Like any other avenue of escapism sometimes gaming becomes the scapegoat of many of our problems. Is there a responsibility on the development side that should be taken into account when it comes to taking our currency (whether it is our money or our time)?

With the release of both Horizon Forbidden West and Elden Ring, we have two very different design philosophies executing an open world. Guerrilla has distilled what makes traditional open world games great and has given us probably one of the best iterations of it kind, while Elden Ring flips most of these paradigms on its head and gives us a very different experience where you're left to your own devices to explore and tackle challenges as you see fit.

Platinum Games used to be the golden standard for fast-paced action combat fun games in an era where Japanese game development went through a dark phase. They gave us many brilliant games, however in the way they stumbled and what used to be banger after banger then became inconsistent. We arrive in the present where they've released Babylon's Fall, a once promising Platinum experience turned into live-service and their worst received game yet. Alongside openly discussing the idea of being acquired, it seems this studio's independence hasn't gone very well for them and they would perhaps do what they do best under the mantle of a bigger publisher.

Critics are an integral part of any media coverage. However, in gaming the discussion often devolves into what low or high score a specific game got. Is this a productive way of discussing whether a video game is worth your time?

With video games becoming more and more expensive to make, big marketing campaigns are employed to maximize the company's return on investment. This brings us to today's topic: the hype. Is it good or bad? Does it help the game it is trying to sell? Do we buy into it?

Hearing that any type of content gets censored is always disappointing. In gaming, this used to come from Nintendo in past decades, however in recent years Playstation has been the platform where games are arbitrarily censored for unknown reasons. Of course, we couldn't discuss this topic without covering how some games edit themselves (sometimes pre-emptively) in order to cater to political sensibilities of governments from countries like China.

New Bloomberg report by Jason Schreier reveals Assassin's Creed codenamed Rift. After an appearance on both David Jaffe's stream and Last Stand Media's Sacred Symbols+, Jeff Ross reveals some information that contradicts a past report made by Jason Schreier regarding how Sony was managing Sony Bend.

Making video games is hard. Very ambitious visions that aren't carried out properly during development result in messy launches, which in most cases means doom for the game and sometimes the dev team. However, there have been cases where a company doubles down on a specific project, fix the issues, actually redeem the game and become quite beloved.

Sony announces plans to acquire Bungie for $3.6 billion. The makers of Halo went from being under Microsoft's umbrella to a long-standing relationship with Activision to being independent to now to being acquired once again. What could this mean for the future of Bungie and Sony respectively?

Female representation has been a hot topic in the video game industry, which for decades has been a very male centric environment. We invite Valentina Aguana to the podcast to explore this fascinating topic from different perspectives.