Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, you went on a stag day this weekend. You sent me several videos from something called The Book Boat, or something similar, Book Barge, possibly. And there was some gentleman performing some kind of jazz on there. I mean, the idea of a boat with books on it seems very you. The overall project seemed not particularly you. How’s it been going this past weekend? Yeah, it was good. It was actually very much my speed as far as stag do’s go, because there was a lot of sitting around and listening to jazz. And while I’m not going to pretend I’m a big jazz head, I am a big sitting around head. So not having to sit in a bar with loads of oi oi ois, that was great, you know. Matthew’s war against the working class continues. This was an expensive London bar, so it was quite near the Guardian offices. That wasn’t meant as a class jive. I promise you. But the presence of jazz drives away an element that I don’t particularly want to be sitting there, having drinks. So it was good. It was like a protective jazz dome around our gathering. But it was four hours of jazz and spoken word poetry. So yeah, it was different. But it was nice. Yeah, it’s intense. It’s like not necessarily how you normally spend your weekend. So a bit different. Yeah, I’m just tired from being out of the house and away from the sofa. You know, I wasn’t drinking or anything. I just drank loads of coke. But I still drank like an unholy amount of Coca Cola. So I feel like as fucked up as you would on booze. It’s just a different kind of fucked up. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So a hangover from having four and a half liters of I imagine full fat coke. I don’t imagine you went for the Coke Zero variant, Matthew, knowing you. No, I just I’m not into it. I don’t want to step on the toes of a question we’ve got coming up. Yeah, that is true. That is something that will be covered in this episode. So something to say up front is we originally advertise that this episode was going to be why Japanese games have thrived since the Xbox 360 era, brackets with Jay Bayless. We moved that back a week because I mean, as is now apparent to me and Matthew recording this, in the only three-hour window, we’re both at our PCs all week. That was never going to happen. We were never going to be able to get Jay squished into that tiny window. It made sense to give it a bit more time to breathe. So brought forward what was going to be the first episode next month. A humble mailbag, a simple quaint mailbag to answer a bunch of listener questions because we think that makes more sense to just give that episode some breathing room. It allows me to create a proper plan for it and make sure it’s as good as it could be, because I think it could be a nice meaty topic. It’s a bit different maybe as well to some of our other episodes. We rarely do a topic-based episode. We tend to do more listy things or the drafts and that business. So a little bit different on that front. I’m excited to have Jay back on the podcast, because I really enjoy talking to him and think he has great takes on stuff, very different to me and Matthew’s perspective on games and culture at large. So yes, we also got a couple of other bits we can discuss in this episode. So we’ve got a bit of breathing room for that, which is nice. So Matthew’s been playing a little bit of Star Wars Outlaws, the embargo on that lifted this week. Lots of online discussion about it, as you might imagine. So I thought we could talk about that, Matthew, and I’ve also been at Gamescom. So we could talk about that a little bit too. So yeah, what should we start with? Outlaws or Gamescom? Let’s start with Gamescom. I want to know how it’s been because I didn’t go this year. You didn’t just go, you went for the duration. I’ve never been for the whole run of it. So what’s that like? What’s five days of Gamescom like on the human body? So I’m just a skeleton now. There is nothing left. Actually, like the real impact of it is when I went out, I’d sort of like been hitting the gym maybe slightly more recently than I had been like in the last few months. I’ve been focusing on it slightly more in lifting weights and stuff. So I felt like I was reasonably muscular. At one point, Ashley Day even came up to me at a bar and told me that I was looking like fairly in fairly good shape, which was quite quite nice. But by the end of the week, Ashley Day, yeah. And by the end of the week, my body looked like Roger from American Dad, The Grey Alien, where all my upper body fat had moved to my lower body. And it just felt extremely large on the bottom half. And it was just like my DNA had been rewritten on the fly or something. Just that’s the sheer damage from colch and beige meats and malnutrition. Just a bad choices basically like a cavalcade of bad choices. So yeah, it’s the longest I’ve ever been there. Normally games come, so to explain how it normally works, because I imagine most of our UK listeners have probably never been. It’s a massive games convention. It’s like the last one standing of its kind really with E3 gone. E3 is reformed into something else, but I think everyone kind of agrees that E3 as it was is gone. And it’s just whatever is in its aftermath is doing the job in terms of promoting those games at key moments, but it’s not what E3 was in terms of how the scale of it. And Gamescom is kind of like E3 in scale. It welcomes I think like hundreds of thousands of people. It’s a huge, huge thing. German government really gets behind it. They’ve had Angela Merkel there before to do the ceremonial shattering of Matthew Castle’s knee, a joke I’ve made several times in this podcast. It’s a part consumer show. There’s like a vast halls dedicated to like big video game boos, you know, sort of like, you know, sort of like there’s a massive cat head that was floating over the hall I was in this year and, you know, like Ubisoft were there and I was there with, I’m like a contractor for Bethesda. So I was there with Xbox and Blizzard and loads, but there’s loads and loads of game developers and publishers in all these different halls. And then on the other half of the center, you have like a media business area. That’s open for like three days, then that closes, but the consumer show goes on. Now, normally the games industry, and what I loosely mean by that is people who work in journalism and like games marketing, flee, get the fuck out of Cologne. They like tend to land on like Monday or Tuesday, and they’re gone by Friday. The idea is like a short, sharp shock, and then like your body sustains serious damage from colch and pork knuckle consumption, and then you get the hell out of there. And this year, I stayed until the Monday because I was also doing like booth work on the Saturday and Sunday. So that was a bit different. Truthfully, I quite enjoyed it. It was, I felt like I saw, I didn’t really see any extra dimensions to Cologne, to be honest. Maybe went to a few more restaurants and bars than I normally would do, but I was amazed how long my adrenaline lasted for. Like right up until the Sunday, like to the end of Saturday, I was absolutely fine. I was pretty pumped. I was going and going and going. The three days of the industry was there. I was in an Xbox area. We were doing interviews for a few games. So I was there for that. I was pretty chirpy for that, even though I wasn’t getting loads of sleep or whatever. But yeah, but then by the Sunday, I just crashed and then I just remember waking up and not having enough grip strength to open a tube of Pringles. You got to peel back that little layer at the top. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get my hands to clasp tightly enough to pull it. I was just pathetically pouring at it. Then eventually just got like, I think, like a bottle opener and just stabbed the top of it. It was just to reach the Pringles within. It was so pathetic, Matthew. But I had a good time. What do you want to ask me about it? What’s coming? What are you curious about? I’ve got a few things of like little notes I’ve jotted about what went on there. But when I go to Gamescom, I do everything in my power to not go to the consumer section, to the point where if someone’s demo is on the consumer section, I just will decline and I won’t go to it because I’m just not interested in dealing with that. Yeah. That isn’t being snooty. That is just good sense. You are obviously in the consumer area, correct? Yes. On a Saturday and Sunday. A Saturday and Sunday. What is that like the full brunt of it? Didn’t the noise drive you insane? How do you deal with that in the middle of it? It wasn’t too bad because we were right at the back of one of the halls. I understand that if you’re anywhere near the Monster Hunter booth, that was not a great place to be because it was so popular and so loud as well. Right. So it’s overpowering the other booths around it. Apparently, the queues were up to 12 hours or something to play Monster Hunter. I mean, Monster Hunter World is one of the cooler demos there. Yeah, absolutely. But also respectfully, I know what that game is and just play it in a few months rather than queuing for 12 hours. That part I don’t really get. So I sound like a right fucking Killjoy setting that down. No, the thing is it’s a game for people with incredible patience. Yeah, that’s true. So that figures. Yeah, so there wasn’t that much in the way of really loud noise. I was in this little light, it’s like four very tall walls that were a nice barrier from the rest of the world, and then people would just filter in and out, play our game, then go. It wasn’t too intense. It was when you had to actually move and get into the hall itself. They did this thing where there’s a main boulevard in the big venue there, that manages to see if people going back and forth. This time, they did some stupid diversion thing, where they made you go into outside, into the car park, so you had to go into the convention center, to leave it again, and snake round into the back of one of the halls. I assume there was some human safety reason they were doing this. But I’m not saying I’m important or anything, but there are industry badges there for people who actually are there to do work, and they wouldn’t let people use the shortcut. They were like, no, everyone has to go the concrete hell way into the burning hot sun. I couldn’t help but be deeply resentful of that. I just thought that was very irritating. I always think this is the year I’ve got the magic shortcut to get around all the bullshit of getting into Gamescom, and you never do. You never do. I calculated it. It took me 26 minutes to get from leaving the train that gets outside the con mess and to my booth. 26 minutes. That’s crazy. Imagine doing that with an open leg wind. But it’s funny actually you say that because all the journalists I’ve booked into appointments are saying, none of these appointments are in the public area, are they? And I was like, no, they’re all in the business center. And I don’t blame them. That’s exactly how I felt when I was a journalist. I guess another question I have is, did you make any Gamescom friends, people you hadn’t met before in terms of people you were working with, because you get to rub shoulders with teams that you don’t work with day to day, or on the show floor, just because you’re, I’d like to think that on your route to your booth, you were walking past, I don’t know, someone dressed as the goat from Goat Simulator or something. So you developed a unspoken affinity with them. No, there were some local kids who were, I don’t say kids, I think they were in their 20s, but they were brand ambassadors who worked on our booth, and they just made me feel hideously old. But I bond a lot with my coworkers who I see fairly regularly but don’t always talk to, for example. There’s definitely a few instances of like, oh, we spent more time together hanging out, talking about TV shows and stuff. Oh, that’s cool. Yes, that was cool. Also working for a publisher that’s got a German team, going for dinner with them, for example, and then just understanding more about their lives and their world and stuff. All that kind of stuff I really like. The other interesting thing about Gamescom is the fact that when you’ve worked in journalism or marketing for a certain period of time, you do just know people. So when you go there, you’ll just see a sea of people you know. The longer you’ve been doing it, the more you see people you know. I think it’s the number one reason people actually like going. It’s like bonding with old friends again. Also, Gamescom is a series of messages that say, we should really catch up sometime. Yes, we should. And then about half of them happen and half of them never happen. And that’s also part of the Gamescom mix. So, yeah. It’s just like a sea of people who’ve made me redundant in the past. It was really nice to be able to catch up with. I would say I caught up with more people than I normally do, just because of the sheer length of time I was there. Any- Yeah, I was- Go on, sorry. I was going to say, any exceptional dinners? Let’s think. On my last day there, I had a filet steak drowning in gorgonzola sauce. And that was beautiful. So I’ll have to get special, sir. It was like that. It was like that. And then I also had some sangria, and then just like the most hideous heartburn you can imagine afterwards. I can imagine some pretty hideous heartburn. Yeah, you live with it every day. So yeah, that was good. I had one pork knuckle there. Went to Haxen House, which is on the river with my mate, Dave Scarborough. I’ve been on the podcast before, and he was trying to pitch me on him coming on for our Star Wars Outlaws episode. I pointed out this is what we’ve been playing, so you’d have to play Astrobot as well, and then that fell apart, which is fine. I ordered one that was like a Chinese-themed pork knuckle, and it had this sweet, bitter sauce with it and a slaw, and no carbs with it. So it’s actually not overwhelming in terms of the pork knuckle experience. It’s just basically, what is a pork knuckle? Just like part of the leg, and it’s got about 30 percent fat. I think it’s fucking disgusting. It is. I agree. I agree. It really turns my stomach. I’m not a pork guy at the best of times, but pork and it’s the gnarliest looking bit. I mean, it looks like something a dog should be gnawing on. I do agree with that. I watched Dave just eat the entire thing, including all the fatty bits, and I was like, I’m not doing that this time. So I was very careful to just only slice off what I deem the edible bits, and it was perfectly okay. So that was good. Had a black truffle pasta at one point. That was amazing, actually. That’s always good when they do that, isn’t it? Tiny portion though, but what can you do? The funniest one was when I thought I’d ordered a 300-gram steak with a side salad, but what I actually ordered, it turned out, was a giant salad with a side order of steak, and it was really pathetic, and my boss just gave me some chips because he felt sorry for me. And that was the biggest meal blunder of the trip. When you get fed by a fellow adult, that’s always depressing. Yeah. I had a few little bits and pieces I thought I’d share as well. So I thought it’s funny that people are so keen to be there. I mean, there’s a lot of drinking that goes on at Gamescom as well. It’s like they go and order Coles, which I’ve talked about this before, tiny German beers that are quite mediocre, but everyone says are amazing because they’re in Germany, and therefore feel cultured, and also they’re served in tiny glasses, so they’re more novel, and that makes people think they’re drinking the tastiest beer in the world. I would argue it’s only okay beer. That’s my stance on Coles. But it didn’t stop me from having many of them. The weird thing is that time operates differently at Gamescom too, because the show runs so late. Weirdly, if you go home and go to your hotel, and go to bed at midnight, that’s like an early night. Somehow, like 2am was like the default time I was staying out every evening. And I don’t know how I was able to sustain that, just in like a bodily sense. I think there’s something about people standing out in like a plaza, and it being quite well lit. It has that kind of like, almost like football arena lighting. It kind of disguises how much nighttime it actually is. So people standing outside the Irish pub, and it has the feeling of like, oh, like a balmy, like eight o’clock evening. And it’s actually like quarter twelve. But I’m, as someone who is always just very aware of the time, I’m always like, this is crazy. Like, you know, you have so much serious work to do tomorrow in eight hours time. Like, I just have to get my sleep. I’m like, I’m not very fun on Gamescom. It’s telling that like, you know, my most memorable and enjoyed Gamescom moment for other people is me like violently hurting myself, you know, rather than I was a really good time one evening. Still brought up with me like three times throughout this event. Again, people talk to me about you, like I’m legally responsible for you. Yeah. Like, that I’m somehow have some kind of stake in all your anecdotes. So I do enjoy people bringing up the knee. Yeah, so there’s the Irish Bar, then people go there and then across the road from it is the Puppet Bar, which basically has a jukebox where some puppets will perform music. And I thought, I really just haven’t been to Gamescom so many times, have curdled so much in the idea of both pubs. I don’t think either of them are good. But I must admit, there was something about the delirium of tiredness, the exact amount of culture I had, that when these puppets start moving, and one of them has this eyebrow that moves up and down while the music’s going, when Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean was put on, and then it reached the chorus of like, boop boop boop boop boop boop boop. For some reason, I just found that hysterically funny and died laughing and rediscovered the joys of the puppet parts. So that was something. You were standing there going, I think this might be the best band I’ve ever seen. These are incredible. So that was that, Matthew. That was kind of like experiential side of it, and I’ve come out of it intact. And yeah, not too bad. But I don’t think I’ll be going to London this week because my body is, yeah, like not entirely there. So I’ll probably just sit down for a while and then see how I fare. Games-wise, I had a couple of interesting things to share with you. So I always ask journalists who came to our booth, like, what’s the best thing you played or the best thing you saw? At least three of them told me that Atomfall was the best thing they saw. Really? Yeah, the Rebellion survival RPG thing. They told me it’s a little bit more stalker than Fallout, which I thought was interesting. And you can kill any character you meet in the world in there. And this one journalist, it was Stephen Langford at the Sixth Axis, I’m sure he wrote about it at some point, told me that when he was told that by Rebellion, the dev, he just got his cricket bat out and then beat the guy giving him a quest to death. And then the dev was like, oh, no one’s done that before. Just like the critical path guy was just like killed basically. And I think the idea of the game is it’s quite open-ended and can morph in different ways. I think they cite like New Vegas as an inspiration, for example. But that was quite interesting to hear about. Yeah. And yeah, people seem to like Monster Hunter as well. I think it’s like that thing where it’s quite familiarly Monster Hunter if you know what that is, but a very slick version of it. Did anyone tell you that they pulled out a cricket bat and killed one of the cat chefs? And they’re like, yeah, you can kill the cat chefs and still get fed, so it’s fine. That didn’t come up. So I don’t really cross the streams and talk about work stuff too much. I’m quite careful with that on this podcast generally, always have been. But I will mention one quite funny thing that happened, where I was in the staff room and one of my teammates came over with the end of the day, and they were taking the Indiana Jones hat and whip off of, it was like a hat, whip and jacket, I think they were on the booth as decoration. They’re like replicas of the original thing. Brought them in into this staff room and then she said to me, want to try on Indy’s hat? And I was just sat there pondering it, and she was like, I know you want to. I was like, no, it’s okay. The world has enough Aldi Indiana Joneses walking around. I just flashbacks to my dad at Disney World, buying an Indiana Joneses hat and being so satisfied wearing it, and me just being mortified by the very sight of it. And then me realizing that I’m now only four years from the age he was when he was wearing that hat, and just thinking, I’m the same. It’s the only way we heal from generational trauma. We just got to move on. We did, but I will admit that I came in the next morning and saw the hat there, there’s no one else there, and thought about putting it on, but then thought, how embarrassing it would be for someone to walk in while I’m wearing Indiana Joneses hat in this empty room. I’m just checking in for the day, and I’m just stood there wearing the hat and carrying the whip, and I was like, no, no. But I came back with them. Actually whip a colleague just as they were walking the door. Explain that. Then there was like, they were giving out some of the Indies. Why have I forgot the name of the hat? What is the hat called again? Fedora. Is it? Fedora. It’s a Fedora, isn’t it? There were some replica ones they were giving away in the booth. I put one on when I got home actually, and do you know what? If they did like a live action Yogi Bear film, I look like a park ranger from that. I thought you were going to say Yogi Bear. Yogi Bear, he’s got Indiana Jones’ hat. A guy who tracks Yogi Bear down. Ranger Smith. Yeah, like that. Why do you know that? Yeah, it’s fine. I’m sure it was on a lot when you’re a kid. Yeah, he’s picking up. I don’t remember the French word for swimming pool. So I look like a park ranger in the Indiana Jones hat for those curious, but I thought that was quite a slightly amusing story. I kept ambushing journalists with Doom pin badges spun around, like the shield saw from the Doom the Dark Ages reveal trailer. Everyone saw and yeah, I was just going after them with that. That was fun. They were really cool. Then I think something slightly amusing I did is, I was out with Dave drinking. We were talking about films like all night, had this terrible pork knuckle carried on into the town. Then he switched to work mode as he was talking to this guy. I just went and set a few beers. I was like, are you still trying to sell things, Dave? Shut up and have a beer. Then turned out he was pitching to one of the most well-known YouTubers around, I won’t name them. I was just being slightly obnoxious. I maintain that was a good take though. It was 11 o’clock and it was time for a pint. So I was policing Dave there. Not sure what else to add, Matthew. Just lived through it really. But it was very fun to catch up with people. I was going to say, I was sad I wasn’t there. That isn’t true. I find it too hot and I have to carry too much stuff around and I feel like I’m just a little bit too old for it. If it was just me and my notepad in the good old days, that would be one thing, but it’s like fucking tripods. Just trying to carry a tripod around. I reflected on something you’ve pointed out jokingly before though, which is like how I seem to hang out with slightly younger people these days, like when I’m photographed on social media, which is not always true, but sometimes is true. I think there is some truth in the fact that I think I’m like, because I’m like 36 and most of them are like, I would say early 30s or younger, that I am somehow sort of like parasitically absorbing energy from them by hanging out with them. It reminds me of what Darren said when we came on. Is that the glow in your photos? What we’re seeing, we’re literally seeing the youth transference procedure. I think that’s just my gray hair, to be honest. But yeah, so I think that is, I think it reminds me of what Darren said when he came on the podcast. When he said he joined like Games TM as a staff writer at 30, but everyone who was younger than him, he like, you know, they made him feel younger. I think that is what’s happened to me, which sounds quite tragic, but it is true. And I know that in a few years, I won’t even reflect on 36 as being old, but at the moment it feels that way. So yes, those are my Gamescom adventures, Matthew. Nothing hysterical really, but a series of things that happened basically. Yes. Okay, good. Well, I’m glad to hear it. Yeah, I was also Games-wise, I was kind of like, it wasn’t loads I was pumped about from the ONL stuff. The Reanimal are pretty good. The kind of Little Nightmares spiritual successor from Tarsier Studios, the creator. I thought the new Dark Pictures look pretty tasty actually. I thought they’d put a bunch of time and effort into that. They got Lashana Lynch is the star of that one, as seen in the not very good James Bond film No Time to Die, but she’s pretty good. Everything I’ve seen her in, I thought she’s pretty decent. Yeah, anything that you caught your attention Matthew? No, stuff where I was like, oh good, I will happily play another Borderlands, that is fine. Re-animal, you know. Oh, Mafia, that’s cool. The Mafia set in like, the Mafia 4 century. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s definitely cool. And, you know, even though it’s hard to talk about without sounding like I’m just sort of shilling, I’m obviously super into Indiana Jones. So yeah, you know, it was all pretty sort of standard stuff, but fine. Yeah, okay. Fine. And so with that one thumb up, we move on to talk about Star Wars Outlaws a little bit. We’re going to talk about this more in a couple of weeks anyway. I’ve I’ve started playing it as well, just a tiny, tiny bit. And I am sort of like immediate impression was very shiny. And like the reviews are mostly positive, but with some people who are more down on it than others. Intriguing what you make of it, Matthew. You’ve played about four hours, right? Yeah, so not not a huge amount, but enough to get to, you know, what is the open world and how that stuff works. Yeah, like I’ve seen a couple of bugs. I’ve seen that be like a key sort of thread of a lot of reviews. And I wouldn’t say like I’ve seen the volume where I’d be like, oh, this is an abnormally buggy game, you know, off the bat. But, you know, these things, you know, sometimes you can just get lucky with this stuff. Yeah, I think that the thing I was kind of interested in is, you know, it’s obviously Star Wars open world. And, you know, people are kind of interested in that. It is the first sort of Star Wars open world of this game. You know, I know there’s an openness to Respawn’s Jedi games, but that’s, you know, very sculpted, more like the sort of Metroidvania model. This is this is a Ubisoft open world. But the question was like, what kind of Ubisoft open world is it going to be? Because there are, you know, distinctions between an Assassin’s Creed and a Far Cry and the kind of game and the kind of spaces that you’re going to explore. And after four hours, I think the game it has the most in common with is probably Watch Dogs of the Ubisoft sort of suite of this kind of thing. That’s mainly because you play, you know, this smuggler character, rogue, scoundrel, I think, guess is the word that they use, cave-ess. And she has this like little animal helper, Nyx, who you can kind of send off to activate things in the environment or collect weapons or distract enemies. It’s basically like a little sort of, you know, AI agent who helps you out. And the feel of that is weirdly very similar to hacking stuff with your phone in Watch Dogs. Like the actual actions Nyx can perform are very similar. You know, getting him to press a button and drop something on some guards is basically the same as hacking a crane and dropping something on some guards. So it really has that feel. Plus everything starts kind of in stealth mode, as does Watch Dogs. And then when it kicks off, you know, it can be more of a sort of like, yeah, everyone’s shooting. It isn’t like you failed. You know, it isn’t Assassin’s Creed where, you know, stealth is the sort of win state and anything outside of that is going to get a little bit messier. So that’s kind of interesting to go, oh, OK, well, that’s what we’re dealing with here. And that’s OK. I don’t mind that as a sort of flavor of, you know, stealth with this super powered creature that can help you through that. That’s fine. I am like most impressed or interested in the faction system of everything it does, which they’ve talked a lot about and managed to make sound very boring so far because, you know, everything’s got like, are you going to work with the Hutts? You know, but if you work with the Hutts, then you’re going to upset, you know, the Pikes over here or you’re going to upset the Crimson Shroud or whatever they’re called. And I’m like, OK. OK, Dawn Matthew, Crimson Shroud’s RPG on the 3DS. Oh, that’s right. Yes, Crimson Dawn, my bad. But, you know, like the whole whenever I hear talks about, like, factions and faction interplay, I tend to switch off because I’ve seen that before. You know, it’s it’s often very binary. You work with these people, these people don’t like you. You know, you can see all the kind of mechanics of it. And, you know, I’ve only played four hours of this, so I don’t know, you know, if this is a bad read or not. But certainly in the early game and in this first open world where this stuff really comes into play, I actually have found it quite reactive and impacting on the like the gameplay and the missions that I’m doing, in that just through choices I have made at key narrative sort of crossroads, you know, I have upset the sort of two dominant factions on this planet. And because of that, their territory, whenever I go into it, they are always hostile to me. So that territory becomes like stealth is just essential. Like there’s no middle ground there. It’s, you know, if you go in there, you will be in a firefight and that firefight will worsen your relationships with them. So and I got to a point where I had a mission where I had to collect an object from one of two factions in this city. And I had upset both factions. And so, you know, I could very easily see how in one scenario, you know, you’d upset one faction, the other was on your side. You could just walk into their territory and pick up that item, minimum of fuss, and that would be fine. But because of just, you know, the quite organic way that things had played out, you know, both these areas were out of bounds. And so the whole thing, kind of like there wasn’t, there was a fun sort of emergent challenge on top of it. And I felt like it had come about through my actions. And, you know, maybe this is a deliberately scripted thing that happens early on in the game, so that you become hyper aware of the faction system. And maybe I’m just being played like the, the Rube that I am, but I felt like, oh yeah, that, that is having an impact. And after that, every moment where I could side with one or the other became a little bit more supercharged for it, which I liked. I thought if, or if they can take that and like amplify that and really create this sort of swamp of difficulties based on this faction play, that could be like an interesting meta layer over all of this, which I haven’t seen executed that well before in a Ubisoft game. That could be its unique thing that makes it not just Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed or Watch Dogs. So currently, I’m feeling hopeful about it in that, while it is standard, it has this layer which is very unpredictable and simulated this criminal ecosystem, not in a hugely complex way, but enough of a way that it matters, which I think is cool. Yeah, I like that idea a lot. It’s that the game sets the stall out straight away. It’s basically like a cassette in the aftermath of A New Hope, so before Empire Strikes Back. And it’s basically this moment where there’s a time for these criminal factions to jump into the space, I guess, left by the Empire having this, having to be on retreat a little bit. And so a war starts basically for this kind of like peace that was brokered previously, that existed while the Empire did its thing, has basically like broken because one of the gangs has started this war. And that’s the kind of like backdrop that you drop into basically. I’m really curious too to see how granular that gets. If it is scripted, you know, like I imagine some elements of it are like you, I’m not expecting like a radical amount of reactivity, but that is a cool notion. I mean, that’s a bit different. I mean, I feel like when Ubisoft does open world games, like their success does vary based on like, what is the twist that hasn’t been done before? And the more successful ones do have a twist that sort of pay off. So I think like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey doing, going like all in on the BioWare style choices, for example, was something that people really liked about that game. You know, the Watch Dogs Legion changing NPCs thing. I think some people were cool on that, but some people were hot on that too. That seems to be the thing to me. Like, it’s what, how meaningful is the spin on the template on top of that? Yeah, I mean, every mission I’ve done so far, you know, maybe in a slightly contrived way, has a moment where, like a character, just as you get the mission objective, another character will like bust into the room and be like, don’t give it to them as previously planned, give it to me instead. And you can kind of shortcut your way to, you know, pleasing this other faction. And, you know, maybe if they do that every time, it will obviously just feel like, you know, quite an arbitrary choice. You’re like, well, if every mission is gonna end with an either or, then it’s not very special. But so far, they have given me pause where I’m like, well, you know, currently, like two thirds of this open world map are quite bad for me. And I can’t go in and just explore them at my leisure because of, you know, I’ve got this poor relationship. So actually, maybe I will buy good favour by double crossing them. And, you know, to even get you to pause for a second on a decision like that is a minor achievement. You know, I normally don’t ponder these things at all. And it may be, you know, offer, you know, it may be quite like a blunt decision. And like the, you know, the rewards are very obvious, like this area will be more or less hostile. But I think that’s, I do think that’s enough. You know, some of the reviews suggest that there are systems in place where you can too easily manipulate faction loyalties as you go on, that it kind of undermines it. Like I think you can just buy your way out of a problem. But I haven’t got far enough to see that. So let’s see. Yeah, okay, interesting. There’s other things I like about it too. Like the writing seems really good, actually. I thought, I was quite encouraged that I’ve only played like an hour, hour and a half. The dialogue’s pretty good. It’s quite fun in places. I like the main character’s design a lot. She looks like a character who could plausibly exist in the style, in like an early 80s kind of Star Wars film. You know, I think that the hair is a nice touch, I think. Curious because I play so few open world games these days. It’s not a genre I’m actually that massive on. I play probably one every year or every two years. It’s not like… It’s such a… It’s the irony of like we talked about this before, but like the idea that when the genre was created with like GTA 3, its unpredictability, the fact that like it was this canvas you could do anything with was like the infinite possibilities was the excitement of it. And then you fast forward two decades and it’s a genre that is so well worn and known how it behaves and what it contains. And I think in general that genre probably needs shaking up. It probably needs some like radical rethinking like across the next five to ten years. I think that is sort of I think what it needs to turn people around who are quite lukewarm on it. Because when any, I find that out when any Ubisoft open world game launchers, they get the same kind of response from players on the internet no matter what it is. And I’m not saying that they’re like wrong necessarily, but I am saying that like maybe there’s a wider perception battle around open world games that needs to be fought, you know, by game developers who are operating in this space. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, no, I can see that. I mean, often that disdain and that sort of tiredness towards the genre comes from the people who are like most invested in games and play the most games and can see these trends more starkly than others. I think for a lot, you know, I think more people are like you, like playing one of these things a year, you know, dipping in, I think people are kind of, you know, if you do police your intake of these things, you know, you won’t have that obvious fatigue. I just think loads of people are going to, who like Star Wars, are just going to be interested in seeing a Star Wars version of this. And, you know, Star Wars fans will pick it up and go, oh, cool, I’ve never played a Star Wars world as big and open as this. I do think it’s both odd and brave and kind of like showing some sort of self-control that this doesn’t like immediately put you in like something super iconic. You know, like, I would have thought the temptation would be if you want to give someone that initial wow factor of like open world Star Wars, you know, you give, you put you in like Tatooine first or, you know, Hoth or something, I don’t know the planets this game goes to, but you know, the first one I think is something of their own making. The first open world planet you go to is, yeah, I think it’s called Toshana or something. It’s, and I think that’s a new one. And it’s kind of like, you know, it looks like a couple of other things, but you don’t necessarily go, wow, I’m in Star Wars. It just looks like, oh, I’m in this sort of like other desert, like Canyon planet. But then that might be one of its strengths as it goes on, that, you know, allegedly this doesn’t just, you know, bow to being full of like Jedi stuff and, you know, fucking Darth Vader’s turning up every five minutes or whatever. You know, it is trying to be a story kind of written between the lines. When you read a lot of the reviews, it makes sense that the reviewers are framing it in the context of other Ubisoft open world games. But like you say, I mean, I think it’s very, very plausible that someone who’s never played a Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed game will pick this up. Because like you say, Star Wars open world is something that appeals to them. But yeah, if you exist in the continuum of thinking about all the different ways that this game compares to the Avatar game that came out last year, for example. Yeah, I think that to a large portion of those players, it won’t really matter. And that’s not to say I’m discounting those takes. I’m curious to see how I’ll feel about it, but yeah. Yeah, the stuff the continuum is sick of isn’t necessarily the stuff I’m sick of. And the stuff that they always give a pass to is stuff I’m not necessarily interested in. You know, it’s like the same group that’s like Boo Boo Ubisoft Open Worlds is like, yes, yes, every From Software game. And I’m like, well, you know, I don’t hold either of those positions, you know? No, no. I’m with you, Matthew, because I have to see people talking about Black Myth Wukong. Oh, that’s it. You know, it’s like that’s the game the kind of in the no masses have decided is the current acceptable game. And you’re like, well, I don’t agree with that. So I’m not defending it and saying it’s like some great game in the ear contender. I’ve just like, you know, it’s fine so far. I’m having fun. That’s that done, Matthew. Should we move on to the mailbag? Yes, let’s give people some mailbag. OK, I’ll read this first one then. It’s from Raspberry Rain in the Discord. There was an image involved with this question, which I won’t be posting, but I’ll just explain the image to you instead. So you don’t have to worry about that. Reading the latest Retro Gamer made me think of a question I’ve had for a long time, and it would be perfect for our esteemed hosts. When laying out a magazine page, what is your intent on how a reader should progress through a page? Should they read the main story all the way through first and then go back through all the sidebar and secondary stuff like captions, or should they stop reading the main stuff, as in the body text, which is what we call it in print, and switch over to the secondary things? I’ve attached an example of this. The main story continues on the page, but it’s full of other smaller things that always pull my attention away and make me think, what should I be reading here? Sorry for the wall of text question. The feature in question is about a load of Nintendo video game hardware and there was a very nice little list bar of the N64, GBA and GameCube and the Wii. What it does is it explains all the different innovations that each of those consoles brought to… Oh, is that what it’s doing actually? I can’t necessarily tell. I think these have been modded. I don’t know. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I think it’s about technologies that they were slow to adapt to. Okay. Right. So this is where they were behind. I thought Nintendo was okay with online gaming. They did actually have it in the system, didn’t they? Well, listen, take it up with the Daron and Retrogamer. That’s true. I guess GBA Illuminate Displays is a fair one because that thing was dark as fuck as we talked about before. My take on this, Matthew, I don’t know if you agree, is I always read the body text first and then go back through for the secondary elements. Maybe I’ll stop on a little pit stop along the way for a caption or two. It’s funny though that reading that way really makes you realize how like mags like N64 and Games Master in the 90s and noughties just had like barely any body text. You end up looking for the body text amid a sea of boxouts. That was very much the style of those mags. What do you think, Matthew? Yeah, I’d say that’s true. I wouldn’t say there’s like… I was never taught some great philosophy in terms of people always do X first and then this. It’s literally up to you. I read the body copy because if it’s written well and it’s flowing, then that’s what you’re reading. One thing I might have in the back of my mind is to… In terms of when I’m placing boxout or pacing the boxouts through a review or a feature, is to maybe bear in mind, if there is some chronological order to the boxouts, sometimes you think, well, this boxout is intended to come after the review, so I’ll put it at the end, or at the end of the feature, so I’ll put it at the end of the feature, rather than, you know, if it hinges on you having read something in the body copy, like trying to make sure it comes afterwards, I mean, that’s super basic bitch, obviously, but like, that’s really about as far as my thinking goes, because you sometimes do those little callouts in the thing where you’re like, see, this boxout, for more information on that, and, you know, I want to make sure that boxout is within reach of wherever that remark is, I’m a bit nervous, but otherwise, I’m just kind of like, let the designer do their thing. Yeah, it’s funny because on PC Gamer, we’re always like, oh, every box-out’s got to be like an inventive box-out. And it would perplex freelancers no end, because they wouldn’t even know what box-out means, really. And I’m like, it’s the little thing that’s on the page that’s not the body copy. And some of them got it, and some of them really put effort to getting it right. But if you hadn’t read the mag as much before, and you maybe knew PC Gamer as a website more than a magazine, it was much harder to grasp. But do a little graph, a little table or whatever. And I imagine now that was probably very irritating to hear from me as an editor asking for that. But there is a reason you do that. It gives it visual variety. Yeah, I feel like when I was at Future, we went through the phase where every magazine redesign was designed around a menu of box-outs. And the pitch was always, we’ll give the freelancer a menu of box-out, and then they just pick, you know, you tell them, you need to take two off the small box-out menu and one off the big box-out, because the way we design the page is, you know, there’s like a special grid and there will always be space for this box out here and this small box out there. So as long as they can pick whatever they want from the page. But what happens when you give freelancers or any writer, you know, on in-house to like a menu of options, is that they just pick the one which is easiest. So on NGamer, I remember in our menu of column box-outs, there was one where you had to like pitch a film based on like what the game was. So in a review would be like, who would play the lead? What would the film be about? Who would direct it? But then one of the other column box-outs was the would Batman like it? And you just had to want to say yes or no. So obviously all the fuckers just picked the would the Batman like it column. And that’s the problem with the menu system is letting people choose because you want to editorially force people to have the variety of box-outs in there. Yeah, but also some of them were just so nightmarish and like time-wasting and like, or a designer came up with them and not like a human being who writes words. You know what I mean? That’s what I mean. They’d be like, oh yeah, it’s this very ornate-looking, this big circular thing with all these different moving parts. Well, most people can’t be arsed. Can they just do five screenshots and like, here’s a fucking cool weapon, here’s a ratchet and clank weapon that fires farts at people. Do you know what I mean? That’s sort of a, I think by the end, I was a bit sick of my own thing I’d been asking people to do. Yeah, I always liked to box out where it was like, oh, we’ve got a pie chart, and then you just have to write like five things and then put a number and hope that the number’s added up to 100. That was your only job, was like, this game is like 20% explosions, 15% fart guns. Yeah, I think that’s about right. Well, I was always fascinated by the, well, the thing is, the reason behind it was like, oh yeah, it makes the magazine feel varied or whatever, but I was always intrigued by the fact that Edge doesn’t really do that. Edge does like text boxes. And occasionally there might be a list box out, maybe, but like not very often. And then in the reviews, it’s like templated sort of like box outy stuff, right? Like the post script and the little developer interview and stuff. And they’re just like, they’re basically more pages. That’s just more copy, isn’t it really? Yeah, I mean, the thing with them though, so with their post scripts, the developer interview, that is the would Batman like it of Edge pages, because you’re like, do you want to have to write an 800 word mini essay on one factor of the game? Or do you want some developers to answer some questions so you don’t have to do any writing? You’re obviously going to push for the developer interview. I don’t go around labeling every Edge review I’ve done, but the majority of them which have post scripts, I have got developer interviews. So I’m a really lazy bastard and I’ve managed to convince people that was better for the thing in question. What happens when it’s a game that’s developed by, say, some Japanese developers? Well, I’ve done at least two where we managed to get Japanese interviews. Okay. Fair enough. Well, Matthew is an expert at this, clearly. But yeah, I think that does answer the question. It’s like, the key thing behind great magazine design is that it is coherent to the reader, where you’re trying to point them, and you can do certain things with the pages to do that, like little arrows that tell them where the body text continues, that sort of thing, or the box out is so distinct from the main body text, you don’t confuse it because it’s got little sub labels and stuff. But yeah, in general, I think that all that stuff exists to support the core copy, which is the main event. And that is more true for more recent games magazines than it was true in the 90s and noughties, or I think the box outs were maybe more designed to be like the thing that drew your eye. Yeah, okay, cool. Do you want to read this next one, Matthew? What video game developer is the biggest one hit wonder? They’ve released only one game that was massive commercially or critically, only to disappear afterwards. My answer is Disco Elysium and Zaum. That’s from Welsh boy Mick. Yeah, that’s a really good one. It’s actually very, very rare for a developer to make one massive thing and disappear. The two I could come up with were Phil Fish and Campo Santo. Campo Santo obviously acquired by Valve. You could argue that their next game was Half-Life Alex because some of these developers worked on it, but Firewatch and Fez felt like the two really key ones to me. Yeah, I don’t know if I’d call them one hit wonders necessarily, because I think if Phil Fish did design another game, he’d have loads to give. But yeah, what do you think, Matthew? Yeah, again, I sort of struggle, because I feel like it is relatively rare that anyone, you know, you just get one amazing thing. And I think there’s plenty of studios who’ve made an amazing game and then some less than interesting games. But I wouldn’t say it’s as aggressive as, like, they’ve completely disappeared. Like, this is nowhere near the same scale as what you’ve said. I wish that it was really interesting what happened with… There was a duo of RPGs called Hand of Fate, Hand of Fate 2, by Defiant Development. And it’s not a one hit wonder because they made two of them, but they were, like, critically acclaimed. And the arc going from one to the next in terms of, like, quality jump and, like, a studio that was taking, you know, what was successful about the first and then growing it and Layers of Fear 2’s, you know, widely accepted to be, you know, a much bigger, better game. But they defiant developments. They sort of… I don’t want to say they shut mysteriously. I’m sure, you know, there are answers out there, but, you know, they struggled to, you know, find a route to making the next game. And I think there’s quite a lot of that kind of going under the radar. That way only jumps out because I happen to really like Hand of Fate 1 and 2. So, that’s not a great answer because they weren’t here one hit wonder, and I don’t know what happened to them. It’s kind of interesting when you see developers who don’t just make one game and disappear, but like make one key game that they’re always known for. So if you say, you say Jäger Development, for example, I think most people would say Spec Ops The Light, right? Because the other stuff they made, I played a little bit of The Cycle, a more recent game they made, just one of a couple of life service games they’ve made that just got shut down. But Spec Ops The Light is pretty much considered like a modern classic and talked about in sort of like very positive terms. Even that’s quite rare, though, to find a developer who’s only known for one good thing, then the rest of what they make is just a little bit unremarkable. Yeah. I guess there are like teams where you’re like, we were talking about Alien Isolation recently, you’re like, well, that combination of people feels like a one-hit wonder currently. Even though they’re within Creative Assembly, which has made loads of fucking hits, that particular combo and that idea of that studio within a studio, unless they decide to get back together and make Alien Isolation 2, in which case, we can come back and laugh at this episode. Seems very unlikely. The team there, though, as I understand it, is that they are like the console team at Creative Assembly. Basically, like that game Hyenas that was shut down. That team is technically, I think, the team that did make Alien Isolation or the remnants of them, because they are known as the console team within CA, and then previously, they made Halo Wars 2, which I thought was really, really good, and yeah, before that made Alien Isolation, which is obviously classic, but I think you are right, like the idea of like an exact combination of people, they come together for that one thing, and they just kind of, they just disperse, and then even if you see the name of the developer there, it’s not really the same thing. What about Real Time Worlds and Crackdown? Oh, that’s a really good one. Because they made APB, but that was obviously a disaster afterwards. I think some of the studio went off to form the developer that made Crackdown 2. But you are right, APB was a proper disaster, wasn’t it? A proper flop. That’s a really good one, actually. Yeah. Because you would think after playing Crackdown, oh, they’re on top of the world, but whatever they make next is going to be huge. But I mean, why did they make a multiplayer-only PC game? Like, why? You found your audience on Xbox. Because what’s his choice? Is it Dave Jones, who is like Mr. Crackdown? Like, he was involved at one point in Crackdown 3, because I remember being in the demo where he showed it off. Yeah, with the physics-y stuff. Yeah, with the crazy physics online stuff. And it ended up being sort of finished, or taken over the line, or whatever, by a team at Sumo. So yeah, I mean, people involved in Crackdown 1 have definitely circled Crackdown. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, definitely real-time worlds, as they were, you know, are no more. Yeah, so weird they made APB after that. What an all-time strange decision. Like it’s Crackdown 2 is right there. Like it, yeah, strange. Really, really weird stuff. They like even, the game launched in 2010, right, APB and by November 2010, it’s reading this on Wikipedia, bidding on thousands of real-time worlds lots ended with industrial auctioneer Sweeney Kincaid managing the sales and collections. The lots included monitors, computers and games consoles, literally selling bits of the office. That’s like crazy how it only launched in the summer of that year and by November, they were selling the computers. That’s so bizarre. I mean, that’s a great story to be told at some point, surely that’d be, I’d love to read a long, long form story about that. Maybe it’s already been done, I don’t know. This is some good ones, Matthew. I will just like credit though, that I did like look into this a bit on the internet and see what people suggested. Campo Santo I came up with, Phil Fish I saw suggested in a Reddit thread about this very thing. I thought it’s quite funny that someone said Bojang in there. That made me laugh. Obviously, Minecraft is persistently popular, but I enjoyed that. This is a quick one I imagine, Matthew. Hey guys, have you ever broken slash damage your gaming stuff over the years in weird ways? In my teens, I accidentally dropped my mom’s DS light into the toilet and it didn’t survive. I’ve also slightly melted the back of a PS5 controller while soaking gel nails off. Whoops. I hate when that happens to me. Lspandherbeans, that is. I have no idea what that username means. Every time I see it, I’m like, what’s the… LSP and her beans. Oh, okay. I don’t know, I’m guessing it’s that, but… That makes sense. Lots to think about there. So the only answer I got to this, Matthew, is that I have a powerful memory of… I got my grandparents to buy me a knockoff Tamagotchi on the summer holiday in like, I don’t know, Skegness in like the 90s, and I dropped it down a drain at my aunt’s house. I have a powerful memory of my aunt putting on like a, you know, some sort of like yellow rubber gloves, and then like sticking her hand down the drain to fish out this naff Tamagotchi that I’d lost. And that came to mind. Otherwise all my other damaged kind of like goods are down to me having a tantrum while playing computer games. There’s no great sort of like comical mishap. What about you, Matthew? Nothing too dramatic. Like, not through any particular accident, more through flimsiness. I don’t think any wee in my orbit. So my personal wee or like the wee’s in the office kept their… The flaps that were on top, they were always snapping off. That’s like one of the flimsiest things. The ones which covered up the GameCube controller ports, like all of our wee’s at work looked so busted. Because we were taking them in and out of drawers all the time, those things would snap off. It’s not very spicy. They were along the lines of your Tamagotchi, and it’s sort of tenuously gaming adjacent. Our family had a Furby back in the days when everyone had a Furby, and I swear this happened. The Furby was like doing its thing, speaking gibberish as it always did. And I shouted incredibly loudly, shut up in its face, to try and like, I don’t know, upset my sister or something. And it’s- To just shut down. It died. It like literally broke, as I said, shut up, and never made another noise. And that may sound like bullshit, but that’s what happened. I swear to this day, I screamed and killed a Furby. I mean, that’s- Oh, I’m so glad that Elle spanned her beans’ asses now, so I could get that. I had no idea you’d done that. But it sounds like one of those bullshit stories, like everyone had those stories about Furbies at the time. Do you remember the thing about- It was quite hazy about what Furbies did and what their actual functionality was, because they were meant to learn from you. And I remember- I don’t know if I read it in the newspaper, or if someone told me that this was in a newspaper, but a Furby had allegedly- like some US General had allegedly taken a Furby to work, and then when he took it home, it started spouting out like military secrets, because it is Furby in the workplace. And it was like, this sort of like, wow, are Furbies secretly spies, because they record all this information. It was such a whole shit. Oh, that’s, yeah, ridiculous. Like, there was so much of a Furby going, we’re gonna kill us all at Middletown. Was that covered by Zero Dark Thirty, Matthew? Did they go into that in the- That’s the director’s cut. The notorious Furby scene. It’s like, well, you’re telling us this, but our other informant cut to Furby in the room next door says otherwise. Well, as you start to enter the slightly ropey Simpson seasons, the Funzo episode is pretty good from that era. Like their version of the Furby, basically. It’s sort of like a riff on how there are several toy trends that exploded at the end of the 90s, like the Tickle Me Elmo in the Furby. And the joke in it that always cracked me up, I mean, I think the twist with that one was that it would destroy all other toys, like it would just start ripping them apart and stuff, and so it would start strangling Bart’s Crusty Doll, and the doll for some reason would start making the noises of being choked, that was pretty funny. But there’s also Bart looking through the catalog for the different accessories for Funzo, and I’ve got this burned into my memory, Funzo’s Dream Fortress, Funzo’s Lower Back Pain Chair, and Funzo’s European Voltage Converter, those jokes. Those have really stayed with me, so yes. Do you want to read out this next one, Matthew? Yes. Which Ubisoft character would you most and least like to get a pint with, beer or otherwise, or Rio, Calpo, or whatever you will? That’s from Naeslin. Yeah. I had a few answers for this. I thought I’d be curious to hang out with John Bernthal from Ghost Recon Breakpoint. I don’t think he’s necessarily a good hang in that game, because there’s a lot of intense military stuff, but I’d like to hang out with John Bernthal. Is that okay to say? I think that’s all right. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Da Vinci from Assassin’s Creed 2. I don’t think both be at the same bar. That might be a bit strange. He’s a good hang. Then Bayek from Origins. He’s Assassin’s Creed Origins. He’s pretty cool, too. Worst, Rabbids, obviously. Also, the bloke in the tank, in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare 2, who says, no say cannot do, when you order him to fucking move the tank down the road and blow up some terrorists or whatever. And he’s constantly saying, no say cannot do. And that guy definitely wouldn’t go for a pint with that guy. But primarily the Rabbids who, no, absolutely not. Thoughts, Matthew? I mean, yeah, all very sound. I would probably go for a pint with Evie Frye, the Lady Assassin from Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. But the London of it all, she probably knows some good pubs. She’d probably be upset to see how gentrified all those neighborhoods are now in modern day compared to Victorian times. Like the Viking Ava from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Like there’s a lot of mead quaffing. I would fucking hate that. The actual quaffing of mead, I wouldn’t want to quaff like a Pepsi. I think that would absolutely wreck me. But they seem all right. Like definite bad hang, that pig from Beyond Good and Evil. Oh, Paige, that’s tough. Is Paige the worst hang in that game? Well, in terms of like wanting to go for a drink, I mean, no, I mean, there’s loads of sub characters in that game. Jade, I might go for a drink with. She seems like relatively normal and is like, you know, sort of a journalist. There’s some crossover there. That Buzz Lightyear guy, I wouldn’t go for a pint with him. That guy who follows her around for Paige gets captured. Yeah. But yeah, I’d be like, pint with Jade, but she can’t bring the pig. All right, Evie Fry one. I wonder what she would make of London now. I think she’d probably quite enjoy wasabi, you know, katsu curry and rice for, you know, like seven quid. That’s all right, you know, it’s not all bad gentrification, you know. I think she’d be upset to see, you know, events which were quite hard for her, you know, to like deal with in her life, rendered as like garish tourist attractions now, like all the Jack the Ripper stuff. Yeah. You’d be like, oh man, this isn’t, you know, you are trivializing what was like pretty horrible. Yeah. Then I go to Waterstones and be like, look at From Hell, this treats the subject with real respect, you know. That’s the best I could really do to balance that out. All right. Well, we’ve given that one enough time, I think. Why are you, that was a fun question. I like it fine, but also slightly weird question. Why specifically Ubisoft? Well, the questions are getting weirder, I find. I think it’s just because people have, we’ve answered probably pretty much all the obvious ones, either in the mailbags or in the content of the podcast itself, where we’ve like plumbed the depths of our gaming knowledge and takes, and some things have come up a couple of times or whatever. So I think that’s why they’re getting increasingly abstract. So this is a very leading, amusing question, this one. A particularly frustrating section in Steel Wakes are Deep has reawoken my confirmed belief that underwater levels in video games are the shittest levels in video games. Would you agree? As from Seaboy77. Matthew, I do have some thoughts on this, but I was wondering if you wanted to take this one first. I think when underwater levels are done right, and that’s quite a rare thing, I think they can be really good. I think it’s a bit of a, like, I’m not very good around water. I’m not a very good, like, swimmer, and I don’t really have a, like, a huge desire to go underwater myself. So it’s a kind of a, you know, an interesting sort of experience to have, sort of vicariously through video games. Certainly, there are a couple of levels, underwater levels I absolutely love. You know, I’ve talked about the opening of Tomb Raider Underworld when you’re descending to the temple. I think that’s really, like, murky and strange and alien, and, you know, the limitations. I’d say both the limitations and freedoms that come with diving and the unique movement of diving are interesting mechanically when they’re done well. I think the underwater stuff in Mario Galaxy and Odyssey is really nice. I really like Mario in those games. I think under the water, I think the swimming controls, they finally really nailed. I think everyone has, like, memories of these things being stressful from childhood, and that’s why they get a bit of a bad rap, because they remember, like, drowning as Sonic, and so then they now just fear all water, but water can be good. Yeah, my take, though, is that Chemical Plant Zone, which is the origin of a lot of that anxiety, is a great level. That’s just really good. Well, I mean, I’m a fan of it. I think, like, the first four levels of Sonic 2 are all bangers. After that, yes, it trails off a little bit, but those ones are pretty good. So same applies for Aquatic Ruins Zone. I would say that level is more damaged by all those arrows that are firing at you out of those little robotnik hatchers. Those are a pain in the ass, but I don’t know if I blame the water as such. It’s just a different challenge. Still wakes the deepest interesting, because nothing really I felt like… I think I do remember, like, trying to understand how the ladder controls work in that when you are underwater, because it’s like a momentum base. You have to push yourself forward and then grab on to the next kind of like yellow bar thing as you were trying to, like, navigate the underwater bits. But at the same time, I don’t think I got stuck on anything in that game for more than about five minutes. Like, it’s a pretty, it’s pretty, pretty speedy in terms of momentum. So I can’t say I found it that objectionable. But that said, I couldn’t think of like many truly classic underwater levels. I will like cop to them, not necessarily always being slam dunks, Matthew. So I’m glad you were able to fish out a few good ones. Yeah, I’d say they’re more bad than good, but I’m not willing to say that they’re all totally shit. Bioshock, that’s a big underwater level. Yeah, but yeah, it’s not really though, is it? I was thinking about this. Bioshock 2 has underwater bits, but you don’t do any combat in them. You just look inside some windows or whatever or fish some stuff off of some animals off the ocean floor. You don’t really have any fights underwater. So yeah, I reluctantly accept your point, Seaboy77, but also don’t think that those bits and still works are deeply that bad. Certainly other things have made me much angrier in games. Seaboy sounds like a nickname for a diver. It does. Check out these Seaboys. Do you want to read out this next one from Alan Stock, Matthew? From Alan Stock. Hello, large lads. Have there been any game genres that you didn’t think you liked until one game broke you into the genre? For example, for me, Zero Escape 999 got me into visual novels, which I used to think were incredibly boring. Yeah. So I thought about this. Like Sekiro with that whole range of games, but I didn’t really get me into them. But I suppose it’s the first of their type that I’ve actually enjoyed. I guess that allows me to understand the design decisions that go into some of the other games I like that riff on them, like the Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor games. I thought about competitive shooters, Matthew, how like COD 4 and Halo 3 is a combo, did that for me with online shooters a little bit. But then you fast forward years later and then even stuff like the live service grind games. Kicking a lot these days, but I played loads of Destiny 2, The Division and The Division 2. So when they are good, they can click me into those. And obviously Apex Legends as well. Online multiplayer is not really my domain, but definitely when I think the experiences has the level of polish or is particularly exciting, then that will get me over that. I’ve got to say, I’ve never quite broken into visual novels. The Phoenix Wright games are still the only ones I think are properly played. I guess that’s not true. I played a couple of indie ones. I played Lucy’s Games when she came on the podcast. But yeah, it’s not something I’ve actually cracked. To be honest, I’m a bit daunted by how long a lot of these games are. Matthew talks about Danganronpa, then I look them up on how long to be, and they just seem, man. If I play those, I ain’t going to play anything else this year. So yeah. What do you got for this one, Matthew? Yeah. I’ve probably said this before, but I always go to Forza Horizon as a game which sort of not opened up racing games, but racing games beyond cartoon kart races, which is really all I probably played before with Mario Kart and what not. I guess you’ve got other middle ground burnout and burnout paradise, which you could see as a sort of connection or a gateway drug into that kind of thing. But in terms of games which took cars and car culture, in a relatively serious way that I’m not really interested in, but still got me over that hump of not being a big car guy, but really, really liking them. I think that’s a really exceptional series for that reason. That’s really what I’m looking for in several genres, is all the game that cracks it a bit for me, and I’d love to have one of those in a fighting game because I just cannot get into them. I had lots of people tell me when Street Fighter IV came along, they were like, oh, this is so back to basics, this is so pure, this is the one. It still didn’t really take. Likewise, I’m still to have my religious souls awakening. Yeah, sometimes it can flicker on and flicker off again. So I definitely had an era where I played a bunch of survival games, so I played loads and loads of Daisy. I think I racked up something like 40, 50 hours in that. After working on PC Gamer, we did a few diary features on it, and got into it and the stories it created, and when that felt fresh and new, it was really exciting. Don’t Starve as well. Again, not really my home turf, that genre, but a really nice version of that type of game. Played a bit of Subnautica as well, so even though a lot of the ones that launch into early access are not my sort of thing, I definitely, yeah, that’s a genre I’ve dabbled with, because there’s been a few really good ways into it. Yeah, so I think that sufficiently ticks that one, Matthew. So, this next one then is from Lexington87. I finally played and just finished Hotel Dusk, a cortex for the pod. I really enjoyed the story, the vibe, the use of dual screens, the characters, et cetera. Really happy to have played it. I’m keen to get your feelings on using guides to get through the more frustrating elements with the genre. I’m 37, two kids, a hard job. My patience limit is very, very short. Hotel Dusk has moments in which the next step is not immediately obvious, especially when you’re one step ahead of the game designer. It’s just looking bits up, an acceptable way to play. Part of me felt guilty as a younger man, I’d have had the patience to poke all the edges until the solution comes around. It’s something lost when you just look it up after 30 seconds of getting stuck in a game like this. Looking forward to giving the last window a go soon enough, cheers. What do you think, Matthew? Guides, how much do you use them? Do they have a place? Do you have any particular hardcore rules about how you enjoy these things? I don’t tend to use them because the meat of what I play is before or so close to release that there aren’t guides. To review games is to play them in a very pure fashion without any helping hands. It’s why games reviewers are better at games than all other players because we don’t have the benefit of all those wikis to help us out. So that’s always a very nice proud feeling. I think it’s more a sign of the times that I feel so many games are focused tested or whatever to an inch of their life, to make sure the journey through them is smooth. It’s very rare that I just don’t know what I’m meant to be doing, which is where I’d use a guide. The last time I used a guide was Beyond Good and Evil when we did that episode. Because it had one bit of a climbable platform that was so poorly communicated, which just wouldn’t happen anymore in the age of yellow paint. I would rather have yellow paint than to get so frustrated that I had to pass all these terribly written walkthroughs from 20 years ago. It’s the truth of it. Yeah, formatted sort of dreadfully and because they were written for like a simple HTML rather than like modern IGN pages or whatever. I mean, I don’t know if you… Did you ever have like reviewing a game when there is no guidance out there? Did you ever have like moments of sort of, you know, that’s that blind fear of like, oh, I’m not going to be able to do this. Yeah, like the strangest one was God of War Chains of Olympus, where there was literally this corner you had to walk around. And because of the way the camera was tilted, I just walked around this room thinking there was no way out. For about like, I think about four hours. And then Matt Handrohan is reviewing it on Games TM, just came and said, oh no, you just have to walk by this rock, Samuel, when there’s like a path that goes round. And I was like, it was like, and when I replayed it for the God of War episode, I didn’t even notice it. But like, that was really strange. That was like my brain just broke and I just couldn’t figure it out. And I started like getting like the hot sweats, and like just the panic and like sweaty bum time. Sorry, it’s not a squeaky bum time, not sweaty bum time. Got that wrong there. Key distinction there. I try to think, other times this has happened where… I had it a couple of times with… One was in Castlevania, Lords of Shadow 2, where there’s this horrible stealth section with this like evil goat. And you’re walking through this maze with all these rustling leaves. And I just couldn’t work out, like, if there was a trick to it, a gimmick to it, if it was just so tightly timed. I mean, there’s a reason why, when the reviews come out, if everyone’s like, fuck, X moment of this game, you know, it’s because they’ve had to battle through it. And it was definitely, like, you know, something you got stuck on for several hours, and it gave you the fear that you weren’t going to be able to complete it. Those are the moments that lodge in the mind and always get brought up. So, Goat Maids in Lords of Shadow 2. Another one was the trying to bring down the Star Destroyer in Jedi Force Unleashed. Yeah, yeah. Because the Quick Time event, like, was very poorly communicated about what you’re actually meant to do. And I think there was, like, maybe a bit of, like, like a stretch of level you had to do to get to it. So like, you get to it and then fail to do it. And you know, it was the combination of this was meant to be like the iconic set piece of the game. And it was like, what am I meant to be doing here? What is it not communicating? That was a real stinker. That moment, you know, and it probably drove that game down a fair few points in my mind at the time, because I was just like, this isn’t good enough, you know. Yeah, I think for that game, they did like one, that one piece of key art of the guy bringing the Jedi, the Star Destroyer down, and then had to like work backwards to put that into the game. And it so clearly doesn’t fit, because it’s not part of the conventional game mechanics, it has to be a QTE. And it’s like visually spectacular objectively, but to play is so, so frustrating, like you say. I hear that on PC as well, if you didn’t have a controller, that bit was basically impossible to do with the mouse and keyboard. So I can’t imagine how unpleasant that would be to just sit at a QTE that’s not working, you know. Yeah, I had one in Famicom Detective Club. The original two, when they did those, it had some… Because that game, there’s very few interactions you can do with it, but you could get trapped in loops of just running between the three scenes that were open to you, clicking on everything, hoping to trigger the next bit of bullshit. Because there was one of them, you had to look at someone’s hands or something. Something that you never had to do at any other point in the game, look at a specific body part to get them to trigger them, look at the next line of dialogue. And that was like, I mean, maybe an hour of just running around and around. And like, when you find yourself reloading earlier saves, because you’re like, is it actually broken? Have I broken this somehow? I better go back and make sure I haven’t broken this. Those are the really bad ones. But you know, that was like quite a big part of the review for that. And I dinged it quite heavily because I thought it was a quite a miserable experience for it. I should say the new Famicom Detective Club, which we’ll probably talk about on the next one we’ve been playing, they’ve really smoothed that stuff out. So if you are interested in it, go right ahead. It’s a much safer recommended purchase. Interesting. Well, that’s good to know, Matthew. To answer the guide’s question on my side specifically, the one game, Beyond Good and Evil, is definitely one from this year. But so is Perfect Dark, actually. So I guess both the older games that we’ve done on the Patreon episodes needed a little bit of help to understand how some of those fucking sub-objectives worked in the harder difficulties. But Dragon’s Dogma 2, I used a guide for not to actually complete the quests, but to actually understand how many quests are in the game. Because sometimes it’s quite abstract the way you pick up the side quests. It’s like just from one NPC, who if you forget to talk to them, you’ll miss out on. I learned about the Sphinx side quest in the game that I completely missed, when I played through it, and I played 80 hours of it, and completely missed that in its entirety. I was really bummed to see afterwards, that I just missed that part of the game, and this quite cool looking weird character, who gives you these challenges and stuff. There’s also an elements to the end game, that I would say would be quite hard to figure out if you didn’t have a guide. Even when I did have a guide, I managed to mess it up a couple of times. That’s all I’ll say about that, because I think that end game is worth discovering for yourself. It’s really something. I still use guides, but rarely just for a puzzle that’s driving me mad. Actually, I’m lying, because I played as well, the Tomb Raider collection they did this year, and some of those old puzzles, there’s some great ones in there, some absolute classics, but there are some that if you don’t activate a certain number of switches in a certain order, I’m thinking of one particular sewer level that’s in that first Tomb Raider game. It involves a massive underground, maybe like an aqueduct kind of thing, where the water rises and falls. You’re in this gigantic room, then you have to snake around it in this very particular order, and if you don’t, you don’t have all the keys you need to actually get the fuck out of there, and I managed to fuck up the order over twice, so we ended up spending three hours on that one level. I was like, what dark evil did they sort of hatch in Derby in 1996? I was driving me completely mad, so rarely do them, but for old games in particular, I’m happy to just press that button and have a good experience because like you, I don’t have two kids, this podcast is evidence of the lack of children in my life, but still, I think not wasting time is the key thing. Enjoy Last Window as well and let us know what you think of that. It’s the better of the two, so hopefully, you’ll enjoy it a bit more. Cool. All right. Matthew, we come to another slightly abstract question here. I feel like this is caused by the cheese draft that happened in the last mailbag. Hello, gentlemen. Curious to know your thoughts on some soft drinks, so please, your immediate reactions to this rapid fire survey. Coca-Cola or Pepsi, Matthew? Probably Coca-Cola. Hard agree. Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi? Diet Coke. Diet Pepsi, for me. Coke Zero or Pepsi Max? Pepsi Max all day, and Pepsi Max is better than Coca-Cola and Diet Coke. Hard disagree. Coke Zero is better than all of those. But it’s close between Coke Zero and Pepsi Max. Pepsi Max is my all-time favorite soft drink. Fair enough. Okay, I would just asweeteners, even God knows what they’re doing to my body, but they serve you. Whatever they’re doing. I love it. Fanta or Tango? I used to be religiously Tango, but I probably say Fanta these days. I would agree, but I thought about it like this, right? If you could never have one of them again, I just thought that I don’t think I can live with the idea, I could never have another Apple Tango. I think I need that possibility space to exist in my brain. Apple Tango was like a cornerstone of my personality at college. Yeah, it’s like, this is something kind of unbeatable about Apple Tango, that I just think that if I could never drink another Fanta, I’d be sad, but I could live with it. But I need to know that I could one day still have an Apple Tango. Yeah. So it’s Tango for me. All right, you don’t have to agree, it’s up to you. Sprite or 7 Up, Matthew? 7 Up as long as it’s the… I like the sugar-free one. Yeah, no real take here for me, but I’ve gotten quite into the Sprite, Lemon and Lime, sugar-free one of late, pretty good that. Okay, J2O or Oasis? Oasis. It’s an either from me, dog. They both taste like ass. J2O, there’s so little drink in that glass bottle. Yeah, comically low amounts. Sam Pellegrino or Orangina? What a wanker’s dilemma. It’s just Tori Fanta, isn’t it? Tori Fanta. I quite like the Sam Pellegrino, the blood orange one. Yeah, okay. I’m an Orangina guy, just from French holidays. French holidays. Well, they’re massive on Orangina over there. It’s a cornerstone. Rio or Lilt, Matthew? Rio. Lilt no longer exists anyway. It’s been folded into Big Tango. Yeah, it’s been turned into Fanta. Big Fanta. It’s Fanta, isn’t it? Like Fanta grapefruit. Yeah, the Lilt identity has diminished over the years. sugar-free Lilt, that was an awesome drink. Okay, well, I’ll take your word for that one. Iron Brewer Vimto. Don’t like either. I think it’s the Cordial Vimto is all right, isn’t it? I just don’t know about the fizzy one. I’ll say Iron Brewer because I think we’ve got a lot of Scottish listeners. Yeah, it’s the stuff for me. I don’t want to spate of cancelled patrons off the back of one fucking answer. I think it’s cultural appropriation when English people drink. Good answer. Diplomatic. Red Bull or Monster, Matthew? I’m scared that they’ll give me a heart attack, so neither. Monster, the white ones, I’m all in baby, I’m afraid. Those things have a demonic call to me. Well, I don’t smoke and other than, this episode does not tell that story. I don’t drink that much these days either, so Monster is one of my terrible habits. So yeah. Okay, it continues, I’m afraid. Pro or anti, Dr. Pepper, Matthew? I love Dr. Pepper. I know it’s bad for me and the Dr. Pepper sugar-free is rank. Oh, I’ve gotten quite into the sugar-free one. It took a bit of time. It’s the only sugar-free one which doesn’t do it for me. I had to break in my taste buds to get that one going. But now, yeah. I’m pro Dr. Pepper, very good. I like a medicinal fizzy drink, it’s good. Lucas aid, Matthew? Again, I’m scared it will give me a heart attack. I don’t really know what it is. Is it medicinal? Well, I mean, my dad used to drink it when he had hangover. That’s what I really associate with Lucas aid. He’s had too much scrumpy Jack during the family barbecue, and he’s having a lie down basically. So, Schler. That feels like it was a bit old school Schler. Do people still drink that? I don’t know. Yeah, Schler is for- I think I’m marginally anti-Schler. People who don’t drink alcohol, like parents, friends at dinner parties. Yeah. I feel like they’ve got, there are better non-alcohol versions of booze drinks these days. I’m going to go slightly anti-Schler. Yeah. I bet I’m on board with that. Root beer? I’m not really into it. I can have one can a quarter, and that’s all my taste buds can handle with that one. It’s just a dense flavor-based experience. Cream soda, Matthew? No, not for me. Sparkling water? Only at Gamescom when it’s just fucking everywhere, isn’t it? I agree. In lieu of actual water, sparkling water will suffice, and water finally, Matthew. Yeah. I’ve got a cold water dispenser built into my fridge. It’s the most opulent thing in our house, and I love that. Fuck, that sounds great, honestly. But this podcast would not exist without that device, so we have a lot to thank it for. Many thanks from Nae Slinn. Okay, we survived that, Matthew. Do you want to read out this next one? Hi, Samuel and Matthew. How much money would you pay to be able to, when you clicked your fingers, make the exact sound, the exact Nintendo Switch click sound at any volume you liked? That’s from Oolong. Fucking hell. My answer to this is no amount of money whatsoever, because I don’t care. Thoughts, Matthew? I mean, like, a pound, like, it would be good for a couple of jokes. Like, interesting at the pub, right? Like, check this out. And everyone’s like, oh yeah, that’s the click sound. But not more than a pound. I don’t value having that skill, really. You had one question that got read out, Oolong, and this was it. Are you proud? Are you proud of the question? Was it worth it? I hope it was worth it. Also, I would worry that Nintendo would be like, you’re kind of infringing on our copyright with that sound, and then they’d have my fingers removed or something, and I’m like, well, I can’t stop it. Fingers removed. In honor of this very weird musical with a very Back Page themed title, I don’t know what that relates to. Here’s the question though. What would you focus a musical of the podcast about? Would it be a musical episode of Gamescourt? That’s from Vegetable Tart. Oh, now I remember what the context was for this. Someone’s done a musical based on the Gwyneth Paltrow skiing lawsuit thing. You know how she says, I wish you well at the end. When she walks out in classic Back Page fashion, they named the musical, I Wish You Well, based on that. I think it’s like an Edinburgh Fringe thing. So yes. I think best rhythm action games in musical episode would probably make sense, Matthew. There’d be a series of skits based around that. Maybe we’d do like a rhythm heaven style, sort of like weird looping beat or something like that. The opening musical number would be our sync claps become like a backing track for a bigger song. That’s great. I really like that. People don’t know what the sync claps are, do they? We do some claps at the start to help me sync all the audio tracks. Yeah. Whenever we have a guest on, Matthew goes, right, before we get started, we’re going to do some sync claps. So when I count down to the invisible zero, please, please clap. I just explain that to every fucking guest and it’s, I just feel sorry for Matthew to do each time. Okay. I think we’ve answered that one then. Rhythm Action Games is the one. I don’t know if you had anything else to weigh in with there. I don’t think Musical Epis is going to happen anytime soon. I’d worried that we do go a little bit Dr. Mbenga on it and it would be a tough hang. Dr. Mbenga is such a prime reference for the very specific phenomenon of unwilling participant in musical content. It tells such a great story. Okay. This is from Daddy Magic. I’m never repeating that name again. What does Matthew make of university classmate Torsten Edstone Bell being elected as an MP and will he be buying his new book? Is this the guy who was on one of the O&M forums, Matthew? No, this wasn’t, no, this was, apparently a chap who used to be on the O&M forums has become an MP, is one of the younger MPs in the last election. No, Torsten Bell was in the year above me at university. He was, I think when I joined, he was editor of the Cherwell student paper. He was at my college and I didn’t really know him, to be honest. He seemed very, very, very bright, and to manage editing a student paper and doing your course is a pretty big undertaking. And he’s since become a, I think he’s part of a think tank type thing. And he often writes articles in the Guardian, which I quite like, the very stats driven. He does analysis of interesting trends and has lots of interesting takes on how to fix things. Yeah, I mean, he seems like a bright, intelligent person, which is probably what you want in an MP, right? I think people are a bit annoyed, because he got like, bussed in to like a Welsh constituency, and he’s not Welsh. Oh, right, okay. But he’s just got bussed into like a safe seat, because they wanted him in, because he’s a bit of a brain. Yeah, now they can do austerity 2.0, because everything they’re saying just sounds like that to me. That’s intriguing. Can you say much about the O&M forum person who… No, I really wasn’t very involved with the O&M forum. I just… I can’t even remember who said it or how it got to me. Maybe someone mentioned it on our Discord or someone tweeted at me or mentioned it on Twitter or something. But yes, I don’t know if it was like a mod on the forum or someone who was just a big figure on there. I remember this thing shut down, like, whatever, eight years ago. They were all very tight-knit, and I think those forumites were quite kind of invested in one another, so they sort of followed each other as friends and followed each other’s careers, and they’ve just apparently become a labor MP, and ex-members of that forum have claimed this as some kind of victory for the O&M forum. Well done to him. I’m a bit worried they’ve got MPs that think like Pokemon is good, but there you go. I’m too sure you’re concerned about that. Yeah. Okay. This is quite a good, interesting question. Apart from this very pod, taking me back to the glory days of gaming in the 360 era, for one reason or another, I’ve been out of video games since 2019 or so. Having only recently bought a PC and try my best to catch up slash re-immersed myself back into the zeitgeist of games, I’m a bit lost. I don’t know where to reliably source my news, reviews or information. Obviously, I’ve got the pod and I’ve resubscribed to Edge by Old Flame. But apart from that, I don’t know what else to use. What sites, magazines, newsletters, forums, etc. do you recommend or personally use? Thank you for your time, Admiral Dong. So there we go. Just the most Edge username of all time there, Admiral Dong. Interesting this one, Matthew, because it did actually make me stop and think about, how do I accumulate this information? I definitely don’t use YouTube or anything like that. I am very trad media in that respect. I read pretty much every video game website, Eurogamer, RPS, IGN, PC Gamer, just absorbing all the information they put out there. I would say that watching Day of the Devs each year, each June, has become a good way to top up the number of prominent Indies that are swimming about in my head as things to check out. That’s always useful for that. I’ve mentioned it before, obviously, I share the interest in Edge and how they curate Indie reviews in particular, especially things that you’ve maybe not heard of before, or things that are about to be huge, or they were one of the advocates for this game, Arco, that’s been discussed as an example of something like an Indie game. This is being ignored despite being reportedly being very good. Occasionally, top it up with a Reddit search though, as well. I don’t mind dipping into different, if there’s a certain type of experience I’m looking for, or if you play one game from this old PC subgenre, you should play this one, that kind of stuff I’ll use as well. But social media is a huge part of it too. Just people posting their screenshot Saturdays or whatever, or just a cool gif of something you’ve never heard of, and then I’ll just go whack up my Steam wishlist, that’s kind of on my radar. It’s a big old mix of stuff basically. Matthew, what about you? Mostly the same. I wouldn’t say I religiously read any gaming site these days. I will flick through RPS and you’re a gamer as a, I will go there as a destination to look for things. Other sites I kind of tend to get dragged into, like whenever articles sort of has a big breakout or there was that IGN article this week about the fake accessibility advisor and- Fascinating. Yeah, absolutely brilliant, but that emerged through Twitter to me rather than visiting the site. I’m quite reliant on other people who do put in the hard work to find this stuff from these sites. So like Nathan Brown, friend of the podcast, his Hit Points newsletter, I feel like he’s quite on top of these things when they come around. And at the bottom of his posts, he often has other news or any other business and kind of recommends things. So I feel like I get quite a lot of juicy stuff through there. Yeah, I mean, you know, for a more kind of just casual appetite trying to get in, that ticks most of the boxes. Reading Edge, yeah, like Sam said, really recommended. I think it’s, you know, it obviously can’t cover as much as the internet, but it’s curated really well. They’re on top of all the stuff I’m interested in. The reviews writing is still really, really strong. And they review stuff which most sites don’t, you know, they’re free of all the kind of obvious SEO concerns and what not. Also, it’s just games. It’s not mixed in with all the other pop culture bullshit, which I just do not want in my life. So, yeah. Hi, do you have any favourite specific back pages from magazines you have previously worked on? And if you have any favourites of each other’s, that’s from Aaron Teer. This feels like a topic we have been trying to do as an episode or been talking about for a while. Yeah, about two years. I think I originally wanted to do this as episode 50. It’s like when we did the covers, the two covers episodes, and you had to actually look at the images in order to enjoy the episode, which was quite a big ask, I realise. And yeah, I think that I want to do something like that for back pages, but I thought it was a bit too granular and that it wasn’t really enough to like enough meat on the bones for a whole episode. Maybe I’m wrong, Matthew, but I just couldn’t quite do it. So it would just be basically two men explaining their jokes from 10 years ago on an episode of a podcast. It just didn’t quite seem right. So I did end up scrolling through a bunch of PC Gamer ones that we did when I was in the mag today, though, to remind myself of the good ones that we did amongst the many, many bad ones. Because we talked about it a bit before, I think, but they were jokes under duress. It was always done as the last thing in the magazine, basically, a gag on deadline. It was never like week two of the mag out of four. And you’re like, I’ve got the back page joke cracked. That never ever happened. So it just meant that, okay, it’s Friday today. The magazine has to go to press on Tuesday morning. What is funny? What’s gonna be funny on this back page? And that’s why they would end up being really massively inconsistent. I’ve found a few different ones. We did an issue where Andy Kelly did a feature on video game toilets and he interviewed a few devs about them. And then for the back page of that one, we did a fake cover of a magazine called WC Gamer, that was just about the toilets in different games. And it was really nicely done. And the main cover line was Latrine Dream. And it was a big 4K picture of Trevor’s toilet from GTA 5 that Andy had gone into the game with some the Rockstar capture tools and taken a 4K image of so he could use for this back page joke. That was pretty good, Matthew. The two division ones that I did, the fake back book covers, I’ve tweeted about these before. Those were, and I’ve definitely mentioned them, those are pretty decent. Just lots of funny, Tom Clancy right-wing propaganda nonsense, parody stuff in there. A few other ones come to mind. We did a big bingo card of angry responses to the annual PC Gamer Top 100. Such things as like, how dare you pick this game instead of Final Fantasy IX or whatever, those kinds of things. Those kind of come to mind as some favorites. But there were quite a few. I think it was about, I reckon I had a 35 percent hit rate of funny ones during my time on the magazine, which is actually okay. What about you, Matthew? Yeah. We did a run on NGamer of fake adverts through time for the Vitality Sensor, which was that strange peripheral Iwata was talking about quite, I don’t know if it was late in the Wii or, it must have been late in the Wii’s lifetime because the Wii wasn’t out yet. It was like a pulse thing that you stuck your finger in because they were really going further down the Wii Fit rabbit hole. Every month, it was a different poster from a different point in history, and they were all written in the style. So there was a Victorian one where it was like, behold, Mr. O’Rourke’s most extraordinary vitality sensor scope or something, and it had all the curly Victorian writing, and more just design lifts than word lifts, but they were quite good fun. There was an art deco one, it was like a Bioship thing of like just a finger rising into the vitality sensor with like, you know, behold vitality or something, which was good. Nintendo Gamer, I did the Iwata asks parodies, which is probably like the most successful thing I ever did on a magazine in terms of people thinking it was funny and liking it. I remember when Kotaku wrote a story about, I think, the Steven Spielberg one of like Iwata interviewing Steven Spielberg and having a really rough time of it. And them just saying like, oh, this so perfectly lampoons the style of Iwata Arse. I was like, yes, I’ve made it. I fucking finally acknowledged by the internet. This is amazing. So that was really good, though they were quite stressful to write because people did like them. So trying to, you know, not kind of ruin the joke and pull it off every month was tricky. Some people would say I didn’t succeed. One I really liked on O&M, two actually on O&M which were joint efforts with Joe Scribbles. One was the like really simple idea, but like the alternative Christmas carols with like Nintendo lyrics, which were just rewritten lyrics, the oldest one in the book, but there was one about. It’s like some kind of rivalry between Mr. Iwata, head of Nintendo and Mr. Shibata, the head of Nintendo of Europe. Right. And I’ve spent all Christmas like shitting it, because we sent it just before Christmas. And I was worried that if you read it in a certain way, it would sound like we were making fun of the way Mr. Shibata spoke English, which absolutely wasn’t the intention, and it would be quite a bad faith reading of it. But luckily, it didn’t kick off. But that was funny, apart from that bit. And then we did the Professor… What are the… Professor Layton solves mysteries in other Nintendo games, which was riffing on the mad twists at the end of Professor Layton games. And it was like they were all really sinister and really violent. There was one about… There was one about Animal Crossing. I can’t remember the exact specifics of it, but at the beginning of Animal Crossing Leaf, you obviously plant this tree and then it grows over the course of the game. And it was like you’d planted this tree that you were eventually going to be kind of hung from. I don’t know if it was some kind of like Wiccan Man thing or something, but it was like surprisingly dark for an O&M back page. That was good. That’s a pretty solid array there, Matthew. That’s pretty decent. I think if you can come out with like ten acceptable ones from a, you know, from a history of like 120 of them. Yes. You’re actually doing all right. Aware that we’re at the two hour mark, Matthew. I thought I’d pick out a couple of quite juicy interesting questions from here to end us on. So I think that would be quite fun to get into. We’ll save some of the other ones for another episode. So now that you’re doing a podcast with a fairly substantial following, do you find yourself disclaiming your opinions more often than not? Prime example being, that’s not for me, dog. That’s from Scott V. I think this is a really interesting one, Matthew, because there’s a few different factors I think about with this. But I was curious what your answer was to this first before I get into it. I was interested to hear your answer first because I was struggling a little bit. Yeah, there’s a few different ways I think about this. So I think for me and Matthew, we’ve never had a platform that’s been this popular. So with magazines, the brand is the star of it, obviously, and I’m not saying that we’re stars, but we are the reason that people tune in to this, the specific chemistry and stuff. So that’s a key thing, is that we’ve made something that’s moderately popular, like you say, we’re not huge or anything, but popular enough that we’re obviously very happy with it. And so I do behave in different ways as a result of that, I think. There’s a few different things. Obviously, I work in PR, so I’m a bit more careful maybe to not stick the boot in the way that I might otherwise if I wasn’t working in games. And I’ve refrained from industry commentary, even though I think in general industry commentary is not very interesting, which is why I don’t tend to do it. And I tend to focus the podcast on different subjects. But I do try to be honest in the midst of that. I try to be really articulate when I don’t like something, rather than just be like, no, I don’t like it. No, it’s crap. That’s the sort of thing I just try and avoid. I just try and be really precise about the fact that there are too many critters in God of War Ragnarok, for example, when I’m complaining about that game or whatever it might be, or the game is just too long, or the Wise is patting the ox sequence going on for four hours, et cetera. It’s not actually four hours. But I’m also aware, this is something else, this is actually something from what Matthew said, and I’m definitely not putting Matthew on blast here, but there was a moment on an episode with the Gen episode, actually, where we commented on, and this is how I started to understand that people were actually listening to the podcast and it’s reaching people more than things had previously done. Matthew made a joke about which B-list actors would be in your super massive game. Then I remember on LinkedIn, the director on one of their games looked at my profile after that clip was used as the clip I put on Twitter. I felt really bad because I was like, well, I don’t denigrate the sort of work they do generally, but it did sound very pithy and I felt a little bit like, oh, it’s the first time where I really feel bad. Sorry. I didn’t bring it up at the time in any real detail because I didn’t want to make you feel bad. But that was a thing of, oh, the people who are making this stuff might be listening. Before, I don’t think I ever really thought about that that much on magazines because there’s such a remove from what you made to the people who actually interacted with them. So that’s another thing. I’m a bit more conscious of, oh, if the person who makes this actually listens to this, what is fair for the listeners? What doesn’t get me into trouble? What wouldn’t massively upset someone who worked on this and probably worked very hard on this? Those are things that weigh up in my brain. The podcast will probably be a slightly different shape if I wasn’t working in PR, but I think I’ve just about made that happen. But that’s very much my side of it, Matthew. What about your side? Yeah, I agree with all that, but I’d say some of that came also just through age and maturity. Like podcast aside, that’s just how I think more generally about talking about games and remembering that there are people behind them. I look back on loads of stuff I’ve written in end game and Nintendo. I mean, basically all my magazine print career, so even up until the end on like OXM and this stuff which really makes me cringe, where I’m like, it just seems so petulant. It just seems like a fucking child out to try and score some points by being shitty about something and that kind of bratty, sort of bratty, sort of screeching journalistic voice, which like I grew up on a lot of that stuff. Like, you know, I used to really, you know, the writers I liked were the people who were really good at like booting in things and like absolutely destroying a game and, and, you know, you know, I guess feeling a bit kind of edgier. But now, now that stuff is like a real, a real turn off for me. That isn’t just, that isn’t like a, you know, oh, we should still love everything and support, you know, I just believe in trying to, like you say, articulate better what it actually is that makes me not like this thing. And listen, I know that I slip into Shithouse 3 on this podcast all the time, you know, recently with the rare stuff or whatever. A lot of that is, that’s more like a nostalgic return to, like, stupid opinions I had when I was a teenager. And it makes me feel like some warmth, you know, to just bite the, you know, bark them out again. You know, some of them I do believe, some of them I don’t. But generally, I’m just, I’m just, you know, trying to be more specific with my criticisms and, you know, not just getting by on vibes. Generally as a person, you know, as well. Outside of games, you know, I’m just trying to be like more reasonable and be able to explain, explain why I think things. But it’s nice having people listen to this. And I am mortified, like when I have, you know, not necessarily upset people in an explicit way that they’ve come out and said I’m upset, but like, you know, I know when I’ve taken a big old shit on something and then I see it on the Discord and a couple of people there, you know, who seem like really good eggs are like, I really love this thing. And I’m like, oh, that, you know, I imagine that kind of probably stung a bit to hear that, but it doesn’t come from a mean place. You can’t please everyone. You know, I would hope we find the audience we, like, deserve, I guess, and all that gels with us. And if you find it really egregious, you know, you can vote with your clicks and that’s fine. Yeah, for sure. It’s interesting as well, because when we get criticism of the podcast as well, it’s quite an interesting thing of, like, I like to dig into why people don’t like something, so I can understand, like, for next time, why it’s not working or whatever, but often you don’t get, like, real specifics on why people don’t like something. They just go, I don’t like this as much anymore, and they’re just like, okay, I’ve unsubscribed, or whatever it might be. And that, I realize, is what it must be like if you’re a game developer. And someone says, oh, it looks shit. You know what I mean? If someone says that sort of thing, or those fucking rancid thumbnails on YouTube of just people just taking a big old dump on something for clicks, which, you know, they’re everywhere and I hate all of them, but like that sort of thing. Like, you know, it’s like, that’s the same. The Nintendo Top 50, right, specifically, was interesting because all the people who said they didn’t like it, they never explained why they didn’t like it. They just said, oh, I just didn’t like it. And like, that is fine. But also I think criticism is useful in that context because then it can be like, oh, I thought it was slightly too long, or the long listing process is a bit flawed, or I think you should have done it like this, or that sort of thing. That’s why I think that when we do criticize a game, and we do break it down in a very granular way, I think that is just much fairer, even if the end result is still quite negative. You know what I mean? Because you are at least qualifying everything you’re saying as opposed to it being, like you say, bratty, kind of like old journalism sort of ways. Yeah. So that’s quite a weird way of maybe explaining that. But I guess I understand it a little bit more from making something that people are commenting on, you know? Yes. Yeah. Okay. I thought it was an interesting one, Matthew. Let’s do a couple more. If you hadn’t found your way into games media slash industry in any capacity, what would you be doing now for work? Also, what is your position on tomato flavoured crisps? That’s from Koig. Not into the crisps. Same. Same. What would I be doing? I honestly don’t know because I didn’t have a very good idea. I left university and I really pinned everything on getting into film school to do screenwriting and I didn’t get into the film school. I didn’t want it. That I didn’t get in. You know, that I applied for. And I, yeah, then I was in a summer of like, well, what the fuck do I do now? This one thing that I thought I should do, I didn’t get to do. And then the games magazine stuff came along and saved me from like a really like listless time. So I’ve never really had to think it through. But would I have pursued that in some way or try to get into writing some way? I don’t know. I’ve got like, people in my year at university did get have gotten into like television writing and producing. That’s annoying. That would annoy the shit out of me. Oh, I mean, not like, you know, I wish them well. Yeah, I mean, I don’t because I’m happy with, I am happy with the career I’ve had. But I’d like to think, oh, well, you know, they found a route through and had a very similar kind of, they were basically working with the same materials I was working with. So maybe that would have been a thing. But I don’t know, it’s pretty a bit of a bit of a sort of fantasy. You know, I think there’s a lot of luck involved in that world, but. Well, luck and who you know. And did someone see your tweets and think you’re cool? Those things, for example. It’s pre Twitter. That’s true. Yeah, that is true. Yeah, I think I agree. Like I am grateful for the career I’ve had. It’s been it’s been fun and interesting. And like, I think as well, like, you know, when it comes to work life balance, some of you kind of grow into. But I suppose what is good about the one good thing about doing what you love for work is that it can occupy as much headspace as you’ll give it. And like it can be very rewarding to just, you know, to just let it take over sometimes, to just be so immersed in what you’re doing, that like, Games Magazine is the, making Games Magazine is like a core part of your being. And being a staff writer, it was very much like that, you know, it was like, I can’t believe I’m doing this sort of thing. And yeah, that changes over time, but yeah, I feel very, very lucky. And then even going into PR, like I’ve worked on some great games and I’m working on great games now and I feel very fortunate to be doing that. That’s like, you know, these are jobs, jobs that if you told me as a kid that I’d be doing, I’d be really excited by and I’ve continued to do them. So no real complaints there. There’s definitely a grass is always greener thing. I think like, like Matthew, I’d like to have done script writing. I think I would have been good at it probably, but it just, it’s sort of like, it just didn’t, because I just messed up at college so badly. It just never really felt like it was within my grasp, you know? Yeah, but it’s just, you know, it’s like a, you know, they just say, well, you just got to do it. You just got to do it. And I did used to, you know, I did used to do that, that kind of writing for myself. But since I became a sort of full-time writer for work, it kind of killed, it didn’t kill my appetite for it, but it killed my, like, you know, I put everything into the job and I just stopped pursuing my own things on the side because, you know, you just had to do so much writing for work. And, you know, admittedly, like the people who have managed to fight through that and push through that tiredness or whatever, you know, they are, they, you know, some of them have been very well rewarded. I mean, it’s a slightly different thing. I often think of, you know, Tom Francis with this, you know, on top of being, you know, this amazing writer and thinker about games on PC Gamer, you know, also had the discipline to make gun points and pursue that in his own time to the point where it could become his career and like, amazing, amazing for Tom, you know, that’s, that’s like so sort of inspirational to me, but not to the point where I’ve done many of my own projects. Yeah, also just like, I also understand in that case, so that’s like something that’s like beyond me because it’s like there’s technical expertise there. Yes, yeah, but there’s all kinds of things I don’t. Or like Tim Weaver with his books, you know. Yeah, that’s like a more, a more relatable one. Yeah, that’s probably closer to it where I’m like, oh man, like you really did but and the truth is, you just have to, you have to sacrifice, you know, all that free time on the dream and the bet that one day it will happen and work. And if it does, then fantastic. But I’ve been quite bad at like getting over that hurdle, which is why I’m not a writer. Yeah, the key thing is like Matthew says, like you just put a lot of time in, when you’re working your day is not stimulating enough. That’s when you, I think you find the energy all the time to like pursue those sorts of projects, to like to write something or write a short story or write a longer project, because you’re just not getting that stimulation in your day hours. Whereas I think that if you’re, if you are writing for a living, you’re constantly getting that stimulation and you never have the appetite to write out of hours. That’s like a key thing. It’s not like a limitless tap writing. You just need to recharge like anything else. So, yes, I think about it quite a lot, to be honest. But yeah, I wouldn’t say it eats away at me, but I do sort of, I guess I think, I assume you are too, Matthew. I would like to have some success with it at some point. And I’m very aware of the ticking clock on it as well. You know what I mean? Yeah, I’m not as worried about the ticking clock because I think you can just write something good. If someone will want something good from someone of any age, and that’s fine. Yeah. I do occasionally think like, I didn’t write that crime novel, but man, I wrote several reviews of Spectrobes. Was that right? Was that the right call? I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. But then I think about the other flip side of this, is I think about, I could also have just worked in the one-stop retail shop that I was in when I was a teenager for five to 10 years. I’m not saying that’s not a great way to make a living if you want to do that. Yes. That’s absolutely fine. If you find that rewarding and it pays your bills, absolutely, obviously, any way you can to make a living, I obviously support. But being able to work in games magazines was felt like an enormous escape from that. It felt like finding your calling in a certain way. So I don’t get too bitter about what I don’t have because what I do have is pretty good and that includes this podcast. It’s a weird one. I think about it loads and loads, to be honest. But I thought we’d end on this one, Matthew, because it could generate quite a lot of discussion in our Discord. When was the last time you played a game and thought it needed more writing, and the opposite, when has a game needed less writing? That’s by Melma. I mean, I often think they need less writing. I agree. I never think they need more. No, I mean, I guess, you know, recently a game which was sunk a little bit for me by how much writing there was in it was a ranger, which I know we talked about in the last of what we’ve been playing. But I just felt like it was, you know, meant to be quite zippy and throw away, but was was like in love with its own voice, only to the tune of like, like four more lines per exchange than it needed. But it was enough that my last impression of that was, man, that game talks a lot. Because, you know, one line too many is enough to start getting on your nerves. Games that could do with more writing? I mean, I don’t know. I always think, you know, simplify, simplify, you know, that’s the key to a lot of these things. There’s not many where I’m like, wow, this is so good, I want more of it. Often, you have to realize you’re probably reacting to the right amount. It’s well-judged, and I’ve only played a little bit, but Tom’s Tactical Breach Wizards is a great example of a game which is very, very funny in its short exchanges to the point where you think, oh, you know, Tom seems to have a limitless ability to produce these funny exchanges. But, you know, he has judged this is how much you need, and this is how much I need, and this is how much you’d want, and I absolutely trust him on that. Just because it is an infinite, like, in quote marks, free resource doesn’t mean you should exploit it. Yeah, it’s interesting, because I think that Tom’s strength as a game designer, one of his many strengths, is like, is the restraint of knowing when an idea is exhausted, or, you know, like, making sure something’s the perfect length. It was true for Gunpoint and everything people are saying about. Tactical Breach Wizards would suggest it’s the same. That’s true for the story and also the design of the game, certain features coming in and out of the experience. I agree, like, I think about a conversation I had with a game designer years ago where they told me that it was like a new project, it was like a horror game with quite a novel premise. And he said that his whole process on the game as, like, the lead storyteller or writer or whatever was scaling back the amount of story that was in it constantly. So, yeah, they’re just like, cut back, cut back, cut back, until so little of the original material was in there, because that was what the game design necessitated. It would not be improved by having vastly more text. So I thought that was interesting. Something I thought I would chuck in here as well, Matthew, is that we have Jamie Britton, who is a narrative director on an upcoming game in our Discord. He also appears on Creighton Crowbar, also co-creator of Skins. So, you know, very, very interesting figure in games. But waded on this and said, one thing I’ve noticed in my albeit short time working as a writer in games is that many writers have very much of the opinion that narrative in games should be lithe and lean and in the business of getting out of the way of gameplay. But the process of making games sort of moderates against that. You’re trying to build a world and make it all make sense. That requires a large amount of narrative content to set it all in motion. But then it’s another task altogether to then strip that back to something that doesn’t seem overstuffed. You could potentially define confident storytelling as knowing what to leave out. But in games built from myriad systems, that’s a real ask. I thought that was an interesting answer, Matthew. Then people start talking about Disco Elysium as a game that has loads and loads of writing, but no one thinks that writing should be cut back because it’s all treasured. But it does also, I think, ask quite a lot from you as a reader versus other games and how games treat writing more generally. So yeah, I don’t know. I think if it ever feels like it’s in the way, that’s when you know there’s too much writing. Or if you like hammering skip on, like, let’s say the story bits in Hotline Miami 2. I have no reason to ever read those again, for example. Or playing Angerfoot recently. There’s some little narrative bits in between. They are like completely optional. They’re just like these rooms where there’s a bunch of very cursed looking dudes who’ll just say funny things. I wouldn’t say that writing shouldn’t be in there, but also that writing doesn’t add anything of value to the experience for me. Yeah, anything more to add on this, Matthew? No, I will say, I did, I won’t get into the specifics of it because I don’t really want to talk about it, but I did a writing test once for a game studio and it was a really interesting exercise because you were like, well, a job could potentially be on the line. So you’re like, a lot weighs on this. You know, you’re trying to kind of prove yourself as a writer and show what you’ve got. And actually having that pressure combined with the functional shape of what you know is needed. That was a really interesting dilemma. And I imagine it is a dilemma that faces like every writer in games on every decision they make, which is the kind of the flex versus the function. And I found that eye-opening, probably why I didn’t get fucking anywhere with the application. But I found it quite eye-opening from that perspective of like, I’d never actually sat down and gone. I imagine writing, having to write the beginning of a mission, a scenario that establishes it, establishes the stakes, establishes these characters, but also doesn’t go on for like 10 pages. Like, I can’t remember the specifics of the task, but I had to do it in, you know, I don’t know if, I don’t think there was a word count or whatever, but it sort of asks you to try and keep it concise. And, you know, I think one of the very few compliments I did get was being able to keep it to two sides, where they were like, oh, a lot of the stuff came in, you know, way longer than this. And you were like, well, you know, I couldn’t really imagine this scene being like five minutes in any game. No one’s going to sit there for five minutes. And ever since then, I’ve just been super tuned in to that exchange, you know, the beginning of a mission and how you get there and establish stakes and do it. And it’s fucking difficult, you know, it’s why I find people going like, oh, I could do it so much better. It’s like, have you actually sat down and tried? Like it’s, it’s not easy, you know, like it’s a, it’s a weird old task. Well, I was going to say that if you think about, let’s say like, remember when like Nolan North was suddenly in every computer game, right? And so you had Uncharted and then you had like the Prince of Persia 2008 game. And the 2008 game lifts a lot of what the Nathan Drake character does. And he’s like quipping a lot, but the quips aren’t nearly as good as the quips are in Uncharted. And then you realize that it takes the very specific alchemy of Amy Hennig writing it and Nolan North performing it and the way they improvise to get some of those funny character beats that you can’t then sort of like replicate necessarily. It’s actually like a specific kind of magic. So just think how hard it is to get a Nathan Drake quip right, for it to be like funny and not too irritating and not egregious to the player. And yeah, it’s sort of like you really come to appreciate it. The writing testing is interesting. I remember an old friend of mine did something similar, and they had to basically write what if all these villains were having a conversation, and then that conversation was basically going to determine whether they would progress further in the process and get an interview. And it was like, you need to like, it needed to be these four specific characters, and there needed to be like some kind of hook to why they’re all in one place together. And it was, it just sounded, it seems so, so hard to kind of get that right. And I find that really interesting. I’d love to see more case studies of like, big studios, how they hire writers, and what those specific tests look like. What does a winning test look like? I bet there’s like, almost nothing out there on the internet about what that is, you know? No, because it’s like, if you had that information, you wouldn’t share it, because the job market is so fucking horrible, you know? He’s like, every man for himself. Click on to what you’ve already got, basically. Yeah, I’ve seen, there are some, there are definitely some, like, slightly kind of hucksterish sort of tutors who are like, you know, do my course for like $2,000 and I’ll teach you how to write like, the perfect cover letter and like, how to do a writing test and da-da-da-da-da. But the impression I get that is, it’s so bespoke and, you know, the personalities you’re dealing with are so different and what they’re looking for is so different. It’s quite interesting when you, you know, not to drag on this, but if you, if you ever do see news of someone being like, recruited as a writer, particularly like a junior writer, often like going to their website and seeing their like, portfolio of what they’ve done, and it gives you some perspective of like, you know, where they’re at in their career and, you know, the kind of work they’ve done and the, you know, the work that they would have put in front of other studios. And it gives you a sort of like, a sense of, oh, this is what, this is the quality bar for what a junior writer looks like. And I found that quite, quite a, quite an eye-opening experience, so. Yeah. When I was at Frontier, I, I, before I left, I spoke to this junior narrative designer about, like, the university games that she’d made to get her job. And like, it was how she answered a very specific questionnaire. And like, the way she tackled these very specific, like, design challenges that were in this questionnaire, well, why she was hired, because I just thought that the thinking on the page as like, how do you kind of solve this, this particular, like, narrative design dilemma, is why, why she was hired as opposed to, like, a particular bit of a game that she built or something. I thought it was really interesting, like, the idea of, like, it’s not necessarily, like, a script as such. It’s just, like, the thinking behind how you solve a certain problem and how narrative fits into, to a game experience. Yeah, it’s super interesting. There’s no, like, it’s like any kind of discipline, I think, where there’s no one way into it necessarily. And just like with games writing, there’s no one size fits all formula for why games writing works or doesn’t work. But yeah, in general, I think I’m with you though, like when I think when you just feel it’s a bit, it’s a bit flabby, you want less of it. That’s one of the other things I’m liking about Star Wars Outlaws so far is the cutscenes are quite short. They seem like they’re kind of there and then they’re gone. It’s like they don’t even seem, so far, they don’t even seem as long as the cutscenes do in Jedi Survivor to me. And slightly perplexingly, there’s a skip button on screen at all times for the cutscenes, which is maybe like doesn’t quite show I have enough confidence in the cutscenes. I don’t know if you could turn it off, Matthew, but I feel like it’s always there. But yeah. Like, I just don’t want to have any context for anything I do. Skip, skip, skip. Who the fuck am I? Why am I in space? Ah! With that, the long rambling answer, which I think was actually quite an interesting little discussion. Hopefully people enjoyed that. I think that’s probably enough mailbag questions for now, Matthew, unless you want to end on something deeply frivolous. Let’s save that for another time. I thought that let’s end on a high. That was actually like some decent chat. It was. That was some stuff like we’ve never talked about before. The game writing test stuff. So, yeah. OK, good. Well, thank you so much for listening to this inexplicably two and a half hour long mailbag episode. It’s been fun to catch up, Matthew. I think it was good to do something like this and blow off a bit of steam. So you can drop questions for a future mailbag into the pod questions channel of the Discord. You can also email us questions at backpagegames.gmail.com and we’ll try and pick them up and put them in there. We are trying to avoid repeating ourselves too much from previous episodes. So I think some of the questions asked in this are quite granular stuff. It is interesting because it allows us to talk about different types of things that maybe we’ve talked about before. But at the same time, if you want to ask us what we think of Monster Munch versus Quavers, that’s fine too, I suppose. But Matthew, where can people get you on social media? I am at MrBuzzle UnderscorePesto on Twitter and at MrBuzzlePestoNoUnderscore on BlueSky. Awesome. In September, we have an array of delights planned for you. On Patreon, we’re doing the XL episode on the top 50 Nintendo third-party games. Looking forward to that one. We’re also in the XXL doing our film club. We’re bringing that back, but we’re doing a dad special slash Russell Crowe special, doing Gladiator and Master and Commander. For our side of the world, we’re going to talk about both those films. I’ve never seen either of them. Matthew has obviously seen both of them. I can’t believe you haven’t seen Gladiator. That is wild to me. It is weird, but I’ve got a good reason which I’ll explain on the episode. Then the episode with Jay, like I say, we’re moving that to next week. We’ve got Jeremy Peel coming on for a PC gaming draft 2010 to 2019. That’ll be really fun to get his expertise on that, and some other stuff that I cannot remember. But Matthew, let’s get out of here. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. I forgot to say that. Back Page Pod on Twitter and Blue Sky if you want to follow us. Goodbye. Goodbye.