Press Pause Radio - Podcast

I t’s funny how we all used to talk about the summer being the perfect reason to catch up on our backlogs, with the notable drought of marquee game releases until the winter season, when publishers and developers arguably carpet-bomb the quarter with hundreds of game releases aimed at competing for those coveted holiday dollars. Well—that’s not so much the case anymore because th...

L ike the twisted version of Santa Claus that he is, once a year, Geoff Keighley comes out of his mousehole to host a grand event in Los Angeles that lets developers and publishers show off their up-and-coming games to the public via a broadcast presentation he calls the Summer Game Fest. So, it’s essentially LIKE Electronic Entertainment Expo in all but name, and like E3, the event engulfs...

O ne more run right?—Just one more go at it, and this time, things will be different. That’s the allure of the Roguelike genre of video games. It isn’t just one thing to jam through a level filled with beasties and hazards, you also have to improvise your approach with whatever power-ups or drawbacks you’re given, at least long enough to make it to the next area. What was o...

T he mind sure is a funny thing—one second, you can find yourself tripping over the gradually increasing existential crisis of modern-day living in 2026, and the next, you’ll find yourself thinking about dumb ways to make peeing for a dog way more fun than it should have any right to be! On this week’s episode of Press Pause Radio, we tackle some of the news bits in gaming and ou...

C ertain logos instill a sense of wonder and comfort the instant they shimmer onto the screens of our games. The branding of something like the Konami bacon strips or neon-styled letters of SEGA getting shouted out through the speakers invokes a fuzzy feeling of what’s to come. One logo, in particular, carries such weight behind its presence that the moment you hear a certain jingle ringing,...

W ow, sorry about the wait! What was it, four years or so? I don't think we missed much though, wrestling still be wrestling. After a long hiatus, Georgie and Toast got to watching an AEW PPV together and thought it'd be the appropriate time to talk about the graps once again. Revolution 2026 was certainly one for the books, with barely any time to catch a breath while witnessing rivalries ended,...

I t’s crazy how glued we are to our phones right? Maybe we should just treat phones the way the cast of Breaking Bad treats them, and just snap them in half every time we’re done with them! Either that, or  mean mug the SHIT out of Jimmy Fallon, either plan is equally cathartic and acceptable. We’re coming out with episode 164 of Press Pause Radio, and we’re here to ta...

H EY! LISTEN! Maybe don’t do that? Oh, you mean you want to figure it out on your own? Naaahhh, let’s pace you through an extensive explanation instead. Tutorialization in Video Games has always been a contentious topic that dates back way before yellow paint, and it was mouthy fairy in 1998 that directed your actions. Sometimes, it came in the form of a speaker box floating around in...

N ow that 2025 has finished swirling its nasty self into the shower drain of time, we’re ready to jump into the  "Düo-Dusé" fresh! (yeah, George is still calling it that) and begin our annual “Game of the Year” feature for 2025, the Golden Zonkies! We’re not going to lie—the selection was vast this year, and there was a LOT to choose from,  espec...

A s we all leave the holiday behind and officially ring in 2026, or whatever the hell George was calling it (we think it was the "Düo-Dusé"). We thought it would be neat to look at the holiday season under a lens, and think about the “comfort games” that come with the season. Think about all of the arguments or justifications you’ve heard for whether or not a film or...

G rifters everywhere, all the grifters the eye can see—usually surrounded by an extra set of fingers or image diffusion to give their position away! We all miss the “halcyon” (and mind you, there are some heavyweight lifting behind those air-quotes) days of 2020 when the only bull-shitters trying to pass off a fugazi were bakers and their silly-ass cake art. Is that a Nintendo Ga...

A re beards still neat? We wonder, mainly because we’re older and less hip—plus we noticed the significant lack of facial hair upon the plastic grimace of Labubus, so shit’s been tripping us up to say the least. Or maybe it’s all of these heavy-hitter video game releases that are stacking up in October that have got us slipping up because HOO-boy are there some blockbuster...

E verything’s an Ad nowadays (#notanAd) and the constant outpour of late-stage capitalism getting pumped out through our screens and on our pages has objectively reached a point of Ad nauseam (sorry, we just couldn’t resist.) In all seriousness, though, if there’s one form of entertainment that’s fueled by marketing magic more than any other medium, it’s video games,...

L ook!—is it a bird? A plane? No! it’s the latest episode of Press Pause Radio! In the shadow of the Man of Steel’s newest film, George, Andrew, and Sean get swept up in all of the hype of a new Superman movie, and the possible family ties between David Corenswet and Christopher McDonald, along with some of the summer concert experiences and the dreaded summer heatwave that&rsquo...

I t’s finally here! At the top of what was arguably the most chaotic week for video games in 2025, the Nintendo Switch 2 is available now, and we’re going to spend this whole episode talking about our first impressions of it. The roundtable of chairs for the show this go-around features George, Andrew, and a very special guest, Greg Sewart , one of the Co-hosts of the esteemed Player O...

N ew recording platform, who dis’? Yeah, we’re all a bit excited over some of the new tech we have to produce the show, and we’re all trying to do everything we can to enjoy it while it’s still fresh and shiny in this latest episode of Press Pause Radio. This session is much more casual than the last few episodes as the cast tries to parse out the tumultuous news cycle that...

A fter nearly ten years with everyone’s favorite console/handheld hybrid, Nintendo is FINALLY gracing the world with a grand-scale presentation of the Switch successor, the Nintendo Switch 2. So, what better way to hype ourselves up for the big N’s upcoming hardware than to fantasize a bunch of our pie-in-the-sky. “what-if” wishes that we want to see out of the new console,...

W ell, we should have guessed that it wouldn’t be a Golden Zonkies episode without a troubled production to delay the release! Some traditions really do die hard! Anyway—our sincerest apologies for the delay, the Golden Zonkie class of 2024 is officially here! Unfortunately, 2024 saw more of the same crap that permeated 2023. The games industry layoffs didn’t slow down, unionizat...

N ew year, same tardy nonsense—we recorded a few weeks ago, but life and technical issues got in the way of the production process, and for that, we sincerely apologize to y’all. Before we get into the Golden Zonkies’ class of 2024, however, we wanted to have an old-school “PPR-ass PPR” round robin on a featured topic, and what better subject than the art and science...

L ife has been pretty hectic for all of us, and even when we have in some time to play some games in between the bustle and hustle of day-to-day life, it’s been a little harder to find time in the day to talk about what we’ve been playing amongst ourselves… So for that, we’re really sorry about the delay with this week’s episode, but hey, we’re pretty excited t...

A s real as Bobby Braddock’s melodic soliloquy " Time Marches On " gets, we are now on the other side of another digital sunset as Microsoft closes down the Xbox 360 Marketplace. The term "sunset" may not be the right choice here, though with all of Microsoft’s confusing cross-pollination between the last couple of Xbox generations, this “sunset” comes off more like a hasty...

I t’s raining diss tracks y’all, and ain’t nobody safe from the rhyming raids of character assault up in this BEE-yotch that we call LYFE… Alright, that’s enough cringe—with all of the harrowing news we’ve seen out of 2024, we’ve decided to try our hand at some levity with a brainstorm-fueled feature topic that we think can bring out...

H ey everyone, apologies for sitting on the production of the episode for as long as we did—a combination of schedule changes within our daily routines coupled with the rare moments of poop-socking that were granted for us to dump giant loads into new releases with near endless maws of content really fucked up our usual operational turn-around times. Nevertheless, that’s all over and d...

N ot to get too sidetracked but did y’all know that American Dad has aired for 13 seasons now? Shit’s kind of wild when you think about it. Anyway, better late than ever, here’s our annual Golden Zonkey Podcast special for the year 2023! We were able to fit a bunch of new games into our lineup, and of course, a bunch of old-ass ones too! Like, sure I guess it isn’t all that...

T here’s one thing to lose a job (it still sucks, there’s no denying that) but it’s a whole other level of despair when you lose a dream job—something you’re proud to call a career. In the year 2023 alone, there has been a reported 6,000 layoffs in the Games Industry since October of this year, and that’s not even accounting for some of the new figures that were...