Grumpy Old Gamer

What is the greatest superhero video game of all time? In Season 3, Episode 8 of the Grumpy Old Gamer Podcast, Ian, Al, Lucas, and Tim dive into the history of superhero gaming, from classics like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Spider-Man 2, and Batman: Arkham to Marvel Ultimate Alliance, X-Men Legends, and modern hits like Marvel Rivals and Midnight Suns. Along the way, we debate what...

This week Ian, Tim, and guest Lucas dig into open world survival games, kicked off by Valheim's PlayStation release. They cover Subnautica, Project Zomboid, Minecraft, Ark, Skyrim survival mods, and more before landing on a Mount Rushmore of the genre. Plenty of honourable mentions along the way, from Stalker Gamma to Grounded to Frostpunk, plus a detour into the Palworld/Nintendo lawsuit and the...

Al and Tim are joined by Will, creative director at Lost Souls Interactive, to talk about his debut horror game Hotel Espir. It is a stealth horror set in a 1942 hotel in the American South, built around a blind antagonist who hunts by sound, where every footstep gives you away. Will explains the studio's "horror with a heart" approach, why they set the game in the deep south and how they handle i...

The lads sit down to work through the Star Wars games that mattered, the ones that didn't, and a good few that only survive because the modding community refused to let them die. Al makes the case for TIE Fighter and Star Wars Supremacy, Ian flies the flag for KOTOR, Lucas reports back from two hours with the Outlaws demo, and Tim can't get through a single mention of the Force Unleashed without i...

Season 3, Episode 3. This time we flipped an old episode on its head. Instead of games that would make good films, we picked films and TV shows that should be games — with one rule: it can't already exist. No Lord of the Rings, no John Wick, no Peaky Blinders. Between the four of us we came up with eight, though we'd argue seven of them actually hold up. Lucas wants a brutal melee brawler out of T...

Season 3 continues with Al, Tim, Ian and Lucas taking on one of gaming's most iconic franchises: Halo. From the original Combat Evolved through Halo 3's record-breaking success and into the modern Halo Studios era, the crew discusses what made Halo a phenomenon, whether Halo: Campaign Evolved is worth the asking price, the rise and fall of Xbox's flagship series, Bungie's legacy, LAN parties, spli...

Season 3 kicks off with Al, Tim, Ian and Lucas tackling the golden age of real-time strategy, roughly 1995 to 2007, running from the original Command & Conquer through to Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes. Tim and Al go deep on Westwood, Total Annihilation and Command & Conquer Generals, while Ian and Lucas offer the outsider's perspective on why RTS never quite grabbed them the way...

The Grumpy Old Gamer crew returns to see whether our game recommendations actually worked. Ian, Tim, and Al challenged each other to play games outside their usual comfort zones, including Remnant 2, Far Cry 5, Stellaris, Tekken 7, Warhammer 40K: Boltgun, and Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2. Some games landed. Some games definitely did not. Along the way, we talk Ubisoft fatigue, 4X confusion, DLC ov...

The lads are back and there are four of them this time. Ian, Al, Tim, and Lucas dig into the big question: who actually won the console war? Spoiler: it's not complicated. Then things get interesting as the crew unpacks Phil Spencer's exit from Xbox, the arrival of Asha Sharma with her AI background and no games industry experience, Sony's quiet 180 on exclusivity, and what Project Helix plus Stea...

Al, Tim, and Lucas confess their digital hoarding addictions by analyzing their Steam libraries. Turns out we've all got hundreds of games we'll never play, bought during sales we can't resist, gifted by friends who promise "we'll play together" and then ghost us. We used SteamDB to crunch the numbers. Al has £550 worth of unplayed games sitting in his library gathering digital dust. Lucas bought...

Al has a confession: he doesn't play racing games. Tim and Lucas do. This was always going to be an interesting conversation. In this episode, the three of us trace the full arc of racing games, from chucking 10p into Outrun at the arcade to Formula 1 drivers logging laps on iRacing between Grand Prix weekends. We argue about whether Driver counts as a racing game, mourn the fact that Lucas has ne...

Al and Tim think they know Warhammer 40,000. Ian definitely does not. So this week, Ian asks the questions, Al and Tim answer them without any preparation whatsoever, and somehow everyone learns something. Topics covered include what Warhammer 40k actually is, the Horus Heresy, why the Emperor is essentially a very expensive battery, the Tyrannids versus the Xenomorphs, whether the Enterprise D wo...

Grinding in games used to feel rewarding. You put the time in, you got stronger, and you saw the difference. Now it often feels like a second job, or worse, something designed to push you toward spending money. In this episode, we break down what grinding used to be, what it’s become, and where the line should be drawn.

Ian, Tim, and Lucas dig into comfort gaming — those familiar titles you keep coming back to when you need to switch off and just play. From Fallout and The Sims to Powerwash Simulator and Path of Exile, the lads talk nostalgia trips, cozy games, survival base-builders, challenge runs, and why some stressful games are weirdly relaxing. Plus: Tim's mobile game shame, Lucas's obsession with South Par...

We replaced Tim with Lucas from Argentina and nobody told him. Now three idiots argue about subscription services, cloud gaming, and why you technically don't own any of your digital games. The conversation covers how none of us can remember the last time we bought a physical game, yet we complain about not owning anything. We're all trapped in the Steam ecosystem with hundreds of games we'll neve...

Season 2 starts with a challenge. Each host picks two games under £10 for the others to play. We'll revisit these choices in the season finale to see how wrong everyone was. Ian recommends Far Cry 5 to Tim for its co-op chaos and rural Montana cult-shooting. Tim throws Tekken 7 at Al as a callback to our arcade episode and a test of whether RTS players can handle fighting games. Al drops Warhammer...

It's the Season 1 finale, and we're coming full circle. 10 episodes ago, we kicked things off with a bold claim: Gaming Is Shit Now. But after 20 weeks of arguing about everything from Half-Life 2's superiority over GTA to the death of couch co-op and the predatory practices of EA (f##k EA) and Ubisoft (f##k Ubisoft even more), we've reached a surprising conclusion. In this episode, we confront ou...

The Grumpy Old Gamer team takes a quick look at the best and worst of videogames in 2025. The greatest releases - or at least the ones that we bothered to play - the controversy of Assassin's Creed Shadows and the sale of EA to Saudi Arabia, and the games that should have hit but somehow fell short. https://gog.fm https://gog.fm/blog https://gog.fm/spotify https://gog.fm/apple https://gog.fm/amazo...

In this episode of the Grumpy Old Gamer Podcast, our hosts dive into the controversial topic of Steam's Early Access program. Join us as we explore the pros and cons of early access games, discuss why only 25% of these games ever reach full release, and debate whether AAA developers are exploiting gamers through this system. We also touch on standout early access titles like 'Manor Lords' and the...

In this episode of the Grumpy Old Gamer Podcast, hosts Al, Tim and Ian explore the age-old question of whether video games were more difficult in the past or if it's just nostalgia clouding our memories. The discussion covers the evolution of game design from arcade to console, the impact of technical limitations, the role of memory cards and auto-save features, and how modern games like Dark Soul...

Ian, Tim, and Al have finally had it with the “console wars.” We talk about how exclusives don’t mean a thing anymore, how every console is just a glorified PC in a plastic box, and how Microsoft and Sony have stopped pretending otherwise. We get into why developers don’t care what you play on, why Game Pass broke the old business model, and why the Steam Deck is quietly killing the whole idea of...

Ian, Al, and Tim trace first-person shooters from 1970s NASA research projects to today's microtransaction machines. The genre peaked with single-player campaigns that had character and personality, then corporate greed killed everything good about shooting things on a computer screen. This covers how FPS games went from academic experiments to id Software's revolutionary trilogy to the console wa...

Remember cramming four sweaty mates on a sofa, squinting at a quarter of the TV, and screaming over who was screen-peeking? We do. This episode we grumble through the golden days of Halo LAN parties, lugging CRTs across town, and the brutal honesty of split-screen gaming. Then we drag ourselves into the present - headsets, online lobbies, and the joy of being insulted by 12-year-olds on Xbox Live....

Tim, Al, and Ian argue whether Half-Life 2's influence trumps GTA 5's sales numbers, discovering that Steam's $10.8 billion annual revenue makes Half-Life 3 commercially pointless. This episode covers the Source engine's lasting impact on every modern shooter, how Half-Life 2 created digital distribution monopolies, and why the gravity gun remains more satisfying than any GTA chaos simulator. The...

Al, Ian, and Tim dive into the $184 billion gaming industry versus Hollywood's measly $42 billion box office, discovering that respect for source material apparently took 30 years to figure out. This episode covers why early 90s game adaptations were universally terrible, whether TV shows work better than movies for adaptations, and Tim's inexplicable excitement for Battlefield 6 despite it being...