It's another episode of the podcast that has absolutely zero consistent release schedule. This time I cover the games I'm playing plus some news, so here the notes I take and then use when recording and the podcast itself.
Disco Elysium – The Final Cut is available now for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. Our award-winning open world RPG and its revolutionary dialogue system gives you a huge amount of freedom as you explore a whole city block in a massive murder mystery. The Final Cut version adds full voice acting and political […]
Most gaming podcasts these days do the same thing: round up the news and talk about the big releases of the week. There is nothing wrong with that, but our love of games isn't tied to a release schedule. Whether you're a hardcore fan or a casual player who only has time for a select number of games a year, the reason you fell in love with this medium is that you loved one game first. We want to put the focus back on some of our favorite franchises, explore how they changed over the years, and examine why they left a mark on the industry.
VideoGameography is a serialized podcast. Each season we'll explore a new franchise and why it's essential. In every episode, we'll examine one game in that series (starting with the first entry), talk about its lore, production history, and the impact it left on those who played it.
There is no shortage of great industry franchises we hope to cover: God of War, Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Doom, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, etc. However, our first season zooms in on Nintendo's iconic Metroid franchise. Did you know that Samus' iconic big shoulder design was a result of the limitations of the Game Boy? Or that she was originally named after the legendary Football/Soccer legend Pele? Or that Metroid Fusion is the only game in the series that can be completed with an item collection percentage of zero?
Join hosts Ben Reeves, Marcus Stewart, and a collection of rotating guests as we examine your favorite gaming franchises. New episodes drop every Saturday, starting on October 16. It's going to be a wild ride.
For more Game Informer podcasts, be sure to check out the GI Show, which covers weekly news and all the details on the big game releases, and All Things Nintendo with host Brian Shea which deep dives into Nintendo's library of games every week.
Now that Metroid Dread is finally in the hands of Nintendo Switch owners around the world, previous entries in the Metroid franchise are seeing a noticeable sales boost on other hardware. Thanks to the Virtual Console offerings on Wii U, Metroid Fusion, the previous mainline series entry that released in 2002 for the Game Boy […]
Disco Elysium – The Final Cut is available now for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. Our award-winning open world RPG and its revolutionary dialogue system gives you a huge amount of freedom as you explore a whole city block in a massive murder mystery. The Final Cut version adds full voice acting and political […]
When the first Xbox console was revealed on stage back in 2001, it was announced that it was packing an Intel CPU. This had been a last-minute decision on Microsoft's part; so last-minute, in fact, that according to the "Father of the Xbox" Seamus Blackley AMD engineers were sitting in the front row of the console's…
There are probably some readers out there young enough to not even know what Games For Windows Live even was, but for those of us who lived through it, we remember: how pointless it was, how broken.
Back 4 Blood is as close to Left 4 Dead 3 as we're ever likely to get, and no new Steam game can escape the need to analyse player counts - so here we are! Now that it's gotten a full release after a few days of early access, Back 4 Blood's player count is publicly available and quite impressive, though it's far short of the heights set by its predecessor. (And that's to be expected.)
Back 4 Blood reached a peak concurrent Steam player count of 39,052, putting it in the platform's top 25 biggest player peaks for the day, as SteamDB shows. (This doesn't count anyone playing the PC version via Xbox Game Pass.) As of this writing, it's the number 13 game on Steam, sandwiched between Rocket League and Rainbow Six Siege.
That's bigger than Left 4 Dead 2's peak player count today of 18,865, though far short of the older game's 162,399 all-time record, set back in 2013. That's not at all a fair comparison, though - Left 4 Dead 2 was given away as a free Christmas present from Valve the day before that massive record was set. Still, L4D2 has been hitting counts as high as 49,193 as recently as August 2021. It's tough to beat one of the games that everyone owns on Steam.
The Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker release date lands in just over a month, but there's still a bit more regular content to enjoy before we kick off the expansion. The return of the Moogle Treasure Trove and Dragon Quest crossover events have been on the roadmap for some time, but now the devs have provided a bit of additional detail on each - especially helpful for all the new players recently hopping into FFXIV.
The Moogle Treasure Trove event starts on Tuesday, October 19 at 1am PDT / 4am EDT / 9am BST, and will last until the launch of Endwalker. For the duration of the event, certain dungeons, trials, raids, and PvP duties will award Irregular Tomestones of Lore, which you can then exchange for special items with an Itinerant Moogle vendor that will be available in each of the three starting cities.
The items available include some that will be new for the event, including the sick leather jacket you see in the image above. Others are already available in the game, though those are mostly tied to especially difficult content or time-consuming grinds. You can see the full list of rewards, and the content you'll need to grind to earn them, on the official site.
Call Of Duty: Vanguard has started to dribble out a few more details about its story in new trailers, with a particular focus on its five new protagonists. If those characters are appealing, then good news: Vanguard's developers say that they hope to make a Vanguard 2 and 3 with the same cast.
Team Fortress 2 launched its Halloween update last week. Scream Fortress XIII adds new maps, cosmetics, taunts and contracts, amongst a lot else. One of the additions has caused a stir, however.
The "Corpse Carrier" is a cosmetic item wearable by Scouts that makes the speedster look as if he's carrying his own severed torso. It's a nightmare for snipers for obvious reasons, but it was initially easy to obtain and wearable all year round. Valve have since changed both of those things - and in turn, created a new, highly valuable item within TF2's trading marketplace.
Boneloaf has published a launch trailer (which also promotes the upcoming physical edition) for Gang Beasts, its multiplayer party game for Switch. The title landed on the system earlier today. Here's an overview of the game: Gang Beasts is a silly multiplayer party game with surly gelatinous characters, brutal slapstick fight sequences, and absurd hazardous environments, set in the mean...
When you're a superhero, every day is a costume party — but not every day gives you candy for free, alas. So it's still a good thing that one of City of Heroes' rogue servers is making sure that masked vigilantes get their holiday fix. City of Heroes Rebirth kicked off its Halloween update yesterday […]
When it comes to making things happen in Dual Universe, like opening doors or docking to constructs, the Lua programming language used in the game is the engine that makes it all hum, and that engine is getting some tuning according to a dev blog. The post outlines some minor adjustments that have been made, like […]
Philipp 'muddasheep' Lehner is a legend in mod circles, making cerebral games like HalfQuake on Half Life and Quake engines. What he's not well known for is family-friendly puzzle games, which Catty & Batty: The Spirit Guide very definitely is.
