The Back Page: A Video Games Podcast Samuel Roberts and Matthew Castle

GameSpot's Tamoor Hussain kindly joins us to discuss his career from CVG to working in the US, and to help us rank the Batman: Arkham games to mark the tenth anniversary of Arkham City. 

This week's music is from the Batman: Arkham Knight soundtrack by Nick Arundel and David Buckley, and the Batman: Arkham City and Arkham Asylum soundtracks by Nick Arundel and Ron Fish.

Judge Matthew Castle puts 16 of our listeners on trial for bad secondhand games purchases, and public defence attorney Samuel Roberts has been assigned to defend them. Who will live and who will die? Plus, hear about our favourite arcade games in this week's episode. 

This week's music is from The Testament of Sherlock Holmes soundtrack by Alexandre Dudko and the Metroid: Other M soundtrack by Kuniaki Haishima.

Our guest this week is journalist and author Simon Parkin. Hear how Simon broke the news of Hideo Kojima's departure from Konami, among many other fascinating industry stories, and learn how he turned reviewing GBA games into a career writing for The New Yorker. 

This week's music is from the Gunstar Heroes soundtrack by Norio Hanzawa, the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu and the Segagaga soundtrack by Tsuyoshi Kaneko.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the N64's release in North America, Matthew and Samuel each compete to pick the 10 best games on the system for a hypothetical N64 Mini console. After you've heard our selections, you can vote for the winner @BackPagePod on Twitter until the end of September. Note that this episode was recorded before Nintendo confirmed N64 games were coming to the Switch Online service.

This week's music is from the Rogue Squadron soundtrack by Chris Hülsbeck, the Super Smash Bros. soundtrack by Hirokazu Ando and the Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon soundtrack by Shigeru Araki, Yusuke Kato, Saiko Miki and Yasumasa Kitagawa.

We've finished Deathloop! Enjoy spoiler-free impressions of Arkane's latest game from Samuel, Matthew and our guest, the brilliant freelance writer Jeremy Peel. In hour two, hear about the history of the immersive sim, with chatter about Deus Ex, Thief and more games that defined Deathloop's lineage. 

This week's music is from the Deathloop soundtrack by Tom Salta and Ross Tregenza, the Deus Ex soundtrack by Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos and Dan Gardopee, and the Deus Ex: Human Revolution soundtrack by Michael McCann. 

Here's where Warren Spector's definition of the immersive sim comes from: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/postmortem-ion-storm-s-i-deus-ex-i-
Here's Jeremy's oral history of Deus Ex: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/deus-ex-at-20-the-oral-history-of-a-pivotal-pc-game

Two very different top 10 lists from 2010, one of the best years of gaming in modern memory. The usual mix of magazine memories and news from the time. That's it! Enjoy. 

This week's music is from the Red Dead Redemption soundtrack by Bill Elm & Woody Jackson, the Halo Reach soundtrack by Marty O'Donnell, the Alan Wake soundtrack by Poets of the Fall and Petri Alanko, and the Super Mario Galaxy 2 soundtrack by Mahito Yokota, Ryo Nagamatsu and Koji Kondo.