Bringing an enemy around to your way of thinking can be a powerful thing - and in games, adding a former nemesis to your ranks can be a lot cooler than offing them. TL Foster joins us to talk about five of our favorite examples, after which we'll dig into Live A Live, highlights from the Annapurna Interactive Showcase, and the games you wanted badly enough to import.

Live A Live's launch this week is a reminder that even if a Japanese game doesn't come to the US for decades, it doesn't mean it never will. With localization expert Greg Moore in the guest-host chair, we chat about five games that took ages to get English releases, after which we sharpen our claws on Stray and MultiVersus, speculate about John Romero's new shooter, and get into the weeds with your childhood anecdotes that kids today just wouldn't understand.

"1980s kids in peril" has been pretty thoroughly mined as a concept by now, and yet relatively few games have tried to recapture the (heavily idealized and romanticized) experience of being a kid in that strange decade - so let's grab Leif Johnson and talk about five of them! Then we'll get into Monster Hunter Rise's Sunbreak expansion, Last Call BBS, Robocop's new game announcement, and your earliest memories of being wowed by games.

We're pretty big suckers for Super NES nostalgia, to the point where we decided it'd be a good idea to grab Greg Moore and talk in a non-visual medium about five games that made incredible use of the 16-bit console's most striking visual effect. Then we'll talk more about Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course, the Skull and Bones reveal, and your favorite games of 2022 so far.

We're at the halfway point of another year, which means it's time to look back and anoint our five favorite games of 2022's first six months, with help from TL Foster! Then we'll get into the Capcom Fighting Collection, Cuphead's Delicious Last Course, more Neon White discourse, Nintendo Direct news, and your favorite videogame dinosaur moments!

One of humanity's greatest regrets is that we never existed at the same time as dinosaurs, and therefore never got to fight them in a planetwide Thunderdome for control of existence. So instead, we imagine the conflict over and over in videogames. This week, Chris picks out five of the best games to feature human-on-dinosaur violence, after which we'll get into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, Neon White, news about Final Fantasy VII Remake and Dragon's Dogma sequels, and your favorite multi-version games.

Videogames aren't always the most welcoming medium for newcomers, and one way they can confuse is through their titles; some series are easy enough to decipher, while others are Byzantine jumbles of numbers and subtitles. With game-industry legend Chris Baker on board, we look at five series with nonsensical titles, after which we'll dig into Summer Games Fest, the Xbox and Bethesda Showcase, Capcom's reveals, and the announcements from the above that you're most excited for.

If they were to happen in real life, the events of a lot of videogames could leave a person seriously messed up - and yet, videogame protagonists always seem to effortlessly bounce back in time for a new adventure. Every so often, though, the events of one game will leave a hero at their breaking point in the next, and this week we invite Tony Wilson of Framework for a chat about five standout examples of heroes who had a hard time coping with the things they'd seen and done. Then we'll get into The Quarry, Sony's State of Play, and the movie characters you think more games should shamelessly rip off.

Back in the '80s, Rambo (along with a lot of other action and sci-fi movie franchises) had a huge influence on game developers, and there was a point when the standard uniform for serious arcade action heroes was just a pair of pants and a headband. This week, TL Foster joins us for a celebration of five of gaming's most memorable John Rambo clones, after which we'll dig into Sniper Elite 5, Diablo Immortal, PlayStation's TV and movie plans, and the fad toys that disappointed you the most as kids.