Absent Minded Podcast

Absent Minded’s Super Official Highly Respected Industry Leading Only List That Truly Matters Game of the Decade Super Slam continues this week as we decide our #1 game of 2013 before discussing the departure of Halo Infinite's project director, yet another delay for Cyberpunk 2077, AMD's recently announced Big Navi GPU lineup, the biggest announcements from Nintendo's Partner Showcase Direct, and more.

Absent Minded’s Super Official Highly Respected Industry Leading Only List That Truly Matters Game of the Decade Super Slam continues this week as we decide our #1 game of 2012 before discussing Facebook's Head of VR doubling down on their ridiculous account requirements for the Oculus Quest 2, Phil Spencer's thoughts on releasing Bethesda titles on PlayStation, the media apps launching day one on PlayStation 5, unskippable advertisements in NBA 2K21 and more.

Absent Minded’s Super Official Highly Respected Industry Leading Only List That Truly Matters Game of the Decade Super Slam officially begins this week as we decide our #1 game of 2011 before discussing the PlayStation 5 user interface reveal, how backwards compatibility will work with your PlayStation 4 games, the incoming PlayStation Store changes and how Facebook's account requirement for Oculus Quest 2 is leaving users with expensive paperweights.

This week Sony finally gave us a peak inside the PlayStation 5, revealing all of its secrets and giving an idea of why this thing is so darn huge! We go over all the things you need to know about this next gen behemoth before getting into the latest changes to the PlayStation trophy system, our thoughts on how Nintendo really could achieve 4K gaming with a Switch Pro, more Final Fantasy XVI news, a potential Dreamcast Mini in the future, and much more!

It's the return of the pretty decent video game movie this week as we watch The Angry Birds Movie! Now, I know what you're thinking, and I will say we say DECENT, okay. So relax. It's got a solid cast, some pretty good jokes and if you had to be forced to sit through this film in theaters for a small child you wouldn't have the worst time. Would it stand up to the 100s of additional viewings they'd force upon you? Probably not! COVID delay season continues as every movie gets scared after Tenet's lackluster domestic box office, moving every major film from the end of 2020 to 2021 and beyond. Superwoman becomes the next Arrowverse series to bite the dust, Sega wants to make a film franchise out of the Yakuza game series, The Boys is so popular Amazon is fast tracking a college-set spin-off series, and Bill & Ted Face the Music prove there is success to be had in the new normal of premium video-on-demand.

Long stretches of game development involving mandatory overtime, known as crunch, are unfortunately very common in the video games industry. It's a difficult topic to discuss as in some ways it almost seems like a necessary evil while the argument for its avoidance can be made just as strongly. Is it always a result of poor planning by project leads and managers or is it just a result of the unpredictable nature of creating such massive projects? After committing to a crunch-free development cycle for Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red has this week enforced mandatory overtime for the six week sprint leading up to the release of the game in mid-November, and with it the discussion of this issue has opened up yet again. Reviewers across games media got access to working Xbox Series X hardware this week so we've been flooded with impressions of the soon to release console, Naoki Yoshida shares some updates on Final Fantasy XVI at Tokyo Game Show, Insomniac details all of the upgrades you'll see in Spider-Man: Remastered on PS5 in an attempt to earn that $20 price tag, and Apex Legends finally makes the jump to console and PC cross-play next week.

Microsoft dropped a megaton bomb on the games industry this week when it announced it was finalizing plans to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, complete with all of the development studios and intellectual property under them. Xbox is now your future home for Doom, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, and so much more, all for the tune of just $7.5 billion USD. Wowza. The rest of the news is fairly light as you might have guessed, who wants to get overshadowed by that after all? Sony apologizes on Twitter for its PS5 pre-order situation, the still allegedly in development Beyond Good & Evil 2's game director quits video games forever, retailers have pricing for your next gen Xbox expandable storage and it's pretty darn pricey, and Amazon is ready to throw its hat into the game streaming ring because well, why not?

Your friendly galactic Lombax gets his big screen debut in Ratchet & Clank and we promise you he's far more interesting in his games. In its effort to distill the franchise into lowest-common-denominator children's animation the film loses most of its personality, though there are a few glimmers of what makes these characters so great among the duds. We got some awesome new trailers this week for Dune and WandaVision, confirmation of where that crazy Nick Cage Tiger King series is ending up, Wonder Woman 1984 being delayed AGAIN, and official confirmation that Tom Cruise is headed to space!

It's finally officially, the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Digital Edition is releasing this November at the competitive pricing we all hoped for, and that's just the beginning of all of the PlayStation 5 news we have this episode! Final Fantasy XVI opened up the PS5 Showcase this week and it's going to back its medieval fantasy roots, Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon's Souls are confirmed PS5 launch titles, we got our first glimpse at the long leaked Harry Potter RPG and we can't wait to go to Hogwarts, and a bevy of other reveals and updates on what's coming this year and next. Besides all the PS5 news, which there is just a ton of to get through, we also discuss Nintendo's discontinuing of the 3DS, the weird decision to use emulation for Super Mario 3D All Stars, Ubisoft bringing Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell to VR, and so much more! It's a big episode people!

After having their hand forced by a leak of the system and its pricing, Microsoft finally unveiled the Xbox Series S, code-named Lockhart, that we've been talking about for nearly a year now. And it's exactly the box we thought. All of the new features and CPU grunt of the Xbox Series X, but with a GPU more targeted for 1080p and 1440p gaming. Microsoft even revealed the price for the X and S, at $499 and $299 respectively, putting Sony in an interesting position with PlayStation 5. But is it all sunshine and rainbows with this entry-level next gen system? The pros may very well outweigh the cons. Ubisoft streamed another one of their Forward events and it's safe to say it was less interesting than their first foray. CD Projekt Red says The Witcher 3 is headed for next gen systems in a free update, 505 Games accidentally does "the impossible" and temporarily upgrades Control owners to the Ultimate Edition, more bad news for Gamestop and rumblings out of Bloomberg that Nintendo is closer to a 4K-ready Switch than we thought.