Silicon Sasquatch

The long-lived series plays the hits and takes a well-deserved bow, but it stumbles in its hesitation to move on

Nick reflects on a year of struggle, transition, and chaos.

Nick, Aaron, and Spencer celebrate 15 years of this nonsense by reflecting on the games industry itself. We ask each other: What are 3 notable trends from the last 15 years, and what's 1 prediction for the next 15? See you for the 20th anniversary!

A storied series renowned for reinvention finally forgets itself.

Wringing the water of life from a lumpy trash bag in the hopes of sparking a brief moment of self-awareness: what’s more cyberpunk than that? Nick reads a short critique of Cyberpunk 2077, a now-infamous big-budget spectacle of a game that's gone from a disastrous launch to a slow and cautious rehabilitation whose ultimate legacy still seems yet to be determined. If you'd like to read this instead...

Did Gamergate contribute to the riot in Washington D.C.? Were its proponents' online harassment campaigns a precursor to sedition? Doug and Aaron ask each other these questions and more in this episode following the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.

Part of our annual GOTY tradition is recording our deliberations and posting them to torture you all. Do you want to hear how the sausage is made? You shouldn’t. That sounds wet and gross. Anyway, pod get!

What’s better than a listicle? A very long podcast! Presenting our raw output: hours of recorded discussion settling our 2020 category award winners.

Well, here it is: the podcast where we successfully reduced 200 nominees to the 20 best games of the decade. Surely this won’t be contentious or anything.

Okay, so. You’ve seen our Top 10 list. But you’re wondering: “Uh, wait, what were they thinking?” Your answer lies within.

You’ve seen the awards. And now, our secret process is unveiled: we mostly just talk for a long time until we agree on something.

This is it: the final part of our Game of the Year 2018 deliberations. Here are the arguments we came up with for the top 10 games of the year.

Here's part 2 of our Game of the Year 2018 deliberations. In this episode, we decide who'll win all ten of our Category Awards.

To kick off our tenth Game of the Year feature, we're exhuming our prior work to look at it again as older and (ideally) wiser people. In this episode, we go year-by-year, list-by-list, and ask ourselves whether we made the right choices at the time, or if other games wound up reflecting our mission better.

We're back with another podcast!

Oh dang. Oh yes. It's podcast time.

The Silicon Sasquatch Podcast is back -- and we've got a guest this time!

Hot on the heels of Doug's in-depth look at the original Xbox's legacy, here's a conversation between him and Nick about the gargantuan hunk of plastic that (somehow) transformed console gaming.

On our first podcast in almost two years, Nick, Doug and Aaron pick through the rubble left by the election's crater to find a constructive way forward for our brand of games criticism.

The mere concept of an 80-hour game just isn't the same in 2014. What does that mean for gaming's tradition of massive, deep role-playing games? And what can developers do to avoid padding their games out with dull, superfluous side missions?

Missing faces. Go-karting Parisians. Awkward bystanders yammering about nothing. Maybe it's just us, but something about this French Revolution feels a little...off.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is, by many accounts, a big step forward for a series that was beginning to flounder. We got together to discuss how Sledgehammer Games updated the tried-and-true formula and speculate on where the series can go from here.

It's 2014: a brave new world where elephants are apparently vehicles of destruction and a simple button press is all it takes to feel feelings about a fallen brother-in-arms. How did we get here?

Months after the birth of the Gamergate movement, tensions are still high and threats are still being made. Where are we now? And what impact will Gamergate have on how we discuss ethical concerns in the games industry in the future?

It's been an uneven debut year for Sony and Microsoft's new hardware. How does it compare to previous console generations? And how long's it gonna be before a purchase will make sense to the average person?