Hello, and welcome to The Back Page XL, a patron-exclusive episode of The Back Page Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re back behind the paywall. Thanks to our backers for supporting us as ever. We do appreciate it. And how are you feeling about being in the safe space of, you can share a particularly shitty take here, and it’ll only reach like a quarter of the people that it normally would. I don’t have any shitty takes. Okay, fair enough. None at all. Or mine are gold. I should say we’re recording this during the potential upset at the palace, or whatever we’re calling it. It’s a slightly odd backdrop to record a podcast about computer games, isn’t it? Not if you live outside the UK, in which case it’s meaningless. But you know, so yes, but we won’t let that dull our good time as we talk about seven out of 10 games, Matthew. So- I’ll try my best. Yeah, yeah. So yes, this podcast, and best seven out of 10 games. I think people will really like the idea of this. I feel like you and I, Matthew, may be slightly synonymous with interesting sevens, that we have a tendency on this podcast to talk about games that can be described in that way. So, you know, the kind of the old, obviously like the core of this is the idea of giving a game seven out of 10 on like a 10-point scale for video games when you’re reviewing them, or 70%, or whatever the version of it is in Stars, your Splatoon review, Matthew, I don’t know. But yeah, so why do you think this is a good, this is good grounds for an episode of this podcast? I mean, yeah, I think it just covers, covers territory that we really like. I think it’s something that comes up a lot in the podcast and we talk about it as if like everyone’s on the same page and maybe we can help like clarify like what exactly it is that we’re kind of talking about and celebrating and maybe recommend some more. I will say like a lot of the, a lot of the really classic seven out of the tens, I think we’ve talked about quite a bit on the podcast already and you will be sort of familiar with them. So I’ve tried to kind of come up with some, you know, slightly older ones or maybe talk about some things which got mentioned in passing that I wanted to go back to. I don’t know how you sort of found it, kind of sort of. It’s not going back to the seven out of ten mind, because you’ve never done an episode just about it, but it’s always been there. Yeah, for sure. Particularly, I think when we’re doing episodes on the different years in the honorable mentions, you tend to get some of them pop up over and over again. So a lot of the games that either make up like the 10, nine, eight bits of the list, or yeah, like I say, the honorable mentions tend to be more in that sort of bracket. Yeah, so it’s an interesting one, but we’ll try and make it less nebulous as we go along essentially, by kind of like trying to sort of like isolate what our criteria is. But I think everyone has an idea in their minds, I have what a seven out of 10 game is. Anyone who’s kind of like vaguely engaged with the world of, you know, reviews and games media and things like that. So yeah, yeah. So Matthew, I didn’t put this in our podcast plan, so apologies for ambushing you like this, but do you remember the first seven you gave out? Can you recall that? It might actually be one of the games I was going to talk about, Time Hollow, which is a bang on, I think, 70% in NGamer. I think that’s probably it. I will say though that like maybe my appreciation of what a seven out of 10 has like changed over the years, maybe there are some things which are, this is already, we get into the weeds. I was about to say, maybe there are some games that I scored higher than a seven, which actually are a true seven. You know, there are games in the eighties where actually I think, oh, you know what? It’s actually better than that. It’s maybe a seven. But that’s why I don’t want to go too far down the alley because I know it confuses people. Yeah, that’s the thing. So my first seven, I think was Heavenly Sword, which I gave 71%. I’ve definitely discussed that in the podcast before. Yeah. Kind of like, you know, obviously Ninja Theory’s first real stab at a kind of 3D action game with these very elaborate cut scenes, motion captured by Andy Serkis and Anna Torv. Very visually impressive for the time. Had some absolutely atrocious six axis controlled guidance arrow from a bow and arrow through the sky and hit an enemy in the head sequences that would just absolutely kill me inside. And the game was over in four and a half hours. I would say though that when I sort of like got into games media, the idea of a seven out of 10 in the way that I think we will describe it in this episode, maybe didn’t exist yet, or at least I kind of knew what it was in my mind’s eye, because I grew up playing True Crime Street Civil A, which at the time was probably a seven, but now it’s probably like a five or a six. But I think the idea of these, well, I won’t get into the weeds too much, but basically what we will discuss in this podcast, that sort of thing, feels like more of a 360 era phenomenon, but we’ll get into that. So Matthew, I think we should probably start with your grand unifying theory on the seven out of 10, that what have you been bewildering our listeners with in the Discord over the last few months? Can you explain it here? Yeah, I think I can. So I think the first thing you need to do, I think a seven out of 10 game is misleading, because people think it’s strictly about a score. And I don’t know that it is. I think not every game that gets a seven out of 10 in a games magazine or on a website is necessarily one of the seven out of 10s I’m talking about. Right, yeah. I think it’s more of an energy a game has. The nature of this energy is why it tends to end up in the seven out of 10 space on the review scale. Here it is. So this isn’t too sort of wanky, but I’ve been umming and owing about this all week. The broadest way of talking about it is that I think it is a game that is often very uneven and odd. And in that unevenness or oddness, it maybe like feels a bit more human and lovable and relatable because it maybe doesn’t have the kind of machine-tooled precision of a traditionally excellent game. Right. I think it’s often something which is a great idea that is executed poorly. It is very rarely a bad idea executed perfectly. Do those exist much in games really? I just don’t think you can be… They’re never boring. Even if they’re a trash fire, you’re like, oh man, there was a quirk in that. There was something about that that kind of spoke to me. And that level of connection, you can’t give that less than a second. That’s quite rare. That’s not even a given in the games you love, that they’ll absolutely connect with you. But sometimes you can just fit… You just really vibe with something, no matter what the quality. That’s something I attribute to a 7 out of 10. I think there is often ambition and vision in 7 out of 10s. I think they’re games that take big swings, or they maybe challenge conventions, sometimes unwisely. And those things are quite hard to pull off, which is why these games are often… Those kind of big changes or big ideas are hard to pull off, and that’s why they’re quite shaky. Looking over the games that I would classify this and the way I think about them, I often think they stick with me as moments or ideas rather than holes. I think if it was a high-quality hole, it would just be a 9 or a 10. If it was consistently excellent, it wouldn’t be a 7 out of 10. So you tend to remember the highs with these games. The 7s, they might be there as one great mechanic, or this weird set piece where that was as good as anything you’ve ever played, but it was only like that for 10 minutes. You know, it’s just like a moment, the sort of madness kind of sort of coalesced and came together. That’s sort of what I think a 7 out of 10 is. Okay, right. So it’s interesting because I think that a 7 out of 10 can still be very trashy. And I would say that some of my 7s here are quite trashy in places, and they can definitely have boring bits. They’re not always like a diamond in the rough. Sometimes they are just like a kind of like mid-budget example of something of a genre where it kind of sticks with you, but it’s a little bit imperfect and not as pricey feeling or refined as some of its sort of stable makes. I think that kind of applies to. Yeah, that’s true. So yeah, there’s some variance here, but I see what you mean. You know, I just, I don’t know, or maybe it’s specifically like the sevens I like or the sevens I connect with. I just think there’s always a sense of like a human in the mix, like a human error, you know, or a really weird creative decision, or really like determined sort of like auteur who’s sort of forcing something on it. I just feel like they aren’t smooth and easy and that’s kind of the key quality, I think. And it kind of speaks, I don’t know, that sort of speaks to me. And I can understand why some people like these games over the better produced games, because for that very reason, and there is a lot of people who would, they would say I’d rather a seven over a nine. I think that’s kind of what they’re probably getting at is like, I just, you know, I want a sort of, you know, a human connection in this thing. Yeah. Like what you have with True Crime LA. Well, no, that was more just, you know, it was like, I can’t buy, my parents won’t buy me Vice City, but this is 15 rated and I am 15, so I can go buy this from Asda. That was like, that was the level of human connection I had, Matthew. Considering it’s something which I hear a lot get mentioned and talked amongst, particularly amongst games journalists, and maybe this is more of a games journalist thing than like a wider punter thing, just because you experience so many more games on the job, and so you tend to like run into things that like people who are only buying nine out of tens wouldn’t ever encounter. You know, maybe you’re like more tuned into it, but there’s not a lot of writing on the subject online. Like, it’s quite hard, or if there is, searching for something about the concept of a seven out of ten on Google doesn’t really give you anywhere. You’d think someone would have written like a really good essay celebrating whatever this tier is. There was like a feature on Eurogamer called the AA Team, which felt like it was in that sort of ballpark, but I would argue they had Enter the Matrix, which is definitely not a seven. That’s like a six for the time and probably a four now. Or the Simpsons game, which again, I think is probably a six. But then they got Child of Light in there, which I would probably argue is like an eight for the time. It’s a pretty good game. But they got Sonic Chronicles The Dark Brother. Wow, this is a real variation in this list. Die Hard Trilogy, that’s a good one. So they did do some celebrating of this type of thing. And all the games do tend to come from the same era actually, which is probably a good segue, Matthew, into my next question, which is, do you think seven out of tens in the form we’re discussing in this episode always existed? Or is this a phenomenon more closely associated with the 3D age of games, where it’s like the volume of games coming out in the late 90s to early 00s to now just means that you had a very visible middle ground, I suppose, where this stuff would occupy. What do you think? Yeah, I think that’s true. Yeah, I definitely think this sort of emerges more in 3D. I think that’s maybe in the earlier days, as you shift into the 3D age, basically everyone’s relearning their craft and working out how new genres and new ideas are going to work in this new world. And in that process is where madness can occasionally creep in. Also, you’re just dealing with powerful machines that give you those ambitions to try something kind of crazy. I will say, though, I don’t think… This is to say that that ambition and madness didn’t exist in the 2D age. I think, if anything, maybe the natural bar for… Things were just naturally weirder back then anyway. Maybe a lower barrier to entry. Games were a stranger. Maybe what we’re reacting to in some 7 out of 10s is a continuation of that. Because so many things get super professional and super polished and super sharp in their thinking. So much thinking around games becomes quite homogenous. You get the idea that certain ideas are just agreed on by the whole industry. This is how this mechanic works. This is how that mechanic works. Often these games exist slightly outside of that. I don’t think I’ve got anything pre-3D on my list. And that isn’t saying people weren’t crazy back then. They were more crazy. Games were weird and pretty shonky. Yeah, but it’s just weird because I can’t quite explain why. But even though I’ve got pretty ample experience of the Mega Drive and the Game Boy and the 2D eras of consoles, I can’t quite equate them to the types of 7 out of 10s I’ve put in my selections. And I can’t quite figure out why. I think it might be what you say. It’s a bit weird to be like, oh, Treasure Island Dizzy is like a 7. Maybe it’s just a generational thing, but for some reason you get to 3D age and when I saw the Eurogame had Die Hard Trilogy there, I was like, yep, that is spot on. That is absolutely an interesting 7, right? It’s three different games welded into one. None of them are great. They’re all okay. But together they’re quite interesting. You know what I mean? So yeah, yeah, it’s weird. Yeah, it’s like this is not true at all. And people like scream and disagree. And that is a great thing to say ahead of a statement. But it’s almost like in the kind of pre 3D age. I don’t know. Maybe it’s like, like, this is like, isn’t it? Is there more of a clear divide between like the greats and then things which are just total shit? Like, I don’t really remember like too much like middle grand existing back then. But I guess maybe like I was only buying and getting nine out of ten games for my birthday. So, you know, well, let’s think. So I had when I had a Mega Drive, let’s think of the range of games I had. Maybe if you look at something like the Jurassic Park game on Mega Drive, like the Weathers, you could play as either a Velociraptor or Alan Grant. Those are exactly the same. Now, and the levels, I think, were basically the same, but I don’t know why they were both going through those levels. So in that game, you would play as a raptor and you could bite enemies and attack them and stuff. Then when you’re Alan Grant, you could fire little darts at them, basically, and you try your best to avoid a giant T-Rex head that would burst through the scenery. Now, that was probably a 7 out of 10, that game. It was all right. It was fine. But yeah, for some reason, I just don’t quite see… I can’t quite equate it in my head to Die Hard Trilogy, as an example of a 7. It’s just weird. I will say that the pitch of you are man or raptor, that is a very 7 out of 10 sentiment. If someone said that to me, I’m like, now I’d be like, oh yeah, that sounds like a 7. Yeah, exactly. It’s got that like, oh, that sounds weird. That sounds interesting. I kind of want to see that. I guess the only one I could think of that we had that maybe sits in there is the not great fighting game Eternal Champions, which was like a bit of a roping Mortal Kombat ripoff. But the whole thing was that everyone came from different periods of time. So it’s like the greatest warriors across time. So there was like a caveman fighting like a Chicago gangster fighting like a dude in the future who shot lasers out of his eyes. But it was very like it had stage fatalities where like on the caveman stage, like a T-Rex would come in and like bite the head off someone if you made them bump somewhere. And there was a witch trial stage where you could like burn the other character on the stake and things like that. But like it had a certain charm to it in terms of oh, these historical characters and their special moves all represent like the periods they come from. And there are these quite colourful kind of violent finishes. That has a little bit of the vibe I’m going for. Yeah, yeah, I suppose so. Like, it sounds a bit like that what Live Alive game that came out for Square Enix this year where it’s just kind of like… Maybe, actually, now maybe that is a classic SNES 7. Yeah, I’m about halfway through it. It’s like super wonky, but super endearing. Right, right, yeah. It seems like a more chaotic version of Chrono Trigger, you know what I mean? Because Chrono Trigger is actually kind of chaotic in its own way. It does take you from dinosaur times to the far future where humanity has been destroyed by a big egg monster in the sky. So yeah, but that’s definitely like a nine or a ten. That’s just too well executed, and it’s just too artful. Where I think Live Alive or Live Alive or whatever we’re calling it is a lot of it you think, oh, that’s cute, rather than, I’m having so much fun, this is so cool, but at the same time you don’t begrudge it, because it has some stinky ideas, but then they may only last 20 seconds or 20 minutes, and then they’re gone, and you’re like, well, what harm did it really do? I wouldn’t want to recommend it to everyone, but I’d recommend it to people who are kind of open to wonkier gems. Yeah, you know what’s funny though, Matthew, because not to spoil an entry on my list here, but I recently played for the first time Shadow Man. Now, I was like, okay, so it’s like a 3D game from the time, based on a comic book, and featured some story in it, actually like quite a lot of story, some slightly rough action and like, you know, all right level design and like the main character was voiced by movie trailer guy. And I just there thinking this is like the dawn of the seven. Do you know what I mean? Like the whole thing collectively is like a bit janky. It’s like an acclaimed game. It’s like just it’s like radiating pure seven out of ten energy. And yeah, you can’t help feeling like that. That I think it’s like you say that step up in presentation into 3D is just where you see that sort of like endearing ambition at work more just more obviously, you know. So yeah, I think Shadow Man definitely ticks the like enticingly interesting box. You know, reading about it at the time in like N64, you were like, wait, one of the bosses is Jack the Ripper. Like that sounds and that sounds quirky. I’m into that. Like all the bosses are famous serial killers. Oh, I definitely want to kind of that sounds dark and edgy and quirky. And it was like they sort of pitched as like imagine Zelda, but if all the bosses are serial killers, I think was basically how I thought of that game for many years. Yeah, I quite I kind of like Night Divers become like the stewards of the acclaimed seven out of tens. Like that’s the whole thing. And, you know, this is this is kind of worthy for that reason you play. And it’s like this is like legit interesting even now. Like it’s, you know, at the time, I could see why why some reviews would go a lot more overboard with praising it. But definitely in retrospect, you’re like, well, that was a seven in a in a world that had like, you know, everything from Lila Wars to Mario 64 to Ocarina of Time. This is definitely a seven, you know, but yeah, interesting stuff. But they don’t always emerge. That’s one other thing I should add is like they don’t always make themselves immediately known. Like, I think sometimes there are things which get like a total drubbing, but if you get, you know, because they’re sort of bad by the standards of the day. But if you can somehow like disconnect from that, like maybe come back to it later where where, you know, you pick it up in a sale or it is no longer like trying to represent the kind of cutting edge you can maybe enjoy what it is. Like this isn’t on my list. I’ve only played a little bit of it, but there’s like a big surge of support for that Terminator Resistance. Oh, yeah, I quite have my eye on that. Just wait for it to be cheap enough, yeah. Yeah, right, right. And so that’s a game that got like, I think it actually got like a 1 out of 10 or something on Eurogamer. Like they absolutely murdered it. Wow. Yeah, and it’s like that is like a car crash of a game. But actually now, if you go on like state like it’s positive on Steam and people are like, you know, this is not the best action game ever made, but it is probably like the best bit of Terminator fan service in a video game. And it’s, you know, it really nails that. And there’s like enough here and enough of that that I absolutely, you know, I like to, you know, like at the lower end of the scale to perhaps even love this game. So that that feels like a, you know, a seven, which maybe had to have a few years because, you know, if you come to games later, you don’t start thinking about them and like, oh, this is a 2019 game. Like you can play Terminator Resistance and its graphics aren’t like absolutely stellar. But then the graphics of like games from 2009 aren’t stellar anymore either. You know, you can just sort of play it and imagine that it’s an older thing and it somehow becomes easy with age to do that. Yeah. Also, there are, I think like in this age where there just seemed to be fewer AAA games as well. Like I’m more and more open to just I’ll play something cool from 10 years ago. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, unless I’m chasing the new thing. Maybe that’s the working games media anymore. In fact, that’s probably probably the reason. But, you know, what I’m saying is, Matthew, I’ve just added Terminator to my wishlist. So I’m going to be buying that motherfucker when it’s cheap. That’s right on my street. Yeah, I think if you could get it for like sub 20, I think you wouldn’t be cross. I think I sort of about 12 quid a few months ago. Oh, right. Yeah, I mean, yeah. All right. Well, that’s, you know, that is interesting as well, because that also feels like a game that I feel like I didn’t see many reviews of, you know. So it’s almost like it was so maybe just seen as middle of the road to the point where press dismissed it entirely, or at least some of them did. Like, I don’t feel like I saw it all over the Internet, that game. Because it was made by the people who made that terrible Rambo game. Right. Which is why I think people went, oh, it’s those guys who get like the license to something and then just sort of, you know, spaff it up the wall. But yeah, I wouldn’t have gone back to it if it hadn’t been like it’s cheerleaded a lot on Twitter by Andy on a Handy. Hamilton’s a big fan of it. And so I thought, oh yeah, I’ll give it a go. And he’s right. It’s like whatever it is, it’s not like a one out of ten. Also, aren’t those devs making a Robocop net game in the next as well? I think it’s them who’s making that. So, yeah, they’re just all they will do is make 80s licensed games. That’s it. So, yeah, a little China. That’s up next, I assume. Or Poltergeist. Pumped for killer clowns from outer space. Has anyone seen that? I don’t know. Anyway. So Matthew, we want to go through the different types of seven out of tens here to further boil down our criteria. You mean you don’t already understand it from what we’ve said? Oh dear. This is very much in the vein of the garbage crime episode that film podcast we listened to. Where it’s like, we’ve made something up, now let’s explain what it is. I think this does exist. I think our listeners get it, but it’s good to boil it down a bit more. Oh, they get it. Yeah, they do. So, what’s an example of a 7 out of 10 that ended up that way because it was meant to score higher but didn’t? Now, this is in our opinion as opposed to what everyone says, but to kick us off, I would say cyberpunk. It kind of falls into this category a little bit. And I would say multiple Assassin’s Creed games, particularly Brotherhood, which I thought was massively overrated at the time. That’s like, what if we welded a bad Facebook game to our Assassin’s Creed game and released it the next year after too? So I think like there’s some games that would not counter sevens in the way that we’re describing them. Cyberpunk is simply too expensive a game, too big a project to be an interesting seven, even though it is an interesting game. So what do you reckon, Matthew? What falls into this category in your opinion? Oh, you see, I didn’t come up with it. Let me have a quick thing. This is like the one thing I didn’t make a note for. Because I thought, oh, yes, Cyberpunk, that’s a good one. It’s funny, because at first when I saw this category, I thought, well, surely no one wants to make a seven. You know, no one sets out to make one. This sounds like, you know, all the games on this list probably wanted to be higher than that. Were all Larian’s game sevens before they made Divinity Original Sin, Matthew? Oh, you see, I haven’t played their pre-Original Sin games because I was always slightly dismissive. They were just sort of slightly Eurojenky kind of RPGs. I think they’re interesting, actually. I think, but I don’t know if they, like, I know obviously wanted to make, get great reviews. You could argue for some of like the Latin, maybe some of the later day Call of Duty’s. Yeah, I could go along with that when they just, the art of the campaign just got sidelined by nonsense. Yeah, yeah. But then there’s some ones which are like secretly alright, which may actually be like actual classic Sevens. I did toy with including the space one on my list. Oh yeah, Infinite Warfare. Infinite Warfare, but it may just be too expensive and too polished. It may actually just be a little bit too good. That’s a weird one, but like I suppose what we’re saying is the uninteresting Sevens could even include things like a Pro Evolution soccer game that people say isn’t as good as the last one. Do you know what I mean? And that’ll just get a Seven, but isn’t the Sevens we’re talking about. Yeah, okay, yeah. It’s like Splatoon 3. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that is a good example, actually. Yeah, yeah, because it’s just another entry in the game, so it ends up getting a slightly lower score from you at least. That’s where I think what I was trying to say that not every Seven is a Seven. There’s a particular energy. There are Sevens which just fit in the score bracket, and then there are ones which actually have the good time device. Wii Sports is a Seven that’s not an interesting Seven. It’s just a Seven, I would say. What do you reckon? Yeah, yeah, it’s… I’d save my Eights in a bar for Wii Sports. It’s maybe too iconic to be a Seven. It’s maybe an Eight. Well, just because enough people have played it, it’s got to be an Eight. Well, it’s absolutely classic pick up and play, and there is magic in that. I suppose for that vine alone of that kid falling off the swing to the Wii bowling, that alone means it’s an Eight. Yeah, there’s… I don’t know, that’s too tied up with happy NGamer memories for me to throw it completely under the bus. Yeah, what about Link’s Crossbow training, Matthew? Oh, that’s not a set, that’s… Maybe there’s a bit of revisionism going on, and people are trying to say that’s a Seven, but that’s like a Five. That’s just not interesting enough. Yeah, okay, that’s good. We don’t have to spend any more time on that one. But yeah, I think that’s like, when a game’s meant to get an Eight, and it ends up getting a Seven, that’s not what we’re talking about, basically. Yes. Okay, so which series are perpetual Seven out of Tens, Matthew? When you just said that last sentence, by the way, in my head, it started singing that to Batsamore, when it was meant to get an Eight, but it actually got a Seven, that’s a Seven. But anyway, that’s pretty good. Maybe we can cut that together at the end, I don’t know. So yeah, which series are perpetual Sevens, Matthew? Not to upset a big take you had later in this podcast. I think you’ve discussed before. Yeah, I could land that big take here. Yeah, I think it probably goes here, doesn’t it? I’ll start with the less spicy one, which I think is fair. I think the Warriors series. Oh yeah, I thought you meant the Warriors by Rockstar and about to kick off, that’s definitely not… Oh no, the Warriors from Rockstar, that’s legit good. I think the Warriors games are like, maybe in some of their Nintendo crossovers, are beginning to knock on the door of Ape. Yeah, I’m with you on that. But they are just dumb, hypnotic fun, which are like a little bit ropey, but you get into the sort of rhythm of killing a million dudes every 20 minutes and there’s something very kind of relaxing about that. I’d say that’s like a classic 7 series. That’s a series where it’s like, I would say it was a 6, has graduated to a 7. Like an inadequate pet that surprises you one day. Your dog’s just like, oh yeah, now that they fetched now, for four years it wasn’t able to for some reason. Your dog fights off 500 muggers in the park at once. With only three legs, you know. Yeah, that’s a few of these. I didn’t know you were capable of this. That’s Hyrule War and his age of calamity right there. So the spicy take, and I know it’s not true, and I have aired this before, is that definitely to begin with, I wondered if the Yakuza series was the ultimate seven. And that isn’t true now. I think they are just too legit. And I’d really struggle to pinpoint where the transition happens. It’s probably early on, maybe four, five. But I think the early Yakuza have this sort of… Basically, I don’t think the fighting systems in them were ever good enough. And we talked about that in the Yakuza episode, which was a big black mark against them. But I love the world. I loved the story and the characters and the weirdness of it. But it’s the weirdness which has definitely emerged more clearly over the years. And they’ve gotten really good at leaning into that. And the modern games are like nines for me. They are surrealist, genius in places. But I think those earlier games are like, oh, this is really cool, but you have to stomach quite a lot to be a big Yakuza guy. I think it has a lot of the personality of a seven as well. Again, that may sound strange to people, but what I mean is it’s just so memorably silly and strange that maybe sometimes some stranger sevens might have more of that energy. But I would say that Yakuza Zero is a pretty firm eight. Maybe some of these more recent ones are built with that much nicer engine they’ve built. Maybe they’re even closer to a proper blockbuster that has a lot of that weird stuff in them. Even then, they’re almost like the little seven that could. Because it still has the kind of, not rough edges, but the fact that a lot of it isn’t voice acted. They have these very weird, surreal comic side missions that kind of play out with static text. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know that this stuff probably couldn’t land if you tried to perform it with a person. But if you just leave it to the player to fill in the gaps, this stuff really, really works. But that probably came from a budget limitation to begin with. It just knows itself so well, Yakuza. It knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s too clever and too refined within its daftness to not be actually good. That’s why it’s just not true. There was a point I think this was true, but now I can’t do it. I played the original Yakuza, and I wouldn’t have called that more than a 7. I think every upgrade it’s got in presentation and ambition has been good for it. The original Yakuza, I think, is quite obvious when you play Kiwami that it’s not that good. It’s just okay in comparison to the more recent ones. So, yeah, I’ve got some perpetual… Sorry, go on. I’ve got some perpetual 7s for you, Matthew. Earth Defense Force. That’s like shoot lots of flying ants and aliens and all kinds of random bullshit. Really good at what it does, but what it does has a cap on it in terms of how much joy you can extract from that idea. I very much enjoyed the PS Vita one they released. I reviewed that and I think I did give it a 7. I had a good time. A couple more for you. The infamous series on PS3 I would say is pure 7 territory, sort of like off-brand superhero games, but made pretty well by the… I’ve forgotten their name now. Do you remember their name? Sucker Punch. Yeah, Sucker Punch. In-house Sony game like we’ve discussed before, had ridiculous moral choices where it’s like, there’s a bridge full of people in danger. Save them or kill them all. It’s that kind of stuff. They really are that silly in the first one. The second one, they’re a little bit better, but they’re still pretty naff. But the actual cities are well-made and the powers feel pretty good. They always give you the ability to sort of scoot around on cables around the city, like you’re using a skateboard or something. Something that basically you would see in Sunset Overdrive a bit later on, which itself is probably an interesting 7-2, right Matthew? Or is that an 8, actually? I think, again, that’s just a little bit too polished. I was actually just about to throw in the pre-Insomniac Spider-Man games. Oh, right. I know some people think Spider-Man 2 is an actual 9 in legit good, but it had the one trick, admittedly the only trick Spider-Man has, which is swinging around the city, but it was pretty shit, I think, outside of that. The side missions and the filler of that world are about as bad as an open world filler gets, which is why I never bought the 9 out of 10 for that. Well, I would say at the time I probably would have said it was an 8, because it had some very frustrating combat in it. Like you say, the boss battle with Doc Ock, we had to dodge all of his pulsating attacks coming out of him. It was an absolute fucking nightmare to do, because it was impossible to make him move precisely indoors. I mean, Spider-Man in the world is always a rough sell anyway. But I think that I would argue at the time, if you were a fan of Spider-Man in any way, shape or form, and we were talking the peak years of Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, the best superhero movies ever, arguably, particularly the second one, you just had to see it, you had to play it, you had to see what they’d built. And I think that that, combined with the fact that you… I would say that the Bruce Campbell tutorial tips were doing a lot of heavy lifting of making that world feel like it had more character than it did. So I think at the time, a nine too high, but an eight for sure. In retrospect, a seven, that’s fair Matthew. Okay, so we like auctioned it down to a seven. Compromised, you have the days behind closed doors in talks who did it. We have a score, it’s like we have a new pope. But they’re not… That you have to kill among two other fake bodes. Like the smoke, Spider-Man is a seven. Yeah, so there’s also… But I wouldn’t say all of them were sevens, Matthew. Ultimate Spider-Man, probably a six, not as good as Spider-Man 2. Shattered Dimensions? I’ve not played that one still. I did it up on eBay, but I’ve not gone for it. Have you played that one? No, the only thing I know about Shattered Dimensions, and I was told this story by someone else, I don’t know if it’s true, but someone went to see a preview of this game, and I’ve ruined the punchline by saying what the game is. And during the middle of the presentation, the developers shit themselves. It’s the story that’s told to me, but it works much better if you don’t know the game, because then you say, and you’ll never guess what it was, Shattered Dimensions. Oh, right. Oh, God, that’s terrible, though. I can’t even remember who told me that, but for about a year I told that anecdote to a lot of people. Well, I’m pleased we can’t, the name of the developer has been kept private, because they deserve that. You know, that’s… I think he had an upset tummy. Yeah, that’s good. He’s like food poisoning and sort of shat himself, which, you know, can happen. Yeah, what can you do? I fear that happening literally every day of my life. Really? Yeah, I’m always worrying about shitting myself, yeah. Just like having a meeting. What an affliction. I’ll just start shitting uncontrollably, do you know what I mean? At least for this podcast, I go, Matthew, I need to disappear for five minutes, and I have done that before, like at least once for one shit. Sometimes I’ve wondered if you’ve muted yourself during a long monologue, and you’re just off doing something. I’ll go and get some water, but I’m not off having a shit while you’re talking about fucking links are waiting for something. We shouldn’t talk too much about this. It’s behind the paywall, so it’s fine. Yeah, the listeners here, they already know what they’ve gotten themselves into. They’re paid for it now. So yeah, I did have some other examples of sevens, actually. Ace Combat, that’s like a seven series. Also a friend of the show, Jay Bayliss, told me he’s been plain-pilled by watching Top Gun Maverick, and so he’s got massively into Ace Combat. Plain-pilled is a great term that really makes sense. I’ve got the new one, the latest one to play from a couple of years ago, because my friend Cyrus was saying, like this game, I think he played, he watched Top Gun Maverick and then went through like a huge plane thing and liked it so much that he bought it for me on Steam. He was like, you’ve got to play this fucking Ace Combat game. So yeah, I think that’s happened to a lot of people. Top Gun’s just gone to everyone’s heads. It’s like just the best bit of military propaganda I’ve ever seen, just phenomenal work. I thought it looked really scary, like in those planes. That’s the message I took away from, like I would die, before I even got in that thing, I’d die. One of those planes would run me over or something. I watched it and saw Bill Pullman’s character fuck it with trying to target that ground bit. And then I thought, oh, I could be in this academy, because I’d be that guy. Do you know what I mean? Like I’d be the buffoon in glasses who doesn’t know what he’s doing. That’s my energy. I’m a bit going to fuck up that I could inject some peril into Top Gun Labyrinth. I could also operate as comic relief in that scenario, so that’s good for me. You’re just shitting yourself. The other thing is Matthew, arguably the first Spider-Man game on PS1, that was a good, probably a seventh of the time, probably an eighth of the time, to be honest. It was pretty stylish and had different… There’s a long history of people overscoring Spider-Man games. Okay, then. There’s more perpetual seventh series. They don’t all come to mind, but Assassin’s Creed, not quite. They spent too much money on them. Sometimes you’ve got knowledge they’ve made an eight. Okay, good. What about Banjo-Kazooie, Matthew? Is that a seventh series? Again, it’s just a bit too polished. I don’t think it’s a nine, which some people would say is heresy enough, but it’s just no way near Barry’s 64 tier. But it’s just all those rare games. I don’t think they necessarily made a seventh. Jet Force Gemini? I love that you hate Jet Force Gemini so much. Because honestly, as a kid, reading about an official Nintendo magazine, I was so up for it. I was like, a rare shooter, I love GoldenEye, sci-fi game, bring it. And then playing it as a 33-year-old man and being like, you literally can’t even control your aiming in this. And yeah, that’s it. I think it’s just because, if there’s one issue I have with that rare worship, which I think is fine for the most part, because I don’t think I even like a lot of those N64 games more than you do, is that all of it gets lumped in as this classic era of rare. And it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, different teams worked on this stuff. And Jet Force Gemini shat its pants. We just have to acknowledge that. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, OK, moving on then. There’s a lot of pan shitting talk in this episode. You just put that in my brain, for fuck’s sake. Sorry, I don’t mean to. OK, good. So what’s a game everyone says is a seven, but is actually a six, Matthew? This is spicy. Well, the first one is Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. But I don’t know anyone would be too upset about that. Well, it’s just it’s just a it’s very I think some people gave it like 80s and said it’s a bit of a wonky eight back in the time. And but then I think it’s been talked down. And some people who I respect who like seven out tens also like would say Billy Hatcher is one. And I just think it’s I think it’s just too bad, too bad. Like I bought it and it’s it’s my biggest GameCube purchase regret for sure. So, you know, I haven’t got a very sophisticated argument against it. I just thought it was a bad 3D platformer. I think Excite Trucks and Excite Bots are not a seven out. I think they’re worse than a seven out of ten. Right. And again, like they’re very culty Nintendo titles. And I know that they’re loved by some people who I know listen to this podcast. But I just think they’re just vague, spongy and characterless. Excite Excite Truck is much better. Excite Bots is an absolute travesty of a game. It basically just adds all this zany bullshit. It thinks, oh, this is more characterful. This is like Nintendo. And it’s like, this is so wide on the mark. I’m amazed Nintendo ever deemed that acceptable or that’s something they’d want to publish or put their name on. Like, honestly, we dodged such a bullet in Europe that they didn’t release it here. Terrible game. Terrible game. Yeah. Here’s one for you, Matthew. Gravity Rush. Everyone says that’s like a seven or maybe a bow. That’s like a six, that game. Like, the movement is not satisfying, I would say. Like, that’s not a super good game, if you ask me. But it’s oodly new. This just feels like you’re still digging at my draft. Oh yeah, I lost the PSP at draft, didn’t I? That was a bummer. XCOM was a bad pick. Yeah. That was definitely the worst pick in my draft. Like, that’s the game I liked. Whatever I said in that episode was probably a lie. Yeah, I’ve probably maybe played like two hours of that game tops and been like, this is hard work, isn’t it? I just don’t get the mechanics that’s not satisfying of just flinging that character around. Yeah. I would also say that there’s quite a lot of love for those remasters they did of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro. I would say I’d probably consider them sixes by today’s standards. They’re like five or six out of ten 3D platforming heroes and forever will be. It doesn’t matter how much polish you slap on them. At the time, I could totally see why a Crash Bandicoot would be like an eight to someone. No, I honestly think if you had a PlayStation, that was pretty… And it was like the mid-90s. What else were you going to do? Watch fucking Brookside. Go around your friend’s house who had an N64 and play a real 3D platformer. Oh, yeah. Learn what the genre is actually about and go, oh, I get it. I just assumed that they didn’t play that game, the people who gave it eight. Oh, here’s one. Here’s one for you. Original 360 Prey. That’s like a six out of ten. And I think people would call that an interesting seven because it’s got all that quite offensive Native American stuff in it. But I think that’s like a six. I played that. I was like not particularly impressed by it. Yeah, that didn’t do it for me. You sometimes see some takes of like, oh, the new Prey is like a really boring take after the exciting old Prey. And it’s like, if you would rather old Prey over new Prey, I mean, there’s no helping it, I’m afraid. Yeah. I think like Prey is, the modern Prey is borderline a seven out of ten. Like it’s a, it’s a, I think it’s like an eight. It is an eight, I think. It’s like too polished and good in places. But it’s like, you know, it’s got a bit of the old profile of a seven, I would say. But it’s definitely, yeah, but original Prey, yeah, I’m good, thanks. There’s a little bit of that, yeah. Okay, Matthew, last up before we get to a lift. So do people still make the sort of seven out of tens we talk about in this podcast? If so, what are some recent examples? Your Terminator game feels perfect, really, but what else do you think there is? Yeah, that’s, yeah. I, that’s still like, it’s got a PS5 upgrade, but that’s still like an end of the last generation game. It’s hard, I don’t, it’s a little hard to see where, like, the 7s are going to be this generation, because things are just too, so expensive to make. Yeah. The space for it, like, you know, like that thing with the Eurogamer column, like a lot of these games do come from the kind of AA space, which just doesn’t really exist anymore. You know, there was a time where you might have said, like, you might have thought, oh, a 3D action adventure from Focus, Home Interactive, that’s got a classic 7 territory, but then, like, Plague Tale was surprisingly good, you know? Like, that should have been a 7, but actually it’s an 8. Yeah, I haven’t played a new one for a while, that’s for sure. I’ve got one for you. So I think Square Enix is still doing a whole bunch of these. And Stranger Paradise. Stranger Paradise, yeah. Perfect example of a 7, right? Like, ridiculous tone, actually quite good mechanics under it, though, and sort of, like, quite a messy game overall, but just, like, quite easy to love and go to bat for, I think. Oh, I’ve only played, like, a couple of hours of it, but the fact that in those couple of hours you get all the mad writing and the guy shouting about chaos, but you also get, like, Frank Sinatra in my way, and you also get, like, execution attacks on, like, beloved Final Fantasy enemies, which are, like, quite, you know, it’s like, wow, he’s really murdering these things, which you’ve only ever kind of killed in the softest of ways in the past. Yeah, a flam or whatever, yeah. It’s very odd. Definitely, like, just the Frank Sinatra thing, but, like, that to me is like, when I read that, I was like, that’s probably a seven. Like, that’s the kind of weirdness I’m talking about. That’s the kind of swing of, like, someone has thought that would be so cool to have that in there, and they’re right, it is cool to have that in there. Yeah, I got a lot of time for that. I was checking that master costume as well, like, a million dollars. Like, it cannot have been cheap, right? That’s the amazing thing. You’re like, I can’t, that’s the thing I’m reacting to, is like, I cannot believe you spent this much money on a swing like this, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. So, coming from there, I think also, like, a lot of, like, the stuff that you see THQ Nordic publish has a lot of seven out of ten energy when you’re bringing back, like, you know, the Destroy All Humans games, for example, you know what I mean? Yeah, Biomutant might be a seven. Right, yeah, yeah. That’s a classic, like, seven profile kind of game. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess they’ve got some other… Saints Row could have been one, but it’s just not good enough, I don’t think. Yeah, there’s, I think, a game called Tempest Fall, I think it’s called, it’s like a Command and Conquer riff. That might be a seven in waiting. They do happen, they’re just happening less frequently, and not from the same publishers they used to. Although I do like the Screnics are still like, we’ll make Final Fantasy XVI and VII Remake, those will be like the highest profile things, but then we’ll keep like the Valkyrie series going, which has got to have a tiny audience, you know, really, or like, you know, the Diofield Chronicle, which is like, you know, firmly in that sort of mid-tier kind of game. Powerful, seven energy radiating from Forspoken. Oh, yeah, yeah, but it looks like they spent like so much money on it. That’s the thing. It doesn’t matter. It’s got… The big giveaway there is talking arm-bangle. You’re like, that’s… Ah, yeah, that’s a seven. Whatever else you do, that makes it a seven. Basically, like no eight would have a sassy talking arm-bangle in it. We’ll see. I don’t want to judge based on a few trailers. Okay, Matthew, then I think we’ve kind of isolated what the concept is there, I think. Or at least I hope we have. But if we haven’t, the next section where we talk about our best 7 out of 10 games will. So, should we take a quick break and come back with Alice? Let’s do it. Welcome back to the podcast. So, the best seven out of ten games, you’ve got a whole bunch of them here. I would say don’t expect the same level of analysis you maybe get with our different games or different year episodes, partly because the games don’t always warrant it. They’re interesting, but we don’t need to go over them in excruciating detail. Plus, I want to fire through quite a high volume of them, Matthew, as I’m sure you do too. So, why don’t you kick off with one of yours? I’m going to kick off with Stranglehold, which is the midway Max Payne-alike with involvement from John Woo and Chow Yun Fat. Rips off Max Payne in lots of ways. It’s like very trashy Max Payne. I actually think it’s more fun than Max Payne 3, having replayed that for our Max Payne episode. Is that a horrible take? We agree that that was good, didn’t we, Max Payne 3 on the replay? Yeah, but I’ve been playing a bit of this this week and it’s like, this is more fun. This is more obviously fun. I think that was, I think Max Payne 3 is a better structured game, like this, this kind of, so what have you put in brackets here, Matthew, because I think this is important. Oh, it’s one of the greatest game demos of all time. Right, yeah, that’s the thing. I think it has like a great opening level and then just trails off big time. Whereas the one thing you can say about Max Payne 3 is that some of its most memorable moments are quite deep into a quite lengthy game. Yeah, so I don’t know if I could stand behind a take. Okay, but well, here’s my thinking behind it, is that the thing this does differently to Max Payne 3 is that Max Payne 3’s got like quite impressive forward momentum. This, because it’s a bit cheaper and doesn’t want to build massive levels, is a lot more content to lock you in a big room with like a hundred enemies swarming in and you basically have to fight there for five minutes. Which design-wise isn’t as sophisticated, but it does mean you get to absolutely wreck the place in a way that I don’t think you do in Max Payne 3. I think Max Payne 3’s naturally higher difficulty and lower enemy count. It’s almost… Max Payne 3 is almost too sophisticated to let you truly just go to town on a place. This is like its entire selling point. It’s definitely like mechanically rougher than Max Payne 3. In this, there isn’t like a fixed bullet time. It’s when you do a dive and if you are aiming at someone, it then goes into bullet time. Or if you do any acrobatic action while you are aiming at someone, it will go into bullet time. But like the actual going in and out of those acrobatic actions is like way like sloppier. It’s a lot more kind of older game animation. Like you can see him transitioning into these canned animations. He’s not the kind of organic jumble of limbs that kind of like crawl up in a ball because you smack him into a corner, which is what happens in Max Payne 3. Like Max Payne 3 is definitely more sophisticated, but I honestly like just tearing through a few levels of this. I was like, this is great fun. This is like trashy great fun. And I fucking love that the Unlock shop in this is run by John Woo. Like you go in there and it’s a model of John Woo talking to you and you buy concept art from him. That’s like massive seven out of 10. That’s the most seven out of 10 thing you can possibly imagine. One of the things I bought as well, it’s like it’s got prototype footage where they basically mocked up this game and tested it in PsyOps. So there’s like, you can see what PsyOps looks like kind of repurposed basically into what Stranglehold would become. So I like that Stranglehold is like a seven out of 10 game that was prototyped in a seven out of 10 game. That’s quite a magic combo for me. Yeah, yeah. So I was sort of like trying to figure out who the developer of this was. Was it what would become NetherRealm? Is it that same developer? They’re listed as Midway Studios, Chicago. Which you would think is what NetherRealm is. And Tiger Hill, who I’m not aware of. Yeah, no idea who they are. I wonder if that’s like some brief, like attempt for John Woo to have a video game company or something, I’m not sure. Well, they were in charge of the story and characters. Okay, right. Which makes you think maybe that is the John Woo bit of it. Right, yeah, like a film production company or something. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I started playing this at the time and kind of enjoyed it. I was actually quite relieved recently that in 2019, actually, GOG relisted this. You can actually buy this right now. That’s what I’ve been playing on, PC. Yeah, and I think like, you know, we sort of talk about preservation and stuff, but this is exactly the kind of game that people don’t normally preserve. Yeah, yeah. It’s got a film star in it and a director in it and likenesses and stuff like that. And you know, it’s really easy for games like this to just fade away. So I actually really respect the hustle of GOG. That’s like them doing great work. So well done to them on that. Yeah. Preserving a classic seven out of 10. I agree. It is a classic seven out of 10. There was quite a funny quote on his Wikipedia page about what John Woo actually did where the developers were talking about like, oh, there’s two things he really intervened on. One was he didn’t like a story idea that involved the export of body parts. So they dropped that from the story. And he once suggested that the enemy design should have more Western clothing. You’re like, thanks John Woo. Here’s a question. Do you think John Woo did more work on Stranglehold or that issue of Alex Semi edited? I don’t know, we’d have to ask John T. Did he edit the flat plan? You know what I mean? Like how much did he, did he drop a house ad in that last minute and like squash one half of you down into a quarter page? Broke the contents page. Signed off the disk, emailed Fran to say the PDF’s ready. I do love the guest edit. Is there any more bullshit in media than guest edited? It’s like, TechRadar was guest edited by what’s-his-face, who made Valerian, that director. The fifth element guy. Yeah, that’s it. And it’s like, what did he do? Did he like update the best SSDs, SEO article that day? What is it he did? He came in and bollocked everyone because their best Frigid article had slipped from the number one spot on Google. And they’re like, whoa, fuck me, Lou Besson, you’re really into this stuff. Yeah, that’s funny. So yeah, that’s a load of nonsense, but amazing. Well, the thing is, I think when you track the history of the seven out of 10 as well, Matthew, like a big event that affects this is that Midway, you know, they had Mid in the title, they disappear. That is a, what a sophisticated take. That’s the analysis people pay four pound 54 a month. They disappear and then THQ disappears, right? And so- Yeah, that guts like a huge, huge part of the seven out of 10 market for sure. Yeah, so like this is, you know, when we talk about why video game consolidation is maybe not always a good thing, like, you know, this is a very different age for this stuff, but you had mid-level publishers dying out and then another publisher in Konami just losing interest in video games for whatever reason. So, yeah, that’s part of why this dies out a little bit, which is, you know, why I’m very sort of like pro Square Enix making this stuff. That’s a good one to kick us off, Matthew. Should I go with my one next? I was gonna go with Shadow Man, but we kind of covered that, didn’t we? Yeah. Yeah, okay, so I’ll go with Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine, a game I played this week. And so this landed at an interesting point. I think now Warhammer has never been more popular because millennials are buying them, and millennials, if they’re anything like me, they spent their youth looking at this stuff, thinking, I wish I had the money to buy this stuff, become an adult, and when they have disposable income, they’re, unsurprisingly, the biggest market for this stuff. And I think that this is, over time, steadily led to a lift in the types of games that are being made. So Dawn of War, I personally think, was a big breakthrough game, and Dawn of War 2 was excellent as well. But you never had this more console-focused third or first-person game. You had Warhammer 40,000 Fire Warrior, which is notoriously not very good. But it’s sort of like a meaty action game. You got to play a space marine who were, arguably, the most iconic race of that universe. And this game came along from Relic, the Dawn of War developers, but made by a smaller team, I believe. And they did it. They were like, we’re going to have the story of these space marines. You’ll be fighting orcs, then later chaos in the game. And it’s a really satisfying, sort of almost dynasty warriors, like mash up a load of dudes, sort of 70% melee to 30% shooting kind of game where you’ll be doing these endless finishes to replenish your health and keep the kind of combos going. And it was a really satisfying meaty take on that universe. I think its limitations are most apparent probably in the budget really, in the kind of repetition. I actually interviewed Philip Ball, I think it was his name. He worked on Dawn of War III, and he worked at Relic. And he told me that the budget for this game was just tiny. It was just such a small production. It was dying days of THQ time. So they didn’t have loads of cash, but they really made something quite memorable. And I played it this week on my Steam Deck, because you might expect to get a classic sort of Steam Deck game again. Really, really enjoyable still. And they’re making a sequel to it. I can see why. So I think this is like an iconic seven out of 10. Do you want to play this one, Matthew? Oh, I actually have one. I must admit, I’m kind of allergic to all things Warhammer 40K. Like it’s just so not my jam that I don’t even know where to start with some of it. Yeah. I sort of like, I can’t really see you reading like, you know, sort of about the Horus heresy instead of like Japanese crime fiction. I just can’t see them getting on top of another. That just doesn’t seem like a likely scenario to me. So I can say, you know, some people are gonna miss out on it. You must have had friends as a kid who loved this stuff. You just missed out. Yeah, we were, I had Warhammer as a kid and my friends were in Warhammer, but we weren’t, you couldn’t be into both. Like who had the money to be into both? So yeah, we were sort of fantasy kids and this just always escaped me. It’s annoying because like all my peers seem to have been really into it and seem to have a great time with it and have now, like half of them seem to have launched quite, you know, author careers off the back of knowing about Warhammer 40K. So, you know, well done for them, I guess is what I’m saying. Okay, a great take. So yeah, I look forward to seeing the sequel to this because it’s a really great stab at something that I think has remained perpetually popular. Like people still talk about this game, but it is firmly a seven. Like there’s not that next level of sophistication to the combat. I would say the presence of Mark Strong voicing the main character gives it big seven out 10 energy. Oh yeah. Yeah, spot on really. But yeah, a beloved seven, definitely one of my favorite Warhammer games still. So what’s your next one, Matthew? A side note, maybe there is a system to be made of like, if this person is in your game, this is the score it probably is. Because there’s some talent, it just has that energy to it. I mean, it’s got to be fairly limited, right? Like, I mean, are we talking Chow Yun Fat and Mark Strong? Who else have we got? John Woo. Well, I could think of other talent. Were they to crop up? I would expect them to crop up in a certain kind of game. Like, if Anton Lesser was in your game, I would assume it was a seven. That is so specific. Okay, really good. But the thing is, some- I love Anton Lesser. Well, some actors appear in all kinds of stuff, right? So, you know, Nolan North is in many more sevens than he is nines and tens, but he’s Nolan North. Yeah, that’s hard. Professional voice actors makes this very difficult. Yeah, face voice actors. But celeb talent. Yeah, yeah, maybe that is the way to do it. I’ll give that some more thought. Cold Winter, which is black if black was actually fun. Black is not a good game. I played it recently. I was not impressed. People were so hyped for black and they really talked it up. And it got like nines and things, I think because it came from Criterion and that they were obviously like everyone’s favourites because of burnout. Black is hugely overrated. This is hugely underrated, which is why it’s a good comparison point. Quite a late in the day PS2 shooter made by Swordfish Studios, who went on to make 50 cent Blood on the Sand. Nice. Classic Seven Territory. They’re vintage. Vintage. They’ve got good form. It’s really like sub bond stuff. I couldn’t tell you the story or tell you anything about the character in this. Like some kind of agent who the government splits from and then has to go around the world chasing down a megalomaniac. But very much in the vein of like that the PS2 generation first person shooter, which I’m kind of quietly fond of, very linear, going through lots of like conveniently interior kind of corridor areas. But also spliced in with some of the late in the day obsession with like physics, which came in because of like Half-Life 2 and everything. So it’s like the PS2 version of that. Like you can flip over like most of the scenery in this game to make cover and tables and things, which just gives it a bit of like a quirky movement, for sure. Also incredibly violent in a way that I really like. Like proper heads disintegrating when you hit them with shotguns and limbs coming off and hats coming off and then things bouncing around because of physics. You can shoot someone in the head and their hat would sadly roll across the floor and things like that, which I think is just… I’m very, very fond of these games. You know, the kind of the GoldenEye era, I guess. But like some of those classics are like so ropy to go back to and so unplayable. I actually think games from this period are still just about holed up, which is why, you know, if you can find a copy of what is quite an obscure PS2 shooter now, I’d actually really recommend it. Did you play this one? No, I didn’t. I mean, God, that’s like the most, one of the top five worst names for a game ever, surely. Like it evokes nothing, Cold Winter. It’s whole spiel was that it was meant to be, cause it’s, I think you’re quite sweary, Scottish guy is the main character, and it’s meant to be kind of like, it’s the anti bond. It’s like really tough and straight talking. It’s very like, you know, I’m a real, you know, fuck these fucking terrorists and all this kind of stuff. And you’re like, that is just very dated enough now. Everything about it looks like it’s gonna be terrible and generic, but it fundamentally like feels good to shoot people in this game, and they react in really horrible, gory ways. Like it’s almost Soldier of Fortune levels of violence, but kind of mixed up, you know, you can just sort of sail through it. It’s just a very easy killing guys, like not crazy ambitious, but kind of a bit physics-y, a bit fun. Yeah, it’s sort of, I get this confused in my head with Project Snowblind from around the same time. Oh, they got very, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can see why in the names, I just missed that. A similar box art as well, I think. Even like things like that just, yeah, really like phoned in kind of packaging. Yeah, just, yeah, maybe more love needed in the kind of title, but I’m prepared to believe this is an interesting seven. Yeah, it just bugs me, because like Black lives on on like EA Play Game Pass. You can play Black on your Xbox now, and it’s just so flat. And at the time, everyone was like, this is really in your face. It’s not an exciting shooter. Big deal about bullet physics, when I played it back, I just didn’t really even notice some of that stuff. And I feel like you could say, oh yeah, it’s an old game now, so you go back and play it, you won’t have the same context, et cetera, et cetera. But we’ve just talked about Call of Duty 2 on this podcast. That is a contemporary of Black. It came out before it, and it is tons better when you go back and play it on a replay. So yeah, I found it super flat, too. I was kind of surprised that that was a big deal. But yeah, I wouldn’t comment too much on that Codemasters thing, because I think that did have some other issues along the way. Yeah, but I can just remember people were like, I was ashamed that wasn’t good from the makers of Black. But listen, I don’t want the Black chat to distract from the fact that Cold Winter is quietly very good. I played this game in the weirdest way. I used to share a flat with Leon Hurley, who was at the time on official PlayStation 3 magazine. And he had a promo copy lying around in one of those like jewel cases. It didn’t have any instructions or anything. And I was like, oh, what’s that? And he said, oh, it’s kind of shit, but I kind of like it. And then I played it and was like, oh, this is exactly, it’s exactly right. It is kind of shit, but it’s also really good fun. It’s just classic seven. And I found it in a classic seven out of 10 way as well. Just a jewel case down the back of the sofa. That’s where all seven out of 10 should be found. You know this is a seven, Matthew, because Edge gave it a six. So. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. Good stuff. Right, so my next one, and this is kind of a sub-genre of games. We can debate that, but 007 Nightfire. Now, this is the furthest back I’ve gone to the PS2 era. I had to pick this because I must have discussed this on our James Bond episode, which was like what, second or third episode we did? Some of them have the least popular of all time, famously. And me and my friend Andrew became obsessed with the multiplayer mode in this. In this, not Goldeneye, which he owned, we chose to play this over Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, I don’t know why, a sickness. Nothing to do in 2005. And basically, what you could do was you could set a timer for each multiplayer map and you could basically just play for like an hour if you wanted to, and it would keep ticking up the score. And the game was, it wasn’t competitive, it was NPCs versus the two of us, but we were quietly, silently competing to kill as many NPCs as we could. So you get to the end of an hour, we both have like red eyes from not blinking for an hour, and it would be like, I don’t know, like 400 kills versus 350 kills or something. And it became so like, so turbulent and weirdly tense that eventually we just had to stop doing it because we got too into it. But that was a good, I think that was a good like, you know, in comparison to obviously GoldenEye is like a nine or a 10 for the time. Like it’s a, you know, a seminal shooter and such a great sort of like recreation of that film’s iconography. It kind of like, it almost takes iconography to a new level, I think. It just gives you this reverence for it when you watch the film back, you see bits that you recognize. Nightfire featured Pierce Brosnan’s likeness, but not his voice, I believe. Basically, it’s a kind of like a reasonably okay first person shooter game, also with some driving sections. That’s how EA did a lot of their Bond games. But the multiplayer would do the thing where they chucked in loads of rando villains from the past films, including Old Job, yes, who had his hat and was completely unbalanced because he could do an instant kill. The AI was very average, had quite a fun level, a fun map, where you could get on these cable cars that go around the map. But the AI was so bad, they didn’t even know how to get in the cable cars, which was quite funny. And then you had an option where you could turn on explosive barrels. Do you think, oh, that’s exciting? All it would do is place two explosive barrels at a fixed point in the map that no one would ever go near. Just really kind of mediocre stuff. Why would you? Yeah, but so memorable. Had a lot of similar guns to GoldenEye, like the Moonraker laser. Really satisfying grenade launchers. Absolutely chaotic hit boxing on the explosive weapons where sometimes if you were stood right next to a grenade, you just wouldn’t be damaged by it. Just like, by today’s standards, would definitely be a five or a six, but for the time, yeah, just something about this era of Bond games is, at its best, seven out of 10. And I think this was the best of them that I played at the time. I preferred this to everything or nothing, which I thought was too repetitive, despite having the actual James Bond in it. And yeah, and also Agent Under Fire, which precedes this, which didn’t have the multiplayer against the AI. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I think so. Maybe this is what I was getting at a little bit with Cold Winter, is just this sort of era of the… I have a fondness for these shooters. I mean, these were like quite expensive blockbuster-y games for their time as well. With the film license and everything tying in. Yeah, I think they’re all right. I wouldn’t include The World Is Not Enough in this. I don’t think that’s very good on the N64. And I’m pretty sure like, some time while we’ve been doing this podcast, someone has said something wild about that game. Like, I can’t believe you picked GoldenEye and not that in the draft or something. And me being amazed when we find that there was one like, Twine super fan. Yeah. Surely that person was having a laugh. Surely. I don’t know. I don’t know. They talked it up. World Is Not Enough is bad. Cause we bought it thinking it would take over from GoldenEye and then we just went back to GoldenEye. Or Perfect Dark, or whatever we were playing at the time. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a solid seven territory. None of these games live on, right? Unless you have the original console. Yeah, basically, they’re just all, they weren’t worth preserving. I mean, how? They haven’t even made GoldenEye able to play still on modern formats for whatever reason. So yeah, this feels like doom to history, but there’s definitely like a whole era here of Bond games and they were quite flawed, but this was the best of them, I think. This had some like legit good multiplayer maps, I think. Okay, what’s your next one, Matthew? Castlevania 64. Oh, I’m excited to hear you talk about this. Yeah, so I think I’ve mentioned this like once or twice before, maybe on the N64 draft, I was toying with it for Wildcard. Now, I’ve got to admit, I haven’t replayed this since I played it back in the day, and a lot of my fondness for it is just sort of snowballing nostalgia. But I think this is a real interesting curio in that it basically comes out at the same time that Symphony of the Night is blowing everyone’s socks off and basically cementing what Castlevania is gonna be. But I love that there’s another team basically trying to drag Castlevania into 3D and working out how Castlevania is gonna work in 3D. And because of that, it’s a super experimental game. Like, it’s not a mega early N64 game. I think it comes in about like three, four years into the console. But it has all the ingredients. You’re working towards the castle, there’s classic enemies, classic bosses in there. But it’s just full of like weird quirks, like a skeleton on a motorbike that you fight quite near the beginning. And then a giant skeleton boss. It’s like the first boss in this game, like this huge gate opens and this sort of 20 foot skeleton comes striding out. And it’s just really like memorable, impactful stuff. A big portion of this game is set in a sort of like non-linear mansion, which is kind of Castlevania by way of Resident Evil, where you’re walking around this house, collecting different keys to open different parts, these sort of puzzles, traps, some terrible platforming. And I’d say it’s the terrible platforming that stops this from being like an eight or like a legitimately brilliant game. But the concept of like being in this sort of like weird house, there are monsters in it. There’s a day night cycle, which impacts the strength of certain monsters at certain times, obviously like vampires at night and so on. There are like events that only happen at certain times. So there’s a sense of like life in this game going like, even be like, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that in any other Castlevania. It’s like a real kind of like one and done feature, very like weird, like I say, experimental streak, but just very, a game that’s full of like, like I said, these really big memorable kind of peaks, like exploring a maze while Frankenstein chases you with a chainsaw. Sounds like a seven. You know, fighting a, you know, a bull that’s like half decayed, a bit where you have to transport a very fragile barrel of explosives through like an incredibly long bit of the castle. And like if it gets hit once, it explodes and you instantly die. And that means having to go back and do all this shitty platforming again. So you absolutely curse it, but you’re constantly pulled on because you just want to see what it does next. It’s got these weird hidden features about like how long you take in this game or decide like the ending of it. And that’s a kind of pretty traditional kind of Konami thing. But there’s other weird stuff like a shopkeeper. And the more you buy from him, if you buy too much, he ends up being like an incredibly difficult boss at the end of the game. Because he’s like the devil and you’ve made like too many deals with him. Now you have to fight him. And he’s probably harder than the end boss. There’s always like just a team that’s like, what does Castlevania look like in 3D? We don’t really know. So let’s just have a guess and see what happens. It’s kind of probably an uneven minute to minute action game. But it’s just full of, it’s just so rich in like imagery and mad ideas that I think it’s like, I wouldn’t have said at the time it was a seven. Like I’d probably curse this game an awful lot. But in my head now, it’s like a definitive seven. Yeah, because I do, my memory is that these were quite critically. Are there two in N64, Matthew, is that right? Yeah, there’s this and then there’s Legacy of Darkness, which is, people unfairly say remake. It adds more characters and it treads over some same ground, but it’s a much bigger, I would say much more like sophisticated game. But yeah, this, yeah. They weren’t like, these were the lowest scored, some of the lowest scored games we bought on N64. Yeah, I quite like hearing you go to Batfrick, because I think a big part of the seven sometimes as well is like a massive part of it is personal preference and being prepared to go against a critical grain on something. Yeah, I think, I’ve definitely like read a couple of things where people are like beginning to reevaluate this one. I think because Symphony of the Night is such a banger, people were playing that and going, oh, this other thing just isn’t that, like not that. And this is what I’m talking about, like with a bit of hindsight, a bit of distance from it. You can just take it in isolation and go, well, there was nothing else quite like that. That’s super interesting. I actually need to play the later 3D Castlevanias because I think it might be a similar case with those. Like I’ve definitely heard people go to bat for those. So yeah, like the seven of the tens, it’s very easy to dismiss things and realize there was a seven there all along. Okay, good. Well, there you go. That’s gonna just send the CX prices for that one spiking 2%. Oh, you’ll never find this fucking game. This is 100% the kind of game that Nintendo should be working to get on their Switch Online service. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Like this, because they’ve got Winback. That’s a seven. Where else are they gonna sell it as well? It’s not like anyone’s gonna buy it if you put it out on like some kind of collection. Do you know what I mean? It’s not. You know, they’d probably be up for a few years, like this would probably make you a couple of extra quid. What’s the harm in it? Yeah, it’s a good point. It’s also really rough to release the first 3D version of your series alongside like, you know, a seminal 2D entry. What an unfair comparison to put people’s minds. Yeah, you know, I think that’s definitely part of it, but this game’s all right, but you know me, I love Lords of Shadow. I fucking love 3D cars and radio. Yeah, you are the guy. I look forward to that. Would you not put Lords of Shadow 2 in here, Matthew, without just too much of a 6? I don’t think of that as a 7. I think I actually gave that an 8. Oh, OK, fair enough. Despite having a couple of like the most dog shit bits of a game I’ve ever played. What was I thinking? Maybe I am a bad reviewer. That’s for another episode. Matthew Castle on trial. And then Judge Castle can be the one doing the trial as well. So it just… Oh, this is too meta. That’s the last episode of the podcast. Yeah. OK, so in a big bin, I’m putting the entire Resistance and Killzone franchises. But more specifically Resistance 1, 2, 3 and Retribution on PSP. They can go in the bin. Killzone Liberation on PSP. Killzone 2 and 3. They can all go in the bin as well. And Killzone Mercenary on PS Vita. I have no love for Killzone 1. And I hear that the Burning Skies Resistance on PS Vita is a pile of crap. So no need to put that in there. But I do have a fondness for these brown PlayStation shooters, which I know I’ve discussed before. I think they’re perfectly solid exclusives at a time where, I think exclusive games, we forget this, but a lot of them had more of that seven kind of profile. Maybe not in Nintendo’s case, because Nintendo obviously were like masters of their craft. But certainly on PlayStation and Xbox, I think this starts to change around the time that Halo happens, because Halo is like a 10 out of 10, obviously like platform holder game that doesn’t have like, obviously Mario or Zelda involved. But at that point, I think that is like the slow build towards an exclusive arms race begins with Halo, I think. So yeah, first-person shooters are the hottest thing ever in the mid-noughties, of course. So Sony takes two punts at it, two brown punts at the first-person shooter crown. Killzone from this developer. Guerrilla Games, which was set up specifically to make a Halo killer, is how it was always sold to me in magazines. They didn’t make a Halo killer, but they did make something very on-the-nose with sci-fi Nazis in it. Quite a rough first game, but then the second one is a lot more refined mechanically. Beautiful looking game for the time on PlayStation. Three, quite short, but again, quite a refined fun shooter, had some nice-looking icy bits in it, if I recall. Resistance is a really weird one, because all three of these games are quite different to each other. They are all brown, of course. They have that in common. Then the third one you play is Don Draper, basically. It’s the most half-life-ish one in terms of iconography, the way they use the aliens and the depiction of this alternate American world which has been occupied by these aliens. The second one is the one that has the Kaiju-sized monsters in it, so this slow build-up to these big monster set pieces. It does that a few times. That’s certainly what I remember the game for. The first one is a much more straightforward set in the UK, I believe, actually. You just go around just all these quite quaint-looking village and town settings shooting aliens. The thing they have in common is this same ratchet-and-clank approach to weaponry where you’d have novel weapons where you’re like, I’ll fire a dart, and then my bullets will travel around a corner towards the dart so I can kill an enemy while they’re in cover kind of stuff and very satisfying spike grenades and things like that. The weapons are pretty memorable. All of these are pretty decent. If they came back now, it would be strange if they came back now because a first-person shooter landscape, there’s still plenty you can play. They’re kind of weird in a world that has Doom Eternal in it, I would say. They’re a little bit strange, a little bit antiquated. But yeah, as games that kept me occupied while I was hungover eating KFC in my flat from the years 2007 to 2010, like, thumbs up, these classic 7 content. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, I have no fondness for Killzone at all, and I’ve only dabbled with the Resistance games. I’m much more interested in the Resistance games because of that slightly more half-lifey kind of approach. Killzone is just always so, I don’t know, the guerrilla aesthetic just doesn’t do it for me. So muscular, so like, in-your-face graphics. Bit of Brian Cox, bit of 7 out of 10. Another actor to match the list. Yeah, yeah. You are an expert on this, and I trust that this is where they sit. Yeah, people might argue there’s a sliding scale, and they certainly got 8s and 9s at the time in some cases, especially from PlayStation mags, but they are 7s, I think. The thing is, as well, if you’d have played Killzone 2 multiplayer, Matthew, you would have found that legit, I think. That was a legit, great, close-quarters shooter experience with really nice choke points and fun linear maps and even though the color palette was so drab, just beautiful effects and stuff. I had a great time playing Killzone 2 on multiplayer. Sounds like Sony’s answer to Splatoon. Okay, so yes, that’s where these belong. They’re kind of like examples of entire series, but I wanted to save them for my list because I don’t think I would ever replay them now, just because I just don’t feel the need to. I played plenty of them at the time though. I played Resistance 1 and 2. I played through twice in like once by myself and once in co-op. So got those out. So what’s your next one, Matthew? Next one, a little shorter entry here. Time Hollow, which I mentioned earlier, I think is like the first seven that I remember given. I definitely gave it a seven. Got a four in edge, so maybe risky territory. A little visual novel made by someone called Junko Kuwano, who is a Konami developer. She also created Shadows of Memories, which is also a seven, I would say, which is the time traveling piece to, I think it’s set in a German town, where you basically die at the start of each chapter and then have to travel back in time, maybe by several centuries to change the past, to alter the future, to keep saving yourself. It looks a little bit like a slightly more budget Shenmue, set in this tiny German town, and it has that kind of… If I said shit-sen Shenmue is obviously a seven, I think that makes perfect sense. Something with that domestic vibe. It has like… Shadow Memories is the most early PS2 looking game you can think of. The main character even looks a bit like Raiden from Mel Gessler 2, I’d say. A more domesticated, boring dad version of Raiden. You know what I mean? It’s got a very odd Charles Martinet voice turn in it as well. As a slightly camps devil figure. It’s very odd, but you can hear him in there and it puts you off the whole thing. Anyway, this isn’t about that. This is about Time Hollow, which was Junko Kono’s second time-travelling game. She also worked a lot on the Sudokan games in between. I think it’s a seven because it feels like just such a specific passion project. This is this thing about, like, where I think you can really feel the kind of intent or fingerprints of someone in that, you know, she writes this time travel mystery for PS2 and then she writes this time travel visual novel for DS where the whole mechanic is you can draw a hole in time to see back into the past and interact with the past that way. So there’s some very light puzzles where, again, similar to Shadow of Memories, each chapter is about you writing a wrong using this time power. Like, it moves at quite a good pace. It’s a pretty decent time travel narrative. Like, within its own rules, like the thriller construct of, like, what’s gone wrong that you wake up and your present has been rewritten, so can you fix these minor problems as you’re trying to also fix this larger problem in your life? But it’s like a very, very fast moving visual novel in the way that it doesn’t have, like, too much, like, life clutter in between. It kind of moves from event to event. It’s probably shorter than ten hours, which is quite short for the form. I just remember thinking, like, this doesn’t quite have the kind of puzzling, like, interest or the big dramatic confrontations of an ace attorney. Which it was obviously sort of being positioned alongside at the time. But it does have a good story, and it does hold up, and, you know, just a strange time travel story that only exists on DS. Like, that just has the kind of the wafty stink lines of Seven all over it. There’s the, you know, someone who got to make something that they were clearly, like, very bothered about, you know? Like, I like time travel. I get to do a second time travel game. Like, yes, more of that. Let weird people make their weird games. You know? It’s a very smelly episode. Yeah, it just… I don’t know. I just… Even back then, I knew it. Like, the Seven was, you know… It was like, you know… It’s like when God speaks through people. You know, that Seven was just unavoidable. Like, it was just… It had to be… That is… That game is a Seven. Yeah. I feel like you must have seen a lot of Sevens on NGamer as well. Like, just, you know… Just awash with them. Particularly, like… Kind of like… There’s like a whole strain of weirdo Japanese Seven out of Ten games. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, Flower, Sun and Rain. Yes, but what happens, though, is that I like the genre so much. It’s a genre that I would pump them up to eights and nines. Right, right. So there’s lots of things, you know, like, there’s probably a lot of people who tell you, like, Little King’s Story is a seven. Right. But it’s so much my jam that I think it is. I think it’s a nine, and I think I could argue the case for that. And people will back me up on that, but NGamer was a magazine where, like, it definitely championed the seven out of tens. Yeah. And because of that, not a lot of them got seven out of ten. Yeah, yeah. Maybe that’s unfair on the readers. I don’t know. But, um, Time Hollow. Good luck getting a copy of this one. Yeah, the silly reason I’m not playing it is because it’s just, like, close to 100 quid, I think. So, um… Yeah, maybe there are other ways of playing it. Who knows? Oh, who can say? Yeah, we can’t really be sure. Um, okay, great. So, yeah, I wish I had more to say on that one, but, um, alas. I mean, it’s, like I say, it’s niche. I do love the wafty stink lines. That’s just killed me there. It’s so good. Okay, um, my next one is Onimusha Warlords and Onimusha 3, but not Onimusha 2, which isn’t mine. This is a definitive Samuel Roberts take. Have I ever talked about my love of Onimusha 2 on this podcast, Matthew? Oh, I don’t know. You’ve definitely talked to me about it. Yeah, because I think that, I mean, I honestly believe Onimusha 2 is one of the best Capcom games ever made. It’s just, like, phenomenal. I think our conversations about Onimusha are one of the reasons the podcast exists, probably. Oh, yeah, maybe, yeah, because it does feel like something… We should just talk about the pub and being like, oh, this was fun. We should do this on a mic. Oh, six times a month. Yeah, this feels like something I would bore you with at the pub. So, yeah, like, so my personal history with it is Onimusha is a game I bought, back when I bought a PS2 and I had a paper round and I had, like, 10 quid a week, and saving up for a full price game was just, like, a month of saving. I just couldn’t do it because I was just too… too much of an impulse buyer has episodes of GamesCourt have since revealed. And so this was one of the first games to go to, like, the Platinum range on PS2. So in 2002, I bought Onimusha. I was a big fan of it, but it was super short. It’s basically, you know, what if, as Keiji Inafune made his version of Resident Evil with swords, and it basically is exactly the same. Like, it’s a mix of puzzles, combat, but it’s set in this sort of like, I don’t actually know the era of Japan, but it is based on real, quote unquote, Japanese history. It’s like, it takes the figure Nobunaga and adds a bunch of random demonic bullshit on top of it. Don’t really know much about the politics of all that, but yeah, that’s kind of like the context. And so you have this quite interesting aesthetic of like, these old Japanese buildings rotting from the inside because of this kind of like infection type deal and these weird monsters walking around. And like, it was atmospheric and it was okay, but it was over so quickly. And even though I completed it probably like two or three times, the next one was such a step up because what they did was, they gave you a new main character. They gave you four supporting characters who could all be playable at different parts of the game depending on how you interacted with them via this trading system. So what this amounts to is, let’s say, the guy with the, there’s like one character with a gun, he’s really interested in history. So every time you find a kind of history related object, you trade to him and he kind of like responds positively and gives you something in return. And they can give you positive or negative responses based on what items you trade with them. And those items can even include weapons that they can equip in the game. So one of them is like a flamethrower. You give it to the gun guy and he’s like, well, thank you very much. And then if you end up like garnering his favor, he’ll pop up later in the story and he’ll have the better flamethrower and better armor that you’ve given him. But also as a player, if you get it wrong and give the flamethrower to the fat monk with a spear, then that’s just a wasted item basically. So it’s quite an interesting trade system. The borders on like a Mass Effect style relationship system. It’s not quite as in-depth as that, but if you were really careful, you could balance it. So you’ve got all four playable, all four characters playable throughout the story, which is, it was hard to do, but you could do it. I did it on one playthrough. And I found that really rich to kind of keep going through over and over again to see the different permutations, because the game, unlike a Bioware game, they’d literally give you a map of all the different cut scenes at the end of it, like a flow chart. And it’d be like, oh, this is a cut scene you missed with this guy. This is a scene you missed with this guy. And so you could keep replaying it, and you could keep filling in bits of this flow chart, essentially, to complete the story. Then Mass Effect, sorry, Mass Effect. Then Onimusha 3 came along. They chucked that out, but they brought in Jean Reno instead. So we went from a 7 to a 9, back down to a 7 again, essentially. And so that’s the history of the Onimusha series, minus a couple of spin-off entries. They are really kind of fun variations on Rezzy, but they weren’t, I would say they were always one step behind Rezzy when it came to quality of the action. Also, the thing is that Onimusha 3 releases around the time that Rezzy 4 happens, so it’s a slightly old hat by comparison. You kind of think the thing that happened to Rezzy, the revolution that happened to Rezzy, just didn’t happen to Onimusha. It was kind of always stuck a little bit in that fixed camera perspective, pre-rendered backgrounds era. To me, the DNA of it was always in that, firmly in the part of that Rezzy canon a little bit. So, that’s Onimusha. Onimusha Warlords and 3, they’re both going in, but 2 remains a personal favourite. So, a long run there, Matthew, but hopefully that was interesting. Yeah, I really need to play this game. It clearly resonates so much. Yeah, I don’t know why I haven’t. One thing they’ve all got in common, terrible voice actors. Absolutely the fucking worst shit you’ve ever heard. Apart from Jean Reno. Well, Jean Reno voices himself in French, but not in English. They’ve got someone else to do that. I think maybe if you have the French language option on, he always voices himself. I don’t know. The merchant, not to try and big up one of my entries again, but the merchant in Castlevania 64 looks a little bit like Jean Reno. It’s got some Renault energy. It’s not him. You’ve got a lot of merchant-related observations in this episode, Matthew. Just following on from the John Woo one. Yeah, well, seven out of tens tend to do interesting things with the shopkeepers. Yeah, for sure. Why didn’t I put that in my opening description? Instead, we have to let people figure it out from a very vague pile of games, so that’s good. Okay, really keen to hear about your next one, which, again, every time I look at screenshots, just makes me feel a bit ill. So what’s your next one, Matthew? The next one is Pandora’s Tower. What makes you feel ill about it? Is it the graphics or the content? Oh, the graphics, because it’s part of the whole Operation Rainfall thing, right? The whole let’s bring some Wii RPGs to the west thing. And you’re up against Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story, which are both such nice looking games. And this looks so, like, such a third-wheel by comparison. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. One of the reasons I like it is that it’s one of the most PS2-looking games on the Wii. Like, I always think it looks quite a lot like Rygar. Yeah, you know, yeah. I mean, it has a similar kind of chainy kind of weapon as well. I always think, oh, Rygar lives. Actually, there was a Rygar port on Wii, so that’s a redundant observation. Yeah, you’re right. This is the weird third game lumped in with the other two. It’s kind of mad that Nintendo sort of published this and helped develop this with Gambarian, because it is fundamentally about you trying to save your lover from turning into a monster by feeding her flesh from monsters that you kill in the series of towers. And so it’s a game where you’re constantly sort of going into these 12 dungeons to kill monsters, get their flesh, come back, and then sort of shove it in her gob in what’s like a really quite odd sort of dating game section of the game. But when you go back to see her, she’s like pottering around her house and you kind of chat her up and feed her like gribbly meat and she’s turning into a monster this whole time. So she’s got these, you know, the more meat you feed her, the less monstrous she is. But if you leave it too long, if you spend too much time in the towers, she can like outright turn into a monster. There’s a very bad ending to this where if you fail to feed her enough meat you come back and she kills you because she’s turned into this thing. So it’s got this weird pressure of like, must feed my lover meat. But that’s probably the biggest flaw of it, is that there is this time pressure and you’re constantly feeling the need to come back. It’s also really hard to get a very good ending in this game. You have to feed her so much meat to make that doable. It’s just next to impossible, I’d say. And most people will get quite a grim ending because of that. Even winning in this game is quite depressing. But what I do like about it is the combat’s quite fun because you’ve got basic melee combat weapons, but you’ve also got this chain which you aim with the Wii pointer. And the chain’s a very tactile, very physical, fun implementation of it. So you can chain onto enemies and then flip them about, smash them into walls or smash them into other enemies. You can chain enemies together so they’re kind of tethered and then I think if you hit an enemy, any enemy it’s tethered to will take its damage. You know, stuff which are sort of… It’s quite like Astral Chain in some of that chain stuff. No relation. Gambari and Platinum, there’s no connection here whatsoever. But there’s definitely… It gets that combat has… The Nintendo difference is that combat has this sort of physical playfulness to one of the items, which I really like. And then around that, you’re exploring these dungeons, which, yes, visually are quite murky, quite blocky and angular, but they’re quite fun. Pulling great big ancient machinery to life with chains and swinging about, it’s got a nice energy to it. They’re not stellar puzzle designs, but it’s basically a game built out of 12 fine Zelda dungeons is kind of the structure of this game, with this time pressure. Why Nintendo decided to make it kind of odd? If you read the What Are Asks, it’s one of the stranger ones, because before it was Gambarian, basically you make anime fighters, they make one piece games, they make Jump Superstars, the shonen jump fighting game, with Nintendo, so they have this kind of existing relationship. And then they say pictures these games, and the hook that gets Nintendo interested is this device of can you save your true love with this time-pressured meat-eating element of the game, and Nintendo think there’s enough of a hook there. But even Iwato is like, this is kind of an odd one for us. It’s a super strange game, but I think it has a baseline level of polish from being a Nintendo co-production. And I’d say there’s enough in the dungeon design, the oddness of the story, and the combat and that chain to make it worthwhile. But it’s definitely not top tier. Some people have likened this to Shadows of the Colossus, which is very generous. But in terms of the whole dynamic of having to go out to defeat something, to save someone back home, but I don’t know. Thematically, yes, that’s true, but mechanically, there’s not a huge amount in common. Okay, interesting. Well, you can still go play this one if you’ve got a Wii U, right? Yeah, it’s on Virtual Console. That’s pretty good. Ideally, you can play on Switch as well, but obviously this is one of those weird games like Mario Galaxy 2 that’s trapped on the Wii U. Yeah, but it’s definitely worth a play. Okay, interesting. Wow, it’s really hard to get a picture of what this game is from you describing this meat-eating element. Yeah, that could just be… Yeah, going back to the house, buying a present. Everything you collect in the dungeons can be used to cheer her up and give her gifts and stuff. It’s like a classic RPG romance system, I guess, is how that’s working. I wish they’d put this and the last story on one Switch card. Yeah, right. But those games are a lot more legit. Like there, they’re working with Takahashi on Xenoblade and old… Arguably two JRPG legends. Or not arguably, there are like two of the definitive JRPG legends and Gambarian. Have they gone on to make anything else, Matthew? They still make the one-piece, like action-y games. Yeah, Gambarian are definitely still around. Headed up and founded by a female developer, which is a bit more unusual in Japan. In the interview, the person who comes up with the idea is the female head of studio. Something like Kakamura, I think I named something like that. But yeah, just a real oddity. Yeah, good deep cut. Okay, cool. So my next one is The Darkness 2, but not The Darkness 1. The Darkness 1 is a game that was… The Darkness 1 is a game made by Starbree Studios back when they were the leads. I think were mostly the people who had gone to form machine games. So first-person specialists, they made the Riddick game, and then they made The Darkness. They only specialized in making sort of C-tier IP games, seemingly. No, it was a weird one, though, because The Darkness is a top cow comic book from the rise of the image comics kind of movement in the 90s, which is basically when all these artists quit Marvel because they didn’t own any of their own stuff and then went and made their own comic books. It was massively successful and got rich. So even though a lot of the comics they made were absolute dogshit, they definitely were, they were really important for securing the future of comics, like so much of what, you know, something like Invincible and The Walking Dead, like instead of those being owned by a Marvel, like the writer and artist literally own the rights to it, which is, you know, that’s a really important distinction to make in that form. It’s very similar to the indie movement in games, really. So The Darkness is kind of a weird one because it’s like, you know, basically like a AAA, or at least close to it, take on that universe. And what it amounted to was this odd mixture between like, sort of like very tropey gangster fiction, like Italian mafia nonsense, combined with this demonic entity content where these little goblin men voiced by that bloke from Faith No More, I can’t remember his name, I’m sorry, to any Gen Xers listening to this. Mike something? Mike, yeah. He’s obviously really good, but I just can’t remember his name. Oh dear, I’ll just have to look it up, won’t I? Mike Patton, of course, Mike Patton. And so he would do these kind of crazy voices where you play this character called Jackie Estacado and all these little goblin men would be going, Jackie! Basically, that’s what they would be doing for the entire game. I’m sure it’s very similar. But it’s quite, the first game is quite odd because you would go from these sort of Manhattan-y underground and sort of street level settings doing these kind of stealth missions, really. You have to take out the lights in order to attack enemies because otherwise your darkness powers would go away. Quite different, almost like a tactical kind of first-person shooter. To this whole hell dimension that was like World War I, it was really fucking out there. The second one, which was not made by the same developers, but by Digital Extremes, who now are like the Warframe people, so obviously Warframe is massive, but they were kind of very work for hire. They made the Bioshock 2 multiplayer that no one remembers, and they made this. Dark Sector? Yeah, of course, Dark Sector. Not quite a seven. Yeah, no, that’s like five. Good glaive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was certainly a thing that happened in the early part of the HD era. But the second Darkness game was firmly a seven, because it basically ditched being a strategic shooter, and was much more about, well, how about we just act like these demonic powers are, like, turn you into a proper badass, and you can rip something out of the ground like a pole, and then throw it to impale a dude against a wall, and then use one of your, like, your sort of tentacles to just swipe a guy in half and stuff like that. It’s a much more fully unleashed kind of power set. And you know this game is a trashy 7 out of 10, because it starts with, like, a dining scene where these two women get, like, mowed down in front of you as part of some gangster war. And then in the middle of the game, it plays that fucking Black Betty song, which is so… I fucking hate that song. You hear it in every film and every TV show. They’re like, Oh, Bleh, Billy, Bleh, Bleh, that one. I fucking hate that song. And that is, like, in the middle of this to tell you that you are playing a 7 out of 10 game. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is not a classy sign. This is not a sign of a classy game. Mark Strong or Black Betty. Or John Woo being a merchant. Shopkeeper. Yeah, so it’s like… It’s also got cell shading. The first game didn’t have cell shading. It’s not a bad aesthetic, but again, that makes it a little bit more… I don’t know, just a little bit more trashier. Yeah, it’s weird, but if you play the first one and you play the second one, you can feel a distinction in craft. One is just meant to push the pleasure centers of your brain, and the other one is meant to be a little bit more cerebral. And so this firmly falls into the 7th territory. I’m guessing you probably play the first one, but not the second one, Matthew, as that’s my guess. No, I did play this. Yeah, I completely… Yeah, it’s sort of like on paper what you think you wanted from the first one, but when you’ve actually got it, you’re like, maybe I actually like the variety of the first one a bit more. It’s just all on all the time. And it does less narratively interesting things than the first. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yes, not quite as good. No, the good thing about these games is because top cow are not precious about the licenses, presumably. You can just play these on Xbox backwards compatibility. The Darkness 2 I actually own on Steam. As you might expect, another classic Steam deck. Many of these 7 out of 10s are. So yeah, good stuff. What’s your next one, Matthew? The Council, which is the interactive narrative adventure from Big Bad Wolf about a man looking for his mother on a mysterious island populated by historical figures, many of whom I can’t pretend to know. It’s a bit like a murder mystery set up in that it’s an island with always interesting people on there, except the people are like, it’s George Washington or it’s Napoleon Bonaparte. But then after those, you start getting into some slightly more maybe massively known in Europe, and maybe I’m just a big dumb idiot, but you’re a big fan of Prussian pasta, Johann Christoph van Volna. Anyone? Yeah, exactly. So yeah, a quite strange set up where you’re rubbing shoulders with all these kind of historical weirdos kind of looking into sort of secret societies and conspiracies. What I really like about this game is it tries to do something a bit different in the narrative space. It isn’t just the telltale kind of make the options, see what the consequences are. It has some RPG systems at play. When you build the character, you actually build them. You pick lots of skills from like different sort of rhetoric styles, information, different sort of disciplines. None of them are really like physical abilities. It’s not like a Deus Ex like strength or jumping. It’s kind of does your character know about this or know about that? Maybe a bit closer to like Disco Elysium, I guess. And then it’s kind of a conversational RPG where the progress you make through it is often like limited or cut off by what you do or don’t know. I just think that’s just a really interesting take on this particular genre. There’s no friction in a telltale game because you just go through it and see what happens. Here, there’s the idea of like the story is happening because you brought this particular character into it. And there’s certain avenues you just won’t be able to take because you were just too stupid to like, you just didn’t understand what people were saying at dinner. It’s a game where you can go to a dinner party and just absolutely biff it by being an idiot, which that’s cool. If someone said that to me, I’d be like, well, I want to see, I want to play that game. That’s what a novel kind of conversation as battle. And they’ve since made that vampire swan song, which came out this year, to kind of mixed, similar mixed reviews to this game. I’m glad that they’re sticking with their kind of sort of slight kind of tabletop rules of conversation. I think it’s a very interesting thing to kind of mine. You know, it is a bit of an acquired taste, because like I say, some of the historical figures, I’m like, this would maybe land better if it was like a little broader. Like it’s super niche and clearly whoever made it is a bit of a brain, but it’s uneven. And the story gets quite bad as it goes along. But for the first couple of chapters, and this was released episodically, I thought this was like a really novel fresh take. I was well up for this being like a nine, but I think it kind of sort of shits the bed too much and sort of ends up being a kind of seven throughout. Yeah, just looking at the sort of like, you know, sort of, I don’t know, old timey dudes in this, I was like, big seven here, just looking at it, so yeah. Yeah, very, very good. People make games with stuff which is just a little bit too highbrow. I sometimes think, that can force you into a seven out of ten niche. I worry a little bit about that pentament. Oh right, I think you’re saying immortality. Well, yeah, immortality I think we should chat about in another episode. But that upcoming pentament is like, oh, it’s all about Bavarian history or whatever, and you’re like, okay, I mean, I’m up for it, but I might be too dumb. What I’ll say to you Matthew is, you try getting acquired by Microsoft and not making a game about Bavarian history. I guarantee you’ll fail, my friend. All of them. That’s the first thing Phil Spencer says when he comes in. He’s like, I hope you guys know about Bavaria. I love that as your impression of Big Phil. Okay, cool. So let’s fire through some more of these, Matthew. So next up, I was going to put The Saboteur, which I think is probably a six, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s a seven. An interesting seven because so this is kind of like a ripoff of Assassin’s Creed, but with shooting and the whole visual novelty element of this is that you’re in Nazi-occupied Paris and each time you liberate a part of Paris, the black and white disappears and reveals lovely kind of like golden skies in Paris as you’re free again, and you drive between the two, and it’s a really interesting visual idea, I think. The actual game is a game made by Pandemic, and their shooters were always very rough in the shooting respect, and I think that kind of applies here. It’s not a great stealth game or a great shooter game, but very, very memorable. My dad has been playing this game every single year for 13 years. Every time I go home, the two games he talks to me about are this and Battle Stations Midway. No, wait, Battle Stations Pacific, that one. The one where you control the boat and also the planes in the middle of a war. He loves that shit. So, yeah, he got very, very into this. I think it’s like all right. It’s like OK, but like this game could never be more than a seven simply because they sold DLC that let you see a pair of boobs for like eight quid or something. Like that was the thing they did. EA did that in the last two decades. They did that in a game. They sold DLC to see a pair of breasts. There are games you can buy where you can see a pair of breasts for just a normal asking price. Immortality. That’s a lot of boobs in it. It has, yeah, it’s true. That’s, yeah, kind of… We’ll get… We’ll save that for another time. But yeah, that’s… So, the Saboteur, Matthew, do you contest this is not a 7 and this is lower? Yeah, so I’ve never owned this. My relationship with the Saboteur exists purely with it being in the future offices for a couple of weeks when it was being reviewed and having a little go on it to decide if I wanted it and going, nah. I always thought this looked just a bit like Alpha Protocol, just a bit too ropy. Yeah, it is a bit rough, but I don’t know. It’s kind of like… Also, they did the really dumb thing of like, they’ve got a deliberate anachronism, which is on the radio. They’ve got Feeling Good by Nina Simone on there, which is like, adds a real sense of style to it, but it’s probably the reason it’s not on Xbox backwards compatibility, because they have to relicense it and they’re not going to pay that money for the fucking Saboteur, are they? Oh, yeah. It should have gone with a much cheaper My Way by Frank Sinatra. Yeah, I’ll just get one of the developers to do their version of My Way. But yeah, so instead it’s kind of like, it’s just sort of lost to obscurity. I think you maybe can still get it on PC or if you own it on Origin, it still works. I have it on PC and I have a 360 version, but it’s, I don’t know, it’s sort of like, because you play this Irish guy in it and he’s interacting with French people all the time and making a big deal about how Irish he is. It’s quite, I don’t know, there’s something kind of endearing about it. I think it is a little bit too rough as a shooter-stealth game. Yeah, I don’t know, I think like, I guess I wanted to name-check it a little bit as I think a lot of people think of this when they think of a seven out of ten. Yeah, I hear it talked in the seven loving circles quite a lot. Yeah, for sure. Why does your dad love it so much? It’s a World War II game, that’s it. He’s a very simple-minded man. Again, not to throw my family members under the bus yet again on this podcast. You can find the paywall, you can say what you like. Actually, I think my mum has subscribed. Leslie, don’t tell Kevin Roberts about this, that would be ideal. Yeah, so it’s… He’ll just play any old World War II shit. But has he played new World War II games? Has he played Call of Duty World War II? Because that would probably blow his fucking mind. I got him that, and he likes it, but he doesn’t like it as much as Call of Duty II. It’s not a very good game called World War II. Does he like Brothers in Arms? Yeah, he had the PS2 ones of those. I just like the idea of him doing his yearly pilgrimage to the saboteur. It’s just wild. It’s because he’s just got this little room that’s got a PS2 and a 360 set up there, and all he does is play his oboe in there, and like… What a wise decision! He’s quite a character, isn’t he? Sounds like quite a character. He’s either playing the oboe or the saboteur. Yeah, but that’s what he does. That is just so wild. That’s what he does to while away his days until the end, I suppose. That is just… what a character! You should get him on the podcast. The funny thing is, he’s got my collection of 360 and PS2 games there, which are… he’s got everything from Half-Life 2 to… I think I’ve still got one of the Persona games in there. Not that a 60-year-old man would play Persona 3. That’s a weird thought, isn’t it? I’d rather find out my dad had been secretly playing the saboteur than Persona. I would feel odd about my father. That isn’t for you. That’s weird. I don’t want my dad going, I’m a big Arnstan. Your dad playing the theme tune to Persona 5 on his oboe. Also, the oboe is a fucking hideous instrument. When you hear it, it’s very, very cursed. I guess this is for you, Dad. I’m mentioning the saboteur on this episode. This is for you, Dad, and also several other dads in our Discord. So, yeah, very good. What’s the next one, Matthew? My next one is Red Dead Revolver. Obviously, what came before Red Dead Redemption. Weird journey to release, which I think actually accounts for the 7 out of 10-ness of it. It started off as a game being made by Angel Studios for Capcom. It took a long time, wasn’t going anywhere, and Rockstar bought the studio. They became Rockstar San Diego, acquired the game with it. Capcom had the rights to release it in Japan if it was ever going to get finished, because I don’t think they thought it was going to at that point. Then Rockstar sort of finished it off. What you get is a game with a lot of Rockstar style, like the obsession with the accuracy of Spaghetti Western iconography. If anything, I’d say it leans into the films way more than Redemption 1 and 2 do. But it still has this streak of Capcom silliness through it, which I actually really miss from Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 afterwards. It becomes a little bit self-serious. This is the arcade version, I guess, of a Rockstar World West game, and it’s a bit lighter on its feet. Not an absolutely stellar action game in terms of how complicated it is, but it serves up an endless succession of set pieces. It’s linear levels, it’s not open world. But within those linear levels, it really takes you to lots of places. You play as lots of different characters. The main character moving through the story. You also almost play bonus side missions as this woman with a long rifle and a Native American with a bow and arrow. So it can mix up the action that way. It’s got some really iconic moments. It’s got really good quick draw contests in this game where you work through fighting lots of people quick in the dead style. And the last guy, the final guy, he doesn’t come back to life, but there’s a sort of story twist tied to beating him. And then all of a sudden he tries to shoot you outside of the competition. And I have this really clear memory of everyone in the town panics and runs in front of you. And you have to try and shoot him in slow motion through the crowd. And I was like, that’s really fucking cool. That’s a real legendary moment in a not particularly amazing game, which I think is a hallmark of a good 7 out of 10. In fact, I mentioned Quick and the Dead there. I’d say this is to Red Dead Redemption what Quick and the Dead is to Unforgiven. You know, in the same sort of genre. But it’s like the dumb, dumb, fun version. Would that make Gun the Cowboys and Aliens? The Gun’s not. I did toy with Gun’s bad. This is actually good. This is almost an 8, I think. But it’s just a little… It just never really evolves as an action experience. The Gun’s feel good. And it does feel nice to shoot people. But it’s just a little flat throughout. But you can still play it backwards compatible. Very easily available on Xbox. Which is quite a treat. It holds up. So well worth revisiting, I think. Yeah, I didn’t know this was backwards compatible. I will definitely get that. Did you want to give a shout out to another gamer as well, Matthew? Yeah, I was just going to shout out to Call of Juarez Gunslinger. Which I fit into similar arcade western territory. The Call of Juarez series feels like there should be some other 7s in there. But I think they’re just all a little bit too rough around the edges to do it. But this one almost felt like it could have been a light gun game at one point. But it isn’t. It’s very driven by combos and headshots and chains. It’s a very arcade based experience. But it’s got a very zippy, fun story to it as well. Which ties into that. There’s a sort of demented energy to the whole thing. Which I really like. But that’s awesome. Maybe that’s an eight? I don’t know. Is that an eight? It is good. Yeah, I do know people celebrate that one as one of the better ones. It’s got a fun structure in there. It’s like a story being told, like a guy telling the story of his past. And as you change things in the story and make decisions, like his narration can change, you’ll be like, oh no, actually, I did shoot the guy because you shot the guy and things like that. Which is quite a surprising amount going on for what I think was like an Xbox Live Arcade title. Right, right. Yeah, I think it was. Is that the Sicario day of the Soldado of the Westerns, Matthew? Listen, Back, Click and the Dead, an unforgiven… That is like completely on point. That is good. Yeah, I like that. Red Dead Redemption is as amazing as it is, it’s like a little bit up its own arse. The Spaghetti Westerns were really good fun. It’s actually really weird that Rockstar would make a sequel to that. It’s actually really strange when you think about it, because I think I heard actually, that triggered a memory actually of me, sometime after GTA IV, back in the day, this still happens sometimes, but PRs would tell you under NDA, what games have got coming out basically, and what they’re going to announce. And that’s how I heard about a Silent Hill game that never came out. And one other Konami thing that sounded awesome, that I’ve never heard discussed publicly, so I wonder if that was ever true. That was only a few years ago actually. But one of them was Red Dead… We just heard that Rockstar are going to make a sequel to Red Dead Revolver, but it’s going to be like GTA IV in terms of how they do it, and it’s going to be properly big. And I just couldn’t picture it in my mind’s eye. I was like, Red Dead Revolver, wasn’t that a game that got sixes, sevens and all that stuff? But it was weird because when I saw the demo for the first time of the game, I was like, oh, I love that slow motion thing. And the PR was like, oh yeah, that was actually in the first game, Red Dead Revolver, we actually lifted that and put it in there. So that’s just odd that there’s this complete tonal disparity, but some continuity between those games. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, okay, good stuff. So just one more from you after this, Matthew. But for me, I was going to mention that Mad Max is like a classic 7 out of 10. It’s a licensed game. It doesn’t have any of the official Mad Maxes in it, either Tom Hardy or the deeply cancelled Mel Gibson, who is somehow still in films, don’t know why. But I also want to lump in Avalanche’s other work here, because I think the Just Cause series is also a 7 out of 10 series. And I think that the reason is, they’re open world games that lack the finesse of a rock star open world game, for sure, they don’t have the same level of detail, because they go big on scale. When you go so big on scale and quite wacky mechanics, I think you become a 7 out of 10, do you know what I mean? There’s no way of escaping it. That doesn’t mean these games can’t be extremely enjoyable, that’s why they’re here, they are 7 out of 10 favorites. But I think Mad Max is probably slightly better than the Just Cause games. They definitely have a similar vibe of like, well, the world is really too big to get anything done. It’s just too big. But it is quite enjoyable sometimes to just take in the sense of scale and enjoy some quite wacky vehicle-vehicular combat, which both of these games do. Just Cause 2 being my favorite of that series. So Mad Max had to be mentioned here. Obviously, backwards compatible on Xbox, we discussed in the backwards compatibility episode, a lot of like a car kind of combat going down, sort of like borderline survival mechanics to give it a little bit of color as well. And if you’re prepared to drive for long enough, you’ll find some really nice kind of like vistas and cool bits of desert that you’ll want to take screenshots of. Yeah, it’s a cool little game. I say little, it’s enormous. Yeah, I think Mad Max, I grew to love it more over time. At first I thought, obviously, it’s a little bit repetitive, but actually the central car is so well realized and there’s really fun mechanics around it. And the car combat is pretty decent. I think the problem I have with Just Cause is there’s all the chaos of It’s Fine, but I never find any of the vehicle stuff particularly interesting. It’s all like the mad strapping bombs to things and using tethers to tear down bridges and whatnot. But the vehicles, which mainly exist to fill in the gap between all the hundreds of square miles of virtual nothing between the actual missions that you’re meant to be doing. But Mad Max, the car feels a bit… It brings everything together, holds everything together a little better. It’s a lot more coherent, but it is just quiet. It’s still very repetitive within that, but yeah, cool. Definitely cool. Yeah, definitely a game you just want to have, I think, and just give a go every now and then. And it’s super cheap as well. You can always get it in PC sales for three quid and things. Yeah, it’s nothing. It’s really weird that they made this, because when you look at a lot of Warner’s, like the Arkham games, for example, the emphasis is on super, super high-end games that score really well with price really like and stuff like that. Mad Max is just a little bit more of that PS2 mentality. Well, 360 mentality, I would say, you know. It’s just a little bit more unusual. So what’s your last one, Matthew? My last one is Cirrus Wrath, which is the game a lot of people dismiss as just sort of an interactive movie that you could watch on YouTube, because it has so many QuickTime events. Probably the biggest overbalance of QuickTime events to actual kind of on the control pad, you know, nuts and bolts fighting of any game. But I think this game is like a true spectacle, and I think the QuickTime events are, which are like a definitive 7 out of 10 mechanic, are just amazingly well done in this game. I think, I really, I should say as a side note, I really like QuickTime event in games, like I’m not down on them at all. I know that they’re like a little bit mechanically crude, but I also think they give you amazing sort of bang for your buck, I guess, like, if you compare like what you put in, a single button press to what you get out, like an infinite number of cinematic outcomes, you know, it’s pretty wild and, you know, a QuickTime event always opens up a game for doing some really crazy stuff outside of its sort of standard system. So I’m like, I’m not against the use of them at all. But I think in this game, like they’re amazingly well produced just in terms of like visually, like the anime style of this game and the kind of scale of the action and the choreography of the action is absolutely superb as this kind of raging god fighting his way through legions of demigods. But really, there’s like a, I think there’s like a tremendous wit to this, to the QuickTime events in this game, which people dismiss by just saying, oh, you could just watch the cutscene and it’s the same. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s the difference between just flimsy button cues coming up on screen. And the fact that, you know, in this game, when you want to activate his like burst rage, it kind of, the cue kind of fills the screen and it’s all on fire. And it’s like as angry as the character’s sort of head is as full with rage. You know, it, it kind of, if ever a visual button cue kind of captured the sort of character psychology, that is it. You know, there are moments in this game where you’re hammering buttons and the kind of, like, the stress of that, you know, the kind of lactic acid build up in your fingers when you’re tapping those buttons, you know, it’s kind of sort of simulating just the endless kind of momentum of him thumping his way through an entire planet. I think it’s really well matched in that sense. I think it also knows that sometimes, like, the ultimate payoff is, after all this hectic action, is to have one tiny button press that does trigger, like, sometimes galactic change in this game. Like, you completely alter the shape of planets, you know, giant gods explode, you drive swords through entire moons, and the fact you press a tiny little button, it sort of zooms out and shows you this kind of what chaos you have kind of unleashed with such a tiny motion. I think they know exactly what they’re doing. I think there’s a good sense of humour in that. There’s lots of moments in this game that, you know, in The Last Jedi, when that really cool bit where she sort of jumps through all the spaceships and they explode. Like this game does that like 20 times, but kind of ties it to a quit time event. And so it makes you think you’re a little bit in control of it. It puts that kind of power at your fingertips. And, you know, is it mechanically sophisticated? The core fighting is merely fine, I would say. Like I’ve seen some people make the case that, oh, actually, it’s a, you know, there’s a decent brawler underneath. But I think it’s a little bit rough around the edges and not where this game comes alive. It’s also got… You sort of have to buy the end of it as DLC. And I don’t know if they’re just giving that away free now, because it is backwards compatible. You still have to buy it. It gets produced a few times a year though. You can get it for like two quid or something, it’s not much. Right. But that’s, you know, that is a wrinkle. Like that is a pain in the arse in that it has this kind of like quite mad, exciting story, but you have to buy something extra to really see the true end of it. I mean, that’s not ideal, but you can probably, like you say, get the whole game cheap enough now that you can play it. And yeah, I just, you know, not a deeply sophisticated action game, but really, you know, stunning boss killing game with quick time events. I mean, of course, like when you marry that kind of scale and hecticness to a great combat system, that’s where you get like Platinum games. You know, Platinum also do this. But, you know, if you really like that side of Platinum games and can stomach a less than amazing like nuts and bolts brawler, I think this is pretty fun stuff. OK, yeah, I think this game basically was, I mean, it was end of the PS3 360 generation, right? Like right at the end, like 2012-ish, 2013 time. You know, just forgot basically just like the wrong time to release something like this, I think. And also just needed like about seven years more worth of like crunchy roll subscriptions for this to really fly, because it is kind of like a playable anime, isn’t it? In a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, CyberConnect 2 who make the game, they make all the Naruto fighters, which, you know, are a lot more complicated. They’re like fighting games, you know, one on one side on things. But those fights also end with these spectacular quit time events. I reviewed a few of those on Xbox. Like, CyberConnect know their way around a spectacle. I just never think the kind of game that leads up to that spectacle is ever particularly amazing. Yeah, for sure. Okay, good recommendation, like you say, easily available. So, yeah, you can just basically spend no more than five pounds and you’ll have all of this, basically. Cool. So my last three entries are going to bulk into one. So there’s two I’ve discussed. Well, one I’ve discussed a lot, which is Red Faction Guerrilla. I gave this eight at the time. I think in retrospect, it’s probably like a seven, but really, really fun physics-based sort of like Mars-set shooter game where you can use like basically like black hole bombs to blow things up and melt the beams with like a laser of different sort of like buildings until they very slowly collapse in quite realistic fashion. Sad that those mechanics had never been picked up and put elsewhere, really, because they were so, so good. So they are forever trapped in this odd little game that was made by THQ, published by THQ. Shadow of Mordor. I feel like these games are kind of big seven out of tens because they’re sort of Assassin’s Creed rip-offs that have a bunch of other slightly boring mechanics layered on top of them, but have the, you know, because they have the like the nine out of ten nemesis mechanic, essentially, which generates all these interesting enemies I feel like they get maybe slightly more credit than they deserve. Really ugly worlds. Yeah, and like… Mordor is not like a fun place to hang out. Was it you who told me about the dumbass twist at the end of Shadow War as well? Yeah, we talked about that in the Lord of the Rings episodes. Oh yeah, that was it, yeah. I was like shocked to hear that. That was the worst shit I’d ever heard. Well, I hope that happens in the Amazon show. Oh dear. Lots of people who played Shadow Mordor are watching that instantly and like old celeb Rimbo is like, hello, I’m really nice. And you’re like, fuck you. Yeah, well soon you’ll be an I along with this other dude. Yeah, okay, good. So last up, and I feel like this is a proper 7 out of 10 game of Hall of Famer. Singularity, a game I played specifically for this podcast. Now, this is, it works since you got all the, it doesn’t have controller prompts on the PC version, but it does work with the controller support, so you can play on Steam Deck this one. 2010, I believe, Raven Software game, back before they were like trapped in you can only make Call of Duty now. You know how Activision just gradually made every studio it had make Call of Duty games, which is a bummer because they actually had one of the best first person shooter outlets of the past 20 years under their wing, but make Call of Duty maps, I guess, whatever. So that happened, but this was their last attempt at something original, and it does actually kind of feel like more of a 2002-era shooter. It’s like dumb alternate timeline stuff, but the kind of big gimmick in it is you have this thing called a time manipulation device, I think it is, TMD, and you can use it to solve puzzles, affect enemies, basically do like time-shifty stuff, but it basically amounts to quite a corny shooter where there’s a lot of American voice actors doing silly Russian voices, and it radiates 7 out of 10 energy, absolutely. The storytelling is not engaging at all, but it is quite a fun set PC shooter that absolutely feels like it does not have the budget of a Call of Duty 4 or anything like that from the time. I can see why this is a favorite of people for a certain type of game. It’s a proper one-and-done game. It’s not terribly long, but it’s pretty enjoyable when playing this week. Good guns, and the story is not good. But the time manipulation device is also a bit nebulous. It’s a little bit like the gravity gun. You can use it to pick it up and throw things at people, and then it can affect enemies, and it can affect environments in different ways. So it’s not as elegant a sell as the gravity gun, I would say. It’s a kind of cool gimmick. But it’s a cool little game. It’s definitely a seven from an era of sevens. Do you play that one, Matthew? I actually haven’t played this one. But again, one of those ones, I remember very clearly being played in the office. I can remember the fellow 7 out of 10 likers really bigging it up in the office. Around this game coming out is when you start hearing the talk about 7 out of 10s a bit more regularly, I think, where people are like, oh, this is one of those games. Is this readily available? Yeah, it’s not on backwards compatibility, but it’s always like three quid in steam sale, basically. Good steam deck game, like I say. That’s the way you want to play it. Okay, I will do that for sure. In fact, I may even own this and haven’t played it, or I’ve bought it pre-owned and not played it because I’m shitty like that. This is like what so many people think of as the quintessential 7 out of 10, and I can totally see why. Just the scale of it and how corny it is and the Nolan North of it, it’s just very 7 out of 10. Back when everyone put Nolan North in every single game, that was a thing that definitely happened for about five years. Did people know Nolan North back then? Were they talking about him? Yeah, they were because as soon as that Prince of Persia game came out in 2008, everyone was like, oh no, I can now hear this guy everywhere. So yeah, he was just everywhere suddenly. And you know, good for him, he got work. He was like, you know, he got a break, so good for him. But it just meant that for a long time, a lot of games sounded quite similar. So yeah, but hey, you know, all good. So yeah, that’s my last one, Matthew. Did you want to just rifle through your honorable mentions? We’ve ran long here, but I think we’ve done some. Yeah, I’m not going to go into huge amount. Like, we’ll probably chat about some of these at different times in other upcoming, or we have talked about them before. But for other 7 out of 10 likers, Prototype kind of has a bit, it’s like violence, like violent Spider-Man, I guess. Really good power set, kind of miserably boring open-world game around it. But you are powerful and you can, like, grab old ladies off the street, climb up buildings and then just sort of chuck them for miles. Which, you know, is great if you’re 15 or me. Yeah, I’ll call that a six, but I’ll accept it as a seven. Yeah, I think Edge may have given the first one an eight. I think they were, like, into it, but maybe I’m wrong and apologies to Edge if so. I think Sonic Lost World might be a seven, even though I actually think I gave it an eight in official Nintendo, because it’s the Sonic game which does an impression of Mario Galaxy, which is obviously, like, you know, the best way to make a good Sonic game is to make it more like Mario and less like a Sonic game. Just a fucking nightmare to play in my memory. I think you’ve got nine out of ten music here. Like, a five out of ten game, probably. Nine out of ten music, eight out of ten levels set on giant fruit. The rest of it. Let’s not go into it. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Crystal Bearers, which I know you think is shit, but I think has the weirdo energy of using telekinetic powers to mash together Final Fantasy monsters and see what happens. I think this game’s fun. It fits the profile of a seven, I think, which is the subjective nature of the pick. The oddball spin-off. It’s all there, the seven out of ten. The developer signs. At the end of this game, it says, thank you so much for playing, and then there’s a man’s signature on screen, and that’s when you know you’re playing a seven. That’s kind of beautiful, I think. That’s so sincere. Yeah, I love it. Kingdoms of Amala. That is a seven, right? Oh yeah, big seven. That’s like Dumb Skyrim, or like less charming fable. Yeah, it’s got Todd McFarlane designs in it. That makes it a seven. It’s got a fantasy universe conjured out of nowhere by RA. Salvatore. That makes it a seven. It’s got all that Kurt Schilling nonsense in the background with that MMO that fell apart and Rhode Island losing a load of money. That’s a seven. You know what I mean? Like, it’s all there, Matthew. That’s a seven. Bankrupting estate. That’s a seven. But the combat’s really good. That’s the thing about it. It’s like God of War style combat. It actually works really nicely. Yeah. I think the original Nier is a seven. Yeah, that’s probably true. But I know it does funny, quirky things, but I think in the moment to moment and the repetition of it, I think it’s a seven. I think Dying Light 1 is a seven. It’s an open world zombie bashing game with quite a nice organic progression system. The more you do stuff, the better you get. Very Elder Scrolls-y in that way. But it’s just quite a charmless world, but I think it actually captures the threat of zombies quite well. We talked about Dying Light in the Dying Light 2 episode, which is almost a more polished, but worse game for it. It takes it out of the interesting zone, puts it down into a six. I’m with you. That’s a seven, that game, for sure. I quite like the Surge games, which are the Surge 1 and 2, which are the two Dark Souls alike set in the future. They look a bit like that Matt Damon film where he’s in the exoskeleton. It’s the one where you bash limbs off robots. Oh, not Elysium, is it? Yeah, Elysium, that’s the one. But it is just a Dark Souls. You die, you have to go back to find your body to get the currency. The world all links up. But it’s sort of sci-fi tinged, and I quite like the idea of, like, if you chop enough robot arms off, you can build a piece of armour from that particular robot arms. I like things we can target limbs. I don’t know what that says about me. Limb targeting. I like that too, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. And finally, Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments, which we talked a lot about in the crime episode with Andy Kelly. Andy Kelly picked this as one of his top five detective games. I think it’s just, production values wise and voice acting and writing, just a little bit too ropey to be a true A, even though it’s got some great systems in it. But it has got some great systems, like the ability to connect your synapses to come up with different outcomes for the case is actually quite elegantly done for one of these detective games. But I do think the subsequent ones were quite not as good. I thought the recent one, Chapter One, was absolute shit. That was a real disappointment at the end of last year. But yeah, this one is always cheap on sale. It should be able to dig it up. Best Detective Games as well, if you want to hear more about that one. The Andy Kelly chat, that was really good. So yeah, that’s all good. We did it, Matthew. That was a long ass episode. Sorry to keep you from your dinner for this long. Oh, that’s okay. I don’t know how it went this long, actually. We got through a lot of games. Hopefully there was something in there you hadn’t previously thought of as an avenue for seven out of ten investigation. Yeah, and hopefully if not, you just enjoyed the anecdote about my dad’s oboe, so that’s good too. So thank you so much for backing us and supporting the podcast. We really appreciate it. We’ll be back later in the month with the XXL episodes ranking the Star Wars movies, so stay tuned for that. You know where to find us anyway. You probably follow us already, because you’re our most dedicated listeners. See you soon.