Let's get back to nature with someone fresh from the cast of Mad Men.

Relevant links!

• From "Irritable Heart" to "Shellshock": How Post-traumatic Stress Became a Disease (via Gizmodo)

The theme this week is Linker, by our very own Pauly!

Join us for a discussion of The Beginner's Guide. This game is so complicated and so deep and so oddly emotional - whether funny or brutally devastating is really up to you, apparently - that we bring in a psychiatrist to help us sift through the experience. I'm having a hard time deciding exactly what to type here about this game; it's almost a divine experience certainly without parallel in the gaming space, an opinion I hold to the level of that for Kentucky Route Zero. The Beginner's Guide is not as much all about videogames as The Stanley Parable, but instead it's a game all about the making of games, the sustaining of the creative forces required to make such inhumanly exhausting projects that are such pieces of the creators' soul(s). I don't want to spoil this experience for any of you (spoiling is what listening to our podcast is for, after all), but take it from me: this is a game you should play if you've ever even considered the humans behind your games.
We recommend listening to our The Stanley Parable podcast beforehand, the spiritual precursor to this game, also by Davey Wreden.

Relevant links!

• Check out our own musician Pauly, whose song Unravishing is featured in this episode!
• Galactic Cafe: Davey Wreden's blog post about The Stanley Parable
• The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and The Beginner's Guide - a truly amazing analysis video of The Beginner's Guide by Innuendo Studios on YouTube (33m)
• Errant Signal: The Beginner's Guide - another awesome breakdown analysis from the YouTube channel Errant Signal (20m) - watch this if you suspect Coda might be a real person

The theme this week is "The Func" by VCMG, a free download from chipmusic.org.
The Will's Quiz Minute(tm) theme is Linker, also by beloved Pauly!

Join us for a discussion of The Stanley Parable, a game entirely focused on turning negative possibility spaces into positive possibility spaces. Game design theory and meta-commentary abound in this episode about the utterly-hilarious Half-Life 2 mod The Stanley Parable by Davey Wreden. The level of fergazzlement on display is outstanding!

Tune in with us next week for a talk about the emotional follow-up to this game, The Beginner's Guide. If you enjoyed this game, BG is a must-play from Wreden's own experience after the release of SP.

Relevant links!

• UPDATE! The Baby Game has been patched as of 2016/12!
• Jazzpunk by Necrophone Games, an absurdest alt-Cold War comedy game with a similar sense of humor to Stanley
• Way of the Samurai, an oldschool game about multiple endings
• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, a textbook on game design
• yep, we talk about the Swiffer in this podcast

The theme this week is "The Func" by VCMG, a free download from chipmusic.org. Also from chipmusic, the WILL'S GAMING MINUTE(tm) theme is "Wienerhype" by jaar.

Warning: This is an early podcast of ours and is long! You have been warned.
Join us for a discussion of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. This week, we talk about the differences between the base game and the glorious PS Vita port, Golden, and whether you have to actually experience something the first time for it to be nostalgic when you play the remaster - a more involved discussion than the "yes" you'd expect from a podcast who's been doing this for a lot longer than we had been at this point. (Yes, the legends are true, it took us a year to bother editing this one.) We discuss Nate's uncanny similarity to Yosuke for frankly pretty trivial reasons, and the intricacies of polyamory. Yes, there's lots to talk about and a contest to be won!

The theme this week is Linker, by our very own Pauly!

Nine years out from its release, we return for some thoughts and critical analysis of Mass Effect. This is almost a companion podcast to our bookclub on Drew Kapyrshyn's first Mass Effect novel, Revelation, and in this podcast we hear Nate being a huge grump after (or because of) missing what is easily argued to be the entire point and centerpiece of not only this game but entire series of games; also hear us talk about the Mako, that lovely divisive game mechanic (I guess some people have to like something for it to be divisive, huh?). We'll chat about other things too, but you'll have to listen to find out!

The theme this week is "Cracks" by Clamm, a free album download from chipmusic.org.

Join the text version of a single Mass Effect side-mission, Mako-free, here in Drew Karpyshyn's debut prequel to Mass Effect.

The theme this week is "Cracks" by Clamm, a free album download from chipmusic.org.

Papers, Please is aptly summed up by its marketing tagline: "A dystopian document thriller". Everything that can go wrong will go wrong in this 'simulation' of being a border crossing agent in the clearly-Soviet-in-all-but-name Arstotzka.

Morality and shades of gray are front in center in this puzzle game, but transparency of choice is not; what you do may make be ethical but its outcomes vary wildly in the face of a political system so obfuscated as to be completely labyrinthine. Papers, Please does more to simulate the atmosphere of Soviet politik than even a good read of Solzhenitsyn, but that isn't just why it's popular: it's also a darn strong puzzle game.

Relevant links!

• Document types in the game
• Caustic Soda, a podcast about gruesome or weird stuff by lovable Canadians

Relevant games!

• The Westport Incident by Double Zero One Zero (the newspaper version of Papers, Please
• The Tomorrow Children by Q-Games
• Calm Down, Stalin by Cartboard Games (no, not Cardboard Computer)
• This War of Mine by 11 bit studios
• Ekranoplans, by Russia Itself, GiantBomb'd here
• The entire Metro series by 4A

The theme this week is "Duck Wings Going Down in Smoke and Flames" by Duck Boy, a free album download from chipmusic.org off of his new album Unknown Command. Also from chipmusic, the WILL'S GAMING MINUTE(tm) theme is, fittingly, "Wienerhype" by jaar.

It's a very intimate show tonight, as Will and Nate venture deep into electronic music territory in two distinctly different approaches to the musical platformer. Electronic Super Joy is a pixel graphic-styled brutal platformer's chase (the difficulty of which has only Super Meat Boy to pay homage to) in order to take down Rogue Pope One as a silhouette of a boy to the incredibly loud thumping beats of Eurodance backed by mid-tier-quality German gonzo porn sound effects. Meanwhile, in a far more mature and artsy vein, PixelJunk Eden is Q-Games and Baiyon's collaboration to give you an idea of what his DJ residency nights at Tokyo's infamous and somewhat secret underground megaclub Womb might be like if you were the only one around and a weird drum track kept popping either into your head or off to stage right; you're not sure because you're on a couple too many tabs of acid, but everything is incredible neon vectors on sharp black backgrounds the color of the Arctic night sky before the Canadians set up that Santa shop and the Russians needed the oil money enough to explore the taiga.

Relevant links!

• Ellie Gibson of Eurogamer gets incredibly frustrated and reviews Eden
• John Walker of RPS, someone who "gets it", reviews Eden
• Maybe relevant to your ESJ interests: some gameplay of Crypt of the NecroDancer
• Maybe relevant to your Eden interests: Hohokum, a Phil Kollar Polygon review

Relevant music podcasts!

• The Anjunadeep Edition for good deep house, a bit more calm than Eden's soundtrack (a progressive house record label out of London)
• Resident Advisor (RA) podcast for getting into techno and more eclectic, less smooth, more worldly sounds
• The Monstercat podcast for slightly more energetic, upbeat sounds midway between the energy of these two OSTs (an upbeat trancey-dance record label out of Vancouver)

The theme this week is so incredible it couldn't be contained: "Voyage: Andromeda" by Jayster, from chipmusic.org. Also from chipmusic, the WILL'S GAMING MINUTE(tm) theme is, fittingly, "Wienerhype" by jaar. The song towards the end is from the ESJ official soundtrack, so go check that out!

In our most up-to-date episode ever, some of us sit around and chat about that rehashing of the '90s phonomenon of Pokémon. Remember that? Yep, so does everyone gathering in your local civic area either rejoicing the human condition together, or robbing one another (or falling off cliffs). We hit peak 2016 this week.

The theme this week is a mildly jazzy and mildly chippy one: "Funk of Ages" by The Jazz Surgeon, from chipmusic.org. The ALBERTO'S HOT TIPS(tm) theme is Summon In The Sunlight from the fantastic YouTube video HAPPY SOULS, and it also makes a charming ringtone.

Here we have a very strange experience that you might or might not share with your boy/girlfriend. The thing about Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is... well, okay, the first thing is that its name is ridiculous and rad. But the second thing is you might not remember your play session if your host is generous enough with his - bourbon, was it? I don't remember.

Anyways, Lovers is a couch co-op game wherein you and a friend (or AI if you don't have friends [available]) control various parts of ridiculously spherical spaceship(s!) and destroy the anti-love that is green and has escaped its confines, now wreaking havoc upon the universe's previous exclusive force: love. It's from Canada and has a silly synthpop soundtrack. Play it!

Relevant links!

• Giant Bomb plays Mario Party: the series
• Seattle's own EMP, a divisive Frank Gehry structure housing major nerd alerts
• TotalBiscuit asks us WTF is Slam Bolt Scrappers?

The theme this week is retrofunk reggae tune "Guilty Heart" by automatonsubsys, from chipmusic.org.