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I said don't just stand there. Come in!

The Zone is a strange place with wondrous promises. It's full of atmosphere and lead, as bands of Stalkers and mutants fight over its strange artifacts, hoping they don't get torn apart by pockets of anomalous physics. Loosely based off of a famous Russian novel and film, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl caps off our Desperation month. Though you quickly get over the resource curve and find your Zone-legs, it remains a demanding shooter throughout... until it gets too demanding, but you probably expected that from a PC game of this vintage.

We continue Desperation Month with Frostpunk, a city building sim where things start bad and only get worse. It's the late 19th century and the world is quickly freezing. Humanity's last chance is to huddle around generators in the north, making moral compromises to survive the cold and the scarcity it brings. Frostpunk is an amazing strategy sim game with A+ theming, and it's sure to make you feel like garbage.

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We begin Desperation Month with a very unusual sim game. You are a checkpoint worker in a fictional communist country, forced to decide the fates of immigrants as the rules change every day. It's a bleak and stressful game that forces you to contort yourself into monstrous shapes, tugging at you with incentives and survival. It's unique and powerful, even if it isn't strictly fun.

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Our preview series continues with another game whose Lovecraft associations are looser, but undeniable. Eternal Darkness is an inventive, but flawed, game. But you can't argue that it doesn't make an impression.

We will have more details about Unfilmable soon!

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Gary and Kole take your questions, and chat about Video Game Violence before reading your thoughts on SMB2, Pyre, and Bioshock Infinite.

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You all have been very generous, and we recently passed a Patreon milestone goal for a new show. That show is called "Unfilmable", and in it Gary and Kole will examine adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft's work and ideas. We've recorded several episodes about Lovecraft-related or -inspired works, so we're re-presenting them to give you an idea of what the show will be like.

This first episode hearkens back to the earliest days of our show, when we covered the Xbox game "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth."

Every now and then between now and the launch, we'll drop another of these preview episodes.

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We don't like Bioshock Infinite. The full episode is four hours of us trying our best to point out the many ways it falls short as a game, and as a conveyor of ideas. This is a preview of that full episode, which you can get by backing us on Patreon.

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Let the circle be broken.

SuperGiant is a studio we really love. We've covered both Bastion and Transistor on this show, so when William Rouse executive-produced an episode about Pyre it was a wonderful chance to complete the SuperGiant collection. And while there is plenty to love about Pyre's world, visual design, and music, we felt that the fantasy basketball came up a little short. Listen in to learn the specifics on why we felt the way we did, and give the game a shot to see if it lands the same for you.

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This is our final "preview" episode of Adaptation Decay, our premium show about the ways that games are adapted to other media. We love this episode about the Buckner and Garcia album "Pac Man Fever" and we think you will, too. It demonstrates that Adaptation Decay isn't just a show about bad movies, but casts a wider net.

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