Silicon Sasquatch

With our ten Category Awards out in the open, it's time to open up the workshop doors and welcome everyone in for a guided tour. Here's the five of us talking through each of the categories and deciding which games are the best fit for our ten awards. We hope you enjoy this look inside the process and that any grievances about slighted games are forgiven in due time.

Note: Some profanity and mild bickering are present. Don't tell our parents.

Don't miss out on our Game of the Year coverage! Check out our full schedule to see what's coming up and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook for instant updates. We've also got some GOTY podcasts in the pipeline, so please subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, or Overcast. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed to get our posts delivered straight to your RSS reader.

Here it is: the debate where we determined our top 10 games of 2018. As usual, expect plenty of spoilers here. We had a great time discussing the games that resonated the most with us last year, and we hope you’ve enjoyed coming along for the ride.

Once you’ve finished this podcast, don’t forget to check out the rest of our Game of the Year 2018 coverage for more details on these award winners!

Thanks for listening, and please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!

We’re back with another podcast! In this episode, you can hear the five of us debating who should win each of our Category Awards — accolades we give out to games that do something really outstanding in a specific area, such as visual art, music, or storytelling.

Once you’ve finished this podcast, don’t forget to check out the rest of our Game of the Year 2018 coverage for more details on these award winners!

Thanks for listening, and please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!

To kick off our tenth Game of the Year feature, we're exhuming our prior work to look at it again as older and (ideally) wiser people. In this episode, we go year-by-year, list-by-list, and ask ourselves whether we made the right choices at the time, or if other games wound up reflecting our mission better.

Thanks for listening, and please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!

What do we love? Video games. What else do we love? Sports! And as the inaugural season of Blizzard's Overwatch League is getting underway, Nick, Doug and Spencer have a reason to discuss the combination of those two great topics. Nick and Spencer still actively play Overwatch at a high level, and Doug is a sucker for anything where they keep score, so it proved to be an interesting and wide-ranging chat. Find out about the nature and history of esports, what may set Overwatch League apart from other esports endeavors, and all the early opinions of OWL teams—suffice to say, we are not fans of the Dallas Fuel.

Click on the link above or subscribe to the Silicon Sasquatch Podcast on your favorite podcast app!

Questions for the Squatchcast crew? Send ’em to [email protected] and we’ll answer the best ones on a future episode. Nobody's done this ever; do you dare to be the first? Think of the prestige! Think of the legacy you'll create for future generations!

Anyway. Thanks for listening, and please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!

Well, hey there. It's been a while! And boy, have there been some games coming out this year. But who has time for all of 'em? Certainly not the hard-working grown adult humans who comprise the Silicon Sasquatch team. But if they teamed up somehow —  combined efforts, in a sense...what could they accomplish?

As it turns out: they can record a podcast. Specifically, a two-hour-long humdinger of a podcast (hey apparently I talk like a grandpa now, so that's a thing we'll all just have to adjust to???) about this winter's unbelievable onslaught of high-quality games, from the tiniest of indie studios to the biggest of franchises.

We've got Doug, Tyler and Nick on this week's show gabbing (see, I did it again: grandpa is me) all about:

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Yakuza 0
• Night in the Woods
• Mass Effect Andromeda

and many, many more games we didn't get a chance to play but still felt entitled to say something about.

Give it a listen wherever fine podcasts are distributed and let us know how you're finding 2017's game offerings so far.

Questions for the Squatchcast crew? Send ’em to [email protected] and we’ll answer the best ones on a future episode. Nobody's done this ever; do you dare to be the first? Think of the prestige! Think of the legacy you'll create for future generations!

Anyway. Thanks for listening, and please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!

I had a chance last weekend to chat with Joseph "Wick" Perry, an independent game developer who's working on Crescent Loom, a game he describes as "Kerbal Space Program crossed with the cell stage of Spore." We talked about all kinds of stuff: Portland's game-development community, how frog brains work, supporting independent artists, and more.

Questions for the Squatchcast crew? Send ’em to [email protected] and we’ll answer the best ones on a future episode.

Thanks for listening, and please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!

As a nice end-cap to Doug's study of the original Xbox's legacy, we close out the 15-year anniversary of the lumbering giant's release with a new podcast. Doug and I discussed our earliest memories of the console, from its unusual unveiling, through its many highs and lows, and to the launch of the Xbox 360 just four years into its life cycle.

Questions for the Squatchcast crew? Send ’em to [email protected] and we’ll answer the best ones on a future episode.

Thanks for listening, and please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!

My wife and I started Westworld last week, before the election. As a couple we're fairly slow TV binge-watchers; balance is achieved between my all-you-can-eat buffet style and her properly portioned consumption. Historically, and if I don't jump ahead out of impatience (a cardinal sin, I know), we watch just an episode or two of a new show each week. However, Westworld's cowboys and androids thriller glued our eyes to the television: we're four episodes in after just a few days--a rarity for us.

Though we don't get into Westworld in this episode, our first in almost two years*, Nick, Doug and I pick through the rubble of politics and media within the smoking crater left by last Tuesday. You'll hear us grapple with how liberal white guys raised on the west coast and running a games blog can contribute to rebuilding America's shaken confidence.

Spoiler alert: part of that answer comes from an effort by Silicon Sasquatch to prod, push and demand inclusion and diversification within the industry.

Show notes:

Questions for the Squatchcast crew? Send ’em to [email protected] and we’ll answer the best ones on a future episode.

Thanks for listening, and please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!

We're of several minds on BioWare's sprawling third entry in the Dragon Age series. On the one hand, the core of the experience -- the characters, the scope of the world and the depth of the choices you make -- are all compelling and well-developed. On the other hand, 80-hour RPGs just aren't what they used to be, and it shows in the repetitive nature of the game's innumerable side quests and diversions from the critical path.

Questions for the Squatchcast crew? Send 'em to [email protected] and we'll answer the best ones on a future episode.

Thanks for listening, and please don't forget to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher!