The Pitch

One of the major dividing lines in video game history is when optical media became cheaper and more plentiful. That brought great stuff like Myst, and a few great FMV games... but it also brought us stuff like "Who Shot Johnny Rock?", a terrible FMV shooting game that's based entirely on fakeouts. Also, Gary torments Kole with a description of a segment from the Tales of the Darkside movie.

This week's episode: We're in a corn maze! (And we talk about Magic Skin, Revelation, Consolation Prize, and Polished Bone.)

Clive Barker's most famous forray into video games is 2001's Undying, but that wasn't his first attempt. Before that, we learned all about the Nightbreed. It's unclear what a Nightbreed is, how you become one, or what they even do, but this Interactive Movie adventure game does its best to get you up to speed, terrible checkpointing and all.

This week we set our sights on the big guy himself, Radahn the Star Scourge, a general whose magic is so powerful that he has arrested the stars themselves. But we're not going to do it alone. Redmane Castle's festival is the first event of its kind, where a whole dungeon is changed for a specific encounter which is the crossroads for a few different quests. And the fight itself is a grand spectacle, iterating on Dark Souls II's Ivory King challenge.

Welcome back true believers! This week we're finishing up the Mutant Massacre crossover by discussing Uncanny X-Men #213 and #214. Then, because we both are 90s kids and we love Archangel, we skipped to X-Factor #24-26 to see Warren Worthington's transformation into the edgy (literally!) blue skinned villain.

Reminder that you can read along with and ahead of the show by subscribing to Marvel Unlimited (we don't get paid for you doing that, so it's not an ad, it's just a cool service). You can also use Comixology, or buy the trades from your local comic book shop (the preferred method, if we're being honest). Be sure to check with your local library to see if they have them there! You can find one using this site

Music by Gary, podcast art by our friend Wayne

Kole, Ben, and Dennis talk about Medieval Dynasty, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, Ori and the Blind Forest, and much more!

• Dennis: Ori and the Blind Forest. Medieval Dynasty.
• Ben: Dome Keeper. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye.
• Kole: Rocksmith 2014.

• What games use simplicity or minimalism to great effect?

• Among Us is coming to VR on November 10.
• Let’s talk about the Mario movie trailer.
• VTubers apologize for streaming porn with Splatoon 3, creatively.

An unnamed man wakes up outside of a macabre circus, and he must set about learning why he is there. This classic-style point and click adventure game tells a pretty standard psychological horror story with a lot of allusions and metaphor, which isn't going to be everyone's favorite thing. However, there is tons of great horror imagery and a few very rewarding puzzles to try to tackle.

Our highlighted project this week is Sinclair Lore, a YouTube channel run by our friends Sin and Sophie, where they talk about Bloodborne, Souls, and Elden Ring lore. Check them out!

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The Sims is obviously an amazing game series and we wish we could play more of it. From the outside, the Sims community seems like an inclusive and welcoming space where people can be creative and have fun.

And then we have the Sims Spark'd, the product of an ill-advised partnership between EA, TBS, and Buzzfeed Multiplayer.

They gather 12 Sims content creators, put them in teams of three, and subject them to baffling challenges, for which they are judged arbitrarily by some people who just happened to be around the studio. You feel for the contestants trying to meet unspoken demands under increasingly brutal time constraints. But that's what happens when you try to make an expressive game into a competition.

You can watch the whole series here, but we only discuss the first episode.

This week's episodes: Yuck Heart, Urn Of Souls, Akeldama, and Tainted Magdalene.

Listen, it's not great when the way you earn points in a game is to find a lady and have vigorous sex with her before she disappears. That's what happens in Dan Dolme, a game about a man with a large penis whose girlfriend goes missing and he must find her and engage with her sexually. But the whole presentation is so surreal that it's hard to condemn it too much, at least from our point of view.

If you want to argue that, we're fine, but please understand that this is a game where in order to proceed you must learn how to double jump off of your own piss.