The Best Games Ever Podcast VG247

Whatever your attitude to guns in real life (for the record, they’re awful and civilians shouldn’t have them), it’s hard not to become a sort of virtual gun nut when you’re a gaming enthusiast because, inevitably, our primary interaction with game worlds is shooting bullets into them. Even games which emphatically are not shooters often feature guns as a tool or special attack. And sometimes – not hugely often, but more regularly than you might think – we get games which have fully developed shooting mechanics and a range of guns that you don't even get to use until many hours in. Perhaps making you wait until the final act before it grants you the right to bear arms (note: nothing to do with bears, see previous episode).

There’s always a very good narratively justified reason for this. Perhaps the game is set somewhere where firearms are naturally scarce, like The Past, or Shropshire. Perhaps the developers are making a clever point about the instant, maximum violence that automatic weapons afford vs the nuanced, patient art of having to stab or punch people instead. Whatever the reason, this week our esteemed panel of professional game enjoyers are tasked with deciding which is the best of these rare treats.

If you want to know what they came up with, there are handy ways to watch or listen to the show below. What a coincidence!

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Hello and welcome to episode 97 of the Best Games Ever Podcast. As is traditional, let us give you some information about the show. This week we are looking for our contestants to think of the best game in which you fight a bear. Let's see if anyone decides to subvert the topic in ways that cause mutiny within the ranks.

As ever, host Jim Trinca must decide who has picked the best game by judging on an unknown list of criteria he most likely makes up as he sees fit on the day. A true professional.

If you want more of the Best Games Ever Podcast, we have an extended edition in which Jim picks a game and the rest of the team tells him how much of a terrible choice he's made. You can get this by becoming a paid member. Head to VG247.com and click on the "support us" section in the top right (in the menu on mobile) for all the details.
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You can’t say anything these days! Is what silly people say, a lot. You can actually say whatever you like. You can say, for example, and with confidence, that there are certain things you could get away with in gaming thirty years ago that simply wouldn’t fly now. Like… racing games with only one track. Platformers with a length of 20mins if you’re good at them. Games with terrible representation of anyone who isn’t a straight white male.

Attitudes and expectations change with time – sometimes it’s progress, sometimes it’s regression. But whatever the reason, it does lead to a lot of otherwise good games being cast into the shame cupboard of history. Games which would be a tough sell or borderline offensive now, but play great.

So what’s the best one of those, according to our esteemed panel? This week Tom and I are joined once again by Richie Morgan from I Hate Doctor Who and Owen O’Donnell from The Infinite Review, two people who also remember the past.
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Inspired by the (frankly excellent) Fallout TV show, this week on VG247's Best Games Ever podcast I've tasked my colleagues with finding the best game where a family member ditches you. With the prerequisite understanding that none of them are allowed to pick Fallout 3, the quintessential "dad's buggered off" simulator.

As it turns out, being forsaken by a family member is a fairly common scenario in video games, especially if you widen the concept of family out to any sort of fraternity or gang. Which didn't stop racer-obsessed Mark trying to crowbar in a racing game, of all things. Or Tom from bringing up the usual guff. To find out which specific guff, you'll have to listen to this, which is presumably what you're doing here in the first place, which means I've essentially wasted the last five minutes of my life typing this out. Thanks for that. Thanks. I could have spent that doing something nice, like cradling my laughing child, or eating crisps, or any number of things that we do while the reaper waits.

Anyway, watch Fallout, it's good.
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Inspired by the recent free drop of current viral sensation Content Warning – a co-op survival “shooter” about making spooky FauxTube videos with three of your mates – this week’s Best Games Ever podcast is all about freebies that we’d happily pay for.

It’s a happy coincidence that this topic coincides with the launch of our extended podcast: a paid version of the show which includes an extra segment where you get to heart the host’s pick, and its subsequent demolishing by the rest of the panel. To paraphrase one recent YouTube commenter, “so this is the idiot whose opinions you plan to monetise?”. Well, yes, but the point is that they get kicked around like a sheep’s bladder, so I’m actually nobly offering myself up as the waste organ in question. For more information on how to become a paid VG247 subscriber, which comes with other benefits such as silky-smooth ad-free browsing, check out our Support Us page: https://www.vg247.com/subscribe/standard

Anyway, some rules for this episode are: we’re talking about actual free games. Not free-to-play games that aren’t actually free once you factor in the entire economic model. So free as in beer, not free as in The NHS. Also, stealing doesn’t count, Connor.


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The Best Games Ever podcast is a game show where three totally normal and socially acceptable panellists have to find the best game in a peculiar category such as "Best game with a breakfast buffet", or "Best game with loads of vandalism". They have to pitch their pick to our host, Jim, who uses his power to decide the winner. But there's a lot of office politics, backstabbing, and meta-gaming going on which makes this mild-mannered panel game fraught with real danger.

These days the overwhelming consensus about a game can act as this great opinion hammer, used by the masses to beat down the oddballs, wildcards, and those with loud voices and poor taste. With review scores aggregated together into one gleaming numerical figure, games can be effectively ranked with a superscore that'll be chiselled into its tombstone forever. A positive score may be a gleaming eulogy, whereas a negative one traps a game in an eternal cycle of being bashed on.

But there are misses! Games that weren't loved, or perhaps still aren't loved, but are really good! You probably have one or two personal faves that fall into this category. A lot of this stuff is personal taste after all, what may work for you may not work for thousands of other perfectly sane gamers out there. The result, a pantheon of underdogs. Games that may not have the gleam of all-time classics in the eyes of the many, but are gems in the hands of the few.

What, then, is the best game that is actually good despite loads of people hating on it? Does it sounds a little bit like Garfield? To find out, watch or listen to our esteemed panel argue about it for like an hour - we're still giving away our extended section, although be warned that this is going behind the paywall soon.
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