Hot Button

Your game of the year answers are finally here! Hear us run through everything revealed at the official 2019 Game Awards and see how we each scored in the process. Hot announcements, new consoles, live performances, we cover all the wins/losses and find out which one of the three of us placed the best bets!

Our Game of the Year series continues! On part II of today’s episode in celebrating the best of 2019, we pick up right where we left off and finish the full list of The Game Award’s official nominations. We even saved the biggest categories for last like best direction, Game of the Year, and best... uhh... eSports coach?

Making it through to the end of the year just means it’s now closer to awards season! On our special two-parter, we discuss the absolute best of gaming in 2019 by running down the recently announced nominations featured in Geoff Keighley’s annual Game Awards show. Hear us list off the greats, category by category. What deserves to be there? What shouldn’t be there? Who do we want to win? Who do we think will win? What do we feel were the most egregious snubs? Our bets are now placed for the first half the event. Be sure to come back next week to listen to the rest!

Performance is one of the greatest advancements video games have made in the past 20 years. Voice acting went from an afterthought of development to a vital piece of delivering a top quality story. However, what happens when those hard-working actors feel highly mistreated? Their union SAG-AFTRA steps in! On this episode, we cover their fight for better working conditions, higher pay, residuals, and actual protections for the craft. We’re gonna tell you all about how that fight went, and why you probably didn’t even notice the longest dispute for rights the union had ever been a part of!

It’s our one-year anniversary! Can you believe we have been doing this for 50 whole episodes now? Us either! Which is why today we are gonna take a trip down memory lane and run through our library of topics starting from our first release all the way through to the present. Hear how we update stories that need to be updated, fix mistakes that need to be fixed, and make jokes that we somehow didn’t get to before. It’s our “where are they now?” episode and even our sound guy is here to celebrate!

Plagues are not new subject matter to video games. Many a fictional post-apocalyptic world starts with a plague. But what happens when the world's biggest MMO accidentally introduces a plague that kills off a ton of it's lower level players, almost making the game unplayable? On this episode we are joined by MMO expert Dan Bittner, as we break down World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood Incident. Learn how a simple bug in a new raid led to players running through the skeleton covered streets of Orgrimmar and Stormwind in a panic. And how these player’s reactions not only changed the world of Azeroth, but also the way Epidemiologists study the spread of disease IRL.

This week we discuss a group known for its lying, backstabbing, racketeering, piracy, war for profit, and corporate greed. No, not Congress, the players of the infamous mmorpg EVE Online. We talk a bit of history, some of its several thousand player battles, and a few of it's more frighteningly dedicated members.

Halloween is just around the corner, so what do you say we close out the end of our spooky scary series by exploring the origins of gaming’s most spooky scary series. This week we enter the world of survival horror to discover just how the Resident Evil franchise was born and how zombies would see their biggest revival in pop culture yet. It’s a story that might go back much further than you think!

Our Hot Button Halloween series trucks on with one of the greatest mysteries of the retro gaming underground, Hong Kong 97’! An unlicensed Super Famicom title that featured terrible gameplay, stolen artwork, gross politics, and the inclusion of an actual dead body to boot. Who made this? Why did they make this? Was the corpse real? It’s a full investigation here on the show today as we dig through the entire history of the infamous title, beginning to end!

 Note: This episode was recorded a month ago and is not related to the current controversies surrounding game company Blizzard and their stances on the state of Hong Kong’s ongoing fight for independence. We do plan on covering these such events in the future.

Its the second week in October, which means it’s time for more spooky Hot Button episodes! And with football season in full swing, what better topic to cover than the infamous Madden Curse? Is being on the cover of America’s most popular sports game a career ending decision? Or is football just an incredibly dangerous sport with a ton of superstitious fans? Follow along as we check in on some of the former cover athletes to find out.