Thumbstick Athletes

This week's episode brings us back to the old days, as the remake of Link's Awakening brings up some surprisingly powerful memories.  Nintendo did such a great job of balancing the classic feel of the game while modernizing it, a tricky task for such a beloved game!

Later in the episode Corey talks about seeing Doug Stanhope perform stand up comedy, and Dan played Untitled Goose Game and Mario Kart Tour for his week.

Borderlands 3 is finally out after what seems like forever...and also all the Thumbstick Athletes are all on the same episode after what seems like forever.  Corey and Eric played some Borderlands 3, and even together!  The good news is that it's more Borderlands, so you can kind of guess what that means, but they also threw in a few neat new modes for players to try.  Now it just needs to make it's way to Steam so Dan can be happy again.

Later on in the episode, Eric talks about his experiences with Gears 5 Horde mode and the Athletes decide that Link's Awakening will be next week's topic!

Dan and Corey invite Shane and Brian onto the show this week to talk some Gears 5.  We say early impressions because we all mostly dabbled in the various modes Gears 5 has, since there's quite a few and it really is a complete package.  And to think we all played it mostly for free on Gamepass.

During "What We Played" Shane and Brian talk about Remnant: From the Ashes and Greedfall, while Dan talks a little more about Astral Chain.

Dan, Corey and Eric (Rephyr) played a fair amount of WoW Classic last week and discuss what the draw is for a game as antiquated as Vanilla WoW is at this point.  What's the draw?  Why is it so popular?

During "What We Played" Dan played a couple of new games in Astral Chain and Pokemon Masters.

Since this is a spoiler filled episode, where we discuss some of the significant happenings in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, we moved the main segment to the end of the episode....so feel free to listen up until I give the warning towards the end! 

Other than Black Eagles spoilers, we discuss some Gamescom news, Gears POP! and and at the VERY end of the episode, our plans for WoW Classic!

With a last minute change of plans, we decide to cover the games we're most likely getting this fall, Like Pokemon Sword and Shield, the new Call of Duty and The Outer Wilds.  We also took the opportunity to make a rough schedule on when we'll be doing an episode on the games we're getting, all the way through the end of November.

During "What We Played" we of course talked more Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Dan played Pokemon Uranium.

It's episode #420...so yeah, we cover the use of drugs in games.  From the burning of the marijuana fields in Far Cry 3 to downing some skooma in Skyrim, we talk about the surpisingly few games that have actual drug use in them.

Later on we of course cover Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Corey relates his experiences with Cultist Simulator and SteamWorld Dig 2.

The newest Fire Emblem, Three Houses is FINALLY out and it does not disappoint!  It's seriously oozing with content, and all really excellent content, making for a much deeper and more connected experience than we've had in awhile. 

Outside of that we talked a little more Super Mario Maker 2 and Dr. Mario World during what we played!

With Fire Emblem: Three Houses just a night away, we decided it was a good time to revisit our favorite titles from this underutilized genre.  Yes....we do have Final Fantasy Tactics on the list.  Shut up about it, there are other games on the list too!

Since last week's episode was a semi-annual recap of the year's most important games, we didn't get a chance to cover some of the important news in gaming like we usually do.  We made up for it this week with an entire main segment devoted to the most breaking gaming headlines...like the Switch Lite, Fire Emblem and Pokemon Sword and Shield news, and Ubisoft's new UPlay+ service.

During "What We Played" there is some more Super Mario Maker 2 talk, as well as first impressions of Dr. Mario World.