This week on The Free Cheese, no more GUILT.

We grab what every great surgeon and medical student calls their most important tool: the Nintendo DS stylus. With it in tow, we gel, slice, burn, cut, inject, extract, and stitch our way through Trauma Center: Under the Knife one patient at a time.

This week on The Free Cheese, the year is half full.

We look back over the past ninety days at the video games we've played on and off air, then discuss some video game headlines from the past quarter. We also check in with each of the major platforms and see how Nintendo Switch 2 holds up one year later.

This week on The Free Cheese, increase the population.

You are in a committed relationship and wake up in bed beside another woman. Great job! Now it's time to climb blocks and navigate your social life one conversation at a time. Atlus takes a break from its established franchises to introduce Catherine and in this episode, we explore its expanded Full Body edition, ranking it on The List.

This week on The Free Cheese, reload reload reload.

We went to an arcade to return to The House of the Dead for a special episode highlighting Sega and some of its arcade history. We discuss our time with the game, what it's like visiting an arcade in 2026, and where we wish the series would go from here.

This week on The Free Cheese, Mobius 1 has crashed!

We take to the skies in the first PlayStation 2 entry in the Ace Combat series. We discuss the story and its presentation, how easy it is to learn to fly, and what lasted with us by the end of our time with Ace Combat 04.

This week on The Free Cheese, it's a blade master's fate.

Atlus, your friends behind the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series, once made a first-person action game for the Sega Dreamcast. We play and discuss Maken X, appreciate its sound design (and question a few of the choices), and reminisce on the start to the twenty-first century.

This week on The Free Cheese, Sly, raccoon on feet.

We return to the second PlayStation to explore one of its core third-person platforming franchises, Sly Cooper. After exploring the world created by Sucker Punch Productions, we share our thoughts on what this first entry does right from the start, how much we loved the look and sound of the game, and why meaningful collectibles make the difference.

This week on The Free Cheese, welcome to Cocoon.

We add our first Final Fantasy game to The List with the flagship title of the Fabula Nova Crystallis series, Final Fantasy XIII. After years of hearing the global criticism of the game, we explore how much of that was echoes and what was reality. We dive deep into the combat system, discuss the characters we gravitated towards, and try really, really hard to understand the story in the game.

This week on The Free Cheese, beginning of universe.

Our exploration of the PlayStation continues this week with the grid-based puzzle game, Intelligent Qube. We appreciate its simplicity and how intense the stages can become, discuss the replayability, and then rank it on The List.

This week on The Free Cheese, when was the last time they made one of those?

We explore the recent notion that the release gaps of new entries in franchises are failing to build deeper connections with younger players. From there, we discuss the franchises we connected with and why we stay engaged with them, looking at how crossovers and cross-media installments have maintained our connections with dormant properties.