Toms F and S are joined by Alex to discuss Monster Train’s forthcoming factions, go full dork over emulation widget MiSTer and be disappointed by England – in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, too! Ha! Ha! Ha!

• Cyberpunk 2077’s developers have conceded the existence of linear time, but not much else, in their roadmap.
• Ogle Dead End Thrills‘ screenshots of cyberladies.
• I mean, cor.
• Monster Train had a free public test weekend for its upcoming DLC, The Last Divinity. It’s over now, though, soz.
• The best advert for Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
• This is the eagle gag that Tom F refers to.
• Are you a man in your mid-40s? Have fun fiddling with emulation doodad MiSTer.
• Zelda meets gacha in the squeakily-voiced Genshin Impact.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Bonus episode! Tom chats to top games critic and lovely person Christian Donlan in a meandering discussion about Star Trek, old Mario games, classic sci-fi films, Rogue, and much more. And then Christian’s cat makes an appearance, which just makes everything even better.

The main C&C pod shall resume service shortly! Also another film ‘n telly pod with Jamie Brittain is in the works. Also I, Tom, having dropped the third-person pretence only moments into writing this intro, will politely nag Christian to do another one of these when he has time. Hope you all enjoy!

Show notes!

• Tom has been playing a lot of Mario Galaxy, Sunshine, and Mario 64 on Switch. Which one is the best though?

• We got into a lot of fun tangents early. Films mentioned: 2001 A Space Odyssey, Rush, Blade Runner, Nice Guys, Les Mis.

• Remember cinemas? BFI constantly sponsor reruns of classic films in the UK – worth a follow.

• Rogue is on Steam, kind of, purists might want to hunt for the unchanged original version.

• Christian revisited Rogue in 2020 and wrote this great piece about it. I love articles that make me immediately want to download a game and chase the same experience.

• ToeJam and Earl is just Rogue – discuss.

• Special shout-out to Christian’s cat, making a sadly brief audio cameo.

• Christian intelligently references Orson Wells’ Moby Dick stage show.

• BUT THEN Tom gets carried away and tangentially references Wells’ War of the Worlds radio show because he listened to it recently and got excited.

• Modern Rogue descendants (there are so, so many more) – Spelunky, Hades, and Below (not so good).

• The title of the next Stereophonics album: “Just Enough Suffering to Make it Worthwhile”

• Diablo: “Hitting skeletons and getting loot”. The perfect five-word elevator pitch.

• Tom dives into the wankthought hole(tm} with reflections on the psychology of dungeons, or at least the gloom and delight of descending to terrible depths and emerging into sunlight as an effective device.

• The Silent Cartographer – Halo, Blighttown, Half-Life Alyx, and so many more games do this, and it’s great.

• Jennifer Allen writes brilliantly about Ski Free over at EG.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Tom and Jamie gathered many weeks ago to record a whole new meandering chat through our film and TV obsessions of the moment! With Christmas just around the corner, Tom has finally found the time to publish this one as a hopefully fun bonus episode for the holiday season. 2020 is ending; hooray! We hope you all get to enjoy some quality films and telly with a beverage of your choice over the break.

Many thanks to Jamie for the following in-depth show notes. You can find the pod on the Crate and Crowbar podcast feed, or a downloadable version right here.

What We’ve Been Watching

2:20 – Elena of Avalor (Disney Plus)

Since recording this, Jamie has realised that Elena Of Avalor actually does have a movie length special to kick it off which outlines the plot, which is ‘hidden’ behind a different tab on Disney Plus. And also, the show was just cancelled, RIP, it’s a really well made, well written show.

Frozen remains amazing. Frozen 2 is a bit of a mess (but the songs still slap).

The new one Ducktales has David Tennant as Uncle Scrooge. The old Ducktales still has an amazing theme song but feels a bit much. Here’s the Finnish language version with the lyrics interpreted in English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSdSzSqLys

Freakazoid Theme Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZmw3jzX1t0

Hey Duggee is a kids show about a dog Scout Master that is also one of the funniest things on tv.

Adventure Time is a fantastic kids show for adults.

The very good Bojack Horseman (Netflix) gets a quick mention here, but it deserves further discussion.

Below Deck (Netflix) is a reality show set on a massive boat, which is Horny Blue Peter about poor quality ironing and beautiful idiots falling out.

Modern reality TV, or, in a loaded and amusing phrase that Jamie has just in this pod introduced me to – STRUCTURED REALITY: Below Deck, TOWIE, Love Island, Geordie/Jersey Shore.

For the behind-the-scenes drama exploring the aspirational psychopathy of being a producer on one of these shows: UnREAL: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3314218/

Othello is by William Shakespeare. There are several film versions, including versions by Kenneth Branaugh and Orson Wells. Jamie’s favourite is of course 2001’s ‘O’ starring Julia Stiles and Josh Hartnett.

Big Brother was a whole thing. Charlie Brooker’s columns were a whole other, superior, thing: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/aug/21/charlie-brooker-big-brother

Love At First Sight was a dark voyage into the bleakest passions of awful people.

The Incredible Hulk. S2 Episode: Alice in Disco Land. Jamie’s description and the title sells the episode more than I ever could here. Here is the disco version of the ending theme, for your health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDTqATFcvyc

Shows about lonely men arriving in a place to solve a self contained scenario and then leaves (still sad): The Lone Ranger. The Fugitive. Quantum Leap, Sliders. 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance Sir Gawain And The Green Knight.

The deep sadness of the 70s: The French Connection, Taxi Driver. Nasty endings are cathartic sometimes aren’t they? But perhaps not in 2020.

The lingering rot of the Vietnam war infected North American drama for years. If the monster that lives inside you doesn’t get you, the Military-industrial Complex will. The Rambo films chart US pop culture’s absurd path from introspection back to celebratory jingoism.

If you had to chart the many plotlines of Dark S1 on a graph it would end up being a massive, meaningless knot. Season 2 is sharper, more focused, and much better. Sadly, you have to slog through S1 to understand what the heck is going on. S3 is a well-made mess.

Formula 1 racing is an extraordinary spectacle. The cars are indeed very fast.

Darts, a spectacle on two levels – sport and pissup. Sid Waddell: “When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer… Bristow’s only 27.”

Top Vintage TV Shows

43:00

Ever Decreasing Circles: An 80s ooh missus sitcom about existential torment. Ruin your Youtube suggestions forever with this playlist of all of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEv6-C-9qD0&list=PLqK471enalfqUa3PIdMbzcya_cENErflI

The Good Life, a less good show from the same team.

Cracker: A masterpiece of writing and performance, and a decade-defining piece of drama.

In fact, Paul Abbot wrote the first series of Shameless and State Of Play at the same time, which is even more impressive.

Just A Boys Game: Completely incredible Play For Today, with an incredible final scene

Brond: Mad Scottish Proto Twin Peaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWT0i4ZKTVU&t=100s

Govan Ghost Story: Written by Jamie’s dad in 1989, he thinks it’s pretty great if he does say so himself, also features an excellent score by Scottish pop heroes The Blue Nile) AND Robert Carlyle’s uncredited first onscreen appearance as a distant, speechless, unmoving figure in the background of one shot:

Modern TV is often very safe, but I May Destroy You really, really isn’t. Better representation in tv is still a long way away, with anyone who isn’t a straight white man struggling to be heard.

Edge Of Darkness is an amazing voyage into grief and mystery. Please don’t watch the film.

Since we’re alone now, the show Jamie didn’t want to speak no more of was the atrocious Drama Life.

Bob Peck was also in Jurassic Park being eaten by intelligent female dinosaurs.

Thunderbirds/Joe 90/Stingray/Captain Scarlet

Spectacle, playground inspiration, freakish real hands.

Tom was Virgil, pilot of Thunderbird 2, specialising in demolition, heavy lifting and logistics, so that checks out.

Kyrano was the name of the the Tracy’s racistly portrayed Manservant, who The Hood was able to physically invade and find out International Recue’s Plans. It says a lot, not all of it good, about Jamie that he saw himself as him. But there was a lot going on in that show.

Team America and Borat are both very fucking funny, FYI. Borat 2 is out now and…well. Yeah.

Borat buying cheese, with the world’s most patient man.

GBH by Alan Bleasdale is an extraordinary show about authority, politics, anxiety and fear. It doesn’t really fit into any easily described genre, but describes a world that feels pretty similar to the one we find ourselves in now. Michael Palin’s speech, could have been written yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX9llMV9qGc

Brazil is Terry Gilliam’s best film, fight Jamie.

1:18 Spoilers Ahoy!

I’m Thinking Of Ending Things

Charlie Kaufman has written some amazing scripts: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is based on a book of the same name written by Iain Reid. I think the film handles the subject matter more sensitively, even though the film is enormous and – for much of the second half – literally too dark to be able to quite see the actors’ performances.

Pauline Kael’s review of A Woman Under The Influence: https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/a-woman-under-the-influence/1/

The song sung at the end is from Ohklahoma, not Casablanca…

Manic Pixie Dream Girls, as defined by Nathan Rabin in this article about Elizabeth: https://film.avclub.com/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-elizabet-1798210595

Anomalisa was very good.

Marriage Story

A film about a messy divorce. Amazing acting across the board. Substantively…not so much.

Noah Baumbach – sometimes great, sometimes bad.

A Separation is one of the best films ever made.

Jamie isn’t sure in retrospect why he felt the need to quote relationship expert Louis CK.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs.

Merry Christmas erryone!

Graham, Tom S, Chris, Tom F, Alex and Marsh pile into the electronic telephone booth for our Game of the Year episode. Many things are discussed, some of which are even games that came out this year.

• Here’s the whole lot of them. Don’t read ahead if you want to rubberneck at the beautiful carnage of Chris’s protracted segue car-crash, the true game of 2020.
• Teardown
• Hunt: Showdown
• Monster Train
• Death Stranding
• Wide Ocean Big Jacket
• Destiny 2
• Gears Tactics
• Paradise Killer
• World of Horror
• The Last of Us Part II
• Desperados III
• Hades
• Half-Life: Alyx
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• Star Wars: Squadrons
• Ghost of Tsushima
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps
• Warzone
• Spelunky 2
• A Monster’s Expedition
• Stay safe and have a lovely holiday. See you in 2021!

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom S and Marsh dial in to the eZone to digichat about obvious replicant Geoff Keighley’s latest data-dump, before opening up our brainchips to irrecoverable corruption by the Cyberpunk 2077 discourse.

• Suffer the many newses beamed from Geoff Keighley’s Laser Cage.
• Bioware had trailers for new Dragon Age and Mass Effect projects, both offering a homeopathic density of information – though little does this impede our speculation!
• Disco Elysium is getting full voice-acting: which will be cool if it’s good and good if it’s cool.
• They’re making another Perfect Dark. LOL!
• Back4Blood does surprisingly little for us.
• Whereas Darktide, which is more or less the same thing, is TICKLE CENTRAL.
• Cyberpunk 2077.
• Rob Fahey’s article on CDProjekt’s stock market shenanigans and their impact on the development of Cyberpunk.
• Tom refers to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.
• Jesus Christ this quiz really outstays its welcome. Sorry everyone. Sorry.
• Sorry.
• The quiz stings were composed from the following free sounds from the excellent freesound.org: “Correct Answer / That’s Right”, “correct.mp3” and “Vomiting on the ground – Remixed”.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Alex and Marsh arrive belatedly at the zeitgeist of September 2018 with a helluva yikes. Like gazpacho soup, enjoy these takes cold: World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

• Fortnite done some big numbers. But are they that big? Yes, but imagine the concurrents if you had to feed buses of children into the slavering maw of Dot Cotton.
• Mask of the Rose is the new game from Failbetter, the devs behind Fallen London. It’s a visual novel romance set in the same sinister world.
• Hit the colonial apologia bullseye in World of Warcraft.
• Acknowledge the badness of raiding before raiding ever harder still in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
• Teardown is a really good game that knows precisely what it needs to be. But do its players always know that?
• Does Not Commute is a previous game by the Teardown dev.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Graham and Alex heed the wisdom of the Time-ramisu and peer into the future of mecha strategy game Phantom Brigade, the alternative past of tactics game Möbius Front ’83, and an eternity of Destiny 2.

• The Golden Joysticks happened again and proved to be an exacting measure of how people who voted in this thing voted.
• Only a dad could forgive horizontal Iron Man but, alas, he doesn’t have time to play that Avengers game.
• Squeenix are switching to work-from-home indefinitely.
• Loosey-goosey simultaneous turnbased mecha heat management strategy game, Phantom Brigade.
• Hex-based tactics game with a pulpy 80s military-mystery theme, Möbius Front ’83.
• Destiny 2‘s continuing reinvention / self-cannibalism does some things to recapture the quiet dignity of the original space nonsense, but also unleashes the occasional potent guff of fomo.
• For whom does the mangonel toll? Will you go to mangon-‘ell or mangon-‘eaven? How much nell could a mango nell if mango could nell mangos? Are these questions answered in this Age of Empires 2 exploit video? Not on your mangonelly.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Graham, Tom S and Marsh gather to caress eagles in pretty action adventure The Pathless, and return to 9th century England to malign herons in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

• IO Interactive are making a Bond game!
• Appreciate the pandering of The Pathless.
• It’s a bit like Journey and Shadow of the Colossus.
• Admire the shining spires of Orpington (maybe) in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
• Chill out to the stress of Super Hexagon.
• Shoot weak points as gruesome therapy in Killer7.
• Spin plates (with an increasing sense of zen) in City Skylines.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex and Marsh chat to Joannes Truyens, writer-designer of Neurocracy – a game about near-future conspiracies, pandemics, surveillance, cybernetics and tuna – that you unravel by exploring a fictional Wikipedia.

You can play the demo of Neurocracy right now. Follow Joannes and the project itself on Twitter and watch out for a release of Neurocracy in spring next year!

You can listen to this interview on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

All the Toms join Marsh to be obliterated by the pitiless ocean, leaving only a flotsam of Elcor facts as a sign of their passing. Also discussed: Watch Dogs’ cockerney spider bots and the fine flails of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

• Codies got bought by TakeTwo for approximately 10 times as much as we would have guessed they were worth.
• DoNotEat did a good video about why Elon Musk’s Loop concept is a bucket of cold piss.
• Bioware are remastering the Masses Effect and are making another one.
• The Mountain Goats lovely song about a horrible deck and a related card.
• Become one of the many faces of the Coffin Puncher in Watch Dogs Legion
• Wild Mountain Thyme’s trailer does for Irish accents what Dick Van Dyke did for Cockney.
• Raid an England that never was in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
• You could get both by subbing to Ubisoft+, play them until you’re bored and then cancel the subscription.
• Welcome to Nanobee’s. Have you eaten here before? Try the explosions.
• Teardown just got better and better the more I played. Gimme a lawnmower, tho.
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton is a good pairing with The Return of the Obra Dinn.
• I got the name wrong for his subsequent naval novel. It’s: The Devil and the Dark Water.
• Perdido Street Station by China Mieville is a fine accompaniment to Anachronox, maybe?
• The Final Empire is the first novel in the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, and complements Dishonored rather well.
• Other good reads: Dune by Frank Herbert, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, and From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
• Ubisoft and Google. You heard it here first and maybe last.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Graham, Alex, Tom F and Marsh turn up the Plancks to Max in the highly-destructible thievery sandbox Teardown, avoid bisection in the deadly arenas of Disc Room and bring birds to political ruin in woodland strategy game Root.

• Kill your solution-carcasses in the very defenestrationy blast-your-own-escape-route thievery sandbox Teardown.
• Graham’s review of the same.
• The ingenious Teardown car-theft solution that Graham references.
• Watch your fingers in pure peril-avoidance game Disc Room.
• Shank a mouse in complex asymmetric digi-boardgame Root.
• Bang your head to the Rotational megamix.
• The fast travel is wanting in the occult Miami-alike island murder mystery Paradise Killer.
• Watch Dogs Legion is a game set in London but not, sadly, on its tube trains.
• Rock Paper Shotgun have a very good podcast about PC games and aquatic pet care.
• Spooky funny podcast This Paranormal Life.
• Rock Paper Shotgun alumnus Brendy has a fun podcast called Hey Lesson that uses games as the jumping-off point to talk to mega-boffins about various things.
• David Dimbleby’s look back at the second Iraq war: The Fault Line.
• David Tenant does a podcast with a somethin’ else and no mystery production word salad with nice celeb chums.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Marsh climb atop one another, together forming the shape of a much larger podcasting lobster, to discuss social spook surveyor game Phasmophobia, probe the pachinko-like possibilities of roguelike Ring of Pain and return to the Warzone.

• Lot of news this week. More puking than normal too. COINCIDENCE?
• Oculus requires a Facebook account and if you delete your Facebook account it deletes your games. BLAAAARP.
• Facebook streaming is – for now – mostly about F2P games for yer da. BLAAAARP.
• Jason Rubin’s interview with The Verge explains a bit more. They don’t need to lock you into your cell because YOU ARE ALREADY IN PRISON. BLAAAARP.
• Ubisoft Connect is Ubisoft’s new swipe at the Steam hegemony. Will it last?
• Watch_Dogs: Legion is out. We hadn’t played it yet at time of recording.
• Assassin’s Creed is coming to Netflix as a live action series.
• Cyberpunk’s delayed again. BLAAAARP.
• The 3D tour of Blue Lick Rd, Kentucky. HELL-BLAAAARP.
• NYT’s Guess The Voter By Their Fridge. Marvel at the number of cold, no-poo eggs.
• Finally, the games we’ve been playing!
• Phasmophobia! Better in VR!
• Card-based roguelike Ring of Pain.
• Warzone‘s Halloween mode is boss.
• Rainbow 6 Siege’s Halloween mode has gone Full Felt Jacket.
• Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and the episode where this was previously discussed, certainly no more coherently than now.
• Our amazing new quiz stings were composed from the following free sounds from the excellent freesound.org: “Correct Answer / That’s Right”, “correct.mp3” and “Vomiting on the ground – Remixed”.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Graham, Alex and Marsh waggle wands in alchemical roguelike Noita, boggle minds in fractal-palace puzzler Manifold Garden, solve crimes in tech-occult mystery Lucifer Within Us and probe private parts in nosy ghost adventure I Am Dead.

• Cool Congresswoman AOC’s Twitch-topping stream.
• PC Gamer’s article on the mainstreaming and word-of-mouthing of PC gaming.
• Stream-beloved backstabber, Among Us.
• Collaboratively developed fantasy baseball game: Blaseball
• Cave-diving witch-based roguelike Noita.
• Fabulous fractal mind-bender, Manifold Garden.
• Susanna Clark’s Piranesi is a fascinating book that you should read rather than read about.
• Techno-occult detective game and bane of BritPop, Lucifer Within Us.
• Do a fox be in there? Nourishing and wholesome looking-inside-things game I Am Dead.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex and Tom F relive the fragtastic heyday of the FPS with Quake mod Arcane Dimensions, and die, with varying degrees of annoyance, at the hands of three different roguelikes: Noita, Spelunky 2 and Hades.

• Voxel-physics-destruction game Teardown is out on the 29th of October!
• The torrid Golden Axed tale.
• Gwen Frey‘s Lab Rat is looking for lab rats, er, playtesters. Link on the Steam page.
• Jakub Wasilewski’s SlipWays made in/for PICO-8.
• A full-fat PC version is on its way!
• Awesome Quake mod and map-pack, Arcane Dimensions.
• American McGee’s 300ft zombie and related dev tales from Quake are briefly recounted here.
• Noita is out of Early Access! Feels kinda similar to how it did a year ago, honestly. It was good a year ago, of course, but a lot of the systems still feel opaque.
• “Let’s get it over with”: Spelunky 2
• The Sealed Shop and the Mind-boggling Mistake, a Tom Francis adventure.
• Hades may be an excellent brawler, but it is sorely missing a leprosy mode.
• Surveillance game Orwell.
• “Emergent sim” classic System Shock 2.
• Daunting sci-fi colony sim Rimworld.
• NEOTOKYO! What a vibe!

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Graham, Tom S and Chris launch a lifetime of fandom directly at the modest target area of Star Wars: Squadrons, setting off a chain reaction of space-spooge. Also: Zelda meets gacha in Genshin Impact.

• Baldur’s Gate 3 has entered early access. It’s quite crashy at the moment, but you can befriend a walking brain. You’ll know in your heart whether to install it now or wait a year.
• Steam’s Autumn Festival has ripened and tumbled from the tree. Will it be a mighty payload of fructose or dispense a mouthful of wasps?
• Much anticipated tactical biffer Fights In Tight Spaces has a demo, as does whatever this is: Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown. There will be Bad Warhammer takes for weeks, too! Hurrah!
• Genshin Impact is Very Zelda. But if you’re gonna steal, steal from the Breathst! Is that a pun? Very almost! For some reason, you have to get it from their site, via a bespoke launcher, rather than via Steam.
• Please. Please. Feed Chris all the space microtransactions to sustain Star Wars: Squadrons. He’ll buy a Frisk Funko Pop if necessary. Anything.
• Master the thrust with your Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas 4!
• Signs of the Sojourner has a really interesting and elegant take on conversation-as-game.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S, Chris and Marsh vibrate with the excitement of an imminent Star Wars game release while trying to talk about Necromunda: Underhive Wars, budget co-op spookathon Phasmophobia and impressively reprehensible VR stabber Blade And Sorcery.

• Listen to Tom Senior’s excellent TV and film spin-off podcast with Jamie Brittain, professional smart telly-man: Monday Or Soon
• They put Minecraft in Smash. Just think of the Skype calls.
• Chris and Tom can barely contain their excitement at becoming a zoom-zoom space-plane in Star Wars: Squadrons.
• Necromunda: Underhive Wars is disappointing, and weirdly recreates the failings of the dev’s last disappointing Warhammer videogame, Mordheim.
• Consider the metaphysical / insurance implications of loamy tap water in Phasmophobia.
• Spelunky 2: great to chew, even better to share.
• I’m savouring a brief period of success in Hunt: Showdown.
• Chris has bought the Oculus Rift S, the last generation of Oculus that won’t require you to have a mandatory in-eye projection of Mark Zuckerberg.
• Half-Life: Alyx. It’s still good.
• Do an official VR Star War Vader Immortal
• Do a very unofficial VR Star War with Blade and Sorcery and the The Outer Rim mod.
• No, not the bearded Younglings!
• Paradise Killer: good fiction, bad friction.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Welcome to a new experiment from the Crate and Crowbar! We love games, but we’re also huge fans of films and television, especially in these Covid times, so we decided to start a podcast about all that. Tom Senior joins TV writer Jamie Brittain for a whiplash tour of the shows we’re watching right now. In spite of everything going on in the world, TV is amazing at the moment, and deserves to be celebrated.

As this continues we’re planning to touch on every genre and mode of TV we can find, from HBO dramas to soap operas, reality TV, and sports coverage. We’ve tried to put in spoiler warnings as required, but it’s worth noting that DEVS in particular shines if you go in completely cold. Now all that’s said, here are the show notes for episode 001.

• “Morphine against the stress and terror of the time”: The Big Flower Fight on Netflix, and The Great British Bake Off.
• Sandi Toksvig has moved on to other projects but I believe she’s still hosting QI. She was brilliant on BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz a few years ago, but they still have Nish Kumar and Susan Calman.
• “We’ve made some shady cakes.” STOP BAKING FOR THE MAFIA.
• What if you took the Great British Bake Off, ripped its soul out, and instead staged a cold blooded lizard war waged by people who no longer take joy from sweet treats? You get Creme de la Creme and Bake Off: The Professionals.
• Deep Fried Masters is art.
• The first series of Gordon Ramsay’s UK Kitchen Nightmares is also art.
• Chef’s Table, however, is wank.
• Snowpiercer! On Netflix! It’s bonkers. But kinda good? Maybe??
• Bon Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer film is great too.
• High Rise is pretty f*cking silly really, isn’t it?
• DEVS is very good but I can’t say why in these show notes.
• Alex Garland’s a busy chap and I’ll watch anything he writes/directs: 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Ex Machina, Dredd, Annihilation, DEVS.
• Into the Spiderverse is also art, obviously.
• CATHEDRALS MADE OUT OF SKIN. The Shivering Truth. Beware.
• The Shivering Truth animators made Anomalisa, which is a fascinating film in its own way that I’m sure we’ll talk about in future.
• Another show that mixes humour and horror: Monkey Dust.
• Both shows owe a lot to Chris Morris’ Jam.
• A Serious Man is quietly one of the Coens’ best. Jamie would like you to know that the thing he says about the villains in your life appearing at the door with Manischewitz wine is a reference to the rich and textured Jewish theming of the film A Serious Man, rather than a piece of horrifying anti-Semitism.
• Arguments! Hereditary; End of the Tour; Girls; Glengarry Glen Ross; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Phew! We covered plenty of ground in this one, and we’ll cover plenty more soon. Email any feedback to crateandcrowbar@gmail.com. You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. Head to the ‘telly and books’ channel for film ‘n TV chat.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, visit our Crate and Crowbar Patreon page. As mentioned in the pod, we only charge Patrons for the core C&C videogame pods, but those donations support the main pod and allow us to do spinoffs like this. Thansferlissenin!

Graham, Tom F and Marsh debate the merits of moon moles in Spelunky 2. That’s it. That’s the only game we need this week. But also: Bethesda’s acquisition, our favourite videogame banks, and multiplayer that isn’t multiplayer.

• Bethesda’s acquisition by the Big Green Giant.
• Spelunky 2. Welcome to the only show note you’ll need for the next 50 pods.
• A collaborative rather than multiplayer game? House Flipper.
• Control a collaborative cat as the second player in Spiritfarer.
• Group sleuthing is possible in Her Story (and its follow-up Telling Lies).
• The Sims 4 may scratch the design itch.
• Other information games that would benefit from two brains: Return of the Obra Dinn or the Frogwares Sherlock games

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Tom F and Marsh island-hop in peerless push-block puzzler A Monster’s Expedition, island-cop in murder mystery Paradise Killer, and Ireland-top in medieval wife-finding interface, Crusader Kings III. Plus! Hadean Lands and Defense of the Oasis.

• Enjoy the agony of U-turning marketing executives as a result of the Sony’s PS5 showcase.
• Is this the best Sokoban ever? A Monster’s Expedition (Through Puzzling Exhibitions). “Now you’re thinking with logs.”
• Footcare is surprisingly important amid the occult aesthetic cacophony of Paradise Killer.
• Fool popes and fear children in Crusader Kings 3.
• Meanwhile, in Al’s Weirdo Corner…
• Minesweeper meets Civ in Defense of the Oasis.
• Excellent alchemical text adventure Hadean Lands.
• Be a witch in a cyberpunk city in A Bewitching Revolution.
• How Bad Design Made Vanilla WoW A Classic by Sea Sells Sea Chels.
• Enjoy the feet and horse anuses of Pine.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Graham, Tom S and Chris pick apart the latest Ubisoft Forward like carrion on road-kill, before swooping on, beaks bloodied, to devour Mafia: Definitive Edition, Marvel’s Avengers and Mortal Shell. Mmm-mm!

• Ubisoft Forward’s livestream and Yves Guillemot’s apology.
• Geoff Keighley was not impressed. For the love of God, Ubisoft, DO NOT BAIT HIS DISPLEASURE! Has not 2020 already demonstrated the devastating power of his wrath?
• Revel in the strong Pip energy of A Monster’s Expedition – it’s out!
• Mafia: Definitive Edition should be as you remember it, but not as it was.
• Avenge your dental pain upon Marvel’s 7/10.
• Is it better to be a skeleton with or without a dick? Decide for yourself by playing Soulsian hermit-crabby gribble-basher Mortal Shell.
• Tim Heidecker’s improvised 24-esque nonsense, Decker.
• This muddle over Star Trek games is beyond my ability to fix in post.
• Roleplay shitty backpackers being monologued at by a villain in Far Cry VR: Dive Into Insanity.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Chris and Marsh offer late takes on the quickly cooling Gamescom starch bomb, ferry frogs to the great beyond in Spiritfarer and nitpick the nitpicking, and other ape antics, in epic evolution yarn, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.

• Gamescom was put in the microwave for 6 minutes and served without butter.
• Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad is half a potato, stamping on a human face, forever.
• Vlambeer is no more! :'(
• But as it expires it has released a final prototype. :’D
• Usher your frog uncle to the afterlife in this ghost therapy game, worth four whole potatoes, Spiritfarer.
• Patrice Desilets’ Chimpin’ Ain’t Easy aka Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.
• A Monster’s Expedition is out next week!
• Fun Youtubesman, Christopher Odd.
• Jack and Kat’s Crusader Kings 3 playthrough.
• A narrative-only cut of The Last of Us 2.
• A Half-Life: Alyx playthrough performed by Luiso Longplays.
• Weird improv skit / playthrough / descent into madness, Half-Life VR but the AI is Self-Aware.
• Surprise Lordranning in Mortal Kombat 11.
• The ISS is really sleeping on the science of frozen rotisserie chicken orbital drops.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and Marsh ogle the inter-corporate fisticuffs of Epic v Apple, boggle at the buffs of roguelike shooter Risk of Rain 2, make bassist assumptions in identity puzzler Family and fear ducks in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

• It’s Tim vs Tim! Chris Plante has a good summary and analysis of the Epic/Apple lawsuit in his newsletter.
• Dim Tanglell? Who he? We will never know or care again, hopefully.
• Wash that Assburger down with a slug of Clancian Ribena in Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War
• Due Process, the perennially awaited counter-terrorism shooter is finally out, sort of.
• Become the ideal – half robot, half plant – in Risk of Rain 2
• Make bassist assumptions in Family: it’s an Obra Dinn but for late 80s pop musicians from London!
• Do we need a Book of Opposites to catalogue the spider-lemon / muffin-kraken spectra?
• International verklempt facilitator / duck dread inducer: Microsoft Flight Simulator.
• Explore and paint a fantasy world in Eastshade.
• Mýrdalssandur, Iceland is a nice walking simulator set in Mýrdalssandur, Iceland.
• Rigid Rubbery Mountain Mage is the coincidentally also the name of Fleet Foxes new album.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and Marsh dispute the tutes of Horizon: Zero Dawn, unpack throwback hack-n-slash Book of Demons, wibble beans in Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout and quibble shtick in meta point-n-click There Is No Game, before returning to our briny home.

• Pony Island and Hex are the Daniel Mullins Games games which precede the recently unveiled Inscryption. Looks great. No idea what it is really.
• Pony Canyon appears to be a Japanese publisher of music, games and anime. It is not the thing we talk about, but it is, apparently, irresistible to say.
• Atomic Heart is a gorgeously arted Don’t Be Beaten Up By A Robot game.
• Not becoming a museum is really hard.
• Immersive not-sim robodino romp: Horizon: Zero Dawn.
• Zero Horizon: Dawn?
• Harry San: See A Dong?
• Deer Bong: Hose On?
• Herzog: Dear Ol’ Horn?
• ZingZong: Dawn Hole?
• Ah, the French!
• Orson Welles’ perfect commercial for Paul Masson.
• Good cauldron cooking and 90s hit-game nostalgia in deckbuilding hack-n-slash Book of Demons.
• Come back next week or beyond for Blightbound chat!
• Wibble your little bean-man to victory in Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout.
• Enjoy wholesome family fall-out in Tricky Towers.
• 4th-wall breaking UI vandalism in There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension.
• Twiddly-bits game Windowsill by Vectorpark. You don’t have long to play this because Flash is to be killed off soon.
• Also briefly mentioned, twiddly-bit game, The Room.
• Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan: “He didn’t like it, but he had to go along with it.”
• Now better known, to Chris at least, as playwright Patrick Marber.
• Lamentable centrist podcast men talk about semiotics. “Sir, please, I only asked if you wanted fries with it.” etc.
• Watch me detonate the tracks of Chris’s amphibi-brain-train. Sorry, Chris! Choo choo!
• Immersive sim. What it be? Raph Colantonio has opinions. And we are three of maybe dozens of people who care about this.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Alex and Marsh gather to discuss Obsidian’s backyard survival game Grounded, go postal, in a very tranquil way, in Thousand Threads, sink into a fug of nostalgia for Halo 3, toot flutes and avoid parps in Ghosts of Tsushima and briefly descend into Hades.

• Dana Schwartz’s tweet about Reddit user NoNoNo_OhOhOh’s post about John Boyne’s novel’s deseparate SEO Zelda calamity.
• Enjoy, or decry, miniature multiplayer makework in survival game Grounded.
• “Just get yourself a small metal spoon, sit back and relax” in pretty open world postal game Thousand Threads.
• Love the bonky stick but fear the UI funnel of The Master Chief Collection.
• Avoid the full parps of Ghost of Tsushima.
• Smoke a whole pack of easy in Hades.
• Control has good tutorials apparently.
• Nice Man James Benson’s real-goodly animated tutorial for a game that doesn’t exist.
• Hideo Kojima’s formative bee experience.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S, Graham and Marsh congeal into a mass of gnashing mouths to chew over indie creature feature Carrion, disrespect the lore in Star Wars: Battlefront II and smash many glass men in the expandalone Superhot: Mind Control Delete.

• We talk about the Xbox Showcase. You can watch the full stream here, and, because I am very lazy, here is Rock Paper Shotgun’s nicely curated list of all the games revealed therein, some of which we talk about.
• The recording mangled the bit where I say the nickname of Halo Infinite’s art director: it’s Sparth. He’s terribly good.
• Here’s Jason Schreier’s scoop on the nixed King Arthur game that was helmed by Mike Laidlaw.
• Become the meatball marinara in metroidvania creature feature Carrion.
• Take out your millennial insecticidal angst in the fan service nonsense kaleidoscope which is Star Wars: Battlefront II.
• Duke around the dogman in Superhot: Mind Control Delete.
• “I crank to the max.”
• Alex’s article on Brutal Doom’s copious splatter.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Tom S and Graham minotalk and cyclopine about the forthcoming Total War Saga: Troy, delight in the hikes and hot bilge of Death Stranding and feel all kinds of 7/10 about Ghosts of Tsushima.

• Here’s that story on testing seeds for impossibility in Slay The Spire.
• Mentioned as Alex’s spire-alike of choice: Monster Train
• Sing, O Goddess, of the mild pique at Total War Saga: Troy‘s compromise between history and myth.
• Stuff piss bombs into the whale to make the ghosts go away in Hideo Kojima’s sympathetic fart machine, Death Stranding by Hideo Kojima.
• Ghost of Tsushima. Collect another 49 podcasts to unlock a sense of apathy at hoary open world mechanics.
• Rob Sherman’s great article about inventory: I Am Overencumbered.
• Exposure is the video series about the aborted development of F-Stop.
• The video Alex and Graham recall which utilises polaroid photographs to alter geometry is this one!
• Portal 1 and 2 are a hard act to follow.
• But follow the FPS-puzzlers did, with much physicsy wibbliness. Some of those mentioned: Antichamber, Superliminal, Manifold Garden, The Talos Principle, The Witness.
• Tacoma is not really a puzzle game, but a very good firstperson story game.
• Alan Hazelden‘s puzzlers are also mentioned.
• Just add a little pet fox! It worked for The Shard.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom S and Marsh pore over the Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, soar over the Hyper Scape, chew over Rocket Arena, simply cannot get over Call of Duty: Warzone, and gush over, er, chess. “Not a new game but a good one.” You heard it here first.

• Geoff Keighley’s illuminating and partially accurate docu-app: Half Life: Alyx – Final Hours.
• Behold! The Ubisoft Forward stream. But I actually got more from Matt Castle’s video on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and this clip of dialogue from Watch Dogs: Legion.
• Here’s Ubi’s statement about their ongoing response to allegations of sexual abuse.
• Become a ball in Hyper Scape‘s very slightly innovative One of Those.
• Become a manta ray in the bloodless chaos of Rocket Arena.
• Assorted chess links: defeat Steven in HELL with the power of Chess Ultra;
  free, open-source chess server, Lichess; the more obvious Chess.com; checkmate the ork in Warhammer 40,000: Regicide; enjoy the gruesome death animations of Battle Chess.
• The preferred Titting About game of the moment: Call of Duty: Warzone.
• A video demonstrating some top-tier titting, from Chris and niceman podfriend Paul Scott Canavan: The Big Honking Death… starring Truck Straddler and Paul Muad’Gib.
• Nobody knows what a bandicoot is.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Rich McC and Marsh attempt to master the remastered Red Alert, get decked online in WWII-themed collectable card game KARDS and prepare to try self-professed Dark Souls homage Mortal Shell.

• Valorant. Skins. Expensive. Boring. Do better, News.
• The Ubisoft longboat is very leaky: the latest vid of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
• You can play Command & Conquer: Red Alert as part of the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection.
• WW2 card game: KARDS. Why is it capitalised? Does it stand for something? Kick A Rommel Down Stairs?
• Mortal Shell
• Excellent but sadly dead Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński.
• Lovingly absorb the materiality of Deep Rock Galactic‘s loot bugs. And then kill them.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip and Chris return for another deep dive (!) into the state of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We delve into the diving discourse, discuss the various quandaries of lategame life, and assemble our wishlists for the future of the game.

You can find this bonus episode on YouTube, and our intro music is, as ever, Clambake by The Mandibles.

For what it’s worth, that’s a raspberry being blown at the beginning of this recording. A raspberry.

Graham, Tom F and Chris aim their laser-like takes to dismantle the zen pleasures of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, the tawdry traumas of The Last of Us Part II, the chaotic bird-butt coop of KeyWe and the narrative clunk of Cloudpunk.

• Do a physics on men, shelves and concrete, in this throwback shooter: Trepang2.
• Do a physics on spaceships and sometimes, accidentally, yourself, in fab extraterrestrial scrapyard game Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
• Do a psychology on dogs in finger-wagging misery-box
  The Last of Us Part II.
• Chaotic co-operative post-office management game: KeyWe.
• A Monster’s Expedition is a lovely puzzle game what our Pip done wrote for.
• Dystopian delivery driver game with disappointing dialogue: Cloudpunk
• Other games of the delivery driver genre:
  Eurotruck Simulator 2, Bus Simulator 18 and Elite Dangerous.
• And the burgeoning delivery-driver-with-narrative genre: Jalopy, Wheels of Aurelia and the really excellent Driver: San Francisco.
• A successful vertigo inducer: Against the Wall.
• Nu-Swede-o prog: Anekdoten and Gösta Berlings Saga.
• Recommended reading: Magic for Beginners and Wild Wood.
• Pulping vivisectionists is videogame jazz in Ape Out.
• Tom F didn’t fall in love with The Witcher 3.
• Graham seeks not the time-sink treadmill of Factorio.
• Was XCOM: Chimera Squad actually enjoyable?
• The original Mafia definitely wasn’t. And yet, beloved.
• A special kind of swearing is also reserved for the original Mirror’s Edge.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Tom S and Marsh swelter and sweat through a discussion of ecstatic automation in Satisfactory, the didactic bleakness of The Last of Us Part II, the long view of Humankind and dire straits in Desperados III.

• Cherish your mucky factory in Satisfactory.
• The Last of Us Part II sounds unplayably horrible to me, but I am tempted by its exquisite ropes.
• The Sumerians have already won this timeline. Sorry. Play Humankind and see if you can do better – when it’s out, next year.
• Despair and delight in Desperados III – still a fantastic stealth RTS.
• The 494th greatest song of all time, Desperado. I think Alex did it better, tbh.
• Explore the fecundity of my joy in Wide Ocean Big Jacket.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Alex and Marsh ponder penguin chicanery, Destiny’s destiny, dialogue-by-card-deck in Signs of the Sojourner, conversation-as-combat in Griftlands, redeem Mass Effect: Andromeda, resist scratching tingles and rejoice at Desperados III.

• What is shape? Shape is crime.
• What is going on with Aiball / Penguin Cretins? Gamesindustry.biz have talked about it here.
• A Monster’s Expedition – the game our Pip worked on – has a demo out! Lovely!
• Be a bally and do a rolly in Stanley Kubrick’s Tiny Wings aka EXO ONE. Also demo-able.
• Destiny 2: put this mess in a box! Then serve up more.
• You might call Bungie’s plan for Destiny 2… vaulting ambition! Ha! Ha! Ha!
• Ha! Ha!
• Ha!
• Imagine being inside the McCartney Destiny Song. Emotional.
• As mentioned last week: Wide Ocean Big Jacket is super, super lovely. It’s also available from Steam.
• Another shout-out for John Walker’s indie curation site Buried Treasure.
• Weirdo puzzler, Ethereal is on itch.io and Steam.
• Conversational card game, Signs of the Sojourner! Itch. Steam.
• Nice game journo man, Chris Schilling.
• Conversation-as-combat in Griftlands!
• Enjoy the beeping and the wooshing of Mass Effect: Andromeda.
• Spread it on toast. Add a chunk of stilton. Perfect. It’s Desperados III.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Tom F and Graham muse on the eternal E3 news, marvel at itchio’s BLM bundle, lament pyromantic stealth game Wildfire, adore deck-builder Monster Train and flail further in Half-Life: Alyx.

• IGN’s eternal E3.
• The Escapist’s indie stream.
• Sony’s PS5 stream. I found it unconscionably boring, to my surprise and dismay.
• Undaunted: The Heretic One is, you know, the Heretic one.
• And Trepang2 is the FEAR one.
• The incredible Black Lives Matter bundle.
• John Walker has been doing a good job of picking out gems from the bundle.
• Wide Ocean Big Jacket, aka My Big Wide Open Morning Jacket. It’s in the bundle.
• One of the previous games from the same dev, Little Party.
• Be a cutesy teen bird in A Short Hike, and enjoy it, just to spite Alex. It’s in the bundle.
• Not mentioned on the pod, but puzzle game Ethereal is really interesting. It’s in the bundle.
• If Found is not in the bundle, but it’s nice.
• Quadrilateral Cowboy. It’s in the bundle.
• Pen and paper RPGs are to be found in the bundle too: e.g. the EXCELLENT Band of Blades (and the fantastically loopy Troika).
• Kids, Minit, Celeste are also games that are in the bundle. But why not look for yourself? In the bundle.
• Wildfire a sneaky, flamey game that is, alas, a bit of a damp squib.
• Comparable 2D stealth game, Tony of the Ninja.
• Tom’s fab post about Metal Gear Solid 5’s failure spectrum.
• Have you played Tom’s games, Gunpoint and Heat Signature?
• Choo choo, motherfuckers.
• Is Monster Train too much fun?
• Your strict and loving parent, Slay the Spire.
• The Peggle of Slay-the-Spire-likes, Overdungeon.
• Flamboyant exercise in cultural obscurantism: Half-Life: Alyx.
• Here it is rendered as a video performance by a Youtube Person.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S, Chris and Marsh try to fathom the bloody ways of Stoneshard, bloody the fathoms in Maneater, embrace doldrums in Sludge Life, bang the old drum for Fez, make other things go bang in Receiver 2, and probe wholes, holes and souls in The Witness.

At the beginning of this episode we express our support for the Black Lives Matter movement and Black and minority communities throughout the US and across the world who are protesting racial injustice.

We understand the responsibility that we have as people with privilege to educate ourselves, and to contribute our time and resources to combatting racism and discrimination in our day to day lives and in the industry to which we contribute.

We are taking some immediate action in the form of charitable donations to Black Lives Matter and the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust. We are also investigating ways that we can use the podcast to support worthy causes in the future.

Below you’ll find a list of antiracism resources and organisations. If you can, we’d love it if you offered them your attention and support.

Resources:

• If you are white and looking to improve your understanding of racial injustice, then How To Be An Anti-Racist by Ibram X Kendi and Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad are both accessible places to begin. For Our White Friends Desiring To Be Allies by Courtney Ariel is a free article that you may also find helpful.
• Many recommendations for books and resources are available from Victoria Alexander’s widely-circulated anti-racist reading list and anti-racist resource guide.
• If you are a parent and you’re looking for anti-racist books appropriate for children, EmbraceRace has a list which is available here.
• Elle Osili-Wood wrote a comprehensive Twitter thread with additional resources, charity links, and advice on action that can be taken by both white people and people of color, in the US, UK and elsewhere.
• If you are protesting in the United States, the ACLU has a useful summary of your legal rights.

Causes to support:

• Black Lives Matter
• Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust
• Liberty Human Rights
• Campaign Zero
• NAACP Legal Defence and Education Fund
• Community Justice Exchange
• List of US bail funds for protestors
• The Marshall Project
• A list of Minnesota-specific organisations can be found on this list compiled by Reclaim the Block

This is by no means a comprehensive list! We’re very happy to make additions or amendments based on your feedback: feel free to contact us at contact [at] crateandrowbar [dot] com.

On with the show notes!

• Why does Stoneshard want me not to play it?
• Tag up late-capitalism in Sludge Life
• Meticulously modelled mechanisms of troubling purpose: Receiver 2
• Eco-chomp through a world of decrepit, indolent human dipshittery in the resolutely 6-out-of-10 Maneater.
• Go beyond the infinite (in two delicious flavours) with Fez.
• Gallop at the speed of a free and beautiful horse in The Witness.
• This is Portmeirion, by the way.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Sorry for the pops and crackles on this one! Alex and Marsh are joined by special and exceedingly distant guest, Rich McCormick, to discuss Noclip’s Arkane documentary, space thriller Observation and space driller Deep Rock Galactic.

• Wholesome Direct – not just a showcase of games about frogs wearing Nike Air Jordans.
• Noclip’s fabulous Arkane documentary and moustache extravaganza.
• Roleplay the solar system’s bumbliest AI in Observation.
• Hide yourself with beards in Deep Rock Galactic.
• Robo-shooty-blam game with inconsistent environmental storytelling: Generation Zero.
• If only we could talk to the sconces.
• Alex is unimpressed by the sense of impending apocalypse in Fallout 3 and its successors.
• Cannon Brawl is this thing apparently. Looks kinda fucking cool actually!
• FEAR THE WILDEBEEST in Nidhogg.
• Comedy viking spoof, Norsemen.
• Enjoy drippy Welsh goblins in Ni No Kuni.
• I’m tired and will now stop these show notes. Goodbye, friend!

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and Marsh gather to be confounded by Crucible, the first foray into videogames by billionaire devourer of iguana flesh, Jeff Bezos, and admire acrobatic aerial shmup Jet Lancer.

• Crucible is out! Should Crucible be out? HMM.
• Whither the edgy boys go? They go to be a sharkborg.
• Fly, fly, up and away in Jet Lancer. It’s very cool. And it’s a bit like Luftrausers.
• Except it isn’t like Luftrausers? Which is also very cool.
• Deep Rock Galactic is a game we will play, myself while involuntarily imagining bulging spandex.
• Heaven’s Vault: a game about archaeology and language that was rendered subjectively infuriating by its stumbling, wayward intrusion into the third dimension.
• Come be a bogbuddy in the ultimate game of all time, Hunt: Showdown, which can easily culminate in concatenated disaster like this.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F and Alex are joined by special guests and storied devs Soren Johnson and (at the end) Leyla Johnson – CEO and president of Mohawk Games, respectively – to talk about Old World, an historical, epic strategy game. And polygamy.

• You can get in on Old World’s Early Access phase via the Epic Games store!
• Follow Soren Johnson and Leyla Johnson on Twitter!
• “Almost everything I do is a mistake.”

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S, Chris and Marsh lay themselves bare to discuss the Xbox showcase, sample the tasty-tasty-tasty open world comfort food of Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, unspool tubes in Filament and eye-roll at time-gribblies in Close to the Sun.

• The XBOX XERIEX X is coming and, if anyone notices, they will be able to play some of these forthcoming multiplatform games with improved loading times! Watch the entire e-event here.
• Or watch individual trailers:…
• We’re trying very hard to make ASS MEAD happen.
• H.R. Giger-inspired scary willy dribbler, Scorn.
• Some sort of space thing: Chorus.
• Spooky Polish walkabout The Medium.
• Newly turnbased gangster-with-a-heart-of-gold (and a baseball bat) game Yakuza: Like A Dragon.
• Potential jankathon, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. Look you’re being evil AND dancing! The most evil kind of evil! That’s storytelling.
• Mutant-dino murdersim Second Extinction.
• Tutu-flower-monster-masher Scarlet Nexus.
• Meanwhile, in the BezoVerse, Amazon’s hero shooter, Crucible has been further revealed – a bit – and looks faintly like its design was led by metrics. But we’ll find out on 20th May.
• They’re also making New World. An MMO. In 2020!
• Open world comfort food in the form of tasty, tasty, tasty orc-chunker Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Aegean murder holiday Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, pants-purloining day-tripper Hitman 2 and replica-lightsaber-lust-inducer Jedi: Fallen Order.
• Unfurl your ass-tube to solve puzzles in Filament.
• Jazz is still allowed, not sure about the rest: Close to the Sun.
• WHY?
• WHY?
• WHY?
• WHY?
• WHY?
• WHY?
• WHY?
• WHY?
• WHY?
• Gothic 1 and the playable teaser of its “remake”.
• As Warhammer as Warhammer gets: The Horus Heresy books. Also recommended: Dan Abnett’s and Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s novels, The Talon of Horus and Spear of the Emperor. We’ve heard good things about The Beast Arises, too.
• My shirt’s already off so I’ve got nowhere else to go.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

More Animal Crossing with Pip and Chris! We talk island design, the pleasures and pitfalls of meeting your inexplicably naked heroes, put Blathers on trial for art crime, and consider the ups and downs of multiplayer island life.

You can find this bonus episode on YouTube, and our intro music is, as ever, Clambake by The Mandibles.

That thread about Blathers’ misdeeds by Max Chesnokov can be found here, and you can check out Stan’s custom island railway while you’re at it.

Alex, Tom F and Graham e-gather to e-give their e-takes on the Assassin’s Creed reveal, get kicked right in the breach phase, courtesy of XCOM: Chimera Squad, and amp up the wide-men of Gears Tactics.

• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has been announced. Watch the Vikings raid and pillage – but in a good way – in the trailer.
• Tom F unloads his feelings on the face-kicking of XCOM: Chimera Squad.
• Upgrade your bellows in the unexpectedly excellent Gears Tactics.
• Kentucky Route Zero. Or you can watch an internet video youtuber play the game instead.
• Other old games periodically returning to our roster:
  Spelunky, Sekiro, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
• “Yes, but will it run Crysis?”
• Future Publishing have deleted the page now, but Thedret is still preserved in this outgoing link from Tom’s site to the defunct article.
• Something’s gotta be done about your nips.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S, Chris and Marsh evade the Gull Squad to bring you takes on the trousers of tactics spin-off XCOM: Chimera Squad, tubestation construction sim StationFlow and kraken-based illusory-victory machine Magic: The Gathering Arena.

• This isn’t relevant to show, but I think it’s important to say at the top of this that Tom would absolutely destroy Samuel Pepys in a fight.
• Delete gulls so we can be free to touch our faces again – using the power of Nvidia RTX Voice! Watch a Games Lad bang things with a hammer silently. You can download it here. You can use it even if you don’t have an RTX card by following these instructions, assuming Microsoft decides you can edit a text file on your own computer for which you are the sole user and administrator.
• Robert Yang’s forensic investigation into the authorship of seminal Counter-Strike level fy_iceworld (which was and is bullshit). And its preceding article digs into the game’s continuing legacy (of bullshit).
• XCOM: Chimera Squad. Why do the snake wear trousers? As a symbol of their epantsipation.
• Find your own Escalator Fuck-it Threshold in zen spatial engineering sim StationFlow.
• Where does the poo go?
• A Game Chris Has Found Pleasant In This Strange Time: Hitman 2
• It’s krakens for days in Magic: The Gathering Arena
• Wired’s article on maybe-just-as-terrible-as-everything-else investment opportunity: Magic cards
• Tim Harford has good facts about Mars Bars and macroeconomics.
• Nice and good art people: Paul and Leesha – behold their sky sharks! Their ligers!
• Here are some JRPGs that have shaped Tom into the 17th-century-diarist-suplexing bad boy that he is today: the Persona series, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6 and the newly reconstituted 7 (currently only on PS4). Also: Lost Odyssey, Tales of Symphonia and Eternal Sonata.
• Adumbric is a good word.
• Games, both video and tabletop in flavour, with interesting win conditions Cosmic Encounter, Solium Infernum (which now only seems to be available through this sketchy-looking site), Blood on the Clocktower and Blades in the Dark.
• What a kraken pod.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F and Marsh are joined by the mellifluous voice of Graham Smith to have weird wives in Sigma Theory, poke fingers into Half-Life: Alyx’s fungal bird beaks and enjoy Valorant in the brief twilight that heralds our inevitable obsolescence.

• A new game from Firaxis comes out next week! It’s XCOM: Chimera Squad, aka Tactical Breach Lizards.
• What a wicky wild wild, wicky wicky wild, wicky wild, wicky wicky wild wild wild world we live in.
• Soren Johnson has announced his new 4X game: The Wilder Olds. Wait. Older Wilds? Old World.
• Jon Blow is working on, and streaming, an unannounced a game. I was going to say, “Can ya tell what it is yet?” like Rolf Harris, then remembered that he’s a sex criminal and now I’m sad.
• Experience the suspense of Chekhov’s Spousal Betrayal in Sigma Theory: Global Cold War.
• Valve’s reportedly superlative attempt to redefine the VR waggle-space for people who have large houses, empty rooms, no cats, 20-20 vision, an imperviousness to vertigo, a spare £1000 and who just love to sweat: Half-Life: Alyx. Sounds great.
• But not as good as Beat Saber, maybe?
• Riot’s mash-up of Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Valorant.
• Animal Crossing: Turnip Salve
• The unrecommendable Wurm Online.
• Make up stuff about goblins together at Roll20 dot net.
• Jazzpunk is a game that looks like it would have been fun to make.
• Similarly, Virtual Virtual Reality.
• And TABS. Follow Wilhelm Nylund for amazing things he has seemingly bashed together with ease.
• Welcome to Light Fields is a VR room thing that lets you explore the interior of a space shuttle via the reflections on a metal cup.
• Pour one out for Geoguessr. They monetized it to bits, those animals.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and both Toms (!) reach across timezones to discuss sunny getaways in Hitman 2, fraught getaways in Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and more.

I’m going to be honest with you. It was very hot in my office when we recorded this episode, so I opened the window a crack. I didn’t realise that this would apparently invite an entire flock of seagulls onto the podcast. We’ve made progress with the echo issue but replaced it with infinite birds. Sorry. Just imagine you’re outside. Remember that? Feels like glass.

• Tom F’s been off on a tropical holiday in Hitman 2‘s Maldives DLC.
• Alex and Tom F ruminate on lovely jumping and manipulative owles in Ori and the Will of the Wisps.
• Here’s Intrusion 2 by Aleksey Abramenko, king of the invisible bendin’ bone.
• Tom S has been screaming for Dave in Gears 5, which is – momentarily, at the time of writing – free.
• Chris has plopped out of the other end of Doom Eternal, and he’s here to talk to you about your mousewheel.
• Be a bad boss in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Hello! Again! We’ve done another one of these! Chris and Pip cross the egg event horizon as they check in on island life, two weeks later.

You can find this bonus episode on YouTube, if you like. As ever, our intro music is Clambake by The Mandibles.

Some show notes!

• Here’s the website that lets you prepare Animal Crossing art in a browser.
• Nico directs our attention to this explanation of one aspect of AC’s tremendous localisation.
• The listener towns we check out are Zed Fang’s Terror, Teamboring’s Temperance, and Chris Allen’s Ragna Rock.

Alex, Marsh, Chris and Tom Senior discuss the most topical games of the age, including but not limited to The Room VR, Call of Duty for some reason, hunting in Red Dead 2, and Mount & Blade: Bannerlord.

We’re still getting used to this new remote recording setup, and we’ll be looking to invest in some decent desk mics to even out the sound quality in future episodes. Thank you for bearing with us!

• Tom is spending his days inside PS VR, chiefly The Room VR, Blood and Truth and, for some reason, James Cameron’s Avatar.
• We nosh heartily upon the monumental failings of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
• Alex’s attempt to recreate Animal Crossing in Red Dead Redemption 2 ends in tragedy.
• Chris has been whisking the hillmen in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.
• THE LONGING and VESPER.5: games about patience and, apparently, shouting.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Marsh, Chris and Alex attempt our first remote pod to discuss AI-augmented game development and the various verbs of Doom Eternal.

This is a shorter pod than usual as we get used to a new way of recording – but we’re going to do our best to continue to deliver hot pods every week. We hope you’re staying well! Washyerhandseverybody.

• Here’s that interview with Google’s Erin Hoffman-John about game creation using machine learning. Who will reach the end of Mike Cook’s Takeshi’s Castle with their dignity intact?
• Here’s Ganbreeder (now Artbreeder), and here’s how Pascal Blanché has used it to do art.
• We’ve all been running and jumpiung and shooting and finding and chainsawing and flaming and grenading and glory-killing and collecting Funkos in Doom Eternal.
• Podcast recommendations!
• The BBC’s Boring Talks, particularly this one about Watergate tape silence.
• This American Life‘s backlog, specifically, Squirrel Cop and squid or bung.
• Sophie’s Dice! Ideal for yer remote roleplaying. Chris has also been getting used to roll20.
• Here’s Chris and Pip’s podcast about Animal Crossing, if you missed it.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Hello! In this special mini-pod, Pip and Chris share their experiences of Animal Crossing: New Horizons while playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. No spoilers, unless you didn’t know about the time that Chris killed his husband and fled to an island retreat with the family silver.

Things are tough all over, and so we thought we’d record this in order to share a game that’s been a genuine source of happiness for us – and for many others – over the last couple of days. You can also listen on YouTube, and our intro music is (as ever) Clambake by The Mandibles.

There was no podcast last week due to a combination of deadlines and coronavirus stress. We fully intend to keep producing C&C podcasts in the coming weeks and months, but the exact hows and whens are still being figured out. Given that we can’t record together, it’s likely that we’ll do some combination of VOIP and the sorts of one-person mini-pods that we’ve produced from time to time. Thanks for bearing with us.

We hope you’re staying safe! Keep those hands clean and those takes medium.

Chris, Marsh and a moth get drippy then descend into the underworld of Iris And The Giant, adjudicate on the latest Destiny drama and order a 14-inch stuffed-crust Warzone. The crust is stuffed with guns.

• Bane of trans-pacific trade and the NBA: Geoff Keighley. Wash your hands to be spared his wrath.
• Alan Hazelden has announced a new game which Pip – our very own Pip! – has written. A Monster’s Expedition (Through Human Exhibitions).
• John Walker said nice things about it!
• Dolorous CCG Iris And The Giant about punching demonic cats and being angry with yer dad.
• Sure, go ahead. Show him the red card for eating Kevin De Bruyne. See what he does.
• Destiny: “it’s a lot like Crufts”. The kids be angry at the new season, even though the beach volleyball robomancy is good.
• I contend that if a footballer can be a bear, a gun can be a boss.
• Doc Burford has this article on Vice all about Destiny 2’s latest travails.
• Happy Meal Toy Tom Clancy: Call of Duty Warzone.
• Spacestation is to gun, as gun is to video format?
• Psychoghost’s video of Hunt: Showdown tips.
• Berserk – a very violent manga that was at least a minor inspiration for some aspects of Dark Souls.
• Lindsey Ellis’s video on JK Rowling’s incessant over-definition of the Harry Potter universe.
• Hilary Mantel’s superb historical novels, Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies and The Mirror And The Light.
• Sadly, it turns out there is already an app called Tudr, and it’s a knowledge-sharing platform for college students and not a 16th century doomed wife solicitation sim.
• The Color Out of Space: wiccan teens versus unfathomable cosmic terror! It’s good says Chris.
• The Longing is a game that pointedly takes a boringly long time to play. Is that an interesting thing to do? Hmm.
• “Time is interesting, man,” says Chris, so I guess the answer is yes.
• Braid is a great puzzle game that exhaustively explores the use and manipulation of time.
• A coda to the moth drama: as I released our friend into the uncertain night, another immediately entered, bringing the final score to Marsh 0, Insect-Tea Coalition 3

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Alex discuss some actual games news and bury themselves kneck-deep in Dark Future and World of Horror – just in time for a special report from salty ocean correspondent Pip!

Plus: voice controls, work-life balance, the hot panic of an embarassing gaming moment, our go-to grunts, and other emanations from this bumper episode of The Shame Edition.

Bar-ney, nooo-ooo-oooo!

• Do go watch Larian’s ace Baldur’s Gate 3 demo from PAX East.
• Here’s the first video in Valve’s series of Half-Life: Alyx gameplay reveals. You put the hat on, and the barnacle, he eat the hat.
• Valve released Dota Underlords, and it’s like, a whole game, isn’t it.
• Tom’s lovely game, Tasteful Bench Lizards. Do give it a spot on your wishlist!
• Alex has been changing lanes without signalling in road-based roguelike Dark Future: Blood Rate States.
• The other roadlike that we couldn’t remember the name of is Convoy.
• Chris is very very into World of Horror, and is sorry for turning into a such a pseud on the pod. A pseud-o-pod, if you will. This is a joke. I’m sorry. Marsh tries very hard with these show notes, and I feel the need to do the same. Is it going well? It’s not.
• Here’s Emily Short’s blog post about Aaron Reed’s horror novel Subcutanean.
• Pip has become a lone wanderer of the Sea of Thieves, a fisherperson nonpareil, and the victim of a sequence of leech crimes.
• It’s time for Kane’s ace GOTY 2019 website, corraling as it does the aggregate good taste of the Crate & Crowbar community. Honk!
• A few nights ago I had a nightmare about these shownotes. I dreamed that it was necessary to provide a timestamp and detailed explanation for every joke on the podcast. I haven’t done this. Please don’t make me do this.
• press triangle to barp

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and Marsh endure the first episode of Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, but only barely, punch towers with mechadongs in Besiege, beat bad bots in resuscitated coop shooter Generation Zero and get bandy-legged in The Suicide of Rachael Foster.

“It’s a real Bront.”

• We sat stony-faced through videogame-dev-set sitcom Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet but YMMV.
• Kerbal Space Programme for Skaven: Besiege!
• You can in fact pit your monstrous pneumatic dongs against one another. There’s a whole Youtube Channel set up to facilitate Robot Wars-style tournaments, as described here by PCGamer!
• Pod friend / bayou-based father-figure Jim Rossignol’s review of wondrous murderswamp Hunt: Showdown.
• Internalise the neutrally regulated phases of tabletop-to-digital game, Warhammer Underworlds Online.
• Generation Zero! Face 1980s mech peril in a very Swedish open world. It’s snikt!
• Horzong Zmeero Verm
• Uncover, or not, the elegaic metaphorical power of a dental retainer in dubious walking sim The Suicide of Rachel Foster.
• I’m a human wound in the psychosphere!
• Pour one out for TJ’s slain spire.
• Play Mordhau with friends to inure yourself to the pain of being beheaded by racists.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex and Marsh grudgingly drag themselves from the swamp to chat about spry roguelike platformer ScourgeBringer, palpate the unctuous parts of The Good Time Garden and feel ways about things in plangent poke-a-story Florence.

• Gentle nature-walk / insect stridulation simulator, Hunt: Showdown now has a PvE onboarding tutorial for new players. That’s nice!
• Red Dead Redemption 2 has over 200 species of animal! But not enough bells, frankly.
• Imagine Celeste, add a bit of Gungeon and you got yourself a crunchy ScourgeBringer.
• Sordid point-and-palp game The Good Time Garden.
• Poke arguments together in sweet, sad and slightly unspecific yarn Florence.
• Destiny. What the fuck is that about?
• Listen to Miniatures Monthly for maximum goblin nonsense.
• Pointed out after the pod: Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem has some really ripe lore-wank.
• Little Big Aventure‘s name remains unbrutalised in its Steam edition.
• Sins of a Solar Empire aka PLANET SHUFFLE.
• Tactical space shooter with a good name House of the Dying Sun
• Eggs Yolk Eggs: Divine Cybermancy is a multiplayer FPS/RPG hybrid with a name that makes me hungry… for EGGS!
• Here is an example of that graph I was talking about during the excruciating Homespun Wisdom section of the podcast.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and Marsh bear witness to the spherical design crimes of Battlefront II, sweat bricks in formidable hell-Tetris game, Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät, and return to their happy place, the cursed murder-swamp of Hunt: Showdown.

No one needs to own this many maglites.

• GeForce Now game streaming thing is out… now! But what is it and why is it? The most definitively nonplussed takes abound.
• It’s a bit like Stadia, which is Google’s similar attempt to answer a question that maybe no one is actually asking.
• A voice echoing from a distant age of game industry folly: Cliffy B opines on the reasons for Lawbreaker’s failure, revealing himself to be a soul of an almost plangent innocence, and also completely and very obviously wrong.
• Dan Houser has left Rockstar and will now ride off into the sunset, pursued by a bear.
• “I like the noises and sounds” – the highest of praise for the canonically cavalier Battlefront II.
• Stephen Lavelle’s multi-directional Tetris game: Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät. It sounds too hard for me, but apparently it gets Alex’s pendulum swinging.
• Hunt: Showdown – has any surplus disemboweled horse asset been recycled into a more perfect form? No.
• Homoerotic death-by-misadventure-during-a-stag-weekend simulators: Mordhau and Escape from Tarkov.
• Golly, what a silly joystick.
• Alex done books! Britsoft and Japansoft!
• The interviewer with the name we dare not mangle: John Szczepaniak
• Consume Chris’s paeon to Roombas in text-based multiplayer simulator hackmud.
• You should not, and blessedly cannot, consume Chris’s horny AVP mods.
• Third mage lucky: the correct name of the Eagles’ song, used for the theme-tune to the BBC’s Hitchhiker’ Guide to the Galaxy, is Journey of the Sorceror
• Pour one out for A Year of Rain, Daedalic’s unloved RTS.
• I don’t even know what point I was trying to make during this conversation. The falldown juice had begun to take hold.
• CRAYYK A BOOBA, SOLO

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S, Chris and Marsh seek the Creature in the Well, guiltily juggle men in Dynasty Warriors 8, revisit the roots of the RTS in Warcraft 3: Reforged, crave decapitation in Mordau and assess the early access jank of Warhammer Underworlds: Online.

“Stay off the tracks.”

• What’s that emerging from the frigid tundra of January? Is it…? Could it be… news? Holy fuck!
• Torchlight Frontiers has morphed into Torchlight 3, shedding its F2P plans along the way.
• Innocent children’s entertainment: Thomas The Tank Engine
• Henry: Portrait of a Se-RAIL Killer
• He’ll put you in a sleeper hold!
• He’ll cut you deeper than Dr Beeching!
• Beware the bogie-man.
• Mind the gap… between your head and your body!
• Miss your stop and he’ll stop you… DEAD!
• *discordant musicbox rendition of Coming Round The Mountain plays*
• Some trains terminate at Ashford International… This train will terminate YOU!
• Yep, that’s it. That’s all I have.
• Meanwhile, in Wales: Psh-ti-cuff, psh-ti-cuff, psh-ti-cuff
• Kentucky Route Zero is out, all the way out, and it’s STILL about America. Sorry?
• Duelyst has fallen upon its sword. Ow!
• Allergens of Room Temperature is more memorable than this game‘s actual name.
• Atari are making hotels now: a generous bequest to the instagram accounts of urban explorers ten years from now.
• I am too weak for 60% of the Creature in the Well
• Dynasty Warriors 8: don’t do gravity.
• Back to where so many things began: Warcraft 3: Reforged
• Mordhau: be dismembered by the worst people on the internet.
• Behold the somersaulting mega-dogs of Warhammer Underworlds: Online.

Ivorrrrrr!

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex and Marsh take a jaunty journey into the depths of Hades and wander the Streets of Rogue. The RNs are very much G’d, gorillas freed and the roguelikes liked, to varying degrees. Also: patch note heresies and our favourite offal.

• The Half-Lifes… Half-Lives?… They’re freeeee!
• Some of the Half-Life: Alyx team answered questions on Reddit.
• Does The Witcher’s success presage a wave of sexploitative videogame adaptations?
• Unity’s short film, Heretic. Very cool. Not anything to do with games or making games, though, is it? Maybe they’ll release a 7-minute feature in which a techno-owl explains why their in-house version control solution is completely boned.
• Ninja Theory’s Dreadnought Diary.
• Hades: the god, the place and the game. It’s well anabatic. Great fish.
• Streets of Rogue arranges its oats in many unique ways, but after a short while… maybe it needs some pecans? Couple of strawberries. Lush.
• Yosser might?
• How long is too long to maroon your family on an island?
• Factorio will make you its slave. A very smart slave, with great bragging rights.
• Can AI Dungeon write show notes for us, plz?
• Resurrect Dig Dug II!
• Squid or Bung?
• Candy Crush was made by King, for the record.
• Look at all the garbage inventory I drew for Sir, You Are Being Hunted.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom, Chris and Marsh gather to reopen Black Mesa’s final chapters, vie to become the ultimate Tom in Slay The Spire, hoover up all the flavour text in Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire and ride the rhythm of Sayonara Wild Hearts.

• Let’s put this at the top: this year’s C&C Community GOTY is now online! Go vote in the only meaningful act of democracy you will ever experience again.
• Kane is the best and deserves all the goats.
• Go back to Black Mesa, and its final chapters in Xen, and tell me what I should feel.
• A new front of inter-Tom warfare opens up as the fourth and final (?) character for Slay The Spire gets released. Go have a nap, devs. Maybe a relaxing bath. Get some Lush in, innit. Bit of Radio 4. Lovely.
• Catch a very big man and be slightly dismayed at the size and number of crowded pubs in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.
• Vicariously re-experience the unfathomable hinterland of youth and/or prefigure the crisis of 30-something thinkpiece writers in Sayonara Wild Hearts.
• Simogo – it’s true, they’re Swedes!
• Star Citizen: the definition of development bardo. Maybe?
• Very gribbly. Definitely a gribble. Unknowable, irrelevant interior.
• Moderately gribbly. Could, if collected with many similar creature, be a gribble. And yet: it yearns, longs, dreams. A noble spirit trapped in ignoble flesh.
• Negligibly gribbly. Not a gribble. A pristine embodiment of a perfect soul.
• Gorogoa. It’s a gorra gorra gaffs.
• Toilet Puncher’s Infinite Surrender
• The Shard. Didn’t there be a fox in there?
• Pip traps Tom in a knock knock joke at 1:32:25.
• Our D&D pods
• C&C Descends into a Total Fuckshow: Dark Souls Edition
• C&C Descends into a Total Fuckshow: Bloodborne Edition
• A Bloodborne friend we hardly knew – but will remember forever.
• Breakers of at least four walls: Eternal Darkness and Banjo-Kazooie: Buts & Bolts
• MACLUNKEY!
• Jason Schreier is very good at telling the stories behind game dev.

A damning indictment of my algorithm.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

It’s the end of the year! Pip, Marsh, Alex, Chris and a hologram of Tom Francis gather on a big sofa to discuss their favourite games of the year. Featuring Sekiro, Baba is You, Red Dead Redemption 2, Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds and more!

This’ll be our last podcast of the year – we’ll be back in January! If you like, you also have the option of watching this podcast on YouTube – view our faces! Watch us sit! Regard the takes!

Apologies to Tom, from me, Chris. I did not realise that I was occluding his entire form with my body. He’s there, honest. You’ll get to see him sometimes.

Here’s the short longlist of games discussed in this pod:

• Baba is You
• Total War: Warhammer 2
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
• Far Cry: New Dawn
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Sea of Thieves (relatedly, here’s a Twitter thread full of Pip’s lovely screenshots!)
• Heaven’s Vault
• Outer Wilds
• Disco Elysium
• Noita
• Unity of Command II
• Teamfight Tactics
• Slay The Spire (obviously)
• Untitled Goose Game
• A Short Hike
• Kind Words

The list is singular, the games are plural.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also watch (!) it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex and Chris discuss Resident Evil 3 and Twin Peaks VR before setting a course straight for the heart of men-in-helmets-land: Phoenix Point, Halo: Reach, and a little Destiny 2: Season of Dawn.

Also featuring: the true pillars of any hero’s journey, the retroactive bigtown crisis, the vital importance of denying yourself the dream gnome, and meditations on how to tell when a wizard is not a wizard and why that wizard can’t be you.

• They’ve only gone and done another Resident Evil, and quickly, too!
• Enter the world of the iconic locations of the big trombone of Twin Peaks VR.
• Chris reports back from the front lines of the Crab War in Phoenix Point.
• Halo: Reach: clunky, merely ganky, or a product of its time? Alex’s verdict: delicious.
• In Destiny 2: Season of Dawn, the Mercury Man’s Magic Washing Machine just gotta keep on turnin’.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom, Marsh and two-thirds of a bottle of whiskey consider the fate of Valley of the Gods, indulge in Russo-phobic whack-a-mole in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and ponder space, loss and buttons in Still There.

• Campo Santo’s Valley of the Gods is now officially on hold as its creators move onto other projects at Valve.
• But not everyone had a wheelie desk to wheel away, as Duncan Fyfe’s plangent tweets make plain.
• Death Stranding’s landscape is not the product of Avalanche’s proprietary engine – but of Guerilla Game’s proprietary Decima engine!
• Gradually stab a Russian man in the leg with screwdrivers in the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Grim stuff!
• No bang with the podge man, though.
• John Walker’s new website is called Buried Treasure! I probably should have said that out loud on the podcast. Anyway. It’s nice!
• Still There: sad man in space simulator / point & click.
• Nice man telling you about wine and pigs: Sam Neill.
• Disco Elysium is still great. I shouldn’t have save-scummed. I should have plunged screaming into the unfolding shambles man tragedy.
• Is Jack Ryan bad? It’s probably bad.
• Rainbow Six Siege is great, but we yearn for the breach-‘n’-clear co-ops of Clancy games of yore.
• You can play Halo Reach on PC!
• Terrifyingly good sound design in The Hunt: Showdown.
• Scary Norse game Apsulov: End of Gods.
• Tim Hutching’s LARP A Crow Funeral
• Jason Rohrer‘s GDC talk from 2018: “2014 vs. 2018: The Shape of Financial Success Before and After the Indiepocalypse”
• Tom’s review of Star Wars: Bog Standard Jedi.
• Homer Simpson’s rendition of Born Under a Bad Sign. A classic.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and Marsh take on the Pied Poper in A Plague Tale: Innocence, pootle across the Sea of Thieves, burp their way through Sigma Theory: Global Cold War and leave a faint but distinctly colonic whiff of Dota in their wake.

• BUY BUY BUY
• And people did – specifically they went and bought all the Valve VR goggles. Bought ’em right up.
• Throw rats at popes in A Plague Tale: Innocence. Top tier charnel house tunnel effluent. 7/10.
• “Settlers with zombies” is the elevator pitch for They Are Billions but perhaps it’s just not a very big elevator.
• Frostpunk gives its city-building game a big final purpose much more successfully.
• Spy management game Sigma Theory: Global Cold War – really neat premise, maybe let down by spreading its sim too thin.
• Hello, I would like a one-way ticket to Hornengrad, please.
• A point of comparison regarding the empowerment that comes from a learning curve: Unity of Command II
• Powerful ass news in Death Stranding.
• Co-op pirate game Sea of Thieves has got different ropes, it’s got bailing and analogue collaborative treasure-hunting. What more do you want? To not be on the terrible Windows Store. That’s what I want.
• Dota: Underlords – it’s sure got a lot of stuff in it.
• Dragon Age: Origins also had a lot of stuff in it. Here’s an email I sent at the time I reviewed it: “Dragon Age is not nearly the worst game I’ve played, but it’s certainly the game that I have liked least that I have played longest.”
• Dota 2 is allegedly a game of some sort. Ridiculous! Never heard of it!
• Sin Vega‘s excellent Eliza review. “We’ve all known a man we pitied but couldn’t trust.” Youch. Also mentioned: Nate Crowley, Nic Reuben, Alice O’Connor, Cass Marshal, Jason Schrier.
• The heartbreaking parrot may in fact be Alex, the subject of a thirty-year experiment.
• You can’t fuck Vangelis. Sorry, it’s just a fact.
• If you are a bee, please get in touch with your taxonomies.
• Here’s the German documentary about “silver gamers” and a link to the team itself.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom, Chris, Alex and Marsh rejoice in the return of Half-Life, coo at the UI of Unity of Command II, marvel at the muddle of Death Stranding and spark up our Good Hot Swords in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

This episode is brought to you in association with The People’s Lidl Rum David Bowie Orchestra.

• Half-Life: Alyx! HOLY SHIT!
• Half-Life 2 was released in 2004, as Alex said. What a wise and ancient creature he is.
• Tom F has actually playtested Half-Life: Alyx and somehow didn’t tell anybody in an act of superhuman discretion.
• Geoff Keighley’s interview with some of the Half-Life: Alyx team! Robin Walker’s beard is nice, isn’t it? Velvety.
• Incredibly clean-looking, supply-line-focused strategy game Unity of Command II. The UI is the bees knees.
• It was designed by Tomislav Uzelac – who is not Polish but Croation. He did make AMP though! Blimey!
• Unpicking Kojima’s wank dream, Death Stranding: camp from a different dimension.
• It’s not actually a very spoilery talk – but Tom does pick up on some big themes that are probably improved if the delivery of them is unknown to the player. If you want to skip it, we start talking more generally about the game at 43:47
• The Mandalorian: a bold return to the aesthetic of the western or samurai movie for an internet-telly show in which BEEP is BEEP.
• Ad Astra was directed by James Gray.
• Other films we mention that I can’t be bothered to link: Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Dunkirk, Michael Mann’s Heat.
• Middle-distanceman Broodman Sad-Dad, Mark Rylance is a fabulous actor. He was very sad about plague and Henry VIII’s roving peen in Wolf Hall and did a lot of melancholic rumination. The book is absooooluuuutely aaaamaaaazing, with one of the most richly drawn protagonists committed to paper.
• Get this man a full bowl of M&M’s and clean hair.
• Much chat there is about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I know I gripe a lot, but I like it. I mean, it might not have the optimal wookie-tech but its Good Hot Sword makes it a great 6/10.
• FINE. It’s a 7.
• Or an 8. But you can keep the fuckin’ ponchos, alright?
• Cosmic treasure Werner Herzog.
• Why are we talking about birds now? Why is any of this happening?
• Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place is v good and I miss it.
• Oh christ, please end.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and Marsh provide only the most deletable content as they marvel at the obscene indulgence of Death Stranding, tumble through infinity in Manifold Garden and test the limits of dark ecstasy in Lust From Beyond: Prologue.

Don’t open with the genital shoggoth.

• Brian David Gilbert has made a Hideo Kojima name generator. That’s a generator that creates names of the kind that Hideo Kojima gives his characters, not a one that creates Hideo Kojima’s own name – that’s just Hideo Kojima, you big silly dingdong!
• Please enjoy falling over hillocks as Deadstrandman America Bridgesman in Hideo Kojima’s Hideo Kojima game, Death Stranding, a metaphor for Iceland and Twitter by Hideo Kojima and, evidently, mostly for Hideo Kojima, too.
• Wow there’s more poo discussion in this episode than I remembered. Sorry everyone.
• Actually, not sorry at all. Here’s a pictoral guide to poo that I drew years ago, an awful gift from me to you, Show Notes Reader.
• The Ladder Scene from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
• Maclunkey!
• Manifold Garden, a post-Witness puzzler set inside a massive fractal cheese dream.
• Plunge into the slick, gaping orifice of Lust From Beyond: Prologue, a slightly naff horror game with explicit NPC orgies.
• It’s inspired by the art of H R Geiger and Zdzisław Beksiński.
• Tag ur fractured self in Disco Elysium.
• Can YOU tolerate Apelegs’ bad eggs?
• Pip will dismantle everything you hold dear in the Star Wars: Rebellion boardgame.
• Dev tip: like all pod-nonsense, if you repeat the words “Tactical Breach Wizards” in front of a mirror three times, it becomes a real game. This is how all games are born.
• Braid is a puzzle platformer and also a paean to self-absorbed sad boys.
• Untitled Goose Game is a game about being a horrible goose and also a paean to being horrible goose.
• The Talos Principle is a game about lasers and existential questions.
• Chris made a compass for charting the varied, but uniformly regrettable, kinds of game journalist.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Marsh is joined by artist John Roberts to sleuth through Jenny LeClue: Detectivu, unpick the mysteries of Tangle Tower and expose deceptions in Telling Lies. Also: class war and Photoshop brushes.

• Fallout 1st is undergoing a proletariat revolution.
• EA’s stuff is back on Steam now. Cool?
• The Steam Library has been revamped. Hm.
• Detectiving and choosiness abounds in Jenny LeClue: Detectivu.
• Tangle Tower – a follow-up to Detective Grimoire by SFB Games.
• Also, not mentioned in the pod, but the excellent character designs are by Catherine Unger.
• Telling Lies – a follow-up to Sam Barlow’s Her Story.
• Chris Morris’s new film is The Day Shall Come
• This American Life had an episode which Morris used as partial inspiration for his film.
• John just isn’t thrilled by The Outer Worlds.
• Netflix has a new trailer for The Witcher TV series and, yes, it has a bathtub in it.
• Hope’s article on Hideo Kojima and Andy Warhol.
• John Ruskin, notable art critic, powerful mutton chop energy.
• Games for ailing PCs: Into The Breach, Slay The Spire, Six Ages and ye olde PC games like Baldur’s Gate and the early Fallouts.
• Goblin Punch. I don’t really understand what this is, but there’s a lot of it. Someone’s thought about goblins a lot.
• Too Like The Lightning is the sci-fi novel that our listener thinks Chris will like. Maybe you will, too?
• Here’s that Genesys Mass Effect Mod.
• Big Robot’s game The Signal from Tolva has some cool lore for roleplaying.
• Paul Scott Canavan – awesome artist, fine purveyor of brushes.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Marsh, Alex, Chris, both Toms and (occasionally Pip) assemble for the dawn of the podcast’s third century. Featuring Outer Worlds, more Disco Elysium, Radio Commander, Teamfight Tactics and more.

Plus: the rise of Norman Buffus, British Public Transport Elysium, an extremely long conversation about pants, books, the cursed Beeb, and some vital Tom Francis news.

Does nobody else have a house hat?

• Hideo Kojima’s best friend Conan O’Brien is here, and you’re an otter now.
• Alex’s BBC Radio 4 bit can be listened to here, starting at around 28:20. Here is the studio, laden with Objects of Power.
• Tom S delivers his most medium take yet on The Outer Worlds.
• We’re all still having them big thoughts about Disco Elysium.
• Alex has been dabbling with Radio Commander.
• Pip looks ahead with trepidation to Teamfight Tactics’ Rise of the Elements update.
• Favourite books!
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• Beloved by Toni Morrison

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Marsh get the comms horn for Fortnite’s spectacular server shutdown, eat the wave of FOMO in Destiny 2 and unleash their inner twat upon Disco Elysium. Also: house rules for goblins.

• Fortnite Chapter 2 is a marketing coup and some sort of game, too, I guess.
• A good thread on the aforementioned.
• Chris often sinks his costly phallus into Destiny 2. That’s what I heard, anyway.
• Yet another white man rises from a booze soup in Disco Elysium – but it’s still brilliant anyway. So far.
• Fleabag is a fourth-wall-breaking TV show that may or may not be too embarrassing to bear.
• Symbaroum – a fabulous dark fantasy world wrapped in a poorly edited manual.
• Pip ran a game of Bubblegumshoe while at SHUX
• Collateral Damage is the roleplaying game about being a movie extra.
• Neon Black is not a real colour, but it IS a cyberpunk take on the Blades in the Dark roleplaying system.
• Other pen and paper games mentioned: Numenera, Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk Red, Dungeons & Dragons and Fantasy Flight’s Genesys system as used in its Star Wars games.
• Gosh that was a lot of Googling, I hope these show notes are over.
• Oh no there’s more
• Amico is a new old console.
• Music exists. There’s quite a lot of it about these days. Something should be done.
• Wolf in the White Van is a good book by the Mountain Goat’s fella chap man John Darnielle
• Convey me to my bed, then to my grave: Love they to live that love and honour have.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Toms Francis and Senior join Marsh to discuss dismissive dad death in Indivisible and lobby for gun-lobbing in both Borderlands 3 and John Wick Hex. Also: why PCs are awful and no one should build them.

Please, don’t say “fampany”.

• Blizzard’s incredible, punitive reaction to a pro-player speaking out about Hong Kong.
• UsTwo Games got caught up in a union dispute when it let one of its employees go.
• Motion Twin are a French dev with a flat structure. But for how long?!?!
• Indivisible: inadvisable storytelling.
• Borderlands 3: mindfulness and wellbeing edition. The character’s name is Amara, not Samara. We regret this error but do not wish to be corrected about this or any of our other many grievous failings. Thank you for your understanding at this time.
• Fractal Design. WHY
• Focus hard to squat in John Wick Hex
• Razbuten’s video about his non-gamer wife struggling with assumed gaming knowledge.
• Black Ops 2: whack-a-mole but with foreigners.
• Matt Castle and his Divinity II videos on RPS.
• Books: Dresden Files (bad start, gets better), John Milton series (enjoyable trash), Altered Carbon (dubious trash) and Hard Magic (good)
• Why doesn’t Gordon just join a techbro start-up? Friend of podcast and AI researcher Mike Cook takes apart a dismayingly credulous Wired article about the exodus from physics academia to Silicon Valley.

You can hang out with us and our community, or should I say FAMmunity, on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Alex and Marsh discuss the voxely promise of Teardown and existential terror of Microsoft Flight Simulator, return to Destiny redux, play some holes in What the Golf? and get nailed by every pixel in Noita.

Put that in your leviathan and smoke it.

• Admire the restrained scope and exquisite smashiness of Teardown by Dennis Gustafsson.
• The triumphant return of Microsoft Flight Simulator: every dead dog procedural.
• Asobo also made rat-a-palooza A Plague Tale: Innocence and underrated American-landscape-pootler Fuel.
• Destiny 2, now on Steam: that’s how you get three weird bleeding eyes.
• A good walk spoiled is then improved in What The Golf?
• Throw things at dinosaurs in Cricket Through the Ages. Currently part of Apple Arcade, but it might easily come to PC too. It’s by Free Lives, who also made Broforce.
• Stadia is Google’s game streaming thingamy, and it knows exactly what kind of a piece of shit you are.
• The new funny games: Jazzpunk, Untitled Goose Game and the oeuvre of Bennett Foddy, GIRP, QWOP and Getting Over It.
• Crumbly cave smasher, Noita. Heed not Alex’s eggy secrets.
• Previous games by at least one of the Noita devs include Baba Is You and Crayon Physics.
• The definitive falling sand, er, sandbox is Powder Toy.
• Hobbes’ Leviathan has baller cover design.
• The soundtrack to Tom’s Aegean muder spree: Fleet Foxes’ Mykonos.
• Deadwood: it’s like Shakespeare basically.
• You too can angst over efficiently pretty cities in Anno 1800 and Islanders, or wield the weapons of an absolute loser in Divinity II: Original Sin.

This podcast is goose resistant to a depth of 50 metres.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F and Chris break into the pod chamber to discuss the latest wave of gaming subscription programmes, the pipe edge situations of Overland, and some game about a goose you probably haven’t heard of.

You’ve always got some redundant beans.

• The subs models in question are Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, Humble Monthly and Google Play Pass.
• The tweet that Tom quotes regarding the negative impact of the Google Play Pass’ playtime-based developer reward model is this one, by Will O’Neill.
• Everybody’s gone to the Untitled Goose Game.
• Here’s that video of a woman desperately attempting to brush a panda pen.
• Tom’s lone inventory slot is stacked with Overland opinions.
• Organ Trail is the zombie-themed Oregon Trail-like that Chris mentions.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom S and Marsh discuss The Hunt: Showdown, Nocked! True Tales of Robin Hood and Astral Chain. Plus things that tinkle and jangle, things that waggle to make friars happy and things that should be renamed, remade and covered with moons.

• It’s a busy weekend for game releases: honk at a farmer in Untitled Goose Game and choose PETROL or DOG in Overland (which is not like Brigador but is a bit like Into the Breach)
• Disco Elysium has a new, kinda baffling trailer and a release date of October 15. You’re a detective and you… and… Well. You’re a detective.
• You scream, I scream, we all scream for beast cream. Get your beast cream freshly curdled from the fly-blown teat of The Hunt: Showdown. Served in a waffle cone.
• Nocked! True Tales of Robin Hood is a text adventure with a LYING SUBTITLE and some light, almost arbitrary resource management. You can’t shag the bear.
• Here are two definite humans who want to talk to you about Nintendo’s motion controller and absolutely won’t lead you into a black subdimensional pond where your flesh springs off you like snapped elastic.
• Astral Chain is a game about being a good cop, ice cream (NOT beast cream) and smashing the shit out of space demons. It’s not on PC, but it almost certainly will be in, ooh, ten years?
• Project Hospital is a management game that friend-of-pod Kane says is better than Two Point Hospital and has top quality NPC phone usage, which is what everyone wants, really.
• Control also has a phone in it. Makes you think.
• Resident Evil 2’s remake is good, and Tom S will allow it.
• Shadow of the Colossus also got remade and was good. Clash of Heroes got remade for PC and its new art sucked a dingo’s wanger and that is NOT a good thing but a BAD thing.
• Come back Fable 2! But not to the Windows Store.
• Bad Names: don’t do them. Name crimes of yore include: Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Omnikron: Nomad Soul and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. More recently: skateboarding game Session and Lovecraftian Epic Store exclusive Conarium.
• Nier Automata’s lead designer has the right idea. Moons for everyone!
• Normal Karl Pilkington’s The Witness, The Outer Wilds, The Return of the Obra Dinn and Ori and the Blind Forest all involve coloured shapes. Some pleasing. Some make Chris unhappy! All of them are better than Brexit.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F, Alex and… Marsh (!) discuss Wilmot’s Warehouse, Guild Wars 2, Slay The Spire’s new class and Control.

Plus: what’s that wizard’s problem anyway, the tricky issue of endings, David Cage’s Hamlet, and so on.

• One is a box in Wilmot’s Warehouse. Here’s the excellent trailer, featuring Pip!
• Six birthdays all at once have ruined Guild Wars 2 for Alex.
• Tom F adopts various stances on Slay The Spire‘s new class.
• Chris shoots his idea-gun at Control.
• We ruminate upon the tsars and oreos of the New York Times crossword.
• Papa Sangre is, indeed, a game (albeit one without a website.).

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F and Alex are joined by special guest Mike Cook: AI researcher, indie dev, and friend of the podcast. We get into AI judging games, combining games, designing games, and failing to understand what’s so good about walls. Also discussed: long Cebs in The International, dialogue style in A Short Hike, gossip in Fire Emblem, and why Tom never knows the world’s about to end.

• Mike’s game-designing AI, which may not always be called Angelina
• Canabalt meets Typing of the Dead: Mike’s hacking game Rogue Process
• A long Ceb
• A Short Hike: sounds fake, still great
• If, like Tom, you can’t get enough Fire Emblem chat, recent eps of Waypoint Radio and Kotaku Splitscreen have more

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and Alex discuss Dicey Dungeons, Jupiter Hell, Exanima and Fire Emblem. Plus: arguably the worst way of categorising games we’ve ever come up with, and that’s saying something.

I’m sorry, but for physics reasons I need you to cradle me and lower me to the earth.

• We’ve all been playing Dicey Dungeons, including Pip, who worked on the game. There’s yer disclaimer!
• Alex has been adjusting to the various speeds of Jupiter Hell, the spiritual successor to DRL.
• Chris would like to tell a long story about a time when he fell over, and also in Exanima.
• Tom is, miraculously perhaps, enjoying Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Except Ferdinand, who he hates.
• Here’s Alex’s blog, including his most recent post about his son’s experience of Spelunky.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Pip and Tom F briefly return to autobattlers before discussing A Short Hike, Stones of Solace, Islanders, and the faults of a variety of algorithms.

All this, just so that an otter can say well done.

• Pip’s lives in Teamfight Tactics now.
• …with breaks for Stones of Solace.
• Tom has taken A Short Hike and will perhaps one day attempt to Drawdog.
• Further art: Passpartout: The Starving Artist and Chris Livingston’s diary thereof.
• Chris has (eventually) been algorithmically led to Islanders.
• …which reminds Tom of Evergarden.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and both Toms wander in late to discuss assorted retro shooters, Nowhere Prophet, Fire Emblem, naughty semaphore, and additional tepid takes.

I’m a murder president on the go, and I need my fix.

• Tom S’s been playing a big pile of all-caps retro shooters, including AMID EVIL, DUSK, Ion Fury.
• Tom F has been relentlessly taunted by Nowhere Prophet and continues his murder cruise in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.
• Chris has decided to talk about Fire Emblem: Three Houses and it’s too late to stop him.
• Here’s the talk on why Tacoma’s voice actors wore their mics on their foreheads.
• Here’s Tom F’s video about Concrete Jungle.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Chris and Alex use videogames’ full name as they discuss Kingdom Come, Bloodstained, Griftlands, Mechanicus, The Witcher 3 and more.

• Chris has been pondering Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus.
• Alex has been developing an art collection in Assassin’s Creed: It’s A Real Journey and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
• Tom’s been pleading with Griftlands and The Witcher 3.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Autobattlers agogo. Pip and Chris take some time out from their busy wizard management schedule to discuss Valve’s Steam Lab before delivering the definitive verdict on the world’s array of autochesses.

• The Steam Labs page has all of the info you need about Valve’s disparate attempts to replace me and everyone I know with a robot.
• Steam’s new microtrailers feature is based on this Twitter account.
• Oh boy you better believe it’s time for autochess games. Begone, manual chess!
• Dota Underlords!
• Dota Autochess, which is available through the Dota 2 Arcade feature. Here’s Pip’s article about it.
• Teamfight Tactics!

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Chris and John discuss the cutthroat business of wizard cards, the biting bureaucracy of Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and the travails of high finance in Hitman 2 New York.

• Here’s a picture of a gem that might belong to a new, free, Slay The Spire character.
• A lot of people sure have played Dota Underlords, and also Magic: The Gathering Arena.
• John’s been trying to bite Pathfinder: Kingmaker.
• Tom’s called time on late capitalism in Hitman 2’s New York level.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and Alex revisit Life is Strange, consider time’s cooldown in Touhou Luna Nights, chew noisily on Dota Underlords, and fling themselves over Shape of the World.

I’ve activated the four rocks… show me the staircase.

• Tom’s returned to Life is Strange.
• Here’s the blog post by Ashly Burch that Tom mentions. Note: this post vividly describes grief and bereavement – and as a far less significant caveat, includes some major plot details for Life is Strange.
• Alex has been playing Touhou Luna Nights.
• Chris is playing Dota Underlords while preparing these shownotes.
• Here’s the Soren Johnson talk that Tom mentions.
• Tom’s also been playing Shape of the World.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip, Chris and Tom F dive into a big pile of E3 nonsense followed by a big pile of questions nonsense, considering the noun-circle ramifications of both.

We’re DONE, Octavian! You know what you did!

• Here’s that Watch Dogs: Legion footage from E3.
• Also, Phil Savage’s review of the pub from Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture.
• The Maneater trailer, in which shark have nice day.
• The Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey Story Creator reveal, in which Herodotus just want to have fun.
• Chris watched this Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order video and, remarkably, felt absolutely nothing.
• Here’s the new trailer for Telling Lies…
• …and also Twelve Minutes.
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons! If you’re cross that we spend a bunch of time talking about a Nintendo game that won’t come out on PC, just imagine that this is a tangent about Pip’s actually life, because it might as well be.
• Here’s Klei’s Griftlands.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and Alex attempt to predict Thursday’s news on Wednesday, again, and mostly fail, again. After that: SteamWorld Quest, Void Bastards, The Outer Wilds!

• Destiny 2 is going free to play, coming to Steam and Stadia, and getting cross-save functionality.
• Pricing details for Stadia have been revealed and are entirely contrary to Chris’ predictions.
• Alex has been playing SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech.
• Tom’s crafted his way through Void Bastards.
• We’re also playing the extraordinary Outer Wilds.
• Hear are some good AI-generated names for cats.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Alex and Chris convene last Wednesday to discuss ‘computer games’, including but not limited to Void Bastards, Observation, Druidstone, and Mordhau.

I feel compelled to perform my military responsibilities in the modern time.

• Early access sky MMO Worlds Adrift is shutting down.
• Here’s Starbase, a computer game.
• Yep, they called it Modern Warfare.
• Tom’s been playing Void Bastards.
• We’ve all played Observation.
• Tom’s also been playing Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest.
• Chris continues to waggle meaningfully about Mordhau.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex and the Toms gather to discuss what they have been playing on their personal computers this week. We didn’t record in our usual studio for this one, but the audio quality will return to normal soon!

• Tom F has been playing Path of Exile.
• Tom S has been playing Destiny 2 too much.
• Alex has been playing A Plague Tale: Innocence.
• Blood: Fresh Supply promises retro shooter joy.
• Star Trek Online is still quite good, and Guild Wars 2 is marvellous.
• The game that Pip talked about on a previous ep is Pillars of the Earth.
• Here’s the story of the lobbyist suspended from EVE Online.
• In our brief film/telly digression we discuss Collateral, Wolf Hall, Deadwood.
• The game Tom F mentions in our language discussion is Heaven’s Vault.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Chris and Alex convene to chat Total War(hammer), Phantom Doctrine, Mordhau, cakes and more. He’s not the Nerevarine, he’s a very naughty boy.

• Here’s a man saying thank you for the bullets in PlayerUnarmed Happygrounds.
• Ultra Ultra, the studio who made Echo, are shutting down.
• Alex is staying up past his bedtime to play Total War: Warhammer II.
• Tom’s got a new passport photo AND face in Phantom Doctrine.
• Chris considers the various arcs and curves of Mordhau.
• Alex adds Star Realms to the list of Ascension-type games that Chris now has to play.
• Tom’s returned to, and finished, Heaven’s Vault.
• Here’s the Path of Exile talk from GDC that Tom mentions.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom S and Alex chat a little bit of Sekiro, some Ascension, a smooth slice of The Room, and a dash of Katana ZERO.

Plus: meditations on the byzantine pizza meta, Rama Tycoon, the completely predictable fate of action dad, and our rebranding as the internet’s premier cutlery conspiracy resource.

• We say that we’re not going to return to Sekiro, but then immediately do. Sorry!
• Alex is enjoying the venerable Ascension, prompting both Chris and Tom to remember how much they like Ascension.
• Tom has been gently stroking The Room series.
• Chris has been playing Katana ZERO.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Tom F and Chris discuss City of Heroes’ surprising fate, EA’s Star Wars doings, Beat Saber, Heaven’s Vault, Risk of Rain 2, and the omega egg.

• Here’s Cass Marshall’s article about City of Heroes’ secret SCORE server.
• We’ve played a bit of Beat Saber.
• Here’s the reveal trailer for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
• We’ve all been playing Heaven’s Vault. Here’s Pip’s review for PC Gamer!
• On the subject of Heaven’s Vault – the issue with a forced-feeling dialogue choice that Tom describes was actually a bug that was found and fixed as we were recording this episode.
• Tom has also been playing Risk of Rain 2.
• I’m very tired, so rather than reupload Star Warr to the C&C YouTube channel, I’ve simply relisted it on my personal YouTube. Here’s the playlist.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and Pip catch up on GDC highlights and discuss Darkborn, Anthem woes, Winkeltje, Sekiro, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator.

Plus: an asparagus crime to save print media, meditations on David Boreanaz The Minecraft Man, Monet’s hot nuts, and the art of Blunch.

Columbo’s here, and he’s furious about Unreal Tournament.

• Here’s Tom’s writeup of Arkane’s Prey: Mooncrash talk at GDC.
• Project Wight has become Darkborn, here’s the video.
• Jason Schreier’s article about Anthem.
• Pip’s been playing Winkeltje: The Little Shop.
• Tom (!) has been playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. So has Chris.
• Totally Accurate Battle Simulator: possibly the best game, perhaps? Tom’s put many clips on his Twitter.
• Graham’s game, Primetime Detective.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and Tom S discuss a brief spate of late-March game announcements before getting into Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. That’s it. It’s mostly Sekiro.

We’re very keen to avoid Sekiro spoilers in this episode, but we do talk about themes and mechanics and, in one case, a few details about different environments – but not much! Less than you’d see in the game’s trailer, as it happens.

Plus: PC gaming tech advice up to and including why an owl shouldn’t officiate your wedding, meditations on the value of this entire accursed enterprise, grunting sounds, SONC HEDG regret, and more.

It’s a low-hanging flute, but that doesn’t mean we can’t toot it for 45 minutes.

• The Wolfenstein game name generator has produced Wolfenstein: Youngblood!
• It’s Sam Barlow’s Telling Lies. How many lies? 96!
• Here’s the trailer for Borderlands 3 that wasn’t out when we recorded this episode.
• It’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, isn’t it? That’s the one.
• Here’s that Daigo Umehara counter clip.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Pip and Alex celebrate IGF winners and huff deep on Google’s big ol’ cloud. Plus: a little Call of Duty, a little Devil May Cry, assorted nonsense beyond.

Don’t die yet, we haven’t finished the pyramid’s ass.

• Here’s the IGF & GDCA Awards stream in full – the show begins about 25 minutes in, including Meg Jayanth’s opening speech.
• The IGF’s finalists and winners page has all of the finalists AND winners and links to the games what they do.
• Google Stadia. Future of gaming IS NOT BOX, we are told. Might be BIG NICE CLOUD.
• Alex has been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered that he might be sad about war.
• Chris would like to talk for exactly three minutes about Dante’s hat.
• Here’s a three hour long YouTube video featuring the music of profound multi-instrumentalist K. K. Slider.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Chris and Alex chat Dwarf Fortress news, franchise developments, a little Far Cry, Hypnospace Outlaw, Devil May Cry 5, and Baba Is You.

Plus: getting whacked with the bollard brush, the half time cutlery switch, the sensesno.cool quadrilogy, how snake feel, a magic leap for mankind, and more. Where’s my fucking money, Paddington?

‘Anser’ is the genus of waterfowl. We didn’t know this. Please don’t write in, even though we told you to.

• Tom’s Tactical Breach Wizards now has a Steam page and video!
• Here are Dwarf Fortress’ Steam and Itch.io listings. When it out? In the past! When it done? Who know????
• Tom is best friends with a boar in Far Cry: New Dawn.
• Alex is hanging with the edgy teens of Hypnospace Outlaw.
• Chris is hanging with the edgy adult men of Devil May Cry 5.
• POD is TALK and BABA is YOU.
• Elijah Wood did make some VR games and Ubisoft DID make a VR eagle game but this things may or may not be connected, I don’t know, what do you want from me.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Alex and both Toms chat Far Cry: New Dawn, DiRT Rally 2.0, Star Trek Online (?) and then just say the word ‘Dune’ over and over for a while.

Plus: don’t talk to me until I’ve got my bow, Ubisoft spade tax, Sir Walter Rally, Alex takes Poland, illicit Terran jambalaya, and so on. These are the voyages, I suppose.

• Tom F has been playing Far Cry: New Dawn.
• Alex has been living with the consequences of his decisions in DiRT Rally 2.0.
• Chris is playing Star Trek Online, apparently.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom and Alex discuss Darkest Dungeon II and Ace Combat 7 and make a lot of sad and frustrated noises about Anthem.

Plus: Edward Lear zooms on a leper, ejecting your upside-down cousin, when wingmates become wingquaintances, and the terble space crab.

• Here’s the trailer for Darkest Dungeon II.
• Chris and Tom have played Anthem, and hmmm.
• Alex has been flinging himself around in Ace Combat 7.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Tom S and Chris discuss Blizzard and then say nice things about Apex Legends, Resident Evil 2, and Devil May Cry 5.

Plus: The Fraudulent Rustling of the Horse Boy II: Redeem This, the adventures of Gordon Fremen, middleware war among the stars, and our winter survival tips and tricks.

• Here’s Jason Schreier’s writeup of the Blizzard layoffs.
• We’ve all been enjoying that Apex Legends.
• Also, that Resident Evil 2.
• Tom’s been playing a bit of Devil May Cry 5, too.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

In this mini-episode, Chris, Alex and Pip discuss Apex Legends and Dota Auto Chess.

Sorry for the shorter episodes lately! We’ve been really busy. Patreon backers should note that they’re not being charged at the moment. Thanks for being backers, though! We very much appreciate it.

• Chris has been playing that Apex Legends.
• Pip’s been at the Dota Auto Chess.
• Alex has strapped on his Sunless Skis and taken to the Sunless Skies.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Pip chat about Subnautica: Below Zero, Sunless Skies, and Wargroove.

• Pip’s been playing Subnautica: Below Zero.
• Benedict Cumberbatch can’t say ‘penguin’.
• We’ve both been playing Sunless Skies.
• Chris is enjoying Wargroove, too.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Both Toms join Chris to discuss Resident Evil 2, Battlefleet Gothic Armada II, a bit of Forgotton Anne, and more.

Plus: further jazz considerations, the torpedo full of man, robot wars meta considerations, puns, wine, and so on.

• SteamWorld Quest: it’s been announced!
• Slay The Spire: it’s out now! We should get around to talking about that.
• Tom S has been playing Hades and Resident Evil 2.
• Tom F has been playing Forgotton Anne, Wandersong, and a little Thimbleweed Park.
• Chris and Tom S have been playing Battlefleet Gothic Armada II.
• Here’s an article about the AI wot cheat at maps, like how Chris do say.
• There are secrets hidden in our community’s GOTY page.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F, Alex and perhaps others dramatise assorted games industry dramas, discuss the anti-cheat ramifications of Dean Leaner, and explore death in a variety of warzones.

Plus: Destiny 2 in 2019, Fortune-299, Slay The Spire modding, our community GOTY vote and more!

• In the event that our summation of the Improbable/Unity business didn’t make any sense – and why would it – here’s a recap. The Improbable blog post that didn’t make any sense is this one.
• Here’s Bungie declaring their independence from Activision.
• Here’s John McDonald from Valve presenting at GDC about using deep learning to combat cheating.
• Here’s Dean Learner combatting cheating.
• Alex is playing his game of 2018, Destiny 2: Forsaken.
• Chris has been rolling around and wailing in Battlefield V and Escape From Tarkov.
• Tom’s been digging into Slay The Spire mods and embarking on Fortune-499.
• You can find our community GOTY site here.
• Tiny Bird Garden Deluxe, Slime Rancher, Candy Crush and Gardenscapes are our recommendations for things to do when it’s gloomy outside.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

The whole gang convenes (sort of) to look back at our games of 2018 while navigating some sort of terrible segue purgatory.

As discussed in this episode, the Crate & Crowbar Discord community is currently conducting its own GOTY vote! You can find out more – and cast your votes – right here.

Games discussed:

• Subnautica
• Far Cry 5
• Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
• The Return of the Obra Dinn
• Into The Breach
• Slay The Spire
• Artifact
• Frostpunk
• Battletech
• Warhammer: Vermintide II
• Monster Hunter: World
• Megaquarium
• The Haunted Island, A Frog Detective Game
• Yoku’s Island Express
• Donut County
• Chuchel
• Destiny 2: Forsaken
• Madden NFL 19
• Hitman 2
• Prey: Mooncrash
• Forza Horizon 4
• Final Fantasy XII
• Far: Lone Sails
• Dead Cells

We’re now off to take our end-of-year break! The podcast will return in early January, along with a brand new C&C Dungeons & Dragons adventure. See you then, everyone! Happy new year!

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Alex and John return to the velvet plinth to discuss the Games Awards announcements, ReCore, Dusk, and Hades.

• Far Cry: New Dawn has flowers.
• The Last Campfire is by two folks at Hello Games.
• Xbox One flagship game ReCore is on PC now and very 7/10.
• Dusk is a 97/100 game according to Steam user reviews.
• Watch a bit of Twinfold being played to get a better notion of it than our muddled descriptions.
• Hades is addictive and infuriating to Tom, who has had to ban himself from it.
• Here’s the Crate and Crowbar community GOTY votey page Kane set up.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom, Alex and Tom discuss the Epic Games Store, more Artifact, Mutant Year Zero, Just Cause 4, and so on.

• Here’s the rundown on the Epic Games Store.
• Everybody has been playing Artifact, but you are not allowed to touch the little imp bottoms, and this is garbage.
• Tom F is still playing alternative card games Thronebreaker and Slay The Spire.
• Alex has been playing Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden.
• Tom F has been playing Just Cause 4.
• Where’s, indeed, an egg?

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F and Alex gather around a velvet plinth, sip beer, and discuss vikings and hitmen. Featured:

• Skin Deep: Brendon Chung’s Die Hard in space.
• Bad North: defend tiny islands from vikings.
• Hitman 2 (2018): Tom’s liking it more now, play his Contract.
• Race for the Galaxy: an empire building card game where the strategies map pleasingly to philosophies.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and Alex convene to talk Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, Artifact, and Hitman 2. Then Chris, Tom F, Alex and Pip convene to talk, er, foxes? Or something.

• Alex has been playing Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus.
• Chris has been sinking hours into Artifact. Here’s the guide he wrote, if you’re interested.
• Tom’s been playing Hitman (Season) 2.
• Here’s a college what look like a gaming PC.
• The Shard. Didn’t there be a fox in there?

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom, Tom and Alex talk strategy remake news, Void Bastards, One Hour One Life, Battlefield V, Thronebreaker, Roblox and more.

• Those crazy kids are remastering Command & Conquer.
• They’re also remastering Warcraft III, the absolute madmen.
• Chris has been playing One Hour One Life.
• Everybody’s excited about Void Bastards.
• Tom Senior’s been playing Battlefield V.
• Tom Francis has been playing The Witcher Tales: Thronebreaker.
• Alex has been playing Roblox.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior
Chris Thursten
Alex Wiltshire

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris is joined by both Toms to discuss Blizzcon controversy, The Blackout Club, Forza Horizon 4, Return of the Obra Dinn and more.

• Here’s Diablo Immortal, and Tom S’ article about said game and its attendant controversy.
• Chris and Tom F have been playing The Blackout Club.
• Do a cool flip off the time ramp into Forza Horizon 4.
• Tom F has also been playing Return of the Obra Dinn.
• This, Tom Senior, is Noby Noby Boy.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom joins Zack Johnson and Kevin Simmons from Video Games Hot Dog to discuss the games of Fantastic Arcade. Spelunky 2! Noita! Samurai Gunn 2! Additional games besides these!

Note: Patreon backers won’t be charged for this episode.

• Zack and Kevin are from Video Games Hot Dog, also Asymmetric. They have created two forms of Loathing: West of and Kingdom of.
• These human beings collided at Fantastic Arcade.
• They played Spelunky 2, the lucky beggars.
• Also, lovely physicsy action roguelike Noita.
• Then! Samurai Gunn 2!
• The Breakout-style digging game that Tom describes is Hole Down.
• Also excellent: Grace Bruxner Presents: The Haunted Island: A Frog Detective Game and Cricket Through The Ages, which proves impossible to Google but you can find a picture here.
• Also by Free Lives people: Sticky Cats.
• Also also: Faith and Paper Planet Pop.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip, Chris and Alex discuss the return of Hellgate: London, ponder Return of the Obra Dinn, and go for a wander around Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

• Hellgate: London! It’s back! But why!
• Pip’s been playing that Return of the Obra Dinn.
• Alex has looked at some things and slid down some things in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Both Toms and Chris dig into this week’s developing Rockstar story and then share stories from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, because all we’ve done for two weeks is kick people off boats.

• Here’s that story about the Red Dead 2 working conditions, and subsequent coverage of Rockstar‘s reaction. We recorded this podcast on Tuesday, for reference.
• Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. We’ve been playing it! Sorry that we didn’t play anything else.
• Tom F’s edit: I am wrong when I say Droqen made Midas – it was by Harry Lee and Jarrel Seah. Thanks to Alan Hazelden for the heads up.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S, Tom F and Chris talk Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Race for the Galaxy and Distance, and then get distracted by literary theory and swearing.

• Tom Senior has been kicking his way to friendship in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.
• Here is Alice Bell’s excellent article about the same.
• Tom Francis has been playing Race for the Galaxy. The GDC talk he mentions is by Theresa Duringer, but it’s not currently publically available.
• Chris likes Distance a lot.
• We demand to be taken seriously.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Pip embark on another Friday morning podcast, covering the Telltale layoffs and highlights from EGX.

• Here’s Wesley Yin-Poole’s article for Eurogamer about remembering that people, not companies, create games.
• Pip’s been enjoying Parkasaurus.
• Chris’ picks of EGX are Total War: Three Kingdoms, Kine, Yellow Rock Road and Valfaris.
• Pip’s picks include Small Talk, Beyond Blue, Willowbrooke Post and The Bradwell Conspiracy.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip, Chris, Tom F and guest John R discuss EGX, Frozen Synapse 2, Megaquarium, Streets of Rogue, advanced noodle techniques, and more.

• Here’s the Heat Signature Twitter, so you can find out about them sweet updatez.
• John and Chris have been playing Frozen Synapse 2.
• Pip’s been playing Megaquarium.
• Tom’s been playing Streets of Rogue.
• On that note, the joke that soured Tom on Streets of Rogue is going to be removed.
• The Flashback-like game that Tom can’t remember the name of is Lunark.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
John Roberts
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Chris and Tom F discuss game dev authenticity, Industries of Titan, Destiny 2, Dragon Quest XI, and Concrete Jungle.

Plus: automatic toilet theory, figuring out how much we actually know about each other, and winning the trust of the shotgun people.

• Here’s Lindsay Ellis’ video essay about manufactured authenticity on YouTube (and elsewhere.)
• …and a contemporary Wired article about the Redshell tracking software.
• Chris and Alex are both doing stuff at EGX. Alex is talking to the Disco Elysium chaps on the main stage at 1pm on Friday. Chris is doing UNANNOUNCED OTHER STUFF on Friday and Saturday.
• Here’s Alex’s interview with Zach Barth for RPS.
• Chris has done a Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop video series for PlayStation Access. First one’s up today!
• Megaquarium is out now! So is Frozen Synapse 2!
• Tom’s been playing Industries of Titan (at PAX. It’s not out yet.)
• Alex has been playing Dragon Quest XI.
• Chris won’t stop banging on about Destiny 2: Forsaken‘s Gambit mode.
• You can find Angel Mapper’s excellent Phase Shift map for UT2004 here.
• Tom’s returned to Concrete Jungle for its competitive mode.
• The good Shadow of the Tomb Raider review that Chris mentions is this one, by Dia Lacina for Waypoint.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip and Chris discuss MMO woes, Destiny 2’s new expansion, Two Point Hospital and a bit of Graveyard Keeper.

• Find out more about the V&A’s videogames exhibit right here.
• Carbine Studios – and their MMO, Wildstar – are shutting down.
• CCP has been bought by Black Desert Online devs Pearl Abyss.
• Chris is very much enjoying Destiny 2: Forsaken.
• We’ve both come down with a case of Two Point Hospital.
• Pip’s been tinkering with Graveyard Keeper.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Tom S sit down for a chat about Spelunky 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 news, Tom’s highlights from Gamescom, and assorted nonsense.

• Here’s that Spelunky 2 footage and PlayStation Blog Q&A.
• We spend a bunch of time with the Cyberpunk 2077 footage.
• Tom S had a strong first impression of Life is Strange 2.
• Battlefield V is finally delivering on the timeless promise of levolution.
• Destiny 2: Forsaken is close to enough to worry Tom’s Warframe character.
• Here’s Chris Bratt’s People Make Games video about Time Commanders.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter:

Tom Senior
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and Pip catch up on a bit of Gamescom news before delivering sizzingly fresh takes on recent hits ‘Spore’ and ‘FTL’.

• Here’s the trailer for Man of Medan, part of the Dark Pictures anthology.
• Also, the Life is Strange 2 trailer.
• Here’s Burrito Tim’s Good Tweet.
• Pip has returned to Spore, ten years on.
• Tom’s been playing something called ‘Eff Tee Ell’.
• Chris is still on that Monster Hunter: World, but he promises he’s not going to bang on about it.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Philippa Warr
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

It all goes a bit wrong as Chris, Tom, Tom and Alex return from a week off to talk Red Dead and Doom news, EXAPUNKS, Warframe, Unavowed and Monster Hunter.

Plus: Horse Up Displays, 90s FPS ASMR, Resident Evil 2 by The B-52s, why it’s good when the spaceships do it, sensible missiles, the Mamma Mia cinematic universe, and Kerbal Space Program Royale.

• Here’s that Red Dead Redemption 2 footage. Nice horse!
• Also, DOOM ETERNAL.
• Flotilla 2 is out soon!
• So is 7 Billion Humans!
• Alex has been jacking in to EXAPUNKS.
• Tom S is into Warframe now.
• Tom F is an avowed fan of Unavowed.
• Chris flippin’ loves Monster Hunter: World.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Alex, Tom S, Chris and Marsh (!) convene to discuss many Metroidvanias, Yakuza 0, console games (!), when to move on, Six Ages, and so on.

• Marsh! Has been playing Chasm.
• Chris has been catching up with Dead Cells.
• Alex’s Castlevania of the moment is La-Mulana 2.
• Here is Goro Majima’s introduction from Yakuza 0, which Tom done been playing.
• Marsh has been losing tapestry men in Six Ages.
• Here’s the article that Marsh mentions about redesigning Vampire: The Masquerade.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Marsh Davies
Tom Senior
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom S and Alex take several trips back to 2016, including but not limited to No Man’s Sky, StarCraft II, DOOM and Battlefield 1.

• We’ve all been playing No Man’s Sky‘s NEXT update.
• Alex has been teaching valuable lessons in StarCraft II.
• Tom’s been revisiting the best of 2016 in DOOM.
• Chris is happily surprised by the state of Battlefield 1, two years on.
• What did you do in the war, granddad?
• Here’s the bit in episode 149 where Chris shames himself in Star Citizen.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Senior
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Alex and both Toms celebrate the 5th anniversary of the podcast with gin and a digression to The David Cage. Plus: more Mooncrash, Yoku’s Island Express, Warhammer 40K: Gladius, and Objects In Space.

That’s for my nan! And her house!

• Tom F’s further explorations of Prey: Mooncrash reveal a few rough edges.
• Alex has been playing Yoku’s Island Express.
• Tom S laments the lone X that remains in the grim darkness of the far future of Warhammer 40,000: Gladius.
• Everybody likes Vermintide II.
• Chris has been pootling around in Objects In Space.
• Our indie faves, per Hannah Flynn‘s question: Dicey Dungeons, Ghost Of A Tale, Slay The Spire, Dead Cells, Totally Accurate Battlegrounds.
• Here’s the brilliant Company of Heroes forum thread that asks: ‘what are the Brits talking about?’
• As ever, let’s remember and celebrate Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed.
• And finally, Alan Partridge’s World Cup Countdown To ’94.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Pip discuss The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, The Sims 4: Seasons, and lots more. This is definitely episode 246, and not, as Chris says, episode 247.

• Pip’s been playing these videogames:
• The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit
• The Sims 4: Seasons
• Cognizer
• Dr Frank’s Build A Boyfriend
• Ashi: Lake Of Light

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and Alex consider the lovely Prey: Mooncrash, big Fortnite murders, a bit of Six Ages and why late capitalism is cool, actually.

• Here’s a Polygon article about the Fortite murder story, including videos and facts.
• We’ve all be playing Prey: Mooncrash, which we like a lot. The video that Tom mentions isthis one.
• Alex has been playing King of Dragon Pass successor Six Ages, which isn’t out on PC yet.
• Roblox is the biggest game in the world that you don’t play or think about.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter:

Tom Francis
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom, Tom and Alex contend with Guilty Gear Xrd, Lumines Remastered, Sword With Sauce, Jurassic World: Evolution, a bit of Vamypr, and get in deep with Big Scorsese.

• Tom S has been watching, and sometimes playing, Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-.
• Tom S and Alex have been playing Hackmud, which is weird for Chris.
• Alex has been enjoying the return of Lumines.
• Tom F has been spilling some bolognese in Sword With Sauce.
• Chris has spent the last couple of weeks in Jurassic World: Evolution and Vampyr, neither of which he particularly recommends.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can follow us on Twitter thusly:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip and the Toms discuss a surprising amount of news, most of it Steamy, then share thoughts on Jurassic World Evolution, Cryptark, Fortnite, and Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

• Chris has been hard at work on the wordy side of hackmud 2.0, which is going live next week and will be 25% off when you read this.
• Steam now lets you follow developers, but there’s no general link for that, so gosh we’ll just have to pick a developer at random and link their page.
• How much have you spent on Steam in your life? No, wrong, it’s this much.
• Here are the secret (public) codes you can type into Slay the Spire to trigger special modes. DRAFT is good.
• Buy Far: Lone Sails and play it all the way through. You will be glad you did.
• Pip’s pretty pic of Fortnite’s loot lake.
• Jurassic World Evolution: a game you could play if you want to deal with a security department that are almost certainly dinosaurs wearing human uniforms.
• Cryptark‘s a good idea but much too hard but full of promise but so frustrating but dammit I’m playing it again.
• Budget Cuts is finally out and, appropriately, 10% off. It’s that VR game that’s good.
• Assassin’s Oranges is drawing Tom S back in.
• The accurate tweet about E3 Tom F was thinking of was not by the person he was about to attribute it to, so it’s good he didn’t. It was Chris Person.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Pip’s off Twitter but you can follow the Toms:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

In which Chris, Alex and Pip promise to avoid overanalysing E3, and to focus on the things we’re excited about, and then do exactly the opposite.

• John Shuttleworth’s I Can’t Back To Savoury Now, the soundtrack to this year’s E3, and indeed every year’s E3.
• From Bethesda: Fallout 76 (don’t forget to look up the Mothman!), Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and The Elder Scrolls VI: Todd’s High Rocks.
• FROM Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
• Maneater, the game where you wanna be where the people are so you can eat all of them.
• Odd Ass, the latest entry in the storied ‘Assassin’s Creed’ computer game franchise.
• Also Skull & Bones, the other nice Ubisoft water game.
• Ooh, would you just look at Sable.
• Rousing on-again, off-again romance sim Halo: Infinite.
• Destiny 2’s trailer was a bit spoilery, if you care about that, so you can Google it yourself.
• Apologies to Unravel Two.
• Funko Gears, Tactics Gears, Regular Gears. In that order.
• Good job, Command & Conquer fans! We found its body.
• Behold The Quiet Man, E3’s worst trailer.
• More like Phwoarza. Horizon Four.
• It’s Devil May Cry Five, isn’t it.
• Neo Cab: or, reverse Uber.
• The Cyberpunk 77 trailer that made the people go ‘this is the computer game’.
• The Death Stranding trailer that made the people go ‘this is the computer game?’
• Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami are coming to PC.
• Remedy’s un-Googleable Control.
• Life is Strange spinoff Captain Spirit: a father too far?
• Finally, lovely Ooblets.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on social media:

Alex Wiltshire
Philippa Warr
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and John R chat Far: Lone Sails, Dicey Dungeons, Totally Accurate Battlegrounds and a bit of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.

Plus: the secret handshakes shared by the kin of the brood-sergeant, top chuffin’, the Haddaway collab we’ve been waiting for, our hottest takes of 2013, an endless sense of Bluth, the Ferris Bueller Escalation Protocol, and Christina Aguilera’s ult.

• Hitman 2 has actually been announced with a trailer, now, rendering our speculation a bit pointless. Sorry!
• John and Tom have been enjoying the lovely FAR: Lone Sails.
• Tom’s been playing Terry Cavanagh’s work-in-progress, roguelike, Dicey Dungeons.
• Chris is happily squatting and beatboxing his way through Totally Accurate Battlegrounds.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Tom Francis
Chris Thursten
John Roberts

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip, Chris and Alex consider the pre-E3 videogame news wasteland, revisit City of Brass, clean up House Flipper, and consider Idle Champions and the specific anxieties of the clicker genre.

Plus: tragedy as volcanic death comes to Emmerdale.

• Here’s the trailer for Fallout 76, and Kotaku’s article about what it actually is, maybe.
• Here’s the Battlefield V trailer.
• Chris and Alex revisit City of Brass, the charming game-where-you-start-over-if-you-die with very wangable hoops.
• Pip’s been flipping houses in House Flipper.
• Behold as Chris’ best intentions lead him to Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms.
• Here’s Chris and Becky T’s analysis of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on social media:

Alex Wiltshire
Philippa Warr
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Pip, Tom S and Alex dig deep to yield icy cold takes on Call of Duty: Blops Four, ‘Bio-Shock’, A Quiet Sleep, and assorted nonsense.

Plus: the importance of Little Boots on the ground, the medium’s most lootable subcultures, whether it was or wasn’t all yellow, whether two Ayn Rands do indeed make an Ayn Right, and clampin’ yer old student.

• Here are all of the Call of Duty trailers.
• …and here’s RAGE 2.
• Tom’s been playing RAGE 1, explicably.
• Pip has been playing BioShock while listening to Kelly Clarkson.
• Alex has been playing The Quiet Sleep, in a vertigo-inducing tonal break from the rest of this episode.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on social media:

Alex Wiltshire
Philippa Warr
Tom Senior
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Pip, Tom F and – for one night only – Marsh (!) discuss Atomic Heart, more Far Cryin’, more Spire Slayin’, SpyParty, Murderous Pursuits, and City of Brass.

Also: feeling nothing about sunsets, playing with orbs, holding for a moment in the hope position, the struggle of games to be effectively didactic, the history of the IGF, maximal train journey encumbrance limit livin’, and the magic of Paper Samples Day.

• Here’s the trailer for Atomic Heart.
• Marsh has been playing Iconoclasts, Gorogoa, and Far Cry 5.
• Tom’s been digging into Slay The Spire‘s new character.
• Chris has been playing City of Brass.
• Pip and Chris have been to a couple of SpyParties.
• Pip’s also been attempting to murder strangers in Murderous Pursuits.
• If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Childish Gambino’s This Is America video.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Marsh Davies
Philippa Warr
Tom Francis
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Tom S discuss Red Dead Redemption 2, new Tomb Raider, the state of triple-A development in general, dogs again, and videogame Millibands.

• The Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer – a splash? Of musky cowboy… water?
• Destiny 2: Warmind – Chris will play it, because he’s already bought it.
• Tom was left cold by his first experience of Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Tom Senior
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom, Chris and Tom discuss Campo Santo’s move to Valve, the latest Ludum Dare, things what dogs do, Battletech, and Frostpunk.

Plus: who you actually play as in The Sims, playing games rightly wrong, and legally mandating the ‘woo’ button.

• Here’s more on the Campo Santo news.
• Tom F’s big list o’ Ludum Dare recommendations includes PE@CE, Turn Based Asteroids Snake Roguelike, Crash Crops, Sheet Music Editor Shoot’Em Up, and Gone Vroom.
• Chris and Tom S have been playing Battletech and Frostpunk.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Tom Francis
Tom Senior
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Live from Rezzed! Chris, Tom F, Graham and Alex discuss their games of the show, and also Crusader Kings II. Plus: real live questions!

Note: we’re still waiting to get the footage of this episode back from the Rezzed guys, so the YouTube version will be a little later than usual. Sorry!

• Here’s a PC Gamer article about Introversion’s latest, Order of Magnitude.
• Tom’s chosen this moment to attempt to learn Crusader Kings II.
• Disco Elysium: it’s really something.
• Capybara’s Below: making surprise appearances at games events near you (perhaps.)
• Also: What if Skyrim, but real.

Plus: good lord, it’s an actual video version!

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Alex Wiltshire
Tom Francis
Chris Thursten
Graham Smith

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris talks to Hannah Flynn from Failbetter about Sunless Skies, life in game development, reaching broader audiences, the myriad flaws of Zoolander 2, and more.

This is the last in our series of chats from Rezzed – hope you’ve enjoyed them! Find out more about Sunless Skies here, and find this episode on YouTube here. As ever, thanks to our Patreon backers.

At Rezzed we sat down with Disco Elysium design and writing lead Robert Kurvitz to discuss entering the games industry as an artist, the complexities of RPG design, politics, and disco.

Find out more about Disco Elysium here, and you can listen to this episode on YouTube if you prefer. The Crate & Crowbar is supported by our Patreon backers – for more about how that works, click here.

Surprise! While we were at Rezzed we recorded a series of short, informal chats with interesting gamespeople. In this first episode, Chris and Alex sit down with X-COM creator Julian Gollop and Snapshot Games co-founder David Kaye to talk Phoenix Point.

You can find out more about Phoenix Point on the game’s official site and, if you prefer, listen to this episode on YouTube. The Crate & Crowbar is supported by our Patreon backers – for more about how that works, click here.

Chris, Alex and Tom S consider the end of SteamSpy, Radical Heights, Jalopy, All Walls Must Fall, and Tom’s daily Slay The Spire tendency.

Plus: too much rum, wonky grammar lessons, and the low hop of the robots.

• SteamSpy announces its inability to continue operating via tweet.
• Boss Key’s Radical Heights.
• Here’s Alice O’Connor being funny about Plunkbat.
• Alex has been playing Jalopy.
• Chris has been playing All Walls Must Fall incorrectly.
• Tom just cant stop Slayin’ That Spire.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Alex ‘Rotationlal’ Wiltshire
Tom Senior
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Chris and Alex discuss Far Cry 5 (again), Superhot VR, and Minit. Then, a chat about Into The Breach is followed by questions from questions calamity.

Plus: the mystery of the third Tom, the lamentable sacking of the sex helicopter, and – what comes, dangling upon a string? Toot toot, it’s the low-hanging flute!

• Tom and Alex dig deeper into their thoughts re: Far Cry 5, its buddies, and its sex helicopter.
• Chris’ VR odyssey finds a destination in Superhot VR. Brass Tactics is also nice.
• Tom and Alex have also been Minit to win it.
• Into The Breach: it’s good. But webby bastards: they’re bad.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Alex Wiltshire
Tom Francis
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Pip reunite with Tom Francis to discuss GDC highlights, Sunless Skies, Far Cry 5, and first impressions of All Walls Must Fall.

• You can find the full IGF results here.
• Everybody love a bit of Wobble Garden.
• Rezzed! We’re doing it.
• Pip’s been playing Sunless Skies.
• Tom has been playing Far Cry 5 and All Walls Must Fall.
• Here’s Daniel Solis’ graph of victory arcs.
• Chris has found much to like in Tyler Hurd’s VR music videos.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Philippa Warr
Tom Francis
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Pip gather in GDC week to discuss basically no news from GDC, many short games you should play, and space mistakes you shouldn’t make in Scavenger SV-4.

Plus: a showcase of Pip’s ability to remember a grudge from four years ago, but not a song from last week.

• Jalopy is out next week. Here’s Pip tale of NOTHING BUT SAUSAGE SUCCESS.
• Here’s James Davenport’s article about Giant Sparrow’s animal-centric next game.
• Pip’s been playing a whole load of short, interesting games:
• Skreal
• Birdland
• Dog of Dracula 2
• My Father’s Long Long Legs
• A Museum of Dubious Splendors
• Stick Shift, via Robert Yang’s radiator 2 collection.
• Chyrza
• Little Party
• Chris as been making space mistakes in Scavenger SV-4, as featured in this excellent Alex Wiltshire venture.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Philippa Warr
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip, Chris and Alex discuss Artifact, Deep Rock Galactic, Vermintide II, and the inevitable end of everything.

Plus: π bake it, Garfield’s first name, co-op FOMO, the dings of Catchphrase, Dota Plus, and my libido (an Amiibo.)

Anyone for questions? I’ll pour!

• This is Artifact, the Dota 2 card game, from Vlav. And this is Tim Clark’s exhaustive article about it.
• Sam Barlow’s new interactive TV thing, #WarGames, is out now.
• Alex has been enjoying the dwarves of Deep Rock Galactic…
• …while Chris has been enjoying the dwarf of Vermintide II.
• Twelve Minutes is the Groundhog Day-style game we discussed way by when.
• Here’s a bleak found footage documentary about what became of Blobbyland.
• Pip doesn’t buy tat. Also Pip: this.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Philippa Warr
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S, Chris and Alex check in on VR, consider the gorgeous eggs of Final Fantasy XV, and ponder the literary aspirations of Beckett.

• Oculus’ critical Rift whoopsie has now been resolved.
• Here’s The Day Today’s remarkable foreshadowing of the experience of using Google Earth VR.
• Here’s Final Fantasy XV. And here’s the most important thing about Final Fantasy XV.
• Alex has been playing Beckett.
• We digress (imagine!) to discuss how great Thirty Flights of Loving is.
• Chris doesn’t have a GTX 1080. He has a GTX 980. That’s a hundred fewer graphics points! Sorry for lying.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Tom Senior
Alex Wiltshire
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom, Tom and Chris discuss a range of ways in which one might fail upwards, from Into The Breach to Phoenix Point to the spooky bayou of Hunt: Showdown.

Plus: my dog ate Hunt The Freeman, accent quandries, questionable etymology, and a sad dearth of whale colour options.

• Into The Breach is out now and, well, it’s very good.
• Phoenix Point is Julian Gollops’ upcoming crab battler.
• Hunt: Showdown is a weird multiplayer experiment that Chris quite likes, so good luck to it.
• CJKinni’s Brough-Like Turbrough and Odward Frenry’s Ship Reck’ are the fresh fruit of our Discord’s #game-dev channel.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Tom Senior
Tom Francis
Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip, Alex and Tom F are back to once again tackle the tough topic of turtle taxonomy. Also games about Garys (Legendary Gary), games by Garys (Abandon Ship), and it would round this out nicely if the other two games related to Garys but they don’t. Cypher and Fe.

Also, we’re doing a live show at Rezzed! It’ll be recorded but if you do want to come along, it’s 4.30pm on the Saturday. You’ll need a Rezzed ticket for that day.

• Choose which finger to give people in Legendary Gary
• Fe is pronounced ‘fay’ and it’s not doing much for Pip yet.
• Cypher is a playable museum of cryptography.
• Abandon Ship is FTL on an oil painting of the high seas.
• A snapping turtle has feets but is not a tortoise.
• Pouring boiling maple sap onto snow makes maple taffy.
• Being derezzed is indeed dying in Tron, and being rezzed is being digitally instantiated.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Philippa Warr
Tom Francis
Alex Wiltshire

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip, Tom F and Alex discuss knowing your enemy in Slay the Spire, dabbling In Other Waters, Dear Esther Live, and turning your tentacles into chickens and bees in Octogeddon.

Also:

• Slay the Spire is in Early Access but already worth it.
• In Other Waters is about halfway to its goal on Kickstarter.
• Last Man Kicking is a cheap spin-off of the forthcoming Last Man Sitting.
• More info on Dear Esther Live.
• Octogeddon is the new thing from Plants vs Zombies creator George Fan. It’s £10.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Philippa Warr
Tom Francis
Alex Wiltshire

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S and Chris are joined by Alex Wiltshire to discuss Into The Breach’s imminent release, why it’s okay to hunt monsters if they’re bastards, RPG combat design and more.

Plus: a brief return to Subnautica and further musings on the ocean willies therein; the secret missing element to Subnautica’s survival formula; toxicity, Dota 2, PUBG, sport, and why the internet is bad perhaps.

• Into The Breach is out on the 27th of February!
• Tom’s new game is Tactical Breach Wizards.
• Everybody’s playing Monster Hunter World, which is out on PC in the Autumn.
• Tom has been playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age.
• Alex has been unpicking the fineries of Divinity: Original Sin 2‘s combat design.
• Here’s Stephen ‘thecatamites’ Gill-Murphy’s talk at Fantastic Arcade, as discussed in episode 216.
• Alex is hosting a panel on the early British games industry in London on the 12th of February.
• …and Tom S and Pip will be at the PC Gamer Weekender, also in London, 17th-18th February.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Senior
Alex Wiltshire

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F, Chris and John R discuss… ‘computer games’. Including but not limited to Iconoclasts, Celeste, Subnautica and Slay The Spire.

Plus: wrench size considerations, creating modes for Bennett Foddy (to hurt him), and that thing where Chris says ‘I’m not going to go deep on this’ and then does that.

• Paragon is no more.
• Here’s that GOG tweet about Opus Magnum.
• John’s been playing Iconoclasts.
• Tom has been playing Celeste.
• Here is that video of a platform game that hates you.
• Chris has been playing Subnautica.
• Tom’s also been playing Slay The Spire.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Francis
John Roberts

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Join Pip under the sea as she heroically embarks on a one-Pip Subnautica special. Featuring the sounds (and underwater bellows) of the game itself.

Apologies for the shaky schedule of late: we’ve had extensive holiday-and-illness-related scheduling problems over the last couple of weeks. Expect regular service to resume next week, and Patreon backers should note that they won’t be charged for anything short of a full pod.

• Pip’s been playing Subnautica. You might be able to tell.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us (Pip) on Twitter dot com:

Philippa Warr

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Dark Souls. Is it news? Chris and Pip ponder this and other subjects, including Subnautica’s imminent release, Paladins’ imminent Battlegrounds mode, and Bennett Foddy’s imminent Getting Over It.

• Here’s info about Dark Souls Remastered.
• Also, Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, which is a thing.
• As is Total War: Three Kingdoms.
• And Subnautica.
• Pip reports back from Atlanta about Paladins: Battlegrounds.
• Chris has been having a surprisingly relaxed time with Getting Over It.
• Finally, Dark Souls gets a Funky New Mode.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Philippa Warr

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Both Toms join Chris to discuss Recursed, Bridge Constructor Portal, Gorogoa, GTA Online, PUBG, and the games we’re looking forward to in 2018.

Plus: a games-from-books jam idea that actually works, things horses don’t do, a bit of Mad Max, a whole lot of boats, and more. Boats.

• Here’s the IGF shortlist! Congrats, Tom!
• Baba Is You has a good trailer.
• Tom F has been playing the mind-bending Recursed.
• Chris has been playing Bridge Constructor Portal. He calls it ‘Bridge Simulator Portal’ for the duration of this episode, because he’s an idiot.
• Awesome Games Done Quick starts this weekend!
• Tom F and Chris have played Gorogoa.
• Tom S has been enjoying Mad Max, which is inexplicably a fiver.
• He’s also been working through GTA Online‘s excellent new heist.
• Chris has, like apparently everybody, been spending time in now-actually-out Plunkbag.
• Here are the games we discuss in our look forward to 2018:
  • Into The Breach
  • Spelunky 2
  • Death Stranding (maybe)
  • Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia
  • BattleTech
  • Frozen Synapse 2
  • Wandersong
  • Age of Empires: Definitive Edition
  • Nimbatus
  • Untitled Goose Game
  • Sea of Thieves
  • HK (Untitled Cyberpunk Cat Game)
  • Ooblets
  • Skull & Bones
  • Abandon Ship
  • Pillars of Eternity II: D(r)eadfire
  • Sunless Skies
  • Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord
  • Kingdom Come: Deliverance
  • Project Tingler
  • Museum of Simulation Technology
  • #Wargames
  • Far Cry 5 (and the associated owning of James Davenport)
  • A Place for the Unwilling
  • A Way Out
  • No Truce With The Furies
  • Hunt: Showdown

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Francis
John Roberts

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

All things must end. Or must they? Yes. But sometimes: no. That’s right: it’s the final part of THE MIRACLE AT GREY HOME!

You can listen this episode on YouTube here. If you’ve taken the time to listen to the entirety of this nonsense, thank you: we hope you enjoyed it. We’ll be back in the new year with the medium to hot takes you’re used to, along with more Miniatures Monthly, Little Grey Cells, Bloodborne, and so on. Merry Christmas!

Many thanks to Mike Debenham for his fabulous contribution to this series. Our music is based on Clambake by The Mandibles. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Confrontation leads to new adventure as Chris attempts to write… a spoiler-free description of part three of C&C D&D!

You can listen this episode on YouTube here. Tune in tomorrow for the FINALE of THE MIRACLE AT GREY HOME. I mean, it’s only Christmas. You don’t have anything else to do, right?

Many thanks to Mike Debenham for his fabulous contribution to this series. Our music is based on Clambake by The Mandibles. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Our Dungeons & Dragons roleplay adventure continues as our heroes take their quest to the streets of Grey Home.

If you prefer, you can listen this episode on YouTube here. Come back tomorrow for part three of THE MIRACLE AT GREY HOME.

Many thanks to Mike Debenham for his fabulous contribution to this series. Our music is based on Clambake by The Mandibles. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

It’s time for something a little different. In the run-up to Christmas, we’ll be posting our first-ever Dungeons & Dragons live play podcast: a magical mystery murder adventure called THE MIRACLE AT GREY HOME. This is part one.

Expect part two tomorrow, part three after that, and so on. You can listen on YouTube if you prefer, or receive your MP3s via the regular C&C podcast feed.

THE MIRACLE AT GREY HOME is an adventure that Chris wrote, played using D&D 5e rules. Our characters began life at level 1 in a warm-up session, and begin this adventure at level 2. This is Chris’ first time DMing 5th edition D&D, so don’t be surprised if he gets the rules wrong. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when people get the rules wrong: Chris says sorry. In the third person, apparently.

Many thanks to Mike Debenham for his fabulous contribution to this series. Our music is based on Clambake by The Mandibles. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom and Pip came here to round up our games of the year and eat praline chocolates… and we’ve got a whole lot of praline chocolates. Also, Pip hates pralines.

This is the last regular C&C episode of 2017! As such, you might want to check out the YouTube version: it’s that time again when we do a video of our faces and mouth parts doing the podcast! Look at them flap!

Discussed in this episode:

• Divinity: Original Sin 2
• The Norwood Suite
• Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider
• For Honor
• Absolver
• Rogue Islands
• Diablo III: Rise of the Necromancer
• Mass Effect: Andromeda
• No Man’s Sky
• What Remains of Edith Finch
• Prey
• Tacoma
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• Slime Rancher
• Assassin’s Creed: Origins
• Dead Cells
• Caveblazers
• XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
• Torment: Tides of Numenera
• The Lion’s Song
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
• Scanner Sombre
• Total War: Warhammer 2
• A House Of Many Doors
• Destiny 2
• Opus Magnum

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Francis
Philippa Warr

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Get ready for a visceral Christmas experience as Chris, by himself, talks about Hello Neighbour and Hellblade. By himself.

This is, needless to say, a bit of a stopgap episode before we gather for this year’s annual roundup special. As such, Patreon backers will not be charged for it.

There’s a lot more C&C coming over the course of the next week. Hold on for our D&D special, Miniatures Monthly, Bloodborne, a video podcast special, and so on.

If nothing else, I hope you find some use for this episode as a kind of bearded man videogames ASMR experience. Or something.

• Chris has been playing Hello Neighbour.
• Chris has also been playing Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.
• You can find the C&C community GOTY vote right here.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here. We’re sorry that Patreon’s recently-announced changes may result in you being charged more: as we say in this episode, we’re going to see what happens over the next few days and then start considering alternatives, and we completely understand if the extra processing fee means you’re unable to continue your support.

You can also follow “us” on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and John Roberts discuss indie news, Seven: The Days Long Gone, Destiny 2’s first expansion, Sorcery!, Shadowhand, and more.

‘More’ in this case includes the opportunity horse, the verb ‘to suchet’, a bit of Warhammer, the changes to Patreon, our upcoming Christmas specials, and so on.

• Joakim Sandberg’s Iconoclasts has a release date!
• As does Gorogoa!
• Davy Wreden is hiring programmers.
• Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It is out.
• Bridge Constructor Portal is a thing.
• HUMANITY(tm). A videogame.
• Here’s Patreon’s blog post about the changes, which we unpack a bit in this episode.
• John’s been playing Seven: The Days Long Gone.
• Here’s Shacknews’ Quake making-of, shamefully not called ‘The quaking of’.
• Chris has been having an okay time with Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris.
• Tom fell down a big hill in Sorcery!.
• Ponder the opportunity horse in Shadowhand.
• How many jokes can we wring out of Deus Ex and the City? The answer: less than you’d think.
• Finally, Chris’ terrible case of generic videogame man face strikes again, this time in XCOM 2

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here. We’re sorry that Patreon’s recently-announced changes may result in you being charged more: as we say in this episode, we’re going to see what happens over the next few days and then start considering alternatives, and we completely understand if the extra processing fee means you’re unable to continue your support.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Francis
John Roberts

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Tom S discuss Destiny 2 changes, Civ VI’s new expansion, the horizontal lifestyle enabled by the Steam Link, and all of the things that Chris likes about Battlefront II.

Plus: the cultural benefits of expending one (1) Sean Bean, why you probably should try to fight a crocodile, games-as-toys, C&C D&D, returning to the early noughties, and why we’re all Bossk sometimes.

• Here’s that update on the future of Destiny 2.
• In Civilizaiton VI: Rise and Fall, it’s not looking good for Sean Bean.
• Despite everything, Battlefront II has meaningfully improved Chris’ life over the last few weeks.
• Here’s a gif of dramatic spaceship fun.
• Steam Link! Be the sideways you that you’ve always wanted to be.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Senior

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F is joined by Zack and Kevin from Asymmetric for a Crate & Crowbar/Videogames Hotdog crossover episode recorded at Fantastic Arcade in Austin, Texas.

Discussed: the explosive appeal of Untitled Goose Game, Wilmot’s Warehouse, Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It, Minute, Into The Breach, and loads more. It’s all in the shownotes below.

Patreon backers will not be charged for this episode. It’s a bit of a departure from normal podcast procedure, and we didn’t want to risk double-charging people who back both The Crate & Crowbar and Videogames Hotdog. So we’re not charging at all!

• Here’s the computer website for Fantastic Arcade.
• Zack and Kevin made West of Loathing, incidentally.
• Tom’s just released a new update for Heat Signature. He doesn’t talk about this on the podcast, but I, Chris, am mentioning it in these show notes.
• Here’s Dick Hogg and Ricky Haggett’s Wilmot’s Warehouse.
• Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is difficult and funny and Tom won’t play it.
• Minit is incredibly hard to Google if you’ve only heard it described on a podcast, let me tell you.
• Jordan Mechner’s Journals cover the making of Prince of Persia.
• 10 Mississippi: also difficult to Google, pals.
• Everybody’s very excited about Into The Breach.
• Here are thecatamite’s videogames and here is his Fantastic Arcade talk.
• And here is Genesis Noir and associated talk.
• Also, Capy’s BELOW and talk.
• Forest Cup brought out the rare competitive side of Tom F (and is also impossible to Google.)
• The other tournament game was Jar Wars.
• Here’s Hypnospace Outlaw.
• Also, the talk about Blind Drive.
• Finally, Pipsqueak by Jenny Jiao Hsia.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Tom Francis

and

Zack Johnson
Kevin Simmons

…who collectively form Asymmetric and do Videogames Hotdog.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and both Toms dig into the Battlefront II microtransactions thing, momentarily become a film podcast while talking about Injustice 2, and rewind back to Shadwen for a chat about parenthood.

Plus: a voice from the past returns, the importance of the trudge AND the squeak, Superman’s uncanny lips, and Ian M. Banks’ Play of the Game.

Here’s a weird thing: we originally thought this week’s episode was going to have to go up on Saturday. It’s not! It’s out on Thursday! That means that the intro doesn’t make a lot of sense! Unless you’re listening to it after Saturday! Thanks! Sorry! Bye!

• Here’s Chris’ tweet about the BBC News front page.
• There’s a good assessment of how Battlefront II’s progression/loot crate system actually works on GamesRadar. And here’s the response from the EA man.
• Here’s Blizzard’s pop at EA/pay-to-win via the StarCraft II free to play announcement.
• Here’s Dan Cook’s tweets about the way that microtransactions confront players with the reality of the real-world wage gap.
• Tom S has been having a great time with Superman’s uncanny lips in Injustice 2.
• (The Wonder Woman movie theme is by Tina Guo. This music video is not particularly safe for work.)
• Tom F has been avoiding disappointing kids in the ambitious Shadwen.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Senior
Tom Francis

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom, Chris and Alex have medium takes on Call of Duty: World War II, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Dota 2 Turbo, and the industry’s latest travails.

Plus: getting the better of Satan, hopes for a hairy new Hitman, co-op jobs, Tuesday, impressing kids with chicken, bud motivation, and more.

Chris talks a bit about Dota 2 in this episode! If you’re one of the people who hate it when this happens, skip from 1:21:20 to 1:34:50. There are also spoilers for quite old PlayStation game Shadow of the Colossus from 1:50:25 to 1:51:20.

• Alex has been playing Call of Duty: World War II, an omnidirectional box of shoot war.
• Here’s that article about algorithmically-generated distrubing children’s YouTube cartoons.
• Tom is living his best life in Assassin’s Creed: Orangina.
• Oh boy you better believe that Chris is back on his Dota 2. You can also find Pip’s article about Dota 2 Turbo here.
• Listener Rahul emailed about rat maps, linking to this PC Gamer one: video here, file here.
• Here is Patrick Lenton’s Twitter thread about trying to do right by a dog in Skyrim.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Alex Wiltshire
Tom Francis

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom F and John Roberts discuss Spelunky 2, Dota 2’s update, Wolfenstein II, Divinity: Original Sin, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and other oranges besides.

Plus: the faulty UX of life, dancemat Tinder, internet things forever lost to time, and diminishing takeout returns.

• Spelunky 2 has been announced! Here’s the trailer.
• Dota 2 has been updated! Here is the nonsense.
• Here’s the trailer for Destiny 2’s first expansion. Minor campaign spoilers!
• Wolfenstein II continues to divide them hot takes. Who wants half a take?
• However, Divinity: Original Sin 2 is almost universally lovely.
• …and Assassin’s Creed: Origins is a surprisingly meditative eagle-based exploration experience.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
John Roberts
Tom Francis

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom, Chris and Tom discuss Steam’s new curator system, Wolfenstein II, Destiny 2, and Opus Magnum.

Plus: an episode of 999 featuring a rogue X-Wing CD-ROM, the New Game+ of your life, and the machinations of the hated foe, Alex Wiltshire.

• The Halloween Steam Sale is on. Stories Untold is good, and cheap!
• Here’s Valve’s blog post about the new Steam Curators system.
• Manveer Heir spoke about EA on the Waypoint podcast.
• Chris has been unpacking his complex relationship with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
• Tom S has been playing Destiny 2 on PC, at last! Here’s his review in progress.
• Tom F is deep into Opus Magnum. Here’s his Twitter thread full of gifs.
• You can find the first entry in Chris and Pip’s series of fuzzy Star Wars recollections here.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Senior
Tom Francis

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Pip and Tom discuss the new Zachtronics game, the closure of Visceral, A Mortician’s Tale, Shadow of War, and more.

Plus: Babe Runner: Pig In The City, the midpoint between The Raid and Watership Down, hot cauliflower facts, inadvisable waffle digressions, and some videogame questions maybe? Jury’s out on that one.

• Here’s the trailer for Zachtronics’ very pretty Opus Magnum.
• Team Fortress 2’s new update comes with the first new animated short in ages.
• Overgrowth is out! Chris didn’t know that Overgrowth wasn’t out.
• The closure of Visceral means an end to Amy Hennig and co’s Star Wars project.
• Pip’s been playing A Mortician’s Tale. Here’s her review for PC Gamer, where she works now!
• Tom F is still making headway in Shadow of War, while Tom S has simply been looking at Talion’s face.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Philippa Warr
Tom Francis

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Tom and Tom discuss the 10 year anniversary of The Orange Box, Universal Paperclips, Middle-earth (TM) Shadow of War, and EVE Valkyrie: Warzone.

Plus: explaining your game in fifty words or less, Chris’ worst idea, games fit for an Oxbridge application, rum, and more.

• The Orange Box is 10 years old this week! Here’s PC Gamer’s coverage, including Tom F’s republished reviews.
• Here’s the Guardian article about the attention-sapping consequences of modern app design.
• Universal Paperclips unmakes an apple pie, destroys the universe.
• Middle-earth (TM) Shadow of War invites you to have big ol’ piss on some orc’s chips.
• Chris has been playing EVE Valkyrie: Warzone (and still is.)

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter dot com:

Chris Thursten
Tom Senior
Tom Francis

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and the Toms discuss Assassin’s Creed: Oranges, Divinity: Oranges Sin 2, and the hunt for a missing crate of origins. Also: Cuphead’s accessibility, Skaven’s terrifying ‘shitty rats anywhere’ power in Total War: Warhammer 2, and Battlegrounds’ Chinese review bomb.

• Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds has had 70,000 Steam reviews in the last 30 days and its score is now officially ‘Mixed’.
• Cuphead’s brutal but you’ll probably buy it anyway because a) it’s gorgeous and b) everyone else did.
• Assassin’s Creed Origins will have a Discovery Tour mode where you learn history with no combat. Here’s the tamest evisceration screenshot in videogames.
• Here’s that remarkable and unnecessary guide to how to get out of Heat Signature’s practice mode the hard way: by drifting so far you find the real world.
• Here’s Tom F’s Divinity character transforming from a lizard wearing a bucket to a barrel with a tail.
• Total War: Warhammer II has treacherous rats with invisible cities and dinosaurs who want paying, dammit.
• Tom S wants to see a game inspired by the art of Sergio Toppi rather than Francesco Toppi, who is someone else.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at questions@crateandcrowbar.com or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. This episode is on YouTube here, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

You can also follow us on Twitter:

Chris Thursten
Tom Senior
Tom Francis

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Pip, Tom F, and some refreshing glasses of gin and tonic assemble to reflect upon the release of Heat Signature before moving on to other hip and happening PC games of the moment, including: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Also! Your questions regarding community controversies and one of like a million reasons why Facebook is bullshit. We’re on a single mic again this week, but hopefully some post processing magic means it sounds okay.

• Heat Signature is out wooo!
• Tom F wrote this post about how the launch has gone on the Heat Signature site.
• Pip is deputy editor of PC Gamer now wooo! Graham did a nice farewell on RPS.
• Enjoy the mild PUBG/Epic/Fortnite beef, clarified here by Chris Livingston on PCG.
• Pip has been playing PUBG with Alice on RPS.
• XCOM 2: War of the Chosen campaigns are loooong now, but the tactical additions are exciting. Yep.
• What happened when a man signed emails using a female name for two weeks, at HuffPo.
• Jeff Kaplan’s interview at Eurogamer regarding toxicity in Overwatch. and the resources required to combat shitty behaviour online.