Retronauts

Retronauts East (Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, Chris Sims, and Ben Elgin) returns to the ’30s to evaluate the failings and successes (mostly failings) of Indiana Jones's most Problematic-with-a-capital-P adventure—and its impact on games, of course. Frickin' mine carts....

As Lucasfilm Games began to refine their philosophy of fairness, designer Brian Moriarty doubled down on this concept with his idea of a video game expressly designed to be completed. This would eventually take the form of Loom, an adventure game far different than anything that would come before or after it. With no inventory, no verbs, and music as your only means of interacting with the world, Loom stands some 30 years later as an interesting evolutionary dead end for the genre. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey and Kat Bailey, and Duckfeed.tv's Gary Butterfield as the two explore one of LucasArts' less remembered adventures.

Finishing out our patron request series on roguelike role-playing games, Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Jason Wilson, and John Harris explore latter-day roguelikes and how we got to the weird, wonderful world of Spelunky.

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Ray Barnholt, and Shane Bettenhausen use the Konami Code to tackle the challenge of recapping the Contra series, just in time for the latest entry in the franchise.

We often talk about the U.S., Japan, and the U.K., but what about the rest of the world? Games journalist and historian Thomas Nickel takes time out of his Tokyo Game Show work to share some insights into the classic gaming experience in Germany.

In the past decade, developer From Software went from making poorly reviewed oddities to being one of the most important developers in our modern era. And it all started with Demon's Souls, a humble, slightly janky game that challenged the new standard of frictionless gameplay in the HD era, and delivered an experience we didn't know we were so hungry for. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy's Parish, USgamer's Kat Bailey, and Duckfeed.tv's Gary Butterfield as the crew explores the bleak and endlessly compelling world of Demon's Souls. Listen now, so the world might be mended. So the world might be mended.

Jeremy Parish teams up with the Retronauts East crew to discuss PC classic puzzle-action game Lemmings before jumping into a one-on-one interview with one of the game's designers, Mike Dailly of DMA Designs.

Now that Retronauts has transitioned to deep dives of single titles over the past few years, it's about time to focus on a genre we rarely touch: adventure games. That said, this marks the beginning of a limited series where I (Bob) will be covering the entire LucasArts adventure library—one game per episode—hopefully with new and/or rare guests. Since I'm not covering these games in any particular order, there's no better place to start than The Secret of Monkey Island, the release that would define LucasArts' house style for its remaining decade of adventure game output. And there's no better guest than Monkey Island superfan Nina Matsumoto (of FanGamer and Sparks fame), someone who's loved the series since 1990 and even created the cover art for Ron Gilbert's latest adventure game, Thimbleweed Park! So join us as we enter the world of corrosive grog, rubber chickens with pulleys in the middle, and insult sword fighting and jump back in time nearly 30 years to explore a game that launched a much-beloved series.

Continuing our journey through the Final Fantasy series, Kat Bailey joins Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey to talk about what makes Final Fantasy VIII such a weird and wonderful chapter in the series—just in time for the remaster! Just mind the spoilers...

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Shane Bettenhausen paraglide into Kazakh S.S.R. to profess the glory of a game that remains indelibly cool even 30 years later: Capcom's Strider.