Player 2's Podcasts

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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...

With Alan Wake 2 not only proving to be a much more out-there, creatively risqué outing than the 2010 game it follows on from, we decided that it was perhaps time to take a moment to express some appreciation for those moments when games get weird. Also, we spoke about horror stuff last episode, so that’s off of the table. This discussion ends up spanning a good number of games and bounces quite l...

It’s getting darker, the air is cooling down and… wait. This is Australia? Well, in that case the air is getting warmer and time has fragmented into a half a billion different zones. In general, though, it’s not seasonally spooky at all, but since the Northern Hemisphere apparently gets to decide when festive things happen for the rest of us, it is nonetheless time to delve into horror games and l...

It is that time of the year again folks, time to join the Player 2 crew on the PAX floor to talk about all of the goodies they ran across while fighting off the infamous PAX Pox. There are Bears in Space, Combat Wombats and Italian Plumbers with Elephantits, it is a veritable zoo of fun. Matt hosts this massive cast of P2 favourites including Jenn, Renee, Stephen, Matto and Jess and all of them go...

This episode represents a scheme that has been a long time coming.  Hewso nicks off to Italy for an overdue vacation, making sure that Tim absolutely be present for each and every episode. Then, upon his return, Ken declares to good holiday games might make a fabulous topic for the next episode! Also, Hewso can only record on a night when Tim can’t make it – effectively removing his ability to mak...

What a year this is turning out to be; certainly a unique one for the annals of gaming. Here we have a year that may be setting a new kind of benchmark for cross-generation viability, where things that feel truly new and shiny are still not as regular as we've been conditioned to expect, but at the same time we have seen an absolutely massive swathe of meaty, single-player experience arrive with e...

Let's get this out of the way right now: Geoff Keighly needs up his security game (but otherwise he handled the incident as well as can be expected) and Sony's streaming-only handheld thing is a bit cheaper than feared, but still seems a bit silly. There. Done. We can get to focusing on some actual games now. Afterall, it is called Gamescom, and it also just happens to be what the crew is discussi...

We got the episode number correct this time around, which we'll put down as a pretty strong opening. This is appropriate, as Tim, Ken and Rob spent the latter half of this particular episode picking out some games that really do put their best foot forwards and talking about what it is that makes their opening moments stand out in a sea of tens of thousands of videogames. Among other things, we le...

Four people! Count, 'em! Four! We've filled all of the chairs for this one and space got so tight that fighting almost broke out! We say almost, of course, because Adam actually took charge of this one and, frankly, he is kind of jacked in a way that the other three simply aren't. The other three in question would be Tim, Ken, and newcomer Renee. But Adam was put in charge, and so the fighting the...