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VG247's The Best Games Ever Podcast – Ep.11: Best game that you were ridiculously hyped for as a teen

Teenage independence brought with it the chance to shape our own gaming futures.

Goodbye England's rose
May you ever grow in our hearts
You were the grace that placed itself
Where lives were torn apart
You called out to our country
And you whispered to those in pain
Now you belong to heaven
And the stars spell out your name

As the news of Diana’s death forced itself into the homes of everyone in Great Britain, royalist tears flooding the carpets and dampening the underside of sofas, some people had other things on their minds.

It takes a lot to get a teenager out of bed on a Sunday morning, and if there’s no money involved it takes even more.

”Princess Diana has died,” Mum put out there as I stumbled down the stairs, bleary eyed having stayed up too late playing Dungeon Keeper.

”Is snooker practice cancelled then?” I asked, not really reading the room.

”I don’t know,” said Mum. “No one has said anything. Diana has died.”

A bowl of Crunchy Nut later and a car tooted its horn outside.

Diana was dead. But snooker practice was on. As a teenager, I was as hyped for snooker as modern kids are for Fortnite Nerf guns and YouTube videos of someone blowing up a million pounds.

Welcome to VG247 Best Games Ever Podcast, Episode 11: Best game that you were ridiculously hyped for as a teen.

Please do let us know what you think of the show – and if this is your first time listening, do go back to listen to the previous episodes. If you’ve got suggestions for topics, we’d love to hear them. I promise to not claim them as my own works of genius – I'll give you credit way down the page, like those people that get viral tweets only to tell you who made the image two tweets under the main one a week later.

“What is VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast?” you ask while thinking about where you were on Sunday, August 31, 1997. Wouldn’t it be funny if you were watching a 30-minute panel show where people decided on the best game in a specific category? As that’s just what this podcast is!

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We’ve got some details on the show’s content below (if you want to get a refresher before heading to the comments to make a wonderful, considered post or don’t want to listen but do want to know what games we picked), so if you want to avoid spoilers, don’t scroll past this fan-made creation of what Chris Bratt would look like if he was part of the family in Resident Evil 7 (Support friends of VG247, People Make Games, on Patreon).

Chris Bratt in Resident Evil 7 at the dinner table

The Best Game that you were ridiculously hyped for as a teen

This is the topic of Episode eleven of VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast. Here’s a rundown of who picked what.

Tom – Formula 1 (1996)

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F1 was just a thing that was seemingly always there when I was a kid. Broadcast on the BBC in the UK, every weekend we’d sit and watch it while eating a Sunday lunch. As such, the first game on the PlayStation was a huge deal that I was super hyped for. Turns out I wasn’t very good at it, but it looked incredible back in the day.

Alex – Dead Rising

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The Xbox 360 had some real killer games early on in its life, and Dead Rising is right up there with the best of them. A brand-new zombie game Capcom, the masters of the zombie genre, and one where you had seemingly endless ways to kill the undead monstrosities. Few games of the era managed this level of hype, and the game itself didn’t disappoint.

Kelsey – Resident Evil 7

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After Resident Evil 6 something had to change, and Capcom (second appearance in this week’s pod) duly delivered the goods. Resident Evil 7 is a masterstroke in game design, player progression, and horror. With the weight of the franchise on its shoulders, Resi 7 thrust the series into the upper echelons of modern AAA releases, and ushered in a new era of quality Resident Evil releases.

Let us know what game you’d pick and if you think young people should be banned from showing how young they are? If you like the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review saying how wonderful it is, and tell all your friends. Do a tweet about it, post on Facebook, put a podcast banner on your drive so it looks like we’ve sponsored it (we won’t do that).

Come back in a week for another episode of VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast.

If you want more podcasts, you could do worse than checking out our friends at Rock Paper Shotgun who have the Electronic Wireless Show. Eurogamer has two shows (greedy!), Digital Foundry has DF Direct, Dicebreaker covers the world of tabletop gaming, and the Outside Xbox lot has Oxventure - A Dungeons & Dragons Podcast.

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