Psitanium Mine

Starfield is a big game… too big, you could say. In fact, Starfield has so many things going on that it’s hard to explain exactly what you do in the game, but let us discuss what stood out after my 100+ hours of playing Bethesda’s new sandbox.

It’s been awhile since we had a Psitanium Mine. To make up for it, wwe are pleased to announced a whole month of space game episodes. It shall be called… SPACEMBER!!! During December, each week we will feature a big space game, including Starfield, Prey, Breathedge, Dead Space and the Mass Effect trilogy. Merry Spacemas everyone!!!

Go on a hike up Hawk Peak with your anthropomorphic bird protagonist Claire while collecting golden feathers to take you even higher. All in the service of getting cell reception to call home. Let's discuss a lighter, shorter game than we normally do as a nice change of pace.

Metroidvanias are cropping up more often now and it’s a welcome return to a great genre. F.I.S.T. is such a title with the added benefit of featuring an anthropomorphic rabbit with a giant mechanical fist on his back. Sounds great, right?

We here at Psitanium Mine are connoisseurs of fine Borderlands content. As such, we proudly present the fantasy-infused looter shooter Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. Gearbox gives us magic, dragons, pirates, unicorns, hand crossbows and so much more as we cross the overworld and hunt down The Dragon Lord. How does it stack up to other titles in the series? What works better and what features are missing...

It’s always a pleasure to play a nice management sim and in this episode we discuss Tavern Master. Here we will build out our tavern, make a hotel, cook some food and host some distinguished dignitaries. Can we get the entire medieval town drunk? Well, yeah, but can we make a profit doing so? Still working on that.

It’s a good old-fashioned demo round-up! Yeehaw! On this Psitanium Mine, we hit the streets as a cat in Little Kitty, Big City. Then we build the untamed wilderness one tile at a time in Above Snakes. We find out what would happen if Vampire Survivors and Hades in Death Must Die! Finally, we get to live the dream of befriending dinosaurs in the cozy game Paleo Pines.

Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game ever. Skyrim is but a fraction it’s size. Oblivion could fit in Daggerfall’s pocket. But the problem is that the game is very old. Luckily, a Unity version was made a few years ago, in an attempt to update the game for modern audiences. But can the old-school Daggerfall survive the modern gamer… i.e. Me? Let’s find out.

And here we are, with my top 10. Well, the other 10. But the top 5 I swear is the real top 5. I'm not good at ranking things. What games stuck with me through all these years? Watch to find out.

Do you ever get depressed with the current state of games? I did toward the beginning of the year and it led me to put together a list of my favorite games of all time. Make a note that this does not mean the games I think are the best, but my personal favorites. This is part 1, handling numbers 20-11, although we're playing very fast and loose with our numbering system here.

So, recently I stumbled into my Amazon Games account that I barely remember having. Come to find out I had many games ready to claim and, on a lark, I thought I would try playing some of them. On this episode, we are going to look at Kardboard Kings, Grime and Abandon Ship… for better or worse. Gonna have to check out the episode to find out which is which.

Farming is always better with magic and Homestead Arcana delivers in that regard. So, let's grow some crops, obsessively tend to them, talk to a cat and throw on a plague doctor mask to explore an infected world. Oh, the places you'll go... on a broomstick.

Make my boners grow! Boneraiser Minions is sort of like Vampire Survivors but with summoning boney boyz. Does it work though? Well…

We now return to the cozy life sim with No Place Like Home, a game about returning to an Earth covered in trash… so everything is basically the same. Ellen comes to look for her grandfather and does some tidying up along the way, building a farm and battling spider robots. Just another day in the post-apocalypse.

Atomic Heart is what happens if you took the concept of Bioshock and placed it in the post-WW2 Soviet Union. And it feels like the Russian version of a dystopic alternate history. To some degree, it works, and yet in many others, it falls short. So, what went right and wrong and is it actually Russian propaganda?

Finally back from our break and so we must discuss one of the greatest games of all-time: Doritos Crash Course. Get ready to crash, crunch, corn chip and crash again in this interactive dystopic game show. Dark, foreboding, probably a psychological horror, shaped like a triangle, covered in cheese dust, we look into the most intense piece of product integrated media I played in March.

And so the time has come to rank all the games released in 2022 that I played and this is going to take awhile. There are 31 games on the list this year and that is even after some paring down from games I didn't play very much (listed in the episode), demos of upcoming games and some top releases I have not gotten to try yet. There is just so much to go through, so let's just get into it.

It’s the start of a brand new year! Let’s ring in 2023 with a nice, light episode discussing the entire Assassin’s Creed series spanning over a decade. Yes, this Psitanium Mine goes into the origins behind the series, the story of the Assassins and Templars, the evolution of the games through the years and where the series goes from here. Really light podcast for the start of the year.

Move over 12 Days of Christmas, Psitanium has 12 Months of Livestreams. Months are more than days. Most of the games played on stream were not made into Psitanium Mine episodes, so this is an opportunity to talk about all the games and whether it was good or not.

The amount of Metroidvania titles of late have been a bit lacking, but the number of games inspired by Dark Souls have erupted. Ghost Song is one of the games that tries to take elements from both genres to make something new. But are they the best elements? How do the two types of games work together? Will my love of one genre outweight my frustration with the other? We dig deep into those questi...

As we get over our Thanksgiving turkey coma, it seems like a good time to look at This Land is My Land, a game where you play a native warrior fighting against westward expansion. If that seems like fun to you, well, hold your horses. Besides the problematic elements around the theme and development, which we will discuss, there are some technical issues and choices that seem odd. So, what does th...

Sometimes I try games that seem like they might be fun but end up being nothing I wish to continue playing. Many of them will wear out their welcome in under an hour. Here are a few examples of the games I played this year that went by so fast... because I stopped playing them.

While I don't play many scary games, I have come across scary moments in otherwise normal games. You can almost feel it in the way the tone shifts from one of feeling powerful to helpless. Sometimes it creeps up on you and sometimes it jumps up into your face and screams. We'll discuss a few of those from games I have played and beware some spoilers for: Halo, Control, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloo...

From it's early roots in 1990s CRPGs to the modern open-world incarnations, Fallout has been a staple of the video gaming industry for decades. On this episode of Psitanium Mine, we're going to look at the origins of Fallout from the time it diverged from Wasteland, the time that Interplay spent making CRPGs and other experimental projects, the Bethesda era, cancelled entries in the series and wha...

And so, we step into the degrading footwear of Norman Reedus in the game Hideo Kojima really wanted to make. Death Stranding is a game where you do a bunch of walking so you can deliver packages across a broken world. Watch out for rocks… very small rocks. A very surreal and unique experience, but is it fun?