A Green Mushroom

I made a podcast!  Well, really, we  made a podcast.  Me and Professor Beej that is. And it's live... RIGHT NOW! We've been working on it for awhile and our podcast feed just got approved!  Go check it out! In our first episode we talk about the subjective value of games as we touch on Firewatch, Superhot, Stardew Valley, MMOs, Steam Sales, backlogs, and lots of other good stuff. I'd love to hear what you guys think of it.  And if you could rate it and review it in your podcast app of choice it would help us out so much.  That's what will let people find us in the future. I'm so excited to share this with you: iTunes Overcast Pocketcasts RSS Feed for all Podcatchers It's filtering out to all the third party apps right now too.  If you're not an iTunes user try searching your app.  Otherwise just paste the RSS feed URL into your app and you should be good to go: http://geektogeekcast.libsyn.com/rss Or if you're someone ...

I just played through Firewatch and loved it.  The game only clocked it around the 4 hour mark for me, but it was wonderful.  I'm so happy when a dev tells their story and then wraps up the game.  This is the perfect example of a game that doesn't need to be 8+ hours to be worth the money. In Firewatch you get a little bit of backstory about your character and then start your first day on the job of watching for forest fires from your tower.  Your only line of communication is through a walkie-talkie to your direct supervisor and that's where the majority of the narrative takes place. But things quickly start to happen that you need to go investigate.  Most of the game finds you wandering the wilderness around your tower digging into things that are going on.  You use an actual compass and map along with a limited gear set to traverse the terrain. Not to mention the in-game disposable camera!  It only has around 20 shots, so make them coun...

It just occurred to me that I don't actually know that many games releasing in 2016 that have a firm release date.  I can't really anticipate a game for 2016 when I don't even know if it's going to release this year. And no, a release "month" or release "quarter" don't count.  That means the company doesn't actually know and it could change with no warning.  It happens all the time. If those counted then I would be super excited for Final Fantasy XV, Star Fox Zero, No Man's Sky, Zelda for Wii U, For Honor, Mass Effect Andromeda, and the remastered version of Final Fantasy IX.  I'm still cautiously optimistic that these will release this year, but until we get firm release dates I'm putting them to the side. The only two games that I'm really excited for with actual  release dates in 2016 are Fire Emblem Fates and Firewatch. Fire Emblem Fates is the first Fire Emblem game after the amazing success/modernization of t...