Purely Academic with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman

After touching base on the games we’ve been playing – including the original Diablo  and 2016’s Ratchet & Clank  remake – and discussing this week’s Bloomberg report about a Last of Us  PS5 remake and the state of Sony’s development priorities, we move on to another Weekly Suit Gundam topic, rounding out our triptych of Gundam 00  reviews with Mobile Suit Gundam 00 the Movie: A Wakening of the Tra...

The great Kaiju showdown of our time has arrived in Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla vs Kong,  the fourth film and grand culmination in their ongoing ‘MonsterVerse,’ and to celebrate, we’re not just reviewing this movie – we’re also going back to Round 1 of this particular match-up, discussing the original Toho King Kong vs Godzilla  from 1962! And that’s not all! We also dive into the other Legendary...

After covering a few pieces of recent news – including the trailer for James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad  and reports that Sony might be sunsetting digital game sales for PS3 and PS Vita – we dive right into our latest Weekly Suit Gundam  discussion, this time on the second season of the fantastic Mobile Suit Gundam 00.  The show has a lot to live up to in its back half, and we find it more than rise...

Better late than never, this week is our annual ‘Year in Preview’ episode, where we look over all the video games and movies coming in 2021 and assess what looks good ( New Pokemon Snap,  yay!), what looks bad (oh God, Disney’s Cruella  movie is real), what baffles us (who the hell thought Six Days in Fallujah  was a good idea?), and what’s likely to even come out (is Halo: Infinite  ever gonna be...

After a little break, we’re back with an episode full of exciting topics, from first impressions on the outstanding Yakuza: Like a Dragon  (now out on PS5, and which we’ll definitely do a full episode on soon), thoughts on the demise of Anthem  at Bioware, and most importantly, another Weekly Suit Gundam discussion, this time on Mobile Suit Gundam 00,  the series that brought Gundam into the era o...

Sean couldn’t be here this week, so Jonathan gets on mic and answers some listener mail, talking about his favorite recent music and most anticipated upcoming games and movies, giving recommendations for getting into classical Japanese cinema, and reflecting on Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk  by reading/making fun of a review he wrote in 2008 at age 15. There’s also a bevy of Gundam -related questions at the...

This week brought our first full-length Nintendo Direct since September 2019 (!), but was it any good? Do a few far-off announcements for 2022, a Mario Golf game, and a low-effort Zelda port make up for Nintendo’s months of erratic communication? We discuss all this and cover a few pieces of exciting Diablo  news from BlizzCon, before diving into our main topic, another Weekly Suit Gundam  discuss...

This week brought one great new video game in Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury  –a Nintendo Switch package including a Wii U classic and, in a wonderful surprise, a brand new 3D open-world Mario game – and two high-profile stories of bad behavior in Hollywood, with a number of accusations against Buffy the Vampire Slayer  creator Joss Whedon and Disney disinviting The Mandalorian  co-star Gina...

Our BATMAN ON FILM series continues with the film all you sadists in the audience have been waiting for us to suffer through: 1995’s BATMAN FOREVER, the third and, thus far, worst film incarnation of the Caped Crusader, marking a shark break from the dark and stylish Tim Burton films in favor of the garish colors, wild tonal inconsistency, and porn-quality cinematography of Joel Schumacher, terrib...

It’s a loose and laid-back week on the show as we catch up on life events, cover one weird and frustrating piece of news, and discuss a few really great games, including our first spoiler-free impressions of Hitman 3,  the triumphant capper to IO Interactive’s outstanding ‘World of Assassination’ trilogy, which has been one of our favorite series to discuss on the show ever since this incarnation...

Ranking at #2 and #5 on Sean and Jonathan’s respective Top 10 Games of 2020 lists, Vanillaware’s 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim  is undeniably one of the most singular gaming experiences of the last year – an incredibly compelling, blissfully confusing, wickedly intelligent mix of the visual novel, adventure game, and real-time strategy genres into one unique package that is absolutely unlike anything we...

Continuing our ongoing BATMAN ON FILM series, we arrive at the fourth theatrical Batman feature, the first animated one, and quite possibly the single best Batman film ever made: Batman: Mask of the Phantasm , a standalone feature based on the classic Animated Series, considered by many to be the definitive portrayal of The Dark Knight. Starring Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker,...

Today’s episode is another Weekly Suit Gundam  extravaganza, this time on the controversial Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny,  but before that, we also discuss this week’s abhorrent Presidentially-ordered insurrection at the US capital, and – in a lighter topic – Jonathan becoming infatuated with Genshin Impact,  Sean’s 2020 Game of the Year. Then it’s on to Gundam SEED Destiny,  a show that tries...

Our 10th year of podcasting kicks off with a look back at one of the very few things that was truly good in 2020: Video Games. While the world was falling apart, gaming, at least, delivered one of the best, broadest, and deepest years on records, with scores of titles we loved playing and reviewing throughout 2020, and today’s episode is our chance to look back on the best of the best, go deep wit...

For part 3 of our Batman on Film series, we move into the 90s with Tim Burton and Michael Keaton’s second outing with the character, the amazingly bizarre, deeply silly, and profoundly psychosexual Batman Returns.  It is one of the wildest, weirdest mainstream movies to ever come out of Hollywood, and also one of the best and boldest Batman films ever made – a gothic, expressionist, Freudian night...

Disney+’s outstanding Star Wars series The Mandalorian  brought its second season to a bold, surprising, and spectacularly satisfying conclusion this week, and we dive deep not only with this amazing episode, but also what it portends for the future of the series, where the saga of Din Djarin could go from here, and all the possibilities for Star Wars  TV moving forward. Before that, though, we al...

Today’s episode is absolutely jam-packed with entertainment news, after Warner Bros. decided to blow a hole in the theatrical market by announcing all their 2021 films will be released on struggling streamer HBO Max, and Disney held a 4-hour investor conference in which they announced or detailed 100+ TV series and movies, the vast majority heading to their (decidedly not struggling) streamer Disn...

This week, our 10-part critical retrospective BATMAN ON FILM continues, as we revisit each of the theatrical Batman features in advance of Matt Reeves’ upcoming The Batman  with Robert Pattinson. For Part 2, we’re looking at the birth of the modern superhero film genre with Tim Burton’s BATMAN from 1989, starring Michael Keaton as the caped crusader and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. It’s a fascinat...

Continuing from our first impressions of the PlayStation 5 last week, we dive deep with two of the biggest launch games: Bluepoint’s stunningly lavish remake of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls,  and Insomniac’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.  They’re two of the best launch titles we’ve ever seen, for very different reasons, and it’s a ton of fun to talk about all the intricate in-and-outs of Demon’s Soul...

After quickly catching up on two weeks of busy global happenings and personal events, and celebrating the life of the great Alex Trebek, we dive headfirst into our first impressions of Sony’s brand new next-generation gaming console, the PlayStation 5! With a blazing fast SSD, a slick and surprisingly fully-featured UI, and perhaps the best controller ever packaged with a home console, the PS5 fee...

This week’s episode was prerecorded a few days before the US election everyone reading this has already lived through, so after a few minutes spent catching up and reacting to multiple possible scenarios, we dive into the week’s main topic: A new episode of Weekly Suit Gundam,  wherein we review Mobile Suit Gundam SEED,  the first Gundam of the 2000s and one of the most broadly popular entries in...

Continuing our 350 episode celebration spectacular, we’re counting down our Top 10 Favorite Books of All Time. Last week, Jonathan talked about Sherlock Holmes, his love of old wooden ships, and words of wisdom from Hayao Miyazaki, while Sean told us about his favorite Shakespeare play, several landmark works of literature concerning the darkness of the human condition, and explained how Moby Dick...

For our latest milestone of 350 episodes – halfway to 700! – we add to our previous ‘canon’ lists – Top 10 Movies for Episode 200 , Top 10 Games for 250, and Top 10 TV Shows for 300 – with something a little bit different: Our Top 10 Favorite Books! Literature isn’t something we talk about a whole lot on this show, but it is of course a big part of our lives, especially for Sean, who got an Englis...

This week, we’re kicking off a new miniseries that’s been in the works for months – BATMAN ON FILM, a 10-part critical retrospective of the caped crusader’s theatrical film history, coming over the next year in advance of Matt Reeves’ The Batman  with Robert Pattinson, and at a time where the cultural conversation around policing in America has given us reason to re-evaluate the character and wher...

This week kicks off with Sean and Jonathan talking about some PS5 news, as the console got a full teardown and backwards compatibility detailed, before discussing Genshin Impact  and Hades in greater detail. Then we take a quick trip to Sean’s Beta Corner to talk Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War,  before diving into our main topic: Another Weekly Suit Gundam  discussion, this time about the 1996...