The Ringer-Verse - The 2004 Video Game Draft | Button Mash

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Ben, Steve Ahlman, Matt James, and Justin Charity react to rumors about the Nintendo Switch 2 and a ‘Kingdom Hearts’ film adaptation (2:35), discuss the significance of the latest in a string of surprise Steam sensations, talk of ‘Manor Lords,’ and name their top five games developed by a single creator (23:43). They then draft rosters of the best titles from the great gaming year of 2004 (30:41). Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Steve Ahlman, Matt James, and Justin Charity Producer: Mike Wargon Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join me, Danny Kelly, along with Danny Hyfitz and Craig Horlbeck every week on the Ringer Fantasy Football Show as we prepare for the 2024 fantasy football season. We'll cover all the biggest news and topics across the league as well as whatever weird topics our listeners email us about. That's the Ringer Fantasy Football Show on Spotify. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tramphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tramphia is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject trumphia, proper training is required.

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Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Tramphiara radio.com. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and making a mess. You don't need weather tech floor liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping. then you'd want a cargo liner. Or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy

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When we want you, we'll fight. In the meantime, try not to gun down any more officers of the law. Y'all can't leave me here? This ballast country. I thought you said you was innocent, Carl. That you don't bang. This is Carl 58. See you around like a donut, Carl.

Officer Pendlebury's down? We'll be right over. See, Hernandez. Ah, shit. Here we go again. Hello and welcome into The Ringerverse, your Nexus podcast feed for Allendez. All things fandom.

I am Ben Lindberg, a senior editor for the Ringer and your button mash matre d, and today I've made a reservation for four. Joining me at the big button mash table, our Ringer deputy art lead, Matt James. Howdy, Matt? Howdy, Ben? Senior audio producer, Midnight Boy and Junior Mint, sweet Steve Allman. Welcome, Steve. Thank you so much, Ben.

And senior staff writer, Justin Charity. Greetings, Charity. BBO Drizzi. This is good, guys. Long, long weekend. Long weekend. Why would you inflict that brainworm on all of our listeners when we're just getting started? Senior editor, senior audio producer, senior staff writer, it's great that we've got so many seniors on the call because we're about to talk about 2004.

Back of my day. Which we are all old enough to remember. Yes, this time we will be maxing out our millennial meters, swallowing some member berries, and rewinding to a time. of wired controllers, standard definition displays, and physical disks, as we select the strongest release lineups from a legendary gaming year. However, before we flash back, let's cover some current events because we do have some rumors and news to non. Let's touch on three minibus banter topics before we do the draft. First, what's in the box? The Nintendo Switch 2. According to a report from Spanish gaming site Vandal,

which accurately predicted some attributes of the Switch OLED, the sequel to the Switch will use magnets, how do they work, to connect controllers to the system, which will be bigger than a Switch, but smaller than a Steen Deck. However, the most important part of this report in my mind was that it specified that Nintendo has allowed

accessory manufacturers to feel, but not see the Switch 2 by reaching inside an opaque box designed to allow access while preserving secrecy. So some people have felt it, supposedly. No one has seen it because someone could snap a pick. It could leak. We could all get our eyes on it. Some of us have had our hands on it.

So I believe this because I'd believe almost anything when it comes to Nintendo's capacity for secrecy. And also, I just want it to be true regardless of whether or not it is. And so my question for each of you is what is the funniest, most surprising, strangest thing you can imagine feeling if you reached inside the switch two gumjabar box. Okay? So you got a few seconds in heaven with the switch two. You get to feel it up. What's the weirdest thing that you can feel inside the switchbox? Matt, any ideas?

Yeah, four C buttons, I think. Like the old N64 controller. They're back. No, stop. Wow. Not C sticks, just C buttons. Just the yellow joints. The yellow joints.

The yellow joints. Yeah, I love it. Okay. Steve, anything? I would actually, if I'm Nintendo, I would use this opportunity to make a, like, a massive troll opportunity and that, like, no box has the same item in it. And everything looks different. Everything feels different.

Like, it's one's like Miyamoto's head. The other is, like, two game control is stuck together. The other one is... Like severed? Like seven... Severed Miyamoto's head inside the box or just a model, hopefully. No, no, no.

It's him, but he's just like... It's one of those like dinner plate things. Oh, I see. His body is concealed below. Okay. Yeah, because we need Miyamoto alive to make good games for Switch to. You know some John Romero-ish right now.

Jesus. Does that show Fear Factor where they used to do this? Right. And they'd put like a hot dog in there and they would lose their minds. It's the same thing, right? What I love about this time of like rumored consoles coming out is that anything can be true in these like speculative times to know that like if I'm a dev and I don't get to see the actual unit but the unit that I'm working on actually has an interactive feature that will be pivotal to my gaming experience.

Then I get to just feel around for it like that's as creepy as that sounds. I hope it's true because Nintendo really is. in some weird, not desperate, but like some interesting NDA workarounds. Yeah. To just like, you know, maybe lock your phones up, like it's a, like it's a Chappelle show or something. I like your idea of just different sizes

so that we just confuse all the accessory manufacturers and we get just a bunch of stuff that doesn't fit the switch to. It seems counterproductive, but also very funny. Charity, they escort you into the secret room. Guards are all around lasers shooting through the air that you have to duck under, jump over, and you get to the Switch 2 paint box,

you stick your hand in there. What do you want to feel, or what are you most apprehensive about feeling? In a vacuum, right, where we pretend that I know nothing else or I've heard nothing else about what the Switch 2 is going to be, I would think you only do that kind of gimmick

of like you can only touch it and not see it if you're soft launching that it's going to be a totally different thing, like a glove. Like, it's going to be the Switch 2 is actually going to be a glove. that you, it's going to be like a cappy type situation. Yeah, power glove, but that works like capy.

And the controller is the glove, but also the console is the glove. And now you put it, and it's a cappy type situation. That's what I, I think it would be something like that. Honestly. In the spirit of 2004, I think if it had a cute little handle on top, Gabe Cube style, that would be fun for me. Just take it all the way back. And if it's a little box, I guess I can't tell if it's going to be purple,

because I can't see it. I can only feel it, but maybe I can sense it's sort of purple. So throwback handle because Switch doesn't really have that, right? You got to get a carrying case. You got to put it in something, but it doesn't really have a convenient little thing you can hold on to, right? Is there anything that you could feel that would actually make you more psyched and hyped to buy this thing, which unfortunately we probably will not have our hands on until 2025? Matt, what were you going to say? I was going to say the two things that I'd be looking for with my hands in the mystery box,

an actual fully connected D-pad would be great. And then the other thing I'd be looking for is analog triggers, R2, L2. That's the one thing I definitely want out of the Switch 2. It's kind of silly that the Switch only had binary on-off triggers. That needs to go, because we need to have some racing games. on this next system. Yeah. I just need, like, raised lettering on a disc inside that says Windwaker, remaster for Switch 2.

I don't read Braille, but something along those lines so that I would just know that it's finally coming out for that system. Any other thoughts on the Nintendo box of secrets, the Chamber of Secrets, the Gamja Bar box that some people have gotten to stick their hands in, the glory hole of Switch 2? frankly I'm tired of Nintendo trying to do cute shit with its consoles like we don't need we don't need it like if they just made like a steam deck that was probably just a little bit more sleek then we'd be happy but instead they might be too preoccupied with making something look like a cute keychain and I think by now in the in the era of like we need 60 FPS we

need at minimum 1080 if you're making this portable I think you just if you just give us the goods then we'll be happy and maybe stop worrying about what's on YouTube. Right. All right. Bantor topic number two. Is Kingdom Coming? We're still in rumor territory here. A movie may be next or at least somewhere in the works for the Kingdom Hearts franchise.

It's been two years since Square Enix, Enix, we never agree about this, announced Kingdom Hearts 4. So if you go by the Kingdom Hearts 3 development timeline, which Square is probably hoping they will not, that means the game may be. at least four more years away. However, according to multiple insiders, so to speak, self-described, there are quote-unquote rumblings of a Kingdom Hearts screen adaptation, most likely a movie, in contrast to previous rumors of a potential Disney Plus series. So, Charity, I think I've got to go to you first here. Would a Kingdom Hearts movie be great or terrible or both? You guys remember Wonder Woman 1984 where the Pascal character, Max Lord, his whole thing, is like people ask

it's the monkey's paw curling right like he's like what do you wish for he tricks people into telling them their wish and then he gives them their wish and then it screws them I just want to all the deranged kingdom hearts fans I know in my life and I'm not one of them but I know a lot of them you're a well-adjusted kingdom

you know it's like I I want you guys to ask yourself like do you really want to put this with do you really want this to materialize like really look into yourself and ask yourself some questions about the rollout of this thing.

I count to your question with another question, Charity. I'm Disney. Do I like money? I mean, yeah, sure. Because I'm going to tell you what, that's lined up like crazy. It's a merchandising gold mine. Yeah, for sure.

And not to be diminutive because I'm actually a pretty big Kingdom Hearts fan myself. it's more or less what that franchise has become after this many years and a million more games that you haven't played rather than you have. It's kind of something that almost has to happen now because the boom of TV-elized, of TV-made and movie-franchised video game properties, like, that's probably the biggest shoe-in for what could easily work and be transferable. Like, it's, it's wild that it hasn't been confirmed already because once it is, I feel like it's a surefire thing to be successful, regardless of how good it could be. Because we're in a post-good era of video game properties anyway. Like, what's the? It doesn't matter because we're just getting sort of good ones.

Yeah. So even if it's fine. You want to go back to the dark old days? Exactly. Wait, Steve, can I say one thing? I will say this that, like, by, it was really around, like, Kingdom Hearts 3 when I just realized how many people I know who love Kingdom Hearts, right? And I think even after a few people tried to sell me on it, I was just still scared.

I was just like, this seems like a ton of, like, video game to grapple with, like, especially going back to the beginning. So at least I can say that, that, like, if this happened, I at least feel less intimidated by the idea of trying to engage with Kingdom Hearts in movie form, as opposed to actually buying the game. So like that's cool. You know what I mean? Like people who got the last time about playing. Yeah. Because the lower learning curve is like Dogecoin in 2020. It just went like that after Kingdom Hearts 1. Yeah. But like one is something that you could actually digest. I haven't understood a plot of a Kingdom Hearts game for many, many years. I still enjoyed Kingdom Hearts games.

So that's not necessarily a prerequisite. But if you're stripping out the gameplay, then that could be a bit problematic if it's completely nonsensical as it sort of infamously has been of late. I guess there's some risk maybe just because we've had so many multiverse movies and shows and crossovers and universes blending together that I think the novelty has worn off to some extent. And you could even say like Disney's big animated release last year, Wish was sort of that idea. It was like a Disney mashup movie of other Disney movies for the big anniversary. And that bombed at the box office. So maybe the enthusiasm wouldn't be there, but I'm guessing it would.

I just think it would have to be a show, not a movie, right? Like we've talked and written about how much better game adaptations have worked on the small screen as opposed to the big screen. And if you're dumping a kingdom hearts level of lore on people, that won't work in a two-hour movie. I don't see how that could happen. Matt, any thoughts? Yeah, I think it might be bad, Ben. Oh, no. You're all heartless, so to speak.

It's just, it's a property that is, as you said, it's just so deep and there's so much to it now. And it also started so long ago that it would have to be like a complete reboot, basically, because no one under 30 probably even knows anything about Kingdom Hearts. And a lot of the characters referenced in it are completely lost on anyone who's not old like us. So it'd have to really be built from the ground up again And I guess they could do that But I also don't know that it can exist outside of the time That it started in

I don't know Full reboot gives me some optimism But I don't know I was never a huge Kingdom Hearts fan anyway So we'll see I agree that TV would probably be a better route Because if you're going to have a whole lot of story Yeah

It's probably better Just drop it on Disney Plus. Fallout style original story set in the Kingdom Hearts slash Disney Universe and sell so many keyblades we would all buy them. All right. Last banter topic. Surprise, surprise. There's another new surprise. Hits or hits.

Steve sent this message to our video games channel in Ringerslack the other day. And I quote, Modern gaming is crazy. I keep seeing headlines like Early Access Hit Builds Simulator breaks concurrent player count record for April. I don't know exactly what inspired that slack, Steve, but I've had the same feeling because we have been seeing headlines like that for quite a while now. The latest examples being Manor Lords and Grey Zone Warfare, which sold respectively a million copies in early access in a day in the case of Manor Lords and half a million in three days in the case of Grey Zone warfare. And those are just the latest in a long line of these sort of unforeseen sensations. Obviously, we've had Hell Divers 2 and Powell World and Lethal Company and Sons of the Forest and Content Warning and Balatro, I guess you could kind of include here, kind of in a different category.

And now we have Hades 2 out in Early Access. It actually just dropped right now. It just did. So we are recording a pod instead of running to play Hades 2 in Early Access because we care about our listeners. But we will certainly check that out soon. And that will presumably be a sensation as well, although not really a surprise. in that case because that is such a highly anticipated game. Meanwhile, you got a bunch of full-price AAA goate-candidate games that have either flopped in the case of, say, Suicide Squad or Skull and Bones.

Okay, we kind of saw that coming. Or say, Final Fantasy Rebirth, which is great and sold well, but sort of disappointingly, at least relative to Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy 7 remake, etc. So why has gaming become so conducive to a series of surprise viral sensations? Because it really does feel like when we're planning this pod now, I pencil in episode topics instead of setting them in stone. Because it's like, okay, we kind of know what's coming out. We kind of know what might be good or popular. But you never really know when the next Powell World or Helldivers will pop out of nowhere. So Steve, since you sent the Slack, what's your hypothesis?

Again, when I thought of that slack, I just wanted to clean a ship full of bilge because I played cleaning simulator for power watching simulator. James' favorite game of all time. But again, I feel like the power worlds of the world and even something that can catch fire this quickly, now is kind of being a bit more about staying power

rather than how popular you can be because the amount of the dichotomy between does this need to be live service, how much money can we milk something for versus how good of a flash in the pan, early access, or small scale moment we can have

on Steam or whatever charts we can be? How long can that last? Therefore, how much money can we make out of those things? It's made me just like a tiny bit cynical because I've always just wanted to wait for anything

to see how much staying power that it has. Thank God. that I just loved Hell Divers 1 before I played Hell Divers 2 and just bought that on site. Yeah. You're a Hell Divers 1 hipster. You were on it before it became big. As one of the hundreds of people that played that,

I'd like to stand on business for Hell Divers 1. But I think for the things that make a game a hit and memorable and lasting, like, do you really think that we're going to be talking about Power World in five years, unless it's like the thing that's going to offer up a bunch of gaming trends or is this going to

be like the thing of like, okay, is early access our new gold mine or is that going to be the next like go west and find your next big hit kind of a thing? Matt, what do you think? I think that people are sick of being fed the biggest corporate

video games of open world maps and loot boxes and I think there's a real thrill in discovering a new game doing a new thing from a developer that's small enough that you know that they're doing it out of love and not as a cash grab. Or out world where it's doing several old things together.

Sure, sure, sure. But this happens, this is like music fans as well who are like, there's people who just want to find the newest things early as possible. And everyone's putting out double albums to juice the streaming stats, right? And maybe you want something shorter, just digestible bite size. Yeah. So I think it just comes out of a love of innovation in the space and root for the underdog. And we're sick of all of this mainstream crap that is generated in a corporate boardroom

to extract as much money from teenagers as possible. Yeah. Take that big AAA gaming industry. What do you think, Charity, are you experiencing some whiplash here when it comes to trying to track what is popular? I had a similar thought about, I was thinking about hip hop specifically, but I guess pop works too, right? To take Matt's like metaphor there, I don't think it's necessarily hatred or backlash. It's just I think about with music, there are some years where you look at the calendar and it's like, wow, there's a Drake album, immediately followed by a Beyonce album, immediately followed by a Taylor Swift album, immediately followed by a Kanye album. And then there are some years where you look back,

and you're like, man, all the biggest things that happened were a bunch of street rappers who no one had heard of until, like, they had some weird random viral hit. And then maybe they got like three more hits off of that, and then they disappeared forever. You know what I mean? And they're like eight of those guys. And also like Drake took the year off that year.

You know, I don't know. I feel like there is a kind of seesaw. between, like, I think people, I don't think people are always necessarily sick of the mainstream stuff, but I do think that, like, I personally at least, right, like seek a balance between that thrill I get

when I'm playing like a really big AAA, like I've been waiting for Final Fantasy Rebirth for however many years, you know, versus when I play, like, some random game on Steam that I hadn't really heard of and was just sort of sitting in my wish list. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, we talked about this on the Goody Pod last year, just how many surprise drops there were. And I think it's been taken to an even higher level this year. It's not even just the best games of the year, though in some cases it is. But it's just that you can't really count on what the biggest games will be, which is, again, daunting from a podcast planning perspective. But as a player, it's kind of fun just to be buffeted by the wins of popularity. I think it's partly because early

is just so standard, so normalized now, right? It's just a part of the development process to kind of make it work financially. And so most people, many people are not waiting for the full release necessarily. And then probably there's some sequel fatigue going on. I know Hell Divers 2 is a sequel, but a sequel to a game only Steve played. So for most people, it was fresh IP. So that's probably part of it. And obviously, a lot of these games are cheap, right? Not that gaming inflation adjusted is that expensive, really, if you break it down by hour, or even if you look historically, I mean, a 60 or even $70 game is a pretty good deal. And yet, if you can give people a game for 40 or 30 or 20 or 10 in some of these cases, they'll be much more likely to check it out.

And then I think it's probably also the game discovery has changed, right? You're not relying on just the traditional mainstream gaming press to the extent that that still exists. So, things can just pop on TikTok or Twitch or Steam or wherever. And suddenly a game you hadn't heard of a week ago, you are hearing of because like Steve said, you're seeing headlines or tweets or whatever it is about this mega popular game. And you're like, what is that? Okay, I got to find out more. I got to check that out.

Oh, it's only 20 bucks. Okay. Maybe I will check that out. Or maybe it's on Game Pass or something, right? So I think it is kind of a lower barrier. I mean, there are just more games being released on Steam than ever. So in that sense, to stand out is really tough. But if you do have a breakout hit, I think the prerequisites for that are maybe smaller than

they used to be. Like, it's not necessarily that you can put enormous amounts of marketing muscle behind your game. It's kind of an organic word of mouth thing, which is kind of cool in some respects. So briefly, before we move on, in honor of Manor Lords and also Lethal Company and the upcoming Braid Anniversary Edition, all those games, were developed by one person, at least initially, a single creator. So I want to hear each of your top five games of all time by a single developer.

Matt, can you lead us off? Yeah, sure. I mean, for me, there are kind of five that are, I can't, nothing can touch them. It's braid, Minecraft, Star Doe Valley, Undertale, and Tetris. Yep. But I will also say that. honorable mention I want to give to vampire survivors, which wasn't really made by one person.

It was made by one person, released in an early state, and then was so successful that he hired on more people to actually make it into what it is. But honorable mention to vampire survivors, which kind of started in that lane. But those five... Sort of similar to Braid,

which initially was just a one-man effort by Jonathan Blow, but then he hired an artist, and when the game was released in the form that most people have probably played it. It looked a lot pretty. Right. So that's true. Yeah.

Sometimes it comes out in more rudimentary form, but it was still acclaimed and celebrated and successful, even in the kind of one-man show version. Steve, got a top five? Shout out Axiom Verge as well. Starter Valley, absolutely. Yeah. One point six update. Anyone gotten back into it? No.

I have not. I'm scared, but yeah. It's a fear thing. If I dedicate like 100 plus hours to a game, I either have to play it for the rest of my life or I have to never touch it again. That's why I haven't touched a persona game in so long. Yeah.

But yeah, mainly Sardy Valley of the ones that I've given that much time to. And then I did not know that in the beginnings before it became an absolute institution that Minecraft was one person, but then it evolved into like a second cornerstone of the gaming marketplace itself. But I have to give it up to Tetris.

That's probably one of the simplest and purest games that's ever existed since like checkers. And it's beautiful. Yeah. And still relevant today, getting headlines as people and movies made about its origins. Set new high scores. Yeah. Speed runners, right. I guess they're not speed runners so much as they are game breakers setting new high scores so high that the computer can't cope.

Charity, you got a different entry to the top five? Obviously, we're kind of congregating around the same. Has no one mentioned Towerfall? No. Oh, that's true. Yeah, Towerfall. That would be the main, like, switch up over that. Because, yeah, I guess, like, I don't know where Cave Story falls with me, right?

But I feel like the others overlap with you guys, but Towerfall, I put. How about Undertale as well? Yeah, Undertail, yes. I'm sorry. I thought one of you mentioned Undertale already. So Undertail and Powerful. And I'm trying to, I don't even know actually where I would rank. Powerfall, I've just had so much fun with people.

Like, obviously, like, Undertale is a great game, and I kind of love the structure of it, and I love the soundtrack of it. But Towerfall, well, I also love the music in Towerfall. But, like, yeah, man, I don't know. It's just the feel of introducing someone to Towerfall, right, is, like, really fun. Yeah. Yeah. My list definitely has Minecraft, Tetris, Star Do.

I think you've got to have that trifecta. I debated Braid and Undertail. I think I'm going to go with Braid. And then the one that hasn't been named so far, Space Invaders, was, I believe, the product of one developer, Tomahiro, Nishikato initially. Going old school there. But in terms of just how formative, foundational it was to the genre

and what an arcade hit it was, I do feel like you almost have to era adjusts because a one-person creation in the 70s a little bit different from a one-person. creation now, right, where the expectations are so high, even for an indie game that when you see, wow, one person made that thing, even if it was something they labored over for several years, like Mineral Lords or something that was a little quicker in some of these cases, like now, just because development teams have ballooned and the expectations, graphically, production

values and everything else have ballooned along with them, I think it's maybe even more impressive if you manage to make a hit by yourself now. I guess some others that maybe deserve honorable mentions that we haven't mentioned, maybe like Spalunky, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Lucas Pope's games, Papers Please, Return of the Obridin. Oh, God. Oh, God. Yeah. And I guess Five Nights at Freddy is just because of everything that it has spawned the franchise, the movie, everything else. How many people made dokey dokey, how many people made dokey Doki Dirty Degree Literature Club?

That's what I want to know. I'd say one person per dokey. So, okay. Well, maybe we will be talking in 24 about some of these surprise sensations from this year. We'll all be reminiscing about Powell. Power. Jesus. What we do our draft of that year? But we are turning back the clock to 2004.

Although, before we do, I've got to give you our ringerverse programming reminders. Later this week, we've got a double dose of midnight boys. Piu-poo! Steve, you're a midnight boy. You're not going to give me a pew-p-poo. Come on, you're leaving me hang it. Thank you. On Wednesday, it's always so great what you did.

It takes me by surprise. This is like the title card to RRR where it comes in like an hour into the thing. Right. Yeah, you know, I want to get people into the episode before I burdened them with the program reminders, though it should get them excited for what's coming up. So on Wednesday, you and the other boys will react to the penultimate episode of X-Men 97, season one. And on Friday, you will be tackling Kingdom of, of the planet of the apes.

Over on House of R on Tuesday, I will be joining Mal and Joe to discuss the latest trailer for the Acolyte and then talk about baseball. Yes, that actually seems to be happening. We're talking about baseball and House of R. But if you're not a big baseball fan, don't worry as much as Mal would love to spend two hours on her beloved Baltimore Orioles. We will keep it accessible and frame it through the lens of fandom, even though Joanna is a burgeoning baseball fan these days.

Finally, on Friday, Mal and Joe will rise once more to deliver a vampire tropes course in preparation for the return of a show that Joe and I love interview with the vampire. And Buttmash will be back later this month, but in the interim, you can email us at Ringiverse Gaming at gmail.com. The playoffs are here, and you can predict the action all the way to the finals with Fandul predicts. Follow all the playoff dishes, swishes, wishes, wishes, and misses. predict the spread, the total points, and even the game winner. Sign up for Fandual Predicts and predict it from the couch. Offered by Fandual Prediction Markets LLC, a registered futures commission merchant. 18 plus.

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I need to look like I tried option. Get 20% off your first purchase at viori.com slash Simmons and discover the versatility of Viori clothing. Exclusions apply, visit the website for full terms and conditions. All right, friends, it is time to get our four-player competitive multiplayer on. No screen peeking as we take a page out of our sister podcast, the Big Pictures Playbook, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2004. Yes, we're all old. That's the latest reminder.

and the upcoming Switch remake of 2004 Classic Paper Mario, the Thousand Year Door, we are drafting the greatest games from one of the greatest gaming years. I have been wanting to do a year draft like this since we started Buttonmash, but there have been so many new big games and game adaptations and pow worlds that it's been tough to find time. So I hope this will be the first of many, and it's a great place to start because, boy, what a year. So without too many spoilers about the games we're going to draft,

I want to know briefly where 2004 ranks for you guys. I wonder whether it is number one for any of us. Matt, roughly, where do you have it? Maybe third or fourth. It's below 1998. It's below 2023. Yeah. But then after that, it gets a little gray.

This is way up there for sure. Yeah. It's inner circle. Steve, how about you? This is up there for sure. only after the fact I would probably rank this underneath like 2011. 98's obviously always the go-to answer,

but this might be the standout year of the early 2000s, I will say that. And there are a lot to choose from because that was a great gaming period, which I think is true even if we're not looking through rose-colored nostalgia glasses because, you know, that was a time, formative gaming years for all of us. But even so, I think if we can be objective about it, it was a great period.

Charity? Yeah, I think I'd probably agree with Steve's assessment. I would say personally, like, it's an interesting year for me because it's the last full year that I even really play video games like that before taking a very long hiatus. Although I do remember in college,

like I got in on sort of Halo Cray's and I think Smash too. Oh, definitely smash. Yeah. 2005, a young Ben Lindberg, a young, Justin Charity in our freshman year dorm when we happened to be on the same floor and I was smashing 24-7 and I mean that purely in the Super Smash brother sense.

Hey, yeah. But yeah, like I otherwise, yeah, it's like a weird year for me to sort of look back on for this reason because it's the last, yeah, it's sort of my exit from video game culture until many console generations later. Yeah. Well, what a way to go out. You went out on top at least for a while. there. Yeah, it's always mentioned when you see best year lists. You will just unfailingly see

2004. Sometimes you see like 85, 86. Speaking of Smash, Super Smash Brothers creator, Masahiro Sakurai recently anointed 1986 as the best gaming year in one of his YouTube videos because you know, you had Zelda and Metroid and then 85. You had Super Mario Brothers and you had the NES really establishing itself and kind of the comeback from the Atari crash. So there are some formative earlier years, 92 often mentioned. And then, yeah, 2001 was a great one, 2007, 2013, 2017 was a big one, and 2023, I think, deserves to be mentioned there, too. But 2004, just about as strong a case as any. Ultimately, I do go with 1998, which I guess is pretty basic of me.

But in 2018, for the 20th anniversary of that year, we did a series of features, making of deep dives on the ringer.com. What a great website that Matt and Charity and I contributed to. And we called it 1998, the best year ever for video games. And I still stand by that. I think it probably was in part because a lot of originals that year, 2004, lots of sequels, right? That's going to be a theme of this draft. And there are great sequels. But I guess if I had to choose as kind of a tiebreaker, I would lean toward the year that really started it all, kicked off a lot of franchises more so than even elevated the originals or built on those foundations. We're going to draft some games here that were sequels to games from 1998.

So I would probably give the nod to the one that really kind of started it all and established things in 3D, maybe a bit more. But this is an incredible year. And here are our rules, our guidelines for this draft. We're going with six categories. And we toyed with different ways to split up those categories. did we want to go with genre or what? Ultimately, we decided to go by platform, which I think matters,

because as Matt, you mentioned when we were discussing this, platform really mattered then, right? This wasn't maybe what people think of as the console wars, but the console wars were raging. It was the first generation of the Xbox. There weren't as many multi-platform games. So it really sticks out in your mind what platform something was on,

probably more so than today, where we have Xbox games, games on PlayStation and Xbox games on Nintendo and PlayStation games on PC and everything's kind of crossing over and mashing up in this postmodern mix. Back then, things were more set. So we're going with PS2, GameCube, Xbox, PC, portable, and wild card, which can be any of those platforms. So you must draft one game in each category plus a wild card from any system. Portable, to be clear, can be any portable system. So Game Boy Advance, the DS, which launched late that year.

I guess technically PSP also launched late that year in Japan, but there weren't a lot of great launch titles for DS or PSP, so it was sort of the last guess, the tail end of the GBA era. Don't want to forget our Nokia engage heads out there. Thank you. Any engage fans? If you pull a engage pick out of here, you should probably win the draft. just for the element of surprise, I think.

You can draft any version of the multi-platform games that did exist, but the version you select has to have come out in 2004. So all of these games, they have to have been released in 2004. Sorry, Charity, Resident Evil 4 came out January 11, 2005. I know you checked, but it just missed the cutoff. And also, also, we are selecting only games originally released in 2000. And we went back and forth about this. No ports, no remakes, no remasters of games that came out pre-04.

So if there was a game that came out in 2003, but then it came out for another system in 2004, it doesn't count. Even if there was a ground-up remake that came out in 2004, this was a tough cut for us. But because this year is so stacked, we just decided to go all originals, things that no one had played before this year. So that means we had some tough cuts like Metal Gear Solid, the Twin Snakes, CounterStrike Source, Super Mario 64 DS, Metroid Zero mission, which was a very, very tough cut, I know, but it is a remake, Pokemon, fire red, and leaf green. So apologies to anyone who loves those games, we're not snubbing them exactly. We're acknowledging their greatness, but we're just rendering them ineligible here. You could argue some of those were different enough from the originals that they should count.

But again, we have an embarrassment of riches here. Winner will be determined, as usual, by an online listener poll. So you can go to at Ringerverse on Twitter and elsewhere and make your opinion felt. And the order of the draft will be randomly determined or has been randomly determined by producer Mike Wargon, who is going to slack us right now. He has not revealed this to anyone in advance. He's going to send us a slack message, a mid-episode draft order drop to let us know. Oh, no.

And there's the message. Number one, first overall pick goes to Steve Alman. I actually was hoping I didn't do that. Followed by me, followed by Matt, and bringing up the rear, Charity. However, some consolation to charity, we will be doing a snake draft format. So charity will get to pick twice as makeup for having to pick last.

So I guess we should get to it. And man, just what a year? Because I think this year was so good because A, like 3D was like well established, right? So those initial forays into the third dimension where people were trying to figure out like, how does this work? How do we translate 2D into 3D? And obviously that led to some all-time great games, but also some growing pains. Here, we're several years past that point, so people have kind of figured that out. Plus, the PS2 came out in 2000.

Xbox and GameCube came out in 2001. So these were, like, mature systems well into the lifecycle when people had figured out how to unlock the horsepower and what worked and what didn't on those systems. So just the best, like just the greatest year. And super backloaded, too, right? Like, the holiday season in 2004, October and November, November. stacked in 2004. Half the games were going to be talking about

coming out after like September of this year. Yeah, it was like it used to be where game release calendars used to be backloaded, right? It used to be holiday season because that was when people would buy games. And now it's not. Yeah, now it's just you put stuff out whenever it's ready, which it's probably

delayed multiple times by the time it's ready. And it's probably not ready when you put it out and deem it ready, yeah. But it's much more free floating now where you can get some of the biggest games of the year earlier in the year, where before it was more like, you know, Oscar season sort of, like, you know, what's going to be the stocking stuffer? So like November 2004, you could stack that month alone up to other years. So, Steve, what will you be selecting with your number one

pick in the video games of 2004 draft? I actually, like, this is so thrilling because I genuinely didn't know what my number one, if I had the first pick, and I thought about this, I was like, I genuinely don't know what my number one was going to be, and I hoped that somebody would go before me

because we would just get the vibes going and it didn't matter after that point. Yeah. Oh, man. The responsibility falls on your shoulders. So, I think this has got to be, since this is such a stacked year,

I'm going to have to go with my favorite game that came out this year and probably my favorite, game that came out this generation. Wow. And that will be Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater. Oh, wow. Stolen from charity and Matt. I am not a huge fan of Snake Eater.

Relative to other MGS. Really? Yeah, I don't really. I don't like it. Wow. I like the villains. I'll tell you why I actually liked it because I think the Metal Gear Solid 2 was like probably one of my first introductions as to what the PlayStation 2 could actually do. like the things that I could see

and the things that that system was actually capable of doing and like the incredible epic storytelling that Cojima was actually capable of and the seemingly wild departure about making it

about making your lynchpin series about a guy that's not actually the guy but it's now the guy is again just like the type of wild shit that we would expect from Kojima and the amount of time that I put into Metal Gear Solid 3 as a kid was

I'm just glad that it wasn't tracked back then because it's probably I feel that I feel that for real. Like the amount of time that we put in the games back in the day I'm like I'm glad that we just didn't say how long you you spent on that thing. Well, RPGs did. Final Fantasy 7 did I think yeah

I won't go back and look at that but yeah otherwise. That's not. We don't need to know the hours. But the amount of times that like when I first saw that like what a story could be in a game, that's not only incredibly lore heavy

but like incredibly cinematic I never thought that my my 14 year old brain could handle something like that and then to be like

the origin on a series that becomes so problematic and misogynistic to the point of homoeroticism

is wild now it's great I think it's probably one of the most important games ever All right. Well, for my pick, I will be going with the one that I had first overall, partly out of sentimentality because this was the game that I played the most in 2004. But also, I think, in terms of legacy and impact, and maybe in terms of positional scarcity, because I think of the three consoles, at least, well, relative to PS2, let's say, I think the Xbox list is a little thinner, right? Maybe just because it came out after PS2 and it was the first Xbox. So for me, I think there's probably the biggest drop-off between one and two here of maybe

the non-portable categories, at least. I'm taking Halo 2. Yeah. Yeah. Halo 2 was a revelation for me. When the original Halo came out, I basically lived for land parties. My only thought in life was like, how can I get eight or more of my friends together with multiple Xboxes and TVs to try to wire those systems together so that we could play

four on four. And those were just the greatest days when we managed to do it. But it was so difficult to do because you needed so many controllers and multiple copies of everything and you needed so many people in the same place and like TVs that were close enough together to connect them. It was a huge hassle. And so it happened fairly rarely, at least for me. Then Halo 2 comes out and I can play with all my friends.

at any time for as many hours as I won. And I think that's the real innovation of Halo 2. It's not the best single-player Halo game. You might even say it's not the best Halo multiplayer game. I'm not going to say it's better than Halo 3, and obviously there's kind of a cliffhanger ending to the campaign. There were knocks against it, but the multiplayer, at the time especially,

to have matchmaking, lobbies, clans, all of the pretty smooth streamlined online services on a console at that time, which was the best-selling game on Xbox and at least for a while, the most played game on Xbox Live. And I basically just lived for Halo 2. You're just like, let's go home from school. Okay, what time will you be free? Coordinate with your friends. Everyone signs on and plays until like your parents kick you off.

I remember having an issue with my wireless network at the time where it would boot me. every now and then there'd be like a wireless hiccup. I had like an extender set up because I was far from the router or something and it would boot me from matches and it was like the bane of my existence because we'd be like about to triumph and then I would drop from the match and everyone would be mad at me. But so many like memorable matches, if I still see the friends that I played with back then, like we can still reminisce about particular matches and exploits that we had in HAL II. That's just an indelible game.

and also I think a game that really demonstrated what was possible in that brave new online console multiplayer era. Anyone want to back me up? I again, I didn't really get into land parties or massively

multiplayer games like that until like the heyday of Call of Duty 2 and stuff like that. But I think when, or Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, when Halo 2 first came out, I remember it being this massive event in high school. People would bring the box.

Yeah, it was marketed. Yeah, maybe more than any other game to that point possibly. It was like a huge blockbuster movie release basically was Halo 2. Remember when steel cases used to mean something? And remember like the I Love Bees campaign, just like the viral kind of like arg alternate reality game where you were like solving real word puzzles and they were. were all related to Halo in this, like, super secret way. Oh, yes.

Yeah, man, what a game. All right. Matt, your first pick? Oh, this is really tough. It's really tough because I feel, I would rather be charity right now than myself. Oh, really? Yeah. I'm going to, this is so hard.

I have to go with, with, I'm going to let something big slip to charity. He's going to eat it up. but I have to go with my heart on this one. And I got to go with Half-Life 2. I knew it. This is probably the most important game on this. Yeah. Archiportian.

Yeah. Generally, a landmark in gaming in my mind. The physics engine of this, the narrative, the mod scene that it spawned. And I know that Counterstrike Source is an ineligible pick. However, it was included with Half-Life 2. So I feel like I'm getting a little bonus here. I'm sneaking in Counter-Strike Source illegally on the side, on the down low while picking Half-Life-2. And also Day of Defeet Source.

Oh, man, I was a big Dave of Defute guy. I mean, the multiplayer scene that spawned off of Half-Life 2 is incredible. And I would probably pick that here, even if, even, Not even considering the single-player narrative experience of Half-Life 2, which was phenomenal. Yeah, really important game. Gary's mod came out in 2004, I think initially. Not as a standalone release, but, yeah, it inspired so many spiritual sequels and no actual sequels. Still waiting for the conclusion of the trilogy.

Shout out to Half-Life Alex, obviously. But, yeah. Yeah. If you haven't played Half-Life 2, it does still hold up because it was such a beautiful game and such immersive storytelling. And like, how do you top the best shooter of all time to that point by making then again the best shooter of all time? Like, it's really tough to do that twice in a row with the expectations, what they were. And yet Valve did it. And the physics, right? Like, the physics were really revolutionary at the time. Charity, you have back-to-back picks now. Yeah, I was going to say, so I have two picks in a row. I'm going to lead with a passion pick. I'm going to lead with a game that actually when I was sort of like looking through stuff and pulled up the Metacritic page for it, one of the first sort of synopsis reviews that stood out to me was just the words overrated garbage. But I'm picking this game.

I'm picking Shin, Magami Tense. I knew you were going to. I knew. I knew. I knew. I just wanted to pick it sort of to be mad. Nocturn, baby. I knew it.

I knew it. That's PS2, right? That's PS2. Yeah, it's PS2. Nocturn. Both a game that I love on its own merits that has like just a totally like just strange alienating vibe has some of the most just like annoyingly brutal puzzle mechanics of all time. Like, sure, you're playing this, like... It's really selling it.

Demon-based RPG with, like, great sort of turn-based combat. That kind of sets the stage for, you know, the combat and the sort of, like... Well, I guess, like, Nocturne is a sort of patient zero of the 3D kind of Atlas game. So, like, both Shimagami Tensei, but also persona, right? But, yeah, there's just something about, like, sitting with that game, when game, you know, old people were always talking about like, when games are really hard, right? Like, that's a game where just like puzzles are constantly killing you in the most tedious way. And I love, I just love that game.

I love that game. It has so much personality, nocturn. Oh, wow. Let's go. I mean, I'm not surprised. I would say it probably would have been there for you in a later round. I'm speaking for myself, at least, possibly a slight reach at your number one take. I might have

dipped in just knowing that it was on his radar just to be it was coming it was coming okay what's your

conventional your your mainstream for the masses pick it'd be Unreal 04 right

Unreal 104 yeah I feel like that's a like yeah yes okay

like I get like it's funny because like multiplayer and shooters in general like are both

the genre video game that I have like the earliest memories of playing like I just remember playing doom at like an inappropriately young age right and like that was my way for a long time and like yeah I became a console brat yeah became you know like a 40 hour campaign like metal gear final fantasy person but I think in my DNA like I am into I think in my DNA is still that persistent gene of like the PC like shooter kid you know what I mean I don't know yeah I do that game was amazing

Half-Life 2 is the only thing that overshadowed it as a PC shooter that year it was so fun yeah great great land material but also online okay Matt back to you wow I did not I did not expect this I'm gonna get another absolute bangor here the next Shin-McGammy me 10th, no.

Oh, wow. Overrated garbage. Overrated garbage. I got a little niche pick here called Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Oh, yeah. That one. Ever heard of it? Not a bad game.

Yeah. Really, like, an all-timer GTA game. I really loved San Andreas. I really loved Vice City. Those two really stuck out to me. All of the Grand Theft Autos that had a particular setting that was off the mainstream path of the flagship titles I've really enjoyed. And San Andreas is no exception. That was, and its memes live on to this day.

Yes. As evidenced by our intro clip for this podcast. The meme currency that game is worth is like incredible. CJ alone is probably like a permanent pack that you get in Garry's mod at this point. Yeah. For some reason, I feel like I have fonder memories of Vice City specifically. And even GTA3 to an extent just because it blew my mind so much, it's not as good a game, obviously, but just because it seemed so revolutionary and amazing at the time, I was just spellbound the entire time I was playing that game. Whereas by the time San Andreas came out, now, it was obviously bigger, way bigger, and you could do so much more. And yet, Some of the novelty maybe of the formula had worn off, but it was a great, great game. I don't think I would have taken it, but only because PS2 for me is probably the deepest category here.

Just a lot of PS2 games I'd be happy to have. But yeah, it's a classic. It deserves to go this high if not higher. I think my only potential bump on the legacy of what San Andreas was to not just GTA, but Rockstar in general, is that I think Rockstar was starting to believe it. its own hype and get high on its own supply after San Andreas happened because games before this or like right around the mid 2000s when I think that Rockstar was actually having like its real autour and incredible moment where like they were making a beat up game about the Warriors and they were making manhunt and they were making all of these games that were like insane to think about even consider making. Yeah. And San Andreas was this mega cultural huge moment that honestly I don't think the studio even maybe like was ready for that level of success.

And it began this trend towards this like elite status of this type of game that I'm honestly quite not quite sure if Rockstar is even reckoned with at this point. But like San Andreas was like this peak of. amazing moment where they've actually like perfected what the idea of GTA is. Yeah. And it was just so big and there was so much mystery surrounding it, right? Like all the stuff that was supposedly in the game in some cases actually was, but in some cases wasn't like all the Mount Chilliad, all the bigfoot hunting, all the like UFO ridiculousness, right?

It makes you ride a bike for the first hour. And it's like, yeah, we know what we are now. So many just urban legends, just, you know, like jankiness, but in a, fun, memorable way. Great, great game. All right. My next pick. The only reason I didn't take Half-Life 2 with my first pick was because I felt like there was a second choice at PC that was maybe equally revolutionary, equally influential, equally beloved and long-lived, and that's World of Warcraft. I'm taking wow. I'm wowing you with my second pick here. Wow is the game probably with the greatest staying power from this year.

I mean, granted, you could say, Half-Life 2 and all the sequels and updates that it has spawned, and there are others here that have had Second Lives that people still play regularly. But World Warcraft has been popular continuously since 2004. It has been a juggernaut, a cultural force. It was an instance of gaming really becoming a mainstream story. and people diving into this world and experiencing it and talking about being big wow fans when several years ago Blizzard put out World Warcraft Classic and was just like, remember what this game used to be like? And then that was a huge hit, just kind of rolling back the clock and taking us back to 2004 the way we are in this draft.

And it turned out there was an enormous appetite for that. And just the way it spawned so many imitators. I mean, obviously there were MMOs before. there were other MMOs that very year, like EverQuest too, right? But that was the one that went huge, that became the absolute blockbuster, that spawned a million copycats that everyone probably played at some point for some amount of time. And just the fact that it's still with us today and still going strong in a lot of respects. That alone, I think, qualifies it for a high pick here. curious about the strength of World Warcraft now but I admire it for like again it's staying power like again this is one of those

ones where we're like I'm kind of glad that in the early 2000s we didn't track hours played because I know some people that got real crusty to that game oh yeah it's never going to it's never something well you can track the money you've spent on it I wonder how much money you would have spent on it

if you have been a subscriber for the past 20 years of World of Warcraft. How much you spent on that game? You had to, you had to submit to, like, you had to pay with a credit card to a company in the mail for that. And then, like, you had to buy discs for expansions. You didn't have to, like, you could just get those things. It wasn't, like, DLC. We didn't have it back then.

And now, like, before that happens, that was a whole other animal because people were, like, losing jobs to that stuff. I remember stories in the news. that thing. And they were talking about the addiction of games and all of that. Like, that was, that was all that that game was in the back in those days. Yeah. There's a book that came out several years ago called Blood Plagues and Endless Rades, 100 million lives in the World Warcraft. There was just a history of World Warcraft and just the people who played it and the incarnations that it went through. Oh, yeah. I mean, just the enormous phenomenon in every, I mean, almost like

a proto-fortnight, I guess, in the sense of like a multiverse that everyone was, pretty plugged into. So yeah, another November banger from 2004 World Warcraft. And now we're all the way back to Steve for his second pick. Okay. And third pick. And third pick. All right. Double pick here

for me. I think I'm going to have to it's a wild pick, but I think I have to do this for a board play pick. And then I got to pick something that I need for Xbox. So my board play pick that I need, I need something

in portable. And of the, like, very narrow field that came in the portable things that were, like, of notable releases that I genuinely do remember playing. For portable, I am picking the Game Boy Advance game Astro Boy Omega Factor. Yeah.

That was a good game. It was a good game. And if you want to, like, talk about, like, it's a interesting little, like, Mega Man Sks send-up and the idea of licensed games that were good and meant something back in the day. I loved Astro Boy when I was a kid.

I love it now. This was a good game. And we don't play out good, crazy underrated nowadays. I missed that one, but I've heard over the years that it's a really good one. Yeah. All right.

What's your next pick? Yeah, where are you going now? All right. I think for my Xbox pick, this is tough. He's going to hurt you, Ben. He's going to hurt you. I got my Xbox game already, so what can I do? Well, I got a wild card. It's true.

I got him to, too. I'm going to hurt you again. I'm taking Knights of the Old Republic too. I thought you were going there. Yeah. Come on. Come on. Honestly.

What are we doing here? This is, this is, this is like, this was taken down from the mountaintop. from from EA and and BioWare in general when I didn't think that Knights of the Old Republic could get any possibly better this was something

that was like a earth-shattering moment in how good an RPG could be when I just play it with my cults and my friend I didn't even actually own it I never owned this game when it first came out my friend owned it because he had the Xbox and I had the PlayStation

like this I would like, I would genuinely consider trading my entire PS2 for a weekend just to take this away from him. Yeah. It was that good. Like, the story was incredible. The amount of twists and turns and actual things that I could do with my character back then were incredible.

Star Wars Night's The Old Republic is like, probably is going to go down in history. It's like some of the best franchised gaming ever. And that's that. Yeah. Yeah. Look, it's a great pick. I mean, honestly, I had it third on my Xbox board. I will not mention what I had second because it's still out there.

Again, Xbox had a great year this year. Yeah, what didn't? But look, generally, Cotor 2 is regarded as not as good as the original Cotor. I would say that's kind of the consensus. There are, I mean, story-wise, I see what you're saying. You know, obviously the twist of Cotor is an all-timer, but Cotor two in some respects maybe had a superior story. It was sort of rushed, arguably kind of unfinished. I mean, it came out in 2004. The original Cotor came out in 2003. The turnaround times in that era were

ridiculous, right? Different developer, but still. And, you know, we did a whole podcast episode on the original Cotor, which is just one of the greatest of all time. And Cotor 2 is wonderful. And obviously, I deeply love it as well. There were some people who considered it a step down or maybe a slight disappointment just relative to how incredible Cotor 2 was. But it's a strong pick. I would call you salty, but I think this is a fine stance. Okay. I have a feeling I'm going to make people salty with my next pick because there's just a little

bit of chicanery. I was going to do it right after you. Just do it. I had it locked in. I'm a little upset it's happening because I was going to do it to you. Thank you. We are. We are.

Okay. As we mentioned, portable is a thin category for this year, right, relative to the others, because it was, you know, just a transition time between eras. And here's what I'm going to do. This is slightly sneaky, maybe slightly controversial, but I think... You have to do this in an English accent. Because it came out in the UK in 2004. I think this is defensible.

I think this is well within my rights, given the guidelines and... rules that we said here. I am drafting the legend of Zelda, the minish cap, which came out in 2004, in Japan, and Europe. Man, you sound like Drake trying to win this on a second reality. Look, we did

not specify it had to be out on every continent in 2004. We just said it had to come out in 2004 for the first time. I had a timer going. Wario where touched is my portable pick. I mean, look, there are a few games that came out in Japan in 2004 that did not reach our shores until 2005. The others, I don't know if I'll

spoil that. I mean, Grand Tourismo 4, for instance, Dragon Quest 8. Those would not be drafted by me, though they're great games, but Minish Cap, which, I mean, look, it came out in its country of origin. I don't know what to tell you. It came out in multiple continents in 2004. We're a global podcast here. I think it's an underrated Zelda game. I'd say... The Ikusa 1 come out on playing station. If you want to do a deep dive into the calendars and find something else that slip through the cracks, by all means, be my guest. You know, I'm just playing some strategy here on the Wikipedia page for 2004. It's on there.

Hey, I sent you guys the IMDB page for 2004, the Wikipedia page for 2004. It's on there. It's not a critic page. It was my next pick. You literally picked it right before I stole it. All right. This is Steph Curry all over again for me. I'm protesting too much here.

Clearly, I'm insecure about the fact that I picked this. But the fact that Matt was about to take it anyway, makes me feel better because we're both craven, fallen, opportunistic drafters. If Minish Cap came in here, I would have been arrested by now. The Minish Cap is a great game. You know, it's not often mentioned as like one of the greatest selves, but I think arguably a top 10 Zelda game. And it's a game that had a cool, unique mechanics. mechanic, like, you know, mini, right, to shrink down, and it had some interesting puzzles related to that. It is arguably, I think, the last 2D Zelda game, right?

The last traditional 2D Zelda, which, I mean, there have been some top-down Zelda since then, but more like 3D or isometric or whatever. 2.5D kind of thing. Yeah, right. This was more like the last gasp of the old school. Zelda, you know, a product of the director of tiers of the kids. Kingdom, like there's a lot of continuity and lineage is always with Zelda. And it was just a really good game. And, hey, if you can get a Zelda game, even if it's not an inner circle Zelda game,

but it's a good one in a weak category where perhaps some drafters were ill-prepared. They just hadn't done their research. Can't relate, then. Can't relate. Well, I'm going to take it and I'm going to profit. So Minish Cap for me. Sorry, but not sorry. I'm not really sorry either because now I get to pick

and I'm going to take Metroid Prime 2. Yeah, Echoes. There you go. Yeah, it's a great game. Metroid Prime 2 echoes. For GameCube. Pretty much just as good as Metroid Prime. A little bit harder.

Yeah, too hard for some people as I recall. Too hard for some people. Yeah. I get it. Phenomenal, phenomenal game. I hope that they, you know, they just remastered Metroid Prime on Switch. which I hope that they give Metroid Prime 2 the same treatment

because, man, I really enjoyed going through Metroid Prime again. And now that I've done that in a remastered form, I don't know if I can revisit Prime 2 without a remaster. Yeah. So let's get that going, Nintendo. I'm sure you don't have anything else going on. Yeah. It was high on my GameCube boards.

For people to feel. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe a remastered Metroid Prime 2 echoes is in the box somewhere. But for me, I think it is maybe at the last. least of the original retro Metroid Prime trilogy, which is still, it's an incredible game. Like, that's more a testament to how great all of those games are. But I felt like the original Metroid Prime was so innovative.

And it's like, oh, it's 3D. And this Metroid can work this way. And then three was kind of like the culmination of everything. And two was also great, but didn't mix up the formula as much as the original. And like you said, you know, some people thought it was too hard. and it kind of had like a grafted-on multiplayer that wasn't great, but it was still like absolutely an all-time great game. What you just said is applicable to almost every game that we've drafted already

because we have been so sequel heavy here. It's true, yeah. Metal Gear 3, Cotor 2, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Metro, Crime 2, San Andreas, Unreal Tournament 2004, Zelda. Yeah, an Astro Boy, not a sequel. Not a sequel. World of Warcraft. Neither was a World of an existing franchise that was 10 years old at that point. So, yeah, I mean, maybe this was kind of like, you know, it was a sign of things to come in our super sequel, heavy culture and video game world now.

2004 was kind of the bellwether. All right. Back to charity. What other off the wall, off the board pick do you have for us here? I don't, okay. So here's the thing. And I'm going to telegraph a bit. There are some of these drafts.

There are some of these episodes with you guys where I'm going in like Kendrick. And I'm just like, I'm going to take you, you, you and you. This is one where I feel more charitable. I feel more characteristic of myself. Just like your name. I feel like I have less strong feelings than you. I can tell you guys are kind of in the pocket. So I'm trying to stay actually to conservative picks that aren't going to hurt anyone's feelings.

Oh, that's so nice. You're taking the eye road. I'm down in the mud. I'm slinging. Watch a pick something that gets me mad. Watch a pick something that gets me mad. I don't think I will from my back-to-back fix.

I will also say I am a little boxed out by the no remake rule. So that's okay. That's cool. You would have been a twin snakes guy, I bet. Well, no, that's not what I was thinking of. I'm going to say Emerald. I'm going to go Emerald.

I know that there are a couple of ways we could have approached Pokemon with different rule sets in this episode. Yeah, Emerald. It's Pokemon. Come on, man. Like, and Pokemon is one of those classic, like, one of those classic franchises, right, where it exists to be sort of immortalized the nostalgia, right? Because you just, like, Pokemon exists so that new games can come out and we can all bitch about how, like, they've ruined Pokemon.

It's not as, like, it's too easy now and it's, it's just not the same. And it's just like, man, when I think back, again, because I'm old, the rest of you guys don't look, though. I like old. I got this beard, right. I'm older than all, y'all. And when I think about playing, I want to say like, OG, like, well, really, I played yellow. But like, yellow through emerald. Yeah.

Like, yellow through emerald, right? Like, that to me, that's like a, that's cordoned off, right, in my mind is like, that was the era. I feel like the downfall of Pokemon can be tracked when Nuzlock runs became more popular. By the way, you've let me off the hook here. I feel better because Emerald came out in Japan only in 2004. It was 2005 international. It feels broken now, Ben.

I know. Once you went on that long again, you went on that part, the heart part six monologue about. Did you do additional research after I made that pick? Or did you have this holstered? But you weren't sure. Like a true fighting game player, I have a flow chart. If Ben does this, then I get this. Is that the counter?

Okay. So you're waiting to see if I'd play dirty. If I'd draft dirty. Okay. Yeah. Absolutely. Fair enough. Absolutely.

I love it. I love it. Thief. That'd be my axe back there. Oh. Wow. Nice. Yeah.

On the board for me. Yeah. I love thief. And that's just like a whole, like the whole ion storm like thing. Like, come on. Yeah. Thief. O4.

Let's go. Good one. Man, that's a good one. I like that a lot. Yeah. I used to, man, that was stealth gaming. Yeah. Stealth gaming that was enjoyable for, I mean, that was actually not the first thief,

but the Thief series. Right. 1998, right? Original Thief. The Thief series really did a great job with the stealth gaming in ways that people weren't achieving. That was a good pick. I like that.

Can I say something real quick, actually, which is like, Deadly shadows, to be clear, right? Right. To be shadows. There's a thief from 2014, but this is deadly. But to Matt's point about self-game, because back in my day, if you wanted stealth, you didn't just put a random stealth section in a game with like, you had to sit there. You made a stealth game and you had to learn how to stealth, and it was the point.

And they had adequate mechanics for it. You had a light meter. Yeah. Yeah. None of this rise of the Ronan, like, I don't know, you're kind of close to them. Is the meter down here? You're hidden. Is the meter up here?

You're probably not. Yeah. Are you in a box? Are you not in a box? Speaking of light meters, no one else came out, at least in some places in 2004 in Europe, I think, was Boktai. The sun is in your hand, the GPA game that was like whether you were. Bokai 2, I think. Yeah, the original came out in 2003 and then in Europe in 2004.

Another Kojima game, right, where he was like, the. The sunlight actually mattered whether you were playing in the side. I love those gimmicky Game Boy games. Those were just great. Shout out to the sunlight gun in MGS4. All right. Back to Matt. Okay.

Well, you guys have already filled out your Xbox and Portables, so I have to draft the wild card here now. Yeah. And there are a lot of options. A lot of good games here. I didn't have my flow chart ready like charity, unfortunately. I think that I have to take a game very

near and dear to my heart in the wild card I'm going to take Katamari Damasi Oh how dare you That was yo I'm gonna see you now A king of all

motherfucking cosmos God damn you I was so mad I was so close Steve was like legitimately bad See? Legitimately

furious I'm so angry too Everyone is rolled up into a ball right now This is such a good game So I was like PS2 You can wait

You know deep category There's a lot of great No We're all there's It's the fact that I'm stupid I'm stupid Because I think they're like

Oh yeah Nobody knows about that You're not stupid Don't talk yourself down It's positivity zone This is your wild card This is an affirming zone That's my wild card

You're getting greedy You already had San Andreas That's right. I'm taking everything. So I just want to say, if anybody doesn't know what Katamari Damasi is, you should check that out. You're a little guy and you roll things around in a ball. And if anything is smaller than you currently, you can pick it up and it makes you into a bigger ball until you are obscenely large. And the scaling of this was pretty impressive when this game came out, how you would, you know, each level you would.

be a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, starting by picking up like thimbles on the ground, and then eventually you are picking up bridges and cities. It's really brilliantly creative, memorable music, and just a whole vibe. Yep. Yeah, you're forgetting the part where the impetus for this game happening is that your dad gets drunk and he destroys all of the planets and stars in the sky, and you just got to make you want to junk from Earth. Yeah, well, that hits so close to home for me. I didn't, I didn't think they'd point that out. You were tasked with making the new stars in the sky?

Yeah, well, let's not talk about me. All right. Yeah, painful memories for all of us, but beautiful memories to remember playing Konramari. Yeah, that, I mean, that felt so original at the time. I know there's always a precursor to every game that feels like, wow, this is unprecedented, but that felt like a mechanic that we just had not seen before. And there were some sequels, obviously, but it was almost like you didn't need sequels

because it was just so perfect and just so much fun the first time that maybe it was diminishing returns. I'm surprised there hasn't been more catamari recently. Like there have been remakes, re-rolls, et cetera. Re-rolls. Yeah. But a new original catamari. Maybe that's what we need with like the horsepower of next gen, current gen systems. We can go bigger, right?

We can have more items. Let's do a photo realistic catamari damasi. I was hoping that would keep slipping. Integrated with Google Earth. Like review scores, that doesn't show up as high as some others. And yet just like fondness scores, just how memorable it was, the feeling that someone gets when you say Katamari-Damasi as evidence by all of us groaning when you selected that game. Great pet. Yeah.

Fuck it's a great game. Well, the silver lining for me of you taking Katamari is that I will take the game that was at the very top of my GameCube draft board, which we will get the. opportunity to play again later this month when Nintendo releases the remake. I'm taking Paper Mario the thousand-year door. Perhaps the epitome of Paper Mario of the Mario RPG genre, arguably the best of the bunch. And it looks like the remake's going to be great. And we'll hopefully introduce a whole new generation to Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door. It's one of those games that, like, you almost don't need a remake because it holds up well,

what with the cartoon-y-seltu-sheeted style of the graphics at the time, which tended to age really well. But just kind of weird in that fun Mario way and just a ton of fun to play. Good story by Mario standards, great gameplay. Very fun feelings about Paper Mario. So give me that paper. I'll take that paper, as CJ used to say. Yeah.

Can't wait to play that remake. Was Paper Mario the origins of, of cozy core video games? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. To pinpoint the cozy game. When does Animal Crossing come out?

That's, that's, harvest moon. Yeah, I don't know. But it was, it was a great one, great entry in that lineage. All right, back to Steve.

All right. I don't have much on my GameCube board, other than things that were cross-platform for a couple of these. but oh boy um all right I think for my GameCube pick

I am going to take a cross-platform game uh that was good and we you know we occasionally uh work for a sports website here I'm going to take a sports game

a little game called NFL Street nice it was a great year for sports games by the way I was like looking at the review scores for all the sports games back then and comparing them to now where we've had a like a monopolistic converging of like one franchise in many cases kind of owns its sport and thus each year's iteration is barely different from the previous year and no one cares they all

just buy it anyway right but back then that was like great great year for sports games so i'm glad we got a sports game represented it was around the time that sports games were finally understanding how to operate in three dimensions yeah yeah and with the like insane run of like ESPN and then that 2K had as well as EA when man EA Sports Big was probably the best we ever had it and like as far as like

logo core like that's that's that was some great shit yeah like not only did that did EA sports have EA sports but it was like a game burr yeah like that I'm right I'm in you got me for three hours all the soundtracks

No, NFL Street was great because you could like wall run and man, wall running was quite a trend back in the day. It was great. It's not going to really touch NBA Street, but NFL Street was, again, a wildly good entry and a very stupid soundtrack if you ever look at the track list for that game. Yeah. Okay. Well, you have another pick to make, right?

Very hard for my wild card. There are so many good wildcards to be had here. Yep. And I think the only thing that I can do is probably pick something, my favorite of the, like, a good pick from the heart from this one. And that's got to be... Sly 2. No!

You couldn't do that to me. The SlyCube for franchise is probably one of Sony's biggest L that they did not capitalize on. How could you? And slide two is... Wow, I really think in a crisis right now. I'm more upset about this than I am about the Katamari pick. This is devastating.

Slide two rules. Slide two rules. Slide two is the best. It's so, so, so good. And as nice of a straightforward, like Crash Bandicoot-esque level-based adventurer that the first slide was, this was a nice, like, open world,

stealth light, super fun, very well-written adventure that was just like a joy. It's a joy that game in that franchise. Slide two and three were like some of the best that we had it on the PlayStation. I'm so mad.

So mad. Slide two, probably my favorite of those like PS2 animal mascot character platformers. I mean, of all the choices, like we had Jack 3 in 2004. We had Ratchet and Clankop your arsenal. as Halo apparently.

Yeah, Ratch and Clank Up Your Arsenal. I love both of those series, and obviously you have Crash Bandicoot earlier, right? But Sly, Sly was my guy. Like Sly of all of those animal mascot characters, the best. And Sly 2 is the best Sly Cooper game, I think. You could make a case for Sly 3, I guess. But Sly 2 is just, it changed up the formula from the first game, which was more like linear little levels and went to more kind of free-ranging open-world style.

And, man, like the voice acting, the cell shading, the comic book style cutscenes and vignettes. I just added, like, mini-games and getting to play as the other supporting characters, which was kind of fun and not annoying. Like, of all the things that I want a series to be rebooted or adapted, because there's been a lot of talk about a Sly adaptation over the years, Sly, like, give me a Sli.

a sly resurgence. I know it's probably not happening any time soon, but man, I'm pissed. All right. Great pick. I guess. I hate you, but great pick. Well, I think you get to make a pick that you'll like right here. I'm sorry, it did come out in Japan a year earlier, but I'm going with a North American release, you know, so. Entirely fair. Yeah. I guess we open up a can of worms if we're going by original release. Japanese release only. Yeah. Okay. Fine. If you had to do that. It makes me even more mad because you already had your PS2 game. I need my PS2 game. You could have taken anything for wildcard and that's what you did. You blocked me. Notorously, PS2, no games on that thing. I know. It's still a deep category. There's still a lot of great games that I would like here. I'm torn. I'm really torn. All right, I need a PS2 and I need a wild card for my PS2 game. I've got a couple multi-platform options here. Now, I could take Jack 3. I could take Ratch and Clank up your arsenal, but they're just

so many good ratchet and clank games and they all kind of blend together in my mind and that was a good one but there are a lot of good ones. So I'm going to take

a multi-platform release for PS2 called Burnout 3 take that. Great pick. Oh yeah. I was considering that instead of how

that might be that might be the one that I forgot. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. Do you want to trade for Slite 2?

Can we trade picks? Can we trade post post-draft pick, is there a moratorium about trading after the picks? Like, Burnout 3, if you go by, like, critical reputation, it probably fell too far. This is probably good value. So some consolation for getting this instead of slide 2 this late. Like, Burnout 3, if you go by the Metacritic list, is fourth in review score among all

games from 2004 after Half-Life 2, Grant Thattaudas and Adraeus and Halo 2. So I don't know that it's remembered that fondly, but it's. It's remembered really, really well. Like, IGN put out a list of the best racing games ever in 2020, and Burnout 3 was number one all time. The only reason I didn't spring for it sooner is that I'm not that big a racing game guy. And so it felt a little insincere for me to take this because it's not really, like, it was a good game, but it's just not my favorite genre. I like driving games more so than racing games, but this game like had driving and racing. It was like collisions, you know?

Like there was just a lot of like crunchy cars crashing into each other and just great graphics. And like it's kind of, I don't know, classic arcade racer, right? Like arcade racing doesn't really get better than Burnout 3. No, it was so good. You didn't need to be a racing, driving fan. It was such a good game that everybody was playing it when it came out. They tried to make an entire game where it was just the crash mode from that game. And that was probably the best part of that game was crashing.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Matt, your penultimate pick, and you have Xbox left. Xbox and portable. Portable. Xbox and portable are the ones I have left. All right.

Let's see here. Well, I think I'm going to take an Xbox game. I'm a little upset that burnout was just taking. I think I might have taken it here if you hadn't taken it. Sorry, it's all Steve's fault for taking Sly too. Yeah, pretty rude. Okay, I'm going to take the Chronicles of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay. All right.

Nice, yeah. Underplayed game, one of the best shooters of the era. Yeah, one of the best licensed. Steve, I don't know if you borrowed the Xbox over the weekend for that one, but that was. Yeah, that was a good one. As far as Vin Diesel games go, I mean, you can't really. No offense to Arc 2 or whatever. Yeah.

But, I mean. Yeah. Prequel to pitch black, right? So it kind of told its own story, but like a good one. Yeah, that was a great game. It broke the licensed game, like movie-related game kind of curse. Yeah, when it came out, people were like, really? That's good.

Yeah. Okay. Charity, you've got, what, GameCube and. Wildcart? Yeah. Okay. Your last two picks? You know, Joe Biden has been in the news a lot lately as part, you know, one of the main commentators for the, for this trade.

Not Biden. Not Biden. Not Biden. Joe Biden, you know, is one of the news. Joe Biden, you know, is one of the main commentator. Joe Biden's way in on the Drake beef. Yeah. Oh, my God.

Oh, I know what you're picking. I was thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like. button, I think back to pump it up. I think back to a time when rappers, when rappers were rappers,

and when rappers, every now and again, rappers, rap at us, charity. Rappers, rappers were in video games. I forgot about this. They had vendettas. Yeah, they had vendettas. Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting that, actually.

Because on the GameCube, I seem to recall, Def Jam Fight for New York Where you got Listen, you got button You got ghost faces in here Busted is in here Let me look at the list real quick In the people that's in this game

Flavor Flavit I have a freeway Freeway first of all freeway and Memphis Bleaker in here Little Flip that's right That's right little flip is in here This is the one when Snoop had that big hat right Yeah I think so I think so Little Flip is in here

Bone Crusher is in here Baba Sparks. Jesus. There's an amazing... What I need everybody in the sound of my voice to do is to YouTube the behind the scenes footage

of all of these rappers being in game studios talking about how they would describe their finishing moves. And it's the funniest thing that I have ever seen. Yeah. When Ludacris

talks about how he wants to body slam somebody, it's so funny. Method Man, like trying to like make a suplex happen in real life. So fun. Yeah.

It's funny. It's like the Super Smash Brothers of rap. Yeah. It's funny because like whatever like Joe Button and Drake have this like very acrimonious relationship where they go back and forth every now and again sort of talking trash by each other. And it's just like Drake will often try to discount Joe Button's contributions to hip hop as a rapper before he became a commentator. And I always want to tell Drake, dog, Joe Button is in this. like Joe Button is in one of these

Def Jam fighting games. Like yeah, that's his contribution. What are you in? They put you in these games. You're not, you're not in, you know, 720p in the fight club, bro. And then like when you press a button,

you go super sayan and then you can do a special move. Yeah, yeah, you do. You go, uh-rah! Well, that was a wild card pick. Oh, man, good times. No, that was a. No, but it was a wildcard.

What is your actual wild. That's not really on brand for GameCube, a mature emirated rat brawler for GameCube. You're a little cute system that you could carry a rat. What's your actual wildcard? A game that I think I'm skirting, I think I'm really pushing the parameters of inclusion on both. Oh, boy. But it's wild cards. I can do what I want.

It works. Resident Evil outbreak. Oh yeah Outbreak too Game that did not have a great time A great release lifetime Right as one of the weird sort of Resident Evil spit off games

But the outlet the sort of like How would you describe I'm trying to think of like how to describe For people who haven't either played Outbreak back in the day Or probably more likely like watched Bokpah soup or someone play Outbreak Um

It's a weird like It's kind of a throwback to the old ones while also like trying to embrace what we knew that Resident Evil would become post-R-E-4. Yeah, but with the online, it's just like, but the multiplayer's stuff and the awkward kind of like interaction of multiple characters trying to like shoot at the same time, but also having to interact with loading zones. I remember it was like really weird with that.

I don't know, it's like a very strange format of like multiplayer Resident Evil game that I think there's always this kind of of in the fan base is lingering appetite for for capcom to kind of like give it another shot. Like I really think Capcom should try like they try every now and again with the mainline games to add kind of more of the maybe mercenary stuff or they'll try to do something that's like outbreak adjacent. But they really do need to. I think Capcom needs to at this point, even though like as an outbreak was a really fraught, I think execution technically. like back in the day,

they really got to in earnest try to do just like R.E. Outbreak. Because it's a, it's a specific, like, vibe. It's good. I'm trying to, like, look at this and I was like, oh, yeah, there is this weird, like, hodgepodge of ideas. Yeah.

We're ready for the time. And I'll have a charity draft board. It's just going to be idiosyncratic, unconventional. He's not, he's not watering down his choices. He's not going for the lowest common denominator. He's not pandering for voting for votes. I'm going for overrated garbage. Thank you, Steve. I'm going for overrated garbage. He's speaking his spirit and I love it. He's not just sorting the metacritic rating boards. Just looking at his picks, if you had shown me the board

blind, I'd be like, oh, well, this is just what charity is playing this weekend. Resident Evil Lepardin. Debt team vendetta and Resonie Walp. It came out in 2003, but we'll allow it because it came out elsewhere in 2004. All right. By the way, Charity, to answer a question from earlier in the episode, Dokey Dokey Literature Club was developed by one person. Oh, that's for 2017. We can save that for the 2017 year draft, which will be a great one. Two people for dokey.

No. More dokey's. All right. Matt, last pick, your portable pick. All right. Well, since we're gaming the system here. Wario Wear Twisted October 14th in Japan

and May in America But WarioWare Twisted One of the best WarioWares ever Man, that thing was incredible So much fun I don't even know what the best WarioWare is because they've all been the most consistent level of awesome

Always I've played probably three in my life and they're just as good as the other. And I genuinely don't know when either the bad one or the great one happened. Yeah, I could see it. I'm psyched to have Warrior Ware

and Katamari on my... Those are two like the quirk cornered here. Expect some phone calls for some early game trades for me. All right. My final pick is a wild card. Gosh, so many great games still available, but I got to go with this one. I can't believe it's still on the board.

Speaking of difficult, challenging games, grueling game experiences, but rewarding ones, I'm taking Ninja Guidon. Oh, boy. Ninja Guiden for the Xbox. Team Ninja, 20 years before Rise of the Ronan, which felt about 20 years old, Ninja Guiden felt fresh when it came out and it was tough, but it was beautiful, and it was satisfying, and it was very violent. And it's just a classic. I mean, just a classic action game, like take some Ninja Guideon series, Dead or Alive, DNA, and continuity, mash it up together. And you've got the 2004 version of Ninja Guideon. So hard.

Such a hard game. Very, very difficult. A very frustrating game. That was my first rage quit, I could remember. Nice. Well, it's got to make you care to make you rage quit. So that's a good sign. That's deep.

That was the deepest thing you've said. That's true. Otherwise, it's a soft quit. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, wait.

Steve, you still have one final pick. You need a PC pick, right? Oh, my God. Yeah. I actually thought you were done, but you're not done. You got to get back in the action here. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord.

You don't have a plenty to work with. Yeah, there's a lot left on the PC board here. Oh, damn. I think PS2. and PC were probably the deep of the categories of this year. All right. Okay. Well, this is actually an easy pick for me because

I this is probably this honestly is the weakest in the entirety of the franchise but I genuinely loved Doom 3 both when it came out and now I have like a retroactive like deep respect for that game

probably because it like there's always this weird thing in like storied franchises where they try to divert and do something that's like, oh, we're going to do like the gritty Resident Evil thing, but we're also experimenting with light

tech. Like, in technology was like, really like, okay, we really like lights this game. So we're going to figure out the best way to do lights and eerie, creepy vibes. Never at all what Doom was, or maybe even should have been.

But something that was still good and inherently, like, very innovative that I really, really liked. And I think that's something that's very worthy of that time. I have vivid memories of playing this game in my room with headphones on with the lights off.

And my roommate coming in and touching my shoulder and me just jumping like 10 feet in the air. So intense. Yeah. It's more of the fact that like, oh, you have a flashlight. Okay, then you can only see a circle. But I'm like, but like there's all this screen that I've got like, no, you've got to turn the lights on, buddy.

Like that's basically what it's teaching you now. All right. Well, I think I have recorded the picks correctly, but correct me if I'm wrong. Let me read them out, remind everyone what we got, and then we can shout out a few that we did not have room to draft. So I'll go in draft order here, not an order of picks, but just an order of systems. So starting with the Xbox and starting with Steve, we have Cotor 2, the Sith Lords, PS2. We have Middle Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater, GameCube, NFL, NFL, Street, PC, Doom 3, portable, Astroboy Omega Factor, and Wildcard, cruelly, Sly2, Band of Thieves. Yes. All right. For me, Xbox, Halo 2, PS2, Burnout 3, Takedown, GameCube, Paper Mario, the Thousand Year Door, PC, World Warcraft, Portable, the Legend of Zelda, the Minish Cap, which everyone agreed was completely eligible and above board. And finally, Wildcard, Ninja Guidance. Just a run of stone cold classics.

They're happy with my picks if I don't say so myself or if I do say so myself. Third, Matt. Xbox Chronicles Aridic, Escape from Butcher Bay. PS2, GTA San Andreas. GameCube, Metroid Prime 2 Echoes, PC Half-Life 2, portable, don't get it twisted, get it, WarioWare Twisted, Wildcard, sorry, Catamari Damas. And finally, Charity, Xbox. Thief Deadly Shadows

PS2 Shinbagami Tense 3 Nocturn GameCube Def Jam Fight for New York PC Unreal Tournament 2004 Portable

Pokemon Emerald and finally Wildcard as everyone predicted The Wildest of Wildcars Outbreak Yeah That is the game

I'm realizing how much of a gamer list that I'm sitting here I was even a gamer at that point That's the most Gamer list I've ever heard

about white That's some like Batman Beyond gamers. Gamer. What is wrong with me? What was I going through? Some snubs on my board.

You can second any of these or a third or fourth them. So Xbox, none of us took Fable, the original Fable. Not the best Fable, but still Fable. It's good. I don't draft scam artists on my board. He over promises. He under delivers. We're not going to reward him.

Peter Miley knew. Okay. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Pandora tomorrow. A claimed game. Yeah. Yeah, that was a hard one to the... Yeah, tough cut. Also, for, well, multi-platform release, Spider-Man 2,

I mean, I toyed with taking that for GameCube, for a bunch of systems. I mean, the great web swinging of Spider-Man 2, often replicated, rarely matched. PS2, I also had, as I mentioned, Ratchet and Clank, Jack. Final Fantasy 11, I was surprised we didn't get, like, you know, charity, you went all Final Fantasy 8. for our Final Fantasy draft again,

you know, zacking where everyone zinks. Yeah, 11. I wondered whether you'd go there, but you didn't go there. Nope. We had Ace Combat 5. The unsung war was also unsung in this draft. GameCube 2, Pickman 2 was tough for me, not to take.

I am a big Pickman person. And Pickman, I think, has gotten better with each successive release. So, Pikmin 2 is better than the original Pikmin, but not as good as subsequent Pickman's. Legend of Zelda, Four Swords Adventures came out that year.

Not a full-fledged Zelda, but an interesting entry. Beautiful Joe, too. I really like the Beautiful Joe games. Those were great. PC, I had Far Cry was high on my board, actually, like third on my board. I might have taken that if I had not gotten, wow. The Sims 2. The Sims 2.

Yeah. Rome Total War. Big year for the RTS heads out there. I'm not really one of them, but Rome. Total War was that year. Battle for Middle Earth was that year. Sid Meyers Pirates. Was that your City of Heroes? That was a good

one, you know? Yeah. The rare... Big phenomenon but with the MMO scene. Right. Yeah. I'm surprised you snubbed the herbs, Sims in the city. Yeah, apologies. Yeah, so many superhero games have kind of attempted to do what City of Heroes

did and fallen flat on their faces, but that one worked. For Portable, I actually had second on my board, Mario Golf Advanced Tour. I can't believe that game wasn't drafted. I mean, maybe the original Mario Golf is even better, but Advanced Tour was great, too. I would have picked it if we didn't agree that we could cheat.

Yes. True. Wouldn't put it that way, but sure. And then Mario versus Donkey Kong came out that year. Also recently remade by Nintendo. Kirby and the Amazing Mirror came out that year. You know, some good games, but a weaker category. Anything else?

I mean, we could just remember some games for, like, hours here. I couldn't come home respecting myself if I picked Kingdom Hearts Chamber of Memories on my portable section, even though I did play that game a lot when I was a kid. So, yeah, I had to go with AstroPoint. Yeah. I mean, Tony Hawk's Underground 2 came out that year. You get X-Men Legends. Oh, man.

Yes. Yeah. The original Killzone, which wasn't that. There were a lot of, like, Killzone Red Dead Revolver, like, series that got better later. Prince of Persia Warrior Within came out that year. Good one. Real good one.

Yeah. Edglord City. So stacked. Tekken 5, Siberia. I don't know. We could just keep listing really good games that would be contenders in most other years. But we only have so much time here.

And I'm afraid that we've run out of it. But this was really fun. I think this was a successful inaugural exercise. here. So we've recap the selections. Thank you, Matt, Steve, charity. You lent me your millennial memories and energy to take us back to a time we remember fondly, at least in gaming. This was great, guys. Thank you very much. Thanks so much.

I can't wait to do this again and see how gamer with a Z charity's list will be. They should put us in a fighting game. They should make little avatars of us so we can fight. How many fighting games has Drake Binid? No. Wait, was Pushit to you in that game or no? No, I don't think push it over. I don't think the clips is in there.

Okay. One day. Thanks also to Mike Wargon for producing and to our Juno Ramikapal for additional planning and production. Remember to weigh in and vote on our selections so that we have bragging rights and we know who won. At Ring orverse, certainly on Twitter. The great Jomi Adenaron will be putting the graphics up and giving you the option to

select your winner. And if you like this, let us know and nominate other years to do drafts of at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com. For now, we will return to the present to 2024, a year with many great games still in store. Until next time, heed the wise words of Half Life 2's Wallace Breen. Be wise. Be safe. Be aware. And now I'll turn it over to the boss for a fitting closing sentiment. My friends, let us fight together again. I have waited long for this day.

We'll fight with you once more. Welcome back. Now that all five of us are together, it's time we go to the depths of hell itself.