Watch Out for Fireballs!

Kole and Gary answer your questions, discuss what makes a good tutorial, read your responses to March's games, and announce May!

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Talion caught a bad break. Not only did Sauron kill his family in front of him, but he was killed too! And then an elf spirit had the nerve to possess him and send him on a rampage of vengeance across Mordor! What a revolting predicament. This open world game's big hook is the Nemesis system, which supercharges the sandbox with an evolving army of captains and rivals for you to hunt and manipulate. The story is pretty bland, but you can't deny that this is one of the most inventive open world games to come out in a long time.

Thank you, I See Spiders!

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Talion caught a bad break. Not only did Sauron kill his family in front of him, but he was killed too! And then an elf spirit had the nerve to possess him and send him on a rampage of vengeance across Mordor! What a revolting predicament. This open world game's big hook is the Nemesis system, which supercharges the sandbox with an evolving army of captains and rivals for you to hunt and manipulate. The story is pretty bland, but you can't deny that this is one of the most inventive open world games to come out in a long time.

Thank you, I See Spiders!

Thank you Joe!

You're trapped in an incomplete game, and given the power to rewrite your reality. It sounds amazing, and there are plenty of grace notes, but this game is a bit too messy for its own good, making broad points with broad characters in a way that left us both feeling a bit cold. A standout performance from James Urbaniak can't quite save this ambitious but flawed indie.

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The Trauma Center series is one of the more interesting things to come out of Nintendo's love affair with strange control schemes in the DS and Wii era. These "surgery simulators" end up playing more like a cross between a light gun shooter and Rock Band, as you cut into your patients and use a number of surgical tools to solve their problems and keep them alive. Less successful is the wrapping story, about impossibly young doctors and medical terrorists who inject people with lung bugs.

Thanks, Tara, for executive producing this episode!

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This month's Dispatch topic is what we're calling "Retro Peril", or the idea that playing a newer entry in a genre would stop you from enjoying classic entries if you went back to revisit them. Would it be impossible to find joy in Torment if you got used to the quality of life improvements in Disco Elysium?

We also answer your questions, and read your responses to February's games.

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The bad news is you only have 22 minutes. The good news is, you have as many 22 minutes as you need. Outer Wilds is a plucky, optimistic game about horrifying circumstances. You stand alone in the footsteps of an ancient civilization, working hard to figure out why your solar system keeps exploding. To do this, you have to fly from planet to planet and navigate hostile conditions, learning as much as you can on each loop. The mechanics may or may not work for you, but the tone and the ending are best in class.

Thank you Fenreliania for producing this episode!

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The bad news is you only have 22 minutes. The good news is, you have as many 22 minutes as you need. Outer Wilds is a plucky, optimistic game about horrifying circumstances. You stand alone in the footsteps of an ancient civilization, working hard to figure out why your solar system keeps exploding. To do this, you have to fly from planet to planet and navigate hostile conditions, learning as much as you can on each loop. The mechanics may or may not work for you, but the tone and the ending are best in class.

Thank you Fenreliania for producing this episode! And thank you, everyone, for being patient as we navigate Gary's back injury.

It's about time we did more WOFF Dispatch topic cleanup! This is a collection of some of the listener prompts and topics we were unable to get to in the normal Dispatch episodes. There's some good stuff in here, such as breaking gaming complacency, and whether or not games have gotten better at portraying overweight people.

A Note: This is coming out today in lieu of the Early Release version of the Outer Wilds episode of WOFF. Gary has hurt himself and we were unable to record that episode earlier this week. He'll live, it's just painful to be upright at a desk for hours on end.

This will also affect the release date of our Bonfireside Chat episode about Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind.

Gary is resting and has been to the doctor, so we are waiting for the treatments to take effect so we can make a plan for how to get back into production. This will impact the Early Release feed over the next week for sure, and possibly the public release of shows.

We will make another announcement when we're out of the holding pattern.

We thank you in advance for your patience and grace as we work this out. Please wish Gary well, he's in a lot of pain and it would be good for him to see nice things in the comments below.

When it comes to cordyceps, we want some more-dyceps! Kole and Gary tackle what might be the most acclaimed video game in history. Despite having some issues with story and gameplay integration, this cinematic genre piece is fun and affecting.

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