The Retrograde: A Video Game Podcast

What's the only thing better than sitting down to play one of your favourite video games? Sitting down to play your favourite moment in your favourite game! This week we sit down to discuss our favourite levels in video game history. It can be a specific moment from an iconic game, a mission which stood out among all the rest, or just an incredibly fun sequence which reminded us why we love this h...

This summer has been ripe with new game announcements from all major players! With the recent Summer Game Fest following earlier announcements by Sony and Nintendo, we wanted to sit down to give our impressions on all of the summer's biggest video game announcements! Which demos got us most excited? Which trailers looked kind of bland? From Lies of P and Phantom Blade 0 to The Plucky Squire, and P...

What's more rage inducing than failing time and time again when faced with a particularly challenging area in a video game? The real answer, for those of us with a temper, is ultimately being unable to complete the challenge indefinitely due to the fact that you've resorted to breaking your controller over the same thick skull that couldn't figure out how to "Get Over It" with Bennett Foddy. While...

Whether it's Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, the general rule of a fighting game is that the two combatants pummel each other 10-20 times until one of their health bars run out. Bushido Blade, this week's focus on the podcast, turns that idea on its head (while simultaneously trying to cut it off). It's a game where a single swing of a sword can end a round, and preference is given to a perfectly...

Where would you go if you had the chance to visit ANY AREA from a video game? This week we compiled our personal Top 10 lists for video game worlds we'd like to live in! Are we looking for the chaos and violence of a Grand Theft Auto city, or do we want to settle down somewhere tranquil in Hyrule? Our lists cover everything from Pokemon to Bioshock, and we want to hear from you what we missed! Plu...

With the release of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 reminding us that Marvel still has tonnes of great stories to tell, we decided to spend this week looking back at all the most iconic Marvel Video Games we've played in our lives! We compiled a list of the most significant Marvel Games ever made and ranked them according to the classic S to D tier system. Will Spider-Man: Miles Morales rank higher than...

Would you believe us if we told you that one of us lifelong gamers has NEVER played a Zelda game? With the release of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Andrew has decided to enter the land of Hyrule for the first time ever! Join us as we play through the first hour of what is being reviewed as one of the greatest games of all time. Is it possible that Zelda as a franchise lives up to the hype...

What would Metal Gear solid be like as a Puzzle Game? Back by popular demand! This week we're taking some of the most beloved video game franchises of all time and pairing them up with a completely randomized genre. That's right! Your Game is Perfect: We've Changed Everything, part 2. The premise is simple: we randomly select a game (Metal Gear, Zelda, Guitar Hero, etc.) then randomly select a gen...

Sure, everyone has a favourite hero. Who wouldn't want Joel from The Last of Us, or Mario from... Mario joining them on a journey? But where's the love for the bad guys? This week on The Retrograde: A Video Game Podcast we count down our top 10 villains in gaming history! Is Bowser more evil than Wario? Would Dutch van der Linde be able to outsmart GLaDOS? Could Psycho Mantis predict Odin's next m...

What would our Month of Mario be without a retrospective on what many consider to be the GREATEST Mario game of all time? It's Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo! Super Mario World has always been one of the White Whales of our podcast, but with such attention behind the game that Shigeru Miyamoto often calls his favourite Mario game in the franchise, when could we POSSIBLY find the right tim...

This week we continue our Month of Mario with a look at one of the LEAST known Mario games of all time: Mario Teaches Typing. Before Nintendo learned to be overly protective over their properties, they let all sorts of companies get their hands on their mascots. The results varied, but occasionally the world got a game which was too strange to forget. But is this Mavis Beacon inspired game worth p...

This week we rushed out to theatres to watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie just for you! Join us for one of the first podcasts out there offering a full review, breakdown, and spoilercast of the Super Mario Bros. Movie! From the release of the first trailer, one of us was pretty excited about the potential of the movie, but the other was much more skeptical. We sit down to discuss how the movie actu...

You can't think about video games without thinking about Mario. He's become synonymous with the hobby, and over the years he's done more than just star in his own line of games. This month to celebrate the release of The Super Mario Bros Movie we've got 4 weeks of Mario themed content! To start things off, we're counting down our top 5 Mario appearances in a non-mainline Mario game. Believe it or...

What's better: the banana from Mario Kart, or the Blades of Chaos from God of War? Between the two of us we've got a combined 60 or so years of demolishing enemies in video games. Over the course of that time, some of the tools we've been given in gaming have really stuck out to us. This week we sit down to run through our top 10 favourite weapons in games! Before we get to our lists, Andrew updat...

This week the gloves are off, as we sit face to face and air out our biggest grievances with the state of gaming. In this episode we each pitch some of our hottest takes in gaming and try to convince the other host of their legitimacy. Is VR just a gimmick? Are the best Metroidvania games Metroid or Castlevania? Let us know your hottest takes, and whether or not you agree with ours! Watch our game...

Hopefully you've all recovered from the season finale of The Last of Us (HBO)! This week we've got a topic SO HOT that we had to release our episode on a Monday instead of Tuesday. We woke up bright and early to go over all of our thoughts on the final episode of Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin's masterpiece. After the full episode breakdown we take some time to talk about the overall effectiveness...

With Creed III in theatres, and everyone from TikTok stars to NBA players trying to step into the squared circle, we thought we'd use this week to play one of the greatest boxing video games of all time: Fight Night Round 3! When it first came out in 2006 it was known as one of the most gorgeous games we'd ever seen. But this love letter to the sweet science used an innovative control scheme to gi...

We're capping off our month long look at dating sims with our listeners' most requested game: Doki Doki Literature Club! It's the perfect way to wrap up FeBOOary, and for a game from 2017 it's amazing we've managed to avoid any spoilers for so long. All we knew about Doki Doki Literature Club going into this episode was that it promised to turn the Dating Sim genre on its head. Did the twists and...

We bet you didn't expect to wake up today and learn that back in 2019 Kentucky Fried Chicken released an ACTUAL, fully playable dating sim. It's called I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin' Good Dating Simulator, and in the spirit of our newly remastered theme of FeBOOary we decided to see if we could get all up in The Colonel's bucket. This episode recounts two journeys through a cooking...

This week we continue FeBOOary with a special episode where we count down our 5 most significant crushes we've ever had in a video game! We're celebrating the month of love with a look back at some of our most formative gaming... relationships? Where does Miranda from Mass Effect rank against Joel from The Last of Us, and why is Ms. Pac Man making an appearance? Find out all of this and more as we...

This week we return to the scariest month of the year (FeBOOary) with a look at Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator! It turns out there was a miscommunication with the theme of our podcast this month, so instead of playing scary games we're spending the next few weeks focusing on romance in gaming! It turns out "Boo" can mean more than one thing! We may not have had any clue about the premise of D...

What would Guitar Hero be like as a First Person Shooter? This week we imagine what some of gaming's most popular franchises would look like as a COMPLETELY different game! We curated a list of just about every major franchise we could think of, and a list of every possible genre, then randomly paired them up to see how creative we could get! Tune in to find out our pitch ideas for Gears of War as...

Have you finally had enough of your boring old birth family? Don't you think it's time to shake things up a bit? Well, we do too! This week we draft ourselves a brand new family consisting of ONLY video game characters. Will we ask for a dad as tough as Kratos, or a kid as sweet as Kirby? We start from the ground up and choose a father, partner, child, sibling, and two wild cards (because what fam...

If you've listened to this podcast long enough, you'll know that The Last of Us holds a special place in our hearts. But when it was first announced that a TV show was going to be made, and that Neil Druckmann would be receive the full HBO treatment, we weren't completely sold on it. Andrew was optimistic, but Mikey thought it would be redundant. How have their impressions changed as we tiptoed cl...

Warning: this one gets sloppy. Let's have another round (of Goldeneye 007), D-Pads! This week we aim to answer the age old question: are we better at gaming when we're drunk, or sober? And what better game to test this out on than one of the greatest multiplayer experiences of all time: Goldeneye 64! After catching ourselves up on our recent gaming habits, including Andrew's new obsession with Mar...