Living La Vita Loca

Welcome to our Freeplay Fortnightly episode (which we last did on 27th November last year of course) where we both pick a retro game that we want to play and keep it a secret from our cohost. We then review said game on the podcast and ask our cohost to score the game out of 10 based on our review. Simple. You bet we are! This week we've lumped for Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega Master System, 1...

Hello you sinful gamers out there. Something wicked this way comes... its LLVL's Guilty Gaming Pleasures! What is a Guilty pleasure? Oxford English dictionary defines it as: "Something, such as a film, television programme, or piece of music, that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard." Its 2024 so we'll just deny and ignore this definition and do whatever we the...

Hello Podgoers. Welcome to Part 2 of our Final Fantasy Extravaganza. We continue to annoy and antagonise Rich's wife Fiona, our resident Final Fantasist, who in turn decides to Trojan horse the pod with her own agenda. She's a regular Yuffie Kisaragi alright. The Final Fantasy series does a great job wandering around aimlessly (just an opinion!) and so, we too, will meander away from the mainline...

Ho there fair Podmaidens! Happy 2024 to the lot of ya. We hope you all had a festive period full of frivolity. To continue the theme of overindulgence, we've decided to super size our pod this time and hit the Final Fantasy franchise hard. We've invited Rich's wife, Fiona, along for the journey. A bigger fellowship means more FF coverage after all. Over the next 2 pods we will delve deep into the...

Hello there, Podfans. Welcome to the world of (Twitchplays)Pokemon! 10 years ago, a simple social experiment started on the streaming channel Twitch created by a freelance Australian computer programmer. The premise: Play through and complete Pokemon Red. How? By allowing followers on the Twitch stream to enter commands (A, B, Direction, Start) for the protagonist to follow. Sounds easy, right? It...

Happy End of Calendar Year to All! T'is the season to provide others with gifts and here is ours, to you, the listening public. The kicker is that the gift is an already chewed dog toy wrapped in tinfoil and it's not even completely wrapped either. The tinfoil is falling off and it's inadvertently choked some of the local wildlife... where was I heading with this again??? Anyway... This year, sinc...

Hi retrofans This week, we take some time out of our busy gaming schedules to do some reading. But it's not just any old book... This year Retro Gamer released a special bookazine dedicated to Handheld Gaming so we decided to take a deep dive into the history of handheld gaming and ask some questions: - Which is the best handheld console ever made according to Retro Gamer and us too! - Which is yo...

Hey pod fans We're exactly three quarters of the way through our first year of podcasting so its definitely time to talk about our favourite sandwiches. Why have we waited so long?!? Okay okay... we're really here to review Daxter (PSP) and Gravity Rush (PS Vita) and at least half of these games are better than a generic every day sandwich. In fact... could one of these games be one of the best ha...

Take that! podfans... Or at least take this podcast and get in ya! It's our Freeplay Fortnightly podcast. We take 2 games, we refuse to tell each other what we have played and then we use each others spoken review to give the game an accurate arbitrary score. Stuff under the teeny tiny microscope this week are the Game Gear Mini (Blue) and Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney. Objection?!? Well you don't...

Hey Podrockers! This week we delve into the murky world of 'classic' collections as we use our retro handhelds from the 15 years ago to play games from 30 years ago. Rich decides to surprise Fazz with a couple of consoles he manages to cram into an average sized pencil case. Like some sort of modern day Agahnim. If you love Mega Drive/Genesis, this pod is definitely for you except it also sortve i...

Lets-a-go podfans! Mario Kart 8 is almost 10 years old. Yes we know y'all want to cancel the Wii U but it produced a bunch of great Nintendo exclusives that were then ported to the Switch and they really (unsurprisingly) took off... Mario Kart 8 deluxe has sold over 57 million units since its release and is the best selling Nintendo Switch game of all time. With the release of wave 6 dlc, we take...

Ooh ooh ahh ahh AHHH! That's how apes say 'Good morrow Podfans'... Probably. On the pod this week, we spend time hanging out with our (pri)mates on our Sony handhelds. We're pretty sure that these consoles are a little more advanced than the tools that monkeys and apes can use but that doesn't necessarily mean the IQ level of your podhosts is much higher... Under the microscope in Specter's lab th...

Happy Halloween pod-tergeists! It's (Freaky) Freeplay Fortnightly at LLVL HQ and it's time for us to haunt your dreams. Not as much as an 89p game called Paratopic has haunted Fazz this week. That would be really mean of us. If you manage to make your way past THAT review then you'll get to some juicy, squashy organic goodness as Rich serves up a treat with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1)...

Hey Retropodders Its Freeplay Fortnightly (We will get some sort of branding to stick on this) here at LLVL HQ and Fazz is always banging on about Rich being steeped in video gaming lore so it's high time he proved it... Rich takes us on a small learning journey through Shmup caravan modes dragging Fazz along for the ride on the undercarriage. Think Sideshow Bob in Cape Feare but with less hair. F...

Big up yo'self podfans. Or should that be EA Sports BIG up yo'self? Yes. We're back in the never ending EA well again this week. Who knew that Electronic Arts had taken over the entire world and owned every publishing house east of Santa Monica?! Oh you guys knew? I guess thats fair. Just because a giant amorphous blob has splattered all over the game publishing landscape and absorbed everything d...

Hi Podbods. This episode is our now regular biweekly freeplay which is a bit of a nontraditional takeover. On the pod, we continue hosting duties with @aaronheffefin once again in the guest seat. Aaron is a very polite guest and he's decided to bring a brilliant selection of beer for us to sample. We spend time breaking down Aaron's newfound love of beer and we ask what he's currently got ranked a...

Hi podefenders! Your planet needs you to listen to this very important public service announcement... about Combat defence games! We've invited along our friend, who's actually flown a plane, Aaron Hefferin. He specialises more in beer nowadays so we've decided to mix both of these things together on the pod. Earth Defense Force 2 (PS Vita) and Ace Combat X (PSP) get put through their paces in our...

Hey podgoers! Its-a-us, The LLVL Bros! Who saw this coming? In our now fortnightly freeplay week, both Fazz and Rich pick some of the heaviest hitters around... Pokemon Yellow (Gameboy) and Super Mario World ( Via Switch, Nintendo Online). We won't lie... these are the kind of games we love chatting on about endlessly. Almost as endless as the first time you enter Mount Moon... We manage to cram a...

Hi Podgoers. We're back in the spare room podbooth this week as Rich has recovered from Covid although Fazz is struggling with some lung goo of some type or other. We might need a cough button! This week we grapple with the past time of wrestling. We discover that we really like talking about wrestling even if we're not really experts in the field. It's almost like this is an amateur production......

Hey ho, LEGO! Hey ho, LEGO! This week we take a look at the Telltale games LEGO series. Unfortunately this is another covid-esque podcast for us due to Rich's ongoing illness. Don't worry, we'll be "building back better" (it works on so many levels) soon enough but until then 'brick' with us... I'm really sorry. Anyway... Indy vs Gandalf, Marion vs Galadriel, Salah vs Bilbo baggins. Its a showdown...

Welcome to another edition of the podcast. This is the '2020 throwback where one of us has Covid-19 and we podcast like isolated amateurs' edition... Let's skip over that and throw it back even further... Let's throw it all the way back to 2005 when Burnout Legends (PSP) and Need for Speed: Most Wanted were released. Let's then throw it forward some of the way but not all of the way... Aim for 201...

Hi Podgoers. Episode 25 sees us, once again, dip into our monthly secret freeplay week where both of the co-host's choose a game to review and our counterpart arbitrarily scores it out of 10 based on the accuracy/strength of our reviews. We're also joined once again by our good friend, Kyle Taylor who barely manages to stay awake during our reviews. Foreboding omens indeed! Nevermind. Let's see if...

Greetings Podgoers This week, we continue our summer of sport at LLVL HQ and this time we are joined by @kyle.taylor.589583, British American Football Association Flag Commissioner. KT is a dear friend of ours who founded @leedssamurai where we all met many moons ago. We'll be using Kyle's wealth of knowledge about American Football to help us dig in on the Madden franchise. We take a look back at...

Grüezi Mitenand once again podgoers. This is part two of our odyssey through football fanship. We're once again joined by host of The 15 Minute Swiss Football Podcast and regular contributor to The Square Ball, Paddy Gunn. This week we start by talking about which football teams we support and why. And a lot of the time we are asking our teams 'JUST WHY?!?' We swiftly move on from supporting teams...

Grüezi Mitenand Podgoers Welcome to part one of a special set of podcasts where we take an in depth look at the beautiful game through the lens of EA Sport's FIFA series. We've had to hit the transfer market for a big target man to help us out with some footballing knowledge. Luckily, we've managed to find Paddy Gunn on a Bosman hailing all the way from Switzerland. Paddy is an absolute expert in...