Episode 116: Expansions that are better than the main game

Interactivity is this medium's entire thing. It's a composite of many other art forms: everything from prose, to sculpture, to television. What it cribs from those things is often its weakest work, but what it does brilliantly and almost singularly is give the audience some control within the experience. All art is interactive on some level, in that the relationship between a creative work, its author, and its enjoyer is always a conversation of sorts. We project our own world view onto motionless hunks of marble. Our own life experiences onto flat planes of pigmented acrylics. Our own cultural conditioning onto Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. And there's those Choose Your Own Adventure books that give you some sense of a branching narrative and are also rubbish. But games? You may inhabit entire worlds beyond the screen via a proxy. An avatar quite often of our own design. An effective physical presence. Games don't just tell us what Narnia is like: they let us stick a steel toe-capped size twelve through the fucking wardrobe, mate. We all get to be Dorothy, except instead of a nippy wee dug we've got an AK-47 and a bandolier of frag grenades. This medium doesn't need to be better at imparting meaning through narrative than all the places it steals from, because it does something that none of those other things can: freedom to change the script. Whether it's through small, inconsequential choices like whether to shoot a guy in the bonce or the willy, or full-on branching narratives with multiple possible origin stories, middles, and endings, games are more or less what you put into them. Namely, you. But what is the best game that lets you control the narrative? Let's ask our esteemed panel of professional Game Likers from VG247, which is sort of like Eurogamer but communist.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes a game comes along that is, for reasons, a bit a of a black sheep as far as its parent company is concerned. It could be a passion project that doesn't tick any zeigeisty boxes, a legacy IP that the current owners have no clue what to do with, sometimes even a perfectly decent game that the court of public opinion has turned sour on and therefore must be canned. Video games are big, unwieldy projects that only ever release in a working state through a combination of talent, grit, and extraordinary good luck, and it's the latter that often pushes one into precarious waters. And yet, there are a number of examples of games that are brilliant, beloved, fine ambassadors of their genre despite being a full-on headache for anyone involved in having to sell them. Which of these, according to our esteemed panel of Alex Donaldson and Tom Orry, is the best ever? Host Jim Trinca will decide in this edition of The Best Games Ever Podcast, a show that is loved by all including its parent company and associated stakeholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Add-on content for video games is often worthless, but it can sometimes go very, very right: just look at the DLC catalogue for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It infamously introduced the gaming landscape to the concept of horse armour, or paid cosmetic items in single player titles, which was widely condemned as a cynical cash-grab (even so, the concept ended up being so lucrative that it survives to this day). But it also gave us Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles, establishing a familiar pattern of big games having a medium sized expansion set within the existing map, and a larger, quasi-sequel sized one set in its own brand new area. Starfield's recent DLC, Shattered Space, hasn't gone down as a vast improvement on the base game, but it may well be the vanguard of a much bigger (and potentially better) expansion coming down the road. Lord knows the potential is there. But that's by the by. The question I'm asking our esteemed podcast panel today is: which DLC expansions have been better than the base game? To find out what they picked, and who I chose as the winner, check out this podcast here what we recorded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gaming is full of rings of power: from RPG trinkets that give your character a small but pivotal buff to a critical stat, warp rings that provide instantaneous transport for Sonic the Hedgehog, and beastly racing circuits. Not to mention, er, the actual rings of power from Lord of the Rings. Season 2 of Amazon Prime's Rings of Power inspired this topic, obviously. Well I like it anyway. That makes one of us. So, which is the best game that features a ring of power, or Powerful Ring? To find out, we assembled this panel of VG247's finest talking heads in order to record this, the latest episode of our pokey little panel game. Featuring Jim Trinca, Tom Orry, Connor Makar, and Alex Donaldson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who won out of Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, the crowdfunded space sim sensations pitched to us a decade ago by two of the genre's most celebrated game directors? Star Citizen being a spiritual follow up to Wing Commander and Privateer, and Elite Dangerous being a direct sequel to Elite, Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters. Well, it depends how you define "win". Or, indeed, "exists". This is just one of the Enthusiastic Disagreements we have in this week's Best Games Ever Podcast, along with GTA vs Saints Row, Call of Duty vs Medal of Honor, and another one that we can't remember. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you were lucky enough to have lived through the 7th console generation as a young adult with enough disposable income to buy a couple of games per month, you ate damn well. You probably have countless fond memories of each big new watercooler game that the studios of the day were firing out with alarming regularity, and you had no idea what the hell "games as a service" meant. Bliss. What wasn't blissful, though, was how unreliable the machines were. The Xbox 360 of course was blighted by the Red Ring of Death scandal, a vast and expensive tech design and consumer rights blunder that cost Microsoft billions to put right. The PS3 similarly had the Yellow Light of Death, which wasn't as bad or as widespread as Microsoft's issue, but still affected a lot of people and is pretty much a guaranteed certainty if you're still lucky enough to have a working PS3 Fat: clean that thing religiously and change the thermal paste. Honestly. Do it. It will die eventually whatever you do, but don't tempt fate. Not that the 7th gen was the only era with widespread tech issues. Every generation of games machine has had some kind of common problem, usually caused or exacerbated by excessive heat, and therefore often associated with games that drive the hardware particularly hard. So which of these system-busting games is the best one? Well, that's what we're here to get to the bottom of in this panel show, featuring Jim Trinca as your host, Tom Orry and Sherif Saed as your regular panellists, and Ian Higton from Eurogamer as a Special Guest (he's my favourite, very handsome, doesn't smell usually). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inspired by the recent release of Star Wars Outlaws, this week's podcast is all about what makes Star Wars, something we're exploring via the unorthodox path of picking a bunch of things that aren't Star Wars and pointing out the ways they are like Star Wars. Confused? Don't be, it's just an excuse to have arguments. Star Wars is a massive media franchise that's had so many ideas chucked into it by various writers, directors, showrunners, and every other type of creative over the years that it's hard to really pin down what its true essence is. Which is what makes the question "What's the best Star Wars game that isn't a Star Wars game?" such a fun topic: you can conceivably make an argument for anything. Yes, even Football Manager. So what does our panel most associate with Star Wars: is it laser swords and space wizards, or a beleaguered resistance movement against a tyrannical empire? Is it the things that famously influenced the young George Lucas, such as Flash Gordon adventure serials, the films of Akira Kurosawa, and living through the Vietnam war? Special guest Ian Dransfield from Games Media joins host Jim and regular panellists Connor and Mark. No Tom this week cos he was on holiday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes video games include the most random things, but who doesn't love that stuff? We all get excited when you can flush a toilet or turn on a tap, even though these are the most mundane actions possible in the 'real world'. Jim, in his wisdom(?), decided that these neat little features are pointless and made everyone pick the most useless of all found in the best video game. How did this go? Well, you'll find out when you listen to this week's episode of the Best Games Ever Podcast. To help make these 30 minutes or so more tolerable we are this week joined by everyone's favourite dated video game journo d-lister, Steve Burns. If you know who he is, brilliant, if you don't, he's hard to explain so we won't bother. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Video games are great, but sometimes you just have to admit that some of them are only available on consoles that, well, aren't great. Rubbish, even. You can guarantee an argument if you ask people to pick the worst games console, so that's what we did. But what is the best game on this worst console? Who showed their ineptitude and picked a game on a great console? Who picked something so perfect it could never be argued with? Did Jim say anything of interest or just stir things up? Truth is, depending on your exposure to certain consoles you're likely to have different views on this to everyone else, but we had to make a definitive choice over the best game on the worst console. It absolutely won't annoy anyone! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Video games are unparalleled in recreating real and fictional experiences. Only when both are channelled well, with love and passion, can a game transcend its place as merely a product and become art. For this reason being able to take a piss in-game is paramount to the merits of the medium. Where would we be without Norman Reedus widdling onto the grass in celebrated Art Game Death Stranding? Or that bit in Postal 2 where you can take a wizz on Gary Coleman, and he gets really cross with you? God rest him. Anyway. Fact is, there are loads of games which, for some reason, include the act of doing a Big Wee as part of their suite of player interactions. But which of these games is the best? To find the answer, listen to the latest episode of The Best Games Ever show: a podcasted parlour game about arguing over metacritic scores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices