
Episode 76: The best game where the protagonist has a stupid pun for a name
The Best Games Ever PodcastShow Notes
From Alan Wake (he’s A. Wake, get it? Get it?) to Miles Prower, there are loads of video game protagonists whose names are rubbish puns. Well, actually there isn’t, but it’s happened just often enough that there’s sufficient material for this edition of VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast. Halloween fell between the gaps of our posting schedule, so we couldn’t really justify doing a Best Spooky Game That You Couldn’t Finish episode, and Guy Fawkes night also doesn’t occur for another couple of days, so we can’t do a Best Game That Makes Light Of Religious Persecution either. But here’s the next best thing – a topic that we can link to the year’s best horror game, Alan Wake 2, on account of developer Remedy’s penchant for giving their characters the most entertainingly daft names despite putting them in serious games with mature themes. Like “staying up past your bedtime”, or “doing that cool thing from The Matrix where you leap across a room firing guns”. But which game featuring a protagonist with a stupid punny name is the best one? And what exactly is a pun? Why is that if I say “talking skull”, you imagine something like Boney from Trap Door or Murray from Monkey Island, where it’s the bleached skull of a dead person reanimated by supernatural means, rather than thinking of the talking skull that you yourself actually live in, or the dozens of talking skulls that you interact with on a daily basis? Not a single one of these questions is answered in this episode, but we do argue a lot, so you’ll probably like it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from The Best Games Ever Podcast
Interactivity is this medium's entire thing. It's a composite of many other art forms: everything from prose, to sculpture, to television. What it cribs from those things is often its weakest work, but what it does brilliantly and almost singularly is give the audience some control within the experience. All art is interactive on some level, in that the relationship between a creative work, its author, and its enjoyer is always a conversation of sorts. We project our own world view onto motionless hunks of marble. Our own life experiences onto flat planes of pigmented acrylics. Our own cultural conditioning onto Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. And there's those Choose Your Own Adventure books that give you some sense of a branching narrative and are also rubbish. But games? You may inhabit entire worlds beyond the screen via a proxy. An avatar quite often of our own design. An effective physical presence. Games don't just tell us what Narnia is like: they let us stick a steel toe-capped size twelve through the fucking wardrobe, mate. We all get to be Dorothy, except instead of a nippy wee dug we've got an AK-47 and a bandolier of frag grenades. This medium doesn't need to be better at imparting meaning through narrative than all the places it steals from, because it does something that none of those other things can: freedom to change the script. Whether it's through small, inconsequential choices like whether to shoot a guy in the bonce or the willy, or full-on branching narratives with multiple possible origin stories, middles, and endings, games are more or less what you put into them. Namely, you. But what is the best game that lets you control the narrative? Let's ask our esteemed panel of professional Game Likers from VG247, which is sort of like Eurogamer but communist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sometimes a game comes along that is, for reasons, a bit a of a black sheep as far as its parent company is concerned. It could be a passion project that doesn't tick any zeigeisty boxes, a legacy IP that the current owners have no clue what to do with, sometimes even a perfectly decent game that the court of public opinion has turned sour on and therefore must be canned. Video games are big, unwieldy projects that only ever release in a working state through a combination of talent, grit, and extraordinary good luck, and it's the latter that often pushes one into precarious waters. And yet, there are a number of examples of games that are brilliant, beloved, fine ambassadors of their genre despite being a full-on headache for anyone involved in having to sell them. Which of these, according to our esteemed panel of Alex Donaldson and Tom Orry, is the best ever? Host Jim Trinca will decide in this edition of The Best Games Ever Podcast, a show that is loved by all including its parent company and associated stakeholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Add-on content for video games is often worthless, but it can sometimes go very, very right: just look at the DLC catalogue for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It infamously introduced the gaming landscape to the concept of horse armour, or paid cosmetic items in single player titles, which was widely condemned as a cynical cash-grab (even so, the concept ended up being so lucrative that it survives to this day). But it also gave us Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles, establishing a familiar pattern of big games having a medium sized expansion set within the existing map, and a larger, quasi-sequel sized one set in its own brand new area.
Gaming is full of rings of power: from RPG trinkets that give your character a small but pivotal buff to a critical stat, warp rings that provide instantaneous transport for Sonic the Hedgehog, and beastly racing circuits. Not to mention, er, the actual rings of power from Lord of the Rings. Season 2 of Amazon Prime's Rings of Power inspired this topic, obviously. Well I like it anyway. That makes one of us.
Who won out of Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, the crowdfunded space sim sensations pitched to us a decade ago by two of the genre's most celebrated game directors? Star Citizen being a spiritual follow up to Wing Commander and Privateer, and Elite Dangerous being a direct sequel to Elite, Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters. Well, it depends how you define "win". Or, indeed, "exists". This is just one of the Enthusiastic Disagreements we have in this week's Best Games Ever Podcast, along with GTA vs Saints Row, Call of Duty vs Medal of Honor, and another one that we can't remember. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices