Silly awards from silly men, ahead of the real GOTY pod next week. Thanks to this year's guests, too, for providing insights on their favourite games of 2024.

This week's music is from the FF7 Rebirth soundtrack by Mitsuto Suzuki and Masashi Hamauzu and the Helldivers 2 soundtrack by Wilbert Roget II.

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Each host must pick the best 10 games that have a score of 79 or less on Metacritic! But who will win out with that tricky criteria in mind? And what gold (if any) lies within the amber ranks of the reviews aggregator? Vote for the winning selection in the Discord announcements channel for the next week.

Some rules that might be handy to know:

• A game needs to have scored below 80 on at least one of its original launch formats to be eligible (so if it got 79 on Xbox 360 but 80 on PS3, it would count)
• But, it can't be more than 10 points lower – this is to avoid shitty ports getting in the mix (Bayonetta on PS3 versus 360, for example, or Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4 versus PC)
• No remasters or remakes can be selected

Enjoy! This week's music is from The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story by Yûki Hayashi and Shogo Yamashiro.

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The quiz part goes on for far too long. The mailbag bit has some low energy answers. But: it is an episode of this podcast.

This week's music is from the No More Heroes soundtrack by Masafumi Takada and Jun Fukuda.

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Our favourite first and third party games on every PlayStation console, just in time for its 30th anniversary.

This week's music is from the Final Fantasy XV soundtrack by Yoko Shimomura.

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In part one, hear us discuss what it's like to work on a games magazine when it's closing down, the rise of prestige games mags, and why crowdfunded independent media is so hard to get off the ground.

A Profound Waste of Time founder Caspian Whistler joins us for part two. Hear about the creation of this successful prestige print project – and check out APWOT issue 5's Kickstarter here, which ends in a couple of weeks.

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Beefy games chat this week on all of the above – plus The Rise of the Golden Idol, FF7 Rebirth and Apex Legends.

Thanks to Matthew 'Big Matty C' Castle for the edits this week.

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We all have too many games to play. One of our favourite guests, Jay Baylis, joins us to discuss how we all gathered massive backlogs – and what can be done to cure it.

Matthew had a cold for this one. But he still went through and edited out all his coughs, bless him. 

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We need an extra week to work on episode 200, so enjoy this great episode we made for our wonderful Patreon subscribers earlier this year.

Support us at Patreon.com/BackPagePod, and get more great episodes like this one.

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One of our favourite returning guests, Louise Blain (last on the pod in October 2021), discusses her current role as Creative Lead at Blumhouse Games. Their first published game, Fear the Spotlight, is out on October 22nd.

It's short but sweet! But next week probably won't be...

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Matthew is zagging on the new Atlus RPG, is surprised at how much he's enjoying Silent Hill 2, and is at odds with Samuel on the merits of the newest Zelda game, Echoes of Wisdom.

You'll laugh when you get to our predictions of the critical response to Metaphor...

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