Too many HD “remakes” these days are content to slap on some sharp new textures and call it a day. Most don’t want to risk the ire of gamers by actually overhauling gameplay or design that worked 20 years ago, but a notable few have braved those waters and actually come out better for it. We celebrate them in this week’s Top 5, then move on to talk about Trials Fusion, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and what your favorite Internet pranks were from this year’s April Fool’s Day.
By listener request (and in lieu of any better ideas), this week’s Top 5 is dedicated gaming’s greatest graffiti artists (or possibly just graffiti-themed games; we seem a little fuzzy on the concept). There’s also lots of talk about Amazon officially getting into the console business, along with some idle conjecture about Titanfall on 360 and your ideas for mundane-activity simulators.
Last week’s trailer for the Michael Bay Ninja Turtles movie was an inspiration — specifically, an inspiration for a Top 5 about the worst TMNT games of all time. With that out of the way, we talk about Goat Simulator, Elder Scrolls Online, California State Senator Leland Yee allegedly becoming a real-life GTA character, and your ideas for games that would be better with virtual reality.
After decades spent on the technological trash heap, virtual reality’s had a huge resurgence in the past week. Sony unveiled Morpheus, Oculus Rift rolled out its Crystal Cove prototype, and Microsoft revealed it was working on its own headset — and that was all before Facebook bought Oculus (which happened after we recorded this week’s episode). It was a no-brainer, then, to start off VGA 57 with a rundown of our top 5 favorite/catastrophically failed headsets, after which we talk about Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, Infamous: Second Mark Ecko’s Getting Up, and what you’d do if you were given free rein to mess up a game’s established canon.
Inspired by the console-specific weirdness in this week’s release of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Episode 56 rolls up with a Top 5 about DLC expansions that threw canon to the wind. Then we continue with some talk about the mildly disappointing Ground Zeroes (which looks like a goddamn 11 out of 10 next to the crass letdown of Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z), and take a look at some of your favorite mechs.
Now that Titanfall is presumably eating up everyone’s time on PC and Xbox One, we kick off our fifty-fifth show with what may be our shortest Top 5 yet, about the weirdest mechs we could think of. There’s also some talk about Dark Souls II and (naturally) Titanfall, some getting grossed out at Chris’ obscene texting (and also at the Shaq-Fu sequel), and then a look at what you’d do if you could turn any TV show into a game.
In case the title didn’t give it away, this week we honor the arrival of South Park: The Stick of Truth with a Top 5 about other games based on basic-cable TV shows, and somehow manage to mess even that up by including a network show! Can you imagine? Also, Anne busts out another “guess the game by its Steam reviews” game, and we give a listen to some of your favorite victory sounds.
The last week of February boasts some notably dark-looking new releases, so we thought we’d add a little color with our five favorite games about bringing dead worlds back to life. Then we unwisely gush about Thief and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 just days before finding out everyone else hated them, chat about some troubling developments in last week’s news cycle, and talk about your biggest crushes on game characters.
VGA takes another quick trip back to the criminality well this week, with a look at five “heroes” who did hard time and became our favorite video-game convicts. Then we dive right into Earth Defense Force 2025 and Strider, talk about our experiences in the Elder Scrolls Online and Titanfall betas, and run through some of your suggestions for game-inspired Olympic events.
As athletes compete and hotel rooms disintegrate at the Sochi Olympics, we follow a listener suggestion and take a look back at some of our favorite games about The Games — with the caveat that few of them were ever any good, and we’ve barely played any of them, if at all. (It’s probably funnier that way.) Then there’s some brief talk about Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, a quick overview of the D.I.C.E. awards, and a long, self-indulgent look at your favorite moments from our first 50 episodes.