right, it’s just a joke machine. It’s just not my cup of tea. It’s not my sense of humour. I don’t know if just people saying words in a Northern dialect is enough for me. Well, it has jokes, it has jokes that aren’t visual gags. There were lots of things, so I was like, oh, that’s good, you know? Right, right. But I wasn’t guffawing at this. How do you get on with Northern comedy generally? Like, royal family, et cetera. Absolutely fine. I like what you said about Inside Number 9. It desperately tries to think of other Northern comedy. Yeah, I don’t think it’s a South-North divide. I just don’t know, it’s a lot in it. I was like, yeah, yeah. Well, I do think that it’s sort of like, I don’t think it’s sort of consistently laugh out loud funny. I think it’s sort of like consistently amusing, and then every now and then we’ll just have, it’ll normally be a bit of a side dialogue from a character where it’ll just make me chuckle. That’s kind of like been my experience of playing it. Yeah, I think that’s where it risks becoming divisive in the sense of not all the jokes in this are going to land for all people. But I don’t know, I think it’s been quite a fun sort of shared experience to have with people who do delight in it or are from the North. People might be aware of a photo taken with a former colleague of mine, Alex. He’s in this F1 manager bib thing. If you’ve seen that photo on social media, hardcore Backpage pod listeners will know what I’m talking about. It’s often joked that he’s my Victorian son or something, just because I’m 10 years older than him, and there’s just lots of weird photos of us, basically. Not in a perverted way, just that I look like his dad in some of the pictures, which is fine. But he’s been messaging me all morning about it, and he is delighted by it as someone who’s just from this part of the country, basically. I was born in Mansfield, which is, people say it’s Midlands, but it feels pretty northern when you’re up there. It feels more northern than Birmingham does, for example, and a lot of people talk in a similar fashion up there. So that sort of things, I don’t know if having some grounding in that humor personally, or knowing some of the characters, they’re the types of oddball local characters in these places that they’re sort of riffing on, maybe gives it a little bit more, gives you a bit more joy when you play it? Or am I just like reaching there, Matthew? No, not at all. I am really in the minority on this. Like, you know, this game has been like universally praised. You know, it got fucking five on Eurogaming. No, people just laugh. You know, if it makes you laugh, if it is your sense of humor, you will just be laughing with this from start to finish. If it isn’t, there’s nothing to it. So you just sit there going, Oh man, I wish I thought this was funny. But that’s happened with loads of things, you know. It takes me back to, you know, when there’s like a film which explodes, a comedy everyone’s really into. It’s like, it reminded me of being like the one person who thought Borat was a load of old shit, you know? And everyone’s like, it’s just not an opinion anyone wants to hear. So you kind of keep it to yourself. I genuinely considered lying and saying I hadn’t played it just because I didn’t want to be the one person who didn’t like it, especially since it’s got people we know in it. That’s the worst thing, you know? It’s nothing against them or their work in it. Just the jokes, just don’t do it for me. That’s fair enough. But I was sitting at the… We went to the pub for someone’s leaving day the other day, and loads of people at work have been playing it. And I’ve never heard people collectively speak enthusiastically about one game like this. You know, they are all exchanging their favorite jokes. I hadn’t tried it at that point and was like, Oh, this sounds great. I’m looking forward to playing this thing which everyone’s so excited about. But now I have to be that bastard and I just have to keep it to myself, I think. It’s just, you know, what can you do? I almost think that it’s sort of like expectations are maybe set slightly too high by the sort of like the social media reaction and some of the reviews, like you say, are just being so positive. Almost like you go into it thinking, well, this is going to delight me. And it’s almost better to go in with low expectations, I think. I downloaded it cautiously thinking, okay, it does take quite a lot. I mean, this podcast might suggest otherwise, but I find Matthew very amusing. But it does take quite a lot to make me laugh from a piece of media these days. So, but I would say I’ve probably had like five audible laughs in about two hours of playing it. And I would say sort of like, but I’ve been like gently amused the whole time, which is okay. That’s kind of like where I land with like sitcoms these days. You know, they’re sort of, unless I’m watching like a proper joke machine written by masters like 30 Rock or, you know, Girls 5 Ever. Those are like the whole Tina Fey, Robert Carlock people. Those are the people that can like really make me laugh these days. It’s actually quite hard to get me to laugh otherwise watching something. So, yeah, I think it’s yeah, it’s okay that you don’t you don’t love this, Matthew. You know, and I just apologize to anyone who does like it. I apologize to the North of England. I like this stuff. There’s lots of Northern stuff. I like that stuff. Some of my best friends are Northern. Okay, Matthew, speaking of games that have gotten high review scores from various outlets, what do you talk about your next game? Yeah, probably only briefly on this one, Arranger, which was a game we identified in our Summer Game Fest Roundup, or I’ve definitely picked it as one of my most anticipated. It’s an adventure game with a puzzle mechanic at its core in that, it looks a bit like Zelda except the world’s tiled, and instead of moving the characters, you slide lines of tiles to drag the character around the world. You can drag them left to right up and down. One of the things I like about the game can be controlled and played entirely on just a d-pad or an analog stick. There’s no other buttons involved, it’s just up, down, left, right. When they first announced it, what I thought was interesting was that with this very simple mechanic, they seem to be proposing that they were going to do all the tropes you expect of a Zelda adventure. It was going to do boss fights, it was going to do combat, it was going to do dungeons, puzzles. Everything was going to have to be re-interpreted through this tile sliding mechanic. It is just, this is not as much to it as I thought there was going to be. I feel like 80% of the game is more of a, you could strip away all the adventure cladding and it is just quite a cold feeling tile puzzle where, what a lot of the puzzles hinge on is that when you, if you have a row of five tiles, if you just keep sliding them endlessly, you loop back round. So when you go out of the rightmost tile, you appear on the leftmost tile. And a lot of the puzzles involve getting things around obstacles by using that relationship. So it’s a spatial puzzler, you know, if there’s an immovable boulder in the middle, rather than just bump your head against it, go right and then you’ll appear to the left of the boulder. If that makes sense. If you play the game, you’ll immediately run into this mechanic. I think there are demos of this, so you’ll be able to see exactly what I’m talking about. And so much the game is just about realizing or remembering that the thing you feed off one side of the screen comes in the other. And that it just felt like I was doing that over and over again. And every once in a while, it would give me something a bit different. So like the way they do combat is you have weapons and you have to use the tiles steering to push the weapon into the enemy to hurt them. And they use that in a couple of boss fights where there are some slightly bigger mechanics. And those are quite interesting. There’s a little fishing mini game where to kind of wind in a fish, you kind of drop the fishing hook and then you use the tiles to kind of pull the character away from the water. So the line kind of gets longer and longer until it’s taut enough to kind of pull out a fish. That stuff’s great, but I thought it was going to be like a thousand examples of that. And maybe that’s on me for imagining a game in my head and then the game didn’t quite live up to that. But actually a lot of it is like navigating between interesting moments like that by using this quite basic tile sliding mechanic. So it was a bit of a bummer all in all. Yeah, that’s how I felt from playing it. I thought, oh, is this kind of all there is to it? Yeah, that was my first feeling of like, oh, okay. Like, I felt like if I wasn’t invested in the narrative, which I thought was fine, I was just a bit like this. I’m basically just looking at some really nice static arts. Yes, there is that. The narrative is only fine. Like, it’s quite a clumsy metaphor about going forwards in life and being static. You know, it’s quite a clumsy metaphor. The enemies just want, like, the idea of not moving, being a sort of visual metaphor, I guess, for the sort of status quo. And you’re like, yeah, that’s fine. Also, I found the writing, there’s too much of it. We’re only talking about like maybe six dialogue boxes in every exchange, but it was three too many. You know, it’s just, I felt myself just, you know, trying to get through stuff more often than not. And yeah, I just found it frustrating. Quite a frustrating game. And again, like I’m not entirely sure where, you know, some people, like the way they reviewed it, they made it sound like that game I imagined, where it uses this mechanic in all these interesting ways. But you know, maybe just because I sat down and like mainlined it for a few hours, maybe that isn’t the way you’re meant to consume this game. Because when you do, you realize there’s not much to it. Yeah, I think like noodling away on the train on a phone screen, and felt like it was probably the optimal way to play it. So just switch it on for every, for like 10 minutes every now and then. Get to a bit of story and come back to it. But yeah, I did give up on it. I don’t have a great desire to go back. I think I thought this would be, there would maybe be slightly more to the time mechanic as well. And it would just wow me by being this quite complex puzzle game as well as having this lovely art and a story in it. But yeah, for whatever reasons, it’s just left me a bit cold, Matthew. So well, it’s for the reasons we just talked about basically. Sorry, Arranger. At least it doesn’t have any tiresome jokes about the North in it. I love that you’re zagging on that game. That’s really good. That’s going to be in so many Game of the Year lists as well. I know. But that’s absolutely fine. I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just not for me. I’m the one. I’m broken. Matthew wishes you well. It’s fine. Okay, good. So my very last game I’m going to talk about is Apex Legends. That’s the sound of lots of people logging off this podcast. Cancelling their Patreon. Coming back next week. I do want to talk about this briefly because they’ve added a new map to the game for the first time in two years. So whenever they add a new map in Apex Legends, it’s a bit of a weird one because when they first started the game, I feel like they were big on creating maps that had landmarks in them. So there’s a tower over there, or there’s some kind of base over there, and getting you to jump in these areas that are quite distinctive. You’d find your favorite areas and then jump in those over and over again because you enjoy the feel of a place, or you understand where all the loot is, or whatever. Then over time, I feel like they’ve buffed that out because they were worried that some areas were just a bit too exciting to people, and therefore they weren’t dropping the way that maybe the game designers had intended them to. My favorite map in the game is World’s Edge. I’ve discussed it in this podcast years ago. It’s where they had the train, then they got rid of the train because the train was too fun, too many people were dropping on it, this moving object in the world. It was hilarious to just drop on that thing and have a good fight. They still got the party boat, and we can let off some fireworks on top of this little floating boat thing. That’s still my favorite location, that’s still there. But it means that the most recent map, which is called Broken Moon, doesn’t really have any landmarks in it. It’s got this little almost ski resort type thing, with on an edge of a cliff, it’s got these platforms hovering above it. But otherwise, our joke is, there’s like this big purple bubble that’s got like this very generic looking base in it. But apart from the purple area, there’s nothing on this giant map of note. And it’s like, it looks like Lanzarote or something. It’s just kind of like, sort of like black, this black gravel feel. And it’s like one of the most unappealing places I’ve ever been to in a game, Broken Moon. I was a bit more excited for this one. It’s called E-District, and it’s a bit more in the vein of a cyberpunk kind of city. It’s got like loads of different sort of like skyscrapers, time-square-y bits with like big billboards and things like that. But the problem is at the moment, they’ve launched it, you can only, unless you go into ranked, which I don’t like doing, because that’s where I tend to get properly sort of like minced by players, you can only play this mode variant called Revival, they’ve added to it. And basically what it does is, it turns a battle royale game into a conventional sort of like death match in that you die and then you come back. The one thing about battle royale games is that you don’t come back, it’s over, and then you kind of like, you live with the consequences of that. That’s the one thing about battle royale games, that and the fact that the arena is closing around you. Those are the two fundamentals. And all it means is, if you want to play this new map, just to jump into, you are trapped in this fucking Sisyphean battle against the same players because the only way you can permanently kill a squad is to have all three of them dead at the same time. But otherwise, it’s just people endlessly respawning back in. So you’re trapped in the same area, not really looking around for loot to give you a tactical advantage, just fighting the same three players over and over again. And they’ve launched this new map with that mode. And it just did our head. We allocated a whole evening to play it last night. We played it for an hour and a half, and then we were just like, no, that’s it. We’ll come back when they’ve got rid of this mode so we can just enjoy the map the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. And it got me thinking about how live service games, they almost lives for so long that they end up getting over-engineered or over-designed or like, you as a player come to these baffling decisions of a battle royale game that won’t let players fucking die unless you go through this endless battle to wipe out another squad, and just feel a bit confused by the decision-making or not really understanding the decision-making that led to that point. And that’s how I kind of feel with this. For the next week, it’s just this mode, I think, that is the only way you can enjoy this new map unless you come with two other players and you play the ranked version of it. And I don’t really get that. The only way I can really rationalize it is the game’s been around so long that they just, it’s almost like, we’ll just try something a bit wacky and different. But there’s not really any need to mess with the formula that much because the formula was already good. I know you don’t care about this game, Matthew, but I thought it was interesting. That’s interesting though, because the question of who do you try and speak to with updates to live service games when they’ve entered this kind of age, when they’ve been around for a certain amount of time, are you talking to the most hardcore of the core? Are you still thinking about what would speak to entirely new players? What would get in total beginners? Every game lands differently. I’m not entirely sure where on the spectrum that mode would land in terms of who is most likely to speak to. It sounds like you’re like, well, I don’t really know who this is for. But then you get, if you look at Destiny 2, for example, which is the real extreme end, where it seems like a lot of the decisions they made were absolutely for the people who’ve been playing a thousand hours on it, and they’ve now made this experience, which is basically completely inaccessible to beginners because they’ve banked all the material you’d need to ever be able to actually pass what’s going on. Yeah. So I guess it’s not as severe as that. Do you think it’s surely it’s not a new player drive, this thing? No, I don’t think so. That’s the thing. I think this will be a perfectly fine and enjoyable map once they just bring back some of the other maps and take this mode out. But to make it a mandatory experience, to rob the game of its rhythm as the only way you can play it. For most people, that’s the only way they’ll play it. Just odd decisions with an otherwise magic game. So it’s been a bit of a weird experience with it. I’m sure they’ll bounce it back. They’ve done a good job of maintaining it generally. They’ve added so many new heroes over the years. Part of the joy of Apex is finding out which baffling new hero they’ve added where a rocket goes through a wall. Or a guy just opens a portal in a wall and disappears. Where you’re like, what the fuck is that? That wasn’t in the game last time I played it. That part of the game is still there and still magic. It’s been maintained really well. But yeah, this kind of stuff, I’m just like, I don’t know, man, treat every game like it could be someone’s first game with this. I’ve got this image of you going into Apex matches after time away and it being like the scene in 21 Jump Street where they’re walking through the school parking lot going, looking at all the new cleaks that weren’t at school when they were at school. And they’re just like, what the fuck is going on? It’s really not dissimilar. It’s like, oh, they’ve added a second Australian character. I like just, oh yeah, who’s this bullshit? Or like, there’s a lot of that going on. I actually do play as one of the Australian characters. I can’t remember his fucking name now. But his whole thing, he’s very enjoyable, Matthew, because his whole thing is he fires a little round of cluster bombs as his ability. And so when people are sniping you on a roof, when you fire up there, you just see little bits of health coming off because you fired these little grenades. It’s really satisfying. Like one time I went into a room full of three people, fired that ability and because they were just healing after a battle, all three of them died and I killed the entire squad with these little grenades. Fucking wonderful. So I’m not really the world’s biggest multiplayer FPS guy, but I still love Apex. Hopefully, it’s got greener passages ahead, Matthew. Well, I’m glad that we still have an Apex correspondent who can update our listeners on that. It’s the one live service game I understand. Probably more useful than having a Singh correspondent. Yeah, but what do the listeners like and respond to more? I honestly don’t know. Well, for those who have made it this far in the podcast, got through the Apex Legends bit, what a treat you have. Matthew Castle talking about the Ace Attorney series. So why don’t you jump in, Matthew? Yeah, so I’ve been playing Ace Attorney Investigations, the Edgeworth games. They’re releasing an HD collection of the two of them, which obviously includes the second game translated by Capcom and released in the West for the first time. There was a fan translation before for those that wanted to try it. Yeah, so it’s not out for a bit yet, maybe early September, late August, but I’ve had a preview build and been able to play the first couple of cases in both the first and the second game. Ace Attorney Investigations, for those who haven’t followed all our Ace Attorney discussions in the past, haven’t really been like high on my list. I’ve always found them to be a little too kind of fan service-y. It took too much of a good thing, I guess. It took a character everyone really loved from the mainline Ace Attorney games, Miles Edgeworth, who was the antagonist, and you think, oh, it’s really good fun going up against that guy. Wouldn’t it be fun to play as a whole game of him? And actually, when you turn him into a hero, I think he loses, or an outright hero, rather than a kind of shades of grey kind of anti-hero, I guess, that he is in the main series. I always thought he lost a little bit of something, and I never thought the writing on the Miles Edgeworth game was particularly as sharp as it was on Ace Attorney, or was funny or interesting. And I still think that. I won’t say that playing these games has radically changed my opinion on them. I think they are more flawed than the Ace Attorney games. Playing a prosecutor who doesn’t have trial sections, it’s more like the investigation sections of an Ace Attorney game, plus arguments with people where you have to present evidence to break their contradictions, but it’s not in a courtroom, and I’ve banged on about this so many times, I just don’t think it makes as much sense. There’s no arbiter in this game to decide that you’re losing other than the criminal, so it’s kind of like, proved to me that I did it, otherwise, what? That’s always bothered me, I just don’t think it’s as neat a concept. What I will say though is that I think this makes a lot more sense as a kind of HD redo than the other Ace Attorney games, in terms of the art pass they’ve done on it is slightly neater. You know, the Ace Attorney game is like, there’s not a lot to them, it’s quite static art, you’re in a court room, it’s got quite limited backgrounds, there’s not a lot of interaction there, and because of that, I’ve often thought, if you can play the originals with the sprite art, they look a bit nicer than the HD art, where they’ve painted these new character arts, and it never quite did it for me as much. Here, there are point and click sections where you are like a little Mars Edgeworth running around crime scenes, so it’s less visual novel, more like an adventure game that you’re interacting with, and you move around the crime scenes. And those parts, they look really nice, the art parts they’ve done, sharpening up the backgrounds, the way that they’ve done almost like chibi versions of the characters. You can play in the original sprite art if you want, but you can press a button and switch. And to me, it looks like way more work was done on it. It feels like a much heavier art lift than the Ace Attorney HD games were. And I’m not saying that radically improves them as games to play, but it definitely feels like a bigger leap. Maybe it makes a bit more sense on a TV screen than the Ace Attorney games did, which I would always recommend you play on a handheld if you can. It feels like where those games live, where here having a little Miles Edgeworth running around corridors or inside an aeroplane or inside a prison, that feels like a clearer television experience to me. And that was really my main observation about it, Samuel. Was that I was like, oh yeah, I can see why they’ve done this. This feels like it was more work. I feel like the leap is better felt. It feels less egregious. Like when you’re playing Ace Attorney on the TV, I’m constantly thinking, this art doesn’t look as good as the sprite art, where I don’t feel that way with this. I’m like, oh, this does look better. They’ve redone a couple of the tracks as well, kind of re-orchestrated them, which is nice. I don’t think the music’s as good in general as the base games, but for games which I still think are slightly flawed, they are definitely handsome packages. Yeah, interesting this because I didn’t expect it to come along so soon after the last Phoenix Wright, the Apollo Justice collection. And so the fact that it has is cool. I guess it speaks to the fact that these games have some back catalog value for Capcom that people are just endlessly hoovering them up when they’re like 10 quid on Switch or whatever. So it’s cool in that respect that they’ve done them. I’m so far from ever getting to these games. This is like when people are talking about more obscure Yakuza spin-offs to me, where I’m like, dog, I’m never going to play Dead Souls or whatever the last one was, Ishin. I’m just not going to happen because I’ve got hours and hours of game to ever reach that point. So it’s nice that these have been salvaged as curios. I think even you were surprised that they did this. I do agree that the art looks very nice. So for those who have just managed to monster through that entire pile of old DS games, 3DS games that have made their way to modern platforms, it’s cool that this exists. But yeah, I’m more just happy for you that this exists. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely other people who are happier because there are other people who hold, particularly Ace Attorney Investigations 2, in high regard. Playing it now, it’s been a couple of years since I replayed it for the ranking episode that we did. I do have legitimate problems with it. I think the cases are, they’re all much longer and baggier and they make you jump through some quite bad hoops. I think the actual mysteries are quite flawed and the solutions are so contrived often that they’re just not as fun. Like I said, I’ve only played the first couple of cases, which are brisker than the others, but the third case in Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is this time-jumping number about rival bakers and it’s so long for one of the limpest motives in the whole series. I remember getting to the end of that one and being like, are you fucking kidding me? You made me do all this for something this stupid. They are flawed. They are also really fan-servicy. They’ve got loads of obscure characters from the core Ace Attorney trilogy coming in. I like doing the old Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme. Yes, I get those characters too. They’re for you, my friend. They did that for you. Yeah, but it always smacks of fan fiction when people just start smashing all these characters together. I mean, why not make your own new characters? You know, why go back to this pool again and again? That’s a bit of a bummer. And it also has this minigame, this logic chess minigame, which is just trial and error dog shit. It is actually dog shit, the way that he plays mental chess with characters. But it’s not about presenting clues. It’s just about going through a branching dialogue tree and somehow picking the right answers based on vibes. You know, the really bad bits of LA. Noire, where it just felt very fuzzy with like the doubt and lie system. Where you’re like, I don’t really know what you want me to do here. I don’t really know what you’re getting at. It’s like that as this really bad minigame. But it thinks it’s being all kind of clever because, you know, it’s chess and chess is for clever people, which is why it’s like can never be more than like an 8 out of 10 game for me, where some people think it’s the best one. But that is by the by. I’m still excited that it exists. I’m excited that people get to play it. I really hope that all these ports and re-dos they’re doing, I hope it means that they are interested in continuing the series. Because it would be mad to have done all this, to then not give us anything more. I really hope it’s not Ace Attorney Investigations 3. Do not want. We’ll have to wait and see. You almost need a bit of a long pause between all of this back catalog stuff and releasing a new one now, because people have a lot of hours of game to chew through. They might not have played before. Hundreds of hours. Yeah, that’s it. It might be like you need a year and a half pause before you do even anything else with this series. Yeah, interesting that they’ve salvaged it. But yeah, I think I agree that the next step has to be taking what you’ve learned about how best to visually present these games on modern systems and building a new game around that. Yeah, okay, I share your anxiety that it might be another Ace Attorney Investigations game, Matthew, but I doubt it actually because that will be like, this is bound to be the lowest selling of all of these collections, isn’t it? I don’t know. Yeah, and it depends how much further there is for that. It’s the only one which you couldn’t play via traditional means. Yeah, but it’s still kind of like hardcore apply only kind of thing. I think so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is far and away the hardest of the series. Feels like it’s made for the real heads. Okay, good stuff, Matthew. Well, that concludes another What We’ve Been Playing episode. Nice little sort of pause, little sort of like, you know, collect our thoughts moment after the three Nintendo episodes. So that’s good. Next week, we’ve got Andy Kelly on the podcast again. We’ll talk about the Alien Isolation book that he’s written. Ask him a bunch of stuff about that series. That’ll be good fun. I know Andy is a popular guest whenever he appears on the podcast. So it’s been a little while. Should be good. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I’m at MrBazzle underscore pesto on Twitter and at MrBazzlePesto no underscore on Blue Sky. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on both Twitter and Blue Sky, the podcast’s back page pod on Twitter and Blue Sky. And if you’d like to support us financially, unlock the Perfect Dark Two Giant Men play episode that we just did. This week then that is patreon.com/backpagepod, backpagegames.gmail.com if you’d like to email us. Matthew, let’s get out of here. Goodbye. Goodbye.