The Best Games Ever Podcast

Whether it’s Patrick Stewart in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Sean Bean in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, or Terrence Stamp in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, there are numerous examples of big name hollywood actors showing up in video games, and it’s always an exciting little surprise to hear a familiar voice that isn’t Troy Baker. But sometimes, there are cameos or guest starring roles that a...

If you didn't listen to last week's show you might be confused as to why we're doing a an Easter episode in September. Well, Jim was goaded into it (like he was with the Christmas episode), so we're doing it. We also reserve the right to do another one when it's actually Easter (we're smart like that). What constitutes an "Easter Game" is even more wooly a concept than an "Easter Movie", because e...

If you didn't listen to last week's show you might be confused as to why we're doing a Christmas episode in September. Well, Jim was goaded into it, so we're doing it. We also reserve the right to do another one when it's actually Christmas. What constitutes a "Christmas Game" is even more wooly a concept than a "Christmas Movie", because examples of entire games themed around Christmas are few an...

Germany isn't especially known for its game development, but there's a huge amount of stuff that gets made there. You've got Astragon, which you might not have heard of, but you’ve definitely heard of the range of simulators it publishes. You've got Piranha Bytes, who’ve been making incredibly 6/10 RPGs since before most of the VG247 crew were on solids, and you got you've got Egosoft constantly s...

With the imminent release of Starfield, people the world over are about to fill their boots once again with Bethesda’s signature style of go anywhere, do anything game. Unless they don’t have an Xbox or a decent PC, that is. But Bethesda aren’t the only studio who have had a crack at that particular style of vast open-world RPG: indeed, they’ve inspired plenty of copycats and homages over the year...

Video games and murder are like cheese and crackers. Vic and Bob. The Edinburgh Fringe and disgruntled locals. A classic partnership, but hardly inseparable: though our chief interaction with these virtual worlds is to deal death to their residents, it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, there are thousands of video games out there where you aren't compelled to kill anyone. Or stab them. Or even...

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 olymp...

Baldur's Gate 3 is finally upon us if you're a PC gamer, in which case, this episode is especially for you, because it's all about good games that you wouldn't dare bring up in polite company. Or impolite company. Gaming, despite its mainstream acceptance in recent years, is still an extremely nerdy hobby, full of very niche stuff that rarely makes headlines beyond the enthusiast press. Yes, that'...

As a medium, video games are often a vast fabric of inspiration-taking, borrowed ideas, and of course shameless rip offs. Some of the biggest and best games in decades have been the result of a lot of hard work coupled with the healthy practice of nabbing what's popular during development. A tad dishonest? Maybe - but it's how some of the biggest game developers in the business got to where they a...

Welcome to The Best Games Ever Show episode 61: The best management sim. Video games are a treasure trove if you like managing things. People. Buildings. Civilisations. Transport networks. Space programs (as in NASA, not as in Star Trek). Whatever organisational or logistic problem you can imagine, there's probably some kind of video game that attempts to let you solve it. And of those there must...

Welcome to The Best Games Ever Show episode 60: The best game with a reptile. With Gex making his grand return, now seems like the perfect opportunity to take a look at video game reptiles. There are loads, obviously, of various levels of importance. So this episode is a real toss up! Who will win... who knows! You'll have to give it a watch or listen in order to determine how things will turn out...

Welcome to The Best Games Ever Show episode 59: The best game with the worst gimmick. There are plenty of crap games with bad gimmicks. Tony Hawk: RIDE, for example, which was built around a terrible skateboard-shaped controller peripheral and was basically a terrible game as a result. Or Crime Boss: Rockay City, which is a painfully bottom tier heist game which boasts “Vanilla Ice is in this” as...

Welcome to The Best Games Ever Show episode 58: The best use of a mega popular license. Licensed games are big business. The richest studios and publishers in the galaxy all have a foothold in the gaming space because, as countless CEOs and market analysts tell us every year, video games make more money than Hollywood, musical theatre, gardening programmes, the broadcasting rights for Shinty, and...

Welcome to The Best Games Ever Show episode 57: The best game where you play a dead guy. Gaming is stuffed to the coffin lid with undead protagonists. Vampires. Poltergeists. Murdered detectives with unfinished business. Starship captains resurrected from death by a rogue human supremacist terrorist organisation with a trillionaire CEO. The list goes on. And indeed, on. But what’s the best game wi...

Welcome to The Best Games Ever Show episode 56: the best globetrotting travel game. This week we welcome our first guest panellist, the ever endearing Bertie Purchese from Eurogamer! If you've ever gone to EGX you may know Bertie as the eccentric host of the Eurogamer Pub Quiz, and if you're generally interested in games writing you'll have come across his tireless work as an Associate Editor of E...

Welcome to The Best Games Ever Show episode 55: The best game with horse armour (but you can't have Oblivion) 2006 feels like a lifetime ago. I’m sure for at least some of you reading, it literally was. In which case you won’t remember the utter stink that was kicked up over the concept of – get this – paying actual real money for in-game cosmetic items, on top of the money you’d already forked ou...

Because we live in a meritocracy, rubbish things never get sequels. Except we don't live in a meritocracy, we live in hell, and therefore rubbish things often get nine sequels and a spin-off TV show while good things are busy getting rejected in board rooms. Such is life. But it's not necessarily a bad thing, because every now and then, sequels far outstrip their progenitors. It's a phenomenon tha...

The video game industry has a long and legendary history of awful names. Several developers have spent literally millions of dollars on otherwise excellent games just to slap the most staggeringly awful title on the final product. Boring names are common enough, with tepid words like War, Quest or Royale thrown in there more as a tone setter than anything remotely interesting. Then there's the wil...

Welcome to the Best Games Ever show Episode 52: the best game with a ginger protagonist. Cal Kestis of Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is just the latest in a long line of Gaming Redheads, an esteemed group that includes such celebrated characters as Official Femshep, Joanna Dark, and what's-her-face out of Heavenly Sword. And it makes me swell with pride to see this proud tradition continuing. Listen. I...

Almost every action adventure game with RPG elements and dungeons, that's set in an open or semi-open world, can trace its roots – a link to the past, if you will – back to the original Legend of Zelda game on the NES. And this is surprising, because that game is 37 years old. That’s roughly as old as I am, which in human terms is “should probably start thinking about life insurance” levels of dec...

Welcome to the Best Games Ever Show episode 50: The best game that is uncomfortably pro-monarchy. Video games are absurdly monarchist. Nintendo's biggest franchises both have you running around after a princess. Final Fantasy is littered with royals showing up as quest givers, party members, and protagonists. Fable III is entirely about seizing your divine right to rule, and leads to an infamous s...

Welcome to the Best Games Ever Show episode 49: The Best Game with the Worst Difficulty Spike. High difficulty is one thing. As long as it's consistent, it can be an asset. Souls games are essentially all about providing a big mountain to climb. But sometimes games have difficulty spikes that, frankly, take the proverbial Michael. Games which aren't supposed to be mountains to climb, but gentle sl...

As most of us are residents of a horrible island, we at VG247 have raised a suspicious eyebrow at Dead Island 2 for being not set on an island or, frankly, horrible enough for our liking. Which has led us to ask the question: what is the best game set on a horrible island? There are so many to choose from, as islands are a popular setting in video games: their size is naturally limited, so it's mu...

Winning this podcast is easy: you just have to convince me, Jim Trinca, that your submission for the topic du jour is better than anyone else's. The tricky part is that I'm fickle and unknowable, and also, Donaldson knows everything, so he's usually uncovered an angle that you haven't thought of. The fact that it's almost always about 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is immaterial. In the cut and thrust...

For all of its faults, the one thing you can say about Crime Boss: Rockay City is that Vanilla Ice is in it. Which reminded us of a thing that happened a while back: it was called "the nineties", and it had loads of good stuff, like the Amiga, Fido Dido, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But the nineties were a great time for personalities. Snoop Dogg. Pamela Anderson. Tony Blair. Loads of them. Chy...