Player 2's Podcasts

It's that time of year, folks, PAX time. Well, to be truthful, PAX has been and gone, but as is tradition, the team on the ground has gotten together to wax lyrical about all the cool stuff they saw. Join Matt, Jess, Stephen and Jenn as they take you through the highs and lows of PAX Aus 2026 and even make some suggestions as to how the event could be improved for next year. From tabletop to indie...

It feels like the last fortnight or so has been spent largely recalling how Halo used to be a near culture-defining event. Sure enough, the games produced under the stewardship of 343/Halo Studios were all perfectly fine games, it's hard to argue that the franchise has failed to hit as it did under Bungie. So, passing it on to some Call of Duty stuff (and leaving a bunch of other people without wo...

We're waist-deep into September now, and as such the games just won't stop coming. It's almost a relief that we've missed out on a couple of the bigger ones for now. That doesn't really mean we have excessive time to just breathe, though, as this episode will help to testify: once again, we've dropped the usual topic from the back end of the show in service of simply being able to get discussion a...

Welcome to the gaming lion’s den that is September. We’re not two weeks in, and already games are spilling from what isn’t so much a leak as a gaping hole. We now all know what the remake of Ocarina of Time looks like, and we’re all… just… so…  tired . At least there’s plenty to play. As such, that’s what this episode is about, really. We eschewed the typical topic format and have instead just all...

We've made an active choice to look at things a bit more warmly this episode. Make no mistake - the games industry continues to be an absolute mess, but there's no need for each and every topic that we do to concern itself with whatever news or event is happening at any given time. Thusly, this fortnight sees us look back to our heady days in the school yard. Or, more specifically, that period of...

One of these days, we're going to stop fretting about the future of videogames. One of these days. But probably not this day. What good we can do, perhaps, is to thumb our noses at the slow progress of English evolution and treat videogame as the compound noun that we all know it should be. Feel better? No? Well... we'll do our best to find a silver lining or two in the actual cast itself. Who is...

Avast! Grog! Other pirate-y sounding terms! While we watch July slide slowly towards August and then the eventual avalanche of new game releases, some of us have decided to take cover on a small island, guarding a giant chest full of shiny trinkets and being perpetually buzzed on watered-down rum.  Or, in other words, the remake of Black Flag is still fresh in our memories, so we decided to theme...

Occasionally, over the life of the PixelCast, we have been known to revisit topics. There are perennial ones, such as reactions to reward shows and personal GOTY discussions, but occasionally we may dip into a wider pool of discussion for a second time. Usually, there would be at least a couple of years’ space between these. We did a show about horror games back in 2023, and revisited that topic a...

Remember the smell of stale cigarettes and what is probably vomit mostly made up of slushy? The horrible carpet that said vomit had soaked into? The loud clink of machines converting ten and twenty-dollar notes into gold coins? No? Well then, treasure your youth while it lasts. For everyone else, arcade games come with a mix of memories, both of place and of game design itself. Granted, most of Ti...

Another (just about) couple of weeks of games hype has come and gone, and we're left to pick up the pieces. That is to say, to look back at our last predictions episode, where we thought a lot of stuff would get pushed into March or April next year and eat crow as we witnessed September get stuffed to bursting. Tim is back in charge, with Rob and Matt on board to help out as they go through the hy...

By the time you're listening to this, the internet has probably tied itself into an unspecified, likely very messy and painful knot after having a very normal one about a God of War game where you play as Kratos's ( gasp ) wife. We didn't know that when we recorded this, though (the specific announcement, that is; people losing their shit we could have safely bet our homes on). But that's half the...

Potatoes! Guinness! Did you know that leprechaun is a really weird and difficult word to spell? Stereotypes! Whatever the case, Tim is back from Ireland where, apparently, the coffee is weak (serious talk, Ireland: we need to address this) and the whiskey* strong (you do you; water of life and all that). In his jet-lagged fugue, he played (and fell in love with) Mixtape. And so, this episode comes...

There is something to be said for a good gimmick. That one bit of gameplay design that a game can hang its hat on and say, "Hey, isn't this bloody cool?" That is what the team is talking about this week: those gameplay mechanics that have stuck in our heads over the years and left a lasting impression on games in general. From plastic instruments to amazing systems that get patented by e...

What if hardware got a bit more powerful, but the production on games visuals didn’t advance far beyond Hollywood’s year of the apocalypse, 2012? As it turns out, we would miss out on some fine-detail advancements and lighting bounces, but things could still look pretty spectacular. That’s what this episode is (or at least starts off being) about.  Games that still look fantastic today, be it beca...

He’s back! After traveling to and from from Heaven knows where, Hewso has reappeared in front of a microphone, ready to record… whatever silly topic we decide to have him record, I guess. That travelling everywhere thing has been hitting Tim as well, though, and so for this episode we’ve decided to focus in a bit on what our favourite games for different travel situations are, and why we think the...

Ever feel like everything is turning to garbage? Funny thing, that... so do we! But just how bad is said garbage? Is it at least neatly sorted into different bins? Maybe scattered around on the floor a bit? Or is is all just on fire releasing obnoxious fumes over unreasonable distances? That's kind of what we went into this episode hoping to find out. Well, from the perspective of gaming as we kno...

Really, if things were more logical and less tied to the soft power of American and British pop-cultural influence, if Australia were to only succumb to Halloween in a sensible way then it is around about now that we should be eyeing the finest-looking pumpkins. At least Capcom is on our side, pretty reliably releasing new Resident Evil games in Q1 when its own Northern Hemisphere is heading into...

Fun fact: while coffee itself is in fact a dehydrating, the amount of water added to your standard cut means that any diuretic effect is rendered basically meaningless. You’re still getting hydration from that sweet, sweet water. Sadly, the same doesn’t seem to apply to beer. Not that this is an episode about beer. Or coffee, sadly. Rather, this one is about that elixir of life itself: water. Whil...

Well, the year is underway and honestly, with January now behind us, it feels like a rollocking start. Best guess is it's because everyone wants to get the eff-train out of the way of the splash that Grand Theft Auto is going to make when it lands towards the end of the year, so now things are kind of a little bit in reverse. That did lead us to think, though: how might the gaming landscape look o...

Sometimes, sh*t happens. You go to turn on your PC, only to find that Microsoft borked a Windows 11 update so bad that it won't even boot up. You go to turn on your trusty RoG Ally, only to find that Microsoft borked a Windows 11 security update so bad that now it seems to view loading up games as the enemy. You go to record a podcast, only to... well, this one may not be entirely Microsoft's faul...

Well, that didn't take long. We thought we could at least get into the first recording of January of a new year before the world leveled up being an absolute disaster, but here we are. Happy new year, we guess? At least the one that let us, while also a disaster in its own right, had some pretty good games released? Naturally, this being the first episode of the year, those present use this as a c...

While the world runs round with Christmas Cheer Player2’s writers cower in fear. For these brave souls, there’s no joy in the festive season And those feelings they have, well, they have good reason They have been beaten, broken, scarred before And still they are asked to dig in once more You see, to them Christmas means just one thing A gift to review that only one man could bring This creature g...

Bells are ringing, snow is… definitely not falling, and something is in the air. It may be magic; it may also be cannabis. Honestly, who can say? In any case, there is no need to get high just yet, though, as Santa’s evil twin is still a couple of weeks away from terrorizing the Player 2 offices* and today instead is about recalling video game gifts that we got and actually appreciated. Mostly thi...

A nagging voice on my shoulder says that we may have said a thing or two on this episode that been proven to be extremely dumb since recording. What, exactly? Well, we could tell you but either, a.) we want to create suspense to make you listen to the show, or b.) with travel commitments complicating our usual schedule, this one was recorded over a fortnight ago now and we honestly can’t remember...

Back to the regular format! PAX is done, but the events certainly aren’t over for the year, and so for this particular episode we’ve decided to whip out our crystal balls and peer just a little bit into the future by trying to guess at now exactly the ultimate game of the year, so much as the short list that will inevitably be coming out of The Game Awards soon. It proved to be a pretty fun exerci...