The Crate and Crowbar

Latest Episodes:

Episode 326: The Noble Truth Of Nature’s Chainsaw Jun 05, 2020

Show notes

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.

Episode 325: Ten Percent More Beard May 29, 2020

Show notes

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!

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.

Episode 324: The Lumpy Beast In Your Love Trousers May 22, 2020

Show notes

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.

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.

Episode 323: Pro-Castration, Anti-Incest May 15, 2020

Show notes

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.”

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.

Episode 322: I’ve Seen A Racoon-Man So I’ve Had A Good Time Tonight May 08, 2020

Show notes

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.

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.

Animal Crossing: Yep, Still Locked In At The Crate and Crowbar May 03, 2020

Show notes

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.

Episode 321: Free Violence, All The Time May 01, 2020

Show notes

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.

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.

Episode 320: Snek Ops Apr 24, 2020

Show notes

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.

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.

Episode 319: A Good Clean Drowning Apr 17, 2020

Show notes

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.

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.

Episode 318: Manipulated By The Baby Owl Apr 10, 2020

Show notes

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.

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.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected