First Gen Gamers

2024 has been a heck of a year. It's been a bit since we dropped an episode. Where's First Gen Gamers this holiday season? What's the show got in store for 2025? Jed drops a quick catch-up to tease what's going on and what's in store.

What makes a fictional character scary? It's hard to say. Dracula is often portrayed as intelligent, sophisticated, even sexy, while Frankenstein's monster is hulking and brutish, but Dracula is somehow scarier. The AI-driven robot version of Chucky from 2019's Child's Play remake isn't scary, but when that doll is possessed by a desperate serial killer stalking a six year old, that's scary. It's hard to pin down what makes one character scary and the other laughable, but you know it when you see it. On this episode of First Gen Gamers, Jed and special guest-host Stephen White of Super Mega Crash Beyond will be celebrating the spooky season with a look at the scariest characters in gaming history. From the unimaginable monsters to regular human beings and more, find out who made the cut.

Ashley and Jed had so much fun talking about boss fights last time around, they figured why not do it again? But this time, they're coming at it from the other side: the worst boss fights. Damage sponges, disappointments, pushovers, unreasonable difficulty, it's all here. Ashley and Jed are going Stone Cold Steve Austin on these bad bosses, and the only way to find out which crappy bosses get the smackdown is to listen!

Who doesn't love their boss? Okay, some of us don't. Okay, a lot of us don't. Most of us would love to go Stone Cold Steve Austin and beat up our boss. Instead, we have to settle for beating bosses in video games, and when it's done right, it can be the best part of a video game. Testing the culmination of your skills and abilities, the narrative building to a point and then the cathartic release … or maybe the boss is just really big and cool-looking. Over 40-plus years, there's been a lot of memorable boss fights. But what do Ashley and Jed consider to be the best boss

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to video game art, sometimes, objectivity goes right out the window if the character looks like they fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. On this episode of First Gen Gamers, Ashley and Jed are talking bad video game character design. The grotesque, the broken, the stupid, the confusing, and the controversial. Who made the list? Only one way to find out!

Kids today don't know what it was like back in the day to play a game with a friend and have them be in the same room. On this episode of First Gen Gamers, Jed and Ashley are celebrating the magic of hanging with your buds and chillin' on the couch, playing games together. They're looking for that one game in each console generation that best symbolizes the joy of couch co-op gameplay. What games did they pick? Listen and find out.

Games inspire all sorts of emotions: fear, sadness, determination, longing. That's not what Jed and Ashley are exploring, though. On this episode, we're going through the console generations and talking about the games that inspired rage. The overly difficult, the tedious mechanics, the games that didn't follow up properly on previous chapters ... there's all sorts of reasons to be mad at a game. Jed and Ashley nominating our picks for the ones that inspired the most rage!

First Gen Gamers is back! We've done a soft reboot. New intro, and new co-host Ashley! On this return episode, Jed and Ash kick it off with a double-header topic; games we love that most people hate, and games we hate that most people love. We're roasting some sacred cows and being the voice for the voiceless. It's a hell of a first episode for Ash and a hell of a return episode for the show!

February means Valentine's Day, the season of love. Gaming is full of love stories and romance, whether it's dating sims or Commander Shepard sleeping his way through half the galaxy in Mass Effect. But it's way too easy to list off good couples. How about BAD ones? That's right, Mike and Jed are celebrating Valentine's Day the opposite way, by going through gaming history and digging up the worst relationships video games have to offer. Gaslighting, manipulation, power imbalances ... and that's not even close to the worst of it!

Get in touch with the show! https://linktr.ee/firstgengamers

It's been said there's no such thing as bad publicity. But what about if the publicity is more like notoriety, and it's undeserved? We're talking about controversy. Video games and controversy are no strangers. They've been stuck with each other practically since the beginning. Sometimes, a game's controversy makes sense. But sometimes, the actual content of the game doesn't really rise to the level of outrage. Sometimes, a controversial game earns a notoriety it didn't deserve. That's what this episode is all about: Mike and Jed discussing games that were considered controversial, and really shouldn't have been. Violence, sexual content, lawsuits, gamer outrage, even manufactured by the developer ... all sorts of so-called controversies that were overblown, puffed-up, and otherwise ridiculous, one by one through the generations What are the best examples they could find? Only one way to find out -- listen!

Got an opinion about what we talked about? Want your voice heard? Here's how to reach us! https://linktr.ee/firstgengamers