The Backlog Files

What happens when you revisit a game that helped shape your childhood and try to judge it like you're playing it for the first time? Adam begins a full Kingdom Hearts retrospective with Kingdom Hearts Final Mix , examining what still works, what has aged poorly and how much of the series' eventual identity was still being figured out in 2002.

Sometimes the best sign that a demo works is realizing you've been playing it much longer than intended. Adam checks out Backpack Syndicate , a dungeon crawler with strong Pokémon Mystery Dungeon energy and a deceptively complex backpack-management system built around weapon placement and synergy. The demo is limited, but it does exactly what it needs to: make the full game immediately wishlis...

Bills Must Be Paid has a very simple proposition: smash piggy banks, make money and try to keep up with your increasingly expensive life. Adam looks at the game's smooth performance, satisfying incremental loop and surprisingly good moment-to-moment feel, along with the progression problem that allows players to exhaust most of what the game has to offer far too quickly.

More than two decades after helping launch the GameCube, the original Luigi’s Mansion remains one of Nintendo’s most distinctive experiments. Adam revisits one of his earliest GameCube games to look at the room-by-room puzzle design, portrait ghosts, E. Gadd’s surprising influence on the larger Mario universe and the mechanics that now show their age. The atmosphere and central ghost-catching loop...

The first major Pokémon Pokopia DLC takes players underwater; but Bubbly Basin succeeds because it does more than simply move the existing gameplay loop beneath the surface. Adam looks at the submerged remains of Cerulean City, the surprisingly effective swimming mechanics, Pokopia’s environmental storytelling and why this expansion made the wider Pokémon world feel more cohesive than ever. But wh...

As Sony doubles down on an all-digital PlayStation future, Adam considers what the industry is asking players to surrender in exchange for convenience. Without physical games, consumers could lose the ability to buy used copies, lend games to friends, discover overlooked releases in stores and preserve purchases beyond the lifespan of Sony’s servers. The episode also explores the danger closed sto...

Adam has never played a Splatoon game in his life, and Splatoon Raiders might be his game of the year. A look at why this single-player looter-shooter spin-off is the clearest argument yet for what the Switch 2 can actually do, how the grind hits that rare Pokémon -level joy that never becomes a chore, why the difficulty curve nails what recent Nintendo games keep getting wrong, and the one buried...

Adam dives into News Tower , an indie tycoon game about running a 1930s New York newspaper that turns out to be far deeper than it looks. Why the simple weekly loop hides three interlocking games, a newspaper sim, an HR-and-employee-happiness game, and a Factorio -style optimization puzzle, and why the faction-influence system, balancing the church, the mayor, and organized crime, is the smartest...

Microsoft just cut thousands from its gaming division and pushed out four studios, and Adam argues it's the first crack warning of a coming collapse, like Bear Stearns to the industry's coming housing crisis. Why the "billion monthly players" mandate is structurally impossible and what it really signals, why games can't chase trends the way movies can, why a decade of failed...

Another week, another new release, and this one's a pleasant surprise. Adam digs into Rhythm Heaven Groove , the first new entry in the series in over a decade, and finds a WarioWare -style collection of musical minigames that nails the feel even when the hardware fights it. Why the catchy, pick-up-and-play design is exactly the itch it sets out to scratch, the audio-latency quirk that makes y...

Sony has announced it will end physical disc production for all new PlayStation games starting January 2028, and Adam has feelings. An extra episode on the slow death of ownership, why a license you can lose isn't the same as a disc that works for fifty years, and how Sony managed to argue against its own decision by delisting purchased movies the same week. Along the way: the delisting incent...

Nintendo has opened a console generation on an Ocarina of Time and a Star Fox 64 remake for the second time, and Adam dug into the new Star Fox on Switch 2 as a series newcomer. Why the remake's tutorials, voice acting, and cinematic story fill the gap left by the death of the instruction manual, how Falco, Slippy, and Fox finally feel like characters, why the tank level is still the tank leve...

GTA 6 finally has a price: $80 standard, $100 Ultimate, and a "physical" edition that's just a download code in a box. Adam unpacks why the number matters less than what it signals, why GTA's discount-driven history makes an $80 launch a tougher sell than it is for Nintendo, why the AAA industry might be too big to succeed, and why even a record-shattering launch could still set...

Adam reports live from Pier 57 at the Tribeca Festival, fresh off hands-on time with seven of this year's indie game selections. A modern 3D Zelda in Demi and the Fractured Dream , a gorgeous paper-airplane journey in DRIFTED , a speedrunner's dream in Rebounder , Devolver's sledgehammer-swinging Virtue and a Sledgehammer , and two out-of-nowhere standouts in Kidbash: Super Legend and...

A Nintendo Direct finally arrived, so join Adam as he breaks down what it actually means. The Ocarina of Time remake is real but shown without a frame of gameplay, Kingdom Hearts IV lands on Switch 2 at launch, and Square Enix turns up in force. So why does a stacked lineup feel so empty if you don't already own the console? Join in for a conversation about ports versus system-sellers, the con...

We covered the console version on the channel, so this week on The Backlog Files I'm taking the Game Boy Advance port of Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure out of the backlog. It's Tony Hawk in a Disney coat of paint, squeezed onto handheld hardware that doesn't want to cooperate, and it gets me thinking about something bigger: the slow disappearance of the on-ramp game, the accessib...

Fifteen years after it launched alongside the Nintendo 3DS, does Pilotwings Resort still hold up? Adam revisits the dormant flight series Nintendo resurrected as a glasses-free-3D showcase, and digs into a launch window built almost entirely on tech demos and ports. The controls are still great, the game around them is still thin, and somehow they made Free Flight grindy. A look at what Pilotwings...

Good-Feel knows how to make a Yoshi game look and feel inviting, but the question has always been whether there's enough underneath. On today's Backlog Files, Adam reviews  Yoshi and the Mysterious Book ; the Switch 2 exclusive that has charm to spare and a genuinely clever premise, but leaves you wondering if Yoshi deserves more of a challenge than this. Is delightful enough?

Adam discusses the new indie Paper Mario-like: Escape From Ever After.

Pokemon Champions is finally here and Adam discusses the borderline disastrous launch.

Adam discusses probably the worst game that's been discussed on this show, Neopets: Mega Mini Game Collection.

With The Super Mario Galaxy Movie releasing this week, Adam looks back at the Wii game Super Mario Galaxy.

Let's look back at 2002 and Nintendo's kind of risky experimental title Super Mario Sunshine!

Adam discusses what is probably the 30th anniversary Pokemon title - Pokemon: Pokopia!

Well, they're definitely ports of FireRed and LeafGreen.