Has it really been 125 years already? Another Thanksgivukkah is nearly upon us, once again merging Thanksgiving with the first night of Hanukkah in an explosion of festive confusion! This week, we spend plenty of time talking about the Xbox One launch (as well as your favorite launch games of all time), but not before discussing our five favorite turkeys in gaming and performing the most amateurish Thanksgivukkah skit we could slap together at the last minute.
We’re stuck between launches as of this writing, with the PS4 (theoretically) in stores and the Xbox One poised to give us a slightly different version of the events of last Friday. What an exciting time to be alive, and what a perfect time to tick off the five best console launch games ever! (OK, seven. We cheated on the last one.) In the second segment, we talk about our experiences with the new systems and their launch games, after which we go over your picks for the game that defined the last generation.
In just a few days as of this posting, the PlayStation 4 will be a thing you can buy, bringing about the first major generational shift for consoles since the release of the Xbox 360 eight years ago. With “next-gen” about to become “current-gen,” and “current-gen” poised to become another fond memory for gamers to get nostalgic about in a decade or so, we’ve dedicated the first half of this show to five games that may not have been the best or even most important, but that — for better or worse — defined the 360/PS3/Wii generation. And, sure, there’s also some talk about the PS4′s launch library, Call of Duty: Ghosts resolutions, and whether any of you are buying Activision’s flagship shooter this year.
This week is Call of Duty week, with CoD: Ghosts hitting store shelves ahead of its next-gen launches, but let’s ignore that for the first half of the show. Instead, we’ll talk about our favorite heroes over 40, then chat with Bob “bobservo” Mackey of Retronauts fame about Typing of the Dead: Overkill, and discuss what you all did for Halloween.
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is out today, and to mark the occasion, we sit down with a SPECIAL GUEST STAR: Gabe Graziani, senior community developer at Ubisoft and the official face of Assassin’s Creed fandom! But first, Halloween is this week, so let’s celebrate by talking about playable werewolves, after which we’ll get to some of your creepiest experiences playing games.
Remember way back when game publishers weren’t interested in locking down their intellectual property, and would hand the franchise keys to any porting house that had two ZX Spectrums to rub together? No? Well, this week’s Top 5 does, as we take a look at some of the not-quite-official sequels that were part of gaming’s early years. There’s also a little chat about Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Dual Destinies, as well as some vague disappointment about Watch_Dogs being delayed and the resultant lack of enthusiasm in this fall’s next-gen launch lineups — and then we talk about what you’d slap Tom Clancy’s name on AND your favorite cover Pokemon.
This week, Mikel and the rest of the regular VGA crew take a breather, giving special guests Henry Gilbert, Carolyn Gudmundson and Brett Elston exactly the opening they need to stage an impromptu reunion of their old Pokémon Monday podcast and chat at length about Pokémon X/Y, before turning the conversation to the very important matter of Pokémon in general.
If you’re not a Pokémon fan*, the biggest release this week is Beyond: Two Souls, the latest beautiful, divisive, interactive game-like thing from developer Quantic Dream and its cackling French overlord, David Cage. In honor of its arrival (and to balance out all the swipes we’ve taken at Heavy Rain over the years), we lavish a little praise on our favorite moments in David Cage’s creations, shed a tear over Tom Clancy’s passing, and talk about some of the things you wanted to do in Grand Theft Auto Online before the servers were working properly.
This week, we decided to take a look at some of our favorite, sadly misguided one-off consoles, created mainly by companies who’d dipped their toes into video games once or twice and suddenly thought they could be the next Nintendo. Then there’s a whole bunch of talk about SteamOS (or possibly a Greek guy named Steamos), a general loss of cohesion, and a look at your most memorable experiences standing in launch lines.
Grand Theft Auto has finally become so ingrained in mainstream culture that not only did GTA V break all sales records for all media ever (probably), but it took a torture scene to raise any real controversy this time around. So naturally, we’ve jumped on the lurid bandwagon with our top 5 disturbingly interactive torture scenes, more GTA chatter, a po-faced discussion about sexism in games by four straight white males, and your favorite GTA or GTA-alike missions.