The Game Show

Happy Halloween from The Game Show. Jack Burton, Jess, Logan, and Darria play Phasmophobia together for the first time while Break hosts from the van. Four haunted locations, three total wipes, one correct guess. Obake, Deogen, Demon, Revenant. Plus Halloween costumes, a tribute to Patrick Stewart, and everyone’s plans for the weekend. Back to the normal time next week, Wednesday 9 PM Central. Mor...

Games that weren’t supposed to scare you, but did. Jess and Break go through the creepiest moments in non-horror games: Big Boo’s Haunt, Lavender Town, Sonic CD’s hidden message, the Broodmother, the Bottom of the Well, SA-X, the Phantom Train, Skyrim’s House of Horrors, the Happy Mask Salesman, Shinra Mansion, 2300 AD, Stardew Valley’s dark shrine, the Guardians, the Rat Man dens, Ravenholm, and...

Clone consoles are everywhere now. Some are good. Some are junk that looks good in a listing. Tonight Ace joins The Game Show to sort out which is which. Ace designed the Mega Amp, the audio mod for the Genesis and Mega Drive, and wrote the Sega-16 guide on Genesis hardware revisions. He spent years building arcade cores for MiSTer at the chip level, including Arkanoid, Iron Horse, Jackal and Neme...

What game came in the box? This week we go console by console, from the NES to the Switch 2, and pick our favorite pack-in game for each one. The classics are all here: Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Sonic, Wii Sports. So are the misfires like Keith Courage in Alpha Zones and the oddballs like Hexic on the 360 and Astro’s Playroom on the PS5. Jess makes the case for Pokémon Colosseum, Jet Set Radio Fu...

Hot takes night. Break, Jack Burt0n, Jess, Logan, and Darria defend their spiciest gaming opinions: GameCube was the best of its generation, long games are overrated, Souls games aren't a flex, and piracy helped the industry. Plus a clip from the very first Game Show in 2002 where Break predicted Microsoft's whole playbook. News: Suda51 goes independent, Microsoft patents ads after boss fi...

The full crew is back and the topic is video game endings. We pick the best endings ever made, from Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid to Portal, Final Fantasy VI, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Subnautica, Alan Wake 2 and a surprisingly emotional case for Mario Kart Wii. Then a lightning round on the worst, including Mass Effect 3, Mega Man X6 and whoever that was pretending to be Chris Redfield in R...

Sir Randall of Ye Old Press joins Break to talk about building physical big box editions for digital-only games. Hollow Knight: Silksong. Ocarina of Time on PC. Warframe. Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters. He designs the box, prints the art, and puts a disc in it. We get into how he makes them, why Limited Run and First Press pushed him into doing it himself, his official Colossal Cave collector's...

We gave box art a full episode. Jess, Jack, and Logan brought picks, the rules were loose, and Jess found a cover so cursed it stopped the show. First the news. A new Nintendogs is rumored for Switch 2. The Blizzard union ratified its first contract covering 1,900 employees. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe got eight-player split-screen, Mario Kart World added free SNES tracks, Metroid Ravenous got a trailer,...

The crew heads back to the arcade this week. Everyone brought a list of their favorite arcade games and the memories that go with them. Break's picks run from Konami beat 'em ups like TMNT and X-Men to shmups like Truxton, Radiant Silvergun, and Metal Slug, plus a deep cut called The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy that you've probably never played. Jack came in with fifteen picks of his own...

Tonight we’re talking cheat codes and the Game Genie. How they worked, why they worked, the arms race between publishers and kids trying to break their games. 🎮 About The Game Show Running since 2002, one of the earliest gaming podcasts around. Season 13 continues our look at consoles, industry news, and the games shaping it all. 🔗 Links BreakmanX: https://breakmanx.com Discord: linked at breakm...

This week the crew ranks sequels that beat the original — Mario, Sonic, Metroid, Resident Evil, Metal Gear, Zelda, Pokémon, Horizon, and more. Some picks are easy calls, some might start an argument. Games discussed: Super Mario Bros. 2, Sonic 3, Pokémon Crystal, Jedi Survivor, Mega Man 2, Mario Kart 8, Alan Wake 2, Super Metroid, Jet Set Radio Future, Horizon Forbidden West, A Link to the Past, R...

We're counting down some of the biggest console failures in gaming history — and we actually played most of them ourselves. The Phantom, Infinium Labs' infamous vaporware console that never shipped a single unit. Gizmondo, the handheld secretly bankrolled by the Swedish mafia. Nokia's N-Gage, the "taco phone" you had to hold sideways to make calls. And the Ouya, the Kickstart...

The greatest GameCube games of all time, ranked and argued about by the crew that started this show on that very console. Rogue Leader, Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, Eternal Darkness, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Beyond Good and Evil, Ikaruga, and a dozen more picks get debated — plus gaming news on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 hitting Switch 2, the Avatar Legends fighting game, and a Dungeons &amp...

The Sega 32X. The Xbox Kinect. Two of gaming's most infamous add-ons, separated by almost 20 years but united by the same core mistake: asking players to buy into a half-finished vision of the future. Tonight we dig into what these add-ons promised, why the hardware and timing worked against them, and what (if anything) they got right before getting left behind. Along the way we'll talk Se...

Who is the greatest video game villain of all time? Break and the crew rank the most evil, memorable, and downright unfair bosses in gaming history, from Dr. Wily and Bowser to Sephiroth, Kefka, GLaDOS, and beyond. Which villains actually earned their reputation? Which ones are overrated? And who takes the number one spot? The debate gets messy. New episodes every week.► MUSIC Opening: Project X –...

Some games bring people together. These are not those games. This week we’re counting down the local multiplayer classics that turned best friends into sworn enemies, one couch session at a time. From NBA Jam elbows to TMNT button-mashing betrayals, and Halo we get into why same-couch gaming bred the pettiest, most personal rivalries in the hobby. Screen-watching. Phantom controller “malfunctions”...

This week we also run the main event: every console launch from the NES to the PlayStation 3. One lineup at a time. NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Sega Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3. The games that made the first impression, the ones that aged well, and the ones everybody forgot. Before "podcast" was a word, th...

My childhood NES has been sitting in a box for years. This episode, Fenris Wolf Retro joins the show to talk through the full restoration, from the NESRGB V5 install to getting a console from 1988 looking and playing like new. We get into what makes these old machines worth saving, the quirks of original hardware, and why this particular NES means what it does to me. Watch Fenris do the actual mod...

The NES front loader has one fatal flaw: that blinking red light. Push a cart down, watch it strobe, blow on it, try again. Alex from BlueShell3D built the fix. The Nin10-Drawer swaps the worn out 72 pin connector for a toploader style slot and an extending drawer, so carts seat clean every time and pull out without the deathgrip. It even bypasses the lockout chip for region free play, no solderin...

The Game Show crew share their all-time favorite video game characters - the ones that shaped how they think about games, design, and storytelling. The Game Show has been running since September 28, 2002, predating the word "podcast." Season 13.Subscribe for new episodes weekly. Community: breakmanx.com/BMXcommunityForum has been running since 2003.#TheGameShow #BreakmanX #VideoGames #Re...

Remember when you had to actually earn the costume? When the second quest meant something? When Mew was a rumor at recess and not a code on GameFAQs? Tonight we’re getting into unlockables and post-game content. The bonus modes, the secret characters, the harder difficulty that opened up after the credits. The stuff that turned a 10-hour game into a 40-hour obsession. We’ll talk about why it worke...

Karl Urban put on the sunglasses last Friday. Mortal Kombat II just hit theaters and its the best video game movie in years, according to critics. So tonight on The Game Show, we go through 34 years of the most controversial fighting game ever made. From the 1992 arcade cabinet that made Congress mad and birthed the ESRB, all the way to Mortal Kombat 1 (2023) and the brand-new movie sequel. Every...

Tonight on The Game Show, we’re cracking open the archive of gaming’s most beloved bugs and the glitches that built speedruns, broke economies, launched congressional hearings, and turned accidents into legends. From the Minus World to MissingNo, from the Backwards Long Jump to Hot Coffee, from Halo 2 sword flying to Skyrim’s flying giants, we’re going era by era through the moments games broke an...

Some boss fights you beat. Others beat you so hard they live in your head rent-free twenty years later. This week on The Game Show, the crew goes around the table with our all-time favorite boss fights — the ones that raised the bar, the ones that ruined our controllers, and the ones we’d fight again tomorrow. From old-school pattern-memorizers to modern cinematic showdowns, everybody brought a pi...

In 1997, I bought Final Fantasy VII. I beat Sephiroth in 60 hours. I spent another 40 breeding a gold chocobo. Today we’re ranking the mini-games that hijacked entire generations of gamers. From the Gold Saucer to the Chao Garden, Triple Triad to Gwent, Blitzball to Queen’s Blood — we dig through every generation to find the greatest mini-games ever hidden inside bigger games. Topics include: Fina...