Purely Academic with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman

We cover a lot of ground in this week’s episode, from news including multiple weird Spider-Man  announcements (movie and game) to a discussion on the state of movie theaters and releases amidst the pandemic, plus some new game impressions and a big bag of listener mail! To start, Sean gives some early thoughts on Genshin Impact,  the Chinese free-to-play game that mixes Breath of the Wild  with Ga...

After an unplanned two-month hiatus, Weekly Suit Gundam – our sister podcast exploring the wide and wonderful world of Mobile Suit Gundam  – is finally back, with a big in-depth review and discussion of Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory,  the OVA series from 1991 that provides some of the highest highs and the lowest lows in the entire Gundam franchise, and makes for one of the best critical discussion...

This week brought maybe the best gaming showcase event we’ve seen all year, as Sony not only unveiled the price and release date of the PlayStation 5, but also showed off the Demon’s Souls remake, gave us a good look at Spider-Man: Miles Morales,  and most surprisingly, unveiled Final Fantasy XVI.  It was a heck of a show, even if the pre-orders that followed were a disaster, and altogether, we’re...

It’s been a big couple of weeks for video game news, from Nintendo unveiling all their plans for Mario’s 35th anniversary to Xbox (finally!) unveiling the Series S and their next-gen launch dates and pricing, to another round of announcements from Ubisoft. We break down all of that and more, including a check-in on the state of movie releases in the US for the rest of 2020. Before all that, we als...

This has been a rough, difficult week in a rough, difficult year, and the sudden loss of Chadwick Boseman, best known for playing King T’Challa in Marvel’s Black Panther,  made it all the more wrenching. We start today’s show by playing tribute to the late actor and the heroic, inspirational legacy he left behind, before moving on to discussing our lives teaching in public schools and at the Unive...

After travel and a giant inland hurricane in Iowa delayed our recording two weeks in a row, we are finally back with another jam-packed episode, full of life updates, news, and more! Jonathan talks about recording from his fancy new computer and making the switch from Mac to Windows, showing his brother Kurosawa movies, and getting into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,  while Sean takes us on a trip...

Our latest and possibly final entry in “Not-E3 2020” came this week with Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase, where they unveiled Halo: Infinite and detailed many other games coming to the Series X and Game Pass. It was certainly a compelling pitch for the latter, but did it do anything to pitch us on the fancy new console itself? We go in depth recapping the entire show, before settling in for a long...

After giving some quick first impressions of Sucker Punch’s outstanding Ghost of Tsushima  for PS4, this episode is fully dedicated to one long-awaited topic: Final Fantasy VII.  This year’s PS4 remake, yes, but also the PS1 original, and the PSP spin-off Crisis Core,  and the depressingly abysmal movie Advent Children.  We talk about it all, having both finally journeyed through the complete Fina...

Not-E3 2020 continued this weekend with Ubisoft Forward, where the company showed off Watch Dogs Legion, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and announced (well, sort of, after many leaks) Far Cry 6. And it came under a cloud of terrible press for the French-Canadian gaming behemoth, as months’ worth of sexual harassment and toxic work environment allegations have resulted in one of the most dramatic corpo...

This week’s episode is a real humdinger of tonal and topical shifts. We start with some Final Fantasy VII  chat – Sean having just played Crisis Core,  the PSP spin-off, and Jonathan having just finished this year’s Remake  – Jonathan reviews Minecraft Dungeons,  and we discuss how weirdly prescient Steven Spielberg’s Jaws  feels in a moment of profound government incompetence. For the news, we di...

To close out the anniversary month celebrations for our sister series, Weekly Suit Gundam, we’ve got a surprise review of a (rightfully) forgotten piece of the Gundam  universe: G-Saviour,  the live-action Canadian TV movie from 2000 that brought Gundam to live-action for its 20th anniversary, in spectacularly awful fashion. Boasting awful production values, bargain bin acting, a script straight o...

Naughty Dog’s latest, darkest, and most ambitious game to date has arrived in The Last of Us Part II,  and today’s episode is a long, in-depth conversation about a game that is difficult to digest, but absolutely worth the effort of engaging with and discussing. The first game is, of course, one of our favorites – it was on both our Top 10 Games of All Time lists – so this sequel has been hotly an...

Our sister podcast Weekly Suit Gundam,  a show exploring the wide and wonderful world of Mobile Suit Gundam,  started out this time last year as a summer bonus miniseries. It’s a full-fledged show of its own now, and in this episode, we celebrate a full year of Gundam podcasts by taking a look back at everything we’ve discussed so far. We’ve reviewed 11 Gundam  shows or movies to date – Gundam 79,...

It’s a short but sweet episode this week as we cover a few pieces of news, including the passing of beloved actor Ian Holm, best known for his definitive portrayal of Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings  trilogy. We also break down another ‘Not-E3 2020 event’ as EA gave one of their worst, least substantive press conferences ever, and rant about American movie theatres wildly irresponsible move...

This week brought the biggest entry yet in “Not E3 2020,” a series of events that would have taken place at E3 2020, if E3 2020 were thing. This time, it was the formal ‘reveal’ event for Sony’s PlayStation 5, with a big swath of game announcements – including a new Spider-Man, Hitman 3,  the long-awaited Demon’s Souls  remake, and Horizon: Forbidden West  – and the unveiling of the console’s phys...

This week’s episode is primarily the topic from today’s Weekly Suit Gundam,  our Mobile Suit Gundam-themed sister series, which turns one year old today as we review 1999’s Turn A Gundam,  one of the greatest and most thematically rich corners of the entire Gundam  universe. But we also take some time at the top of the show to discuss the protests that have grown across the United States and abroa...

This week, we’re sharing an episode of our sister series, Weekly Suit Gundam,  where we talk about one of the least known and most underrated corners of the Gundam universe, After War Gundam X.  Running for only 39 episodes, its shortened run marked the end of four continuous years of the franchise holding the same time slot on Japanese television. But it’s also a special, woefully underappreciate...

We’ve got a shorter episode this week, but it’s packed with fun topics, including Jonathan getting a fancy new 4K TV and reviewing the Xbox Elite Controller Series 2, thoughts on finally playing 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey,  and Sean’s joy revisiting Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack  as an adult. For the main news topics, we discuss the announcement that HBO Max is producing the ‘Zack Snyder...

On today’s bonus episode, we’re doing something different. A few weeks ago, Jonathan teased he was working on a paper for his phD program about Star Wars,  and more specifically, the weird, disturbing relationship to nostalgia in the sequel trilogy films, along with other 30-year-later ‘legacy sequels’ that are now flooding the market. The essay was actually informed quite a bit by the discussion...

It’s a jam-packed episode this week, as we’re joined by Jonathan’s brother Thomas, fresh off an entire year spent in Japan, to discuss a week’s worth of news, a whole lotta stuff, and a very silly surprise topic at the end. First, we talk a bit more about Jonathan watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars,  and take a look back at the original Genndy Tartakovsky’s original Clone Wars  from 2003. We also...

This week promised the much-hyped first look at next-generation gameplay footage from Xbox, but the event was…well, underwhelming, to say the least. A lot of promising titles were introduced, but with almost no gameplay to speak of, how did Xbox and their partners set expectations so disastrously wrong? We talk about all that and more, after a big Star Wars  hour at the top of the show. The final...

This is a week where we absolutely live up to the title of the show, with a crazy glut of random stuff to discuss, from Sean translating a video from Gundam’s 40th anniversary event, to Jonathan reaching a milestone reading One Piece,  to Sean telling us about an awesome new anime called Keep Your Hands off Eizouken,  to Jonathan talking about the wonders of finally playing Bayonetta,  and so on b...

After a brief discussion of games we’ve been playing like Bayonetta  and Yakuza 5  – and a preview of a Star Wars- themed paper Jonathan is writing with a very weird title – it’s back into the wide, wacky world of Gundam,  as we finally reach  Mobile Suit Gundam Wing,  the 1995 anime that finally brought Gundam to the mainstream in the West when it premiered on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block in 2...

It was a light week in video game news, though a report about improved working conditions at Rockstar Games and some insight into Sony’s production strategy for the PS5 gives us a chance to talk about how games are made and what the future is looking like with next-gen consoles. We also talk about the games we’ve been playing during the shut-in, with Sean returning to Kamurocho for Yakuza 5  and J...

It’s a fun grab-bag style episode this week, as we have one big ticket news item – the reveal of the PlayStation 5 controller – and a lot of other random topics, including some great listener mail! First, we tell some more stories from life in the Coronavirus lockdown, including Jonathan drowning his classmates in Terraria.  Then, we look back on the masterpiece that is Capcom’s Resident Evil 4, ...