Hello, and welcome to The Back Page A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Hello, Matthew. You wanted to tell me what’s been going on with Times, formerly one of your favorite sandwich shops. I thought we’d start there straight away. Well, I would say it was one of my favorites. It’s a bath staple. Yeah, it just exists, isn’t it? It was like in that three-star sort of bracket, but, you know, it’s sort of like, yeah. Like you say, it was just there, you know? Yeah. It was just there, yeah. Well, sandwich shop update, so time looked like it had closed about four months ago, and its windows have been painted over all summer, you know, and everyone’s been excited to see what emerges from it, like a beautiful butterfly, or whether it would just end up being another closed shop on the high street, like so many others. Or a vape shop. A vape shop or a bath shop. What’s emerged, though, is very puzzling. It’s either Fritz Caesar, or Caesar’s Fritz. I can’t remember which way around it is. But it is a chip and steak and lobster takeaway. What? Lobster takeaway? That’s what people assume people are doing in Bath. That’s just… Well, this is it. This is why I wanted to bring it up on the podcast, because I thought it would tickle you. All their things are basically like chips, with then a fancy meat layered on top. So, mainly like steak, or some lobster meat. But because of this, and as far as I can tell, it is meant to be a takeaway place. It’s only got two tables inside. But the cheapest option on the menu is 15 quid. Who’s having fucking chips and lobster for lunch for 15 quid? Absolutely baffling. Well, you were right to save that surprise. So, for context, me and Matthew went for a pizza last night, and you were like, I won’t tell you now what’s happened to time. I’ll wait to do it on the podcast. You were so right to do it, because steak and lobster on chips is not something I saw coming. Yeah. I believe a small group of listeners are visiting Bath in the not-too-distant future, so I think it’s important that I just lay out all the lunch options for them. If any of them are feeling particularly opulent, please do try Caesar’s Freights. I haven’t. You can’t afford it. That’s just too much money. That’s just too much. This is too much. But yeah, the other sad news is the Poke Bowl place. It’s closed down. I went in and it looked like it was closing down. You know, like they’d taken down the menus and things and because it’s inside a theatre and the guy who sits on the door is there running like the theatre box office. But he must have seen me go in there enough times to know that I was definitely in there for the Poke Bowl. And he just looked at me rather forlornly and just shook his head. He was on the phone and he just shook his head to say like, no, no more Poke Bowls for you. And you just turned away, never to return. Yeah, I just turned away and went and got a prep. So there you go. Did you say they seemed to resent doing the Poke Bowl thing whenever you went in there? Like they were a bit like, oh, here he is. There was another bit like that too. One of them did. Some of them were really, really chatty. There was this very charming server and she had this whole thing about, she had this special, this is really going into the weeds on this. But as part of the Poke Bowl, they put this sort of like Meso Source on it. And she was explaining in great detail her special Meso Source like deployment routine, where she kind of like left like a special channel for it that she’d then pump it into later. OK, that is granular. I appreciate it. Yeah, it was. But she also identified in me someone who would be interested in her Meso Source technique, which I was like, correct. Yeah, that’s, well, I mean, you know, and you have identified the listeners as people who’d like to hear about that. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know about this. I keep seeing there’s a lot of sentiment going around about like bad podcast intros where they spend too long getting to the subject in hand. But I’d like to think that this podcast is 5% bath eateries. So yeah, that’s OK. I would say so. We’ve also been, I think we’ve been good in particular recently to like avoiding all of the frivolous stuff around the outside and just getting straight to it, you know. There’s been a bit more of that to it recently. And normally the frivolous stuff lasts for one minute. My only food update, they opened a branch of my favorite bagel shop, Taylor’s, nearer to my flat actually. They must have like used some kind of geolocation thing to go, where are all the bagel purchasers coming from in bath? And then found my location and then like built a new sort of like branch nearby in order to tackle that. It’s like algorithmic kind of like bagel consumption data, I assume is what they’re using. So that’s opened up nearby. Haven’t tried that yet. I will get to it. But yes, nice to see the Taylor’s empire expanding. Truly the kings of bagels. Congratulations, Taylor’s. As long as it’s about mine spending nine quid. I also went to a chicken shop that opened up in Bath. I’ve become very fixated on chicken shops lately, Matthew, because I’ve been going to the one that’s just called Chicken Shop in London. That feels like an SEO play to me. It was renamed from, I think, Chicken with a K and no C. No second C, I should say. And then that’s good. That does like honey, soy and Korean glazed tenders. And it’s fucking great. And I went to a place called Butchies as well with Sam White, who I know listens to the podcast. So I had basically a tub of melted blue cheese sauce with buffalo wings. It was amazing and probably 3000 calories, to be honest. But looking for the chicken shop experience in Bath, you’ve obviously got KFC. Listeners know my thoughts on KFC. And this new place, which has replaced the old kind of like, I think it was like a noodle bar there that used to be there, Gong Fu, that place. Oh, yeah. Which was okay. It was like a slightly unconvincing. I took my ex there once, and she was not very impressed by the quality of the meat served in the noodles. But nonetheless, this place opened up, and I did have like a big cone of popcorn chicken, and it was quite tasty, actually, even if it was like sort of like congealed fat, basically. That’s what it kind of tasted like, but was like a much higher quality of popcorn chicken than your standard KFC one, in my opinion. But the place felt a little bit like GongFu, a little bit of rickety in there, like the floor had loads of busted bits in it, and I was like, why don’t you just get a new floor? Well, I mean, there was like missing paint and stuff, and I was like, why don’t you just get a new fucking floor if you’re opening a chicken shop or whatever? Some of the reviews on Google, I thought were a bit sus as well. So that gets a three out of five from MeDog. It’s not too bad, but it’s not like life-changing London chicken. They’ve got all the best chicken in that London, Matthew. I don’t want to fall through the floor of a restaurant as well. I don’t want the risk of that hanging over me or sitting under me. It’s not a health and safety thing. It just looks a bit shabby. There’s no risk of you collapsing to the depths of Bath into the Dark Souls style dungeons of Bath. Who knows what waits down there? Just a cellar full of chicken bones. Exactly. MIA staff writers from future, basically, for years past, basically. Trying to think what else would be in the Bath, like Dark Souls dungeon. Couldn’t really think of anything funny at the top of my head. So we come to this episode. I’m still waking up. I literally woke up 20 minutes ago. So I’m coming to you basically live on the show. So it’s another What We’ve Been Playing episode. Our thinking here was that more games are coming out all the time, in this part of the year in particular. So we thought we’d use having two episodes to bust through some of the, to make sure we covered off some of the more interesting stuff. And I would say this episode has fewer of the big shiny things and more of the stuff around the edges has been coming out. But some of that stuff around the edges is excellent and well worth discussing. So that’s what you’ll get this episode. We’re also going to return to Astro Bot at the end of this episode. So we figured that most people have probably had a chance to play through it now, at least most of it, the main story stuff in it. So I say story, I mean, the bulk of the campaign. We’ll come back to it at the end of the episode and we’ll talk about maybe some of the better levels and references in detail and share how we both feel about it now that I’ve finished it. I’m in the same position Matthew was when we originally talked about it. So it feels like a good time to do that, but because it’s spoiler stuff, we’ll isolate it towards the end so you can enjoy the rest of the episode. So Matthew, first up then, we’re going to talk about Ufo 50, a game we’ve both been playing. This is a game that is a compilation of a compilation of a fake video game, a piece of video game hardware from the 8-bit era. All the games are fictional. The hardware that they played on is fictional. And it’s basically like a massive kind of, I don’t want to say game jams, that’s not quite right. They are 50 full games, but they are all built around this fictional notion of what if one publisher’s output, you know, all happened in this one time window in the 80s, from the early 80s to the late 80s. And what if the games reflected that sort of creative trajectory and range of genres and kind of like a sort of like parallel, or like a parallel nez, I guess. What is a better way to describe this? When I was playing this, actually, the thing that really hit me is that this was not my era of games. This is the generation before my generation of games. And so the frames of reference, even though I have like a base understanding of what they’re going for, it’s not tapping into a thing that I engaged with as a kid. It’s something that I only really experienced from afar. So what do you make of that concept? What do you think it is riffing on? Yeah, I think just based on the time frame, Nez is a good comparison point. The thing it actually reminds me of the most as a package is playing Rare Replay, weirdly, which obviously charted the kind of history of all Rare games and you know, or not all Rare, I don’t know if it was every Rare game, but it was, you know, a chunk of like 30 Rare games over 30 years. And it really reminded me of playing like the earlier stretches of that game, you know, where you’ve got like your Jet Pack and Lunar Jet Man and Saber Wolf and Night Lore and all that kind of stuff. And actually, it really, I mean, it was so close to kind of playing that game in terms of you’re jumping into loads of games you don’t know here because they’re fake and never existed. But, you know, you’re trying to kind of glean like what the game is, how it works, what the rules are. You know, it gives you some very basic controls and a little kind of description on the main menu screen. When you boot this up, you sort of see a wall of 50 game cartridges, which you can play in any order you want. And when you click on them, you can get like a little page of description that sort of describes the sort of historical relevance in the fictional timeline of this LX game system by Ufo software. And I think there’s a page which maybe explains like the thrust of the game. Because a lot of them, you go in and you’re like, I have no idea until I start pressing buttons, what I’m meant to be doing. And I guess it’s like maybe trying to reflect that period of, they’re not being a central source of information. And if games didn’t explain themselves to you, then you just had to kind of figure it out. So it’s as much riffing on the NES, say as it is going into an arcade and trying to figure a game out in an arcade. You know, or I’ve seen lots of people liking it too, like video game piracy in the early days, where people would be swapping discs of games in the playground and you just have no idea what you’d get, but you’d just sort of like battle your way through it. I mean, for me, you know, very specific memory this tapped into was, we got a second-hand Amiga. And a lot of the games had boxes with some instruction manuals, but there was like a box in there of just sort of blue discs with no real markings on them. And so much of our Amiga time was spent just putting these discs in, going, what the fuck is this thing? Trying to figure it out as best we could, like within the game itself. And then moving on, you know, there’s probably some absolute classics in there that we bounced off, just because we didn’t know how to play them. And that, I feel like they are very specifically targeting that sensation. Yeah, definitely, it does feel like something I’ve experienced before. I was even reminded a little bit of when we did the Dreamcast episode this year, where I had, it had all these games pre-installed on it when I bought it. And so I plugged it into Matthew’s TV, and we went through and played like 20 of them one by one. And there was a mix of stuff we, that is the difference, I guess, much like the Rare Replay Collection, we knew some of the games in there. But most of the ones we played, I don’t think we had really played before, had much experience with. And so it was, the fun of it was the discovery, the feeling of like, selection box element of it and dipping into something that you were kind of intrigued by the name of. This is interesting because all the car shows, one really nice touch about how it’s presented is that they are all dusty when you get them. And then the dust is removed when you click on one and you play it for the first time, then it becomes, you know, permanently de-dusted in your collection. So you are like, basically just, yeah, like as you discover this stuff, it lights up and then the full collection kind of becomes clear. It definitely taps into as well, anyone who’s bought one of these AliExpress emulation devices, and it turns up and it’s got all the games already on it. And like you just go to the NES games and you’re just like, I didn’t realize that eight Batman games came out on this or whatever. And you’re just dipping into that or like weird kind of Game Boy license games you forgot and just kind of like your wild discovery element. But the interesting thing about the games here, so like this is a project led by Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky and a bunch of collaborators to make 50 legitimate sort of full games that, you know, like some of them, I would say are like full games by modern standards, but most of them are meant to be full games by eight bit era standards. So they are not necessarily enormous in all cases or overly complex. Some of them are incredibly straightforward. But like what’s interesting about the games is that even though they adhere to the visual restrictions in a lot of ways of like the eight bit era, the actual ideas reach forward into the future from its fictional timeframe and like pull ideas back to its own timeframe, which is quite cool. So you’ll end up seeing things that you end up experiencing game ideas that feel a bit more contemporary or will remind you of things you’ve actually played that are, that exist beyond the timeframe in which the game is set, which is a good touch because I don’t think they necessarily, if you put too many guardrails on, I think the project becomes a little bit too much of a tough hang, you know, probably for them and also for the people play because you’ll just end up making like a limited series of experiences. But what it amounts to is like a bunch of riffs on stuff from the time, there is a game in there that is very kiddicuracy, for example, Matthew, I’m guessing you love that one. It’s interesting which ones we have and haven’t played and whether we’ve played the same ones. So we should put into that in a bit. Yeah, let’s get into that now. So I’ve played 13 of the games, but I’m playing them in chronological order. So I’ve played the first 13 in there basically. How about you? So I’ve only played nine of them. I think I’ve played the first eight and then I jumped forward to a much later one, which was called Pin Golf. Oh yeah, that’s meant to be good, right? Pin Golf, that’s got like one of the… I just saw a review, I think. I think it called that out as one of the better ones. Yeah, it’s a bit like, weirdly, it reminds me a bit of Liam Edwards’ Cursed Golf in that kind of 2D side on sort of, it looks like a platforming level, but it’s got a golf mechanic in it. Except here, it’s kind of Golf meets Pinball, is the sort of vibe of it. Yeah, that one feels a bit more, you know, having only played the first eight and then jumped through to one, which is in like the latter third of the collection. I don’t know if, as the collection goes on, they’re meant to feel a bit more modern or kind of in line with kind of some current ideas, but definitely that that pin golf, I could see being a thing now, you know, more so than some of the first eight. Yeah, that is the really interesting thing at the heart of this game, is that, is when you as a player are wondering, so are any of these meant to be quote unquote bad? And I don’t mean that in the sense of like they’re a bad game, but the first thing that you play is this Zelda kind of 2D Zelda, but side on, sort of, I guess like Zelda 2, sort of like slightly vibes to it, called Barbuta, I think it’s called. And it’s just a really hardcore dungeon crawler with slightly Zelda-y combat in it. And I played it for about 10 minutes, and then I turned it off, and I then went on to the next game. And that’s happened with a few different games in this. I think like a major part of it is dipping in, seeing if it’s for you, and if it’s not, just going on to the next one, because hey, you’ve got 50 of them to play, so keep going. And it made me wonder if some were deliberately meant to be like, oh, this is so hardcore that only so many people will get it, and you are designed to leave this and go and play the next thing. Or like, you know, whether every single one had the design intent of like, it’s got to be an absolutely fucking A-plus banger game from the time, it’s got to be that good. But my feeling is that the variation in quality, as in there are some like amazing peaks in it, and some games that you just like won’t get, I think, is deliberate. What did you think of that when you were playing through? Yeah, I would agree with that, though, you know, anecdotally, from following, you know, a few people on Twitter or reading forum posts, you know, about how people are tackling this, it is interesting to see that there’s quite a lot of, not disagreement, but like variety of opinions towards like, which ones are good. And there’s some where I was like, I had like the Barbuta. I mean, I don’t really know what’s going on with that one. Maybe there’s like, you know, some amazing hidden depths to it, but it’s just really hard. I can get about five screens in any direction and then I die and then I say fuck Barbuta and then that’s it. That was me playing original Zelda on Nez for that Nintendo Top 50 episode. They’ve emulated that experience brilliantly. Screens of death. But I had a similar thing with the second game, Bug Hunter. I couldn’t really figure it out quickly enough to hold my attention, so I moved on. But then I saw Ash Day saying Bug Hunter’s all he’s been playing. I’m pretty sure it was Bug Hunter. I think he said, and this is wild, Ash Day if you’re listening, he said it was better than Into the Breach. It’s not better than Into the Breach, but it is of a similar game type. That’s what I played quite a lot of. Okay. Anyway, that goes to show that one person’s five-minute test is like another person’s whole jam. Which one have you enjoyed the most so far of the ones you’ve played? Right. This sounds very me as a choice, but my favorite one so far is Avianos, which is like dinosaur bird civilization. It takes place on one screen. The goal is to control four different castles. In that one screen, they’re able to emulate everything that Civ does, from collecting resources. You have to decide which god to worship that turn in order to collect a certain type of resources that you’re after. Then each god has a series of things linked to them. A series of actions linked to them. So there will be a harvest resources function. There will be a move function. So when that one comes up, that’s when you move your units on the field. There will be a build function. So you’re like, okay, well, I’ll build a military fortress here and then I will build like, there’s only three buildings you can put on each tile, but basically the Civ building element in miniature. I thought that was really impressive. But first, I was a bit like, I could even work out what the fucking interface was, because it’s all just done with like white text on a black background. It looks so of its time that I was like, why would I play this instead of actual Civ? Which is how I felt playing Barbuda. I was like, there are Zelda games I’ve not finished. You know what I mean? How much time can I spend in this? But you realize that the achievement of the game is that it has that aesthetic, but it pretty much does everything that Civ does in a way. It doesn’t have the layers and layers of tech trees and stuff like that, but it doesn’t need it. It’s very much like a quick burst Civ based experience. And I thought it was really impressive. I also was quite impressed. The first one I was quite impressed by the actual game design was Mortal, which is Matthew has also played. Again, it was a bit, I was impressed by, but I just thought it was insurmountably hard. It was just so tricky. I thought you just had a difficulty settings here, and you could spawn one for your enemy a turn. I think it does have the stuff. It was a really nicely layered strategic experience. You have this base set of moves and shooting abilities you start with, but then you can buy new ones as you collect energy on the field. It’s a really impressive little thing. It was just too hard for me to keep playing. Because I probably played about an hour of it, and then I was like, I’m not getting past this first level. I’ve got to move on to other stuff here. Mortal is, how best to describe it? So you’ve got 20 lives, but each life represents one guy you send out into the field to perform one of three actions. Whatever actions they perform are designed to help your next guy when he spawns on his next turn, because it’s a continuous level, and it’s just dropping in new clones basically of your character to keep moving. So the three things they can do, they can basically turn themselves into an arrow, shoot forward and wedge into a wall in the distance, and then your next character can then use the body of the previous character to climb that wall, use it as a ledge basically to ascend that. They can also detonate and kill enemies or blow up little blocks around the environment, or they can turn into stone, which will allow you to again use them as stepping stones, but it can also offer safety over spikes below and stuff like that. That felt like a really smart little riff on platforming games from the time while also being like, it doesn’t overextend itself in terms of mechanics. It’s just a kind of amazing simplicity to it. You can tell I’m excited about these games by the way, I’m talking about them Matthew. But what did you think of, I guess, Mortal and Bug Hunt you have played, right? Yeah, Mortal I thought was interesting. It actually reminded me of there was a platformer in the last 10 years where it was a bit like Super Meat Boy, but you were like a little bear and every time it died, got impaled on the spikes, it basically became a platform for a future run. So it actually reminded me a little bit of that, and that persistence felt, maybe this is just me showing my ignorance of early gaming systems, but that character persistence feels a bit beyond the technology of the 80s. That’s one way you’re like, oh, this feels like something a bit more modern, but done in this older style. Yeah, I quite like Mortal. It’s quite stressful, and I do feel for the… The little men jump out of a plane or something, they parachute in, and every time, I think, it must really suck to be the first guy out of a plane, because you’re like, I know I’m not getting to the end of this level. I am definitely becoming a platform for man number 10, or I’m becoming a rock in a spike pit. I am absolutely fucked. Like I say, if I was on that plane, and we were jostling for like, who’s going to jump out first, you want to be as far near the back as possible. You know, you’re like, do not be in the first 10. You are not getting out of that level of life. It’s like, imagine if Sam Rockwell in Moon, their whole goal was to finish a platforming level. Right. That’s basically, that’s what the game is basically. So yeah, that’s quite fun. It’s quite hard, and I’m really shit at it. The one I’ve played the most is Magic Garden. Oh, that’s a snake, isn’t it? Well, sort of. It’s like an arcade sort of puzzle game where you’re moving around a grid, picking up these pink blobs, and they kind of trail behind you. And like Snake, the front person, who’s this witch, can’t bang into enemies’ walls or their own snake trail. And then you lead them into these little star zones, and then you press a button to sort of drop them in there, which is how you start scoring points, is you need to drop these little pink guys off in this safety zone. When you drop them though, if any of them aren’t in the star zone, say your snake path is too long, they become extra enemies, like the leftovers, and the enemies are also slowly piling up. And when you drop off six, I think it is, in the star zone, you get a potion, which is a bit like the power pill in Pat-Man, which then lets you eat the enemies. And it seems really simple, but there’s quite a lot going on in it, in terms of the actual balance of when to deploy, when to drop off, when to grab the potion, and whether, to make the potion more valuable, it actually becomes worth your while to build a long trail and make more enemies. You want to flood the arena with enemies because you get a multiplier for every consecutive enemy you then eat with the potion. I could see it’s spiralling into some mad high score chasing thing. It has that feeling that so many of these kind of arcade games of this era or early console games, where you think there’s probably loads of hidden rules to this, which people are going to uncover over time. There’s probably like, if you shoot the third bug on the left, that one’s worth 10,000 points if you hit it first. It just has that feel of, oh, there’s stuff to this we don’t get. I’ve seen some people theorise that there is maybe like bigger meta stuff going on that you might expect from Derek Yu and Spelunky had a lot of this. Maybe the whole collection kind of connects in some ways that we don’t understand. I’ve seen no kind of hint of that, but I think that’s more just people excitedly theorising based on who made it. But definitely that sense of each game being a series of minor breakthroughs of like, oh, I understand this core mechanic now, or, oh, this is how I get onto the leaderboards. And you find yourself kind of creeping up with them. And that’s probably why I’ve played like the most of Magic Garden, because it was like, well, I feel like I’ve grabbed onto the thread of one of these games finally. So I’m just going to stay here for a while and sort of stubbornly try and kind of work this out a bit more, which is why I’ve only done, yeah, like nine of the games, because I’ve spent so much time in the couple that I did get. I think Vellgress, have you played Vellgress? Yeah, that rings a bell. That’s the Kid Icarus-y one, right? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah. Where you’re kind of climbing up a tower and there’s like a big sort of meat grinder type bar at the bottom of the screen, which you pull up with you as you climb. So if you’ve ever fall, you’re destined for the meat grinder and all the platforms are quickly disintegrating. So it’s really fast moving and between levels you’re kind of collecting currency and you can buy kind of buffs which make the next bit of the run a bit easier. You can sort of slow down the platform disintegration time or you can like increase the potency of your gun or you can make your gun bullets be able to collect far distant coins. That really feels like a mobile, you know, it kind of has the loop of like a down well or a point P or something, you know, one of those, you know, you get a little bit further and then you start all the way from the whole beginning of the game and you’re getting these upgrades which are kind of pushing you higher and higher and higher and it’s got that kind of, it’s so fast moving, it has that kind of one more go flavour. But that urgency to it, that feels like something newer. You know, that feels, that’s what makes me think, oh, this was a game made in the 21st century. You know, that kind of, the sheer speed of the thing, you know, compared to Kid Icarus, which is a much more kind of gentle climb up a tower. So yeah, I’m like, you know, it’s kind of like fascinating stuff, you know, digging into those and finding the ones that click. And it does strike me that the conversation around this game so far is just a lot of people figuring out like how to play it and how to enjoy it. Yeah. And you know, whether you play them in chronological order, I’ve seen some people go like, fuck off the early ones entirely and get straight into like the latter half. Nah. But I feel- That’s against the spirit of it. Yeah, also, you know, if you are into the, I don’t know how you describe it, like the narrative of this console or the chronology of the console, because you’ll see like certain characters return and there are sequels to certain games and things. I think playing in chronological order will probably like reveal those strengths of it because you’ll have that sense of, oh, is this fucking guy again? So yeah, I don’t know. I would probably like personally advise the chronological order approach. Yeah. I’ve actually not been paying attention to the bits of text for each game, so I’ll go back and read those. Yeah, they’re quite hard to find. You need to press a button on the zoomed out screen of all the consoles. You can’t get to them in the games. Okay. Interesting. Are you playing on Steam Deck as well? No, I’ve been playing just on desktop with a controller at the moment. Fair enough. Yeah. I find it just so obviously perfect for Steam Deck. A lot of people have said, why isn’t this on Switch yet? I agree that once this is on Switch, it will be like an all-timer, like TimeSync. It does feel perfect for it. But yeah, I’m interested to dig into that stuff because I thought it was intriguing from what you said on social media about how you almost wished the project went further. It had this almost like Daniel Mullins layer of fake interviews with developers from the time and that sort of thing, like that and stage to look like it’s from the time. I found myself like wondering, if you just had something like that, wouldn’t it take it to the next level? It would also become a much larger undertaking for the team. So I understand why it’s not. But I do think in its current form, it’s a really special little thing. It has vaporized four of my hours already, and I’ve only played 13 of the games, and there are games I want to go back to for sure. I think there’s some total of my experience with it will be, I will have my six or seven games that I really like, and I’ll play enough of them to feel like I’ve properly played them. And then it will be one of those games, I maybe will join the Bellatro part of my Switch library, where I just open it every now and then to have a go on something. It’s just a great train time sink. But I really admire it as a project. I think it’s well worth getting behind it, as it’s really cool and imaginative that someone, a team made that riffed on this game compilation concept to build something really original feeling like this, and something that is able to just keep surprising you. It really does, because like you say, you’re learning about the games each time. If the element of surprising games is what you like, then this game is so good at rewarding that desire to see new things and to be wowed by them. I really like that. Even if I don’t love all of the games, I definitely don’t. I’m finding ones I do love, and I think it’s fantastic, Matthew. Which is your least favorite? Is it Barbuda so far? Probably is Barbuda, just by default. There was one game, I cannot remember what it was, I literally could not figure out how to even interact with it. I just logged off straight away. I cannot remember what game that was. What’s the planet Zoldar? I think it was actually. That’s the resource management one. I didn’t know. Oh, fuck. I was like, no, this is not for me, this game. I walked around, talked to two aliens, got killed by another alien, did the same thing again in the next life. And I was like, you know what? I’m good. And I think after that, I went straight into Avianos or something like that. So, Avianos, I’m not sure. But, yeah. We can become incredibly irritating sort of hipsters who keep dropping references to Ufo 50 games into this conversation. Like, oh yes, that’s so NINPEC. And people are like, what are they talking about? Oh, it’s one of those Ufo 50 games again. We get it. You appreciate Ufo 50. Well, the thing is, it’s like 19 quid as well. Like, it’s got a launch discount. And it sort of doesn’t seem like it’s soaring on Steam. It seems like it’s done OK, but like not amazingly. And it feels like, I don’t know, this is really cool. I love that this exists. It’s just, maybe it’s just like in a month that’s got Astro Bot, Zelda, you know, Space Marine 2 in it. Maybe it doesn’t quite seem all the plucky Squire. It’s the opposite of Space Marine 2, this game. I can’t think of a game which is less Space Marine 2 than UFO 50. Yeah, exactly. That could be one of the quotes that they put on the Steam page when you scroll down. It could come from you, actually. My quote will be, fuck Barbouta. Barbouta, yeah. I was saying, actually there, because the other intriguing thing is that some games do have sequels. I’ve been reading a couple of the reviews to see what, like you, to see what like different reviewers have latched on to. And you’re right, there’s actually like not that much of a thread between them. There’s, people just do find their favorites based on the kind of games they like. And it’s quite cool in that respect. Like someone will definitely do a kind of like, if they haven’t already, or a UFO 50 games ranked or whatever. But that list will just be nonsense, I think, because yeah, you really, you’ll latch on to different games for different reasons. And I think you form different relationships to the games in this compilation than you would to a normal game that you buy. It’s a bit, because the relationship is much more transient, because it’s just one game of 50. So I don’t know, it’s just, yeah, it’s really, really special little thing. I’m very fond of it, Matthew. So I’m just looking forward. I know that they’re in somewhere in the mix. There is a sequel to Mortal. Yeah. I’m intrigued to see how, where Mortal goes. Are you more excited about Mortal 2 or Echoes of Wisdom, Matthew? Which sequel is more exciting to you this year? Probably still Echoes of Wisdom. You know, maybe that will also have a mechanic where you kill multiple Zeldas to build up a pile of dead Zeldas to climb. Yeah, exactly. You finally unlock the 51st fictional game in this game and it turns out it’s like, Barboota 2, welcome to the fuck dungeon. And it’s like, oh, that’s not what I wanted, to be honest, dog. Anything more to add on this one, Matthew? Or should we move on? Yeah, let’s move on. Okay, cool. What note to end on? It doesn’t get better than that, does it? Okay, so next up is a game that I failed to play because I was playing too much Avianos. There we go again, Matthew, referencing hipster games from Ufo 50. Tactical Breach Wizards, a game by Suspicious Developments, including, well, Tom Francis is the main sort of like game design force behind this with his frequent collaborators, including John Roberts, the artist, who worked with on Gunpoint, and Heat Signature, his previous games, which are very, very good. Someone Matthew has known for many years. And this game is kind of like XCOM with Wizards, Matthew, but seems like it’s got a lot more going on besides that. So, what do you get to it? It sits maybe somewhere between like XCOM and Into the Breach. It’s very fast moving. It has that kind of Into the Breach thing of, it’s more a game about like individual engagements, rather than here’s like a huge level where you’re going to spend like an hour unpicking the kind of puzzle of it, which is maybe more the XCOM vibe. The word breach is in the title, because each encounter begins with you breaching into a room. The levels are a succession of self-contained rooms. You’re placing wizards at the door of the room and then they bust in, and you get the impression that the game is about trying to clear those rooms in as quickly a time as possible using a combination of these skills, which is where the kind of Into the Breach element that it comes from. You know, it’s almost a sort of puzzle strategy game, you know, an efficiency puzzle. If I knock this guy into this guy and then push this guy out of a window, we can clear this room in one turn. It’s all about the kind of interplay of character skills and levelling them up and adding interesting wrinkles to them. That is just such a sort of sweet spot. The idea of trying to pull off lots of small, perfect encounters is highly satisfying rather than the more gruelling push-pull of a longer XCOM level. Because the levels are split into these individual encounters, every room you bust into can be given its own kind of wrinkle or the particular enemy combination and the flavours of them can vary massively. I’m not hugely deep into it, you know, I’m about an act and a half into it probably. But already there was great level where we were sort of storming this government facility. You know, you had sort of some simple rooms where two people were coming in through the same door, and then in the next room they’d come in different doors, and they’d be kind of crisscrossing the room with their powers, which was really fun. And then in the next room, the two characters ended up splitting and they were in kind of two corridors, split with like a gap in the middle but joined by windows. And all of a sudden, you had kind of like a wizard in one corridor firing their powers across to the other corridor, taking it in turns to sort of snipe out each other’s sort of obstacles. And from a design perspective, it gives them, you know, that kind of moreish one more go, very quick action, which is fun. But it also lets each section of each level feel like a little miniature set piece, which is really interesting. And actually the way that it mixes up something which is very sort of systems based, which you would sort of associate with being quite like hands off and, you know, you go forward and experiment and have fun with this. But also very cinematic. There’s a lot of story in it. And the way that those two things have been made to play nice together is that’s that’s really impressive. So because each level is split into these individual sections before you breach, the wizards gather by the doors and have little conversations with each other. You know, whether that’s about the stakes of the level, you know, the target they’re hunting down, just some backstory, just some like colour, you know, very quick back and forth. It’s not voiced. It’s, I think they use the inkle system, actually. So it’s, you know, it’s written text, but it kind of bangs through it. And Tom is a very, very funny dude and a very, very good writer. And, you know, this dialogue is just really short and punchy, but also really funny. Like the dialogue choices, you know, they don’t really impact what happens, but, you know, you can express yourself in some quite funny ways, which I really like. But I actually like that, you know, this isn’t a genre you necessarily associate with great storytelling, you know, because the stories are the ones you make yourself. You know, it’s what happens in XCOM when you name a load of troops after yourself, and then you come out of it with this idea of, like, the narrative that happened. But actually the way that it kind of maintains the sort of stakes of the world and deepens the lore of the world, while very, very easily switching back into, well, this is now the gameplay part where you’re having fun and, you know, expressing yourself through the systems, that’s really great. And that, to me, feels the meeting of, you know, sort of two sides of, you know, not… I don’t mean to kind of project too much onto him, but that feels to me like a meeting of, like, two sides of what I know are, like, you know, Tom’s interests, I guess, you know, he is really into the systems games, but he is also, like, he loves the narrative, he loves stories, you know, he loves pop culture, and that, to me, like, it’s just really odd seeing so much of a person in the game, you know, which obviously have the benefit of knowing him, so I can kind of sort of see that. I thought that about Gunpoint as well, though. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I thought there was, like, a little less of that in Heat Signature. That’s more like mechanics-driven, random sort of like, or procedural generation, wasn’t it? So there’s a bit of a different sort of experience. Yeah. It also just, it feels so much more lavish a production, you know, like, in fact, there’s this little sort of 3D world and 3D character models, the art design on it’s amazing. You know, even the levels are a succession of rooms, but they are inside buildings and like between the rooms, you get these transitions where it sometimes sort of zooms out and you see that like, oh, this is taking place in a boat or whatever. And it feels like a huge step up on that side of things as well. You know, it’s yeah, it’s just really, really impressive what he’s done. And the whole, like, you know, the magic element of it as well is really interesting because obviously, you know, you’re playing wizards and you have wizard powers and they’re pretty kind of outrageous, you know, what you can do with those powers. Some of the basic characters you get fly around the room, kind of smashing multiple people at once. So you can, you know, theoretically kind of punch three people out of three different windows with one move. You know, there’s a character who can see a few seconds into the future or one second into the future, but they make this big thing of like, well, in this world and in this game, you know, one second is going to make like a huge difference. And you can see how the turn is going to play out exactly and then rewind and just keep honing those powers and honing your application of them until you get a really clean run. So you know, I think, you know, someone might look at those powers and go, well, this is really, really overpowered. There’s no way these enemies are going to stand up to this. Where actually I think if you approach it with the mindset of the art of this game or the satisfaction of this game is doing this as cleanly as possible and in as few turns as possible. And there are things which encourage that. There are like rankings at the end of levels. There are like hidden objectives which reward you for doing it in one turn, say, or taking no damage. And actually, they’ve kind of created systems around those very powerful abilities which do stretch them, I think. If you go in and go, well, I’m going to take seven turns to do this one room, then yes, those powers are probably a bit unneeded. You could very slowly methodically just move through this game going into cover and shooting people in the head. But that isn’t the speed of it. And I think the game does enough to kind of encourage you not to play like that. And that’s where I think it really snaps into place. That’s an interesting point of comparison with Into the Breach as well, because there, the pressure for efficiency is the, is like the urgency of the whole situation. The more time you’re in levels, the more damage you’re going to accrue and you’re going to take that damage forward because it’s got that rogue like sort of feel to it. This obviously doesn’t have that. It’s very like linear level to level to level. There’s nothing to kind of punish you for taking your time. So I can understand why some people might not see the kind of full potential of some of it. But I do think personally there’s enough there to kind of get you into it. There’s a thousand fun little touches in this. The fact that it’s done so well, like it’s obviously caught the imagination of a lot of people. And yeah, it’s great to see. I’m obviously thrilled for the dude. I am looking forward to to digging into it as well. I got a cheeky launch disc out because of I owned Cobot Core and it’s in a package without my view. So it’s like 17 quid. It’s very, very reasonably priced. And yeah, like I guess it’s tapping into the whole breach thing is like the idea of the slow motion breach and like a first person game, right? And how that’s always like a fun kind of experience and another preoccupation of Tom’s, I imagine. It feels like the work of someone who’s been forced to play too many military or tactical games over the years. And it’s a really like thorough send up of that world. It isn’t like, I wouldn’t say it’s like sniffy about it. Like the, you know, it’s something you kind of have to sort of experience yourself in the game, I guess, but the names of the weapons and all the organizations, it just, it really feels like on point. It feels like someone who’s been forced to play like 10 Call of Duty campaigns over the years and it’s just absorbed it all and gone, I’m going to just do a really like wacky version of this. Very believable, very well observed. Yeah, I’ll definitely, definitely get to this in the next few weeks, I think, and make sure I play it before the end of the year. So that we do good stuff, Matthew. So the reason I didn’t play it was it was 1130 last night. I was lying in bed having played lots of Avianos and Mortal, and I was, and I just couldn’t be bothered to go back to my PC and like turn it on and play Tactical Breach Wizards because it was just sitting up at that time after we both eating a pizza, it wasn’t going to happen. So I remained in bed playing my Steam Deck, and I thought I would play Peglin for the first time. So this game is, I’m sure a lot of people know what this is. It’s been a big success on PC, and now it’s just recently launched in this 1.0 version, is available on Switch as well. It’s basically Peggle in the form of a Roguelike. I think what I thought that would mean would be you would just do a Peggle, sort of like a puzzle, clear all the pins, and then it would move on. What it actually amounts to is a much, much kind of like more obvious crossover of Slay the Spire and Peggle. So there are RPG style battles occurring at the top of the screen, and your success in the Peggle puzzle below, how many pins you hit, which pins you hit, that sort of thing, determines how much damage you’re doing to the enemies you’re fighting on top, as well as the type of damage that you’ll do. So, let’s say you hit a bunch of regular pins, and then it scores, then your little character, who looks like Yoda for whatever reason, will attack the one enemy in front of them. If you hit one of the bomb pins, of which there are, I don’t know, maybe five to 10 in the range of pegs that you can hit, you will attack every enemy on screen. So like if there’s four enemies in front of you, it’s obviously advantageous to do more damage to more enemies. And then the actual, as you go, the actual Slay the Spire progression element is you have that whole tree of choices you can make. And where the ball lands at the bottom of the screen determines which of the two paths you take, you’ll fire it attempting to get the treasure one rather than the scary monster one. And then that’s how you progress down that tree. But you also accumulate tons of items as well that have different functions, but most of them tend to add different multipliers to different types of pegs or different actions that you do or the weapon that your character is using to fight enemies on the top screen, that sort of thing. It’s a much more involved Slay the Spire element than I thought it would be actually. And I was quite surprised to see critics were a little bit cool on it. It only had like seven reviews on Metacritic. They’re all in the 70 range. And they’re all a bit like, oh yeah, it’s like Peggle but rogue like. And it’s just like, oh, what you basically just said was, oh, it’s like chocolate but they put peanut butter in it. You know what I mean? That’s what that reads like to me. It’s like, oh, it’s like freets but you put lobster on it. Oh, that’s a great call back. So I think it’s incredibly moreish. It just like devoured an hour of my time. And I dug into it and in the Steam reviews, people seem very fond of it. There’s a lot of tension about RNG and the different items you get fucking you on different runs in those reviews. That seems to be the thing that people are most bothered about. But the fundamentals of like, Peggle but there’s progression and all these different reasons you’re doing the actual Peggle bit of the game, I think is like a really potent combination. I found it very pleasurable. It’s got like boss battles in each area as well that you have to kind of like beat when you get to a certain part in the little sort of like tree of choices that you make. I just, yeah, it’s just a really, I think it’s a really cool thing. Do you feel like you have enough control or mastery of Peggle to like make strategic decisions? Well, the thing is that your character is always attacking. It’s just about how much value you’re adding to that attack. And that, but I think that same element of chance applies to Peggle more generally, right? It’s like, do you have enough control of this in order to actually like do exactly what the game wants you to do in ten balls, basically. So it has like a similar tension, I would say, to OG Peggle. But yeah, I don’t know. Is it a priority to Joy ever? No, it does not, sadly. So that’s one difference. It’s graphically a lot more simple than regular Peggle as well. But if you just like need more Peggle in your life, if you played Peggle, Peggle Nights, you played Peggle 2, and you’re just like, I just need fucking more Peggle. And I honestly think I could always go for more Peggle. Then Peglin is the one. So yeah, I’m really enjoying it, Matthew. I enjoyed hearing the word Peggle so many times in quick succession there. That was fun. Peggle and Peglin, yeah. Peggle Nights. What a name, you know? They are so good, Peggle Nights. Saltree, Saltree Peggle. That was like peak. I think the 360 era peaked with Peggle Nights. Like the name Peggle Nights and the launch of Peggle Nights. Like it was never gonna get better than that for like video games, really. So yeah, it’s good stuff, Matthew, Peggle Nights. It’s not very expensive either. If you can get it discounted on Switch, I imagine it will really hit the spot. But played this and a Ufo 50 and I was like, man, I’ve kind of missed having my Steam Deck on actually. It’s just nice to dip into all these different treats on here. Other thing I was gonna talk about. I’ve been playing Marvel Vs Capcom Fighting Collection Arcade Classics. Been playing that on Switch. You’re gonna throw a bone to the fighting game fans, are you? Well, you know what though? The first thing I played when I turned this on is it’s got like, so it’s got like, I think, five or six fighting games. They’re like, they’re all different Marvel Super Heroes, Street Fighter vs X-Men. There’s an X-Men specific one, I think, called Children of the Atom, something like that. They’re all a little bit different from each other, but the crown jewel of the collection is Marvel Vs Capcom 2, which has not been re-released, I don’t think, since the 360 era when it was available on Xbox Live Arcade. So that’s kind of a long time coming. And that’s like an all-timer game in terms of, you know, you have those three different fighters, you’re cycling between those very visually opulent kind of moves and a great kind of like 90s roster of Marvel characters to choose from, you know, such pre-MCU stylized, beautiful Capcom art of all these different Marvel characters and all these different Capcom characters as well. And I think if you have an affinity for both like I do, then even if you’re not a fighting game fan, that game is still extremely appealing, I think. But the thing I went for straight away, there’s a side-scrolling The Punisher beat him up in this, which I need to be like a sort of like coveted cult object, but it was only ever released at home, I think, on Mega Drive in quite a bad compromised port. And so the original arcade one was never actually re-released. And that’s here. And this, that’s fucking great fun. I played through it on the way to work, like the entire thing, because you can add as many lives as you want. Obviously, it’s not the longest game in the world. You get to play as either The Punisher or Nick Fury. I just find that funny as like a focus for a Marvel game. It’s just so specific. And then it’s just incredibly violent. And it’s like a bit. Yeah, yeah. It just really like it’s not like massively bloody, but there’s so much. The Punisher is a pretty violent character. It’s just like the twist of it, as far as I can tell, as a beat him up. It’s a really slick feeling, like really responsive beat him up. Like it’s not, you feel like you have complete grasp over the controls in a way I sometimes don’t when I’m playing these games. But it’s just the fact that you’ll be punching people and throwing people. And then every now and then it’s that Danny DeVito in Always Sunny. So I started blasting kind of like meme and it’s just like, and he just starts firing his gun, like just wildly. It’s just like a science school and beat him up. You know, I’m just going to shoot these dudes for a while. I just like gunned down like seven dudes. It becomes a beat up again. And it’s, I found that, I found that quite appealing. And yeah, I played through the whole thing. And then the end boss, like Kingpin, you fight Jigsaw as well. It’s quite punishery. You’re just sort of like fighting through all these kind of like Rambo ish, kind of like military locations and stuff. You can play it in two player. There’s not like loads more to it, but it’s like again, punisher and Nick Fury. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s just a really cool little relic to have on this collection. It’s like we’re going to give you a bunch of fighting games, but then also one weird thing that you might not have encountered otherwise. So yeah, so that’s kind of like my personal highlight of this collection so far. It’s quite a pricey collection. It’s 40 quid. So I think that, but I think the key with all these Capcom compilations, so they’ve done loads of really good ones in recent years. That one that’s got Parcel Fighter Turbo, Two Turbo on it, for example, is that they put online back into the game, so you can play online in any of the games here, which is a really nice touch, I think. But also, they are always discounted massively. I’m sure this will be like 50 percent off in a few months. At that point, I think this is like a well-worth-having kind of thing to have in your backlog. Marvel Vs Capcom 2, obviously, is extremely appealing by itself. But yeah, the Punisher thing is just a great curio for a little compilation like this. I almost wish to have more weirdo games like this. Here’s a Doctor Strange game we made in 1994 that no one’s fucking heard of or that kind of thing. But yeah, so I’ve been playing that as well, Matthew. But those are my dabbled for a couple of hours kind of things that I’ve been up to. You’ve got another one of these here, right? Yeah, I’ve played a little bit of the Sumerian Six, which is published by Devolver Digital, developed by Artificer, who I’m not hugely familiar with. A quick Wikipedia search tells me that they were a spin-off studio from Creative Forge, who made a lot of those, like Hard West, or is it Hard West, like the Cowboy X-Con anyway. We won’t, probably not very interesting. That’s an easel background. Yeah. I just wanted people to know that I’d done some research. Acknowledged. Yes. It is a kind of pulpy World War II, sort of Nazis doing mad science experiments, being brought down by a squad of specialist heroes with special abilities in the mold of commandos or desperados, or the other current me, me, me games, Shadow Gambit, Shadow Blade, and Shadow Tactics, sorry. And so it’s a real-time stealth tactics game, isometric maps, characters with very varied abilities that you use to take out combination of guards who have big swinging view cones. It’s kind of about creative application of special abilities and comboing special abilities to sort of break up all these guard formations. It’s kind of what’s at the heart of this genre. Obviously, I love this genre of games. So I think the work me, me, me did there was just so good. It’s absolutely stellar games. So I think every one they made was like a proper nine out of 10 for me. And yeah, this is, you know, obviously me, me, me have shut down, which is sad. You know, if they decided it wasn’t a genre that, you know, they could keep working in or there just wasn’t enough to the financial interest in it, sadly. Which made this a bit of a mystery. I guess this was commissioned before that happened. It was kind of smaller in size than a full me, me, me game. I think there’s like 10 levels to it. I think it was about 30 quid as well. So, you know, kind of a slightly smaller proposition, but, you know, made to a similar standard. I don’t think they’re quite as pretty as Desperados or Shadow Gambit. You know, I really like the kind of isometric style. They’ve done with a, they’ve gone with a slightly cartoonish like visual filter on it, which maybe makes it look a bit simpler. Like I said, set in World War II, so it has a very sort of pulpy comic book version of it. It’s kind of hard to talk about these games without getting too into the weeds about, you know, like very tiny tweaks, which make all the difference. You know, I could say I don’t think it feels as tight as the MiMiMi versions of this, mainly because I don’t know if it’s that the powers are too overpowered and juicy and just a little bit too spectacular and it’s just going to be very hard for them to like create scenarios and enemy formations where those powers are properly tested. Or if it is meant to be a bit friendlier, you know, if it is meant to be maybe a bit more of a beginner’s because the one thing I would say about the MeMeMe games is that they’re recently hardcore and you have to like absolutely meet them halfway to kind of get any kind of footing in that world. This I feel like it’s a little bit a little bit more generous but in that generosity it loses some of the bite which I think is quite key to it. You know, the satisfaction of this genre is, you know, it’s sort of, you know, slipping the thread through the eye of the needle and you look at these levels and think, how the hell am I ever going to get through this? And, you know, by very clever use of all these contrasting abilities, you know, you find a kind of chink in the armour and, you know, work out, well, if I take down this guy, then this guy is suddenly a bit more vulnerable. And if I take down this and, you know, how you kind of approach levels and unpick them is part of the pleasure. Here I felt like you can, you know, certainly if the first couple of levels that I’ve played, you can kind of charge through them quite quickly. On the plus side, like the powers are quite fun and it’s got some abilities that I haven’t seen in this genre. So like, you know, for example, one of the characters has a, one of his powers is that he can kind of hijack enemies that is sort of, I don’t really know how he’s doing it. If it’s like magic or some kind of gizmo, there is magic in the game, but he kind of like moves his whole body inside another enemy. And when that enemy is patrolling, you can then jump out of the body. So if there’s an enemy walking like a circuit at the level, you can basically ride in his body and then hop out anywhere, which is obviously really powerful because when you hop out the enemy is sort of stunned and you can do a huge amount of damage just with that, like hopping into bodies, jumping out, killing them while they’re stunned, and then hopping into the next body and repeat. There’s another character who has the ability to just physically swap locations with an enemy so that you can use that to kind of drag an enemy into the shadows by swapping places with them and then have a mate waiting in the shadows to stab them when the enemy arrives or whatever. They’re quite grand feeling and they’re definitely exciting to use, but I do also think like, well, what scenarios could you possibly conjure up where these powers are going to be fully tested? The powers only kind of get wilder from there. There’s a guy who has the power of a bear, for example, and things like that. So it feels, I’d say, slightly zippier and a bit shallower than Desperados and Shadow Tactics and Shadow Gambit. And I do wonder if the kind of depth and tension is like a key part of this genre. And maybe that’s like a bit of a not a fatal flaw, but a kind of a harder thing to get over. It hasn’t seemed to have made any kind of splash or whatsoever this game. You know, you sort of wonder like, why bother if you’re not going to kind of get behind it in any in any serious way, which is a shame because it’s absolutely like it’s very like serviceable. It’s just it’s just kind of tough coming to it when you’ve played like the very best version of it, which are still the mini games. But, you know, I won’t say no to more of this. Yeah, yeah, it’s sort of like I sort of noted that as well. It just sort of came and went, didn’t it? It was there was a few reviews, but then it was sort of like it was sort of gone. It’s you wonder if it’s like maybe a tricky time of year for this sort of thing. I saw the yeah, I saw the trailer for the PC gaming show, I think it was. I thought it looked like a pretty solid version of what it is. But like you say, if what you’re up against is exceptional, and there are multiple exceptional MeMeMe games, that is a tough sell in some ways. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it’s so much the interface lifted wholesale from MeMeMe. I just feel like they’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of working out how this should look and function in the kind of modern era. And, you know, I mean, why not, I guess? You know, why not borrow those things? But yeah. Do you think this genre would have succeeded more if they’d have added waifus to them, Matthew? Because is that why Fire Emblem did well? Is it because there’s like waifus in it? Like it’s adjacent to something like Fire Emblem, isn’t it? I mean, it’s adjacent to so many things that people like. You know, like the satisfaction of doing something stealthily and perfect. I know that speaks to people who like stealth games, but maybe like the perspective, they can’t see like, oh, well, this looks wildly different to like a Metal Gear Solid. But the skill and the art of it is the same, you know, in so many ways. Also, like there’s so much immersive sim DNA in it, in how you combine different powers to screw people over, you know, luring people with one character’s powers and then using someone else’s powers to coincide with that to do something. And I’m amazed, you know, I know that is a genre which struggles in and of itself, but I’m surprised there’s not a bit more kind of like, you know, interest from that fan base. I feel like it’s a genre that has just not been able to break through again despite being in like such an excellent version of itself, such excellent form. Yeah. No one ever quite figured out, you know, like what is the cell here? What is the thing that will make people play? You know, was it license? You know, if you did a Metal Gear version of this, would that like open people’s eyes to it? You know, rather than like, you know, sort of slightly generic kind of ninjas, cowboys, pirates, you know, did it need, you know, like I’ve said on this podcast before, did they need to do a mission in possible time, you know, and have the squad doing like heists in skyscrapers and things? Like, I think that would be a perfect match for them. And, but, you know, it wasn’t to be. Then last up, we’re going to talk about Astro Bot in some more detail. Some spoilers follow here. So yes, you’ve been warned, you’re now in the spoiler zone. Welcome. So I play through the whole game now, including, so for those who have played it, there are five main worlds. Then there are a bunch of secret levels you unlock via portals in those main worlds. And then I basically ticked all those off and each of the different worlds also has a selection of PlayStation shape themed levels basically. So you have triangle, square, circle and cross levels, which represent a different tier of platforming challenge. The main game has a very gentle difficulty curve to it, in terms of a lot of it is about experiencing the ideas more than it is about being genuinely challenged. The hardest thing most of the time is trying to find where all the different puzzle pieces are in the game and the different hidden Astro Bots are as well, which most of the time or a lot of the time represent a different PlayStation references as well. So collecting those is a key part of the game. So I’ve done all that now, that every single thing you can do in the game, aside from some of the trophy challenges, which I looked up and thought that’s a waste of time. I’m not doing those. I’d rather go and watch a film. So that’s what I did. I watched Nocturnal Animals with Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams. But I have played the whole game, Matthew, and I did want to revisit it because it’s interesting. So first of all, we got, there was a little bit of a tension towards your takes on the game when we talked about it, and your comparisons to Mario. That was an interesting bit of podcasting, I thought, and I like that. But I also wondered if you coming to it having finished everything were slightly more down on it than you might have been, because some of those higher level challenges show that the 3D platforming, despite being very good, does not quite have the stuff when you try and make it really skill-based and tricky, because that’s how I felt about it after finishing it. I thought Magnificent Game, very generous with its ideas, I thought some of the signature levels in Astro Bot were amazing, like the one that’s in this big underwater open world for you to go and find everything, that’s really cool. The Casino one, which I think they showed off at Preview, where you can slow down time, is fucking magnificent. There’s loads and loads of great levels in there. But I wondered if your opinion on it had taken a slight turn from getting to those shape-based challenges, and then also the Grand Master Challenge, which awaits you at the very end of the game. Yeah, a little bit. I wouldn’t say it was tied specifically to those high-level challenge games. I think it was more that, I think when Astro Bot didn’t have specific abilities like the power-ups, I thought a lot of the levels kind of bled together a bit. Like I feel like without those powers or without the gimmick of you’ve turned into another PlayStation mascot, it was a lot of quite simple platforming because he’s only got a jump and a hover jump. So what you can actually sort of do with that, there isn’t much you can do with that. You know, there was a lot of like, not very interesting kind of punching the same five robots in this game. And I just felt like those things emerged a little more as it went on. Like I almost felt like, you know, there’s kind of two games as the pure world of Astro Bot, and then there’s all the kind of extra kind of gubbins they stick around it. And when those gubbins went away, that’s when I was less interested. And I still found it all very like pleasurable from a presentation point of view. You know, I’m definitely not down on this game. You know, I think this is a great game. I think this is one of the best, you know, first party PS5 games easily. I just, I don’t know, when I was done with it, I thought, well, I will never go back to that. You know, you know, I’ve seen everything. I felt like once I’d emptied a level of its secrets, you know, bots and jigsaw puzzle pieces, it was like, well, that’s what that level had, really. You know, and I definitely said this on the first episode. I didn’t feel like he’s like expressive enough. Like I wouldn’t want to just play him for the sake of playing him. Right. Which I do have with Mario and some people be like, well, that isn’t true of Mario. And it’s like, okay, if you don’t have that kind of relationship with 3D platformers, if you just want to get through and see a load of stuff, then yes, I can see why this would absolutely scratch that itch. But you know, if these are games where you hope to be going back to them every couple of years, I don’t really know what there is to pull me back. But I did think it was interesting what you were saying about that it was these harder levels which maybe made you think that there wasn’t as much going on with him as a character. I thought the hard levels, I mean, they’re quite well-tuned to who he is. Yeah, they are. But there’s a few things where it just, because you’re getting so forensic with the mechanics, it starts to expose very slight weaknesses to the game. So things like the camera not quite giving you the information you need at all times. So just like there are some bits where I just needed to like full on tilt the camera 90 degrees to understand why something was hitting me, or just because from the perspective you have of being quite far away from Astro Bot, you can’t always tell why that’s happening. Or enemy behaviors that are not consistent enough for you to actually be able to like always understand how to deal with them. It’s like, I don’t know what causes those fucking little purple blob things to spit at you. I can’t work out why it determines the exact angle it does a lot of the time, and seems to be able to home in on you sometimes even when you’re behind objects. Is it like timing? Will they always spit on the 10th second of the level, or do they spit because you’re near them? That’s it. Exactly, yeah. Things like that, or the fact that this fire comedian seems able to hit me at an angle on this number shot, even though in the last time I played it, it was not firing at that exact angle. So what is causing that because my player movements are still roughly the same. It’s little bits of inconsistency where I was like, I don’t know why that’s happening and I can’t learn it exactly. I just have to hope the game won’t do it in a way that will fuck up my run basically. And so those bits combine with the fact that I increasingly thought your point about his, I sound like I’m being such a grump here. I do think this is a really good game, I should say. But like his little lasers underneath when he jumps over enemies. I did eventually agree with you that I could use something that’s got a little bit more feedback when I’m like hitting enemies underneath because it feels a little bit like I’m not really doing anything and then the enemies sort of blow up. It’s a bit too lightweight in terms of the response you get as a player. I think that’s actually not necessarily a bad thing because I think that means there are actually some ways they can improve the platforming for next time. You can definitely take this character back to the drawing board a little bit. The actual jumping navigation movement for the most part, absolutely fine, wouldn’t change much about that. But maybe you can improve his moveset a little bit and you can probably add quite a lot of dimensions to the game. But yeah, I was there thinking, it might be nice if you just like, instead of these little like polite kind of lasers, it was a bit like, I don’t know, you’re just firing rockets underneath him or something. I don’t know. I was just thinking, I wish you had a little bit more heft to him sometimes, like you say, that basic skillset. The laser things are weird because they come from, that’s their solution to, you don’t know where you’re going to land in a platformer. Yeah. If you’ve got a direct blue line from your feet to the floor, you’ll always know exactly where you are. And I kind of, I get that. That is useful. Useful information, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But they also become, you know, they’re used to like jumping over and like frying enemies with those leg lasers. It’s just not as satisfying as bopping a goomba. You know, it just isn’t. And that’s, there’s a lot of that. I really don’t like the enemies in this game. I think that’s part of it. I just think that there’s, like, they’re the same things. There’s like five enemy types for the whole game. And you know, they’re either absolutely, like they literally can’t hurt you. Like there’s some enemies that can’t damage you at all. Like there’s nothing, if they touch you it doesn’t hurt you. They’re just, they’re just there to be there. Then there are ones where spikes come out of. They’re just a bit annoying because you’re just waiting for the spikes to go back in so you can kill them. There’s the spitty boys. The ones I, I tell you, the one I really do like is the, like, he looks like he’s like a glass ball and he spins around a big spiky thing. Yeah. Because I love shattering the big, I love shattering his glass body. That’s, that’s really tactile and really, really fun. Every time I’m into like fucking that guy up because you’re like, you with your big spiky ball, you think you’re like the guy and you’re really hard to get to. But once I’ve got past that ball, you’re absolutely fucked. You think you’re like the guy. I love that. That’s so funny. He reminds me of, what’s that mascot, which is like a big glass of like orange squash. It’s like an American thing. The family guy one. Yeah, it comes through the wall. Yeah, I can’t remember his name now. Whatever, a glass container. Cool aid man. There you go. Cool aid man. A glass container with some substance in it. It just reminds me of that. It reminds me of that’s what it’d be like to shatter that guy. And that’s satisfying. Yeah, I do like them. But yeah, particularly in the later stages, I don’t know if it ever stepped it up in a way that I kind of hoped it would, that the 10 out of 10s do. You know, it was just sort of like merely very good throughout. I found it like quite one note in its kind of quality in a way. Yeah. And I think some of its best power ups happen like in the middle of the game. Like you have the big surprise of like the slow mo casino and the big sponge Astro, which is just like, you know, a delight and full of these mad physics effects. And then by then it’s a little bit like, oh, chicken bet pack again, is it? Yeah, I agree. It peaks quite early and you almost wonder, does it have slightly too many levels? Like should it, does it draw attention to that by having many more levels than it does have different ideas? I particularly felt that going through the different secret worlds you unlock through the portals, I thought those are all going to be like humdingers. And they’re actually kind of all like, they normally got like quite a fairly strong conceptual hook, like this is the level that’s all like in the dark or whatever. But they’re not like, they’re not like the, I thought they were all going to be like casino level quality. And it turns out there’s actually only really like three or four levels that are that good in the game, you know? They’re also, I mean, I know it has the gauntlet levels, which are the hard ones, but I wish those secret levels, I wish there were some traditional Astro Bot levels that were all so hard. You know, I wish the secret world had been like, this is like the world that unlocks after the creator. Like, all the way up to the very end, I was like, oh, I bet there’s going to be another galaxy of hard levels. Like, there’s got to be, you know, there’s got to be some traditional, challenging levels in this, not just these gauntlets, which are quite abstract spaces. And it was like, nope. And you’re like, okay, I mean, I’m not saying, I don’t feel like I was short-changed. I was surprised that, given that there wasn’t that extra tier to it, that those secret levels weren’t hard. I don’t really know what the point of making them secret was. Because you’re like, oh, you had to do something quite skillful to get here. And then here is a completely regular level for you to play. And you’re like, oh, all right, well, you know, I like the ideas of them, but I wish there’d just I just wish there’d been some variation in difficulty. And I know it’s fucking boring to blather on about difficulty constantly, but there’s like all the levels and the gauntlet levels and nothing in between. Like, it’s just a mass of it’s just a mass of like easy pleasure and then some quite hard bits. And like, would it have killed them to spice up a little bit? Yeah, I think that’s I think that is fair criticism. Like it’s I think it does. It does reach that peak. And then it just never quite reaches those peaks again. And yeah, like it’s the difficulty variance is kind of is kind of wild, like you almost wonder. It’s actually, if you did, if you were like playing to like collect all the little, I don’t know, I guess if you wouldn’t have had, you wouldn’t be able to do the Grandmaster Challenger unless you had completed all the Shape Challenges. So yeah, okay, interesting. Yeah, it’s like, it’s sort of like you got easy and you got hard and you got no medium in between. Right, yeah, that is absolutely it. Yeah, yeah. That said, I thought we should also talk about some of the little PlayStation pastiche stuff in this because we dabble with this a tiny bit. We didn’t really spoil it. I clumsily stumbled in and talked too much about this, but anyway, apologies for the people who were salty about that. Well, I don’t think it was too big a deal. You spoiled that there are Resident Evil characters in the game and you spoiled the Horizon bit of the game, but I don’t think you necessarily spoiled anything else. I certainly didn’t feel like you spoiled the game, but anyway. So yeah, so at the end of each world, the five worlds, they give you a different PlayStation pastiche, like a different sort of version of Astro Bot through the prism of Uncharted or, well, Uncharted, Loco Rocco, which is like a real highlight, I think, conceptually, Horizon Forbidden West, it’s in America, San Francisco, and God of War as well. And is there any other missing? I think that’s it, isn’t it, Matthew? Ape Escape. Oh, well, yeah, of course, Ape Escape. Ape Escape, which is probably the least memorable and interesting, I would say. Like I say, couldn’t go over the fact that Ape Escape was literally just that. That was what the game was, but hey, it was the PS1 day, so fine. I thought the Uncharted one was delightful because it had the theme tune. And it was like, well, that helps, doesn’t it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also it was like, there’s a bit where Astro Bot gets the gun, right? And he looks at it like, hey, hey. And it’s kind of like almost, it reminds me of that Futuraba joke where it’s like the extended riff on Wizard of Oz, where the professor goes, who needs courage when you’ve got a gun? It really reminded me of that where you see Astro Bot with his little gun and he just starts shooting all these guys. And it’s a clear homage to Uncharted 1 as well. Like it’s got the submarine, the rusted Nazi submarine, kind of like wedge there and stuff. And like the jungle environment is pure Uncharted 1, and it has all the different characters. I loved that. I thought that was great. I agree that Horizon 1 wasn’t that interesting, just a bow and arrow, you get the occasional robot dinosaur in there as well. God of War 1 I thought was pretty good. Just duplicated what the axe can do. Chucking that, pretty cool. And then the LocoRoco one, I almost felt like that was the one they picked because that’s like their heritage as a Japanese Sony studio, and therefore felt like the most kind of meaningful and therefore delightful of the different ones included in there. What did you make of that overall dimension of the game? I kind of hope that, I don’t know, I sort of hinted at this when we chatted about it last time, but I had to hope that there was going to be more of the loco-roco, like here’s a completely different game style. I think The Uncharted, God of War and Horizon, I think they’re all like triumphs of like art design and observation. You know, they really look like the things, but they are also like three third person games. So they’re all, you know, it’s three levels where you’re walking through shooting stuff and you’re like, that’s fair enough, but it makes you realize like, you know, how quite similar that, you know, first party catalog is, you know, where there isn’t like a LocoRoco anymore. That said, if you put a gun to my head and went, name five very varied games that you would like them to riff on, you know, I just don’t have the PlayStation sort of heritage or nostalgia to necessarily go, well, I would definitely do this, you know, maybe like a Parappa, like a rhythm level or something, you know, because Parappa gets quite a big sort of billing in this, weirdly, for a character who doesn’t then have, you know, the last big cameo in the game is a Parappa one, weirdly. But that’s, you know, I kind of enjoyed them more as, oh, this is, these are like triumphs of animation and, and, and sort of visual homage, you know, like the, in The God of War, where you discovered the, kind of what they called those, those sort of doors that you open up and then there’s like a myth behind them, whatever those things were. The fact they’ve got like a little version of that and, you know, it kind of nods to the trappings of the game without necessarily feeling like too much like the game itself, you know, barred, like the axe returning to your hand and things like that. So yeah, like I thought they were, I thought they were kind of fine. I wish they were more like a Roku Surprises, it basically is the headline. Yeah, fair enough. I thought that what was there was a fair compromise between what people would expect from a PlayStation Rift and what dweebs like, you know, me or like, you know, it’s- I’m not like, you know, they weren’t going to do a fucking Pat upon level, you know, I know that, you know, and they did like the mascots, the big mascots that people love, but I guess they were first party, you know, it’s kind of like you get into the what if scenario of like, you know, could they, you know, what if they could have worked with some of their partners on games which are so important to the PlayStation story, you know, what happens if they’d had a Metal Gear Solid level, you know? Like, you know, what happens if they, you know, what if they could have done, you know, the opening stretch of Final Fantasy VII, well, with Astro Bots or something. Yeah. You know, but maybe that’s just too big an ask. I don’t know, like that’s potentially, because when I played this, I thought, okay, well, they’re using up so many different references here because there are some real deep cuts of, like, Legend of Dragoon or Rogue Galaxy characters in here or Dark Cloud, etc. And they even like Sui Koden and they’ll sweep it in, well, however the fuck you pronounce that, we can never work it out. So I do think that if they, you know, it seems like it’s done pretty well. I imagine it will keep selling. It’s that kind of got that long tail to it, I think. It’s a kind of evergreen game for people to pick up. And then I think they could do more extended rifts like that in the next game. And I kind of hope they do because they haven’t really exhausted that at all. Yes, you’ve got all the different cameos, but you do wonder if the bigger prize might be doing some of those more iconic third party kind of games. Like you’re starting in Shadow Moses or whatever and doing all that stuff. And like you say, opening of FF7, there’s still a lot to play for on that front. So basically, I think there’s a much higher ceiling to what they could do with Astro Bot than I think just this game is able to achieve. And that’s a good thing, I think, because what’s here, I think is still probably an eight for me rather than a nine, but it’s like a high eight, it would be like an 85, I was reviewing it, I think. I’d be like, well, you should definitely play that if you got PS5 100%. It was only the sheen came off it a tiny bit as I got deeper into it, but that’s okay, Matthew, because that still makes it one of the better games of the year for sure. And I know it has just delighted people so much. In some ways, I don’t think it’s ever going to delight you more than it does in that opening five to six hours when you’re going through those first three worlds. It’s just such a great, great thing to discover and experience and it’s well worth it just for those and then it’s still got a lot of game besides. It’s a very generous game even if all of the bits of the game aren’t necessarily amazing. So, yeah, good stuff Matthew. Is that all there is to say on Astro Bot? I think that’s us done, isn’t it really? Yeah, I imagine it will turn up in Game of the Year. I would expect so, yeah. Unless we have many more surprises to come, but I doubt it at this point, so yes. Okay, thank you so much for listening. That was What We’ve Been Playing episode. Next week is the PlayStation 4 draft featuring returning guest Dave Scarborough. We are going to do another three-person draft because the PC gaming one with Jeremy has gone down so well. People like that additional tension, and I do think picking 30 games rather than 20 games will make it a little bit trickier for everyone participating, and therefore for better podcasting. But I was wondering, in the meantime, where can people find you on social media? I am at MrBazzill underscore Pesto on Twitter, and at MrBazzillPesto on Blue Sky, where I have done a couple of messages, tweets, whatever you call them. About puddings, yep. About puddings, it’s good pudding material. Vital Matthew Castle material. So go check that out. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Blue Sky and Twitter as well. And the podcast is at Back Page: Pod on Twitter and Blue Sky too. You can find us there. You want to support us on Patreon, patreon.com/backpagepod. Get two additional episodes a month. This month we’ve done top 15 Nintendo third party games, massive beefy episode we did there. And we’re about to do an episode on Gladiator and Master and Commander, a Russell Crowe slash Dad movie special. I think that’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re excited to get into that. So look forward to that on the last Monday of this month, very soon when you’re listening to this. So Matthew, we’re done. Goodbye. Goodbye. Okay, so Matthew, you may remember yesterday, I sickened you at the pizza dinner table by suggesting that the newest murder mystery by author slash TV personality, Richard Osmond, was called The Fudge Shop Mysteries. And you just like rolled, you rolled your eyes at this. And I vowed. I just thought it was like a very lazy representation of what those books are called. That’s fair, that’s fair. So I, having amused myself with that joke, I thought I’d go away with 10 more suggestions of like fictional fake Richard Osmond book titles to like see if- Have you looked at the actual ones to give you any inspiration? Yeah, a little bit. My hope is that you’ll see a little bit of that through line in the suggestions I’ve got here. So for those who, yeah, for those who don’t know these, but you probably do, these are like cozy mysteries basically. They’re like sort of, you know, inoffensive, a variety of people get together and solve something. Was the first one called The Thursday Murder Club? They’re like old age pensioners in a retirement community who solve mysteries. That’s his whole deal. Yeah. It’s exactly what I would expect someone who is on British TV to create. It’s like this is designed to sell to as many people as possible and like pensioners have money, they’ll lap it up and it will not be like fincher-esque in content. It will be like, so that was kind of like the thinking. You’re going to prestige this now, are you, with 10 titles? Yeah, you can rate each one as we go. I’ll just read them in quick succession, actually, you used to see how you feel about them. So, right, I’ve got The Sider Festival Crucifixions. That’s my first one. The Hump Day Murder Slipper. That’s my second one. The Haberdashery Stranglings is the next one. Oh, that’s so crude. Bullet Holes at Timpsons. Got that one. The Frogman Who Wasn’t There. What’s that? Execution at Elevenzies. That’s quite fun. It was the Scone What did it. Oh, my God. The Monday Evening Rogerings. Oh, boo. The Sunday Regicides. I quite like that. The Centrist Supper Slaughters. That’s my final one. They’re all too zany. It was the Scone What done it. That’s literally it, people. Well, the one that mystifies me the most is the Frogman Who Wasn’t There. I don’t know where that goes. I’m just trying to think of what might you see in like a pond in Britain? Oh, Frogman. You know, that might be a thing that happens. I don’t know. One of his books was like… I know one of them was called like The Man Who Didn’t Die or something or The Man Who Didn’t… That’s what I was riffing on there. With a bit of the Coen Brothers chucked in for good measure. Probably wasn’t there. Well, that was… You know, I’m glad that you did that exercise. Yeah, you were sickened by at least half of them. In the light of those, I think the Fud Shop mysteries is actually probably closer to something that could happen. Yeah, fair enough. It was definitely… I put, you know, upwards of two minutes into coming up with these ideas. And yeah, I think the results speak for themselves. So many regicides.