Everybody's Talking At Once

Phil Tibitoski stops by to talk about Octodad: Dadliest Catch , the upcoming update and PS4 release thereof, and what's next for the Young Horses team . We also discuss the dissonance and melancholy of review scores, the perils of balancing games without letting outsiders play them, and Twitch Plays Pok?mon (which may serve as the inspiration for Young Horses' next project, though not in a Twitch...

Unproductively hating Macklemore: It's not just for Kendrick Lamar fans anymore! Last week, we talked about the backlash against Macklemore in the hip-hop community —which meant we also talked about cultural appropriation, race, and the surprisingly slippery issue of who's more mainstream than whom. This week, we talk about the backlash against Macklemore in the queer community (and why we conside...

The Heist is a really good album. good kid, m. A.A.d. city is a really good album. How did we get to the point where those two statements sound contradictory? In these next two episodes, Lucio and I will dig deep into the current, Internet-wide backlash against Macklemore, by which we're more than a little baffled. It seems to come down to one core question (the first half of which we'll cover thi...

Richard Terrell of Critical-Gaming stops by to discuss something I wrote in response to something he wrote in response to something Ed Key wrote about whether Proteus is a game. (Still with me?) Just how much work should we be doing to decide what is and isn't a game, and why? Where does an attempt at clear, precise language become an unproductive terminological sword-measuring contest? Where does...

Alx Preston , Lead Designer of Hyper Light Drifter , stops by to discuss how limitations foster and enable creativity, how videogames could learn a thing or two from Ernest Hemingway, and how growing up with a treatable-but-undiagnosable illness has left him with zero patience for glib, oversimplified views of life, the universe, and everything. ("The stars don't care about your love life" is abou...

When last we left the saga of SteamOS , Lucio and I were envisioning a future owned and operated by Valve, and for the most part, we were comfortable with that idea to a degree that made us, well, uncomfortable. So this time around, we dig deep into the topic of DRM. We both hate DRM, yet we both kind of love Steam. Does that mean we love DRM? The horror. Now we are become Death, destroyer of fair...

Steam wants into your living room , in the guise of a gadget that's not quite a PC and not quite a console . That could have a moderately apocalyptic effect on the console market, not to mention the long-taken-for-granted dominance of Windows as PC gaming platform. In this moment between big announcements (and big Steam Sales), Lucio and I take some time to discuss what's in it for Valve, what's i...

Can we separate what black means in Magic from what blackness means in everyday life? Should we? Can it be done in a way that's intelligible to outsiders? Some independent game developers made a set of jokey, rollickingly broken Magic cards. An awful lot of people found the jokes therein sexist, racist, and generally objectionable. Which is where it gets complicated. Does the Indie Custom Cube get...

Davey Wreden discusses life after the release of his vividly realized, genuinely unique first game, The Stanley Parable —the problems that come with success, the guilt that comes with admitting that success comes with problems, endlessly recurring impostor syndromes, oscillating egomania, all that. We also discuss the ongoing process of becoming an adult, our shared love of Spelunky , and the impo...

Game developer and graphic artist Jake Kazdal, who you might know from his work on Rez and Space Channel 5 Part 2 , joins us for our inaugural podcast. He discusses the finer points of his studio's first release, Skulls of the Shogun , and shares the (crazily ambitious) plan for their next game, a roguelike-alike space shooter called Galak-Z: The Dimensional . Plus, I talk about cultural consensus...