Player 2's Podcasts

With PAX Australia now firmly in the rearview mirror for 2024, we thought that we might take a moment to consider what it is that actually keeps on drawing us to conventions, year in, year out. Both our panel members and the conventions themselves have changed somewhat notably over the years, and we are painfully aware that it’s not the ’90s any longer. As perhaps the only Player 2 regular to have...

For some reason, Hewso thought it might be a good idea to invite a bunch of freaks and weirdos into his hotel room while PAX was going on in Melbourne. Fine choice of city; questionable choice of behaviour. In any case, this is an unusual episode in the sense that it doesn’t follow the exact format of 90% of our shows, but it’s also usual in the sense that Matt basically always does something like...

With the way things are going in the world, getting stuck on a deserted tropical island or some unmapped alpine mountain my almost seem desirable. It’d probably hurt your gaming a bit, though. That said, imagination can be a fun thing to flex, and so we set some rules to discuss our desert island top 5 titles. This proved to be a pretty fun experiment, as the crossover between our absolutely most...

Who knows, by the time this is published and you're listening to it everything that there could possibly be to know about what we'll simply call the 'Switch 2' may have been leaked and everyone has already moved on to Microsoft officially announcing some kind of XBox handheld or branded partnership with other handheld gaming PCs. It's hard to keep pace with the speed of console news right now. Whi...

Big fish, little fish, cardboard box! Big fish, little fish, cardboard box! Ahem. Sorry. To strain this into a truly tortured metaphor, some games are big, some are little, and for a sizable part of the 90s they mostly came in cardboard boxes. Nintendo didn't give that shit up until the Gamecube. Anyway, with the world going (rightly) nuts over Astro Bot , an apparently smaller game that has becom...

Nein, Geoffory! Nein, nein, nein! We don’t need any more of these stage shows! Yes, your dress sneakers are lovely (and, I hope, comfortable), but it’s just been a couple of months since we last did this and we don’t always need multiple drinks after dessert. Nonetheless, the Keighly opening light extravaganza of trailers and flashing lights has successfully invaded Cologne, Germany, and with it a...

At the beginning of this century, Shenmue was listed in the ( honestly pretty corrupt ) Guinness Book of World Records as the most expensive videogame ever developed, with its protracted development cost sitting at around $80 million. Fast forward to the current generation, and Spiderman 2 is sitting at an eye-watering $300 million, over three times what its predecessor cost to develop. Is it any...

After looking at the flakey ashes left by our previous episodes, people’s dreams fluttering and dissolving in the air as the literal value of their words dissipates before our very eyes, we figured we needed to shift gears and try and find something at least a little greener to focus on for this one. Where did we land, exactly?  To put it very simply, we landed on the rise and rise of PC gaming. T...

TBD

It's a two-man show this week. But take heart, because it's the finest two men as Tim and Hewso take to the recording chairs to ensure that the fortnightly podcast goodness remains delivered on time! Okay... so maybe only one of the finest men; it's up to you, dear listener, to decide which as they talk about games like it's the mid '00s! We're still in a bit of a slow season, so we dug into a bag...

Hyyyyyype Traaaaaaaiiiiiiiiin! Somehow, it happened! Amid all of the disappointment and despair in the industry, we got a Summer (Winter) season of announcements and updates that actually got us a bit excited. 2025 is actually looking kind of badarse now. And that was before Metroid Prime 4 went and got shown in between the time when this episode was recorded and when this post was getting typed....

Do you feel it? That summer heat? All of that there scorching excitement layered in sunshine as a Bubble O' Bill melts its way down the paddlepop stick offering your hand short cool reliefe that will soon become a sticky annoyance? No? Yeah... calander events should probably stop using actual seasons in their titles. Summer Game Fest only happens in summer for half of the planet. That's what this...

You see, this Shaun fellow loves himself some kung fu. Tim, on the other hand, only knows what he has seen in a handful of movies, and so thought it fit to shove him into a pond because the master types in those movies aren’t exactually… nurturing tutors. That is to say that Shaun is in charge on this one! He’s joined by Nick, Renee and Tim as they talk about a few games they’ve played over the pa...

Remember how clever design decisions or visual tricks just blew your mind as a kid? Maybe you do, but in our case, these things are things that we actually only come to appreciate years after the fact. That’s what this episode of Player 2’s PixelCast is about: finally giving some due to games (and gaming-related things) that did cool or innovative things that we played back in our school days that...

It's all about that ookie-ookie waku-waku feeling as this latest PixelCast episode brings the fresh beats! Or maybe not, but there is some talk about music. Soundtracks, specifically. This is more a jukebox kind of a thing than it is about carefully composed scores. You know, good old radio-friendly tunes. We suspect that this is because Hewso wants to talk about the music in Brutal Legend. Or may...

Remember Demo 1? First of all, if you're too young to remember Demo 1, please grow old very fast and die. Now, for those of us who are starting to find the odd white hair... remember Demo 1? Those demo discs that came with the original PlayStation seemed so special at the time - as did those cover mount discs that sold official tie-in magazines to us for several years! Then demos seemed to mostly...

Things were simpler when we recorded the first ever PixelCast. Well, aside from how we kind of started at episode three for reasons that aren't worth going into here. In any case, the Rocksteady superhero game was surprisingly excellent, Microsoft seemed to have finally figured out the console market, and indie games were real goddamn indie games. And now? Look at how messy all of that has gotten...

In the interest of fun things such as, um, feeling very, very old, we decided to look back at another classic year in gaming for this episode. The year in question 2007? Many of us were underway in our careers, or at least moving out of home already at that point! How the hell could this already be considered retro!? Is Mario Galaxy somehow as old today as Super Mario Land was when Galaxy released...

We're 128! 128 bits!? Is this the episode of the Dreamcast and PS2!? Were either of those consoles truly 128 bit machines? The answer to those questions is no. Also, that answer doesn't really matter. We're here to chat RPG's today; specifically, we're supposed to be here to talk about what exactly makes a JRPG and if that genre label is even relevant today, but we kind of distracted and were prob...

With the current console generation finally getting its engine properly warmed up, we couldn’t help but stand back and realise that – damn, the PS5 and Xbox Series machines are over three years old already! Last generation, following the same timeframe, the PS4 Pro was out already! So, yeah… things feel like they’re moving slowly, so we decided to look back and see if a sense of technical leaps us...

Gurgle Somehow, we're already a whole month into 2024 and, despite living in a time of timid publishers being unwilling to gamble on many new ideas, wherein both Last of Us titles have been remastered for PS5 before we've even received a whisper of any new project that Naughty Dog may be working on, there still be a bunch of old properties that a few of us are left wondering why their shambling co...

A new year! A new podcast! This is a long one, too – after chewing his way through Starfield for th efinal quarter of 2023, it seems that Ken has found something that he is actually excited about in the form of a free-to-play title, of all things. Suffice to say, his enthusiasm here is actually a bit infectious! He’s not even the one steering the ship, here! That was Tim! Or, at least, that’s what...

The Player 2 PixelCast 124 – Sadistic Santa Will. Not. Die. Gather round boys and girls, let me bend your ear For it is time to give you a warning, a warning you must hear When Christmas comes to your place, forget the gifts and toys For an evil presence lurks about, filled with malicious ploys You see this devil in red takes joy in crushing all your fun By swapping all your lovely gifts with thin...

Another year, another white hair added to the beard. 2023 has been a peculiar ride, a unique mountain-valley-mountain-valley landscape of ups and downs within the world of games. It may well go down as simultaneously the best year to be playing them and the worst year to be making them.  This leaves us feeling a little bittersweet about celebrating what we enjoyed playing over the course of the ye...

And all at once, every news anchor and talk show host said that we're nearly at the end of 2023 and can you possibly believe it. Time is meaningless, but we're all somehow one year older and there have simply been far too many interesting games released this year for any single person to play. All of which kind of brings us nicely around to this, the one hundred and twenty-second episode of The Pl...