Show Notes
Gimme ham steak on rye with extra pickles and a dozen egg whites on the side. Hold the pickles. Who's uncle do I gotta bribe to get a parking space around here? Get outta here.
And so on. Yes, this week we're asking our esteemed panel: what the best game set in New York (or a facsimile thereof)? There are an absurd number of games to choose from. The Big Apple is probably the most depicted city in the medium, and it's not hard to understand why: beyond the fact that it's an enormously influential media hub (the "capital of the world", or so the saying goes), where a disproportionate percentage of the world's most successful creatives hail from, it's also just has an intoxicating allure. Everyone wants to explore its streets, its hip neighbourhoods, its melting pot of cultures and cuisine. And what better way to explore it than from the comfort of your own home, in video game form, where you don't even have to go through security at Heathrow first. Anything is worth avoiding that, frankly.
New York, or close approximations of it, serves as backdrop to a huge number of the greatest games of all time. Its stunning photorealistic recreation in Sony's Spider-Man games is one of the most intricate game locations ever constructed, as is the painting-like autumnal metropolis of GTA IV's Liberty City, a deft imitation that absolutely nails the vibe of the real world city and many of its signature landmarks, despite being completely unlike it in terms of its layout and geography. New York crops up in places you'd hardly expect, too. Mario Odyssey, anyone? Despite literally featuring a character who is canonically from Brooklyn, the last 3D Mario adventure has an entire sequence set in New Donk City, meaning that the Mario universe has at least two New Yorks. It's so good, they built it twice.
But which New York-based game is the best of all? Well, to find out, you'll have to watch or listen to this podcast here. Handily, below are several methods for doing so. So keep your frickin' hair on, aight? 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
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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