Purely Academic with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman

It’s another grab-bag style week, as Sean and Jonathan give updates on their progress in Red Dead Redemption 2, Jonathan reviews the outstanding Tetris Effect for PS4, and we go over some recent weird news about Final Fantasy XV. Jonathan tells the story of his nearly-doomed trip to Illinois to see a concert, and Sean gives us a mini-lecture on the (surprisingly gay) delights of Herman Melville’s...

This week brought us another disappointing episode of Doctor Who, a lot more time with Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption II, and the final Nintendo Direct for next month’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. We talk about all of this and more, going through all the announcements from Masahiro Sakurai in Nintendo’s event, continuing to be depressed about Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who writing, and discussing how...

The biggest game of 2018 has arrived in Rockstar’s long-awaited Red Dead Redemption 2, and after a solid weekend of play, we give our initial, spoiler-free impressions of this massive, wildly ambitious sequel. It’s an amazing game so far, almost mind-bogglingly vast in scope yet surprisingly intimate in tone and story. We break down what we’ve seen so far, while also grappling with the latest news...

It’s a calm before the storm kind of week, as we prepare for the biggest video game of the year next week in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is galloping into stores upon a trail of controversy after comments about Rockstar’s working conditions in an interview last week. We break down all that news, discuss Netflix’s move to start cancelling their Marvel shows, and do a good bit of Dragon Ball talk –...

Doctor Who continues its new season this week with “The Ghost Monument,” an episode that improves on the premiere, but also reveals some real limitations in Chris Chibnall’s writing style. We discuss the episode in depth, including the new opening credits, TARDIS design, and more. But before that, we also chat more about Dragon Quest XI, Jonathan reviews Damien Chazelle’s First Man and talks about...

Our favorite TV show is back, as Doctor Who returns for its 11th modern season (37th overall!), with a new Doctor in Jodie Whittaker, a new showrunner in Chris Chibnall, plus new companions, a new composer, and an entirely new look. The entire show has effectively regenerated, and the first episode, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” in a promising if imperfect start. We give it the usual in-depth tre...

We really live up to the podcast’s name this week, covering a wide assortment of stuff, including a large grab bag of video game, TV, and movie news from the past week. From the sudden closure of Telltale Games to trailers and announcements from the Tokyo Game Show to the launch of Nintendo’s online service to Sony’s surprise unveiling of the PlayStation Classic, this week brought a lot of surpris...

This week, we dive deep with one of the best video games of the year: Insomniac’s Spider-Man for PS4. We break down the story, the gameplay, the open world, the characters, and much more, building on our spoiler-free discussion from last week to explore what makes this a new standard-bearer for the superhero genre in video games. This discussion has spoilers aplenty, but we give fair warning befor...

As a special bonus episode this week, we wrap up our recent retrospective journey through Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man films with our in-depth discussion of the controversial Spider-Man 3. Though a record-breaking commercial hit, the film was widely considered a creative disappointment upon release, and its reputation has only soured more and more in the decade since. Is that reputation fully d...

It was an amazing week for video games, as Marvel’s Spider-Man and Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age both launched on the PS4, and after spending an unhealthy amount of time playing as much of them as possible, we’ve got spoiler-free impressions of both. Jonathan gives his thoughts on the early hours of Dragon Quest, Sean sings some more praise for Yakuza Kiwami 2, and we both gush over th...

After years of incessantly mentioning this movie in top 10 lists and while reviewing other superhero films, it is finally time for a full, in-depth retrospective of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, the greatest superhero movie of all time. As we did last week with our look back at the original Raimi film, we’re preparing for the launch of Insomniac’s PS4 Spider-Man by revisiting some of our favorite Spid...

With Insomniac’s highly-anticipated Spider-Man game swinging onto the PS4 next month, we thought now would be the perfect time to revisit some of our favorite superhero films of all time: Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy from the early 2000s, starting this week with the original Spider-Man from 2002. In many ways, this film is the template for the superhero boom we’re living in right now, so thoroug...

Last week, on our special 250th podcast, we began counting down our Top 10 Favorite Games of All Time. We did this once before, way back in 2013, but with 5 years and the better part of an entire console generation having passed, we thought now would be a great time to revisit this topics and remake our personal video game canons. We covered #10 through #6 on each of our lists last week, and this...

250 is a big number. It’s a lot of episodes. It represents somewhere in the vicinity of 750 hours of podcast recording, better known as one full month’s worth of time. And for the occasion, we are revisiting one of our oldest topics: Our Top 10 Favorite Games of All Time. We originally did this topic for episodes 55, 56, and 57 of the podcast, back in 2013, before the launch of the PS4 and one of...

2018 marks the 5-year anniversary of Naughty Dog’s masterpiece The Last of Us, and with Part II on the horizon and having made a big splash at E3 this summer, we thought now was the perfect time to look back on the game that closed out the previous console generation, but in many ways presaged the major creative trends of this one. Alongside guest Thomas Lack, Sean and Jonathan go in depth reevalu...

We dive deep into one of Hollywood’s best and most interesting modern franchises this week with the Mission: Impossible series. The latest in the Tom Cruise action series, Christopher McQuarrie’s Fallout, is out this week, and we gush enthusiastically over its greatness at length. But as Sean recently went through the first five films for the first time, we also talk about those as well, setting t...

What looked like it might have been a quiet week for the podcast turned out to be a very busy one, as a surprisingly eventful Comic-Con brought big news and reveals for Doctor Who, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the wildly schizophrenic state of DC’s film and TV slate, ranging from the awesomeness of getting Batman The Animated Series on Blu-ray to the unintentional hilarity of the awful Titans trai...

This week, one of our biggest projects of 2018 comes to a close as we complete our journey through the original six Star Wars films with Episode VI – Return of the Jedi. Easily among the most iconic pieces of mainstream Hollywood blockbuster history, Return of the Jedi is a fascinating experience to watch and discuss in this context, as it represents some of the best and some of the worst Star War...

Marvel’s third film of the year arrived this week with Ant-Man & The Wasp, an imperfect and slight film that is nevertheless an absurd amount of fun. We give it our traditional in-depth treatment, but before that, Sean pays homage to two recently deceased creative giants who have had a big influence on him – Spider-Man creator and renowned comics artist Steve Ditko, and science-fiction giant H...

It’s a good-old fashioned grab-bag this week, as we cover a week’s worth of news – including Doctor Who getting a new composer, Halo coming to TV, and Sony’s continued refusal to play nice with others – and discuss the strange grab-bag of old and new games we’ve been diving into to escape the dumpster fire that is America in 2018. We’ve both been replaying The Last of Us, and find ourselves more i...

This week, we return to the world of Star Wars in our ongoing series of in-depth retrospectives on the original six films, this time arriving at the best and most iconic Episode of them all: The Empire Strikes Back, a sequel that not only defined much of what we now think of as Star Wars, but created a sequel template that countless Hollywood franchises have since followed. For as widely appreciat...

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey turns 50 this year, and in celebration, Warner Bros has been touring a brand new 70mm print of the classic film around the United States, which arrived here in Denver last week. It’s a marvelous presentation of a masterful film, and we thought we’d take the opportunity to dive deep with one of the greatest films ever made, in one of the most enjoyable and en...

The third day of E3 2018 shows brought us Nintendo’s showcase, which was almost entirely focused on the reveal of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for Nintendo Switch. The game looks like it will deliver the goods and then some – but did the show need to spend over 25 minutes diving into such extreme minutiae? We answer this question and any more as we consider Nintendo’s offerings, before diving into s...

Day 2 of E3 2018 brought us big showcases from Sony and Ubisoft, and a completely baffling non-event from Square Enix, and we recap and analyze all of it on today’s show. We dive deep with the big looks at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Beyond Good and Evil 2, Kingdom Hearts 3, The Last of Us Part II, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, Spider-Man, and much more, celebrate Ubisoft’s awesome dancing pan...

It’s that time of the year again: E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, has kicked off in Los Angeles, and we’re doing daily podcasts this week to catch up on all the news, announcements, gaffes, demos, and reveals from each of the major press conferences. This weekend saw EA, Microsoft, and Bethesda each take their turn at bat, and they’re the focus of our Day 1 podcast. EA saw our first in-dept...