The Free Cheese

This week on The Free Cheese, blocks and mushrooms. As we approach the end of the season, we look back on Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Tetris Effect: Connected. We have a final discussion on our time with each game, then compare them ahead of our pending ranking against Wii Sports.

This week on The Free Cheese, we close the gap. Throughout 2024, we hosted monthly streams where we checked in with some of our childhood favorites from the 16-bit era. Now, we're reviewing and ranking Super Strike Eagle , Krusty's Super Fun House , Scooby-Doo Mystery , and Sonic Spinball on The List.

This week on The Free Cheese, point and click. The car has crashed and we're at a haunted house. Everything is black and white and—oh, that's the nature of the Macintosh. In Uninvited, we're finding the secrets in every corner of every room and learning the truth of sorcery trapped in the walls of this house. Will we find our brother and escape alive? Maybe. Eventually...

This week on The Free Cheese, I don't wanna talk about it! We add the last in line of classic Resident Evil games to The List. We share our strategies for combatting some of the troubles we encountered, revel in the absurdity of the story, and highlight one of the best soundtracks in video games.

This week on The Free Cheese, BYORPG. We add perhaps the most indie game so far to The List with 2012's RPG Maker classic, Ib. We explore the art gallery and the horrors within, solving puzzles and trying to find our way back out with some friends.

This week on The Free Cheese, we get lost in the plot. We're rolling through FMV backgrounds one screen at a time as we discover the nuance of Fear Effect. We discuss its supernatural plot, its attempt at survival horror gameplay, and how well the game's art holds up today. Then, we rank it on The List.

This week on The Free Cheese, Spartans who play together... We play through the campaign together on the couch and come together for one final episode on Halo: Combat Evolved before we rank it later this year. We share the highs and lows of playing together and how successful our speedrun tactics were.

This week on The Free Cheese, we learned something today. We both collectively wonder why we ever fell off of this game at its release and add South Park: The Fractured But Whole to The List. We discuss our respective journeys through the story and struggle to find a bad thing to say throughout.

This week on The Free Cheese, we're all sackdudes, hey!   We revisit Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet and explore its single player campaign to see how it holds up. We also discuss the loss of the game's internet connectivity and the unfortunate absence of its greatest features.  

This week on The Free Cheese, you got green stars? We cover the second half of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and discuss our favorite moments from the final stages. We revisit some of our favorites from the campaign as a whole and look ahead at chasing 100% completion. We also look at the Wii Remote and its role in the gameplay overall.

This week on The Free Cheese, grab a Beam Cola and head to class. What happens when you repurpose a city sandbox engine for one of the world's most popular video games and use it to build a school campus? Rockstar sought to find out in 2006 with Bully and we spend this week adding it to The List. We go deep on its story, side missions, class structure, and everything in between as we lose five poi...

This week on The Free Cheese, super brother. We add one of the Dreamcast's most interesting innovations to The List this week with Smilebit's Jet Grind Radio. We discuss how different the gameplay feels in comparison to games before and after and reflect on the iconic soundtrack and style introduced 24 years ago.

This week on The Free Cheese, it's all part of the journey. The second half of our Tetris Effect: Connected discussion picks up with a focus on the single player mode that made the game so special in 2018. We recant our memories of playing it for the first time and share what it feels like to revisit Journey Mode all these years after. We also explore our personal theming and word associations wit...

This week on The Free Cheese, thank you Player570. You have earned 100 points. We revisit a game we both left unfinished and follow up last year's addition of Year Walk to The List. This time, we're spinning our mobile devices in circles and listening closely to the sounds between the lines in Device 6.

This week on The Free Cheese, bury me with my treasure. We spend some time with a puzzle game that never found much attention in North America, playing the re-release of its Sega Saturn port from the arcade. Join us as we work through the best strategies and tactics for clearing the game and setting new high scores in Cleopatra Fortune!

This week on The Free Cheese, give me your garbage and I'll send it right back! What do you do when your fighting game is the most popular game in the genre? You make a puzzle game spinoff. We play and rank Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, while providing some tips that helped us to become incredibly intermediate level players!

This week on The Free Cheese, we're sliding into P Tier.   In celebration of EVO 2024 and fighting games, we're spending an episode talking about Salty Bet. The online betting casino based on the MUGEN fighting game engine has been around for over a decade and still shines as an example of using a live streaming platform in a unique manner.   We discuss our best wins, greatest losses, and some of...

This week on The Free Cheese, which weapon will you choose? SoulCalibur II joined the scene with some new friends when it hit consoles, bringing exclusive characters to each version of the game. We discuss the general gameplay and experience of its fighting system, then go deeper into Weapon Master and the secret characters you unlock.

This week on The Free Cheese, to the mountain top. Our evaluation of Pokémon's second generation continues in this episode as we return to Kanto and complete the second half of the games. We discuss the balance in difficulty across the next set of gyms and share our experience taking on the game's final boss. Then, we assess how it fares in comparison to itself, other games in the series, and its...

This week on The Free Cheese, they're probably dead by now. We bring Digimon expert Marc back to the podcast to discuss its history and future, share our collective histories with the franchise, and what makes it stand out against its contemporaries. We each acquired a Digivice ahead of recording and spent some time training our virtual pets. In the episode, we recant our experiences raising Digim...

This week on The Free Cheese, you wanna get nuts? It's the 35th anniversary of Batman and we're celebrating by playing the Sunsoft video game adaptation. We discuss the impact of Tim Burton's 1989 film, our history with Batman, and of course we rank Batman: The Video Game on The List.

This week on The Free Cheese, we like our new, old consoles. As we reach the 50% mark of the year and this season, we reflect on the games we've played so far. We discuss our disappointments in some and surprises in others. We talk a bit about what 2024 has brought us, both in new titles as well as new experiences for us. Finally, we discuss the purchases of PSP and Xbox that we made this year and...

This week on The Free Cheese, DualShock controller required. We play, review, and rank one of Sony's early first-party efforts to see how it stands against The List. We discuss the unique gameplay of Ape Escape and how the right stick combat works with each gadget you acquire.

This week on The Free Cheese, we try to set the high score for car flips. A Sega classic joins The List this week while we take an intense, leisurely drive across several countries. We dissect the gameplay of Out Run, how it has held up for almost forty years, and share our tips for success (or more realistically, how to avoid our mistakes).

This week on The Free Cheese, grab your Xbox and 15 friends, we're having a party. Our three-part series on Halo: Combat Evolved continues with a focused conversation on the competitive multiplayer of the game. We discuss our history with Halo multiplayer, how it influenced other titles, and try to uncover what makes it special. As a bonus, we add Halo: Fireteam Raven to The List.