Welcome to the Best Games Ever show Episode 64: The best game you love despite itself.
Some games make it hard to love them. My beloved Assassin’s Creed, for example, is often hard to recommend to people, because so many of the games get bogged down in icon janitor nonsense, obscuring the feelgood sense of motion at the heart of the gameplay, and the epic meta-narrative that’s essentially an olympian love story set across time, space, death, and reality. But the tailing missions are annoying, so.
This week we’re joined by someone who I consider an expert on loving things despite themselves, given that he’s a committed fan of the long-defunct Dreamcast, a console that died such a definitive death that it took SEGA’s entire status as a platform holder with it. And it died for a reason. The reason was that it was bobbins, and nothing on the machine was as good as the whale bit in Sonic Adventure, but by the time it came out everyone had already seen that bit on telly, so there was no actual reason to buy the console.
Still, it had a good light gun, as our guest Owen O’Donnell explains beautifully in this video on his excellent Infinite Review youtube channel where he has set himself the task of critically appraising every thing, place, historical event, and concept in the universe.
We gave him a break from that burden though to come and tell us what he would pick as the best game you love despite itself, along with panel regulars Tom Orry and Sherif Saed, and your host: me. Jim Trinca. You know I’m important because I have my own theme tune.
Special thanks to David Bulmer for performing “Jim’s Theme”.
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You could also simply read the summary below, if you’re the sort of person who skips to the last page of a book (a wrongun, a reprobate, a Bad Seed).
Owen
Owen picked Silent Bomber, one of the last PS1 games to sneak out before the release of the PS2 and therefore one that very few people noticed or cared about. Including the developers, apparently, because by the time they got around to the European release it included a major game-breaking glitch that made it impossible to complete. Sigh.
Tom
Tom picked Goldeneye on the grounds that it’s a great game which had a terrible framerate on release, making it virtually unplayable. There are only two flaws in his argument: firstly, millions of people did in fact play it, including him. And secondly, you can play it right now at a silky-smooth 60fps on two major platforms, and he hasn’t bothered, because as it turns out it’s actually crap.
Sherif
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Sherif surprised everyone by, instead of picking a souls game or a classic Call of Duty game, picking a recent Call of Duty game. Which obviously didn’t surprise us at all, but there we are.
“What is the Best Games Ever Show?” you ask? Well, it is essentially a 30-minute panel show where people (Jim Trinca and associates) decide on the best game in a specific category. That’s it. It’s good. Listen to it.
Come back in a week for another exciting instalment of the Best Games Ever Show.
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