Two top 10 lists of the best games from 2025. This week's music is from the Promise Mascot Agency soundtrack by Peter McCaughan and Ryo Koike.

Want to play Matthew's number 3? Head here. 

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Need a video game awards show with dumb categories no company would ever sponsor? We've got your back, once again.

Thanks to all our returning guests from this year for dropping in!

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This episode is all about the games that hit players with emotional gut punches. You get 50 minutes of nice preamble with returning guest, indie developer Lucy Blundell, then 1 hour+ of our combined 15 top emotional moments in games.

After the 50-minute mark, this episode features spoilers (some light, some heavy) for these games: Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Final Fantasy X, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Final Fantasy VII (and the remakes), Botany Manor, Ori and the Blind Forest (just the intro), The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Fable 2, What Remains of Edith Finch, Halo: Reach, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy.

But...most of it is pretty topline, and it's well worth a listen. Find Lucy's latest game VIDEOVERSE on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch.

This week's music is from the Final Fantasy X soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu, Masashi Hamauzu and Junya Nakano.

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Cassette Beasts developer and all-round great video game thinker Jay Baylis joins us once again! In time for the release of Metroid Prime 4, Matthew and Jay each share their top 5 games in Nintendo's series.

This is the Critical Hit article Jay mentioned on Metroid's possible influences. This week's music is from the Metroid: Zero Mission soundtrack by Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano.

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The podcast eats itself! The Back Page finally dedicates a whole episode to its namesake. How do back page jokes go wrong? And what about the less frequent times when they go well? Returning guest Phil Savage, Global Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer, helps us examine the creation of these gags. There's also a 20-minute bit on ARC Raiders near the start if that's your sort of thing.

This week's music is from the Yakuza 0 soundtrack by Hidenori Shoji. 

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The drafts return! Four giant men compete to pick the best games on the Mega Drive (or Genesis, if you're American), SNES and Neo Geo across 8 categories – plus a 9th bonus category specifically for the Amiga.

This week's music is from the Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro and the Chrono Trigger soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda (not Rick Astley). 

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A deep dive into an all-time classic on Wii. We'll do this again on Monday for Super Mario Galaxy 2, exclusively for Patreon XL Tier members!

This week's music is from the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack by Koji Kondo and Mahito Yokota.

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Games discussed: Dispatch, Absolum, The Séance of Blake Manor, Ninja Gaiden 4, Hell is Us.

Then, Samuel butchering a bunch of Zelda quiz questions. It has to be heard to be believed.

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A deep dive on the demos we tried during Steam Next Fest, hopefully giving you a few things for your wishlist consideration.

Samuel's games: Reanimal, Birdcage, Lumines Arise, The Killing Stone, Evil Egg, Skate Story, Ambrosia Sky, Cairn.

Matthew's games: CiniCross, No More Work For Ito, Opus: Prism Peak, The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time, The Seance of Blake Manor.

We won't list the duds, but one was Bubsy 4D.

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Following our moderately good episode about games set in Britain earlier this year, we assemble a list of the 10 key games set in Japan. Did we get it wrong? Probably. Plus: a mini 'What We've Been Playing' episode about two recent download games we've been digging!

This week's music is from the Persona 4 soundtrack by Shoji Meguro. 

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Music podcaster and former games journalist Jon Denton is our guest this week! Hear about Jon's journey from gamesTM to being pals with The Weeknd.

This week's music is from the Super Mario World soundtrack by Koji Kondo. 

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A massive year for games, a bleak year for at least one giant man. One of our oldest and most popular podcast formats is back, more than two years after our 2016 episode!

This week's music is from the Yakuza 0 soundtrack by Kensuke Inage and Yoshihiro Arai.

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If you enjoy this episode, consider supporting us so we can make more Two Giant Men episodes just like it!

As voted for by the listeners, we revisit Rockstar Vancouver's 2006 ode to high school life – as well as our own cursed teenage years.

This week's music is from the amazing Bully soundtrack by Shawn Lee, which we neglected to talk about in the episode. Thanks to Michael 'BanyaBat' for the edits.

These are the two articles mentioned in the episode – Samuel Horti's Bully piece and Game Informer's Bully 2 piece.

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Our quarterly four-person draft is here! The Two Giant Men are joined by two further giant men as we compete to pick the best 11 games from some of our favourite Japanese game developers. To mix things up, expect a couple of twists on the usual draft format...

This week's music is from the Street Fighter 2 soundtrack by Yoko Shimomura and Isao Abe.

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The Back Page's road to GTA 6 – a borderline-unviable series of playthroughs of older GTA games – continues! You don't need to have revisited San Andreas to enjoy this episode. We give you a nice overview of everything going on in the story and missions. We dig deep into the game's early '90s Californian setting, the ways it pushed the GTA mission formula forwards, and why its Definitive Edition solves many of the original PS2 version's problems.

This week's music is the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas main theme by Michael Hunter.

A few show notes and small corrections: Samuel is wrong about GTA 4 having checkpoints. The Breaking Bad episode referenced is called 'Caballo Sin Nombre', not 'Caballero Sin Nombre'.

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With 750 Metacritic 'points' each, who can pick the best 10 games based on their critical averages? A panel of judges will decide, and we'll talk about who won in a future episode! Let us know what you think of this episode format in the comments. It resulted in at least one incredibly wild choice...

This week's music is from the Binary Domain soundtrack by Hidenori Shoji and Mitsuharu Fukuyama.

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