The #NOTplaying Podcast

They said it wouldn’t happen, that it was an integral part of the system and that they would never entertain the idea of selling the Xbox One without the Kinect Sensor/Camera thingie, but this all came from Microsoft, who have now 180’d on almost every part of the controversial strategy they laid out when the Xbox One was first announced. On the subject of announcements, we have the latest Call of...

Time for another update on the games that have been occupying our time over the past couple of weeks. First up - the multiple GOTY contender that is sure to most likely not be Goat Simulator, then we get all Political and Cultural and Historic in the post Brave New World version of Civilization V. Patrick explains to us how much Darkfield isn’t like being in a Dark Field, Iain explains what Firefa...

It might not be strictly speaking a videogame related story, but the Star Wars saga casts a significant enough shadow upon our medium of choice that the announcement of the Episode VII cast is sure to have an impact on the gaming landscape for years to come. At the very least we’ll be getting some ‘in-cannon’ entries from EA, whose 10 year exclusivity deal with Disney will benefit from the genius...

Virtual Reality is one of those things that has to be seen to be believed, so it’s only right that all three of us show regulars are now fully on board, having all recently descended upon Castle Patrick to test-drive his Oculus Rift Dev Kit (DK1). So most of this week’s show is devoted to our early impressions of the hardware and the experiences we’ve so far witnessed with it, but there’s still so...

On this week’s show we find ourselves all in the same physical location for once. The main purpose of which was (ironically) to check out all the virtual reality experiences currently available via Patrick’s Oculus Rift Dev Kit 1. We’ll share our thoughts about that on next week’s show, so in the meantime we’ll be digging into some of the more notable news headlines from the past couple of weeks,...

Following on from last week’s discussion about Oculus VR's Facebook acquisition, we are once again joined by Reverend Kyle to talk about some of the games we’ve been playing. Unsurprisingly, this includes some experimental VR titles such as Darknet, IO Moon and Asunder: Earthbound, before moving on to more conventional(?) fair such as The Stanley Parable, Titanfall and Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cr...

There may have been a report from America in last week's sorry excuse for an episode, but this week we have an actual American on the show to discuss the acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook. Reverend Kyle is the host of the Rev VR Podcast and part of the Road to VR team. He is possibly even more of a fan than our own Patrick, which is quite saying something, so it was a pleasure to have him on th...

Bit of an odd one this week. We weren't able to record a proper show, but we did get a report from Tim Diggle about his time at GDC in San Francisco the other week. Oh and Iain and Rob played some Titanfall and some of the audio from that is on here too. Apologies for the rant at the start, but it had to be done. Normal service should resume next week... Enjoy! To Check out other shows in the Coll...

Rob and Patrick are once again joined by Paul Barke to talk about the wholesome, purely educational merits of Obsidian's long-awaited South Park - The Stick of Truth, whilst on a turn-based RPG tip also checking in on the second Shadowrun Returns campaign: Shadowrun: Dragonfall. Paul catches us up on what's going in the world of petrol-fest, Project CARS and Rob has a round-up of all the mobile ga...

On this week’s show Rob and Patrick are joined by fellow game-dumper, Paul Barke to talk about some of the latest and greatest bits of videogame-related news on the planet, kicking off with the recent Bafta Winners. There’s also mention of the newly announced Batman: Arkham Knight, a new release date for Watch Dogs and that obviously purely coincidental Xbox One price drop on the eve of Titanfall....

Another Iain-less show this week, but one that has Jon on again, this time to talk about the Titanfall and Elder Scrolls Online Betas (Spoiler: One of them is a day one purchase and one of them might be not - can you guess which it is?). Pat's also been delving into the incredibly lucrative and now zombie-less early access hit, Rust. There's also plenty of hilarity to be had from the 'Game-Jam-Con...

On this week’s show we discuss the end (as we know it) of Bioshock Developers, Irrational Games and that Flappy Bird Fiasco before looking at a couple of upcoming games whose embargoes have now lifted: first up there’s the multiplayer-focussed Evolve, from the creators of Left 4 Dead, Turtle Rock Studios, which pits 4 players against a single player-controlled monster. Then there’s Playstation 4 e...

So we figured that now the first (and last) DLC for The Last of Us has been released it would be a good time to talk about Naughty Dog's masterpiece in greater detail. This has nothing to do with Rob having only just finished it. Honest. It goes without saying that there are spoilers right from the start, so please don't listen to this unless you've already finished this excellent excellent game....

On this week’s show we talk about the crowdfunding success (madness?) of the massively multiplayer space-sim first person shooter behemoth that will one day be Star Citizen, the pros and cons of early access and why it's worth actually playing Beyond: Two Souls instead of just watching it all on YouTube. All this and actually not a whole lot more on this week's Game DumpCAST... To Check out other...

On this week’s show we talk about what went down at the recent Steam Dev Days event in Seattle, where Valve revealed their partnership with Oculus VR, showed off a new iteration of their Steam Controller and sent everyone who attended home with a shiny new Steam Machine. The lucky bastards :S On the subject of unholy alliances, we also use the news of Undead Labs signing an exclusivity agreement w...

We're quite a way into January already, but there's still enough of 2014 left for us to talk about all the games we're excited for this year. There really are quite a lot. Too many to list in fact. The theme of Survivalism and application of VR technology seems to feature quite heavily though and there are a refreshing lack of sequels come to think of it. If you were just looking forward to the ne...

This first episode of 2014 was intended to be a preview show of sorts, showcasing some of the games we're looking forward to over the next 12 months - we've had to push that to next week though because, well, CES 2014 happened... and we had to get to all the news that dropped there while it was still fresh in our minds. This includes the grand unveiling of the first wave of Steam Machines, the new...

On this final Game DumpCAST of the year we thought it would only be right to go over some of our favourite gaming moments of 2013 and try to figure out our top 5 games of the year. We’ve bent the rules slightly in that some of the games mentioned might not have come out in the past 12 months, but this is our podcast and we make the rules, so if you don’t like it - don’t listen. With that mild host...

Game DumpCAST: #10: Gone Home, Black Flag, Dead Space 3 On this week's show we go all Emo with Gone Home, swashbuckle our way through Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and freak ourselves out good and proper playing Dead Space 3 in co-op. There's also a token sprinkling of VR in the form of Kairo, some mobile thrills with the amusingly retitled Stealth Inc. and finally Rob going all misty eyed with...

Game DumpCAST: #9: Broken Sword 5, The Mandate and more You could say it was a bit of a slow news week - so slow in fact, that it's started us thinking about how we structure the show (you have been warned! :S). Aside from the expected teething troubles of the new consoles, some mobile game announcements and game-related movie news, there wasn't an awful lot to talk about. The most promising tidbi...

Game DumpCAST: #8: Bandit Skies, Torchlight 2 and more... On this week's show we talk to Game Developer, Tim Diggle about his bullet hell shooter, Bandit Skies, discuss the co-op merits of Diablo clone, Torchlight 2 and convince each other that we were man enough to finish Outlast (honest!). In the VR corner this week is Blue Estate, Minecraft and F1 2013. And it looks like Iain and Patrick have h...

Game DumpCAST #7: PS4 and Xbox One Special As the next generation of consoles begins we run down some of the top stores from this most momentous couple of weeks in gaming. Smelly Controllers, Kinect witchcraft and the heinous act of plugging a PS4 into an Xbox One are all covered here. We even have a special guest in the form of Game Developer, Tim Diggle, to give us his own unique perspective on...

Game DumpCAST #6 Metro: Last Light, Battlefield 4 and more... On this week's show we talk about the masterpiece that is 4A Games' Metro: Last Light and how they were able to achieve so much with so little, Patrick comes back from the VR brink after treating his Oculus Rift to some Halloween scares and Iain tells us all about the latest installment of EA's military shooter series, Battlefield 4. Al...

#5 Call of Duty: Ghosts, Batman: Arkham Origins & more... It's another dose of gaming news this week as we discuss this year's crop of (almost) annualised sequels, including Call of Duty: Ghosts, Batman: Arkham Origins & Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Of course, we haven't played any of them ourselves, but that's not gonna stop us having an opinion on the general consensus! There's also word fro...

#4 Beyond: Two Souls, Shadowrun Returns & More This week we talk about some of the games we've been playing, including Quantic Dream's latest interactive drama, Beyond: Two Souls, famously starring Ellen Page and Willem DaFoe. We also dig into the end result of Hairbrained Schemes' wildly successful kickstarter project, Shadowrun Returns, the early access PC version of State of Decay and Patrick d...