The Pitch

Kole, Ben, Dennis, and David talk about Roboquest, Arcade Paradise, the Horror of Salazar House, and much more!

• Ben: Slay the Spire. Metroid Dread. Magic: Arena.
• David: Destiny 2. Roboquest.
• Dennis: Roboquest. Slay the Spire.
• Kole: Arcade Paradise. Horror of Salazar House.

• Patch notes for reality.

• Slime Rancher 2 enters Early Access on September 22.
• The Lords of the Fallen, a reboot of Lords of the Fallen, announced.
• Ben’s recommendations: The Rehearsal, Dune Imperium.

We're stretching definitions here a bit, but it's for a purpose. "American Movie" is a documentary about the amateur production of a short horror film called "Coven". It tells the story of its long and troubled process, all centered around its inept but persuasive director Mark Borchardt.

We've talked about indie horror movies here, but American Movie documents one of the last times when a production like this could have happened, before filmmaking was fully democratized by digital video technology.

And after we talk about the documentary, we watch and react to the film "Coven" itself, which, uhh, is very bad. And we should have realized that it might be.

We answer your questions, read your responses to August's games, and spend some time talking about the sorts of places that show up in games, and what we'd like to see more of, before announcing our slate for the best month of the year, October.

Support Watch Out for Fireballs!

Everything To Guppy is a weekly comedy/gaming podcast that releases four 15-minute episodes in a single hour-long chunk every Tuesday for reasons that seemed good at the time. Gary Butterfield (Watch Out For Fireballs) and William Hughes (The A.V. Club) attempt to analyze every single item, boss, character, and concept in the rogue-lite video game The Binding Of Isaac. They manage to pull it off only slightly less than 50 percent of the time.

WiiWare is an untapped market for us, and Gary brought in a doozie: a game about eating a lot in a very short amount of time. And you know what? It's not that terrible. It would at least have kept us entertained for a night in our dirtbag early twenties. So listen in and hear us talk about competitive eating, and learn a little more about Gary's horrible childhood.

Having explored the Academy of Raya Lucaria, it's time to set our sights on the other seat of power in Liurnia: Caria Manor. All of this is in service of our quest to find the witch Ranni, a demigod who seems to be pulling a lot of strings. And to get to her, we'll need to deal with a whole lot of fingerspiders.

Kole, Dennis, and Jala talk about Mortuary Assistant, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Under Falling Skies, and much more!

• Kole: Mortuary Assistant.
• Jala: Sonic Mania. Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
• Dennis: Under Falling Skies. Vampire Survivors. Rainbow Six: Extraction.

• What are your little gaming habits and rituals?

• The Contradiction guy has a new FMV project called Fogtown.
• Alone in the Dark reboot announced.
• Sony is exploring adding its own launcher for PC games.

Wario is one of Nintendo's secret best weapons. As "the opposite of Mario" he is an aesthetic triumph, indulging in every vice and drawing us in with his shamelessness. And for a while, he was the star of his own series of puzzle platformers on Nintendo portable systems. Wario Land 4 is an odd duck in that sub-series, with a more action-oriented presentation that doesn't leave the puzzles behind. And best of all? It hardly repeats itself, giving the player a buffet of unique visual and gameplay concepts. It's hard to recommend against this one.

This week’s highlight project is HuggableHipster, a video creator and game studio head who does video game let’s plays and deep dives on YouTube. Here’s her site, and here’s the channel. Enjoy!

It's the year 2012 and vacations are outlawed, so instead of just kicking back at home you engage in some car combat to cart unpleasant tourists around. Rogue Trip's premise is messy, and built on a genre that we don't really care for at all. But it might be a good idea to add some non-killing mechanics to car combat, so it's hard to write this off entirely. The characters are garbage though, and not in the intentional way they're trying for.

We're here, the end of the Venture Bros. for now. Hopefully. As long as that WB merger doesn't shake everything up and kill the movie. But we're going to think positive for now, and cover the DVD extras, read your responses to season 7, and offer up our firsts and worsts. Thank you so much for listening!

Special thanks to Joshua Jarett for our cover art, Gwen May for our theme song, and Brayton Cameron for being our announcer.