WIRED's Game|Life Podcast

Virtual reality is finally a reality, in the sense that consumers finally own the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. (Or, you know, you’re on a giant waiting list with no end in sight.) On this episode of the Game|Life podcast, Time’s Matt Peckham joins in and we run down our favorite VR experiences so far, and talk about what makes a good VR game versus a bad VR game.

Final Fantasy XV’s lavish release-date announcement party, Microsoft’s new Xbox One game and Nintendo’s first smartphone app are today’s topics on the Game|Life Podcast.

The voraciousness with which the Internet set upon those faked photos of the Nintendo NX is our first topic of discussion on this week’s Game|Life podcast, followed by Jake Muncy’s initial explorations into Bandai Namco’s highly anticipated Dark Souls III. (It’s nearly available here in the U.S., but you can play it on Xbox One right now if you set your regional settings to Japan.)

Lots of games on this week’s Game|Life podcast! TIME’s Matt Peckham and WIRED’s Jake Muncy have been playing a lot of Tom Clancy’s The Division, and they attempt to convince me that I should play it too.

On this week’s Game|Life Podcast, we talk about videogames! Specifically: Jake Muncy and Time gaming editor Matt Peckham have been playing Superhot and Far Cry Primal, and have an enjoyable discussion about those, largely without me, who didn’t play them. But I did play Star Fox Zero, and Matt actually spoke to Shigeru Miyamoto about it, so we have a lot to say there, too.

At the DICE Summit this week, I got the chance to talk with Penn Jillette, one half of Penn & Teller, and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, following their keynote presentation. The pair are working together on a new version, with some virtual reality elements, of the classic Desert Bus. Their session at DICE focused on how game developers can use principles of magic in their designs.

What was going on in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the PlayStation 4 game by The Chinese Room released last year? I had a lot of thoughts about the message that this game was trying to convey, but I held a lot of them back at the time of its release for fear of “spoilers.”

On this week’s Game|Life podcast, we discuss one game that’s being altered to be more inviting to players, Nintendo’s impending HD remake of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and one that seems very much to want to make players feel unwelcome, that is, The Witness.

Are we close to finally hearing some details of Nintendo’s upcoming “NX” platform? There are certainly a lot of leaks and rumors coming out about it, which would tend to indicate that Nintendo is getting close to announcing something about the new dedicated game machine that it’s often said it planned to discuss at some point in 2016.

TIME’s Matt Peckham joins me on this episode of the Game|Life podcast to discuss the NX rumors and what it might all mean, what we might hear at Nintendo’s upcoming financial briefing on February 2, and of course what we both think about Jonathan Blow’s The Witness, because you pretty much have to talk about that these days on gaming podcasts.

I don’t do difficult games, but Jake Muncy certainly does, and so he’s here on the Game|Life podcast to discuss Darkest Dungeon. I meanwhile tell him about Oxenfree, which it would be difficult to not be able to finish in a few hours.

Riding the line between easy and hard is Super Mario Advance 4, recently released on Virtual Console for Wii U. A souped-up version of Super Mario Bros. 3, the Virtual Console version contains the extra levels that were only distributed via collectible trading cards, and some of them only in Japan. Some are incredibly easy, and some are quite difficult!