PPR 147

t sure has been a while now hasn’t it? Well, we made sure to make it count with this new episode as we brought along John Unterseher from Super RPG Friends to round out this week’s table of chuckleheads!

In an effort to talk shop on all of the recent announcements that took place while also trying to keep things Water Cooler with what we’ve been  playing, we mixed it up a bit for this episode. John joins Andrew and George as they discuss which announcements made the most notable impression on us from Summer Gamefest block of announcements they’ve affectionately dubbed to be “Not E3” and then decide to steamroll right into what’s been in their consoles with 2023’s packed release schedule. Announcements of games to come along with games here and now ranging in Super Mario RPG, XDefiant, Project Octopath Traveler 2 , Persona 3 Reload, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, Pikmin 4, Super Mario Wonder, Sonic Superstars, Sand Land, Nicholas Cage, Mortal Kombat 1, AEW Fight Forever, and so much more.

So sit down and clean that off-lavender shake off your lip as we bring you Press Pause Radio Episode 147, also—you don’t look so hot, just how much of that shake did you wolf down?

Mail us at our new email Mailbag@presspauseradio.com, leave a voicemail at 469-PPR-TALK, and be sure to stop by at our Forums if you haven’t already registered and post your thoughts about the show. Finally, make sure to rate and subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube, follow us on Twitch page and Twitter, and finally take part in our Facebook and Steam group!

Click to read more ...

PPR 146

here are some events that we’ve come expect with the certainty of a season change. Whether it’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, The Super Bowl, or The Oscars—these annual institutions have operated for most of our natural-born lives, and won’t go anywhere anytime soon. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 for short, used to be one of those long-standing institutions, but has recently seen come rough days the couple of years, and has decidedly skipped out on 2023 altogether.

While writing has been on the wall, the language that E3’s parent company, ESA, has used over the future of the showcase is a little too ambiguous for comfort, and it’s likely that we may not see the event come back in the near future, or ever. Despite it going out with more of a whimper than a bang, there have been a ton of memorable years in Video Gaming where the event hosted some truly historical announcements, cementing moments that still occupy our headspaces to this very day, and we’re going to spend this episode talking about that, and so much more.

Join Andrew and George as they take you on a Post-Mortem of what George called the “Met Gala” of the Video Games Industry as they discuss the up’s and down’s of the yearly trade-show, and all of the notable footnotes it’s had in its run, bizarre pageantry and all.

Mail us at our new email Mailbag@presspauseradio.com, leave a voicemail at 469-PPR-TALK, and be sure to stop by at our Forums if you haven’t already registered and post your thoughts about the show. Finally, make sure to rate and subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube, follow us on Twitch page and Twitter, and finally take part in our Facebook and Steam group!

Click to read more ...

PPR 145

ANADA INVENTED FOOTBALL! That’s just one of the many things you’ll learn in this new episode of Press Pause Radio—aside from the fact that George also got a Vasectomy, that’s a thing too we guess.

We keep it pretty casual off the heels of the Golden Zonkies and just talk about the latest stuff we’ve all been playing. On tap for this session is Ed, Andrew, and George as they gab on about games like Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, Tetris Effect, Moss, Baby Pac-Man, Wanted: Dead, Horizon Dawn: Forbidden West, Forespoken, Atari 50, Ninja Golf, Blood & Truth, Yggdra Union, and so much more.

So kick up a chair, grab some pretzels, and decompress from a long afternoon of socializing over Sports Ball as we share some thoughts and words over fast-paced start to our 2023 here at Press Pause Radio!

Mail us at our new email Mailbag@presspauseradio.com, leave a voicemail at 469-PPR-TALK, and be sure to stop by at our Forums if you haven’t already registered and post your thoughts about the show. Finally, make sure to rate and subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube, follow us on Twitch page and Twitter, and finally take part in our Facebook and Steam group!

Click to read more ...

QCF: Wanted:Dead (Playstation 5)

 

 have fond memories of not only playing but also selling what was referred to as a “B” game from my time as a game store employee during the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 era. This type of game, normally an action game would be from a smaller developer and publisher, with a limited budget but always offered entertainment and combat for a lower cost. It was an easy sell for someone looking to play something but didn’t want the larger scope and price of a triple A title. Just some fun games like Stranglehold, Shadows of the Damned and Wet, just to reference a few from the past. For better or worse, Wanted:Dead from Soleil and 110 Industries harkens back to this time in gaming, offering sword-clashing and gun-blazing combat with some corny voice acting and glaring issues in level design and difficulty that might need more than nostalgia to win over most players.

Click to read more ...

QCF: Trophy

o matter how many times I’ve seen it, I still think it’s BUCK wild to see a brand new game for the NES get commercially released over 30 years past the system’s prime. The Homebrew scene for these legacy platforms are further bolstered by the flexibility of the Digital Marketplace hosted by every notable name you can think of, like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Valve, or hell, even Atari.

One of the latest releases for the most popular 8-Bit machine is an homage to Mega Man by developer Gradual Games named Trophy, and it’s not only been made available on Cartridge for its original hardware, it’s also available on Switch eShop and Xbox Marketplace via a proprietary NEW Emulator to boot. The technical chops on display are nothing of impressive, as the game seemingly uses every MMC Mapper to push the most out of the system to run it, but the core design of the game hardly does anything to impress beyond the sheer novelty of it being a new Action Shooter you can grab for the NES.

Tophy is certainly no Mega Man, but it isn’t even a Darkwing Duck, or a Krion Conquest, or hell even a Whomp ‘Em—it’s just a another retro game with some bizarrely outdated design by comparison.

Click to read more ...

Late to the Party: Sonic Orgins

orgive the clichéd sentiment, but even after 31 years of blazing across all manner of screens, SEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog does show any sign of slowing down. Riding the hype train of the recent film’s success at the Box-Office in the same year the little guy turns 31, the folks at SEGA and Sonic Team in collaboration with the talented folks at HeadCannon took to the task of releasing yet another Classic Sonic Collection, Sonic Origins. The collection features Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic CD, and the first re-release of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles in over a decade; each one optimized with the same Retro Engine Sonic Mania ran on, enhancing these cult-favorite titles with a sizable HD upgrade for the current generation of gaming.

Despite the number of times some of these titles have been re-released, Sonic Team and company have boasted that this new arrangement will come loaded with more passion and fandom than we’ve seen from the likes of Sonic Jam or Sonic Mega Collection. While some of those claims are founded, I can’t quite help but feel like Sonic Origins struggles to live up to the potential it had, let alone the hype going into the whole thing.

Click to read more ...

QCF: Nescape

hen most think of the NES, they'll likely imagine platformers, side-scrollers and turn-based RPGs. Nintendo's premier console did, after all, introduce us to the very roots of these genres as we know them today while also restoring our faith in video games as a whole after the 1980s game crash.

Some titles, however, were more experimental than others – more specifically, those of the point-and-click genre. Two that immediately come to mine are the console ports of King's Quest V and Shadowgate, in addition to Manic Mansion from Lucasfilm Games.

One could consider NEScape! a faithful ode to any of these titles now available in the Nintendo Switch and Xbox Live libraries, albeit with a much more docile feel. In short, it truly is an "escape room" for the NES.

Click to read more ...

PPR Presents The Golden Zonkies: Class Of 2022

ow that we’ve torn all of the pages off of our 2022 Bluey licensed Calendars, we’ve jumped ahead into a whole new January filled with work, fatigue, and the occasional video game or two set the vibe to 2023 with. While we’ve definitely had some negative things to say about the last couple of years—we took a few steps to help steady ourselves against the increase chaos in our civilian lives, and in the process, those small sabbaticals we did take as a team have really did a lot to refresh both our minds, and our souls.

We finally took a big step forward with some of the equipment we were able to obtain, and we’re hoping to bring y’all that promised regular video content that we’ve been teasing the last couple of years. In the meantime, a new year means a new class of Golden Zonkies to pass out, including the Press Pause Radio Golden Zonkey for Game of the Year! So without further ado, let’s get into the unofficial rules of our official awards:

In case y’all don’t remember the updated flow from the last couple of years, we have changed up our format and have done away with categories!  Now, bear in mind, we’re still giving our prestigious mark of excellence, a Golden Zonkey, to the games that are deserving of recognition, only, we’re not doing by a respective genre, or category. Instead, we will be giving them out in a personal list format by each of us in the podcast, and we’ll be spending time discussing why we picked the titles we did within a countdown of three.

 Normally we would have done a roundtable of games that were worth a quick mention from the year, but we decided to mention them in passing instead, along with some not-so-honorable-mentions (we also chose a few more not mentioned on the show to include in the post!) We will then award the “Golden Zonkey of The Year” in a unanimous vote that was similar to the previous format, and conclude the show from there.

Thanks again for listening to us gab on about our favorite time-wasters from last year. May we do what we can to capture both your ears AND eyes this on Press Pause Radio with all the neat shit we have in store—love ya! 

Mail us at our new email Mailbag@presspauseradio.com, leave a voicemail at 469-PPR-TALK, and be sure to stop by at our Forums if you haven’t already registered and post your thoughts about the show. Finally, make sure to rate and subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube, follow us on Twitch page and Twitter, and finally take part in our Facebook and Steam group!

Click to read more ...