Thumbstick Athletes

Yes, February is almost over, but it's not too late to get in our predictions for the REST of 2020.  It's ALWAYS fun to speculate what Nintendo might or might not do and unfortunately the coronavirus will have an impact on gaming this year.  But stay positive, there's bound to be some surprise announcements, and we're pretty positive about 2020's outlook!

Since 4 in February has been a contentious staple for the Thumbstick Athletes Podcast, and we forgot about it this year...we decided we would make March the month where we tackle backlog games.  Luckily Will was prepared with a few titles so only Dan had to scour his backlog for games to play. 

We also discuss some of the announcement for Animal Crossing New Horizons and Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 2!

Dan played GRIS finally and it inspired a discussion on some of the better examples of artistic games out there.  It's a topic that's very important to us, as we've been on team "Games are art" since the very beginning of this podcast.  Also GRIS was spectacular!

Later on we talk about the new Fire Emblem DLC Cindered Shadows.

That Pokemon-esque MMORPG Temtem finally hit Steam Early Access and Dan was all over it.  While there are certainly some similarities, the differences are what make it shine and help differentiate it from Pokemon.  Temtem up!

On the request of Tito, Dan and Eric (and Corey through the power of email) discuss elements of great videogames.  Is it graphics, gameplay, difficulty?  All of them?

Later on Eric talks about seeing Joker and 1917 and Dan played some Temtem.

So yeah, a new Dragon Ball Z game has come out and...it's pretty good.  If you're a DBZ fan of course, though some reviews say it holds up pretty well on it own.  Either way, Will...a big Dragon Ball fan played a pretty good amount over the past week and offers up his thoughts.

In other news Stardew Valley has sold 10 million copies, Dan beat Pokemon Sword, and Will is playing a buttload of WoW.

It was a big week for game news, with some colossal game delays, surprise PC releases, and Pokemon and Smash news...so Will and I scrap our original episode idea and cover some these stories like true gaming pundits!

An early entry for the "Most Surprising Podcast Development" Thumbie award...Will has been playing World of Warcraft!?

Another annual episode for the TSA Pod....we do our 2020 Games Preview here talking about some of the big releases coming soon, including Cyberpunk 2077, The Last of Us 2, and Animal Crossing New Horizons.

This was also a "My Week" and "What I Played" heavy episode!

It's time for our semi-annual recap, where I play some clips for episodes of some the bigger game releases that we cover for episodes.  At the end of the year, of course we cover the second half releases, meaning anything from July on...like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, WoW Classic, and Borderlands 3 among others.

It's time for the annual, end of the year celebration of games...where we nominate some games, and tear down others.  We have some outlandish categories, like "Best Ambassador Game" and "Best Rainy Day Game."  We also fuel the fires of the console wars with "Most Valuable Console."  Then we have some more run-of-the-mill awards like "Best Indie Game" and GOTY.