On his fifth attempt to get into Borderlands, Blake Grundman is finally making progress on his way to open the vault thanks to playing the Borderlands Legendary Collection for the Nintendo Switch. Now that he's ready to talk about his experiences on Pandora, we brought in our resident expert vault hunter, my fiancee Corey, to join the discussion. We have an our of conversation about all things Borderlands for you, so catch a ride to Moxxi's bar and pull up a seat. Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via... Continue reading

Capcom's Street Fighter II and its various upgrades tend to get most of the attention in the gaming world, but when telling the story of the game that revived the arcade market in the early 1990s, it's important to go back to the very beginning. While the original Street Fighter hasn't aged well and doesn't have much replay value today, at the time it was the start of something big. Polygon is on a mission to chronicle all of the Street Fighter history over the next several months starting with the first game in the series that was greatly overshadowed... Continue reading

My fiancee and I love Borderlands, we love artwork, and we love our cats, so of course we found a way to combine them all. Thanks to @Natashagalyaart we have commissioned artwork of two of our cats in Borderlands settings. First we have Moxxi the cat styled after her namesake, Moxxi the bartender. We even have a little Moxxi costume for her to wear for special events. Our local GameStop invited us to bring her to their Borderlands 3 release event last year and she was very popular. Next there's the loudest cat in the clowder, Emma, who we refer... Continue reading

In a normal year would have just come off of a June full of E3 announcements and news, but this is no ordinary year. News has still come in bits and pieces though, so as we leave this Not-E3 behind, it's time to take an hour and discuss some of that news. We have Min Min arriving in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Nintendo backing away from the mobile gaming world, Crash Bandicoot 4 on the way, and more. Join us and escape for a little while. Apologies for my poor audio quality this week. Skype decided to be "helpful" and... Continue reading

Vblank Entertainment's delightful 16-bit-stylized Shakedown: Hawaii was released for modern gaming platforms such as the Nintendo Switch last year, but developer Brian Provinciano loves a challenge, so he's bringing the action/adventure title to a pair of older consoles just for kicks. Later this summer the game will launch for the Nintendo Wii and the Wii U. Why did he do this? Because he can. Here's how it worked out: While it still feels like yesterday, it's been nearly 14 years since the Wii launched. Although we've still seen some Wii releases over the past few years, seeing one more wasn't... Continue reading

Nintendo's 1992 release Mario Paint for the Super NES sought to turn the console's audience into artists and musicians with its suite of creative tools, and while the game came with an instructional manual, the learning curve could be steep if you didn't have a basic grasp on the concepts behind digital art and music. Nintendo published an official player's guide packed with stamp templates and basic tips to get you started on your creative adventure, but in Japan you could also get an official Mario Paint instructional videotape. Released by Ape Inc., this thirty-minute video explains how to use... Continue reading

Nintendo believed it was poised to become a billion dollar force in the mobile gaming app market a few years ago when it announced its first game developed exclusively for mobile hardware, Super Mario Run, but as Takashi Mochizuki at Bloomburg reports today, the company is retreating from that market following a series of lackluster returns and a question of whether its worth continuing to pursue that market now that the Switch is so successful. As the article points out, Nintendo's mobile projects were announced during the Wii U era when the company needed profitable successes, and with that console... Continue reading

When a genius inventor named Evan Goldstein disappears, his last supposed location is on a mysterious island. Years later, a letter arrives asking that a girl named Dysis go to the island and find him. That's about where things are when we pick up the plot of Evan's Remains, a new indie game developed by Matías Schmied for the Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. The publisher, Whitethorn Digital, offered me a free download of the game to check it out, and since I'm a fan of side-scrolling puzzle platformer adventures, I eagerly accepted. What I... Continue reading

As the new next-generation video game consoles rev up for debuts later this year, it's Sony's turn to show off the PlayStation 5 and wow us with tales of things to come. Join us as we discuss the ups and downs of Sony's online presentation and cover which games we're most excited to try, which hardware features are the most intriguing, and some educated guesses as to a release date and price. Tell the affiliates that we're running long this week as we have nearly an hour and a half of conversation for you. Download this week's episode directly from... Continue reading

Insomniac Games always likes to show off its technical wizard skills whenever possible and the company's developers are doing it again in the announcement trailer for the upcoming Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart for the Sony PlayStation 5. The PS5's solid state hard drive will definitely cut back on the time needed to load new levels, so what better way to demonstrate that then with a game built around blasting into alternate dimensions during fast-paced action? Every new console generation boasts more polygons, more objects on screen, better lighting, and other gee-whiz improvements, but to see how we're about to... Continue reading

Those of us who grew up with gaming in the 1990s relied on magazines such as Nintendo Power and Electronic Gaming Monthly for our news on new titles, and often those titles were teased in print before they had official titles. Everyone was talking about Zelda 3 before it was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and, and before we bought The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time we knew it as Zelda 64. The thing is, these shorthand titles tend to stick. Clyde Mandelin discusses the staying power of temporary titles over at Legends of Localization.... Continue reading

We're looking at some of our favorite video game endings on this week's new podcast episode with a trip through our dreams with Super Mario Bros. 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, a long game of endings spanning the Mega Man X series into the Mega Man Zero series, Halo Reach's unhappy ending, Mass Effect 2's suicidal ending, Portal 2 ending with a song, and much more.Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes and Google Play, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of... Continue reading

Depending on which generation's members you ask you would think that Nintendo's only forays into the world of movies and television shows were either 1993's Super Mario Bros.: The Movie which is notorious for being... let's just say something else, or of course the juggernaut that is Pokémon. The company has licensed several other of its properties to film and animation studios over the years, and rather than let those slip through the cracks, Matt Paprocki writing for Polygon has put together a detailed recap of all of those productions spanning The Super Mario Bros. Super Show in 1989 up... Continue reading

Sega is prepping another mini console to follow up its successful Sega Genesis Mini, and while many fans have clamored for a Dreamcast Mini or Saturn Mini, the company is instead going even more niche with a tiny Game Gear. Coming in October exclusively to Japan (as of this announcement) is Game Gear Micro, an impractically small version of the company's Game Boy competitor that measures only three inches wide with a one inch screen. While that is adorably cute, it's much too small to play as anything more than a quick gimmick. Four colors will be available, each color... Continue reading

Somewhere in the middle of the major Street Fighter versus Mortal Kombat fighting game wars of the 1990s was SNK with its fighting favorites such as Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown. Each of these title led to several sequels and revisions in the arcade and home console markets. Samurai Shodown is set for a compilation re-release in June from the developers / archivists at Digital Eclipse, and in the process of working on the project they were able to snag a lost, unreleased version of Samurai Shodown V to include in the collection. Ian Walker at Kotaku... Continue reading

I know that you know all about Buckner & Garcia's famous "Pac-Man Fever" hit single from the 1981 album of the same name (seriously; it hit number nine on the Billboard Top 100 chart that year). After all, you have the original vinyl album, the cassette release, and even the 2002 re-recorded CD version and 2015 remix inspired by the Adam Sandler film Pixels. The poster is hanging on your wall right now, I bet. What you, the "Pac-Man Fever" superfan, are missing is an exclusive Japanese variant of the song that was re-recorded as "Puc-Man Fever" to match the... Continue reading

When you develop a first-person shooter for a console that isn't expected to sell many copies but then becomes a colossal hit and redefines how the genre is treated on consoles, what do you do for an encore? That's the question asked of Rare's developers in the late 1990s after the company's GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 became one of the best games on the console and one that is still remembered and revered today for its multiplayer mode. The easy answer is to follow it up with a direct sequel and make Tomorrow Never Dies, but the better... Continue reading

Times are tough lately and we can all use a pick-me-up. Start your week out with some peppy energy thanks to musician Rob "88bit" Kovacs and his piano rendition of one of the Nintendo Entertainment System's best racers, R.C. Pro-Am. Composed by Rare soundtrack master David Wise, these songs make some interesting use of the NES's limited sound channels. Rob explains: The opening title screen theme is one of the more unique NES themes in that it is saturated with triads, something you don’t hear too often due to the 3-voice limitation of the NES soundchip. Composer, David Wise, gets... Continue reading

Major gaming leaks in the past few weeks have shown us the past and the future as Nintendo suffered a system breach that resulted in all kinds of trade secrets and information from the late 1990s through the 2000s posted online and Naughty Dog and Sony had to deal with fallout from spoiler-laden videos from the upcoming The Last of Us Part II were posted online. All of this talk of leaks and stolen data had us thinking of all of the most memorable gaming leaks that have happened over the years, so this week's podcast topic explores focuses on... Continue reading

Thanks to the pandemic lockdown I've recently clocked one hundred hours spent in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and still have lots more to do, so that's a natural jumping point into this week's podcast topic in which we discuss games we're spent more than one hundred hours exploring and enjoying. You'll find some expecting titles here such as Destiny, Borderlands, and Red Dead Redemption along with some unexpected entries including Crosswords Plus for Nintendo 3DS. Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes and Google Play, toss this RSS feed... Continue reading

Thanks to the pandemic lockdown, I've had lots of extra free time to dump into a video game I've wanted to come back to playing for months, Assassin's Creed Odyssey. ACO is set during the era of Ancient Greece and sees the protagonist, Kassandra, wandering the Greek world doing all of the usual Assassin's Creed kinds of things. This time around there is an evil Cult of Kosmos whose members are all hidden away across the land and their identities kept secret. Over the course of the ninety hours I've spent so far in the game, I've managed to uncover... Continue reading

Now you too can learn the secrets of the great amiibo fighting champions of the world and become a renowned figurine coach as you train your plastic buddies for ultimate domination in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate! Or, at least, you'll learn what makes an amiibo fighter tick and discover the most efficient ways to turn them into little smashers. Yes, I'm talking about John Harris's new book Figure Fight which is currently available as part of the latest Story Bundle. You'll learn what amiibo are doing when they're training to fight and what happens to them when they go on... Continue reading

I recently fell down the rabbit hole of Retromags.com, the Internet's premiere archive of video gaming magazines from days gone by. I was inspired to look up the first gaming magazines I ever read, Game Player's August 1988 Nintendo Buyer's Guide and Game Player's August 1988 Nintendo Strategy Guide, which inspired this hour of discussion about what constituted a video game magazine over thirty years ago. We're essentially ripping on a dated publication that I'm sure was doing the best that they could with the resources they had, but this magazine has not aged gracefully. It's a time capsule of... Continue reading